Roseanna Vitro & Friends Pay Tribute to Bird

PARKER: People Chase [Steeplechase].^1,5 The Scatter [Red Cross].^1,2,6 Bird’s Song [Relaxin’ at Camarillo].^3,5 Parker’s Mood.^4,5 Grapple With the Apple [Scrapple From the Apple].^1,6,8 Audubon’s New Bluebird [Bluebird].^2,6,7 Sheila, Jazz Child [Cheryl].^1,3,6 Quasimodo.^3,6 Now’s the Time.^4,5 Yardbird Suite.^1,5 Medley: Ko-Ko/NOBLE: Cherokee.⁵ STRACHEY-MASCHWITZ: These Foolish Things ^1-3,6 / ¹Roseanna Vitro, ²Bob Dorough, ³Sheila Jordan, ⁴Marion Cowings, voc; ⁵Gary Bartz, a-sax; Alan Broadbent, pno; Dean Johnson, bs; Alvester Garnett, dm. ⁶Mark Gross, a-sax; Jason Teborek, pno; Johnson, bs; Bill Goodwin, dm. Add ⁷Paul Myers, gtr; ⁸Mino Cinelu, perc / Skyline SKYP 2101

With all the tribute albums to Charlie Parker (Bird) that have come out this year, you’d think this was the centenary of his birth or death, but actually the centenary of his birth was last year—the year of the Dreaded Pandemic From Hell—so I guess that they held off releasing this CD until now, particularly since some of the tracks to complete this album couldn’t be made until May of this year. It’s scheduled for full release on September 24.

And what a tribute it is, including vocals by one singer who actually knew and sang with Parker, Sheila Jordan, as well as the late Bob Dorough, who just made it to this album before his death on April 23, 2018 as well as Marion Cowings, a master of scat singing. Jordan’s voice has finally dropped in pitch from the way she sounded even into the early 2000s, but the girlish sweetness of tone remains the same…plus it’s a treat to hear her with a full band and not just a bass playing.

Indeed, although the album was Vitro’s project it really does sound like an open jam session in which she or the band invited these other three excellent jazz singers up to the stand to pitch in. She had an urge to put new lyrics to Parker’s compositions, thus creating a bop counterpart to Lambert, Hendricks & Ross’ classic Sing a Song of Basie LP from the 1950s; Jordan, Dorough and Cowings, all of whom she considers models and/or mentors, were thus invited to join in. The rhythm sections seem to vacillate between a bop beat and a swing one, but bop came out of swing anyway just as R&B did. Of the two alto saxists, both try to channel their inner Parker pretty well but for some reason Gross’ tone sounds a bit more like his model.

Yet in the end, I think Bird would have enjoyed this tribute because it really does come from the heart. All of these singers and musicians obviously admired Parker, and if I single out Jordan for top honors among the vocalists it’s simply because her improvisations are the most imaginative and interesting. Interestingly, Vitro’s style, though clearly good, sounds closer to young Sheila as she sounded on her recently-released lost 1960 album than modern-day Sheila.

But as I said, everyone is in there pitching and every singer and musician gave his or her all on this effervescent set. There’s not a bad track on the entire CD, they programmed the songs well. The Ko-Ko/Cherokee medley is the only instrumental on the set.

Strange though it may sound, there are too many highlights on this album to spend time describing them all. The album is flawless in the sense that there isn’t a bad or indifferent track or solo from start to finish, yet except for Vitro’s excellent new lyrics the album doesn’t break any new ground. But it didn’t have to. This is jazz perfection as you rarely hear it in any genre nowadays. What a shame that it wasn’t issued on Blue Note, who could have given it bigger promotion, but nowadays as long as you know about the record you can go online and buy it regardless of who put it out.

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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Fassbaender’s Excellent Loewe CD

LOEWE: 5 Gesänge der Sehnsucht, Op. 9: No. 2: Meine Ruh’ ist hin; No. 3: Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh; No. 4, Der du von dem Himmel bist; No. 5, Sehnsucht; Book 7 No. 2, Im Traum sah ich die Geliebte; Book 8 No. 4, Mädchenwunsche.  6 Lieder, Op. 9 No. 1: Szene aus Faust. 6 Nachtgesange, Book 1, Op. 9: No. 1, Die Lotosblume. 12 Gedichte, Op. 62: No. 3, O süsse Mutter; No. 4, Süsses Begrabnis; No. 5, Hinkende Jamben; No. 6, Irrlichter; No. 10, Das Pfarrjungferchen. Frauenliebe, Op. 60 / Brigitte Fassbaender, mezzo; Cord Garben, pno / Deutsche Grammophon 28942368026

This album, recorded in 1988 and rereleased in 2015 but not previously reviewed by me, came under my radar because I’ve been on a bit of a Carl Loewe kick lately. And the problem I’ve run into is that, with few exceptions (Johannes Martin Kränzle, Roman Trekel, Thomas Hampson and Fassbaender), most modern singers don’t have a clue how to sing Loewe, which is probably the reason he’s not as frequent a visitor to song recitals as he should be.

