Becoming Billie Holiday

With a lyricism and warmth to his sound that was without equal, Arthur Stewart Art Farmer will always be remembered as one of the finest trumpet and flugelhorn players in jazz. Continually evolving in style and approach throughout his career, his playing was noted for its distinctive phrasing, letting the beat run ahead of him rather in the manner of Billie Holiday's vocals". Farmer produced a number records that remain among the most defining of the jazz genre, and which often featured him performing alongside other legendary musicians, including Benny Golson, Gigi Gryce, Horace Silver, Jim Hall and Sonny Rollins. 1961 saw one of the most important shifts in Art Farmer s career. Having played primarily trumpet up until that point, Farmer switched to the softer tone of the flugelhorn, and for the rest of his life it would remain his instrument of choice.

Before becoming an expatriate in 1965 and eventually settling in Munich, pianist Mal Waldron cut several stateside hard bop albums full of his idiosyncratic and Monk-ish piano work, and featuring choice contributions by some of the music's finest. For this 1957 date, Waldron worked with a stellar sextet interchangeably manned by John Coltrane, Jackie McLean, Idrees Sulieman, Art Taylor, and others. Bookended by the pianist's ebullient "Potpourri" and the avant-noir blues "One by One," the set also includes a fetching cover of Cole Porter's "From This Moment On" and a beautifully complex arrangement of Billie Holiday's "Don't Explain." (Waldron was Holiday's accompanist for the last two years of the singer's life until her death in 1959)…