The critic Gary Giddins once wrote that Kenny Dorham is "practically synonymous with underrated," so don't feel ashamed if you've never heard of this golden-toned trumpeter, who came up in the 1940s alongside the bebop giants, toiling for a decade as a sideman. Quiet Kenny, a 1960 album on the New Jazz label, is the only Dorham album that features no other horn player. It's just his quartet, and what a quartetDorham is accompanied by Tommy Flanagan on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, Art Taylor on drums.
I took another look at the blog I posted on December 21 ("The Best Jazz Albums of 2016"), a few more thoughts came to mind. With one exception (#5, Brad Mehldau Trio, Blues and Ballads, on Nonesuch), the big labels (or even labels big by jazz standards) are absent from the list. . .
Last year, Sony released The Complete Concert by the Sea, not just a remaster of Erroll Garner's classic 1955 live album but two extra discs containing the entire, unexpurgated concert, from start to finish casting new light on the pianist's sparkling wonders. It turns out that Garner's agent, Martha Glaser, who died a few years ago, had socked away thousands of tape reels of musiclive concerts, studio sessions, rehearsalsand now her niece, Susan Rosenberg, who inherited the estate, is going through the cache, with the aid of a professional archivist. The first bounty of their labor is Ready Take Onepreviously unknown studio recordings of Garner and his trio from 196771.
It's Thanksgiving week, which means that if you're in New York City, you can (and should) go see two of the best jazz bands at two of the best jazz clubs. Maria Schneider's Jazz Orchestra is playing at the Jazz Standard through Sunday (except for Thanksgiving Day). Jason Moran's Bandwagon trio is playing at the Village Vanguard through Sunday (including Thanksgiving Day).
Tonight (Tuesday, November 8), at the Jazz Standard in New York City (116 East 27th Street), the 7:30 set, along with Brooke Gladstone (co-host & managing editor of public radio's On the Media and, as it happens, my wife), I'll be announcing election updates and analyzing results between tunes (by Ted Nash's Presidential Suite big band).
Almost a year ago, I wrote in this space about Darcy James Argue's Real Enemies, a multimedia big-band spectacle making its debut at BAM's New Wave Festival in Brooklyn. The CD of Real Enemies is out now . . . This is creepy fun soulful shiversome stuff.
Resonance Records has put out some of the most vital, previously unreleased (in some cases, unknown) historical jazz sessions in recent years, and the latest is one of the sweetest: Shirley Horn, Live at the 4 Queens, recorded at a now-defunct Las Vegas hotel-casino of that name in 1988. It's Horn's best live album, and one of her top few albums, periodwhich says a lot.
How the hell could I have missed Cecile McLorin Salvant? It's not as if she's been toiling in obscurity. She won the Thelonious Monk award in 2010, the Downbeat Critics' Prize for best jazz album (WomanChild) in 2014, and a Grammy for best jazz vocal album ( For One to Love) just this year. She's been singing with her trio at the Village Vanguard this past week, and every set has been sold out or nearly so. Again, how did Isomeone who's supposed to follow this sort of thingmiss the boat?
Rudy Van Gelder, pioneer recording engineer, creator of "the Blue Note sound" (and the many sounds that imitated it through the years), died at the age of 91 this week. Every true jazz fan and true audiophile has grown to venerate Van Gelderat least the work he did in the 1950s and '60s for the innovative labels of the day: not just Blue Note but also Prestige, Impulse!, Riverside, New Jazz, and scattered others.
The August 2016 issue of Downbeat includes the results of its 64th annual Critics Poll, and, as usual, I'm in accord with some picks, in discord with others. (I should say, I started to cast my votes in the poll, but something went wrong with the server halfway through and I never got back on.)
Many of the results are strange, as democratic theory would predict of any poll that involves many candidates. (It's conceivable, for instance, that the winner of a category might be someone who was nobody's #1 choice: maybe this musician was everyone's #2, but the picks for #1 were so split, among so many other candidates, that the universal #2 rose to the top.)
Checkpoint, the new CD from David Krakauer's latest band, Krakauer's Ancestral Groove, a jazz quartet occasionally expanded into a septet, digs deep in the rock-jazz-klezmer-hip-hop sediment.
Matt Wilson is one of the most versatile and inventive jazz drummers on the scene, and Beginning of a Memory (on the Palmetto label) is, I think, his best album in his 20 years as a leader.
On the heels of its revelatory release of long-lost sessions by Larry Young in Paris during the mid-1960s, Resonance Records pulls another treasure from the archivesSarah Vaughan's appearance at Rosy's, a now-defunct New Orleans jazz club, in May 1978.