Saturday Music Club: third stream music Bachanalia

Nina Simone: Love Me or Leave Me


The Modern Jazz Quartet: "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme" BWV 645  


The Swingle Singers: Sinfonia dalla Partita n°2 in DOm BWV 826 


Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan: The Way You Look Tonight


The Modern Jazz Quartet: The Golden Striker


Brubeck Quartet (1956 version): Two-Part Contention 


The Modern Jazz Quartet and the Swingle Singers: Little David's Fugue


Jacques Loussier: Air on a G String


Mulligan Quartet: Festive Minor

Saturday Music Club on Monday: some soundtrack music

from Who Fears the Devil? (aka The Legend of Hillbilly John): 
"The Devil" by Hoyt Axton


from the television series Legacy (which used it as opening theme), 
"The Mummer's Dance" by Loreena McKennitt (longer edit/"album cut" with best audio)


"Walk On Boy" (Doc Watson's recording is the soundtrack for the short film starting at 4:17)


The Dillards and Maggie Peterson: "There Is a Time" (from The Andy Griffith Show):


"Chove Chuva" performed by Miriam Makeba, Sivuca, Leopoldo Fleming, Jr. and William Salter...perhaps cheating a bit since this from a concert for Swedish television, but I think I'll forgive myself...


"Unsquare Dance" by the Brubeck Quartet featuring Joe Morello (used as the opening theme to Emma Thompson's series Thompson as well as providing the soundtrack to this number taken from an Australian concert program, The Craven Filter Special):


Charles Mingus in Mingus: Charles Mingus 1968 (a documentary)


please see also:
Sunday's "Forgotten" Soundtracks: 3rd Streamers John Lewis (ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW) and Dave Brubeck (MR. BROADWAY) for crime drama, David Amram's Beat

Dave Brubeck, December 6, 1920-December 5, 2012

The last studio album, devoted to original compositions (save a reunion album they would record in 1976 for A&M), that the Paul Desmond/Joe Morello/Gene Wright quartet would record, 1966. This was the most famous and successful quartet, performing from 1958-66.

Dave Brubeck: “They Said I Was Too Far Out” by Ralph Gleason — 8/8/1957 An Exclusive Online Extra

A live recording of the quartet's arrangement of music from his oratorio, The Light in the Wilderness...one of the reasons for the end of the Desmond/Morello/Wright quartet, so that Brubeck could write some of his longer works, most with some spiritual import.


Iola Brubeck was the usual lyricist for her husband's songs...such as this from the song cycle, The Real Ambassadors. Louis Armstrong sings lead, supported by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross on "They Say I Look Like God."


An instrumental version of a work written in response to the murders at Kent State and Jackson State, Truth Is Fallen. This piece of the longer work is called, simply "Truth." Gerry Mulligan was actually not a "guest" here, but a regular member of the Brubeck/Mulligan quartet, with Allen Dawson and Jack Six.


The Octet was made up of largely of jazz players who were fellow students of Darius Milhaud, as Brubeck was, and was sort of a West Coast parallel to what the Gil Evans/John Lewis/Gerry Mulligan "Birth of the Cool" group was doing in NYC.


Brubeck and his sons performed for a while as Two Generations of Brubeck...this is an even larger, if slightly less purely Brubeckian, assembly.


A latter-day quartet version of one of the movements from Howard Brubeck's Dialogues.


And from the initial recording of Dave Brubeck's brother's composition, by the Brubeck Quartet and the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Leonard Bernstein.


The final track from the suite Miro Reflections, the lp having been released as Time Further Out...my default choice as a kid for my favorite record.


Teo Macero on how "Take Five" became a hit.

