Fred Kaplan

I’ve listened several times these past few weeks to Erik Friedlander’s new CD, Block Ice & Propane (on the Skipstone Records label), a haunting, sprawling, majestic piece of Americana. The album is subtitled “Taking Trips to America: Compositions and Improvisations for Solo Cello,” and that sums it up. The cellist’s father is the master photographer, Lee Friedlander. When Erik was growing up, Lee would spend summers driving a 1966 Chevy pickup truck around the country, taking pictures, and he’d take the family along: he and his wife in the front, often blasting the radio, Erik and his sister in the thin shelled-box camper up above, watching the clouds and the road markers flash by. Block Ice & Propane—named after the old techniques for keeping food chilled and gas stoves lit—is a remembrance of those summers, an elegy for innocent adventure, a musical road trip in its own right.

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 music—live concerts, studio sessions, rehearsals—and 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 One—previously unknown studio recordings of Garner and his trio from 1967–71.

Friday night, I saw one of the finest, most intimate jazz sets I'd seen in a while: Ethan Iverson and Ron Carter playing duets at Mezzrow, a small new jazz club in Manhattan's West Village...

Edward Simon: Solo Live, The Wonderful World Of Louis Armstrong All Stars: A Gift to Pops and Fred Hersch: Breath by Breath.