Lopes Graça Piano Concerto No. I /Miguel Henriques, piano. Orq Sinf Portuguesa, Directed by Ola Rudner

Fernando Lopes-Graca (1906-1994) was a Portuguese composer and conductor. I happened to come across the CD this piece came from quite by accident-I saw it in a music store and bought it on impulse.

The piece is "genuine Iberian"-I'm not endorsing any silliness about "cultural appropriation"-but it does seem true that most works intended to be in this style, by people from outside the region, are pretty cliche'-ridden (I do like Copland's El Salon Mexico). Now, the three note Moorish motif that the first movement of this piece is built upon might itself be thought of as a cliche', but it's the only one.

The concerto features a fair amount of dissonance, but stays true to its roots in both native folk music and Romanticism. If you like this you may want to try Lopes-Graca's Second Piano Concerto, a darker work, no doubt, but equally enjoyable.

Fred Astaire, Vera-Ellen-"Mr and Mrs Hoofer at Home"

Ahh-the Hollywood/Broadway musical. Something of a joke now, and for good reason-few good ones have been produced since the mid-60's-but there was a time when they represented the peak of American movie entertainment..

That peak may have been reached in the 50's-just when Hollywood musicals were on their way out, presumably due to their expense in a time when people were becoming accustomed to watching television for free. As much as I love the Astaire/Rogers musicals of the thirties, the technical possibilities available two decades later made lavish productions like Gene Kelly's "An American in Paris" a possibility.

This cut is from what is actually not a great movie-1950's "Three Little Words", starring Fred Astaire, Vera-Ellen, and Red Skelton. The plot's pretty light, and the comedy only so-so, but this dance routine is certainly one of the best ever filmed. Sheer joie de vivre.

Not that you asked for it, but here is an informal ranking of the best 50's musicals. I'm the ultimate Fred Astaire fan, as noted, but Gene comes first.

1. "Singin' in the Rain" (1952)-Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds. Easily the funniest of the era's musicals. O'Connor's dance scenes make you think he lacks bones.
2. "The Band Wagon" (1953)-Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Oscar Levant. Director Vincente Minnelli at his best. Plot: Should we turn a light musical into an updated version of "Faust"? Nah.
3. "An American in Paris" (1951)-Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant. Kelly's climatic ballet might've been enough by itself to make this the best, but the Kelly/Caron romance is a little silly-he's a grown man (pushing 40 in real life) and Caron looks to be about 15 (she was in fact still a teenager).
4. "It's Always Fair Weather" (1955)- Gene Kelly, Dan Dailey, Cyd Charisse. Co-directed by Kelly with Stanley Donen, this somewhat cynical story (war buddies meet ten years after the war and soon realize they don't like each other) was a box office flop, but it's a delight. It's a musical comedy with a real plot.
5. "Funny Face" (1957)-Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn, Kay Thompson. Young intellectual (Hepburn) agrees to become a model because it means a free trip to Paris. Again, you have to overlook a big age gap between the romantic leads-Astaire is thirty years older but looks a lot more. And yes, Audrey can dance-I would've included her great solo dance but it's now gone from Youtube.
6. "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1953)-Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, Charles Coburn. Marilyn plays dumb but cagey here-she wants a rich guy and makes no bones about it. Russell, who gets a lot of great lines and knows how to deliver them, is her somewhat cynical friend. Again, I would've included my favorite scene from this one (Russell's sexy, funny "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love"), but that's also disappeared from Youtube, though other scenes from the movie are still there.

Tito Puente/Maynard Ferguson-"On Green Dolphin Street".

Tito Puente (1923-2000) occupied the jazzier end of the salsa spectrum. I have just written a sentence that would've irritated Puente, who was famous for saying "salsa is a condiment, not a musical style". In any case, the great Latin percussion master, known as "El Rey de Los Timbales", had many recorded encounters with people from the jazz world, including Woody Herman, Sonny Stitt, Quincy Jones, and here, the Canadian trumpet virtuoso Maynard Ferguson (1928-2006). 

"On Green Dolphin Street", by Bronislaw Kaper and Ned Washington for the 1944 film "Green Dolphin Street" (the "on" came later), is one of those many pop songs that emigrated into the jazz world and became the exclusive province of jazz artists such as Miles Davis and Marian McPartland. This treatment features swinging flugelhorn work by Maynard, as well as Ferguson band alum Don Menza on tenor sax.  

Enjoy!

