The review you won't see on Amazon

I wrote this review of Gordon Goodwin's latest work a while back, when I was in the middle of enthusiastic throes for this phenomenal work. Somehow, the review got set aside and I'd lost track of it. Today, I pulled it out and reread it, and while I still like it and I still think it encompasses my true feelings about the work, I don't think Amazon buyers will get what I am saying. So, I'm going to put this review up here exclusively on Late to Jazz, and write something else for Amazon. I might even post that, too, eventually. We'll see. Here it is:

Phantastic!

It took me a while to get around to listening to this with full attention and seriousness, because I got distracted by the Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga recording. Now that I’ve spent a good while absorbing Gordon Goodwin’s latest work, I’m ready to weigh in. To my ears, the music written, played and produced over the years by Gordon Goodwin and his band has never been anything but swinging, shouting, hand-clapping, heart stopping, dance-inducing joy, and I wish I could say that Life in the Bubble continues Goodwin’s and BPB’s trend, but I have to say, it does not.

 

Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band's latest, and, dare we say it, best!

Because this recording is way better than all that.

These are some of the best sounding, hard swinging, jazzy, soulful, bluesy, big band tracks that have been recorded, not just in the last ten years (say), but, possibly ever. Sure Maria Schneider continues to be inventive and productive, and the only thing that stopped Bob Brookmeyer from continuing to make truly great modern jazz big band recordings was his unforunate death. There are a few jazz collectives making wonderful big band recordings, and of course, Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra raise the bar every time they play, but then came Goodwin’s Bubble. This recording is just spectacular. There is so much going on, so much inventiveness, and the push of swing, sound, and clever, inspired solos is relentless from start to finish. This is one of those CD’s that after you’ve listened to it once through, you sort of feel like it isn’t even over when it’s over. It keeps cycling through your mind. Then, when you listen a second time (and third, and fourth), you wonder how you missed those hard hitting horn shouts, or the subtle stylistic shift on piano or sax, or the weaving bass line that came out of nowhere. A detailed song-by-song explanation of the exciting and inspiring music that waits here would take a lifetime to write poetically and accurately, so all I’ll say is, this is a Phat-tastic CD and if you love jazz and big band music, this is a must buy. It’s phenomenal.

Back to facing the music

 I'm still working on the listening guides in Jazz Styles, a book that (except for the listening guides) I just finished reading recently. I've also added a bunch of interesting chunks of musical history to my collection, that I thought I would brag, er, write about.

I like the early pictures of Duke, because he doesn't show all the weariness of 50 years in the music business that his later pictures do. Just a happy, confident musician.

The top of that heap is the 3 CD set of Early Ellington: The Original Decca Recordings. This is an increasingly rare set that could be had on Amazon and E-bay forever, but almost always at ridiculous prices. So, when I happened to be surfing around and found one for less than $20, I was all over it. I really consider it a cornerstone of my collection, even though I've only had it for a few days. Of course, Mrs. S put it on for me the other night as our dinner background music, and she quickly thanked me when I walked right over to the iPad and put something else on. "I thought you wanted to listen to it," she said. I told her simply, that's music to study while listening to it, not to eat dinner. She said, "Well, thank God." Which is not to say there's anything wrong with the music, just, it's old, and it really takes a lot of focus and energy for a person living in the 21st century to listen to.

A subdued and simple piece of cover art, oddly compelling, that requires a second look, and then a third, just like Haig's music. 

Next is Al Haig's Will-O-The-Wisp, a collection of four ten-inch LP's from the '50's. This can actually be played during dinner to no great detriment, but it too is music I bought to study. I didn't know it, but Al Haig really is the grandfather of post-bop piano (Bud Powell fans: please give me a break on that one), and because of his work with the bop masters, he really laid the groundwork for a lot of the great pianists that were to come, like McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans, Ramsey Lewis, Ahmad Jamal and others. I find Haig's simple statements quite attractive because they are approachable to untalented players of little skill, like myself, making a decent sound not only attainable, but manageable.

