Archives for June 21, 2005

The June 17 item about Bill Perkins elicited this response from Gordon Sapsed in the UK.

Thank you – and to Steve Voce for the original interview. The piece today about Bill Perkins has got me starting my day revisiting Perk Plays Prez – and the CD will follow into the car with me when I go out later. I had forgotten that it is Jan Lundgren on piano – and that Jack Sheldon vocal! Rifftides is already influencing my life ….

Tell your friends. We want all the visitors we can round up.
The superb vibraharpist, jazz theoretician and teacher Charlie Shoemake e-mailed this reflection on Perkins.

Bill Perkins was a wonderful musician but a bit of a mystery to me.I’ve always thought that there were two ways to improvise.One, completely by ear and, two, by ear based on knowledge of chord changes.If you were to transcribe any solos of Sonny Stitt, Hank Mobley, Dexter Gordon, Harold Land, Sonny Rollins, Tubby Hayes, Joe Henderson, (and many others coming from Charlie Parker’s concept) you would be able to easily ascertain the chord changes of the song from their melodic lines because that’s where they’re drawing them from. With other players like Zoot Sims, Art Pepper, Paul
Desmond, and Bill you couldn’t. In an earlier time think of the difference between Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw or Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins.
It’s not that one way is infinitely better (though I myself always tended toward more admiration for the harmonically knowledgeable guys), they’re just two different approaches. The mystery for me with Bill’s playing was that I always assumed that because of his style that he didn’t know anything about chord changes, but in speaking with the fine pianist Frank Stazzeri awhile back (Frank worked and recorded with Bill extensively) he said that wasn’t the case at all. He said that he too felt as I did at first but as he got to know and work with him more he realized that in actuality Bill knew EVERTHING about the changes of the songs he played.He just heard his melodic lines in a different way. This was really surprising to me because, as you mentioned in your piece, he started out coming from a Lester Young base and finished more in the style of Wayne Shorter (both of whom put very little stock on improvising off of specific chords). Straz also said that Bill’s playing (and personality as well) always had some hidden hint of mystery, which I certainly agree with.

Charlie and his wife, the fine singer Sandi Shoemake, left the wrangle that L.A. has become and moved up the coast to Cambria. They run a series of concerts at a restaurant called the Hamlet, with name players as guests. It has become a Central Coast attraction, I once wrote, second only to the Hearst Castle. Details here.

For the next few days, I’ll continue playing catch-up with CDs that accumulated, and may have reproduced, while I was working on Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond (See Doug’s Books on the right). John Bishop’s Origin and OA2 labels concentrate on jazz in the Pacific Northwest. That gives Origin a large pool of talented musicians from which to draw. The label issues so many CDs that it’s hard to keep up with them. The music ranges from mainstream to the near edge of the avant garde. The sampler Modern Jazz: A Collection of Seattle’s Finest Jazz offers an overview, but merely hints at the riches of the Origin catalog. Like many albums by Origin artists, the sampler consists exclusively of original compositions. However satisfying that approach may be to the artists’ egos and sense of integrity, and regardless of how many mechanical royalties they avoid paying to the Gershwin and Porter estates, it presents a challenge to listeners who subscribe to the Broadbent principle. As you may recall from yesterday, that principle involves pianist Alan Broadbent’s conviction that listeners need and appreciate familiar melodies and forms with which to orient themselves. Trombonist Michael Vlatkovich’s trio CD Queen Dynamo offers a double whammy—nine originals as points of departure for free playing. I wonder how many record store or internet browsers unfamiliar with Vlatkovich’s blowsy, often optimistic, music are likely to add it to their shopping carts based on track titles like “The Length of the Tail Doesn’t Really Matter But it Does Have to be Bushy.” The music is funny and cheerful, and Jonas Tauber is one hell of a bass player.
Notes on a few other Origin and OA2 CDs:
Marc Seales Band, A Time, A Place, A Journey. A professor of music at the University of Washington, Seales is one of the Northwest’s most popular jazz pianists. This set by his sextet, recorded at Tula’s night club, shows why. It tends toward Seales’s reflective aspect and includes a slow “Deep River” ending on a powerful tremolo that releases the tension of exhiliration beneath the spiritual’s surface.
Steve Korn, Points In Time. Korn is the drummer on Seales’s album. Seales is the pianist on Korn’s. Two saxophones with a rhythm section play originals that are gentle, modal, peaceful, suitable for meditation. The CD is interesting until, about half way through, a sameness sets in.
Randy Halberstadt’s Parallel Tracks has only pieces by others, among them Artie Shaw, Bronislaw Kaper, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Cole Porter and Frederic Chopin. Halberstadt wrote one of the best books on jazz improvisation, Metaphors For The Musician: Perspectives from a Jazz Pianist. Accompanied by bassist Jeff Johnson and drummer Gary Hobbs, he demonstrates with his refined touch, harmonic adventurism and humor that he knew what he was writing about.
Like Halberstadt, Johnson and Hobbs would be better known if they were based in New York. Johnson’s Near Earth is a successor to his Free CD of a few years ago and again presents the bassist in empathetic conjunction with the luminous saxophonist Hans Teuber and a drummer, in this case Tad Britton. The only standard tune is Johnny Mercer’s “Dream.” As in their originals, they take “Dream” out, but not so far out that they’re not near Earth.
Hobbs, who played in one of Stan Kenton’s last bands, is a thinking drummer whose arranging imagination is an important factor in his Of My Times. He blends horns and cello with each other and with conventional and unconventional rhythm section instruments for surprising effects, among them a sly funk version of “Oh, Suzanna,” langorous backdrops for Gretta Matassa’s vocal on “Besame Mucho” and the techno thrust of “Robot Love.” I would like to have heard fewer synthesizer features and rock derivatives and more of the lyricism of the title track, but Hobbs’s drumming is fascinating no matter what the context.
More tomorrow on items from the Origin storehouse

I think it’s about time to put to rest the matter of New York Times critic Ben Ratliff’s predicting the quality of a concert that hadn’t happened (Rifftides, June 15.) But not quite. The Portland, Oregon, writer Jack Berry offered us this thought:

The Ratliff flap is sad. But it’s not so much the need to be “edgy,” which some observers suggest is the Times‘ new obsession. Pop culture is all about the next thing. If it’s been done, it’s done. Jazz is classical music (for better and worse). Writers about classical music are supposed to check in and see what the primary performers are doing. And, in doing that, you can be “edgy.” It’s appropriate to drop music that has no shelf life and that’s where Ratliff should be working. Ah, when Mozart was pop, when jazz was pop….

Berry is writing a biography of the tenor saxophonist Jim Pepper.