bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
= 2 (Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Jazz duets got off to an awesome if taxing start, peaking early in 1928 with “Weather Bird,” Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines’s friendly fracas of capers and feints. We have long since grown too polite for that sort of thing. A contemporary duet between jazz musicians is more likely to represent an excess of understanding and support, often to the degree that one takes a backseat to the other—as in a sonata where the violinist gets all the good lines while the pianist props him up. In the last few years, the duet has become increasingly popular as a means of making diverse records at relatively low rent. Diversity, however, is not what Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock had in mind when they embarked on 1 + 1 (Verve), a suite-like meditation that rewards scrutiny but demands patience, much patience. A reunion of two bent romantics who have spent much of the past 25 years eluding the implications of their enormous impact on jazz in the 1960s (when they worked together in the Miles Davis Quintet and on sundry I referred earlier to the album as suite-like. But the suite is a form designed to abet variety, not a collection of adagios. What then to make of this odd disc? As an album, it is poorly paced and almost obsessively narrow. It can lay no claim to the ambiguities of mood music: The soprano is a penetrating instrument and Shorter uses high or strident notes to sculpt and mottle its sound. Taken whole, the album is as baleful as an overdose of Satie. Yet each piece on its own, some more than others, rewards attention for its depth of feeling and superb execution. In Ellington’s frequently misapplied adage, 1 + 1 is beyond category—a challenging landmark in the careers of two artists who specialize in confounding expectations.
New Tunes for an Old Ax (Joe Morris)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Joe Morris, the 42-year-old New Haven-born guitarist, is nothing if not original—he plays his weathered, compact black Gibson like an obsessive who can’t be bothered with what fellow guitarists do. But his originality stems in part from the unlikeliness of his inspirations. He doesn’t play generic guitar music, having adapted precepts, concepts, and even phrases from musicians who play piano, saxophone, and other instruments. This sort of thing is not unusual in jazz. Roy Eldridge sounded like no other trumpet player of the 1930s, because he siphoned many of his ideas from saxophonists, teaching himself to play as fast as they, but with the trumpet’s special brilliance and range. Morris has gone to the avant-garde well to test the brink of improvisational reason, but at the same time developed a quintessential jazz-guitar tone, dark and dulcet, its vibrato squarely modulated and inimical to sonic overkill. If Ornette Coleman were Jim Hall he would be Joe Morris. For three recent evenings at the Knitting Factory, Morris’s trio offered a retrospective of his compositions, from the 1983 “Sweep Out” (on the vinyl-only Wraparound, self-released on the Riti label) to most of the pieces on the new Antennae (Aum Fidelity). His consistency was as impressive as his diversity—the records, mostly duos and trios with one solo and a couple of quartets, show that he’s been working the same track for years.
Lit at Both Ends (D. D. Jackson)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

For their last set in the short-lived Minetta Lane Theater series some weeks ago, D. D. Jackson and James Carter elected to make the most of their capacity for bravura exuberance. Carter’s gleaming metallic sound on reeds and Jackson’s heavy-lifting keyboard attack resonated in episodes that were by turns sensational and showy, even ersatz, and you wished they would cool down, dim down the ecstasy a little, find an amenable backbeat, groove on the changes. Yet in the end alienation was allayed during a modishly anarchistic “I Got Rhythm,” which commenced with expansive allusions to “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (Red Nichols would have passed out if not away), “The Marine’s Hymn,” and other lockstep ditties. Grooving primarily on themselves, they made technique for its own sake its own reward, and you found yourself laughing encouragingly at the pleasure—the old homo ludens—they took in exchanging phrases, solitary pitches, squeaks and clusters, staccato bullets, rattling eruptions, and copious digressions, not least a sort of Crime Doesn’t Pay police show anthem.
Piano Men (Teddy Wilson / Lennie Tristano / Bill Evans)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Teddy Wilson abides as a benchmark figure in the development of jazz; his historical role is secure. Yet he is chiefly remembered for associations with more perennially celebrated musicians. As a member of Benny Goodman’s trio and quartet, Wilson helped to create and sustain chamber jazz, while breaching segregation (in his later years, he was often referred to as music’s Jackie Robinson). As the director and frequent leader of Billie Holiday’s early recordings, he piloted the most inspired small-band sessions of the 1930s, which helped to establish the jukebox market. His immense influence as a pianist with an exceptionally lilting conception, nearly Mozartian in its blending of formality and irreverence, is less frequently honored. Wilson’s Columbia prewar sessions without Holiday, including his vital solo piano work, have been unavailable for decades, and a generation has grown up with little awareness of his music.
