Prize-winning jazz from Denmark

Roy Haynes: My Shining Hour

Roy Haynes, drums
Tomas Franck, tenor sax
Thomas Clausen, piano
Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, bass

This album is from a concert in Copenhagen on the occasion of Roy Haynes winning the 1994 Jazzpar Prize. The prize, organized by trumpeter Arnvid Meyer from 1990 to 2004, came with 200,000 Danish Kroner (worth then, I believe, around $30,000), from the sponsorship of the Scandinavian Tobacco Company. Haynes is in fine form here, obviously enjoying the attention, and the spirited playing of his Scandinavian side-men. All three are standouts, with impressive playing from Swedish tenor player Tomas Franck, sensitive work by one of the top Danish pianists, Thomas Clausen, and most importantly, the superb bass support of Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, known to many jazz lovers as NHØP.

Europe has been a major destination for American jazz greats for a long time. It was a welcome respite from Jim Crow for African-American musicians, and from the 1960s on, a return to what it was like when jazz was truly a popular music. You can tell from the audience response at the end of the final track that these are dedicated, even rabid, fans. It's great to have such an important concert easily available, very well mastered, and documented with Storyville's usual thoroughness.



This album will be released on March 13, 2020, which just happens to be Roy Haynes' 95th birthday!

Reliably great music from Budapest

Michel Pignolet de Montéclair: Jephté, Tragédie, Paris, 1737

I'm so excited every time I see a new recording on Glossa that features the Purcell Choir and the Orfeo Orchestra, conducted by Gyorgy Vashegyi. I've reviewed four in the past: Rameau in 2019, and again in 2018; and Mondonville in both 2017 and 2016. I've come to expect the highest level of both choral and solo singing, the most stylish, Historically Informed orchestral playing, with superb engineering and really excellent supporting documentation, including libretti and good English translations.

Now it's the turn of Michel Pignolet de Montéclair, and I can encapsulate my review in a single phrase: more of the same! Montéclair is hardly a household name, and I admit never having heard his music before. I know: I don't spend enough time listening to the music of the French Baroque, which is quite surprising considering how enamoured I am of Rameau, Lully, Charpentier and Mondonville. In any case, this is a superb tragic opera, a huge hit from its first performance in 1732 through many revivals (over one hundred performances at the Paris Opéra and the Queen's Concerts at Versailles, over thirty years). And it's no wonder, considering the splendid orchestral and choral effects the composer produces. As well, there was some controversy driving the strong interest in this work, the only operatic work from the periodf based on Biblical stories. I never worry too much about the story in these kinds of stage spectaculars, since there's so much great music to move things along.

This album will be released on March 6, 2020

Not this time

Joseph Anton Steffan: Concertos for Harpsichord

Josef Antonín Štěpán, known in Vienna as Joseph Anton Steffan, was born in 1726, six years before Haydn, and died in 1797, six years after Mozart. He's part of the extraordinary composing flowering in Bohemia in the 18th century, with greats like the Stamitzes, the Bendas, Richter, Dusek, Mysliveček and Rosetti, not to mention the great Christoph Willibald Gluck. After listening to these four rather slight concertos, I wouldn't hesitate to relegate Steffan to a second tier in the Bohemian Composers' League. This is in spite of their fleeting charms and occasional erudite flashes. Perhaps it says at least as much about the very high level of his countrymen's music than any deficiencies of Steffan's. Harpsichordist Edita Keglerova and the Hipocondria Ensemble give their best efforts, which are significant, but they're eventually undone by the slightly washed-out music, which a few times veers close to the banal.

Everyone hopes to hit gold when they come across an obscure release like this; I know I do. Hope springs eternal, but I have to say, yet again, "not this time".

This album will be released on March 6, 2020.

A heroic interpretation of the spirit of Bach

J. S. Bach: The Art of the Fugue

Tatyana Nikolayeva is a legendary pianist with a bit of a cult following, especially for her Bach and Shostakovich (the two were close friends; he wrote the great Preludes & Fugues op. 87 for her). This is a live recording from the Sibelius Academy in Helskini on April 26, 1993, a month before her 69th birthday. Nikolayeva had a huge repertoire: "Sometimes I think I know practically everything that has been written for the piano!", she says, laughing, in a 1991 interview. On top of this, she had the habit of playing by memory. This shows in this recording, not necessarily in the few minor flubs, but because there is a real feeling that there's a well-thought-out, cohesive plan to her interpretation, the result of significant mental as well as physical work. This plan involves the pianist taking full advantage of the capabilities of her Steinway, without any special attention to Historically Informed Practices, but complete and absolute attention to the spirit of the music.

Just over six months later, in November 1993, Nikolayeva was playing the Shostakovich Preludes & Fugues at a recital in San Francisco, when she suffered a stroke. Remarkably, she managed to play until the intermission, but she was dead ten days later. This recording, with its poignant final fugue unfinished at Bach's own death, is a superb memorial.

Photo: Co Broerse, Amsterdam, 1990

This album will be released on March 6, 2020

Dizzy Con Alma

Dizzy Gillespie Quintet: Live at the Liederhalle Stuttgart, Kongresshalle Frankfurt, 1961

The jazz archives of SWR include thousands of hours of audio (plus video) of jazz concerts recorded in Stuttgart, Baden-Baden, Mainz and other German cities, and it's encouraging that more of this music is making its way onto disc and the streaming services. I'm especially interested in jazz from the 50s and 60s, so this new release is right up my alley. It includes songs from two concerts: at the Liederhalle Stuttgart on November 27, 1961, and the Kongresshalle Frankfurt two days later. The band is Dizzy Gillespie's great ensemble with Lalo Schifrin on piano, Leo Wright on alto sax & flute, Bob Cunningham on bass and Mel Lewis on drums.

This is absolutely marvellous music. Duke Ellington's The Mooche is an excellent song to introduce these concerts, since it gives each of musicians a chance to shine, and together to show off their tight ensemble. There's transcendent cool from Leo Wright's flute in Willow Weep for Me, ably supported by Schifrin, Cunningham and Lewis. Dizzy brings soul to a very fine version of Vernon Duke's I Can't Get Started*, occasionally making way for Wright's alto sax, and allowing Schifrin to put down some really interesting piano chords along the way. Dizzy's own composition Kush gets a hard-driving, percussion-heavy arrangement that sounds more than halfway to something from Dizzy's Big Band. Kudos here to Mel Lewis, but of course so much of this comes from the energy and passion of Dizzy's trumpet. Dizzy provides comic relief in his fun novelty number Oops-Shee-Be-Doo-Be.

It's the two takes of Con Alma that impressed me the most, though. In his introduction to the version from the Frankfurt concert Dizzy makes a great joke: he says "the name of this tune is Con Alma, which means, In Spanish." - beat - big laugh from the audience. It actually means, of course, With Soul, and there's plenty of that here: soul and musicianship and passion.

Lalo Schifrin & Dizzy Gillespie in 1961, at the Monterey Jazz Festival.
A great photograph by Jim Marshall

* Ira Gershwin wrote the lyrics, by the way

This album will be released on March 20, 2020.

Music of unbridled joy for #Beethoven250

Beethoven: The Complete Piano Concertos

"The sonatas were pursuits of inner truth, the symphonies pursuits of the highest qualities in humanity, the piano concertos pursuits of unbridled joy." In a heartfelt essay in the liner booklet, Stewart Goodyear notes that he waited to record the Beethoven Piano Concertos: "... it had to be at a time when I felt that I knew deeply what universal joy and delight felt like." This joy and delight is clear to hear in this 3-disc album with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Andrew Constantine, from Orchid Classics.

When we think about joy and Beethoven, it's Friedrich Schiller's Ode to Joy that comes to mind:

Joy, beautiful spark of Divinity,
Daughter of Elysium,
We enter, drunk with fire,
Heavenly One, thy sanctuary!

Schiller's poem was published in 1785, and revised in 1808. In between, Beethoven wrote the first four of his piano concertos; the fifth was begun in 1809. Beethoven's own apotheosis of joy came, of course, with the Schiller setting in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony in 1822/24. But I love Stewart Goodyear's characterization of this wonderful music as being in some way essentially joyful. It's the serious, grumpy stereotype of Beethoven himself that Goodyear is fighting here. Unlucky in love, navigating family difficulties, grappling with political disasters that seem as dire as our own today, experiencing the vagaries of the "gig economy" as one of the very first freelance composers, and stricken with deafness in this very period; we can feel for Beethoven today. We can even imagine a black cloud hanging over his head. Especially with the late sonatas and string quartets to come, we look to Beethoven for spiritual and aesthetic resolutions to his own pain and suffering. "The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing",  Walter Benjamin once said. But listen to the music, especially in these performances, and you'll hear incredible verve and passion, as Beethoven reaps the harvest of his own "pursuit of happiness" in his art, if not in his personal life. Perhaps it was the Mozartian model - Beethoven's 3rd Concerto in C minor owes so much to Mozart's C minor Concerto K. 491 - that helped Beethoven get over his own hump on his way to happiness.

These are special performances by this team assembled by Orchid Classics: the assured and stylish playing of the BBC National Orchestra Wales shows that conductor Andrew Constantine and this fine Canadian pianist (why are there so many fine Canadian pianists, by the way?) are on the same page. I look forward to listening to these discs in regular rotation during this Beethoven Year, along with the amazing set from Richard Goode & Ivan Fischer, the equally fine recordings of Mitsuko Uchida & Kurt Sanderling, and, of course, the Wilhelm Kempff & Ferdinand Leitner set which was my first experience of this marvellous music.



This album will be released on March 13, 2020