Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers: Three Blind Mice

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Art Blakey. What a guy. Perhaps you know the famous story about Blakey and his sidemen driving between New York and Pittsburgh.  They drove by a cemetery where a burial service was taking place. They stopped and parked and Blakey walked over to listen. It turned out that it was a pauper's funeral and the preacher was having no success in getting someone to say something over the dead man. There was a long pause and a lot of uncomfortable shuffling and, finally. Art said, ‘If no one wants to talk about this man, I'd like to say a few words about jazz.’”

- Doug Ramsey, 1998, from a private correspondence with me

Returning to our current theme of favorite Jazz records, the digital reissues made possible by the development of the compact disc often provided more music from the original LP dates in the form of alternate tracks or tracks left off due to lack of space.

This abbondanza was especially welcomed in the case of drummer Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Three Blind Mice [84451 and 84452] which was recorded in performance at the Renaissance Club in Hollywood, CA in March, 1962

An alternate take  of Up Jumped Spring [and three additional tracks [Wayne Shorter’s Children of the Night, Curtis Fuller’s Arabia and Cedar Walton’s The Promised Land] were added and released as a double CD, although to be accurate, two of the three additional tracks are from a different live date as is explained below.

In addition to Curtis Fuller on trombone, Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone and Cedar Walton on piano, Art’s Messengers at the time feature Freddie Hubbard on trumpet and Jymie Merritt on bass.

Michael Cuscuna wrote these insert notes for the expanded version  Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Three Blind Mice which provide insights into its place in what he refers to as “The Golden Era of Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers.”

“The Golden Era of Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers began in late 1958 when Blakey introduced his new quintet with Lee Morgan, Benny Golson, Bobby Timmons, and Jymie Merritt with what is probably his best selling album of all time MOANIN'. Golson was soon replaced by the returning Hank Mobley In the fall of '59, Wayne Shorter replaced Mobley and Walter Davis replaced Bobby Timmons. When Timmons returned at the beginning of 1960, the quintet's personnel was stable and during the next 18 months recorded for Blue Note an incredible body of music: THE BIG BEAT, A NIGHT IN TUNISIA, LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE, MEET YOU AT THE JAZZ CORNER OF THE WORLD Vols . 1 & 2, ROOTS AND HERBS, THE WITCH DOCTOR and THE FREEDOM RIDER.

Even the most perfect of situations must evolve, preferably before redundancy or staleness set in.  So it was with this most perfect quintet.  In June of '61, they recorded one album of standards for Impulse with Curtis Fuller on trombone. Soon thereafter, Lee Morgan and Bobby Timmons left to be replaced by Freddie Hubbard and Cedar Walton.  Fuller stayed on to make it a sextet

A new Messengers was born. The third horn opened up new arranging possibilities. And Walton, Hubbard, Fuller and Shorter started arranging and voicing a small group with the same brilliance that made their compositions so remarkable. The Jazz Messengers moved further away from the funky approach that gave them such hits as "Moanin"' and "Dat Dere" and into the forefront of the most intricate modern jazz. When these men wrote for the group, it was not a simple matter of an AABA structure in 4/4. They were starting from scratch structurally, harmonically and rhythmically to create awesome pieces. What made the miracle complete was that Blakey drove them with a vengeance, making every shift and change without ever disturbing the swing or velocity. This was a most major organization for its three-year existence.

This sextet's recording life started most inauspiciously with a failed live recording at the Village Gate on August 17, 1961, which was never released at the time. The two retrievable performances from that night, "The Promised Land" and 'Arabia", appear on Volume Two of this collection.

Two months later, Blakey took the band into Rudy Van Gelder's to re-record most of the material from the live date and out came the absolute classic MOSAIC. Two months later, they recorded another studio album BUHAINA'S DELIGHT At this point, Blakey and Blue Note parted ways.

In March of 1962 came a one-shot deal with United Artists Records recorded live at the Renaissance in Los Angeles which bore the magnificent THREE BLIND MICE, which is fully embodied in Volume One of the CD reissue

Along with on alternate take of "Up Jumped Spring", versions of "It's Only A Paper Moon", 'Mosaic" and "Ping Pong" were ultimately issued in 1976 on a Blue Note album entitled LIVE MESSENGERS.  Despite the quality of these performances, these tunes could not be considered for release at the time because they had been recorded too recently by Blakey for Blue Note.

