bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Vivid Multitudes (The Best Jazz Records of 1992)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Travel, influenza, and the death of Dizzy Gillespie have all conspired to postpone the onerous task of a 10-best list into the Season of Clinton, which has already delivered a number of sprightly ‘93 releases by some of the very people listed below. The trick in looking back is not to work too hard at it. Go with the records that stand out vividly, that provoked multiple hearings or at least good and stable thoughts. Even so, know that you haven’t listened to everything, and recognize the inevitable: Immediately after your list goes into print, you will find the year’s masterpiece buried in the sofa—still wrapped in cellophane with one of those annoying silver adhesives to ensure the absolute and utterly pointless sterility of the disc. The selections are arrayed alphabetically. Mea culpa in advance. • Muhal Richard Abrams, Blu Blu Blu (Black Saint). “Bloodline” and the title selection, a big production blues of the sort only Abrams can pull off (but hasn’t since 1981’s “Blues Forever”), are peaks in an album that demonstrates perhaps more convincingly than The Hearinga Suite that he is one of the leading big band composers of the day, not least because he makes his soloists shine.
Living Large (Bobby Watson)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
It couldn’t have been his new album, Tailor Made (Columbia), that brought out SRO crowds for Bobby Watson’s big-band debut at the Village Vanguard in mid-May, because it had hardly hit the streets and is something of a disappointment anyway. So credit the turnout to a vestigial jazz alertness periodically sweeping over Manhattan when something good is in the air. Musicians caught up in the presently fashionable winds (long may they blow) of big band repertory have a mission. But a musician who endures the trauma of organizing a big band to play his own new music has an obsession, one to be applauded and encouraged at every step. Soloing before or simply listening to the crashing brasses and swaying reeds, Watson exuded the kind of pleasure—it’s almost sexual—unique to orchestral amplitude, which in jazz means a number in the very low two-figures. With a rhythm section (augmented by Latin percussion) taken from his quintet, Horizon; an equally practiced reed section drawn from the 29th Street Saxophone Quartet (Watson is a member); and brasses boosted by the patented brilliance of Jon Faddis, Watson had reason to beam. The divisions swirled and coiled, lifting his fiery alto sax solos on crests and then floating them in pleasurable anticipation of crests to come. The straightforward, bop-inflected writing made up in limberness what it lacked in depth, and when the voicings got fancier, the mild stretches of balladic prettiness were direct and even ingenuous. This is an orchestra that takes its cue from the 1950s, not for the purposes of revival or homage, but to grasp again that moment when fluent bebop melodies and boisterous Latin rhythms found common cause. Several of the pieces—”Lafiya,” “Old Time Ways,” “Free Yourself”—advanced with storytelling logic and a deft concerto-like regard for the soloists. You’ll want to catch this band on its return.
Gallic Swing (Stephane Grappelli)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The 85th birthday tribute to Stephane Grappelli, at Carnegie Hall on June 9, was a triumph for the ageless violinist and the particular brand of jazz he has made his own. The swing he invokes is as decisive as a pendulum or an axe, a bright and inexorable thumping that subdivides every measure with four definitive blows, 128 per chorus. The music soars over those demarcations, charged by the beat, but it’s difficult if not impossible to ignore the rigors of that ground rhythm; at times my own bobbing neck and those all around put me in mind of perpetual motion cranes pecking at water glasses. Periodically, you brake the action, the better to focus on the specific notes, but before you know it the chompchomp-chomp-chomp infiltrates an unguarded part of the brain, and the foot begins to tap, the elbow to twitch, and the neck to pitch forward. It’s a kind of hypnosis.
A Surprise Banquet (JVC 1993)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
When the peak of a nine-day jazz festival is scaled by a 75-year-old entertainer whose jazz associations over half a century have been at best tangential and at worst gratuitous, you can assume that the usual suspects flagged terribly or that said entertainer astounded. Lena Horne’s sublime 30-minute performance at the tribute to Billy Strayhorn should become part of Newport/New York/Kool/JVC legend. And yet she wasn’t the only one who performed at a level that may, as time goes by, also qualify as memorable. Thus what looked like thin gruel going in provided something of a banquet. Against all odds, the flagship of impresario George Wein’s global operation turned out to be a modest success—not for the sweep and aspiration by which we usually evaluate it, but for incisive and animated musicianship. The Sound of Surprise surprised. True, the perception may have been helped by diminished expectations. The piano recitals were gone, as were the crossover artists—Ray Charles, B. B. King—who ensure a certain boisterousness. Instead of three major hall concerts per evening, JVC ‘93 offered two or one. New music was conspicuously absent. Several young mainstreamers were pressed into jam session tableaux, but none received important debuts or showcases.
Tremolos and Elegies (Cyrus Chestnut)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
By their tunes ye shall know them. So in welcoming pianist Cyrus Chestnut as he emerges from the ranks of accompanists into the limelight of leadership, let’s begin with the tunes—those he writes and those he interprets. Last week he debuted with one trio at the Village Vanguard and with another on his first major album, Revelation (Atlantic). The 31year-old, Baltimore-born, Berklee-graduated, and widely apprenticed pianist is a prolific composer, and he favors his own material. But not exclusively. The album’s two exceptions suggest something about his range and taste. The jazz genealogy of Jules Massenet’s “Elegie” as one of Art Tatum’s pet morsels is well known. Tatum elaborated the tune with characteristic e´lan, his variations partaking of stride bass, supersonic arpeggios, and a rubato close, all underscoring the source melody. Chestnut is less respectful of the original. He begins improvising over a pedal-bass, then buttresses himself with a descending four-chord figure that suggests nothing so much as the turnback for “Sweet Georgia Brown,” which is his immediate set-up for Massenet’s tune. The pop reference is echoed in the introduction of a standard old-time four-note descending bass vamp. He wails on that and then on the chord changes he has adduced, kicking into overdrive with propulsive riffs and, unlike Tatum, completely escaping the gravitas of the original. Chestnut reprises the tune only at the end, as a head, incorporating the four-note vamp on piano before a quick and not inelegant fade. In stately contrast, “Sweet Hour of Prayer” is an old hymn sweetly played, peeled of all complexity, with a slow-motion Bach mordent as the kicker.
The Power and the Reticence (JVC 1994)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Competing big bands, controlled jam sessions, piano duets, salutes, jazz al fresco, Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck, Ray Charles and Mel Tormé. Where the hell are we—the Newport Jazz Festival of 1958, the Newportin-New York Festival of 1972, Nice, New Orleans, a Savoy Ballroom of the imagination? No, we’re right here on the sun-scorched terra firma of New York City in 1994, where the JVC Jazz Festival gazes stoically at the future through a rear-view mirror. Satchel Paige had it wrong: Always look back, because if you’re lucky, your old and just possibly better self may be gaining on you. The iconoclast in me wants to catalog what JVC ought to be, especially by example of what Europe routinely offers in the way of summertime jazz festivals—at Norway’s Kongsberg Festival, where I dropped in for a day, the performers included the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Randy Weston, Steve Coleman, bluesman Johnny Copeland, and opera singer Barbara Hendricks, who presented an evening of songs from Ellington’s three Sacred Concerts in the local church. But you’ve heard that spiel before and, in any case, the reporter in me prefers to honor that most resilient of impresarios, George Wein, for once again taking cheapjack and making Jack Daniel’s. I’m not referring to the more adventurous afternoon concerts, a welcome return to the street events of Newport’s early years in New York, but to hall-bound exhibits that transcended expectations. Not for the first time has a schedule that looked tepid on paper produced magic in the playing. You’ve heard that spiel before, too, yet this year the surprises were a little more intense than usual.
Leonard Feather, 1914–1994
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Leonard Feather, who passed away on September 22, 1994, nine days after his 80th birthday, always insisted that John Hammond was the most important of all jazz critics. That’s not surprising if you recall that Feather, who was Hammond’s junior by four years, initially made his way through the British jazz world in the early ‘30s, when Hammond’s articles in The Gramophone and Melody Maker were stirring the jazz waters as no English-speaking critic had or would again until Feather himself took up the sword for modern jazz in New York a decade later. Hammond encouraged him to make the move, in 1935; 20 years later, he helped midwife publication of Feather’s Encyclopedia of Jazz. Yet it was also Hammond with whom Feather conducted the most vitriolic of several public feuds. Hammond was the prototype writer-activist, enforcing his critical pronouncements with a regimen of recording, promoting, producing, and general agitation, mostly on behalf of new talent and new movements— he helped launch the Swing Era. He was also unstinting in his devotion to civil rights, in and out of the music biz. With varying degrees of success, Feather would follow his lead, adding his by no means negligible abilities as lyricist (occasionally aided by his wife, Jane) and composer. Indeed, his early years here were devoted almost exclusively to producing, arranging, and composing. Not until the early 1940s, when he became associated with Metronome and Esquire, did he begin to function primarily as a critic.