The problem is that most of Loewe’s songs are NOT “polite lieder” in the sense that most of Schubert’s, Schumann’s, Brahms’ or Mahler’s are. They are little dramas in music—you might say stories, or you might say dramatic epics—in song, thus they don’t sound very good when you interpret them subtly. Just imagine, for instance, that every Schubert song was like Erlkönig, Der Tod und das Mädchen or Winterreise and you’ll know what I mean. Loewe’s songs demand a full-blooded, almost operatic approach to the lyrics, and for whatever reason the older singers (e.g., Paul Bender, Lula Mysz-Gmeiner, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, young Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Kim Borg, Josef Greindl and Hans Hotter) “got” Loewe better than even such normally fine interpreters as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau or Thomas Quasthoff, who underplayed the drama in each song.

But by and large, Brigitte Fassbaender has been an operatic animal more than a lieder singer, her father Willi was one of the better interpreters of his time, and so she approaches these songs with both refinement of voice and enthusiasm of approach, with excellent results. Were these recordings released on an old mono LP or 78s, they would be collectors’ items. That’s how good they are.

For this program Fassbaender chose a few lieder to go along with the ballads, and she is wise enough to understand that they need a slightly different approach. Loewe wrote so many songs that to do a full edition of them would take a couple of dozen CDs. CPO tried to record a complete Loewe edition in the early 2000s, but except for Trekel and veteran bass Kurt Moll, none of the singers on those discs really understood Loewe’s style and so did not give them the “operatic” interpretation that most of them need in order to be effective.

Since I have young (1941 vintage) Schwarzkopf doing several of the 12 Gedichte, including “Irrlichter,” I was able to make a few A-B comparisons with Fassbaender, and the latter even takes some of these songs a bit further than young Lizzie did, which is all for the better. And thankfully, Fassbaender was still in prime vocal estate in 1988 (a smart singer who never over-extended herself, she preserved the voice for decades while many of her contemporaries fell apart) which makes them doubly valuable.

So if you listen to this CD and decide you like Loewe, where do you go from here? I suggest Kim Borg’s 1958 recording of seven Loewe songs with Huber Giesen as pianist, along with a few songs by Trekel and the two that Kränzle has recorded, but then head back in time. Go to YouTube and dig up Mysz-Gmeiner’s Herr Oluf, Lawrence Tibbett’s Edward, and as many Loewe songs as you can find by Bender, Greindl, Hotter et. al. I guarantee you, you won’t be disappointed. And then I urge you to go to Emily Ezust’s LiederNet Archive and dig up the words to all the songs. With Loewe, the words mean everything towards your understanding his music and the right approach. Enjoy!

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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Adam Nolan’s Primal Jazz

PRIM AND PRIMAL / NOLAN: Expand the Tempo. The Modern Jazz Trio. Latin Jazz? Ancient Mayan Jungle. The Magic Carpet. Kung Fu Master vs. the Ape / Adam Nolan, a-sax; Derek Whyte, bs; Dominic Mullan, dm / Self-produced CD, no number

Irish-born Adam Nolan is a free jazz saxist, and the musicians featured with him on this trio CD are also Irish jazz musicians, which shows that jazz is truly a universal language nowadays. Though not as far-out as the music of Brazilian tenor saxist Ivo Perelman, Nolan clearly enjoys fractioning time and harmony, even to the extent of adding “space” between his notes whereas Perelman is all about cramming as many notes (most of them well outside the tonality) into his playing.

There’s a certain quality to this trio that put me in mind of a number of different experimental groups from the 1960s, in the era just before fusion took over for about a dozen years. Although he is an alto player, some of his shapes and figures put me in mind of tenor saxist Pharoah Sanders except that his bassist keeps a fairly steady time while both Nolan and drummer Dominic Mullan go in different directions. Oddly enough, there’s quite a bit of Charlie Parker in his sound though his playing has a bit more of a “tubular” sound and does not rely as much on the blues (though it does to some extent).

Insofar as these pieces go as compositions, it’s difficult to say because so much of the music within each one is improvised and, to ne honest, the structure I do hear seems to be amorphous. I think that the trio could easily shift sections of these pieces around in live performance or even omit parts of them entirely and they would still work; and, as is so often the case with free jazz, the titles given to each seem to be a whim and not always (or necessarily) descriptive of that particular piece, but if one simply absorbs the music as presented it is continually interesting and absorbing.

Latin Jazz? is clearly one of the most amorphic and least structured piece on the album, a musical tale told by allusion rather than forceful playing. The bowed bass moans softly in its upper register for several bars before Nolan enters playing abstract figures around it. This certainly fulfills the album’s promise of something quite “primal”! Ancient Mayan Jungle is similar to the opening track, only played at a much faster tempo and having even more diversity in the fractioning of the meter. Although I felt that in some of these pieces some of the things being played were merely affects and not altogether musically cohesive, Nolan clearly has no fear in experimenting outside the usual norm in jazz.