In going back to the original three-track master tapes to remix to digital tape in 1990 for the best possible sound quality we also discovered a still unreleased version of Wayne Shorter's "Children of the Night" which is issued for the first time on Volume One

Soon after this live recording, Merritt was replaced by Reggie Workman and the sextet signed with Riverside where it made three excellent sessions. They returned to Blue Note in February of '64 and recorded the ferocious, majestic FREE FOR ALL. In May, Lee Morgan returned to replace Hubbard and the band recorded INDESTRUCTIBLE. Within months, this extraordinary ensemble would disband and Blakey would leave Blue Note permanently as a recording artist.

But the voluminous and breathtaking output of these two related editions of The Jazz Messengers from 1959 to 1964 will help the magic of their music live forever in our hearts and minds.”

—Michael Cuscuna

OTHER BLUE NOTE CD's BY ART BLAKEY & THE JAZZ MESSENGERS YOU WILL ENJOY:

A NIGHT AT BIRDLAND-VOL 1         B2-46519

A NIGHT AT BIRDLAND-VOL 2       B2-46520

AT THE CAFE BOHEMIA-VOL 1         B2-46521

AT THE CAFE BOHEMIA-VOL 2       B2-46522

RITUAL                                          B2-46858

MOANIN'                                              B2-46516

THE BIG BEAT                                         B2-46400

A NIGHT IN TUNISIA                           B2-84049

LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE                     B2-84245

MOSAIC                                                  B2-46823

FREE FOR ALL                                        B2-84170

INDESTRUCTIBLE                                   B2-46429

THE BEST OF ART BLAKEY                  B2-93205

Although it is primarily a feature for pianist Cedar Walton with the horns only coming in to add occasional color and to help create a vehicle to close the tune, I've selected That Old Feeling as an example of the music on Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers, Three Blind Mice because it also shows off another great quality in his playing - his skill as an accompanist.

BTW ... Art was a skillful bandleader in that he always included a piano-bass-drum feature when The Messengers were making a club date to allow the horn players to rest their lips [aka "chops"] during each set.

And what is it about Cedar Walton piano playing that is so engaging? He 's not a technical marvel with dizzying displays of notes flying all over the place. Nor is he an introverted romantic whose playing forms deep and melancholy moods. His approach to the instrument is to play it in a straight-forward and swinging manner. He weaves in and out of a rich tapestry of melodies that leave a smile on your face and a feeling of light fascination in your heart. Cedar's music just feels good: nothing complicated, no overt pianism; just That Old Feeling- the one that made you fall in love with Jazz in the first place.

Paquito D' Rivera: Live at the Blue Note

© -Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“There isn’t a weak link in Mr. D’Rivera’s band. And he has already honed it to a sharp edge – the ensemble playing is fastidiously tight, the breaks and endings are executed flawlessly. It’s a band that should be heard … by anybody who likes Jazz that’s inventive, hot and heartfelt.”

- Robert Palmer, “The New York Times”

“D’Rivera has developed into a startling innovator who moves from mordant, birdlike bop to manic split tones and squeaks.”

- Leonard Feather, “The Los Angeles Times”

“Jazz is speed reading of speedwriting and Paquito can make comfortable listeners of us all while playing at the breakneck speed of more than 300 beats a minute. The big tone in the attack, the fast phrasing, the rapid changes of keys, and the alternation of rhythms combine in Paquito’s music with great technical proficiency. He is the master of the sax – and the clarinet, too.”

- G. Cabrera Infante

“A fluent, virtuoso musician, whose playing … [leaps] with an exuberance quite unlike any other alto saxophone player in Jazz ….”

- Stuart Nicholson, “Jazz: The 1980’s Resurgence”

“I have been a fan of Paquito D’Rivera since the moment he first blew me out of my seat one humid night in Havana during an outdoor concert by the outstanding band Irakere. That was in April, 1978, when a group of recording executives and musicians of which I was a part made a musical sojourn to Cuba. Paquito’s blazing solo on Irakere’s very first number of the night left us completely speechless.”

- Bruce Lundvall, record company executive

As frequent visitors to these pages will no doubt have observed by now, I have been dwelling a bit lately on postings about some of my favorite recordings and one that certainly fits into this category is The Paquito D’Rivera Quintet Live at The Blue Note [Half Note Records 4911].

