Parque, The Earworm Versions

Parque, a Portu- guese new music avant improvi- sation group with six members, performed three pieces as part of Ricardo Jacinto's "Earworm Exhibition" at Culturgest/Lisbon. Parque: The Earworm Version (Shhpuma 003) is the recording of that performance. The group consists of Nuno Torres, alto saxophone, Ricardo Jacinto, cello and percussion, Nuno Morao, melodica and percussion, Joao Pinheiro, vibraphone and percussion, Dino Recio, percussion, and Andre Sier, electronics.

This is high abstraction music and each piece seems to have pre-planned compositional guideposts and what the liner notes call "instrumental devices concept," all by Jacinto. There is live interactive electronics software developed by Sier and utilized for the first two works. The third work brings in a "Pendular Speaker". The second, longish work includes a sci-fi narrative from "The Left Hand" by Hugo Brito.

That gives you the nuts and bolts of what is going on. The sound of the music is an evolution, an original contribution in the "tradition" of high outside, often electronically expanded modernist live music as MEV, AMM, Il Gruppo and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble pioneered it back in the early days of European improv. It is fascinating, full-fledged avant music of a very high order. If you know what all that means you will like this. If you have an adventurous spirit you will like this.

Eddie Daniels & Roger Kellaway, Duke at the Roadhouse, Live in Santa Fe

When things are clicking in jazz-improv- isation-land one always prays that "the tapes are rolling." That was most fortunately the case when Eddie Daniels and Roger Kellaway did a concert at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe. Duke at the Roadhouse (IPO 1024) captures it in fine fidelity. It's in a way a reminiscence of when clarinetist/tenor saxist Eddie Daniels was graced with the unforgettable opportunity to sit in with Duke Ellington at the piano in a small club when Eddie first made his mark in New York. But it's more than that. Sure it consists of Duke compositions, "Perdido" by Tizol and an Eddie original that gives the CD its title. While they pay the compositions the super respect they deserve, they are arranged in a modern way for Eddie plus Roger Kellaway with his inimitable way on piano and, most of the time, some terrific cello from James Holland.

Any Duke fanatic like me will remember the sides Duke recorded with Oscar Pettiford on cello (along with Strayhorn) so the cello is no afterthought.

What makes this disk a standout is the piquancy and freshness of the arrangements. But the inspired improvisations coming through that night, most especially Daniel's clarinet and Kellaway's piano, are also exactly to the point. They are marvelously energized. I don't think I've heard either quite so relaxed and lucid. Holland's cello adds very much and there are some rare moments for Eddie on tenor.

In the end this is one bang-up set. Duke, swing tradition and the "ever after" of these artists at a peak make for pure pleasure!! Do not miss it. If it sounds like you'd like it, I can't imagine you wouldn't.

Chris Greco Quartet, Trane of Thought, 1994

Why does an album as good as Trane of Thought (GWS FourWinds 71959), recorded in 1994, take so long to come out? Whatever the reasons, they aren't about the musical quality. To the credit of composer-saxophonist Chris Greco, he's been very prolific, creating compositions that are getting attention, and like all of us he has to raise money to eat as priority no. 1. And in the end it doesn't matter, as long as the music is here now.

This is a grouping of eight Greco compositions plus Mal Waldron's classic "Soul Eyes," played by a together quartet of Greco on reeds, electric guitarist Brad Rabuchin, Dean Taba on acoustic bass, and Kendall Kay on drums and conga.

The music has a post-Trane torque (though Greco doesn't sound like Trane exactly, more himself) but with the changed texture that the substitution of guitar for piano can bring. Rabuchin comps nicely and can solo well too and Greco has a very creative solo approach. The rhythm section swings and burns with a quiet but busy fire. And the pieces have genuine substance.

I am sorry I missed this Greco conflagration back then, but very glad to catch up with them now. This is a real sleeper!

June Tabor, Iain Ballamy, Huw Warren, Quercus

The world of the ECM sound has never been an entire strang- er to folk music. Garbarek has done some things with Norwegian folk melodies and others too, for example, but it is not entirely typical for the label.

So when vocalist June Tabor, saxophonist Iain Bellamy and pianist Huw Warren begin their album Quercus (ECM B0018267-02) with an old Robert Burns lyric set to a traditional folk melody, and they do it with a folk purity yet an ECM ambiance, one's ears perk up. The rest of the album weaves in and out of old English folk worlds and tuneful ECM extensions, and then dips into a songbook standard and things contemporary-timeless. One feels transported.