The Arranger’s Monk (Bill Holman / T. S. Monk / Fred Hersch)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Bill Holman, who may be the premiere living jazz orchestrator and is surely a contender, is back, at 70, in rare form. One of the best records of 1997 was A View from the Side, and whatever 1998 brings, few albums can top Brilliant Corners: The Music of Thelonious Monk. Holman always keeps busy in Los Angeles and Europe, but records released under his name are so infrequent that they support a long-standing cult without confirming his reputation as a major figure in the development of big band music. Brilliant Corners may not change that, but it provides standards for an idiom that too often waffles in amateurish unoriginality and is sure to keep you searching for more of the same. The work of all great arrangers raises the question of where the line is drawn between composition and orchestration. Several of the best, from Gil Evans to Nelson Riddle, were insignificant melodists who brought organizational genius to the melodies of others. Holman has composed several effective pieces—”Invention for Guitar and Trumpet,” “The Big Street,” “Far Down Below,” “Concerto for Herd”—but he is never as inspired as when recasting a familiar tune. He is at bottom a variations man and a good theme frees his imagination, which exults in diverse effects, tempos, humor, melodic juxtapositions, and vigorous rhythms. The wonder of his Contemporary Concepts, written for Stan Kenton in 1955, is that he simultaneously reconfigured the big band for a world bereft of ballrooms while stressing the Count Basie dictum to pat your foot, in addition to transfiguring melodies like “Stompin’ at the Savoy” and “What’s New” and turning the intransigent “Stella by Starlight” into a concerto for Charlie Mariano that would have earned the alto saxophonist a footnote in jazz history all by itself.
Is Everybody Happy? (Texaco–New York Jazz Festival)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Why complain if a jazz festival is no more than a highly publicized, highly congested confluence of concerts? It provides work, a little excitement, an occasional surprise, and focuses attention on jazz, New York, the impresario, and the sponsor. Is everybody happy? You bet. Happy, but perhaps not entirely festive. The Texaco–New York Jazz Festival stomped into town June 1 for a two-week party, offering something for everyone. Produced by Michael Dorf and centered at his Knitting Factory and other points south of Canal Street, it was not the rowdy “What Is Jazz?” thumbsucker of years past, but rather a big, big tent, assimilating mainstream jazz (Joe Henderson, Kevin Eubanks) and pop (Bela Fleck, George Clinton) along with the avant-garde and Downtown genrefication. Texaco is no longer a challenge to the musical status quo, but rather a would-be challenger to the entrepreneurial powers that be. Its jaws are primed to sink into the throat of JVC, which recently considered and rejected a collusion with BET, a most uninspiring prospect: JVC’s conservatism is earned, a reflection of George Wein’s taste as well as the demands of expensive concert halls; BET’s conservatism is institutional— it requires fodder for TV. Texaco hasn’t abandoned its roots, but in true arriviste fashion, it wants establishment respect and will do anything to get it, even to the extent of generating the phony baloney New York Jazz Awards, handed out at Lincoln Center before an audience drawn largely from “the industry” and willing to pay benefit-priced tickets ($150, half for civilians). The awards are administered by Dorf’s KnitMedia, which selected the voters and counted votes. You won’t be surprised to learn that virtually every nominee is signed to a major record label. The Jazz Journalists Association also handed out awards at the same ceremony—a clever bid on Dorf’s part to find a credible beard; JJA president Howard Mandel committed his organization without a formal referendum.
Rousing Rabble (JATP)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

As Illinois Jacquet chomps down on his reed and squeals for the fifth or sixth time, you may feel a tad self-conscious about listening to The Complete Jazz at the Philharmonic on Verve 1944–1949 (Verve) at home alone. No, the way you want to experience a good portion of these 10 CDs is to rent a hall and invite fifteen hundred or so rowdy friends to shout encouragement as the music unfolds. You might also consider recruiting someone who can leap from a balcony to add mythic resonance, and actors in pinstripes to pretend to play on stage. Of course, having gone that far you may as well junk the discs and hire real musicians. Gosh, why hasn’t anyone thought of that? JATP, so-named because the first concerts were staged at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, began in the early ‘40s, the brainchild of Norman Granz. The hugely successful series toured the United States until 1957, and continued in Europe for another decade. It popularized staged jam sessions and concert recordings and furthered the cause of integration in theaters (discussed in Nat Hentoff’s welcome liner-note interview with the normally reclusive Granz) as well as the careers of Illinois Jacquet, Charlie Parker, Flip Phillips, Oscar Peterson, and Ella Fitzgerald, among others. Critics loathed JATP and its audience; in a 1946 piece reprinted in the 224-page CD booklet (which includes everything but the track descriptions you’d expect), the reviewer observes, “Every hydrocephalic and congenital idiot in Chicago was on hand,” and declares Jacquet “the lousiest tenor in the country making over $50 a week.” Musicians, too, balked at JATP excesses. Asked to appear in a finale, the majestic Coleman Hawkins, the MVP of this collection, told Granz, “I don’t play numbers like that.”
