Search - Randy Weston, Melba Liston :: Earth Birth

Randy Weston is best known for being one of the few American jazz musicians to actually spend a lot of time in Africa, making the connections between the motherland and the improvised, swinging blues of America's cities. Less well known are Weston's links to European music. In the 1950s, the pianist retreated from New York to the Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts, where he attended many of the summer symphonic concerts at Tanglewood. These helped inspire him to compose a series of elegant jazz waltzes for children for his classic 1958 album, Little Niles. In 1981, Weston performed four of his compositions, including the standards "Hi-Fly" and "Portrait of Billie Holiday," with John Williams and the Boston Pops Symphony Orchestra. So when he recorded his 1997 album, Earth Birth, with his trio and the 24 string players of the Orchestre du Festival de Jazz de Montreal, Weston revived four of his children's waltzes as well as "Hi-Fly" and "Portrait of Billie Holiday." Weston is a marvelously succinct pianist, saying as much with his pauses and elisions as with his quick-fingered phrasing, and he achieves an obvious rapport with bassist Christian McBride and drummer Billy Higgins. Nonetheless, the true star of the live recording is Melba Liston, who has done many big-band arrangements for Weston, Count Basie, and Dizzy Gillespie. Here she turns her attention to a string orchestra and delivers always-sympathetic, never-intrusive charts that greatly enhance the inherent romanticism of Weston's writing. --Geoffrey Himes