Holiday Season

I'll be gone for 10 days or so, spending Christmas and New Year with family everwhere a bit. I won't have the opportunity to update the blog i presume so that will be it for this year. Thanks a lot for passing by and hope to see you soon in 2010. Best wishes to all!

Terry Pollard R.I.P.

http://jazztimes.com/articles/25540-jazz-pianist-terry-pollard-dies-at-78

12/22/09
Jazz Pianist Terry Pollard Dies at 78
By Aubrey Everett


Terry Jean Pollard, a leading female jazz pianist during the thriving Detroit jazz scene of the 1940s and 50s, died in New York Dec. 16 after a long illness. She was 78.

An enthusiastic cheerleader and tireless Jazz supporter who told others she was from “the home of the pros in Detroit,” Pollard got her professional start at the age of 16, and recorded one solo album before settling down to raise a family.

Born on August 15, 1931, Pollard got her first taste of the prolific Detroit jazz scene by recording with Billy Mitchell in 1948. She then collaborated with Johnny Hill from 1948-1949 and the Emmitt Slay Trio from 1950-1952.

From 1952–1953, while Pollard was again working closely with Mitchell, she was discovered at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge in Detroit by well-known vibraphonist Terry Gibbs and asked to join his North American tour as part of the Terry Gibbs Quartet. Pollard played piano and second vibes with the group, recording many songs with Gibbs and Dick Garcia, which set her on track to ultimately hit the highest point in her Jazz career.


Pollard won a recording contract with Bethlehem Records and recorded one solo self-titled album in 1955. The following year she won the prestigious DownBeat Magazine New Artist award. During this time Pollard performed alongside John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Nat King Cole, Dinah Washington, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, and appeared with Gibbs on the Tonight Show hosted by Steve Allen.


Shortly after recording her solo album, in the late 1950’s, Pollard decided to return to Detroit to raise a family. She continued to participate in the music scene, performing with local artists Yusef Lateef and Dorothy Ashby, and headliners Bert Myrick, Earl Klugh and Diana Ross & The Supremes in the Detroit area.


Pollard was a 60-year-member of the Detroit Federation of Musicians Local 5 in Southfield, Mich., and won many awards during her career. She was featured in the 2001 book Before Motown: A History of Jazz in Detroit 1920-1960 by Lars Bjorn and Jim Gallert.


Pollard leaves one son, Dennis Michael Weeden; a daughter, Corby Marlene Swindle and their families. Funeral arrangements have not been finalized.

ROIO OF THE WEEK : JERU VOL. 4

I got this recording in a trade a few years ago, only got around listening to it recently. The sound is quite good. Enjoy the music. The links are were they ought to be.



W 9004 " JERU " VOL. 4
G.M.6ET
Jon Eardley (tp), Bob Brookmeyer (vtb), Zoot Sims (ts), Gerry Mulligan (bars, p*), Peck Morrison
(b), Dave Bailey (dm)

BASIN STREET CLUB, NYC,OCTOBER 1955
1. APPLE CORE
2. MOONLIGHT IN VERMONT
3. NIGHT AT THE TURNTABLE
4. BROADWAY

BASIN STREET CLUB, NYC,DECEMBER 3, 1955
5. UTTER CHAOS
6. THE RED DOOR
7. SOFT SHOES
8. MAKIN' WHOOPEE
9. BERNIE'S TUNE

MILANO, TEATRO DELLA FIERA, FEBR. 25, 1956
TV BCAST, RAI TRE, SCHEGGE PROGRAM
10. BERNIE'S TUNE
11. WALKIN' SHOES
12. ONTET *

G.M. 4ET
Bob Brookmeyer (vtb), Gerry Mulligan (bars),
Bill Crow (b), Dave Bailey (dm)
NY CITY, CBS TV " CAMERA 3 "
TV BCAST
July 29, 1956
13. LINE FOR LYONS
14. MY FUNNY VALENTINE
15. FIVE BROTHERS

Pete King R.I.P.

Pete King, who died on December 20 aged 80, was the co-founder of Ronnie Scott's jazz club and in charge of its day-to-day running from the opening night. Read the full obit here.

Wintertime

Took these pictures when we out for a walk yesterday afternoon in our village.

Tony Williams article

Peter S. from the U.K. brought my attention to this older article on Tony Wiliams. Enjoy the read!

Miles From India

Here's the concert, direct recording on HD of the radio broadcast and brought to you in FLAC...

Enjoy!

