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Reliving Moments in Time with Stan Getz

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Stan Getz twice revised. For good reason I’d say.

Why now? Why Stan Getz now? I’d meant to post this on his birthday, February 2, but got sidetracked. Still, I post because this remains his birthday month, and because he’s a voice in time and beyond it, a voice within time and forever. Wherever I go, I’ve come to know, I yearn to hear him, and all he has to say.

I also share a warm moment with him, forever.

I understand now, as well as a non-saxophonist can, what John Coltrane meant when he said of Getz, “We’d all sound like that if we could.” Coltrane was, among other things, a supreme master of balladeering, where many saxophonists make their bid for a sound as beautiful as possible.

My own analogue to Coltrane’s indirect superlative: I would carry Getz’s sound with me further than any other instrument’s, if forced to forsake all but one. Maybe it’s a Sophie’s choice between Getz and Miles Davis.

As a relatively young music journalist, I had already reviewed a Getz performance at the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery for The Milwaukee Journal, a highlight among many superb artists I heard and reviewed there. Two years later, I interviewed him in his Chicago hotel room, then wrote a feature previewing a Getz performance at a Rainbow Summer concert in Milwaukee. There I met him again afterwards and, though brief, his thanks for the article seemed authentic. Then he surprisingly asked me to accompany him walking to his nearby hotel room, under one small condition.

Would I please carry his saxophone for him? After the performance, he was fatigued, partly the byproduct of years of abuse of his body with drugs and alcohol. He was only 57.

I accepted the task gladly, and the moment soon swelled into a thrill. I gripped and hoisted the case of one of the world’s most revered artistic instruments, beside its owner and artmaker. It inspired a short poem, “Bossa Not So Nova.”

So, I’ve written about Getz in three modes but, mea culpa, it still doesn’t seem enough.

You see, lately I’ve revisited him upon buying a used copy of the Getz musical biography Nobody Else But Me, by Dave Gelly. It discourses across the artist’s career with close readings of numerous Getz recordings, his legacy beyond memories, as he died in 1991.

This excellent book prompted me to dig out an array of Getz recordings. As I write, I’m listening to him essay “Infant Eyes,” an exquisite ballad by another giant of the tenor sax, Wayne Shorter, and each long whole note unfurls with delicious tenderness and knowing delicacy.

Here’s a link to Getz’s version of “Infant Eyes,” from the album Moments in Time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvr_BrW_xk0

I couldn’t have responded to this recording much earlier than a couple years ago, when I obtained a copy of this album, recorded live by Getz’s Quartet in 1976, but not released until 2016 on Resonance, a label specializing in what I’d call “jazz archeology.”

And there’s more affinity between Getz and Shorter than a few tunes in Getz’s repertoire. The sound of their voices resonates similarly, an exquisitely soft vibration, a singing like a distinctly masculine bird that — warbles and vibratos aside — can hold a note like a distant horizon of destiny. Both saxophonists have lived lives deeply shadowed by tragedy, likely informing their profound sensibilities.

Indeed now, the tune playing is “The Cry of the Wild Goose,” by trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, and it belies one misplaced reservation I held about Getz in the past.

He disabused me of it when I saw him in 1982 at the Jazz Gallery. But I’m referring to back in the mid-1960s when he broke into public awareness with his lilting bossa nova luminosities. He could hold and caress a note as if it were palpable and breathing which, with him, it truly was. Such audible tenderness enchanted me as much as any other single jazz artist did with one recording, Getz/Gilberto. Created, arranged, and recorded by virtually all Brazilian musicians, the album racked up unprecedented sales for a jazz recording (2 million copies in 1964) and became the first non-American album to win a Grammy Award for Album of the Year, in 1965.

And sure enough, right now with Horace Silver’s “Peace” (also from Moments in Time), Getz is beguiling yet again. But back during the bossa nova craze, for all my admiration, I doubted whether Getz was capable of anything approaching what I call “The Cry.”

