Coleman Hawkins & Django Reinhardt – Stardust

Coleman Hawkins – Tenor Sax

Django Reinhardt – Guitar

Stephan Grappelli – Piano

78 recording on RCA Victor, 1935

Tiny Grimes – Flyin’ High (High Flyin’)

Tiny Grimes, tenor guitar; Wilbur “Red” Prysock, tenor sax; Jimmy Saunders, piano; Charlie “Ike” Issacs, bass; Sonny Payne, drums

78 issue on Atlantic Records, 1950.

New Jazz Review: Duke Ellington – Live at the Whitney (1972)

Duke Ellington live at The Whitney Museum of Modern Art: April, 1972.

Review is here:

http://bopandbeyond.wordpress.com/jazz/

Crime Jazz Month: Krzysztof Komeda (Knife In The Water)

Krzysztof Komeda was a hero of the international jazz scene, keeping the music alive amidst the suspicion and repression of the Polish Communist Regime.

The music is remixed by Bonny Larmes out of Komeda’s score for Roman Polanski’s 1962 directorial debut: Nóż w wodzie (Knife In The Water), a terse psychological thriller in which an unhappily married couple pick up a stray hitchhiker and offer to take him sailing with them. Complications ensue, including threats of violence, simulated drowning, and infidelity. The film generated enormous critical acclaim, allowing Polanski to leave Communist Poland where the film was not well-received. Komeda remained behind, using his growing influence as a film composer to push for jazz’s acceptance behind the Iron Curtain.

Sadly, both Komeda’s score and Bonny Larmes’ remix album remain out-of-print and hard to find. Most of Komeda’s score, however, is available on Last FM:

http://www.last.fm/music/Krzysztof+Komeda/Knife+in+the+Water

Crime Jazz Month: Henry Mancini (Experiment In Terror)

Experiment In Terror is an underrated noir crime film directed by Blake Edwards with a fantastic score by Henry Mancini, whose music touches on both the West Coast cool jazz sound and his own brand of lush, romantic strings — all of this, of course, dashed across the face with a salt grit of pure pulp crime!

The film is a bit of a sore thumb in the filmography of Blake Edwards, whose more successful features were all comedies (including The Great Race, The Pink Panther, and Breakfast At Tiffany’s). What most people don’t know about Edwards is that he grew up a huge fan of the pulps and wrote a hard-boiled serial for NBC before finding success as a film director. Experiment In Terror is, sadly, the only crime film Edwards made.