In The Magic Carpet, it is drummer Mullan who keep up a relatively steady tempo (and a bit of a swing beat) while the other two explore uncharted territory. Track by track, Nolan takes you down his rabbit-hole to a strange musical land in which only a few musical shapes and licks act as a map to what is going on. By and large, this music is even more fragmented than Ornette Coleman’s but like Coleman’s it operates on its own inner order—or sometimes, lack of same.

Truly an invigorating CD for children of all ages!

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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Maria Finkelmeier’s Bizarre Music

FINKELMEIER: Spirit Touch. Orbs of Ghostliness. The Shadow of the Now. Mujina’s Arrival. Muse(s). The Shadow-Shaper. Moon Song. Mirror in Matsuyama / Jean Laurenz, tpt/voc/perc; Maria Finkelmeier, marimba/voc/toy pno/melodic/elec/perc; Greg Jukes, dm/acc/perc; Buzz Kemper, spkr / Bright Shiny Things CD12

I’ve reviewed some really strange music on my blog, of which the furthest-out is probably the sliding atonal chromatics of Julián Carrillo or the rhythmically far-out music of Harry Partch, but this one surely qualifies as bizarre. On this disc, Maria Finkelmeier attempts to capture, as the promo sheet puts it, “the untamed underbelly of our supernatural selves: the side that believes in ghosts and spirits…inspired by the life of ghost-story, folk-writer, Lafcadio Hearn.”

Before delving into the music contained herein, two notes. One is that we here in Cincinnati, Ohio know and honor Hearn not so much as a ghost story writer but as a journalist, one of the first to create, along with Mark Twain, a personal journal of events through our local newspaper. The other is that I personally haven’t bought into the concept of ghosts and spirits since I was ten years old, and that was a long, long time ago. But since I’ve had to suspend my non-belief in organized religion when reviewing music based on religious themes, I chose to suspend my belief that there is no such thing as ghosts as a basis for this review.

How does one even begin describing this music? Rhythmic? In places, yes, such as the opening of Spirit Touch, with Finkelmeier banging repeated Ds on the marimba while the trumpet (muted at first, then open), voices and other percussion swirl around it. And there is definitely a touch of Latin or at least Caribbean jazz in this piece; but then, at the 2:30 mark, this melee suddenly stops dead, followed after a pause by some ruminating marimba figures and Finkelmeier doing more ghostly, wordless singing. Truthfully, I found the music livelier and less spooky than just enjoyable in a bizarre sort of way. (We then get a narration, by Finkelmeier, about ghosts, but thankfully it’s short and can easily be ignored.)

Atmospheric? Certainly in Orbs of Ghostliness, in which an electronic instrument that sounds like a glass harmonica sets the tone with repeated two-note figures as a synthesized oboe sound plays its sparse melodic figure above it. There’s a certain Meredith Monk-like quality about this piece, yet somehow it doesn’t even sound as tightly structured as Monk’s music. We hear what sounds like an improvised accordion solo emerge from the soft massed sound pillow, followed by the muted trumpet, set far back in a swath of reverb.

Can we call this music classical? I’m not so sure. Perhaps only in the sense that it’s written out and not improvised. Otherwise, I don’t think you can call it classical in form or any other category than would identify it as such. The soft, breathy male voice narrating about ghostly sounds in The Shadow of Now reminded me of the great “word jazz” artist Ken Nordine, and in Mujinas Arrival what we hear almost sounds like soft techno-rock. One thing I’ll give to Finkelmeier, she certainly doesn’t stay in the same place. Every track has its own character, each one strange but in a different way from the others.

I don’t want my readers to think that I didn’t, or don’t, like this CD. On the contrary, it’s so different that you stay tuned in fascination, wondering just what Kampmeier has in store for us next as it moves from track to track. But as I say, bizarre is the only way to describe this disc. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it always evokes ghosts, but it consistently evokes strange and conflicting feelings from within—which is probably where “ghosts” reside, anyway. Muse(s) is mostly a marimba solo with soft percussion and a light scraping sound, into which the trumpet comes flying in from its topmost register down. By the 2:21 mark, however the music sounds like stomping jazz. A hip ghost? Hope you can dig it.

The sound of rain opens The Shadow-Shaper, and our Ken Nordine sound-alike to, I guess, try to spook us out with his deep-voiced narration. Really, the whole CD is just so fascinating and weird and entertaining all at the same time, but not (at least not to me, the non-believer) scary or ghostly. Moon Song is a Caribbean-type song that you could almost imagine Harry Belafonte singing back in the late ‘50s, just another piece of Kampmeier’s strange musical gumbo. In Mirror in Matsuyama, the trumpet plays its own melodic line over the marimba figures in a relaxed 6/8.

I most definitely recommend this for those with an appetite for the unusual and outré, as long as you’re open to new experiences. It’s quite a trip!

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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Anja Harteros’ “Mystery” CD

WAGNER: Wesendonck-Lieder. BERG: 7 Frühe Lieder. MAHLER: Rückert-Lieder / Anja Harteros, sop; Munich Philharmonic Orch.; Valery Gergiev, cond / Munich Philharmonic 0746935760199

Put on your deerstalker hats and pull out your magnifying glasses, boys and girls, because we have a real Sherlock Holmesian mystery on our hands here.

I just happened to log into the Naxos Music Library yesterday to check on some recordings of ballads and lieder by Carl Loewe when, le and behold, the front cover image of this CD suddenly appeared in the New Releases section. I was flabbergasted because, although it was listed for release this month (August), it was NOT in the Naxos New Release Catalog for either the first two or last two weeks of August when they came out in September. I know, because I really like Anja Harteros and would gladly have auditioned any CD she made for possible review.

Happily, I found all of the tracks on YouTube and so was able to covert them to MP3 files and download them, which is how I am reviewing this disc. I was also quite fortunate that when I clicked on the image in the NML, I was able to download the booklet. But this just goes to show you how little any CD is promoted nowadays, particularly a private label like this disc which was issued by the Münchner Philharmoniker itself.

Now, to be honest I was a little leery of the disc because the conductor is Valery Gergiev, who morphed from one of the most exciting and energized conductors in the world during the 1990s and early 2000s into a slow, drippy, maudlin conductor once he began performing with regularity in London. The British have this tendency to do this to their conductors because the classical music public there prefers slow, drippy, maudlin performances of classical music. They deem it “touching” and “deep” and “meaningful” when in fact it is none of that.

But what the heck…none of these song cycles exactly calls for a muscular reading anyway, and since Harteros was the star of the show, I decided to take the plunge.

I remembered Harteros’ voice well from her years at the Metropolitan Opera (only two seasons, I think) in the late 1990s: firm and brilliant with a fast but controlled vibrato. Twenty-some years on, the voice has aged a bit. The once-fresh sound is now more mature, with some hardness in the tone I didn’t hear back then, and her vibrato is a little looser than it once was, but she can still control the voice well, sing with feeling and make an impact when the mood calls for it…note, for instance, her impassioned performance of “Stehe still!” in the Wesendonck-Lieder. Gergiev’s conducting sounds to me a shade more exciting at times than he usually sounds in England; I think the Munich orchestra suits him better. This is an excellent interpretation of these songs that I would put on a par with the ancient recording by Emma Eames or the 1950s performance by Martha Mödl, which are my two favorite versions.

Harteros’ performances of Berg’s seven early songs are also very good, but not quite on the level of the late Jessye Norman, whose recording if them is still my gold standard (Magda Laszlo was also excellent). Nonetheless, she gets into the words and the mood of each song very well.

I wonder, however, at the wisdom of programming a CD of songs which are mostly all in the same tempo (slow) and mood (reflective). People who work in radio know how to contrast moods by alternating songs or instrumental pieces of varying moods and tempi, and I think that Harteros should have contrasted interspersing some faster, more energetic songs with the slow, reflective ones. Other than that, this is a very good release and, if anything, Harteros’ voice sounds at its freshest and most silvery in the Rückert-Lieder of Mahler.

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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Baby Laurence, Jazz Tap Master

GRAHAM-JACKSON: Baby at Birdland.¹ The Sand.¹ Mall March.¹ HERMAN-PIERCE: Buck Dance.¹ JACKSON: Concerto in Taps.¹ Baby’s Walking Blues.² SCHOENBERGER-COBURN-ROSE: Whispering.² YOUNG: Delila’s Theme.² PARKER: Moose the Mooche.² Ornithology.² YOUNG-PERKINS: Lullaby of the Leaves ² / ¹Paul Quinichette, t-sax; Nat Pierce, pno; Skeeter Best, gtr; Al Hall, bs; Osie Johnson, dm. ²Bobby Jasper, fl/t-sax; Roland Hanna, pno; Arvell Shaw, bs; Gerard “Dave” Pochonet, dm / Classic Jazz CDBY 5637215125 or available for free streaming on YouTube by clicking individual tracks above

I was 25 years old in 1976 and had known jazz critic and historian Ralph Berton for about five years when he pulled out the LP listed above and proudly showed it to me.

“Who’s Baby Laurence?” I asked, naively.

“Who’s Baby Laurence? Are you jivin’ me?!?”

“No. I’ve never heard of him.”

“He was the greatest jazz tap dancer in the world!”

But I still hadn’t heard of him. I knew of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, John Bubbles, The Nicholas Brothers (who didn’t know about the Nicholas Brothers?), Bunny Briggs, Sammy Davis Jr. and Hines, Hines and Dad, the latter a famous tap dancing act of the time who had appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show several times. Gregory, one of the junior Hineses, went on to become one of the most famous tap dancers of his day.