I do hear a cry in the “wild goose cry” tune I’d just heard, but I’m referring to a sound often heard among saxophonists in the 1960s, during the same time Getz lulled and seduced with “The Girl from Ipanema.”

The notion of “The Cry” is the expressionism that numerous saxophonists especially began manifesting during that period of social upheaval and raised consciousness over racial injustice. It’s a heavily freighted topic and subtext. So perhaps its unsurprising that a naturally lyrical white saxophonist isn’t easily associated with it. Nevertheless, over the years, the true and extraordinary range of Getz’s expressive power expanded, and his version of “The Cry” arose, as such a striking contrast to his inherently singing style that it carried the weight of striking effects, like a sculptor’s chisel discharging chards and sparks, to convey how life can force us to extremes of feeling and response.

To me, Getz seemed to be universalizing the plight and poignance conveyed in “The Cry,” most often associated with African-American musicians. This is not to minimize the racial suffering those artists endured and expressed, but to find the shared humanity in it. Getz’s suffering might be arguably his own demons’ making more than of a cruel society built on systemic racism. As a Russian Jew, he may have ancestral instincts of suffering and class oppression hounding his psyche. Accordingly, he seems a different sort of expressive animal — “Nobody Else But Me” as the biography’s title seems to borrow from his voice. The simplicity of the declaration also may reflect Getz’s uniqueness, his fingerprint identity, his sonic originality as a pied piper whom, when heard, we still feel compelled to follow, decades after bossa nova first sailed across waves and valleys. Years after his last living breath.

Gelly insightfully notes a great irony, how the drugs and liquor might’ve facilitated an “alpha state” in which, Getz explained, “the less you concentrate the better. The best way to create is to get in the alpha state…what we would call relaxed concentration.”

Such can be the price of art. Does that make it ill-begotten? Illegitimate?

Nay, I say. Thank the music gods for his voice, retrieved and captured.

Stan Getz and Astrid Gilberto in Berline 1966.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVdaFQhS86E

Finally, here is my revised version of “Bossa Not So Nova.”

Bossa Not So Nova

Fattening and fifty-seven, Stan Getz

sweats out a melody, red-faced.

The sax sings effortlessly.

“Hey thanks for the article,
I gotta walk to the Hyatt,
can you carry my horn?” he croaks.
The sax sings light blue.

Young and tan, and tall and lovely
the girl in knee socks walks and sways.
And Stan stops his sax, and walks and goes,
“Ahhhh.”

It ain’t so much man appraising sweet youth.

Or it’s that too, with a clear trace of chagrin.

“I’m beat,” his cigarette breath bellows softly. “Just go slow.
Hey can you find a doctor?
My bass player needs one.”
His bass player?

We walk along the Milwaukee River
at 10 PM Sunday.
Is there a doctor in the river?
They’re all on-call, sleepin’ or smokin’
in a big, green, long-and-cold halllll.

Stan wonders about Mader’s, is it open do I know?
His belly rumbles southern volcanos.
The sax sings effortlessly, but just not really at me,

no, right from its case like the wind,

in her hair, in her long and lust-erous hair .

Tall and tan and young and handsome,
the boyish man from Ipanema is wheezin’

while a woman somewhere dreams…
to the old scratchy side that goes, Ahhh.

The sax singing ever so softly

as in a morning sunrise,

on a tide-swept beach full of guys…

(tenor sax solo to fade-out)

  • Stan Getz’s saxophone case was used to store his ashes after he died of liver cancer in 1991. His ashes were then scattered into the ocean off the coast of Marina del Ray, California.

– Kevin Lynch (Kevernacular), 1988

_________

I’m hardly the only person to poeticise Getz. I imagine numerous have. One who did it as beautifully as anyone is Jim Hazard, a poet from Milwaukee who served as my primary committee-member when I did my masters in creative writing at UW-Milwaukee.