Old Guys Yes, Retro Never (The Best Jazz Records of 1998)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

The retro vogue muddied the water a bit. Some jazz enthusiasts thought they had to proffer at least qualified support, as in: Isn’t this what we fantasized—a popular revival of swing, big bands, touch dancing, and, let’s just say it flat-out, an antidote to that damn rock? Indeed, if we can impeach the ‘60s, why not go whole hog and eradicate the ‘50s, where the trouble began? I call on every young person reading this to forage in granpappy’s and granmammy’s closets, keeping an eye peeled for round cardboard boxes—they may contain wartime fedoras and pleated skirts. Free passes to Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line to the first person to locate a snood, dead or alive. On the other hand, don’t bother with old vinyl recordings, even if you can figure out how to play them, because a taste for retro will not necessarily translate into a taste for ‘30s and ‘40s jazz. Retro is exclusively dance music, like acid jazz, like second-rate orchestras of the Swing Era. It’s about generation, costume, and perhaps rebellion, all fine and dandy. But a cursory examination of records by such bands as Royal Crown Revue, the Flying Neutrinos, or Indigo Swing reveal little to interest listeners. Every tempo is jitterbuggy, every riff an homage to “In the Mood,” every beat laden with bass; arrangements and solos are generic, which is to say in opposition to the imperial individuality that sparked competition among the great players and bandleaders of the swing era. And the vocals are shameful. Who would have imagined that the worst vocals of 50 years ago would one day be considered forerunners? Merv Griffin and Harry Babbitt, your day has come.
A Bottomless Well (Duke Ellington)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Duke Ellington liked to claim he won his job at the Cotton Club in December 1927 because he showed up three hours late for the audition, as did the owner, who heard only Ellington and none of his rivals. After five years of touring or working in arson-prone saloons, it was the luckiest of breaks. Radio broadcasts transmitted from the gangster-owned, segregated (blacks on stage, whites at the tables) Harlem nightclub were relayed across the country and ultimately the world, bringing him instant recognition. The long engagement enabled Ellington to double the size of his orchestra, encouraged a daring prolificacy, and provided him with a daunting apprenticeship working with top-flight choreographers, songwriters, dancers, singers, comics, set designers, and other professionals involved in developing the Cotton Club’s slick and sexy revues. Ellington responded with a wry, insinuating music—erotic, exotic, and, at once, ironic and ingenious. He invented his own instrumental voicings and found uncanny soloists whose virtuoso embellishments seemed to burble from the ravishing brew like the nighttime chatter of an urban jungle. Some considered Ellington’s music as salacious as the serpentine dancing it accompanied, but music lovers in and out of the academy heard in it a fresh, audacious musical language and a genius for sultry melodies and startling harmonies. Ellington tapped into something recondite, almost occult, yet accessible—unshackling characters as shadowy as “The Mooche” and as seductive as “Black Beauty,” while issuing injunctions on the order of “Rockin’ in Rhythm” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.”
Rapprochement (Cecil Taylor / Elvin Jones / Dewey Redman)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Momentum Space (Verve) by Dewey Redman, Cecil Taylor, and Elvin Jones—yes, the billing order is strange—was recorded last year and released several months ago with no fanfare and little serious response, pro or con. I have heard it denounced as disappointing, which makes me wonder how lofty are the prayers that haven’t been answered and reminds me of reviews of the 1961 collaboration between Armstrong and Ellington. Critics then were disgruntled because Ellington didn’t compose a concerto to mark the occasion; critics now embrace their meeting as a hitherto neglected jewel. I have also heard Momentum Space dissed as a rip-off because the full trio appears on only two selections, which is tantamount to spurning a great Monk solo because Coltrane laid out. The two selections, incidentally, total 30 minutes, more than half the CD’s playing time, though that’s beside the point. This is a considered, committed album—not an autumnal all-star caucus like the Giants of Jazz in the ‘70s, but a unique and artful collaboration. Even if the music and conceptual organization were less remarkable, this disc would be one for the books, as a detente deferred much longer than the Armstrong-Ellington sessions. The avant-garde movement that took shape in the late 1950s and 1960s was unparalleled not least for the distance maintained by the three principals: Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, and John Coltrane. That breach was only partly mandated by their discrete apprenticeships—respectively, in the conservatory, r&b, and jazz itself—and the routes they took in fomenting a new jazz. Parker, Blakey-style press rolls he employed to keep Coltrane on track while “Chasin’ the Trane.” In this context, they become waves for Taylor to surf. The intensifying trio consummates the euphoric madness of ‘60s free jazz, and even after Redman drops out, Taylor’s simultaneous bass lines and flashing chords create the illusion of a trio—Elvin and two Cecils.
