Hello again from ejazzlines!
We will be attending the National Association for Music Education's Eastern Division Conference in Providence, RI, March 12-14.
This is our first time going, and we are looking forward to it. We will
have a booth in the Exhibit Hall, and we would enjoy meeting any of you who will also be attending.
This January was especially difficult at IAJE time, as it was the first year in ejazzlines' existence which did not have the month of
January enhanced greatly by an IAJE Conference. This was our very best opportunity to meet so many of you from places as diverse as Vancouver,
Kazakhstan (no, Borat couldn't make it even once), Germany, and even New York! The Jazz Education Network
is a new organization which is doing a fantastic job of creating something new to fill the IAJE void and we are enthusiastically working with them and wish them the very best.
Their web address is http://www.jazzednet.org/ and we do encourage everyone to explore and support the exciting things they are doing.
They plan to have a significant presence at the Summer NAMM show in Nashville, and we hope they will one day also have a conference of their own.
We salute the folks at JEN who are doing great work to help spread the beautiful word of jazz.
We took a very interesting trip this week, to southwestern Connecticut. First we visited the good folks at Mosaic/True Blue, led by our friends Michael Cuscuna, Fred Pustay, and Jerry Roche.
Few people on this planet are doing more to keep jazz alive, from the works of the huge stars to the lesser known folks whose heydays were many years ago.
From their Mosaic sets to the many other items they offer, they provide an amazing catalog for fans of all eras and styles. Michael, Fred, and Jerry are always a pleasure to chat
and swap industry info with. While Michael's internationally-known name graces more jazz CD releases than we can count, he is a very kind, approachable, and generous guy,
with a wicked sense of humor, and spending time with him in his office is definitely about as close as one comes to being inside the brain of jazz.
We then went to visit Franca Mulligan, the widow of baritone great Gerry Mulligan. We are researching Gerry Mulligan's manuscripts from the famous 'Birth of the Cool' recordings, all of which we will publish this year.
As the education-minded widow of the greatest of all jazz baritone sax players, she was gracious enough to host us as we spent an afternoon discussing Gerry's legacy.
We are working with her to publish many of Gerry's arrangements in our Jazz Lines Publications series, as they are treasures which we hope will be much more widely played and studied.
Franca welcomed us into her lovely home, which is largely a shrine to her late husband. We were fortunate enough to share blueberry juice and many stories with her, and we sat in Gerry's studio,
walked by his grand piano, and saw many artifacts from his amazing career, including pictures from all over the world ranging from exotic international locales to a visit to the White House.
As jazz lovers and history students, we thank Franca for sharing her stories and momentos with us.
For those of you who like to keep up with new jazz releases, below are some items that you may wish to know about.
We once again thank everyone for your support - it is sincerely appreciated every day of the year!
Doug and Rob at ejazzlines.
New DVDs:
March has a fine crop of new DVDs to offer. First off, we have the omnipresent David Sanborn Live at Montreux.
David has played with everyone from Gil Evans to Stevie Wonder to David Bowie to the Eagles, and this DVD features his usual outstanding band, which included Hiram Bullock and Larry Willis, and was also graced by an
appearance by Rickie Lee Jones. We also have a wonderful new documentary on the very full and productive life of Fats Waller.
This DVD features documentary and performance footage, and also features Fats' son Maurice, and several of his contemporaries.
We finally have a DVD featuring one of jazz's great vocalists, Mark Murphy,
which is another from the Ad-Lib TV series. Another volume from this series features Brazilian legend
Tanya Maria.
We also recently discovered and added to the site a Tower of Power live DVD,
from Iowa State University in 1987. As our good friend and ejazzlines transcriber Dr. Jonathan Lorentz can testify to, George Garzone is one of the very best and most interesting saxophonists
on the jazz scene today. We are thrilled to offer his 2 DVD masterclass, The Music of George Garzone & The Triadic Chromatic Approach.
This DVD is a treasure for all musicians looking to improve themselves, and looking for new ways to approach improvisation, playing, time, and many other areas of musicianship.
Jim Chapin is a legendary drum instructor,
and we are proud to offer his new DVD, Power, Speed, Control, Endurance.
This DVD is sure to help drummers of all levels and styles to improve themselves. And also for the drummers out there, the
Modern Drummer Festival 2008
DVD has just been released. Finally, we also have new DVDs featuring BB King,
Juan Martin,
Paul Robeson,
Phish,
and Frank Zappa.
Also in stock are February's best and most popular, Wayne Shorter Live at Montreux,
Fourplay Live in Capetown,
Kenny Werner's Living Effortless Mastery, and
Freddie Hubbard One of a Kind.
New CDs:
We received four new Criss Cross CDs in the last few weeks that are worth mentioning. Guitarist Jonathan Kreisberg has a new release out titled
Night Songs. Jonathan is joined by pianist Gary Versace, bassist Matt Penman, and drummer Mark Ferber on nine standards. Trumpeter
Alex Sipiagin's Mirages is a fantastic journey through eight mostly original tunes. Featured here are
tenor Seamus Blake, pianist Mulgrew Miller, bassist Boris Kozlov, and drummer Johnathan Blake. Pianist David Kikoski has a new trio release of mostly standards aptly titled
Mostly Standards. Drummer Jeff 'Tain' Watts and bassist Eric Revis complete the piano trio. The guitarist Joe Cohn (Al Cohn's son and frequent sideman for Harry Allen)
has a new quartet CD out titled Shared Contemplations. This date features pianist Peter Beets with bassists J.J. Wiggins or Peter Washington and drummers Joost van Schaik or Willie Jones III. Joe deftly handles
a nice array of standards and lesser-known tunes including Just One of Those Things and two of his dad's tunes.
New Books:
March's newest are led off by the CD-ROM release of Hal Leonard's Real Book Volume 1, C Edition.
This is an especially exciting development, and was just made available this morning. It has all 400 tunes from the book, in a very convenient CD-ROM package.
We are very happy to finally be able to offer this, and we of course also have the book available,
as well as the play-along CDs,
which are all in stock. Soloing Strategies for Guitar
is a multi-style and -faceted approach to many avenues of improvement for all guitarists. Mel Bay has just published two great new jazz piano books,
Jazz Piano Solo Concepts
and Jazz Piano Improvisation Concepts.
These books are companion pieces to the previously released and very well-received Jazz Piano Voicing Concepts.
They are all by Philipp Moehrke, and all aspire to present a very well-rounded course on the title topics.
The three of them make a fantastic jazz piano class. We also have John Thompson's classic Easiest Piano Course
available in a brand new boxed edition of all four books and CDs. Other new items include the
Best of Liza Minnelli,
six different editions of 3 Ragtimes by Scott Joplin,
Broadway Gems,
Easygoing R & B for Women Singers,
Jazz Cabaret Songs for Male Singers,
and several more as well. Finally, we also have some of February's best in stock, including the new
Jim Hall book,
the Duke Ellington Anthology,
and our friend Chuck Sher's two most recent great publications,
the Real Easy Ear Training Book and the
Jazz Singer's Guidebook.
New Big Band Arrangements:
We are very pleased to announce 2 new Jazz Lines titles: Rocker [as played by Charlie Parker with Strings]
and Flight of the Foo Birds [Count Basie/Neal Hefti - from the original manuscript!].
Though Charlie Parker received quite a bit of criticism during his lifetime for making his 'with Strings' recordings, they are now universally recognized as masterpieces. Bird did a live performance at Carnegie Hall on September 17, 1950
with a similar group to his studio recording of 1949, performing some of the tunes that he had previously recorded. This arrangement of Rocker was arranged by Gerry Mulligan for this live concert.
This is a great arrangement featuring interesting counterpoint and fresh-sounding harmonies clealy influenced by Tchaikovsky and Bartok. Gerry Mulligan, only 23 at the time, but already famous from his work with Claude Thornhill and Miles Davis (he did most of the arrangements for Birth of the Cool),
put together a hip-sounding string arrangement based on his original composition. We have used the original manuscript as a basis for this publication. Though, we did transcribe Charlie Parker's part and the beginning piano solo and they are presented here as-played. But, in a separate staff we
also indicated what was written for Bird so that your alto player has a choice in what to play. In addition, we have included alternate parts in the event that you don't have access to string players.
Chord changes have been supplied for the alto solo - the solo section is 'I Got Rhythm' changes in concert C. This publication features some of the most important bebop playing and influential arranging of the 20th century. Secondly, we now
have available Neal Hefti's famous arrangement of Flight of the Foo Birds EXACTLY as recorded in 1957 for the Atomic Basie record. You may be aware
that we previously had available a transcription of this arrangement - we are now especially pleased to offer the manuscript edition! We also just got in a small group arrangement of Kirsty MacColl's classic
In These Shoes, exactly as heard on the soundtrack to the movie Kinky Boots. Also available for small band is
Michael Buble's Everything - a relaxed, Latin arrangement from his 'Call Me Irresponsible' album. And, finally, we have Bill Dobbins'
tribute to Bill Evans Elegy. It features piano, both in written statements of the theme and in an improvised solo. Soprano sax and flugelhorns help to create a reflective mood in this medium-tempo jazz waltz.
New Release Summary:
In our ever-expanding, genre-bending efforts to present the best selection possible of jazz-related items, as of this newsletter we have added a total of
103 new CDs for the month of March 2009 and
41 for the month of February 2009;
27 new DVDs for March 2009
and 46 for February 2009;
30 new music books for March 2009
and 72 for February 2009;
15 new big band and combo arrangements for the month of March 2009
and 9 for the month of February 2009.
In our DVD section, we now carry a constantly growing and diversifying selection of over 1,725 jazz DVDs!
We have all of the live performance DVDs, the documentaries, the method DVDs, the personal master classes - we proudly offer a selection of jazz and jazz-related DVDs that is second to none.
If you haven't visited our Imports and Rarities CD section lately, please check it out. We are now stocking more and more obscure, rare, and hard-to-find titles from Japan, including many titles that you may not be able to find elsewhere.
Please keep in mind that many of our new releases are available in limited quantities. We do our best to predict demand and fill orders as quickly as possible, but we do run out of new releases. Even if we run out of stock, almost everything featured in this newsletter should be available to ship within 5-7 days; some imports may take 2-3 weeks.
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