Here’s my little remembrance of Jim and his Getz poem:

Note: James Hazard was a very gifted writer and a dedicated jazz cornetist who died in 2012. (disclosure: he was a professor of mine in grad school, 22 years ago. He was a warm, funny, soulful and deeply supportive teacher, and continued to champion my career efforts over the years. He loved especially Chet Baker and Stan Getz, among many jazz musicians) 

 

 

Writer and cornetist Jim Hazard with his spouse of 38 years, poet Susan Firer.

Coincidentally or not, Hazard and I both wrote Stan Getz poems. Hazard’s, “A True Biography of Stan Getz,” is great modern poetry, from this 1985 collection New Year’s Eve in Whiting Indiana, a masterful book-length ode to his hometown, shedding light on myriad shards and stories of naked, radiantly quirky humanity obscured by grimy smokestacks.

Jim’s poem suggests how Getz’s inimitable saxophone style channeled the romantic impulse in the young Hazard. My Getz poem is based on an actual encounter with Stan Getz (1927-1991), and quotes from his hit song “The Girl from Ipanema.”

Here are excerpts from:

A True Biography of Stan Getz

By James Hazard

“When you change the modes of music, the society changes.” — Confucius, via Gary Snyder

“Place yourself in the background.”, rule one , “An Approach to Style” — Strunk and White

I. 2013 Davis Ave., Whiting, Indiana

The place of his first grade appearance, 1950 or 1951. I was doing the Forbidden in the bathroom: listening to the radio while I bathed, heedless of electrocution and hoping for a jazz record , on the rhythm-and-blues Gary radio station.

Stan Getz played “Strike Up the Band” and I was heart-struck. I was already a heart-wreck, having seen Gene Tierney, her face hitting the screen as a flash flood in LAURA…

(Hearing for the first time that sound, the long and many noted phrases of it, but the sound itself carrying those long phrases out to the ends of breath as if Stan Getz’s lungs and heart would fall in on themselves, wreckage. And Gene Tierney filled one entire wall of the Hoosier Theater and like the bathroom radio – electric, fatal — could not be touched.)…

__________

 

Zev Feldman: “The Jazz Detective” is haunted by the greatest ghosts of the music

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Zev Feldman’s reputation in the jazz world has spread to where he is a consulting producer for the legendary Blue Note label. Here he is with Blue Note president Don Was (left) in the label’s tape archives. All photos courtesy of Zev Feldman

. The name Monk for decades meant jazz giant Thelonious Monk. Then a Emmy-winning TV detective named Monk became the star of a popular series called Monk, claiming new first association for the name in popular culture.

And now, along comes Zev Feldman, to take the detective role back from the TV guy, and for the sake of jazz. So now Feldman is known as “The Jazz Detective.” Detective Monk’s mystical raised hands might have a counterpart in Feldman’s internal musical dowsing rod, sensing the jazz dead, who gravely whisper, “Over here lies my best undiscovered work.”

Hearing such spectral vibes over and over, the researcher-record producer has become one of the most important non-jazz musicians in the art form, responsible for an astonishing bounty of recordings that are helping reshape the legacy of jazz history.

And his musical roots are deep, if not pure, Milwaukee.

The GRAMMY-nominated independent record producer, and the Co-President of Resonance Records, is now also a consulting producer of archival and historical recordings for Blue Note Records, the quintessential jazz label. He’s been dubbed “the Indiana Jones of Jazz” in Stereophile magazine and is widely known as the “Jazz Detective.” Over the last 25 years, he has worked for PolyGram, Universal Music Group, Rhino/Warner Music Group, and Concord Music Group, among others. In 2016, he was voted “Rising Star Producer” in Down Beat Magazine’s International Critics Poll, and he was voted “Producer of the Year” in 2022.

He’s co-produced several other labels’ important historic projects, including the acclaimed Thelonious Monk discoveries Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Palo Alto.

He also co-produced the monumental 2021 release of John Coltrane, A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle on Impulse! Records.

