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Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

Holidays with music, in person or not

Despite my avowed abhorrence of Christmas music, I enjoyed maestro Kurt Elling leading his hometown quintet in a holiday-themed performance at Chicago’s City Winery last Sunday.

Kurt Elling © Marc PoKempner

My entire evening — accompanied by best friends, and including the surprise discovery after the Winery show of a heartening young trumpeter at the Hungry Brain — was a reminder that hearing music in person with others is a key experience, even if the potential for spreading disease makes us stay home.

[What I’ve been listening to at home: Favorites of ’21]

A seasoned and complete performer at age 54, Elling is a canny and original vocalist with a unique approach and seemingly genuine persona. Singer-songwriter-bandleader-storyteller-character actor– well-tailored, a good mover, a model of sophisticated masculinity — he ought to be in movies! I felt lucky to hear Kurt charm a full house (150-200 attendees for an 8 pm second show, maybe 95% masked, seated at socially distanced four-tops), stirring his vocal resources and fellow music-makers’ skills into a flowing entertainment of thoughtful depth and inclusive warmth. True jazz.

Elling has carved a place for himself between bel canto balladeer and husky-throated songster. He’s able to sustain ringing high tones dramatically and also growl or cast an aside as if under his breath yet still remain audible and understandable). Most often he starts casually then ramps up to a swinging stance, like a smart pal with something valuable to say. Consider him in the lineage of regular (but talented!) guys like Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Gene Kelly, Chicago’s own Mel Tormé, Joe Williams, Oscar Brown Jr. and Nate “King” Cole. Guitarist-singer John Pizzarelli is another currently working in this vein (and I won’t rule out Patricia Barber, haven’t listened enough to say), but unlike any of them other than Cole during his piano combo days and maybe Barber — almost like Betty Carter, come to think of it — Kurt directs the energy of his group from within it. He sets up and, after making a

from left: Stu Minderman, Clark Sommer, Kurt Elling, Dana Hall, John McLean © Marc PoKempner

definitive statement, passes his musical ball to lyrical pianist Stu Minderman or unusually telegraphic guitarist John McLean as if by impulse rather than pre-arrangement, with bassist Clark Sommers solid, alert, flexible and pairing well with drummer Dana Hall’s assertive push. They cohere as an ensemble, so the music flows. This band was ending a two-week tour, yet everyone appeared to be fully engaged, refreshed by being onstage.

Their onstage teamwork, clear to see as well as hear, drew me into the holiday vibe. Never mind being a committed secularist, cynical about virgin births, uneasy about imposition of any public religious celebration on the entire body politic, believers or not — I realize this is America! As long as I’ve been alive Christmas has been an uncontrolled cultural behemoth, a day draped in a ancient, holy story actually advancing consumer capitalism. As a Jewish kid, I reasoned why fight it? Well, that manger stuff. And, uh, Hanukah. But ok, then, also Yule, Saturnalia, Festivus, Kwanza, Diwali. I’ve come to accept if not embrace all humanity’s collective reactions to the sun withdrawing, and hopes for its return.

Although Kurt Elling sang “We Three Kings” and with Hall worked the miracle of turning the odious “Little Drummer Boy” into a driving scat-drums duet, the focus of his message was not Jesus’s arrival but the world’s annual experience of rebirth, with a particular appeal to the clear-eyed spirit of children which, he assured us, we all still contain. No “Silent Night,” though he did enact a “T’was the night before Christmas” parody, and for an encore — yes, “The Christmas Song” (aka, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire. . . ” words by Tormé, music by Robert Wells, née Levinson — and yes, Kurt mentioned that in his research for popular Christmas songshe’d been struck by how many were written by Jews, Communists and Jewish Communists. As his father was Kapellmeister at a Lutheran church, that seems like a nice ecumenical acknowledgement).

The other dependable confluence of so-called “holiday music” with music that has actually brings a smile to my wintry mind is saxophonist Mars Williams‘ inspired Ayler Christmas program, the Chicago manifestation, held again

at the Hungry Brain. Five recorded volumes of this project exist, so we can anytime we care to hear the ingenious inspiriting of carols and hoary Xmas staples with ecstatically freed improvisations by all-stars Williams has enlisted on his road trips with it — such as electronica cellist Helen Gillette in NOLA, bassist Luke Stewart in DC, trumpeter Jaimie Branch and trombonist Steve Swell in NYC. Here Mars featured his bandmates in Extraordinary Popular Delusions keyboardist Jim Baker, multi-instrumentalist Brian Sandstrom and drummer Steve Hunt as well as cornetist Josh Berman, guitarist-violinist Peter Maunu and others. I missed it.

BUT — after Elling my little party went to the Brain (like a dive bar, run by Berman and drummer Mike Reed, who were hanging out) where drummer Matt Wilson, known to be an acute talent scout,

Jamie Breiwick and Matt Wilson © Marc PoKempner

was backing up New Orleans-born trumpeter Jamie Breiwick, who we’d never heard of before. And was he fine! With the kind of melody-spinning ability I admire in Don Cherry, offering Sun Ra’s “Love in Outer Space” as a natural standard, in league with a complementary alto saxophonist and stalwart bassist, whose names I regret not taking. The music was so sweet, I had trouble leaving. I wouldn’t have known about him if I hadn’t been there. Might have checked out a recording, but. . .

Over the past 18 months I’ve gone out infrequently, only for what I’ve most wanted to attend. Herbie Hancock’s return to performance at Symphony Center; singer Josie Falbo, whose liner notes I wrote, at the Jazz Showcase; Joanie Pallatto‘s cabaret act at the Mercury Theater; trumpeter Orbert Davis’s Chicago Jazz Philharmonic; bassist Tatsu Aoki with AACM collaborators at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Hyde Park Jazz Festival (both the latter outdoors). Seeing the musicians interact and audiences respond adds so much more value to the music, obviously, than observing from a remote location or listening to even the utmost audio equipment that music lovers usually don’t think it’s worth mentioning. But over this period of going without, after more than 50 years of taking in music where and when it happens as a habit, I appreciate the immediacy, context and company of live, in-person music now more than ever. Best for the new year, so partaking of live performance becomes commonplace again.

Jazz Autumn: Returns, galas and even awards

If all “jazz” shares a single trait, it’s that nothing will stifle it. Adjusting to covid-19

Ari Brown greets fan at Hyde Park Jazz Festival; photo by Michael Jackson for Chicago Reader

strictures, Chicago (just for instance) in the past two months has been site of:

  • A stellar Hyde Park Jazz Festival;
  • Herbie Hancock’s homecoming concert at Symphony Center;
  • audiences happily (for the most part – no reported incidents otherwise) observing appropriate covid restrictions in intimate venues where I’ve been — including Constellation, the Jazz Showcase, Hungry Brain and Fitzgerald’s;
  • a heartening multi-kulti success — Japanese taiko drums and shamisen hooking up with Brazilian percussion trio and guitarist, Ukrainian bandura improviser, string quartet, jazz rhythm team all led by brassman Orbert Davis in the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic‘s return to in-person (as well as streamed, and free of charge) performance;
  • the fourth annual Afro-Futurism weekend at Elastic Arts;
  • An AACM 55th Anniversary concert by the Great Black Music Ensemble at the Logan Center;
  • the Jazz Institute of Chicago staging a “projection promenade” featuring performers in front of large-scale digital photo exhibits, in three lots along south side Cottage Grove Avenue.

Most of those events were free of charge to attendees (not the jazz clubs of course, but prices haven’t risen and are low by, say, New York City standards), simply required advance registration, and have benefitted from generous arts support from the City of Chicago, which has truly stepped up to bat in terms of channeling funds to small and dispersed organizations as well as major central ones. As I understand it, commercial enterprises as well as not-for-profits have received financial support.

Kudos to Mark Kelly, who has just retired as director of the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) for energetic, creative responses to the challenges of his tenure — pandemic included. But it should be made clear that the efforts mentioned above resulted from efforts of many actors across a broad and deep, if under-heralded, local artistic ecosystem. And I barely scratched what’s happening here, just glossing over music highlights, not addressing the Film Fest, Humanities Fest, Lyric Opera’s MacBeth, re-opening of Steppenwolf and other theaters, the Art Institute’s Kertész exhibit, and so on.

Guess I’m sounding boosterish. Be that as it may, financial insecurities are ever-present for arts

presenters, non-profit or commercial, and so fundraising events continue, sometimes in unusual formats. Another for instance: The Jazz Institute, of which I’m secretary of the board, holds its annual fundraiser November 4 — and all the world is invited to attend free of charge.

It’s wholly virtual, offering insiders’ perspectives and on-site videos hosted by reedsman Rajiv Halim and vocalist-educator Bobbi Wilsyn, singer Meagan McNeal, trumpeter Corey Wilkes and more. Of course donations are strongly encouraged; it takes ever more cash to produce music free of charge in Chicago Park district facilities city-wide, to run Artists-in-Residence programs in local schools, a high school big band competition, and after-school programs (which have graduated successive waves of exciting new musicians). But the JIC will be happy if you simply tune in to watch fresh videos of the student jam sessions held at the Jazz Showcase; Awards being presented to Chris Anderson of the Fulton Street Collective loft venue and Joan Colasso, director of the Timeless Gifts Youth Program; a tour of local jazz shrines with voice-over by Maggie Brown (daughter of Oscar Brown, Jr.). Check it out. Get acquainted.

Will it raise a sou? We shall see. The distinctly different Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, co-led until just recently by trumpeter Davis and his business partner Mark Ingram, held its all-online, not-cheaply-ticketed virtual gala back in June with Kurt Elling as a collaborative guest (Rhapsody Snyder was introduced as new Executive Director on the webcast), and announced income from it of $85,000, $10k over its goal. So yes, these can be important sources of unrestricted funds.

Orbert Davis leads Chicago Jazz Philharmonic in Chicago Immigrant Stories III, with Tatsu Aoki (shamisen) and his daughters playing taiko drums and flute, and (not in this photo) Geraldo de Oliveria with Dede Sampaio and Luciano Antonio; and Ivan Smilo, bandura and vocals. Photo from CJP

Speaking of which — >>DIGRESSION WARNING<< — congratulations to all 52 jazz and improvised music practitioners receiving support of between $25,000 to $40,000 for creative residencies from Jazz Road, a South Arts initiative funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This round reaching many artists I’ve long admired, including Chico Freeman, Ernest Dawkins, Mars Williams, Josh Abrams, Adegoke Steve Colson, Craig Harris, Elio Villafranca, Nasheet Waits, Kip Hanrahan, Michele Rosewoman, Meg Okura, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Melvin Gibbs and Jason Moran. Congrats also to pianist Kris Davis, eminent composer, saxophonist and band-leader Wayne Shorter, and pianist Danilo Perez (a principal in Shorter’s long-running, now suspended quartet), named Doris Duke Performing Artists ($275,000 comes with this honor).

Not to overlook rare recognition (not from the Jazz Journalists Association) for music journalists. The 52nd annual ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Awards for outstanding print, broadcast, liner notes and new media coverage of music honored (among others) Daphne A. Brooks for “100 Years Ago, ‘Crazy Blues’ Sparked a Revolution for Black Women Fans,” published in The New York Times; Fat Possum Records and No Sudden Movements for their release of the documentary Memphis ’69, with performances by Sleepy John Estes, Bukka White and Fred McDowell; Ted Gioia for his appreciation of jazz critic Whitney Balliett, “The Music Critic Who Tried to Disappear,” published by City Journal; Frank J. Oteri of New Music USA’s New Music Box for the podcast, “Valerie Coleman: Writing Music for People” and John Kruth for his article, “Ceremonies Against the Virus: Bachir Attar of the Master Musicians of Jajouka,” published by the online journal, Please Kill Me. Monetary awards of $250 to $500 accompany this recognition. As a two-time Deems Taylor Award-winner, I can attest to its value as an uplift.

In praise of Donald Newlove

I was knocked out on first reading of Sweet Adversity (1978), by Donald Newlove, who died Aug. 17 at age 93.

It’s about co-joined twins who love Louis Armstrong, play jazz in the 1930s and arrive New York’s Lower East Side in the early 1960s, where one of them sobers up. Besides the unique story, it’s the novel’s language that dazzles — intricate, high-spirited sentences that conjured unusual images and ringing perceptions in a continuous, unpredictable stream. It’s hilarious, delirious and heartbreaking, a classic American serio-comedy operating on several levels (twins Leo and Teddy are stand-ins for Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky) and seems to me not as much appreciated, recognized or read for its verbal largess, deft characterizations, repartee and solid insights as the work deserves (and rewards).

Sam Robert’s NYT obit claims all Newlove’s books were about “drunkenness.” Though he is both the poet and scourge of drinking, and deservedly hailed for the self-scouring Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers, (out-of-print, hardcover listed at Amazon for $578.99), it doesn’t seem quite true true. For instance, “The Welles Requiem” in Starlight Photoplays is a carnivalesque tale weaving together bits of Orson in many of his roles, and Eternal Life is accurately (!) subtitled “An Astral Love Story.” Love of a deep, searing — drunken? — kind registers prominently in most everything of his I’ve read.

“I rewrite everyone when I read — and retongue all Latin into Anglo-Saxon,” Newlove mentioned in Painted Paragraphs Inspired Description for Writers and Readers: A Handbook for the Soul, one of his three entertaining yet relatively casual books examining the work of others (the others are Invented Voices, a celebration of dialogue from novels and the movies, and First Paragraphs, selected from the world’s literature). Do not let that suggest he stripped verbiage down. Far from the minimalist literary trends of the later 20th century, he practiced a reality-based magical lyricism (and was amazed to find Eternal Life being marketed as “science fiction”). Tough Poets Press has reissued Sweet Adversity and published his “Jungian fable” The Wolf Who Swallowed the Sun, but his acclaimed debut The Painter Gabriel, Eternal Life, and Curanne Trueheart are out-of-print. In the early 2000s Newlove began to self-publish, and several virtually unknown books are available from Otego Publishing, some free via Kindle.

When the Jazz Journalists Association held an online Jazz & Fiction symposium 20 years ago, I posted an excerpt of Sweet Adversity titled “Satchmo Dead, A Jazz Era Ends,” and invited Donald Newlove to join the live chat. He was reluctant to go on-line, saying he had not been impressed by the level of discourse and feared being further distracted from his main activity, writing. But he didn’t mind if I put up some notes.

“I can only think of about three examples of writing that works as music,” Newlove told me over the phone. “Kerouac’s The Subterraneans reads like bop prose, which proves to be pretty hard to sustain. The first three or four pages of it sound like Lester Young playing saxophone — the long run-on sentences. Of course Kerouac was conscious of that.

“Then there’s an excerpt from Joyce, the chapter in Ulysses that begins ‘Bronze by gold steely ringing.” It’s about a waitress in the window of a cafe, who hears a horse going by; that phrase describes the hoof irons.

“There’s also the novel Napoleon Symphony, by Anthony Burgess: that imitates music. But a reader’s interest in such imitation drops almost instantly.

“With Joyce, you go along with it for the many rewards. With Jack — well, I was there when it was published, so the novelty of it and immediacy kept me interested. But he only created one character, Dean Moriarity in On The Road, and that was it. None of his other books have a Dean Moriarity, you know?

“Maybe giving the sense of music is easier in poetry. . . Vachel Lindsay’s ‘The Congo,’ with the stanza endings ‘boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM!‘ — that’s nice! I memorized that when I was in ninth grade.”

Was he still involved with jazz? Sure! He kept his trumpet at hand and played a few bars of pure melody over the phone at the end of our conversation.

I also had lunch with Newlove once in his Greenwich Village apt. looking out on Jefferson Market library which graces the cover of Eternal Life, and it was a great pleasure. We spoke (I mostly listened) of various forms of intoxication, but also of music, writing, books, the Metropolitan Museum, NYC in general and movies, of which he was an aficionado. As a writer for Kirkus Reviews he had amassed a large collection of laser disks, and he slipped on Blade Runner so we could watch Harrison Ford’s visit with Sean Young — “Afternoon with a goddess,” Newlove proclaimed.

His writing shouldn’t be forgotten. Avid readers will find it.

City of Chicago, music promoter

Lollapalooza 2021 had some 385,000 attendees (without significant Covid-19 outbreak, fortunately) but featured little of host Chicago’s indigenous talent or styles. And that’s just wrong, declared Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events commissioner Mark Kelly, launching the month-long Chicago in Tune

Mark Kelly, photos © Lauren Deutsch

“festival” at a reception August 19. Here’s the still-evolving event calendar of hundreds of local music performances — of every conceivable genre, free and ticketed, outside or in, most requiring vax proof and/or masks — running on through Sept 19, in every city neighborhood.

Chicago, Kelly asserted, has never officially or adequately embraced and supported (he didn’t say it — but allow me: or exploited for publicity’s sake) its homegrown music communities comprising artists and audiences of boogie, blues, jazz, gospel, r&b, house, hip-hop, rap, folk, rock, Mexican mariachi, Polish polka band, Latin jam sessions, singer-songwriter performance, contemporary composers, virtuosic instrumentalists and improvisational ensembles.

At his direction DCASE had planned 2020 as “The Year of Chicago Music” and responded to Covid-19 shutdowns by extending that initiative into ’21. Yet the shutdowns continued, and the matter of sustaining or improving the lot of Chicago music writ large was for Kelly, a one-time jazz drummer retiring from his position in October, becoming more urgent.

So in an unusual effort to broadly stimulate the existing musical ecosystem (not incidentally, a potential tourist draw) and project our brand in the class of New York, New Orleans, Nashville, Austin, Detroit while also productively de-centralizing it — his department in the administration of Mayor Lori Lightfoot has coordinated partial-to-full underwriting and promotion of grants to artists and shows in dozens of venues and public spaces across this third-biggest (by area as well as population) U.S. metropolis.

Included are the ARC Music Festival in Union Park (September 4 & 5), Pitchfork Music Festival Chicago in Union Park (September 10–12), the punk Riot Fest in Douglass Park (September 17–19) — and “Music Lives Here,” a public art initiative installing graphic markers at 50 musically noteworthy sites. The City’s own production centerpiece: over Labor Day weekend an evening each, free of charge in Millennium Park, for jazz, blues, house and gospel, a necessary adaptation of Chicago’s former multi-days fests.

As a native and as a music journalist, I subscribe to the notion that Chicago has a unique and highly significant place in the past and ongoing development of American if not indeed world-wide music. The case for this is well known, so I won’t detail it here.*

However, for all the glories of sounds come from Oz-on-the-Lake in just the last 100 years, say, including its eminence in commercial endeavors like music publishing, jingle production and harp manufacture and establishment of prestigious institutions including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Lyric Opera, in the aftermath of the late 1960s consolidation and relocation of major record labels to Los Angeles and New York City few sizable business structures have emerged (pace JAM Productions) to loudly, systematically advance the cause of local music either throughout or beyond the city’s limits.

There are feisty independent labels such as Aerophonic, Alligator, BluJazz, Delmark, International Anthem, Southport, and The Sirens (of course with dislocations across the music industry, they, too have struggled). We have worthy non-profits — the Jazz Institute of Chicago, Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, South Side Jazz Coalition, AACM, Hyde Park Jazz Society, Hyde Park Jazz Festival (2021 program live/in-person Sept 25-26), Elastic Arts, Experimental Sound Studio and Hot House among them — and dedicated performance locales including the Jazz Showcase, the Green Mill, Fulton Street Collective, Constellation and the Hungry Brain, Rosa’s Lounge, Kingston Mines, Buddy Guy’s Legends, Andy’s, Winter’s, Promontory, Space, Fitzgerald’s, Epiphany, City Winery, concert halls such as Symphony Center and the Harris Theater, special series programmed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Du Sable Museum, Navy Pier and the Shedd Aquarium. For decades we’ve had immersive multi-stage, week or weekend-long free of charge festivals celebrating Chicago jazz, blues, house and gospel in downtown’s Grant and Millennium parks, continuing if pared down next weekend on the Frank Gehry-designed stage of Pritzker Pavillion.

Roscoe Mitchell-Famadou Don Moyé Art Ensemble of Chicago Large Ensemble, Sept 2019, Pritzker Pavillion; photo ©Marc PoKempner

This year’s reduced iterations of those fests amount to three hoursfor each genre on one of four days Sept 3 to 6. Jazz night Sept. 4 (programmed with the Jazz Institute, the board of which I sit on) features our righteous elder statesman saxophonist Ari Brown, trumpeter Marquis Hill and vocalist Lizz Wright with their bands. Among ancillary events catching my eye, produced independently of the City but underwritten in some measure with tax dollars, is the Rockwell Blues and Jazz Street Stroll, scheduled for mid-day Sept 4, organized by Delmark Records to showcase several of its artists.

Municipal endorsement and underwriting for both profit- and not-for profit spaces nurturing creativity seems to me a very good thing at this moment. Infusing Chicago with music, hearing for ourselves what we have, enjoying it as much together as is safe and wise, letting each other and the world at large know what this place, in all its variety, sounds like at this time — I find those worthy goals. We’re facing a Covid-19 surge with indoor masked mandates imposed again (including for kids about to re-enter the schools) and continued gun violence, among other ills. Music won’t fix those problems, but may help us live with them.

Photo-journalist Marc PoKempner attended one Chicago In Tune show last Friday: Saxophonist Ernest Dawkins leading the Live the Spirit Residency Tentet in “Redefining Frederick Douglass,” at Douglass (Frederick and Anna) Park. He reported the crowd was small but ardent, the music intense and Khari B‘s readings of Douglass’s oratory powerful.

from left: Alexis Lombre, Ernest Dawkins, Steve Berry, Junius Paul, Corey Wilkes © Marc PoKempner
Spoken word artist Khari B, reeds player Kevin King © Marc PoKempner
Crowd with social distancing at Douglass (Frederick and Anna Park, © Marc PoKempner

So much more is yet to come, including a homecoming concert on Sept. 2 at Symphony Center by the great Herbie Hancock, age 80, pianist/composer/Grammy winner, “creative chair” for jazz of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, namesake of the formerly-known-as-Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador and face of International Jazz Day. I’ve adored his music since the mid ’60s– from his Maiden Voyage through the ’60s with Miles et al to his experimental, exploratory Mwandishi albums like Sextant,

hip-scratch-funk-nuts “Rockit,” tributes Gershwin’s World and River: The Joni Letters. I won’t miss it.

But best about this all is that Mark Kelly said Chicago In Tune would not be a one-off, but only the beginning of the City’s turn to identifying music as key to our culture for our own benefit. Considering the Chicago-steeped legacies of an enormous and highly diversified creative contingent (my can’t-help-it-must-cite list is below, merely a scratch at what’s happening or happening here), it’s high time.

*Quick list, off the top of my head, roughly chronological, by no means comprehensive, focused on the deceased and hugely influential Chicago-born or associated music makers: Jelly Roll Morton, Johnny and Baby Dodds, Louis Armstrong, Lil Hardin, Earl Hines, Bix Beiderbecke, Eddie Condon, Alberta Hunter, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Thomas A. (aka “Georgia Tom,” when he developed proto-rock “hokum” with Tampa Red) Dorsey, Lionel Hampton, Mezz Mezzrow, Jimmy McPartland, Bud Freeman, Jimmy and Mama Estelle Yancy, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Boy John Lee Williamson, Mahalia Jackson, Milt Hinton, Art Hodes, Dinah Washington, Nat “King” Cole, Eddie South, Steve Allen, Mel Torme, Capt. Walter Dyett, Johnny Griffin, Sam Cooke, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Otis Spann, Willie Dixon, Junior Wells, Otis Rush, Magic Sam, Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, Hound Dog Taylor, Magic Sam, Koko Taylor, Big Walter Horton, Cary Bell, Carmen McRae, Wilbur Ware, Richard Davis, Ralph Shapey, Shulamit Ran, the Staples Singers, Ahmad Jamal, Eddie Harris, Malachi Favors, Andrew Hill, Wilbur Campbell, Barrett Deems, William Russo, Sir Georg Solti, Sun Ra, Marshall Allen, John Gilmore, Phil Cohran, Muhal Richard Abrams, Fred Anderson, Jodie Christian, Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, Leroy Jenkins, Ann Ward and other distinguished members of the AACM, Ira Sullivan, Nicky Hill, Oscar Brown Jr., Lee Konitz, Hal Russell, Willie Pickens, Geraldine de Haas, the Chi-Lites, Jerry Butler, Curtis Mayfield, Earth Wind & Fire, the Freemans (Von, George, Bruzz, and living Chico), John Prine, Steve Goodman — sorry, going on and on but as a native son, I can’t help it — Gene Chandler, the Shadows of Knight, the Buckinghams, the Flock, Minnie Ripperton, and among the living: Mavis Staples, Jeff Tweedy, Wilco, Tortoise, Kanye West, Liz Phair, Common, Chance the Rapper, Jennifer Hudson, Orbert Davis, Julian Priester, Rufus Reid, Amina Claudine Myers, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Thurman Barker, Wadada Leo Smith, Douglas Ewart, Mwata Bowden, Ari Brown, Steve Coleman, Foday Musa Suso, Adam Rudolph, Hamid Drake, Robert Irving III, Thaddeus Tukes, Joel Ross, Ben LaMar Gay, Makaya McCraven, Isaiah Collier, Michael Zerang, Billy Branch, Lurrie Bell, Jimmy Johnson, Dee Alexander, Kurt Elling, Miguel de la Cerna, Ernie Adams, Dana Hall, Avreeayl Ra, Bobby Broom, Nicole Mitchell, Erwin Helfer, Myra Melford, Jim Baker, Edward Wilkerson Jr., Mars Williams, Brian Sandstrom, Steve Hunt, Ken Vandermark, Dave Rempis, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Savoir Faire, Pat Mallinger, Cameron Pfiffner, Paul Wertico, Tomeka Reid, Mike Reed, Margaret Murphy Webb, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Amir ElSaffar, Brad Goode, Mike Allemana, Nick Mazzarella, Maggie Brown, Fareed Haque, Howard Levy, K-Rad, Greg Ward, Joanie Pallatto and Sparrow, George Fludis, Erin McDougald, Josie Falbo, Zvonimir Tot, Tatsu Aoki, Chris Foreman, Geoff Bradfield, Matt Ullery, Josh Abrams, Josh Berman, Augusta Reed Thomas, Rachel Barton Pine, Victor Garcia, Katie Ernst, Kahil El Zabar, Ernest Dawkins, Rajiv Halim and a zillion others.

Tania Leon interview 1989

Tania Leon, 2021 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for music composition, has not often been

Tania Leon, photo from TaniaLeon.com

interviewed in the popular press, so here’s a Q&A I conducted with her as published in 1989 by Ear magazine, and Jeremy Robins’ 2007 Composers Portrait of her, commissioned by American Composers Orchestra.

Tania Leon, Assistant conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, has distinguished herself as a proponent of music without category beyond a standard of excellence. Her enthusiasm for contemporary composers regardless of gender, race or national origin indicates an all-embracing world view as befits a warm, lively woman who accepts no imposed limits on her own activity. We spoke at a midtown Beef ‘n’ Brew, and were interrupted mid-interview by an assistant manager who claimed we needed “approval of the manager” to conduct our interview in his restaurant. Tania Leon laughed that off, but later shook her head. “I can’t believe it,” she said of the unnecessary intrusion. “I’ve been in the United States a long time, but I’m still surprised by the mechanical way some people approach others.”

HM: What have you been doing?

TL: This summer I did some courses fsor the LIncoln Center Institute in Memphis, and something at Bard College with Joan Tower. And of course I did all the concerts in the park for the Brooklyn Philharmonic, which started in May when Lukas Foss and I did a concert to celebrate the 70th birthday of Leonard Bernstein.

As fas as my music is sconcerned, this summer I finished a commission from the American Composers’ Orchestra that will premiere December 4 at Carnegie Hall, with Dennis Russell Davis conducting and Ursula Oppens on piano. I also wrote a quintet for the Da Capo Chamber Players, which premiered November 24 at a celebration of Joan Tower’s birthday.

Now I’m writing a piece for National Public Radaio. It’s going to be the theme for a new daily broadcast called “Latin File.” I’m writing all the themes and the buttons — all the musical activity

HM: Is that fun?

TL: Yes, tremendous. After that I’ going to be immersed in a collaboration with the composer Michel Camillo, written for the Western Wind vocal ensemble. Then I have to write a piece for the celebration of the 60th anniversary of Brooklyn College. It’s a symphonic piece with text by Allen Ginsberg that will premiere at Carnegie in 1990.

HM: Do you work on all these different projects at once, or sit down with one at a time?

TL: I work project after project. Unless something collides.

HM: What are you doing now?

TL: The radio program.

HM: Is that different because you have to composer for small periods of time?

TL: It’s a different language altogether, because the music I want to write for the program is “Latin music” — what you identify as Latin music. It’s not going to be strictly contemporary music.

HM: But as a composer your heart is with contemporary music?

TL: Oh yes, very much so. But as far as being a conductor, anything that is new to me is contemporary. Even the oldest score of early music I would hear with an open ear. I play and conduct all kinds of music. But as far as producing music and being part of that community, yes, that is where my heart is.

HM: How much control do you have over what you conduct?

TL: When I guest conduct, something the program is completely put together by the music director of the management. Sometimes I’m able to input one, maybe two pieces. Some want a program with X theme to reach such and such an audience, or they would like to implement such and such a style in the overall programming of the orchestra. In the case of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, where I have been based, it has been a bit different because I have been leading a series of concerts that I founded.

HM: How did that come about?

TL: It was originally an idea between myself and composers Julius Eastman and Talib Hakim. We started around 1977 or ’78. I ended up pursuing the project. We went into urban com unities with all types of music, but with a big emphasis on living composers and composers who had something to do with the communities. We’re talking about so-called ethnic composers, meaning more the ethnicity of the composer than the ethnicity of their music. There were up to 12 concerts a year.

HM: Was anybody else doing that?

TL: No. And in fact I don’t think there’s any other orchestra that has done it. But that series has gone on 10 years, and no one seems to move it out of what it is. The program was needed at the time it was implemented, but I find that it is completely segregated.

HM: Did you hope at the time that it would grow into a more normal way of concertizing?

TL: No. I thought the people it addressed would feel more comfortable coming to the concert hall because they found out they had something to do with it. But the way it has been done has perpetuated segregation. Those composers are not included in any other programs, and nby not including them in a more integrated way, their communities don’t come to see anything.

These composers are part of the comm unities, and the communities relate to them. The people in the community know who they are. If my piece is played, for example, a lot of Hispanic people come out, a lot of Cubans. Because of my participation with the Dance Theater of Harlem, the black community comes, too. A lot of people who never come to the concert hall show up for that occasion.

HM: And if you conduct a Muhal Richard Abrams piece, for instance, I come, as do other people who follow avant-garde jazz. But we are a self-selected community. I chose to belong. . .

TL: But the point is not that you chose to belong to the community of Muhal, but that you came to the concert where Muhal’s work was played. If Muhal gets to be played more by the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic and by New Jersey, and so one, perhaps you will subscribe. You will go, and you will feel comfortable.

HM: When you’re conducting a piece by an Asian composer, for example, do you have to do some research on their ethnicity in order to authentically interpret it?

TL: Well, this is something personal about me. My family has had many cultures in it — Chinese grandfather, white Spanish from Spain, my grandfather’s father, French, and Afro from the Nigerian region. The way I grew up, these cultures were a part of me and it was natural. So I have the tendency, the flexibility, to get into a culture very easily. I am a sponge, in a way.

HM: You grew up in Havana?

TL: Yes.

HM: Have you gone back?

TL: I’ve been back seven times, with a special visa to visit my family.

HM: Have you conducted there?
TL: No. I haven’t done any progressional activities there.

HM:When did you come to the States?

TL: 1967. May 29, 1967. Two o’clock [laughs]!

HM: You must have been looking forward to the change for a long time.

TL: I don’t know. Since I was little I liked looking at books with pictures of different sites of the world. I was in love with the Seven Wonders of the World, and my dream was to go to Paris and live around the Eiffel Tower.

But I never thought leaving Cuba would be such a dramatic experience. Unfortunately we are all caught up in this territorial situation — you cannot go over here, you cannot go over there. I’ve always been very terrestrial, part of the entire planet. I’ve always found it imposing that we have so many limits. So I left Cuba with the curiosity of exploring growth and culture and expanding my musical possibilities. I came out as a simple pianist just graduated from the conservatory. All of this, becoming a composer and conductor, has been growth.

HM: Did you become a composer and conductor at the same time?

TL: Not really. When I was in Cuba, the first compositions I did were boleros, bossa novas and popular music. My last year there I wrote some simple preludes and things for piano.

I did have one piece that became very well known. It was something I wrote about two months before my graduation recital. Paquito D’Rivera and me, we graduated together, and we played Brahms, Kabalevsky, all these things. Then, as an encore, we decided to surprise the conservatory by playing and improvising on my bossa nova. We created an uproar [laughs]! That happened 24 years ago. And last weekend Paquito gave me the surprise of calling me and telling me that on his next album he’s bring out my bossa nova again. I never thought I would become a composer; I was just putting things together. To write symphonic music or music would accuse of being “contemporary” — that was not on my mind.

HM: What about the conducting impulse?

TL: Conducting!?! First of all there was no role model. Women conducting a symphony orchestra? Taboo. It was completely unheard of. It never crossed my mind.

I met a man here who I consider part of my family, like a brother or an extension of my father. That man was Arthur Mitchell, founder of Dance Theater of Harlem. I met him within a year after I arrived here — a coincidental meeting. A friend of mine was sick and asked me to replace her as pianist for a ballet school in Harlem. This man walked in looking for a studio to begin his company. He heard me and he said, “Look, I appreciate the way you play. Would you like to become my pianist?” We talked. Since I didn’t speak English at that time, we communicated with the little bit of Spanish and Portuguese that he had. I became their first pianist. I also create a music school at Dance Theater of Harlem, and we started giving scholarships to kids in the area. Some of the kids have become real musicians.

