Archives for March 15, 2009

You may recall the Rifftides tip a year ago about a Michel Petrucciani documentary DVD. The film followed the pianist around the world and culminated in a memorable concert shortly before he died in 1999. If you didn’t know about Petrucciani before you saw the film, it is unlikely that you forgot him afterward.
In the current issue of The New Republic, David Hajdu does a fine job of placing Petrucciani in his time, assessing the importance of his music and tracing his refusal to let disability impede his art. Petrucianni’s osteogenesis imperfecta, the “glass bones” disease, stopped his growth at three feet and impaired his mobility. It never overcame his spirit. Here are excerpts from the early part of Hajdu’s piece.

I cannot think of a jazz pianist since Petrucciani who plays with such exuberance and unashamed joy. Marcus Roberts and Michel Camilo have greater technique; Bill Charlap and Eric Reed, better control; Fred Hersch has broader emotional range; Uri Caine is more adventurous. Their music provides a wealth of rewards–but not the simple pleasure of Michel Petrucciani’s. With the whole business of jazz so tentative today, you would think more musicians would express some of Petrucciani’s happiness to be alive.

Giddily free as an improviser, Petrucciani trusted his impulses. If he liked the sound of a note, he would drop a melody suddenly and just repeat that one note dozens of times. His music is enveloping: he lost himself in it, and it feels like a private place where strange things can safely ensue. Today, when so much jazz can sound cold and schematic, Petrucciani’s music reminds us of the eloquence of unchecked emotion.

Hajdu’s article, “The Keys to the Kingdom,” is on The New Republic‘s web site. To read the whole thing, click here.
Here is Petrucciani in Germany in 1993. YouTube identifies what he plays as “C-Jam Blues.” It is, except when it’s Monk’s “I Mean You.”

If you detect similarities between Petrucciani and the pianist in the next exhibit, don’t let it bother you.

I am adding to Other Places in the right column a link to Mule Walk And Jazz Talk, a web log posted from Madrid by Agustín Pérez. The legend Sr. Pérez erects below the name of his blog leaves no doubt en el que viene de, as they say in downtown Madrid.

Random thoughts, casual writings and specific research on early jazz styles. If you think there is no jazz before Coltrane, you may have come to the wrong place.

Mule Walk And Jazz Talk is bilingual and nicely organized. It is packed with treats, written and visual. Associated with a video clip of Dick Wellstood playing James P. Johnson’s “Caprice Rag,” for example, is this quote from Wellstood.

I would like to say, first, that I don’t like the term “stride” any more than I like the term “jazz”. When I was a kid the old-timers used to call stride piano “shout piano”, an agreeably expressive description, and when once I mentioned stride to Eubie Blake, he replied, “My God, what won’t they call ragtime next?” Terms, terms. Terms make music into a bundle of objects – a box of stride, a pound of Baroque -. [Donald] Lambert played music, not “stride”, just as Bach wrote music, not “Baroque”. Musicians make music, which critics later label, as if to fit it into so many jelly jars. Bastards.

To a three-part transcribed interview from 1952 with the stride (or shout) pianist Joe Turner, Sr. Pérez appends three video clips of Turner in action on French television in the 1960s. I am shamelessly appropriating one clip. But, then, Sr. Pérez appropriated all of them from Dailymotion. In this one, Turner plays his own “Cloud Fifteen,” charmingly, then James P.’s “Carolina Shout, too fast for complete coherency. Still, it is a rare opportunity to see a pianist who deserved wider fame and a plaque from the cigar industry.