Amid this auspicious career in the music’s archeological byways, Feldman found his seeming destiny when he crossed paths with “my dear friend and mentor (producer) George Klabin at Resonance Records,” he says. “Since Resonance, my life was forever transformed. I was given an intriguing proposition: if I found unreleased jazz recordings, not just reissues, but newly unearthed material, George said I could produce it for release on the label. That was like putting fire on gasoline and led directly to what I’m doing now.”

Feldman with his mentor, Resonance Records president George Klabin

But Feldman’s back story shaped who he would become. He was born in Los Angeles, but his family moved to Madison shortly afterwards and Feldman’s passion for jazz goes to deep Milwaukee familial roots. His great uncle was the stellar Milwaukee tenor saxophonist Alvin “Abe” Aaron, who worked and toured with Les Brown (on all those famous USO tours with Bob Hope and in the studio), Dave Pell, Jack Teagarden, and others. Another uncle, Joe Aaron, also played reed instruments. Feldman’s cousin is longtime Milwaukee flutist Rick Aaron, now based in Florida. His Aunt Dora played guitar in an all-female jazz band in Milwaukee around ‘20s and ‘30s called The Bachelor’s Delight.

Feldman’s Aunt Dora (second from right) played guitar in the all-female jazz band Bachelor’s Delight in the 1920s and ’30s.

“Music, especially jazz, was always around and was passed down from the elders,” Feldman says. “It’s been part of our family’s language since I was a child.

“My mother and father (who were Milwaukee natives) had an awesome record collection in all genres of music. In high school I was all about classic rock from the Beatles, the Stones, Hendrix, the Who, but was also really digging Miles and Coltrane, and eventually the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and so much more. My most memorable live music experience in Milwaukee was seeing my great uncle Joe Aaron perform at a club when I was 18 years old and went with my great aunt, Shirley, and my grandmother. I even had a couple of Heinekens, which was very exciting.”

Feldman’s great uncle was the noted Milwaukee tenor saxophonist Joe Aaron.

 Joe Aaron’s and the great tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins (left)

“Growing up, my grandparents lived right behind Peaches record store in the Silver Spring shopping center. I spent so many vacations visiting their house, and countless hours in Peaches, which eventually became a Mainstream record store. Milwaukee has always been a second home for me and I’m very lucky to be able to say so,” says Feldman, who’s formulative detecting fuel may be his passion for Kopp’s hamburgers.

Talent and Chutzpah

Since becoming a jazz music host and music director at his college radio station, Feldman’s talent and chutzpah led to progress impressively in the music business, at Polygram Records in Maryland as early as age 20 as a merchandiser and marketing specialist. He later went to Rhino Records, the reissue company, and finally national director of catalog sales for the Concord Music Group.

After a period of freelancing, he met producer George Klabin of Resonance Records in 2009. “George pulled me out of the sales and marketing realm and put me on the production highway and I’m eternally grateful.”

Since his ground-breaking success at Resonance, Feldman has co-founded a similar label, Elemental Records, and is now releasing with his own “Jazz Detective” imprint. Among the other dazzling array of historical recordings Feldman has dug up over the

The Jazz Detective label logo

years for either label are no less than eight recordings by the beloved, influential pianist Bill Evans, and five by iconic guitarist Wes Montgomery, as well as recordings by Sonny Rollins, Sarah Vaughan, Stan Getz, Charles Lloyd, Eric Dolphy, Jaco Pastorius, Grant Green, Shirley Horn, Woody Shaw, The Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchesatra, and Larry Young, among others. Most recently the acclaimed finds have included “The Lost Album from Ronnie Scott’s” by Charles Mingus for Resonance.

From Elemental has come the massive five-LP, three-CD set of Albert Ayler’s Revelations: The Complete ORTF 1970 Fondation Maeght Recordings. Jazz Detective has recently released two double-disc sets of Ahmad Jamal Emerald City Night: Live at the Penthouse, Sonny Stitt’s Live in Baltimore and Chet Baker’s Blue Room: The 1979 Vara Studio Sessions in Holland, which followed a superb Baker Live in Paris trio album from 1983-84. Both Baker sets give a good idea what the often-sublime trumpeter-singer sounded like when he performed between those two dates at the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery in 1981, which this writer reviewed. 1

No Bootlegs

It’s important to understand the consistent quality of Feldman’s recordings. He never settles for crudely recorded “bootlegs” no matter how great the artists. Rather, he finds tapes done on high-grade recording equipment or, as with Baker’s Live in Paris, professionally recorded for Radio France, but never released as albums. And his packaging always includes substantial critical liner notes, unpublished photos and interviews with artists, often conducted by Feldman.

“For me, it’s literally about pulling out all the stops, and bringing a story to life,” Feldman says. “I truly want to elevate the art of record making…We brought a style, sensibility and classiness to the presentation, and made it completely legal and official with all the rights holders being cleared and compensated.”

A recent Zev Feldman unearthing, a recording of trumpeter-singer Chet Baker live in Paris.

The multiple Evans and Montgomery projects have been memorable experiences for Feldman, as well as historically redefining the artists’ oeuvre.

“Getting a chance to know the families of Wes Montgomery and Bill Evans has been a blessing,” Feldman says. “We’ve done numerous projects together and have become good friends as well. It’s also been a thrill to work directly with Sonny Rollins, Charles Lloyd, and Ahmad Jamal, who just passed away recently. It’s so interesting because they have a chance to share their experiences and weigh in on all the elements that go into a project.”

Globetrotting “jazz detective” Zev Feldman relaxing in his music library.

No End in Sight

What’s on Feldman’s horizon?

“I’m working with the great Sonny Rollins on a four-LP box set, and he’s looking at everything that comes through and playing such an important role.” Upcoming there’s also unissued live recordings from Les McCann in 1966 and 1967. Feldman is especially excited to have recordings of Wes Montgomery with the Wynton Kelly Trio from the Half Note jazz club in New York City in 1965 (a collaboration which produced what Pat Metheny calls “the absolute greatest guitar album ever made,” Smokin’ at the Half-Note). 3.

Also, “George Klabin and I have been looking for a long time for unissued Art Tatum recordings, and we have a glorious three-LP and 2-CD package coming soon of three hours of unissued recordings.”

The sky is the limit? For Feldman, the deepest buried treasures are the limit. How many jazz ghosts would disagree?

_____________

This article was originally published in slightly different form in The Shepherd Express, here:  https://shepherdexpress.com/music/music-feature/the-jazz-detective-searching-for-vintage-music/

1. My review of (and an interview feature with) Chet Baker (Aug. 7 and Aug. 12, 1981) are both in Milwaukee Jazz Gallery 1978-1984, an anthology of the venue’s press coverage and more:

2. The Ahmad Jamal Emerald City Lights sets and the Baker Blue Room set are reviewed in a separate Culture Currents blog, here:

Reviews of two notable “Jazz Detective” albums by Ahmad Jamal and Chet Baker

3. A previous 2005 release from 1965 called The Complete Live at the Half-Note (Wynton Kelly Trio with Wes Montgomery) appears to be an incomplete misnomer.

from NPR feature

REVIEW

MUSIC REVIEWS

Albert Ayler made sublime music. The world was not ready

The saxophonist’s last recorded concerts appear on ‘Revelations’

“Music is the Healing Force of the Universe” begins and ends Revelations: The Complete ORTF 1970 Fondation Maeght Recordings. The gorgeous box set — one of many archival jazz gems recently released under the care of producer Zev Feldman — features unseen photos, extensive liner notes and commentary from Ayler’s daughter, critics, producers and musicians. But more importantly, Revelations restores two full sets performed by the tenor saxophonist’s band, just months before Ayler was found floating in New York City’s East River. The circumstances around his death remain a mystery, but listening to these concerts — recorded July 25 and 27, 1970 — there’s a sense that Ayler was a musician in transition, the primordial yawp of his saxophone sparkling anew from the music of his youth.

 

 

Reviews of two notable “Jazz Detective” albums by Ahmad Jamal and Chet Baker

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ALBUM REVIEWS:

Ahmad Jamal, Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse 1963-1964

and Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse 1965-1966 (Jazz Detective)

and Chet Baker Blue Room (Jazz Detective)

Jazz producer and executive Zev Feldman has long had the nickname of “the jazz detective” for his uncanny skill at finding previously unreleased tapes from the genre’s greats to release as high-profile archival releases. (See related feature article). Now he’s putting that moniker to use for his own label, Jazz Detective, with a distinctive fingerprint logo, along with his typically highest-quality recording and packaging. Plenty of national media, from Variety, The Washington Post, NPR etc., have paid attention.

As a jazz piano aficionado, I’ll testify that the various Bill Evans albums are all treasures, expanding a deep catalog of one of the most beloved and influential modern jazz pianists. But I want to focus on Feldman’s 2022 “Jazz Detective” albums of Ahmad Jamal, a more controversial artist in serious jazz circles. Snobbish naysayers would sniff “cocktail pianist,” as Ahmad Jamal rose to rare jazz popularity with his hit album But Not for Me: Live at the Pershing in 1958. Yes, he’s capable of dazzling ornamentation and glittering fills, but, for the most part, done with stunning grace rather than excess. He’s also a deft and sometimes breathtaking employer of grace notes, of space and silence.

Far more than even that classic album could convey, these two Jazz Detective double-discs prove revelatory. Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse 1963-64, and a same-titled one, recorded in 1965-66, provide vast and varied musical protein. Jamal is technically muscular, and expansive, yet exquisite, dynamic and capable of piston-like, two-handed chording, and hard-swinging (eg. “Bogota” and Johnny Hodges’s “Squatty Roo”). Yet he’s always a master of the grace note, poised with a wizardly sense of silence and space, even building drama with it.

You come to understand how Miles Davis learned the art of lyrical-yet-incisive understatement from him: “All my inspiration comes from him,” Miles wrote in his autobiography, an unusual thing for a trumpeter to say about a pianist. You hear, in these four nights recorded over four years, how, riding chops-to-die-for, Jamal expands his sonic, conceptual and harmonic canvas to mural-like dimensions. Jamal’s deep-in-the-night take on “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” becomes a musical joke, as he nurses a Hamlet routine for over 15 stunning minutes, yet you want to shadow his musical genius every step of the way, as it’s filled with dynamic surprises, a la his radical 1965 composition “Extensions.” Has this evergreen ever been played better, ever fresher?

By superb contrast, Anthony Newley’s “Feelin’ Good” plays out in low registers, funky and freewheeling, repeatedly quoting “Workin’ on the Chain Gang,” and the enduring strength of the blues and spirituals. And worry not, there’s a splendid version of his trademark superhit “Poinciana” in the second volume. Suffice to say, this was one of my three choices for historic album of the year in the 2022 Francis Davis jazz poll.

Annotator Eugene Holley Jr. aptly explains the range of classically-trained Jamal’s sources: “a protean and profound pianism that ingeniously melded pianist Art Tatum’s swing-at-the-speed-of-sound and his hometown (Pittsburgh) hero Erroll Garner’s tender and torrid touch, with Franz Liszt’s boundless keyboard technique and the azure French impressionism of Ravel and Debussy.” He has influenced Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Jacky Terrasson and Aaron Diehl (The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s “artistic partner,” who soloed in his orchestral adaptation of Mary Lou Williams’ Zodiac Suite May 26-28 with the MSO).

