It's almost time for the Deer Isle Jazz Festival in Stonington, Maine. For eight years, I've helped bring great jazz to this tiny Down East Maine island. In that time, both the fest and I have grown. This year's event is a New Orleans blowout (more on that in my next post). Here's a recent piece I wrote for Jazziz, about my experiences as volunteer producer.

MAINE ATTRACTION

by Larry Blumenfeld

"Condoms. Tampons. Excess hair. SMALL AN-I-MALS!"

So sang the dozen folks forming a circle within a tiny cabin last July, holding that last syllable until Arturo O'Farrill dropped his right hand with a conductor's authority. I'd just made the nine-hour drive from Brooklyn, New York, to Deer Isle, Maine, but my bleary eyes found strength to widen. I laughed.

I'd walked in on a rehearsal for Haystack, The Opera: An Afro-Cuban Jazz Odyssey -- and it was no joke. O'Farrill's wife, Alison, sat at a keyboard, his eldest son, Zack, before a set of conga drums. His youngest, Adam, held a trumpet, awaiting his cue. Soon various rhythm instruments -- hand drums, cowbells, guiros, clavés -- were handed out.

Before long, O'Farrill had these painters and potters and sculptors, all of whom had come to the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts for a summer session, creating four layers of rhythm and sounding pretty damn in-sync.

O'Farrill had come to Maine to headline at the annual Deer Isle Jazz Festival, for which I've been volunteer producer since its inception, in 2001. Each summer, one festival musician serves as artist-in-residence at the Haystack School. O'Farrill, a celebrated pianist and bandleader, the son of a legendary Cuban composer, met this challenge by bringing his whole family and creating an opera, with lyrics drawn from Haystack Director Stuart Kestenbaum's work -- not his celebrated poetry, but his school manual, the part about "what not to flush down the toilet."

It was, and I did. A year later, four women bought the place, cleared out the dead raccoons, and renovated. The Stonington Opera House -- at various points, a dance hall, vaudeville theater, and high-school basketball arena -- was now home to the nonprofit Opera House Arts. I introduced myself. Linda Nelson, the indefatigable executive director, suggested we mount a jazz festival. Artistic Director Judith Jerome talked with me about improvisation in all its forms. We sat until sunset, when the island sky turned blue and pink and cast eerie reflections on the water that changed with each passing moment. Whitney Balliett famously called jazz the "sound of surprise," I thought, but this place looked the part.

We were off. There were jazz fans hidden in the hills, literally. Several opened their homes to visiting musicians and didn't stop there; they baked blueberry muffins, demonstrated lobster bisque recipes, lent Subarus. Saxophonist Dewey Redman, our first headliner, sent yearly Christmas cards to his hosts. I recall indelible images: Romero Lubambo sitting on a porch after breakfast, strumming his guitar as Luciana Souza slapped soft percussion on her thighs and sang bossa novas into the morning mist; William Parker's band members dotting the sloping hill near Lindsay Bowker's stately house, grinning giddily as they carried bright-red lobsters in varying stages of dismemberment; Greg Osby and his wife heading off to Nervous Nellie's Jams and Jellies.

There were silly, touching moments (Jason Moran lifting his pant leg onstage and thanking his host, Stan Bergen, for the dress-sock loaner), and scary stretches (driving from the Bangor airport through pounding sleet and blinding fog with Randy Weston cramped into my Saab, praying not to be scripting his bio's final line).

I'd come to Deer Isle 10 years ago to be refreshed. Yet even more invigorating then the brisk air and chilly water was the attitude of these audiences. The morning after Parker's 2004 concert, I asked Perry Hunter, who had offered to drive the band to the airport, whether the music sounded too "avant-garde.

"Only an old man would say that," he shot back. With that, the 75-year-old slammed the van door shut and drove off. I felt transported.

Politics were in the air during jazzfest -- literally. While the Neville Brothers closed the event on the Acura stage, a plane circled above the Fair Grounds towing a banner that read: "Shell, Hear the Music. Fix the Coast You Broke." Not all the commentary was so overt, and none as visible, but it was there if you kept your eyes and ears open. Mind you, it's too easy in New Orleans these days to read meaning and purpose into every lyric or song choice -- was Sheryl Crow making a statement by covering "Gimme Shelter," or was she just doing a Stones tune? -- yet some of the messages were timely, pointed, and worth remembering.

Here's my reflection on all that in a piece for the website Truthdig.

Just when I was feeling guilty about heading into Passover without a thought of my desert-crossing ancestors or my going-without-bread family members, I ran into Ronald Lewis, a sweet-hearted, tough-minded guy who is still among the lonely pioneers who've returned to his Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood. (He was a key character in a piece I did for Salon last year.)

"You comin' to the Seder?" he asked.

"What Seder?"

"The one at my house."