June's voice is lovely in the way Sandy Dennis used to sing when she did the way-back songs; there's something tender and real there. And Ballamy's sax and Warren's piano ECM-ize it all with their own version of the lyrical sound. Warren sometimes sounds like he's playing a folk harp, yet he isn't. Other times he soars with articulated ECM soulful classicism. And otherwise he gives out with his own purity. The same applies to Ballamy's sax obligattos and solos. He does not sound like Jan Garbarek, which is I suppose a feat in itself once this sound opens to the air, but the tenor has its own post-Trane purity too.

This is marvelous music. It's so good it makes you wish you were not here, but back in some timeless folk past. And yet the music is both back there and right here. What could be better? Recommended.

Giovanni Guidi Trio, City of Broken Dreams

An artist may build, per- haps must build upon and over what has been before. With the present-day existence of musical terrain, like the surface of a long-used and therefore stratigraphically deep historical-archaeological site, what you see partially conceals and partially reveals its long-standing "thereness."

That's what I sense and feel listening to pianist Giovanni Guidi and his Trio on the new CD City of Broken Dreams (ECM B0018265-02). Guidi joins with Thomas Morgan (contrabass) and Joao Lobo (drums) for a highly interesting set of Giovanni originals.

And the archeological metaphor occurs to me because the trio in effect stands atop, absorbs and radiates the new layer of free-tonal spaciousness in piano trios/trio compositions that came before and/or exist alongside them, especially the Evans-Paul Bley-Jarrett-Kuhn-Melford-Crispell-Carla Bley-Annette Peacock grouping, to mention some of the principal players-composers that come to mind as part of this by-now tradition.

All that gives you some idea of what you hear on this fine disk, but not the originality of Guidi-and-company's contribution. It's there in the music, a logical outcrop of the approach and affinitive creativity the trio generates, and the musical thinking of Guidi the pianist-composer.

Suffice to say it's a beautiful record that shows us a major pianist talent in his first self-actualized recorded album. Terrific set!

Frank Wess, Magic 101

Could it really have been 55 years ago or so that I first heard Frank Wess (without knowing) on a Count Basie Roulette 78 rpm record I bought for nine cents at the Butler 5 & 10? I was four or five. It was my first jazz record. And it makes sense given all that, that he should be 91 years old this year! 91! He was only 36 then!

The good news is that both he and I are still alive. The Butler 5 & 10 is gone. Count Basie is gone. But Frank Wess is very much NOT gone and I have the pleasure to write about his new album, recorded several years ago when he was a sprightly 89. Aptly titled Magic 101 (IPO C1023), it is indeed magic. Frank joins with the still wonderful sounding Kenny Barron on piano in duet and quartet performances with Kenny Davis (bass) and Winard Harper (drums).

It's music that speaks directly to your soul. Standards, jazz classics and a Frank Wess penned "Pretty Lady" grace your ears for nearly an hour of the beautiful, classic art of improvisation.

Frank comes through with incredible presence. The sound is still there, in that uncanny combination of swing and bop tenorism that was always his. It's burnished and completely essentialist playing, with nothing extraneous, nothing extra, nothing unneeded. And there is total command--not a hint of faltering that you can get with players of venerable years.

This is mostly the art of the ballad. And Frank is the master. The master is alive and very much well, 55 years after my first encounter. Thank you Frank!!

Jemeel Moondoc, Connie Crothers, Two

Two (Relative Pitch 1009) pits Jemeel Moon- doc's alto with Connie Crothers' piano, recorded live at Connie's Loft in 2011. Good free explorations are what you would expect, and that you surely get.

Jemeel's post-bop outness shows strong roots here, transformed, and Connie's rootedness comes through a little bit more than on some of her other recent collaborations. What is nice especially about that (and what in part distinguishes the set) is that neither are looking back. They are continuing their movement forward into new avant freedom. It's just that the past figures as reference point a little more from time to time than perhaps on some other recordings lately.

There's even a song . . . or two. Jemeel's "You Let Me Into Your Life," for one, with a harmonic-melodic base which they launch off of. Connie's "Deep Friendship" isn't as much taking on song form, but it has compositional guideposts that serve as the basis of a free salvo.

This is the first time the two have recorded together and that turns out to be an auspiciously good thing. Both bring their "A" game, not that I have heard either in a "B" mode. They do what two improvising masters do best when engaging in spontaneous two-voiced interplay: to respond to each other's uniqueness with the uniqueness that is their own and in the process create something not quite the same, intermelded twoness, as what they might have done by themselves or with any other possible twosome.

They have mutual brilliance and the shining that comes about is that much better in tandem, like the earth if it had two suns and it was a beautifully sunny day. Like that.