Rifftides

With fairness, it could be charged that Rifftides has been too concerned lately with the old and the dead. Well, certain observances and acknowledgements needed to be made. But let's move on. David Liebman wrote with an antidote. Here's his message:

ok--it's a cliche now that "they"(meaning the kids) get better earlier-check this out--he's already doing classical stuff since he was a babe--jazz for two years--Ravi (Coltrane) turned me on to him before I went to Israel a few weeks ago

13 yr old from Tel Aviv in a club there--just jamming

what's next, out of the womb burning or what?

The 13-year-old's name is Gadi Lehavi. Now you know about as much about him as I do, except for how he plays "Autumn Leaves" with Dave Liebman. Here they are, less than a month ago.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.--Friedrich Nietzsche

It is all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.--George Bernard Shaw

For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!--Robert Louis Stevenson

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible -- and achieve it, generation after generation.--Pearl S. Buck

Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances.--Frank Lloyd Wright

I'll tell 'ya how to stay young: Hang around with older people.--Bob Hope

What three administrations in the White House have refused to do, the people have done. They have recognized Willis Conover, the Voice of America broadcaster who may have been America's greatest cultural diplomat of the Cold War. He now has his own Facebook page, The Willis Conover Club. Will that lead to his getting a long overdue posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom? Possibly not, but his page, up only a day or two, is rapidly accumulating fans. One of them typifies the many musicians who huddled around their shortwave radios behind the Iron Curtain and were inspired by the jazz that Conover sent around the world during some of the most perilous decades of the 20th century. This is his message on the Conover Facebook page.

Dear everybody, Please join the Willis Conover Club, He had done for Jazz as much as Art Blakey, Duke Ellington, Horace Silver, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie etc..... Valery Ponomarev

Ponomarev went on to migrate to the United States from the Soviet Union, play trumpet with Art Blakey and become an international jazz artist whose career continues. For background about Willis and a personal Rifftides recollection, go here. To read the many other items about Conover in this blog, go to the archives, click on "edit," then "find" and enter "Conover" in the search box.

Politicians and bureaucrats have downgraded the VOA to a remnant of its former power to objectively inform the world about the United States. Much of what Conover accomplished lingers in the good will he created toward his country with the music and dispassionate commmentary he disseminated for years by way of his Music USA program. In these daunting times, with the US so in need of good will, perhaps a swell of recognition from the bottom up will persuade the administration in Washington that cultural diplomacy is a potent tool.

If you are a Facebook member, enter Willis Conover in the Facebook search box. If you are not, you can go here to sign up.

Sad news from London that Johnny Dankworth --Sir John Dankworth-- has died at 82. The alto saxophonist, composer and band leader and his wife, the singer Cleo Laine, have been pillars of jazz in England since the early 1950s. To read the BBC's announcement of his death, go here.

Browsing YouTube, I came across what must be among the rarest pieces of jazz film, a sequence of Woody Herman's Second Herd, the celebrated Four Brothers band. We hear Herman's vocal and a bit of Stan Getz's tenor saxophone on "Caldonia," then most of "Northwest Passage," both pieces holdovers from the First Herd destined to be staples in the Herman book for the rest of his life. Herman, Getz and Shorty Rogers play the trio section of "Northwest Passage," then there's a succession of four-bar solos by a guitarist, Getz, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Serge Chaloff, a trombonist and Herman.

The guitarist looks like Jimmy Raney, who was with the band from January to September of 1948. My guess is that the trombone soloist is Ollie Wilson. The alto saxophonist, who does not solo, is Sam Marowitz. Don Lamond is on drums. The pianist is most likely Fred Otis. I hope that knowledgable Rifftides readers can identify the bassist and confirm the identity of the pianist and the trombonist. Here's one of the greatest of all big bands:

Did I mention that it ends without ending? We take what we can get.

Rifftides Washington, DC, correspondent John Birchard has rediscovered pianist Mike Wofford and filed this appreciation:

I've been listening lately to Mike Wofford. I first heard his work on an Epic LP titled Strawberry Wine back in the early 60's and was impressed, especially with a couple of his originals, "Strawberry Wine" and "Three For All." In '67, he did another trio LP, Sure Thing, on Discovery, produced by Albert Marx, that I still have on my LP shelf. In '76, during the brief Scott Joplin revival associated with the movie "The Sting", Bob Thiele produced Scott Joplin Interpretations '76, a Joplin collection by Wofford, Chuck Domanico and Shelly Manne. That album's "A Real Slow Drag" comes highly recommended.

