Archives for November 2005

Bill Crow, the stalwart bassist and indispensable jazz anecdotist, comments on the Rifftides posting about the separation of reporting from advertising.

I’m glad you brought up the news/advertising issue in newspapers. And it isn’t just the advertisers…it’s the editors. I rely on The New York Times for a lot of the information I want, but I’m afraid it isn’t the paper it once was. There seems to be a new editorial policy to make the front page more entertaining. There are hardly any straight news stories any more. Everything is written with a byline, and with a personal slant. It bugs me to have to wade through three paragraphs of cute writing in a news story before I can find out what happened.

Every day or so, the Times notes in its Corrections department a mistake that was made “due to an editing error.” They’ve got to find this editor and stop him before he edits again!

The piece about Randolph Scott brought a comment from Frank McGrath in New York.

About two years ago, I gave up on trying to find classic movies at my local Blockbuster video store, and I started a subscription to Netflix. After reading your Rifftides piece on Randolph Scott, I went to Netflix.com and found that about two dozen of his movies are available, including Seven Men from Now. I’m pretty happy with Netflix, especially never having to pay a late fee.

Hmmm. I may try it. Thanks for the tip

Joshua Breakstone, the melodically inspired guitarist, writes, also from New York:

Thanks for the link to Terry Teachout’s article on Randolph Scott. As great as the lines you quoted in your piece are, it’s genius- no doubt- to come up with an observation on the order of “The dashing young leading man of the Thirties now looked as though he’d been carved from a stump, and every word he spoke reeked of disillusion.” It’s brilliant, it’s illuminating and heart wrenching at the same time, it’s got time, cadence, rhythm, what a line!

I feel the hot breath of a deadline on my neck. For a day or two, posting may have to take a back seat to necessity. But check in tomorrow. You never know, I may have a burst of speed and be able to feed Rifftides a little something. In the meantime, be sure to visit the fine artsjournal.com blogger colleagues (blogeauges?) in the right-hand column.

“…on Jazz And Other Matters,” it says up there on the masthead, or whatever a masthead is called in blogese. You may have noticed that the other matters occasionally include journalism. News is where I came from, and my conviction is as strong as ever that a free flow of information through the news is essential to the survival of the democracy. The flow can be impeded as easily—perhaps more easily—from inside news organizations than from outside.
Increasing fiscal pressures on newspapers and traditional broadcast journalism companies are forcing them to look for ways to increase revenue in order to survive. Deep staff cuts are a cost-cutting method at nearly all major newspapers, including the Boston Globe, the Knight-Ridder papers, the papers of the Tribune Company and at The New York Times, which is about to make a big reduction in manpower.
Another way to increase revenue and profitability to stockholders is to make the newspaper more attractive to advertisers. It must be tempting, if you own a newspaper, to break down the traditional separation between the news side of the paper and the advertising department. There are plenty of advertisers eager for credibility they think will come from a more direct connection with news content, and there are plenty of good reasons why a breakdown of separation is a bad idea for a news organization.
In a recent column, Byron Calame of The New York Times wrote about why it’s a bad idea. Calame retired after years as the number-two man on the news side at The Wall Street Journal and contracted with The Times to be its ombudsman—the paper’s independent in-house monitor and critic of news practice. Here is some of what he wrote:

Why is the line between news and advertising so important? I hold to the traditional view, that readers trust a paper more when there’s a clear separation. Advertisers are attracted to readers who trust what’s in the news columns. And the resulting revenue enables the newspaper to keep providing high-quality journalism.

Advertising, of course, is the major source of revenue for newspapers. Although The Times doesn’t break out the numbers, advertising appears to account for about twice as much revenue as circulation does.

The sky isn’t falling at The Times. But I see a few worrisome indications that advertisers are being allowed to tap into the credibility of the news columns in ways that slip over the line.

To read Barney Calame’s entire column, click here. His warning is important for The New York Times and for the print and broadcast news business at large. It is important for all citizens, regardless of whether they are disenchanted with the performance of news organizations. If you have thoughts about it one way or the other, please share them with your fellow Rifftides readers. You will find the e-mail address in the right-hand column.
If you wonder why a jazz guy is addressing an issue like this one, see “About Rifftides” at the top of the right column.

