March 11: from left, Andrew Cyrille duets w/ Irene Schweizer, and Oliver Lake (no Reggie Workman, sorry!)

I detail some of the shows — and why people think jazz is better loved abroad than at home — in my new column in City Arts-New York.

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With electric guitar Bill Berends, violinist Marina Vishnyakova, electric bassist Elliot Garland and keyboardist David Dzubinski addressing roles originally performed by McLaughlin himself (usually on a double-necked instrument), Jerry Goodman (still active, he’s been in the Dixie Dregs among other genre-confounding groups), Rick Laird (now Richard Laird, photographer) and Jan Hammer (composer for “Miami Vice,” Cocaine Cowboys, innovative computer animations and the first commercial tv network in Eastern Europe), Weston pounded out gloriously fast, muscularly emphatic rhythms to propel “Hope,” “One Word,” “The Dance of Maya,” “Open Country Joy”, “Triology,” “Dawn” and “Meeting of the Spirits” — multi-part compositions originally recorded on The Inner Mounting Flame (released in 1971), Birds of Fire (’72) and The Lost Trident Sessions (recorded in ’73, not released until 1999).  If it seems odd for a drummer to reprise material written for a frontline of electric guitar, violin and keyboards (including synth) plus electric bass, know that the original Mahavishnu Orchestra was driven by Billy Cobham, a contributor as essential to the group’s sound and prodigious four-year-run (reportedly 580 concerts during that period) as McLaughlin himself. (In fact, drummer Gregg Bendian also has an ambitious Mahavishnu Project -Redefined , which coincidentally had a booking scheduled for tonight (Feb 11) in New Hope, PA — postponed due to icy roads in the region).

Obviously Weston digs Cobham. He showed up in Tribeca with a vast array of tom-toms, cymbals, a gong and double bass drums, akin to the kit Cobham eventually employed. Weston’s beats were true to Cobham’s models: solidly struck, whip-snap fast and precisely fulfilling the unconventional time signatures derived from Indian tabla practices which gave the Mahavishnu Orchestra its distinctive motivation. But Weston has his own shtick, too. Among his skills:

• ferocious press rolls on his snare, but also with his two feet on the kick pedals;
•  independence yet also paired coordination of his four limbs;
• ability to throw in fills and accents where there wouldn’t seem to be time to put them;
• mastery of the different pitches/timbres of all those cymbals and toms;
• control of dynamics so that there’s always a notch up-the-scale to go,
• and with bassist Garland an instinct for bringing the lowdown funk out of Mahavishnu material initially intended for seeking a transcendent spiritual plane.

Weston directed all the action from his seat in the manner of drummer-bandleaders like Art Blakey and Jack DeJohnette. At 52, he has enviable reserves of energy. He turned what had been advertised as two sets into one long one, throwing punches for two hours continuously like a determined boxer who doesn’t hear the bell tolling that he can rest between rounds.

Although the Mahavishnu Orchestra was brilliantly conceived to flow from classically-stated themes to raging collective jams, soft, folkish or raga-like passages to competitive call-and-response episodes, it was the bodacious end of its sonic spectrum that most engaged listeners in the ’70s and has wowed us ever since. Not that the MO was just loud, though it was indeed loud. The MO was on fire, with neatly shorn, pale, earnest, white-clad young McLaughlin, a disciple of Sri Chinmoy (who gave him the name “Mahavishnu” after the Hindu creator/destroyer/preserver of the universe) at its center, engaged yet serene. He excelled at articulating strange scalar lines and bent notes in upper octaves at speed-metal tempi, while violinist Goodman bowed quickly also in top registers and Hammer bent or pushed pitches where newly developed synthesizers had never gone before.

Berends, Vishnyakova and Dzubinski worked the same angles to nearly the same affect. There were minor, easily forgiven fluctuations of intonation, and by definition they weren’t the originators of the MO vision, so the question sometimes arose: Whose music is this? Weston’s Treasures of the Spirit last night was not so visually imposing as its predecessor: The players wore street clothes, and Berends bears a resemblance to Penn Gillette wearing a pirate bandana, rather than McLaughlin the handsome Yorkshireman pure as snow aspiring to eternal bliss.

Well, it’s no longer 1971, and the shock of hearing musicians reach with hedonistic rock fervor for the holy unattainable is gone for good. The small crowd at the Y, a multi-use facility with excellent performance space but off the nightlife track, seemed to be predominantly men who remember hearing Mahavishnu in their youth and have not gotten over it (like me). That’s unfortunate, because this music — not just its imagery and mythology —  as Weston & Co. put it forth should appeal to ravers of all ages, anyone looking to pump it up.

G. Calvin Weston’s other associations are certifiably hip: He’s recorded and toured with Ornette Coleman’s amplified double quartet Prime Time, been in the Lounge Lizards, the Free Form Funky Freqs with Vernon Reid and Jamaaladeen Tacuma and on the Get Shorty soundtrack. In each context he strives for the personal satisfaction of making music live, immediate and interactive as possible.

If Treasures of the Spirit has a flaw, it’s that the band sometimes moves less than persuasively through the pastoral, contemplative moments McLaughlin planted in his pieces for introduction, punctuation and contrast to the urgency Weston wants to convey about time passing inexorably, now. Time is moving fast, there’s no way to stop it and we don’t exactly catch up by reaching back 40 years to remembered pleasures. But revisiting, restoring and reviving music that was born years ago but has lost no vitality doesn’t feel like a desperate attempt to recapture an era so much as a statement of faith in the value of that music then and in the present. Jazz — fusion-manifestations included — is made in the moment and if the sounds fit those who play it and hear it, they are indeed treasures of the spirit. I came home from G. Calvin Weston’s show enriched by people out here collaboratively lifting earthy rhythms and searing melodies to the open sky.

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John Coltrane meets Don Cherry in "The Avant-Garde"

New things — innovations — thinking outside the box — breaks from conventions and the continuum of progress (evolution) — these issues are regards jazz, among other art forms, has long fascinated me. It’s the topic of my book Miles Ornette Cecil – Jazz Beyond Jazz and the inspiration of this blog. So I spin out more of my pov about these matters in response to Jose’s questions, and I hope you’ll enjoy them while listening to the playlists he’s set up — but comment on the Q&A discussion below, or on my Facebook post of this blog posting.

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Broderick Crawford as populist pol Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men

Of 10 American novels critic Terry Teachout posted yesterday that he wishes he’d written, only All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren similarly appeals to me. I can imagine hunkering down as Penn Warren did, dryly but fiercely etching the sickness of American populist politics, which we’re seeing swirl at its sickest this very  primary season. It would be work, for sure, but at a white hot energy — which I’d think would be hard to sustain, but so satisfying to bring to completion.

I haven’t read all Terry’s other choices (but of course Gatsby), and as he says his whimsical exercise is based on personal taste. Would it have been fun to write Gatsby? Maybe for F. Scott Fitzgerald, but not for me. I’d rather have dreamed up the terse treachery in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, the flat-out funny of Max Shulman’s Barefoot Boy With Cheek, the kaleidoscopic enormity of
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.

I’d have enjoyed penning “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” (not novels, I know, but then neither is “The Tell-Tale Heart”; the three of them together = a novella, so I’ll claim them) and Sirens of Titan and would be proud (of course) to have authored Huck Finn. Tropic of Capricorn is another I could, when I read it, fantasize that someday I might come up with with something like. Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed is excitingly vivid and visionary — just think of spending time conjuring flawed but fantastic immortals in paranormal conflict. Elmore Leonard’s Killshot — Elmore always has fun when he’s writing, you can tell. And maybe Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, though I have nothing like the grasp of time and space (physics, right?) I’d have had to have for that.

I admire a gazillion other American novels (and many foreign ones, too), but couldn’t have turned out The Turn of the Screw or Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter or An American Tragedy or Invisible Man or Miss Lonelyhearts or Donald Newlove’s fantastic Sweet Adversity (much less his latest, Kindle-only, 1000+ page Starlight Photoplays) or Robert Coover’s The Origin of the Brunists or Naked Lunch or even Portnoy’s Complaint — but gee, if I could! Just one of the not-so-simple Dr. Suess classics, W.R. Burnett’s iconic Little Ceasar or James Cain’s Double Idemnity (the Amerian Crime and Punishment) or Christopher Buckley’s The White House Mess or gosh, Carl Haissen’s Tourist Season — sitting at the keyboard, knocking any of those out — that would be a kick. I don’t know if John Burdett’s Bankok trilogy counts as an American novel, exactly, or if Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues is a novel, though it’s ultra-American. Like The Freelance Pallbearers, My Life and Hard Times and (back to Twain) No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger or Algren’s The Devil’s Stocking or The Wizard of Oz. To dwell within such books while they’re unfolding, that must be what novelists live (and die) to do.

