Jazzing the Classics

FOR A FEW DECADES during the last century, when classical music was a familiar part of the musical landscape, many jazz bands borrowed tunes with pleasing results. John Kirby’s sextet recorded several such examples (his Schubert Serenade is a knockout), and Freddy Martin set lyrics to those strains. Harry James played the Bumblebee; Woody Herman did the Sabre Dance. The practice has fallen off a great deal since then, but two recent recordings remind us that, as bassist Mark Wade puts it, “A good tune is a good tune.”

Wade’s trio performs on “New Stages” (Dot Time), a fifteen-track collection that takes some unusual turns through the classical repertory, while pianist Ted Rosenthal’s trio (and guests) explore eleven songs on “Impromp2" (TMR), so-named because it’s a follow-up to his 2010 collection of classical-informed pieces. 

Both collections share rhythmically compelling, harmonically inventive approaches to the music under consideration and, remarkably, given the breadth of source material out there, they also share a single piece: Chopin’s Waltz in A-Flat Major, Op. 69 No. 1, known to many as the “Farewell.” 

Rosenthal’s version was fashioned as a vehicle for Ken Peplowski, in one of the clarinetist’s final sessions (see Chip Defaa’s tribute to Peplowski in the March issue). It opens with a straightforward reading of the tune by Peplowski in duet with Rosenthal, who gives a light swing to his first solo passage; without deviating very much from the structure of the piece, Peplowski and Rosenthal alternate 16-bar passages, diving behind its innocent sweetness to embellish the melody with increasing urgency before Peplowski calms it again and brings it home.

Galway Dazzles, Flute Sparkles

Critical Drubbing Dept.: A few weeks ago (in this piece), I recounted my journey from a snotty, full-of-himself critic to a somewhat less-snotty, still rather full–of-himself critic, and I cited a concert by James Galway as one of the turning points in my attitude. I tried searching for the actual review with no success; naturally, it sprang to light when I wasn’t looking for it at all. Like so much of what I had published in 1986 and earlier, the original computer files are long gone, so I’m relying here on a tearsheet that lingered in my files. I wish I’d gotten over berating the audience for applauding between movements by then; now I’m just happy to learn that we’re all awake. Here’s that review.

                                                                                          

HIS GOLDEN FLUTE sparkling in the spotlight, James Galway dazzled a near-capacity crowd at Proctor's Theatre, where be performed with the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Canada Monday evening.

Galway served as soloist and conductor, and his music alone radiated the charm that the television audience knows from his talk-show appearances. Thanks to that exposure, he is a known quantity on the classical stage and thus draws people who might otherwise think twice about spending ticket money. His program similarly comprised known or accessible pieces, a splendid starting place for the novice coecertgoer.

The first suite from Handel's Water Music was the opener. Galway has a lean but enthusiastic conducting style —  not for him those flailing Bernstein arms — and he shaped his ideas along conventional and acceptible lines. The orchestra responded with appropriate energy, although there were the spotty problems that suggest a not-well-warmed-up group. There were no surprises in this very familiar work until the hornpipe movement busted loose with a wonderfully quirky but ompletely sensible rhythm; Galway probably has an Irish insight other conductors would be wise to learn.

Big Bands are Victorious

THE FIRST BATCH OF V-DISCS shipped to military fighters overseas on Oct. 1, 1943. Less than two years later, we won the war. Many other elements contributed to this victory, of course, but let’s not short-change the power those records must have had.

Mosaic Records celebrated this unique catalogue category with the release in 2024 of a massive set of V-Disc small-group sessions and the promise that a big-band set would follow. It’s here. It’s ten CDs of excellent-sounding music by top-flight bands and a few who never gained that category but should have. 

Right off the bat what invites celebration is the restoration quality. Those discs were meant to be played beside bunk and rack and even out in the field using the spring-wound phonographs that were shipped with the discs (along with packets of extra steel needles). And you got a lot of music: These discs were cut with more grooves per inch than usual to allow for up to six minutes of music on a 12-inch side.

The program continued until May, 1949, at which time the companies producing them destroyed all of their discs and masters. Service men and women were forbidden to bring them home, but with over eight million of those platters circulating overseas, many were bound to find their way back. There are stories of scofflaws having their collections confiscated, and at least one offender did jail time. 

Honey and Steel

From the Classical Vault Dept.: Again (as with last week), going back twenty years, I wrote about two back-to-back concerts that included an orchestra appearance at Proctor’s Theatre, something that now rarely happens at that venue. In any event, the violinist within me was thrilled. I’m a lousy player but a keen fan of the repertory.

                                                                                      

TWO MAGNIFICENT VIOLINISTS appeared within two days of each other in Schenectady, in two significantly contrasting settings of music and hall. Young Arabella Steinbacher blazed through the dazzling Khachaturian concerto surrounded by a large orchestra and witnessed by some 2,000 concertgoers at Proctor’s; Jaime Laredo, a renowned artist with decades of performance credit, played the three autumnal Brahms sonatas in an emotionally riveting partnership with pianist Leon Fleisher in the more intimate setting of Union College’s Memorial Chapel.

Arabella Steinbacher
Photo by Peter Rigaud

Laredo played like honey, Steinbacher like steel; both knew how best to approach the works they’d chosen.

Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto is a big and brassy trifle, replete with modal characteristics springing not only from the composer’s Armenian heritage but also with a fascination for Oriental sounds that found its way into music by Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakoff, among others.

Written in 1940 with lots of advice from violinist David Oistrakh, its fast outer movements are busy – the concluding Rondo is a feast of pyrotechnics – while its middle, an Andante, displays the lyricism that has attracted Khachaturian’s ballet music to hip filmmakers (the love theme from “The Hudsucker Proxy,” for example).

Gambling on Dining

From the Culinary Vault Dept.: Twenty years ago, I reviewed a restaurant in Saratoga Springs that seemed destined for a long run, but didn’t make it very far off the back stretch. After eight years, owner Tim Meaney put the business up for sale, telling the Times Union that winters were a struggle, and it was time to move on. As near as I can figure, the address was next home to a tapas bar calling itself “62 Beekman”; currently, it’s an Italian eatery called Taverna Novo.

                                                                                                

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, a friend of mine ran a drop-in center for kids in a storefront on Saratoga’s Beekman Street. Although he was doing good work, offering a place for teens to engage in meaningful activity, he wasn’t particularly welcomed by the neighborhood. After the program fell apart, he encouraged his board of directors to hang on to the building, predicting that the neighborhood would develop a more artistic identity. They unloaded the building anyway, for a sum they must these days deeply regret.

Because Beekman Street is doing just as my friend predicted, spawning galleries and eateries and attracting a clientele happy to get away from the busy downtown. The Beekman Street Bistro is in a building that, not too long ago, was condemned; its owner, a construction engineer, crafted its reconstruction with ideas and input from Tim Meaney and Dan Spitz, who decided to take a chance on this burgeoning neighborhood and commit to a fine-dining restaurant.

 I‘ve Got a Secret

RED NORVO STARTED HIS JAZZ CAREER playing xylophone, which isn’t a very shouty instrument, but he was forward-thinking and harmonically inventive enough to enhance any ensemble he joined or led. In keeping with his instrument, he also was quietly rebellious. He made most of his rebellious statements through music, as his 1933 trio recordings of “Dance of the Octopus” and Bix Beiderbecke’s “In a Mist” attest, but in 1942 he initiated a different kind of rebellion: He made a (technically) illegal recording.

He’d made many recordings before this date, but they were officially recorded and officially released. But at midnight on July 31, 1942, the official recording industry was shut down by a musicians strike called by union president James C. Petrillo.

Petrillo was a firebrand, so renowned and feared that his name became the punchline for popular radio comedians – and every listener knew who Petrillo was. His argument was that the radio industry was robbing his musicians through a lack of royalty payments on the recordings they aired. And he believed that recordings themselves wiped out some 60 percent of in-person gigs. The strike would end only when the major record companies – RCA Victor, Columbia, and Decca – signed agreements to pay into a special fund.

Dick Baker's Cat

Mark Twain Dept.: It was the fashion, over a century ago, to entertain the public with dialect stories, which could range from the affectionate to the racially savage. This was a characteristic that ranged from stage performers like Chic Sales to writers like Mark Twain (who also took to the stage). Here’s a fine example of Twain’s facility with the genre and familiarity with the mysterious wisdom of cats.

                                                                                                

ONE OF MY COMRADES THERE — another of those victims of eighteen years of unrequited toil and blighted hopes—was one of the gentlest spirits that ever bore its patient cross in a weary exile: grave and simple Dick Baker, pocket-miner of Dead-Horse Gulch. He was forty-six, grey as a rat, earnest, thoughtful, slenderly educated, slouchily dressed and clay-soiled, but his heart was finer metal than any gold his shovel ever brought to light—than any, indeed, that ever was mined or minted.

Drawing by B. Kliban

Whenever he was out of luck and a little downhearted, he would fall to mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own (for where women and children are not, men of kindly impulses take up with pets, for they must love something). And he always spoke of the strange sagacity of that cat with the air of a man who believed in his secret heart that there was something human about it—maybe even supernatural.

I heard him talking about this animal once. He said:

"Gentlemen, I used to have a cat here, by the name of Tom Quartz, which you'd 'a' took an interest in, I reckon—, most anybody would. I had him here eight year—and he was the remarkablest cat I ever see. He was a large grey one of the Tom specie, an' he had more hard, natchral sense than any man in this camp—'n' a power of dignity—he wouldn't let the Gov'ner of Californy be familiar with him.