Jazz and Improvised

Stage & Screen
John Pizzarelli
Palmetto Records JOPI01 (propermusic.com/label/p/palmetto-records.html) 

There can be no question that guitarist/vocalist John Pizzarrelli, as the son of the late, iconic guitarist Bucky, was born with special musical DNA… and for the past 40 years plus, Pizzarelli the younger has honed his craft and performed to sold-out concert halls and venues throughout the world. Joining him on a new project that pays tribute to a dozen compositions that have been presented on both stage and screen, are his intuitive collaborators Isaiah Thompson on piano and Michael Karn on bass.

The opening salvo, Too Close for Comfort is a jaunty, swinging take from the 1956 Broadway hit Mr. Wonderful that showcases Pizzarelli’s impossibly pure vocal instrument, as well as his gorgeous intonation. A snappy, sinuous piano solo from Thompson and a fine unison voice/guitar scat section are the icing on the proverbial cake. Another choice, up-tempo track is I Want to Be Happy, where prodigious 7-string guitar technique takes one’s breath away and Karn renders a facile “in the pocket” solo.

Bernstein’s Some Other Time from On the Town is performed as a pristine guitar solo that plucks our heart strings all-the-while weaving melodic and lyrical magic. Other delights include Pizzarelli’s percolating arrangement of Just in Time from Comden and Green’s Bells Are Ringing, and the Oklahoma Suite, which is the lovely synthesis of three tunes from the beloved American musical. Closing the set is a gleaming gem:  As Time Goes By, which is authentically performed with a fully restored verse. A stellar collection, lovingly drawn from our shared art forms of music, theatre and film.

For Jemeel – Fire from the Road
Steve Swell’s Fire Into Music
RogueArt ROG0126 (roguart.com) 

Emerging in the 1970s, Chicago-born alto saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc was a firebrand of free jazz, his work characterized by original phrasing, emotional immediacy and unwavering commitment to musical liberation. In 2004 the younger trombonist Steve Swell put together a New York dream band with Moondoc, bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake (the latter two a definitive rhythm section for rugged extended improvisation) for a tour ranging from the U.S. Midwest to the West Coast and then through Canada. Moondoc died in 2020, after a lifetime plagued by sickle-cell anaemia, just as the group planned a reunion recording; in lieu of that, Swell assembled this three-CD, three-hour set from 2004-5 concerts. 

Moondoc’s command is apparent on Space Cowboys, his style deeply rooted in essential bop and blues sources, but they are pressed into his own distinctive lines. Swell combines all the bends, smears and raw and celebratory bleats of generations of jazz trombonists. Junka Nu, from the 2005 Guelph Jazz Festival, moves with an Afro-Caribbean lilt, combining twisting, expressive lines with a dancing rhythm, creating a compound space that marks the special possibilities of free jazz. It’s a quality maintained here by Parker and Drake, whose compound rhythms are at once determined and celebratory. 

It’s rare to find documentation of this scale appearing for a band that wasn’t famous, but this is rare work with a consistent, incendiary power, a tribute to the band as well as to Moondoc. 

Treasures
Bill Evans
Elemental Music 5990444 (elemental-music.com) 

Blue Room
Chet Baker
Jazz Detective DDJD-008 (deepdigsmusic.com) 

Bill Evans and Chet Baker had much in common. Both born in 1929, they were great lyric talents. Both achieved tremendous acclaim, and both suffered the ravages of heroin addiction, contributing to Evans’ death in 1981, Baker’s in 1988. Baker had known stardom and decline before Evans emerged in 1958, and they were very different musicians, Evans a meticulous student of complex harmony, Baker a “natural” who could travel fluently through chord progressions without naming them. These boxsets, available on CD or LP, present aspects of their individual European careers, Evans a visitor, Baker a long-time resident.  

Treasures packs a few facets of Evans’ career into visits to Denmark. It initially presents him in 1965 in his favoured trio format, a conversational form here completed by the necessarily virtuosic bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and either Alan Dawson or Alex Riel on drums. The material ranges from standards to Evans’ own compositions, Time Remembered and Waltz for Debby. The rest of the disc, from 1969, has the trio with bassist Eddie Gomez and drummer Marty Morell joined by the combined forces of the Royal Danish Symphony Orchestra and the Danish Radio Big Band in a suite of mostly Evans’ compositions conducted by arranger/trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg, who manages the massed ensemble with apt taste.

There follows a 1965 solo set that ranges from a moody ‘Round Midnight to a rhapsodic My Funny Valentine, then continues with trio sets from 1966, with Gomez and Riel, and 1969, with Gomez and Morell. Evans’ could return repeatedly to the same material, trusting to his bandmates and his own invention to reignite the composition in hand. Here Miles Davis’ exotic Nardis appears in each trio’s playlist, explored at contrasting lengths, and there’s a joyous account of Johnny Mandel’s Emily, another favourite Evans vehicle.   

Last year’s release of Chet Baker’s Live in Paris: The Radio France Recordings 1983 -1984 (Elemental) presented some of Baker’s finest performances, expansive, consummately lyrical and enlivened by intense support. On Blue Room’s two 1979 sessions one gets both very good Baker and some lesser work. Mercifully, the first session contributes 70 minutes of music, the second only 25. Baker travelled to Hilversum, The Netherlands, in April with mostly American partners. Pianist Phil Markowitz, a regular, is empathetic, embellishing Baker’s brilliant minimalism, evident on Wayne Shorter’s Beautiful Black Eyes. Drummer Charles Rice and Belgian bassist Jean-Louis Rassinfosse contribute firm underpinnings as well, for both Baker’s hesitant but engaged vocals and his warmly muffled trumpet balladry. The brief session from November had Baker driving a long distance, forgetting his sheet music and playing with a local band he had just met. The results are sometimes positive, but the relaxed communication that Baker enjoyed with the previous group is absent, and his vocals sound tired. That April quartet session, however, shows Baker in excellent form.