The Masters Have It (The Best Jazz Records of 1999)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

The arbitrariness of annual top-10s always becomes clearer the week after, when you look at other lists and think, damn, how did I forget that album and why haven’t I heard this other one? Then again, maybe the most honest list you can come up with eschews research and secondguessing in favor of albums that instantly come to mind because you’ve returned to them time after time and filed them in that corner of your skull reserved for potential classics, or at least music you expect to live with more fully in the future. Every generation of critics is obliged to make cases for works neglected the first time around and puncture those that get a free ride on the wings of received wisdom. I don’t know how 1999 will stack up, but my 10-bests usually run to about 17 albums, and this year I wasn’t certain of reaching 10. The fact that it was a grand year for reissues (a subject for later discussion, though in the interim do pick up Vanguard’s restoration of From Spirituals to Swing) and that most of the new albums that pleasured me were by musicians over 70, puts me in mind of the early and middle 1970s, when posthumous Ellington or Clifford Brown routinely aced out the living as we waited for Godot. Godot and friends finally arrived from the heartland (R.I.P. Lester Bowie, Julius Hemphill, Phillip Wilson, Fred Hopkins, Steve McCall, et al.), and something similar will break up the academic malaise of the present. For now, there are the old masters, though fewer than last year (R.I.P. Harry Edison, Red Norvo, Milt Jackson, Art Farmer, et al.). Of 10 CDs that made the cut, the top three stand out, but one dominates, the CD of the year:
Hammond’s Best and Brightest (From Spirituals to Swing)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Some 20 years ago, Columbia Records, then operating under the benevolent jazzcentric hand of Bruce Lundvall, threw a party at Broadway and 52nd Street, the site of the original Birdland. Many great musicians from the bop era performed in a jam session, but the music usually had to vie with conversation. At the end of the night, though, a few swing musicians took the stage, fronted by Helen Humes and Buddy Tate, and they wrapped the room in a sling and twirled it above their heads. Humes’s piping, girlish voice and Tate’s stark riffs locked into a beat so rigorous it silenced everyone. The place went crazy; no one wanted to follow them on the bandstand. I turned to the veteran critic Stanley Dance, the last of the Charlie Parker haters, and said something brilliant like, “Jesusfuckingchristalmighty.” With characteristic noblesse oblige, Stanley replied, “Well, you know, I always thought bebop was rather corny.” Corny? I had never heard that one before. But for those few minutes I was willing to raise the white flag. We had just heard something unlikely to be repeated, no matter how many times we would see Buddy and Helen or musicians like them. Rhythm is a mysterious thing, and the most mysterious rhythm is the one for which the Swing Era was named. Compared to the jazz rhythms that followed, it is elemental, a ready thumping of all four beats. Compared to what came before in jazz and followed in r&b or r&r, it is plush and elegant. It was made for dancing, of course, but when it goes into overdrive you realize it was also made for over-the-top, death-defying exhilaration.
Freed Jazz: Bell One (Ornette Coleman)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

On a recent Thursday morning, I visited the recording studio and rehearsal space Ornette Coleman has created in a building at 125th Street and Park. Fifteen mostly young musicians were coming to grips with Coleman’s “La Statue,” subtitled “The Country that Gave the FREEDOM Symbol to America.” Commissioned in 1989 for Bastille Day and performed several times in Europe by Ensemble Moderne, it will receive its American debut Thursday night, June 1, at the Battery Park kickoff to the New York Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival. On the same program, Coleman will perform in and present new work composed for the Global Expressions Project—with Charnett Moffett, Denardo Coleman, and Asian musicians, including Badal Roy—and the immortal trio with Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins. The last time Coleman presented a triptych in New York was four years ago at Lincoln Center and that was spread over as many nights. His erratic performing schedule over the past 40 years has had the benefit of keeping the ardor of his fans at a constant low flame. When a fix is in the offing, the flame erupts, and if the fix includes a reunion with Haden and Higgins, time stops. You will never get to see Oliver and Armstrong at Lincoln Gardens, or Ellington at the Cotton Club, or Parker and Gillespie on 52nd Street, or Brown and Roach in concert; Coleman, Haden, and Higgins, however, live and breathe. Did I mention that this concert is an Event? Michael Dorf must be praying everything will go off without a hitch, despite the broken toe Ornette recently suffered, in which case we can happily concede that he is a true showman—the Florenz Zeigfeld of jazz.
Comeback Number Six (Lonnie Johnson)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Lonnie Johnson is back, sort of. It’s only fitting: He’s been coming back every decade or so since the 1920s, casting big shadows and then receding into them, as though he were nothing more than a footnote to his own text. Had he died in 1930, he would be remembered as a legend twice over: in blues, as one of the two men—along with Scrapper Blackwell (whom he preceded on records by three years)—responsible for the single-line guitar style that supplanted the denser, scruffier Delta attack; in jazz, as one of the two men—along with Eddie Lang (who preceded him on records by one year)—present at the birth of jazz guitar, consigning the banjo to riverboat oblivion. He is the only player claimed as an influence by T-Bone Walker and B. B. King as well as by Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian. But he died in 1970, filling in time between rediscoveries by working in steel mills and at other nonmusical jobs, all the while learning and writing more songs, so that by the time of his last corporeal go-round, he baffled at least as many listeners as he pleased. The blues and folk audience looked away in embarrassment when he sang “How Deep Is the Ocean,” “My Mother’s Eyes,” or “Red Sails in the Sunset.” The jazz crowd dismissed him as a relic. According to notes for the just-released The Unsung Blues Legend, Duke Ellington, with whom Johnson recorded so memorably in 1928, declined to appear with this “old blues guy,” when he guest-starred with Ellington’s band at Town Hall in 1961. No evidence is given, but it could be true; the New York Herald Tribune caught the flavor of the moment with the headline “The Duke and the Janitor Hold a Jazz Reunion.” There was no reunion; Ellington, who introduced Lena Horne, didn’t even introduce Lonnie.