How do you take a tax-deductible trip to France: Record your latest CD while you're there!

Then, speaking of Ahmad Jamal and getting some music we could listen to, we picked up the latest by "armadillo", as he's known in our house. ("Ahmad Jamal" in spoken Japanese sounds remarkably like "armadillo".) As I've indicated in my side bar: "It’s scary to think that Ahmad Jamal has been playing jazz piano for something like 20 years longer than I’ve even been alive. Maybe that’s why he sounds as good as he does. His original compositions also have a way of sneaking into your head for long periods of time, which means the best solution is to just put him on the iPad and leave him on." His music is just a joy.

Ah, it feels good to write about music again. I must do more of this in the very near future.

Another realization on the road to understanding jazz

For those who have been reading this blog for more than a year, you are probably aware that I graduated from college a mere three years ago this May. I’m proud to say that at the tender age of 43, after achieving credits at 6 different colleges over a period of 26 years, I obtained my BSBA degree. Quite an accomplishment, if I do say so myself. I would say, however, that as hard as I worked, with as many solo and team projects, assignments, papers, etc. that we had to complete, no single project that I undertook toward my degree required as much time and hard work as the project I just completed for my jazz arranging class: a seventeen piece arrangement of Bill Evans’ “Peri’s Scope” with a lick from Thelonious Monk’s “In Walked Bud” thrown in for good measure (or eight good measures).

To complete the 150 bars or so, I estimate that I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty hours. It required complete reworking of the saxophone soli – twenty four bars of five parts. It required at least five hours just learning the software (Finale) to compose. It required two critiquing sessions with my instructor and classmates (three if you count the one for the soli). It even took about forty-five minutes just to print out the parts, make adjustments, reprint them, etc. etc. Then yesterday evening, the big band sight read it, got some tips and insight from me (not much), then played it through once more.

Finished.

All that said, I really enjoyed it. As much work as it was, the feelings of accomplishment and completion were just exhilarating, and it makes me feel good that I can get back to my regular, non-scholastic life. First order of business is to buy myself some jazz CD’s and get all my music that’s been laying about organized. In order to do that, I’ll have to find some shelves to put it on.

And I’m looking forward to keeping up with this blog once again.

Admitting to going a little crazy of late

The job is literally killing me, sending me to the doctor every week as bad things happen to my body, such as my arm going numb one night (better now, thanks), gaining eight pounds in two weeks (dropped four since), and even losing a crown from my wisdom tooth. To cope, I just decided to keep myself occupied with music. And since I’m studying jazz arranging, I’ve been focusing on big band stuff to keep my muse energized. Here’s what I’ve acquired, just in the last two weeks:



By far the CD getting the most listening right now is Abdullah Ibrahim’s Bombella. The WDR Big Band just blows Ibrahim’s arrangements right out the door and halfway up the street. If you could hear the sound of energy, this is what it would sound like.

A close second is the Bill Holman Big Band compendium. Talk about fun music! I’ve only listened to about five songs so far because I can’t stop myself from going back for seconds and thirds. The thing is just amazing.

In third, I have to go with Buddy Rich for two reasons: one, he and his bands embody the west coast sound and are similar enough to Stan Kenton as to be confused with those great works, and two, his version of Love for Sale is probably the best ever recorded. Brilliant.

And this recent trend gave me a good idea that I’m happy to announce here: I’m doing away with the Yoity Tot “B” List and breaking it out into The Yoity Tot Big Band CD list and the “regular” Yoity Tot CD list. It’s going to take me a little bit to put those together, so keep watching this space for that change.

Keep it jazzy, folks!

Neither here nor there...

I still suck at ear training. Best I can get is 64% right. Usually, I'm in the 40% area. In fact, I think I'm getting worse. I noticed I can't even detect octaves half the time now. That's really bad.

I watched the Arturo Sandoval story, "For Love or Country", starring Andy Garcia. It was pretty good.

