Bob Koester,
jazz & blues record man

Congrats to Bob Koester, indie owner and producer of Chicago’s Delmark Records, on the label’s 60th anniversary, which it celebrated over the weekend — and lucky are listeners to jazz beyond jazz for the broad yet niche-like taste that has informed his Quixotic efforts from the start.

Not that I was there in 1953. No — I discovered Koester’s Jazz Record Mart (the old location on Grand Ave.) the day after Christmas 1967, becoming quickly, completely absorbed in the vast, vivid, unexpected worlds of music and culture the tiny shop seemed to open into, and I hung out there constantly, even racking up one post-college year of clerking there circa 1972.

It was a narrow, dusty place between a currency exchange and a steam-table restaurant for down-on-their-luckers, but absolutely the center of info on who was playing where and when in Chi environs — we used to advance that info weekly to the newspapers’ listings writers. Stacks of 78s sat there priced at a dime or a dollar; musicians associated with Delmark such as Jimmy Dawkins, Big Joe Williams and Junior Wells, as well as those passing through town including Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Betty Carter and Dave Holland used to visit, too.

Those five years gave me plenty of time to soak up the pleasures, rare and often obscure, of the Delmark catalog in the significant developmental phase during which it grew unlike any other jazz record venture before or since. This is no small thing, since at the time jazz and blues were recorded and issued (on vinyl lps) by labels including Arhoolie, Argo, Arista, Atco, Atlantic, Beehive, Bet-Car, Biograph, Black Jazz, Black Saint, Blue Note, BYG-Actuel, Cadet, Capitol, Catalyst, Chess, Chiaroscuro, Columbia Records, Concord, Creative World, CTI, ECM, Elektra, Embryo, ESP-disk, Chess, Fantasy, Flying Dutchman, Fontana, GNP Crescendo, Groove Merchant, JCOA, Impulse!, Mainstream, Milestone, MPS, Muse, Nessa, Onyx, Palo Alto, Pablo, Perception, Philly Jazz, Prestige, RCA, Riverside, Roulette, Sackville, Saturn, Solid State, Spivey, Steeplechase, Strata-East, Takoma, Testament, Theresa, Vanguard, Vee-Jay, Verve, Warner Bros., World Pacific, Xanadu, Yazoo, and a lots of others, even more obscure.

Obscurity has never fazed but evidently always fascinates Koester, a font of exacting, detailed (not to say  ”trivial”) information about the arcane histories of American recording labels prior to (but many as independent as) his own. In conversation he likely without cue to  bring up some long out-of-print title from some short-lived firm with mostly regional distribution half a century ago, a trait that accounts for his having been able to acquire and reissue masters once owned by the imprints Apollo, Euphonic Sounds and United.

As long as I’ve known him, Bob has been a man of strong and catholic tastes, but he’s not an elitist or an esthete. His personal preferences have always been for traditional jazz and rough-hewn Delta post WWII blues — yet under his supervision the first works of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians were rec0rded, Sun Ra’s earliest big-bop band albums were distributed, Junior Wells with “Friendly Chap” as well as Magic Sam and Otis Rush shaped the sound of  electric rock-soul blues.

Whenever Delmark Records is mentioned, Wells’ classic Hoodoo Man Blues comes up, with good reason.
I love that record’s spare, taut, self-restrained hipness. And then there’s Sound, Roscoe Mitchell’s unprecedented, still astonishing debut and the first release
by musicians from the AACM. But there are other classics on Delmark you ought to know about, including at least two of Wells’ other  albums: South Side Blues Jam, which features terrific accompaniment by pianist Otis Spann, and On Tap, a tightknit production with snap, crackle and pop. Here are some further (by no means all) Delmark standouts:

The Dirty Dozens, by Speckled Red — “You got the right string but the wrong yo-yo,” murmurs the solo pianist/singer who bounces through one of the most ringing, upbeat barrelhouse ‘n’ boogie programs I’ve heard — the first Delmark release.

1. Sound, Roscoe Mitchell — The first recording issued by an AACM cast, saxophonist/composer Mitchell’s structural originality, confusions of scale through sensitivity to dynamics and mordant humor already fully formed.

Song For, Joseph Jarman — Saxophonist/composer and poet Jarman soon joined Mitchell in the Art Ensemble of Chicago, but here performs with the sole document of tenorist Fred Anderson’s young quartet. All the AACM records are very different: Song For is fiercely expressionistic.

Three Compositions of the New Jazz, by Anthony Braxton — Cerebral, mysterious and penetrating, the “three compositions” for Braxton’s alto,
Wadada Leo Smith’s dark trumpet and Leroy Jenkins’ astringent violin (with Muhal Richard Abrams on one track) go where no jazz went before.

Things to Come From Those Now Gone, Muhal Richard Abrams — Abrams’ third Delmark album demonstrates his unusual tunefulness with a broad range of rarely heard collaborators such as tenor saxophonist Edwin Daugherty and 
vibist Emmanuel Cranshaw.

Humility in the Light of the Beholder, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre —
The saxophonist/clarinetist’s debut takes Pharoah Sanders’ quasi-pantheistic spiritualism  several steps further, into and out of chaos and lyricism.

Hawk Squat! by J.B. Hutto and the Hawks — Fans of Little Ed and the Imperials, start here for a gritty yet fun-filled, non-stop show; guitarist-shouter J.B, Ed’s uncle, tears up the house.

Cold Day in Hell by Otis Rush — The extended title track is a rare example of an electric bluesman
revealing his personal torments and playing some killer guitar in pursuit of art. It’s Rush’s most committed performance.

West Side Soul/Black Magic by Magic Sam — The two full studio albums by a golden voiced crooner who transformed blues basics into irresistible party songs.

Feel Like Blowing My Horn by Roosevelt Sykes — The pianist with horns, bass and drums puts raucous blues in a setting between rough swing and roots of r&m. He hollers funny rhymes, too.

The Legend of Sleepy John Estes — Mournful solo playing and singing by an indomitable old man, rediscovered decades after his first flowering. As blue as one can get.