Touring the Jazz Museum (JVC 2000)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Is jazz a dead historic thing or is it simply homesick for another era, any other era? The first concert hall ever built to house jazz is about to go up at Columbus Circle; the academy is rapt with attention, building new departments, endowing chairs; statues will follow. But what exactly is being honored: a music of unceasing innovation and achievement, or an archive parsed into its historical components? If jazz in the 21st century is to become what classical music became in the 20th century, an art of reconnaissance and interpretation, then this year’s 2000 JVC Jazz Festival may be remembered as a key transitional event. For the first time in its history, JVC looked backward every night. Two concerts by modern players, Don Byron and Dave Douglas, were canceled for lack of audience interest. But, then, Byron was scheduled to play his score for a silent picture and Douglas has been exploring Mary Lou Williams. It’s as though we were strapped into a time machine without the lever that moves it forward or back: Time marches on, but we are stuck—with our memories.
Zooids New and Old (Henry Threadgill / Roswell Rudd and Archie Shepp)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Schoenberg warned a century ago, during that twilight zone between Wagner and Stravinsky, that the tempered scale was used up—its melodies worn out, its thematic variations a close-order drill going nowhere. Jazz proved him dead wrong by revitalizing the verities with blue harmonies, rhythmic force, and melodies of expressive and exuberant originality. Still, he was right about European classicism, a not insignificant field at the time, and his solution, serialism, forced his adherents to disavow habits and conventions. This produced a whole new musical world, though not many hits. Meanwhile, jazz snubbed its nose at the worrywarts and had a high old time for 50-plus years, until it, too, began to ruminate about habits and conventions, opening the gates to rock ‘n’ roll, which took up the hit-making gap. Now at the dawn of a hiphopping new century, one cannot help but notice that the tempered scale once again seems used up—its melodies worn out, its thematic variations a close-order drill going nowhere.
The One You’ve Been Waiting For (Sonny Rollins)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Last August, at Lincoln Center Plaza, 70-year-old Sonny Rollins gave one of the most exhilarating, inspired, go-for-broke, don’t-look-back performances I have ever seen. Okay, I’ve probably written something like that before, but having missed maybe three of his New York engagements over the last 35 years, I rate this one very high—in the top five, anyway. For one thing, he played two hours and fifteen minutes without a break. You can tell right off when Rollins is feeling cramped because he can’t get out of the heads; on this night, he could scarcely wait to eject himself into improvisational flight. His infallible time reflected a wary, boplike sagacity, a witting agility; as the rhythm section hammered down the beats like pickets in a fence, he alternately stepped back to launch parabolas and charged forward hugging the ground—Calypso Joe roaring and guffawing. For another thing, he introduced more new music than usual: tributes to Harold Vick and Charles Mingus and two forgotten trade-winds ballads so unlikely that no one else would have dared. As the huge mob stood waving like wheat stalks, a woman asked no one in particular, “Did you ever think you would be grooving to ‘Sweet Leilani’?” Not like this.
Billy Higgins, 1936–2001
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Is it spring or the waning days of autumn? The festivals are getting underway, so it must be spring. Yet it feels like a shivery October in the realm of jazz mortality, as every passing week brings news of another loss, beginning late last year with Milt Hinton and continuing with Jack McDuff, Norris Turney, Lou Levy, George T. Simon, Les Brown, Buddy Tate, Ike Cole, Billy Mitchell, and two radiant beacons of the modern jazz movement and all of American music, as players and composers, J. J. Johnson and John Lewis, who spoke for them all when he remarked, “Everybody wants to be in the image of God. That’s why I play jazz.” Unlike many of their predecessors, they at least made it past 70. Billy Higgins, who died May 3 of liver and kidney failure, did not, which is one reason his passing hurts, even though he had been ill for years and was awaiting his third liver transplant. The main reason, of course, is that he gave so much pleasure. When you walked into a club where he was playing drums, you knew you were going to hear good time and have a good time.
Ladies Day (Billie Holiday)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

How many Billie Holidays are there and which do you prefer? Elated or dour, funny or truculent, sweet or sour, our Lady of Sorrows or 52nd Street’s Queen, early Billie or late, Billie of hope or heartache, Billie with Pres or with strings, Lady Day or Lady Nightmare or Lady in Ermine, Lady Be Good, Lady in Red, Lady Luck, Lady Blue, Lady Divine, the Lady who Swings the Band, Lady Mine—crank up the record machine, listen closely, and take your choice. For Billie Holiday is one of those exceptional artists whose work is a perfect tuning fork for our own inclinations. She echoes our emotions, rehabilitates our innocence, cauterizes our nerves. How she managed so capacious a vision with her slim vocal range and infinite capacity for nurturing demons is a miracle to which generations of interpreters have been and will continue to be drawn. The greatest art never loses its mystery. The better we know hers, the more dreamlike and sensational it seems.
Nashville (Ted Nash)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Eclecticism has been so much the norm in jazz during the past 30 years that you expect just about every player who comes along to have one foot in jazz proper and the other tapping elsewhere: Cuba or the Balkans or Argentina, or if not a geographical locale then a time period, like that of ragtime or swing or r&b, or another idiom entirely, classical or hip hop or gospel. Not to overstate, but has any other work proved more philosophically on the money than Ellington’s posthumously released Afro-Eurasian Eclipse, the suite he said was inspired by McLuhan’s prediction that no culture would be able to retain its identity, and that no individual, in Ellington’s words, will “know exactly who is enjoying the shadow of whom?” Carla Bley deserves credit as an early brewer of musical influences for her work on Gary Burton’s A Genuine Tong Funeral and Charlie Haden’s heartfelt frolic, Liberation Music Orchestra, not to mention her magnum magnum, Escalator over the Hill, which someday I plan on hearing in its entirely, though not yet, Lord, not yet. Bley colonized styles—from Weimar Germany to Spain and Asia—that became standard sources for those who followed, not least Holland’s deft, daft jester, Willem Breuker, who pursued them seriously but also parodied them to expose the eclectic habit as little more than a fad for a disoriented generation. The phrase “world music” had not yet been coined and jazz players, like the peripatetic Zusaan Kali Fasteau, had yet to acquire vast collections of flutes and bells. In those days, you were playing world music if you hired an “extra” percussionist, and world musicians paid homage to every American improviser.
Looking for Better Than That (Diana Krall / Jeanie Bryson / Vanessa Rubin / Etta James / Rosemary Clooney)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Early Tuesday, September 11, conniving for a lead to begin this column, I fancied myself Diogenes in search of an honest singer, squinting through the light of my lamp and defeated by darkness time and again. A meager joke, but at 8:30 A.M., having spent days listening to dozens of new recordings by women vocalists (saving the men for later), jokes were still easy to come by. Those who began the day with the Times were treated to a sidesplitter, as the paper of record inexplicably devoted an arts lead to the book-plugging of two unrepentant Weathermen bombers who said, from their prosperous academic perches, that they would do it again. The punch line was yet to come, of course. I suddenly recalled a promise to an editor friend to write 300 words about Harry Belafonte’s The Long Road to Freedom, so I turned to do that—the easy stuff. Then I discovered a voice-mail message from my assistant Elora, who said she would be late because, apparently, a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center and subways were stalled. I had finished Belafonte and returned to Diogenes when a thumping on the door revealed my wife Deborah, aghast and breathless, having just been evacuated from her office in the Empire State Building. Had I heard? Yeah, some kind of accident.
Heir to a Secret History (Jason Moran)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Blue Note Records is turning out to be, of all things, the Blue Note Records of our time—in an unexpected way. Hard bop is not on the agenda. And the label has not yet found a jukebox favorite like Jimmy Smith, Horace Silver, or, briefly-but-big-time, Lee Morgan, though it has come close with Cassandra Wilson, Charlie Hunter, and, briefly-but-mediumtime, US3. Instead, it is flourishing, musically if not commercially, by extending what I’ve come to think of as jazz’s Secret History, that school of resolute, autonomous wizards who swim right of the avant-garde and left of the mainstream, and usually have to wait, as Monk warned, for the public to “pick up on what you are doing—even if it does take them 15, 20 years.” Alfred Lion’s devotion to Monk established Blue Note’s alternative vision; later signings, beginning with Herbie Nichols in 1955, endorsed an ongoing new wave that never quite rolled into shore though it endures as incredibly clairvoyant.
Fearless (Tony Bennett)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Frank Sinatra, who later called him the best singer in the business, pegged Tony Bennett at the start of his career when he observed, with apparent astonishment, that Bennett had “four sets of balls.” He was probably thinking of Bennett’s dynamic, nervy, over-the-top attack and vocal range, but he proved more discerning than he knew. Two decades later, the remark might have also referred to Bennett’s challenging repertory, heart-on-sleeve emotionalism, actorly inflection of lyrics, or stubborn idealism, which motivated him to leave Columbia Records and go independent when he felt corporate powers cared more about the marketplace than his musicianship. Indeed, it’s impossible to survey Bennett’s 51 years of recordings—capped this month with the almost absurdly demanding Playin’ with My Friends: Bennett Sings the Blues— and not marvel at the guy’s sheer moxie. His daring was apparent from the beginning, when Bennett made the big leap from Astoria, Queens, to the Village Inn in Manhattan, where Pearl Bailey championed him and Bob Hope invited him to sing in his show at the Paramount Theater. After Bennett finished his number, Hope joked, “Well, I was getting tired of Crosby anyhow!”—another remark with more significance than intended. For two decades, Bing Crosby had ruled the mainstream of pop singing, engendering countless imitators and a genuine rival in Sinatra, all of them casual baritones. Bennett was a tenor and “casual” was not in his makeup.
All Around the Town (Uri Caine)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

With irony now rotting in the grave, Uri Caine demonstrated a prescient sobriety two years ago when he recorded The Sidewalks of New York, which—adapted and abridged—received its New York debut November 3 at the Center for Jewish History. The disc is an audio kaleidoscope, convening singers, spielers, musicians, and sound effects to create a moving sense of the city in all its ethnic motley as the 19th century gave way to the 20th. I know of no other album quite like it—a couple of 1950s recreations of minstrel shows approximate its ambition, but not its reach or achievement. The absence of irony was especially notable at the time of its 1999 release. Caine made his name with Don Byron and Dave Douglas, frequent indulgers in musical caricature, and through adaptations of Mahler, Wagner, Schumann, and Bach that go as far afield as gospel singing and turntabling and serve even at their most honestly affecting (the Mahler works, Primal Light and Mahler in Toblach) as discerning provocations.
Bad Haircut, Good Ragtime (Brun Campbell)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

In westerns, the saloon pianist never gets any respect. Always a foil and never once a hero, he’s there in a thousand movies, utterly nondescript in his bowler and gartered sleeve—a professional dweeb who plays “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” too fast and if he’s lucky gets to back Ann Sheridan or Angela Lansbury, but whose primary job is to look nervous when trouble brews and duck as soon as the fists or bullets start flying. Who is this guy? Was he schooled, did he have a wife and kids, did he audition for the gig, could he read music, did he have a day job, was he paid tips or salary, was he a solid citizen or a drifter, where did he find material, did he ever get applause, did he have to supply his own garter? In real life, the job was not without allure. The adolescent Irving Berlin, for one, could think of no grander position.
Laureate (Irving Berlin)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

In the aftermath of September 11, the whole country seemed to be singing “God Bless America,” underscoring Irving Berlin’s unimpeachable place in American song. (Berlin wrote the piece toward the end of World War I, but suppressed it until the outbreak of World War II, fearing that it might be too broad or corny.) No other songwriter has written as many anthems, including “White Christmas,” “Easter Parade,” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” No one else has written as many pop songs, period. Yet although Berlin was lauded as a tunesmith of genius as far back as 1911, when he debuted “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” he is often undervalued as a lyricist and said to lack Porter’s erudition, Hart’s interior rhymes, and Mercer’s homespun wisdom. The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin, edited by Robert Kimball and Linda Emmet, spans 81 of the composer’s 101 years (1888–1989) and implicitly asks us to reconsider his achievement. In addition to highlighting his gift for economy, directness, and slang, it presents Berlin as an obsessive, often despairing commentator on the passing scene.
Heroes at Work (“Made in America”)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

A new organization called Jazz Alliance International produced “Made in America,” a jazz concert to benefit “the heroes and victims of September 11,” on December 5 at Town Hall. No financial details were supplied about the poorly publicized and sparsely attended evening, except that it raised—obviously not from ticket sales—$260,000, which was given to the Robin Hood Foundation to aid “lower income victims.” Save one mercifully brief speech by the JAI’s president and an equally brief intermission, the program provided three hours of music, as each performer or band appeared for one number and then disappeared or remained on stage to play with the next configuration. None of the music was shabby, which is pretty impressive for an event of this kind; more amazing was the presentation’s overall smoothness. However successful JAI may or may not be at raising money, it already knows how to organize a show; the only failing was the overmiked sound. Rhetoric was reserved for a playbill with musician bios, lists of board members (some 40) and absentee politicians, and a statement of purpose. The musical numbers were permitted to turn like pages in a novel, breezily unmolested, and it was impossible to reenter the night without thinking that jazz is a lot healthier than it’s usually made out to be.
Brutality and Revival (The Best Jazz Records of 2001)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Last year at this time I sermonized about the lack of consensus reflected in best-of-year record lists and tried to pep myself up for the long haul of a jazz post-history in which no one had the stomach for—let alone expectations of—genius or innovation. Kind of Blue was the year’s bestselling jazz album; Louis Armstrong’s centenary was off to a shaky start; and Ken Burns’s Jazz was poised to change everything. What a difference a year makes. Not that anything revolutionary took place, short of a dismantled Taliban and a vanished surplus, yet jazz optimism grew throughout the year, triggered by responses to the PBS documentary (even vitriolic criticism helped keep small-j jazz in the news) and underscored by the sparsely attended but inspiring “Made in America” 9/11 benefit. Kind of Blue continued its box office rule; Armstrong’s centenary was disgracefully neglected by mass media; and the incredible rise in record sales following the Jazz broadcast could not be sustained, especially in a Bush economy, though the show’s long-term effect won’t be known for years—dozens of anecdotes have been reported like the one I heard from a man in a midwestern bookstore, whose 14-year-old came home from Tower with two CDs: Britney and Satchmo. The jazz business is more than ever an oxymoron, so where are the signs of revival? Chiefly in the return of consensus. For the first time in several years, a handful of recordings roused general admiration—many of the same faces make the best-of lists every year, but I discerned a fresh excitement, a shared have-you-heard-so-and-so enthusiasm regarding live performances as well as records.