***

Also, I’ll note that the new Jazz Detective Chet Baker studio set Blue Room, from Holland in 1979, reminds us vividly of the sublimely cool trumpeter’s personalizing of Miles Davis’s style. 1 Yet no trumpeter had a more buttery-golden horn tone, on the verge of melting, right from the opening Wayne Shorter tune “Beautiful Black Eyes.” Over the years of an extraordinarily tough, heroin-burdened life (he once spent a year and year a half in an Italian jail, as did his newlywed wife), his solos were consistently shapely, lyrical and swinging.

Elsewhere here, Baker again demonstrates how he was as emotionally affecting a jazz singer as we’ve ever had, on songs like “Oh, You Crazy Moon,” “Candy,” and “My Ideal,” by singing almost despite himself. He sounds like a shy introvert vocalizing to a loved one’s photograph. So, while not overtly expressive, his warm vocal tones unfold rounded, often liquidly limpid, and tender, with whimsy, pain and loss, delicately vulnerable. Yet he also scat-sings several choruses of “Candy” and one of “Crazy Moon” superbly.

Blue Room also reveals how underappreciated Phil Markowitz is as a crystalline, hard-swinging, harmonically deep and potent pianist. 2. As a bonus, Baker, in effect, steals something right from under Miles Davis’s embouchure. Miles wrote the superb tune “Nardis” but, mystifying, never recorded it, instead allowing Bill Evans to appropriate it, often as a centerpiece of the great pianist’s repertoire. Ah, but Baker smartly saw the opportunity, so here we finally hear the austere, lonely beauty of “Nardis” as a Miles-esque trumpeter would handle it. However, one also suspects pianist Markowitz, a deeply Evans-influenced player, and a master re-harmonizer, might’ve suggested this tune to Baker.

Blue Room follows a Feldman’s marvelous 2022 Elemental label’s two-album set Chet Baker Trio (with a French pianist and bassist) Live in Paris.

The Jazz Detective catalog and Feldman’s Resonance and Elemental label dates accumulate, both as limited-edition CDs, and historical vinyl packages. These include two 1970s concerts by pianist Bill Evans in Buenos Aires; a long-lost 1972 recording of bassist Charles Mingus at London’s Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club; French radio broadcasts of Baker in 1983-1984; and, the prize package, a five-disc box featuring Parisian concerts from July 1970 by free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler — some of his last recordings before his death the following November.

The Ayler recordings especially underline how Feldman’s pioneering globe-trotting research and development is contributing to expanding jazz history with recordings by artists with strong influence but unjustly low historic profiles, like pianist Walter Bishop Jr. and Shirley Scott, one of the first female jazz organists to ever record. A third album features saxophonist Sonny Stitt, a prolific recording artist in his day who still doesn’t quite get his due.

___________

1 Actually it’s debatable who influenced whom, Chet Baker or Miles Davis. Miles was still a bebopper, though with modest technical facility, until his transformation into the deft poet of Birth of the Cool, recorded in 1949. But it wasn’t released until 1958. However, Miles did partake in the less-heralded cerebral all-star “cool jazz” album Conception in 1951, with Stan Getz, Lee Konitz and Gerry Mulligan. When was the real birth of the cool? Baker had been playing a very similar style at least since he began recording as a leader in 1952.

  1. The 1979 Blue Room recordings vividly brought to mind Baker’s live performance in 1981 at the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery. At the time, this reporter described him thusly: “Baker’s music glows with a moody romanticism, which takes his trumpeter into a role uncharacteristic of the normally declamatory instrument…But Baker’s playing is more than moody wafting. The intelligence displayed on the venerable “’Round Midnight” was engineered with skill and imagination. Like a ghost slipping through the crack of a door, Baker slid into the familiar shrouded melody, stripped his second chorus to an elegant spareness, then overlaid it with several plush phrases.

“Baker’s singing reveals an even closer view of his personal expression – lyrics of broken love flowing from a tenor feathered with soft gray textures.”

The Milwaukee Journal, Aug. 12, 1981. from the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery 1978-1984 anthology (For those interested in a copy of the anthology at a retail outlet, I’m aware of only of a single copy remaining at Woodland Pattern, in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood).