**** – Page 16 – musicophilesblog – From Keith Jarrett to Johannes Brahms

Gentle Ben – Ben Webster & Tete Montoliu

Finally writing about Jazz again

I’ve been a bit disappointed by the Jazz releases of the recent months, I’ve been checking out pretty much every new album on my streaming service, but there weren’t a lot of new albums that raised my curiosity.

So let’s go back to the classics and talk about two not very well-known artists that both were outstanding musicians.

Ben Webster

If you ask Jazz fans about well-known Sax players, you get Bird, Rollins, Coltrane. Does anybody mention Webster? Yes, when you ask them, but he’s clearly not top of mind.

This is really a pity. He has a very unique sound, full, with a lot of “air”. I’m not usually very good at identifying saxophone players at their sound, but Webster is very easily recognizable.

He is as much at ease in uptempo as he is in beautiful ballads.

I could have mentioned several Ben Webster albums here, e.g. Ben Webster Meets Oscar Peterson, Coleman Hawkins Encounters Ben Webster, or Soulville, all classic Verve albums from the late 1950s.

However, I’ve chosen another one, recorded in 1973, one of his very last albums. Why?

Tete Montoliu

Well, to allow me to write about Tete Montoliu, another not as well-known musician, from Barcelona. No idea why this excellent piano player didn’t become more famous? Maybe because his main career was in the 1970s, when everybody was listening to Fusion?

Gentle Ben

Ben Webster Tete Montoliu Trio Gentle Ben

Whatever the reasons were, this album is proof that both artists were outstanding musicians.

Take the starter track, Ben’s Blues. 9 minutes of pure concentrated swing.

The Man I Love is one of my favorite Jazz ballads. I’ve rarely heard it better played than here. You really can hear Billie Holiday in his saxophone voice.

Or Don’t Blame Me, another beautiful slow ballad, where you get all the nuances of Websters amazing sound.

This album really is a lot of fun all the way.

My rating: 4 stars

You can still download it here (Qobuz), unfortunately, my favorite download and streaming provider seems to be in major financial trouble and may not be around any more in the near future, which would be a pity.

Cavalli: L’Amore Innamorato – Christina Pluhar’s new album

Francesco Cavalli

I actually thought I knew my composers reasonably well, even more obscure ones, but Cavalli was new to me. I’m probably not the only one, this is one of the composers that was known only to early music

So I was a bit surprised to see two new recordings on this Venetian composer coming out at pretty much the same time, Mariana Flores Heroines of the Venetian Baroque (which good excellent reviews in the French press by the way), and also from Christina Pluhar’s early music ensemble Arpeggiata.

Cavalli was a singer and Monteverdi protégée who later started writing his own operas. At his time, he was famous enough tube noticed by Louis XIV’s Cardinal Mazarin to play his operas at the wedding of the Sun King. (That’s probably relatively speaking even better than being invited to play at Kimye’s wedding these days. But I digress.)

L’amore innamorato (Erato 2015)

Christina Pluhar’s ensemble L’Arpeggiata has released some great albums, although the recent ones, especially the “jazzy” Purcell, were reviewed rather controversially.

I haven’t yet seen any reviews on this new Cavalli album, but I think this will be less controversial, as was their initial Monteverdi Teatro d’Amore album from 2009.

It is basically a lot of fun. The beautiful voice of the Spanish soprano Nuria Rial (helped by Hana Blažíková) is a big part of the fun, but Pluhar’s early music ensemble really is playing with a lot of dedication here.

The program is a best-of of Cavalli’s operas (apparently he wrote at least 24), and this is probably a good thing, as following a full early baroque opera seria can sometimes be a bit tedious.

No boredom here, this is thoroughly enjoyable. I suggest you check it out! I’ve added a Youtube sample below.

My rating: 4 stars

You can download it here (Qobuz) or here (HDtracks).

UPDATE November 22: Alexandra Coghlan reviewed this album on Sinfinimusic and gave it 5 stars.

Keith Jarrett: La Scala

Keith Jarrett’s Live Albums

Keith Jarrett and his solo piano concerts are legendary.

If Wikipedia is to be trusted, his Köln Concert is the best-selling solo and piano album in the history, with more than 3.5M albums sold. This may not be much by Taylor Swift standards, but for Jazz, where albums usually selling a some thousands of albums, this number is just mind-boggling.

And what is probably even more mind-boggling is that the Köln Concert is not a one hit wonder, but Jarrett has turned out dozens of solo concert albums in the last thirty years, and usually nearly all of them are worth having.

I’ve started this blog writing about the lucky chance I had to see Jarrett live earlier this year, and it is truly an outstanding experience.

In my 25 Essential Jazz albums post, I’ve promised to myself that I’ll eventually review all of his live solo albums.

This will be a challenging task, but well, you’ve got to have ambitions in life. Let’s see how long this journey is going to take.

La Scala (ECM 1997)

Every journey has got to start somewhere. I rather randomly chose La Scala for a start. Why? Well, the cover is beautiful, and it is probably one of the lesser known albums.

La Scala was recorded (you would have guessed) in Milan’s famous opera house, in 1995, and released in 1997. Apparently, this is the first time a solo jazz concert was hosted in these illustrious walls.

The formal structure of the concert is very simple, you have “Part I” (approx 45 min) and Part II, adding 28 more minutes.

Part I evolves very slowly over time. it reminds me of a large river maeandering slowly and majestically. You have time to let your mind wander around while listening to this. In a way, this nearly becomes meditation music, but this is Jarrett, so you can rest assured that you won’t get bored, instead you just keep floating with the river.

Part II starts a bit randomly. This is the style I personally don’t really like that much, I just get lost without a clear melody and rhythm. Well luckily for me he doesn’t overdo the randomness, and structure reemerges rather quickly after around 4 minutes or so. Unlike part I, this part has some much faster flows, and while part I was focused on chords, here you often just get a chain of individual notes. Around 10 min in, the character changes again, chords reappear, and a melodic structure reemerges.

And in my personal opinion, he’s really saving the best for last. The encore is “Over the Rainbow”, in a very simple, minimalistic approach. I’ve mentioned previously how much I love this song, and I’m not disappointed here either.

My rating: 4 stars (not the most essential of Jarrett’s solo albums, but we’re really talking from a very high standard here, this is still better than 95% of other solo piano albums out there).

You can download it here (Qobuz) or here (HDTracks)

Rachel Podger’s Magnificent Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

When I was young and just started listening to classical music, I had a slight disdain for Mozart. “Too easy”, for kids, or similar stereotypes.

How wrong I was. Sure, pretty much every single Mozart piece has something immediately pleasing to it, something that even a non-classical music listener usually easily grasps, and mostly likes.

What I completely missed how hard it is to make something sound easy AND interesting at the same time. The more I discovered the music of Mozart’s now mostly forgotten contemporaries (Stamitz, Salieri, Michael Haydn, etc.) , the more you discover what is really missing there and what makes Mozart’s music so unique.

Mozart’s violin sonatas

When you think about chamber music, and the very simple but elegant form of violin sonatas, usually people think of Beethoven first, with his famous Kreutzer sonata, or sometimes Brahms (see my review of Brahms sonatas with Isabelle Faust here).

Mozart isn’t the first composer that springs to mind when talking about this genre. Probably this is partially due that quite a number of them were written when he was really young. Luckily, he stuck to this form throughout his life, and ended up writing 36 of them.

Rachel Podger

I’m a big fan of Rachel Podger. She is usually focusing on Baroque music and has recorded some outstanding albums here (more about this later on this blog).

However, she also ventures into Viennese classical music. And how well she does. She has recorded the complete Mozart sonatas in a total of 8 volumes. She plays here with Gary Cooper, who plays a beautiful fortepiano.

Let me arbitrarily talk about vol. 2 here, but honestly, all 8 volumes are worth getting.

On each volume Podger mixes more mature works with some of Mozart’s very early works (e.g. KV7 here). And while it is clearly evident that this is not mature Mozart (the boy was approximately 8 years old when he wrote this, and probably helped by his father), even this one is worth discovering.

