Lynne Arriale Trio's Exquisite "Estaté"

The Lynne Arriale Trio’s “Estaté” haunts me. I can’t get it out of my head. I don’t want to. It’s an exquisite song – intensely romantic, deliciously blue. Composed in 1960 by Bruno Martino (lyrics by Bruno Brighetti), it became a jazz standard many years ago when João Gilberto recorded a catchy Bossa nova version of it in on his classic 1977 album Amoroso. There have been many renditions of it since. But, for me, the most compelling is the Lynne Arriale Trio’s version on their Live at Montreux (2000). The Trio consists of Lynne Arriale (piano), Jay Anderson (bass), and Steve Davis (drums). Arriale interprets it so ardently, so achingly. You can see the depth of her passion for it in a YouTube video of her Trio performing "Estaté," among other songs, at a 2005 concert in Stuttgart. Great as this Stuttgart variation is, I still prefer the earlier Montreux version. Oh to have been there in person to hear it. The album is the next best thing to being there. I love it.  

Cécile McLorin Salvant / Jerome Kern / Alec Wilder / Lorenz Hart

Last night, searching Cécile McLorin Salvant’s name on YouTube, I found her 2016 “Live in Budapest,” with Renee Rosnes (piano), Rodney Whitaker (bass), and Louis Nash (drums). What a terrific concert! Salvant sings “Easy to Love,” “The Gentleman Is A Dope,” “Never Will I Marry,” “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” “All Through the Night,” “Cry Butterfly, Cry,” among others – all swinging! It whetted my appetite for more Salvant. YouTube is loaded with her videos.

I watched one of her singing “Yesterdays,” accompanied by the Aaron Diehl Trio. Wow! That song is gorgeous, drenched in melancholy. Who wrote it? I couldn’t remember. I looked it up in Alec Wilder’s American Popular Song (1972). Answer: Jerome Kern. Wilder writes, “It is an extraordinarily evocative song, simple in construction, narrow in range (a tenth), and unforgettable.” I agree. Reading Wilder, I got thinking about his writing. He wrote one of my all-time favorite New Yorker reviews – “Orange Juice for One” (October 18, 1976), an assessment of a book of tributes to Lorenz Hart called Thou Swell, Thou Witty. Here’s a sample:

Hart was a contemporary of Ira Gershwin, E. Y. Harburg, John Mercer, Otto Harbach, Dorothy Fields, Cole Porter, Howard Dietz, and Oscar Hammerstein II, After careful examination of the work of these people, I still find myself returning to the two who most please and nourish me: Lorenz Hart and John Mercer. And I believe that the reason for this is by no means that they were such masters of their craft but that in their craft they were vulnerable to the point of self-revelation. And in revealing themselves they also revealed their profound need to put to paper their attitudes toward love, life, irony, absurdity, loneliness, and loss. The other lyricists wrote well, but I never sensed that need, that hunger. I was aware of craft and cleverness, style and polish, but no deep self-involvement.

Wilder knew what he was talking about. He wrote at least two songs that have entered the Great American Songbook: “I’ll Be Around” and “While We’re Young.” I’d love to hear Salvant sing them.  

The Village Vanguard: A Salute

Adam Shatz, in his absorbing “In the Vanguard of Trio Jazz with Micah Thomas” (NYR Daily, May 29, 2020), describes a place I’ve always wanted to visit:

Ever since the Covid-19 era began, I’ve been daydreaming about a basement down a flight of stairs on 7th Avenue South, in the West Village. It’s a room where I’ve spent many late-night hours over the last thirty years. There’s a small bar in back, a stage in front. The tables are packed so closely together that it was probably some kind of hazard even before the pandemic, at least for those who had to navigate between them, taking orders and serving drinks. The green-felt walls are covered with framed photographs of John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Dexter Gordon, Cecil Taylor, and others. It’s not a beautiful room, it’s even a little shabby, but it’s a room dedicated to beauty—the beauty of live jazz at the Village Vanguard.

Shatz goes on to mention some of the trios he’s seen at the Vanguard – “trios led by Tommy Flanagan and Geri Allen (both now deceased), Fred Hersch, Craig Taborn, and Jason Moran.”

