Kit Clayton: Nek Sanalet

A sample of friendly jazzy affinity between real Swing players with the virtues that should have to jam. These rare transatlantic dates issued by HRS & Vogue performs Basie-ite trumpeter Clayton (for whom Stanley Dance coined the term "Mainstream") with solid feelings of Tiny Grimes, Dicky Wells-Trummy Young, Don Byas, George Johnson and young pianist Billy Taylor, or French cats like Alix Combelle & André Persiany in four sessions that can be considered among the final small-group swing events of the classic era.

Pianist Gerald Clayton is set to release his Blue Note Records debut Happening: Live at the Village Vanguard on July 10. Recorded at the legendary NYC jazz club with a quintet of longtime collaborators—Logan Richardson on alto saxophone, Walter Smith III on tenor saxophone, Joe Sanders on bass, and Marcus Gilmore on drums—Happening spotlights Clayton’s layered identity as a leader.

Allan Clayton demonstrates his exceptional versatility with a Liszt programme of eighteen songs, all of which—in contrasting ways—make prodigious technical and musical demands of the performers.

Composed in feverish bouts interrupted by long periods of inaction, Hugo Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch was brought to completion in 1896. The 46 songs are settings of poems in German by Paul Heyse, after Italian folk songs – miniatures with a duration of less than 2 minutes in most cases. Heyse’s collection numbered more than 350 poems, but Wolf ignored the ballads and laments, and concentrated almost exclusively on the rispetti. These are short love poems which chart, against a Tuscan landscape, the everyday jealousies, flirtations, joys and despairs of men and women in love. Heyse’s translations often intensify the simple Italian of the original poems, and in their turn, Wolf’s settings represent a further heightening of emotion. Miniatures they may be, but many of the songs strike unforgettably at the heart.