"Huh?"

Turns out LJ Goldstein, photographer, Jew-about-town, founding member of Krewe du Jieux, was holding his krewe's ritual dinner at Lewis's recently restored home. If my culture was on display for a night at Lewis's place, so was his, permanently: When I introduced my wife, Erica, Lewis commanded: "Go see my museum!" -- the House of Dance and Feathers located just behind his home (this is the second edition, and impressive at that, reconstructed after Lewis lost his previous artifacts in the floods).

Some guests had prepared traditional Jewish fare -- kugel and matzoh ball soup and so on. There was brisket, too -- from The Joint, a favorite Bywater barbecue spot. We sat on the floor and worked through two hours of a Passover service far more faithful than my family's version. And different -- the Haggadah, for instance, began with "Shalom, y'all." Helen Regis, scholar of all things second-line, was there, as was Joel Dinnerstein, who is on Tulane Univeristy's faculty. So was Willie Birch, whose paintings, drawings, and mixed-media sculptures tell stories of struggle and transcendence as powerfully as the Haggadah.

"Yeah. I'm doin' a multicultural thing," Lewis joked when Birch showed up. When it came time to give thanks and to reflect, he turned serious. "I'm thankful for being back. But I miss the Ninth Ward like it was. I used to be able to just walk and see everyone and everything where there is still mostly nothing."

From there, as any good Seder does, we traced the tale of enslaved Jews on the run from Egypt, and I thought about how little difference there is between "Let My People Go" and "Let My People Go Home."

By Larry Blumenfeld

Cuban pianist Bebo Valdés once recalled for me his first meeting with the bassist known as Cachao, in Havana. "Were both wearing short pants then," he said, before making a deeper point: "Cuban music had timing, but no syncopation before Cachao."

I know what Valdés meant: Cachao transformed the bass tumbao -- the bassline that both anchors and propels the music, and which is commonly referred to as the "glue" that binds montunos (repeated musical phrases) with clavé-based grooves. In the bass tumbao, more than one Cuban musicologist has said, beats the heart of the song. And no one plays it, feels it, like Cachao.

Cachao's brother Orestes, a pianist, says that Cachao's innovation inspired his own 1937 composition "Mambo," which crystallized a transformation of a then-popular Cuban danzón style, and ignited a dance revolution within and outside Cuba. And like Valdés, who played in the earliest recorded Cuban descargas (loose-limbed, jazz-inflected jam sessions), Cachao was instrumental to this phase of Afro Cuban jazz development, too.

Descargas: The Havana Sessions (Yemaya), gathers all of Cacao's legendary jam sessions, recorded between 1957 and 1961, along with other seminal tracks, in two discs that you would previously have had to assemble from five different recordings, if you were lucky enough to find them. It's two-and-a-half hours of driving, swinging, sweet, hot, improvised music, full of jazz ingenuity and Afro Cuban dance-music thrust. It comes at you in 39 tracks, each like its own wave, most of which are no more than three minutes long ("Descargas in Miniatura" the title of Cachao's original Cuban release of this material, refers to its song-like condensations of late-night improvisations that would typically linger far longer).

Born in Havana on September 14, 1918, Israel "Cachao" López was the youngest child in a family full of accomplished musicians. By age nine, Cachao was playing for silent films. At 12, he joined the Havana Philharmonic. In his teens, along with Orestes, Cachao joined Orquestra Arcaño y sus Maravillas, a dance band that had begun to take the danzón style, known for its emphasis on violin, brass, and timpani drums, into a more percussive, African-inspired direction. Cachao and Orestes are said to have composed literally 2,000 tunes in this new style -- as prolific as, say, Ellington was within the swing idiom. "Mambo" marked the moment this new wrinkle developed into a movement all its own. But the descargas on the new discs are a different thing -- defining moments of a Cuban musical evolution that is closely intertwined with and yet clearly distinct from what went on in the United States.

"We all invented the descarga," says conga player Tata Guines in the CD notes, "all of us who met in the small hours of the night to improvise. And improvisation takes you to jazz -- jazz in a Cuban way which has nothing to do with the jazz they do over there on the other side, although it has a little swing and some bebop. We were Cuban musicians, playing Cuban music with the spirit of jazz."

Cachao left Cuba for good in 1962, after Castro took power. He headlined in New York and in Las Vegas. But longing to be among other Cuban émigrés, he moved to Miami, where he languished for a while; in the 1980s, he could be found playing weddings. All that changed in the 1990s. With the help of actor Andy Garcia and producer Emilio Estefan, he found himself the subject of an acclaimed documentary and a Grammy-Award winner (for 1994's Master Sessions). At 89, Cachao still lays down a tumbao with authority and invention, still plucks, slaps and bows his strings to ignite fellow musicians and anyone who cares to dance.

The story told by his descargas seems especially poignant to me just now. Last November, I added my name to the hundreds of musicians, writers, and arts administrators on a petition asking for an end the political ban between U.S. and Cuban artists (www.cubaresearch.info/cubaletter). A brief relaxation of the embargo during the Clinton administration made for something of a Cuban-music boom in this country (Cachao's resurgent career here owed in part to all that); but the Bush administration shut that window tight.

"Let us work together so that Cuban artists can take their talent to the United States," wrote Alicia Alonso, director of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, in a letter that sparked the petition, "so that a song, a book, a scientific study or a choreographic work are not considered, in an irrational way, a crime."

The reissue of Cachao's Descargas preserves a shared history. If only our common future could be so well assured.

Links between basketball and jazz run deep
By Larry Blumenfeld

One striking absurdity of the National Basketball Association is this fact: The team from Utah wears the jerseys emblazoned with "Jazz."

That name originated in New Orleans, of course, where the Jazz played its first five seasons in the late 1970s. Back then, the shirts made fundamental sense -- and not just as a nod to the city's iconic art form.

(read on or click here to link)

The predominance of jazz might surprise viewers and even players used the the game's more customary hip-hop and R&B soundtrack. But at least one former NBA All-Star -- Hall of Fame center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who played on six championship and 19 all-star teams during his 20-year career-- grasps the links between basketball and jazz quite deeply and completely.

"I was always conscious of those connections," said Abdul-Jabbar, sitting in a midtown Manhattan NBA conference room, his 7-foot-2 frame tucked improbably into a Herman Miller chair. He recalled how he used to listen to the music of saxophonist Sonny Rollins before practices.

Abdul-Jabbar's fondness for jazz is no secret. He was born in Harlem, the son of a Juilliard-trained trombonist and singer who rubbed elbows and made music with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie at nightspots including the legendary Minton's Playhouse. In 1987, Abdul-Jabbar made a short-lived attempt to start his own jazz record label, Cranberry Records, with Gillespie on its planned roster.

In his affectionate liner notes for the 2004 CD "Monk 'Round the World," Abdul-Jabbar recalled first hearing legendary pianist Thelonious Monk on New York's long-gone WRVR-FM, then making "a seventh-grader's ultimate sacrifice: laying down three bucks for an LP."

Harking back to his high-school days, he pulls out a photo of himself -- not as the dominant center leading Harlem's Power Memorial Academy to 71 straight wins, but as a background figure, towering above reporters clustered around a table at which sat Martin Luther King Jr.

"It was a summer program aimed at showing the kids how to make Harlem a better place," he recalled of that 1964 scene. "And I was in a journalism workshop, so I'd earned a press credential. That's when I became a black historian. And that's still my gig."

At 60, Abdul-Jabbar keeps a hand in basketball's future as a special assistant coach for his former team, the Los Angeles Lakers. And he's followed through on that initial gig, sharing his interest in the past through a series of books, including 1996's "Black Profiles in Courage" and 2005's "Brothers in Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII's Forgotten Heroes."

With "On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance," published last year, he mined basketball's past and linked it with jazz through a common history of black achievement rooted in the cultural ferment of the Harlem Renaissance -- and highlighted through a literal convergence. The book is staked to the story of the New York Renaissance Five, better known as the Harlem Rens, a trailblazing all-black team named for Harlem's Renaissance Casino, whose second-story ballroom served as their home court.

"There'd be jazz mixed in with the games," Abdul-Jabbar said. "After the first half, there'd be a warm-up band. After the second half, people would dance to Count Basie until 3 or 4 in the morning."

Between 1922 and 1949, the Rens compiled a record of 2,588 wins and 529 losses. The team played a cunning and determined style of basketball, in contrast to the entertainment-oriented ostentation of the Harlem Globetrotters, whom they beat along the way to winning the first world professional basketball tournament, against the all-white Oshkosh All-Stars, in 1939.

Among other things, "On the Shoulders of Giants" connects the big-money, tattoo-and-hip-hop-inflected world of today's NBA with its humbler, jazz-affiliated legacy.

"I'm definitely trying to bridge a consciousness gap," Abdul-Jabbar said. "I want to create a time tunnel to transport people from the ESPN world to the Harlem Renaissance. And I think jazz can do that."

Abdul-Jabbar is hopeful that the presence of this year's all-star game in New Orleans will keep a spotlight on a city that "deserves more, and more positive, focus." Just as he was so often mischaracterized by the press during his playing days -- his shy and dignified demeanor often interpreted as unfriendly and aloof -- New Orleans has too often and too easily been caricatured by media accounts, he said.

"On a basic human level, we owe New Orleans the care and consideration and compassionate aid that was missing in the response to Katrina," he said.

In terms of the history Abdul-Jabbar mines and the culture that flowered during the Harlem Renaissance, he acknowledges a huge debt.

"Without New Orleans, we don't have jazz. And it's more than that," he said. "There's a certain essence of joy and a pride in achievement -- it says that despair cannot be the last thing we will experience in life, that we can overcome anything -- that I think has firm roots in New Orleans."

Abdul-Jabbar has almost completed a documentary based on his latest book. Already available is the four-volume, eight-CD, "On the Shoulders of Giants: An Audio and Musical Journey through the Harlem Renaissance", which makes use of archival tapes of Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois, among others, and new spoken commentary by the likes of Maya Angelou.

The audio book also highlights a newfound connection between Abdul-Jabbar and New Orleans: Its soundtrack features four tracks composed by students in the inaugural class of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance at Loyola University.

And Abdul-Jabbar is anything but shy these days. His new blog (www.latimes.com/kareem) shares everything from tips on "care and maintenance of the over-50 athlete" to a five-step guide to mastering his signature "sky hook" shot. And it includes complex musical reflections such as this one, about the Grammy-winning CD by his friend, pianist Herbie Hancock: " 'River: The Joni Letters' represents Herbie's expansion beyond the race-based straitjackets of nomenclature imposed on American musicians. American music has such a rich and varied foundation, it is really grotesque to try to define it as R&B or rock or pop or metal or Latin or Reggae or country or blues."

In New Orleans, as during the Harlem Renaissance, he said, we can best grasp the category-defying nature of American music, and of the arc of American culture in general.

Abdul-Jabbar's sky hook, perhaps the most graceful innovation basketball has ever known, surely is one artifact of that culture. Like jazz innovators from Louis Armstrong on, he approached his role by transforming it, thus changing the game.

New Orleans has a new team now, the Hornets, whose style of play is not only winning these days, but distinctly jazzlike, full of the tempo changes and spontaneity one expects from a swinging quintet. And maybe that classic NBA mid-'80s five, Abdul-Jabbar's Los Angeles Lakers, can be thought of in the same terms. If so, how would Abdul-Jabbar cast himself in the band?

"I'd be the bassist," he said, "who soloed a lot."

My thoughts on how the two subjects intertwine (or not) is expressed in this Village Voice piece:

"It's amazing how much joy and hope these beads and feathers bring."

The Sunday before Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Donald Harrison Jr., Big Chief of the Congo Nation, son of Big Chief Donald Sr., lay on the living-room floor of his mother's house in the Ninth Ward, cutting leopard-print fur in a pattern as he spoke. Nearby, a sofa and chair were covered with beads and rhinestones, along with ostrich and turkey feathers that had been dyed a golden yellow. Harrison was preparing to "mask," to enact the city's least-understood tradition, and these days, perhaps, its most essential: Mardi Gras Indian culture. These rituals, which date to at least the mid-1800s, are an African-American homage to the Native Americans who once sheltered runaway slaves and to the spirit of resistance.

The calendar was pointed in its irony this year: Elsewhere, February 5 marked Super Tuesday....

For the full piece, click here or read on.

Doing their part to keep New Orleans culture alive

by Larry Blumenfeld

"It's amazing how much joy and hope these beads and feathers bring."

The Sunday before Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Donald Harrison Jr., Big Chief of the Congo Nation, son of Big Chief Donald Sr., lay on the living-room floor of his mother's house in the Ninth Ward, cutting leopard-print fur in a pattern as he spoke. Nearby, a sofa and chair were covered with beads and rhinestones, along with ostrich and turkey feathers that had been dyed a golden yellow. Harrison was preparing to "mask," to enact the city's least-understood tradition, and these days, perhaps, its most essential: Mardi Gras Indian culture. These rituals, which date to at least the mid-1800s, are an African-American homage to the Native Americans who once sheltered runaway slaves and to the spirit of resistance.

The calendar was pointed in its irony this year: Elsewhere, February 5 marked Super Tuesday. All attention was squared on would-be elected leaders with practiced battle cries, competing to prove themselves fierce and attractive. But in New Orleans, Super Tuesday was Fat Tuesday. Uptown, in the limelight, the various well-publicized krewe parades (a throng that included Hulk Hogan, King of Bacchus) lorded over the city, riding high on floats and tossing down beads. But on less-traveled streets, more in the shadows and announced mostly on a need-to-know basis, Mardi Gras Indian Chiefs, possessors of strictly inherited thrones, asserted their authority. Dressed in 10-foot-tall, 6-foot-wide feathered and beaded suits and accompanied by "queens," "spy boys," and others, they were announced by drumbeats and chants, lending voice and hope to New Orleans residents who'd been all but ignored this primary season. The Big Chiefs competed with words, too. And in a ritual that once frequently did turn violent, they battled to win hearts and minds, competing through elaborate suits to "kill 'em with pretty." The presidential candidates were selling change, but in New Orleans, a city all but ignored by that lot (except for John Edwards, who stood in front of the Ninth Ward's Musician's Village as he dropped out of the race), the message from these local leaders was continuity.

