Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

Celebrating Chicago pianist Willie Pickens (1931-2017)

Willie Pickens, photo by Marc PoKempner

Pianist Willie Pickens, 86, a powerful, lyrical and generous modernist who performed, taught and mentored young musicians from Chicago starting in 1959, died of a heart attack on Dec. 12 while at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, readying himself to play at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola with 29-year-old trumpeter Marquis Hill. Having heard him often in the past three years, I can attest that Pickens was at the height of his creativity, and a warm, engaging presence in every public context.

For instance, at the 40th anniversary party of Southport Records (which put out his debut cd as a leader, It’s About Time!, in 1986) at the Green Mill last Nov. 5, Willie performed a stunning rendition of “Giant Steps,” John Coltrane’s chord-running piece, and  then improvised piano duets with composer George Flynn. The two tangled seriously, thornily, although they’d only had talk-through preparation. Willie said afterwards that he’d had to stretch.

However, extending himself seemed to come naturally for this gentleman, who taught music in Chicago’s public schools from the mid ’60s until the mid ’90s, when he went on international tour with Coltrane drummer Elvin Jones’ Jazz Machine.

Prior to then he’d gained a reputation and fans without leaving town very often. He earned admiration as a frequent collaborator with well-known jazz stars passing through Chicago, often gigging at Joe Segal’s Jazz Showcase.

Pickens’ style is hard to pin down, but typically flowed readily, richly, as if from a reservoir of knowledge and inspired imagination. He seems to have been influenced by or akin to such jazz innovators as McCoy Tyner, Thelonious Monk and perhaps Herbie Nichols. Although his hands were not large, notes, phrases and chords all rolled out from them with firmness and fullness. He was melodically and rhythmically exciting, and harmonically investigatory. I never heard him play with less than total involvement. Like here:

Pickens is heard on saxophonist Eddie Harris’ 1961 hit version of the theme from “Exodus”; he recorded with Marian McPartland as well as with Elvin Jones, and A Jazz Christmas (on Southport), which led to his 2016 Kennedy Center “Jazz Piano Christmas” concert. According to Howard Reich in the Chicago Tribune, Pickens had a spiritual side, reflected in his oversight of an annual Christmas benefit concert at Hyde Park Union Church. He initiated the jazz program at south side Kenwood Academy High School in the ’60s, taught for years at Northern Illinois University, founded the Ravinia Jazz Mentor program in north suburban Highland Park in 1995 and intended to continue work in Ravinia’s Reach Teach Play Education program when he returned from New York. He had appeared at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, and at Jazz Institute of Chicago events including its summer Straightahead Jazz Camp. He had a welcoming smile.

Chicago has a long legacy of important, creative and popular pianists — think Jelly Roll Morton, Earl Hines, Nat “King” Cole, Ahmad Jamal, Herbie Hancock — and Willie Pickens has a place in that line. His daughter Bethany Pickens is also a pianist, and teaches at Kenwood Academy High School. The two played Christmas song, jazzily, at the Kennedy Center in 2016, on two pianos. That was something like standard operating procedure; here’s their 2015 performance at Chicago’s Piano Forte, originally broadcast live by radio station WDCB.

Willie Pickens will be missed, and remembered.

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Hyde Park Jazz Fest, summer’s last dance (photos)

Chicago’s Hyde Park Jazz Festival in the first days of fall (Sept. 23 & 24th) which were unusually hot, is an exceptional event, curated for creative artistry, local and otherwise, drawing a highly diverse crowd

Late afternoon jazz dance. All photos by Marc PoKempner unless otherwise credited.

to a fair that mixes popular and specialized performances at a range of boutique venues.