Jazz A/V: two hours plus of jazz, JAZZ CASUAL and more

There was a sporadic presence of jazz on television as I grew to love the music...in the 1970s one might catch a performance on The Tonight Show (or, more infrequently, on Saturday Night Live) and there was (starting in 1983, though somehow I remember it being earlier), somewhat intermittently it seemed, Oscar Brown, Jr.'s series From Jumpstreet, or the very occasional appearance of jazz musicians on PBS's other music series such as Soundstage or Austin City Limits. The small but persistent efflorescence of jazz programming from the 1960s was gone, and no one seemed too interested in repackaging it or even simply repeating it...the innovations of the latter 1980s, such as Sunday Night/Night Music, hadn't arrived yet. When Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was one of the more reliable sources of jazz music on television, you knew things had reached a pretty pass. So, here, after the complete presentation of a notable third stream work I'd missed over the years, are two episodes of Jazz Casual, jazz critic and Rolling Stone co-founder Ralph Gleason's NET (proto-PBS) series, bookended by some European presentations of comparable heroes of mine.

Dizzy Gillespie, soloist: J. J. Johnson, composer; Gunther Schuller, conductor: Perceptions




The Thelonious Monk Quartet in Denmark:


Jazz Casual with Ralph Gleason:
The Modern Jazz Quartet:



To make up for the disappearance of this, here's the MJQ on the UK series Jazz 625:

  
And also the full episode with the Bill Evans Trio:


The Dave Brubeck Quartet:

(followed by a much-later Paul Desmond performance and a 1962 performance by the Shorty Rogers band, apparently for the Steve Allen series Jazz Scene USA; elsewhere credited: Lou Levy on piano, Gary Peacock, bass, Larry Bunker, drums, Gary Lefebvre on woodwinds and Rogers as flugelhornist).

Max Roach Group: Freedom Now Suite (for German television, 1964)

Incoming!

Newly rec'd these last several days:
*"Vin Packer" (Marijane Meaker): Something in the Shadows/Intimate Victims and Whisper His Sin/The Evil Friendship (Stark House)...I wonder if "Anne Perry" and "Packer" have ever conversed over that last, like the film Heavenly Creatures based on the adolescent crime "Perry"/Hulme was involved in.
*Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Jon Breen is going semiannual with his column. Alas, but thirty years of monthly, or nearly monthly, columns is a lot to keep asking for more on top of...
*Fantasy & Science Fiction. Interesting Lucius Shepard take on the film Monsters

*T.V. Olsen: The Stalking Moon. The Leisure edition.
*Michael Chabon: Gentlemen of the Road. Or, "Jews with Swords" as Chabon would've had it, he notes. Managed not pick up either of these two before, and am amused the Chabon was published under the Del Rey Books imprint.


*Ecotone
*Asimov's Science Fiction...it is getting to be increasingly difficult to find new issues of the fiction magazines in the big box stores, my usual source for them...I haven't been able to pick up the new issue of The Strand or Cemetery Dance or Conjunctions for a bit, for example...
*Cinema Retro. But picking up a few odd items where and when I can...

From the mailbox:
*Harper's has a rather good short story from Daniel Mason, no relation, and another opportunity for William Vollmann to make an ass of himself, even though his cover essay's subject, the homeless in his affluent California city, is an important one which doesn't lend itself to masturbatory self-celebration...which hasn't ever stopped him before.

*Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, the humor issue
*Esquire, the typically trivial issue (though I suppose one can appreciate, for example, cheesecake photos of Sarah Shahi...among others...though not in this issue...)
*Sight and Sound, the attempt to defend auteurism issue (which is why the feature articles in the magazine tend to be weak, of course)

Books strongly considered: the newish Vonnegut collection of short stories; the newest two Joyce Carol Oates collections and her widowhood memoir; Peter Beagle's anthology The Hidden History of Fantasy.

In the secondhand store: a few annuals (O. Henry and Best American Short Stories), a couple of recent issues of The Gettysburg Review, a book club edition of Mazzeo's Hauntings, an Anthony Boucher anthology, a Peter De Vries novel. Spoiling myself, as with finally buying the cd of this:


The Brubeck Quartet album that Joe Morello told me he thought was their best recording, At Carnegie Hall.