Well, as long as we’re on other matters, how about Randolph Scott? Video stores, at least the ones where I live, do not have his movies for rent. There’s no theater within 800 miles of here that’s likely to run one, let alone mount a Randolph Scott film festival. I got hooked on his laconic, righteous cowboy character years ago, and I miss him.
It came as no surprise to learn that artsjournal.com colleague Terry Teachout also appreciates Scott. After reading the long piece about Scott that Terry wrote for American Cowboy magazine, I searched the net for DVDs of Scott pictures and found that a few are available, including the remarkable Seven Men From Now. In his Westerns, Scott had flint in his visage, his convictions and his resolve. His films are simple, short and satisfying. Here’s a paragraph from Terry’s article about Scott.

He always played the same character, a lanky, dryly amusing cowboy with a Virginia accent who spoke only when spoken to and shot only when shot at, and you could take it for granted that he’d do the right thing in any given situation. If he’d been younger and prettier, he would have been too good to be true, but Scott was no dresser’s dummy: he had a thin-lipped mouth and a hawk-like profile, and wasn’t afraid to act his age on screen. Nobody in Hollywood, not even John Wayne, looked more believable in a Stetson.

For the whole thing, click here. It’s a terrific read.

Artsjournal.com Commander-in-Chief Doug McClennan posted a lead to a BBC Radio report on the likelihood of New Orleans musicians returning home to a city ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. It’s another good reason to regularly check the AJA home page.
The Beeb’s Stephen Evans has two reports, one in print, one a superb broadcast documentary. You needn’t agree with his editorial conclusion that Wynton Marsalis is “the world’s greatest trumpeter – classical or jazz” to admire the thoroughness of his reporting on the background of New Orleans music and its perilous future. But you’re likely to love hearing Ellis Marsalis, Wynton’s dad, propound his theory that if the English and not the French had ended up with New Orleans, there would be no jazz. To read and hear Evans’s reports, click here.

Eric Felten, trombonist, singer, band leader and occasional Rifftides correspondent, is a talented free lance writer. Now and then he does a column—“How’s Your Drink?”—for the weekend Wall Street Journal. This weekend, his topic is single malt scotches. In our affluent culture, single malts have become a passion of people who, a few years ago, might have been coveting rare cigars. Felten reports that some single malts sell for more than $50,000 a bottle.

Driving these prices are extremely limited quantities. The Dalmore 62 was created in 2002 when the distillery combined what it had from four old casks — 1868, 1878, 1926 and 1939 — yielding just enough whiskey to fill 12 bottles. Most of the rare single-malt scotches are bottled from individual casks, which, depending on the type, hold from 200 to 500 liters when filled. But when old casks are finally tapped, they give up far less than that. Evaporation steals between 1% and 2% of the whiskey every year — the “angels’ share,” as it is called.

I wish that I could link you to the column, but the Journal restricts its online content to electronic edition subscribers. The best alternative is to pick up a print copy of the weekend edition published today.
The Personal Journal section also includes a short list of Diana Krall’s favorite Christmas recordings. Her own new CD would be on my short list, if for no other reason than her moving treatment of Irving Berlin’s “Count Your Blessings.” The Christmas album is a lovely way for Krall to bounce back after the boredom of her excursion into pop territory, The Girl In The Other Room.

If Paul Desmond had lived, he would be eighty-one years old today. His last birthday, in 1977, fell on Thanksgiving. For the occasion, Devra Hall cooked a turkey dinner for Desmond and her parents, Jim and Jane. Here’s the end of the story of that visit, told by Devra in Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.

“It was a very quiet dinner. Paul was not feeling well, but he was clearly happy not to be home alone. He didn’t have to say a word around my folks. They talked a blue streak, usually, but he was just very comfortable. My fondest recollection is that I made him dinner on his last birthday.”

The senior Halls and Desmond went back to Jim and Jane’s apartment when they left Devra’s, and on the way stopped at the Village Vanguard. Thelonious Monk was performing there. Between sets, they all gathered in the Vanguard’s kitchen, the closest thing the club has to a Green Room.

