JazzWax

Wanda, Creed and Julia

In The Wall Street Journal last week, I interviewed comedian Wanda Sykes for my "House Call" column in the Mansion section (go here). Wanda talked about growing up in Maryland and who inspired her the most (her brother Harry and TV's Moms Mabley). Wanda is now in the Netflix sitcom The Upshaws. [Photo above of Wanda Sykes by Lara Solanki, courtesy of Netflix]

Last week, she was on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and they talked about my column here...

Creed Taylor. Last week I spoke with producer Creed Taylor on his birthday. He sounded fantastic. We talked about trombonist Urbie Green and the recordings he made for Creed at Bethlehem and ABC-Paramount in the 1950s. As Creed said, "Whenever I felt out of sorts, I'd put on one of Urbie's album. The sound of his trombone was so tasteful and relaxing, largely because of his fantastic breath control." We also talked about his hanging out with jazz musicians and getting to know them on a personal level. "I admired them and loved the special quality of their art," he said. "It was about my own passion and enjoyment rather than a some sort of strategy. They recognized I was as committed to their music as they were." [Photo above of Creed Taylor by Chuck Stewart]

Creed Taylor 2. For a post on Creed's early years, see Mark Cathcart's Creed Taylor Produced blog here.

A new blog from Jeffrey Sultanof called The Eclectic's Corner: About the Arts had its debut on May 7 (go here).

CD you should know about:

Julia Perminova—Imagination (JP Music). Born in Tyumen, a city in Siberia, Russia, Julia Perminova is a pianist and composer who started piano lessons at a local music school at age 5. She attended Tyumen College of Arts in the pop and jazz music department, and in 2013 moved to Moscow to study at the Gnessin Academy of Music, graduating in 2017. In 2016, Julia released her first album, Luminescence. Her trio album, Revival, followed in 2018. She's now at the Jazz Institute in Berlin and lives in Amsterdam. This year, she released Imagination, a solo album. Her 14 originals have a singular intensity, lulling you into a range of moods that coax you to feel and think. The music is different than the type of jazz that appears on most albums, but the difference is its charm and the root of its hypnotic power. The more I listened, the more I found myself imagining imagine nature—the feel of the wind, the smell of snow and sound of birds. The transformative power of Julia's playing and music is quite remarkable and special. Listen to Imagination at Julia's site here. You can buy it there as well—or at Amazon here.

Here's a promo video for Julia's new album...

Here's Julia in action in 2019...

And here's Julia taking a solo...

Curtis Fuller radio. This Sunday, May 16, Sid Gribetz will be hosting a five-hour tribute to the late trombonist Curtis Fuller on "Jazz Profiles" on WKCR-FM in New York, from 2 to 7 p.m. (ET). Listen from anywhere in the world by going here.

And finally, here's João Gilberto and Caetano Veloso, another great Brazilian singer-composer, performing Antônio Carlos Jobim and Newton Mendonça's Desafinado...

Nara Leão: Muse of the Bossa Nova

Nara Leão (pronounced LEE-yay-oh) was a celebrated Brazilian bossa nova and Tropicália pop singer in the 1960s. Her father had given her a guitar at age 12, and as a teenager in the late 1950s, she became friends with many of the singer-songwriters who were pioneering the bossa nova. The list included Roberto Menescal, Carlos Lyra, Ronaldo Bôscoli, João Gilberto, Vinicius de Moraes and Antônio Carlos Jobim. Many of them rehearsed in her parents' home in Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana district in 1958. As a result, she became known as the "muse of the bossa nova."

But Leão was much more than a muse. She became a bossa nova star, married Brazilian director Carlos Diegues and gave up music to move to Paris in the 1970s to be with her family. In 1979, when she learned she had an inoperable brain tumor, she returned to singing and recording with a ferocity to complete as many projects as possible. She died in 1989. She was 47.

I have many of Leão's albums and she never made a bad record. Her guitar playing was superb and her voice was spectacular. Here are seven clips:

Here's Leão with Roberto Menescal in Japan singing Samba de Uma Nota So and Samba do Avião...

Here they are on O barquinho, O pato and Manhã de carnaval...

Here they are on Dindi...

Here's Leão with Antonio Carlos Jobim singing Desafinado...

Here's Part 1 of an 18-minute segment for TV with a bunch of her live performances...

Here's Part 2...

And here's Leão's recording of Desafinado...

Creed Taylor: Shades of Green

Today is Creed Taylor's birthday. He's 92. The fabled producer had a significant influence over the direction of recorded jazz from the mid-1950s on. His first job was at Bethlehem Records in New York in the summer of 1954, attracting talent and overseeing the recording of jazz singers and instrumentalists on the East Coast. Creed's vision was to get Bethlehem to start releasing 12-inch records, which he felt was the future of the LP. [Photo above of Creed Taylor by Chuck Stewart]

A year later he moved to ABC-Paramount, where he met the demand for albums with an emphasis on the kind of jazz he loved—small groups with a great sound. Part of the deal with the label was that Creed's signature would appear on the backs of albums he produced. Am-Par, as the label was known, was fine with that. If an album tanked, he'd take the heat. 

But Creed was willing to take the risk and focused on the up-side. If the album did well, no one could steal credit from him. He simply focused on going after top New York artists he liked and encouraged them to be themselves. The result was a bonanza of superb recordings. Creed then pushed to start his own jazz imprint at Am-Par. Given the green light in 1960, he called the label Impulse! Six releases later, Creed abandoned Impulse for the top A&R job at Verve, which had a much bigger jazz footprint in the marketplace. There, he repeated his success on a much larger scale.

By the mid-1960s, Creed was at A&M, where his success with Wes Montgomery led to his own in-house imprint, CTI. When Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss decided to move the entire operation to Los Angeles, Creed struck a deal to go off on his own with CTI, where he created a completely new style of FM jazz that wasn't acoustic or fusion. At the height of component stereo systems, album covers on CTI and its subsidiaries were notable for their richly colorful photography by Pete Turner and glossy-wet reflective surfaces.

On Creed's birthday, I thought I'd focus on his first album for Am-Par—trombonist Urbie Green's Blues and Other Shades of Green, a brilliant title that was pure Creed (Blues and the Abstract Truth also was Creed's, among many others). Green had recorded for Creed at Bethlehem as a leader and sideman. The album was the second LP issued by Am-Par, #101. The first (#100) was Alec Templeton's Smart Alec, produced by Sid Feller.

Recorded on October 12, 1955, the album featured Green's confident, powdery slide and valve trombone backed by Dave McKenna (p), Jimmy Raney (g), Percy Heath (b) and Kenny Clarke (d). Instead of sitting in his ivory tower, like so many jazz producers at the time, Creed knew New York held a wealth of special jazz talent that was eager to record as leaders. Creed also needed product volume, since he had production quotas to fill in terms of new albums rolling out of Am-Par's printing plants.

So during the day, he'd visit the many Midtown watering holes, like Charlie's Tavern (above), where musicians hung out between recording sessions as sidemen. By befriending them, Creed was able to develop a keen understanding of their art, build trust and harvest enormous talent for Am-Par recording sessions. They were relationships that lasted his entire career, no matter where he was producing.   

Creed loved Green's aggressive but velvety trombone playing. On the album, the quintet recorded Reminiscent Blues, Thou Swell, You Are Too Beautiful, Paradise, Frankie and Johnny, One for Dee, Am I Blue? Dirty Dan, It's Too Late Now, Warm Valley and Limehouse Blues. He also got DJ Al "Jazzbo" Collins at NBC to write the liner notes. As Creed told me during our many conversations, "I was just recording jazz I wanted to listen to in my home, without the long jam-session solos favored by some other producers."

Happy Birthday, Creed!

JazzWax tracks: You'll find Blues & Other Shades of Green here and, on vinyl, here.

JazzWax clip: Here's the entire album in individual tracks. An incredible quintet...