One of my favourite trio albums is “The Bill Charlap Trio: Live at the Village Vanguard,” recorded in September, 2003. It contains nine tracks, including Gerry Mulligan’s “Rocker,” Vernon Duke’s “Autumn In New York,” and Harold Arlen’s “My Shining Hour.” Charlap’s rendition of “My Shining Hour” is exquisite. The whole album is exquisite! It puts me there, in that “room dedicated to beauty” – the one and only Village Vanguard.

Nate Chinen on Brad Mehldau

If you’re a fan of Brad Mehldau’s gorgeous album series The Art of the Trio, as I am, you’ll likely enjoy the chapter in Nate Chinen’s Playing Changes titled “From This Moment On.” Chinen praises Mehldau’s “virtuoso style – a confluence of silvery precision, ambidextrous ease, floating equilibrium, and courtly lyricism.” Note that last element. “Courtly lyricism” is exactly what I most treasure in Mehldau’s playing. It’s an ingredient glaringly absent from the music of most of the other jazz artists Chinen celebrates (e.g., John Zorn, Steve Coleman, Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer). He appears to favor the jagged, lurching, screeching, churning, dissonant deconstructions of postmillennial jazz. His chapter on Mehldau is a tonic exception. 

Bill Charlap's Sparkling "Uptown, Downtown"

September was a banner month. Two of my heroes produced new works. John McPhee published Draft No. 4. And Bill Charlap released Uptown, Downtown. I’ve already posted my response to McPhee’s superb book (see here, here, and here). Today, I want to comment on Charlap’s brilliant album. The choice of material is inspired – Gerry Mulligan’s “Curtains,” Tommy Wolf and Fran Landesman’s “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” Stephen Sondheim’s “Uptown, Downtown,” Isham Jones and Gus Kahn’s “The One I Love Belongs to Someone Else,” Michael Leonard and Herbert Martin’s “I’m All Smiles,” Rodgers and Hart’s “There’s a Small Hotel,” Gigi Gryce’s “Satellite,” Jim Hall’s “Bon Ami,” and Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady.” Each number is stocked with surprising notes and rich melodic imaginings. Charlap’s playing is fresh, sparkling, and perfect. He’s an improviser of the greatest subtlety and invention. His sidemen – bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kenny Washington – are excellent. My favorite cut is “Curtains,” a gorgeous, swinging, shimmering thing that went straight into my personal anthology of great piano jazz.

May 22, 2017, Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Fred Kaplan’s “Kind of New,” a profile of jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant. Reading it, I was astounded to learn that Salvant considers herself “not a natural performer.” For me, one of her most compelling qualities is her naturalness. I’m a huge fan of her singing, particularly her renditions of American Songbook classics like Richard Rodgers’ “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” and Henry Warren’s “I Only Have Eyes For You” (see my “Cécile McLorin Salvant: The Sound of Surprise,” March 10, 2013). In Kaplan’s piece, Salvant says of her brilliant accompanist, Aaron Diehl, “It was exciting to see somebody play Fats Waller with a fresh take yet very much in the spirit of the music. I’d been trying to do this for years—take something old and make it yours but still authentic—and here was someone who’d figured it out.” Take something old and make it yours but still authentic. That’s what Salvant does, too. Kaplan’s “Kind of New” is an arresting portrait of a truly original jazz artist. I devoured it.

Tony Bennett and Bill Charlap's "The Silver Lining"

If Whitney Balliett, the great New Yorker jazz critic, were alive today, I’m sure he’d be savoring Tony Bennett and Bill Charlap’s superb new album, The Silver Lining. Balliett, who died in 2007, was a fan of both Bennett and Charlap. In his classic profile of Bennett, “A Quality That Lets You In” (The New Yorker, January 7, 1974; included in Balliett’s 1979 collection American Singers), he wrote,

He [Bennett] drives a ballad as intensely and intimately as Sinatra. He can be a lilting, glancing jazz singer. He can be a low-key, searching supper-club performer. But Bennett’s voice binds all his vocal selves together. It is pitched slightly higher than Sinatra’s (it was once a tenor, but it has deepened over the years), and it has a rich, expanding quality that is immediately identifiable. It has a joyous quality, a pleased, shouting-within quality.