Miles From India
Cité de la Musique, Salle des concerts
November 2nd 2009
RB
France Musique 17.12.2009

1. Intro Radio Ann.
2. All Blues
3. Ann R.M.
4. IASW
5. So What
6. Blue In Green
7. Ife
8. Jean Pierre
9. Ann & crowd
10. Encore Miles runs the Voodo down
11. Radio outro

Nicholas Payton , Trompette
John Beasley, Clavier
Adam Holzman, Clavier
Rudresh Mahanthappa, Saxophone
Darryl Jones, Contrebasse
Badal Roy, Tabla
U. Shrinivas, Mandoline
Ndugu Chancler, Batterie
Vince Wilburn, Batterie
V. Selvaganesh, Khanjira
V. K. Raman flûte, Voix
Anantha Krishnan, Mridangam

Links are in the comments section !

Miles From India

This evening at 20.00 PM France Musique will broadcast the following concert :

Miles from India
Concert donné le 2 novembre 2009 à la Cité de la Musique, Salle des concerts
Nicholas Payton , Trompette
John Beasley, Clavier
Adam Holzman, Clavier
Rudresh Mahanthappa, Saxophone
Darryl Jones, Contrebasse
Badal Roy, Tabla
U. Shrinivas, Mandoline
Ndugu Chancler, Batterie
Vince Wilburn, Batterie
V. Selvaganesh, Khanjira
V. K. Raman flûte, Voix
Anantha Krishnan, Mridangam

House honors Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue"

Miles Davis
House honors Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue"
Dec. 15, 2009, 2:28 PM EST

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Fifty years after jazz legend Miles Davis recorded "Kind of Blue," the House voted Tuesday to honor the landmark album's contribution to the genre.

Davis collaborated on the record with saxophonists John Coltrane and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, pianists Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Jimmy Cobb.

Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat who sponsored the measure, H.Res.894, said the group "made musical history and changed the artistic landscape of this country and in some ways the world." The resolution recognizing the album's 50th anniversary passed on a 409-0 vote.

Columbia Records released the album in August 1959. The original album — only 37 minutes — had a huge impact that extended beyond jazz to other types of music — from rock musicians such as the Allman Brothers and Carlos Santana to minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

Davis, one of the greatest trumpeters in jazz history, died of a stroke in 1991 at age 65. He was renowned for morphing his cool jazz into fusion and experimental sounds that later gave way to jazz funk and hip-hop grooves. Cobb is the only musician from the "Kind of Blue" sessions who is still alive.

A quote by René Magritte

"We mustn't fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world."

"Il ne faut pas craindre la lumière du soleil sous prétexte qu'elle n'a presque toujours servi qu'à éclairer un monde misérable"

René Magritte

A whole night of Dave Brubeck on France Musique

As they did for Wayne Shorter and Miles Davis recently (and earlier on for Trane, Chet,..) France Musique spends tonight a whole night with Dave Brubeck. You can find more info here. It's possible i'll record it, don't know yet. It starts at 01.00 A.M. and lasts until 07.00 A.M.

ROIO OF THE WEEK : Marcus Miller NSJF, 2002

I recorded this in the early days of my 2nd radio recording career;-). A Marcus Miller show from the North Sea Jazz Fesitval, The Hague in 2002. It's a radio broadcast as far as i may remember, or possoibly a soundrip from a tv broadcast. Anwyay decent sound after all. I thought it fits perfectly with the 'We want Miles' expo in Paris and the concerts Marcus Miller is doin here in Europe these days.
Links are at its usual place.
Enjoy!



Marcus Miller
NSJF, The Hague
00.07.2002
RB/TB? -) EAC -) HD -) FLAC

1. So What
2. Ann.
3. Lonnie's Lament
4. Killing me Softly
5. When Your Life Is Low
6. Tutu

Marcus Miller el. b.
Michael Stewart tp
Lalah Hathaway voc on 4 & 5
Dean Brown g
Poogie Bell ds
Roger Byam sax
Bruce Flowers keyb

We Want Miles article by George Cole

The Guardian published a review of the 'We Want Miles' expo written by 'The Last Miles' author George Cole. Enjoy the read!

Empress Josephine: The woman who taught France to drink

Empress Josephine: The woman who taught France to drink By John Lichfield
10:30 AM Thursday Dec 10, 2009

An exhibition at Paris' Chateau de Malmaison (pictured) examines the role Napoleon Bonaparte's first wife, the Empress Josephine, had in changing France's wine tastes. Photo / Wikimedia Commons image from user Wabill


When Marie-Josephe-Rose de Tascher de La Pagerie died in 1814, she left a heap of unpaid bills and a golden legacy to social historians.

Marie-Josephe-Rose, better known as the Empress Josephine, the first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, was, among other things, a great connoisseur and collector of clothes, and an innovative gardener and botanist.

The written inventory of her final possessions in her chateau west of Paris has inspired learned studies and exhibitions on subjects as varied as the fashion trends and gardening styles of the early 19th century.

Josephine was also a celebrated hostess and, although not a great drinker, a great collector of wine.

The official inventory of her possessions at her death includes more than 13,000 bottles of wine from all over the world, from the Cape to Hungary to Champagne.

