HORACE SILVERLive at Newport ’58(Blue Note)
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Producer Michael Cuscuna, who helped prepare the Monk-Coltrane tapes for release, found this superb recording of the Horace Silver Quintet headlining the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958 while he was digging through the Voice of America tapes at the Library of Congress—the same vast trove where the Monk tapes were discovered. It’s hard to imagine Live at Newport ’58 causing the same kind of excitement, since Silver doesn’t have the exalted aura of a Coltrane or a Parker, but it’s still a wonderful addition to the pianist’s catalog. Silver kicked off the ascent of hard bop by joining forces with drummer Art Blakey in 1955 to found the Jazz Messengers, and though he left the group a year later, the sound they’d forged would endure—and not just in Blakey and Silver’s bands. A lean, streamlined successor to bebop, streaked with blues and gospel, hard bop provided the template for much of the small-group jazz that followed.
SHELBY LYNNEJust a Little Lovin’(Lost Highway)
Saxophonist and composer Matt Bauder has used the name White Blue Yellow & Clouds for a variety of projects over the years—I first saw it stamped on the labels of the uncased cassettes he sheepishly sold for a buck when he was living in Chicago. A solo multitracked affair, that tape included a strange a cappella version of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows,” a wordless original, and a take on the Spaniels’ doo-wop gem “Goodnite Sweetheart, Goodnite.” Bauder soon formed an instrumental group called White Blue Yellow & Clouds, but it played slow-moving Feldman-esque meditations—he didn’t return to the doo-wop sound till after he left Chicago in 2001. Now based in Brooklyn, he’s found plenty of fellow travelers to help flesh out his vision. On the new Introducing White Blue Yellow & Clouds they include jazz improvisers like New York trumpeter Peter Evans and Chicago bassist Jason Ajemian, Fred Thomas from the Ann Arbor indie-pop band Saturday Looks Good to Me, and Brooklyn sound artist Dan St. Clair.