It was recorded in performance at the Blue Note in New York City in 2000.

Listened to in its entirety, it is the perfectly paced Jazz set.

Many of the reasons why this is so are explained below in Fred Jung’s insert notes to the recording which you'll find detailed below.

I first heard Paquito around 1980 on Irakere’s initial Columbia album about which we have written extensively in this profile of the band.

It’s hard to believe that almost 40 years later, he generates the same excitement in me every time I listen to him play.

Paquito’s enthusiasm and energy are exemplified in his music - the man just knows how to light it up.

“Paquito,” so we are told, is a variant of the of the Latin name for Francis meaning “from France:” one connotation being that France is the “land of the free man.”

And so it was for Paquito when he left Cuba and eventually took up residence in New York in 1982, thus becoming a “free” man.

One benefit of this freedom has been the amount of superb music that is has enabled Paquito to generate over the past four decades. In a word, his discography is prolific. You can checkout his many recordings via this link to his Discogs page.

Here are Fred’s insightful and well-written  insert notes to The Paquito D’Rivera Quintet Live at The Blue Note [Half Note Records 4911].

“A good leader allows his players ample space to perform. A great leader trusts in his players and empowers them to creatively interpret his music. Paquito D'Rivera has learned to be a great leader, no doubt from one of the most eminent bandleaders of our time, Dizzy Gillespie (D'Rivera directed Gillespie's United Nation Orchestra for a number of years).

"Dizzy, still today, is a great influence in my career and in my life, not only his playing and his music, but the way he approached life, the way he helped others to make their careers. The music and the spirit of Dizzy Gillespie is always in someplace around my heart," acknowledges D'Rivera.

Long before he defected from Cuba in 1980, D'Rivera was a true child prodigy, taught by his father Tito D'Rivera, a renown classical saxophonist and educator himself. At 12, Paquito enrolled in the celebrated Alejandro Garcia Caturia Conservatory of Music, where he studied theory, harmony, composition and clarinet.

After working at the Havana Musical Theatre, and a three year stint in the army, teenager Paquito D'Rivera along with Chucho Valdes, Armondo Romeu and other distinguished Cuban musicians, found the Orquesta Cubana de Musica Moderna, from where Irakere originated. Of which Mr. D'Rivera admits "It was a very important part of my career, especially from the point of view of international exposure. I had been playing with Chucho for many years, so Irakere was what I call, old wine, new bottles."

For his live performance at New York's distinguished Blue Note Jazz Club, D'Rivera chooses the commendable route of recording with his working band of five years rather than the more commercially savvy, all-star grouping. "I realized that I had never recorded with this quintet. This quintet is the engine for all my other projects," admits D'Rivera. D'Rivera's quintet - trumpeter Diego Urcola, pianist Dane Eskenazi, bassist Oscar Stagnaro, and drummer Mark Walker - perform a colorful Latin program.

Live at the Blue Note is certainly a departure for D'Rivera in more ways than one from his more recent orchestral projects. D'Rivera primarily sticks to playing the alto saxophone throughout most of the performance, beginning with "Curumim," a composition from Brazilian composer Cesar Camargo-Mariano. "I am a fan of the composer, Cesar Camargo-Mariano. I heard the song over twenty years ago and I fell in love with the song. Many years later, I met Cesar Camargo and I asked him for the song and he sent me the piano part for that. It means the son of the Indian. It's a great song," explains D'Rivera. The scintillating trumpet charts of Buenos Aires native Urcola, who occasionally performs in George Chuller’s Orange Then Blue, simply outpace everyone else, except for fellow Argentinean, pianist Eskenazi, whose poised narration sets the tone for the remainder of the session.

An up-tempo D'Rivera original, "El Cura," follows with the saxophonist uncorking a burning solo, blowing hard to the ideal backdrop laid out by Eskenazi, Stagnaro, and Walker. The saxophonist expresses, "That is a dedication to a very dear friend of mine, the great guitar player and one of my main influences in jazz music, Carlos Morales. He was the guitar player in Irakere for more than twenty years. We called him 'El Cura' because he looked like a priest."

D'Rivera's rhapsodic clarinet playing for Urcola's homage to his native Argentinean homeland, "Buenos Aires," is a main point of interest. D'Rivera professes, "What he (Urcola) wrote reflects very well the atmosphere of Buenos Aires, especially at night. I have been there many times. It's a beautiful city."