Produced by an independent 501c3, the 11-year-old Hyde Park Jazz Festival receives some support from the University of Chicago’s Office of Civic Engagement, and has co-founders in principals from the Hyde Park Jazz Society but relies for funding on grants it applies for on its own and solicited individual giving. The fest occurs mostly on the U of C campus, which strives to be more inviting to its surrounding black residential neighborhoods than it’s been for decades. The efforts seems to work — a racially integrated crowd of several thousand, skewing middle-aged but including students (the term had just started) and families with kids, attended, all free of charge ($5 donations were encouraged). Some set up discreet tents, inflatable loungers or camp chairs within hearing distance of the outdoor stages at either end of a pedestrian mall on the Midway, socializing while taking in sun and street food. Others took refuge in the darker, cooler venues of the Logan Center for the Arts, the DuSable Museum, the Smart Museum or the Little Black Pearl art and design center on 47th St. 

Hyde Park Jazz Fest audience in the Midway.

No way to be everywhere, hear everything. My idea of fun.

Beckoned, walking to the site, by the muted trumpet of Marquis Hill in drummer Makaya McCraven’s band with rare, pleasing vibes-guitar duo (Joel Ross and Matt Gold, respectively) and in-demand bassist Junius Paul. Glanced in on Thelonious Monk’s biographer Robin D.G. Kelley‘s talk, hustled to the premiere of the Bamako*Chicago Sound System, flutist extraordinaire Nicole Mitchell’s collaboration with Malian kora player Ballake Sissoko,

Bamako*Chicago Sound System, Nicole Mitchell sixth from left, Ballake Sissoko farthest right

balafon virtuoso Fassery Diabaté and singer Fatim Kouyaté with Chicago vocalist Mankwe Ndos,bassist Josh Abrams, percussionist Jovina Armstrong and former Chicagoan guitarist Jeff Parker.

Amina Claudine Myers

This was swaying, tuneful music, superficially light as a breeze but with transparent, undulating layers of activity. I presented Ms. Mitchell with the Jazz Journalists Association’s 2017 Jazz Award for Flutist of the Year — it is her eighth consecutive such honor — and she accepted it mirthfully before the performance. As always, her personal improvisations are melody-rich, and she performed one solo that was genuinely edgy, pushing her instrument and the song’s formal limitations, too. See Lauren Deutsch’s photos of Nicole Mitchell for apt visualizations of her music. The cross-cultural ease of Bamako*Chicago Sound System’s ensemble is heartening.

A few blocks away, at the Hyde Park Union Church, Amina Claudine Myers performed gospel songs from her childhood on piano. I only heard part of the performance, I think she played organ and sang, as well. Myers, a foundational member around 1965 of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians is still active in its New York chapter, though she’s less well-known than many of her AACM cohort. Her experience with her spiritual material is undeniable, and of course it imbues jazz.

Ben Goldberg, clarinet

Clarinetist Ben Goldberg, from the Bay Area, cast a secular if similarly ethereal ambiance in the Logan Center performance penthouse (9th floor looking towards the Lake) when night came on. He considered compositions of Thelonious Monk, 100th birthday boy/immortal genius. Almost a third of the full house cleared out after the second long episode in which he thoughtfully deconstructed such compositions as “Work,” “Ask Me Now,” “Mysterioso” and the hymn “Abide with Me.” Said Goldberg, “I understand, solo clarinet is not for everyone,” and when the room had re-settled, added, without rancor, “The lightweights are gone.” His evocations of Monk’s themes, phrase by phrase, started at high point of understanding and went up from there.

Bill McHenry and Andrew Cyrille, photo by Dennis McDonough

I missed a lot — hometown favorites Ari Brown, Dee Alexander, Tomeka Reid, too many others — but happily heard drummer Andrew Cyrille and tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry in a large hall in International House. A broadly-informed, highly skillful and imaginative drummer, Cyrille is still most associated with his 1960’s – ’70s collaboration with pianist Cecil Taylor, documented on the two masterpieces Unit Structures and Conquistador!, although prior to Taylor he’d supported Coleman Hawkins and Mary Lou Williams, among others. It’s less often recalled that he recorded what may be the first all solo drums album, What About? in 1971 (and another, The Loop, in ’78), the historic four-drummer album Pieces of Time (with Kenny Clarke, Famadou Don Moyé and Milford Graves in ’84), has

Andrew Cyrille concentrates on tom-toms with his mallets; photo by Dennis McDonough

led and recorded several distinctive ensembles from the ’70s through last year’s The Declaration of Musical Independence featuring guitarist Bill Frisell, synthesist Richard Teitelbaum and bassist Ben Street, as well as Trio 3 with reedsman Oliver Lake and bassist Reggie Workman, and this duet project with McHenry (recorded as Proximity).