Sunday night, when most Americans were watching the Giants and Patriots do battle, Big Chief Darryl Montana of the Yellow Pocahontas--son of Allison "Tootie" Montana, known as "chief of chiefs"--was completing his own suit out in Kenner, the suburb he's called home since Katrina drove him out of the city. Such work is all-consuming, not to mention expensive and physically demanding. It's not uncommon for a chief's hands to be scarred from needle cuts; while affixing one section of his crown to its backing, Montana had run a drill into his finger.

The brass-band second-line parades endemic to New Orleans culture draw on the same African-rooted bamboula rhythm as do Mardi Gras Indian chants, derived from Congo Square, where enslaved Africans were once permitted to dance and drum on Sundays (and for which Harrison's tribe is named). These days, that site, on the fringe of the French Quarter, sits behind a gate to Louis Armstrong Park that's been nearly always locked since Katrina. On Lundi Gras, the Monday before Mardi Gras, the New Orleans Social Aid & Pleasure Club Task Force, representing some 30 clubs, held its third-annual unified parade at that spot. The police had tried to cancel the event just days earlier, the latest in a series of city-sponsored challenges to this tradition. But aided by the ACLU, the Task Force took the city to federal court--the second time in a year that they've resisted and scored a legal victory. The clubs were saying, in effect, what the Indians sing in their traditional song "Shallow Water": "We won't bow down."

Early Mardi Gras morning, I was back in the Ninth Ward, waiting for the Young Guardians of the Flame, led by six-year Big Chief Kevin Cooley Jr. and organized by Cherice Harrison-Nelson, Donald's sister. This year, Cherice wore orange, red, and yellow. Last year, her suit was emblazoned with a beaded likeness of her father; above it, covering her heart, was a beaded American flag, its stars represented by crystals shaped like tears. "Something deep within your soul calls you to do this," she said. "And you've got to do it, for your mental and physical survival, and for the welfare of those around you."

Midday, Victor Harris of Fi-Yi-Yi showed up in front of the home of Joyce Montana, Tootie Montana's widow. I recalled how he'd looked fierce in his African-inspired green-and-red mask two years ago, when the wake of Katrina threatened to swallow all such traditions. "They spit us all over this land," he shouted then, amid drumming. "They told us we had to evacuate. But they didn't say we had to stay away." Now, Indians in a rainbow of colors passed through, did mock battle, embraced, moved on. A small crowd had assembled. Around 3 p.m., Darryl Montana came out of Joyce's front door, looking regal in his tall, broad, lavender, feathered suit, which rippled gently in the growing breeze as he headed up to Claiborne Avenue, where Indians generally convene on Mardi Gras, beneath the overpass for I-10--"Under the Bridge," as they call it.

That phrase holds a different meaning these days, as it did splashed across the cover of the local weekly, Gambit, headlining a piece about the growing encampment of some 200 homeless underneath the freeway, just a small portion of an estimated 12,000 cast-out residents. And not far from view on Claiborne was the darkened façade of the Lafitte Housing Projects, its doors and windows covered with steel plates. It seemed a cruel indignity, some mash-up of Dickens and Orwell, when, five days before Christmas last year, the New Orleans City Council unanimously approved a HUD-ordered plan to tear down some 4,500 units of public housing. I was in New York, watching CNN as residents assembled outside by barricades and police lines. "If you know New Orleans, you'll know how dilapidated these housing developments are," said anchorwoman Kyra Phillips. "They've been crime-ridden, very popular for drug-running. . . . According to the mayor, this is an effort to clean up the city, have better housing for folks."

Meanwhile, like some bizarre B-roll footage, we saw a live shot of New Orleans residents being turned away with pepper spray; one woman fell to the ground after being Tasered. But we heard only Phillips. The residents were voiceless, as they'd been in the debate about demolition and rebuilding of public housing in a city hard-pressed for affordable homes. On Mardi Gras morning, Gerard Lewis, Big Chief of the Black Eagles, led his tribe in a prayer outside the B.W. Cooper projects--once their coming-out spot, now slated to be destroyed.

As the week rolled on, and Super Tuesday's primary results proved inconclusive, sure enough, New Orleans made its way into the election-year discourse. "Suddenly, candidates are paying attention," read the subhead to Thursday's front-page coverage in The Times-Picayune. Barack Obama spoke at Tulane University that day, mentioning slaves at Congo Square and their "dances of impossible joy," but not public housing. However, the subject was raised later in the day at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, in a panel discussion of architects who bemoaned the loss of sturdy and historically significant structures.