"To me ‘Tobago' sounds like a theme inspired by Horace Silver," says D'Rivera. Eskenazi's "Tobago," features inventive solos from Stagnaro on electric bass and Walker.

"Como Un Bolero" is a bolero that the leader wrote while he was with the Caribbean Jazz Project with Andy Narell and Dave Samuels, "It’s is a romantic bolero. The bolero is the national Cuban ballad. I call it a ballad with some black beans and rice," explains D'Rivera.

"Centro Havana," an original penned by guest flutist Oriente Lopez, is a rich melody that is destined to become a standard. "I heard that piece first recorded by Regina Carter. I liked it very much and I called Oriente and asked him for the piece and he gave me the whole arrangement. That piece is killing," confirms the Cuban-American bandleader.

The Grammy Award winning D'Rivera's credentials speak for themselves and as evident by this performance, the Cuban-American has become a great leader. Join D'Rivera for an extraordinary journey into the music of Latin America by genuine Latin Americans.”

Fred Jung, Editor, Jazz Weekly

"Looking for Chet Baker" - Bill Moody

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Chet Baker—or Jet Faker, as I often called him—and I met in the early 1950s. The musical rapport between us was immediate. We worked, recorded, and traveled together for nearly five years. In 1953 Chet, his first wife, Charlaine, and I rented a house together in the Hollywood Hills. It was there that I wrote many of the compositions we later recorded. In addition to being arranger, composer, and pianist with the quartet, I took care of all the details when we went on the road, so I came to know Chet very well.

Chet was often thoughtless where other people were concerned, but he could play. He loved cars and drove too fast, but he could play. He was a drug abuser for forty of his fifty-eight years, but he could play. All that is true.

It's not true that Chet couldn't read music, although he couldn't read it well enough to do studio work. But it is true that he knew nothing about harmonic structure or chords, even simple ones. If you asked him what notes were in a certain chord, he couldn't tell you. He was, however, a truly instinctive player with an incredible ear and great lyrical sense.

If anyone has doubts about this, just listen to "Love Nest" or "Say When" from the CD - Quartet: Russ Freeman and Chet Baker [Pacific Jazz]. It's unfortunate that many critics and musicians were unaware of what they were listening to. Chet Baker was unique; there will never be another like him.

Bill Moody has done an outstanding job in capturing a very difficult subject. Not only is Looking for Chet Baker an enjoyable read, but Bill provides a further glimpse into the jazz life and the character of one of the music's most remarkable musicians.”

—Russ Freeman Las Vegas, 2001

Bill Moody’s background as a musician and his talents as a writer have made the Evan Horne mysteries a favorite of jazz aficionados and crime-fiction fans alike. Investigating the death of Chet Baker, a major cult figure in the world of music, brings out the best in both the author and his pianist sleuth, Evan Horne. Moody, a professional drummer and noted critic, lives in northern California. Looking for Chet Baker is his fifth Evan Horne mystery.

Previous titles in the series are Solo Hand [1994, which introduces his main character, pianist and private detective, Evan Horne], Death of a Tenor Man [1997, which focuses on the mysterious death of tenor saxophonist, Wardell Gray], The Sound of the Trumpet [1997, Clifford Brown] and Bird Lives [1999, Charlie Parker].

I found out about the publication of Looking for Chet Baker through two reviews that appeared in May, 2002 in The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, respectively.

The Times review was written by Julius Lester who is an author of numerous books and a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

King of Cool - Julius Lester

“When I was in high school, there was a small group of us who liked jazz. I don't recall how we discovered it in the Nashville, Tenn., of the mid-1950s, but in the sounds of the Count Basie Orchestra, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Clifford Brown and Max Roach we heard statements about living that were far different from those in the banjos and steel guitars of the country music for which Nashville was famous.

Bebop had the exhilaration of an improvisatory order being imposed on a chaos that could be controlled only lo the extent and only as long as one plunged into it. It was one cultural response to the giddiness of the postwar economic expansion accompanied by the Cold War against a communist enemy and the ever-present possibility of a nuclear war that could end human life on the planet.

Another and almost opposite cultural response was found in the "cool" sound of what came to be known as West Coast jazz. Where Parker and Gillespie would leave one breathless with the number of notes they could play on one breath, "cool" jazz made silence an integral part of the music and showed that one held note was as expressive as the 10 Parker or Gillespie would have played in the same time.