But you also get the outstanding KV481 on this album which dates from the same time of his great Da Ponte operas (Don Giovanni, Figaro etc.).

As an additional bonus, Channel Classics is a label that care a lot about recording quality, and this is one more example of it.

My rating: 4 stars (5 stars+ playing, but the inclusion of the early sonatas gives 1 star off, making it just not AS essential as some other works).

You can get it in it’s native recording format of DSD here (Native DSD), note that not all players do support this format. Otherwise you can also purchase the full 8 CD box here much cheaper if you prefer physical media (Prestoclassical). At this point in time, there’s even a special offer ongoing.

The Legacy of the Jazz Messengers (6): Freddie Hubbard’s Hub-Tones

I’ve a little bit neglecting my Jazz Messengers Mini-Series, don’t really know why. Maybe it is because I consider Freddie Hubbard’s albums for example as just a little bit less essential than the artists I’ve written about so far. Well, anyway, here we go again:

Freddie Hubbard

Freddie Hubbard is considered among musicians as one of the trumpet legends. He probably is one of the typical “musician’s musician”. He has, as my title indicates, played with the Jazz Messengers, but has played with pretty much every well-known Jazz musician of the period, be it John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, you name it. He also plays on The Blues And The Abstract Truth, one of my 25 Essential Jazz albums.

Hub-Tones

Why the 1962 Blue Note album Hub-Tones?

Well, I was torn for a while whether I should feature Open Sesame, Ready For Freddie (both released 1 and 2 years prior to Hub-Tones on BlueNote), or one of the two subsequent releases on Impulse, The Artistry of Freddie Hubbard, or The Body And The Soul.

You get the picture, these years between 1960 and 1965 were highly productive for Freddie, and all of the above mentioned albums are worth having.

One of the reasons I chose Hub-Tones is probably the cover. Blue Note’s cover art from this period was generally excellent, but I really like the minimalist cover of this particular album.

The other reason is Herbie Hancock, which I prefer slightly to McCoy Tyner on the two previous Blue Note albums (yes, I have a piano background so those things matter to me).

Finally, this album features a lot of Hubbard originals, which I really appreciate.

Another great artist on this album is James Spaulding playing the flute and alto sax alternatively, who is not that well known these days, but has played as a sideman for a large number of Blue Note albums.

My rating: 4 stars

You can download it here (Qobuz) or here (HDTracks)

My favorite Four Seasons by Giuliano Carmignola with the Venice Baroque Orchestra

Another blog post triggered by the series of blind comparisons on Swiss radio, Disques en lice, the French version, this time. They’ve recently compared 7 versions of the world famous Four Seasons.

Antonio Vivaldi and The Four Seasons

I’ve mentioned previously that I’m not a very big Vivaldi fan. On my personal scale, Bach and even partially Händel are miles ahead of the Red Priest. I wouldn’t go as far as Stravinsky who said Vivaldi had written the same concerto 400 times, he has a point though.

But obviously, you just HAVE to have a version of the world most famous program music, the Four Seasons, in any decent record collection (or music collection to be more generic, does anybody still collect records out there?).

Obviously this has been overplayed to death. But if you haven’t listened to it for a while and actually give it a go again with a fresh ear, there are many beautiful elements in there that makes it worth going back to it occasionally. On my personal playlist it appears about 1 per year.

How to choose a version

Obviously, this work has been recorded a gazillion times. I had chosen my personal preference, the recording by Carmignola below, some time ago after comparing about 20 versions. So take this with a grain of salt, obviously there are many other good recordings out there.

In any case, I was obviously very curious if it would appear in the Disques en lice selection, and how it would compare.

Unfortunately, exactly this recording didn’t appear. However, luckily for me, Carmignola actually recorded the Four Seasons twice, and his earlier recording with the Sonatori de la Gioiosa Marca was selected. I was surprised how close these two versions were, in spite of being recorded with 10 years between them.