I’ve known Cyrille personally since profiling him for DownBeat in the ’80s. I traveled with him briefly in the Soviet Union, invited him to address Jazz Journalists Association meetings at the New School Jazz program (where he’s taught for decades) and do lecture-demonstrations at my NYU classes. His distinctive strengths are embedded in the extraordinary range and responsiveness of his sensibility.

Cyrille can wield and drive a slashing attack or underlie a passage with sustained but muted drama. He is always structurally and compositionally aware, so purposeful, but he’s also quite willing to go with a collaborator’s flow. He tunes his drums carefully, yet will play anything — I’ve seen him stand from behind his kit, put his sticks to chairs,

Andrew Cyrille, NYC, 2012, photo by Sánta István Csaba

stands, tables, the wall and the floor until he returns to his stool without having missed a beat. He is a jazz master, if not yet acknowledged as such by the National Endowment of the Arts nonetheless known to fans of improvised music worldwide. Here he’s playing a snare with his teeth or tongue, like Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Guy mouthing guitar strings.

McHenry is a fine match, exploring horn motifs steadily, methodically, free to do anything/go anywhere but hewing to his own clear logic. Together, they exemplified a balanced partnership intent on physically generating and shaping sound.

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Jazz community upends Englewood’s bad rep

The 18th annual free Englewood Jazz Festival in south side Hamilton Park last Saturday (9/16) affirmed the best of Chicago’s grassroots culture,

Dancing at Englewood Jazz Festival. Photos by Marc PoKempner, unless otherwise credited

promoting an opposite image of this challenged neighborhood as a dangerous place — unless one fears powerful, creative music that speaks as directly as dance rhythms to its family of listeners.

Produced on behalf of the Live the Spirit Residency by saxophonist Ernest Dawkins — current AACM Chicago chairperson, Park District music teacher and every-Sunday star at Norman’s Bistro, who led a terrific little big band (12 pieces, not 18) and jam

Wallace Roney, l; Emilio Modeste, tenor sax

session with singer Carolyn Fitzhugh — the fest also starred Chicago’s down-to-earth diva Dee Alexander with her ace group (pianist Miguel de la Cerna, bassist Junius Paul, drummer Ernie Adams) and East Coast-based trumpeter Wallace Roney, whose three very young sidemen (his 13 year old nephew Kojo on drums; tenor saxophonist Emilio Modeste) proved up to his music’s hard, fast demands.

The afternoon-long program was emceed by WDCB‘s music director/morning show host Paul Abella and station manager Dan Bindert (Dee Alexander has a show now on ‘DCB, too). It drew some 1500 folks skewing late middle-aged, who sat on lawn chairs and blankets and a few rows of low bleachers. We drank bottled water and herb tea, bought barbeque, considered shea butter, t-shirts, costume

Ernest Dawkins conducts Live the Spirit Residency Big Band at 18th Englewood Jazz Festival

jewelry and baked goods from local vendors. About half a dozen uniformed police officers hung around, available and amiable, untroubled and untroubling. Dawkins gave them a shout out from the stage. The biggest problem was the vegan food never arrived. The Englewood Jazz Festival was a lark in the park.

Yet the Live the Spirit Residency Big Band’s soloists took it seriously, their music consistently tight and urgent. Trumpeter Pharez Whitted isn’t to be messed with — he was also playing that night as he had the night before at the Green Mill in pianist Willie Pickens‘ quintet, masterful on ditties like “Salt Peanuts” and “Giant Steps”. Here he was paired with trumpeter John Moore, whose open attack and muted sound, too,

Ernest Dawkins and Howard Mandel

reminded me of late, little-heralded Billy Brimfield, trumpet partner of late, deservedly-heralded saxophonist Fred Anderson. Decades ago, performing at a coffee house in Evanston, they introduced me into jazz’s serious nature.

