Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC 1 Nat Hentoff The Survivors on. One of her most satisfying sets, originally recorded in Tokyo in 1977, has been picked up here by the invaluable George Buck Jr. and his...
...1 have never understood why Carol is not a headliner in the jazz clubs of this land...
...But you can have perfect pitch and still swing like George Bush, Carol, however, was a true jazz im-proviser, swinging instrumentally, but shaping the song like a singer...
...But in these performances, it comes out sounding as spontaneous as the play of winds, some of them mysterious, on the sea...
...She is sensuous, but without a touch of slyness...
...deserve particular note...
...He swings hard but breathes deeply during ballads...
...Richie Pratt, drums, and particularly George Mraz, who plays the most singing bass in current jazz...
...But then again, he isn't gone for good...
...Carol Sloan, Sophisticated Lady, Audiophile AP-195, 3008 Wadsworth Mill Place, Atlanta...
...She doesn't showboat...
...She cares too much about lyrics to do that...
...That is also a precise description of Phil Woods...
...The New Yorker's jazz critic, Whitney Balliett, recently said of Harrell: "He never lets up, and he never loses his improvisational thread...
...I thought of Joe and the survivor medals he gives out when Phil Woods's new album was issued—Integrity/The New Phil Woods Quintet/Live (Red Record VPA 177, two-LP set, distributed in America by Polygram Special Imports, 810 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10019...
...But over the years, it became more and more evident that Phi...
...Among other musically thriving survivors on hand are trombonist Al Grey, drummer Panama Francis, pianist Junior Mance, and trumpeter Joe Newman...
...I first heard her at Max Gordon's Village Vanguard in New York in the late 1950s...
...This is an honest singer: She doesn't cheat on articulation, the sense and the sensibility of the lyrics—the flow of the time...
...Woods had found his own voice, and now he is the most compellingly "together" alto saxophonist in jazz...
...and his Audiophile label...
...Joe introduced us and said, pointing to me, "He's another survivor...
...Also on the date but since gone for good is the vibrant, elegant bassist George Du-vivier...
...And it fits Carol Sloan, too...
...She becomes the music, and the music becomes her...
...But, a survivor...
...His ideas are ideas...
...As I remember, she was working with Coleman Hawkins, and any musician—singer or instrumentalist—who played with Bean could not get by with wrong notes because Bean heard everything...
...Woods married Charlie Parker's widow, becoming the stepfather of Bird's son, further linking his musical identity with that of jazz's Great Speckled Bird...
...He was an exceptionally competent musician (four years at Juilliard in addition to barrels of club dates...
...The crutches haven't kept Arnett Cobb off the road, nor is his playing any less gutsy, blues-laced, and whoopingly swinging...
...The set contains only Duke Ellington songs, and though they sound easy to sing, the intervals and the way the melodies are structured are, as Carol says, sometimes like a minefield for a singer...
...And his sound is still so resoundingly big that it wouldn't matter a bit to him if all the electricity went out...
...not just licks, and in retrospect, they are so logical, though often surprising, that they sound written...
...In his playing, everything coheres at white heat...
...She does better in Japan, but still, it's like being a political columnist based in Washington who doesn't have a Washington outlet...
...Her colleagues are joys unto themselves—Sir Roland Hanna, piano...
...She gets work, but not top-line work often enough...
...he wrote for the particular sounds of each of his players, and I think he would have much enjoyed Carol's sounds in this set...
...His nicknames used to be "Rooster" and "Hoss...
...Carol keeps on keeping Acouple of years ago, backstage at Carnegie Hall, I looked up a long flight of stairs and saw, standing at the top, a big, powerful-looking man on crutches...
...But for an alto saxist to sound that much like Bird was to guarantee that few would lake Phil seriously as anything but a disciple...
...That is, unlike many pseudo-jazz singers, the kind you hear in motel lounges, Carol doesn't imitate instruments when she sings...
...For Joe, those who last more or less intact, whether they become famous or not...
...I felt 1 had just been knighted...
...His solos think...
...It was the Texas tenor Amett Cobb, who, after breaking both legs in an auto accident almost thirty years ago, has been on those crutches ever since...
...A new, infectiously lusty set by Arnett is Keep on Puskin'(Bee Hive BH 7017, Bee Hive Jazz Records, 1130 Colfax Street, Evanston, IL 60201...
...Carol made no musical mistakes at all...
...As does he, now sixty-seven and working steady, as always...
...He survives on this album, and hundreds more...
...But her phrasing and textures come from memories of jazz horns—transmuted memories...
...His musician friends now call him "Speedy...
...Yet Phil is an insatiable im-proviser because that way, night after night, song after song, he can keep challenging himself...
...But he clearly, too clearly, had been mesmerized by Charlie Parker—as was every young player then, regardless of his instrument...
...GA 30032-5899...
...Duke loved distinctive sounds...
...Phil, playing alto saxophone, came out of Springfield, Massachusetts, and began to be noticed in New York in the early 1950s...
...Phil's current group includes pianist Hal Galper, bassist Steve Gilmore, drummer Bill Goodwin, and a young trumpet player, Tom Harrell, who seemed to have his own voice almost from the time he began to play in public...
...Joe Williams, the authoritative but gentle jazz-and-blues singer, was talking to me once in his dressing room when a musician came in...
...I figured she had perfect pitch, which turned out to be true...
Vol. 49 • October 1985 • No. 10