“Well, except for Bunny Briggs, none of them are jazz tap dancers,” Ralph said. Then he explained the difference to me: most tap dancers just danced in rhythm to the music they heard, but Laurence, and Briggs, actually created new, more complex rhythms when they danced. They were jazz percussionists, not just dancing for flash.

As it turned out, there was a reason why I’d never heard of Baby Laurence. Like most tap dancers—including the phenomenal Nicholas Brothers—his career went into a tailspin during the 1950s and ‘60s when tap suddenly became passé. In addition, he only appeared on American TV twice, once on a Hollywood Palace show hosted by Sammy Davis Jr, who idolized him, in 1967, and once on the Mike Douglas Show the following year, and I missed both of those shows.

But listening to that record, which you can do by clicking on the titles above (it was reissued on CD by Classic Jazz in 2008 and thankfully uploaded on YouTube), you can hear what I heard—and be blown away by it. Laurence creates such complex cross-rhythms with his feet that your mind spins just trying to keep up with him. Several years later, after I had moved from New Jersey to Ohio, I played the record for a friend of mine who professed to liking tap dancers but who wasn’t a jazz fan in the least. His judgment was that Bay Laurence just danced “a standard military tap.” I almost broke the LP over his head, I was so angry!

But thankfully, you don’t have to just rely on aural evidence to recognize how great he was. One intrepid soul has been kind enough to upload Laurence’s complete Hollywood Palace appearance HERE and, better yet, someone else uploaded an even better (and longer) display of his awesome talents in a half-hour 1981 British TV documentary on the legendary dancer HERE. The latter includes an astonishing amount of real jazz tap footage shot, apparently by an amateur cameraman (once in a while Laurence’s feet disappear from the screen, but thankfully not too often), during a live outdoor performance in Baltimore, Maryland in 1972, two years before he died. The documentary also includes some footage shot in a Harlem dance studio. At one point, going back and forth between Baltimore and Harlem, Laurence gives us the complete history of tap dancing and how it evolved, naming all the important innovators of the art. He also explains how he came to be a dancer and specifically a jazz dancer.

Laurence Donald Jackson was born in Baltimore in February 1921 but wasn’t originally a dancer. He was a boy soprano at the age of 12 and that year sang with the McKinney’s Cotton Pickers’ band in that city. When famed bandleader Don Redman came to town he heard him, was impressed, and asked his mother if Laurence could tour with him. His mother gave her consent (“She almost had to,” Laurence once said; “I was so hyperactive she couldn’t keep me in school anyway!”) provided that Redman would promise to get him a tutor to complete his education, which the bandleader did.

But Jackson didn’t stay with Redman very long. Touring with Redman on the Loewe’s circuit, when they hit New York he visited the Hoofers’ Club in Harlem where he saw and met dancers Honi Coles, Raymond Winfield, Ronald Holder and Harold Mablin. The latter took the 13-year-old under his wing and taught him how to tap dance, but as Laurence put it, “He gave me the devil because I turned all his steps around, and pretty soon he just gave me ideas and I went on from there.” When he eventually returned to Baltimore with Redman he learned that both his parents had died in a fire, which unsettled him emotionally. He later told jazz critic Marshall Stearns that he never “got used to the idea” that both his parents were dead because “they always took such good care of me.”

At this point, Laurence and his three brothers formed a vocal group called The Four Buds and tried to make it in New York, but the quartet broke up when Laurence was offered a job as featured tap dancer in a club owned by another former dancer, Dickie Wells (not to be confused with Count Basie’s star trombonist of the same name), who nicknamed him “Baby” and encouraged his dancing. Baby got turned on to jazz when he worked at the Onyx Club with the newest jazz piano sensation in New York, Art Tatum. Fascinated by what Tatum was doing with fracturing rhythm on the keyboard, Laurence picked up on it and began developing into a jazz dancer. In addition to working in clubs in Cincinnati, Washington, D.C. and of course New York, where he eventually played at the Apollo Theatre, Laurence danced a lot in after-hours sessions with famous jazz musicians, Tatum included. His second jazz “epiphany” came when he heard Charlie Parker for the first time, and from that point on he was determined to stay with creating intricate rhythmic patterns like a jazz drummer. “In a 16-bar solo,” he often said, “I could create at least 32 different rhythms. Sometimes I’d create up to three different rhythms in one bar.”

When the tap dancing decline hit, many famous dancers who had been around for years, including the Nicholas Brothers, decided to call it quits, but somehow Laurence and Bunny Briggs survived because of their high reputation with jazz musicians. Nonetheless, due to financial woes as well as alcohol and drug abuse, Laurence stopped dancing for a few years, eventually returning to the limelight shortly after he recorded his one LP. He was featured in a dance number with Honi Coles, Pete Nugent and Briggs at the 1962 Newport Jazz Festival, but it wasn’t until Hines, Hines and Dad re-established tap again in the late 1960s that Laurence re-emerged from the shadows and became something of a star once again. In 1973 he established his own dance studio in New York, appeared at the Palace Theater with Josephine Baker, and also taught tap at the Jazz Museum. He seemed set to become a star once again, giving another triumphant performance at the New York Newport Jazz Festival.

