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Marty Grosz's Bass Motives at Chautauqua (Sept. 18, 2010)

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My flippant title is not completely irrelevant.

For starters, at jazz clubs and parties and festivals, there are performances ranging from humdrum to spectacular. And—not very often—there are performances that viewers and listeners know they won't ever forget.

I take great pride in presenting one such episode: around four minutes long, quietly rocking rather than explosive, and performed before noon—an unseemly time of day for most jazz musicians.

The band was officially titled Marty Grosz and “The Mouldy Figs," referring to those rather artificial wars between musical ideologies stirred up by jazz critics and fans in the Forties and Fifties. A “Mouldy Fig" read Rudi Blesh rather than Barry Ulanov or Leonard Feather, revered Bunk Johnson rather than Fats Navarro. Figs deplored “be-bop," horn-rimmed glasses, and berets.

Since Marty Grosz has displayed a serious leaning towards band-names no one has thought of before (his Hot Puppies, his Orphan Newsboys, and so on) I have taken the liberty of renaming the band—for this performance only “Bass Motives." Why? Well, there's Arnie Kinsella on drums—someone who knows how to make a particular point with a ferocious hit to his bass drum; Andy Stein, usually playing violin but here picking up his baritone sax; Vince Giordano, bass saxophonist supreme; Scott Robinson, the Doc Savage of the instrument room, also playing bass saxophone.

The tune they launch into is the pretty old Eddie Cantor tribute to his wife, Ida—IDA (SWEET AS APPLE CIDER). But behind Eddie and Ida and their family is the far more serious presence of Red Nichols and his Five Pennies in the Brunswick studios in 1927—the Pennies including Pee Wee Russell and Adrian Rollini, perhaps the finest bass saxophonist ever, ever. And one of the songs they took on was a moving ballad-tempo version of IDA.

Marty and his Bass Motives not only evoke that lovely recording but sing out in their own style. When I wrote that some rare performances are unforgettable, I wasn't over-praising this one:



Incidentally, for the chroniclers in the audience: Frank Trumbauer and Bix Beiderbecke have received a good deal of well-earned praise for their imperishable recordings in early 1927 of two “jazz ballads," that is, improvisation carried out at a medium-slow tempo: SINGIN' THE BLUES and I'M COMIN' VIRGINIA (with a sweet reading of 'WAY DOWN YONDER IN NEW ORLEANS not far behind). The original Nichols recording—in August of that same year—seems deeply emotionally influenced by the pretty playing of Bix and Tram.

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