bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
= 2 (Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock)
Authors: Giddins Gary 
Published: November 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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