"Jazz," Composer Milton Babbitt once said, "isn't necessarily just what is improvised after 4 a.m. on 52nd Street." To prove it, he accepted an invitation from Brandeis University last summer to write one of six jazz compositions for the annual Brandeis arts festival. Also represented: Composers Harold Shapero and Gunther Schuller, Jazzmen Charlie Mingus, Jimmy Giuffre and George Russell. Their efforts are now presented by Columbia on an album entitled Modern Jazz Concert. The selections range from Russell's blues-favored All About Rosie, "on a motif taken from an Alabama Negro children's song game," to Babbitt's lurching, jaggedly profiled twelve-tone piece. All Set.
Composer Shapero contributes a jazz arrangement of a Monteverdi chaconne. Entitled No Green Mountains (a play on Monteverdi's name), it holds its baroque flavor and allows for some intriguing solo-trumpet embroidery on the main theme. Most successful work is Transformation, by Composer Schuller, who is both the first horn player of the Metropolitan Opera and a sometime player in jazz combos. His tautly constructed piece opens with a wistful theme, gradually begins to swing, gives way to free improvisation and a swelling riff in the wind instruments. All the pieces have their fascinating moments, but they seem less intent on saying anything than on pacing the distance between Birdland and Carnegie Hall.
Other new jazz records:
All Night Session (Hampton Hawes Quartet; Contemporary, 3 LPs) seems designed to prove Composer Babbitt wrong, and to show once again that real jazz must be improvised. Pianist Hawes, Guitarist Jim Hall, Bass Player Red Mitchell and Drummer Bruz Freeman turned up at the studio one night and piled into Jordu and Groovin' High, and from there on "we just played because we love to play." The result is one of the few genuine jam sessions on LPs. The quartet offers some effervescent readings of blues and ballads, including four numbers composed on the spot by Pianist Hawes. For listeners who can stay with Hawes's clipped, glistering piano through 16 selections, the set kindles a kind of inner momentum rare to the recording studio.
For Basie (Paul Quinichette, tenor sax; Shad Collins, trumpet; Nat Pierce, piano; Freddie Greene, guitar; Walter Page, bass; Jo Jones, drums; Prestige). "Count don't play nothin'," said a Basie veteran once, "but it sure sounds good." This nostalgic album is a fine reminder of what that line meant. The selection of five Basie classics (including Texas Shuffle and Diggin' for Dex) is taken from the period 1937 to 1941 and played by three veterans of the Basie rhythm section.
Bill Harris and Friends (Ben Webster, tenor sax; Jimmy Rowles, piano; Red Mitchell, bass; Stan Levey, drums; Fantasy). Trombonist Harris, who sometimes sounds as if he were blowing through several folds of velvet, is the weakest operative on an album chiefly distinguished by the pensive unfolding of some fine solos by Saxman Webster. In Where Are You?, I Surrender, Dear and In a Mello-tone, Webster articulates his longings with spacious ease and a tone as husky with melancholy as a distant-sounding foghorn.