Bennett was forty-eight when Balliett wrote those words. Now he’s eighty-nine. Amazingly, Balliett’s description still applies. If anything, Bennett’s voice is even richer now than it was in 1974, when Balliett profiled him. And it still has that “joyous quality” that Balliett mentions. Listening to him sing Jerome Kern’s gorgeous songs on The Silver Lining, I’m struck by his expressiveness; he sounds like he really believes the lyrics he’s singing.

Bennett and Charlap’s singer-accompanist relationship seems perfect. To my knowledge this is the first time they’ve performed together. Charlap seems to intuit Bennett’s every melodic move, embracing them, celebrating them. He’s a great jazz pianist. Balliett thought so, too. Here’s some of what he said about him in his wonderful “The Natural” (The New Yorker, April 19, 1999):

His ballad numbers are unique. He may start with the verse of the song, played ad lib, then move into the melody chorus. He does not rhapsodize. Instead, he improvises immediately, rearranging the chords and the melody line, and using a relaxed, almost implied beat. He may pause for a split second at the end of this chorus and launch a nodding, swinging single-note solo chorus, made up of irregularly placed notes – some off the beat and some behind the beat – followed by connective runs, and note clusters. He closes with a brief, calming recap of the melody. His ballads are meditations on songs, homages to their composers and lyricists. He constantly reins in his up-tempo numbers. He has formidable technique, but he never shows off, even when he will let loose epic runs, massive staccato chords, racing upper-register tintinnabulations, and, once in a while, some dazzling counterpoint, his hands pitted against each other. His sound shines; each note is rounded. Best of all, in almost every number, regardless of its speed, he leaves us a phrase, a group of irregular notes, an ardent bridge that shakes us.

That “His sound shines; each note is rounded” is inspired. It exactly describes Charlap’s playing on The Silver Lining. The album is sublime.

Cécile McLorin Salvant - The Sound of Surprise

Interpretation of the great American Songbook is overdue for major renovation. I know just the singer for the job. Her name is Cécile McLorin Salvant. I first learned about her in a “Goings On About Town” note on Lincoln Center’s “American Songbook” series: “The swinging singer Cécile McLorin Salvant, who has a vocal warmth to match her rhythmic ease, is a vibrant neo-traditionalist who makes the old new again” (“Jazz and Standards,” The New Yorker, February 4, 2013). Not recognizing the name, I went to iTunes to see if there were any samples of her work. I found a 2010 album called Cécile, containing ten songs. I decided to buy it. I’ve been listening to it ever since. Whoever wrote that anonymous New Yorker blurb knows what he/she is talking about. “Swinging” is exactly the right word to describe Salvant’s singing, along with “delightful,” “inventive,” “agile,” “rangy,” “magnetic,” “calm,” and “assured.” Her rhythms and inflections and accents change continually. Her voice seems capable of endless colors and timbres. Her dynamics are consummate. On Cécile, she sings an exquisite version of Gigi Gryce’s “Social Call.” Ben Ratliff, reviewing her performance at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, says, “She radiates authority” (“A Young Vocalist Tweaks Expectations,” The New York Times, November 2, 2012). Ratliff’s piece is illustrated with a video of Salvant singing Richard Rodgers’s “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.” What a mesmerizing rendition! She perfectly expresses that great song’s mysterioso quality. There’s a fascinating YouTube video of her singing Harry Warren’s “I Only Have Eyes For You” in which she repeats “disappear,” in the line “You are here, so am I / Maybe millions of people go by / But they all disappear from view / And I only have eyes for you,” an astounding eight times. It’s an amazing interpretation. Salvant’s singing has what Whitney Balliett identified as jazz’s defining characteristic – the sound of surprise. 

Credit: The above photograph of Cécile McLorin Salvant is by Tony Cenicola; it appears in The New York Times (November 2, 2012), as an illustration for Ben Ratliff's “A Young Vocalist Tweaks Expectations.”