Well, I’m not too shy or superstitious to admit I still harbor novelistic ambitious. I’ve got a complete draft of a fast-paced, hiply talkative crime novel (if anyone’s interested, leave a comment below), notes for a long work on an underground movement in a dystopian future and a couple old, extremely fanciful chapters of a backwards odyssey in the ’60s, if it had been completely different. I intend to shape all these up, finish them, publish them. True, novels take time, but they make time for the writer and the reader — that suspended bubble of the moments (hours, years) spent writing and reading. I’m sure it’s time well spent, ’cause look at what worlds they depict, so easily accessed and fully inhabited, how wondr’ously eternal yet marvelously new they are every time I open the covers. For sure the kind of novels a person likes – loves — say a lot about the person. A poet, not a novelist, said it: “I am large, contain multitudes.” Not to be grandiose –when I feel that way it’s from reading all these novels. . .

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Tim Berne, right; Oscar Noriega, left

There’s nothing fraudulent about Berne, it must be said from the start, any of his past music or this particular album, which is another (his 41st) uncompromising demonstration of what musicians come up with when they think for themselves about beauty — which seems to be his chief concern. Berne’s tone on alto, to begin with, is exacting while ranging moodily from plaintive clarity to steely assertiveness. His compositions are not slick or glib — they are rather long, multi-dimensional and demand genuine engagement of all the musicians involved, rewarding most those listeners who pay full attention, free of suppositions, to the sheerly sensual fluctations of of sound and the players’ interactions. With no bass, rigorous-as-chamber-quartet attention to detail and the patented ECM sonic treatment delivering the tonal richness all the instruments (besides Berne’s sax, Oscar Noriega’s clarinet and bass clarinet, Matt Mitchell’s grand piano and Ches Smiths’ traps and other percussion), the composer’s concept and ensemble’s realization are presented with utmost honesty.

This is how the music is meant to sound, you become convinced, how the musicians hear it in their minds, so pressing they have to get it into the air (and they’re enormously lucky to have it so documented). Their music, for all its obvious framework, also seems to spring from them spontaneously – Noriega’s clarinet, in particular, has episodes of venturing forth all but unaccompanied, toeing a thin line of naked uncertainty that lures the ear along in suspense ’til he connects (gasp! — how?) with a resolutely structured (though still far from conventional) part of the song.

Berne’s efforts have always been for serious contemplation. I don’t know of any of it you (or at least I) could dance to, but the alternative to rockin’ rhythms and ecstatic riffs has its compensations. Follow these pieces and you slip through dark woods, roam the lip of a cliff looking down a ravine, removed from any referents to easy pop culture, the way things dully always are, the usually inescapable context of urban life.

Snakeoil has a Nordic quality, as do many ECM records — meaning they’re more cooly incisive than hot and heedless. Well, over the course of a 35+ year career, Berne has evaded the traps of predictablity, being tamed or de-toothed, and that’s an achievement to be admired, in part because it’s so hard for musicians coming up today to emulate. On the other hand, Berne is not now and has never been withdrawn, musically. He plays well with others: Bill Frisell, Hank Roberts, Herb Robertson, Tom Rainey, Craig Taborn, Michael Formanek, David Torn and Chris Speed have been among his most reliable collaborators, and represent an enlighted circle. He also gets them to play well with him.

That’s a rare strength for a lone wolf, but then you’ve got to figure that a survivor of 35+ years independence in an art form already as out in the territories as jazz is by Darwinian precepts and definition an alpha. He doesn’t bite, but he suffers no foolishness either. It’s tough being an outsider, trying to get heard. But dig, Snakeoil aint’ hardly about selling.

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Playing a Hammond C-3, which he explained was a B-3 restored and put into a (somewhat) more easily transportable cabinet, Lewis demonstrated complete mastery of Monk’s penetratingly insightful, somehow intuitive melodies and startlingly flexible rhythmic structures. While the music of Monk has become iconic for jazz modernists as Bach’s is for classicists of the Western European tradition, generating tribute albums from talents as disparate as Wynton Marsalis and Hal Willner, Lewis’s interpretations capitalize on the reedy sustain of his instrument to highlight the “ugly beauty” (Monk’s term) in the songs’ often close-interval riffs and “wrong is right” (another Monkism) chords.

