A Great Forgotten Tenor

A friend of mine sent me a CD which included a large number of recordings, most of them acoustic, of rare recordings from the first 34 years of the 20th century. Several of them impressed me, but none quite as forcibly as a Belgian tenor I’d never heard of, Laurent Swolfs. Although he was “only” singing a song, Flégier’s Le beau rêve, the voice absolutely bowled me over. Who WAS this guy? Well, as we shall see, except for a brief sojourn in Vienna, he restricted his career to Belgium, France and Holland, and although he recorded extensively between 1906 and 1924, 193 sides in all (21 were unissued, destroyed takes), he played “record tag” with a number of labels, some of them obscure like Reneyphone and Disque du Saphir, and even when he recorded for known labels like Odeon, Pathé or HMV, they only had local distribution. No one had ever issued an entire album of his recordings; the closest any of them came was Malibran Records, which put six tracks by him on a CD of Belgian and Flemish singers. You can view his entire discography by clicking HERE.

Swolfs as Tristan

So I began digging. I found eight other recordings on YouTube, one or two on the Internet Archive, and a surprise cache on another site which finally included a couple of Wagner arias. Yet this was a man who sang a wide gamut of roles, from such lyric parts as Wilhelm Meister in Mignon, the title role in Werther etc. to Canio in Pagliacci, Enée in Le Prise du Troie (the first part of Berlioz’ Les Troyens) and all of the Wagner roles, which makes him the only other tenor besides Lauritz Melchior to sing the full range of Wagner’s approved operas. Yet frustratingly, most of his 123 recordings were of songs (he was particularly fond of Keurvels’ Wiegenliedje)! Some of these were really rubbish, like Ma Curly-Headed Baby,

Swolfs as Werther

and for some ungodly reason he made three different versions of “Cantique de Noel” (“O Holy Night”). He also recorded two different takes of “Chanson Hindou,“ but NOT the Rimsky-Korsakov aria; it was written by Bemberg. Like Caruso, he recorded a version of Handel’s “Ombra mai fu” from Xerxes at his last recording session (1924). He was also loath to record duets. The only ones he made were Faure’s “Crucifix” with a Dutch bass named Huylebroeck for Parlophone c. 1912 and three duets (one each from Mirielle, Faust, and Carmen) with a French soprano named Berthe d’Anory for Reneyphone/Polydor in 1922 or ’23. Apparently he had a thing for doing songs or, like Jon Vickers, he hated “ripping” arias and duets out of context to record as a single item, but sooner or later I came up with 16 sides—technically, enough to fill out a full LP back in Ye Olde Days.

Enée in La Prise de Troie

Here is what I learned about him by searching online. Born in Ghent in 1868, Swolfs studied singing in Antwerp and Brussels with Désiré Demest, among others, but it was essentially Demest who settled his voice for life. Demest was also the teacher of Fernand Ansseau, Armand Crabbe and Hector Dufranne, all first-rate singers. Swolfs began his career as a concert singer, then made his debut in 1901 at the Opera House of Antwerp as Max in Der Freischütz. In 1903 he was engaged by the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, where he had a successful career for more than 20 years. In 1906 he sang, astonishingly, the first part of Berlioz’ Les Troyens (La prise de Troie) in Brussels with Mme. Charles-Mazarin and Sylvain Dupuis (11 performances), then later the same season created the role of Herod in the Belgian premiere of Strauss’ Salome (17 performances), and in the 1908-09 season he worked at the Opera House of Lyon. In 1908, conductor-composer Felix Weingartner, who heard him in Antwerp, brought Swolfs to the Vienna Court Opera to create the leading role in Weingartner’s opera Genesius. While in Vienna he also sang the title roles in Lohengrin and Samson et Dalila. In 1910 he had a huge success at the Paris Grand Opéra as Siegmund and as Samson. In 1911 he sang at the Opéra-Comique of Paris in the premiere of Albéric Magnard’s opera Bérénice. In 1913, he appeared there as Loge in Rheingold and made guest appearance at the Opera House of Nice. After the First World War, he became a successor to Ernest van Dyck as a professor at the Brussels Conservatoire. From 1923-25 he was at the same time the artistic manager of the Opera House of Antwerp and continued singing. After his retirement he lived in Ghent, and near the end of his life he became blind.

Young Swolfs (pre-facial hair)

The one thing everyone agreed on was that he had a powerfully controlled and metallically shining voice. What I found most interesting about him were two things: first, that he took most of his high notes in head voice or voix mixte, much like the French fort tenor Léon Escalaïs, and second, that he had almost inexhaustible lung power which allowed him to sustain phrases for an incredibly long span. In addition to these assets, he was also a sensitive and musically creative singer who could shade the voice and color it effectively, especially in those songs. In short, his is the kind of singing that should be a model today for virtually any tenor attempting to sing heroic roles, but of course he isn’t. Most modern dramatic tenors bluster and bellow as if they were trying to blow down the third little pig’s house of bricks and not doing so. They have vocal strain, wobble, uneven registers and all sorts of vocal flaws which would never have allowed them to get beyond comprimario roles in the old days. But of course we can’t just blame the singers themselves; all of them had teachers, thus it is to the teaching methods of today that we must lay 90% of the blame. Lauritz Melchior, Wolfgang Windgassen, James King and Jon Vickers all sang with steady tonal emission well into their 60s. There is really no excuse for the garbage we hear coming out of modern-day dramatic tenors. Even José Cura, who started singing professionally rather late and went on a bit too long, had some marvelous years when he didn’t have half the problems we hear out of such tenors today.

Swolfs as Dalibor, 1902

But to return to Swolfs, one really must hear him to believe him. Like Escalaïs, Caruso, Slezak and a very few others, his voice sounded remarkably natural even on acoustics, and I would go so far as to say, based on the cross-section of records I’ve heard spanning 14 years, he was even more consistent than the latter two. Putting it plainly, Laurent Swolfs was a singing machine, but one with a heart and a mind. What sounds so easy on the records must have cost him untold hours of practice and discipline to create and, more importantly, maintain.

Curiously, there is almost nothing available online about his personal life. We don’t even know if he was married or had children, and nowhere can you find an inkling about his personality. We know at least a little bit about his more famous Dutch contemporary, Jacques Urlus, than we do about him. Of course it is his singing that principally engages us, but it would be interesting to know if he was a lover of poetry since his song interpretations are so outstanding.

A cross-section of Swolfs’ record labels

Swolfs as Samson

I have uploaded most of my Swolfs recordings, cleaned up as best I could, to the Internet Archive, and at a page on the Historical Tenors website you can hear five more recordings (not cleaned up) including two of his Wagner excerpts, “Am stillen herd” from Die Meistersinger and the “Wintersturme” from Die Walküre. Yet all of this information put together does not indicate the breadth of Swolfs’ repertoire, which included Dalibor, Der Evangelimann, Der Freischütz, La damnation de Faust, Hérodiade, Elektra, and even one of the “outside” Wagner operas, Feuersnot—yet oddly, it did not include the French operas from which he recorded the duets with Mme. d’Anory!

In any event, Laurent Swolfs is clearly a tenor you should investigate if you are a lover of truly great singing. As I wrote to my friend, he has brought several excellent but neglected singers to my attention over the years (such as mezzo-soprano Susanne Brohly), but among tenors Swolfs is clearly the greatest artist and voice of them all.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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The Forgotten Classical Satirist

If you were asked to name the best classical music satirists if the 20th century, the first name on your lips would undoubtedly be the late Peter Schickele, a.k.a. P.D.Q. Bach, with Spike Jones and Anna Russell probably coming in at Nos. 2 and 3. The next name on the list would probably be Victor Borge; those who are deeply involved in opera might come up with falsetto soprano Michael Aspinall or female opera satirist B.J. Ward. But you’d probably run out of names without ever coming up with that of Alec Templeton. Until a few days ago, the only thing I knew Templeton from was his tongue-in-cheek fugue from Bach Goes to Town, which was recorded (and performed in person) by Benny Goodman’s popular swing band back in 1938.

