Word: saxman
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...Tenor saxman Zoot Sims is still cranking out the same old ballads that he recorded about ten years ago. His latest album, Strike Up The Band, with Bobby Hackett, features some pleasant renditions of a couple of Gershwin warhorses, including "Embraceable You." Nothing really innovative there, however. But Sims is paired with Al Cohn over at Sandy's Jazz Revival and there is a good chance that he'll snap out of it, and play some of his own stuff. While you are there try to tell the difference between Sims and the great Lester Young. Through Saturday...
E.S.P. (Columbia). Miles Davis and his fine quintet in abstract musings of their own invention (Agitation by Davis, Iris by Tenor Saxman Wayne Shorter, Mood by Bassist Ronald Carter). Sometimes the drum, bass and piano drive the soloists, but mostly they provide only phantom rhythms under the fluid runs and fragmentary phrases of the trumpet and tenor sax. No one will be tempted to tap a foot or sing along, but few with any E.S.P. at all will stop listening...
...into his own. His album of Jazz Variations on Movie Themes was a surprise hit with disk jockeys. He was busy scoring a new movie, planning new album material, and preparing the Gershwin Concerto in F for eleven concerts with the Hollywood Symphony. "When you talk about him," said Saxman Benny Carter, "you gotta be well versed in superlatives...
Cannonball is a brilliant improviser and he stitches his agile figures with a warmth of tone, a turbulence, and a gusto that is the envy of every other saxman in the business. In their most popular number-This Here, by Pianist Bobby Timmons-the quintet pours cool brass over the driving beat in long, looping lines that seem to glide through the roof and into the night...
Playwright Garson (Born Yesterday) Kanin (rhymes with rain in), a jazz saxophonist during his knockabout days, has managed this much. His novel is cast in the form of a onetime saxman's fond, moody reminiscence of the hard-blowing early '303. Jogged by a telephone call from one of his old partners, the narrator recalls the rise and fall of the combo they formed. The group begins as a trio, built around an astonishingly good young trumpeter. Then the saxman finds a pianist at a Harlem rent party, and the trio sounds even better as a quartet. Bookings...