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Aside from his prowess as a drummer, his restless need to invent on the bandstand and his compassionate embrace of musical partners young and old, famous and not, Paul Motian, who died very early this morning at 80, was a real person. The kind you need to meet and sit with a while to understand. And then you get up and leave, feeling better and wiser in ways you can't yet process. Motian didn't want to meet with me for the July Cultural Conversation piece I wrote about him for The Wall Street Journal back in July. His stalwart and wonderful publicist, Tina Pelikan, finessed my way in. Motian told me up front how unhappy he was with his decision to do another interview. ("What haven't I said yet?") Then, two hours later, I could scarcely get him to stop his soft-spoken, stop-start, painterly flow of words, which were not entirely unlike his drumming.

I don't know if I'll write anything new in commemoration of Motian's life and career. I do know that I'm reflecting on it today, and that I welcome any news of memorial concerts or gatherings. Here's that Journal piece again:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903461104576459980345305492.html

Just a bit of reflection on hurtling balls of precipitation and anniversaries.

A email on Thursday from Long Island's Stephen Talkhouse informed me that, with Irene (then still a bona fide hurricane) on its way, last weekend's shows by Trombone Shorty and his Orleans Avenue band would be cancelled.

"Having lived through Katrina," the promoter explained, "they have opted to head home."

A New Orleans musician heading back home from New York to avoid a hurricane--to feel safe. Irony is only a few letters removed from Irene. It turned out that, for New Yorkers, Irene wasn't the monster it appeared to be--and could well have been. Not to dismiss the floods, blackouts, damages, costs, and even, up and down the East Coast, several losses of lives. But we were braced for something far more devastating and it looked real.

In my Brooklyn neighborhood, save for a few fallen trees, Irene was mostly just heavy rains and howling winds while holed up inside. But don't head to a hardware store the day before a forecast hurricane. There is the smell of panic. Flashlights? Gone. D Batteries? Sold out. Duct tape? Shoulda come yesterday.

Only days earlier, I'd been rethinking my plans, considering heading down to NOLA for what I hesitate to call an "anniversary" of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, the precipitating event of the levee failures that caused the flood of 2005, leading to a manmade disaster of unprecedented and long-running proportion. It felt odd not to be covering the day for a newspaper or magazine, as I have each of the past six years, save for the one, three years ago, when my boy Sam was newborn. For me, the 29th is more than an anniversary or commemoration; rather, it has been a peg to draw national (and editors') attention to both the ongoing needs and glories of a city I've come to hold as dear as the family with which I was holed up.

A quarterly magazine takes some time till publication. So here's my piece in the Winter issue of JAZZIZ, inspired by Sonny Rollins and, sort of, by my brother Leslie.

Blu Notes

Winter 2010

Sonny Skies

by Larry Blumenfeld

Pull quote: "It was a metaphysical experience, not a musical experience. You had to be there."

It was the best thing I'd ever done for my older brother Leslie -- a seventh-row seat to Sonny Rollins 80th birthday concert at New York's Beacon Theater in September. Back in the '70s, when I was listening to Billy Joel, Leslie was into modern jazz. I couldn't wrap my head around the music he listened to then -- Dexter Gordon, Thelonious Monk, Rollins. A few years later, while he was off studying music at college, I grew to appreciate those LPs enough to steal them before heading off for my sophomore year at Boston University.

Though he earns his living in computers in Jacksonville, Florida, Leslie remains a dedicated reedman, playing on weekends in wine bars and restaurants. (I like him best on tenor sax, Rollins' instrument of choice.) But he had never heard Rollins in person. So with Leslie turning 50 and Rollins turning 80, I figured it was time to get the former in front of the latter. Who knew how many more chances there'd be? I sprung for concert and plane tickets.

Rollins no longer performs in clubs. The Beacon show was his first in New York in three years, making it the sort of hot ticket rare these days in jazz. Rollins was billed with his working quintet, plus trumpeter Roy Hargrove, guitarist Jim Hall and bassist Christian McBride and "surprise special guests." Since Rollins' last New York concert, at Carnegie Hall, featured him in trio with McBride and drummer Roy Haynes, I suspected Haynes would be among the surprises. At least I hoped so. At Carnegie, Haynes and Rollins had maintained a musical dialogue loose as a barbershop conversation. For all his harmonic genius, Rollins' rhythmic prowess (and an adventurousness grounded in that ability) has been just as elemental to the brilliance of his epic solos. Haynes' driving and utterly organic brand of swing time -- which has anchored music by Louis Armstrong through Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and today's best -- is the perfect complement. I couldn't wait for another taste of that hookup. I happened to interview Haynes for an article about jazz families the day before the Rollins show. He confirmed that he'd be on the date. "And there's someone else, too," he said, eyes agleam. "Not gonna say who, though."

I've been back from Barcelona for more than a week, but it seems like yesterday.

If Barcelona is one of the world's most alluring cities--and it is--its Voll-Damm International Jazz Festival must be counted as one of the world's most distinctive and complete jazz events.

