Archives for 2011

Wynton Marsalis plays the immortal jazz of Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong tonight  (Dec 29) 7:30 pm & 10:00 pm ET on Facebook and Livestream  live from Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in Jazz at Lincoln Center, NYC. This is repertoire that the newly named CBS cultural correspondent relives better than anyone else, and it’s great to hear material written for the Hot Peppers, Hot Fives  and Sevens in 2011, 80 to 90 years since it was the very newest music in the world.

I highly recommend checking this out — free, after all — but I must report there’s been honest debate about whether WM’s new status as a cultural commentator is a good or a bad thing for jazz — never mind “jazz journalism” — and whether my facebook post “endorsement” of Wynton as having a “raging curiosity about . .  the entire range of human expression”  is ironic or not. Here it is in it’s entirety: you decide —

“Wynton Marsalis’ raging curiosity about music of every sort, and his open mind about art forms presenting the entire range of human expression, are sure to stand him in good stead as he assumes the position of arts pundit for CBS News. Among jazzers, Dr. Billy Taylor has ever had such responsibilities before — I can think of no film director, choreographer, fiction writer or visual artist who has ever been hired for this job (but if you know of someone, please fill me in).”

from left, Tim Schneckloth, Howard Mandel, Neil Tesser; photo © Lauren Deutsch

My longtime colleague and long ago frontline mate Chicago-based critic Neil Tesser called me out about this —

 “Raging curiosity about music of every sort?” I think you’re giving him a bit of a pass here, pal. This is the same Wynton who shaped Ken Burns’s “Jazz” into a reactionary, past-besotted series that ignored the quarter-century of music leading up to its production. And the same Wynton Marsalis who berated Miles while lashing out at anything that didn’t “swing” New Orleans-style. I happen to greatly respect Wynton for his talent, his accomplishments, his ability to connect with audiences, and his telegenic presence, and I think these may make him a fine successor to Dr. Taylor in his new role. But let’s not ascribe to him a quality that has seemed in short supply during much of his tenure as America’s jazz spokesperson.

And I wrote back, “Irony is SO hard to express in print.” One correspondent kudo’d my “bone dry” assessment, but another said he thought I’d endorsed the hiring 100%. Bartender, another shot of ambiguity, please — on the rocks!

Now about Marsalis’s status update:

“Can’t be good,” wrote Tom Blatt, bassist and sculptor  (whose stated political motto is Quincy Adams Wagstaff’s immortal “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” )

Sculpture by Tom Blatt

To which responded Larry Appelbaum, a not-only-virtual friend and colleague (the man who found the Monk/Coltrane Carnegie Hall recordings in the Library of Congress!),

sure it can. it might not be what you like or what you might prefer, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be good. and i’ll bet it does some good, too. . .

whining about Wynton is a tedious cliche. trash him if you want, but i think it’s great that CBS has created such a position not relegated to a magazine entertainment show, but as part of their news division.

Mary Jane Leach, a composer I met in the ’80s around Phill Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia loft concerts, wrote,

I’ll agree with raging, but not the curiosity part. He’s probably the most actively disliked musician I know of.

James Hale, jazz journalist from Ottawa, a pal and former vice president of the JJA, wrote:

 I wonder if he’ll cover female artists since he clearly doesn’t think much of them as bandmates.

At least the Banff School and the Kennedy Center made forward-looking choices [pianists Vijay Iyer and Jason Moran, respectively]. CBS? Conservative and predictable.

Many more lively, informed, nuanced, strong! comments — from Pamela Firefly, Frank Feldman, Eugene Holly, Steve Dollar, Jon Arnold, James Keepnews, Gerald Cox, Dita Sullivan, Chuck Byers, Joyce Byers Hines, Chuck Zeuren, among others. Several suggested we wait and see, expect the best or assume Wynton will be fine (anyway, better than no one).

That’s ok by me and what we do anyway. But imagine Dylan hired by CBS News cultural commentator, or Toni Morrison, Patti Smith, Ya Yo Ma, David Simon (my choice), Prince (would be interesting), Sean Combs . . . Speculating on such “newscasts” is half some fun.

I second a hope expressed by Michael Rosenthal, an East Villager I met holed up in a summer camp writing short stories (we both were) a couple decades back

Maybe Wynton will experience an epiphany on the road to Black Rock, and rise to speak in harmolodics.

At first I thought “black rock”, like Vernon Reid and Greg Tate espouse and,

Black Rock

uh, that won’t happen. But no! Black Rock as in  “30 Rock” for CBS.

Wynton has spoken in harmolodics – I’ve heard it live – with representatives of Ornette and sometimes the visionary himself in the house. One of Wynton’s greatest strengths is his command of a breadth of the genuine musical elements, details, patterns, necessities — the how to?s and why?s — of a broad swath of American and Western European music, up to and including Ornette (who his father Ellis had sought out when both were young). In the early ’80s when Wynton arose, he sounded like second great quintet/pre-electric mid ’60s Miles, but he has since turned into a devotee of Armstrong and Ellington (and Ellington trumpeters like Bubber Miley, Rex Stewart), their scores and improvisations, image projections and  career developments, historical contexts and personal milieus.

I’ve heard Wynton play entire evening-long programs of rarely heard repertoire by JR Morton and John Coltrane, both convincingly, with style and passion appropriate to their distinctly different purposes, in the course of one week. He can recreate Ellington’s compositions to a fare-the-well and has some very strong instincts for interpreting the works of Thelonious Monk. A half dozen years ago I heard him play one beautiful, evidently spontaneous concert coda at Alice Tully Hall — a single unaccompanied chorus of “Embraceable You” frought with imaginative and immediate flights of melodic romance. I’ve heard him rip it up at Newport, I’ve laughed with his score to Tune In Tomorrow. He has hands-on made JALC the foremost branded, authoritative and far-reaching enterprise jazz has had from its beginning to this day.

I don’t listen to Wynton’s music for my own pleasure, but I know others do. To my taste, what he does can seem fussy, uptight, precious. I wish more people knew about an listened to Don Cherry, Red Allen, Clifford Brown, Lester Bowie, Freddie Hubbard, besides living cats —  Ron Miles, Cuong Vu, Taylor Ho Bynum, Ingrid Jensen, Brian Lynch, Kermit Ruffins, Ron Horton come to mind. But over almost 30 years of observation, I’ve learned: Do not underestimate Wynton Marsalis.

Still, Wynton has prejudices and blind spots, especially since he is so personally identified with certain interests — financial, aesthetic and otherwise — of the arts and entertainments. He is party to many of the specific issues of arts and culture developments upon which a cultural commentator specializing in “jazz” in the 21st century might be expected to expound. Expound, Wynton will. Whether his information and analysis will be more pertinent than that of a lesser-engaged, potentially more aggressively investigative observer? I suppose it depends upon the hypothetical observer. If it were me. . .

I know it’s not, it won’t be. Face it: Wynton’s got accomplishments, position, personality, talent, dedicated energy beyond most of the rest of us. We live in his world. Here’s the entirety of my CityArts column late last October on Wynton turning 50. It was not put on the web by City Arts itself, otherwise I would have posted it earlier.

The King at 50

Wynton Marsalis is indisputably the reigning King of Jazz. Trumpeter, composer, soloist and orchestra leader, artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, NEA Jazz Master, visitor to the White House, international ambassador of American music, the King celebrated his 50th birthday on October 18.

The event was heralded by a hour long PBS broadcast (of a two-hour concert, all streamed live and archived for free viewing at PBS.org) at the Rose Theater in the fabulous JALC facilities he had designed to jazz specifications and built in the fifth floor of the Time Warner Center; it opened in 2004. As Movado, the watchmakers Marsalis endorses, noted in its half-page New York Times ad celebrating his half-century, he’s sold seven million records, won nine Grammys and the Pulitzer Prize. He’s been on tv, written books, lectured at Harvard. He looks fit, speaks with eloquence and charming modesty and can play up a storm. As Mel Brooks has noted, “It’s good to be King.”

And yet one wonders: How heavy sits the crown?

Marsalis was coronated more than 25 years, upon winning Grammys for both jazz and classical recordings, something no one did before, in 1984. His administration has a conservative aesthetic, as he’s cast himself in the lineage of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, exemplary models from the past century. Yet he’s shouldered responsibilities no previous jazzer ever faced. Neither Pops nor Duke ever presided over a $42 million annual budget, as Marsalis does – in wise collaboration, evidently – at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

The King came up at a cultural turning point, when the opposing musical camps of disco and punk rock gave way to rap and pop-as-mostly-easy-listening-pap. Back then the frontlines of jazz were in commercial disarray, still-great veterans like Art Blakey (one of his mentors) and Miles Davis (who Marsalis took as the king to oust) in their last years. Record companies were eager to profit from reissues of classic records in a spanking new format, the CD. However, Columbia Records got behind the young prince, as did Lincoln Center. The rest is history.

Marsalis was originally and has remained dismissive of electric jazz, funk and much of the avant-garde, rallying his forces around the flag of swing, blues and ballads. A proud scion of New Orleans, he positioned himself as a race man for serious strivers at a time when more black Americans were becoming prominent in the bourgeoisie. His attitudes were attractive, as was his tailored style, especially as his virtuosity supported his claims.