Study of her 1814 "wine list" reveals something that may seem unsurprising but was, at that time, extraordinary. Almost half of her bottles and barrels came from vineyards around Bordeaux.

Most of them, though little-known in France at that time, would later come to be recognised as among the greatest names in wine: the four "top" Medoc chateaux of Latour, Lafite, Margaux and Haut-Brion.

At the time of the Revolution 25 years earlier, the wine cellars of King Louis XVI had contained not a single bottle from the vineyards of south-west France. In aristocratic French society in the 18th century, Burgundy and Champagne reigned supreme.

Bordeaux was regarded as fit mostly for the English (who had been stubborn lovers of claret, or red Bordeaux wine, for four centuries).

Was the Empress Josephine a precursor of the great switch in French wine tastes which allowed the vineyards of Bordeaux, and especially the great chateaux of the Medoc, to emerge by the mid-19th century as the most prized wines in France and the world?

This is one of the subjects explored in an entertaining exhibition, La Cave de Josephine (Josephine's Cellar), which has started at the Chateau de Malmaison, west of Paris. It was here that Josephine lived for the last 15 years of her life, and died in June 1814, aged 50.

The exhibition, which will move to Germany and Italy next year, also examines other changes in the art de vivre of the French nobility which followed the fall of the monarchy.

Before the Revolution, an aristocratic French dinner-party was a kind of immense, stand-up buffet in which all dishes were served at once. Wine glasses were kept on trays by servants and topped up as required.

After the revolution, France gradually adopted the "Russian" style, now universal, of serving different, sit-down courses one after another.

Wine glasses began, finally, to be placed permanently on the table. These changes were driven partly by the post-Revolutionary dearth of legions of ill-paid servants.

France had also finally cracked the "industrial secret" of how to make crystal wine glasses, something previously known only to the British.

Elisabeth Caude, the joint curator of the exhibition, and joint curator of the chateau itself, says the Empress Josephine did not originate these shifts in the style of French dining but she did become one of their most celebrated exponents.

The Chateau de Malmaison, when bought by Napoleon and Josephine in 1799, was in wooded, open countryside beside one of the great loops of the river Seine west of Paris.

The site has now been enveloped by the suburban sprawl of the French capital but the chateau has been restored by the French state and looks, inside and out, much as it did in 1814.

When Napoleon divorced Josephine in 1809, he gave her the building and its contents. Josephine retained the title of Empress and maintained a kind of second imperial court. Hence her well-stocked wine cellar and her debts.

The new exhibition provides an entertaining insight into Josephine's life in Malmaison but also offers a freeze-frame of a pivotal moment in the history of wine.

In the late 18th century, two-thirds of all the vines planted in the world were in France. Domestic French tastes were dominated by white wine, mostly sweet, and by wine from Burgundy and Champagne.

The Emperor Napoleon was something of an exception. He would drank only Chambertin, a wonderful red wine from Burgundy which he insisted - following the habit of the times - in drowning in iced water.

How then did the cellar of the Empress Josephine, a dedicated follower and maker of fashion, contain so many barrels and bottles of unfashionable Bordeaux? How did it come to be dominated by red wine, rather than white?

The exhibition has borrowed huge, dusty ledgers from, among other places, the Chateau Latour in Medoc, showing the Empress Josephine's wine orders inscribed in ornate hand-writing.

It displays, among other things, the beautiful, porcelain labels which were hung around the necks of wine bottles before paper stick-on labels became common.

Of the 13,286 bottles of wine in her collection, no less than 5,973 came from Bordeaux. Only 419 (and one half) bottles came from Burgundy.

"Partly, you have to put those figures in perspective," Ms Caude said.

"We know there had been a great deal of entertaining just before Josephine's death. It is likely that the stocks of Burgundy and Champagne had been run down and were waiting to be replenished."

All the same, she says, the presence of so much Bordeaux, and not just any Bordeaux, is intriguing. The Napoleonic wars had cut off the traditional, British markets of the Bordeaux negociants, or traders.

One of Josephine's "knights of honour" and the manager of her household was Andre Bonnin de la Bonniniere, the Marquis of Beaumont. He was also the co-proprietor of the Chateau Latour vineyard in Medoc.

"It is obvious Bordeaux was desperate, at that time, to find new markets in France," Ms Caude said.

"One can also presume that the Marquis de Beaumont influenced Josephine's wine purchases, in an attempt to introduce the best kinds of Bordeaux to the imperial court and, therefore, to leading French society.

"But Josephine was also a woman of great character and great taste. She would certainly not have served her guests wine that she hadn't, herself, tasted and approved of. We can, therefore, say Josephine, as a leading figure in the new Imperial society of the early 1800s, did point the way to a change in the French taste in wine, which, by mid-19th century, had enthusiastically embraced Bordeaux."