Archie Shepp and the New York Contemporary Five — With pocket trumpeter Don Cherry and alto saxist John Tchicai sharing the frontline, the Five dig into Ornette Coleman’s boisterous “When Will the Blue Leave?” and five other pieces showing a range of strong early ’60s ideas.

All for Business by Jimmy Dawkins — In his debut album, bluesman Dawkins was dry almost to the point of bitter — his words bite, his guitar stings.

Sweet Home Chicago — The outstanding introduction of guitarist-singer-songwriter Luther Allison, a taste of Magic Sam and tenor saxist
Eddie Shaw nailing a gruff wail —  lyrical, without pretense, honest urban blues.

What’s made Delmark so special is that Koester has never been about making money (though if it were to happen, he wouldn’t spurn it) and has exhibited no agenda other than to capture the boldest performances by Chicago’s genuine local geniuses, paying scant attention to conventions or niceties of style. Since I worked at the JRM, Delmark has done well by cutting edge and emergent jazz players including Nicole Mitchell, Rob Mazurek, Jason Adasiewicz, Eric Alexander, Ernest Dawkins, Kahil El Zabar (for whom I’ve written liner notes), Brad Goode, Jeff Parker and Josh Berman, among others — blues people Lurrie Bell, Big Time Sarah, Dave Stryker, Tail Dragger and Willie Kent. Despite modest marketing and promotion, the label has succeeded in establishing international reputations for many of its artists and helped sustain the thriving local scene. Delmark’s secret is the integrity implicit in its every release. Long may the label live.

howardmandel.com

Subscribe by Email or RSS

All JBJ posts

The live and mostly exciting two-and-a-half-hour webcast of a star-studded concert from Istanbul

is on Youtube for universal free access. The music starts 37 minutes in, with Joss Stone singing what MC Herbie Hancock calls “music of your soul” — “Some Kind of Wonderful” w/Joe Louis Walker, Ramsey Lewis, James Genus and Vinnie Coliauta, followed for tw0 hours by musical segments featuring Ruben Blades, Al Jarreau, Dianne Reeves, Esperanza Spalding and Robert Glasper, Milton Nascimento, Hugh Masakela –a lot of singing, but always with very strong instrumentalists (Keiko Matsui, Alevtina Polyakova, Imer Demirer, George Duke, Marcus Miller, Terri Lynne Carrington, Eddie Palmieri, Terence Blanchard, Anat Cohen, Igor Butman, John McLaughlin duetting with Lee Ritenour, Jean-Luc Ponty, Christian McBride, Zakir Hussain, Wayne Shorter — all organized by pianist/music director John Beasley) engaged in what they do best: Playimg. Purists and snobs may carp there’s no experimentalism (other than that inherent in fresh, spirited improvisation!) and nothing specifically harkening back to traditional jazz of the ’20s/’30s/’40s. But this event is intended by definition to be mainstream, and overall it’s rousing, upbeat, high quality entertainment.

Admirable as the far-reaching nature of  such an event is, considering the state of jazz here in the U.S. where it was born IJD’s global ambitions must be balanced with near-at-hand realizations. To enable that, and impress upon jazz audiences the decentralized nature of jazz (which has always been the case, though the power of New York-based press and recording companies long obscured it), the JJA encouraged two dozen parties organized by local jazz activists celebrating local Jazz Heroes. Although this year’s heroes include such instrumentalists as Beegie Adair, Craig Alston, Marcus Belgrave, Karl Berger and Ingrid Sertso, Mwata Bowden, Kidd Jordan and Julian Priester, these Jazz Hero Awards and the others were presented not principally on the basis of their musicianship, but due also to their activities presenters, educators, community stalwarts, broadcasters, mentors. There are newly-named Jazz Heroes from Atlanta and Austin to Baltimore, Bloomington, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Gainesville, Nashville, New Orleans, Nogales, Philadelphia, Portland OR, Schenectady, Seattle, Tallahassee, Tucson, Washington DC, Woodstock, Ottawa (the Bay Area, Chicago, NYC and Newark still to come).

Several mayors and other local officials issued proclamations extolling jazz, and even showed up at the celebrations to read them. Newspapers ran coverage, photos were posted online, radio stations picked up the news, journalists blogged about the Heroes, social media postings emerged, buzz was raised, profiles lifted, jazz was noticed. And this is essential to getting future coverage of jazz, funding for jazz, building audiences for jazz, instilling appreciation for and pride in jazz, validating jazz musicians and their followers, fostering the enjoyment of it every day all over America — not only in the Big Apple, in major festivals, with the occasional tv special 0r melodramatic bio-pic, but as a reflective, evolving aspect of our environment, the audible expression of our creative best.

Here in NYC, the Louis Armstrong House Museum — one of the most stunning of all institutions situating jazz squarely in mainstream residential communities — co-hosted a party with the JJA at the Langston Hughes Library and Community Center in Queens, a similarly down-home establishment. What could be more fitting? Armstrong the  genius with genuine, career-long love of his fans, who lived in a modest bungalow when he could have bought a palace, and Hughes, poet of “The Weary Blues,” portrayer of low-income Harlemite Jesse B. “Simple” Semple. About 100 people, all attending for free. Trumpeter Stephanie Richards composed a Fanfare for Louis, performed by a hastily rehearsed quartet of brassists — herself, Jeremy Pelt, Igmar Thomas and David Weiss.

from left: Michael Cogswell, Stanley Crouch w/Bloomberg proclamation
and Howard Mandel
photo by Susan Brink

Then Dan Morgenstern, dean of jazz journalists and a member of Armstrong’s coterie from 1949 until his death in 1971, detailed some memories of Pops, especially at his early ’60s performances at Freedomland Amusement Park in the Bronx. Dan was there. Ricky Riccardi, the extraordinary scholar of Armstrong (and official archivist at LAHM) who has a palpable delight in this man and deep knowledge of his every era, spoke of the newly discovered 1961 recordings spun for us, including a beautiful, noble version of Armstrong’s classic “West End Blues,” first recorded in 1928. Finally Stanley Crouch spoke, marveling at Louis “sound,” and joined LAHM director Michael Cogswell, Hughes Center director Andrew Jackson, Ricky and Dan and me in reading the handsomely inscribed statement issued by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg hailing Jazz Day. And we ate soul food from Keicha’s Catering– red beans and rice, quite good and seemingly healthy lightly fried chicken cubes, meat balls, pasta salad, cookies and little cream puffs.

JJA members and unaffiliated colleagues turned out (and I should have introduced them from the stage): Ted Panken, Russ Musto, Jared Negley, Paul Devlin, Tim Wilkins, Dan Kassell, Susan Brink, Alan Nahigian, Morgenstern of course (a winner of the JJA’s Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism Award, as well as of the NEA’s Jazz Master honor) — and also Jimmy Heath with his wife Mona, pianist-composer Amina Figarova (originally from Azerbijan, just last fall she received her green card) and her husband flutist Bart Platteau (originally from Belgium; now they live in Forest Hills), and singer Antoinette Montague. Cable network NY1 covered us (I can’t find the video online, though — looking! or the UStream video, which may have not been saved). Maybe some of those journos have written us up. Thanks to LAHM public relations specialist Jennifer Walden we were mentioned in Queens neighborhood papers, the New York Daily News (thanks to Greg Thomas!) and the NYTimes listings last Friday. Following the event there was a flurry of  social media notes of appreciation, and Ricky Riccardi didn’t blog about it but did put a photo on fb. Stephanie Richards has sent a score to the House Museum for its archives.

So everyone was happy. We feted jazz with new music and enduring music, talk about music, food and schmooze. We were international and local. We were free and inclusive. We felt like we’d celebrated a holiday, and planned to do it again next year. But not waiting ’til then — I’m off to hear some jazz tonight.

howardmandel.com

Subscribe by Email or RSS

All JBJ posts

Jazz Heroes designated in 2013 by the Jazz Journalists Association
and 25 local North American communities

1) A glorious legacy of enduring music;

2) The dedication to the art form of musicians and their supporters now, worldwide;

3) The recognition by government officials and institutions of jazz as an entity that will not be silenced or co-opted;

4) Access as never before, via the internet, to jazz historical and present;

5) The rise of jazz education

6) The widespread popularity of jazz festivals

7) Jazz that retains its essence while inviting, embracing, absorbing influences from everywhere, everything;

8) Writing, photography, dance, visual arts inspired and/or derived from the listening experience;

9) Rhythm, unabated

10) Melodies, infinite.

I want to acknowledge the economic forces that keep jazz going, the boundless imagination of the greatest jazz artists and the unbowed spirit that lives in the spontaneous interactivity of this most open, expressive and truthful music. Long live jazz and the culture that creates it. (go to JJAJazzAwards for profiles of each of the Jazz Heroes above, and at noon ET on May 1 for names of the winners of musical categories in the 17th annual JJA Jazz Awards).

howardmandel.com

Subscribe by Email or RSS

All JBJ posts

from left: August, Wilson, Mathisen, Brown
* photo credits below

Five jazz-associated composers took on the heady task of writing eight-minute works for full symphonic forces, introduced to the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and worked up for performance by conductor Matt Kraemer on Tuesday and Wednesday this past week, thanks to Earshot /Jazz Composers Orchestra Initiative, organized by American Composers Orchestra.

As an “embedded journalist” (along with Frank J. Oteri, founder and editor of NewMusicBox.org) I observed the whole process closely, privy to private critiques and discussions composers Gregg August, Anita Brown, Joel Harrison, Ole Matheson and Dave Wilson had with Maestro Kraemer, instrumentalists from the Orchestra and mentoring composers Anthony Davis, Nicole Mitchell and James Newton. It was one of the most enlightening and intense of intensives I’ve experienced — much more so, I’m sure, for the composers whose ambitious, accomplished works were read.

getting feedback: from l., Mathisen, Wilson, August, Brown

Each of their pieces had distinct characters and challenges. These composers – August, a bassist in the conductorless Orpheus Chamber Ensemble, the Brooklyn Philharmonic and saxophonist JD Allen’s trio, among others;  Brown, leader of her own Jazz Orchestra, long involved with the BMI Jazz Composers Workshops and with ties to U.S. military music corps; Harrison, an electric guitarist and band leader who chafes at categorization, and has released 14 cds as a leader since 1995; Mathisen, a saxophonist who teaches at Columbia U., has composed for movies, tv and commercials, and — as I know him best — plays in the avant-garde Latin jazz SYOTOS ensemble; Wilson, a saxophonist in the ethnomusicology program at UCLA who’s worked with rock-pop stars and French gypsy jazzers — embraced this very rare opportunity of access to an orchestra to create genuinely new and unusual music.

from l., Wilson, Mathisen, August, Brown, Harrison

To get their pieces across to the demanding and unjazzlike instrumentalist-interpreters, the composers had notated (most for the first time) in an infinitesimally coded and precise language, like hand-drawn hieroglypics for computer programming, to secure specificities of pitch, timing and tonality that would result in unique moment-after-moment of transformative sound.

I describe the pieces inadequately, I hope not inaccurately but surely insufficiently — because it’s impossible (for me at least) to completely hear, understand and absorb five such completely personalized projects of this scale on first impressions, quick go-overs of changes and one complete run-through. Though a recording made by the BPO of each culminating performance was made, I don’t have them to refer to; as per BPO/American Federation of Music union protocols and contracts, each is available only to its composer, and then degraded with spurts of white noise to protect against broadcast and/or pirate duplication. An un-marred three-minute excerpt will be made available to the composers for limited promotional uses.

