pure science with a splash of black cat

The Dave Brubeck Quartet - “Take Five (Live)”
from Time Out: 50th Anniversary Legacy Edition

We’re going to wrap up International Jazz Day with jazz in its best form: in front of a crowd. Everything from a small club date (the tinkling of glasses, the murmur of voices) to a large festival crowd (yelling, whistling, whooping) can add something to even the most perfect of performances. And it gives the musicians something else to feed off.

I love this edition of Time Out so much and it’s more because of the second disc. Oh, of course, the main album is very nice; it would have to be to be worth a 50th anniversary Legacy Edition, wouldn’t it? And I love “Strange Meadow Lark,” and the original “Take Five” is one of jazz’s most enduring recordings.

The second disc, though! All eight tracks are taken from various Newport Jazz Festivals (I think all in the early sixties). A marvelous mix of standards and DBQ compositions, to wit:

1. St. Louis Blues
2. Waltz Limp
3. Since Love Had Its Way
4. Koto Song
5. Pennies from Heaven
6. You Go to My Head
7. Blue Rondo à la Turk
8. Take Five

Everyone is on it here, and if you are going to own Time Out, this is the version you should choose. I highly recommend it.

I hope you got some jazz in those ears today, whether you were at a performance or you had to hum it to yourself quietly in the elevator at work. And I hope you liked the selections I put up today and throughout April. (You can go look through it here if you missed it.) As far as I’m concerned, every day is International Jazz Day. Keep on swingin’.

Unlike most schoolchildren, when I took general music as a wee thing, our teacher had us learn about melody and notation using xylophones rather than recorders. We were never allowed to use two mallets, though. To this day, whenever I watch Lionel Hampton, I think of that, and I grow extremely envious. Mallets are the greatest. Aside from the clarinet, of course.

Bill Evans is one of jazz’s great successes and great tragedies. All at the same time. Even if you take it all together, there’s almost never a single moment in his life in which he’s not both, he always had so much going on in both directions. He’s his own Hamlet.

Fortunately for us and for jazz, he left us with all the good things, including “Waltz for Debby,” seen here on a Jazz 625 performance that I’ve probably posted before but which bears repeating. It’s not one of the best versions I’ve heard; he sounds like he’s tripping over his own fingers in the introduction, not as clear and smooth as he sounds on the Cannonball collaboration. The quickened pace is so lively and fun, though.

It’s always worth repeating that Chuck Israels was — is (he’s 75 now, which makes him 28 here, although he looks 12) — an excellent bass player in his own right and didn’t deserve the comparisons he got for immediately following Scott LaFaro in the chronology. As Humphrey Lyttleton (yes, ISIHAC fans, our very own Humph) put it when presenting this very edition of Jazz 625, he is “a superb technician who handles the double bass as if it was a guitar. Chuck Israels is one of the reasons why musicians have come reeling away from performances by the Bill Evans Trio in a mood poised between elation and utter despair.”

I’ve never been the greatest fan of bebop, in that it just tends to be a bit much for me. No objective problem with it, don’t get me wrong. I can listen to Bird all day, though. What a sound in that horn.

I talk a lot about how I love Paul Desmond’s sound, Wayne Shorter’s sound, Bill Evans’s sound, this, that, and the other thing. Nobody, but nobody, in the history of recorded sound, has a sound as pure, clear, and still so versatile as Ella Fitzgerald does. And that Louis Armstrong impression! I love her, you guys.

Here’s a lesson in being a woman: this woman is built like a brick house, she’s sweating and unpologetically wiping her face, and she’s one of the most beautiful, wonderful, incredibly gifted, amazing creatures that we have ever had the privilege to know in the history of civilization. So you can have your fucked-up patriarchal view of the feminine ideal. The rest of us will be over here with the radiant and sublime Lady Ella and you can miss out like you deserve.

She was more than just a singer. She was a true, complete musician, and even though she’s almost twenty years gone now, her legacy is the reason that music is more whole than it ever would have been otherwise.

Steve Provizer wrote an article on his blog Brilliant Corners not too long ago about the marginalization of women within jazz, how they’re often relegated to the role of vocalist — less so today, but not much — which is often regarded as a second-class job in jazz music regardless of the gender identity of the person doing it anyway.

In a rare ’20s example of the complete opposite of that phenomenon, Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five performs “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue,” composed by the group’s pianist and Satchmo’s wife, Lil Hardin Armstrong.

If you think you have to rock to be a great guitarist, you’ve never heard Joe Pass. Or Django Reinhardt. Or Jim Hall. What is wrong with you? You’re missing out.

Because it’s rare to find a YouTube commenter with good ears, a sense of humor, and the ability to be self-deprecating, I want to note the current top comment on this video: “My guitar is watching this and thinking, ‘Joe, come rescue me from this string murderer.’”

“Whether people know it or not, they have been listening to imitators of Lester Young all their life. Now they ought to check out the real thing.”

—Ted Gioia, “Why Lester Young Matters”

A lesson in mainstream for the young’uns in the crowd: no, popularity isn’t equal to quality. But sometimes, something is the most famous of its kind because it was transcendent, innovative, and objectively, mind-bogglingly good, and it remains that way decades down the road. Benny Goodman is one of those things.

I don’t mean to insert a downer, but if, as I asserted, jazz is indeed the music of tolerance and progress, then we must acknowledge a tune like “Strange Fruit” and an artist like Billie Holiday.