Lewis improvised excitingly, opening up “Little Rootie Tootie,” “Evidence” and “Think of One” among other tunes with dazzling fast finger runs and emphatic clusters, sometimes quoting other Monk songs in the midst of the one his trio was addressing. Jackson’s thick, clear tone and flowing solos admirably matched  Lewis’s interpretations and Reid, a last-minute sub for the trio’s usual drummers, was also fully aware of the repertoire’s quirks, adding his own intense energy. Mentioning he’s recently performed and/or recorded with saxophonists Steve Lehman, Steve Coleman and Rudresh Mahanthappa and trumpeter Nicholas Payton, Reid is in demand and his playing showed why.

Lewis’s album Organ Monk made my 2010 best of the year list, and I’m still listening to it (he’s recorded a followup, which awaits final mixing and release). A native New Yorker whose father David Lewis was a jazz pianist, Lewis plays Harlem venues including Showman’s Lounge and the Lennox Lounge where pretensions gain no traction but expressive soulfulness is prized. He claims organist Larry Young as his main instrumental influence; Young (1940-1978) was arguably the last organist to reframe his instrument’s potential (on both his own albums and with Tony Williams’ Lifetime). Lewis takes the advanced keyboard technique and free-thinking Young espoused (and others including Joe Zawinul, Don Pullen, Andrew Hill and John Medeski have each in their own ways have demonstrated) to compositions which boast distinct integrity, retaining the bluesy drive and church-redolent atmospherics of the first generation jazz organists (post-Waller and Basie, Wild Bill Davis and Milt Buckner leading to Jimmy Smith). And Lewis with Jackson and Reid (on the Organ Monk record, Cindy Blackman drums) are impassioned. All of which added up to breakthrough music, enriching and fun, jazz and beyond jazz.

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Johnny Otis, 1993 - photo by Jack Vartoogian

But the jazz world — listeners, broadcasters and journalists, musicians and institutions up to and including the NEA — would be well-served to proclaim that Etta James and Johnny Otis are “jazz masters.” Their sub-genre identities remain within the greater mainstream of Afro-American music born about a hundred years ago, with blues becoming ever less a so-called “folk” form by engaging with other  musical and commercial influences, leaving rural isolation for urban hubbub, diverse developments and the ear of the world. Furthermore, Otis’s and James’s specific sounds emerged from America’s unique swing era stylings, in response to and generation of post-WW II U.S. cultural norms. As one with jazz.

Why would it matter if we called Otis and James “jazz masters”?

1. It would emphasize the structural girding jazz has provided for the past century  to all of American popular song. So pop audiences would be encouraged to recast their “jazz as dead” stereotype, comforting current jazz artists who complain they can’t make it ’cause their music is chained to the “n-word”. Indeed, such jazz musicians might learn something from Otis’ business sense and James’ dismal history.
2.  If we don’t recognize people like Otis and James on some official level as jazz masters, then as what? Heritage artists? That designation has been coded to mean ultra-traditionalists and conservationists. Nothing wrong with that — but Otis and James were more involved  with updates, revisions, hybrids, popularizations and other pragmatics of music-making than in revering its glories or protecting its legacies. They’ve been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Blues Hall of Fame — fine and good, such recognition and honors for their links to jazz aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s beneficial to admit that categories aren’t rigid. Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown was a jazzman, too.
3. Johnny Otis and Etta James were jazz musicians from the start — jazz was their inspiration. Understanding them as such provides us with a truer vision of the breadth of jazz and its manifestations. It also prods us to enjoy their music in more depth, to take in its subtleties and appreciate the art.

Johnny Otis had six years of big band jazz experience before he convened his own 16-piece ensemble in 1945. The distance between mainstream jazz (if not that new thing, “bebop”) and pop music for dancing was quite close then. Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Billy Eckstine, Tommy Dorsey,  Bob Wills, Ella Fitzgerald, Big Joe Turner and Louis Jordan were among the genuinely popular stars of jazz.  Otis could hang with them; he  drummed with Lionel Hampton on “Flyin’ Home” as the climax of a 1950 broadcast, 24 minutes into the program —

Etta James wanted to be Billie Holiday. Holiday’s influence is palpable in all of James’ ballad singing, including her version of “At Last” (originally recorded by Glenn Miller and his orchestra)  – it’s in the way Etta phrases, hesitating behind or jumping ahead of the beat, how she wrings lyrics for layers of meaning and employs all the qualities of her voice despite a fairy limited octave range for nuance. James won a Grammy for Mystery Lady: The Songs of Billie Holiday, and in her 2006 album All The Way she’s as credible with that Sinatra signature song as with Lennon’s “Imagine” and “What’s Goin’ On?” That’s a jazz artist’s adaptability. And though it was rare for her to record with swing-oriented backup, though she shouted out upbeat messages with gospel fervor rather than float through melodies like a horn, Etta James could improvise just fine, as when she joined Glady Knight and Chaka Khan, backed by B.B. King, in the Bessie Smith classic “T’aint Nobody’s Business,” which Billie Holiday also sang.

Otis and James were musicians who projected no pretense of performing high art, experimenting or abstracting.  They were on-the-road entertainers who, if they lacked probing and profound repertoire yet depended upon consistently performing real live music people would flock to and pay for night after night, everywhere, in pursuit of being made more relaxed, happier, less blue — transformed. Otis, in particular, was alert to trends in taste and the talented people who could fulfill listeners’ desires, and discovered several singers including Etta James but also Esther Phillips who brought jazz-derived edge to bluesy pop material. James was a balladeer for the working class, never very glamorous, often in her early work raunchy or a victim, but touching because she put emotions in her voice that rang so true.

Johnny Otis and Etta James may have ended up as the Godfather of R&B and the First Mama of Funky Stuff, but when they started those categories didn’t exist. They toiled in the fields of popular jazz. That they affected change in popular music coming from such background and never dishonoring it means, to me,  they were masterful enough to focus elements of the jazz arts into music of wide appeal, gathering audiences from across formerly divided demographic groups, turning definitions that hewed to conventions on their head.

Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that the National Endowment of the Arts issue posthumous honors holding up Johnny Otis and/or Etta James as embodiments of jazz originality or virtuosity. But I do submit that popular artists who employ jazz strategies, techniques, tactics, materials and values are also part of the jazz spectrum – as today the jazz industry (what’s left of it) and press (ditto) includes under the greater jazz umbrella, sometimes grudgingly, Kenny G., Boney James, Najee, Soul Live, Diana Krall, Tony Bennett, Jamie Cullum and countless others.

If we don’t, maybe we should. Because counting their sales boosts the bottom line on overall interest in jazz, and makes a mockery which is well-deserved of definitions which only have to do with marketing. Because playing them in a jazz radio show demonstrates the connections between the earthy and the esoteric. Because music is a stylistic continuum, and not series of separate bins.

If it’s vernacular music made in America since the 1920s, derived from African-American traditions and urban circumstances, engaging primarily with the marketplace rather than the academy or conservatory, depending upon knowledgable musicians to make it good in real time — then I say it’s fair to call it or at least reasonable to say it’s been informed by “jazz.” Whether you agree or not, please hail Johnny Otis and Etta James, find some of their music to listen to and dig.

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Here’s the criteria for the Jazz Masters fellowships, and process of nomination, directly from the NEA’s website:

The NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship is a lifetime achievement award. The criteria for the fellowships are musical excellence and significance of the nominees’ contributions to the art of jazz. The Arts Endowment honors a wide range of styles while making the awards. There is also a special award given to a non-musician, the A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Master Award for Jazz Advocacy, which is awarded to an individual who has made major contributions to the appreciation, knowledge, and advancement of jazz.

Fellowships are awarded to living artists on the basis of nominations from the general public and the jazz community. The recipients must be citizens or permanent residents of the United States. An individual may submit only one nomination each year, and nominations are made by submitting a one-page letter detailing the reasons that the nominated artist should receive an NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship. Nominations submitted to the Arts Endowment by the deadline are reviewed by an advisory panel of jazz experts and at least one knowledgeable layperson. Panel recommendations are forwarded to the National Council on the Arts, which then makes recommendations to the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Nominations remain active for five years, being reviewed annually during this period.

Lobbying may well help move the jazz experts’ advisory committee — the Jazz Institute of Chicago spearheaded a 10-year effort to get Jazz Master status for tenor saxophonist Von Freeman, who seemed to be at a disadvantage for having performed all but exclusively for decades in Chicago (where he anchored a thriving South Side scene and style, generating dozens of proteges, Rudresh Mahanthappa and Steve Coleman among them). But note that an individual can only make one nomination per year.

Remembering that Sam Rivers is one instance of an artist who should have received the designation, I’ve got my own list of deserving nominees — it starts with Eddie Palmieri – and wonder who’s on yours.

Eddie Palmieri in action

Let me know in the comments section, and let the NEA know by preparing a one-page letter explaining your nomination, in anticipation of a deadline for nominations being announced.

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Sheila Jordan, NEA Jazz Master

But of equally significance immediately was spread of the word that the Jazz Masters program will indeed continue into the future in regards to financial awards for selected Masters, for sure.  As for celebratory ceremonies and productions such as the concert, press activities, luncheons and fellowship attending the 30th annual Jazz Masters awards, the future is less clear.

Here are some highlights of what I saw and heard:

• Bobby Hutcherson, 72 and hooked to oxygen, sitting back from his vibes for brief rest between each chorus, ending his duo with pianist Kenny Barron improvising one of the most utterly spontaneous yet finely struck of final cadences.
•  Frank Wess, turned 90 Jan. 4, blowing a tenor sax tribute to long gone but never forgot Lester Young, with young Benny Golson (83 on Jan. 25, 2012) fast on his tail.
• Irrepressible class of 2012 Jazz Master Sheila Jordan, 83, playfully getting an audience to sing along with her, “Bird!” and returning to scat with ’12 JM Jimmy Owens playing flugelhorn on Ornette Coleman’s jaunty “When Will The Blues Leave?” — driven by ’12 JM Jack DeJohnette, tethered by long-ago-named JM bassist Ron Carter, and with Ornette himself (a JM of course) listening from a front row.

This was music full of fun, a sense of possibility and jauntiness — nothing old fashioned about it, though sure enough a blues.

A few minutes earlier Owens had played a touching unaccompanied flugelhorn solo on “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” which he dedicated to the late Dr. Billy Taylor — having first lambasted New York City’s jazz performance clubs for reneging on promises purportedly made to a jazz musicians’ pension fund. His blunt indictment might have seemed out of place at a fete of lifetime achievement, had not Jack DeJohnette in his acceptance speech cited today’s turbulence as like that of the ’60s when he began his jazz career, and had ’12 JM Charlie Haden, who stayed home for medical reasons, not earned a rep for similar truth to power with protests that got him arrested in Portugal, and that resulted in his classic Liberation Music Orchestra album.

Wynton Marsalis, named an NEA Jazz Master along with his father Ellis and brothers Branford, Jason and Delfayo in 2011, sat in the trumpet section of his Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, backing the performing masters as necessary and delivering substantially swinging versions of big band works by Count Basie and Benny Carter. There was an ostensible bridging of generations in this Jazz Masters concert, as young up ‘n’ comers Grace Kelly, Kris Bowers and Ambrose Akinmasure with older Masters Phil Woods, Wess-Golson and Liebman/Carter/DeJohnette, respectively. Altoist Kelly could aspire to Woods’ naturalness, Bowers seemed more Monk- than Basie-like, and Akinmasure didn’t make a strong impression, though Liebman did, squeezing sardonic squiggles out of his soprano saxophone as if putting his reed under the most intense pressure.

There were other nice moments, like Hubert Laws’ rippling low notes against Ron Carter’s upright bass. Some nice moments of speech — as when Stanley Crouch, presenting the award who, like Von Freeman, wasn’t attending for health reasons, spoke of empathy as the essence of jazz.

The Jazz Masters ceremonies, including press conference and photoshoot, luncheons, rehearsals as well as the two and a half-hour concert performed by Masters and Wynton Marsalis’s Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, are the occasion of an amazing gathering of living, aging yet still active jazz masters. At a photo shoot before the concert, Randy Weston, Ahmad Jamal, Muhal Richard Abrams, Annie Ross, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Lee Konitz (seemingly recuperated from a medical crisis last summer), Jimmy Scott (wearing one perfectly white shoe, one sneaker, and in a chair), Paquito d’Rivera, Candido, Laws, Carter, Jordan, Woods, Coleman, Sheila Jordan, DeJohnette, George Wein, George Avakian, Gunther Schuller, Dan Morgenstern, Yusef Lateef, Jimmy Heath, Joe Wilder, Roy Haynes . . .  They posed for a formal portrait, then broke and let in NEA officers and about half the music photojournalists in the tri-state area (Jack Vartoogian, Norm Harris, Alan Nahigian, Mitchell Seidel, Frank Stewart, etc.) It was most entertaining.

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