But a friend of mine from Brooklyn sent me a homemade CD on which he included Templeton’s 1936 recording of Arthur Sullivan’s The Lost Chord, first played straight (well, some of it, anyway) and then played as if it were a patter song from one of the Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. It was just so funny that I had to look him up online, at which point I discovered a great deal more of him: vicious satires of Italian opera (including a Metropolitan Opera “performance” of Ziggy Elman’s swing tune And the Angels Sing), a simulation of all the different musical sounds you hear in the corridors of a music conservatory, one recording on which he played The Stars and Stripes Forever as a Strauss waltz and The Beautiful Blue Danube as a Sousa march, a surprisingly good imitation of Frankie Laine singing “My heart at thy sweet voice” from Samson et Dalila, a take-off of a man with a new radio who just likes to dial-flip, parodies of German lieder singers and off-key Gilbert & Sullivan choruses, and a sign-off song called Good-Byee in which he informs his audience that he can’t wait to get off the stage. And on top off all this, there are his tongue-in-cheek jazz-classical hybrids: in addition to Bach Goes to Town there are also Mozart a la Mode, Mendelssohn Mows ‘Em Down, the Ghost Rhapsody and a Pocket-Sized Sonata for Clarinet and Piano. The first-named of these has been recorded by several pianists as well as by the distinguished British harpsichordist George Malcolm and the last-named by a surprisingly large number of clarinetists including the legendary Reginald Kell (who gives us the squarest and least swinging version of all). At his height in the 1940s and ‘50s, Templeton was an almost permanent summer replacement show on radio, played both jazz and classical works with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in the 1950s, appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and had not one but two TV programs on the Dumont network.

So why is he forgotten?

My guess is that it’s because most of his classical spoofs ended around 1941, by which time he had become very popular as an erudite radio host who played popular and light classical piano works on the air as well as on records. Out of sight, out of mind, you know, and Templeton’s transformation from classical satirist to popular jazz and classical entertainer was virtually complete.

Born in Wales in either 1909 and 1910—according to Wikipedia, his birth certificate clearly states 1909 but his tombstone says 1910—Templeton was, like George Shearing, blind from birth but showed remarkable musical talent at a very early age. How early? Well, he was admitted to Worcester College, Oxford at the age of NINE where he studied the organ with Ivor Adkins and later was admitted at an early age to the Royal College of Music in London. In addition to having a steel-trap mind that could remember any and all music he heard, Templeton was also gifted with absolute pitch, which later helped him in his very complex classical spoofs. Judging from his recordings, he must have driven the other students at the Royal College crazy with his devastating spoofs and sharp wit. They were probably very happy to see him go when he graduated.

Templeton was hired as the jazz pianist in Jack Hylton’s very popular British dance band. During their tour of America in 1936, Templeton decided to go out on his own and stay in the U.S., where he became a citizen a few years later. In that same year of 1936 he made his first series of records for The Gramophone Shop in New York, which included The Lost Chord, The Shortest Wagnerian Opera, the Ghost Rhapsody and his spoofs of Italian opera, off-key Pinafore selections and his Trip Though a Conservatory. Possibly for the first time in show business history, recordings made for a small label led in turn to his being discovered not only by musicians but also by the entertainment industry. By 1939 he was a sensation, recording for RCA Victor; a year later he jumped to Columbia for a few more devastating parodies (including versions of the popular song Some of These Days as it might have been played by Bach, Czerny, Bob Zurke and Rachmaninoff).

But then…he went “serious” on us. An album of piano solos for Decca is disappointing unless you like cocktail-party versions of Gershwin or the Grieg piano concerto, but as it turns out, this is just what America wanted to hear, so Templeton became famous, made money (lots of it), but lost his mojo.

By the early 1950s he had amassed so much money, in fact, that he could subsidize his somewhat expensive hobby of collection musical clocks and music boxes, which he absolutely loved. Remarkably, he issued two LPs of them, one in mono on the old Remington label and another in stereo on RCA Victor. They’re cute to listen to but certainly not something most people would want to hear more than once. Yet they sold surprisingly well at the time, and in a rare November 1952 appearance on the Sullivan Show he showed that he still “had it,” doing his Frankie Laine-sings-opera spoof as well as a jazz song called Give Me the Name, Age, Height and Size of You. In 1958 he appeared on one TV program playing soft jazz numbers like Moonglow, then he died in 1963 of unrevealed causes.

Thus did Alec Templeton maximize his talent as best he could, but those of us who loved his classical satires regret the metamorphosis. Still, you can find a great deal of his early material online at both the Internet Archive and YouTube. If you are a fan of well-done and devastatingly funny classical spoofs, I urge you to go and listen to them. You can also find excellent performances of Mozart a la Mode by Paul Berton, the complete Pocket Sized Sonata by clarinetist Andrej Supan, and Malcolm’s recording of Bach Goes to Town. They somehow all fit together to portray an immensely talented pianist-singer who walked a tightrope between blatant musical satire and true popular appeal at the keyboard.

And don’t forget to check out his Good-Byeee song as sung by him along with Bea Lillie and Bing Crosby. I’d love to hear some classical singer do this as a final encore in one of their recitals!

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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Rediscovering Anton Webern

J.S. BACH-WEBERN: A Musical Offering: Ricerare.¹ WEBERN: 2 Songs for Mixed Choir & 5 Instruments.^3,6 5 Movements for String Orchestra.⁵ 2 Songs for Voice & 8 Instruments.^2,5 5 Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 10.⁵ 4 Songs for Voice & Orchestra, Op. 13.^1,4 6 Songs for Voice & 4 Instruments, Op. 14.^2,4 5 Sacred Songs for Voice & 7 Instruments, Op. 15.^2,4 Das Augenlicht, “Through Our Open Eyes.” ^3,5 Variations for Orchestra, Op. 30.¹ Cantata No. 2, Op. 31 for Bass, Soprano, Chorus & Orchestra^3,5,7 / ¹Twentieth Century Classics Ens.; ²Members of 20th Century Classics Ens.; ³Simon Joly Chorale; ⁴Tony Arnold, sop; ⁵Philharmonia Orch.;  ⁶Members of Philharmonia Orch.; ⁷David Wilson-Johnson, bs & Claire Booth, sop; Robert Craft, cond / Naxos 8.557531

While re-reading Robert Craft’s excellent book, Stravinsky Discoveries and Memories (Naxos Books, 2013), I ran across some extremely interesting comments on the music of Anton Webern including a few by Webern himself, and they confirmed my belief that most of the music of the New Vienna School was never meant to be performed in a clipped, cut-and-dry style but, rather, with legato phrasing and moments of rubato. The reason, of course, is that these were musicians, not machines, and they grew up in an atmosphere in which musical phrasing was curvilinear and not brittle and angular. Of course, the same thing applies to all modern composers who shook the world between the years 1910 and 1950, a group which includes but is not restricted to Béla Bartók (listen to his own piano recordings of his music!!!), Zoltán Kodály, Serge Prokofiev. Artur Schnabel and of course Alban Berg, which is why I always prefer recorded performances that reflect these features of musical styles.

The particular comment that struck me forcibly in Craft’s book was that Webern’s late works were “never” performed correctly until the early 21st century, also that Tony Arnold’s performances of Webern’s songs were superior to those of Marni Nixon, who had recorded the Webern songs with Craft back in the mid-1950s. This spurred me to go online and research his later recordings of these works, and voila, this is the CD I came up with—one of the very few of Webern’s music that I didn’t have in my collection. And to paraphrase the title of Craft’s book, these performances really were a “discovery.”

Quite aside from the high quality of these performances by the various forces involved, one is continually astonished by Craft’s taut, dramatic conducting. For a man who was in his late 80s at the time, it is almost unbelievable; there is no drop-off in intensity in any of his late Naxos recordings, even when compared to his earlier self. I’m convinced that if he had a wider repertoire and didn’t just confine himself to four composers, of which the only early one was Gesualdo, Craft would be thought of as one of the greatest conductors of all time. But of course, the reason he did confine himself to these composers was that their music was, and remained, under-represented on records for nearly a half-century, and since his performances and recordings were so meticulously researched and rehearsed, everyone knew before buying the records that his interpretations were to be considered the last word on these composers. (Note that he stopped recording Gesualdo once he realized that several other very skilled Renaissance vocal groups had finally come to terms with them.)

