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What A Swell Party This Was!

BY ED SHANAPHY

It was a chilly and sunny January weekend at the Sheraton Sand Key Resort in Clearwater Beach, Florida. But inside it was ‘hot’—and raining piano players, along with a formidable collection of world-renowned musicians, all of whom were providing the heat. From the stage of the Grand Ballroom to the resort’s Mainstay Tavern, where the glorious sounds went well into the wee small hours, it was wall-to-wall, continuous musical excitement.

This was the First Annual Arbors Records Invitational Jazz Party, featuring traditional jazz at its best: everything from solo and dueling pianos, to hot New Orleans style ensembles, to sensitively crafted guitar duets and chamber jazz combinations, all served up by some of the finest musicians in the business. It was a party not to be missed, and if you did, the good news is that there is another one scheduled for January, 2010.

The Arbors record label has a lofty and admirable mission: to preserve, record, and promote what it describes as “traditional and contemporary classic jazz, and the swing styles of the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, and beyond.” This new series of Arbors Jazz Parties follows its previous March of Jazz series which ended in 2004. These Jazz fests, and all the recordings in the Arbors repertoire have “in common a love of melody, improvisation and swing.” Arbors Records is a family affair, a labor of love, conceived and founded by Rachel and Mat Domber. Since the release of their first recording by Rick Fay’s Hot Five in 1990, this husband and wife team has recorded hundreds of CDs featuring such stellar pianists as Dick Hyman, Dave McKenna, Dick Wellstood, Ralph Sutton, Rossano Sportiello, John Bunch, Derek Smith, Skitch Henderson, Johnny Varro and Shelly Berg among others, to say nothing of the many more world class soloists such as guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, cornetists Ruby Braff and Warren Vaché, reed men Flip Phillips, Kenny Davern, Bob Wilber, and Ken Peplowski, trombonists John Allred and George Masso, and vocalists Nicki Parrott, Daryl Sherman and Rebecca Kilgore, to name but a few.

The party this year was focused on the piano inasmuch as it was organized as a tribute to one of the true piano legends, Dave McKenna, who passed away this past October.

There were two grand pianos on the stage flanked by two large viewing screens on either side that provided close-ups of the players and the action of their hands on the keys, valves, strings and fret boards, made possible by a multitude of planted cameras covering every angle. There was not a nuance or note to be missed. In a weekend simply filled with unforgettable and cherished moments, some of the true highlights came when only two musicians would take the stage, be they two pianists such as the masterful Dick Hyman pairing with such brilliant pianists as Shelly Berg and Rossano Sportiello, or the meeting of the stride piano giants from Germany, Louis Mazetier and Bernd Lhotzky, or guitar legends Bucky Pizzarelli and Howard Alden, or Hyman again with the amazing saxophonist Ken Peplowski, or the 23 year-old wonder of the jazz violin, Aaron Weinstein, joining forces with his 83 year-old mentor Bucky Pizzarelli, Bucky having brought a 17 year-old Aaron to the attention of the Dombers in the first place. The fun the musicians were having on stage was highly infectious, and that spirit of fun was what permeated the entire weekend. And just when one thought, after a particularly inspiring performance, that it simply could not get better than that, it did.

At one point, listening in wonder to Dick Hyman performing his customary sorcery on one of the Steinways, while Rossano Sportiello, the greatest Italian import since Barolo, brilliantly commandeered the other in what was a seamlessly and flawlessly constructed two-piano opus, an extended multi-chorus improvisation on “The Sheik Of Araby,” with no music in front of them, nor even so much as a roadmap or cheat-sheet (one that might indicate that “on chorus #3 Dick plays top, Rossano stride bass”), I leaned over to my table-mate, Julia Hyman, Dick’s charming wife, and asked, “Did Dick create charts [arrangements] or something for these duos, that they’re so perfectly executed?” “What charts?,” she responded. “There are no charts. But you know Dick. He organizes everything,” pointing out that this kind of joining of forces does need a special discipline so that the performance has a beginning, a middle, and an end, logically building in excitement, and that the players also know how and when not to clash with each other. “They just seem to know where they’re going at any given moment,” I said. She threw in, “Except when he’s behind the wheel. He never has any idea of how to get where we’re going. He says himself that he’s ‘directionally impaired.’” Well, perhaps, but never so on the piano bench. Or is it his brilliance at improvisation, his knack for never playing or improvising upon the same tune the same way...

Continued in the Spring 2009 Issue of
Sheet Music Magazine

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