Victor Feldman All-Stars Plays Soviet Jazz Themes

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

Drummer, vibraphonist and pianist Victor Feldman was such a superbly talented musician and accomplished reader that he made his primary living in the Hollywood studios during their heyday in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  He was also dependable, prompt and courteous, not to mentioned very well-liked by the coterie of contractors and first-call studio players that populated that scene.

Although he didn’t have to “go on the road,” occasionally some great opportunities to do so came up such as his stint with Cannonball Adderley’s sextet in 1961.

Another, much briefer road trip, turned up in the form of Benny Goodman’s tour of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics which commenced on May 28, 1962.

It took the first several weeks in April for the personnel of the group to be finalized; but when it was, the band was a dynamite cast of musicians. Joya Sherrill was the featured vocalist. Zoot Sims; Jerry Dodgion, Gene Allen, Phil Woods and Tommy Newsome were the saxophone section. Joe Newman, Jimmy Maxwell, Joe Wilder and John Frosk made up the trumpet section while the trombonists were Jimmy Knepper, Willie Dennis and Wayne Andre. The rhythm section consisted of Bill Crow on bass and Turk Van Lake on guitar, and featured Victor on vibes and Teddy Wilson on piano.

Upon his return from the Soviet Union, Victor signed an exclusive recording contract with Fred Astaire’s Ava records.

The first project that Victor completed for the label was to record three “Jazz Impressions of …” tracks with Bob Whitlock [b] and Colin Bailey [d] that augmented the release of the original soundtrack by Mark Lawrence to the highly acclaimed film – David and Lisa: An Unusual Love Story [Ava-AS-21].

But while at Ava records, Victor was at work preparing a real gem of a recording based on compositions that he and Leonard Feather had come across during his trip to Russia with the Goodman band.

Released in 1963, The Victor Feldman All-Stars Play Soviet Jazz Themes [Ava-AS-19] is comprised of two recording sessions involving three Soviet Jazz originals, both featuring the rhythm section of Bob Whitlock on bass and Frank Butler on drums. The first took place on October 26, 1962 with Victor on vibes, Nat Adderley on cornet, Harold Land on tenor saxophone and Joe Zawinul on piano and the second session was done on November 12, 1962 with Victor on piano and vibes, Herb Ellis on guitar, Carmel Jones on trumpet and Harold Land once again on tenor.

Here are Leonard Feather’s original liner notes that offer a perspective on both the Cold War politics of the time as well as on the Soviet Jazz musicians and their music which Victor represented on this recording.

“There has never been an album quite like this before in the annals of recorded jazz.

The very existence of Soviet jazz, of artists who could play or write it, was virtually unknown outside the USSR until 1959. That was the year when two intrepid Americans named Dwike Mitchell and Willie Ruff, in the guise of Yale choral group members, entered the Soviet Union and let it be bruited around that they were really jazz musicians. The resultant impromptu concerts led them to discover that a cadre of young musicians existed whose interest in the American jazz world, bolstered by Voice of America broadcasts, was as deep and intense as their feeling for the music.

Three years later, on a more official and far more broadly publicized basis, Benny Goodman's band, the first American jazz orchestra of modem times to play the Soviet Union (under U.S. State Department auspices) opened May 30, 1962, at the Central Army Sports Arena in Moscow. On this tour the brilliant and versatile Victor Feldman played vibraphone in the small combo numbers; and most valuably, during the six weeks of the tour, he gained a fairly broad picture of the musical life of the Russians, the Georgians and other citizens of this endless land.

I was lucky enough to be in Moscow for the opening. and later to spend a little time in Leningrad. At a press conference I heard much talk of arranging for local jazzmen to sit in with Goodman and show him some of their music. The plans failed to materialize however, for B.G. never sought out these Soviet youths whose music amazed those of us who did get together with them. And aside from token gestures such as the use of a couple of Soviet pop songs, there was no acknowledgement in the band's program that such a phenomenon as Soviet jazz existed.

