Classic Vanguard Jazz Piano Sessions

HALFWAY THROUGH CD 3, which is given over to the protean Mel Powell, comes his Sonatina for Piano, nestled between the likes of “You’re Lucky to Me” and “Makin’ Whoopee.” The piece was included on the original Vanguard ten-inch LP release, an album titled “Mel Powell Septet,” the septet in question also including Buck Clayton, Henderson Chambers, Edmond Hall, Steve Jordan, Walter Page, and Jimmy Crawford, recorded at the end of 1953. High-powered players, and they really dig in on the four tracks where they’re included.

Of course they do. Powell was revered by the jazz community at this point in his career, acknowledging his dynamic jazz piano playing, composing, and arranging, most notably with Benny Goodman in the late 1930s – at which point Powell was still in his ‘teens. His earliest piano studies were in the classical realm, but a performance by Teddy Wilson so astonished him that he veered into jazz, with outstanding results. Powell’s Army stint during World War II put him in Glenn Miller’s Army-Air Force Band; while in liberated Paris at the end of the war, the French-fluent Powell sat in with Django Reinhardt and visited the Bibliotheque Nationale’s Debussy archive, celebrating one of Powell’s all-time heroes and inspiring his composition “Duplicates: A Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra,” which won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1990.

You can see Powell in the 1948 film “A Song Is Born,” a vehicle for the always-annoying Danny Kaye but which contains a fantastic jazz sequence in which the incredibly youthful-looking Powell is joined by Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Benny Carter, Charlie Barnet, Louis Bellson, and the Golden Gate Quartet. But it won’t prepare you for this Sonatina.

Lorin Maazel in Cleveland

THE CENTERPIECE of this 15-CD set is an appealing Beethoven symphonies cycle spread across seven CDs to replicate the initial LP box-set release. (That actually was an eight-record set, but a judicious shift of some overtures reduced the count.) Mired as I was in vinyl during my formative years, I don’t mind this approach. I don’t need all 80 CD minutes filled, and I’m still spared the side-flip in the middle of a symphony.

Lorin Maazel led the Cleveland Orchestra in those Beethoven sessions beginning in October 1977, with the recording of Symphonies 3 and 5 and a trio of overtures; the following February they taped 6 and 7 and, on a single-day marathon, 1, 2, 4, and 8. (Donald Rosenberg’s biography of the orchestra disagrees and spreads out the sessions, but I prefer to believe the superhuman marathon approach.)

The ninth, saved for last, was recorded on October 13, 1978, and included the voices of Lucia Popp, Elena Obraztsova, Jon Vickers, and Martti Talvela, with Robert Page leading the Cleveland Orchestra chorus. Excellent vocal work in a thirlling finale. In an audacious move, the symphonies came out the following March as that eight-LP set. Although maybe it wasn’t so audacious: Had the symphonies hit the shops as individual items, buyers probably would play favorites, leaving poor 1 & 2 and 4 & 8 to languish.

Going Back to T-Town

THE STORY OF ERNIE FIELDS BEGINS, as it must, with the visit from John Hammond. This was in the late 1930s, when Hammond was prowling the country to find the kind of jazz talent he enjoyed. He’d already discovered Count Basie but was always eager for more. Tipped to the talent of the Fields organization, he traveled to Tulsa, Ernie’s home city, where he tracked down the bandleader and set up an audition.

Hammond was delighted. He set up an audition for Willard Alexander, the powerhouse band-booker for William Morris. Alexander also was impressed. Next step: Move the band to New York. Make some records, play the Apollo.

Some problems start to creep in. Some members don’t want to travel. Alexander had already told Fields that he might have to replace some of the weaker members, so Fields brought some new hires aboard. Trouble was, the guys who insisted on staying behind were the very players with whom Alexander was most impressed.

But the band did make it into the recording studio, waxing nine sides for Vocalion in August 1939, and four more a month later. They played the Apollo and some city ballrooms and took some upstate gigs as well. And then – nothing. Alexander was promising more dates, but money was running out and some of the band members wanted to go home. Soon enough, Ernie shared that feeling.

Fantastic Four

WE’RE HEARING an increasing death-knell for big box sets, so I’m thrilled to welcome the reissue of all of the Guarneri Quartet’s RCA Red Seal recordings in a 49-CD set from Sony Classical (current owner of the RCA catalogue). The recordings run from 1965 to 1986, with a singular jump ahead to 2005. The quartet changed labels in the mid-‘80s, recording for Philips and Arabesque (much of the time re-recording works initially waxed for RCA). But this set is an excellent starting place for getting to know the core quartet repertory – and also a benchmark collection of those recordings. Performances don’t get much better than this.

You’ve got all of Beethoven’s quartets, as well as his charming quintet in C; a complete Brahms and Schumann package, issued as it was originally as a three-record, now three-disc set, alongside quintets and piano quartets by those composers as well. Lots of late Schubert, Mozart, Dvořák; quartets by Mendelssohn and Grieg and Debussy and Ravel. And a complete Bartók  traversal for a little more crunch.