Over the years, his attitudes have mellowed, but virtuosity has been a keystone of his career, matched by discipline and ambition. Recording prodigiously, touring non-stop with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, collaborating with everyone from Peter Martins to Eric Clapton, actively promoting the revival of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and mentoring a generation of youngsters who’ve risen through jazz ranks, the King has labored with only a brief break in 2006 to recover from laser surgery on his lip. Putting aside classical repertoire, he’s demonstrated instrumental mastery across the range of jazz, credibly addressing works by Jelly Roll Morton, John Coltrane, bebop, Western swing, Latin jazz and Ornette Coleman.

The King is a brilliant trumpeter, always impassioned and capable of stunning nuance. During his broadcast birthday performance he was omnipresent and omnipotent, emerging from his big band with plunger mute in hand for a horn solo employing an early-jazz vocabulary of growls and smooches. He presented sections from his major works “Blood on the Tracks,” “All Rise” and “Abyssinian 200,” stronger for being excerpted from lengthy scores; they can be ponderous when offered up whole. He generously featured loyal members of his Orchestra, as well as singer Gregory Porter, fiddler Mark O’Connor, tap dancer Jared Grimes, Damien Sneed’s Chorale Le Chateau and Ghanian drummer Yacoub Addy with his ensemble Odadda!, who provided an authentically African-derived “Ring Shout” and upbeat finale during which the entire cast second-lined into the wings.

Most tellingly, Marsalis dueted with pianist Marcus Roberts, his longtime confederate, jamming on “Delfeayo’s Dilemna” like jazz has no bounds – which is hasn’t. After working up a sweat, Marsalis pshawed it, commenting that they’d played like that when they were young but had decided jazz needs more melody. Wait: There was melody, engagement and excitement about the unknown, still, in what the two men did. It was nothing to be ashamed of, to fancy up or trim for some protocol of propriety. And it was hot, which his formal works aren’t.

That Wynton Marsalis has it in him to blow like that makes me ask, if the man needs a holiday. Does he want to be free? If so, then he should be! Do as you will, Wynton, play like the free man you are! You rule jazz, not a castle. And live long that way, King.

Obviously, Wynton has ignored me. He needs no vacation. He thrives on being busy, productive and responsible. He is at the helm of an expanding empire, as Jazz at Lincoln Center plans a Dizzy’s Club at the St. Regis hotel in Doha, Qatar

St. Regis Hotel in Doha, Qatar

is not enough to compose and play, tour and teach, curate and consult, endorse and advance the art form — he will now be the first “cultural commentator” to be so-hired by a television network in the U.S. Who knows what his beat is, his mission, his point? Wynton will define it. The King at 50 is not at rest. That’s my last word on the subject this year.

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December 26 is a birthday I share with some great musicians — John Scofield and the late Quinn Wilson, for two. But yesterday I was thinking of a Christmas baby: pianist Don Pullen, 12/25/45- 4/22/95. A Don Pullen Arts Exhibit opens today in Roanoke, VA, his home town, produced by the Jefferson Center and Harrison Museum of African American Art, and that’s a fine tribute. But I hate to think that Pullen’s music may be falling out of consciousness or access.

His very first records with drummer Milford Graves are extremely rare (self-produced, from a concert at Yale, as Nommo), and so is some of the brilliant playing he did with others, like A Well Kept Secret by drummer Beaver Harris’ 360 Degree Experience, with bari saxist Hamiett Bluett. Pullen’s most prominent position in someone else’s ensemble was his stint with Charles Mingus resulting in the albums Changes One and Changes Two, leading after Mingus’ death to a quartet with saxophonist George Adams, bassist Cameron Brown and drummer Dannie Richmond. I think Pullen’s finest album may be The Sixth Sense, for which I wrote liner notes. After writing a Down Beat feature about Pullen, I was invited to the residency at the Yellow Springs Institute where he organized his breakthrough African Brazillian Connection, and I annotated a couple of more albums, including Sacred Common Ground, on which he forged a bridge between jazz and Native American drumming/chanting by the Chief Cliff Singers. In ’97 I wrote notes to The Best of Don Pullen: The Blue Note Years, which perhaps can serve as an introduction, a valedictory, a spur to remembering. The man had music in his soul.

At his best—and at the piano, he was always at his best — Don Pullen was peerless. The proof endures in these grooves: nine original pieces which Pullen, with dedicated compatriots, realized during the last phase of his career, a seven-year association with Blue Note Records. Exhibiting his consistently virtuosic level of subtlety, elegance and sheer excellence, this compilation album is an admirable introduction, rather than a summation, of a person’s musical expression that’s rich with light, insight and grace for whomsoever is lucky enough to listen.

It is music of a multitude of dimensions, as Don was an inspired keyboard artist, an unforgetttable improviser, a composer of many tuneful and moving themes, a daring band leader and an impeccable accompanist. It’s music which — from its moment of creation, evermore — bears its makers’ intensity, ultimately joyous spirit, and hard-won wisdom regarding life. Pullen’s playful lines, his fully voiced chords and his unique keyboard glisses contain and releasefeelings through vivid narrative, insightful portraiture and probing reminiscence. Pullen’s pieces seem to allow him to sing arias, drum thunder, joust, feast and love across an ocean of octaves, to reach from his childhood in Roanoke, Virginia to far beyond his death in New York in 1995.

Hear: Powerful rhythms pulse up from the ground beneath Pullen’s feet through his wiry, upright and eventually swaying torso (he might be wearing ankle bells, a hiply cut future-suit, or a torreador’s brocaded black jacket and tailored slacks), down his muscled forearms, into his strong wrists, cigar-thick fingers, calloused tips, palms and hand-heels. Those rhythms summon and are shaped by impulses from Pullen’s heart and soul, providing the power of the bright-skipping, soon sweeping clusters he rains upon the keys. Never more than a few beats into a chorus, musical ideas start to stream from Pullen, flowing towards us with solace and cheer. Here’s music to bask in, to absorb and recall.

By 1979, when Don Pullen came to record his Blue Note debut (Breakthrough, by the Don Pullen-George Adams Quartet, a collective drummer Dannie Richmond liked to brag that he led, and bassist Cameron Brown supported as a stalwart oak), he was a mature jazzman, age 36, accomplished if not completely fulfilled. Son of a Southern family, with a background in gospel church music, semi-classical parlor recitals and soul music studio sessions and encouragement from Muhal Richard Abrams, co-founder of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Pullen had made his mark as a member of the mid ’60s New York City underground. He’d debuted on ESP Disks with multi-instrumentalist Guiseppi Logan, and independently issued ferocious, exhaustive duets with drummer Milford Graves taped live-in-concert at Yale University. In 1971, Pullen left his steady gig with Nina Simone to join Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers briefly and land in the final great ensemble led by bassist Charles Mingus. A Mingus band member until ’75, he appears on Changes One and Changes Two.

All the while Don took gigs under his own name: appearing unadvertised, often on organ, in black clubs of New York’s Harlem and nearby New Jersey, recording solo for a Canada’s Sackville label and Japanese Trio, some spotty combo albums for Atlantic and several adventurous productions for Italy’s Black Saint-Soul Note combine. In the process he’d become a pre-eminent figure in avant gut-bucket and new world/jazz/blues circles, collaborating with Hamiet Bluiett, David Murray, Beaver Harris, John Scofield, Olu Dara, the Art Ensemble of Chicago (Fundamental Destiny) and Kip Hanrahan, among many others.

Tenor saxophonist George Adams, who Pullen had brought to Mingus, painted in similarly vibrant hues (evident in both burning and ballad idioms), and after Mingus’s demise the Pullen-Adams (Richmond/Brown) Quartet cut 10 albums over 10 years, their final two for Blue Note. When Dannie Richmond died and Adams fell ill, Pullen set out to establish his trio with New Beginnings  (here represented by its title track and “Jana’s Delight,” probably Pullen’s finest romp). A happy studio meeting with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Tony Williams, New Beginnings raised Pullen’s visibility and furthered his songwriting rep. Random Thoughts, its follow up with his working-band bassist Jame Genus and drummer Lewis Nash, also comprised all original melodies (including “Andre’s Ups and Downs” for his son, and “Indio Gitano”) that depicted people and places near and dear to Don.

In 1990, through a grant administered by the Yellow Spring Institute of Art in Chester Springs, PA, Pullen was afforded a unique opportunity to further his global musical explorations.

“I’ve always had an affinity for Latin music and African music,” he explained at the end of a two-week residency during which he’d convened the African Brazilian Connection, a band which embraced musicians from Cameroon, Panama, Sao Paulo and Senegal. “The very first composition I ever wrote when I was a kid was a samba, or something like that. I play those tunes very easily, and they feel very good. The music of Brazil and flamenco and the music we play in America — blues and jazz and so forth — all has its roots in Africa. That’s why we can all play together.”

Following the ABC’s three albums and tour of Europe, as well as the diagnosis of his terminal disease and an initial course of treatment, Pullen pursued the musical threads that link all peoples to Sacred Common Ground, a historic collaboration with the Chief Cliff Singers, Native Americans from the Salish-Kootenai Reservation in Montana. “Reservation Blues,” co-writtten by Pullen and the Singers’ leader Mike Kenmille, turns on what I remember from the session itself as not an edit but a perfect fermata. At the end of the Indians’ chanting there’s a pregnant pause . . then, picking up the same earth beat, Don rolls out a long blue road under the moans and protests of alto saxophonist Carlos Ward and trombonist Joe Bowie, atop the pocket of bassist Santi Debriano and drummer J.T. Lewis, accented by percussionist Mor Thiam.

Pullen’s playing there, and the grandeur of his ABC’s track “El Matador,” suggests something of his resistence of the mediocre and the debilitating, his ferocious will to create a beautiful, enduring mark. Perhaps no piece from Pullen’s oeuvre so aptly shows his sublime touch, delicacy and sense of emotional nuance as his unaccompanied rendition of “Ode To Life,” which ends this collection. Originally written and dedicated to George Adams, this rendition was its composer’s meditation on his own mortality, and proceeds through a range of moods to come to rest in serenity.

The Best of Don Pullen: The Blue Notes Years represents a heartfelt selection of the man’s music by some of the people who were closest to him, notably his companion Jana Haimisohn, his agent Eric Hanson, his children André (his eldest), Don Jr., Tracy and Keith and his Blue Note producer Michael Cuscuna. It’s just a fraction of Pullen’s best, though, about an eighth of his Blue Note output — substantial, yet just a step in taking his full measure.

What retrospective, however complete, can ever take an artist’s full measure? Here’s my standard: I still very much enjoy listening to Don Pullen.

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Sam Rivers – en.wikipedia.org

Sax and flutist Sam Rivers called me a few months back, out of the blue, from his home near Orlando. “This is Sam Rivers,” he announced, Oklahoma-born voice at age 89 88 somewhat husky
but energized — like his horn sounds. “I want to say I’ve played jazz with everybody from T-Bone Walker to Dizzy Gillespie, and never had a grant or government funding or anything. That’s all.” A fair if woefully incomplete summation of a 60+ year musical career. Sam Rivers died yesterday (Dec. 26, 2011/b. 9/25/23), and below I point to some of his recorded highlights.

Riveres rang off, and when I called back he didn’t answer. He’d made his statement. Without being formally recognized by the National Endowment of the Arts as a Jazz Master, though he sure was one, without a Grammy though he recorded a couple of dozen memorable and thoroughly original albums of his own original material and was nominated in both 1999 and 2000, in terms of recent honors Rivers had only the 2004 Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Award for reissue of the year, Fuscia Swing Song. In his remarks back then from the stage of B.B. King’s Blues Club, he had explained that the album, his debut on Blue Note Records, wasn’t what he’d intended but the last-minute substitution of songs he’d been playing since the 40s for some new compositions producer Alfred Lion didn’t like.

Fuscia Swing Song is a gutsy, bluesy and sometimes tender whirl, driven by drummer Tony Williams (then 19 years old), bassist Ron Carter and pianist Jaki Byard. It was the first of a series of Blue Note classics Rivers led, my second favorite to Contours, on which he plays flute as well as tenor, on the composition “Euterpe“ creating a beguiling blend on the melody with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. He also contributed significantly to vibist Bobby Hutcherson’s Dialogue and pianist Andrew Hill’s Change. That was a peak era for the Blue Note label, issuing album after album of inside-outside jazz beyond jazz.

Sam Rivers and Dave Holland – twitter.com

Rivers was great at playing with others, distinguishing his place but respecting a zone of interaction: hear him contrast with Anthony Braxton on Dave Holland’s masterpiece Conference of the Birds (Holland was always a firm but flexible anchor for Rivers). Hear him challenge Miles Davis In Tokyo, hear him twine with Wayne Shorter on Tony Williams’ Spring, hear him meld with organist Larry Young on Into Something, inspire pianist Jason Moran on Black Stars, embrace and transform secularized Jewish motifs on Steve Bernstein’s Diaspora Blues. Considering the complex density of River’s big band writing on Crystals, the depth of his improvisations on piano and soprano sax as well as flute and tenor on his live trio albums Streams and Hues, the brilliance of the Studio Rivbea All-Star Orchestra he had convened at his landmark Manhattan jazz loft (where Wildflowers: The New York Jazz Loft Sessions were recorded in the 1970s) as documented in Inspiration and Culmination, those Grammy-nominated works released, the mastery with which he met Cecil Taylor in Nuits de la Foundation Maeght  (I have privately recorded evidence of Taylor’s quartet with Rivers, alto saxist Jimmy Lyons and drummer Andrew Cyrille — hot stuff!)  and the fact that Rivers continued leading a big band and trio, writing and improvising, traveling occasionally (I last heard him at the Vision Festival X, which gave him a lifetime achievement celebration in 2006), and the sheer live-loving enthusiasm of his writing and playing, it sometimes seemed like he could do everything and would do so forever.

Sam Rivers at Vision Fest, 2006 – photo credit sought. No copyright infringement intended.

No one can do everything forever, but Rivers tried. My friends and colleagues Geoff Himes and Kevin Whitehead write well about Rivers on his website, www.Rivbea.com. Here are the liner notes I wrote for Inspiration:

Sam Rivers avows that Dizzy Gillespie– a jazz artist clearly worthy of all accolades — is his main man. But for countless new music devotees, deep-dyed players and listeners alike, Sam Rivers himself is great Inspiration.

A distinguished composer, a wondrous multi-instrumentalist, an indefatigable ensemble leader and an enduring free spirit, Rivers has lived the entire second half of the 20th century on jazz’s creative edge, and at age 77 come up his most forward-looking work yet. A “representation” (each performance guaranteed different) of seven compositions (of more than a hundred) that Rivers says could easily run 50 minutes each, his RCA Victor debut album Inspiration pours forth as a symphony of undreamt sounds. Along its course, it shifts like colors through a prism, unfolds and refolds like forms in a kaleidoscope, and ceaselessly paints vivid backgrounds against which rugged soloists swing free.

Featuring his own kinky, long, exploratory and vocal-like lines on tenor and soprano saxophones and flute, Rivers also showcases some of the most daring blowers in jazz land, including after his turn on soprano on the opening cut, “Vine” (in suspected order) alto saxophonists Steve Coleman (who also produced and mixed this record) and Greg Osby, trumpeters James Zollar and Ralph Alessi, tenor saxists Chico Freeman and Gary Thomas, trombonist Ray Anderson, tubaist Bob Stewart, and a young Florida-based rhythm team, bassist Doug Matthews and drummer Anthony Cole. Since Sam Rivers’ Rivbea All-tar Orchestra comprises also trumpeters Ravi Best and Baikida Carroll, trombonists Joseph Bowie and Art Baron, baritone saxophonist Hamiet Blueitt and Joseph Daley on baritone (brass) horn, aficionados will have a field trying to identify each individually distinctive player called on to hurtle through the bracing ensembles and wide-open spaces of these charts.

It’s especially gratifying that The Inspiration  seems so new, fresh and free while it simply furthers the reach of music issuing Rivers, an American artist who’s confounded styles, genres and fads for generations.

From age four, when he picked out tunes on his music-steeped family’s piano in his Elko, Oklahoma home, through salad days in Boston, where he attended New England Conservatory and labored to forge his voice on gigs with locals Jaki Byard, Serge Chaloff and Herb Pomeroy and tours as sideman for T-Bone Walker, among others, Rivers has always had a vision. Reportedly “too advanced” for Miles Davis to keep in his band (succeeding Coltrane!), Rivers nonetheless brought his protégé, teen drummer Tony Williams, to the trumpeter, and went on to record a slew of pace-setting records with Williams, Jaki Byard, Ron Carter, Elvin Jones, Herbie Hancock, Andrew Hill, Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, and other ’60s vanguardists. In 1964 and ’65, Rivers burst out via Blue Note Records on his own Fuchsia Swing Song and Contours, (1965), Williams’ Spring  (with Wayne Shorter) and Grant Green’s Into Something! Miles Davis’ Live In Tokyo with Rivers prominent was recorded then, too.

In the late ’60s Rivers establishing himself in New York City, joined pianist Cecil Taylor’s Unit and opened the fabled jazz loft Studio Rivbea, which he and his wife Beatrice maintained for more than a decade. Internationally renown during the ’70s for his galvanizing trio performances, Rivers, fellow saxist Anthony Braxton and drummer Barry Altschul contributed to a classic on bassist Dave Holland’s Conference for the Birds on ECM; Rivers’ projects have also appeared on the Tomato, Black Saint/Soul Note, and Postcards labels.

In the ’80s Sam formed close musical ties with trumpet great Dizzy Gillespie, and in the ’90s he returned to Florida, launching point of his career 40 years before, to start a record label and encourage an educationally-oriented jazz-youth movement.

Inspiration is the CD debut of the Rivbea All-star Orchestra, from studio session recording during the weeks around a booking at New York’s Sweet Basil jazz club, and in quick sum it represents everything jazz has ever been: lusty, bluesy, funny, bristly, a balancing act of personal expression and group play, outrageously melodic and quintessentially rhythmical — frequently, all at once. The detail and complexity Rivers hears and creates is from first note challenging yet compelling. His originality is formidable, but not forbidding. Writes Steve Coleman, who first confronted Rivers’ compositions in 1979,  “The rhythms unexpectedly suspend, back peddle and surge forward in the form of melodies that are expressed in three dimensions (up/down, horizontal and depth).”