The aims of Victor Feldman's LP are, first, to compensate for this omission; second, to provide a program of modem jazz by superior soloists with plenty of blowing room; third, to point up the similarities, rather than the differences, that can be found in a comparison of jazz composition as it is conceived in Moscow, Tbilisi or Leningrad vis-À-vis New York, Chicago or Los Angeles.

Soon after arriving in Moscow, we found out that homegrown jazz, supposedly taboo in the USSR, not only wasn't underground or outlawed as had long been believed, but was actually flourishing on a modest scale. It even had young. growing outlets at a Moscow jazz Club, where students earnestly discuss the latest news about John Coltrane or Ornette Coleman, and at a couple of Youth Cafés, where music by the new Soviet jazz wave is often heard live.

Writing in Down Beat about a visit to the Café Aelita. I observed: "It is the closest Moscow comes to a night club … serves only wine, closes at 11pm, and is decorated in a style that might be called Shoddy Modern, though radical by Moscow standards ... the shocker was the trumpet player, Andre Towmosian. who is 19 but looks 14, plays with the maturity of a long-schooled musician, though in jazz he is self-taught."

I learned that Towmosian was acclaimed in the fourth annual Jazz festival at Tartu, Estonia. (It was amazing enough to learn that there had been any Soviet jazz festival, let alone four.) He was also featured with his quartet at the Leningrad University Jazz Festival; and one of the souvenirs I brought home was a tape, given me in Leningrad, of Towmosian playing Ritual, the original heard in this album.

Also on tape were some of the compositions of Gennadi (Charlie) Golstain, the alto saxophonist and arranger whose apartment I visited in Leningrad. Though nicknamed for Charlie Parker, clearly he has at least two other idols, for side by

side on the wall of his living room I noticed adjacent photographs of two men: Nikolai Lenin and Julian (Cannonball) Adderley.

Golstain's tapes featured him with a combo similar to the Feldman group on these sides, but he works regularly with a large modern orchestra headed by Yusef Weinstain and writes most of the band's book. He is a soloist of considerable passion,as yet incompletely disciplined and subject to multiple influences, but his dedication is beyond cavil and his writing shows an intelligent absorption of the right influences.

“Several of the fellows in Benny's band jammed a couple of times with Gennadi at our hotel, the Astoria in Leningrad," Victor recalls, "and some of us, including Phil Woods, played with him at the University., He was eager for knowledge and information, like so many of the musicians we met."

Goldstain is the composer of three of the lines in this set - Blue Church Blues, Madrigal, and Gennadi - as well as the arranger. or virtual re-composer, of the folk song Polyushko Polye.  (For those curious about the first title, it should be pointed out that the church Gennadi had in mind was not Russian Orthodox, but probably Southern Baptist.)

Also represented here is a young arranging student named  Givi Gachechiladze, the composer of "Vic." He lives in Kiev," says Victor, but he's studying at Tbilisi; and when we arrived at the airport there, he and a group of his friends were at the airport to meet us - with flowers. The next day he gave me this tune, dedicated to me and named for me.'

The rapport that grew between the Soviet musicians and the Goodman sidemen showed in microcosm the kind of amity that could exist on all social levels if meetings were possible between men and women of the two countries who have common interests. All of us who tasted the hospitality of these devoted jazz musicians and students were touched by their sincerity, their lack of political animosity (many seemed totally apolitical), and their obvious desire to discuss things shared rather than differences.

The young musicians like Towmosian, Golstain, Constantin Nosvo and Gachechiladze, none beyond their 20s and many in their teens. have not yet gained substantial recognition in their own country.  It is ironic that this is the first album featuring Soviet jazz compositions that has ever been recorded, not merely in the U.S.A., but anywhere in the world. For decades American jazz was a prophet un-honored at home; Europeans were the first to give it profound critical attention. Now, in a strange reversal, Americans are the first to draw attention to a set of swinging, unpretentious Soviet jazz pieces that are still waiting to be recorded on home ground.

The group selected for these two sessions is in itself further reflection of the "United Notions" character of jazz. Here are the works of writers in the Soviet Union, performed in America by a group under the leadership of Victor Stanley Feldman, who came to this country in 1955, at the age of 21, from his native London (the native city also of this writer, who helped organize the sessions); and on the tracks that feature Feldman's vibes the piano is taken over by Joe Zawinul, a superb modern pianist who was born in Vienna and did not arrive here until 1959, Zawinul works regularly with the sextet of Cannonball, whose brother Nat is heard on three tracks (Ritual, Madrigal, Blue Church Blues.)

Harold Land and Herb Ellis, both from Texas, and Carmell Jones of Kansas are well known to the Soviet insiders, as are drummer Frank Butler from Kansas City and the Utah-born bassist Bob Whitlock

Certainly these sides, because of the historic precedent they set and because of the esteem in which Feldman and his colleagues are held in what used to be thought of as the borsch and balalaika belt, will be among the most desirable collectors' items when the first copies reach the Soviet Union. For listeners in this country it is to be hoped that they will help reinforce a concept not of the jazz-as-propaganda-weapon cliché, but the unifying image of this music gathering strength and growing stature as part of a single world.”

Brad Mehldau - "Formation" - An Appreciation

 © Copyright ® Wall Street Journal, copyright protected; all rights 

reserved.

‘Formation’ Review: Brad Mehldau’s Song in the Dark

The jazz pianist chronicles his early years, in which music was the bright thread guiding him through an often harrowing maze.

By John Check

May 12, 2023, Wall Street Journal 

“The recording opens metronomically, with eight repeated notes on a string bass, each pulling you in closer. The piano enters, then the drums. After playing the melody, a familiar and endearing Beatles tune, the pianist embarks on a solo of such easy funkiness that you wish it could last forever. Eventually the melody—what jazz musicians call the “head”—returns, a conventional sign that the performance is about to end. But the end is deceptive: bass and drums drop out, leaving the pianist, Brad Mehldau, to return to the register of his earlier improvisation and mine its territory for new delights. “Blackbird,” from 1996, was on the first recording following the completion of what Mr. Mehldau calls his “Bildung,” his formation.

Mr. Mehldau explores his formation as a musician and a man in this memoir covering the first 26 years of his life; a sequel is in the works. Now 52, the winner of a Grammy Award, a noted composer, a bandleader, sideman and solo player on a string of acclaimed recordings, Mr. Mehldau is one of the top pianists in all of jazz. He is also a vivid writer with a compelling story to tell, one of pain and suffering—one, too, of persistence, hope and faith.

Mr. Mehldau spent his boyhood in Georgia and New Hampshire before settling with his family in West Hartford, Conn. His mother encouraged his music-making and arranged for him to study with good teachers, one of whom, a hotel-bar headliner in Manchester, N.H., showed him, at age 7, how to be “spontaneously creative at the piano.” In loving detail, Mr. Mehldau recounts his early immersion in music, whether it was waiting by his bedroom radio for his favorite song to play or being transported at a local swimming pool by the latest hits of Fleetwood Mac and the Steve Miller Band. For him, at this time, music “imbued everyone and everything in front of my eyes with grace and some quiet, unknown purpose.”

As years passed, he found himself drawn to darker music, especially “The Wall” by Pink Floyd—music, “like a lonely siren,” that spoke to his burgeoning sense of loneliness. By the age of 13 he was becoming a “sensualist,” a thrill-seeker, smoking cigarettes and nipping drinks from his parents’ liquor cabinet. He did these things to cope with being bullied, and out of uncertainty about his sexuality. Even so, he continued to hone his music skills and expand the range of his tastes. (“I was lost after that solo,” he writes of the experience of listening to Jimi Hendrix’s live recording of “Machine Gun.”)