What’s not here are the likes of Barber and Ives, no Lutosławski or Berio, and certainly nothing Second Viennese. Which is not to say those weren’t in the Guarneri repertory: works by many of those composers were performed in concert, but I suspect that nervous RCA execs discouraged them from recording the more modern stuff. Even their wonderful disc of Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir de Florence” sextet was dropped from the catalogue for lack of sales mere months after it appeared in late 1966. (It was reissued a decade later, after the ensemble had achieved superstar status).

Nightmare on Main Street (Encore)

From the Food and Wine Vault Dept.: I wrote this piece in 2009, when the issue of wine in grocery stores was gaining momentum. I blog-posted it in 2016, when it seemed to be gaining some traction. Now it has more traction than ever, with a lot of press being churned up by plausible-sounding advocacy groups that probably are on the payrolls of grocery conglomerates like Price Chopper. The figures in the piece below are outdated, I suspect, but the sentiment remains the same.

                                                                                                

AMONG THE NEW YORK STATE DEPARTMENT OF BUDGET’S many breathless proposals to save, grab or re-claim money, the one of most concern to this column is a proposal to allow wine sales in grocery stores. It’s pitched to accrue something like $150 million over the next three years ($105 million the first year; far less thereafter), most of it coming from the licensing fees the supermarkets would pay.

Whether all 19,000 grocery and convenience stores across the state actually would pony up is but one of many variables projected into this proposal. But the Business Council of NY State has eagerly signed off on the issue, promising that it “will create new markets for upstate and Long Island wineries and convenience for consumers,” according to council president Kenneth Adams. “In addition, the proposal will generate new revenue for the cash-strapped state.” It’s a point of view no doubt shared by two of council’s board members with a large stake in the issue: Paul S. Speranza, Jr., General Counsel and Secretary to Wegmans, and Neil Golub, CEO of Price Chopper.

Completing Louis Armstrong

AROUND THE TIME Louis Armstrong moved from a big band to a small-group setting in 1947, grumblings were being heard. At first, it came from the Black community, especially from fellow musicians. Dizzy Gillespie termed him a “plantation character” in a DownBeat article, and would later amplify that sentiment. Miles Davis went after both Armstrong and Gillespie, writing “I hated the way they used to laugh and grin for audiences.” The general argument was that Armstrong’s onstage antics were too reminiscent of minstrelsy, an era laden with racist baggage. And this attitude was writ in stone by white critic Gunther Schuller in his 1967 book Early Jazz, wherein he praised Armstrong’s innovative genius, “at least until the early 1930s, when he did succumb to the sheer weight of his success and its attendant commercial pressures.”

This chorus of misguided criticism would crescendo throughout the 1950s and ‘60s as the critics parroted one another, not unlike the classical-world phenomenon of ritually calling Jascha Heifetz’s performances and recordings “cold,” a judgment only attainable without listening to the artist. But critics tend to be reliably sheeplike.

This is why it’s a good thing that Armstrong authority Ricky Riccardi began his three-volume biography of the jazz genius with the third book in the series, What a Wonderful World, published in 2011. It picks up Armstrong’s story from 1947, when he made the important transition to the small-group setting that he’d use for public performances for the rest of his life. The most important task for anyone wishing to paint a balanced portrait of the man’s life is to objectively present those criticisms, then counter them with thoughtful analysis.

The Once and Future Ormandy

THREE MASSIVE BOX SETS have given us nearly 300 CDs of Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in recordings made between 1944 and 1968, which is the entirety of his recordings for the Columbia label. Ormandy decamped to RCA, according to a 1967 New York Times piece, with mixed feelings, laying the decision at the feet of the orchestra’s board. But, according to the article, Columbia’s then-president Clive Davis “indicated that a dispute over the repertory Mr. Ormandy had been permitted to record figured heavily in the split.” The article finished with Ormandy recalling his earlier years with RCA, implying that he had more freedom then.

We had a look at what’s almost the earliest of Ormandy as a conductor with the 11-CD box of Minneapolis Symphony recordings, presenting an astonishing amount of repertory recorded in January 1934 and January 1935, including a terrific Mahler 2. Now we can explore the conductor’s first steps with the Philadelphia Orchestra, where he succeeded Leopold Stokowski on the podium – as thankless a challenge as could be imagined.

Stokowski, after all, was handsome, dynamic, and relentlessly charming, probably the only symphony conductor ever impersonated by Bugs Bunny. And he’d shaped the orchestra into an ensemble that easily sat alongside the bands in Boston and New York. Ormandy co-conducted for a couple of years before taking over the job completely, and the two co-recorded during that time as well. (Sony should consider issuing a box set of Stokowski’s Philadelphia work.)