Webern’s one transcription on this disc, the Bach Ricerare, is skillfully orchestrated, with sparse textures and only one or two chords attacked by the full orchestra. He frequently uses the brass, especially the trumpets, to play counter-lines against the strings, knowing that their timbres would not blend. And this is also what we hear as soon as we get into the two songs for chorus and mixed instruments. What fascinated me in this music was the extremely complex counterpoint that Webern created, again voiced for clarity and transparency so that the chorus can stand out. What a phenomenal ear this man had! I was lucky enough to hear his Five Pieces for Orchestra twice in live performances, once by Pierre Boulez when he was music director of the New York Philharmonic (and trust me, New York audiences did NOT appreciate him; in fact, they hated him and that music) and once by Michael Gielen with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Gielen tried to soften the blow by mixing the Webern pieces with excerpts from Schubert’s Rosamunde music. I liked it, but again it didn’t go over well with the staid audience.

In the second of the 5 Movements for String Orchestra, marked “Sehr langsam,” Craft’s new approach to Webern is apparent, especially in the languorous legato of the viola soloist. And yes, it makes a very different impact on the listener that hearing it played in the stiff, clipped fashion that it was recorded at=, even by Craft, in the 1950s, but you can even hear a more relaxed approach to rhythm in the following, faster “Sehr bewegt.” The music, quite simply, has a different vibe. It’s not exactly sweet music, to be sure, but much of its abrasiveness is defused when played this way.

The songs performed here by Tony Arnold are also, as promised, better than the Nixon recordings, but this is due not only to the new approach to the music. Arnold, quite simply, had a sweeter voice with an even better legato than Nixon, good though she was for that time. I think the only soprano of the 1950s who would have given better performances than Nixon would have been Magda Lászlo, who seldom performed in America. In addition to her sweeter voice and purer legato, Arnold also at least attempts to interpret the lyrics, thus making her a genuine lieder singer and not just “a voice.”

And of course, the sonics on this album far outstrip Craft’s Columbia recordings of the ‘50s. For once, Naxos avoided overloading these recordings of excessive reverb and echo. There is natural space around voices and instruments, which is all you need, in fact anything more than this would have spoiled one’s listening experience to the almost lace-like delicacy of Webern’s scoring. Here we can appreciate, as for instance in the Op. 10 5 Pieces for Orchestra, his use of “space” and quietude in combination with a lyrical performance.

I was particularly interested to hear the Cantata No. 2 since I already owned, and liked, his Cantata No. 1. This is even a bit longer than its predecessor and, for once, Webern used a full-sized orchestra to back his soloists and chorus. Craft was one of those rare conductors who always had excellent taste in singers, thus I didn’t feel the need to cringe before hearing the bass soloist (Davis Wilson-Johnson), but this was 2008 and even for Craft, he had to compromise with a singer whose voice is basically unsteady, though his pitch is fairly good and his diction excellent. Soprano Claire Booth, however, was excellent. Sadly, the text was not included in the booklet because at that time (2008) the poetry of Hildegard Jone were still under strict copyright, but now, in 2024, the statute of limitations has run out (at least in Europe if not in America, where greedy bastards insist on at least 100 years to make sure that no one can profit from dispersing high art which only appeals to perhaps 20% of the world population), and you can find the texts on Emily Ezust’s superb LiederNet Archive, one of the great (if sometimes maddeningly incomplete) resources in the world. In a nutshell, it is a largely secular cantata (or perhaps more accurately, a Deist cantata) focusing on the sounds of nature. Here are the lyrics of the second section:

Very deeply muted, innermost life sings
in the beehive in the quiet midnight,
because within it there still comes the message
that diligence creates sweetness from colourful multiplicity.
The beehive, the white canopy of stars,
is densely permeated by the sweet light of creation.
Within it circles every bee-world,
until the swarm breaks out into eternal morning.
The heart, the smallest beehive,
surrounds all of the others.
Its honey is clarified by the one beekeeper
who loves the sweetness of pure love,
which he bestows fully.

Being one of Webern’s late works (written in 1941-43), we are given the full brunt of his mature style in this cantata. Even with Craft’s “new” approach, this music is harmonically more abrasive than almost anything that preceded it on the CD, but like all of Webern’s music it is not confused or assembled just to create cheap effects. He put tremendous thought into every note, let alone every bar, but even the most advanced listener will feel disoriented at times when he ends different sections of this work in the middle of nowhere, without any resolution, not even an atonal resolution.

Listening to nearly 80 full minutes of Webern at one sitting can be a challenge even with this more lyrical approach. So many pieces are so dense (e.g., the 5 Sacred Songs, Op. 15, which makes the Op. 13 songs sound almost like Schubert) that continuous listening not only taxes the mind but tends to run many of these works together, which was never Webern’s intention. Thus I recommend that you take a few breaks when listening to this music. It will enhance your appreciation of these small, delicately-crafted gems, sparkling but miniature cameos cut with the tip of a pin. Even the Variations for Orchestra, which runs seven and a half minutes, sounds longer because so much music is compressed into each and every bar. In addition, Webern’s constant use of short pauses gives one the impression of hearing several movements during that timespan rather than just one.

Highly recommended. If you don’t have these works in your collection, this CD is an absolute must, and even if you own the early Craft Webern set, you need to hear how these performance were modified to meet Webern’s meticulous demands.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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Lisa Rich’s Stunning New Album

LONG AS YOU’RE LIVING / Long As You’re Living (Priester-Turrentine-Brown). Throw It Away (Abby Lincoln). When I Look in Your Eyes (Bricusse-Harrison). New Morning Blues (Clayton-Granelli). Lonely Woman (Silver-Feather). Isotope (Henderson-Kuhn). A Timeless Place [The Peacock] (Rowles-Winstone). Jitterbug Waltz (Waller-Grean-Manners-H. Jones). Close Your Eyes (Bernice Petkere). Ask Me Now (Monk-Hendricks). Bye Bye Blackbird (Henderson-Dixon). Haperchance/Drifting Dreaming (Clayton/Satie-Don Read) / Lisa Rich, voc; Dave Ballou, tp; Marc Copland, pno; Drew Gress, bs / Tritone Records 003

Most jazz fans know Lisa Rich’s story by now. In the 1980s and early ‘90s, she had a good career going as an up-and-coming jazz singer, but a long-term illness sidetracked her career. It took years for her to fully recoup, but over the past few years she has re-emerged on CD (Highwire, 2019), and this is her latest.

Rich is not quite on the same level as Ella Fitzgerald, Anita O’Day or Cleo Laine, but compared to most of today’s whispering ballad chickie-poohs, she is a towering figure in jazz. She swings with an infectiously light beat, she uses outstanding musicians for her back-up bands, and she can create brilliant if brief scat solos. Probably due to her illness, she does not sing “out” very strongly—she is close to the mike, and uses fine gradations of volume within a fairly narrow compass—but she is such a great artist that she puts herself on a par with the great Sheila Jordan.

I think what separates Rich most from the pack is that light feeling for rhythm, which she insists on her bandmates playing behind her. No matter what the tempo (the opening song is in a relaxed 6/8) Rich and her musical partners lay down a beat that just won’t quit. In addition, their relaxed approach engenders excellent solos, on this track particularly from pianist Marc Copland, and every so often Rich scats impressively considering her age and vocal resources. In short, she is HIP.

Bassist Drew Gress opens Throw it Away with a nice, relaxed improvised intro, and Rich hangs back on the beat when singing that speaks volumes as to how completely she has absorbed jazz feeling. Copland’s solo on this track is played a cappella, and I think the omission of drums helps sustain the feeling of intimacy that is one of Rich’s hallmarks. She and her highly skilled band are the kind of musicians who can keep the intensity level down without sacrificing a real jazz feeling; even in a ballad like When I Look Into your Eyes they hold your interest because they are musicians conveying a jazz feeling, even though ballads are not my thing. Listen, for instance, how Rich subtly stretches the time on the line “the deepness of the sea.” This is truly subtle artistry. Another good example is the way she and Copland, singing the wordless theme of New Morning Blues together, add space between the notes before she takes off on a very good scat improvisation with just piano and bass behind her.

