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Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

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.

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 . . . .”

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.

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.

Chicago Jazz fest images, echoes

Roscoe Mitchell onscreen, presiding over The Art Ensemble of Chicago,
Pritzker Pavillion Millennium Park Chicago, 8/30/19
photo (c) Marc PoKempner

The 41st annual Chicago Jazz Festival has come and gone, as I reported for DownBeat.com in quick turnaround. I stand by my lead that the music was epic — cf. Marc PoKempner‘s beautiful image of the Art Ensemble of Chicago at Pritzker Pavillion, facing east towards Mecca just before their African percussion-driven orchestral set.

And epochal, yes: the Art Ensemble is 50 years old, as discussed in my radio piece for NPR’s Here and Now). Such longevity is remarkable for any jazz or improvisational unit but the more so as the AEC in its current incarnation is resolutely looking ahead, with younger players (Nicole Mitchell, Tomeka Reid and Christina Wheeler among them) taking the responsibilities of fallen members (co-founders Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors and Joseph Jarman now all deceased).

There was grumbling re the AEC set as having abandoned favorite themes and leaning towards surviving founder Roscoe Mitchell’s involvement with Western classical compositional and vocal traditions. I say hooey.

Of old repertoire “Dreaming of the Masters” ended the performance, and “Chi-Congo” was a charged percussion episode, organized by longtime AEC drummer Famadou Don Moyé. There was little-instrument play, as introduced into jazz by the Art Ensemble, and so a broad dynamic range. Roscoe Mitchell focused on bells as well as his sopranino saxophone, blowing uninterrupted streams of notes. Two excellent trumpeters, Hugh Ragin and Fred Berry, supplanted by trombonist Dick Griffin, stood in for Lester Bowie; three bassists (Junius Paul, Jaribu Shahid and Sylvia Bolognese) were required to fill the pulsating role Malachi Favors originated.

AEC in action: from left, Roscoe Mitchell, Dick Griffin, Dudu Koate, Jaribu Shahid, Baba Attiba, Dee Alexander, Famadou Don Moyé. Photo (c) Lauren Deutsch.

I admit, however, that my DownBeat report underplays the immense contribution of local musicians to the popular and aesthetic value of the Chicago Jazz Fest. It’s understandable the jazz-mag-of-record concentrates on nationally touring acts comprising well-known artists, but in fact this festival has its greatest impact immediately and down-the-road by presenting players from the extraordinarily energized current scene.

Several — including singer Dee Alexander, saxophonists Geoff Bradfield, Ari Brown, Rajiv Halim, Greg Ward and John Wojciechowski, trumpeters Russ Johnson, Rob Mazurek and Pharez Whitted, guitarist Mike Allemana, pianist Miguel de la Cerna, bassists Clark Sommers and Anton Hatwich, drummers Dana Hall, Avreeayl Ra, Mike Reed and Charles Rumback — showed up in more than one group, demonstrating flexibilities and abilities to attend to specific materials.

Reed’s obscurely named Jazz Institute of Chicago 50th Anniversary band actually brought together composers represented in his newly published Chicago “real book,” The City Was Yellow. (I wrote some artists’ bios for this volume, whose profits go to Jazz Institute of Chicago music education activities, but the greater value is the lead sheets of some 50 tunes written between 1980 and 2010). But that was only one of several deliberate celebrations of Chicago’s jazz past folded into its present.

Robert DeNiro as Al Capone, under the Chicago Cultural Center’s Tiffany dome

To walk into the Chicago Cultural Center (setting for key scenes in Brian dePalma’s The Untouchables), for instance, on a Thursday morning to the sound of trumpets is to be swept back 100 years, to the arrival of first generation New Orleans jazzmen eager to expand their audience. To hear the Fat Babies play classic jazz, as they do every Tuesday night at Al Capone’s long ago speakeasy the Green Mill, is to catch an old style imbued with new life. When Ernest Dawkins leads current members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in a tribute to the Art Ensemble’s late Jarman, drummer Alvin Fielder and Saalik Ziyad, who died unexpectedly, very young, the conjunction of time is crystalized.