December's "Forgotten" Music (and others' links!): SUNDAY NIGHT/NIGHT MUSIC on NBC-TV/syndicated; Brubeck Quartet on CBS Radio

The best television music program, at least on late-night television that I'm aware of, probably will remain the 1988-1990 Sunday Night, later known (to allow syndication customers more freedom of scheduling for this series, which was shown on NBC "owned and operated" stations and syndicated to individual stations in other cities/markets) as Night Music. The Wikipedia page for this series is pretty damned good, and cites the cast of the best episode of this often-brilliant series as including the Sun Ra Arkestra, Al Green, the Pixies, Arthur Baker, Sister Carol and Syd Straw, doing their things individually and then in various combinations. Sadly, the Arkestra, the Pixies, et al. backing up Al Green doing "Let's Stay Together" doesn't seem to be online, and no one has released a legit home video of the series, which was hosted in its first season by saxophonist David Sanborn and ex-Squeeze pianist Jools Holland, and in its second by Sanborn alone; Holland has since returned to the UK and conducts a similar, but not quite as engaging, series called Later , which currently can be seen in the States on the Ovation cable channel. However, from the same episode, here's some of the Sun Ra Arkestra's set, including Al Green on cowbell in the closing credits (and since this video has since been set to "private"/restricted access, here's another example from the episode below it):



From that episode, the Pixies' "Monkey Gone to Heaven" and "Tame":


Meanwhile, earlier in that season was the episode with Philip Glass, Loudon Wainwright III, Pere Ubu and Deborah Harry...Harry's "Calmarie":


...and, in duller audio and blearier video, alas, her "I Want That Man":


...and Pere Ubu's closer, "Waiting for Mary," with Harry and Night Music Band members backing them:



Meanwhile, the Acrobat Music Group collection of airchecks from CBS Radio concerts by the Dave Brubeck/Paul Desmond quartets of 1956 and 1957 demonstrate very well how Not to introduce a band, as the CBS staff announcer is a klutz, at best...the 1956 quartet featuring the fine Joe Dodge on drums performing in two sets from the Basin Street East in New York City (the latter's recording is notably crisper than the earlier's), and, from Chicago's Blue Note nightclub (and with a notable but not intolerable drop in audio quality), the 1957 version featuring the transcendant Joe Morello on percussion, with both groups rounded out by Norman Bates (possibly the inspiration for Robert Bloch to name his most famous character, perhaps even from hearing one of these airchecks...and, no doubt, the source of endless ribbing for Bates very shortly thereafter..."No cutting contests with you, Norman..."), as Gene Wright, the bassist for the quartet's most popular and innovative years, would join in 1958 (though, as the booklet for this disc notes, Morello and Wright were on hand for a 1956 radio broadcast with Leonard Bernstein, so clearly the most memorable quartet was foreshadowed). The big treat here is a fine improvisation, "A Minor Thing," which as far as the packagers know was never again recorded by any version of the quartet. But despite some noisy audience members on a couple of tracks around the edges, the playing is uniformly impressive here, and it's a very pleasant set of recordings to have, whether a confirmed fan such as myself, or someone wanting a sense of what this group was about, as it moved from success to (occasionally controversial) megastardom in jazz.
Track List:
Theme (The Duke) and Intro #1
Stardust
Gone With The Wind
Stompin’ for Mili
Out of Nowhere
A Minor Thing
In Your Own Sweet Way
The Trolley Song
Intro and Theme #2
Love Walked In
Here Lies Love
All the Things You Are
Theme and Intro #3
I’m in Dancing Mood
The Song is You

For more of this month's "Forgotten" music, please see Scott Parker's blog...only it seems Scott has taken a vacation from hosting the links, so here're the other FM links I'm aware of:

Bill Crider: recitation records (as one of the predecessors of rap?--perhaps, as with opera recitative, by example, but less directly so than talking blues and jazz and poetry recordings)
Jerry House: Cisco Houston and collaborators
Randy Johnson: Surfing with the Alien (and more), Joe Satriani
George Kelley: Come and Get It: The Best of Apple Records
Evan Lewis: "The Lone Teen Ranger" and other "Jerry Landis" (early Paul Simon) recordings (as Jerry House notes, Simon and Garfunkel first recorded as "Tom and Jerry")
Charlie Ricci: Festival of the Heart by John Boswell (well, close enough to a FM selection!)--likewise:
Patti Abbott: "Am I Blue?" by Hoagy Carmichael (and, slightly unfortunately musically, Lauren Bacall)