You needn’t be a musician, though — or an architect, physicist, brain surgeon — to dig the exuberant musical energy and love-of-life that Rivers and his company spout on about. “When Sam sings these melodies to the band,” continues altoist Coleman (recognized by his on-the-beat attack, consistent tone, biting articulation and upright phrasing), “I hear the connection between the music and the soul of the man. I can see that these ideas come straight from his imagination without any editing.” Nor do they require extra analysis. That Sam Rivers has realized such vast thought and feeling with all-star colleagues, spontaneously engaging his lifetime’s work, hoping to bring pleasure to all within earshot, is really Inspiration enough.

Thanks to recordings and memories, Sam Rivers’ music and inspiration doesn’t die.

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I’ve recovered a vintage JBJ posting from the archive, December 2008 (hence the reference to waiting for the end of the Bush administration. Still waiting. . . )

Yuletide music in the U.S. hasn’t gotten better since I first posted this, but it’s not for lack of song programmers scraping the bottom of the barrel. Among seasonal kitsch in heavy rotation I’ve heard Burl Ives warbling “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” enough to times to realize he’s really quite glum — maybe it was the blacklist, maybe the testifying to HUAC as a friendly witness to get out of it, but he’s not a happy man singing a happy song.

Is it really Frank Sinatra on “I Wouldn’t Trade Christmas”? Must be, who else would dare a line like, “You buy the Kris Kringle scene”? Shame on you, Sammy Cahn! And then there’s “We Need A Little Christmas Now” from Mame, which I believe is a plea from retailers going broke. Jerry Herman wrote better in his first Broadway musical, Milk and Honey, about Jewish widows looking for husbands in Israel. It’s okay, there’s a long line of Jewish composers cashing in with Christmas jingles. Hats off to Irving Berlin — “White Christmas“  suits Jascha Heifitz.

As a disbeliever, I am most offended by songs blasted into secular public space about the newborn King, Christ Our Lord cometh, Holy Night — uh huh,hallelujah. Glad to say I’ve found a couple of new (old) songs that spell Christmas relief: Eartha Kitt purring “Santa Baby,” which puts the “pay for play” element of mid-winter capitalism right out front. Taylor Swift’s version isn’t nearly as avaricious.

 Sonny Boy (Rice Miller) Williamson #2  blows true to his fashion on “Christmas Blues,” —  drinking ’cause his baby left him, and allowin’ how, “I tried to fetch religion, but the Devil won’t let me pray.”

Thanks to Jim Eigo of Jazz Promo Services for tipping me to organist Bill Doggett’s 12 Songs of Christmas, but it’s basic ice rink material. Bob Dylan, of course, has his Christmas In The Heart album (in which he channels Tom Waits); John Zorn has his A Dreamers Christmas (in which he employed fine players from the “downtown avant garde) — but damn if both don’t play the seasonal sentiments straight. Where’s Spike Jones when we need him? Out-of-print.

As promised above, here’s “I wake up screaming”. Steel yourselves, friends. Soon it will be over.

“Do You Hear What I Hear?” — the most odious quasi-pop song ever committed – was ringing in my semi-conscious loud enough to jolt me out of sleep one night last week (I summoned to mind “Night In Tunisia,” trying to recall every kink in Charlie Parker’s famous alto break, to dispel it). “Little Drummer Boy,” “Silent Night,” Gene Autry’s original version of “Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer” and James Taylor singing “Go Tell It On The Mountain” — does it really have an extended chorus for recorder ensemble? — assault me at the grocery store (the butcher behind the deli counter fights it with a salsa radio station on high volume). “Jingle Bell Rock” is the best of the bunch — at least Bobby Helms swings and the guitar twangs. Must we suffer this cloying drivel every winter holiday?

The grocery’s manager directed that the Xmas tape be played LOUD! starting the day after Thanksgiving, and the clerks — Brooklynites apparently out of Mexico, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, serving customers from points including Russia, Syria, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Manhattan — have gone nuts, bombarded by this stuff on every shift. Last night I shopped in Soho clothing boutiques with my teenage daughter and endured shamelessly glitzy renditions of clichés — er, “classics” — that should have been buried decades back by the big stars of pop now, Beyoncé among others I’ve blanked on in self-defense. There is perhaps one handful of moderately acceptable tunes, relatively literate lyrics and decent voices (perhaps “Chestnuts Roasting,” “Winter Wonderland,” “Let It Snow”) and maybe one seasonal delight (“Baby It’s Cold Outside,” Ray Charles & Betty Carter still the best), but all are rendered obnoxious by six weeks of ceaseless repetition.

The loop is too short, that’s part of the problem. Come on, djs! Throw some curves! Where’s Mae West’s (or Marilyn Monroe’s, or Marianne Faithfull’s) “Santa Claus is Coming To Town”? Bing Crosby or Prince drooling “Merry Christmas, Baby”? James Brown powering or George Clinton slandering “Up on the Rooftop with Good St. Nick?” They don’t exist? Then let’s hear Bird and Kenny Dorham blow hipply on “White Christmas” (since Billie Holiday didn’t sing it as a dirge), Count Basie’s big band boogie “Jingle Bells,” and Jimi Hendrix throw down “Little Drummer Boy” (yuck) and “Silent Night.” Let’s hear Stevie Wonder and Aretha and, oh, John Zorn’s Masada or Steven Bernstein’s Diaspora Soul for some Hanukah flavor.

But enough of this inescapable, annoying, pseudo-sacred, unholy over-wrought, rudely self-righteous and irresponsibly sectarian crap in public places! Can it possibly be helping people spend? I did notice one elderly lady pushing her shopping cart through the aisles while humming along with “Ave Maria” but the vocal was way out of her range and she did not add pleasantly to the esthetic experience. And her cart was empty. She may have been there expressly for the Muzak, but it makes me mu-sick and for sure I want to get out of the store as fast as possible. Things are bad enough, economics, war, climate change, waiting for the end of the world or the Bush administration, whichever comes first. Can’t we go out with a bang, not a whimper? Enough — more than enough! — too, too much commercial Christmas corn!

Complete disclosure: My birthday is the day after Christmas, a distinction I share proudly with Henry Miller, Friedrich Engle, Steve Allen, Elisha Cook Jr. and Frederick II, less proudly so with Mao Zedong, Rosemary Woods and Phil Spector. As a child I felt I was cause of all the fuss, newborn king or just as good as, and though I’ve been told otherwise I can’t say I’ve adjusted. So I stay home surrounded by my own selections or venture forth glad sound is not wired into the subway. But something dreadful can emerge anytime, from any opening door, any car window. “Feliz Navidad.” “Joy to the World.” “This Christmas.”

At least I found a different grocery store. It’s at the edge of Boro Park and seems to be patronized mostly by Orthodox and Chasidic Jewish residents of the area. I have a hard time making myself understood there, speaking English. But I haven’t heard the Chipmunks or any of their ilk rattling on about 12 days of partridges in pear trees. Twelve days — aren’t they over yet? Ah, sweet relief: Roscoe Mitchell’s “Nonaah.” Iannis Xenakis’ Electro-Acoustic Music. The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black.”

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I refrain from abject product endorsement — but The Jazz Icons Series 5 is my no-fail recommendation for those favorite (weird?) aunts or uncles obsessed with “culture” — for parents who space out listening to long, wordless music from their decades’ back youth — for snobs who should meet vernacular jazz in its noblest and most durable form — best of all, for you yourself.  Six impeccably produced dvds of genuinely iconic — nay, canonical — performances by some of our most intensely compelling mid-20th Century American artists: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Freddie Hubbard and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers with Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter.

The musicians’ names in themselves ring richly of “jazz” to anyone who subscribes to that tradition. The music herein validates their reputations,  proviung to be as powerful and entertaining now as when the videos were shot by French television, 1959 – 1973.

[And though there’s been a lot of hubbub about the “jazz” word elsewhere on the web, which is worth acknowledging, I disagree with the anti-“jazz” sentiment and its core premise: that the term “jazz” is demeaning and limiting, whereby in my dictionary, “jazz” expresses so much more than a historic period or style as a process and reality check that is infinitely open-ended, pliable, transformative, uplifting, humane, and we ought to give thanks to the originators of this art form for helping us gain a basis, from which we cannot help but ourselves grow. . .So Jazz Icons is ok by me.]