Pianist Alexis Lombre thickened and detailed the ensemble’s blend (she’s going to appear solo and with her trio at the Jazz Institute of Chicago’s upcoming Gala — she’s emerged from the JIC’s Links program). Baritone saxophonist Dudley Owens called up phrases from the deep, his bandmates answering with contrapuntal riffs which Dawkins brought to focused climaxes. Tenor saxophonist Kenneth Lethridge burst out from the ensemble irrepressibly on a hot, bold arrangement of the evergreen “Summertime.”

A story teller called Shake-A-Leg spoke then, chillingly, of the first atom bomb’s charge — and the players went down front to propound on congas and barrel drums.

Ernest Dawkins and Mark Ruffin

They knew and summoned ancient, timeless rhythms. We could have been in New Orleans, Havana or Lagos — as everywhere, these beats stirred anyone alive to move. (My photojournalist pal Marc PoKempner adds he was quite disturbed that his so-called colleagues mobbed the troupe for shots, oblivious to blocking the audience’s views.)

Next, Maestro Dawkins presented Sirius/XM jazz director and producer Mark Ruffin and me with engraved plaques, hailing our “inspiration and many contributions to jazz in all its forms.” (trumpeter Orbert Davis, on the road, was also so honored). I’ve received Awards before and have helped present many, but was unusually touched.

Howard Mandel and the Spirit of Jazz Award; photo by Dennis McDonough

Mark and I are nearly Englewood home-boys. His parents ran a record store, where he worked as a kid, in an adjacent neighborhood. I grew up about 3 miles due east, absorbing the spirit of our city and nation’s music from the radio, tv, my parents’ records, my friends and sounds of the streets. Ruffin and I have known each other for decades — he credits me with giving him his first paying job in radio, producing a half-hour interview with needle drop of pianist Judy Roberts for Jazz Chicago, a series I co-produced with JoAnn Kawell circa 1979 under Jazz Institute auspices, aired on WBEZ.

He has since then racked up extensive experience in jazz radio, print journalism and presentation — he was an emcee of the Chicago Jazz Festival this year, and he’s produced Grammy-nominated albums. Orbert Davis, you should know, is the co-founder and director of the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, with extensive educational and performance activities including collaborations with musicians in Cuba. I’m doing what I do — writing this blog, liner notes, articles, working on books, stoking the Jazz Journalists Association, hearing music, reading about it, fiddling with it, serving as a board member of the Jazz Institute of Chicago.

As Ernest Dawkins and the rest of the musicians know, and so do such as PoKempner,  Ms. Kawell, Hot House curator Marguerite Horberg,

information technologies innovator Ivan Handler, photogs Dennis McDonough and Kent Richmond, writer Davis Whiteis, among my friends who were attendance, and also the JIC board members there, some of them involved with the Hyde Park Jazz Society and the Hyde Park Jazz Festival Sept 23 & 24, as well as all the other good folk who turned out at Hamilton Park, the spirit of jazz is infectious, demanding and self-renewing. You catch it and it catches you; it carries you along, we’re happily swept away, and here we are: Englewood.

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My Q&A for Blues@Greece & Spirit of Jazz Award

Jazz, blues, American literature and where I’d go for a day in a time machine are topics I address in an email interview with Michalis Limnios who blogs at Blue@Greece. I post this item out of sheer vanity, reinforced by my being presented with a Spirit of Jazz Award tomorrow (9/16) by the Englewood Jazz Festival, taking place from noon to 6 pm on Chicago’s South Side in Hamilton Park, not far from where I grew up.