Clifford Brown with Strings-"Laura"

There are a lot of lovely songs named after women-think of "Emily", "Waltz for Debbie", "Nancy with the Laughing Face', or, as featured here, "Laura". This one's by David Raksin and Johnny Mercer, and was heavily featured in the Gene Tierney/Dana Andrews 1944 film of the same name.


Brown's 1955 performance is a wonderful illustration of how beautiful trumpet playing can be. It's not all about screaming out high notes, though I certainly enjoy that sort of playing when appropriate.

Clifford, a Wilmington, Delaware native, died far too young-he was merely 25 when he died in a car accident, the year after this recording-but he is well-remembered by jazz fans and still heavily featured on jazz radio. There is also an annual Clifford Brown Jazz Festival held in his home town.

Maynard, Miles, Birdland, and "Oleo"

My last post, featuring some great 1959 work by Bill Evans, alluded to all the great jazz produced in that year, by the likes of Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Dave Brubeck, and others.


Today's JazzTrack was also recorded in 1959. It's Maynard Ferguson and his most excellent big band wailing at Birdland in June of that year. At that time Maynard and Miles led the dual house bands, if you will, at that esteemed jazz outpost. Each was featured for several weeks a year. One sign outside the club had Maynard as the headliner, another Miles, in an ingenious bit of artist ego-stroking.


Maynard and band here go toe to toe with a pretty intense reading of Sonny Rollins' "Oleo". No word on a body count. And, yes, big bands could play bop. Solos include Joe Zawinul on piano,  Jimmy Ford (called "The White Bird" for his Charlie Parker tendencies), Slide Hampton on trombone, and Jerry Tyree on trumpet.


It should be noted that this was an integrated band, at a time when not all that many jazz groups were. It featured black players such as Hampton and drummer Frankie Dunlop.


Here's a detailed and appropriately enthusiastic review of Maynard and band at the Newport Jazz Festival in July of that same year: "Ferguson debuted his big brassy well-oiled machine at the Newport Jazz Festival the following year. Ferguson's Friday afternoon set at the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival was an uncanny display of energy, chops and abandon melded with thoroughly polished charts by arrangers Don Sebesky and Slide Hampton..."

Bill Evans Trio - "Autumn Leaves"

I usually avoid seasonally appropriate music posts, but I couldn't resist this one-the brilliant Bill Evans on piano and Scott LaFaro on bass. This is from Bill's 1959 album "Portrait in Jazz". 1959-the year of my birth-was a particularly good year in jazz history. I don't assert a causal connection between my arrival and this fact.  

Somewhere along the way Evans became my favorite pianist. I probably would've named Chick Corea as such a couple years ago. People who know more about modern harmony than I do can tell you about Evans' approach to his instrument-how he often didn't play the roots of chords (leaving that to the bass player), his use of chords voiced in fourths instead of thirds, etc-and that's all very interesting-but technical analysis of music doesn't get you very far. Does it, for want of a better word, grab you, or not?

Vocalchord-"Texas Girl at the Funeral of Her Father"

Vocalchord is, or was, a Dutch group of opera singers who did some very nice close harmony vocals. Here they tackle Randy Newman's lovely "Texas Girl at the Funeral of Her Father". The song is simplicity itself, but very moving, and this treatment certainly does it justice.


Newman is, by any reckoning, one of the finest songwriters of this musical era. So good, in fact, that while Randy was still in his 20's the brilliant Harry Nilsson had already done an album composed solely of Newman material, 1970's "Nilsson Sings Newman".


Which makes me think of the CD's I've listened to recently: 1) Randy Newman-"Little Criminals" (which the above is from); 2) Frank Sinatra-"Sinatra's "Swingin' Session"; 3) Maynard Ferguson-"Maynard '61"/"Straightaway Jazz Themes" (the latter of this double set is from the early 60's ABC series "Straightaway" which Maynard did the music for); 4) Chick Corea-"Concerto" (Chick's sole recorded foray into classical music, as far as I know-he wrote a new orchestration of his "Spain", as well as a new piano concerto for himself); 5) The Beatles-"The White Album" (yes, I actually think that for a few minutes "Revolution 9" works, as a sort of sonic tour of Hell as imagined by John Lennon, that is before John starts into naming dances-"the Watusi, the Twist" and such); and 6) The London Brass-"Modern Times with The London Brass" (hyper-modern set designed to annoy people, though I like a lot of it, actually).

Nina Simone - "Here Comes The Sun"

It's nice to note that this treatment (please don't call it a "cover"-did Ray Charles "cover" songs? Did Sinatra?) of "Here Comes the Sun" by the great Nina Simone has over 17 million views on Youtube. Maybe it will introduce people to Nina. Cool little gospelly piano solo by Nina as well.