"Cool" jazz was both more controlled and more melodic than bebop, attributes that made it more accessible and appealing to white audiences.

For a brief few years in the '50s, no one exemplified cool jazz more than the white trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker. …

Bill Moody's mystery, Looking for Chet Baker, describes vividly the paradoxical existence of a man who created art of ineffable beauty while simultaneously living a sordid and self-destructive life.

Born in 1929 in Oklahoma, Baker moved with his parents to the Los Angeles area in 1940. His father, a failed musician, bought him his first instrument, a trombone, and later a trumpet when Baker found the trombone too big to handle. Because music came as naturally to the young Baker as breathing, he could scarcely read a score and was never known to practice. He only had to hear a melody once to be able to play it back flawlessly. Baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, with whom Baker teamed in 1952 to make some of his best recordings, describes him in "Deep in a Dream" as an idiot savant, "a kind of freak talent. I've never been around anybody who had a quicker relationship between his ears and his fingers." Ruth Young, one of Baker's many abused lovers, went further: "You gotta realize, Chet was not that intelligent. He did not know what he was doing-----He just did it."

Baker's reputation grew when, at 23, he played with Parker on the great alto saxophonist's West Coast tour. In 1953 and 1955, Baker was voted the top trumpet player by the readers of Down Beat, the jazz magazine. Black musicians derided him as the "Great White Hope" and wondered if Baker really believed he was a better musician than Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Gillespie and Brown, all of whom finished behind him in the polls.

But Baker's popularity was not only the result of the lyric sweetness of his trumpet playing and the depth of feeling he conveyed. His image on album covers was the quintessence of "cool." He looked like an androgynous puer aeternus, the eternal youth who belonged on a Keatsian Grecian urn. Baker was perhaps the first jazz musician who was conscious of his image, so much so that he seldom opened his mouth to reveal the missing front tooth knocked out when he was a child.

James Gavin in his Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker,  says that beneath that cool exterior, however, was an insecure man. Because playing jazz came so easily, perhaps he did not value his talent or think he deserved the acclaim. He admitted to an Italian magazine that playing in public terrified him and only drugs made him feel in control. "The public stops being an enemy, a hostile bunch of adversaries ready to strike me down with their whistles. I don't have anyone in front of me anymore. I am alone with my trumpet and my music."

But perhaps there is no deeper reason for Baker's almost lifelong drug addiction than what he wrote in his brief memoir, As Though I Had Wings.  After thanking the person who introduced him to marijuana, he added, "I enjoyed heroin very much." Heroin use was an integral part of the world of jazz, bebop and cool. But although many musicians, such as Davis and John Coltrane, struggled to free themselves from the drug, Baker was among those musicians for whom playing jazz was merely the means to make enough money for the next fix. In Europe, where Baker lived most of the time from 1955 until his death in Amsterdam in 1988, many doctors were willing to keep him supplied with narcotics.

Mulligan explained Baker's popularity in Europe as "a case of worshipping the self-destructive artist... .It's a Christ-like image of self-immolation."

By the end of his life, he was injecting drugs into the arteries of his neck because a lifetime of needles had destroyed the veins everywhere else on his body. ...

Baker died under mysterious circumstances. His body was found lying in the street outside an Amsterdam hotel, his head bashed in. Some believe he got high and slipped or jumped from his hotel room, but the one window in the room was only raised 15 inches. Others think he was killed by drug dealers to whom he owed money.

The mystery of Baker's death is the subject of Bill Moody's Looking for Chet Baker, the fifth in his wonderful mystery series featuring Evan Horne, a jazz pianist who gets embroiled in unraveling mysteries, generally involving the lives and deaths of jazz musicians.

Horne is in Europe for a couple of gigs when his close friend, Ace Buffington, a professor of English at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, seeks his help in researching a book on Baker, but Home turns him down.

However, Horne's Amsterdam promoter has gotten him a room at the same hotel in which Baker was staying at the time of his death, the same hotel from which Buffington has mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind his leather portfolio containing his research materials. Concerned that something has happened to his friend, Home begins looking for him. To find Buffington, he must retrace Baker's steps during the last days of his life and try to solve the mystery of his death.