When guitarist George Freeman, 92, jokes with harmonica master Billy Branch, 67, with an enthusiastic contingent of Southport Records principals behind them, the continuity of distinctly Chicago music is manifest. When players in their 20s such as vibist Joel Ross, the Collier brothers (saxophonist Isaiah, bassist Micah and drummer Jeremiah) and drummer Isaiah Spencer, or a bit older like pianist Richard Johnson, saxophonists Sharel Cassity and Juli Woods, multi-instrumentalist Ben Lamar Gay, trumpeter Jaimie Branch, etc. take over the stage, tomorrow’s arrived.

The fact that a jazz festival happened 10 days ago doesn’t mean it’s over. People are still living with the reverberations. Those fading sounds have something to say about what comes next. In fact, thanks to WDCB-FM and WFMT’s connection to a global radio network, recordings live from the 41st Chicago Jazz Festival of Freddy Cole, bassist Christian McBride’s New Jawn, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago will be heard, in coming months, throughout the world.

Transcending Toxic Times with street poetry & music

My DownBeat article about Transcending Toxic Times, the compulsively listenable, critically political album by the Last Poets produced by electric bassist/composer Jamaaladeen Tacuma, includes a lot of quotes from my interviews with him and poet Abiudon Oyewale.

from left: Baba Donn Babatunde, Jamaaaladeen Tacuma (in front), Umar Bin Hassan, Abiodun Oyewole

I reproduced some of the searing imagery/lyrics on the recording, and provided background on how these men have been calling out American mendacy and hypocrity for half-a-century, as black street seers emerging in the late 1960s — before poetry jams, signifyin’ djs or rappers — backed by African-American percussion. But there’s more to tell.

Jamaaladeen Tacuma at Ornette Coleman’s birthday party;
photo by Sánta István Csaba

Firstly: Tacuma, who positions the declamatory truths amid truly music, often ebullient and genre-defying settings performed by his core collaborators, most of whom are Philadelphians, may still be best known for adding profound buoyancy to my hero Ornette Coleman‘s electrically amplified band Prime Time. But he’s been a recording artist under his own name since an inspired string of 1980s albums for Gramavision (now only Renaissance Man, second of five, is available as an import, but it’s a good one).

He’s backed vocalists from Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez to Nona Hendrix, and recorded with James “Blood” Ulmer, Vernon Reid, Marc Ribot, Derek Bailey, Kip Hanrahan, Jerry Gonzalez, John Zorn and Arto Lindsay among a host of others. But when Jamaaladeen was working with Prime Time, he was simultaneously grounding poet Jayne Cortez’s unique Fire Spitters (with other Prime Time members including Ornette and Jayne’s son Denardo and the late guitarist Bern Nix). Cortez’s fierce declamations and clear-eyed perspective had a major impact on the bassist at a young age, and initiated his interests in creating music in interplay with words.

Since then, he recorded with Amiri Baraka, the Roots and Ursula Rucker, too. His own spoken project Brotherzone has continued for 20 years. All this experience informed how Tacuma approached Transcending Toxic Times.

“As a producer,” Tacuma went on, “you have to really get inside of the project, and that project shouldn’t be about you, it should be about the artist. So I familiarized myself with the material, I familiarized myself with them, I knew their live show, so when I cut our raw music, I knew the length of time the poems took, and I made sure we were within the time frame. I knew the tunes, I knew the pieces, I knew the rhythms, so when I did the music I made sure their recitations would fit just like a glove, right on top of it.”

With assistance in all things from his wife Rahima, Tacuma has produced the Outsiders Improvised & Creative Music Festival in Philadelphia for the past five years (I wrote for DownBeat about the 2018 edition). To clarify the origin of Transcending Toxic Times, Rahima sent me this information:

David Murray brought Jamaaladeen into the 40th Anniversary tour of the Last Poets in 2008. This happened before the Tongues on Fire date, which was a Black Panthers Tribute concert in 2010.

