«Swiss Radio Days Jazz Series» 30th Anniversary
Double Release «Vol. 49 & Vol. 50»
Marc Copland Solo
Jazz
Three quarters of a century of jazz history in radio recordings
The Montreux-based jazz label TCB is celebrating the fiftieth album in its «Swiss Radio Days» series in thirty years.
The recordings come from the Swiss radio archive and the release was planned from the outset as the start of a series that has produced fifty albums to date. These go back to radio recordings, which were mostly made at concerts on a large stage, but sometimes also in front of a smaller audience directly in a radio studio. In their entirety, these fifty productions offer a journey through jazz history, at least as it presents itself in the light of performances in Swiss concert halls.
The chronologically most distant recordings date back to the immediate post-war period, when Don Redman's orchestra did the honours in Geneva in 1946. The historical depth of the event can be measured by the fact that Redman, born in 1900, belonged to the pioneer generation of jazz and developed the foundations of the big band vocabulary towards the end of the 1920s. In 1949, it was the turn of Coleman Hawkins, who shaped the early history of the jazz saxophone like no other and who travelled to Europe, including Switzerland, in the second half of the 1930s, as well as Bill Coleman and Don Byas. In the 1950s, Switzerland was honoured by Benny Goodman, Nat King Cole, Oscar Peterson, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Sonny Rollins and Horace Silver, and in the following decade - we will content ourselves with selected names - Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Ray Charles, Cannonball Adderley, Dave Brubeck and the orchestras of Thad Jones and Mel Lewis.
We will stop the name-dropping at this point in order to address a larger subset of the fifty albums, namely the recordings that were made directly in the context of radio concerts, which were conceived according to a recurring formula: A house trio received an illustrious soloist, often an American - such as Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Phil Woods, Art Farmer or Benny Bailey - but also Europeans such as Albrecht Mangelsdorff, Enrico Rava or Alan Skidmore. Swiss musicians such as Franco Ambrosetti and Andy Scherrer were also invited, and - as a final subgroup - a few women. The Jazz Live Trio, which was active in this context between 1964 and 1982, consisted of changing line-ups centred around pianist Klaus Koenig; his regular partners were Isla Eckinger and Peter Frei on bass as well as drummers Pierre Favre and Peter Schmidlin.
The latter, who died prematurely in 2015, must also be mentioned in another context, as it was he who founded the TCB label in 1991 and ran it until his death - a task that has since been continued by his widow Barbara Frei Schmidlin in the spirit of the founder. It is therefore a nice gesture that the fiftieth «Swiss Radio Days» production is dedicated to the timeless classic jazz of the trio Dado Moroni (p), Reggie Johnson (b) and Peter Schmidlin (dr), who played in Morges in July 2009.
Incidentally, two of the latest productions in the «Swiss Radio Days» series are also being released on vinyl, in collaboration with the American label Dot Time Records, which has its own series of historical recordings: These are numbers 48 - Louis Armstrong with his All Stars in 1952 - and 49: the latter captures the dialogue that pianist Marc Copland had in September 2022 with a pre-recorded version of himself, with whom he entered into a multi-layered musical dialogue live.
Georg Modestin, jazz'n'more
This article appeared in the Nov/Dec 2024 issue of Jazz'n'more magazine. More info & subscriptions: jazznmore.ch
«Swiss Radio Days Jazz Series» 30th Anniversary im Moods
«Swiss Radio Days Jazz Series» 30th Anniversary
Double Release «Vol. 49 & Vol. 50»
Dado Moroni Trio
Jazz
