muzycy:
Russ Lossing piano
John Hebert double bass

Editor's info:
We might begin just where this CD ends, with Russ Lossing and John Hebert playing Pitter Panther Patter, a tune originally composed by Duke Ellington for a duet with his brilliant bassist Jimmy Blanton. The piece-suggested to the duo by producer Werner X. Uehlinger-invokes a great tradition of piano/bass dialogues in jazz, Lossing and Hebert ending just where many would have it begin. Part of what makes the tradition remarkable is the variation possible within it. It doesn't move in one direction or value just one approach.
In a sense the Ellington/Blanton duets announce the bass as a solo instrument, Blanton, the instrument's great liberator, possessing an unprecedented fluency that would inspire Pettiford, Brown and Mingus. But there was already another essential piano/bass relationship in jazz, in the rapprochement achieved between the two great Kansas City bandleaders Walter Page and Count Basie, the former supplying the fundamental pulse and the latter a series of sparkling asides and intrusions to create some of the essential Basie band sound.
The most spectacular piano/bass moments may have helped reshape jazz itself. In the mid-1950s Thelonious Monk and Wilbur Ware brought an unprecedented subtlety to the rhythmic possibilities of the piano/bass dialogue, Ware uniquely suited to match and shift Monk's almost perfect sense of momentum.
Move a little further along the continuum and there's the equally significant relationship between Bill Evans and Scott LaFaro, based in part on Evans' omission of the root note from his chords creating an almost constant tonal ambiguity.
Leaving the root tone to the bass, Evans also employed the most fluidly inventive bassist to have played the instrument, so that the bass became a kind of constant melodic presence, kick-starting the languidly rich chords of the piano and embracing its melodic lines. The relationship would further develop in Paul Bley and Gary Peacock's free, l.......
more

Editor's info:
We might begin just where this CD ends, with Russ Lossing and John Hebert playing Pitter Panther Patter, a tune originally composed by Duke Ellington for a duet with his brilliant bassist Jimmy Blanton. The piece-suggested to the duo by producer Werner X. Uehlinger-invokes a great tradition of piano/bass dialogues in jazz, Lossing and Hebert ending just where many would have it begin. Part of what makes the tradition remarkable is the variation possible within it. It doesn't move in one direction or value just one approach.
In a sense the Ellington/Blanton duets announce the bass as a solo instrument, Blanton, the instrument's great liberator, possessing an unprecedented fluency that would inspire Pettiford, Brown and Mingus. But there was already another essential piano/bass relationship in jazz, in the rapprochement achieved between the two great Kansas City bandleaders Walter Page and Count Basie, the former supplying the fundamental pulse and the latter a series of sparkling asides and intrusions to create some of the essential Basie band sound.
The most spectacular piano/bass moments may have helped reshape jazz itself. In the mid-1950s Thelonious Monk and Wilbur Ware brought an unprecedented subtlety to the rhythmic possibilities of the piano/bass dialogue, Ware uniquely suited to match and shift Monk's almost perfect sense of momentum.
Move a little further along the continuum and there's the equally significant relationship between Bill Evans and Scott LaFaro, based in part on Evans' omission of the root note from his chords creating an almost constant tonal ambiguity.
Leaving the root tone to the bass, Evans also employed the most fluidly inventive bassist to have played the instrument, so that the bass became a kind of constant melodic presence, kick-starting the languidly rich chords of the piano and embracing its melodic lines. The relationship would further develop in Paul Bley and Gary Peacock's free, l.......
more