Notes from the Net: Lake and Caine lauded, Reeves and Monheit on tour, Miles set ready for release, and more

Oliver Lake

All About Jazz's New York writers have a year-end "best of 2005" article posted, and two players with St. Louis connections are mentioned on the list. The big band of saxophonist Oliver Lake was cited for one of the year's best live performances, and the Backstabber's Ball CD from bassist Neal Caine was named one of the year's best debut albums...Vocalist Dianne Reeves, due at The Sheldon later this month, is currently on tour with a Christmas show. Meanwhile, singer Jane Monheit, who was at The Sheldon just a few weeks ago, is also incorporating some holiday music into her current sets, but according to a review by Seattle Times critic Paul DeBarros, the end result is less than satisfying: "At her opening Tuesday, a holiday-themed show drawn mostly from her pop-ish new album, The Season (Epic), you had the feeling Monheit was inhabiting a series of roles, but not speaking from any one, true place....Who is Monheit, exactly? And why does she seem less coherent and consistent now than she did four years ago, when Come Dream With Me debuted at No. 1 on the jazz charts?"

You'll have to wait until December 27 to get your hands on a copy of Miles Davis' Cellar Door Sessions box set, but this wire story has a few details about the release, and there's a review of the set (and Bill Evans' new live-at-the-Vanguard box set) here...The New York Times had an interesting article by Nate Chinen this week about how the indie-rock aesthetic is crossing over to jazz, thanks to artists like The Bad Plus, Brad Mehldau and James Carter. (If you hit a registration roadblock trying to access the Times directly, the same story is also available here.)... Summing up the history of jazz on a single page would seem to be a tall order, but the American and British Studies Program at New Bulgarian University in Sofia, Bulgaria gives it their best shot here, with biographies, photos and full-length, free MP3s from major jazz figures including Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Count Basie, Lester Young, Lionel Hampton, Mahalia Jackson, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, George Shearing, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, John Lewis, Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus, Bud Powell, Oscar Peterson, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Chet Baker, Ornette Coleman, Herbie Hancock and Wynton Marsalis.

Longtime St. Louisans may remember singer Maggie Finley, who worked in St. Louis clubs and theater productions in the Eighties and Nineties under the name Asa Harris. Her father Ace Harris was a singer, pianist and arranger for the original Ink Spots, while her uncle Erskine Hawkins was a trumpeter and composer who wrote "Tuxedo Junction." Finley is now working as a hospice chaplain in Seattle...And bringing it all back home for our final item, Post-Dispatch gossip columnist Deb Peterson writes that performers at this year's First Night celebration in the Grand Center arts district will include Latin-jazz-world music band Farshid Etniko as well as the Blues Inquisition, which features Jazz at the Bistro's Gene Dobbs Bradford on vocals and harmonica.