A characteristic of the modern mystery novel is the intimate look it provides to readers of a world they might never see. As a professional jazz drummer, Moody knows jazz clubs and musicians, and he is adept at evoking place, whether it is Los Angeles, San Francisco or Amsterdam. He is wonderful at melding the facts of musicians' lives with fiction, and here he vividly re-creates the sad and painful last days of Baker.

Looking for Chet Baker is the best in the series. The writing is fluid, the plotting is tight and there is a wealth of interesting minor characters. The book also has a lovely introduction by Russ Freeman, who played with Baker for many years, and closes with a selected discography of Baker recordings; Gavin's biography contains as complete a discography as one will find. Moody's and Gavin's books skillfully recreate the jazz subculture and pay tribute to a man who could not apply his extraordinary musical intelligence to the rest of his life.”

The Wall Street Journal review was written by Gene Santoro, a former working musician and Fulbright Scholar, who also covers film and jazz for The Nation and the New York Daily News.

He has written about pop culture for publications including: The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, New York Magazine, Atlantic Monthly,People, The New York Post, Spin, 7 Days and Down Beat.

Santoro has authored two essay collections, Dancing In Your Head (1994) and Stir It Up (1997), which were both published by Oxford University Press, and a biography of jazz great Charles Mingus, titled Myself When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus (Oxford, 2000). He is currently completing Made in America, essays about musical countercultures.

Die Cool: A mystery novel revisits the 1988 death of the jazz trumpeter Chet Baker in Amsterdam. - Gene Santoro

LOOKING FOR CHET BAKER By Bill Moody. 253 pp. New York: Walker & Company. $24.95.

“JAZZ and detective fiction have been linked almost since the days of hard-boiled pulps, and their relationship deepened once film noir set it to soundtracks. Some of the spark between the two is the stuff of genre: jazz as the dangerous sound of the other side of the tracks was part of the atmosphere  private  dicks moved through on the margins of America.

Bill Moody has taken the next step, creating a jazz pianist-sleuth named Evan Horne. A Berklee-trained musician, Horne packs a piano player's curiosity about and thirst for harmony — in jazz terms, possible scenarios for a melody and musical arrangement. Like a hero out of Hitchcock, he is drawn, usually against his will, into amateur crime-solving — in his case, crimes involving jazz. (In the wryly tongue-in-cheek Bird Lives, he helped the F.B.I, track a killer stalking smooth- Jazz stars.) Once hooked, Horne translates his musical talents into investigative skills. Just as he would with a new piece of music, he focuses on the plot's key features, runs alternative variations to see how they play, eliminates extraneous elements and searches for coherence.

Looking for Chet Baker is the fifth Horne novel, which says something about how good Moody is. A musician himself, Moody is a fluent writer with a good ear for dialogue, a deft and ingratiating descriptive touch, a talent for characterization and a genuine feel for the jazz world. His anti-hero is white and vaguely middle-aged, smokes nonstop and is coming back from a hand injury that nearly ended his musical career. He also has his own ironic twist. As Fletcher Paige, the saxophone star who duets with Horne on and offstage, notes slyly: "F.B.I. girlfriend, cop friend, ex gonna be a lawyer. Man, you the most law-enforcement-involved piano player I ever knew.”

In earlier novels, Horne's sidekick was a professor named Ace Buffington. A fan who aided Horne's musical comeback, Ace reflects jazz-milieu tensions between insiders and outsiders. In Moody's new novel, Ace is at the mystery's heart. While researching a biography of Chet Baker, he shows up in London, where Horne is gigging at Ronnie Scott's club. Ace sees his Baker book as the steppingstone to becoming chairman of his English department, but he needs Horne's help to get inside the jazz world. Horne refuses. But when Horne arrives in Amsterdam a few days later, he discovers Ace has disappeared — from the same Amsterdam hotel Baker died in front of in 1988, after falling (did he jump or was he pushed?) from a window.

Horne's fears for his friend and his curiosity shift him into high gear once he finds Ace's research wedged behind the radiator of the hotel room where Ace stayed — the room that was Baker's last. As Horne chases leads, he rings some standard P.I. changes — withholding information from cops, getting set up and drugged by his quarry. All the while, Ace's mystery and Baker's become more entwined.

