The Dublin Concert - Louis Stewart and Jim Hall

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LIVIA RECORDS - Press Release

Louis Stewart with Jim Hall

THE DUBLIN CONCERT

Unique 1982 Live Recording of 2 Guitar Masters with 16 Page Booklet and Photos

THE DUBLIN CONCERT is a previously unreleased album of Louis Stewart and Jim Hall

Recorded live in concert to a delighted Dublin audience on 26th December 1982.

Tapes discovered in 2022 have been carefully digitized and mastered to present the

captivating, empathetic and poetic playing of this outstanding duo.

This album will be a delight for Louis Stewart and Jim Hall fans alike as it is the only known recording of them performing together.

Key Points About the Release

Recorded in Dublin's Maccabi Hall on 26th December 1982, THE DUBLIN CONCERT captures both musicians in top form, performing standards with stunning close interaction and improvisation.

Bill Frisell's biographer, Philip Watson, wrote the detailed sleeve notes which also include photographs and recollections from musicians who attended the gig to see their local hero and the then leading exponent of jazz guitar.

Catalog #: LRCD2402/ LRLP2401 and Format: CD, Vinyl and Download. 

Release Date: 6th September '24

The concert was hastily arranged when it was learned that Jim was holidaying in Ireland.

It is believed that Jim and Louis met in 1981 during Stewart's New York Bechet's residency.

Louis was a big admirer of Jim, particularly the duet albums with Bill Evans.

Both musicians had previously recorded in duet settings.

Though masters in different styles, they carefully listened and complimented each other.

"Look at what Santa brought us for Christmas" is how Louis introduced Jim.

The onstage recording set up was simple, just a mic on each guitar amp.

For Interviews/more detail, Contact Dermot Rogers: dermot@liviarecords.com / +353-86-2488233.

As you would imagine, with the JazzProfiles blog and Cerra Substack platforms, I get many preview copies and downloads of new recordings.

Every so often one comes along that allows me to talk about the musicians and the music from the standpoint of mutual familiarity. 

Bassist, composer-arranger and bandleader Chales Mingus was quoted as saying - “We have to improvise on something.”

For me, given my proclivities and predilection of mind, when that “something” involves songs from the Great American Songbook and/or tunes from the repertoire of Jazz Standards, I am most pleased because these recognizable melodies give me a place to put my ears, so to speak.

To put it another way, I can hear where the improvisations are going more easily because the underlying melodic structure is more familiar to me.

The process reflects where I come from; my entrance into the world of Jazz was from a time when it was commonplace to play Jazz based on familiar tunes or songs. 

Imagine my delight, then, when Dermot Rogers sent along his latest homage to the late Irish guitarist Louis Stewart [1944-2016] in the form of The Dublin Concert - Louis Stewart and Jim Hall on his restored Livia Records label [LRCD2402]. 

Not only do I get to enjoy the Jazz improvisations of two world-class guitarists, but of the eight tracks on the album, six are from the Great American Songbook and two are Jazz standards.

From a strict approach to the instrument stand point, Louis and Jim make for an odd couple: Louis burns with rapid note runs while Jim simmers with short, open phrases leaving plenty of space in his solos.

Oddly enough [pun intended], they compliment and complement each other perfectly because they blend when they play together and allow each other to assume the solo spotlight when they are apart.

Frankly, it’s the only way this could have worked because essentially what we have here is a jam session involving two world class guitarists doing their thing in the presence of standard material. There wasn’t much rehearsal time and the duo itself was not a formed group with arrangements in place. So relying on known material allowed both Louis and Jim to do what they do best - make Jazz guitar happen!

One of the Jazz standards - 2 Degrees East, 3 Degrees West - first featured way back in 1956 on pianist John Lewis’ Pacific Jazz LP - Grand Encounters: 2 Degrees East, 3 Degrees West.

John, of Modern Jazz Quartet fame, also wrote the title tune and the album subtitle signifies a meeting between two East Coast based Jazz musicians, John and bassist Percy Heath [also a member of the MJQ] and three West Coast based players - guitarist Jim Hall, saxophonist Bill Perkins and drummer Chico Hamilton.

Of Jim’s playing on this recording, Whitney Balliet, the distinguished Jazz writer and critic wrote:

“Jim Hall was born in New York [1930] and is twenty-five. He, too, has been a professional for only a few years. His style is remarkably similar to that of Charlie Christian, especially in the direct way he strikes his notes, and in his practice of repeating certain single notes and simple figures. Some of the best modern guitarists have a tendency toward slipperiness and laciness. Hall, however, gives each note weight, with such intent that his work occasionally has a kind of puggish, lumbering quality about it, which is not at all unpleasant.”