These videos — festival shows and  one extraordinary studio session — originated in Europe during an era when jazz was very rare on U.S. tv. They exemplify a  music of meaningful improvisation at its most immediate and exciting, created by heroically distinct talent individuals in close, real time collaborations. These performances are not merely iconic, a couple of them are canonical. Highlights:

• John Coltrane’s monumental and only public performance of “A Love Supreme” (the two parts that have been found of four, anyway) backed by his essentially symphonic quartet, plus his only video’d  “Ascension.” The mostly straightforward video footage sometimes segues into passages of overlays — McCoy Tyner’s fingers on the ivories, Jimmy Garrison’s bass bow, Elvin Jones’ drumsticks — but Coltrane blows implacably, all-confident, breaking into the future as a ship plows through the sea.
• Thenlonious Monk, thinking through each chord voicing and finger move as he sounds it, like he’s rediscovering the peculiar melodic twists and turns he likes to follow, for fun, through a hedge of harmonic thorns . . .
• Freddie Hubbard, hardest driving trumpeter in jazz, jazz, yes jazz! With a superhip early ’70s band, imbuing melodic variations of  “Straight Life,” “Intrepid Fox” and “First Light” with real-life funk at flat-out rock energy levels.
• Freddie’s only rival — not Miles, who played a different horn — was Lee Morgan, caught here in 1959 at age 21 with powerhouse Art Blakey’s Messengers, which saxophonist Wayne Shorter and pianist Walter Davis had just joined. “Bouncing With Bud,” “Along Came Betty,” “Blues March” —  the players tear up these anthems, all the while cool in their dark suits.
• Johnny Griffin, a superior, fast and serious ex-Messenger bop tenor saxman, dominates his  top notch quartet  (though drummer Art Taylor, a man of many parts, frames it perfectly) — then guest Dizzy Gillespie arrives, trumpeting his utmost on “Night in Tunisia” and “Hot House,” on which Grif quotes a Charlie Parker phrase from a the New York tv version Diz had been in on almost 20 years before.
• Am I saving the best for last? Rahsaan Roland Kirk in full force on all of his instruments — flute, clarinet, tenor sax, stritch, manzello, toys in various combinations, a human breathing machine, with his touring band at it’s peak. His playing is literally awesome — it’s energizing but also exhausting to watch him. So back to Coltrane. . . .

I typically watch jazz videos just once or twice, using those I like best in the NYU classes I teach — and these days I introduce those videos to students as clips on YouTube. But this Jazz Icon series overs so much substance — the music itself, plus so much visual evidence of how it was made, what were the interactions — that it’s a pleasure to own them, put them on a good playback system as one does with favorite audio albums to have in the room while relaxing or even doing something else.

Though, fair warning, it’s hard to take eyes off these musicians. They are not consciously dramatizing anything, but making music they are naturally and irrefutably dramatic. All musicians on each these six discs deceased, we can yet have them virtually live now, before us. Earlier Jazz Icons releases have been very worthy — among my favorite of the previously issued dvds, now available singly, are Charles Mingus’s sextet with Eric Dolphy and Jaki Byard, from 1964; Sonny Rollins with European-based specialists in ’65 and ’68, and guitarist Wes Montgomery in quartet, also from ’65. The Series 5 dvds only come as a complete set, all six, for now, priced about $100. For that, you will be thanked, or thankful.

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Wynton Marsalis has in one swoop become the world’s most prominent jazz journalist. The 50-year-old trumpeter, composer, bandleader, winner of multiple Grammys in multiple categories, author of several books on jazz (all but one co-written), artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, world-traveling ambassador of the American experience, holder of uncountable awards, degrees and honors, an esteemed lecturer and educator, is the CBS network’s new cultural correspondent.

Marsalis has previously been a frequent guest on the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes. His first broadcast as cultural correspondent is scheduled for January 16, 2012 — the Monday celebration of the birthday of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

There is scant precedence for an artist of Marsalis’s stature to sign on with a media giant such as CBS in the capacity of news commentator. The late Dr. Billy Taylor (who died Dec. 28, 2010) is the only jazz musician who has served in a similar role, first in 1958 as musical director of the NBC tv series The Subject Is Jazz (produced by the then-new National Educational Television
network), and after 1981 as an on-air correspondent of CBS News.

Leonard Bernstein, arguably Wynton’s most comparable predecessor as an acclaimed creator/performer/activist/celebrity with strong connection to Lincoln Center, famously produced television lectures for the CBS show Omnibus, starting in 1954 (the program later transferred to ABC and NBC), and Young Peoples’ Concerts for CBS — but these were not news shows. Since the 1950s, jazz musicians have sometimes hosted televised performance shows — think Eddie Condon to David Sanborn. But taking the role of journalist, critic or commentator is something else.

Wynton Marsalis has been seen and heard analyzing music and airing his opinions on Ken Burns’ Jazz, among other documentaries. He may be a valuable cultural correspondent by virtue of who he is and what he knows more than for any investigative activities or neutral perspective. But then, news reporting and opinion sans agenda are not crucial to broadcast news.

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Richard Bona, promotion photo

Richard Bona introduces his Mandekan Cubano project at the Jazz Standard, Dec. 27 through New Year’s Eve — as I detail in my new CityArts-New York column. But from now through December 24 there’s other strong, new music to check out in, especially at Roulette in Brooklyn.

Tonight (Dec. 15) and tomorrow (Dec. 16), trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith celebrates his 70th birthday. First night with his Golden Quartet, his trio Mbira (which has put out the spare, penetrating album Dark Lady of the Sonnets) and String Quartet Plus with vocalist Thomas Buckner. Second night with that Golden Quartet (Angelika Sanchez, piano; John Lindberg, bass; Pheeroan akLaff, drums) and his Silver Orchestra. Smith — out of the deep blues and the AACM, currently teaching at California Institute of the Arts — has a compellingly rich trumpet tone and the rare range to go from near-complete abstraction to credible expansions on the electric music of Miles Davis (though he’s not doing that here).

Taylor Ho Bynum – photo credit sought. No copyright infringement intended.

(Also tonight, at the Jazz Gallery, drummer Tomas Fujiwara‘s The Hookup features guitarist Mary Halvorson and trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson — mature young innovators who prove “jazz” is only “dead” if you believe it’s frozen in 1959. Saxophonist Peter Apfelbaum’s NY Hieroglyphics large ensemble is there on Dec. 16; cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum‘s Sextet celebrates the release of Apparent Distance, its new album on Dec. 17; Tony Malaby, perhaps NYC’s busiest under-valued tenor saxophonist, leads his nonet Novela with drummer John Hollenbeck on Dec. 18).

(And, Dec. 15 – 17: World premiere of “Vidas Perfectas” the Spanish-language version of Robert Ashley‘s opera “Perfect Lives,” the dryly and wryly hilarious story of a bank heist, now set on the Tex-Mex border, enacted by my friend and colleague Ned Sublette, Cuban pianist Elio Villafranca, music produced by Peter Gordon — at Irondale in Brooklyn).

At Roulette on Saturday, Dec. 17 — Eric Dolphy’s masterpiece Out To Lunch and other rare compositions by the revered inside/outside saxophonist-bass clarinetist-flutist are brought to life by all-star individualists comprising trumpeter Russ Johnson’s Quintet: alto saxist Roy Nathanson, pianist Myra Melford, bassist Brad Jones and drummer George Schuller. I heard this program two years ago at Merkin Concert Hall, and blogged about it being “in the zone.” This ensemble performed this program last week in New Haven. It is not slavish in reprising Dolphy, but it is appropriate, accurate and so continues to push the boundaries defined by expectation.

On Dec. 21, experimental intermediast Phill Niblock holds his annual Solstice Concert at Roulette — and if anyone can bring light to the darkest days of the year, Niblock can. The last time I heard him, at a Bang on a Can festival, his unique construction of digitally-processed monolithic microtonal drones seemed to fill the auditorium with sonic luminosity. Niblock explains, “What I am doing with my music is to produce something without rhythm or melody, by using many microtones that cause movements very, very slowly.” Usually I find minimalism very, very boring, but Phill’s is not that.

Dec. 22: Pianist Bob Gluck, who has been doing deep research on Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band and the dawn of electric jazz in general, makes a rare trio appearance at the Gershwin Hotel with his trio, celebrating the release of their new album Returning.

John Zorn, by Andy Newcombe

And on Christmas eve, Dec. 24, tzadik John Zorn hosts and his Aleph Trio performs a nittlenach benefit for the Sixth Street Synagogue’s Center For Jewish Arts and Literacy, with
upbeat percussionist Cyro Baptista’s Banquet of the Spirits playing Zorn’s compositions from Masada Book II, Rashanim meets Hasidic New Wave’s Rabbi Greg and Frank London, and The Ayn Sof Arkestra and Bigger Band with Jake Marmer of Jazz Talmud.

There’s much more happening — thanks to everyone who’s invited me to their gigs. I’m getting to some, not all . . .

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Lists of top projects of the year are expected from arts journalism – my apologies for being so late this year, but I needed to re-visit many of the the 1200 cds and dvds I received as promotional samples from Thanksgiving 2010 – TG 2011.  Here are some favorites — top 10 I’ve liked best, and more (even at 30 more, far from exhaustive) —

Favorite New Releases, # 1 – 10

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Elliot Sharp – photo credit sought – no copyright infringement intended

No label exists for the music of composer-guitarist-saxophonist Elliott Sharp, who performed with two of his Carbon concept ensembles at Roulette in Brooklyn last week. In both quartet (Sharp on 8-string guitarbass with electronic processing, curved soprano and tenor saxes, and musicians playing electric bass, prepared harp and drums) and septet (the quartet plus second electric bassist, pianist and percussionist) formations, vernacular rock rhythms anchored advanced explorations of texture and gesture. Repetition of brief motives slid upon and beneath shifting sonic fields. Narrative arc encompassed extended and advanced instrumental techniques.

