It’s amazing; YouTube can cosponsor presidential debates and still find time to put new music on the internet. In the past few days, up popped two clips of vibraharpist Charlie Shoemake playing and his wife Sandi singing with the Bill Holman Orchestra.
Charlie Shoemake Bill Holman Sandi Shoemake
YouTube provides no information beyond the superimposed titles, so the Rifftides staff swung (heh-heh) into research mode. The video was taken in Los Angeles during the making of Charlie Shoemake’s 1991 CD, Strollin’, a fine entry in the discographies of the Shoemakes and Holman. Stan Levey, the late drummer turned photographer, produced and directed a videotape at a rehearsal for the recording session. It is the source of the YouTube clips. To see and hear the clips, go here and here. The tenor saxophone soloist on “I’ll Never Stop Loving You” is Pete Christlieb.
Alerting me to the clips, Charlie Shoemake reminded me that I wrote the album notes for Strollin’. I looked them up and, as Paul Desmond used to say, didn’t have to cough too often during the playback. Here is a paragraph about Shoemake the teacher.
Shoemake goes a long way toward putting to rest the popular notion that jazz can be learned but not taught. When he came off the road in 1973 after six years with George Shearing, he settled down in Los Angeles to teach. For hundreds of musicians, he has solved the puzzles of improvisation. His system includes study of the solos of, among others, Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro and Hank Mobley. These were musicians for whom chords comprised territory to be won through exploration. Studying their solos does not mean memorizing notes in the light of the harmonic possibilities that led to their choice. It means learning to apply that knowledge at the speed of thought so that the student can make choices of notes and execute them with coherence on his instrument in improvised performance, often at rapid tempos while observing a time feeling that grows out of a communal pulse.
What’s more, he wrote a book about it.
On the CD and in the YouTube clips, Charlie Shoemake demonstrates that, sometimes, those who teach, can. And, as it says in those Strollin’ liner notes, Sandi Shoemake displays “her control, her intonation and the meaning she imparts to lyrics.” Holman reminds us, if a reminder is needed, that he is the eminence grise of modern arrangers, with a magnificent band that keeps helping him prove it. In addition to Christlieb, the 1991 version of the Holman band was loaded with stars including Lanny Morgan, Jeff Hamilton, Andy Martin, Bob Enevoldsen, Bob Summers and Carl Saunders.