Michael Fitzgerald

Yes, this does have to do with Les Liaisons Dangereuses. From Chris Sheridan's excellent Brilliant Corners bio-discography, p. 95. The tunes is "Bye & Bye" by Rodgers & Hart. Not from a French film but from the stage musical "Dearest Enemy". Sheridan also notes that Wilen is added to the quartet for two titles. Only four tunes made the original movie, but apparently a video version (Castle 9021) includes those AND eleven more. Monk also played "Bye & Bye" on a German TV show (March 2, 1963). In both instances it's just one minute of solo piano. I wonder if this is what is being referred to? The setlist was: Epistrophy, Off Minor, Bye & Bye, Round Midnight, Blue Monk, Criss Cross, Epistrophy. Mike

I would propose Billy Brooks. Mike

Great resource! Getting to the point of the Montreux database. Now if they'd only include all the personnel from the groups. (Montreux has setlists too, but I don't want to be greedy.) Mike

The Horricks book is notable for a chapter on Gigi Gryce (the most extensive writing done on him during his life). It's a book that should be used more as it has some primary research on its subjects that isn't found elsewhere. But while somewhat uncommon, it doesn't really fit in this thread about lavish self-published coffee-table sort of items. It was published a couple of times - once by Victor Gollancz in 1959 and then reprinted by the Jazz Book Club in 1960. Mike

Burns did manage to keep busy after Woody Herman. ----- Ralph Burns, 79; Jazz Pianist, Noted Arranger by Jon Thurber Los Angeles Times, November 22, 2001 Ralph Burns, a onetime jazz musician who fashioned a diverse career as an arranger, winning two Academy Awards, a Tony Award and an Emmy while helping expand the range of several popular artists, died Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 79. Burns died at St. Vincent's Hospital of complications from a recent stroke as well as pneumonia, according to a spokesman for his business manager. After making a name for himself as a pianist and orchestrator for Woody Herman's band, Burns played a key role in some of Broadway's most memorable shows. He worked on "Chicago," "Funny Girl" and "No, No, Nanette." Over the years, if there was a Bob Fosse production, Burns' name was usually connected with it. With Fosse he did "Sweet Charity," "Dancin'" and the film "Cabaret." His award-winning career spanned decades, as did his awards. He won a Tony in 1999 for "Fosse" a couple of decades after he picked up his Academy Awards for adapting the scores of "Cabaret" and "All That Jazz." Some critics say his orchestrations for the Kit Kat Klub band in "Cabaret" helped make that one of the prime movie musicals of the last quarter- century. He later added a shared Emmy to his collection of statuettes for "Baryshnikov on Broadway." And he collaborated with a who's who of leading figures of American song. He worked with Richard Rodgers on "No Strings," Rodgers' first score after Oscar Hammerstein II died, and with Jule Styne on "Funny Girl." In the recording studio, he worked with Ray Charles, Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis. "Everything I did with Fosse I loved," he later told Michael Phillips -- now The Times' theater critic -- when Phillips was writing for the San Diego Union-Tribune. "That was my ideal situation. But I also loved 'Funny Girl,' working with Jule Styne and with Barbra Streisand." Born in Newton, Mass., Burns learned piano at an early age and by 12 he was playing in dance bands in and around Boston. He attended the New England Conservatory of Music briefly, but spent most of his teenage years working in a local jazz orchestra. He later said he learned orchestration by analyzing the recordings of Count Basie, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, transcribing their legendary compositions note by note to see how they worked. Burns moved to New York City as a young man, playing in the clubs on 52nd Street. By the early 1940s, Burns was playing piano and writing orchestrations for Charlie Barnet's big band. Then he joined Herman's band, also as a writer and piano player. He worked with Herman over the next 15 years and wrote many of the band's big hits including "Bijou," "Apple Honey" and the three- part "Summer Sequence." "Early Autumn," one of his later and more notable compositions, came from an assignment to write a fourth movement for "Summer Sequence." Years later, Johnny Mercer wrote lyrics for the tune, and it became a favorite of singers. Herman later told Leonard Feather, the jazz critic, that Burns had much to do with the success of his band. "...I suppose the most important change for us was having Ralph Burns as arranger and pianist. He was as much responsible for our sound as anyone at that time," Herman said. But after several years of touring, Burns left the band to continue his writing and to take work as a freelance orchestrator. He worked with Bennett, Mathis, Charles and, later, Aretha Franklin and Natalie Cole. It was Burns who introduced Charles to the instrumentation that combined a big band and strings and gave him two of the biggest hits of his long career: "Come Rain or Come Shine" and "Georgia on My Mind." He began orchestrating and arranging for the Broadway musical theater in the mid-1950s and kept at it all his life. Last year, he orchestrated "Thoroughly Modern Millie" at the La Jolla Playhouse. He told Phillips that his big-band training always helped him in the theater. "When it came to arranging a Broadway score's big, jazzy numbers -- the dance numbers -- I was already used to writing for an orchestra in that way. Most of the orchestrators who worked in the theater at the time would hand over that stuff to somebody else. It was not their world, you know. They were legit; they were schooled in the strings and woodwinds. With me, they'd say 'Get hot,' and I could get hot." His first film credit was "Cabaret" in 1972, which was followed by such familiar movies as "Lenny," "Urban Cowboy," "Annie," "My Favorite Year," "The Muppets Take Manhattan" and "New York, New York." In the 1990s, Burns returned to his roots, arranging jazz albums for Mel Torme and John Pizzarelli. It was probably fitting that Burns would return to the music he started with. "I still listen to jazz. My roots are still there, and I feel I can go listen to Woody's band to steal ideas when I'm writing for a film," Burns told The Times some years ago. "'Simple Is Better' was always [Herman's] motto, and good taste; I think he's taught an awful lot of arrangers how to develop that way." Memorial services are pending.

Discographies show this to include: Poor Butterfly Whisper Not Lullaby In Rhythm Holiday Hop I'm Beginning To See The Light Cornet Chop Suey Ill Wind Swiss Criss The Lady With The Lavender Hair Morning Aire The Seal I Guess I'll Go Back Home This Summer Zig Zag Mike

I would guess the Hartmut Geerken book "Omniverse Sun Ra" would qualify? Mike

Well, if someone is ambitious, why not take that list as a starting point and flesh it out with websites, email, phone numbers. Then it can be put on the web and maintained. It would be a great resource. I'll tell you right now that in NJ, Crazy Rhythms and Cheap Thrills are gone. Princeton Record Exchange has LP/SRBU and CD/SRBU - they just took $300 off me. http://www.prex.com/ In Rochester, NY, The Bop Shop is http://www.bopshop.com/ Mike

Years back, this very task was undertaken by Bill Hery at rec.music.bluenote. The results of his efforts are still online here: http://www.wnur.org/jazz/lists/stores.html Of course, in the interim there have been many changes, but I think the list still has some value. Mike

Green, Dixon, and Young are also together on His Majesty King Funk (with Harold Vick and Candido). Mike

For details of the Sextet in KC album, check the Joe Hunt discography on my website. Mike

Mainly Sy Johnson, but Mike Mossman has done several charts for the Mingus Big Band. Ronnie Cuber, Steve Slagle, Jack Walrath, Howard Johnson too. Some of this stuff is available from Hal Leonard. Mike

But.....the Brookmeyer record actually has something to do with Kansas City. The Russell record has nothing to do with Kansas City, except for the fact that the sextet had a gig there at the Blue Room. Despite the implications of the title "George Russell Sextet In K.C." it wasn't recorded there, nor was it live. Here's one Russell quote: "We found that the people of K.C. still love the blues, so Sandu was right in their groove." Were I programming the show (and I'm not), I might go with the Shorty Rogers Courts The Count record as another example of revisiting the Basie stuff. Even some tunes duplicated on the Brookmeyer. I don't have ANY problem with getting any of this stuff on the airwaves, but it just seems like a stretch to make it a "thematic" set. Mike

I'm sure those in the field can better clarify this, but I don't believe that a distribution deal is much to worry about - ECM, for example, has never been a part of one of the big guys (5 or 4 or 3 or whatever) but they were distributed by Warner Bros. at one point, then by PolyGram, then by BMG, now again by Universal if I recall correctly. But they're still ECM, their own individual company. The distributor just gets the "product" moved to the stores. They don't own the master tapes or anything. Or am I mistaken? Mike

WKCR-FM will be broadcasting 36 straight hours of Illinois Jacquet starting at 6 PM EDT tonight. www.wkcr.org or 89.9 MHz FM in NYC. Mike

Just got an email starting as follows: The great tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet has just passed away in New York of heart failure this morning Thursday, July 22 around 2 A.M. Mike Apparently he played this past Friday with his big band at a Lincoln Center Midsummer Nights Swing event. I didn't catch that, but I did see him play that same gig a few years back and it was a great night.

Ah good - jazz AND adult music. Does that go along with adult movies and adult magazines? Besides, I knew jazz was only kids music anyway. Once you grow up you get over it and start listening to - what? Mike

Yes, the Body & Soul notes do mention this as Shorter's "debut as a big band arranger" - but certainly that could be wrong, or we could be talking apples and oranges since Golden Boy isn't really a "big band" - just larger than a sextet. Mike

There's an album that is listed as being on Empathy, but I'm wondering if it's a *different* label, not the Joe Carter one. I have this album as Inner City 1028 - Lew Tabackin: Dual Nature. Bruyninckx and Lord discographies show this as originally on Empathy (Jap) EMP-1001. I know that the Joe Carter & Rufus Reid: Too Marvelous For Words was Empathy E-1001. The Tabackin session is much earlier (1976) than when the website says Carter established the label (1981). Is there any relation between the labels or just a coincidence? I don't know of any other Japanese Empathy issues. Are the discographies correct with their issue information in this instance? Tabackin was recording the same day for Japanese Victor. Mike

As a sucker for a good deal, I have a huge backlog. If I see something that I know I won't find at a better price and it's something that belongs in my collection, I grab it. I try to listen to this stuff ASAP but I've got about 75 LPs purchased Tuesday that I won't get to for a while. And there's more stuff in the mail. Mike

Probably between 1981 and 1984 when Williams lived in Boston. Mike

Rumored or threatened?

No, not the saxophonist - some guy at the Village Voice. Mike

Tragic - so much of my time in recent days has been spent with the results of his wonderful work on the new Maria Schneider Orchestra CD. Mike

I also picked up the University of Miami CD Romances that has the premiere recording of three of the five pieces from Concert In The Garden. Very interesting to hear the differences - some in the orchestration (no vocals, for example), some in the accompaniment (different rhythm section feel), some in the solos (obviously). The CD also includes another earlier Maria Schneider piece called "Lately" which is otherwise only available on the wine CD. Mike