4/18/00

"Last Swing of the Century."

by Alan Greenblatt

One of the great jazz performances I've witnessed here in Washington, or anywhere, was Ken Peplowski's playing of Benny Goodman tunes with a big band put together by local trombone player (and journalist) Eric Felten about three years ago. Peplowski has since played Goodman's clarinet parts with the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra and led a big band of his own on a tour through Japan in 1998.

We now have a souvenir of the latter, a CD recorded live called "Last Swing of the Century." Peplowski gets the lion's share of the solos, of course, but the band also featured other major swing talents such as trumpeter Conte Candoli, pianist Ben Aronov and drummer Frank Capp. Happily, they get to improvise their own solos, rather than trying to recreate the long-ago inspirations of Goodman's sidemen on 78 rpm records.

Peplowski is a remarkably fluid player and seems so much more relaxed when you're not watching him in person hunching his shoulders and violently pursing his lips. The one time he's really challenged on this disk, by Frank Vignola's furious guitar solo on "China Boy," he comes through with a soaring closing solo that's pure joy.

Also recently out on disk is a Verve release with excerpts from performances by Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Carmen McRae with their respective trios on consecutive nights at the Newport Jazz Festival of 1957. The Fitzgerald and Holiday material was out on record, long ago, but the McRae stuff is new.

This is a good CD but not a great one. It's best recommended either to people who don't have much material from these singers as a kind of starter set, or obsessives who have to own everything.

As a rule, it's smart to buy Fitzgerald material from her Verve years, which were her best in terms of the quality of her voice, her sense of swing, and the accompanists she was given to work with. From the same period, and featuring much of the same material, I would recommend "Ella in Rome."

As a further rule, her late, Verve period was not Holiday's best. Her voice was much worn by her famously dissolute life; she sang a lot prettier during her Columbia years, when she regularly sang in front of the likes of Lester Young and Teddy Wilson and other players in the Goodman and Basie bands. Her later stuff on Verve or Commodore/Decca is the most famous but not the best.

As for McRae, this is not her greatest work, either. Her singing is often flat and her renditions fairly ordinary. She hadn't yet adopted the conversational style of phrasing that would make her such a wonderful interpreter later on.