Jazz Flashes Videocast: Will Friedwald's Best Books on Jazz and Classic Pop

Anyone who has read my posts here in Jazz Flashes and in my other blog, The Vintage Bandstand, especially those that deal with vocal jazz, classic pop, and the crooners, is aware of my admiration for the work of New York-based critic Will Friedwald. To me, Mr. Friedwald is an authority on the subjects of classic pop and vocal jazz, and all his books are an absolute pleasure to read because of the depth of his knowledge, the wide variety and scope of information they include, and the incomparable wit of his writing style.

I've been following Mr. Friedwald's work since the 1990s, when I first ran across a copy of his eye-opening study, Jazz Singing, and I've read nearly all his works, from his exploration of twelve of the greatest songs from the Songbook (Stardust Melodies) to the biography of Tony Bennett that he wrote in tandem with the singer (The Good Life) to his volumes on the music of Warner Bros. cartoons to his mammoth (and indispensable) Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers. Mr. Friedwald is also the author of Sinatra! The Song Is You, which, in my opinion, is by far the best book ever written about the music and the recorded legacy of Frank Sinatra. His latest work, The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums, is yet another necessary addition to the shelves of any serious vocal jazz aficionado. It's a collection of essays on some of the most influential vocal jazz and classic pop albums that will have readers dusting the records off and listening to them under a new, different light. Mr. Friedwald is a very persuasive writer, never afraid to offer his personal opinion on a given LP, artist, or arrangement, and even though we may not always agree with his view on a particular point, more often than not, we'll find ourselves rethinking our own approach to each specific album after reading what he has to say about it.

As a personal tribute to a writer from whom I've learned a great deal and who has been a primary influence when it came to discovering or rediscovering this or that artist or album, I've recently recorded a videocast whose aim is to review briefly my five favorite books by Mr. Friedwald. It's really not my intention to rank them, so I simply talk about them in chronological order of publication, beginning with Jazz Singing and ending with The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums. For anyone willing to understand vocal jazz and classic pop or to gain a deeper knowledge of both subjects, Mr. Friedwald's work is undoubtedly the place to start. I'd like to express my sincerest gratitude to Mr. Friedwald for the marvelous books that he's been producing for many years now, and I hope the video will serve as a fitting introduction to his work for many readers of Jazz Flashes.

Jazz Flashes Videocast # 4: Holiday Gifts and Purchases

Dodo Greene

To paraphrase Irving Berlin's lyric, it's time to start the New Year right with a new episode of the Jazz Flashes Videocast. On this occasion, I briefly discuss three of the gifts I received this holiday season, as well as two purchases I made myself while spending a few days in North Carolina with my family. The albums I review in the video are the following:

Dodo Greene's My Hour of Need - This was one of the best discoveries I've made lately—an album by the vastly under-recorded soul jazz vocalist Dodo Greene, who unfortunately only cut a couple of dates in the early 1960s. On this 1962 Blue Note album she is backed by a stellar cast that includes the Ike Quebec Quintet.

Hank Jones & Frank Wess's Hank and Frank - The first volume of a 2003 encounter by these two jazz greats. If you listen to this one, you'll definitely be looking for its companion volume!

Miles Davis at Newport 1953-1973 - The fourth installment of Columbia-Legacy's ongoing Miles Davis bootleg series. These four CDs span twenty years of appearances by Davis in different settings at the famed Newport Jazz Festival.

Bill Evans's Some Other Time: The Lost Session from the Black Forest - A recent release by Resonance Records of some late-1960s Bill Evans trio recordings made in Germany and previously unissued.

Larry Young in Paris. The ORTF Recordings - Yet another great Resonance release, featuring some 1960s sessions by the lesser-known organist and pianist made for French radio.

You may find this episode of the Jazz Flashes Videocast on YouTube (click on the top-right corner of this website to access our YouTube channel, which includes several other videos) and also here below. Happy New Year to all the readers of Jazz Flashes!