Performers include saxophonist and organizer Ernest Dawkins, singers Dee Alexander and Carolyn Fitzhugh, the Live the Spirit Residency Big Band and trumpeter Wallace Roney. This one-day free fest is the important date between the Chicago Jazz Festival and the Hyde Park Jazz Fest (where I’ll present the Jazz Journalists Association’s Flutist of the Year Award to the great Nicole Mitchell, appearing with kora player Ballake Sisoko in the debut of their Bamako*Chicago Sound System).

I’m thrilled to stand for this Spirit honor with fellow recipients trumpeter-composer-Chicago Jazz Philharmonic leader Orbert Davis,and Sirius/XM jazz director-record producer-journalist Mark Ruffin, who credits me with giving him his first paying job in radio about 40 years ago).

But back to ME: Here’s the pull quote Mike used from my response to the heady question, “What is the impact of Blues and Jazz on literature and on the racial, political and socio-cultural implications?”

Your not-so-humble blogger, photo by Marc PoKempner

Mark Twain was at the font of the American vernacular style the blues and jazz gave impetus to, and we can put Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, Jack London, a few others there, too. Then read the fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Ishmael Reed, Chester Himes – “hear” the rhythms and snap of their language, the sounds of people meeting in the streets and taverns of modern cities – that’s jazz and blues.

Asked “How has the Blues and Jazz culture influenced your views of the world and the journeys you’ve taken?”

Jazz has helped me learn to be adaptable and has heightened my sensitivity for responsiveness. It’s encouraged me to savor life in all its dimensions, and swing with it, try to make it work for me, dance lightly and gracefully, with power when advisable. It’s taught me about changeups I can use in my writing.

Where I’d go in a time machine?

Room 305 of the Savoy Hotel, Chicagon on February 15th, 1943, to overhear Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie hash out the basics of what became bebop for their first recording. Or back to Soldier Field, Chicago on August 15, 1965, to hear John Coltrane with Archie Shepp, McCoy Tyner,

Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones at the DownBeat Jazz Festival (Gerry Mulligan, Woody Herman, and the Thelonious Monk Quartet were also on the bill). I was there!”

 

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Youssou N’Dour on stage & screen, PoKempner photos

Photo-journalist Marc PoKempner‘s images from the Chicago Jazz Fest, as featured in my previous post, and these from Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour’s rousing who two weeks earlier, exhibit how he’s dealing straightforwardly and creatively with the screen backing musicians at the Pritzker Pavilion of Millennium Park. Giving us eyefuls to enjoy.

Here’s what we can see — as PoKempner proves, without post-production; the double images are the videographers’ superimpositions — when visually-conscious, kinetic performing artists are video’d and magnified in near-real time, presumably so audiences far from the stage can better appreciate their costumes, moves, expressions and expression.

Dazzling effects, new visions when those moments are captured in the snap of a photograph, too.

The colors and rhythms of these image seem related, naturally, to those of the elegant, graceful, melliflous singer-composer-bandleader-politician’s lastest album, Africa Rekk.

His songs on it include “Goree” (for the island off Dakar from which slaves embarked to the Americas), “Be Careful,” “Exodus,” “Conquer the World,” “Food for All” and “Money, Money.” One can discern his messages simply from the way Youssou N’Dour and troupe looks, dancing, playing, singing. PoKempner’s photojournalism takes us there.

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Jazz on Millennium Park’s big screen – PoKempner photos

How’s that for brass? Jon Faddis presents the trumpeters of the Chicago Jazz Festival Big Band (from left: Chuck Parrish, Pharez Whitted, Tito Carrillo, Victor Garcia)

A 40-by-22½-foot LED screen is a dominating feature of the stage in the Pritzker Pavilion of Chicago’s Millennium Park, difficult to ignore though many try. Photographer Marc PoKempner does the opposite in his shots from the 39th annual Chicago Jazz Festival: he uses what he (and everybody else) sees to create striking images, in the best tradition of artists in his medium.