Trumpeter Ballou returns for five of the last seven tracks, and both he and Rich are excellent on Joe Henderson’s Isotope and Ask Me Now. Pianist Copland follows their lead and also plays excellent solos. Her reading of the lyrics of A Timeless Place is almost Zen-like, and she completely revamps Fats Waller’s olf Jitterbug Waltz in a way that I would never have imagined. And surprisingly, Ballou plays open horn on this track (he was muted on the previous two), a nice minimalist solo with some Chet Baker overtones. Copland and Gress are also excellent here.

Some of Rich’s phrasing on Close Your Eyes is very similar to the work of Sheila Jordan. Both Rich and Copland gear their solos to emphasize the feeling of falling chromatics, which gives the whole piece a strangely sad vibe despite the uptempo and mostly major-key setting. And listen to the way she arches her phrases across the meter in her sensitive rendition of Monk’s Ask Me Now, a track that includes another outstanding open Ballou solo.

Her vocal resources may be diminished by age and illness, but Lisa Rich is better than just a “jazz stylist.” She is a true artist who gets deeply under the skin of the music she sings and turns even such an old chestnut as Bye Bye Blackbird into a jazz masterpiece. And if that weren’t enough, the last track, opening with her mentor Jay Clayton’s bitonal piece Haperchance, finds her singing some truly avant-garde lines on a par with Sophie Dunér before morphing into a jazz reimagining of Erik Satie’s famous Gymnopedie No. 1. You simply have to hear this record to believe it.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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Matt Wilson is in “Good Trouble”

GOOD TROUBLE / Fireplace. CommUnity Spirit (Matt Wilson). Albert’s Alley (Jeff Lederer). Be That As it May (Akihito Gorai). Good Trouble Suite: RBG; Walk With the Wind; Good Trouble (Wilson-Lederer). Feet Music (Ornette Coleman). Sunshine On My Shoulders (John Denver). Libra (Gary Bartz) / Tia Fuller, a-sax; Jeff Lederer, t-sax/cl; Dawn Clement, pno/voc; Ben Allison, bs; Matt Wilson, dm/glock / Palmetto Records PM2012

I’ve long admired drummer Matt Wilson and the quality of the music on his CDs, thus I was eager to review this new release. Featured on it are two more female jazz musicians I was not aware of previously, alto saxist Tia Fuller and pianist Dawn Clement, so that was another reason for my being curious about it.

The album’s title is based on a comment made by the late Civil Rights leader John Lewis in Selma, Alabama back in the 1960s, to “Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” Sadly, despite the huge gains that African-Americans have made since then, there are still problems to be overcome, particularly the tendency of certain police officers to overreact to any perceived threat of violence from black Americans.

As usual with Wilson’s groups, he manages to find or create pieces that swing, have immediate appeal via their themes, yet are interesting and quirky, and one can find no better example of this than the opener, Fireplace, with its strong Monk vibe. Both saxists, Jeff Lederer and Fuller, channel their inner Charlie Rouse to a point but also play strong lines of their own, sometimes including “outside” jazz phrases and licks. They alternate turns as well as play together, but any way you listen to them, they are extremely interesting.

Lederer’s original Albert’s Alley, pays tribute not to free jazz saxist Albert Ayler but to his dog! Well, Albert must be a pretty hip doggie, because this piece is a real swinger at the kind of tempo that has all but disappeared from jazz, a medium swing pace. Wilson is quoted in the publicity sheet as praising this band for its “energy and audacity”:

When we got together in the studio it felt so joyful and loose, yet focused. It proved to be a great combination of people that can deal with music in the moment and be flexible, but also be attentive to the details.

In addition to this, I’d also like to add about Wilson what I said about German jazz drummer Michael Griener: he plays music. He’s not interested in showing off his chops or messing around so much with the rhythm that it sounds like he’s playing an entirely different piece, yet he clearly makes his presence felt when it counts. In short, he is a superb, tasteful musician. Pianist Clement sings a vocal on Be That As It May, but I think the first part of the song must be in Japanese because I couldn’t make out a word she sang until the middle eight. She has a good sense of rhythm but not much voice, sounding like a hip 10-year-old. I didn’t much like the song anyway, so halfway through I just skipped the rest of it.

Next up is the album’s centerpiece, the Good Trouble Suite written jointly by Lederer and Wilson. The opener, RBG, is one of those funky type of pieces that were so much the rage on Blue Note albums of the late 1950s-early ‘60s, not a particularly strong or recognizable theme but lots of swing, and the solos are outstanding, particularly Clement’s on piano. Towards the end we understand what the initials stand for: Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the late Supreme Court justice.

Walk With the Wind is a slow, moody piece but clearly not a ballad (thank goodness). Again, it harks back to the soul jazz of the early ‘60s—perhaps that was its intent—but I really liked the long-lined melody played by the two saxists, and Wilson plays a sparse yet highly effective drum solo in the middle, followed by the two saxists playing without rhythm accompaniment. One might almost hear this as a sort of modern jazz spiritual. When the rhythm section returns behind the saxists, they create an unusual metric feel. The last piece in the suite, Good Trouble, has a wonderfully brief but lilting theme and a kind of Gospel beat to which Fuller responds with some excellent playing, sounding like a cross between Johnny Hodges and Sonny Stitt. And wow, does she take off in her solo! You GO, girl!!! (The band really gets into it behind her; you can hear a few shouts of enthusiasm from the other musicians as they kick it into gear.) For me, this track and Fireplace were the highlights of the album.

I found it interesting that they followed this suite with a piece by Ornette, Feet Music, but this, too has that kind of funky feel that permeated so much of Coleman’s piece in the 1970s and ‘80s (his Prime Time band period). Allison also plays an extended solo on this one, but it’s the final double-time playing of the two saxes with piano that really grab you. I’m not sure why they included a John Denver song in this set, but they give Sunshine on My Shoulders a funky sound as well. This one also includes a Clement “vocal.”

Gary Bartz’ Libra is a tune with a very strange meter in the first chorus, followed by straight 4 in the second, etc. The band really flies here, especially Fuller on alto who sounds entirely different from her previous solos: a harder, slightly rougher tone and really hard drive; Lederer comes close to matching her in intensity and invention. This track was also very, very impressive.

Wilson’s CommUnity Spirit, which also sounds like a slow Gospel song, closes out the program. About a minute and a half into it, however, it moves into an irregular meter which sounded to me like 9/4, to which they give a sort of quasi-Caribbean feel to. It is on this track that Lederer suddenly switches to the clarinet for his solo, but this time Fuller is clearly the better improviser, turning out an exquisitely-crafted solo that has the feel of a real composition about it. Every phrase she plays leads logically into the next, and the next. Even when Lederer’s clarinet comes squealing in behind her, it sounded more like a distraction from what Full was playing than something that added to it.

This is a pretty good album, primarily of interest because of the excellent tune construction and the playing of the two saxists and Wilson. Had they left the two vocal tracks off, the entire album would have had a much stronger feel.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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Korstick Plays the Brahms Concerti

BRAHMS:  Piano Concerti Nos. 1 & 2 / Michael Korstick, pno; Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin; Constantin Trinks, cond . Hänssler Classic HC23082

Having give the world one of the very best sets of the complete Beethoven Piano Concerti, Michael Korstick here applies his skills to the two concerti of Brahms in a set scheduled for release next month. As Ernst Denert described the process in the liner notes, these recording were made the old-fashioned way: in the studio, with the best parts of each take spliced together to make a whole that Korstick and Trinks decided on. So at least from that standpoint, the recording has a perfection about it that is sometimes difficult to achieve in the concert hall.

But Korstick’s meticulous attention to detail is certainly not limited to his selection of takes or portions of takes of his recordings. He has been noted, ever since his Juilliard days in the 1980s, for his ability to research a work beyond whatever edition of the score he is working from. He tries, whenever possible, to consult autograph scores as well as printed ones. He listens carefully to recordings made by pupils and favorite interpreters of the composer he is working with. In this way he tries to get to the core of each work and try to present it as much as possible the way the composer conceived it.