The 40th Anniversary was monumental event and the tour was arranged in collaboration with the filming of The Last Poets: Made in Amerikka by Claude Santiago. It marks the reunion of The Last Poets, accompanied by veritable musical legends like Ronald Shannon Jackson, Robert Irving III and Kenyatte Abdur-Rahman besides Jamaaladeen. Nearly 40 years after their separation, the members of this legendary group — the founding fathers of today’s hip-hop, rap, and slam — came together in Paris for a one-time concert at the 2008 Banlieues Blues Festival. This was significant since it was the first reunion ever and included all living original members of The Last Poets: Abiodun Oyewole, Babatunde, Dahveed Nelson, Felipe Luciano, Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, Umar Bin Hassan. Only Gylan Kain was unable to attend.

From 2008-2011 he did several tours in Europe with Abidodun, Umar and Babatunde. During this time Jamaaladeen began to  form the musical ideas that come later during the first sessions. In 2011 when Jamaaladeen received the Pew Arts & Heritage Fellowship he used the money to start the production. He self-produced the project without any label funding. The Pew Grant was a vital component of the productions. 

Besides all that, Jamaaladeen is one of the best dressers in musicdom. The verve of his clothing matches the vitality of his music. Perhaps paisley jackets can help us transcend toxic times.

Digging Our Roots videos, speakers inspire engagement

Billy Branch watches Sonny Boy (Rice Miller) Williamson II. Photo by Alan Frolichstein
Billy Branch watches Sonny Boy (Rice Miller) Williamson II;
photo by Alan Frolichstein

Nearly 100 Chicagoans (maybe some visitors?) watched Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy and other heroes of the blues on videos at the Cultural Center Thursday night (5/23/19), with harmonica star Billy Branch and WDCB program host Leslie Keros telling stories and participated in lively interplay with knowing attendees. It was the fifth Digging Our Roots: Chicago’s Greatest Hits “listening session” this spring, co-presented by the Jazz Institute of Chicago and Jazz Journalists Association.

Full disclosure: I sit on the JIC board, am president of the JJA, curated and moderated this series. Let that not invalidate this report! Because since cold last January, our once-a-month, free, public music show-and-tells have drawn a steadily growing, diverse and highly engaged audience to both revisit and discover anew jazz/blues favorites of the distant and recent past, pointing to culture of this city now.

I don’t say that to brag, just to confirm that small budget, low cost, all-ages-and-sophistication-level presentations can raise the profile of local musicians and journalists working together, expose successful (entertaining!) if perhaps forgotten artists to awe and encourage younger music lovers, and generate fine content for posting, such as Mashaun Hardy does for the Jazz Institute’s social media streams by video streaming portions of the proceedings, live — like below:

The economical nature of the production is thanks to the Cultural Center (overseen by the Mayor’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events) providing space and staff, as well as the amazing banquet of video performances online (we watched clips selected by the panelists, including this dynamite performance by Billy Branch and Lurrie Bell with an early version of their band Sons of the Blues).

The Jazz Institute provides promotion online and a staffer or two who help with production, harvest attendee’s email address and sign up new members. I contribute my efforts on behalf of the JJA, and have enlisted members as speakers.

For instance, in April photographer/writer/visual artist and saxophonist Michael Jackson joined tenor saxist Juli Wood to celebrate the Chicago Tenor Tradition represented by Gene Ammons, Johnny Griffin and Von Freeman (pianist Michael Weiss, at the Jazz Showcase that week with saxist Eric Alexander to celebrate Grif’s birthday, sat in). John McDonough, a longtime writer for DownBeat and the Wall Street Journal, created a medley of historic versions of “King Porter Stomp” for a presentation of Jelly Roll Morton’s classics in February with roots Americana pianist Erwin Helfer performing two of Jelly’s tunes.