Jazz Flashes Videocast # 3 - Frank Sinatra Box Sets

As we're slowly approaching the holiday season, a new Frank Sinatra 4-CD/1-DVD box set has recently hit the stores. Entitled World on a String, it features live performances by Sinatra recorded between the 1950s and '80s in different locations around the world, including Monaco, Italy, Australia, Egypt, and the Dominican Republic. In many ways, it's a follow-up to the excellent series of sets issued in the past several years under the titles of Vegas, New York, and London, all of them offering unreleased concerts taped in those cities. Though I haven't gotten my hands on this brand-new set, it sounds like a great Yuletide present for the Sinatra fan, and its release has given me the idea to create this video where I discuss some of my favorite Sinatra box sets that have been made available over the years. You can watch this videocast here:

Frank Sinatra in Egypt, 1979

In the video I concentrate on the aforementioned city-specific sets, but I also go back to the beginning of Sinatra's career to review The Song Is You, which documents Young Blue Eyes' association with Tommy Dorsey between 1940 and 1942. I also discuss 1996's The Complete Capitol Singles Collection, which contains all of Sinatra's recordings for Capitol that were released as singles throughout the 1950s, and I talk about A Voice on Air, a beautifully presented set released last year that offers an overview of Sinatra the radio star between 1935 and 1955. I have deliberately left out the mammoth sets that include Sinatra's whole body of work for Columbia, Capitol, and Reprise in the belief that, though very recommendable, those are strictly for dedicated Sinatra aficionados. I hope you enjoy the video, whether you own these great boxes or not. In my opinion, they're all worth the money, and I like them all for different reasons that I hope to have explained successfully in the course of the videocast.

Frank Sinatra, the radio star in the 1940s

Jazz Flashes Videocast # 2 - Herbie Nichols

Born in New York in 1919, pianist and composer Herbie Nichols was one of those jazz musicians who were so ahead of their time that their art was never fully recognized for what it was worth during their lifetime. Though Nichols became a cult figure of sorts after his death from leukemia in 1963, throughout his life he didn't get to lead his own groups too often and was mostly limited to playing alongside musicians who were far less talented than he was. There were exceptions to this, of course—Nichols worked with some fine jazzmen such as Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, Illinois Jacquet, and Lucky Thompson, but these collaborations went mostly unrecorded, and the 1940s and '50s saw him performing in traditional dixieland contexts instead of the forward-looking kind of bebop that he preferred. In my new Jazz Flashes Videocast I briefly discuss the life, career, and musical legacy of Herbie Nichols. You may watch the video here:

Describing Nichols as a misunderstood, underrated jazzman actually sounds like an understatement. Not very many musicians recorded his compositions during his life (pianist Mary Lou Williams was an exception to the rule) and his recorded output is rather meager. In the video I mention two releases that are absolutely essential: The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Herbie Nichols is a three-CD set that contains all the sides Nichols cut for Blue Note in 1956, all of them in a trio setting, accompanied by Teddy Kotick or Al McKibbon on bass and Max Roach or Art Blakey on drums. In 1957 he led a session for Bethlehem Records, also fronting a trio, that was issued as Love, Gloom, Cash, Love. He was accompanied by George Duvivier on bass and Dannie Richmond on drums. The former, including 18 alternate takes, is the perfect introduction to Nichols's music, while the latter is also worth purchasing.

Jazz Flashes Videocast # 1 - Bobby Hutcherson; Toots Thielemans; Dempsey Wright; Red Norvo

Toots Thielemans (1922-2016)

A few months ago, a couple of friends suggested to me that I should start a podcast or a videocast about jazz to post on YouTube and make available periodically in this blog. I gave it some thought, and the idea took me back to the time when I used to host a radio show with my wife in Nashville, TN, so I liked the suggestion right away. However, several personal things and projects I've been involved with this summer didn't leave me almost any free time to devote to planning the videocast. In the last couple of weeks, before the semester started at the university where I teach, I enjoyed a little more peace and quiet than usual, so I decided to give the videocast idea a try. Here's the result, the first installment of the Jazz Flashes Videocast:

On this edition of the videocast, I briefly discuss the careers of two recently deceased jazz greats, vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson and harmonica/guitar player Toots Thielemans. Moreover, I recommend two lesser-known albums that I've been playing quite a bit lately: The Wright Approach, by Oklahoma guitarist Dempsey Wright, and Red Plays the Blues, featuring an all-star group led by the great vibraphonist Red Norvo. I hope you enjoy this new section of Jazz Flashes, and if you do, it's my intention to create similar videocasts in the future, and hopefully do a more polished job than I did on this pilot installment!

NOTE: You may click on the names of each artist to access a track by that artist.

Bobby Hutcherson (1941-2016)