But sadly, it didn’t last. He contracted lung cancer and died at the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital on August 5, 1974. He was only 53. His funeral at the Emmanuel Church in New York was highly unusual, much more of a celebration than a eulogy. Nearly every surviving tap dancer in or around the city showed up to reminisce about how much they admired Laurence, and then tap-dance their hearts out. It ended up being more like a party than a funeral!

Somehow, I think that Baby Laurence would have wanted it that way. He didn’t just love what he did, for him it was the only life he was even halfway comfortable in, and it meant all the world to him that at least part of his audience “got” what he was doing artistically and didn’t think it was just a show-off act. And now, thanks to this recording and these film clips, you can see and hear how great he was, too.

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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Judith Ingolfsson’s “Happiest Years”

SCHNABEL: Solo Violin Sonata. ERDMANN: Solo Violin Sonata / Judith Ingolfsson, vln / Genuin 20711

When this CD was first released in May 2020. I tried my best to review it. I downloaded the music files from Naxos’ secure website for critics and happily began listening…only to discover that the second movement of the Schnabel sonata stopped playing after only 50 seconds. And the same was true of the third movement.

So I complained to my contact at Naxos, who assured me that it would be fixed online. It never was. Even worse, when the CD showed up on the Naxos streaming site, the same problem occurred…and it occurred again when they uploaded the sound files on YouTube later on. (Update: I just checked and the first two movements of the Schnabel now play their normal length on the Naxos streaming site, but the third movement, which runs 11:27, cuts off after just 2:26, so we still have problems.)

Unfortunately, at the time I couldn’t connect with the artist via her Facebook page, but after giving a rave review to her latest CD she contacted me, I told her the problem, and she was gracious enough to mail me a physical copy of the CD from Germany, which I received yesterday afternoon, so here is my review of it.

The title of the CD does not refer at all to the second composer on here, Eduard Erdmann, but to the first. Artur Schnabel later said that the years 1919-1924 in Berlin were his happiest because he could cut back on giving concerts and devote more time to composition, which he loved. Yet oddly, it wasn’t necessarily because he “loved” his own music! To quote the liner notes, “He was ‘happy’ composing and considered it ‘a kind of hobby, or love affair.’ He was not interested in the ‘value’ of his compositions, rather in the ‘activity.’”

Schnabel & Schoenberg

A century on, and much (but not all) of Schnabel’s music is now highly valued for its musical content—much to the consternation and irritation of conventional music lovers who can’t stomach it because it is atonal. For me, Schnabel’s best music is that written for the piano (his instrument), his String Quartet, the few songs which he wrote for his wife, mezzo-soprano Therese Behr-Schnabel, and this solo Violin Sonata. I find his orchestral works, which he wrote in the late 1930s, to be heavily congested musically and somewhat incomprehensible. When Dmitri Mitropoulos gave the American premiere of Schnabel’s First Symphony with the New York Philharmonic in December 1946, it was roundly booed by the audience and panned by the critics, and with justification. But this didn’t stop Mitropoulos from also performing Schnabel’s equally indigestible Rhapsody for Orchestra  two years later, in November of 1948, to equally derisive comments. I don’t think it is just coincidence that none of Schnabel’s orchestral works are programmed nowadays. (Yes, I know, some reader in Bad Gestomachache, Germany will post a comment that some visiting conductor programmed one of them back in 1998 or 2015 or something, but you get my point.)

My sole experience with this work is the very fine performance given by violinist William Harvey on Centaur 3678, but Ingolfsson plays it just as well if not better. What I find so attractive about these solo works (and the string quartet) that I do not find attractive in Schnabel’s orchestral music is that, when he was writing one line of music, he alternated between harmonic edginess and extreme lyricism, which was in his blood, whereas in his orchestral music it seemed as if he was always trying to out-Schoenberg Schoenberg and it just didn’t work. Ingolfsson plays this sonata with a light, fast vibrato which adds luster to her tone, yet she does not shy away from the strong emotion in those louder, edgier passages where the soloist is asked to attack the instrument more forcefully. Nonetheless, she finds a way of folding those edgier moments into the overall lyricism of her playing. It’s had to describe, but you can hear it when you listen to the performance.

As I mentioned when reviewing the Harvey performance (February 2019), the relatively brief second movement surprised me because it “sounds like a cross between modern violin music and something that Fritz Kreisler might have written. This is also, considering Schnabel’s penchant for tightly-constructed music with little in the way of flash, a surprisingly virtuosic piece.” Interestingly, Ingolfsson’s performance de-emphasizes the Kreisler-like effects, concentrating more on the angularity of the musical line. Touches like this make her performance sound, at times, considerably different from Harvey’s.

