Music

...With a warm, singing sound and a lithe beat, Farlow improvises solos which can almost never be anticipated but which, in retrospect, are unerringly logical and cohesive...

...No matter what inner blues you were carrying, it was very difficult not to feel good, extraordinarily good, when Erroll performed...

...It was 1956, and then as now, the music was taken seriously there by proportionately many more people than in its native land...

...Erroll Garner, the preeminent romanticist in jazz, was also a smiling source of seemingly endless surprises—not only in the way he shaped and reshaped the tunes (no performance was ever the same) but also in his fantasia-like introductions...

...Among currently available sets by the Akiyoshi-Tabackin big band is Farewell to Mingus (JAM, Jazz America Marketing, Suite 300, 1737 De Sales Street NW, Washington, D.C...

...Although she had been composing for a long time, Toshiko was increasingly aware that what she heard in her head was far larger in scope and detail than what a small combo could play...

...Seeming understatement—of facial expression, of musical inflection—is one of the marks of bluegrass, but as you keep listening, those mountain airs can blow pretty strong...

...In addition to the probing, affectionate, large-spirited portrait of Mingus, there is the intri-guingly textured "Autumn Sea," with characteristically vivid, vocal-like flute by Tabackin, who is charting new jazz directions on that instrument...

...To this day, musicians coming back from Japan invariably tell me in wonder of the extraordinary range of jazz albums NatHentoff writes regularly about music for The Progressive...

...And the feeling returns now, as he's heard in the three-volume Erroll Garner/Master of the Keyboard...

...Still, there were a lot of dues to pay...

...There was also the question of temperament...

...The kind of masterful ease possessed by Erroll Garner is also ap-pealingly evident in a wholly different cultural context—the bluegrass singing of Larry Sparks (It's Never Too Late, June Appal Recordings, Box 743, Whitesburg, Kentucky 41858...

...The best description I've seen of Sparks's way of music is Leonard Duckett's in the Beaumont Enterprise: "His voice is mellow, warm, expressive...

...Then she was heard intermittently with her own trios, but gigs got so scarce that for a while, she enrolled in a computer programming school...

...There are high, lonesome harmonies and a lot of reverberating storytelling...

...On rare occasions, he'll play a club or a festival, and even rarer are his recordings...

...Johnson...

...Except for certain singers, and except for pianist Mary Lou Williams...

...Toshiko writes all the music, thereby making history as the first woman in jazz to lead an orchestra of all-male sidemen playing only compositions by a woman...

...Her imagination and mastery of jazz orchestral forms (many of her own devising) are such that the repertory is continually absorbing and surprising—from exuberant, crackling swingers to remarkably evocative intermingling of jazz and Japanese musical traditions...

...you don't have to belong to the Book-of-the-Month Club...

...It can be totally emotional without apparent effort—a natural phenomenon...

...They also say ruefully, as one of them puts it, "While I'm playing in Japan, I get to think of myself as a very respected artist, but as soon as I get off the plane at home, I'm anonymous again...

...With her current husband, tenor saxophonist-flutist Lew Ta-backin, she formed a big band...

...In so intensely competitive a field—where each improviser must continually take such vaulting nocturnal risks in public—how could the little lady keep up...

...With pianist Mike Nock and bassist Lynn Christie, he engages, moreover, in true collective improvisation...

...Among those sung by Sparks, and played with tangy zest by his Lonesome Ramblers, are "Single Girl," "I'm Going to Sleep With One Eye Open," and "Will You Be Lonesome Too...

...Erroll never announced the songs, and to enhance the unpredictability of his sets, he would lead into each number with an expansively structured, often funny, skein of hidden clues that few listeners ever fully connected...

...Like a painter needs a yellow or a blue, I need horns...

...In 1972, however, Toshiko found her way up...

...As she told critic Len Lyons, "If you compare piano music to a black-and-white brush painting, the big band is a picture with color, and that's what I wanted...

...Toshiko's major influence as a writer for orchestra is Duke Ellington, and she notes particularly that "his music was deeply rooted in his race and he was proud of his race...

...Toshiko worked for a time with her then husband, alto saxophonist Charlie Mariano, and briefly with Charles Mingus and J.J...

...Toshiko too was beginning to doubt seriously whether the little lady could keep up...

...Big bands are expensive to maintain, and there are fewer places for them to play than in the "golden era" of the traveling bands—the 1930s...

...Well, it soon became clear that the shyness disappears as soon as her fingers hit the keyboard...

...As can be heard, among Sparks's influences are Hank Williams, black blues, and mountain gospel...

...While Toshiko can be a graceful, subtle col-orist on ballads, she is also capable of the kind of blazing, hard-driving solos that led nonpareil drummer Kenny Clarke to say to me one night, as we listened to her in a Greenwich Village club, "She has more guts in her playing than most of the men in this town...

...But in 1956, Toshiko left Tokyo to study at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, with the hope of eventually being accepted as the real jazz thing, rooted at the source, rather than an exotic tourist...

...And for Toshiko as a trio pianist, there are, on Inner City, Notorious Tourist from the East and Dedications...

...In Trilogy (Inner City), Farlow indicates he is even more impressively inventive and lyrical than when he was on the scene fulltime...

...Take note of Christie, who really "speaks" on his instrument, as, of course, does the resilient Farlow on his...

...But this was and is like no other big jazz band...

...Guitarist Tal Farlow came from North Carolina, but he gravitated toward jazz rather than country sounds...

...Furthermore, although the situation is changing slowly, women—wherever they came from— were considered insufficiently macho swingers to make the big leagues...

...The odds were greatly against her...

...Externally, Toshiko was, and remains, shy, self-deprecatory...

...It took a while, but the shy little lady has not only established herself as a jazz insider, but is now leading what both the laity—as indicated in the polls—and musicians regard as the most stimulating and original big band in all of jazz...

...available in Japanese stores...

...The sidemen are not just accompanists but figure integrally—and always resourcefully—in the proceedings...

...There was still a long, uncertain road to go...

...Book-of-the-Month Club Records at Camp Hill, Pennsylvania 17012—$21 plus $1.50 shipping and handling...

...After an active career with Red Norvo and Artie Shaw, among others, Farlow . went into selective retirement some twenty years ago...

...20036...

...Only one non-American jazz player, Django Reinhardt, had ever achieved peer status among American insiders...

...But of Mary Lou, the good old jazz boys used to say, "She plays like a man...

...That encouraged me to draw some heritage from my roots...

...Choice cuts His beat was like an exultant tidal wave, and over it soared rhapsodic melodic variations that were full of sun and water...

...Except that when you see her direct that orchestra, "little lady" hardly applies...