The rest is oenological history. The days when British wine-lovers had the best Bordeaux chateaux to themselves have long gone.

The Empress Josephine died of pneumonia, after she wore a fashionably light gown outside on a chilly day. She was taking the Tsar of Russia on a tour of her famous gardens at the time.

She would have done better to stay inside and introduce him to her wine collection.

- INDEPENDENT

By John Lichfield

Sonny Rollins at The Kennedy Center

Source :

By Sriram Gopal in Arts and Events on December 3, 2009
During the 1960s, a great debate among jazz aficionados was over who was the better saxophonist, John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins. A fool's errand, really, as they had completely different approaches to music. Both were master technicians who could run the gamut, from aggressive to serene. Coltrane's playing had a deeper spirituality, while Rollins was the more mischievous, always playing with a witty edge. And while 'Trane's group was probably more groundbreaking, Sonny deserves a great deal of credit for his sheer longevity and high quality output over a 50+ year career. Few jazzers of his generation remain, making the 79-year-old saxophonist an artistic treasure, and totally deserving of the standing ovation that greeted him as he took the Concert Hall stage last night at the Kennedy Center.

Though walking with a bit of a hobble due to age, any sign of frailty disappeared the second Rollins brought the horn to his mouth. Opening with and uptempo swinger, he prowled about the stage, upper body bobbing back and forth, like a prize fighter throwing musical jabs at each of his bandmates. His tone was as powerful as ever, and the elder was the only band member who did not take a seat for the duration of his two-hour, two-set performance. Time has also not diminished Rollins's stylish flair. Always known for being one of the cleanest cats on the scene, yesterday he was looking quite dapper, with his hair slicked back while sporting a white blazer, dark pants, and his trademark sunglasses. Rollins even changed during intermission, returning to the stage with an equally eye-catching bright red shirt.

The evening's heartwarming moment came just before the band performed the ballad, "Cabin in the Sky," the title song to the 1943 picture starring the wonderful Lena Horne. Rollins recalled seeing the picture as a youngster at a movie theater in Annapolis, while on a trip to the nearby Carr's Beach and Sparrow's Beach, waterfront spots available to African-Americans during segregation. Rollins went on to tell a story of how he saw a big band while at the beach, and was heartbroken to see his crush sitting on the bandstand. But that same concert also planted the seed of his love of jazz, something he remembers, he said, every time he plays in this area. The song itself featured a soulful trombone solo from Clifton Anderson, who also shined on a moving tribute to J.J. Johnson, the trombonist who gave Rollins one of his early breaks.

While this was clearly Sonny's show, he gave his formidable bandmates plenty of space to shine. The first set closed with a Rollins original, "Nice Lady," an island theme that showcased the musicality of percussionist Victor Y. See Yuen, who gave a clinic in balancing technical prowess with taste and restraint. The second set began with another uptempo number that saw Rollins trade phrases with Kobie Watkins, a versatile young drummer with no shortage of chops, but who is also steeped in tradition. Guitarist Bobby Broom was given several solos throughout the evening, and rocked out on "Sonny, Please," the title track to the 2005 release. Bass guitarist Bob Cranshaw, who has been collaborating with Rollins since the late 1950s, spent most of the night holding things down, but was given a moment on the closer, "Don't Stop the Carnival." An homage to his parents' Virgin Island roots, the Rollins staple is built on an instantly hummable melody played over an infectious calypso groove, which brought the boisterous crowd to its feet once more.

In an interview conducted last year, Rollins told DCist that he does not listen to much music anymore. That remark struck us as odd, given the inherent desire artists have to grow and evolve. But like a grandfather who is unapologetically set in his ways, even artists of Rollins' stature probably reach a point where they don't feel that inner fire lighting an explorer's spirit. Instead, they are content to express the emotions and knowledge they have amassed over decades. And like that same grandfather who doles out words of wisdom for us to cherish, last night's audience could feel blessed that Rollins is still around to lend us his sweet, sweet sound.

New York Times : review of 2 books on Jazz

The NYT reviews two books on jazz : 'POPS A Life of Louis Armstrong' by Terry Teachout is reviewed here and there's 'JAZZ' written by Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux which is reviewed here

Great way to start the weekend!

Miles Davis in Belgrade 1971

BBC Radio Scotland broadcasted yesterday a small excerpt of Miles' concert at Belgrade 1971. I captured it from the net and the links can be found in the comments section.

More info on the complete concert can be found here

Miles Davis
November 3, 1971
Dom Sindikata, Belgrade (Yugoslavia)

1. Radio Intro
2. Yesternow (inc)
3. Radio Ann

Miles Davis (tpt)
Gary Bartz (ss, as)
Keith Jarrett (el-p, org)
Michael Henderson (el-b)
Ndugu Leon Chancler (d)
Charles Don Alias (cga, perc)
James Mtume Forman (cga, perc)