Of course, there are always gaps in such a system, particularly in the case of composers who left no recordings. Brahms left us but one terrible-sounding Edison cylinder from December 1889, playing his own Hungarian Dance No. 1 and Josef Strauss’ polka-mazurka Die Libelle; yet though his music for the piano was masterful, contemporary accounts—some of which are cited in the booklet for this CD—suggest that Brahms himself was a technically flawed pianist, thus even if his recording was in perfect condition we would not get much from it. Both famed accompanist André Benoist and orchestra manager Berta Geissmar, who worked for Wilhelm Furtwängler from 1921 to 1934 and then for Thomas Beecham from 1935 until her death, knew people who had heard Brahms play his concerti and confirmed that he made numerous mistakes and hit several klunkers—which is perhaps one reason why he liked slow tempi.[1] But I listened to this cylinder on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H31q7Qrjjo0) and one thing came through clearly, and that was that, at least in this one recorded performance, Brahms played his own Hungarian Dance a bit quicker than the written tempo in the score.

I bring all this up as a preface to my review of this recording to illustrate one thing that I’m sure that Korstick is aware of himself as a performer, and that is that truly creative artists, himself included, take risks in live performance that contradict the written score. Korstick is very circumspect about posting live performances of himself on YouTube, but there is one utterly remarkable performance there of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 which, although staying within the parameters of the score tempo, is much more exciting than his studio recording of the work (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow8Q6rUYHPE). And he is not alone. Beethoven, in particular, was noted for his dynamic, exciting yet at times technically imperfect performances of his own piano concerti. Pierre Monteux once owned a copy of the score of Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique marked up heavily by his former boss, Eduard Colonne, who made numerous changes in the score the one time he heard Berlioz himself conduct the work (Monteux’s 1930 recording of the symphony includes those changes). And Serge Prokofiev often played his own piano works so differently from the way they appeared in print that one piano student (I forget now who it was) who dared play a Prokofiev piece the way Prokofiev himself played it was told by his piano teacher that if he did such a thing again he would flunk him.

But again, I’m sure that Korstick is aware of these anomalies. They’re part of the classical world’s lore and legends, yet as in the case of the Beethoven Concerti, his choice was to simply go to the score and give the listener what is there, imbuing his performances with life and energy while still sticking to what is on the printed page.

Which leads us to the first movement of the Piano Concerto No. 1, taken at such a slow tempo (quarter note = 136) that I was shocked when I first heard it; but then I downloaded the score from the IMSLP Petrucci Music Library—a copy of what is purported to be the 1875 first edition, published in Leipzig by Winterthur, J. Reiter-Biedermann—and was stunned to discover no metronome markings. The first movement is simply marked “Maestoso” at a 6/4 tempo, and this in itself surprised me, since “Maestoso” is a tempo slower than “Andante,” and Andante or quicker is the way I’ve been used to hearing it. When I wrote an email to him questioning this, he responded thus:

There are many ways of doing it, to be sure. The score simply says “Maestoso”, and it’s in 6/4. One could make a valid case for a quicker tempo by arguing that “Maestoso” is not a tempo indication and that the pulse is in two – most performances go that way. I learned the piece in the early 1970’s and the only recordings I knew at the time were Arrau, Fleisher, Serkin, and Barenboim, the usual suspects. And then came the Gilels/Jochum recording, and I thought it was a revelation, confirming what I always thought the piece should sound like. A lot of recordings since then tried to imitate that approach, but they all fail to keep the structure organized (after the exposition they all get faster and the tempo is all over the place), and most of them lack the intensity which is necessary to “fill” the slow tempo… when you have grown to like a certain tempo in a piece it is very disturbing to hear something totally different, particularly when it’s slower, I can absolutely see your point. And it doesn’t help that Glenn Gould set a very bad precedent with his ridiculous performance with Bernstein. The important thing is to determine the exact point from which on an even slower tempo doesn’t work any more and take everything from there (same thing goes for fast tempi where most of the time an “even faster” tempo brings absolutely nothing).

There are a few recorded performances of people closely connected with the Brahms circle which tell a different story. I should mention a recorded performance of the 1st concerto by Alfred Hoehn with Max Fiedler (a Brahms adlatus) which is quite “slow”, and we have a recording by Elly Ney (who performed both concertos under Brahms’ friend Fritz Steinbach in the 1910’s) which is VERY SLOW. This is enough evidence to prove that the 1st movement of Concerto #1 is meant to be “Maestoso” in the true sense of the term. Just as interesting is a performance of the 2nd Concerto by Carl Friedberg, who was taught by Brahms himself. His slow movement of the 2nd is living proof that Brahms’ metronome mark of 84 is a mistake, Friedberg takes it at 60 (as I do).

But the first movement of the Gilels-Jochum Brahms First Concerto is taken at a tempo of quarter note=142, which in the soft section he lowers to quarter=140—certainly slower than most other recordings but not as slow as Korstick’s. Checking online, I learned that a Maestoso tempo ranges from 128 to 156 beats ber minute, thus Korstick’s tempo falls into that range, but Emmett Ankending, on TheMusicDictionary.org, adds that Maestoso is “often associated with triumphant and heroic music.” I personally wouldn’t take it any slower than quarter=142, otherwise it drags when you get to the more relaxed middle section. So, to summarize all of the above, the Korstick-Trinks performance of the Concerto No. 1 may not be the way Brahms wanted to hear it all the time, but it clearly represents a choice for the performer.

In addition to this, Korstick conspicuously avoids the slowing-down of the piano part upon his entrance in the first movement of the first concerto as well as similar slowing down of tempo in other portions of both concerti. Add to this the fact that we know that Brahms originally conceived his first piano concerto as a duo-piano sonata (what a strange idea!) but was then transformed into what would have been his first symphony, constantly consulting his friend Julius Otto Grimm who was better schooled in orchestration than the largely self-taught Brahms, but after living with it a while and being dissatisfied with it, the composer changed it into a concerto. Yet even its first performance, in this form (with Brahms himself as soloist), drew pans from critics who found it bleak, dry and overlong, one complaining that “this retching and rummaging, this twitching and pulling, this patching together and ripping apart of empty shells and clichés one has to bear for more than three quarters of an hour!” Ah, the life of a contemporary composer. It never was easy, was it?

Examining the score of this first concerto I was struck, despite the absence of metronome markings, with Brahms’ incredibly detailed and frequent changes of volume and key, but not of tempo. That stays steady as a rock, even in the second-movement “Adagio” despite such urgent pleadings by the composer to play certain passages “espressivo ,” “dolce,” and yes, his favorite word, used over and over, “legato.” Beethoven was really into con brio; Brahms was into legato. It was practically his mantra. And yet, just as Beethoven wrote some very slow, profound and emotionally moving music to counteract his con brio, we have to remember that Brahms’ first gigs as a musician were playing polkas, waltzes and czardases in the whorehouses of Leipzig, including some with Hungarian gypsy violinists, which gave him the ideas for his Hungarian Dances, the Liebeslieder Waltzes and those marvelous gypsy-music-inspired last movements of his Piano Quartets (especially No. 1, the “Rondo alla Zingarese”), thus one must always counter his relaxed tendencies with forward propulsion.

And that is what we get in this performance of the first concerto: slow, but muscular and energetic. As promised, Korstick does not introduce a decelerando when he enters, but keeps the musical tension up. Once you get used to this “new,” slower tempo, you can just sit back and enjoy all the intricate little details they put into the performance. The loud explosions of strings and brass certainly wake you up after Brahms has just lulled you into relaxation with his low-string legato. In places I felt that Trinks was channeling a bit of Toscanini, one of whose trademarks was an extremely wide dynamics range, and Korstick has clearly not forgotten that Brahms always tried to inject some of Beethoven’s traits into his own music. Nonetheless, it is clearly different from most other recordings of the work although closer to the score. Careful listening reveals Korstick adding numerous little rubato touches, making his playing far more detailed than that of most of his predecessors.

Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that by making this opening movement more “Maestoso” than usual, it was only marginally a bit quicker than the second movement. Perhaps this is the reason why most performances and recordings speed up that opening movement a bit more than the score suggests. At the same time, however, I kept thinking that their performance of the second movement “floated” a bit too much, meaning that it didn’t have an underlying momentum, slow though it may be and score-accurate as it is. But in this case it’s partly Brahms’ fault: remember how I commented, a few paragraphs ago, about all of Brahms’ pleas for espressivo dolce, etc.? Perhaps, by paying such close attention to the score, Korstick and Trinks let the directions lead them into a more relaxed state of affairs. But in a way, I think the somewhat dry sound of the recording studio contributed to this feeling. It’s just my impression. The third movement, however, is absolutely terrific.