In a nutshell, that program confirmed my clear preference for Carmignola. The three experts in the program liked it as well, but in the end found it a bit too middle of the road (and they have a point in a way) and preferred in the end the more extreme recordings by Diego Faso’s, very theatrical, worth checking out, but a bit “too much” for me, and Midori Seiler with the Akademie für Alte Musik, a really good recording but I personally don’t like the sound of Seiler’s violin very much).

Carmignola’s 2nd recording of the Four Seasons

So what does Carmignola do? Well nothing special, just everything right, and very right. His Guarneri has a beautiful voice, and the Venice Baroque Orchestra plays with just the right level of energy, speed and drive, and a lot of transparency (which by the way luckily is very well recorded, so you get the same transparency transported very well).

Ah yes, and you also get two world premiere recordings of two previously unknown violin concertos as a filler. But in a way, we’re back here to Stravinsky’s 400 times the same, there don’t really disturb, but I really don’t feel you would have missed anything if these had stayed unrecorded for just a little bit longer.

My rating: Four stars (It’s a true five-star performance though, but I just cannot get myself to give 5 stars to Vivaldi, so just ignore the star rating and get it anyhow).

You can get it here (Prestoclassical) and here (Qobuz).

Tord Gustavsen Trio: The Ground – Atmospheric Trio Jazz from Norway

ECM

Enough ink has been spilled on Manfred Eicher’s outstanding Jazz label from Munich, Germany. He obviously was smart enough to land a superstar like Keith Jarrett, but they’ve been such an important driving force for contemporary jazz (and classical music) that you owe it to yourself to check out each new ECM release. To be fair, for me their output is hit and miss, on average every 2nd album I just love, every other is not my cup of tea. But I never regret checking them out.

Tord Gustavsen

Like Helge Lien (reviewed here), Tord Gustavsen comes from Norway. That, plus the fact that they both won an important Norwegian Jazz award, is probably the only apparent commonality between the two (plus the fact that they both have played with Silje Nergaard at some point, probably a mandatory rite of passage for Norwegian jazz pianists).

Lien is much more energetic, and experimental. Gustavsen in his arrangements in a way represents the typical ECM house sound, atmospheric, sometimes a bit detached, and extremely well recorded.

He has released a number of albums, mostly in trio, but also more recently with Saxophone, however, this 2004-5 album remains my favorite album of his.

The Ground

The Ground was Gustavsen’s 2nd ECM album, after the equally beautiful Changing Places, which gave him quite some visibility.

His style is really the opposite of what was developed by Esbjörn Svensson Trio, his neighbor from Sweden. It is very minimalistic, laid back. He has been called “the Satie of Jazz”. This is music to savor late at night, with a glass of single malt (I’d recommend a Caol Ila 12).

Critics around the globe mainly loved this album, calling the music “shimmering” (the Village Voice), and quoting the ” liquid, flowing quality of his motion” (AllAboutJazz). You did find some critical voices as well, usually finding this a little bit too laid back, or some even called it boring.

Well, obviously if you want high energy jazz that brings you to the edges of contemporary creativity, look elsewhere. But if you, like me, appreciate the ECM sound, this album is really worth checking out.

Actually, I’m a big fan of the very minimalistic and modern ECM cover art in general, but on this particular album they really nailed it. The blue, unfocused feeling you get from the cover is exactly what the music will do with you. You’ll get lost in space and time (the Caol Ila certainly helping….).

Note that the recording quality of this album is truly outstanding, so if you have a good hi-fi, you’ll enjoy it twice as much.

My rating: 4 stars

You can download it here (Qobuz) or here (Gubemusic)

Finally writing about Jazz again

Ben Webster

Gentle Ben

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Francesco Cavalli

L’amore innamorato (Erato 2015)

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La Scala (ECM 1997)

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Mozart’s violin sonatas

Rachel Podger

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Freddie Hubbard

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Antonio Vivaldi and The Four Seasons

How to choose a version

Carmignola’s 2nd recording of the Four Seasons

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ECM

Tord Gustavsen

The Ground

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