Time passed and I largely forgot about Wofford until I happened to see a CD by him recorded at San Diego's Athenaeum. I listened to it and was immediately a fan all over again. You're probably familiar with it, but he's accompanied by Peter Washington and Victor Lewis - and all three came to play. I love Wofford's version of "My Old Flame", as well as "Take the Coltrane", "Dex-Mex" and Conte Candoli's "Macedonia."

Last week, wanting to hear more Wofford, I bought Holly Hofmann's CD Minor Miracle, which also has Washington and Lewis on bass and drums. A little flute goes a long way with me, but Wofford's work makes the waits worthwhile. He is another of those musicians who have worked with many major figures, absorbed their influences and grown, and whose talent far exceeds their fame. I hope you agree.
-- John Birchard

Shank calls Wofford a closet genius, but the pianist hardly keeps his talent under wraps. It is true that his visibility is in low ratio to his ability and the admiration of his peers. He left Los Angeles in the seventies, returned to San Diego and got a degree in philosophy at San Diego State University, but he never stopped working in music. He was Sarah Vaughan's accompanist for two years and Ella Fitzgerald's for four, putting him in a distinguished piano elite that includes Jimmy Rowles, Lou Levy and Tommy Flanagan.

Like virtually every jazz pianist of his generation, Wofford was heavily influenced by Bill Evans, a fact of which Shank took note in discussing Wofford's composition "Bill's Vane":

"Wofford was a Bill Evans fan," Shank says, "and for that reason the record was difficult for him. It's hard for piano players influenced by Bill to respect that period of their lives and not be imitators. He didn't want to revert to his Bill Evans period. He wanted to be Mike Wofford, but here he is playing this material he had spent all that time with 20 years before."

Wofford says, "I think this was some of my best playing."

It was. He didn't imitate Evans and doesn't imitate anyone else. He's been Mike Wofford for a long time.

For a selection of available Wofford CDs, go here.

In the clip below, we catch Wofford and Holly Hofmann dueting at home. The camera operator has trouble finding Wofford during much of his solo, but the audio quality is excellent.

For an extended example of why singers cherish Wofford as an accompanist, you'll find him in this video with the late bassist Andy Simpkins and drummer Harold Jones backing Sarah Vaughan at the 1984 Monterey Jazz Festival. YouTube has prohibited bloggers from embedding the Vaughan Monterey clips, but the site has additional videos of Vaughan's performance with the Wofford trio.

Daedalus Books and Music is a company that sells remaindered or overstocked books and recordings. It is the beneficiary of what we might conservatively call a state of flux in the fields of book publishing and recorded music. Daedalus and similar overstock specialists gather the fruits of catalogs thinned or, in some cases, decimated by publishers and record companies and sell them at reduced prices. The Winter 2010 Daedalus catalog includes 33 pages of cutout jazz, blues and rock CDs. All but a handful of the albums are on labels owned by Concord Music. In 2004, Concord bought the company that expanded from the little Fantasy label founded more than half a century ago in San Francisco by Max and Sol Weiss. Fantasy, Inc. already had under its umbrella the Fantasy, Riverside, Prestige, Pablo, Stax and Specialty labels, among others. Concord added its own catalog and acquired Telarc jazz and classics, to bring the total of labels under its ownership to 28, including subdivisions such as Original Jazz Classics and Concord Picante.

The cover of the catalog highlights these albums:

• Charlie Byrd's Homage to Jobim
• The Red Garland Quintet: Soul Junction
• Coleman Hawkins All Stars: Swingville
• Abbey Lincoln: Abbey Is Blue
• Sonny Rollins: Worktime
• Sylvia Syms: For Once In My Life
• The Dirty Dozen Brass Band: What's Going On
• The Riverside Folklore Series

Like most of the 225 albums Daedalus offers on those 33 pages, each of the CDs on that list is on a label of the Concord empire, except for the Dirty Dozen, which is on Shout Factory. A survey of the Concord catalog shows that many of the albums are still available from Concord as CDs, others only as MP3 downloads. Some have disappeared entirely from the Concord lists. Among the missing are precious items like Jimmy Heath's Swamp Seed and Cal Tjader Plays Harold Arlen & West Side Story, with its gorgeous Clare Fischer orchestral arrangements. Concord offers Sylvia Syms's For Once In My Life solely as a download. In fairness, I should emphasize that I had time only for a survey. You are free to go here and here and spend the hours (or days) it would take to do an item-by-item comparison of the Daedalus offerings with Concord's. Surely, Concord's web site must be a contender for the championship of extensive, exhaustive and challenging sites.