The audacious architectural achievements of Gaudí, the searching experimentalism of early works at the Picasso Museum, and the unexpected culinary inventions (what, for instance, Catalan chef Isma Prados can do with tomatoes, strawberries, and sardines) all figure into a novel context for great and adventurous music, and for concert-going in general. The "tenderness sutras," as he calls them, offered by saxophonist Charles Lloyd and his terrific quartet seemed especially radiant there, and both the intimacy and the ostentation of Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés's music were perfectly matched by his setting, the Palau de Música. Not to mention the graciousness of artistic director Joan Anton Cararach, a former music critic himself, his exceedingly lovely wife, Doan Manfugas, whose deeply felt ideas about music owe to her early training in Havana's finest conservatories, and the suave General Director Tito Ramoneda, whose dream of a cultural event linking his city with both New York and Rio de Janeiro seems just crazy enough to work.

So I'm finally stepping up as a sibling, doing something deep and grand: Flying my older brother Leslie, who happens to play tenor saxophone, to New York so that he can sit tomorrow night in the seventh row of the Beacon Theater, at the feet of Sonny Rollins. The occasion? Leslie's 50^th and Sonny' 80^th birthdays.

No saxophonist should walk through life without at least once listening in Rollins's presence. Hell, no human should. There is so much spiritual presence embedded in Rollins's sound, so much intellectual wonder invested in how he treats a melody, so much musical history referenced in his solos, and yet more--philosophy, politics, and a sense of social purpose--reflected in simply how he conducts himself on and off the stage.

Here's an interview I did with Rollins for The Village Voice, during which we dealt mostly with extra-musical affairs, including for instance why music is an appropriate response to terror. I'd also suggest this lovely piece, full of reminiscences of the Harlem in which Rollins grew up, by my colleague Marc Myers in The Wall Street Journal. 

Tonight's "Tavis Smiley Reports" primetime special, "New Orleans: Been in the Storm Too Long," is produced in collaboration with Academy-Award-winning director Jonathan Demme. It premieres at 8pm EST/7pm Central on PBS.

Both Demme and Smiley focused on New Orleans with depth and sensitivity in 2005, after the flood, and they've both stayed on the storyline. (With so much attention rightly paid to the oil spill just now, it's my hope that the still-relevant story of the flood's aftermath is not forgotten--rather, that the two narratives are folded together to highlight many core issues in common.) 

This collaboration owes in part to Demme's ongoing documentary project "Right to Return." Back in 2008, Smiley gave over a week of his airtime to Demme's material and to the post-Katrina narrative in New Orleans. This New York Times piece by Felicia R. Lee offers more background.) On tonight's special,  Smiley interviews, among others: musicians Ellis and Branford Marsalis, and Lenny Kravitz; and actors Wendell Pierce and John Goodman (both of whom have central roles in HBO's "Treme"). Pierce, in particular, has seeded important redevelopment work in his native Pontchartrain Park.

Harvey Pekar was pissed at me. He told me so himself but I'd seen it coming because, as a parting gift, the outgoing editor of the jazz magazine I'd just taken the reins of had repeated to Harvey my criticisms--all legitimate--of his article about Jazz at Lincoln Center, knowing it would raise his substantial ire. I was "one of those Wynton sycophants," he raged, another "spineless suckup" looking for power and missing the real music. Harvey was wrong. I mean, he was right about the real music--Harvey was more often than not right about music; he had great taste and the knowledge to place it in context. But he was wrong about me: I agreed with his point of view, I just had some issues with the way he'd expressed it in print, with his research or lack thereof.

There was no such thing as a short conversation with Harvey. And boy do I miss that today. Not just because there will be no more conversations with Harvey -- in truth, there haven't been for me in a decade, since I left that gig (yet now there's not even the possibility of another one with him)--but also because the world I've now entered, one filled with emails and texts but little in the way of actual human discourse, is a place Harvey predicted, along with a dozen other dour but spot-on prophecies. Harvey's shit could bring you down if you let it, sure, but it was usually accurate.

Harvey was again incorrect a few calls after that first one, when he called me a "garden variety Jew" in a combative tone when I queried his commentary about Sephardic musical themes. (I think he was reviewing something by Joe Maneri, but it could have been John Zorn. Or maybe neither.) When I explained that my grandfather on my mother's side came from Greece, that I'd been Bar Mitzvahed in a Sephardic temple, landing on t's, not s's at the ends of words, he seemed convinced of my legitimacy as a Jew (if not an editor) of some distinction. 

Things went more smoothly after that. 

If you're in NY this summer, you've got plenty of chances to hear New Orleans music that, as you await next season, offers insights into the sight, sounds, and characters of HBO "Treme." You can find my piece in today's Wall Street Journal with something of a roadmap to that effect. And something I wrote for the current issue of the Village Voice, looking back on June's wave jazz in Manhattan, has a point of connection, in the musical communion of two clarinetists--avant-gardist Perry Robinson and New Orleans traditionalist Michael White.