Spent two and a half hours today on my jazz theory class homework. It was all about harmonic minor scales and 13th chords, two more weak areas for me, and man, it was a lot of work. So when I can't play anything in the band tomorrow, I'll tell the director (who also teaches the jazz theory class) that I had too much homework. We'll see how that goes.

I've been listening to a lot of Dizzy Gillespie lately. Sometimes, you just forget how good some of these musicians are when you haven't listened to them for a while, and then when you do, you just can't put them away because they sound so fresh all of a sudden. I can honestly say, only jazz music does that to me. Or so it seems.

And it finally stopped raining in Alabama. I got some sunlight vitamin D today and it felt great!

I put out an ad online looking for a free piano. No surprise that one hasn't shown up yet. I may have to break down and spend some money on one. I should do it soon, too.

That’s that

So, on my way to the concert Friday night, I’m stopped at a yield sign waiting for traffic to let up enough for me to merge. The guy behind me decides it’s let up enough to go ahead and merge. Unfortunately, he completely forgot there was a car in front of him. Mine.

I suppose there are worse things than a traffic accident to take one’s mind off of things and help one lose some of one’s nervousness and settle down before performing in a concert. I calmly got out of the car and honestly, at first I couldn’t see any damage. We looked underneath and around, and all I could see were some vague scrapes where the dirt had some off my car. Me and the perp didn’t even bother to exchange info, as I simply couldn’t see anything wrong and wanted to go back to thinking about the concert.

The concert was standing room only. Literally. The audience was siting on the staircases at the top. I had about ten or twelve supporters of my own there, only one from where I work, the rest colleagues and former colleagues of Mrs. S. Our band played first and we led off with Splanky. I had the first solo and it was really the only time anyone was going to hear me. The rhythm section and I nailed the behind-the-beat opening, played our 24 bars, then I soloed. I dropped in a Pop Goes the Weasel lick halfway through, but otherwise stuck to an unadventurous but nice sounding blues-scale-based line. It received the usual lukewarm opening solo applause. (Later, somebody told me they thought I would be soloing a lot longer, which was why they didn’t clap.)

From that point on, I was home free. The pressure was off. The rest of the concert went well, even if it ended up being a little long.

Fourth ever jazz concert is done and gone. Back to practicing from The Jazz Piano Book and working on technique, plus I’m going to start a new, critical listening project which I will outline in some detail soon. Updates to Yoity Tot are also long overdue.

Ups and Downs

As we kick off Jazz Appreciation Month...

The past week has been filled with a series of ups and downs. Monday night was big band rehearsal, and our drummer was absent. This allowed us to hear the band in a completely different light, and the fact that I wasn't playing very well at all really came out. On one of the songs, I was even play a completely wrong chord, pretty much altering the whole progression of the song. Although I arrived at rehearsal full of confidence after a productive weekend of practicing, by the end of rehearsal, I was starting to feel like an accident that put my hand into some kind of cast for the next three weeks would not be completely unwelcome.

Due to the emotional strain of putting down our eighteen year old cat on Tuesday (a story that I won't go into other than to say that after spending 18 years together with any sort of living thing, it has to be the hardest decision in the world to decide to end that being's life), I didn't practice very much on Tuesday, so I showed up for band practice on Wednesday, pretty much looking forward to the drummer being back and covering up my mediocre, uninspiring sound.

Unfortunately, the drummer wasn't there yesterday either.

So I did what any other jazz pianist with my lack of skills would do: I created space. I played sparser chords more sparingly, played fewer notes, played less on the beat, and even got a section taken away from me where we changed how we play the solos. I was fine with all those decisions, and I think they were made for the betterment of the music. Plus my overall sound was more interesting because I stopped doubling the left hand with the right.

Jazz ensemble actually went pretty well from start to finish. I picked up some good pointers on soloing and was able to implement them right away. At my piano lesson, we worked on some chord voicings for one of the songs I've been having trouble with in big band. The end result was, my confidence is back, my willingness and desire to practice is back, and my sound is better.

