Marc Myers’ JazzWax wraps up a four-part interview with Denny Zeitlin, packed with good questions, and answers that give insights into an intriguing man. For decades, Zeitlin has maintained parallel careers as a jazz pianist and a practicing psychiatrist. Myers asked him how empathy plays a role in both pursuits.
When I’m doing my most effective work as a musician playing with other musicians, I try to lose that positional sense of self so I can enter their musical world
and merge with what they’re doing. With a patient in my office, I do my most effective work when I’m able to enter their psychological life so deeply that I can really seem to feel what it is that he or she is feeling. Yet in both cases, there’s a part of me that is still available, that is able to pull back and observe the process that both of us are in.
To read all of the interview, go to JazzWax.com. For a piece I wrote about Zeitlin in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year, go here.
The nonagenarian pianist presented de Barros with every biographer’s hope, unrestricted access to his subject’s personal papers and nearly unrestricted access to her private thoughts. He made the most of it, turning exhaustive research and hundreds of hours of interviews into a true story with the sweep of a novel. From the early discovery of McPartland’s musical gift through her wartime service, her ecstatic and stormy marriage to Jimmy McPartland, her growth as a pianist, her deep affair with Joe Morello, and the radio show that made her a national figure, she has had a fascinating life. It makes a splendid read.
Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band had three fewer musicians than most big jazz outfits. Its size permitted precision, flexibility and subtlety, yet the band had the power of sprung steel. In this concert from a half century ago, the CJB is as fresh as yesterday. Arrangements by Mulligan, Bob Brookmeyer, Al Cohn and Johnny Mandel set standards to which big band writers still aspire. Bassist Buddy Clark and drummer Mel Lewis inspired Mulligan, Brookmeyer, Conte Candoli, Gene Quill and Zoot Sims to some of the best soloing of their careers. This beautifully produced issue of the complete concert is a basic repertoire item.
Zeitlin is showing up everywhere thanks to the complex Myers interview and attention paid thereafter, like right here–even on my sorta pop culture blog,
http://www.mrebks.blogspot.com, if you care to read a different take.