Guitarist George Freeman (age 90) with fellow guitarist Mike Allemana, organist Pete Benson, drummer Mike Schlick

 

A smaller but not less intense screen at the Claudia Cassidy Theater of the Chicago Cultural Center, where drummer Ignacio Berroa led a band of students demonstrating points in his talk on “The Evolution of Afro-Cuban Jazz.”

 

Boom Tic Boom, demonstrating the welcome trend of gender-diversified ensembles: bassist Todd Sickafoose, pianist Myra Melford, violinist Jenny Scheinman, leader and drummer Allison Miller, cornetist Kirk Knuffke, clarinetist Ben Goldberg.

 

Kirk Knuffke magnified, visible in detail to the crowd in the grassy field. The sound is amplified — why not the sight?

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Chicago Jazz Fest expanded review & Deutsch photos

My DownBeat review of the 39th annual Chicago Jazz Festival held over Labor Day weekend in and spilling out of Millennium Park, highlights the best I heard — including the specially organized big band

The Chicago Jazz Festival Big Band, led by Jon Faddis, in Dizzy Gillespie’s Centennial Celebration, at Pritzker Pavilion of Millennium Park, 89/31/17 (all photos on this page copyright Lauren Deutsch)

led by trumpeter Jon Faddis, making big fun from his mentor Dizzy Gillespie‘s fresh-as-fire arrangements dating 60 to 70 years back. (Gotta wonder what a music fan raised on the past decades’ pop, country and rap but who never heard anything like this would make of the power of 16 players so synced in rhythm, tune and spirit, partying with sound).

Lauren Deutsch’s photos depict that set splendidly — (and thanks in large part to her work over the past 21 years as executive director of the Jazz Institute of Chicago, the fest retains its essential community DNA).

To expand: The huge screen backdrop is good for attendees in the grassy field and back rows of seats, but can dwarf those onstage. Faddis was able to make this presentation, lasting more than an hour, seem intimate and simultaneously made for tv (astute camera work from the City’s staffers helped).

Jon Faddis, eyes open

A large man in dark clothes, Jon was at ease talking with his horn under his arm, and equally so lifting it to pierce the limits of hearing at key points in the hard-driving, wildly colorful compositions from the era when swing bands went bebop over Afro-Cuban beats. Gillespie was a pioneer of drawing on Afro-Cuban, Caribbean and South American elements and on the flagwaver “Manteca” Faddis’ silvery upper register is so amazing we might forget what a swift and sensitively musical mind he has. But like Gillespie, that’s the real crux of his creativity, his high notes and wit, willingness to be silly and ability to spontaneously inspire a dozen or so virtuosi simply aspects of it. To me, Faddis’ best and most personal playing was his all-but-recklessly fast, nimble, nuanced, shapely, melodically developed solo on “Tanga,” based on one of Gillespie’s later career combo recordings.

Victor Garcia on flugelhorn, Jon Faddis admiring

One man’s solo doesn’t a set make. Faddis demonstrated generosity as well as geniality joshing with Victor Garcia, an up’n’coming Chicagoan in the brass section, creating a running joke that had a handsome musical payoff, gaining Garcia extra attention for his flugelhorn feature.  (More or perhaps less incidentally, the very first solo of this show, on “Night In Tunisia,” was performed by Audrey Morrison, Jazz Studies Director at the Music Institute of Chicago, a mature white woman.)

New Yorker Antonio Hart, a last minute sub for his mentor, saxophonist Jimmy Heath (91, he had a medical issue)

Alto saxophone Antonio Hart soloing on “Things to Come” by Dizzy Gillespie

was a standout, tearing through “Things to Come,” Gillespie’s warning from 1946, in alto sax language that took the freedoms claimed by of Charlie Parker through the changes wrought by such as Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Albert Ayler. Chicago tenor saxophonist Pat Mallinger of Sabretooth, the hardbitten, longtime midnight Saturday to 4 am Sunday attraction at the Green Mill, showed his stuff, as did trumpeter Pharez Whitted.