Veteran broadcaster Richard Steele, just hours back from a tour of Cuba in company of trumpeter Orbert Davis, talked with saxophonist Eric Schneider about the collaborations and careers of Earl “Fatha” Hines (with whom he’d toured) and Louis Armstrong. Ayana Contreras, producer for WBEZ and Vocalo Radio, provided in-depth commentary about the jazz influences and nuances of Curtis Mayfield, Minnie Riperton and Earth Wind and Fire in the March Digging Our Roots, which climaxed gloriously: as keyboardist Robert “Baabe” Irving III played EWF vamps on the Cultural Center’s piano, audience members started singing along, Maggie Brown (Oscar Brown Jr.’s daughter) rushed to the stage, grabbed a mic and started wailing — dancing erupted! It was grand.

At the May session, Branch spoke admiringly of the musicianship of his elders he had known, especially including Sonny Boy Williamson II, as slyly understated harmonica man Rice Miller called himself while touring from the Mississippi delta to the capitols of Europe, having appropriated repertoire and reputation of John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, who had hit records but was murdered in 1948. Keros introduced an excerpt of a film of Maxwell Street, Chicago’s fondly remembered outdoor market at which Blind Arvella Grey, guitarist Robert Nighthawk, Big John Wrencher (don’t the names summon their images?) held forth.

One fan corrected my impression that Bill Broonzy was playing from his own doorstep — actually the clip was from a film shot by Pete Seeger. Another suggested that the way to return blues to popular music today is have a deejay/producer grab it for presentation to the EDM audience. Apparently that gent was unaware of previous attempts to turn that trick, such as the Elektric Mud Cats — Chuck D and Common with guitarist Pete Cosey — doing a number on Muddy Water’s “Mannish Boy.”

The next Digging Our Roots session, at 6 pm on Saturday June 29, highlights Chicago’s singers, starting with Dinah Washington, Oscar Brown Jr and Johnny Hartman. The panelists are Aaron Cohen — former DownBeat editor and author of the forthcoming Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power — and singer Bobbi Wilsyn. The venue changes to the Logan Center, in Hyde Park on the edge of University of Chicago campus, which is hosting two free days of Jazz Institute programming, noon to 10 pm, as a 50th anniversary Birthday Bash reveling in the breadth of JIC and our local scene’s concerns and activities.

As part of the JIC’s year long 50th engagement and fundraising campaigns, a series of jazz movies programmed by the Chicago Film Society kicks off Monday, May 27 with Mickey One (starring Warren Beatty, directed by Arthur Penn, with music by Stan Getz, shot in Chicago) at the Music Box. Further flicks include Ornette: Made in America, Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues and Les Blank’s Always for Pleasure.

The drift is: Mutually beneficial partnerships for free or modest-fee events featuring local celebs at readily accessible venues can advance the mission of medium to small not-for-profit arts groups (like the Jazz Institute and the Jazz Journalists Association). Knowledgable people who have insights into pre-recorded media can offer curious listeners and viewers an interactive experience (all Digging Our Roots sessions included q&a time) that bonds most everybody present, like any successful performance. I’m thrilled to present music I love to anyone who’s got the time and inclination to enjoy it and hope to continue this series in autumn in Chicago.

Billy Branch, Leslie Keros, Howard Mandel;
photo by Alan Frolichstein

Might I suggest Digging Our Roots-like programs as a model for arts journalists and arts organizations spotlighting arts-near-us, contemporary or historic? All you need is a public space, time, date, and speakers able to be enlightening about great content. That last is the main thing. We’re lucky here to have such enduring jazz and blues.

Audio-video jazz improv: Mn’Jam Experiment, w/teens

What’s really new in improvisational music? Where else can innovation go? Mn’JAM Experiment — singer Melissa Oliveira and her visual/electronics/turntablist partner JAM — are daring to mix high-tech audio-with-video media in live performance, and as they say, it’s an experiment, in a direction that live performance seems sure to go.