That's what I'm going to school to learn, anyway, so it's good to know we are at least accomplishing that.

There was a quote in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, that John Coltrane once said, "This (jazz) music is a serious as life itself." I'm not sure I buy that on its face, but I will say, if you had to pick something to take seriously while pursuing it, jazz would be a good selection.

New Addition to Yoity Tot List

Since becoming interested in jazz music, I've always been a big fan of the big band sound. Something about all those horns and winds and rhythm instruments, coming down different roads headed in different directions all arriving at the same location at the same time. I don't know if it is the virtuosity of the players, the cleverness of the arrangers, or the resulting sound that appeals to me - probably some mixture of all three. Which is why when I was given the chance to play in a big band, I jumped at it: All that is something I wanted to experience firsthand for myself.

Which is a round about introduction to how I arrived at my latest addition to the Yoity Tot list: The Complete Atomic Mr. Basie. Before we started working on our Valentine's concert tunes, we took a look at a tune called, Teddy the Toad, which is a Neil Hefti arrangement done for Count Basie's orchestra. I couldn't play it for crap, but it sounded vaguely familiar and I liked it's swing moves. Yesterday, our first post-concert practice, we got handed a bunch of new music, including another Hefti-for-Basie arrangement of a well-known swing tune called, Splanky. One of the trombone players in our big band had brought it in and mentioned it was on Basie's album "E=mc2". I seemed to remember that album being the backbone of TCAMB. Again, we beat our way around Splanky, but I couldn't do anything with it right out of the box, not knowing the tune very well on top of not being the world's most talented sight-reader. What a relief to find I had those two tunes on the CD, and listening to it at dinner, I sort of wondered to myself, why hadn't I been more intimate with these great tunes and arrangements.

When I looked at my Yoity Tot list, I was actually surprised that TCAMB was not on it. I can only describe that as some kind of oversight on my part. Oh sure, I've got some other big band stuff on there, like Duke Ellington (with what I call his "medium band"), the Grammy nominated Gordon Goodwin, and of course, Thad Jones and Mel Lewis. And though I can't put it ahead of those overall, there is no doubt in my mind that TCAMB needs to be included in the Yoity Tot list, too. And now it is.

If you are a fan of big band and you don't have that CD, or at least an old LP of E=mc2, you need to go ahead and add it to your shopping cart on your favorite music site. It's one of the swingingest CD's around and killer cool!

AND, WHADDAYA KNOW? That's the 25th entry on the list, completely filling it out for the very first time. From here on out, I'll only be editing the list - taking out what I haven't listened to in a while, putting in what I am listening to - at least until I think the list could do with some growth. Which may be sooner than I think (I've bought ten new CD's in the last week. Who knows how I'll feel about the list after I've listened to them all...)

Big band begins

This week I had my first practice with a big band. Due to lack of a second piano player, I was asked to join the second big band group, and even though it means I'll have to get up at 4:30 twice a week so I can leave work early to make the 4:00 start time, I was anxious for the experience and agreed to join.

It appears that the band will have 14 members, but we are hoping to add a tenor sax, so it might end up being more. The director gave me three pieces of music right after I sat down at the piano. One was an original song and arrangement, one was an arrangement of "My Funny Valentine", and the other was some kind of boogaloo piece. After a brief introduction of myself and two other new members, we jumped right into the two numbers, since we are preparing both of them for a Valentine's concert on February 11.