• August’s “Una Rumba Sinfonia” was organized around a rhythmic motif  counter-intuitive to players steeped in Western classical tradition, which danced lightly but purposefully across instrument families with an elegant transparency;
• Brown’s”Disarming the Tempest” is a tone poem exploration of the interior experience of a Marine with post-traumatic stress disorder, asking the orchestra to employ unusual percussive sounds and include passages of pitched speech;
• Harrison’s “The Other River” seemed to me multiply episodic, with transitions like a dream which drifts through several moods then suddenly turns dramatic — in this case with a bold figure I took as an electric guitar line, though Joel initially thought of writing the piece as a bassoon concerto;
• Mathisen’s “Tone Poem: The Mind’s Eye Inverted” also moved laterally through several ideas, derived from his own tenor saxophone improvisations — both the music itself and the formal concept, his self-examination of his mental processes and group interactions while improvising. There was humor in this, maybe even merriment;
• Wilson’s “Springs of a Desperate Heart” was sensuous, evoking an unlikely combination of inspirations: the life and songs of Billie Holiday and Macedonian folk music and legends — which resulted in an exotic garden in which an oboe sang like a nightingale.

Mentors, from l., James Newton,
Anthony Davis, Nicole Mitchell

The amount of detail — and concentration — that goes into composing and performing new music for orchestra is astounding. Bill Holab, a specialist in music publishing (including copyright issues), held a workshop going into some depth about simply how to set up scores and parts for ease of reading. The composers (and some local composition students) were raptly attentive. How big should the paper be? What weight? How can long pieces be laid out to everyone’s advantage? These things matter.

I’ve had previous up-close experience watching the birth and development of compositions for chamber ensembles, but total immersion in the vast unto infinite strains and dimensions available from an orchestra of several dozen virtuosi able to deliver astute realizations of never-bef0re-seen parts almost instantly was a process
I’d never seen before, or tried to understand as a strictly auditory phenomenon, either.

My ears were stretched, without doubt, and my curiosity stirred about some of the larger questions accompanying this project. What can it mean for a jazz composer to write for the orchestra — when it’s so  unusual to get the chance to even hear such work performed? What will happen to these pieces, which I’d personally like to hear again, but know the odds are against them being placed with orchestras for further

from l. HM, M. Kraemer, O. Mathisen, A. Brown,
G. August, D. Wilson, J. Harrison, F.J. Oteri

performance? What about the jazz elements in these compositions: Are there any on an audible level, or do they mostly exist as foundational, and in the composers’ attitudes? How should the tradition-bound symphony orchestra open up its language and repertoire to jazz ideas? How can that best be effected? Do symphonies want to do it? What would the result be of a turnabout project suggested by Frank J. Oteri — What would happen is some symphony composers were enlisted to write for jazz big band or combo, in the jazz language?

Like every worthy experiment, this one raised more questions than answers, one of the most pressing being how can worthy experiments like the Jazz Composers Orchestra Initiative be assured of ongoing funding? Related: Who has a stake in being sure that jazz artists have all the opportunities (should they seek them) to partake of the enormous palette the traditional orchestra has come to perfect? How do the orchestra’s supporters feel about discovering and accepting new music? Is the cliché true, that all seasons’ series ticket buyers want is the beloved works of dead white European males?

left, Matt Kraemer with BPO in rehearsal

Where do African-American composers — as were all the mentors composers, none of the “participating composers” — fit into this conception of jazz? And how about multi-kulti audiences?  Does the “new music” world, largely comprising chamber music composers, ensembles and presenters who, of the current generation, have affinities for alt.rock, rap/hip-hop and pop, have any interest in bridging the jazz gap? How would listeners — those who identify themselves as symphony buffs or those who are jazz devotees — react to these compositions? Will they get a chance to hear them? Can the traditional symphony adapt to 21st century American and global musical diversity? What is the future of music? Who will write it? Who will play it? Who will listen to it? Who will love it?

* all photos thanks to Michael Geller and Greg Evans, American Composers Orchestra

howardmandel.com

Subscribe by Email or RSS

All JBJ posts

“Tote that barge, lift that bail” –
bear the burdens, sing it out

But when I addressed students at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, as a substitute for temporarily ailing vocalist Lisa Sokolov, the value of jazz to America (and the world) seemed as powerful as ever.

I’ve subbed for Lisa before, and enjoy introducing classic performances of jazz, blues, Americana and enduring, truly popular U.S.-born or adopted culture to college students eager to act, sing, dance — to enrich themselves and others by becoming entertaining, and yet to my astonishment (and Lisa’s) have seldom seen some of the iconic works from whose shadows they will emerge. I show my own NYU classes (in Blues, Jazz, World Music and the Roots of American Music) video clips from Youtube or dvds and videos of my collection, too. But the Tisch students are among the most responsive, even when I show relics like hammy, blackfaced Al Jolson singing “Mammy” at the end of The Jazz Singer, or Paul Robeson’s majesterial  ”Ol’ Man River ” from Showboat. Judy Garland ’s heart-rending “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” the vision of hope from the Wizard of Oz, though, gets across directly.

By then, I’ve introduced one of the indelible film clips depicting delight in life — Louis Armstrong before a Danish audience in 1933, singing, muccing and playing “that good ol’ favorites, ‘Dinah.’”

Then, to demonstrate that yes, jazzer’s know life’s not all a bowl of musings about one’s happy partnerings but we can prevail even over mean mistreating, I bring on Billie Holiday with true all-stars, singing “Fine and Mellow” from the the CBS tv’s The Sound of Jazz.

And finally here’s the John Coltrane Quartet expressing some of the most profoundly sorrowful, enraged, serenely and committedely resistent of minor blues, “Alabama” –

To me, Coltrane’s music here with drummer Elvin Jones, bassist Jimmy Garrison and pianist McCoy Tyner stands as a timely reaction to the horrors of attacks on the innocent, sadness at the refusal of too many public figures to take serious, obvious steps to right age-old wrongs and regulate ever-dangerous circumstances. There is more upbeat jazz — Fats Waller, Lambert Hendricks and Ross, Bobby McFerrin top the list of videos to restate the joy Louis Armstrong brought to our undeniably beautiful, but also so terrible, world.