Mn’JAM, photo by Charlotte Steunebrink

Grounded in jazz fundamentals (call and response, in-the-moment interactions, individualized expression, rhythmic drive, repertoire; she went to Berklee, he to New England Conservatory) they use screens, loops, layers, cut-ups, self-crafted as well as appropriated items, abstraction, distortion and familiar themes — and they’ve made it all portable, so they tour and teach worldwide, recently out of Melbourne.

Their performance last week Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music proved Mn’JAM’s essential ingredients of multi-track looping and rapid-fire yet intentional manipulations of images that are wedded to percussive, sometimes pitched, also malleable sounds can be rapidly understood, enjoyed and adopted by young players. Members of the School’s Teen Collective had a two-day workshop with Mn’JAM, then performed well, I’ll say rockin’, at the School’s estimably international Wednesday night community-donation series (which is funded in part by the European Union). These teens, 13, 14 and 15, added their own solo and backup voices, electric guitar, bass, keyboards and traps parts to the act — as Mn’JAM has on their 2017 DVD/CD album Live With A Boom (still, much of that album’s musical material is significantly more complex than what these forces tried).

Teen Collective members, from the Old Town School of Music — JAM at far right. Photo by Devin Sebastian Bean

While Melissa records stacks of vocal loops cleverly metered for polyrhythmic effects, over which she sings and which she can distort or add to using a Korg Kaossilator, JAM triggers images ranging from GIFs, pictograms, geometric figures to accompany, complement, lead (or ignore) her. He, too, manipulates source material, starting with a bank of let’s call them visual-sonic gestures, typically totaling 60 — consider bank a keyboard, different for each of the duo’s tracks (which they compose separately but collaboratively), which he can change with color, overlays, stretching/mirroring/dividing/warping functions by hand-drumming and table-spinning. The visual display can be — is — quirky, surreal, hypnotic, distracting, sometimes simultaneously. (They’re into moire patterns.) Melissa, sings affectingly in Portuguese, and rather more cooly in English, but still slices, dices and swirls her phrases, isolating key elements of “Body and Soul,” for instance, or offering a hot version of Bill Withers’ “Use Me.”

In the training sessions (I’ve attended two Mn’JAM conducted for adults), the two musical artists quite openly discuss and demonstrate their equipment and techniques, designed and devised to offer vast opportunities for creative composition, spontaneous variation and sensory overload, including considerations of what can be carried, used to greatest affect, replaced/repaired/modified on short notice. Having formerly been based in Amsterdam, Oliviera (she says she’s half-Portuguese, half-Australian) and JAM (persistently “all Portuguese”) have done a TedX SPJain Sydney, Talk, performed at the 2017 Cairo Jazz Festival and in India, in 2016 traveled extensively in China, Japan, Macau and Hong Kong.

They acknowledge a couple of other ensembles are trying to unite image and audio, but intend their own processes of combination to more immediate, organic and as much as possible analog — they abjure using a click track to sync music and image — and identify themselves, in the best sense, with jazz. So they keep experimenting, and explaining what they’re up to with weekly YouTube clips. Pretty cool.

2018 jazz, blues and beyond deaths w/ links

Cecil Taylor, March 15, 1929 – April 5, 2018, photo by Sánta István Csaba

Not a happy post, but a useful one: here are the hundreds of musicians and music industry activists who died in 2018, as compiled by photographer-writer Ken Franckling for the Jazz Journalists Association. Ken scoured local newspapers, the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt newsletter, AllAboutJazz.com, Wikipedia, the New York Times, Legacy.com, Rolling Stone, Variety, JazzTimes.com, blogs, listserves, Facebook pages and European publications. Links to their fuller biographies or obituaries are provided where possible.

Legacies of Music Makers

The deaths of multi-instrumentalist Joseph Jarman, best known as the face-painted shaman of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Alvin Fielder,

re-conceptualizing drummer, remind us that artists’ contributions to music extend beyond recordings and awards. Read my essay at NPR Music, commissioned by Nate Chinen of WBGO, on the enduring legacies of Jarman and Fielder, both founding members of the still thriving Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) NY and Chicago).


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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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