From the audience, historian Nick Spitzer commented, "Let's not lose sight of these as what they are: homes." Marshall Truehill, pastor of the First United Baptist Church and former chairman of the city's planning commission, mentioned how much the housing projects meant to Mardi Gras Indian culture and vice versa. "When you destroy neighborhoods, you tear apart a culture too," he said. "Once you tear down these buildings, you can't put them back."

The next day Jerome Smith, an activist who runs the Tremé Community Center, compounded the thought: "Even though we had a good turnout for Mardi Gras, it's not the same, and I wonder if it ever will be. The great sorrow is that the people from those projects, especially the children who have been cast out of this city, can't receive those rituals they way they're supposed to."

The Sunday before Mardi Gras, Donald Harrison had told me he was going to wear his suit, but that he would stay close to home, holding court as it were. He wasn't going to take to the streets, to "come out." I told him I didn't believe him. "Wasn't ritual important?" I asked.

We waited and waited, a group of us, in front of the Holy Faith Temple Baptist Church on Governor Nicholls Street. Finally, near dusk, Harrison arrived, driving a yellow Penske truck filled with the parts of his suit. As the sky darkened, he made his entrance from church to street, arms folded, concealing the detailed beadwork in the image of his father, feathers rippling as he walked, chants and beats following him. He looked spectacular, and moved tall and proud.

The following weekend, he was playing saxophone alongside pianist Henry Butler. Harrison, who is not only a Big Chief but also a world-class jazz musician, talked to me beforehand about the connections between Mardi Gras Indian rhythms and the drumming of Art Blakey, his early employer. He related the beadwork of his suit to the intricate patterns in the Afro-Caribbean music of pianist Eddie Palmieri, whom he was about to join on tour. He spoke of the lessons of leadership he soaked up as a Big Chief, which he passes on to the musicians he teaches through the local Tipitina's Foundation.

"So you came out after all," I said.

"Yeah," he shot back. "Ritual matters."

Since Katrina, Harrison's attitudes have transformed. He's no longer comfortable with the term "Indian," which is a complicated matter. But his purpose remains clear. "I'm going to continue to mask in beads and feathers," he added. "I'm going to play my saxophone. If enough people do their part, everything will endure. But that's the question: Will people be allowed to do their part?"

by Larry Blumenfeld

The scene has been enacted countless times in coffee shops and dorm rooms: Folks sitting around and listening to or, maybe, just reading Joni Mitchell lyrics, digging for biographical facts, mulling over meanings, exclaiming "ooh" or "ahh" at an unexpected image drawn with words. But in May 2007, these were no college students on study break, no latte-sipping dilettantes kicking back, dissecting Mitchell's work. This was Herbie Hancock reading aloud the lyrics of "Court and Spark." And that was Wayne Shorter clapping his hands as he let out a deep sigh of recognition. It was the prelude to a session at Hollywood's Ocean Way Recording studio for Hancock's new album, River: The Joni Letters (Verve), which turned out to be not so much a tribute to Mitchell as an investment by a master musician in the power of exalted lyrics.

Hancock and Mitchell's history together began on shaky ground. Not long after Hancock established himself as a leading force in modern jazz - initially through his work in Miles Davis' quintet, then through his own recordings - Mitchell rose to unparalleled stature as a singer and songwriter, a poet and painter, a Renaissance woman the likes of which popular music had never before known.

But Hancock was largely unaware of Mitchell's artistry back then. "I remember hearing about her," he says from his Los Angeles studio. "And I heard some of her songs on the radio. But my focus back then was on jazz and classical music. I wasn't really paying attention to any pop or rock or folk music at the time."

Hancock was eventually drawn into Mitchell's orbit by a 1979 call from bassist Jaco Pastorius, who invited the pianist to work on Mingus, the album Mitchell developed with Charles Mingus during the legendary bassist's final days. Shorter was also involved in that project, and had previously worked on Mitchell's 1977 album, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter. Hancock recalls: "Wayne had told me that Joni was willing to go out there, to not worry, to just be creative." Still, the pianist figured that he and the other jazz musicians in Mitchell's company would be "restricting themselves to play in a certain way." Instead, he was pleasantly surprised at how free the musical environment was, and at some inherent qualities in Mitchell's songs. "It wasn't jazz, you know, but the DNA of it was there." During the Mingus sessions, a friendship bloomed between Hancock and Mitchell that would grow richer through the years. Hancock would occasionally perform with Mitchell, sometimes at benefits thrown by the San Francisco-based Bread and Roses organization. He played on another Mitchell album, the 2000 orchestral collection Both Sides Now.

The relationship among these musicians and their spouses grew throughout the 1980s, with much of the socializing taking place at a now-defunct restaurant on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood called the Nucleus Nuance. "We'd all hang out there," says Larry Klein, Mitchell's ex-husband and close musical collaborator, who was Hancock's partner in arranging and producing the new CD. "And every New Year's we'd be the band - Herbie, Wayne, Joni, myself, and assorted characters."

