Mark Stryker

Some others

https://whatsupnewp.com/2025/09/christian-mcbride-steps-down-as-newport-jazz-festival-artistic-director/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/04/arts/music/wayne-shorter-archives.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Thanks for the kind words. Obviously, I'm biased having worked on it, but I do think this set, whether the music is to one's specific taste or not, is in the tradition of the best of what Mosaic has done.

Many thanks for the kind words. Appreciate it.

Public Service Announcement "The Best of the Best: Jazz from Detroit," the documentary film that I wrote and co-produced, now has its own YouTube channel. Please consider clicking below and subscribing. We'll be posting performance videos, excerpts from the film, parts of interviews that didn't survive the final cut, and other special features. Our first entry is an except from our interview with maestro Charles McPherson in which he improvises two of the most relaxed, spare, and soulful choruses of the blues you'll ever hear. Next screening is Oct. 3 in East Lansing, Michigan. We've think we'll have some exciting news about screenings and distribution in coming soon but it's too early to talk about it all. #JazzFromDetroit

One of the four tunes from 2/18/66.

FWIW, this material is very good, but, honestly, it's nowhere close to the intensity and creativity of the same band captured six months later at the Half Note, 2/18/66, playing four songs from he Cape Verdean Blues. A tape of this (from an Alan Grant radio broadcast) has circulated for some 40 years, which is how I first heard it. They were issued on an unautyorized CD, Horace Silver Featuring Woody Show -- Live at the Half Note. on the Hi-Hat label, and I think one tune ended up on the Emerald release. I'm glad Blue Note is putting out what they are, but it's a missed opportunity to not have found a way to include the 1966 Half Note broadcast, which has some of the best Woody and Joe that I know.

Nate's remembrance is lovely, and don't miss Tessa Souter's fantastic comment. (Full disclosure: Nate quotes from "Jazz from Detroit" in his piece and I chime in the comments with a coda.)

Close friends of Sheila Jordan are reporting on social media that she has died at age 96. I'm not putting R.I.P. in the title of this post because I haven't seen confirmation from family or other official source, but I have no doubt that it is true. One of the all-time great Detroiters. There was only one of those ...

Eddie and Joe go head to head here in 1969 with Thad and Mel in Europe. "Tow Away Zone." (Clip says 1970 but it's from a year earlier.) Coda: I heard Daniels give Eddie give a fantastic performance of the Nielsen Clarinet Concerto with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 1997 -- not a good-for-a-jazz guy performance but great-for-anyone performance. If memory series, he also played an arrangement of Gershwin's "Three Preludes" preceded by an improvised cadenza and offered a brief "Chelsea Bridge" as an encore. I don't remember who arranged the Gershwing and Strayhorn for clarinet and orchestra.

John Garvey, the legendary jazz band conductor at the University of Illinois from the late '50s until the early '90s, played viola in the Walden String Quartet, which was in residence at U of I. When Carter wrote his first quartet in 1950, he sent the score to a gaggle of of string quartets -- I think it might have literally been dozens but I can't recall -- and the Walden was the only one that agreed to play it. The gave the premiere in 1953 and then made the landmark first recording for Columbia Masterworks in 1955. John once told me that it was the first string quartet you couldn't sight read and tell if it was any good. You actually had to learn itbefore deciding whether it was a good (successful) piece or not. Glad you like the JSQ's performances of those Haydn quartets ...

All Detroit rhythm section -- Lightsey, Wright, Brooks. Smokin' is for me the best of the lot, particularly because Chet plays such a creative and expressive solo on "Have You Met Miss Jones" -- the melodic flow, swinging easy, surfing the beat. I also think it's interesting how his ear leads him astray of the changes on the second bridge to the point where he really clashes with the piano -- in the first bar he lands squarely on a B-flat (trumpet key) on beat 3, the flat seven against C Major. Then in the fourth bar on beat three he lands hard on a D natural, the minor third against the B7 chord -- and you can tell he's not thinking sharp 9 for tension -- because on beat one of the next bar he doesn't resolve to E Major but instead plays a B-flat and for the rest of the bar appears to be outlining E-flat major, a half-step "off." Only in bar 6 does his melody sync back up with the piano. Chet is technically "wrong" but it's oh so right -- sequences, internal logic, expressive melody.

The book is Producing Jazz: The Experience of an Independent Record Company, by Herman Gray, now emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California-Santa Cruz. It's a small monograph published in 1988 (Temple Univ. Press), when Gray was a young scholar interested in independent cultural production -- though much of the initial research was conducted in 1983, when Gray was a grad student. Though the writing is a bit flat and academic, it is truly a remarkable document, opening a window on a corner of the jazz record business on the ground, at a particular moment and in real time. It proved invaluable to me in writing the notes for the forthcoming Sanders set, particularly because both co-owners of Theresa, Allen Pittman* and Kazuko Ishida, are now deceased and the details of the company's history and Sanders' involvement, including direct quotes from Sanders himself, would have otherwise disappeared into the ether. I spoke with Gray in the course of writing and he was quite amazed and proud (as he should be) that after all these years, his early work was being recognized and recirculated to a wider audience. *Note correct spelling of Allen with an "e."

I don't know why they moved to RCA -- I never asked Mann that in my conversations with him -- but it must have had to do with money, repertoire, or people. Playing Mozart well is really, really hard on many levels.