The Erdmann sonata, although in the same vein, is less than half as long, clocking in at 18:30 compared to the Schnabel sonata at 46:39. The opening is lyrical but atonal, using much more widely-spaced intervals and quite a few pauses after which the tempo changes considerably. This sonata was inspired by the composer’s close friendship with violinist Alma Moodie, one of Carl Flesch’s prize pupils. After a pause at 10:06, we hear a bouncy sort of tune, albeit one in bitonal harmony, and the tempo becomes even faster a bit later on. Erdmann’s second movement, though an “Allegretto scherzando,” emerges in bits and pieces which the listener must put together in his or her head while listening to the music—yet somehow the music coalesces. Thus this piece is not as easy to assimilate as the Schnabel because the listener must work harder to catch everything that is going on, but ultimately it is rewarding. A perfect example is the bouncy (but very atonal) fourth movement, marked “Lebendig” (“Lively”) with its serrated atonal melodic line and occasional strange dead stops in the music.

I think that both Harvey’s and Ingolfsson’s performances of the Schnabel sonata are of equal value because both violinists bring out different things in the music and in different ways. I’m a little more ambivalent about the Erdmann sonata, not because it isn’t good but because it’s more cerebral and sometimes a bit confusing as to what the composer was driving at, but her performance of it is excellent.

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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Armengaud Plays Dutilleux

DUTILLEUX: Piano Sonata. Le Loup (version for piano). 3 Préludes / Jean-Pierre Armengaud, pno / Grand Piano GP 790

Pianist Jean-Pierre Armengaud, a pretty old guy to judge from his photo, is considered to be a leading exponent of French music. Thankfully, he at least chose a composer who continued to write music into the late 1980s, Henri Dutilleux. The “World Premiere Recording” (break out the spotlights and brass fanfares!) on this disc turns out to be the original piano version of the composer’s ballet, Le Loup (The Wolf).

We begin with the oldest work on this CD, the Piano Sonata of 1944-48, written at a time when conductor Charles Munch first became aware of him, later becoming a champion of his symphonies and other orchestral works. One is immediately aware of Dutilleux’s unusual take on modern harmonic language, wrapped in lively French rhythms. This is music that will surely confound and even repel the average concertgoer but which I found immediately interesting, even riveting; clearly one of his best pieces. The first movement is full of tricky passages, little fast, falling figures in the right hand, eventually moving away from the strongly rhythmic opening section into a more open musical space at a much slower tempo for the development. It’s almost as if Dutilleux had been jogging along an atonal highway when he suddenly spotted some flora and fauna that clearly came from outer space on the sidelines, and stopped to investigate it. Later on, when the tempo picks up again, there are some tricky rhythms in the right-hand part. A highly original and imaginative piece that I enjoyed tremendously.

And I will say this, Armengaud is a stylish and energetic interpreter who fully immerses himself in the scores he performs. Even in the slow, somewhat spacey second movement, which seems to be comprised almost entirely of simple block chords in the left hand against an equally simple. high-lying melodic line in the right, he holds your interest. The third movement, an extended “Choral et Variations” that runs almost 12 minutes, is a continuous whirl of sound that envelops the listener with its swirling figures and upward keyboard runs in the right hand.

Le Loup is, of course, the composer’s famous ballet score from 1953. In my review of John Wilson’s excellent orchestral performance of the score, I mentioned that although there are some very tricky rhythms which are clearly not easy to dance to, the music is more tonal than usual for Dutilleux. Although Armengaud does a very fine job with the score, I have to admit that I prefer the orchestral version better. And—very odd—different sections of this long piece seem to have been recorded in different venues and/or with different microphone setups, because the aural perspective of the piano changes dramatically, sometimes within different sections of the same piece.

I was, however, much more taken by the three Préludes. Here, Dutilleux very carefully condensed his style, producing works that were not only densely packed but which had a lot of content. Unlike the early Piano Sonata, he remains in relatively slow tempi wit shifting colors and moods, but the music’s very lack of density brings the listener even closer to the heart of each piece, and in these works Armengaud is truly superb. This is very spacey music, similar to Almeida Prado’s Cartas Celestas.

To sum it up, then, a very fine recital although I find the piano version of Le Loup a bit too bare-sounding for my taste (no fault of the artist).

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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Ronald Center’s String Quartets

CENTER: String Quartets Nos. 1-3 / The Fejes Quartet / Toccata Classics TOCC 0533

Once again we encounter a composer virtually unknown outside his native country, in this case Scotland. Ronald Center, who only made it to age 60 (1913-1973), according to the publicity blurb, was considered to be “the Scottish Bsrtók.” Like his Hungarian model, Center enfolded his own folk music into the complex polyphonic webs of his pieces. The second and third quartets on this CD are first recordings. (I detest the new modern term “world premiere recordings.” If it’s a first recording, of COURSE it’s a world premiere, duh!)