The first year or so I played with him I never played from books, I improvised everything. He would dictate a combination and I would make a piece out of it. He persuaded me to write a ballet with him. That was my first piece, called “Tones.” In fact, as part of the celebration of the 20th anniversary of Dance Theater of Harlem, that very same ballet will be danced next week. I never knew that was the beginning of something for my own creativity.

About two years after that we went to the Spoleto Festival in Italy, and that was my first opportunity to conduct an orchestra. Arthur Mitchell, along with Gian Carlo Menotti, the director of the festival, thought it would be better to have the music done live than on tape. So where’s Tania? Of course she knows the pieces, so she should conduct them.

From that I came back to the States and got in gear. Having redone my Bachelor’s at NYU, I took a Master’s in composition. About two years after that I got the conducting urge, and I started studying.

HM: What do you study to learn to be a conductor?

TL: You study conducting. There are wonderful teachers. And you go to a lot of rehearsals. You learn by watching a lot.

HM: What are you watching for?

Tania Leon circa 1997,
photo from Ithaca.Edu

TL: You have to learn the patterns that will determine the beats in a specific measure of music. Once you have that, you incorporate it into your body. You have to coordinate your baton arm with your free arm, and get not only the patterns, but the nuances. You have to create expression with your hands. These patterns become expressive and translate the character of the music. It’s a whole elaboration of movements that in a silent way conveys what you want to happen — specifically for precision and interpretation. After all, if you’re conducting a group of 40 to 70 players, you need a very precise way of creating unity.

HM: You have a very expressive face. Do your facial expressions convey meaning to the musicians, too?

TL: It seems to me that is bound to happen. I haven’t seen myself conducting, so I don’t know. I’m not that self-involved — I get very involved in the music. When I do anything, I am lost into that.

I think conducting is about being expressive, and expressing something so your colleagues can receive it not only through the technical medium but through the spiritual, or whatever you want to call it. Yoiu would be surprised how one orchestra can sound completely different under different people.

HM: It was unheard of for a woman to be a conductor. People of color were also unusual. Have you had experiences you think are unusual because of these circumstances?

TL: For me, people are not black or white ore yellow. People are souls. You may have a body people resent because it’s too beautiful. Apparently we don’t like to work with differences — sometimes they become a threat. But I’ve always loved differences. Perhaps because my family environment was so different, I gravitated towards feelings and other types of communications which were not based on the physical aspects of a person. I’ve never understood segregations or discriminations.

Another thing is that specific people are thought to be good for specific things, like an “Oriental” dancer is good for dancing “Oriental” material. Or if you happen to have dark skin you might be very good for tap, or things that move the torso in a “primitive” way. We go through a lot of codifying or labelling. I am opposed to this, because labels limit my possibilities. I don’t like confinement.

When I have confronted these situations, my feelings have not been hurt the way they would with someone who may feel inferior because they look different. And when I went into conducting I never that of myself as a conductor from the point of view of having skin color or of my origin in the Caribbean. You come as a package deal with teeth, eyes, nose and skin. But still human.

HM: What happens when someone gets on the podium in front of an orchestra who doesn’t seem like their immediate image of what a conductor is? Can the orchestra have a bad reaction to that?

TL: If therre have been bad reactions, there have been very good cover-ups. I think the reaction I have seen the most is astonishment. “Who is this person? What is this person doing up there? Let’s check this out.”

HM: Then you begin to work with the music. . .

TL: And then there is a communication in music and you don’t see the people. You communicate in sounds and feelings. It doesn’t even have to be sounds — when we really communicate, all the barriers are gone.

HM: This goes for 20th century music, too, which many people feel is foreboding. They are not comfortable with this part of the repertoire. They have not accepted it yet.

TL: I think everything is changing. We’re close to the 21st century, and we’re going to see some big changes. I mean big. Because nowadays you have musicians who are making waves such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich and John Adams. There are many establishments, many communities of musicians: Uptown, downtown, this university, that university, the blue collars. . . We’re finally creating, somewhat, a primitive merging.

By my criteria, what we inherited from Europe was a tremendous degree of sophistication of their primitivism. I listen to Beethoven, and I listen to the folk music within his music, and I trace the dance steps of that music in his music. Something tells me of the region of the world where he was coming from. And it’s not because I have been trained classically; it’s a matter of how I receive the music. That’s my ear — I don’t hear any difference.

Since our continent is so much younger than Europe, we have often modeled after it, imitating its forms and sounds. But things like television and being able to fly around have opoened us a lot. We can go to other communities in the wworld andn actually listen to their music. Now we are very into Bali, into Asian and African music. Everybody is doing research — Ligeti, Messiaen. We are starting to recognize the classicism of music in every culture. It’s like ethe classicism of jazz. Aftere so many years of denying that quality, we are finally gewetting down to it.

HM: Do you conduct jazz?

TL: I conduct everythhing. I’ve conducted and premiered many jazz pieces for very valuable colleagues. The last pieces I premiered were by Muhal Richard Abrams and Leroy Jenkins.

HM: Is there one piece you’ve especially enjoyed conducting?

TL: There was a piece by Noel Da Costa I conducted three or four years ago, for orchestra and soloist. The soloist was a drummer. And the drummer was Max Roach. And I will never forget that piece.

Thanks to Iris Brooks of Northern Lights Studio for providing a pdf of this article from Ear/New Music News, Volume 13, Number 9, December-January 1989 — also featuring articles on conductors Butch Morris, Lukas Foss, Yip Wing Sie, Oliver Messiaen (by Kent Nagano), and Kronos Quartet, Ursula Oppens, Nurit Tilles.

Record man Koester’s blues and jazz legacy

Chicagoan Bob Koester, proprietor of the Jazz Record Mart and Delmark Records for nearly 70 years, is a model of music activism and entrepreneurship from an era rapidly receding and unlikely in current business circumstances. Neil Genzlinger did a nice formal New York Times obit, and I’ve written a remembrance for the Chicago Reader.

Bob Koester at the Jazz Record Mart, photo by Michael Jackson

Although some independent record stores dealing new and used physical recordings remain in Chicago, I know of none co-joined to an active independent record company, and at the hub of a metropolis-wide community (or interlocking communities) of musicians, fans, writers, photographers, recording engineers and casual listeners. To do that all that now requires a media savvy and bankroll that dwarfs what was possible pre-Internet anad prior to big media industry consolidations.

I continue to believe a personal vision with lots of energy behind it can break through at least to the point of surviving, even if it’s concerned with niche or off-brand content. That is to say more clearly: If you want to get some art out, yours or someone else’s, being smart and determined you’ll find a way to make a mark. A scratch or a dent maybe more than a splash, but that’s something. And who knows where it can lead. When Bob Koester started even his new record store, when he recorded or obtained and issued what have become enduring classic albums by Speckled Red and Big Joe Williams, Junior Wells, Luther Allison and Magic Sam, the first Sun Ra, Roscoe Mitchell and the other AACM originals (Jarman, Muhal, Kalaparusha, Braxton) as well as late career works by artists of earlier decades (Edith Wilson, Roosevelt Sykes, Art Hodes, Sleepy John Estes, Franz Jackson, too many to mention) — when he co-founded the Jazz Institute of Chicago (he insisted blues be part of its portfolio, and knew a lot of musicians to contact for performances) — could he have foreseen what would come of his efforts?

Does anyone?

Boogie-man Helfer bounces back from covid-depression

Erwin Helfer, the 84-year-young Chicago pianist of heartfelt blues, boogie, rootsy American swing and utterly personal compositions, has told his tale of covid-19-related profound depression, hospitalization, treatment and recovery to the Chicago Sun Times.

Erwin Helfer and the author; photo by Marc PoKempner

I’m a longtime friend, ardent fan and two-time record producer of Erwin’s, and had lunch with him soon after the article ran. He was in fine fettle — a great relief to me and the rest of the large, devoted community that’s been deeply concerned about his health since April, when his troubles became evident. Shockingly (no pun intended) it took electroconvulsive therapy to get Erwin Helfer back on track.

Caroline Hurley’s reporting is appreciated. Two minor corrections: Erwin was raised on Chicago’s South Side in the late ’30s and 1940s, moving with his family to a north suburb when he was in 7th grade (circa 1948), and he never met boogie-woogie’s founding father Jimmy Yancey (who died in 1951), though he did eventually accompany and record with Mama Stella Yancey, Jimmy’s widow.

Erwin Helfer and Mama Estelle Yancey, circa 1983; photo by Lauren Deutsch,

But Hurley’s main focus is spot on: The coronavirus can have a devastating affect even on those not infected. It can change how we think, and not for the better.

Helfer was beset, I learned back in April talking to him on the phone, with the darkest of demons. He’d never previously struggled with mental health issues, he generally takes care of himself, but he’d come to feel he was doomed — ill, although tests showed otherwise; ruined financially, though there was no reason to think so, and of toxic danger to his friends, a highly diverse coterie, including some of whom live nearby, all of whom were eager to express their love by supportively checking in, doing errands, bringing food, offering transportation and eventually urging him to seek medical help, which at first he resisted.

But it was obvious to associates such as Ivan Handler (mentioned in the Sun-Times) from his weekly meditation group and Erwin’s loyal producer Steven Dolins of The Sirens Records that he’d let his place and himself go. No one seemed able to cut through his insistence that he was dying and would be better off that way. He had lost — well, let’s say “misplaced” — his typically light touch and good-humored centeredness, attributes many people have relied on to enhance our own spirits and peace of mind.

A source of musical fun, originality and continuity, Erwin has for the more than 40 years I’ve known him (and well before) been a warm, modest, generous, open-minded yet tradition-revering entertainer, collaborator, creator and teacher. He’s a mensch, without arrogance or pretensions. Throughout his career he’s encouraged, championed, recorded and recorded with several somewhat obscure but eminently worthy pianists including Billie Pierce of New Orleans, Speckled Red of St. Louis, and most recently Chicago’s Barrelhouse Chuck Goering, who died in 2016.

Erwin has often played benefits for social causes, house parties and the like; most recently he’d brought joy and comfort weekly to audiences at the Hungry Brain, with an 8 pm set requiring no admission fee. His sets feature a mix of tunes he learned firsthand from past-masters such as Cripple Clarence Lofton and Little Brother Montgomery, familiar themes by Duke Ellington and Hoagy Carmichael, eight-to-the-bar renditions of “Swanee River” and “Jambalaya,” and his own melodies, interspersed with reminisces and corny, often ribald jokes. He prefers to play solo, but happily makes music with people he likes and trusts.

At Katerina’s, circa 2012, from left: Lou Marini, bass; ? guitarist; Erwin Helfer, piano;
Katherine Davis, John Brumbach and Sam Burckhardt, saxes. Photo by Marc PoKempner

In March he’d completed recording sessions for what will be his eighth album from The Sirens, and was looking forward to new project in which his original compositions, which imbue blues structures with impressionistic nuances, would be interpreted by some of his admirers among Chicago’s younger, nominally avant-garde musicians.

However, when the weekly gig Erwin often rode his bike to was suspended due to the coronavirus closings, and students could no longer come to his home (on a street the city marks as “Erwin Helfer Way“) for their lessons, Erwin’s isolation got to him.

Erwin Helfer Way album cover, 2013

As a performer usually in intimate venues (he has also concertized at the Old Town School of Folk Music, in Millennium Park for the Chicago Blues Festival, on regular tours in Germany and during annual visits to the Augusta Heritage Center’s Blues Week in Elkins, West Virginia) he’s ultra-adept at reading and absorbing an audience’s vibe, working in the moment with the people around him to maximize pleasure. That kind of interaction, a true give-and-take, is essential to performing musicians.

Don’t discount the “take” part. Performers need audiences. Most of them can (must) learn to shrug off an unreachable crowd or uninspired night, but if no engagement with other people is possible at all it’s like water withheld from someone parched. The thirst just gets worse, and there’s no substitute. Playing for and by oneself may seem solipsistic, pointless, futile.

A lot of nudging from his closest friends led Erwin to be admitted to Rush University Medical Center’s inpatient psychiatry program. After an initial regimen of drugs, he responded well to electroconvulsive therapy, aka “shock treatment.”

“They wanted to give me 12 sessions,” Helfer told me, “but I only had 11. I was okay after eight. They put me out for them — you don’t feel it. I don’t need to go back, like for a booster, but I’m taking medication, and I have a once-a-month phone appointment with a shrink. I feel great — I feel like I’ve been reborn.”

The day I visited, there was a lot of renewal going on in Helfer’s house. He was having his roof re-done. Katherine Davis, a blues singer Erwin’s worked with for years, was puttering around — she’s taken up residence in his finished attic. Katherine has helped Erwin — an animal lover who titled one of his piano tunes “Pooch Piddle” — acquire a dog and a cat. As we ate sub sandwiches he talked about a how-to-play-blues-piano book he intends to publish, and the modernist instrumentalists he wants to let loose on his songs such as “Day Dreaming,” “Within” and “Stella.”

“I think I’m a better composer than pianist,” he said. “That’s one thing — since my depression I haven’t been playing. And I may not play again. I haven’t been feeling like playing, and I don’t feel it in my fingers. The doctors said my playing might or might not come back. If it doesn’t, I’m okay with that. I think I’ve made my statement.”

“You might have more statements to make,” I suggested.

“What about?” He seemed genuinely curious.

“Maybe you’ve got something to say about what happened to you.”

“That’s a point,” Erwin considered agreeably. “People have been saying to me, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry you had to go through that!’ Well I’m not sorry — I think it’s the best thing that could have happened to me, considering where I am now. Everything seems fresh to me. But how are things with you?”

Since I’ve been trying to learn “Day Dreaming,” I asked Erwin a technical question about the composition. He tried to talk me through the chord pattern, but I told him he was going too fast and I couldn’t match the melody to what he was saying.

“I’ll show you,” he said, and went to the electric keyboard he’s taken to jobs when there’s no acoustic instrument onsite. “Hmmm, it’s not plugged in. Okay, I’ll show you on the piano.”

I cleared a couple boxes off the piano bench, and opened the fallboard so he could get at the keys. He showed me the opening of “Day Dreaming,” an unusual phrase coming up from the bass clef, the execution of which requires both hands.

“Day Dreaming” cover version recorded and posted by Caleb M.

Then I asked him about “After Hours,” a classic he often mentions from the stage was once called the Negro National Anthem. He demonstrated his approach to it, too.

Erwin’s fingers are not especially long, and his reach isn’t particularly broad, but his hands went directly to notes he’s pressed and gestures he’s practiced for eons, moving naturally if not quite precisely to summon the songs. I watched from over his shoulder. He looked up at me. “You think I can get my chops back?”

“Hell yes,” I said. “You haven’t played in four months! Your fingers know where to go, you’re just rusty. Play some, and you’ll be back.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I had that thought, too. I asked the bass player and drummer I was working with to come over. So we’ll see . . . .”

RIP Annie Ross: Her last stand with Jon Hendricks

Annie Ross, who died July 21 at age 89, sold “Loch Lomond” as a seven-year- old in the Little Rascals with brass equal to her hero in “Farmers Market” hawking beans. The child of Scottish vaudevillians, she was maybe never shy. In 2002 I reported on her last stand with fellow vocalese icon Jon Hendricks, at the Blue Note in Manhattan for the newspaper City Arts.

The second-to-last set ever to be sung by Hendricks and Ross, two-thirds of the vocal trio once hailed as “the hottest new group in jazz” was delightful, sad, instructive and substantial, all at once.

Annie Ross, a doyenne of lyric interpretation, and Jon Hendricks, a bard of bop vocalese, appeared at New York’s Blue Note for five nights on a double bill with the quartet New York Voices, in what was publicized as their final goodbye after decades of chilly relations. Hendricks had been less than discreet, and perhaps given to exaggeration, about some of his partner’s old bad habits in an interview for an English newspaper. Ross, probably best known in recent years for her role as a seen-it-all, done-it-all saloon singer in Robert Altman’s 1993 film Short Cuts, had announced she’d take no more guff from the guy she’d first joined (along with the late Dave Lambert) in 1956 to “sing a song of Basie.”

Back then, English expatriate and child movie star Ross had already secured her reputation by putting witty narratives to saxophonist Wardell Gray’s solos on “Twisted” and “Farmer’s Market.”

She quit Hendricks and Lambert in 1962, relocating to London where she briefly ran a nightclub and worked in films and on television.

Hendricks, who grew up in Toledo, Ohio as a protege of Art Tatum, has enjoyed a varied career for half a century, highlighted in the ’90s by his portrayal of a trickster spirit in Wynton Marsalis’s oratorio Blood on the Fields.

Ross and Hendricks first reunited for a singing gig in 1999, and since then have come together for special bookings, to delve into Lambert, Hendricks and Ross material and do their own speciality numbers, as well.

So there were two complicated lifetimes of jazz singing onstage, supported by a self-deprecating rhythm trio led by guitarist John Hart, and though their voices clung together as close as braids of twine, the artists generated little warmth for each other — only professional regard.

Hendricks, dapper in tailored suit and bowler hat, made the announcements, and Ross, in a red dress, exuded the merest hint of aloof attitude. They began by trading choruses on the saucy “Home Cookin'”; she walked off for his forlorn but articulate version of “Just Friends,” and returned to race through “Charleston Alley.” Hendricks essayed one original tune in which he whistled up a winsome solo, pretending to play a conductor’s baton like a flute; he departed for Ross’s always amusing “Twisted,” which she acknowledged had gained new life through a recording by Joni Mitchell.

Then Ross nailed the hilarious, lugubrious novelty number “One Meat Ball,” and engaged Hendricks like a sparring partner on an upbeat, feisty blues. Their finale was a rampaging “Cloudburst,” on which each demonstrated an extraordinary grasp of rhythm, deftness of mind and quickness of tongue.

Neither Hendricks nor Ross has as much command of vocal tone as they did when younger, but that’s the inevitable exchange with age for experience. Character, gumption and personality they both showed aplenty.

Annie Ross and Jon Hendricks, at an NEA Jazz Master ceremony
at 2014 Jazz at Lincoln Center

They are veterans of a golden time for jazz, an era in which the music’s popularity was at an unsuspected peak, and its urbanity was unchallenged. They exemplify jazz’s sophistication, swing and, each in their own ways, class. They demonstrated enduring grit, if not chops, for the much younger and unstrained New York Voices to aspire to. Their final Sunday night performance, which started around 1 a.m., reportedly was just as strong. Aficionados of American song could only hope this unmatched duo will someday mend its rift, and that Jon Hendricks and Annie Ross might appear again as partners, if never more as friends.

Post-script: As the photo above by Sánta Csába Istvan shows, Annie Ross and Jon Hendricks seemed quite cordial when they met at a reception celebrating the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters, at Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2014. He had been named an NEA Jazz Master in 1993 and Ross was so designated in 2010.

Revered jazz elders, deceased: portraits by Sánta István Csaba

As a generation of jazz elders leaves our world — some hastened by the pandemic — their faces as photographed by Sánta István Csaba become even more luminous, haunting, iconic.

Guiseppi Logan, multi-instrumentalist (May 1935 – April 2020)
Henry Grimes, bassist (Nov 1935 – April 2020)
Pianists Geri Allen (June 1957 – June 2017) and
McCoy Tyner (Dec 1938 – March 2020)
Wallace Roney, trumpeter (May 1960 – March 2020)
Lee Konitz, alto saxophonist, improviser (Oct 1927 – April 2020)
Bucky Pizzarelli, guitarist (Jan 1926 – April 2020)

Originally from Transylvania and currently living in Turin, the northern Italian area with heaviest covid-19 infections, Sánta reports that he is healthy, employed at the reception desk of a nearby school, and has recently been honored with a Hungarian Press Photo Award. However, with the lockdown, that Awards ceremony has been indefinitely postponed.

Future Jazz past: Hal Willner, circa 1992

The death of funny, smart, idiosyncratic, unique music producer Hal Willner at age 64 saddens me.

Hal Willner, photo by  David Andrako

We were East Village neighbors in the go-go ’90s, flush with ideas to try in the future. Here’s my entry about him from Future Jazz (Oxford U Press, 1999).

CONCEPT PRODUCER AS VISIONARY

“My projects happen mostly by accident,” claims Hal Willner, soundtrack producer of Robert Altman’s films including Short Cuts, based on short stories by the late American “dirty realist” writer Raymond Carver and Kansas City, a paean to jazz during that town’s Depression era apotheosis. Incidents in Carver’s fiction, Altman’s films and Willner’s total-concept soundtrack design might seem to share only temporal connection, yet nothing in any of them occurs out of nowhere.

Considering Willner’s unusual accomplishments — he’s longtime music director of the television staple Saturday Night Live, the man behind the musical guests romantic sax star David Sanborn introduced on the short-lived but fondly remembered tv program Night Music, and producer of albums in which rock ‘n’ roll, jazz and new music notables have emerged from obscurity, made career comebacks, or stretched their talents in unpredictable directions — “mostly by accident” is no explanation.

 Willner had prepared, perhaps unconsciously, to realize music in narrative terms — and vice versa — since his youthful fascination with old-time radio shows in which stories were told through sound. As a teenager in the late ’60s and early ’70s, he appreciated “concept albums with beginnings, middles and ends that somehow transcended the music and became almost visual.””And you know the producer Joel Dorn, right?” he asked me on afternoon, sitting in his apartment on Avenue B in New York City’s East Village. “I had an internship with him in Philadelphia, and he used to make records like this with jazz artists. Remember the spin-through-the-radio-dial on Yusef Lateef’s Part Of The Search, and the story behind Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s Case Of The 3-Sided Dream in Audio Color? I think it’s a real loss nobody makes albums like that anymore.”

These albums foreshadowed Willner’s creation of a genre-defying genre in which re-interpretations of a noted composer’s work by widely diverse musicians reveal unexpected implications.

His ouevre as a concept album producer includes tributes to Federico Fellini’s film composer (Amacord Nino Rota),  iconic iconoclast Thelonious Monk (That’s The Way I Feel Now),  Kurt Weill (Lost In The Stars), songs from vintage Disney films (Stay Awake) and the brooding bassist Charles Mingus (Weird Nightmare).

Willner also produced career peaks for rock chanteuse Marianne Faithful (Broken English Strange Weather and Easy Come, Easy Go) and song-speaker Leonard Cohen (the live concert for the documentary I’m Your Man), albums of readings by poet Allen Ginsberg and satirist William Burroughs set to hip downtownesque music; works by admired if lesser-known jazz musicians (the Beaver Harris-Don Pullen 360 Degree Music Society’s A Well-Kept Secret) and a restoration of long lost tapes by comic social critic Lenny Bruce. The list is the wish fulfillment of a man with broad tastes, an encyclopedic memory for jazz and pop, a sense of larger structures (naturally, he’s listened to classical European chamber and symphonic music), and very good connections.

Willner’s unplanned way began in high school.

“I was into radio programs like Inner Sanctum and the Orson Welles productions, then I got interested in records like the Beatles’ white album, the first Blood Sweat and Tears, Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and Miles Davis’s Sketches Of Spain. They took me somewhere, they were like journeys through dreams. In fact, I was going to call the Monk album Monk’s Nightmare until Steve Lacy suggested the title we used.”

Anyway, “Weird Nightmare” was the title of a Charles Mingus composition, and perfectly fit Willner’s 1992 Mingus production.

  “Mingus is a logical choice for me to make — his music works with this kind of approach. I try not to think of too many possible subjects, and I’ve never done anyone who’s not dead, because then you have a complete career to work with. I’d like to do an Ellington; it would be a great excuse to immerse myself in his music, study it and become more expert.” That’s why he did Kurt Weill.

“I originally intended just to examine the music of Nino Rota with one artist,” Wilner says of his first cast-of-hundreds album production. “But I got a vision in the night to do it with Carla Bley, Jaki [Byard] and Muhal Richard Abrams. Then Chris Stein and Deborah Harry [of the band Blondie] wanted to be involved, and when the record came out it got all this attention. I thought ‘This is going to be my record production high water mark. It won’t get better than this.’

One of Harry Partch’s instruments

“Then after Monk died I was sitting in Carnegie Hall at some jazz fest memorial to Monk, getting freaked that Terry Adams from NRBQ and Donald Fagen from Steely Dan and all these other people who really had a love of Monk weren’t performing, and that the jazz people who were playing Monk’s music were making it boring. Monk’s music was never boring. When Oscar Peterson came on, that was it — he had even put Monk down. So there was my Monk idea. And after that, the question was ‘Who else?'”

Willner has by now called on stylists as disparate as New Orleans’ voice of r&b Aaron Neville and East Village punk saxophonist/composer John Zorn to participate on his albums, which come off as less eclectic than visionary. He’s mixed music scene such outsiders as the self-styled “Peruvian songbird” Yma Sumac with such insiders as Beatles drummer Ringo Starr. He’s effected arguably obvious but never before attempted pairings such as soprano saxist Steve Lacy with drummer Elvin Jones, and surprisingly powerful meetings such singer Betty Carter and saxophonist Branford Marsalis with blues bassist Willie Dixon. He’s provided invaluable a&r suggestions to bands with their own distinctive sounds — from Los Angeles barrio homeboys Los Lobos to NYC downtown new jazz vaudevillians the Jazz Passengers.

Many of Willner’s mixes and matches immediately announce themselves as inspired. Sting sings Weill’s “Mac The Knife.” The Marsalis brothers play a medley of melodies from early Fellini. Sun Ra’s Arkestra swings “Pink Elephants On Parade” from Dumbo.

On the Mingus tribute, arrangements by black rock guitar star Vernon Reid, reedist Henry Threadgill and pianist Geri Allen, among others, use the justly intoned musical instruments of the late composer Harry Partch, some under portions of Mingus’s exaggerated autobiography read by Robbie (the Band) Robertson, novelist Hubert {Last Exit To Brooklyn) Selby Jr. and gangsta rapper Chuck D.

Willner says his ideas are always at the service of undervalued or misapprehended 20th century classics.

“I look for music that has influenced or can influence different types of musicians, and music that can break down so it flows from Todd Rundgren to solo Randy Weston to Zorn with Arto Lindsay and Wayne Horvitz to Terry Adams to Eugene Chadbourne’s Shockabilly to [New Orleans’ guitarist] Mark Bingham with John Scofield and Steve Swallow, without seeming like a novelty,” he says. “That’s one of my favorite sequences on the Monk album. Check it out.”

Sheer pleasure in making the never-before happen seems to motivate Willner, who for most of the ’80s and ’90s lived modestly next door to Charlie Parker’s final home in Manhattan’s East Village. His personal style is self-depreciating, and he brings a fan’s respect to his productions’ subjects. That’s generally won him kudos from critical purists, though some pop musicians feel a need to defend their versions of beloved jazz against possible complaint.

Cover of Weird Nightmare

“I like Hal’s records; whether or not serious-minded people approve of them is irrelevant,” said Elvis Costello, who sang the challenging title track of Willner’s Mingus tribute Weird Nightmare. “There’s a place for different interpretations of great music; having different musicians keep the music alive by playing it cannot diminish any version which to some ears is truer or closer to the original. Whatever comes out of my work on the Mingus record will be because of my love of his music — not to promote myself.”

Same with the producer, really, though he doesn’t completely abjure the spotlight. On Monk’s “Misterioso,” after tenor saxist Johnny Griffin blows a fervent solo over Carla Bley’s swirling orchestral chart, Hal Willner himself chimes in, credited as The Voice of Death.

JazzOnLockdown: Musicians, venues, .orgs — writers? — turn to live-streaming

It’s the most obvious, available and so far low-cost option for anyone who can cast a performance online for public consumption — jazz musicians specifically included: Live-streaming.

Fred Hersch has been first out of the box, committing to live-streaming daily mini concerts from his living room, 1pm Eastern Daily Time  (10am PST, 7pm in Europe) — https://www.facebook.com/fredherschmusic. 

As New York, California, Illinois and other U.S. locales request and/or require a suspension of public gatherings, the personal broadcast, whether of live-in-living room concerts, pre-produced video or even audio-only podcasts, can serve fans, maintain a presence and (it’s fervently hoped, perhaps, maybe maybe maybe) make some bit of money towards replacing what everyone will lose from in-person gigs. 

This being critical for jazz musicians, Jazz On The Tube — which serves 30,000 jazz-lovin’ subscribers to emails with embedded performance videos daily — has posted the best start-up live-streaming suggestions. It offers good information and valuable inks for players, teachers, producer-presenters, jazz support and service organizations and maybe even writers (how about I publicly Zoom with friendly/contentious colleagues, picking apart new releases)?

And perhaps most significantly, Jazz at Lincoln Center has started a blog where artists can post about their scheduled upcoming jazz live-streams, and listeners can find them.

A central calendar would be a boon to venues such as Baltimore’s An Die Musik, which broadcast what it promoted as it’s “first” live streaming event Friday, 3/20, of the Warren Wolf Quartet — charging viewers $5 to see it, and, if JALC is broadminded and inclusive, Experimental Sound Studio, a Chicago non-profit presenting contemporary composition and improvisation (Ken Vandermark is among their curators), which posted a schedule of “Quarantine Concerts,” but on 3/21 was flagged by YouTube for “inappropriate content,” so found a “friendlier platform,” switching to Twitch. Jazz on the Tube is eager to post links to upcoming jazz-streaming online, as is AllAboutJazz, now promoting live-stream events and offering to host uploads. But Jazz at Lincoln Center‘s “corona jazz livestreams” site could become the go-to platform, as it has announced plans to ramp up all its online content by digging into seven years of video’d concerts, panels and classes. Wynton Marsalis is also intending to sit for participatory online chats. 

Organizations such as New Music USA are telling members they’ll promote life-streamed events on their websites and feeds — a practice which seems like to grow, fast. Indeed, anyone who belongs to any such organization should look into what the organization’s plan is for online activity to be of general benefit. The JazzOnLockdown series of the Jazz Journalists Association, of which I’m president, is one such initiative, born out of the recently launched campaign “Working the Beat,” which all JJA members (and unaffiliated colleagues, too) are welcome to join.

But since most jazz musicians (and jazz journalists) are self-employed freelancers, it’s probably essential to rely on ourselves and do it ourselves.. Adapting or heightening one’s media game may seem tiresome if not daunting, but in reality it’s no longer so time intensive and difficult. It’s a matter of experimenting, improvising, taking your time and trying again until you’ve got enough of a grasp on the array of current cheap and accessible tools that connect us online to be able to jam for and with your correspondents (friends/family/fans/international audience). Trying these new methods can be fun. Still, we all hope they won’t be so singularly necessary — the only space to convene, assuredly safe from a virus — for very long.

Jazz vs. lockdown: Blogs w/ vid clips defy virus muting musicians

image by John Fenton

Jazz doesn’t want to stay home and chill — so members of the Jazz Journalists Association launched on Monday, 3/15/2020, JazzOnLockdown: Hear It Here, a series of curated v-logs featuring performance videos of musicians whose gigs have been postponed or cancelled due to coronavirus concerns.

The initial JOL post, by Madrid blogger Mirian Arbalejo (of MissingDuke.com) is dedicated to Marcelo Peralta, Argentine born/Spanish resident saxophonist-composer-arranger who is reportedly the first jazz musician to succumb to the illness.

Marcelo Peralta, photo https://www.lagacetasalta.com.ar/

The second JOL post, by New Zealand’s John Fenton (JazzLocal32.com), presents keyboardist/synthesist/dance club remixer Mark di Clive-Lowe, a native son now based in Los Angeles, playing in his hometown at the start of what turned out to be an aborted world tour.

Both posts and subsequent ones (coming from Chicago, Havana, the Bay Area and elsewhere) include information on how to sustain musicians financially as their live shows have been curtailed (for a limited time, it’s hoped).

Mark di Clive-Lowe, photo by Farah Sosa

The JJA intends to add to its JazzOnLockdown posts daily. Anyone anywhere is invited to submit JazzOnLockdown posts, which require 1) name(s) of musician(s); 2) venue, locale and date of cancellation(s); 3) posted video to be embedded; 4) appropriate contextual information; 5) methods for helping the musician(s) get by (i.e., links to their Bandcamp page, website, records for sale); 6) link to the submitter’s own page or site. Send all inquiries to JazzOnLockdown@JazzJournalists.org.

Mardi Gras’ lewd Krewe, Marc Pokempner’s photos

Krewe du Vieux Carré puts on the most satirical and scatalogical of New Orlean’s pre-Mari Gras parades, says photo-journalist Marc PoKempner, whose images © here provide convincing evidence.

PoKempner writes: “Our dysfunctional evil-clown-in-chief figured prominently in this years’ Krewe du Vieux parade and the immediately following krewedelusion — an annual outpouring of satirical, political, scatological and outrageous imagery that can always be counted on to top the charts of the crude, lewd and rude. At once the most topical and most traditional (no tractors, handmade floats, throws and costumes) of processions, and the only large parade still allowed in the French Quarter, it epitomizes the participatory creativity that distinguishes New Orleans from . . . well, anywhere.”   

“Not incidentally,” he continues, “each sub Krewe was accompanied by its own band – only live music is allowed – and the brass bands were rockin’, fueled by the exuberant energy of the marchers and the wildly enthusiastic crowd. 

“I had foolishly avoided Mardi Gras for years after experiencing frat-boy gridlock in the Quarter early on – before discovering the community based downtown action,” says PoKempner.

Such spirited ridicule could become a regular feature of protest marches across the land, should they proliferate as the political season continues.

On the other hand, we needn’t dress up funny or roll out a float to VOTE.

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Howard Mandel

I'm a Chicago-born (and after 32 years in NYC, recently repatriated) writer, editor, author, arts reporter for National Public Radio, consultant and nascent videographer -- a veteran freelance journalist working on newspapers, magazines and websites, appearing on tv and radio, teaching at New York University and elsewhere, consulting on media, publishing and jazz-related issues. I'm president of the Jazz Journalists Association, a non-profit membership organization devoted to using all media to disseminate news and views about all kinds of jazz.
My books are Future Jazz (Oxford U Press, 1999) and Miles Ornette Cecil - Jazz Beyond Jazz (Routledge, 2008). I was general editor of the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz and Blues (Flame Tree 2005/Billboard Books 2006). Of course I'm working on something new. . . Read More…

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