Not all of the reconstruction work to be done in New Orleans is a result of Katrina's damage. One of the city's jazz landmarks has been falling apart for decades. Now, it appears that Crescent City officialdom may be about to ride to the rescue of the Halfway House. It could be a long, slow process. To read Danny Monteverde's story in The Times-Picayune and see photos of the building in its heyday and in deterioriation, go here.
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Jazz.Com

I have not kept up with the doings at the valuable web site jazz.com now that its founder Ted Gioia has announced that he is leaving. My artsjournal.com colleague Howard Mandel, proprietor of Jazz Beyond Jazz, is looking into the matter. He has comments of his own and two lengthy responses from Alan Kurtz, who designed the jazz.com site. To see Howard's initial piece and his exchanges with Kurtz, go here.

Eddie Locke

Family and friends of Eddie Locke will celebrate the drummer's life Sunday evening, November 22, at St. Peter's Church, Lexington Avenue and 54th Street in New York City. Widely respected as a perfomer and a teacher, Locke died on September 7 at the age of 79. In his later years, he tended to be typecast in traditional bands because he deeply felt that kind of music and had a rich history with Red Allen, Dick Wellstood, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Warren Vache, Dick Sudhalter and many other exemplars of the genre. From Teddy Wilson, Roy Eldridge and Coleman Hawkins forward, he was in demand by players in all tributaries of the modern mainstream. Locke and pianists had a particular affinity. He could be found with his fellow Detroiters Barry Harris, Tommy Flanagan and Roland Hanna, and later with Bill Charlap, Mike LeDonne and Tardo Hammer, to list a few of the thoroughly modern keyboard artists with whom he played. In this clip, he is in a familiar latterday milieu, with Duke Heitger, trumpet; Antil Sarpilla clarinet; Bill Allred, trombone; Bernd Lhotsky, piano; and Nicki Parrott, bass. This was in January, 2009, at the Arbors Records Jazz Party in Clearwater, Florida.

Among the score or so of musicians expected to perform at Locke's memorial gathering are Charlap, Harris, LeDonne, Vache, Louis Hayes, Frank Wess, Ray Drummond and Richard Wyands. Pianist John Bunch will be music director, a.k.a. traffic cop.

Thanks for posting Dave and Rebecca's Fresh Air show which I have just finished listening to and would have missed but for you. Last week the TCM channel had a marathon of Mercer movies beginning in the late 30's and I had to sit through hours of nonsense just to see him perform. Worth its wait in gold, though.

Speaking of "P.S. I Love You": I learned it as a kid from Johnny Mathis (I think it was the flip side on a 45 of "Chances Are"). When I conduct for Diana she occasionally sings it as a solo feature and I never fail to choke up. The first time I heard her do it I could hardly conduct the next number from weeping uncontrollably. The way she sings it, It's the first time I really understood that the person writing has nothing in particular to say and that everything is said behind the words.

I'm feeling very sad about the loss of it all. I was born way after my time.

But how can any of this compare to the new song my 9 year old son is learning from his guitar teacher, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"?

The Fresh Air Mercer program is archived here.

We may presume that, whatever Ms. Gross has up her sleeve, Becky and Dave will accentuate the positive, among other things. I couldn't find a clip of Mercer singing that famous song of his, but that's all right because we can enjoy him with Bing Crosby in a recently unearthed television performance. It's not jazz, except in the sense that these guys were marinated in jazz from the 1920s on. But, hey, Mercer mentions Bix.

How could he leave out Woody Herman?

Admired for his harmonic knowledge and the subtlety of his touch, Katz was a favorite of the Modern Jazz Quartet's pianist and music director John Lewis, who arranged for his first recording contract. In his days as one of New York's busiest utility players, Katz worked with with Tony Scott, Roy Eldridge, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Kenny Dorham, and Carmen McRae, among many others. He came to the attention of a wide audience with the success of Benny Carter's Further Definitions, on which he was the pianist in Carter's spectacularly successful mixed marriage of swing and bop musicians. His collaborations with singer Helen Merrill, on the Milestone recordings The Feeling is Mutual and A Shade of Difference, fell out of print as vinyl albums, but Mosaic Records rescued them in a CD reissue. With Orrin Keepnews, Katz founded the short-lived but productive Milestone label.

For a comprehensive obitutary of Dick Katz, see Ben Ratliff's New York Times article. For further insights through an interview with Katz, go to this installment of Marc Myers' JazzWax. On its web site, WNYC-FM in New York has a video made last May of Katz reminiscing and playing with his contemporaries vibraharpist Teddy Charles, bassist Bill Crow and drummer Ron Free. The Rifftides staff thanks WNYC for permission to show it to you.

"Eternal Interlude," the title piece, is nearly 20 minutes of impressionism in which the sensation of floating is sustained through energy created by the contrast between long ensemble tones centered on flutes, and percussive effects of marimba, piano and drums. In this piece, the exquisite subtlety in Hollenbeck's writing is reminiscent of what the late Gary McFarland used to achieve with woodwinds. Much the same can be said of "The Cloud," which has the added elements of whistlers, a section of aphorisms spoken by Theo Bleckmann and Bleckmann's wordless vocalizing. "Perseverance" comes as close to traditional big band writing as we're likely to hear from Hollenbeck. The resemblance is mostly in contrapuntal lines between brass and reeds, a succession of rowsing, even rowdy, saxophone solos and a masterly drum solo.

In "Guarana," infectious Latin rhythms and minimalist repetition work hand in hand. "No Boat" is a two-minute tone poem, full-bodied but subdued. It has the effect of a closing prayer.

Back to work tomorrow. The plan is to do a bit of catching up, with brief reviews of additional recent, and maybe a few not-so-recent releases.

The music has moments of annunciatory boldness--there is a kind of bebop fanfare in "Gunners"--but even at its most complex and active, Oh, Akinmusire and Calvaire exercise the restraint of artistic judgment. In "Numero Uno," Akinmusire overdubs himself into a brass choir of contrapuntal voices before the piece evolves into a series of thoughtful solos and a stretch of interactive improvisation. The swift "Fourth Limb" is all three-way interaction for its first half, with sparkling trumpet work from Akinmusire over Calvaire's pointillist drumming, then a bass solo that manages coherence at a demanding tempo. Though the CD package gives no composer credits, all of the pieces but one seem to be by Oh. The album concludes with the contrast of intensity and, ultimately, peacefulness in a cover of The Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Soul to Squeeze." This is the debut recording of a musician who leaves the listener with a keen sense that she knows who she is and where she is headed. It is available as a CD here or an MP3 download here.

There will be a Jam Session tribute to Eddie Higgins on Sunday, December 6 from 4pm to 6pm in the ArtServe auditorium at 1350 E. Sunrise Blvd.

(Ft. Lauderdale Library branch)

Haydn (Eddie) Higgins 1932 to 2009

Pot Luck finger food, please. Soft drinks provided. BYOB.

Free admission.

Contributions to the Haydn (Eddie) Higgins Memorial Music Scholarship Fund
will be gratefully appreciated.
For information about the jam session and scholarship, call 954-524-0805.

I think Haydn would like the BYOB part.

Ms. Rowles and her father co-led a group in Los Angeles for a time in the early 1990s. She recorded three albums with him. They included Me And The Moon, which featured her on flugelhorn and as a singer. Jimmy Rowles died in 1996. Me And The Moon is an out-of-print collector's item. Jazz enthusiast and frequent Rifftides correspondent Gordon Sapsed used the title tune as the soundtrack for a tribute montage of his photos of Stacy. He posted it on YouTube. Both Rowleses play and sing.

Also on YouTube, but off-limits to embedding bloggers, are two performances by Swinging Ladies, one of several all-female groups with which Stacy Rowles played. They are from a concert in front of Hannover, Germany's, imposing town hall, the Rathaus, in 1998. With her are Sharon Hirata; alto and tenor saxophone; Janice Friedmann, piano; Lindy Huppertsberg, bass; and Jill Fredericksen, drums. You will find them by clicking here and here.

In a snippet of conversation at the end of their workout on the changes of "Doxy" (misidentified in the booklet as "Blues #2"), Evans talks about his ideal of group interaction.

Evans: "I like to blow free like that, with no 'four' going, but you know where you're at. It's crazy. If everybody could do that, if the bass could be playing that way --why not-- drums could just..." (he vocalizes in imitation of a drummer playing free).

Elliott: "That's right; doesn't have to help you."

Evans: "Not if everybody feels it, man."

It would be 1959 before Evans put bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian together in a group in which everybody felt his way of playing time. They went on to reform the very idea of the jazz trio, but this glimpse into his thinking tells us that Evans was ready years earlier.

LaFaro may have felt ready when Evans was expressing his vision to Elliott, but he was on the west coast, a 21-year-old still developing. There is precious little of him on record from his Los Angeles days. Two recordings, one with Victor Feldman, the other with Cal Tjader and Stan Getz, provide strong indications of his growing musicality and technical prowess.

There is even less of early LaFaro on film or tape, to my knowledge only two pieces, both from Bobby Troup's Stars of Jazz television program. LaFaro was in tenor saxophonist Richie Kamuca's formidable quintet with Feldman on piano, trombonist Frank Rosolino and drummer Stan Levey. Here are both of those clips, "Cherry" and "Chart of my Heart." The video quality is dreadful and there are audio dropouts, but this is our only option for seeing Scott LaFaro in action. If your speakers have tone controls, turn up the bass setting and you'll find it easier to follow his lines.

There is no video of the Evans trio with LaFaro and Motian. Their primary recorded legacy is in Portrait in Jazz, Explorations and Sunday at the Village Vanguard. The CD titled Waltz for Debby was compiled from the Vanguard date. This is its title tune, decorated with a photo montage courtesy of whoever posted it on YouTube.

In between the Blanton (and Pettiford) soloing styles that were so influential in the 1940s and 50s and the new age that was marked by Scott LaFaro's playing, was Red Mitchell. Red was the first bassist I heard who used a lower action, pressed rather than pulled the strings and used some left-handed plucking articulation. It cut his in-person volume down a lot, but was phenomenal on recordings. And his solo lines were melodic, horn-like, and very original. He opened up the ears of a lot of us to other possibilities of the instrument. I think he may have given Scotty some ideas. And this was all pre-amplification. When Red finally started using pickups, the result was beautifully audible soloing at the highest level.

Bill Crow

In the early 1980s, Mitchell worked frequently in a duo with Bill Mays. In their performance of a Thelonious Monk piece, he demonstrates what Bill Crow emphasizes about his peer's skill and originality.