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EL SONIDO NUEVO (Verve) is not a new sound at all but old-fashioned Latin dance music played by Vibraphonist Cal Tjader (Soul Sauce), along with half a dozen softspoken, hypnotic percussionists and a trio of growling, pulsating trombonists. What lifts the album to the top groove is the piano of Eddie Palmieri, whose syncopated rhythmic sallies are a quiet contrast to Tjader's smoothly bubbling vibes.
THE DISSECTION AND RECONSTRUCTION OF MUSIC FROM THE PAST AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF LALO SCHIFRIN'S DEMENTED ENSEMBLE AS A TRIBUTE TO THE MEMORY OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE (Verve). The title is a tortured joke, but the music is airy and inventive, if a bit dry. It consists of jazz improvisations on classical, Renaissance and medieval styles of music. Several ensembles, one predominantly strings (Beneath a Weeping Willow Shade), one heavy on the horns (Blues for Johann Sebastian), are led by Schifrin, who also plays an ornamental harpsichord.
ELUES ETUDE (Limelight). Oscar Peterson is still a topflight jazz pianist—a suave swinger with impeccable technique—crisp, fast and featherlight. But half these tracks catch him with a new drummer and bassist, and at times the trio seems merely to be making polite conversation. Oscar softly grunts and moans, rather surprising accompaniments for urbane offerings like Let's Fall in Love and The Shadow of Your Smile.
CINEMA
GEORGY GIRL. The rags-to-riches story of a butler's dumpy daughter is like a thousand eccentric English comedies, but it boasts one sterling asset in Georgy herself, played with vibrant good humor by 23-year-old Lynn Redgrave, daughter of Sir Michael and sister of Vanessa.
LOVES OF A BLONDE, the outstanding hit of this year's New York Film Festival, is a delightful Czech comedy written and directed by 34-year-old Miloś Forman. Slight but abrim with humorous insights, Blonde observes what happens when a pudding-faced pretty from a small town succumbs to a callow young piano player and follows him to his home in Prague.
THE SHAMELESS OLD LADY. An old woman, having spent long years in servitude as daughter, wife and mother, wins a new lease on life when her husband dies. She outrages her family by becoming the liveliest widow in Marseille. Played to perfection by the veteran star of the Paris stage, Sylvie (like many other French performers, she uses only one name).
CRAZY QUILT. Director John Korty fashions a modern fable about a marriage between a realist (Tom Rosqui) and a romantic (Ina Mela), who learn to accept their differences after ten years of mutual misunderstanding.
THE WRONG BOX. Bryan Forbes has a high old time directing Michael Caine, Ralph Richardson, John Mills and Peter Sellers in a Victorian spoof of such varied subjects as vast fortunes, star-struck lovers, Bournemouth stranglers, venal doctors, missing bodies and orphaned cousins.
BOOKS
Best Reading
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, by Jean Guéhenno. The character and egocentric doctrine of the erratic Rousseau, in many ways the first modern man, are brilliantly displayed in an excellent translation from the French.
THE FIXER, by Bernard Malamud. This fictional version of the Russian equivalent of the Dreyfus case—the Beiliss trial—becomes a vehicle for Malamud's probing analysis of the modern individual beleaguered by orthodoxies.