What's the point? Not to make a case against what appears to be the digital era's unstoppable dismantling of the recording industry as we have known it; I'll leave it to others to sweep back the tide. Not to bring business to Daedalus, which seems to be doing fine on its own. Not to warn Concord to be careful lest it fall of its own weight. The point is simply to alert Rifftides readers who may have been putting off acquiring valuable recordings in the belief that they will be available forever, or even later this year. This might be a good time to get those CDs, whatever the source.

I hope that the Library of Congress or the Institute of Jazz Studies is archiving the Concord catalog. Many of the recordings in it are vital documents of American culture. It would be a shame for them not to be preserved.

GOING

To repeat: I have no intention of Rifftides becoming an obituary service, but as James Moody says his grandmother told him, "Folks is dyin' what ain't never died before," and some passings demand to be observed.

John Norris died yesterday in Toronto at the age of 76. He was the founder of the Canadian jazz magazine Coda, and of Sackville Records. Norris was a benevolent and resolutely independent spirit in music north of the border. He steadfastly resisted technological demands of not only the 21st century but also many of the 20th. To the frequent frustration of his correspondents, he eschewed both computers and fax machines, but he somehow managed to keep up with music and produce valuable recordings. His roster of Sackville artists was varied. It included Ed Bickert, Don Thompson, Benny Carter, Terry Clarke, Julius Hemphill, Ben Webster, Dick Wellstood, Archie Shepp, Ralph Sutton, Jay McShann, Ronnie Matthews, Geoff Keezer and Junior Mance, to name a very few. According to longtime Toronto broacaster Ted O'Reilly, Norris's wife Sandy will schedule a memorial service. For more about John Norris, click here.

COMING

Thanks to Tony Emmerson's blog Prague Jazz, I learned of a young band called the Infinite Quintet. Based on their videos, it seems that they are nurturing the modern jazz legacy established by such predecessors as Karel Velebný, George Mraz, Emil Viklický and Karel Růžička.

The band is Petr Kalfus, alto and soprano saxophones; Miroslav Hloucal, fluegelhorn; Viliam Beres; piano; Petr Dvorsky, bass; and Martin Novak, drums. Here they are in a video from Czech television.

For other videos of the Infinite Quintet, go here.

The pianist and singer Joyce Collins died recently in Los Angeles following a long illness. She was 79. Highly respected in jazz circles, Collins played with a sensitive touch and subtle use of chords. Her singing was an outgrowth of those values, with attention to interpretation of the meaning of songs and, as Marian McPartland put it, "...deep feeling, a way of lingering over certain phrases, telling her story in a very poignant way." Collins's recorded debut as a leader had Ray Brown on bass and Frank Butler on drums. Earlier, she worked with Bob Cooper and Oscar Pettiford, among others, later toured and recorded as a pianist and vocalist with singer Bill Henderson and played with Benny Carter. Collins's following included many musicians who sought out her gigs, which became increasingly rare in recent years as she depended increasingly on teaching for a living. Most of the recordings under her own name and with Henderson have become collectors items going for elevated prices on Amazon or as bargain LPs on eBay, but one of her best, Sweet Madness, with bassist Andy Simpkins and drummer Ralph Penland, is still in print.

Collins was born in Nevada and went to college in northern California, but not for long, for a reason I explain in Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.

...Joyce Collins, like Desmond, was a musician not majoring in music. Dave Brubeck heard her in 1947 playing in a bar in Stockton, where she was a student at Stockton Junior College. He thought she was too good a musician for Stockton J.C. and recommended that she move to San Francisco and study with his piano teacher, Fred Saatman.

"I don't know why," she said, "since I didn't know who he was, but I took his advice. I went to San Francisco State, enrolled as a liberal arts major, called up Fred Saatman and started with him."

She found herself in two classes with Paul Desmond, one on Shakespeare, another on the American novel.

"I'd go plugging along, never missed a class, studied hard. Lucky to get a C. He rarely came to class. He'd breeze in, always looking sleepy. Literarily brilliant, but sleepy. And of course he got A's. I was so shy and so in awe of him, I was tongue-tied. It was hard for me to make conversation, but I always used to say to him, 'We're the hare and the tortoise.' He was so witty. He was talking to a girl and I kind of overheard him, and he said, 'There's a vas deferens between us.' I thought it was the wittiest thing I'd ever heard. It went around. People quoted that."

For more about Joyce Collins, including a rare piece of video, see Bill Reed's blog, The People vs. Dr. Chilledair.