“It was the most coherent conversation I ever had with Thelonious,” Hall said, “in the kitchen with Paul and me and Thelonious. I had a sort of nodding acquaintance with Monk, but he and Paul really connected. I’m not even sure what they talked about, just standing around in that kitchen, going through old memories and things. It was nice.”

This is an important American national holiday. To those of the U.S. persuasion, the Rifftides staff sends wishes for a happy Thanksgiving. To readers around the world: we are grateful for your interest and attendance.

The trumpet is an extremely difficult instrument. It feels and reacts differently to the player each and every day—Allen Vizzutti

Some days you get up and put the horn to your chops and it sounds
pretty good and you win. Some days you try and nothing works and the
horn wins. This goes on and on and then you die and the horn wins—Dizzy Gillespie

You pick up the horn, put it to your chops and the son of a bitch says: Screw You—Roy Eldridge

I have never seen a country where they worry so much about their chops as they do in America—Maurice Andre

One of the joys of listening to The Bill Holman Band the past decade or so has been the opening minute of “No Joy In Mudville.” Over an insistent one-bar riff figure repeated by the saxophones, Bob Enevoldsen plays a valve trombone solo of pure exuberance. It is the first track in Holman’s CD A View From The Side. It was, almost invariably, the first piece he called when the band performed. I write “was” because the bad news is that Enevoldsen died last Saturday. In a palpable sense, he was central to the spirit of that great band, as he was to jazz on the west coast for more than half a century.
In Leonard Feather’s and Ira Gitler’s Biographical Encylopedia of Jazz, his entry begins,

ENEVOLDSEN, BOB (ROBERT MARTIN), v-tbn., tbn, bs, bari horn, tr sax, etc. b Billings, MT, 9/11/20

That “etc.” covers arranging. Enevoldsen was a superb arranger and ochestrator and, when the occasion arose, an effective and congenial leader. He was best known for his valve trombone and in greatest demand on that horn, but he was also a tenor saxophonist with original ideas and a fetching graininess in his tone. He shines on both horns in his own group and with Harry Babasin’s quintet in Jazz In Hollywood, a CD reissue of 1954 recordings from the Nocturne label. In the fifties when his trombone chops went temporarily into decline, Enevoldsen switched to bass and continued to make a living. There’s a bit of his bass playing on the Babasin recordings.
Much of his income came from work in Los Angeles television and movie studios, which offered economic survival for many top-flight jazz artists. But his heart was in jazz, and he left a fifty-year trail of memorable performances and recordings with Holman, Gerry Mulligan, Shelly Manne, Shorty Rogers, Bob Florence, Bob Crosby, Tex Beneke, Mel Tormé, the Lighthouse All-Stars, Henry Mancini and Terry Gibbs, to name a few in the wide range of musicians who insisted on his services.
A burly man, after he worked up a crop of facial hair and took on some age he came to resemble St. Nicholas with a neatly trimmed beard. Enevoldsen was hampered the past several years by the circulation problems that led to his death, but he kept working. His daughter drove him to rehearsals and gigs and helped him onto the bandstand. Bill Holman told me yesterday that Enevoldsen’s physical problems disappeared once the band started playing. “When it was time for him to solo,” Holman said, “the years fell away.”
Bob Enevoldsen: never a star, never a household name, always a pleasure to hear; gone at eighty-five.

Two weeks ago, Rifftides examined one aspect of the film Good Night, and Good Luck, which tells the story of Edward R. Murrow’s pursuit of the demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy. The entry included this:

CBS head William S. Paley’s demotion of Murrow established the primacy of network profit over news integrity. It set up conditions for the MBA mentality that meshed with technology and the rise of cable networks to produce the broadcast and cable news we have today in which, with few exceptions, the line between information and entertainment has been blurred beyond distinction.

To read the whole thing, go here.
Three days before my posting, in her invaluable Serious Popcorn, fellow artsjournal.com blogger Martha Bayles recognized the point about commerce versus journalistic independence. As one would expect of a film critic with finely tuned political antennae, her posting ranges more widely through the film’s messages. She praises director George Clooney for not taking a direct route along the road of what she calls “righteous Hollywood anti-communism.”

No, Clooney went for the slightly less burned-over district of TV news in its early fluid state, before it hardened into the monstrous shape we know and love today. Not surprisingly, the red meat here is anti-anti-communism – or if you prefer, red-baiter-baiting, performed at the highest level of photogenic integrity. The film neither stresses nor denies the fact that Murrow came late to this cause. By the time his program, “See It Now,” jumped on the anti-McCarthy bandwagon, it was already loaded with radio commentators, print journalists and editorialists, congressmen and senators from both parties, military brass, and the Eisenhower White House.

But no matter. If this movie achieves anything beyond flogging the well pulped carcass of McCarthy, that achievement will be its portrayal of how unfree TV was during its so-called Golden Age.

Bayles refers to and agrees with the warning by Murrow’s contemporary, the critic Gilbert Seldes, that television’s power to persuade is neutral, as potentially dangerous in the hands of bad guys as it can be beneficial in the hands of good ones like Murrow. Her conclusion that the film “totally shuts out the concerns that made McCarthy’s witch hunt possible” assumes that moviegoers who were alive then have short memories and that those who weren’t are uneducated about American history. That may be at least half right. In any case, her piece stimulates thought about the uses of journalism, television and political power. To read all of Bayles’s review of Good Night And Good Luck, go to Serious Popcorn.

A check of tracking information discloses that Rifftides has readers today in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Bermuda, Russia, Canada, Sweden, New Zealand and all parts of the United States including Lampasas, Texas; Aliso Viejo, California; and Lithonia, Georgia.
Welcome. Come back soon. Tell your friends.

What constitutes a jazz standard? Purists may contend that only an original composition by a jazz musician qualifies—“Confirmation,” “Doxy,” “Sail Away,” “Seven Come Eleven,” as examples. Working musicians and fake books say otherwise; a jazz standard is a song, adaptable to improvisation, that has worked its way into the general repertoire. An entire website is devoted to that proposition.
JazzStandards.com was put together by jazz aficionados and musicians who saw the need for a centralized source of information about the tunes most often played in jazz. The site ranks jazz standards from 1 to 1000 in order of importance and frequency of performance. It has documentation and links for the first hundred songs. Number one, hardly a surprise, is “Body and Soul.” The information about it and the other top 100 runs from basic…

Because of its complex chord progressions, “Body and Soul” remains a favorite of jazz musicians. The unusual changes in key and tempo are also highly attractive and provide a large degree of improvisational freedom.

to technical…

A very motivic melody, thus easily remembered. Noteworthy is the use of the penultimate “blue note” (flatted third) at the end of “A,” – easily missed by the untrained or novice performer. The harmonic progression seems to be controlled by the movement of the bass line, descending and ascending by step (Ebm –Bb7/D – Ebm7/Db – Ab/C – Db – Ab9/Eb – Db/F –EËš7 – Ebm – Ebm7/Db – Cm7(b5)) before returning to the tonic via the circle of fifths, using parallel minor substitutions.

Each song’s profile includes its history, recommended recordings, links to CD samples, links to books about the songs and their composers and, in some cases, musicians’ comments on the pieces.

In the forty years I’ve played “’Round Midnight,” I’ve done so to my satisfaction perhaps a dozen times at most. It’s one of the hardest for me in that, to play it really correctly, you can’t use those “fake book” changes; you have to use the Monk changes or it sounds silly (to me). —Jessica Williams

JazzStandards.com needs musicians’ comments on more of the listed songs, and it cries for something it probably can’t have—lyrics. It would be daunting and expensive to get clearances for publication of words to the majority of songs that are in copyright. Those, however, are minor deficiencies in a website whose complex facets are wrapped into a design that’s easy to navigate. JazzStandards.com is a resource for musicians and researchers, and rewarding for anyone interested in song. The site was founded by Jeremy Wilson and is edited by Sandra Burlingame, who also writes much of it.

Don’t be a musician under any circumstances unless you can bring yourself to be nothing else—Paul Desmond

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music—Albert Einstein

The week’s eeriest internet experience: being mesmerized by the masthead picture box at the top of Jazz Improv magazine’s home page as a dozen great musicians appear and dissolve.
While you’re there, don’t miss the interview with guitarist Russell Malone. It includes his story of sitting in, as a twenty-two-year-old novice, with the brilliant, irascible, organist Jimmy Smith and making a shambles of “Laura.”

So I was going to leave, but I said, “Well, you know, I should, at least, go up to the old man and thank him for letting me sit in with him.” So I walked up to the bar and I tapped him on the shoulder. He looked around at me and before I could get the next sentence out of my mouth, he got in my face and poked his finger in my chest, like this, and he said, “Let me tell you something. All of these guys that you’re trying to play like”—and he named Pat Martino, Wes Montgomery, George Benson, Kenny Burrell, this long list of guitar players—“all those guys that you’re trying to play like, I taught them too.” And he said, “So don’t ever get on my bandstand with that bullshit again.” So I said, “Oh my god, man!” So I hung around. At around 11:45, he finished his drink, and he motioned for me to come with him. He said, “Bring your guitar. Come with me.”

The story has a happy ending.

I first heard the tenor saxophonist Tommy Smith on opening night of the Portland Jazz Festival earlier this year. Smith was a commanding figure in several areas of the festival, notably so in a guest turn with one of his favorite collaborators. I mentioned that appearance in a Jazz Times review of the event.

Vibraharpist Joe Locke’s Four Walls of Freedom quartet included Tommy Smith, Scotland’s impressive contribution to the world’s post-Coltrane tenor sax population. Performing in kilts, Smith matched the high-tension energy and stop-on-a-dime tempo and mood shifts of Locke, bassist Ed Howard and drummer Gary Novak.

To read the entire review, go here.
Smith is something of a Scottish cultural treasure. His precocious talent became known in Edinburgh when he was a teenager in the mid-1980s. A public fund drive raised money to send him to the US and the Berklee School of Music in Boston. At eighteen, he was playing with Gary Burton. Long since back home and active as a composer, educator, and nurturer and developer of young talent, he devotes much of his time and considerable energy to giving back to his country.
Smith shares his knowledge with radio listeners on BBC Scotland. In his latest series, he examines jazz standards in a well-produced, entertaining, thirty-minute program called Jazzlines. Smith’s attentions in the current installment are on “A Night in Tunisia.” Internet listeners can hear it in streaming audio by going here. The program includes various recordings of the piece and a live duo performance by Smith and pianist Brian Kellock. Smith’s inspired tenor sax personalization of Charlie Parker’s famous alto break is worth considerably more than the price of admission.

This piece ultimately concerns Ben Webster, but it requires setup. The setup has to do with books.

The book discussion group to which I belong operates a bit unconventionally. We don’t use outlines or lesson plans. There is no discussion leader. We are a sort of freewheeling literary cooperative. Sometimes, the discussion goes far afield from the book at hand, although we usually manage to get back to it. We laugh a lot. We live in one of the great wine producing regions of the world, so we drink wine—moderately, of course—as we discuss the book at hand. There are eight of us, four men, four women, none married to one of the others. We alternate meeting at one another’s houses. The host provides the wine, coffee and dessert. Ordinarily, we select a slate of six or eight books for the coming year. Last year, this was the list:

The Conservationist: Nadine Gordimer
The Moviegoer: Walker Percy
Light in August: William Faulkner
My Name is Red: Orhan Pamuk
The Canterbury Tales: Geoffrey Chaucer
Robinson Crusoe: Daniel Defoe
Kim: Rudyard Kipling/Candide: Voltaire (a twofer)
Wise Blood: Flannery O’Connor

This time around, we are devoting an entire year to James Joyce’s Ulysses. That’s only fair; it took Joyce nine years to write it. Last night, in addition to discussing the book, we watched an installment of the 1967 Irish film of Ulysses starring Milo O’Shea as Leopold Bloom. Then, we had coffee and dessert. As we ate, I noticed that the host had on a table next to my chair a copy of the CD box set of Duke Ellington at Fargo, 1940. He saw me staring at it as lustfully as Blazes Boylan contemplating Molly Bloom and asked if there was something I’d like to hear.
“Of course,” I said, “Ben Webster playing ‘Star Dust,’” He put it on.

“My God,” one of the women said about halfway through, “It’s as if he doesn’t have a horn, as if he’s just breathing the music.”

A good deal has been written about that imperishable tenor saxophone solo, but I can’t imagine a finer description of it. Joyce couldn’t have put it better.