Moody works these story lines like a clever arranger setting two familiar melodies in unexpected counterpoint. Fletcher Paige helps make it swing. A 69-year-old veteran of the Count Basie band, Paige has moved to Europe, where his life is relatively free of racism and full of celebrity perks. A fan of hapless Hoke Moseley, hero of Charles Willeford's mysteries, Paige plays a street-smart but cautious Watson to Horne's Holmes. Their musical dynamics give rise to some of the book's most vibrant descriptions: "I start a rubato introduction, letting the minor chords do the work through one out-of-tempo chorus. Then I start a vamp, in tempo, just beyond ballad speed. Fletcher slips in like he's parting a curtain, and just suddenly there, sliding into the melody, singing with his horn, catching everybody off guard with long, elegant lines, at times almost like cries, floating and lingering like billowy clouds in the air even after they're gone."

Though it’s Long Goodbye denouement ties up loose ends a bit too neatly, Looking for Chet Baker is thoughtful entertainment. And like Baker’s music, it is open to anyone - no jazz-insider ID required.”

Rosario Bonaccorso's "Beautiful Story" on Via Veneto Records and Jando Music

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The press release that accompanies Via Veneto and Jando Music’s latest recording states that:

“A Beautiful Story is the title of the new album by Rosario Bonaccorso, produced by Via Veneto Jazz. Following his last album released in 2015, Viaggiando on Via Veneto Jazz (VVJ 098 CD, 1991), Rosario Bonaccorso continues to enrich and expand his musical pathway, evolving his ideas as a bandleader and composer.

The twelve outstanding compositions on A Beautiful Story immediately enchant the listener with their beauty and depth. Once again, his music is smooth and powerful, and the listener is swept away into an overpowering, yet refined, intimate universe.

On this new album, the double bassist is joined by a group of acclaimed musicians: his friend Dino Rubino on the flugelhorn, Enrico Zanisi on the piano and Alessandro Paternesi on the drums. These young "lions", widely appreciated by critics and audiences on both Italian and European jazz scenes, are sensitive and mature artists and despite their young age, they boast of a rich variety of noteworthy collaborations and experiences.

There's a particular charm in the musical direction and the refined sound of this quartet, where the Italian flair for writing music is manifest, Rosario Bonaccorso representing this at its finest. With A Beautiful Story, Rosario Bonaccorso allures the listener into a sonic journey filling heart and soul, radiating the myriad of emotions in his music.”

Of course, the purpose of a press release is to impress upon the reader the benefits of the music such that the Jazz fan buys the recording.

But there is much about this description that is an accurate portrayal of what’s going on in Rosario’s latest recorded outing.

Let’s start with the musicians as they all display wonderful control over their instruments which allows them to be very expressive, both in terms of their individual solos and in the way they provide accompaniment.

Nothing is rushed on this recording; everything unfolds - beautifully. “The “beautiful story” on this disc is this totality of the music itself.

Bass players inhabit a quiet world; they bring down the volume of the music when they solo. The listener has to seek out what they are “laying down.”

Also, because the bass has to be plucked with the use of a finger [perhaps two or sometimes three depending on the technique of the bassist], bass music is made one note at a time.

As a result, there is a lot of space between the played notes by a bass, not to mention the leisurely way in which they are conveyed.

Rosario has imposed these qualities - quietude, space and an unhurried pace - to create a music on A Beautiful Story that is pleasantly reflective and sonorously alluring.

The title track - A Beautiful Story -opens with a legato flugelhorn and piano theme statement that serves as a wonderful introduction to Dino Rubino’s strikingly lush and full tone on the  flugelhorn whose smooth articulation leads into light and airy solos by Rosario and pianist Enrico Zanisi.

Come l’Acqua tra le dita has a bell like introduction played by Enrico and Rosario that unfolds into a ¾ tempo and another grand statement by Dino.

Drummer Alessandro Paternesi employs a stick-clicking, four-beats-to-the-bar device to create a Latin-feel over which the melody to Der Walfish just floats.

On Duccidu, Rosario’s big bass sound crafts a Jazz-Rock feel that is pulsating but never overpowering.

My Italian Art of Jazz uses tonal centers and tonal clusters played over a sustained bass riff that literally evaporates over a melody played out of tempo by Enrico.

The other seven tracks have more music that continues to create an introspective mood, almost to the point of allowing the listener to enter the souls of the musicians as they are creating the music.

If you like beautiful Jazz, than A Beautiful Story is tailor-made for you and you can order a copy of it at The Forced Exposure website.

Here’s a sampling: