The Art of The 12"

In listening to the five years of the Brad Mehldau Trio represented in this box set, one hears the unfolding of a new and significant part of modern jazz history, as the end of the 1990s opened the door on the explosive creative renaissance of the music in the 21st century. Nonesuch has compiled the five releases in the Art of the Trio series, as well as an additional disc of unreleased recordings from the same period (1997-2001), offering a serious reconsideration of what has already been accepted as a "next step" for the jazz piano trio's history. On Vol. 1, Mehldau, bassist Larry Grenadier, and Spanish drummer Jorge Rossy intriguingly and seductively begin uttering the first sounds of their new language via Mehldau's originals, such as "Lament for Linus" and "Ron's Place"…

Built on the Afro-Caribbean past, forged by visionaries such as John Santos and his comrades, and steeled by its rootedness in American life, Latin jazz is a major force shaping contemporary American musical culture. Over decades of performing, arranging, producing, and teaching, Santos has helped make the San Francisco Bay area a Latin jazz stronghold. In Art of the Descarga, The John Santos Sextet and a parade of stellar guests mine the music’s imaginative motherlode, the descarga—the spontaneous, improvisatory interplay that is the beating heart of Latin jam sessions. Orestes Vilató, Jerry González, Orlando “Maraca” Valle, Tito Matos, Juan “Juango” Gutiérrez, and other luminaries join the sextet in this spectacular collision of beauty, design, and time-honored creativity.

All but two of these 13 tracks date from the late 1950s (the other two were done in 1965), and while Baker's talents were undimmed at this point, this wasn't his best era recording-wise, in terms of either material or bands. For his best you should turn to the earlier Pacific Jazz discs, but this is still a good set of slow and sentimental Baker for those who have heard the peak stuff in this vein and want yet more. "Autumn in New York," recorded in Italy with a string orchestra, is one extreme of his sentimental predilections, yet there's also stuff in a far more straight-ahead vein with the likes of Bill Evans and Kenny Burrell among the backup musicians…

The art of transcription - of recasting music, more or less literally, from one performance medium into another - has been a common practice for a long time. A good transcription (or a paraphrase) tests the abilities and the imagination of the transcriber as much as the creation of an original composition. Trying to maintain the distinct characteristics of a given work, while meeting the demands of a new medium, are not always easily achieved. But in a world where the pursuit of stylistic authenticity has become the performance ideal, transcriptions and paraphrases have often been frowned upon by purists as tamperings or sacrilegious alterations with the purity of the composer’s original.