Last month, there was a terrific profile in the NY Times by Stephen Holden on the very special song-writer, Jimmy Webb:

Is it possible for a musician to emerge unscathed from the kind of early success enjoyed by the singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb? In the late 1960s, when he was barely 21, Mr. Webb was showered with Grammys for writing the Glen Campbell hits "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," "Wichita Lineman," "Galveston" and the Fifth Dimension’s "Up, Up and Away." Then there was "MacArthur Park," the grandiose quasi-symphonic "cake out in the rain" popularized by the Irish actor Richard Harris and in 1978 remade into a disco fantasia by Donna Summer.

These songs established Mr. Webb -- the son of a strict Baptist minister from Elk City, Okla., who moved his family to Southern California in the mid-'60s -- as a pop music wunderkind with a Midas touch.

He's a special musician with a new CD out - finally:

Sitting in his publicist's Lower Manhattan office on a steamy afternoon recently, Mr. Webb, tall and rangy, now 63, still has a wild man's gleam in his eye. He is a marvelous storyteller with the expansive style of a rural yarn spinner, who becomes more excited the more wound up he becomes. If he is an endless storehouse of real-life rock 'n' roll adventure stories, set mostly in Hollywood and London in the late '60s and '70s, part of him is still a wide-eyed Oklahoma country boy agog with wonder at the goings-on in the big city.

This country youth is the focus of his new album, "Just Across the River" (E1 Records), a sturdy collection of his songs, some famous, some not, recorded with a dozen of Nashville's top musicians and sung by Mr. Webb with guest harmony vocalists like Billy Joel ("Wichita Lineman"), Linda Ronstadt ("All I Know"), Jackson Browne ("P. F. Sloan"), Willie Nelson ("If You See Me Getting Smaller"), Vince Gill ("Oklahoma Nights") and Michael McDonald ("Where Words End").

The profile continues:

Today Mr. Webb has the aura of a pop-country patriarch who is keenly aware of having outlived a number of his rock 'n' roll contemporaries, including two Beatles. He has five sons and a daughter, age 19 to 35, by his first wife. Recently remarried, he lives in Oyster Bay, N.Y. He is also vice-chairman of Ascap, the organization that protects musicians' copyrights.

"Jimmy's background is 100 percent Americana and rooted in gospel and country," producer, Fred Mollin said the other day. "As a boy he played piano in church and listened to his father's Ernest Tubb records. I wanted him to go back to his Oklahoma childhood of barn dances and sneaking off to hear rock 'n' roll."

And then there's Linda Ronstadt's take on Jimmy Webb:

An ardent Webb champion who recorded several of his songs on her blockbuster album "Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind," Ms. Ronstadt, reached by telephone in her home in Tucson, commented, "From a singer's point of view, Jimmy is the only songwriter in my experience whose level of craftsmanship is comparable to that earlier era of Rodgers and Hart and Gershwin." She went on to compare the colors of his harmonies to Debussy and cited the tension between his disciplined craftsmanship and his songs' "over-the-top" emotionality as one of his most compelling qualities.

Continue on with the profile. You won't be disappointed.

Oh, and while you're at it, pick up his fantastic book, "SongSmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting."

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Tags: Jimmy Webb, Linda Ronstadt, MacArthur Park

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Yes, the title of this post is not an exaggeration:

For decades jazz cognoscenti have talked reverently of "the Savory Collection." Recorded from radio broadcasts in the late 1930s by an audio engineer named William Savory, it was known to include extended live performances by some of the most honored names in jazz -- but only a handful of people had ever heard even the smallest fraction of that music, adding to its mystique.

After 70 years that wait has now ended. This year the National Jazz Museum in Harlem acquired the entire set of nearly 1,000 discs, made at the height of the swing era, and has begun digitizing recordings of inspired performances by Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Bunny Berigan, Harry James and others that had been thought to be lost forever. Some of these remarkable long-form performances simply could not fit on the standard discs of the time, forcing Mr. Savory to find alternatives. The Savory Collection also contains examples of under-appreciated musicians playing at peak creative levels not heard anywhere else, putting them in a new light for music fans and scholars.

It's simply astounding what these recordings might reveal. Already, we have a few samples that The Times has released (you'll have to stream the 1938 selections from Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman & Teddy Wilson, Bunny Berigan, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Fats Waller & Louis Armstrong, since they aren't available for download yet):

This 1938 broadcast brings together the trumpet king Louis Armstrong, the pianist Fats Waller and the trombonist Jack Teagarden to improvise, at Martin Block's request, an impromptu blues.

By late 1938, Bunny Berigan had been required to play "I Can't Get Started," his hit from the year before, so many times that some of the bloom had probably come off the song for him. But here, playing with an all-black ensemble at an impromptu session for the WNEW disc jockey Martin Block, the white trumpeter sounds startlingly energized. His tone is strong and bright, and the band, with members from the Jimmie Lunceford, Fats Waller and John Kirby groups, sounds relaxed and confident. On-air interracial interactions at this time tended to feature blacks sitting in with whites, not vice versa, so this performance is interesting both for sociological and musical reasons.

The Gershwin Brothers' "Oh, Lady Be Good!" from the 1924 Broadway musical "Lady, Be Good," has been jazzified many times, with versions by Ukulele Ike, Ella Fitzgerald, Artie Shaw, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie and others. But this October 1938 rendering is one of the more unusual and unlikely: a duet featuring Benny Goodman and Teddy Wilson, with Wilson on harpsichord instead of piano, his regular instrument.

Once you get finished listening to those clips, head on over to the video that The Times put together in the loft of the sound engineer, Doug Pomeroy, "a recording engineer in Brooklyn who specializes in audio restorations and has worked on more than 100 CD reissues, among them projects involving music by Louis Armstrong and Woody Guthrie. The process involves numerous steps, beginning with cleaning the discs by hand and proceeding through pitch correction, noise removal, playback equalization, mixing and mastering."

"As fate would have it, a couple of the most interesting Count Basie things are so badly corroded that it took me two afternoons and 47 splices just to put one of them back together again," Mr. Pomeroy said while working on yet another Basie tune, a shuffle featuring Lester Young on clarinet rather than saxophone, his main instrument. "In almost every case I've been able to get a complete performance, but it can be very fatiguing to hear the same skip over and over again and have to close the gap digitally."

And when will all this new music be available to the general public?

Executive Director of the museum, Loren Schoenberg, said that they planned to make as much as possible of the Savory collection publicly available at its Harlem home and eventually online. But the copyright status of the recorded material is complicated, which could inhibit plans to share the music. While the museum has title to Mr. Savory’s discs as physical objects, the same cannot be said of the music on the discs.

"The short answer is that ownership is unclear," said June M. Besek, executive director of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts at the Columbia University School of Law. "There was never any arrangement for distribution of copies" in contracts between performers and radio stations in the 1930s, she explained, "because it was never envisioned that there would be such a distribution, so somewhere between the radio station and the band is where the ownership would lay."

At 70 years' remove, however, the bands, and even some of the radio networks that broadcast the performances, no longer exist, and tracking down all the heirs of the individual musicians who played in the orchestras is nearly impossible.

Make sure to read the entire story of Bill Savory and how these remarkable recordings came into existence. It's an amazing chapter that was just added to the story of America's Classical Music...Jazz!

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Tags: Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, Doug Pomeroy, Fats Waller, Harlem Jazz Museum, Loren Schoenberg, Louis Armstrong, William Savory

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She had an amazing career:

Abbey Lincoln, a singer whose dramatic vocal command and tersely poetic songs made her a singular figure in jazz, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 80 and lived on the Upper West Side.

Ms. Lincoln's career encompassed outspoken civil rights advocacy in the 1960s and fearless introspection in more recent years, and for a time in the 1960s she acted in films, including one with Sidney Poitier.

Long recognized as one of jazz's most arresting and uncompromising singers, Ms. Lincoln gained similar stature as a songwriter only over the last two decades. Her songs, rich in metaphor and philosophical reflection, provide the substance of "Abbey Sings Abbey," an album released on Verve in 2007. As a body of work, the songs formed the basis of a three-concert retrospective presented by Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2002.

Hers was a truly original voice, both haunting and elegant. Through her marriage to Max Roach from 1962-1970, she became very active in the Civil Rights Movement:

The most visible manifestation of their partnership was "We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite," issued on the Candid label in 1960, with Ms. Lincoln belting Oscar Brown Jr.'s lyrics. Now hailed as an early masterwork of the civil rights movement, the album radicalized Ms. Lincoln's reputation. One movement had her moaning in sorrow, and then hollering and shrieking in anguish -- a stark evocation of struggle. A year later, after Ms. Lincoln sang her own lyrics to a song called "Retribution," her stance prompted one prominent reviewer to deride her in print as a "professional Negro."

Ms. Abbey Lincoln will be sorely missed.

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Tags: Abbey Lincoln, Civil Rights Movement, Freedom Now Suite, Max Roach

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Our May 1st CD Release Performance at Smalls Jazz Club here in NYC has finally been edited and posted - a total of ten new videos!

You can check 'em all out on YouTube anytime, OR start with "A Moment of Silence" right now:

Thanks for watching!!

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Tags: Smalls Jazz Club, video, Vinson Valega Sextet, youtube

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Recent Entries

Jimmy Webb
Once-in-a-lifetime treasure trove of jazz recordings discovered.
Abbey Lincoln: R.I.P.
Ten new videos posted!
Vinson Valega Quartet, Live@The 55 Bar, Monday night, 8/2/10
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