Album Reviews

Another sonic spectacular from the Everest catalog, this pairing of Shostakovich’s 9th Symphony, completed in 1945, with Prokofiev’s score for the 1933 film “Lieutenant Kije,” offers rich, warm orchestral colors, remarkable transparency and air, and dynamic contrasts that mimic what one hears in a good concert hall.

You don’t have to be a Blue Note fetishist to know that pianist Sonny Clark made at least one great and enduring album, the 1958 hard bop classic “Cool Struttin’, though the cult of Cool Struttin’ has driven up the price of original pressings to the $4000 range and higher.

Last night during the intermission between performances of Brahms’ Third and Fourth Symphonies, I stood on the Avery Fisher Hall balcony talking with a couple I didn’t know who were probably in their mid-sixties and I mentioned that I wrote about “stereo” equipment. They reacted with surprise, with the husband exclaiming, “Stereo. Now that’s an old-fashioned term. I didn’t think anyone used it anymore.”

The title track is not twice as good as Desmond's surprise jazz “hit” “Take Five,” immortalized on the Time Out album recorded with his regular band mates in the Brubeck quartet, but it has its own serpentine charm, and having Jim Hall comping on guitar instead of Brubeck on piano gives the track a far different, more delicate texture.

This review was but a few words from being finished and a fumbling finger destroyed the whole thing. I hate when that happens! I'm not going to try to reproduce it. Too painful. So let me summarize what I'd written: yes The Four Tops and the other Motown acts were slick and aimed at white America, and the Chess stuff was much hipper, but this was great pop stuff nonetheless.

The concert promoter, tour organizer, record label owner Norman Granz had a knack for assembling groups that produced successful sessions like this. Benny Green's somewhat defensive annotation tells you the story: Webster had been popular during the big band "swing" era as a member of Duke Ellington's band as its first star tenor saxophonist. He was one of the "big three," the others being Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins.