Ruby Braff

[Lazaro Vega]

Ruby Braff may have been a difficult, opinionated, perfectionist of an artist -- but I'm sorry I never heard him live or had the chance to bring him into Grand Rapids. His stylistically omnivorous music is relaxed and swinging, with a keen sense of Louis Armstrong's primacy to the jazz tradition and the subsequent dimensions of his style as developed in Bunny Bergian, Bobby Hackett and Buck Clayton. The fact that he recorded with Roy Eldridge and can, depending on the record, evoke Miles Davis or even Dizzy makes him a master within the tradition. His humor with low notes in later years sort of wipes the slate clean of all the "difficult artist" aura. Tonight Jazz From Blue Lake spends part of each hour on Ruby Braff, plus music by Ken Peplowski and Shelly Berg who appear this weekend in Kalamazoo, and new cds 10 p-3 a www.bluelake.org/radio