bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Good Vibrations (Stefon Harris)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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.
Works
Authors: Millington Barry 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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.