Moving on to the second concerto, we hear a performance that is both very good and for the most part more orthodox in tempo and phrasing. Much of this recording reminded me of the superb Backhaus-Böhm reading for Decca around 1967, which happened to be the first I ever heard. One difference is that Korstick, who is younger than Backhaus was at the time, plays with even greater energy; the lively first-movement rhythms practically leap out of your speakers. The other is that Trinks, who is likewise younger than Böhm was at the time, again relaxes his grip in slow passages to allow the music to “float,” and this, to my ears, doesn’t work quite as well. But then, I’m listening very critically on a moment-to-moment basis. Someone who is just playing it and not being so critical may enjoy it more than I do. Oddly enough, I found the tempo of the “Andante” to be just right, and here Trinks does nudge the music forward.

There is a much-praised set of the Brahms Concerti by the late Nelson Freire with the Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly (Decca) that is surprisingly analogous to these Korstick recordings. Although Freire and Chailly take the last movement of the Concerto No. 2 a bit quicker than Korstick-Trinks, their performance is otherwise nearly identical to Korstick’s recording; heard from a slight distance, I would defy anyone other than Korstick to tell in the first three movements whether it is Freire-Chailly or Korstick-Trinks. In Concerto No. 1, however, both the first and third movements are faster, particularly the first which they take at the outer limits of a Maestoso, quarter=155. David Hurwitz, executive editor of Classics Today, claims on a YouTube video that “a Brahms expert” (no name given) listened to the Freire recordings and claimed them the best she had ever heard. Like Korstick, Freire does not slow down when he enters in the first movement of Concerto 1, and overall the performance is absolutely electrifying, the best I’ve ever heard, although the sonics of this concerto, recorded at a live performance, do not reveal as much textural clarity as Trinks does (for that matter, neither does Jochum).

The bottom line, however, is that one must take historical evidence such as the Hoehn-Fiedler recording, which I own (it’s on Arbiter 160), into account in judging this set. Compared to Korstick and Trinks, Hoehn and Fiedler take it a shade faster, at quarter=143, but only to start with. Fiedler, like Jochum, slows down considerably in the soft section, and even more later on (and even further just before the piano’s entrance). Trinks introduces just a little bit of tempo relaxation in the slow section following the powerful opening, and compared to both Fiedler and Jochum, he conducts much more powerfully. Yet it’s odd, once again, that in trying to be historically correct, Korstick and Trinks, like so many other such performances of music from any previous era, ignore the heavy rubato effects of the old days. But of course, what Max Fiedler did in 1936 may or may not have reflected Brahms’ original intentions. Rubato and rallentando effects had so permeated the classical world even as early as 1900 that had nothing to do with the composers’ original intentions, in every genre including opera and chamber music, so we really don’t know what the composers wanted. It is an historical fact that Brahms greatly admired 13-year-old Bronislaw Huberman’s performance of his violin concerto, and both of Huberman’s surviving performances of this work are taken at a brisk tempo—but with tons of portamento thrown in. This, too, was performance practice in the 1890s and early 1900s that we now consider gauche—in violin music, specifically, it was killed off by Joseph Szigeti and Jascha Heifetz—but BRAHMS LIKED IT! (He even told Huberman that he would write a violin fantasy for him, but died before he could get around to it.)

Thus whatever your personal reactions to the very slow first movement of Concerto 1, this is clearly a valid and at times exciting set of the Brahms Concerti. The sound quality is excellent although I would have put a little more “space” around the instruments. Recommended as an alternative to whatever set of these splendid works you already own.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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[1] Geissmar, Berta: Two Worlds of Music (Da Capo Books, 1946, digitized by Google Books in 2006)

Oùat’s Elastic Bricks

ELASTIC BRICKS / Shall We. Mother and Son. Dala-Floda. Tibia of the Mole. Weihnachten. Borghini Balade (Joel Grip). Sommer. Height of Nothingness (Sieger-Grip). Topsy (Simon Sieger) / Qùat: Simon Sieger, pno; Joel Grip, bs; Michael Griener, dm / Umlaut Records, no number, available as an LP or as a digital download at Bandcamp

This highly unusual album, issued in 2022, came my way courtesy of the drummer Michael Griener. It immediately caught my ear because of the unusual structure of the compositions contained on it, all written in a bitonal or atonal musical style.

According to the brief notes:

Oùat is a trio that found its origins in instinctive moments cast over the front and rear windows of jazz history. On their home ground in Berlin (Au Topsi Pohl) they have performed the music of Ellington, Hasaan Ibn Ali, Elmo Hope, Per Henrik Wallin and Sun Ra. Their debut album of strictly original material, Elastic Bricks, might remind you of Hindemith’s dream holiday in Tangier. Sounds and tempi in a strange mix of recognizable disarray and unrecognizable order.

Oùat (Once upon a time) is collective storytelling, about what, where, and at, bringing forth questions about being when and where. Its members play revolving roles in the creative music scenes in Europe, from Marseille to Dala-Floda via Berlin. Their individual work encompass groups like Monks Casino, [ahmed], and Art Ensemble of Chicago. 

Well, now, you’ve just got to like a jazz group that plays the music of Hasaan Ibn Ali, whose astonishing recordings I reviewed a while back on this blog.

The music clearly bears a resemblance to “regular” jazz, yet even from the opening of Shall We, pianist Simon Sieger seems to be not so much atonal or bitonal as just all over the place harmonically, slipping in and out of tonality at will. As in the case of the late Charlie Haden always being able to follow what Ornette Coleman was doing, bassist Joel Grip never seems to lose his place in following what Sieger is doing. The theme for this piece, as for all the others, is actually interesting and not just a series of musical gestures. There are also several “false stops” in this piece where you think they are coming to an end but don’t. Yet somehow, Sieger and the trio manage to make what they do sound somewhat coherent. For all its strangeness, the music has a beginning, middle and end. It’s just not the kind of beginning, middle or end you’re normally used to. In Shall We it just ends in the middle of

nowhere

But if you think that piece was strange, wait until you hear Mother and Son. The theme for this piece in itself has several luftpausen to interrupt its flow, which is slow enough to begin with (but, thankfully, is NOT a “ballad” in the strict sense of the word). Sieger uses double-time figures in the first fully improvised chorus, yet the bass and drums stay in their original tempo for a while; eventually, it is drummer Michael Griener who prompts bassist Grip to step it up, after which they settle into a medium tempo that ever-so-slowly accelerates. Some Dave Brubeck-like chunky blues chords emerge, then back we go to the initial slow tempo.

Sommer begins in a sort of 3-against-2 beat but quickly stops and then disintegrates before Grip plays an a cappella bass solo, followed by the piano’s re-entrance, now unsure of the proper tempo. Grip, however, feeds the 3 feeling (perhaps in 6 is a better description) as the music lurches forward and Sieger really begins to swing. After listening to so many current American jazz drummers who seem to want to dominate the proceedings, it’s a real pleasure to listen to Griener, whose playing is always “just right” in terms of accent and momentum, is clearly complex, but does not go out into its own universe leaving the rest of the group behind. Indeed, there is not a single moment on this CD where any of the three musicians sound as if they are doing anything entirely on their own. Each of them feeds off the other and interact in an organic way that I found especially enthralling. Near the end of Sommer, Sieger plays some licks that once again reminded me of Herbie Nichols.

Due to the unusual construction of each of the pieces played on this album, I’m not sure that detailed descriptions of all of them are necessary for the reader to get an idea of what and how they play, except to point out that no two pieces sound alike despite having unsettled tonality and often unsettled or fluid tempos in common. Indeed, except for the themes themselves, I wonder how much of these works were pre-planned since so much of the music sounds completely improvised. “Elastic bricks,” indeed! The important thing, to me at least, is that somehow or other, despite all the stops and starts, tempo shifts, etc., they all have a real jazz pulse, which makes them at least partially accessible to the untrained ear; yet, of course, the more you know about advanced jazz the more you’ll get out of them. Height of Nothingness, with its similarly 6/4 or 6/8 beat used as an ostinato by the bass underneath Sieger’s bitonal and rhythmically shifting piano lines, is particularly attractive for the neophyte. Possibly the most “fractured” piece on the album is Tibia of the Mole, which sounds like something Harry Partch would have written in collaboration with Ibn Ali and perhaps Charles Mingus, particularly Grip’s wacky bowed bass solo which comprises a separate theme unto itself beneath Sieger’s repeated piano licks. And then, unexpectedly, the tempo increases and the band is resolutely in C major. What?? This, in turn, is followed by Topsy, which opens completely out of tempo and has strange underlying bass lines throughout.