The good side of high school for Mr. Mehldau began and ended with music. He started to get gigs, which forced him to learn a lot of tunes at any tempo and in any key. The bad side was bad indeed. Though bookish, he was nonetheless a terrible student, spending his teens “in a cloud of marijuana.” He skipped so many classes that graduating, and with it continuing his music study in college, was looking doubtful. His way out was an unspoken deal with the devil—the high-school principal, a predator, who used Mr. Mehldau for his own sexual gratification.

New York City, the jazz mecca of the U.S., beckoned to Mr. Mehldau from his early adolescence. In 1988 he enrolled in the New School’s innovative jazz program, soaking up the influences of both faculty and classmates, absorbing the kind of subtleties—what he calls “depth of tone”—one gleans only from live performance. Mr. Mehldau learned “comping,” the harmonic and rhythmic support a pianist supplies during the solo of another musician, from the veteran bluesman Junior Mance. The teacher’s sense of swing was so strong that it pulled the student into its gravitational pull. (“That’s not something that can be taught with words,” Mr. Mehldau adds.) It was in New York that he met many of the young musicians with whom he would later collaborate, including the tenor player Joshua Redman, the drummer Jorge Rossy and the bassist Larry Grenadier. With the last two Mr. Mehldau recorded his career-making five-volume series “The Art of the Trio” (1996-2001).

“What a partisan, bickering bunch we all were when I arrived in Manhattan, aged eighteen,” writes Mr. Mehldau. He refers to the rift between students devoted to the approach of bop stylists such as Charlie Parker and Bud Powell and those drawn to a slightly later style, hard bop, pioneered by Horace Silver and Lee Morgan. Adaptable and versatile, Mr. Mehldau learned the importance of “toggling between styles.” He participated in his first recordings in the early 1990s, around the same time he performed his first extensive tour. The experience changed his career: “I began [the tour] as one person, musically speaking, and came back another.” It was, he recalls, “the beginning of my own style.”

Mr. Mehldau speaks of an inanition [lethargy or lassitude caused by a lack of energy] that beset him and other jazz musicians of Generation X in the early ’90s: the feeling of having missed out on the musical ferment of the ’50s and ’60s, when the likes of John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter reigned supreme. What more was there to do but pay “ritualized tribute” to the past? “The fear,” he writes of himself and others like him, “was that we lacked authenticity.” Mr. Mehldau meditates on this matter at some length, seeking guidance from writers such as Harold Bloom and Terry Eagleton, Theodor Adorno and Thomas Mann. The language in this section bogs down at times, but what crystallizes in Mr. Mehldau’s mind is an important realization: In his own playing, he had to draw not only on the jazz music that was his inheritance but on all the other music that played a role in forming him—classical, prog rock, hip-hop, Americana.

The last part of “Formation” delves deeper into Mr. Mehldau’s addictions and his eventual triumph over them. There are harrowing accounts of failed attempts at sobriety. The deaths by overdose of two boyhood friends leaves him wracked with guilt: “I wondered why it had been them and not me.” On a job with the Joshua Redman Quartet, trying to quit heroin, he got so drunk that he was fired. He missed recording dates. Eventually his friends staged an intervention, the first of many. Still in his mid-20s, Mr. Mehldau was wearing out the patience of even his most loyal supporters. Gigs were canceled; his parents threw him out of their house; he was down to his last six dollars. At his lowest point, he was tempted “to just end it, to end everything.” Somehow, though, through the beginnings of faith, he chose to live. He went to L.A. to make another attempt at rehab, and this one stuck. Upon returning to the East, he formed his trio and his “real work” began.

Among the songs in Mr. Mehldau’s “personal canon” is “Blackbird.” He’s returned to it time and again, finding something new with each exploration. In a solo performance two years ago at Steinway & Sons Hamburg, viewable on YouTube, he adds a few delicately played high notes above the melody. Because of the finesse with which he plays them, they acquire a beautiful fragility, all the more so in light of Paul McCartney’s corresponding lyrics, “Take these sunken eyes and learn to see.” Readers of this poignant memoir will discover what Brad Mehldau learned to see during the long course of his formation.

