bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Khesanh
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

By the fall of 1967 the United States had had combat troops in Vietnam for two and a half years. Troop strength was around a half million, plus the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARYN), which was gaining trainin namese Army, to a diversionary attack seems unlikely. Some historians think that the whole operation, Tet and Khe Sanh, was designed to break American popular will, but no documents from the time mention any such hope for that outcome. The fact that such was the outcome, was for the Communists an unexpected but happy result to a disastrous military operation. “Walter Cronkite in his lugubrious analysis on 27 February 1968-the one President Johnson said cost him middle America-forecast that ‘Khe Sanh could well fall, with terrible loss in American lives, prestige, and morale.’ ... The truth was that Khe Sanh was never in danger of falling, nor did any officer in authority from Marine Col. David E. Lownds, the Khe Sanh commander, to West-moreland ever hold any such thoughts” (Davidson, Vietnam at U’.7tir, p. 552).
Sarajevo
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

Since the fall of the Roman Empire Bosnia-Herzegovina has been an area fraught with strife. Through the centuries peoples of dissimilar ethnic and religious backgrounds settled in the area. Immediately preceding the nineteenth century, those of all three diverse backgrounds (mostly Muslim Bosnians, Orthodox Christian Serbs, and Catholic Croats) described themselves as Bosnian. However, by the end of the 1800s, a severe polarization of ethnic and religious groups commenced. The strong leadership of Josep Tito (who came to power in the wake of World War II) kept ethnic and religious diversity from becoming a problem. Upon his death, political, ethnic, and religious tensions emerged.
Grozny
Authors: Davis Paul K
Published: November 2023

Hostility and discord between Russia and the tiny yet important Caucasian republic of Chechnya dates back approximately 300 years to the early 1700s. Czar Peter the Great used the territory as a base for his campaign against Persia. Russia’s forced annexation of Chechen land gave rise to multitudinous revolts by the Chechen people. In the course of the 1800s, Chechnya was one of the strongholds of Islamic strength; the Chechens were one of many peoples engaged in combat for independence through jihads (holy wars) in the Caucasus region. Just preceding the creation of the Soviet Union, during 1917-1924, the Chechen people allied with others in the vicinity to battle the Russian occupation, of both the Bolshevik Red Army and the Menshevik White Army.
The Naked Voice
Authors: Smith W Stephen , Chipman Michael
Published: November 2023

In The Naked Voice, W. Stephen Smith invites all singers to improve their vocal technique through his renowned and time-tested wholistic method. Focusing not only on the most important technical, but also on the often overlooked psychological and spiritual elements of learning to sing, his book allows readers to develop their own full and individual identities as singers. With philosophies and techniques drawn from a lifetime of teaching voice, Smith demonstrates how one can reveal the true unique sound of one's own voice by singing with the whole self. The master's method, presented in concrete and comprehensible terms with helpful illustrations, is enhanced by a CD containing exercises performed by singers from Smith's own studio-singers whose talent and training bring them across the USA and around the world. The clear and easy style of The Naked Voice welcomes the reader into Smith's teaching studio, and into conversation with Smith himself as he presents the six simple and elegant exercises that form the core of his method. These exercises provide a foundation for free singing, and lead singers through the step-by-step process of mastering the technique. Throughout, Smith speaks sympathetically and encouragingly to the singer in search of an unencumbered and effective approach to the art. The Naked Voice is a must-read for all singers, giving teachers and students, amateurs and professionals, access to the methods and concepts that have earned Smith his reputation as one of the most highly-sought-after vocal instructors in the international arena today.
Introduction
Authors: Smith W Stephen , Chipman Michael
Published: November 2023

I have spent my professional career teaching singers how to undress (vocally, emotionally, and psychologically). My goal is to help them clear away the entanglements, hang-ups, insecurities, habits, and fears that keep their voices from singing true and free. The process is sometimes long and difficult, but often rewarding and crucial to personal and professional success.
Playing the Game
Authors: Smith W Stephen , Chipman Michael
Published: November 2023

The skills and techniques we gained in the Inventions are crucial to conditioning and training the voice, but conditioning is very different from singing repertoire (any piece of music). Many additional factors come into play once we begin applying technique to repertoire. The Inventions are designed to be an exercise routine that conditions us to “play the game,” but it is not the same as actually performing. Singing a piece of music is “playing the game.”
Lifestyles of the Healthy Singer
Authors: Smith W Stephen , Chipman Michael
Published: November 2023

The human voice is integral to all aspects of life—emotional, spiritual, psychological, intellectual, and physical. So when we uncover the naked voice, we uncover the naked self. A healthy singer is a healthy human being. Part of the Wholistic Approach to Singing is caring for the physical body, which not only encases the vocal folds but is a part of the singing instrument itself. Singers therefore have to pay even more attention to their health than most people because their identity and sometimes their livelihood depend on it.
Tender Moments (JVC 1990)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