When Verve Records executive Dahlia Ambach-Caplin approached Hancock with the idea of tackling Joni Mitchell tunes, Klein was the natural choice for collaboration. "And the next call," says Hancock, "went to Wayne." A devastatingly accomplished core band was assembled: Hancock, Shorter, bassist Dave Holland, guitarist Lionel Loueke, and drummer Vinnie Colaiuta. Guest vocalists were enlisted: Norah Jones, who sings "Court and Spark" with casual ease; Tina Turner, whose worldly wise and proudly funky "Edith and the Kingpin" is among the album's highpoints; Corinne Bailey Rae, who purrs and croons through "River"; and Luciana Souza, who elegantly mines the meditative core of "Amelia." The gravelly bass voice of Leonard Cohen speaks "The Jungle Line" to Hancock's accompaniment and, on "The Tea Leaf Prophecy (Lay Down Your Arms)," Mitchell herself provides a vocal so agile in phrasing and color that it nearly steals the show.

Yet Hancock's River is hardly a showcase for singers. There are four instrumentals among the 10 tracks, including two songs that were early obsessions for Mitchell: Duke Ellington's "Solitude," which she experienced as a child through the Billie Holiday recording her mother favored, and Shorter's "Nefertiti," which she listened to again and again on Miles Davis' 1967 album of the same name. More to the point, the arrangements and playing here are woven so well with the words that they turn the tunes into seamless tone poems.

Time and again, Hancock and Shorter seem to complete a sung phrase. Over and over, the rhythm section adds perfect punctuation. And though this is ostensibly an album of Hancock considering Mitchell's art, it is as much about the pianist's relationship with Shorter, whose tenor- and soprano-sax playing turns out to be the most human voice in the cast. Shorter whittles "Court and Spark" into a five-note mantra, tosses out a delicate lullaby-like figure near the end of "River," and, during an instrumental version of "Both Sides Now," lands eventually on just breath.

For Hancock, the approach to this recording was both a revelation and a challenge. As Klein explains, "The big overview was that the record should emanate from the words and everything should be subservient to the poetry."

"I'm just not used to looking at words," says Hancock. "We just don't pay attention to them. We're dazzled by textures and timbres and colors and chords." Klein was Hancock's guide to Mitchell's lyrics. "Her imagery is incredible," Hancock continues, "and some of it is pretty deep and hard to get into. I'd have to ask Larry, 'What does she mean by this?' And for the most part, he knew the connections."
"It was great watching him discover," Klein says, "just like it is when you turn someone on to a great book and watch it set off sparks."

Before each session, Klein would play Mitchell's original version of a song. He'd pass out the lyrics, and the band would discuss them. "To one degree or another, I'd give my synopsis," says Klein, "and people would have questions of their own about what this or that meant."

Hancock was fascinated by the story behind "The Tea Leaf Prophecy," which foretold Mitchell's parents' marriage. Mitchell sang the tune for Hancock's album just one month after her mother's death, adding new drama to the lyric. He was blown away by the powerful imagery of "Amelia" - how, for instance, Mitchell conflated the vapor trails from six jet planes with the strings of her guitar. And, according to Klein, when Shorter heard the narrative of "Edith and the Kingpin," about a small-time pimp and his minions at a club, he lit up with inspiration and said, "'I'm going to be the guy at the end of the bar, taking this all in."

There's a line in "Edith and the Kingpin" when Mitchell's narrator, describing the club's "sophomore jazz," says, "The band sounds like typewriters." Maybe Klein and Hancock had that in mind at their earliest meetings, as something to avoid, when they decided together another rule of thumb for the recording: less is more. "The most typical thing that people in jazz do is that they reharmonize the hell out of everything with [chord] substitutions, and yank out all of the main pillars of the structure," Klein explains. "Herbie knew that wasn't the right approach here. And Joni can't stand that sort of thing."

Sure enough, on "Court and Spark," the familiar four-chord pillar is intact. And there is a marvelous economy to nearly everything on River. Hancock and Shorter don't so much take solos as offer concise counterpoint to the vocals. On instrumental tunes, they seem to converse.

The one substantially reharmonized treatment is "Both Sides Now," the first tune that Hancock worked on, and one performed sans vocal. That was the only arrangement that he wrote out. (Klein did most of the others, which were more sketched than composed.) "I had all these chords in my head," says Hancock, "all these tonalities that the lyric suggested to me." When he played a fragment of his treatment at a meeting, Klein nodded. The song is about changing perceptions and evolution. With that in mind, Hancock reasoned, the chords could also change.

For Hancock, the recurring musical cycle of "Amelia" presented a particularly vexing challenge. "How do you make musical variety with six or seven verses, where each one has the same shape? Lyrically, Joni did it. Musically, I wasn't sure how."