All these videos are evidence that jazz grasps the spirit people have within that sustains us. I can’t think of anything I’d have rather have done, or better have done, to celebrate Jazz Appreciation Month culminating in International Jazz Day – the two initiatives which the Jazz Journalists Association calls JazzApril, that to show emerging artists the standards they can look to, perhaps live up to.

howardmandel.com

Subscribe by Email or RSS

All JBJ posts

• co-founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center;
• envisioned and developed the electronic synthesizer as a tabletop orchestral palette;
• created Silver Apples of the Moon, the first  composition intended specifically for the long-playing vinyl record and home listening;
• as first director of multi-media at the Electric Circus, effected the birth of techno and electronic dance music;
• advanced electronic audio projection/placement and improvisatory interaction to a high art;
• has worked and re-worked Jacob’s Room, a dark opera (sometimes, mono-opera) concerning the absolute isolation of individuals in the universe;
• produced “Making Music,” highly popular software to teach musical concepts to children, and
• last year released Pitch Painter, a $3.99 iPAD app that lets even toddlers  compose by choosing instruments from the world over and tracing lines on a screen.

Subotnick is one of the most continuously innovative musicians on the planet, still. He performs, lectures and teaches, and has been getting up at 5 a.m. daily to write a book for M.I.T. Press. He’s candid and articulate about his remarkable 60 year career (he was a child prodigy clarinetist, soloing with symphonies while still in his teens), clear and detailed in his memories (he’s been friends and sometimes collaborator with inventors, composers and artists including Stan Brakhage, James Tenney, Ramon Sender, Donald Buchla, Allan Kaprow, and new music vocalist Joan La Barbara, with whom he’s been together for 33 years). He’s quite fit. He performed the entirety of Silver Apples of the Moon at Moogfest 2012 (today he does that using digital files and Abelton Suite), and has installed a prototype of Pitch Painter in the Human Origins hall of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.

I’ve been able to spend some time with Subotnick over the past year, in an attempt to produce a radio profile for NPR, which I hope will be broadcast within the next week.

Here’s what happened when Mort let me play with Pitch Painter (click to hear audio file). Besides that fun, Mort brought up two ideas in conversation that won’t make it to my radio script, yet stay with me.

One is his dictum that “The appropriate feeling to come from listening to electronic music is awe,” by which he means electronic music has the power of a force of nature, a sound that generates wonder, rather like listening to a waterfall.

The second is his speculation that in the 21st Century, time will be the new frontier. Perhaps not for manipulation — he’s not suggesting that a time machine is about to be invented — but he believes there will be an understanding that all time eras exist simultaneously . The example he gave me was that the clash between Western culture and Osama ben Laden, for instance, was a clash of epochs, and that ben Laden actually lived with a worldview akin to that of the West’s Middle Ages, which would not possibly countenance the West’s digitally-directed 21st Century. Yet both do

Subotnick’s music since Silver Apples (1967) includes many electronics works — Sidewinder, Touch, The Key To Songs, The Wild Bull, Until Spring, A Sky of Cloudless Sulpher, Gestures: It Begins With Colors (with La Barbara), Until Spring — often including live video mixes, films and dancers. His work  has never sounded like anything else, like anyone else’s. The simplest, over-arching description I can offer is it bubbles with complex, visceral joy. Exception to the joy and it’s a big one: Jacob’s Room. But take a look at the beautiful German production –

If you’ve got an iPad, download Morton Subotnick’s Pitch Painter (via the iTune store). Share it with kids — or else they’ll grab it from you. Tell them who to thank. Happy Birthday, Morton Subotnick.

howardmandel.com

Subscribe by Email or RSS

All JBJ posts

• pianist Edsel Gomez talked  in my NYU “World Music” class of working with Malian musicians on Dee Dee Bridgewater’s extrafine Red Earth project;

• Ralph Simon, producer of late lamented Postcard Records and soprano saxist, had a private with me consultation on resuming jazz activities;
• Bassist Charnett Moffett at Birdland, midtown, for a showcase of The Bridge, his new solo recording on Motema Music, for which I wrote liner notes;
• Immediately thereafter:  Gamak (Rudresh Mahanthappa, alto sax; Dave Fiuczynski, electric guitars; Francois Mouton, upright bass; Dan Weiss, traps kit) at le Poisson Rouge on the Village;
• Then 6 train uptown to Café Carlyle for trumpeter/singer Bria Skonburg‘s set with quartet backing of Sean Cronin, upright bass & vocals; Dalton Ridenhour, piano;  Darrian Douglas, drums;
• Sampled some new recordings: Ross Hammond Quartet Cathedrals and John Ehlis Ensemble Along the Way, among the worthies;
• Consulted on Jazz Hero parties in Austin for Dr. James Polk, blues jazz pianist; Schenectady for Tim Coakley, veteran Sat. night radio jock, area drummer  and copy editor; Philadelphia for Jim Miller, drummer/educator and one-man record label Dreambox Media; San Francisco bay area for Sunny Buxton (KCSM, ex-Pearl’s jazz club) and Randall Kline (director SFJazz);
• Organized the Jazz Journalists Assoc’s Int’l Jazz Day party, co-hosted by the Louis Armstrong House Museum — on April 30, 2 pm at the Langston Hughes Community Library and Cultural Center, Corona, Queens — unveiling newly discovered Louis Armstrong tapes from 1961, Freedomland Amusement Park, the Bronx with discussion by archivist Ricky Riccardi and dean of jazz journalists Dan Morgenstern.