Sharp is a veteran in high standing of the late ’70s and thereafter downtown New York community of originalists, a status he substantiates by pursuing his own investigations of how sounds synchronize, collide and collude. His pieces, presented in fairly short versions (10 minutes? I wasn’t clocking) he alluded to wryly as “songs”, are derived from patterns found in nature, science and math, but his interests are in raw roars and tribalism. He’s not afraid of dissonance, indeed, it is for him what B’rer Rabbit called “the briar patch.” As sophisticated as is Sharp’s mastery of the mysteries that can be unfolded by so-called minimalism, the enveloping storm he stirs up dashes all bounds.

There are many ways to approach and perceive Sharp’s work. His music has volume levels (often, not always) and surface grooves that will please headbangers, but also complex layers of more subtly intriguing sounds and ideas. And Sharp is conscious of it all. He’s quite a good blues guitarist, for one thing (having drawn the late Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf‘s right-hand man, into collaborations in his Terraplane band), and you see that from the way he strums and picks his broad-necked guitarbass, no matter what chords or clusters he’s getting from it. But he also is doing unusual work with overtones that he produces via a tapping technique, all the fingers of both hands on the guitar’s neck. If that’s coming from the blues, it’s rather a distance from the genre’s roots.

At Roulette, he offered only a couple of “melodies” in any conventional sense, though melody could be thought of as arising from his efforts (and in the quartet set bassist Marc Sloan put forth melodic figures, intermittently. That was interesting, too: Sloan did not keep a constant bass line going, instead playing a phrase, waiting, playing another phrase, etc., and at one point using a metal bar as a bow across his ax’s body, while drummer Joseph Trump provided the solid beat a la a loose, less frenetic Keith Moon). On his curved soprano, Sharp used continuous (circular) breathing, requiring serious concentration, and repeated a hyper-fast fingering pattern to produce the kind of full-out, throaty wail I associate with the Master Musicians of Jajouka all blowing double-reed rhaitas. Sharp also moves a lot of wind with his tenor — it has the squawk of an r&b honker, but he’s going less for tuneful, however-overblown riffs than a blur of unremitting sound. The other musicians improvise, but not jazzily. The emphasis is on collective.

So, within or from all this the effect is orchestral. There is much more going on than four people usually generate — especially considering that three of his four play “strings,” reconstructed. During the second septet (Orchestra Carbon) half of his Roulette “CARBONic Evening”, Sharp conducted some big blocky section changes, though again the instruments were layered like tectonic plates, creating new interrelationships and densities as they slipped under and over each other. At times this evoked an earthquake, breaking a crusty topside into shards yet sustaining characteristics of a given plot. In one movement, pianist Jenny Lin swept her keyboard and harpist Shelley Burgon did the same for glisses that seemed to fling open simultaneously all the doors and windows of a house in a cyclone. In a finale, which Sharp introduced as “dreaded” by his musicians, the action was all low register, earth rumbling under ocean currents. One thick stew of an ocean . . .

Sharp’s music can certainly seem foreboding, maybe anarchic or confrontational, and I bet my descriptions don’t do anything to belie that impression. But he is not nihilistic or even morbidly dark. The music he makes is ultra-deliberate, however wild it seems on first exposure, and he has labored to develop virtuosity in spheres lesser musicians only pretend to acknowledge actually exist.

I find the music he makes risky. His concerts aren’t inevitably successful; his stuff is not easy to play (I didn’t already mention that in Orchestra Carbon percussionist Danny Tunick did wonders on vibes, with a basic 4/4 groove that once in a while added added a 5/4 measure; second bassist Russ Flynn looked startled when called on to “solo” but held his own). It’s not generically easy listening, either. But it’s very rewarding, bracing and inspiring, primal and technological, monstrous yet humane.

Elliott Sharp has released some 85 albums. If I were to suggest one for starters, it might be Sharp? Monk? Sharp! Monk! because it’s a solo album that generously displays his guitarism and interpretive insights while dealing with the legacy of a canonical figure he reveres and who exemplifies the notion of “ugly beauty” from which E# does not shy.

But then you’d not be hearing Sharp’s self-designed and -realized launching points, which ain’t like Monk’s (or only like Monk’s). So I don’t know what I’d recommend. Oh, yeah: I recommend you hear him live.

Alternatively, here’s a trailer for a documentary film on Elliott Sharp. Maybe it shows better than I tell what the man and his music are about.

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My new CityArts column is about the wave of conducted orchestral improvisation currently sweeping New York City  — with Karl Berger’s Stone Workshop Orchestra and Lawrence Douglas “Butch” Morris’s Lucky Cheng Orchestra wrapping up their lengthy Monday night runs, Elliott Sharp reconvening Carbon at Roulette, Greg Tate’s Burnt Sugar: The Arkestra Chamber at Tammany Hall in a benefit for the Jazz Foundation of America, Adam Rudolph’s Organic Orchestra also in the mix and “soundpainter” Walter Thompson in discussion with aforementioned Dr. Morris at Columbia U’s Center for Jazz Studies (that’s tonight, November 30), leading students from Columbia U Jazz Ensembles at Miller Theater Dec. 4.

Conducting improvisation of individuals constituting large ensembles might be likened to herding cats or directing crowd scenes or arriving at consensus in the General Assembly or processing activities through chaos theory or refereeing games or . . . I don’t know, but it looks like fun and can sound spellbinding. Better witnessed live than heard on recording, usually — you want to see what’s happening. At least I do. Lots of opportunities to do that, immediately.

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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Christopher Buckley’s New York Times Book Review frontpage piece on And So It Goes, Charles J. Shields’ biography of Kurt Vonnegut, is as lazy a bit of evaluation as it’s possible to pick up a paycheck for. I can’t tell from it anything about Shields’ book, and nothing about Vonnegut’s many novels, either. (See “jazz” content at post’s end).

How does Buckley — whose comic novels I’ve enjoyed (esp. his first, The White House Mess) – – spend his 1500 words about a 500-page life of one of America’s best-selling fabulists of the late 20th century? He entertains us with what interests him. So we  learn in the lede  that the bio is “often hearthbreaking,” evidently because of Vonnegut’s human flaws, his “vexed” relations with women (such as the “hell on earth” — Buckley’s phrase — he shared in marriage with photographer Jill Krementz) and his attempt at suicide, perhaps in imitation of his mother (whose did indeed kill herself). We learn, too, that Vonnegut was sad, angry about the ways of the world (what satirist isn’t?) and resented being underrated by the literary elite but got rich off of actual book sales (sounds like a fair enough trade-off). We don’t find out what author Shields himself says about any of this in his long volume.

Berkeley neither tells nor shows us how Shields writes, explains why Vonnegut was read (and feted and influential) or describes the social context of the period of his greatest productivity. I hope Shields writes about that; as a reader, I’m  interested in an era that resulted in mainstream publication and public embrace of American satires and other serious, experimental, speculative, entertaining fictions by V., his pal Joseph Heller and also Pyncheon, Roth, Nabokov, Mailer, Coover, Burroughs, Brautigan, Algren, Phillip Dick, Hunter Thompson, Thomas Berger, Jerzy Kozinsky, Jerome Charyn, Ursula LeGuin, Grace Paley, Stanley Elkin, John Barth, Gore Vidal, Terry Southern, Donald Barthelme, Ishmael Reed, Chester Himes, James Purdy, Bruce Jay Friedman, Richard Condon, Tom Wolfe, arguably even such learned pundits as William F. Buckley, Jr.

It is this latter’s son, the reviewer Chris, who gets stuck on whether Kurt Vonnegut will matter forevermore (but doesn’t tell us if he thinks he should, only ties him to J.D. Salinger, relatively speaking a realist). One can only surmise Shields wrote a 500+page book because he thought his subject mattered.

I dig Vonnegut, having read most of his 14 novels from the dystopian Player Piano (1952, much indebted to Orwell and Huxley) through Timequake (1997), and I recommend the half dozen best of them highly.Vonnegut wrote clearly and directly, with a Midwestern-born sense of economy and understatement. He was comic and imaginative in a plainspoken style with an undercurrent of feeling — which might seem simple, but isn’t. Try to imitate his voice, his scruples about showing the worst sides of some protagonists and yet his compassion for ordinariness, his dry flights of fancy. In Sirens of Titan (1959) and Cat’s Cradle (1963) he is hilariously ironic and unblinkingly pessimistic, deeply fatalistic and soaringly fantastical. I get continued pleasure from both those novels.

Mother Night I haven’t read for quite a while but recall for its daringly dark yet sympathetic character creation. God Bless You Mr. Rosewater also sticks in my mind as an unpredictable story about mixed-up morality.

Personally I find Slaughterhouse Five more sentimental and obvious than any of these early works, but I guess to many readers it seems most heart-felt, and it is no doubt earnest — the fire-bombing of Dresden is a searing episode. Of V’s later works, I thought Breakfast of Champions troubling, skipped Slapstick, remember little of Jailbird and avoided Deadeye Dick. Galapagos was diverting, Bluebeard mystifying and Hocus Pocus not very memorable, but I am firmly in favor of Timequake. To me Vonnegut’s summing up joins Heller’s Portrait of an Artist, As an Old Man and Charles Bukowski’s Pulp as the finest, funniest recapitulations of careers writing fiction I’ve read.

Image © Edie Vonnegut

I’ve met Vonnegut’s daughter Edie, and like her paintings of Domestic Goddesses,  and once met the man himself. I was standing behind him in a line for food after a preview showing of Robert Altman’s Kansas City. I introduced myself as a fan, and answered his question about what I do as “write about jazz.” Vonnegut, whom I remember looking sort of hang-dog, said he had played clarinet, and loved jazz. He added that he had tried to introduce the music to high school students while he was teaching at a high school in Cape Cod, but couldn’t get them interested.

I said I knew of only one bit of writing about music in his novels, one of my favorite scenes: When space traveller Malachi Constant finds himself stuck for an indeterminable amount of time in the caves of Mercury, he takes solace from the beautiful songs, light patterns and messages (“I am here, I am here, I am here” and “So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are”) of the harmoniums. Vonnegut seemed pleased I could quote that.

I haven’t read Shields’ bio, and might not, but it and Kurt Vonnegut, too, deserve better from the Times than being tossed off as topics rather beneath the reviewer’s engagement.

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Paul Motian – JazzProfiles

Drummer Paul Motian died November 22 at age 80. He was a unique sound organizer and constant actor on the jazz scene in New York City for nearly 60 years. He spoke to me for Down Beat in 1986 — an interview I offer in slightly different form below. Of course it doesn’t account for 15 more years of music, much of which has been stellar. But Motian’s voice — onrushing, exacting, broken occasionally by his barking laugh, may come through:

Drummer Paul Motian, like many a jazz player, lives in the eternal present. “When there were bohemians, I was a bohemian; when there were beatniks, I was a beatnik; when you were a hippie, I was a hippie, when you were a yippie, I was a yippie! I’ve been through the whole thing and even before there were bohemians, there was something else – I don’t know what it was – and I was that.”

He laughs dryly but enthusiastically, comfortable in his upper West Side of Manhattan apartment, hoping perhaps that his yuppie days are coming so he can decide whether or not to buy his soon-to-be-condo rooms with a view. The piano Keith Jarrett grew up on fills Motian’s living space, along with a partially setup drum kit, some stereo equipment he’s unhappy with, severeal healthy plants, records, shee music and well worn, friendly furniture. One acquires things, even living in the moment. Maybe what’s surprising to Motian, now that he thinks about it, is the extent of his past.

It’s been an amazingly brief but music-filled three decades since Motian made his first record – “with a band made up of Bob Dorough, the piano player, a bass player named Al Cotton, trumpeter Warren Fitzgerald, Hal Stein, a sax player, and Bob, uh, Newman, I think tenor player, in the summer of ’55, for Progressive Records, in New York and New Jersey” – not long after his Navy discharge. Could it have been so long ago he met the pianist Bill Evans, worked behind clarinetists Tony Scott and Jerry Wald, traveled with Oscar Pettiford’s big band, drummed with everybody at Birdland, at Small’s Paradise and the Café Bohemia, formed the trio with Evans and Scott Lafaro, joined the Jazz Composers Guild’s October Revolution, played in groups led by Arlo Guthrie, Charles Lloyd, Paul Bley and Keith Jarrett, sparked Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra and Carla Bley’s Escalator Over The Hill, began composing and recording, first for ECM and for Soul Note, too, under his own name, fronting his own combos, all the while maintaining his own highly poetic sound? Can’t be: check how open, alert and at the breaking point his most recent albums are. (It Should’ve Happened A Long Time Ago with guitarist Bill Frisell and tenorist Joe Lovano, Jack of Clubs with saxist Jim Pepper and bassist Ed Schuller added to make five. Taste and momentum have long been Motian’s long suits: his love of music and the beat – “I was talking to Dewey Redman,” he mentions, “and he said it’s like a blessing and a curse at the same time” – goes back to his childhood.

“I was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Providence, Rhode Island; my parents moved there when I was one or two years old.” Both his folks were Armenians born in Turkey. His father was much older than his mother, and had been hired by her father to travel to Havana – where she’d gone from the Middle East – to marry, bring her to the States, then have the union annulled. Instead, the marriage took.

Besides his swarthiness, Motian retains his ancestry by calling his publishing company Yazgol Music, after his grandmother. “They spoke Armenian and Turkish at home, but the language I know is a mixture of both. I can only spak it with people from the same province as my parents.

“I heard Armenian music, Arabic music, Egyptian, Turkish, all on 78s on a wind-up phonograph when I was a kid. I like the Turkish stuff; it seems to be more earthy, have more bottom. But what got me started playing . . .?

“Actually,” he shrugs, “I started on guitar, but it didn’t go. I signed up on the street with a cat recruiting kids to take lessons. I was attracted because I like cowboy movies – the guy puts his guitar around his neck, strums, sings – that looks like fun, I thought. I want to do that. But when I went to the class, here were 10 or 15 kids with guitars across their laps – Hawaiian guitars, right? I was real disappointed. I split, took the guitar home, put a rope around it, put it around my neck, took the metal bridge off it, and just started strumming. That was the end of that.

“The drum thing started because there was a drummer in the neighborhood and I used to hand out with his brother, who was my age. This drummer was a little older, like 20, and when he played people used to gather in the street on his stoop to listen. I got into that. I used to go over there a lot, and I liked what I heard. I really liked it, and before you knew it I was taking lessons with this guy. I was about 12. Then I found a more legitimate teacher, then another one, and just grew from that.

“I played in the school band, starting around seventh grade, and in high school  played in the marching band. Also, they had a dance band and I got into that – two or three trumpets, a couple of trombones. I got out of high school in ’49, started gigging around Providence in parts, playin’ tunes. I got involved with a band that toured New England, playing stock arrangements, Glenn Miller stuff, and Dorseyes, yeah; and they used to have big bands come to theaters in those days. I caught Count Basie and Duke Ellington and Jimmie Lunceford, Gene Krupa – I used to go backstage for autographs.

These were the days of critical disputes over the merits of bebop vs. Dixieland. Paul recalls hearing a Charlie Parker record in ’48 or ’49. “I didn’t really know what was happening, but it sounded good to me. It sounded different – interesting and exciting. And I heard Symphony Sid’s radio program from Birdland, sent away for 78 rpm records with Max Roach, Bud Powell. I still didn’t know about the construction of music, but it had me, it grabbed me. I remember driving down to New York one time: the smoke-filled rooms – I was 16 or so – Birdland was packed, went across the street and saw Dizzy Gillespie with his big band opposite George Shearing’s quintet with Denzil Best. It was great.

“I went into the Navy because the Korean War was happening, and I found out if you joined the Navy you could go to music school in Washington, D.C. I missed out on the school because I got sick, and when I got out of the hospital they shipped me out, so I spent a couple of years going back and forth from the Mediterranean – but playin’ in the band. And coming out, I stayed in New York. I was in Brooklyn. That’s the start of my professional playing. I was already 24 or 25.

“There used to be a lot of sessions in New York,” Motian continues. “There were chances to play. At the Open Door, near where NYU is now, they had sessions during the week and on the weekend Monk or Bird. One night Arthur Taylor didn’t show up and Bob Reisner, who was running the sessions, said, ‘Go get your drums, you can play with Thelonious. I ran home, got the drums, ran back, played with Thelonious, and he gave me $10 at the end of the night. I was the happiest guy in the world. Fantastic.

“In those days I was out every night looking for places to play, and I found them. I met Bill Evans right around that time, out on an audition for Jerry Wald – he had a big band for a while, and then a sextet – I found about at the musicians union. Bill was also auditioning. We hit it off right away, both got the gig and went on the road. Then Bill and I hooked up with Tony Scott and hooked up with Don Elliott. We did some records with him – and with Jimmy Knepper, Milt Hinton, Henry Grimes, Sahib Shihab. There’s one of me and Bill and Scott LaFaro playing with Tony Scott that’s never been released. And Lennie Tristano’s record company just put out a second that Henry and I did with Lennie back then.

“I learned so much from all of that, man. I worked a lot with Lennie, actually. One time we played the Half Note for 10 weeks. Think about that today: 10 weeks in the same club? He kept me, but he used a different bass player every week: Paul Chambers, Teddy Kotick, Peter Ind, Jimmy Garrison, Henry Grimes, Whitey Mitchell, Red Mitchell. They all played differently, of course, but I loved all those people, and I never thought about making any adjustments for any of them. I just played what was happening.

“So Bill and I stayed close. We used to play every day in his place, which was tiny. This is before his first record, before he played with Miles. We’d play tunes, or he’d write a tune. I told you about my first record; I think the second one was either Bill’s trio, New Conception, or a George Russell record where we played “All About Rosie.” Yeah, that: I think Bill’s trio with Kotick was the third record I did. I listen to some of those records now, and I’m really proud to have been part of them.

“I saw someone the other day who I recognized from years ago, I don’t know his name, and he said, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember you – you were the house drummer at Birdland.’ I didn’t remember it like that. I worked some gigs there. But when he said that, I realized I played there a lot. With Bill Evans opposite Basie – what a night that was – oh, man! I played there with Mose Allison, with Oscar Pettiford, with Chris Connor, with Zoot Sims, with Sonny Rollins once. I got to play with Coltrane in there, because Elvin was late. In those days Pee Wee Marquette, the doorman, used to say, ‘We don’t want no lulls between the bands – no lulls, no lulls.’ Elvin’s late, Pee Wee says ‘Paul, will you play with John?’ ‘Oh no, I can’t, I don’t want to play with John.’  They talked me into it. That was a real challenge. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to sound like Elvin.’ And he was so strong, his presence was so strong, it was hard not to sound like that.”

Did Motian sit down and try to determine what he did want to play to make himself distinctive and original? Or did he just sit and play it?

“Yeah, just played,” he recalls. “At times it seemed hard. I had a hard time getting with Scott LaFaro at the very beginning,

’cause I wasn’t used to the way he played – they said in those days, ‘This guy sounds like a guitar player.’ We didn’t click right away, it wasn’t like, ‘Ah, magic!’ Personally we were good friends; remember, he hadn’t been playing that long either, just a couple years at that point. It took a little time, but we hooked up, hooked up good. We each made adjustments, maybe, but we didn’t talk about it. We didn’t even rehearse much. Playin’, okay, but rehearsals, no.”

Hearing the Evans trio’s records today, one may become aware of their narrative detail – what subtly nuanced stories those three told – and the reorganization of the piano trio into a more equal unit.

“We knew we were doing something that was different, new, good and valid,” Motian testifies. “It was like three people being one voice instead of a piano with bass and drums accompaniment. We talked about that. And at the end of our Vanguard gig, when we recorded, we were talking about how we really reached a peak, we’ve got to be sure we work more, play more. But Scott died that Fourth of July weekend, the same year. Bill stopped playing for a while. I took some other gigs. Around the same time things started changing in New York. Albert Ayler was here, Paul Bley, the Jazz Composers Guild started – I wanted to be part of that. And stuff with Bill seemed at a standstill. We were doing the same stuff over and over. I quit Bill in California, when we were on the road.

“I’ll never forgive myself for that, but at the same time I couldn’t make it anymore. We were at Shelly Manne’s club, with Chuck Israels. The first night was great. The second night was a little not so great, and the third night. . . Everyone was telling me I was too loud, so I played softer and softer until I felt like I wasn’t even playing. I got pissed off and I quit. Bill said, ‘Please, don’t do this. ‘ But I paid my own way back to New York. What a horrible thing to do. If anyone ever did that to me now. . . Anyway, in New Ork I got back into the scene. I was in a band in the Village with Paul Bley, John Gilmore, Albert Ayler and Gary Peacock. We make two, five dollars a night.”

Didn’t time explode in the mid ’60s? Sure, but Motian simply kept his fingers on the intangible pulse. As he explains his method now, “I’m discovering the music as I do it. Playing a couple of nights ago, in Frankfort, with Dewey, Charlie Haden and Baikida Carroll, I did some technical things on the drum set I’d never done before, and I realized it at the moment or just after. The discovery as you do it, that’s what turns me on. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I go out there, nothing is pre-planned. I’m hoping I’m going to turn myself on, and that’s going to turn the drum solo or playing on, and it’s going to turn itself on and make me do something even better, make me grow.

“You ask about my characteristics. Well, I would say I have a sound. I do have sound that’s me, that’s my sound, and 90 percent of the time I can get that sound on any drum set. It’s the tuning, and I don’t have any preset about it, I’m just using my ears. Each drum has a different tonality, and I use my ears to get that which is pleasing to me and my ears. That’s my sound – plus the cymbal I’ve been playing on for 30 years or so.”

Keith Jarrett was the next leader to benefit from Motian’s sound, from his first LP as a trio leader (Life Between the Exit Signs, with Haden, too) to his last with a quintet (Mysteries, with Redman, Haden and Guilhermo Franco),

including such highlights as The Survivor’s Suite (quartet as above, without Franco). Though Paul did night club work for bread during the lean rock-impact years (“A waiter at the Vanguard asked me one night, ‘Paul, would you work with the Beatles?’ and I said, ‘Hell no, are you kidding me, man?'”), he didn’t exactly suffer. Due to a connection with Alan Arkin’s bass-playing brother Bob, Motian backed Arlo Guthrie at Woodstock and on the road, alternating weekends between the folky and Jarrett’s associate Charles Lloyd. These were literally riotous times, which were captured by Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra. There, under a red and black banner held by Haden and arranger Carla Bley, stands Paul between clarinetist Perry Robinson and trombonist Roswell Rudd, among Gato Barbieri, Don Cherry, Mike Mantler, Bob Northern, Howard Johnson, Andrew Cyrille and guitarist Sam Brown.

Motian knows just where he waws on the nights Bobby Kennedy was murdered and Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot dead, during the Chicago Democratic convention of ’68 and other calamitous events. (Besides having sharp recall, he’s kept a detailed gig log from an early point in

“But as far as the political thing goes, I don’t consider myself knowledgeable enough. I’m into the music. The politics were Charlie’s stuff; I don’t say I don’t agree with it, ’cause I’m more on his side than any other.” Maybe Motian just happened to be around to cut “For a Free Portugal” for Haden’s Closeness album of duets, but titles such as “American Indian: Song of Sitting Bull,” “Inspiration from a Vietnamese Lullaby” and versons of Ornette Coleman’s “War Orphans” and Haden’s “Song for Che” on Motian’s own early ECM recordings suggests his political consciousness was no source of shame.

Working with Jarrett – “That sort of disintegrated; it was inevitable we would break up” – Motian had met Manfred Eicher and Thomas Stowsand (who became his European agent) of ECM. “On our first Europe tour, they were like roadies,” he says. His sound must have appealed to Eicher; certainly Motian’s brush work, his crisp stick patterns and his emphasis on the higher surfaces (rather than the bass drum) of the traps has been well served by ECM’s studio and engineers. “ECM offered me a record. I was still with Keith, but I was writing, My first record, Conception Vessel, had different people playing different things: Keith for one track, a trio with Sam Brown and Charlie, another track with [violinist] Leroy Jenkins, Charlie and [flutist] Becky Friend.

“Then Sam Brown told me about another guitarist, Paul Metzke, whom he liked; why didn’t we try something with two guitars? I thought it was a good idea, I wanted to do that, that was Tribute. By then Keith’s thing was over; the Tin Palace on the Bowery was happening, there were a lot of new people I hadn’t heard around and I didn’t know who I wanted, so I started going out, listening. I heard people I liked and talked to them; some were willing, some weren’t. I liked (saxophonist] Charles Brackeen, his playing, so we got together, and [bassist] David Izenzon – I’d known him for years. I got into putting together my own stuff; our album’s called Dance. Le Voyage was my next trio record, with Brackeen and [bassist] J.F. Jenny-Clark. I had Arild Anderson play bass on one tour. Then in 1980, summer, somehow it wasn’t working anymore. I want to changre, get out of that bass/saxophone/drum format. I wanted guitars. I played a gig with Pat Metheny and he recommended Bill Frisell. We’ve been together almost five years now, and the rest of the band came by people suggersting other people.

“I think Tim Berne brought up Ed Schuller’s name – if we play a tune with changes, Eddie’s cool, and if we play free, he’s cool: he can cover. Marc Johnson [bassist], I think, recommended Joe Lovano, and after I got with him, I wanted another one (tenor saxophonist]. Mack Goldsbury did one French tour with me – he’s from Texas and had that sound, but it didn’t quite work out. Then I found Jim Pepper, and we’ve been doing that.

“I also had in the back of my mind this thing about the saxophone and guitar and drums, without a bass. I never had the nerve to pull it off or try it. Then I did try it, and I liked it, it worked out. Now I’m working mostly with the trio, but the quintet’s still together when there’s money and interest in it. But it’s so simple with the trio, the transportation aspect, the money. I don’t even carry drums. The three of us can fit in one cab.”

This may sound like Motian’s typical flexibility and practicality, but he’s got a new attitude about his career, now accepting the drums – and his urge to compose – and laughing about at least some of the dues paying that attends most jazz endeavors. “I found out it’s possible to do your own and other stuff. You don’t have to be exclusive. Like, I’m playing with [pianist] Marilyn Crispell at Carnegie Recital Hall – she was up here rehearsing yesterday; that’s going to be nice. Or this thing with Charlie, Dewey and Baikida, and I’m going to Canada for a couple of weeks with David Friesen. In the past, when people called, I wouldn’t take their gigs, because everything I did took me away from my stuff, and it took me too long to get back into it, writing tunes, playing and rehearsing. But I’ve changed. I just made a record for ECM with Paul Bley, John Surman and Bill Frisetll. First time I’ve played with Bley in 20 years.

“I like melody, lyrics, tunes and songs more and more,” Motian admits. “Writing is not easy for me. I’ll have an idea, or sit at a piano – I’m a terrible pianist – and play until I do something I like, then write that down and keep it in mind. It’s not easy for me because I’m not knowledgeable, but I trust my ears and my intuition, and that’s the right way.

“That’s something I learned on piano, that taught me something about drums. I was taking piano lessons, playing a piece of music, looking down at my hands and I was really playing the piece. I remember thinking, ‘Whose hands are those? They can’t be mine.’ That’s great when that happens; you trust yourself. You know, you’re playing with someone and you’re thinking, ‘I should change the tempo now, I should anticipate. . . ‘ Or you’re playing a tune and it’s ending and you think, ‘Okay, I should end this now . . .’ No, it’s cool, just sit back and trust yourself. When the right time for that to happen is happening you’ll know it and you’ll just do it. Wait, trust yourself, it will end when the time comes. Now I do that, I trust myself.”

Of course he does. His past prove that many others have, and his present attests to his success.

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