The other Jazz Standard is Sonny Rollins’ “calypso-tinged signature tune” St. Thomas. It was first recorded in August 1955 as “Fire Down There” by Randy Weston and released in February 1956 on the “Get Happy” album. The tune started as “The Lincolnshire Poacher” and evolved into a nursery song in the Virgin Islands which Sonny Rollins’ mother sang to him and on which he based the song “St. Thomas”. It was Rollins’ 1956 release which popularized the song and it is still his most readily recognized composition.

The joyous theme is a tune to have fun with and both Louis and Jim have a jaunty good time doing just that. In his booklet notes, Philip Watson wrote: “One of the highlights of the evening was a rousing and irresistible version of Sonny Rollins’ exuberant calypso-tinged signature tune [there’s that phrase again] St. Thomas; Stewart’s solo even included a brief quote from traditional Irish reel The Sligo Maid.”

Elsewhere in the booklet notes, Philip quotes the pianist Jim Doherty who comments that Louis and Jim “were kindred spirits and shared a very dry and quick wit.” You can hear their humor on St. Thomas and throughout The Dublin Concert. As the bassist Bill Crow is fond of saying: “Jazz is meant to be fun” and Louis and Jim are having a ball and so will you as you listen to these marvelous guitar mates perform.

Among the six standards is one of my favorites from the Great American Songbooks - Stella by Starlight - about which Ted Gioia has this to say in his definitive The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire, 2 Ed. [2021]

“The structure is conventional in length, with the melody filling up the expected 32 bars. But everything else about it breaks the rules. Instead of the usual repeats found in American popular song, "Stella by Starlight" is a masterpiece of through-composed misdirection. At bar eight, where one would normally get a repeat of the A theme in most Tin Pan Alley songs, we do go to the tonic chord, but this is actually its first appearance in the piece. We might now expect that the repeat will come in bar 16, but here Young has another surprise in store—a gut-wrenching modulation, in which the melody is held on an altered note of the chord for a full bar. The final eight bars are as close as we will get to a recapitulation of the main theme, but even here [Victor] Young tinkers with his melody and chords, only lingering on the familiar opening motif for two bars before heading off toward a different path to a final resolve.

This bold framework, which violates our ingrained expectations, was precisely what made me embrace "Stella by Starlight" as a bracing iconoclastic composition….”

One couldn’t serve up a better melodic platform for Louis and Jim to improvise on and they take full advantage of the unconventional structure of Stella by Starlight to create brilliantly inspired solos.

But this is just the beginning - literally as Stella serves as the opening track - and is followed by masterful interpretations of Jerome Kern’s All the Things You Are, Irving Berlin’s How Deep is The Ocean, Rodgers & Hart’s My Funny Valentine, Jimmy Van Heusen’s But Beautiful and Duke’s In A Sentimental Mood.

To paraphrase Ted Gioia: “These songs' cross-generational familiarity and popularity have made them frequent choices when musicians of different eras collaborate on a project.”

This is no less the case here and is one of the reasons that this first-time pairing of these two Jazz greats comes off so well. Each had been playing these melodies since the inception of their careers at jam sessions, on studio recordings and in club and concert appearances.

Along the way, they had devised clever chord substitutions or augmentations from those originally assigned to the songs by their respective composers. Maybe they played them in different keys than the original, at slower or faster tempos, or with other stylistic inflections.

So when all of this familiarity and experience was brought together in the hands of two masters like Louis and Jim, magic happened on the evening of December 26, 1982.

And now, thanks to the commitment and dedication of Dermot Rogers to reestablish Livia Records, you can share in the enchantment of Stewart and Hall, two of Jazz’s most formidable guitarists.

In his Jazz Encyclopedia, the late Richard Cook observes of Louis:

“A perennially unruffled bebop stylist somewhat in the Tal Farlow mould, Stewart has rather more of a reputation among musicians than listeners, partly because he comes from a territory with very little jazz clout, and further because he has never had much interest from record labels: a sympathetic company could yet get a classic out of him.”

Sadly, Richard Cook passed away in 2007, but the champion he wished for Louis did materialize when Dermot Rogers revived Gerald Davis’ Livia Records and began issuing Stewart recordings on that label in 2021 among them Out on His Own and Some Other Blues in 2023 and Louis the First which was released the following year.

You don’t want to miss The Dublin Concert. Jazz guitar, times two, at its very best.

For order information, please see www.liviarecords.com.