I didn’t attend many events at the JVC Jazz Festival this year, in part because of other commitments and in part because there wasn’t much I wanted to hear. From what I saw, the staid schedule was given a lackluster presentation. My sense of foreboding was triggered opening night when I noticed that the usual program was replaced by a JVC brochure in which pride of place was given not to greetings from the “organizer,” George Wein, but to the sponsor, JVC president Hiroshi Sano. The general absence of Wein at the concerts was also notable: His enthusiasm can usually be counted on to impart a touch of festiveness. Too many of the disc jockey announcers, on the other hand, recalled Zippy: Hey, kids, are we having fun yet? One of them obliviously advised the audience to attend an Oscar Peterson concert that had been canceled weeks earlier. The venues were troublesome as usual, excepting the marvelous Weill Recital Hall. Most nettlesome was the rudeness of latecomers who, per usual, were encouraged to flounce in whenever they liked. Still, there were tender moments even amid the chaos, and lessons to be gleaned.
Front Porch Blues (Colorado 1990)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Early in the first afternoon of music at Dick and Maddie Gibson’s 28th annual Colorado Jazz Party, I found myself especially looking forward to the sets with Herb Ellis, hoping to hear some blues. Even before the party was off to an official start, at the Friday night musicians’ jam, he got off a few lucid 12-bar strophes that made me realize how hungry I was for that southwestern minor-third twang, the gospel according to Charlie Christian. Ellis’s phrases have an easy, loping quality that whisks you along; they are buoyed by familiar dissonances yet surprisingly unfogged by cliché. The opening sets on Saturday afternoon usually smack of warm-up time, and so it was when Snooky Young and Urbie Green played a duet on “When Your Lover Has Gone” and Flip Phillips and Kenny Davern followed with “Hindustan.” It was when those same players, plus a rhythm section including Ellis, went into “Blues Walk,” however, that the stakes went up a notch. Ellis let loose one chorus after another, grunting in unison with his solo, his eyes shut and mouth distorted by the divine afflatus. Years ago people talked about his technical agility—this was the guy who nightly traded body blows with Oscar Peterson and earned a niche in the studios. But the most winning quality of his playing all Labor Day weekend was simplicity of technique and a corresponding inflation of feeling.
Benny’s Brood (Rickey Woodard / Jesse Davis)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

The 29th annual Gibson Jazz Party, held in Denver over the Labor Day weekend, got jump-started at Friday’s preliminary musicians’ jam. The rhythm section, as good as any of those heard during the 56 sets programmed over 60 hours during the following three days, consisted of Roland Hanna, Ray Brown, Herb Ellis, and Frank Capp, and the ancient tune was “How Come You Do Me Like You Do?” The first soloists to take a shot at it were Harry Edison, the seductive master of the cup mute; Al Grey, the swashbuckling trombonist; Spike Robinson, a Lestorian tenor saxophonist known in Denver and London but not in New York; and Glenn Zottola, a big band trumpeter with an increasingly Armstrongian bite. Then Benny Carter stepped in, pacing himself at first with curvy elliptical phrases, and soon connecting them in pungent exclamations that slashed at the rhythm, poked open the all too familiar chords, and brought the room to a sudden respectful silence. Carter, at 84, defies expectations about the vigor of jazz elders, not because he can still do it jazz musician because he’s always full of surprises. You’d never think a man who walks so slowly to the stage could get up there and kick ass on the horn like that. But his playing is so beautiful, it really inspires you.” As we walked out of the musicians’ room, Jimmy Knepper walked in shaking his head: “Those old cats are playing their asses off—John Frigo and, of course, Benny!”
Yin, Yang, and Noir (Oliver Lake / Charlie Haden)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Oliver Lake was nearly 30 when his first recordings made their way— via his own label, Passin’ Thru—from St. Louis to New York. That was 20 years ago, and his subsequent career offers a kind of Baedeker of the era’s jazz itinerary. First we encountered him, along with many promising musicians of the early ‘70s, in a collective (St. Louis’s Black Artists Group), performing with a malleable ensemble that favored “little instruments” and modal subjects, or standing alone, an unaccompanied altoist with a distinctively stark, urgent style. He made the obligatory trip to Paris before settling in Brooklyn, part of an unusually mature generation of newcomers who were bred in all the new musics of the ‘60s, rock and soul as well as jazz, and could hear beyond them to previously established forms and functions. Although he mentioned Paul Desmond and Jackie McLean as early inspirations, Lake had a sound as individual as his hair, a tonsure circled by dreads. His timbre was cured in acid, but his intonation remained centered and sure. By the end of the ‘70s, he had recorded two sets of duets (notably Buster Bee, with Julius Hemphill), and embarked on a long alliance with drummer Pheeroan ak Laff.
Giant Step (Jackie McLean)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Jazz sets that are strings of solos are tedious, except when they aren’t. Jazz originals lack distinction, except when they don’t. Hard bop is glaring and rigid, except when it isn’t. In other words, all the axioms apply to the second rate, merely. When the giants come to town, all the conjectures about what makes so much jazz club action a deadening thing disappear. For those who remember all the years when you couldn’t hear Jackie McLean at the Village Vanguard, years when he focused his attention on teaching, his appearances there now are simply too precious to miss. Last visit, he presented the final appearance of the quintet that included pianist Hotep Idris Galeta, and was made especially memorable by McLean’s searing version of a Burt Bacharach tune, “A House Is Not a Home.” A year and a half later, his music is someplace else entirely. But not really. Mastery is its own home and God bless the child that’s got one.
They Never Went Away (Big Bands)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

The big band is the most imperial and recondite of 20th-century musical ensembles. Even jazz critics, who for reasons of close kinship have devoted far more serious attention to the big band than critics in pop or classical, are frequently ignorant of its workings. Orchestration, the least examined of the jazz arts, is widely regarded as a species of behind-thescenes arcana, like film editing; only writers with distinctive styles and onstage roles—Ellington, Gil Evans—excite acclaim. Other arrangers of enormous talent are overlooked or, if they go Hollywood (and earn a living), patronized. Of the jazz whiz kids who jammed the musical landscape of the 1920s, Don Redman and Bill Challis are the least known, though one could argue that their influence was as decisive as that of the instrumentalists and singers now appearing on stamps. Similarly, section men and lead players are treated as faceless technicians by those who wish there were soloists in every chair, even though it is often the “studio” musicians who make the orchestra roar. The role that section leaders play within a section and the role the section plays within the band are apparently as forbidding as higher mathematics. The soloists are the stars, understandably. But the others are inexplicably overlooked—a situation analogous to football fans knowing the quarterbacks and not the defensive linemen. Seventy-five years have passed since Paul Whiteman made dance bands glamorous and jazzy, 70 since Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington made them streamlined and jazzier, 60 since Benny Goodman made them fashionable and rich—yet their methods and devices remain less understood than they were in the Swing Era. The music itself is buried in a haze of nostalgia, invariably scored to that old, old refrain, “Will big bands ever come back?”
Monk with Frets (Marc Ribot)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Over no aspect of jazz is there so lusterless a uniformity as modern guitar. Before the war, you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of jazz musicians who could play it at all. But by 1960, Barney Kessel’s manual was everywhere, and an army of eighth-note plectrists swarmed onto the scene. The few who really stood out, by virtue of doubling the lead or editing out notes or phrasing in octaves or adding or deleting strings or frets, were the blessed minority. Too many guitar players sounded like too many others. Mark Ribot’s new CD, Don’t Blame Me (DIW), sounds different—at least, from other guitarists. If you need a reference point, consider Thelonious Monk. Ribot, a 41-year-old native of Newark, is a certifiable eclectic who has been circling the downtown irony school for more than a decade.
They’re Bo-o-o-o-xed! (The Best Reissues of 1997)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

The most vivid memory of live jazz ‘97 that I take with me into the New Year was sown at the Vanguard a few weeks back, when Jackie McLean fronted the incomparable Cedar Walton Trio (David Williams, Billy Higgins). With nary a pause following a stoic “Never Let Me Go,” McLean stomped a breakneck “Lover,” and before he was 16-bars out of the starting gate, something unusual happened, a flashback to a wilder time: The audience got into the act. First, just an isolated shout and whoop, then a mass low-level rumbling, with more shouts and applause for a particularly nimble turnback or long-legged phrase or spiral conceit. It sounded like a Jazz at the Philharmonic album, the congregation midrashing the soloist, who at one point spun out the most befitting quotation in an evening of quotations: “He flies through the air with the greatest of ease.. .”—speaking for himself and Walton, who backed him with pulsing, vital chords and mixed in “Melancholy Baby” and “Comin’ Through the Rye.” When McLean initiated eights with Higgins, neither man could contain himself for long and the exchanges became a duet, until the drummer took over with customary savoir-faire.
Reviving the It Girls (The Boswell Sisters)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Later it would be called hip or cool. Before the war, the word was simply it, not as defined by flapper sexuality, but by a musical savvy that acknowledged America’s panracial music with that rhythmic grace it don’t mean a thing without. In a 1930 radio broadcast of “Does My Baby Love?” the Boswell Sisters interpolate the question: “Has he got it?” And 10 years later, when only Connie was hitting the boards, she and Bing Crosby introduced Sy Oliver’s “Yes Indeed!” with characteristic Southern-fried badinage: BING: Now has you got it, sister Constance, tell me, has you got it? connie: Whoayeah, I got it, brother Bingstons, now you knows I got it. Connie, Vet, and Martha Boswell, the subjects of a stirring new revue, had it from an early age, growing up in middle-class propriety in New Orleans in a musical family, hanging with neighborhood kids like Louis Prima and Leon Roppolo, while playing chamber trio classics—Martha on piano, Vet on violin, and Connie on cello. According to Chica Minnerly, Vet’s daughter, that changed when Connie got hold of a saxophone and Vet picked up a banjo. Soon they had a vaudeville act good enough to take them to Chicago and then Hollywood, where they scored on radio. Chica suggests that they thought more like instrumentalists than as singers. As they realized that their singing went over best with audiences, they dropped other aspects of the act, which involved dancing and about a dozen instruments (including spoons), retaining only Martha’s piano.
Turner Classic Moves (Mark Turner)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Mark Turner is now playing his first gig as a leader in a major New York club—a split-week at Sweet Basil—to celebrate his first album as a leader for Warner Bros. Yet the album, Mark Turner, was actually recorded in 1995 for the Criss Cross label, which had released his true debut earlier that year. The new CD is thus two years older than the very weird jam session album he made for Warners last year, Warner Jams Vol. 2: The Two Tenors, which was lost in the shuffle of 1997 releases. In retrospect, that’s hardly surprising: Turner, then virtually unknown, was billed equally with the legendary James Moody, prompting a confused cry of Mark Who?—as in, shouldn’t we know who he is and is it wise to admit we don’t? Worse, a note in the useless booklet identifies Moody as on the left channel and Turner on the right, when the reverse is true. In any case, the new disc demands reconsideration of the old one, which has the virtue of relative contemporaneity.
Fusions (Wayne Shorter / Odyssey)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Wayne is coming to Lincoln Center. What will Wayne do? What will Wayne, who like Miles needs no last name (no more than Herbie, Ron, or Tony), ever do? The only thing certain is that he won’t do whatever we expect. No, that isn’t quite right. He has trained us not to bring expectation to his performances, but rather anticipation—though he cannot quell our vain hope that he will parcel us into a time machine and do do that voodoo that he once did so well. Dream on, or better still, go back to the recordings, which have grown in stature as few from that era have. The Lincoln Center program promised a new work for chamber orchestra and jazz musicians, an adaptation from Sibelius, and a retrospective running the gamut from the Blue Note pinnacle, Juju and Speak No Evil, to the recent Verve enigmas, High Life and 1 + 1. It did not promise nor deliver the saxophone virtuoso of yore. Indeed, as the orchestra set progressed, with Wayne alternating constantly between tenor and soprano—phrasing with the strings, overlaying a few fragments, launching blood-rushing solos that quickly ran aground in the clogged arteries of the composition—one couldn’t help suspecting that the musician who never wanted to be a leader, or at least postponed the obligation until he had no choice, was no longer interested in playing the saxophone either. Fair enough: focus on the composition.
Good Vibrations (Stefon Harris)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Before this year, music lovers were known to remark on the odd statistic that all of the most eminent players of the vibraphone (and its acoustic forbears, the xylophone and marimba) were alive, defying the normal mortality rate while encompassing most of jazz’s history. True, vibraphonists constitute a small crowd—so small that jazz polls usually consign them to the same miscellany as French horn, bassoon, and didgeridoo. Like passengers on the Ark, they have arrived in pairs and at generational intervals: Lionel Hampton and Red Norvo (both born in 1908); Milt Jackson and Terry Gibbs (1923, 1924); Bobby Hutcherson and Gary Burton (1941, 1943); Jay Hoggard and Steve Nelson (both 1954). Their ranks have now ebbed by a fourth with the passing of Norvo in April and Jackson a few weeks ago, a loss partly relieved by the arrival of Stefon Harris (born 1973). No one starts out on vibes—musicians generally get there via the two instruments it fuses, piano and drums. Yet if for no other reason than that the vibes are quintessentially African, you might expect a lot more Harris’s new ballads, “After the Day Is Done” and “Faded Beauty,” are more fetching and less derivative than those on A Cloud of Red Dust. “Of Things to Come” is a solid 32-bar invention, with a modulated one-bar riff for its first half and an expansive melody for its second.
Mrs. Swing (Mildred Bailey)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Poor Mildred Bailey. Her life was short and difficult and the neglect of her art has been long and impervious. During the height of her career, she was accounted one of the most important singers in jazz or popular music, universally admired by critics and peers. Yet she enjoyed fewer than a dozen hits, most of them in the years 1937 to 1939, when Bailey and her husband Red Norvo were optimistically promoted as “Mr. and Mrs. Swing.” Norvo’s band, with its plush Eddie Sauter arrangements, was no less prized, but it also eluded popularity. Mildred’s deceptively girlish voice and Red’s nuanced polish had to fight for a place at a banquet dominated by lusty swing and mooning nostalgia, when the only kind of fighting they knew was to remain stubbornly independent. After they split up, Red brought his xylophone and (as of 1943) vibes to Benny Goodman, bebop, and Woody Herman, and established himself as a maverick jazz star. Mildred recorded for small labels while fighting debilitating illnesses for nearly a decade, before dying, in 1951, at 48.
Signposts of Post-history (The Best Jazz Records of 2000)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

So the year 2000 in jazz, which was supposed to be the year of Louis Armstrong, turned out to be the year of Kind of Blue. True, Pops has a year to go—he gets a double centennial, one for his presumed birth in 1900 and one for the actual one in 1901. And if Ken Burns’s Jazz achieves nothing else, it will reposition him in cultural history. Meanwhile, Kind of Blue appears to have achieved a Valhalla of its own. Sony, which caused nary a ripple of news when it dismantled its jazz department, reports that Miles Davis’s 1959 classic sells 5,000 copies a month, more than all the company’s recent jazz discs combined, while Ashley Kahn’s illuminating book of the same name (subtitled The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece) is breaking sales records in jazz lit: some 25,000 copies in five months. Sony, or one of its vestigial Columbia appendages, also released the most significant of the numerous Armstrong reissues, an imperfect but hard-to-resist Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, and collaborated with Verve on a five-disc boxed companion to Burns and 22 Burns-selected individual-artist discs.
Bedside Jazz (More Best Jazz Records of 2000)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

The other day, tunneling through boxes of books stored for lack of space, I came across a 1945 anthology, The Bedside Tales, subtitled “A Gay Collection with an Introduction by Peter Arno.” The unidentified editor merged golden oldies by Hemingway, Faulkner, and Perelman; forgotten efforts by Hammett, Cain, and Joseph Mitchell; once famous tales now known for the movies they inspired (“The Most Dangerous Game,” “The Sobbin Women”—Seven Brides for Seven Brothers); neglected writers like Bemelmans, Hecht, and Asbury; humor and journalism—a large compilation of found treasure. So it never occurred to me to question the compiler or complain about the inclusion of so-and-so at the expense of what’s-her-name. The delight of anthologies is that of giving oneself up to someone else’s taste. It was precisely that delight that chaperoned many of us through historic jazz during the LP era. If you bought the Columbia Golden Era Series or RCA-Vintage compilations or Decca Heritage collections, you got a short-order survey of flash points, one masterpiece after another. In the 78 era, reissues meant pricey, bulky photo-albums, rarely with more than six or eight sides. The LP greased the process of salvaging history. A jazz expert like George Avakian, Mike Lipskin, or Stanley Dance would select 12 or 14 or 16 tracks that best represented a given artist, and a generation was weaned on the old even as it pursued the new. Then a strange thing happened. After you had committed to memory every measure of the 12 classics on Lady Day, you wanted more. So the label released a boxed set (48 tracks), which did well enough to justify a second box. By now you had heard a helluva lot of Billie Holiday and you wanted to get beyond the anthologist’s subjectivity: You wanted everything. You bought imports and bootlegs, traded tapes, focused on chronology and the sessions themselves, and railed against the capitalist pigs who were keeping all this stuff in their corporate vaults.
Parajazz (The Avant-garde)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

For many jazz lovers, the avant-garde is an inferno that derogates them and the orthodoxies that make jazz appealing. Feeling personally reproached, they respond with anger or contempt. Although the avantgarde’s audience is international, its achievement vast, its influence sweeping, and its history fully half as long as that of jazz proper, it is often regarded as a thing apart—a separateness sanctioned by those enthusiasts who listen to nothing else. Like much of jazz history, this schism has a precedent in European classical music: the divisive reaction—augured by Shavian critics who championed radical Wagner at the expense of reserved Brahms—to serialism, which begat converts and antagonists, but few neutrals. The avant-garde has been treated as a metaphor rather than as music by proponents and enemies alike. The former have adapted it to suit social and political movements as various as Marxism, mysticism, pacifism, internationalism, black nationalism, and integration, implying at times a revolutionary-cause-du-jour applicability. Not surprisingly, the avant-garde is often characterized as music of the left. But so is jazz itself—”a people’s music,” in Sidney Finkelstein’s 1940s phrase. Detractors revile avant-gardists as both elitist and barbarous: on the one hand, as insulated academics who hijacked jazz and turned it into a nearly occult pursuit only they can comprehend; on the other, as charlatans who clothe their ineptness in fashionable rhetoric. Either way, naysayers invariably insist, the avant-garde alienated the very “people” it hoped to liberate.
She Writes the Songs (Abbey Lincoln)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

The result of Abbey Lincoln’s decision to make her concert triptych at Alice Tully Hall (March 7 through 9) a referendum on her songwriting can only be described as triumphant. If the performances were occasionally uneasy, her ipso facto argument left little doubt that her oeuvre is compelling, distinctive, and, oddly enough, given her recurring melodic tropes and dilatory tempos, varied. Boring she never was. Two questions heard ringing in response were: Who will be first to record an Abbey Lincoln songbook album, and why hasn’t it been done before? The second question, though hardly new, may be answered in part by the fact that her book seems older than it is. Many of the 30-plus songs she presented were composed or recorded in the 1990s. A few that dated back to the 1970s—”Throw It Away,” “Playmate,” “Caged Bird”— weren’t much heard then. Plus there is the intimidation factor, the seeming inextricability between songs and performer. Perhaps more important, pop singers aren’t in the market for the jazz hymns that are Lincoln’s specialty, and cabaret singers (Baby Jane Dexter is an exception) and jazz singers (Kendra Shank is another) are a timid and conservative lot. In pre-Depression days, when jazz singers were mostly blues singers, it was not uncommon for them to add to their material, contributing a lyric and even a melody.
Fetishizing the LP (Verve Miniatures)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Old recording artifacts die hard, their value increasing in ratio to the emotional coldness of their replacements. Last year, box sets of Billie Holiday and Charley Patton mimicked 78-rpm albums. Many CDs replicate original LPs, in cardboard or paper-modified jewel boxes—among them series from Savoy, Sony, Impulse, and Verve. Verve was the first to offer miniaturization with The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Songbooks, which remains one of the most delectable of reissues, a shrunken version of the original albums that seemed remarkably witty in 1993. Since then, Verve has specialized in amended versions of LPs in its Master Edition and By Request lines, which combine cardboard gatefolds with (breakable) plastic disc-holders. Now the label, which, due to recent mergers, owns Impulse, Decca, Mercury, A&M, Horizon, and other catalogs, returns to the miniaturization template for the LP Reproduction series. Unlike Savoy editions, which have inserts with the basic recording info that was omitted from the original jackets, Verve provides wraparounds that the unwary might (like me) inadvertently discard.
Equilateral Chamber Jazz (The Bad Plus)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Traveling from the completely sold-out Cassandra Wilson gig at the Jazz Standard to the completely sold-out Bad Plus gig at the Village Vanguard, one could jump to the conclusion that jazz had, at long last, been blasted out of the doldrums. The winds blew emphatically from the audience, which seemed renovated and primed, aglow in anticipation and on its feet at the curtain, though some of us may need remedial repertory catch-up. Sonny Rollins plays “Sweet Leilani” because that’s what he grew up with, which is the same reason Wilson sings “Lay Lady Lay” and the Bad Plus (or two-thirds of them) covers Blondie. It’s a sign of prime-time preparedness that the Bad Plus’s covers are rarely as good as its original pieces; indeed, the part of one’s brain wired for cynicism might conclude that they choose cloying pop tunes because their originals seem so much more compelling by comparison—whiskey to wipe away the taste of grenadine. That would even explain why they call themselves the Bad Plus.
The Academy’s Pulitzer (Jazz and the Pulitzer Prize)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Two days after the Pulitzer Prizes were announced, the New York Times ran a story by Anne Midgette, “Dissonant Thoughts on the Music Pulitzers,” in which John Adams, who had received the award for On the Transmigration of Souls, expressed astonishment at winning, and ambivalence bordering on contempt. The prize, he said, has “lost much of the prestige it still carries in other fields,” because “most of the country’s greatest musical minds” are ignored, “often in favor of academy composers.” He specified the Pulitzer’s neglect of mavericks, composerperformers, and “especially” the “great jazz composers.” His point was hardly surprising; that a recipient made it was. He had said aloud what countless American composers grumble privately every year, most of them shy of going public and courting accusations of sour grapes. In 1967, when Edward Albee won a make-up Pulitzer for A Delicate Balance, he said that friends urged him to refuse it; four years before, the drama jury had chosen to present no award rather than recognize Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. In effect, Albee argued that his dissent would have more meaning as a winner. He went on to win more Pulitzers, and if he contested them at all he kept it quiet. So Adams took a nervy stand, opening himself to allegations of biting the hand that massaged him.
Savooooy Be Gooood (Jazz Jive)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Bill Milkowski’s entertaining encyclopedia of jive, Swing It!, attempts various explanations of the word, but when push comes to shove settles for a definition that seems inclusive enough to silence debate: “Coded speech of the jitterbug scene.” Yet Milkowski defines a jitterbug as “a swing fan,” while many of his jivesters are devoted to bop or r&b. So clarification is in order. I suggest: a wacky, usually “inside” mode of humor associated with but not exclusive to African American musical idioms generated between World War I and the Korean War. Even that embrace, however, fails to account for the 18 tracks on the Savoy collection All That Jive. And neither does the subtitle “Jazz Classics with a Swinging Sense of Humor,” unless straight readings of “‘Round Midnight” and “The Way You Look Tonight” crack you up. Few catalogs have been reissued and repackaged more frequently than Savoy’s, which includes various short-lived indies like National, Dee Gee, Parrot, and Hi-Lo. A succession of owners have done complete editions, best-of anthologies, and facsimiles of the original LPs, which were infamous for their weird covers and sometimes semi-literate but always useless liner notes. In recent years, excellent editions—handsome packaging, restored sound, informative notes—have recycled the label’s stars: Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Erroll Garner, Billy Eckstine, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, and others. All That Jive is a negative image of all those virtues.
Deep Easy Listening (Jim Hall / Cyrus Chestnut)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Call it a taste for opposites, but in taking note of the nearly simultaneous appearances by Jim Hall at the Village Vanguard and Cyrus Chestnut at the Jazz Standard, it occurred to me that they might sound wonderful together—the former’s tight asymmetrical phrases and careful timbres coursing through the latter’s buoyant chords and gospel preachments. They play as they look: Hall is lean and deliberative, Chestnut rotund and effusive. Heard on their own, they underscored the breadth of contemporary mainstream jazz. They’re both reliable club draws with hardearned yet largely undeserved reputations for middle-of-the-road easy listening. What I mean is, yes, they are readily enjoyed, but you do have to pay attention, and though that is true of any music worth your while, Hall and Chestnut—separated in age by more than 30 years—violate many of the very conventions they appear to embody. Of the two, Hall is the more radical. Long associated with players and composers on the edge (Chico Hamilton Quintet, Jimmy Guiffre Three, Sonny Rollins Quartet, John Lewis, Gunther Schuller, Ornette Coleman, Paul Desmond, Joe Lovano, Greg Osby; duets with Bill Evans, Ron Carter, Dave Holland, and others), he is now less well known as the writer of pliant melodies like “Romain” than of idiosyncratic third-stream conceptions in which each member of the ensemble is accessed as a distinct voice, occasionally reflecting a guileless sense of comedy (one charming example, “Circus Dance” on the inspired Textures) that is otherwise more apparent in his stage patter than his solos. Yet it’s Hall’s soloing that most persistently defies the orthodoxies of jazz improvisation.
All Duke’s Chillun Got Melody (Gerry Mulligan)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

At long last, Gerry Mulligan’s five Concert Jazz Band albums, recorded for Verve between 1960 and 1962, have been collected, though not by Verve. Mosaic (the mail-order company in Stamford, Conn.) has done a consummate job with The Complete Verve Gerry Mulligan Concert Band Sessions. These much-loved but long unavailable records have never sounded better—even the muzzy Milan sides gleam. The integrity of the original LPs is preserved, with unreleased takes placed at the end of appropriate discs. From the first measures of Al Cohn’s arrangement of “Sweet and Low,” you know you are on enchanted ground, and the feeling of discovery and triumph never subsides for long, partly because each album’s personality is distinct from the others. Mulligan became an overnight sensation with his pianoless quartet in the early 1950s, but big bands remained his first love and the CJB was his boldest attempt to initiate a venturesome orchestra: The very name warned dancers to go elsewhere. It was to be a workshop ensemble, an expanded version of the Miles Davis nonets (for which Mulligan had scored most of the music), allowing him and other writers to show what a full complement could do. His celebrity, plus the willingness of members to work cheap and Norman Granz’s deep pockets, made the undertaking possible. Another crucial component, as Bill Kirchner demonstrates in his notes, was the steady instigation of Bob Brookmeyer, the Mulligan quartet’s valve trombonist and ultimately the CJB’s most prolific arranger and deputy soloist.
Fellowbeings
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

In the modern world, rescue is often a relatively easy affair. Discover that some unfortunate band of adventurers is trapped in the wilds— isolated by the natural confines of mountain or island or jungle—and usually a helicopter can whirl down and disgorge medics and guides and helpers of every ilk. There are exceptions, of course. It has been said that the upper reaches of Mt. Everest might as well be the moon, for all the hope of sudden deliverance from afar. But most of the time, if sufferers can be found, assistance can be delivered with astonishing speed. Sailors are saved from turbulent seas; climbers are plucked from cliffs. Even if those in need cannot be reached, they can often be located, so that a crackly voice on the radio or the steady beep of a transponder can serve as the target for a parachuted cache of calories that preserves life until the motor-powered cavalry roars over the hill.
Threshold of Desperation
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

As Reason Tucker’s initial relief party bulled its way up to the high camps and then started back down, James Reed was busy mounting a separate attempt at rescue, one that lagged behind Tucker’s but ultimately would become intertwined with it. Discharged from his military duties after the Battle of Santa Clara, Reed rode north to the little town of Yerba Buena, which was about to shed its name for the more impressive San Francisco. He was armed with a petition informing the American naval commander that the Donner Party had been delayed ‘‘from unavoidable causes’’ and was now trapped. The signers, prominent local residents from San Jose, asked that the government dispatch rescuers on snowshoes immediately.
Chronology of Wagner’s Life and Operas
Authors: Millington Barry
Published: November 2023

Born in the Brühl, Leipzig, the son of Johanna Rosine Wagner and (probably) Carl Friedrich Wagner: the rival claim of the actor and painter Ludwig Geyer has never been conclusively proved or disproved.
Works
Authors: Millington Barry
Published: November 2023

Nothing more vividly demonstrates the multiplicity of genres available to composers of opera in the first decades of the 19th century than the stylistic variety of Wagner’s first three operas, Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot, and Rienzi. In Die Feen the model was German Romantic opera, especially as developed by Weber and Marschner: the supernatural subject matter, the enhanced role of the orchestra, and the shift away from static, closed forms towards organic growth are all evident to at least some degree. Acts 2 and 3 each contain a fine scene and aria, that in the latter, depicting the mental derangement of Arindal, being a complex in which recitative, arioso, and aria are juxtaposed. One of the work’s most inventive numbers, the comic duet for Drolla and Gernot in Act 2, is untypical in its opera buffa-style patter. Die Feen is marked by the return of a few characteristic melodic ideas, but scarcely with a persistence such as to merit the term ‘leitmotif ‘.
Die Feen
Authors: Millington Barry
Published: November 2023

The models for Wagner’s first completed opera were Weber and Marschner, with whose works the young composer became familiar in his first season as chorus master at Würzburg. He began work on the libretto probably in January or February 1833 and the score was finished on 6 January 1834. An aria for Ada was revised in the spring of 1834. Die Feen did not receive its first performance until five years after Wagner’s death. It was not staged in Britain until 1969, when it was given by the Midland Music Makers Grand Opera Society at Aston University, Birmingham.
Das Liebesverbot
Authors: Millington Barry
Published: November 2023

Das Liebesverbot was written under the influence of the emancipatory hedonism of Wilhelm Heinse ‘s novel Ardinghello und die glückseeligen Inseln (1787), of Heinrich Laube ‘s Das junge Europa (1833–37) and of the Young Germans generally. A celebration of free love and a humorous attack on sexual puritanism and bourgeois morality per se, it transfers the action of Measure for Measure to sunny Palermo. Musically Das Liebesverbot is indebted to Italian and French models, in particular Bellini and Auber.
Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribunen
Authors: Millington Barry
Published: November 2023

Herald, Ambassadors from Milan, the Lombard States, Naples, Bohemia and Bavaria, Roman nobles and attendants, followers of Colonna and Orsini, priests and monks of all orders, senators, Roman citizens (male and female), messengers of peace Setting Rome, about the middle of the 14th century Wagner’s reading of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes in Blasewitz, near Dresden, in the summer of 1837 confirmed his intention of writing an opera on the subject (the idea had apparently been implanted earlier by his friend Apel).
Der fliegende Holländer
Authors: Millington Barry
Published: November 2023

According to the composer’s account in Mein Leben, Der fliegende Holländer took shape during the Wagners’ stormy crossing of the Baltic and North Seas in July and August 1839. It would be characteristic of Wagner to emphasise, or even invent, an autobiographical inspiration, and yet it is also possible that his experiences on that memorable voyage did indeed coalesce with the legend of the Flying Dutchman—with which he was already familiar—to provide the fundamental material, or perhaps sonic image, for the work.
Der Ring des Nibelungen
Authors: Millington Barry
Published: November 2023

Myth and history were interwoven in the Ring from the beginning. In the period immediately prior to its composition, Wagner worked on no fewer than four dramatic projects (probably intended as operas, though all remained incomplete) which deployed historico-mythical motifs eventually to find a home in the tetralogy. Friedrich I dealt with the legendary 12th-century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (Wagner’s speculative connections between the stories of the Hohenstaufen emperor and the Nibelung hoard were formulated in the essay Die Wibelungen: Weltgeschichte aus der Sage). Jesus von Nazareth married a dramatic treatment of the historical figure of Christ with a progressive social outlook influenced by Proudhon and Feuerbach. Achilleus similarly suggested a treatment of the legendary Greek hero in the noble, heroic mould of Siegfried, while Wieland der Schmied wove motifs such as a clever smith, the forging of a sword, and an all-powerful ring into a tale of heroic liberation from oppression.
Die Walküre
Authors: Millington Barry
Published: November 2023

First day of Der Ring des Nibelungen in three acts set to Wagner’s own libretto; first performed in Munich, at the Königliches Hof-und Nation-altheater, on 26 June 1870. The first Wotan was, as in Das Rheingold, August Kindermann; the first Brünnhilde, Sophie Stehle (Fricka in Rheingold). Siegmund and Sieglinde were sung by Heinrich and Therese Vogl. For the 1876 cast, see Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Leitmotif
Authors: Millington Barry
Published: November 2023

The word ‘leitmotif ‘ is from the German Leitmotiv meaning ‘leading motif ‘: a term adopted by early commentators on Wagner’s music dramas to highlight what they believed to be the most important feature contributing to comprehensibility and expressive intensity in those works. A leitmotif is a theme, or other coherent musical idea, clearly defined so as to retain its identity if modified on subsequent appearances, whose purpose is to represent or symbolize a person, object, place, idea, state of mind, supernatural force, or any other ingredient in a dramatic work. The leitmotif may be musically unaltered on its return, or altered in rhythm, intervallic structure, harmony, orchestration, or accompaniment, and may also be combined with other leitmotifs in order to suggest a new dramatic situation. A leitmotif is to be distinguished from a reminiscence motif (Erinnerungsmotiv), which, in earlier operas and in Wagner’s works up to and including Lohengrin, tends to punctuate the musical design rather than provide the principal, ‘leading’ thematic premisses for that design.
The Summer of Lincoln’s Discontent
Authors: Weber Jennifer L
Published: November 2023

Lincoln sailed into may 1864 in reasonably good shape politically. In the heartland, where conservative Democrats enjoyed the greatest support, people seemed frustratingly content with the state of the nation, or so the Peace Democrats thought. “Feel very sadly People do not seem as bitter as I expected to find them but still there is enough of political rancour manifest,” attorney Charles Mason wrote upon returning to Iowa from Washington. But May proved to be yet another turning point in the fortunes of Lincoln and the Copperheads. The machinations to replace Lincoln with Chase and the violence in Charleston, Illinois, were harbingers of trials to come. Lincoln’s most difficult months lay ahead of him, and the reason was the usual one: the failures of the Union armies.
Additional Shows by Other Orchestrators
Authors: Suskin Steven
Published: November 2023

The following shows fall outside our area of discussion. Even so, many of them are of interest, orchestration-wise and otherwise wise, and are thus included for reference.
Chronology
Authors: Suskin Steven
Published: November 2023

Arranging the show listings in alphabetical order is the most logical way to do so, as it enables the reader to handily locate a given production. Part of the story of Broadway orchestrators, though, has to do with not only what they did but when they did it—and what else they were doing at the same time. This chronological list of the shows contained in our main listing section (but not the shows in the supplemental “additional shows” section) will provide an idea of when the shows were produced in relation to each other.