Edsel Gomez, who I’d run into by chance at lunch during JazzApril week 1, spoke candidly to my class about the challenges and rewards of music-directing an ensemble mixing traditionalist Mali griots with the American pros of hot singer Dee Dee Bridgewater’s band. He said the Africans were meticulous preservationists; that it had taken him several days of rehearsal to win their trust; of how he learned to use the piano to extend the harmonic limits of their mostly pentatonic scales of their koras and balafons, and of the extreme wealth he’d seen touring North Africa, juxtaposed with widespread poverty. A superb pianist, Edsel made the funky instrument in my classroom ring orchestrally through his version of “Afro Blue,” written by Mongo Santamaria and sung by Dee Dee on her Red Earth tour (which lasted on and off for three years). He mentioned his fascinating background, too: Growing up in Puerto Rico playing in salsa bands, arriving at Berklee School of Music when he was 17, away from home the first time, speaking mostly English suddenly, having to make his way; 10 years living in Brazil, then his return to the U.S. His next gigs are in the Chick Corea Festival scheduled for May at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

I annotated at least a couple of the albums Ralph Simon organized and co-starred on in the ’90s (notably Magic Club: Music for the Millenium, with collaborators including Paul Bley, Gary Peacock, Julian Priester, Bruce Ditmas, Alan Pasqua). Upon the label’s sale and evident demise several years ago, he retrained himself as a family therapist, but now he’s got the jazz itch again. Simon believes there’s talent still to be encouraged, recorded and enjoyed from the jazz era Ken Burns skipped over (that would be from the death of Coltrane, 1967, to the rise of Jazz at Lincoln Center, circa 1987) and is eager to discover some of the new talents I mentioned who have emerged while he’s been engaged elsewhere. Simon’s considering, plotting, gathering forces. . .and I told him times are tough for selling jazz albums, but yes, we want good new ones. . .

Holding a crowd playing solo bass ain’t easy. Tell it to Charnett Moffett — who has worked with Wynton Marsalis, Ornette Coleman, Stanley Jordan and McCoy Tyner, among others — has his program down and his chops way up for the widely-drawn repertoire he plays. Completely exposed in this setting, he demonstrated a virtuosic manner of weaving the rhythm, melody and harmonic extensions of songs by Sting, the Beatles, Monk, Mingus, Ellington et al. into performances that throbbed and glistened. The crowd seemed to like it; I did, too, otherwise I wouldn’t have written the notes or introduced him from the bandstand.

Wow is the right term of the Mahanthappa-Fiuczynski front line — they are two of the fiercest lyrical hard-blowers now. Fuze plays double-necked guitars, sliding microtonally around the unfretted one, picking unbelievably fast and intricate figures with rock-star alacrity on the fretted. Rudresh pours his breath through his alto in impossibly long lines, with exquisite sighing inflections as well as a righteous burn. Mouton and Weiss both dug in, too. My colleague Bill Milkowski, sitting with me, said ‘They sound like Prime Time,” and I answered, “Prime Time from Hawaii,” due to the slack-key/surf’s up qualities; there were nods to the Grateful Dead and Mahavishnu Orchestra, not to mention Fuze’s old outfit the Screaming Headless Torsos. Wow they were smokin’. I’d go again.

The Jazz Journalists Association having nominated Bria Skonberg for the 2013 Up and Coming Artist Award, I wanted to check her out, and I’m glad I did. She’s a bright young woman from British Columbia who sings and plays trumpet, shares patter with her bassist and occasional vocal partner Cronin, and has put together a program called “Brass and Belles” that revives Valaida Snow’s “High Hat, Trumpet and Rhythm” as well as “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” (a la Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong) and “September Song” (referring to Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown). These selections are lively, and if some of her horn playing seems more studied than spontaneous, when she loses herself in a giddy version of “Old Black Magic” (from Keely Smith with Louis Prima), she wins grins. Pianist Ridenhour was at his best on a blues, and drummer Douglas is fresh to NYC from New Orleans, as one could hear from his backbeat.

I’ve received more than 50 cds potentially for review since April 1 (more than 100 since March 14), plus a couple of dozen links to music for downloading, and have sampled them spottily, which isn’t a good way to get into new music. The good way, without doubt, is to sit down, relaxed, and let the sounds roll over you. My present occupations make such quality time a rare luxury, but after previewing guitarist Hammond’s Cathedrals (with Vinny Golia on reeds and flute; Steuart Liebig, bass; Alex Cline, drums/percussion) and guitarist Ehlis’s Along the Way (quartets to septets with a strong cast, including John Tchicai on tenor sax for his last recording) I intend to get better acquainted with them.

And I’ll at least dip into new music by the big band Swingadelic (Toussaintville), guitarist Marc Ribot’s trio Ceramic Dog (Your Turn), guitariasts Gilad Hekselman (This Just In) and Philip Gibbs (with vocalist Mossa Bilder and Karl Berger on vibes, After the Storm), drummers Jaimeo Brown (Transcendence) and Kendrick Scott (Conviction), flutist Nicole Mitchell (Engraved in the Wind and Aquarius), pianists Peter Madsen (Soul of the Underground), Aaron Diehl (The Bespoke Man’s Narrative), Laszlo Gardony (Clarity), Uri Caine with Han Bennink (Sonic Boom), Edward Simon (Trio Live in New York at Jazz Standard), Steve Kuhn (The Vanguard Date) and Jacky Terrason (Gouache); trombonist Reut Regev (Exploring the Vibe), Quest (Circular Dreaming), pianist Eli Yamin with clarinetist Evan Christopher (Louie’s Dream for our Jazz Heroes), bassists Robert Hurst (Bob A Palindrome) and Joshua Abrams (Unknown Known), tenor saxist Norbert Stein (Pata on the Cadillac), alto saxist Miguel Zenón (Oye!!! Live in Puerto Rico), Monika Roscher Big Band (Failure in Wonderland), reedsman Ben Wendell with keyboardist Dan Tepfer (Small Constructions), singer Cécile McLorin Salvant (WomanChild), and many more (I’ll mention duo pianists Tommy Flanagan/Jaki Byard’s The Magic of 2, drummer Yoron Israel’s Visions, The Music of Stevie Wonder and drummer/percussionist Kahil El’Zabar Quartet’s What It Is! with the caveat that I wrote the liner notes for all three, so I’ve already devoted hours to studying — and enjoying — those productions).

howardmandel.com

Subscribe by Email or RSS

All JBJ posts

Performing a set of more than an hour’s length with only percussionist Adam Rudolph and a bit of pre-recorded material to support him, Lateef sang, recited poetry, played oboe, flute, small wind instruments and tenor saxophone with a directness and wisdom that has no match today. Looking serene and elegant, he engaged in free-form sound painting in which each phrase, intonation, squawk and whisper of overtones seemed to be meaningful. Dr. Lateef (he received an Ed.D. in Education from University of Massachusetts/Amherst in 1975,  his dissertation on Western and Islamic education and earned a Ed.D. in Education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1975, and taught there) remained seated throughout his appearance, and does not have the hearty tone and fullness of breath of a younger man but the honesty of his music was unwavering. He sounded by turns solemn, rude, plaintive and gruff;  his poetry spoke of the dominion of Providence;  his message was to love live, to avoid moments that are without love and to hold off despair. The most affecting episode of this concert, which was uninterrupted until by a standing ovation before the duet’s encore, was Lateef’s vocal call to “cross the river.” He sees the other side and is, evidently, unafraid.