With that being said, the first quartet opens with tonally consonant drone but quickly moves into bitonality. Center uses very deliberate, slow upward steps before doubling the tempo and moving into his secondary theme. But I must say this, that some of this music sounds somewhat contrived, the result of careful pre-planning and not of great inspiration, thus it is good music but, for me, not great music. There’s also something a bit funky about the Fejes Quartet’s playing; they sound somehow just a touch sour, as if one or two members of the group were not 100% in tune. Nor do they play with much energy, and this too makes the music sound less impressive.

Yet the music is quite interesting in places, in the first quartet, oddly enough, the slow movement. The second quartet, which followed the first by seven to nine years (it was written over a two-year period, 1962-64), is even more complex yet played with even less energy by the Fejes Quartet. (Where did Toccata Classics fins these guys, in some conservatory rehearsal room? “Hey, you sound like you could play this music, though not exactly in tune or with any energy. How much you want to make a record of it?”) Trying to listen through their excruciatingly bad playing, however, I really liked the first movement. The second clearly uses a traditional Scottish rhythm, but the Fejes Quartet plays it so badly that it loses its impact.

I really don’t enjoy being the bearer of bad tidings about this recording, but what else can one say when the music is interesting but the performances are borderline awful? Toccata Classics should delete this recording forthwith and find a competent string quartet to re-record these works.

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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Steve Million’s Interesting Jazz

JAZZ WORDS / MILLION: Heavens to Monkatroid. Mis’ry Waltz. Missing Page. Hymnal. Nika’s Changes. Cold Wind. Loss. The Way Home / Jim Gailloreto, fl/t-sax; Steve Million, pno; John Sims, bs; Juan Pastor, dm; Sarah Marie Young, voc / Self-produced CD

Steve Million, a Chicago-based jazz pianist-composer who grew up in Boonville, Missouri, His first jazz love was the Count Basie band, which he heard when he was eight years old, and he has only gone on from strength to strength.

The opener, Heavens to Monkatroid, is a perfect example. Using even freakier harmonies than Monk did, Million creates a surprisingly hot swinger on which Sarah Marie Young sings. And she’s no soft-voiced whisperer; she sings out, and she swings. So does this band, every single one of them, but particularly Jim Gailloreto on tenor sax and flute and Million himself on piano. It’s hard not to get enthusiastic about this music since it’s just so effervescent and energetic—a real counter to the sad, drippy laments that other “jazz” groups are turning out in response to Covid-19.

With that being said, I was a little leery of the title of Mis’ry Waltz, but Million infuses this with a strong blues feeling, producing a sort of slow 6 over 4 feeling, and Young again provides an excellent vocal, this time without much improvisation. And yes, once again Gailloreto’s tenor is superb; he doesn’t play a lot of notes and only goes “outside” occasionally, but his solos are so well structured and make so much musical sense that it’s hard not to be enthusiastic about him. Just a really, really good musician.

But if this disc is Young’s coming-out party, we should all put on our party hats and celebrate. This young woman can really SING, folks, and I don’t mean just a little. She has a clear, pure tone, impeccable diction that would be the envy of many a classical soprano, and an impeccable sense of time. Not even the complex 11/8 beat of Missing Page fazes her; she just keeps on going and does a great job on  each and every track. I foresee a great career for her, and sincerely hope that she is wise enough to keep the voice in the good shape it’s in now. Far too many singers nowadays, both jazz and classical, don’t work on their voices as their careers progress, with the result that their voices begin to show an unsteady flutter in four or five years and they are no longer as good. So to Sarah Marie Young I say, Listen to Ella, Sarah Vaughan, Cleo Laine and even, if you go back a few decades, Mildred Bailey. These were jazz singers who knew how to keep what they had and not let it deteriorate (well, in Sarah’s and Cleo’s cases, old age eventually caught up with them, but…they were good for a very long time).

As for the other pieces on this album, the only one I wasn’t really fond of was Hymnal; just a bit too much of a drippy ballad for my taste, and not a terribly interesting ballad at that, but I’m sure that some listeners will like it more than I did. Happily, the wonderful Nika’s Changes picks the mood (and the quality of music) up again. On this track, Young sings along with herself in one double-tracked passage, and Gailloreto again shines on tenor.

Cold Wind opens with ostinato bass over soft brushes and piano chords; it’s a ballad, but in this case an interesting one written in 3 with a very interesting melody line. Gailloreto plays a brief flute solo on this one behind the vocal, with other solos given to bassist John Sims, Million himself, and then a full chorus by Gailloreto. Loss is also a sort of ballad, but in a medium tempo with a bit more of a beat.

To a certain extent, I felt that Jazz Words was an album that started out like a house on fire but then cooled off quite a bit as it went along (sorry, but I’m  not into “hearts and dreams” songs), but for the most part Million’s lyrics are not maudlin and most of his tune constriction is interesting and worth hearing. A fine album, then, most especially for Young.

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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