Mr. Check is a professor of music at the University of Central Missouri.

Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Appeared in the May 13, 2023, print edition.

Artie Shaw - Self-Portrait

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Overall, it's my belief that performers have a right to be judged by their best work. Roger Bannister must have run lots of miles in more than four minutes, but he's remembered as the man who broke the four-minute record. Such home run kings as Babe Ruth and Henry Aaron struck out I don't know how many times. Perfectly understandable, of course: anybody who's really trying is bound to make mistakes. But why include my own strikeouts? In the end, then, I've chosen only those performances that come reasonably close to what I had in mind when I did them-which is also why this package includes examples from all my different bands. Let's call it a summing-up, a retrospective of what I consider my best work regardless of label, an overview of my entire career as a clarinetist-band leader.” 

- Artie Shaw

Something not afforded through streaming is this exquisite and unprecedented retrospective that contains the best performances from the entire career of one of the most exciting artists in music history. Selected by Artie Shaw himself, it includes music from every band  he ever led. including his most popular hits and his greatest  artistic achievements.

*   95 tracks remastered from the best available sources

*   Complete discography

*   Extensive liner notes by Artie Shaw himself and historian Richard Sudhalter in a 47 page booklet

*   Produced by Grammy-winning jazz legend Orrin Keepnews

*   Rare photos of Artie Shaw and his musicians

I realize that multi-disc sets can be expensive, but when one considered the number of subscription services fees we sometimes engage in that can put us at the mercy of impersonal, algorithmic programming, the occasional investment in a collection of CDs devoted to the music of a particular artist can often be a bargain in the long run, especially when one considers the old adage that “possessions is 9/10ths of the law.” [A euphemism for if you own it you control it.]

" Self Portrait 9/1938-6/1954

Bluebird 09026-63808-2 5CD Selected by Shaw himself, and discussed by the leader in conversation with Richard Sudhalter, this is an impressive shot at the defining Shaw collection - even if some of it might be thought subject to its maker's own caprices. He sometimes chooses broadcast versions of tunes over their studio originals, and the notes are boastful and self-deprecating at the same moment -inimitable Shaw. His choices reflect his ambitions, though fortunately that seems to have allowed the inclusion of his greatest hits along the way, and it does take the story up to the final sessions of 1954 ….” - Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6th Ed.

From the producer Orrin Keepnews in the insert booklet that accompanies the set:

“This compilation is probably the most unusual jazz reissue project I have ever been involved with. It is, for that matter, possibly the most unusual such project ever attempted. It is not at all surprising, then, that Artie Shaw, the focal point of this set, is an entirely remarkable man and musician, still thoroughly intense and alert although he happens to be in his nineties.

Since I am not particularly young either. I have no problem admitting that I first became aware of Artie Shaw back in his early days as a giant of the Swing Era. As a New York teenager, who first heard this wonderfully rhythmic music on the radio, then skipped a class or two to catch a matinee "stage show" at a Broadway movie palace, I was particularly intrigued by one of the major rivalries of the day. 

As I recalled to Artie not long ago, if you were at all serious about the music, you had to make a choice. It was just not possible to equivocate — you were either for Artie Shaw or for Benny Goodman. Under the circumstances that now find me working on this in-depth look at his full career, I'm glad I can honestly report that I have always been a Shaw enthusiast. (His own current view of the subject is a little detached and analytical: "Benny was a better clarinet player," Artie told me. "but I was a better musician.").

