Jazz Records

"Jazz," Composer Milton Babbitt once said, "isn't necessarily just what is improvised after 4 a.m. on 52nd Street." To prove it, he accepted an invitation from Brandeis University last summer to write one of six jazz compositions for the annual Brandeis arts festival. Also represented: Composers Harold Shapero and Gunther Schuller, Jazzmen Charlie Mingus, Jimmy Giuffre and George Russell. Their efforts are now presented by Columbia on an album entitled Modern Jazz Concert. The selections range from Russell's blues-favored All About Rosie, "on a motif taken from an Alabama Negro children's song game," to Babbitt's lurching, jaggedly profiled twelve-tone piece. All Set.

Composer Shapero contributes a jazz arrangement of a Monteverdi chaconne. Entitled No Green Mountains (a play on Monteverdi's name), it holds its baroque flavor and allows for some intriguing solo-trumpet embroidery on the main theme. Most successful work is Transformation, by Composer Schuller, who is both the first horn player of the Metropolitan Opera and a sometime player in jazz combos. His tautly constructed piece opens with a wistful theme, gradually begins to swing, gives way to free improvisation and a swelling riff in the wind instruments. All the pieces have their fascinating moments, but they seem less intent on saying anything than on pacing the distance between Birdland and Carnegie Hall.

Other new jazz records:

All Night Session (Hampton Hawes Quartet; Contemporary, 3 LPs) seems designed to prove Composer Babbitt wrong, and to show once again that real jazz must be improvised. Pianist Hawes, Guitarist Jim Hall, Bass Player Red Mitchell and Drummer Bruz Freeman turned up at the studio one night and piled into Jordu and Groovin' High, and from there on "we just played because we love to play." The result is one of the few genuine jam sessions on LPs. The quartet offers some effervescent readings of blues and ballads, including four numbers composed on the spot by Pianist Hawes. For listeners who can stay with Hawes's clipped, glistering piano through 16 selections, the set kindles a kind of inner momentum rare to the recording studio.

For Basie (Paul Quinichette, tenor sax; Shad Collins, trumpet; Nat Pierce, piano; Freddie Greene, guitar; Walter Page, bass; Jo Jones, drums; Prestige). "Count don't play nothin'," said a Basie veteran once, "but it sure sounds good." This nostalgic album is a fine reminder of what that line meant. The selection of five Basie classics (including Texas Shuffle and Diggin' for Dex) is taken from the period 1937 to 1941 and played by three veterans of the Basie rhythm section.

Bill Harris and Friends (Ben Webster, tenor sax; Jimmy Rowles, piano; Red Mitchell, bass; Stan Levey, drums; Fantasy). Trombonist Harris, who sometimes sounds as if he were blowing through several folds of velvet, is the weakest operative on an album chiefly distinguished by the pensive unfolding of some fine solos by Saxman Webster. In Where Are You?, I Surrender, Dear and In a Mello-tone, Webster articulates his longings with spacious ease and a tone as husky with melancholy as a distant-sounding foghorn.

The John Lewis Piano (Atlantic). The leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet takes some standards (Little Girl Blue, It Never Entered My Mind) and some of his own compositions (Harlequin, Colombine) and strips them to the clean, cool bone. The spare treatments have a fragile charm all their own, but when heard in bulk they speak in an emotional monotone ultimately as wearying as a series of landscapes executed in whites and greys.

The Lion Roars (Willie "The Lion" Smith; Dot). In an interview with Critic Leonard Feather, Harlem's most-storied stride pianist rambles through some richly colored reminiscences about the good, bold days of jazz. (Willie's earliest jazz school: the brickyards of Haverstraw, N.Y.). The Lion roars too much and plays too little, but a couple of his own compositions--Echo of Spring, with its lacy embroidery over a rolling bass, and Zig-Zag, with its propulsive drive--are worth the price of the album.

If This Ain't the Blues (Jimmy Rushing & band; Vanguard). The indestructible Mr. Five-by-Five of the old Basie Band shouts some familiar blues and ballads--My Friend Mr. Blues, Pennies from Heaven--with a voice like a curdled trumpet backed by a solid boomp-a-cha beat. Jimmy sometimes wheezes now, but his talent for reading a message of ageless evil into the simplest of lyrics--"Sometimes I think I will/Then again I think I won't" --is as strong as it ever was.

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