Festival Blues (JVC 1995)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
No jazz festival in the world could compete with the combination of ace musicianship and star power that was New York’s bounty during the last two weeks in June. You had your choice of Benny Carter, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Elvin Jones, David Murray, Javon Jackson, Kenny Burrell, Anita O’Day, Dick Hyman, Don Byron, Roy Hargrove, and Charnett Moffett in the upscale clubs alone. An additional 108 (so they say) bands were corralled by the Knitting Factory for the “What Is Jazz?” festival, featuring Cecil Taylor, Lester Bowie, Dewey Redman, Marty Ehrlich, Henry Threadgill, Evan Parker, Rashied Ali, and James Blood Ulmer. Parks and pubs likewise brandished their finest jazz wares. And oh yeah, the JVC Jazz Festival was around, the presumed excuse for all this, with its gloried history and invincible publicity machine. Shall we be charitable and surmise that most of the major artists had already been booked for the aforementioned gigs, leaving JVC no options beyond Al Jarreau, the Ohio Players, a Russian rock band, and Helen Schneider? No, we shall not. Impresario George Wein didn’t merely trim back; he zoned out. He had at his disposal two of the city’s great concert halls plus Bryant Park. He had a couple of aging legends whose very appearances prompted vertical ovations. What he lacked was an idea or a theme that might manifest a concern for, love of, or interest in jazz. There were moments, yes—there always are. But calling those disparate events a festival is like calling the Republicans a party.
Young and Verbal (Carmen McRae)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Someone once claimed that nobody could impart more emotion and meaning to certain words—like love—than Billie Holiday. It was a compliment she relished. No question, she could penetrate the core of intention in any song, even a fatuous one: The phrase “me, myself, and I are all in love with you” is banal on paper, but what a buoyant declaration she makes of it. She wasn’t the first, of course, but until the mid-’30s, Louis Armstrong focused his singing more on music than words, Bing Crosby was most expressive as a ballad singer, and Mildred Bailey explored a gentler dramatic range. The blues singers were relatively generic and, by Cafe Society standards, primitive, though not as dated as the torch singers, who made do with one overheated recipe for tears. So whatever else Holiday achieved, she located meaning in songs while simultaneously freeing them from melodrama, and in that respect and others she was a beacon for Frank Sinatra, her exact contemporary, who pared singing down even further. In studying the precise message of a lyric, Sinatra defined the abyss between a good pop singer and a poor one: the good one subordinates instrument and technique to the art of interpretation; the poor one is too in love with the sound of his or her own voice to bother with the song.
Three by Three (Tim Hagans / Dave Douglas / Roy Hargrove)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Jazz trios built around wind instruments don’t quite scan. Exceptions from Sidney Bechet to Sonny Rollins to Leo Smith notwithstanding, the rules of jazz deportment dictate that a saxophonist is not fully dressed without a complement of three; nor is a trumpet star complete without a full rhythm team or a front-line partner. Such customs spring from the assumption that a brass player’s chops cannot withstand a solo regimen unsupported by at least one other improviser, and from the fear that reprieve-choruses will be taken up by bassist or drummer. However emphatic the conception, the suspicion abides that the poor fellow has lost his fourth wheel. Judging from the appearance of three new trumpet trios, tricycles may soon make a comeback. attributes are displayed on the title selection, and then emphasized on “Unhooking the Safety Net” (he’s good with titles), with its opening cadenza and a sort of Mediterranean march-dance that savors of Flamenco trumpet. The East European mode is felt on “Taking Sides,” which combines unison and part writing, and the Spanish tinge permeates the extended “Maquiladora.” In contrast, he offers a superb rendition of Herbie Nichols’s “The Gig,” which is built on hesitations that sound strangely European in this context, a thorny meditation on “Scriabin,” and a reading of a Schumann duet subtitled by Douglas “mit Humor.”
Different Drummer (Modern Jazz Quartet)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Long ago, in the depths of adolescence, I stood shoulder to shoulder with a friend and future jazz critic at a Duke Ellington concert and dance. I had seen Ellington before, including a recent performance of virtually the same set—a point I made with jaded impatience to my friend, who was hearing him live for the first time. He turned on me with justifiable irritation for trying to divert his awe. Taking in his slack jaw and glazed eyes, as he stared at the bandstand, I recalled my own first encounter with Ellington, my own slack jaw and glazed eyes, and quickly recovered my sense of wonder. The first time with Ellington is, like the first time with sex or Charlie Chaplin or really good asparagus, epic. Later you may have to call up your purer self to defeat the deadening effects of sophistication. A great concert is ultimately a collusion between artist and listener, in which the alertness of one is inseparable from that of the other. The musicians may savor the joys of a shining performance before a dull audience, just as a falling tree may crash through an uninhabited forest, but art truly burgeons when its nuances are shared. The Modern Jazz Quartet, now at the close of its 43rd year, opened the 1995 San Francisco Jazz Festival with a performance worth savoring—a performance that restored the wonder elicited by this longest-lived chamber ensemble at its best.
Lost and Found (Brian Barley / Andrew Hill)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
A Canadian label that morosely calls itself Just a Memory has re-released three recordings from 1967 and 1970 that turn a belated spotlight on an obscure saxophonist named Brian Barley. A search of periodicals and books turned up not a single reference to him outside of discographies, so all I know of him is drawn from the blurb on his sole album as a leader—born in Toronto; took up saxophone under the influence of Lee Konitz; favored “Coleman, Coltrane, Dolphy, Rollins, and Shepp”; died “a tragic and accidental death” in June 1971, at 28. Not much. His playing on these CDs makes you want to know more. The earliest is Maynard Ferguson Sextet, a radio transcription session coordinated with Ferguson’s homecoming during Expo ‘67. This was a transitional period for Ferguson, whose long association with Roulette had ended in 1964, leaving him foundering among labels and alternating between big band and sextet. The Canadians hired him to stock both units with homegrown talent. In the sextet, they got a credible rhythm section and a front line comprising Ferguson’s blaring trumpet, an untuned altoist, and the 24-year-old Barley, whose tenor saxophone displays a promisingly forthright middle register and a penchant for growls and pitch deviations. It’s his blues solo over a walking bass on Mike Abene’s “To and Fro” and his soul-style variations on an otherwise flat performance of Lanny Morgan’s “Polecat” that make the album worth Hill, and there is something preposterous about hearing him in a restaurant, where the slightest chatter or table noise can throw off your (but apparently not his) concentration. Still, his opening set at Iridium last week settled any fears that he might actually have learned a standard over the years, or written an AABA tune in which each letter represents eight bars.
Drum Dada (Han Bennink)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Some performers, like Chaplin, are not ensemble players—you train the spotlight on them and hope for the best. No one who knows the 54-yearold Dutch drummer Han Bennink exclusively from the diverse recordings he has made over 35 years would put him in that category. Yet at the Knitting Factory’s Bennink festival, which consisted of eight hourlong duets with as many partners over four nights, he emphasized his theatrical inclinations. Looking trimly Aryan with a close-cropped blond pate, he opened each set with a gunshot whack on the snare, attended his associates’ initial forays with rudimental support, and then departed for the realm of Dada in a series of gestures, anarchic and funny, that transported the audience into a realm of prudent but grateful tittering. Boring he is not. The presentation was far more musical and rewarding than it can possibly sound autopsied, but here goes. In practically every show, he did much or all of the following: accoutered himself in wooden clogs and, seated on the floor, played them like drums; placed a cymbal on his head and rang it like a gong; snapped scissors in rhythm; bunched sheets of newspaper percussively; rested his right foot on the tom-tom; deadened the snare with a towel; flipped, dropped, and threw away his sticks; carried the snare to the stage apron; placed the end of one stick in his jaw and rapped on it with the other; held the snare to his mouth and screamed; played the backside of the bass drum through his legs; produced various rattles, bells, and other noisemakers; pushed over parts of the traps and tossed cymbals in the air or threw them to the ground— always rhythmically, of course.
Classic Ambition (Wynton Marsalis)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Longer than Don Giovanni, Aida, or the combined playing time of Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige, Max Roach’s We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, and Hannibal Peterson’s African Portraits, Wynton Marsalis’s Blood on the Fields, an oratorio that—like the latter three works—takes as its subject the African American slave experience, is, in short, long. The first question posed by a three-hour piece must be: Does it justify its length? Beethoven, attacked for self-indulgence in his Third Symphony, doubled the duration in his Ninth; time may tilt the scales for Marsalis as well. But the audience for the February 24 Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra performance was unwilling to wait; some two-thirds of the sold-out house rose to its feet (“feet in the butt,” the work proclaims, “beget recognition”) and fled, greater clumps scurrying with each ensuing episode. Marsalis anticipated that response in an unusual opening plea for the house to stick. “It gets there,” he pledged. I was reminded of the screening of Otto Preminger’s Exodus during which Mort Sahl rose and petitioned the director, “Otto, let my people go!”
Hard of Hearing (JVC 1997)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The 25th edition of George Wein’s New York jazz festival, now firmly sponsored by JVC, was all over the map, musically and geographically, including a series of potentially canny shows at the Kaye Playhouse that promised to look at neglected areas tangential to jazz. For the first two nights, though, good intentions were undone by what one observer called the Worst Wives Clubs. Ignorant of Rich Conaty or his radio show, “The Big Broadcast,” I had foolishly assumed the concert of that name would be a look at ‘30s radio and maybe the Paramount movie series that celebrated it. But it was merely a vanity production, with Conaty producing comedy routines that caricatured the good old days as a dreary joke. A reasonably likable baritone named Allan Marks sang “I’d Rather Lead a Band” in a Batman mask (no explanation). A girl group proved that deedle-dee-dees do not the Boswells make. A boy group crooned all too soberly in spite of ceaseless mugging by a little guy in the middle.