Shaw never fit the stereotype of either pop music star nor big band leader. Emerging from a youthful period as a highly skilled and sought after lead alto player in the New York studio bands of the early 1930s, Artie's view of himself as a musician clearly influenced the way he handled sudden stardom. (Begin the Beguine, his overwhelmingly popular initial hit, was a product of his very first day of recording for RCA Victor, but he has consistently denied liking the record.) He used strings to a far greater and more adventurous extent than any of his colleagues; he was noted for his intolerance of the intrusiveness of his fans; and it seems quite likely that if he had not decided to leave the music business completely, he would have been comfortable with many developments in jazz during the second half of the twentieth century. He was proud of the fact that Al Cohn and Zoot Sims joined his 1949 orchestra — known to insiders as his "bebop band" — right after leaving Woody Herman. And his very last recordings, heard on the final disc in this collection, involved outstanding young players like pianist Hank Jones and guitarist Tal Farlow. as well as Tommy Potter, one of Charlie Parker's favorite bassists. Quite apart from music., he has for many years paid serious attention to writing, both fiction and autobiography. Critics have rated his published work as professional and richly talented, and I think you'll find some strong supporting evidence further along in this booklet.

There are specific reasons for considering this a most unusual reissue. Obviously the most intriguing and important one is that the artist himself has been deeply involved in assembling this retrospective, which covers his work between 1936 and 1954 — which is not exactly yesterday. I have compiled a great many reissue collections over the years, and have become accustomed to the fact that the music predating the advent of tape recording in 1950 is in a different category from anything more recent. That difference involves not merely technology, but the almost-universal truth that pre-tape artists are no longer with us. One of my favorite clichés is to describe reissue work as: "I spent all day in the studio with Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong, or Benny Goodman — and he didn't give me the slightest bit of trouble." In this case: not true! Shaw did not actually join me at the BMG Studios in New York, but between telephone discussions and extensive e-mail exchanges and visits to his home north of Los Angeles, the legendary central figure in this collection had no trouble making his presence felt.”

INTRODUCTION by Richard Sudhalter -

“To identify Artie Shaw as an exceptional figure in the world of popular music is to state the obvious. Peerless clarinetist, successful bandleader, proprietor of a restless, ever-questing imagination, he remains a thoughtful and articulate man in a field not always notable for such qualities. Since putting away his clarinet half a century ago he has continued to read and inquire, emerging meanwhile as a writer of formidable, if occasionally idiosyncratic, strengths. Shaw's records as a bandleader, made over a period of just eighteen years between 1936 and !954 remain as varied and challenging as the man who brought them into being.

In the spring of 2001, when he was asked to select and comment on the nearly one hundred performances in this boxed set, Artie Shaw had just passed his ninety-first birthday. But his remarks spring from a mind still clear and incisive, and from the same iron will that conceived, shaped, and realized his numerous bands. "Artie," a veteran fellow-musician remarked recently with no little awe, "has an opinion about everything, and most of the time has a way of being right. Even when he's wrong, he's right."

Here, then, is Artie Shaw, both in choosing his finest moments on record and in offering often trenchant observations on them, on-himself, and on his extraordinary life in music.

-R.M.S.”

And in conclusion, one more from Artie Shaw - 

Now and then people ask me: how do you feel to have lived so long, to have seen and achieved so much?              

My best answer is that I feel spiritually and mentally better than ever. And I've come to realize that what I did had in its own way a lot of importance.

These records are a case in point. Various people have issued "Complete Artie Shaw'' record packages, and though some may have contained my entire output on one record label, none have been really complete. Also, too many "Best-of-Artie-Shaw" compilations have included stuff I never did much care for, pop material I'd been pressured or coerced into recording. I never had much respect for most pop tunes, and none of that material is here. But I used my own judgment when it came to recording music I liked, mostly standards — and occasionally a new tune that sounded as though it might eventually become a standard. Some of those songs, like Summertime and Blues In the Night, are in this collection.

I've omitted most vocals because they were usually on banal trifles that I felt would probably have a life-span of ten to twelve minutes. However, there are a few vocals here, where the orchestral material is also interesting. Like the ones that Hot Lips Page sang, which had first-rate arrangements, and two by Tony Pastor, where the band really swings.”