What better perspective can a man of his age gain? He must be — and should be — proud of his accomplishments, as he has expressed himself fully, expanded upon the potentials of his heritage and brought musical pleasure to many people, worldwide. Although trumpeter Don Cherry is often called the first “world musician” (meaning he absorbed melodies from everywhere, and responded to the fundamentals of music so as to collaborate with anyone, anywhere), Lateef was introducing reeds instruments from foreign lands to audiences of Cannonball Adderley’s sextet in the late 1950s, when Cherry was still emerging from Los Angeles (in company with that other musical universalist, Ornette Coleman). Yusef Lateef embraced Middle Eastern and Eastern musical ideas, incorporated bells and recording studio collage in his practice, has written novellas and essays as well as reflective, imagistic poems, has brought spirituals like “Wade in the Water” (made famous by the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1901) into jazz repertoire. His breadth was demonstrated by the concert’s first half, in which his compositions for string quartet (no. 2, from 2012 — a world premiere), saxophone trio (“Elan Vital” dating from 1998, a New York premiere) and piano (“Autophysiophysic variations,” also from 2012, also a world premiere) received scrupulous performances by the Momenta Quartet; soprano saxist J.D. Parran, altoist Marty Ehrlich and baritonist Alan Won, and Taka Kigawa, respectively.

Devoted as their interpretations were, no one was more attuned to the Master than Adam Rudolph, who has been his duet partner for 25 years (they have also recorded several albums, including In the Garden with Rudolph’s Go: Organic Orchestra, and Towards the Unknown). On congas, an array of hanging cymbals, a Gnawan guembri and a fat, resonant clay jug, Rudolph accompanied, echoed and sometimes anticipated Lateef with remarkable empathy. He listened raptly, responded imaginatively, never overshadowed the 0lder man. Their interactions were intimate and exemplary.

If Lateef could not or perhaps didn’t want to reel off volcanic eruptions of sound, as he has in the past, he still created some stunning phrases, their impact emphasized by the silence they marked as a broad brushstroke defines a bare canvass. As a seer, Lateef was in no rush,was not constrained to blow loudly, and offered no upbeat panacea to the 600 some attendees, who had come for what they got: the truth distilled by a man who has spent his long life exploring, studying, experimenting with and shaping sound, mostly as a product of exhalation. To breathe music, from the guts and heart, strikes me as a wondrous thing. Praise and peace to Yusef Lateef, who calls his music “autophysiopsychic,” with the directive that “it should be the goal of every musician to combine their theoretical knowledge with their life experience, and to offer to and accept knowledge from their personal source of strength, inspiration and knowledge.” Amen.

howardmandel.com

Subscribe by Email or RSS

All JBJ posts

“A critic for the common man” is the Times headline. “His opinions propelled film criticism into the mainstream of American culture,” writes Douglas Martin. “Not only did he advise moviegoers about what to see, but also how to think about what they saw.”

That’s correct: Ebert did go mainstream as no movie critic had before him in such a big, smart way. If he did not deliver the aperçus of Kael, Sarris, Ferguson and Farber, perhaps it was because he was doing the Chicago thing of writing plainly, swiftly and without pretentions. This is a skill lost on critics who are from their outset pretentious.

Ebert’s thinking was not “middlebrow,” however, nor were his instincts and taste. He loved movies, the very movie-ness of them, but was much more than an “earnest enthusiast,” as Terry Teachout has described him. The Chicago Daily News nightlife/jazz/theater/movie critic/feature writer Sam Lesner, back in the day, was an earnest enthusiast — honest but with little genuine insight, flying opinions from the seat of his pants. Chicago Tribune theater critic Claudia Cassidy at the time was, by contrast, an outright elitist; knowledgable, yes, but self-absorbed, wielding her influence despotically. Ebert vis á vis his writing seemed like a regular guy, on the level with metropolitan daily newspaper readers. All the better to reach them with his on-target responses to an art form meant for everybody.

Ebert was far from unsophisticated, though and could analyze Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni and Godard with comprehension equal to anyone’s. He also had a finely honed sense of irony and — more rare yet — the guts to put it to the test, writing Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, one of the first intentionally trashy, highly referential movies intended to be enjoyed for its surface luridness as well as its sub-themes, in the way Quentin Tarantino has brought to an art.

Russ Meyers and Roger Ebert

Ebert, even in collaboration with director Russ Meyers, was no Tarantino. Maybe he would have been if he’d grown up in L.A. and video stores had been available to lounge about in for minimum wage. Instead he grew up amid the cornfields surrounding University of Illinois (Champaign/Urbana) and as a kid worked on a grade school newspaper, edited his high school newspaper, and according to the Times at age 15 earned “75 cents an hour covering high school sports for The News-Gazzette in Champaign.” Originally hired by the Sun-Times as a feature writer, he became the paper’s movie critic at age 24. I bet he felt like he’d landed on one comfy throne.

His movie reviews were always crisp and clear. He liked being entertained, but abjured unearned or false sentimentality. He was into action, adventure, comedy, lighthearted musicals and gripping drama. Violence didn’t bother him unless it was transparently pornographic, a point he made clear in his screenplay for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which spoofs everything including itself.

I haven’t watched that flick in many a year, and don’t recommend it for intellectual study or even dorm-room debate, such as Django Unchained, Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs can stand up to. But I admire Roger Ebert for having conceived a movie that was knowingly trashy — what we called “camp” — and seeing it produced, distributed, reviewed (often scathingly), then returning to his desk at the Sun Times to resume writing about other movies. That in itself demonstrated to me the gumption he so heroically showed in fighting to be himself every inch of the way as his illness progressed. I never spoke to Ebert, but he spoke to me. And what he said was as meaningful as anything written by others in more high falutin’ prose or precious style.

P.S. — Roger Ebert died on the 100th birthday of Muddy Waters, another Chicagoan (born and raised, though, in the Mississippi Delta) who plied his art in a straightforward, hard-hitting way. The debt of contemporary pop music to people like Muddy remains unpaid, acknowledged among the cognoscenti but no longer assumed by casual listeners. Too bad for us: Muddy and his peers laid down the bedrock upon which Elvis, the Stones, the Beatles and subsequent American rock built. Same as Ebert, who modeled how most people today think and talk about the movies. Both thumbs up to them both.

howardmandel.com

Subscribe by Email or RSS

All JBJ posts

• heard the all-star Monterey Jazz Fest on Tour band at the Blue Note Jazz Club, and
• singer Imani Uzuri w/band there, too;
• learned about the James Moody Democracy in Jazz Festival (sponsored by TD Bank) at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC, Newark), and NJPAC’s upcoming jazz season;
• joined representatives of the Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium on the steps of City Hall in Manhattan
• had lunch with pianist Edsel Gomez and Alex Webb, chair of judges of the UK’s first Jazz FM Awards and the writer of a musical about Café Society which he hopes is coming to a theater off-Broadway next year.

The musical highlight was beyond doubt Dee Dee Bridgewater tearing it up with bassist Christian McBride, pianist Benny Green, drummer Lewis Nash, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and tenor saxist

photo courtesy of the New York Times

Chris Potter — that’s the Monterey Jazz Fest on Tour — starting with Louis Jordan’s classic “Let the Good Times Roll” and ending with Horace Silver’s “Filthy McNasty.” Before Ms. Bridgewater got onstage, the rhythm section was fine all on its own — Benny Green is a swift, dazzling two-fisted pianist who imbues songs such as “Taking a Chance on Love” with more varieties of mood than most mortals can imagine.

Bridgewater is a powerhouse, and a veteran — she slowed down for a touching version of “A Child is Born,” the lovely ballad written by Thad Jones, who was her mentor when she first entered the local scene via the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra in the early ’70s.

Imani Uzuri, who filled the Blue Note for the first set Monday night, is by comparison a beginner. She sang material from Gypsy Diaries, her second self-produced CD,  with the game support japanese shinobue flutist Kaoru Watanabe, sitarist Neel Murgai, cellist Marika Hughes, “world percussionist” Todd Isler and her co-producer Christian Ver Halen on acoustic guitar. She’s got a great voice but could profitably expand into more challenging material.

In Newark, NJPAC presents outstanding jazz in a hall that rivals Carnegie for beauty and acoustics. The programming of the second Moody Festival, a seven-day event starting next November 4 with a concert by tenor saxophone wiseman Jimmy Heath at Bethany Baptist Church is impressive, including a celebration  ”in words and music” of the 50th anniversary of Newark author Amiri Baraka’s important book, Blues People on at the Newark Museum on November 5.

Jazz House Kids
photo by Howard Mandel

NJPAC’s season from next fall through spring 2014 is promising — curated by bassist McBride (he’s everywhere, and deservedly so: great sound, fantastic facility, hearty spirit), brilliant pianist Bill Charlap (who performed a brief medley of Ellington, Gershwin and Richard Rodgers songs — they are the composers of focus in the concerts he’s put together), Dorthaan Kirk (Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s widow, a JJA “A Team” award winner and NJ jazz community icon, long affiliated with WBGO which partners on the series with NJPAC) and Larry Rosen, co-founder of GRP Records and more recently producer of the Jazz Roots traveling concert series. The complete schedule is described in a press release here. But the big fun at that event was hearing a combo of teenagers, including 9th graders on alto sax and piano, play a rousing short set that included Moody’s “Last Train to Overbrook.” These were students of an obviously outstanding northern NJ program called Jazz House Kids, established by Melissa Walker (who has just been named a “Jazz Hero” by the Jazz Journalists Association) and in this case coached by saxophonist Don Braden and guitarist Ron Jackson. Those are terrific jazz adults, but these kids obviously had talent and were deep into swinging hard-bop, conjuring grown-up solos.

The Central Brooklyn bunch (with a couple of Manhattanites for seasoning) was quite hardy, standing in a chilly, stiff wind while members spoke about the importance of jazz in their lives — mostly for the

Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium on NYC City Hall steps; far right, City Councilwoman Letitia “Tish” James            photo by Howard Mandel

benefit of several photographers in attendance, since the area in front of the City Hall steps was blocked off to the general public by police, who subjected everyone allowed to enter to metal detector searches. They also forbade instruments, though Jenny Hill held her soprano sax protectively in her arms, and Jeff King pulled out his tenor to blow one chorus of Sonny Rollins’ “Tenor Madness.” Others present: bassist Larry Ridley, drummer Newman Taylor Baker, CBJC media man Bob Myers. Which shows what a determined bunch (we) Brooklynites are.

It was a delight to have a burger and brew with Alex Webb, a multi-talented gent (author songwriter, ex-journalist, broadcaster, university lecturer in music and events management), just passing through New York and wowed by the edge of the jazz he’s been hearing at Smoke and Dizzy’s Club — and to spend some time with Edsel Gomez, one of whose gigs is musical director for (full circle) Dee Dee Bridgewater. We simultaneously lamented and celebrated the states of the worlds of jazz, journalism, contemporary music more broadly and scholarship. Among the pleasantries was Edsel’s interest in my “World Music” class at NYU; he promised to come on Monday to audit, and when I pressed him agreed to show some things on the rickety piano, which will certainly inform as well as delight my students.

This does not include my actual work: Investigating with that “World Music” class some of the ways music gets “popular,” advancing the JJA’s JazzApril and Jazz Awards initiatives.

The month has just begun.

howardmandel.com

Subscribe by Email or RSS

All JBJ posts