Reissues by the Box, Singers by the Cut (More Best Jazz Records of 2001)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Reissues and reclamation projects (vintage recordings that never previously saw the light of day) are the oxygen in which jazz, as a living art, breathes. They are the classics, benchmarks, standards, soul, and history of the music. They are proof that an improvised art can defy time; an excuse or demand for re-evaluation; a prize for the curious, the nostalgic, the acquisitive; and an economic security blanket for record companies that can’t count on the sales of contemporary artists to satisfy their distributors or stockholders. Skeptics bewail the constant recycling of the old and reliable, rightly so when the only excuse is pointless tampering— like some of those microgroove remixes by Rudy Van Gelder (his recent work with 78s like Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool is another story entirely) that are sabotaging his reputation as well as the music he so brilliantly documented. Novices complain at the number of reissues, yet 20 years after the CD juggernaut many important performances have never been digitalized—try to find Teddy Wilson’s “Blues in C-Sharp Minor,” Stan Getz’s “Diaper Pin,” The Jazz Odyssey of James Rushing, Esq., Miles Davis in Europe, Sam Rivers’s Crystals, Pee Wee Russell’s Ask Me Now, Archie Shepp’s Live at Donaueschingen.
Black Arthur’s Return (Arthur Blythe)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Arthur Blythe’s story may not make a movie, but it certainly works as jazz allegory. He came to New York from San Diego in the magical mid’70s, and on his second night out sat in with Elvin Jones. Although he had been critically neglected at home, at 34 he was hardly inexperienced—having studied with, among others, the 1940s Lunceford saxophonist Kirtland Bradford and bandleader Horace Tapscott, in whose groups he had played for a decade—and he came East complete with the attention-grabbing sobriquet Black Arthur Blythe. Far more impressive was his wholly original approach to timbre. He made the saxophone sound uniquely fat and pungent: round as Benny Carter, ardent as John Coltrane. Along with Julius Hemphill and Oliver Lake, he put the alto back into contention. His hard-riffing, economical phrases were girded by a fast, edgy vibrato that at its best cut like a Ginzu and at its not-best vibrated with the whining nasality of Al Jolson. The phrases, too, were original, punchy with a fastidious lyricism. When in 1975 he performed at a loft concert with the no less distinctive 20-year-old David Murray, it seemed as though western winds were, at last, blasting jazz out of its long night in the doldrums.
Enchantment (Johnny Hodges / Rex Stewart)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

A masterpiece, by definition, ought to be singular, or at least uncommon as regards an artist’s accumulated work. Yet during his 50 years in recording studios, Duke Ellington often produced two or more classics at a clip, particularly in the early 1940s: “Ko-Ko” and “Jack the Bear” one day, “Concerto for Cootie” and “Conga Brava” another. And yet even by his standards, the sessions of November 2, 1940, and July 3, 1941, were astounding. On each of those enchanted afternoons, Ellington directed two seven-piece ensembles, respectively starring and nominally led by saxophonist Johnny Hodges and trumpeter Rex Stewart—creating no fewer than four masterworks by each group on each occasion: eight per date, 16 in all, like falling off a log. When RCA-Victor began transferring its ‘40s Ellington trove to LP in the 1950s, it focused on his big band, and the small-group achievements faded into memory for two decades. Not until 1966 were the Hodges and Stewart recordings finally reclaimed in RCA’s two-year-old Vintage series. Things Ain’t What They Used to Be was greeted with much fanfare, in part for Don Miller’s subtly faithful mastering. Vintage had renounced artificial stereo, which at that time had become the bane of every jazz lover’s existence; it actually respected RCA’s superb prewar engineering, cleaning and enhancing the originals without sacrificing warmth and intimacy. This was essential because the Hodges and Stewart sides are deceptive: They are painstakingly scripted, but sound casual, even conspiratorial, as though made up on the spot.
Continuing Education (Marian McPartland)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Marian McPartland’s learning curve is apparently infinite, an Escher-like, Velcro-covered loop that keeps picking up incremental details as it winds its way through jazz for six decades, turning what began as a generic approach into something personal. Her early ‘50s records, made at the start of her eight-year engagement at the Hickory House, reveal a gifted pianist with accomplished technique and a passable understanding of contemporary currents. But her playing was often polite—stylish without suggesting much individual style. Yet even by that time, Margaret Marian Turner of Windsor, England, had wended her way through much music history, forging her approach with at least as much stubborn persistence as natural talent. She was born in 1918, and began playing by ear; years of formal study followed, but in her early teens she discovered jazz and begin imitating records. “I just played everything,” she told me a few years ago, on the occasion of her widely celebrated 80th birthday: “Duke Ellington was my big inspiration, and then I tried to play like Teddy Wilson.” She won a few scholarships, including one that enrolled her in London’s Guildhall School of Music, which she abandoned before graduation to go out on a tour in vaudeville. In 1944, while entertaining troops in Belgium, she met trumpeter and Beiderbecke acolyte Jimmy McPartland. Stationed deep in the Ardennes, he came to her rescue by commandeering a grand piano from a family of Nazi sympathizers so that she could play a concert. They married and settled in New York in 1946, and though her work with Jimmy was Dixieland, she instantly began to soak up the forces of modernism, asking and receiving advice from Bud Powell and Lennie Tristano, among others, and leading her own trio with Bill Crow and Joe Morello.