Bottom line: Oùat’s music may seem nutty to the neophyte, but it is certainly creative and, oddly enough, rather cheerful to listen to.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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Wei & Monteiro Play Jazz Classics

THE NEW JERSEY SESSIONS / Dewey Square (Charlie Parker). A Weaver of Dreams (Victor Young). I Want to Talk About You (Billy Eckstine). Nothing Ever Changes My Love for You (Marvin Fisher). When Sunny Gets Blue (Fisher-Segal). Out of Nowhere (Green-Heyman). Bags’ Groove (Milt Jackson). Life Goes On (Jeremy Monteiro). Sophisticated Lady (Ellington-Mills) / Sean Hong Wei, t-sax; Houston Person, a-sax; Alex Sipiagin, tp; Jeremy Monteiro, pno; Jay Anderson, bs; Evan Sherman, dm / JazzNote 182325

You might call Sean Hong Wei the Chinese jazz rebel. Originally from Singapore, Wei, who was born in 1999, started playing the tenor sax in his school band at age 17 and became a star with Jeremy Monteiro’s “Jazz Association Singapore” at age 22. One will note that there are two prominent guest musicians on this session. The first, who is pretty well known by most jazz fans, is alto saxist Houston Person, but not that many know that Alex Sipiagin was for many years the star trumpet soloist of the Charles Mingus Big Band financed by the late Sue Mingus. Now that Sue is gone, I’m not sure if the Mingus band is, too.

This is what you’d define as a “standard” jazz album, comprised mostly of standards in relatively simple arrangements, but at least what we have here are real compositions and not the usual sequence of bitonal musical gestures that pass for “themes” in much of today’s jazz.

Wei’s style harks back to that thrilling time in the late 1940s when several swing stars began branching out into bebop, among them Charlie Ventura whose sound his most closely resembles. It’s a rich tenor sound with a bit of “grit” in it, much like Ventura, who started with Gene Krupa’s orchestra but in 1949 started his short-lived but extremely popular “Bop for the People” band.

Sipiagin’s smooth but interesting trumpet style adds quite a bit to the proceedings, and long-time veteran bassist Jay Anderson, now 69, still has the chops to keep him busy as one of the most-desired first call musicians on the West Coast. There aren’t a lot of surprises in the improvising of either Wei or Monteiro, but neither do they just play standard licks. It’s just that, as musicians working within the jazz mainstream, their style is retro without sounding imitative or stale. Had this recording been made in the mid-1950s instead of today, it would surely be hailed as one of the most interesting and fun jazz discs of the year. I’m trying to remember the name of that young tenor saxist who made such a splash back in the 1980s—Scott Hamilton, I think?—who played so very well but was out of step with the fusion movement which dominated jazz at the time. Wei plays like that. The difference between the two is that although this is a studio group, they play with a unity and joie-de-vivre that makes them sound as if they’ve been a working band for years.

Wei is so good that he can even make ballads sound interesting: listen to his exquisite solo on I Want to Talk About You, where he tosses in a few Charlie Parker licks as well as a few that reminded me of young Coltrane. He can also vary his tone extremely well, in fact even better than Ventura, who generally had a “thicker” sound, which gives his playing color and variety. Although he is obviously surrounded by first-rate jazz talent, most of the time they just take spot solos, leaving the floor to Wei to show off what he can do, but listen to Monteiro’s wildly creative solo on Nothing Ever Changes My Love for You. He, too, is a major improvising talent who is probably taken for granted in the jazz world because he plays what is now a retro style.

There were several ballad songs from Ye Olde Days that I never did like, and When Sunny Gets Blue is one of them (Send in the Clowns is another). The changes just aren’t very interesting and the melody is pretty much nothing, yet in a way this was probably the biggest test-piece for Wei because of those shortcomings, and he almost makes it palatable once he gets to his improvised solo. But surprise! Wei is followed by Houston Person on alto, and to be honest, Person’s improvisation is even a shade better, but that’s only to be expected…he’s a seasoned pro with decades of experience. The fact that Wei could at least hold his own says a lot for him. This track also includes what I felt was Anderson’s most imaginative solo on the album, which also helped to elevate this clunker of a tune into the realm of art.

Johnny Green’s classic, Out of Nowhere, is turned into a bossa nova. Now, THIS is a song that will live forever because the changes are GREAT. In my view, Green is one of the most underrated songwriters in jazz history despite the fact that this tune, I Cover the Waterfront, and a couple of others have survived for nearly a century. One of the tings I liked most about Wei’s playing is its serpentine qualities: he sort of “twists” notes and phrases into shapes as well as being able to create entirely new structures over the changes of any song. Yet to be honest, he really only seems to get into this tune near the end of the track. I don’t know why.

It’s interesting to hear Wei play Bags’ Groove (in the second chorus, as a duet in thirds with Person), a tune that has been so long associated with the vibes and is also an example of what you might call “soul jazz.” Not only does he have no problem with this style, but due to his ability to twist notes and phrases as well as color them, he actually revels in it. Even Person, who follows Wei, cannot do better although he does do as well. Here, too, Monteiro finally reappears on piano, playing an outstanding solo. Wei is lucky to have such an immensely talented mentor.

The one original tune on this CD is Monteiro’s Life Goes On, which is a ballad. It’s a nice piece, and here Wei does his best Ben Webster impersonation. Sipiagin also plays on this one, but why not one of the other uptempo tunes? (My way of saying that I don’t much like ballads.) We end with Sophisticated Lady, also a ballad but a more interesting one; after all, it’s an Ellington piece. Once again, Wei suggests Webster, and appropriately so, yet with some slightly boppish twists.

All in all, a very nice album and a good introduction to Wei’s playing, I hope he can develop into an even more adventurous improviser as he gets older. Joey Alexander went from interesting to middle-of-the-road. Not all youthful prodigies get better with age.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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Tarbaby’s “You Think This America”

YOU THINK THIS AMERICA / Dee Dee (Ornette Coleman). Mirror of Youth (David Murray). Red Door. Reconciliation. Betcha By Golly Wow. Blues (When it Comes). Kush. Richard. Comme il Faut (composers unidentified). Tree Tops (Sunny Murray) / Tarbaby: Orrin Evans, pno; Eric Revis, bs; Nasheet Waits, dm / Giant Step Arts GSA-11 (live: New York City, 8/15-16/2022)

This album, due for release June 28, features drummer David Waits’ regular working trio Tarbaby, which was founded in the late 1990s. According to the publicity sheet, the CD includes music by Ornette Coleman, Andrew Hill and David Murray, but only Dee Dee (Coleman) and Mirror of Youth (David Murray) were identified by any of those names. Tree Tops is credited to Sunny Murray (I don’t know if he’s any relation to David), none were specifically credited to Andrew Hill, and I have no idea who the other song composers are. Sometimes we reviewers are forced to play Sherlock Holmes in order to review a disc!

As in the case of New York Love Letter, however, the names of the tune composers don’t seem to matter quite as much as the musical treatment which, once again, leans strongly in the style of Thelonious Monk. Here, this is in part due to the surprisingly Monk-ish piano solos of Orrin Evans, which transforms Ornette’s Dee Dee into a sort of Coleman-Monk hybrid (remember that Ornette seldom worked with pianists, except for Geri Allen on his Sound Museum albums). Bassist Eric Revis often doubles the top line of the music along with the pianist while Waits stays busy in the background. There is a style that is both rooted in tradition and modern at the same time, thus they do well in the asymmetrical rhythms of David Murray’s Mirror of Youth.