I've never been a big fan of George Harrison as a songwriter-he tended towards the preachy and pretentious-but this is a good one. The most obvious comparison is to Macca's "Good Day Sunshine"-very much an inferior song.

Rumer -"What The World Needs Now"

Rumer is a British singer (nee' Sarah Joyce).

The simple beauty of her voice, and of this arrangement of the Bacharach/David classic, need little comment-though I'll mention that Rumer has been likened to Karen Carpenter. Not hard to hear some similarities, but I don't think she's aping Carpenter. You'll note that Madeleine Peyroux sounds more than a little like Billie Holiday, and that Linda Eder sounds like Barbra Streisand. Not sure it's intentional in any of these cases.

Tony Bennett-"Emily"

In the 90's Tony did an album called "Perfectly Frank"-a tribute to you know who. Excellent album, but none of the 24 cuts was as good as the Sinatra version. That's the danger of doing a Sinatra tribute album!

In any case, here is a song that Tony may well do better than Frank. (Frank's "Emily" is here). Not sure when Sinatra did his treatment (Tony's dates from 1966), but obviously it's fairly late in the game. Frank's "Emily" is more about building a home with Emily; Tony's with passion for the girl. Tony's is also rhythmically looser-the waltz beat is much less obvious, when it's there at all.

For another case where Tony may in fact exceed Frank, here's a live 1993 version of "One for My Baby". Tony does it as a roadhouse shuffle, which the song needs. As a straight ballad it's sort of a lesser "Angel Eyes"-which, if you think about it, is basically the same song, only better.

Glen Campbell - "Try A Little Kindness" - [live]

What's Glen Campbell doing on a jazz site? Well, he was a hell of a guitar player. Listen to him rip through this one. Plus, I like the song and Glen's singing, as well. RIP.

There's a funny story, somewhat politically incorrect, about Campbell, who did a lot of session work early in his career, on a Sinatra session. Glen seemed to be enjoying himself hugely, staring at Sinatra in awe. So Frank, ever tactful, asked the producer: "Who's the queer guy on guitar?"

This cut is circa 2000.

Frank Sinatra-"I Had The Craziest Dream"

This is from "Trilogy", Frank's Past-Present-Future three album set recorded in 1979. As pretty much everybody who has heard the album has noted, only the Past record-from which this track is taken-is much worth listening to.

I've always thought of Sinatra as a great actor-he delivers the meaning of the lyrics, acts them...as he understands them, of course. It might be a hoary cliché, but this track gives me chills up the spine. This is acting, at its best.

The wonderful, Harry James-esque trumpet solo is by Charlie Turner.

Maynard Ferguson - "Rhythm Method"

The last two decades of Maynard Ferguson's life and career were a fertile period. He was finally free of the Columbia (now Sony) record contract which had led to the recording of so much questionable material. He had-re-formed his big band after a short interval with a small group. And the first few years-with the full-sized version of Big Bop Nouveau-were especially productive. His own playing was still at full strength, and the bands were loaded with top-flight soloists, such as Chip McNeill on tenor and Walter White on trumpet, as heard here. Recorded live, circa 1990.

Bernard Herrmann- "Vertigo"-theme

I'm constantly coming across new examples of wonderful music by Hermann. I watched "The Ghost and Mrs Muir" (1947-Gene Tierney, Rex Harrison) recently and marveled at the beauty of the opening theme, heard over shots of the seaside where Tierney's character would end up living. Then I noticed the credits and saw, not surprisingly, Hermann's name. Of course. Another perhaps surprising place you run into Hermann's music is Twilight Zone re-runs, many of which were scored by Hermann.

As, presumably, most people know, many of Hitchcock's movies were scored by Hermann, including this wonderful example. This strikes me as Hermann's best work for Hitchcock, though some will name "North by Northwest" as such. In any case, this is modern, in the right way.

"Chet"-a poem

Here is a poem I wrote a while ago about Chet Baker.


Found his way to Birdland-

Valhalla of the jazz men.

Played his horn like an angel whispering,

Not a warrior bearing his weapon.


All the beauty was on the stand,

Darkness all else.

But if your darkness be light-

O, how great the light!


Sought by Hollywood in his youth-

James Dean's worthy heir?

Killed himself more slowly,

But we were no less fascinated.


The standard songs with the standard changes,

Conventional to the last.

The 50's gospel-the sated man of alley and bandstand-

The perfect fix, the perfect note.


"Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy":

A better tale than a triumph,

In a world that lives out its woes,

One song at a time.