Image and sound: Webster Hall, 1956

One satisfaction of researching jazz photography—for it is a lot of fun—is the rare occasion when the images can be married to sounds. The book The Sound I Saw (Phaidon Press, 2011) by Roy DeCarava (1919-2009) includes a beautiful collection of black and white images, many of jazz musicians, with no credit whatsoever. Checking faces, names and discographies like this one, there are two photographs which can be pinned down, taken at the magnificent Webster Hall, RCA's regular studio in NYC at the time. These:

Tony Scott and orchestra, Webster Hall, NYC,
Friday, December 14, 1956

Left to right: Frank Foster, Danny Bank (with back to the camera), Frank Wess, Sahib Shihab,
Gigi Gryce, Tony Scott; same date and location.

ND — Carlos Montoya: From St. Louis to Seville (and a book...)

Carlos Montoya: From St. Louis to Seville
(RCA/Victor LPM-1986)

This new entry in the infrequent series Notes on discography (ND) is about an early experiment in jazz-flamenco fusion. From St. Louis to Seville is an album by Carlos Montoya published in 1959, at a time when the recording business was booming partly thanks to the mass introduction of stereo and hi-fi, flamenco had began to be well known in the US, and jazz was going through a sweet spot in its history. The significance of this LP is more historical than musical, given the context of both flamenco (think Sabicas) or jazz at the time, or even the meeting of jazz and Spanish music arranged by Miles Davis and Gil Evans about a year later in their Sketches of Spain.

Piazzolla in New York (III): Take Me Dancing! — Discographical details

In 1959, while jazz was going through an incredibly fertile period and New York's cultural life was just mind-boggling, the grand modernizer of tango was struggling to make ends meet, and musically he wasn't really getting anywhere.

Since then, the result of his plans to mix jazz and tango have been marked as pretty much irrelevant by conventional wisdom, and with no hard data in the original album sleeve or any other published sources, there's hardly anything solid regarding the personnel and date of recording of Take Me Dancing. Who would be interested in knowing the details of a "failure", right?

Discographical research on Take Me Dancing! begins and ends with the picture below, first published in Piazzolla Loco Loco Loco (Ed. de la Urraca; Argentina, 1994), a book by Óscar López Ruiz, one of the main guitar players in Piazzolla's career. Besides the faces you can see on it, other names have been offered as present in this session, such as Tito Puente (discussed in the previous post), guitarist Barry Galbraith, and bassist George Duvivier. There's also the additional question of there being more musicians in it than can be heard on the record. A few internet searches will give out some vague results, with errors in the spelling of names and the pairings of instruments and musicians.

Sunday, April 26th, 1959?

In any case, the complete personnel is, from left to right:

ND - Michel Legrand: Legrand in Rio

[UPDATES: Go to the bottom of the post to see an update on the subject]

Every once in a while I'll publish small pieces of discographical research, or notes on discography (hence, ND). This one is about an old LP by Michel Legrand, who came to prominence in jazz with his Legrand Jazz, recorded in the summer of '58. That was a true all-star affaire (Miles, Coltrane, Bill Evans, Ben Webster...) commanded by a 26-year Frenchman just arrived in New York... Have times changed!


Legrand in Rio itself was recorded and published months before than Legrand Jazz, and musically it's closer to previous efforts such as I Love Paris than to the celebrated jazz album. In Rio is a well-crafted, well-executed collection of instrumentals, not bland and with a few competent jazz solos, but very much an easy-listening pop record. As in I Love Paris, there's some heavy tape-editing, with string sections fading in from (and fading out to) nowhere, as well as plenty of "Latin" percussion. The tunes are Brazilian, Spanish, Cuban, Mexican, and Argentinian classics, but even so the album came out as Legrand in Rio in the US and the UK.

Although by listening to the record it's clear that Legrand in Rio and Legrand Jazz are worlds apart, for some reason In Rio has been lumped together with Legrand Jazz (of which all dates and personnel are known) in discographies, probably as a wild guess. This is what both Lord and Bruyninckx gave the last time I looked: