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.