Unlike many if not most piano trios, Tarbaby is a true collaborative in terms of performance interaction between the three instruments, but to my ears Waits is a little too busy in most of these tracks compared to his excellent work on New York Love Letters. Even so, there is much to admire on this disc; I particularly liked Red Door with its unusual harmonies and funky groove, and Evans’ piano solo is simply breathtaking in its invention and drive. I’d love to hear much more of him, perhaps in a solo recording; his playing obviously includes several influences besides Monk. Bassist Eric Revis also shines on this track, the notes streaming from top to bottom of his instrument and including a great deal of atonal playing that he somehow makes fit. Waits’ playing behind this bass solo is some of his best on the album, and his own solo is also excellent. For me, this was one of the highlights of the album, but the opening piano solo on Blues (When it Comes), which sounded a bit like Lennie Tristano, was also superb, and here Waits’ drumming is less dominant and better integrated into the ensemble, making the trio really swing without overwhelming the others. Revis moves from walking bass accompaniment to walking bass solo here, adding his own thoughts while maintaining the strong swing of the piece.

Reconciliation has a definite Herbie Nichols vibe about it although, as it goes along, the rhythm begins to be subdivided in a more complex manner. Betcha By Golly Wow is, surprisingly, a ballad, and here Waits is particularly sensitive, sticking mostly to brushes behind the piano and bass, and this is followed by another ballad, Kush, which becomes quite complex rhythmically in the middle section.

Richard opens with a semi-walking bass solo before drums and then piano come in. To my ears, however, the melody bears a striking resemblance to Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out, the old Bessie Smith tune.

Comme il faut is a slow piece but not really a ballad; it has a certain dark side about it, emphasized by the remarkable bass solo that opens the proceedings. When the piano enters, it is playing small fragments that just sort of fit into the scene of the continuing bass as Waits plays subtle cymbal washes behind them. The piano eventually comes to the fore, playing a melodic line that vacillates between tonality and bitonality as Waits starts playing drum rolls behind it.

The closer to this set, Tree Tops, begins with uptempo playing by Revis and Waits, but Evans’ piano is resolutely calm, playing what amounts to musical gestures rather than a defined melodic line. Eventually, however, this coalesces into a melody albeit a quirky one as the double-time playing of Revis and Waits continues, the latter, in fact, becoming louder and busier as it evolves.

I liked this album but was glad that I had heard New York Love Letter first. For the most part, the music is richer and, for me personally, more rewarding on that album, but there are several tracks on this set that I liked very much as well.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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Nasheet Waits’ New York Love Letter

NEW YORK LOVE LETTER (BITTER SWEET) / Snake Stance. Snake Hip Waltz. Moon Child. The Hard Way AW (Waits). Liberia. Central Park West (John Coltrane) / Mark Turner, t-sax; Steve Nelson, vib; Rashaan Carter, bs; Nasheet Waits, dm / Giant Step Arts GSA 14

Scheduled for release June 28, this album spotlights versatile drummer Nasheet Waits, who Ted Panken of Jazziz named the “First call…for multiple bandleaders…who want a drummer to render a 360-degree range of styles and authoritative execution, high musicality, imaginative invention and inflamed-soul spirit.” This particular quartet also includes tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, whose own Giant Step Arts CD I gave a good review a while back, as well as Steve Nelson on vibes and Rashaan Carter on bass, all playing compositions by Waits himself.

My regular readers are well aware how much I’ve complained about the paucity of really interesting original jazz compositions nowadays. With a few exceptions (among them Moppa Elliot, Silke Eberhard and Jungsun Choi), the majority of contemporary “jazz composers” just write what I hear as a few indistinct musical gestures, hastily stitched together to make a “theme” which is really no theme at all. On many such album, the only interest is in the improvisations.

Not so here. Waits is a musician through and through, not “just” a drummer, and these compositions actually have meat on their bones. Although not super-tuneful (of course they don’t have to be), they are at least real themes with good harmonic movement. In fact, one of the things I liked about them was that the harmony moves with the melodic line, and in form and shape they resemble the music of Thelonious Monk without aping it. You will never hear a “real” Monk theme in a Waits composition, but he comes close enough to at least evoke that great master of modern jazz.

In fact, what I heard on this recording were fully integrated jazz compositions in which the structure is actually more important than the solos, good as they are. In a way, this harks all the way back to such pioneer jazz composers as Jelly Roll Morton and Bill Challis, who found ways to integrate the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of the individual musicians in the bands they wrote for, producing what were then real rarities, fully integrated conceptual jazz. Monk did the same thing in his early period, 1947-52, but later Monk recordings tended to sound more like convivial jam sessions with rare exceptions (like the Thelonious Monk Orchestra’s live set at Town Hall in New York).

None of which is meant to belittle the contributions of these soloists, particularly Turner whose solo on Snake Hip Waltz is one of the greatest and most prodigious solos I’ve heard from any modern-day tenor saxist, but even Nelson and especially Carter play solos on this track (and the others) that are mind-boggling in their originality. As for Waits, yes, he does tend to dominate certain passages within each piece, but like the very best drummers of the past (Dannie Richmond, Jack DeJohnette, Elvin Jones, Joe Morello, etc.), his playing is musical, Never once did I get the feeling that what he was playing diverted too far away from the basic pulse of each piece or was trying to dominate the ensemble just to show off. Yet I do think that, whether purposely or accidentally, that his drums were over-recorded. The reason I say that is that, in the very soft and intimate Moon Child (a really creative as well as lovely theme played primarily by Nelson on the vibes), Waits sticks mostly to brushes, and brushes should never really dominate the sound of a quartet…yet they do so here, and personally I don’t believe that Waits was the one who insisted on this kind of microphone set-up. A foot or two further back from the mike, and he would have sounded just right.

Between the excellence of these compositions and the excellence of the solo playing, I found myself mesmerized from start to finish of this extraordinary set. Although none of this is really “outside” jazz, Turner does stretch “out” occasionally, which makes the listener pay close attention to everything he performs. Small wonder that Waits has praised him for his sensitivity and high musicality. The one really sad thing about this set is that, when you hear the live audience applaud, it sounds as if there were only about 10 people in the audience. Does jazz this good really appeal to that few number of people?

Yet the inspiration engendered by this quartet transcends whatever audience they had; this is a group that evidently plays for themselves, to spur and encourage each other to the best they can do. You can hear this particularly in The Hard Way AW, one of Waits’ more adventurous compositions with its juxtaposition of different themes in different rhythms, including one passage using quarter note triplets in each bar. This is also one of those tracks on which Turner flies into the musical ionosphere with some edgy outside playing, to which Waits responds with one of his finest drum solos on this record. Although he generates a lot of power on his drums, he does not steamroll his musicians the way Art Blakey did. Rather, he is one of those rare beings, a real percussion artist like Vic Berton, Chick Webb, Morello and Elvin Jones, who creates solos with a large amount of rhythmic diversity and subtlety. He is a colorist on the percussion, drawing as much out of his instrument as Turner does on the tenor sax.

Intentionally or not, the impression one gets from this group as the CD continues is that Turner and Waits are the real musical leaders. Both Nelson and Carter continue to be very good, both in the ensemble and in their solo spots, but in the end it is Turner and Waits who mesmerize you most often.

Clearly the strangest piece on the album is John Coltrane’s Liberia, its opening crafted by Carter playing his bass with the bow on the very edge of the strings to create an eerie sound. Eventually he returns to playing plucked bass with the vibes mixed in. At one point—and I may be wrong—it sounded to me as if a portion of the performance was spliced out of the master tape (perhaps it didn’t come off as well as the musicians would have liked). When Turner enters, the tempo gradually increases and Waits’ drums become busier, but in a “dancing” way. His playing is light and airy, not heavy, and surprisingly the tempo increases once again into a fast swing beat, with Carter driving the group from the bass. Turner continues to be the dominant soloist, however, and on this track Nelson rather recedes into the background, yet what he does play fits in. Despite his excellent technique Carter isn’t a flashy bass soloist. What he plays is musically “meaty” and, again, fits into the overall concept of the piece

We end with a ballad, and (for once) a really good one, Coltrane’s Central Park West, which has almost an Autumn in New York kind of vibe. Waits is again on brushes (and a little more recessed than previously) with occasional soft press rolls and cymbal work as Palmer plays very sensuous tenor and Nelson adds a lovely vibes solo, but again it is Palmer who dominates one’s attention. Overall, this is an extraordinary set and clearly one of the finest jazz releases of the year to date.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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