I have to say, I'm a bit amazed at how little I really have to do. Comping chords - if they aren't too complicated - is one of the few things (I think) I do reasonably well, and so I did that, straight up in both hands through the first song (the name of which eludes me). I started to embellish a little bit, but it occurred to me that if there was something I was expected to play, it would be shown on the piano part given me, and since there wasn't anything there, I stopped doing that. (I talked to the director afterwards, and he said, "Yep. Just play what's there." Okey-doke. Vanilla it is!) There was a lot of sitting through repeated sections of songs as the trombones "try it", then the saxes, then the trumpets, then all together, then add the rhythm section, but really, I kind of like that pace. It's especially nice to play in that environment knowing that I will also be playing in the same combo this semester that I played in last semester, a class where the pace will be a lot more brisk and the demands on my skills and speed will be a lot higher - which is the essence of playing in a smaller group. But enough about the combo...

After about fifty minutes on that one song, we worked on "My Funny Valentine" which starts with a slow (really slow, quarter note = 56) six-bar piano solo. Honestly, I couldn't play it that slow. It was impossible. I kept wanting to swing it and take off. I'm going to have to get my drum machine out, turn it down (if it goes that low), and pound those slow bars into my brain. I'll need to get my piano instructor to suggest some interesting chords to comp with so I'm not just playing straight up during my debut big band solo. We only really had about fifteen or twenty minutes to work on that, so practice seemed like it was over before it even began. I felt relieved, and happy, though.

So, now I'm playing in two groups, one at a leisurely, comfortable pace, the other at whatever pace we are going that day. It promises to give me a lot of good, solid musical experience, across a broad spectrum in a very short time. And with my reduced alcohol intake and increase in practice time of late, I expect to realize the dividends very soon. At least, a successful concert four weeks from now. (Speaking of which, if you are in the area, have a look at the concert schedule, and swing by to hear me sometime.)

Free music for late to jazz readers

OK, so this is not going to jump start the economy, but it might get you going a little bit:

Folks, I was contacted by "Tiffany" from the Gordon Goodwin Street Team. They liked what I wrote about Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band's new recording, Act Your Age, so much, they decided to reward me by offering my readers free jazz music. All you have to do to get your free music is send an e-mail containing your full name and mentioning that you heard about this offer on the late-to-jazz blog, and you would like to have your free download of "Jazz Police". Send the e-mail to [gordongoodwinstreetteam@gmail.com]. They should send it out to you right away. I checked it out and this is for real and the song they are giving you is great stuff: kind of Dragnet and Mannix theme-song-ish, but for this century. Really cool. And keep in mind: This is free. I don't get a kickback for a certain number of downloads, and Gordon will not be coming over to mow my lawn. I'm doing it because I love Gordon's music, and Gordon's doing it, because, he wants you to experience his music, too. Give it a try. It won't hurt a bit, I promise.

This is all particularly timely as I've just signed up to play in one of the big bands at UAH, while also continuing with my Wednesday night ensemble. This is going to be a musically busy spring with lots to write about. I'm excited.

Keep it jazzy folks!

Two additions to the Yoity Tot CD List

Just in time for Christmas (well, not really), here are two CD's I highly recommend. I love them both so much, I'm going ahead and adding them to the Yoity Tot CD list. Tony Bennett's "Jazz" makes it on the strength of his interpretations of many great jazz standards. I especially love his takes on Ellington's Don't Get Around Much Anymore and Solitude. Also, the recording is chock full of other jazz superstars, like Herbie Hancock, Count Basie, Stan Getz, Art Blakey, and many more.

The latest recording by Gordon Goodwin and his Big Phat Band is the other going on the list and in the top spot. Honestly, I haven't heard the entire recording yet because I can't get past Senor Mouse, but this rousing, full-out, big band stuff just gets in my blood and sends shivers down my spine. My love for jazz just deepens whenever I hear jazz done right, and George and BPB do it right. That's all I can say. It's a freakin' great recording.

Personal note of (some) interest (maybe): It's a little funny that I discovered Gordon Goodwin the day before my birthday and his band's latest recording is titled "Act Your Age". I turned 45 today, so I'm officially "pushing 50". That means if I act my age, realizing my dream of someday conducting in front of a big band will be really, really hard to achieve. So to hell with that. I've decided to pursue that dream nonetheless. I'll save "my dream" entry for another day...