Luciana Souza, who sang the tune, believes Hancock not only met the song's challenge, but also understood its essence. "I felt myself very calm, trusting that we were all telling that story together, all in the 23-measure cycle of her song," she says. "I felt like we were fishermen who trust the tide that rises and empties out." Souza, who has mined the poems of Pablo Neruda and Elizabeth Bishop for her own repertoire, appreciates River on a deep, extra-musical level. "Herbie's record translates Mitchell's music very well to a more abstract context. Even where you do have lyrics and a singer, things are implied and not literal, leaving room for the listener to complete the thoughts. In this way, it is the purest form of poetry."

When the album was completed, Klein played it for Mitchell, who loved it. "I told her we wanted to make a record that was a conversation about the poetry. She said, 'That's what I was trying to do on Mingus.'"

Hancock, who's known Mitchell for decades and has long recognized the poetic qualities in even her everyday conversation, feels that through this newest project he's discovered his friend's art anew. "Now that I've had a chance to study these lyrics, to live with them, I have to ask myself: 'How could I have missed out on all this? Where was I when all this was happening?'"

When I paid for my latte at New York's JFK airport in November, there he was, looking right at me from the cover of "The Measure of Monk," the latest checkout-counter CD compilation offered by the coffee chain.

Hell, if those folks ordering frappuccinos can learn to say "Crepuscule with Nellie" (track seven on the new CD), I might just learn to say "tall" when I really mean "small," or "venti" for "large." Had this uncoolest of coffee chains suddenly turned hip? Could Monk's dark tone clusters really sell to the masses alongside the biscotti and bittersweet chocolates? As it turns out, yes.

Rollins provided my live-jazz high point for 2007 -- his September 17 Carnegie Hall concert, honoring the 50th anniversary of his debut at the hall. In 2005, a jazz specialist at the Library of Congress had discovered a long-lost tape of that show, which inspired Rollins to revisit the material. He played the same three songs ("Sonnymoon for Two," "Some Enchanted Evening," and "Moritat"), this time alongside bassist Christian McBride and drummer Roy Haynes. Rollins and Haynes -- who'd last performed together 49 years earlier -- seemed to pick up where they'd left off, a fact perhaps best expressed when a melodic fragment from Rollins' tenor sax was met with a flap of Haynes' brushes on the snare, and the phrase, unbroken, found completion.

Whenever I think of Rollins, I think not just of music, but also of social statements like those contained the liner notes to 1958's "Freedom Suite" and the title of 1998's "Global Warming." Such consciousness was also central to the career of Max Roach, who died in 2007. And so it was for Charles Mingus, whose anti-segregationist rant in "Fables of Faubus" came alive again last year through the powerful double-disc "Charles Mingus Sextet with Eric Dolphy: Cornell 1964" (Blue Note), drawn from previously unreleased tapes.

Having spent much of 2007 in New Orleans, I'm now especially attuned to political statements within jazz's ranks. Trumpeter Terence Blanchard's "A Tale of God's Will (Requiem for Katrina)" (Blue Note) provided powerful commentary on the continuing story of post-flood New Orleans. And notably last year, jazz musicians organized to speak out about, often simply to defend, their embattled art. I was struck by parallel efforts in New Orleans and New York.

In New Orleans last August, a "Musicians Solidarity Second Line" featured some two-dozen players, instruments in hands, for a traditional second-line parade -- except not a note was played nor a step danced. A steady rain lent dramatic drips to homemade signs that read, "Living Wages = Living Music," "Imagine a Silent NOLA," and "Keep Our Story Alive." "Our musicians are suffering," announced Musicians Union president "Deacon" John Moore. "We hate to come out here like this but we have no alternative." The message was clear: New Orleans' musicians need better support, lest the music that lends the city its identity one day fall silent.

Four months earlier in New York City, free-jazz musicians ignored a persistent drizzle, assembling on the steps of City Hall. Some 50 musicians held instruments aloft, along with signs that stated: "NYC in Cultural Crisis" and "Condo Culture." A flyer demanded that city officials "recognize the damage done to the city's cultural heritage and status as a cultural capital," imploring them "to act now to protect those remaining venues from displacement." "If New York already subsidizes classical venues playing old-school European masters, why can't New York support its own culture?" asked guitarist Mark Ribot.

I'll be watching for how -- or if -- these issues play out in 2008. And I'll be waiting with heightened anticipation for a number of CDs -- especially new Blue Note releases from Lionel Loueke and Cassandra Wilson, and a collaborative effort from Wynton Marsalis and Willie Nelson -- not to mention live takes from Sonny Rollins at Carnegie Hall, from both 2007 and 1957, on his Doxy Music label.

Now, that'll be living large -- or is it venti?