The rhythm section, however, was this orchestra’s solid core: Dr. Todd Coolman, understated but unwavering bassist and professor (former director) of jazz studies at Purchase College (SUNY), where Faddis also teaches; drummer Ignacio Berroa, who arrived in the US from his native Havana as a refugee/alien during the 1981 Mariel boatlift, was hired by Gillespie for his quartet and stayed until the trumpeter’s death in ’93,  plus Chicago pianist Willie Pickens, at age 86 undiminished in ideas and agility.

Willie Pickens

Just days earlier I’d heard Pickens in command of entirely different repertoire, accompanying Gary Bartz. He sweeps stylistically from Bud Powell’s fast single note lines to the more spacious, all-octaves approach of McCoy Tyner, and his infectious momentum connected with the clavé rhythm of “Manteca” irresistibly.

This all made for a thrilling first night for a jazz festival, and set a high bar for all the acts who followed.

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Jazz/Improv Chicago: Wide-ranging talents, free fests, PoKempner pix

Chicago’s jazz/improvised music scene contains multitudes, last week ranging from the wild yet earnest Liberation Music Collective to veteran piano sophisticate Michael Weiss in trio, as two of Marc PoKempner‘s photos document (and more of his vision, focused on links between local music and politics — Obama included — is on exhibit titled “Harold’s Got the Blues” for the next month at the restaurant Wishbone).

The Liberation Music Collective, a young ensemble led by bassist-vocalist-lyricist Hannah Fidler and trumpeter-conductor Matt Riggen, celebrated the release of its new album Rebel Portraiture in performance at the Jazz Record Art Collective which runs a terrific series at a loft called the Fulton Street Collective. The music, like PoKempner’s photomontage, had outsized elements — songs and raps about martyred freedom fighters, set and offset by strong solos and big band climaxes in the manner of Gil Evans or maybe David Baker (several LMC members have studied at University of Indiana in Bloomington, where Baker launched one of the first college jazz programs).

Weiss, perhaps best known from his years accompanying Chicago-born tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin but with scads of other credits and works under his own name, is deeply in the tradition defined by revered elders such as Barry Harris, derived from breakthroughs of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. Leading a trio with bassist Jake Vinsel and drummer George Fludas at Andy’s Jazz Club and Restaurant, Weiss played several original songs as well as “Green Dolphin Street,” but the repertoire was less memorable than his fleet right hand runs, intricate voicings and harmonic explorations in which complex incidents followed fast upon each

other. Not to be simplistic, but Weiss, age 59, is all about his instrument, and what he can do with those hands.

That’s not all I heard in the past several days — Danish alto saxophonist Laura Toxvaerd, visiting the city briefly, threw out horn conventions to improvise sonically with a trio at Elastic Arts. Saxophonist Gary Bartz was at the Jazz Showcase, playing it relatively straight, with local great pianist Willie Pickens in a combustable quartet; bluesy, sardonic yet hopeful vocalist/songwriter/pianist Ben Sidran led his four-piece group at the Green Mill, and of course a lot went on that I missed entirely.

What matters more is what’s coming up: the Chicago Jazz Festival starts with a Club Tour during which trolleys convey ticket-holders to venues all over town on Wednesday night, and then four days of free performances by artists ranging from Roscoe Mitchell to Sheila Jordan to Jason Moran to Dr. Lonnie Smith to Mary Halvorson in Millennium Park. Then there’s the Englewood Jazz Festival all day Sept. 16 — I’m honored to have been chosen to receive a Spirit of Jazz Award there! — and the Hyde Park Jazz Festival  (I’ll present flutist Nicole Mitchell with a Jazz Journalists Association Award at her Bamako-Chicago Sound System performance Sept. 23). Wonderful lineups at all these free (did I mention free?) events. Not to be missed, so I’ll be there — probably with my buddy Marc PoKempner, working together as we have for years.

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War for laughs: Marx Brothers, Strangelove, Chaplin, Lehrer

My father taught me at age 8 to trust the Marx Brothers’ for trenchant social commentary. Here’s Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo in Duck Soup.

On the night of my 17th birthday I sat in a theater, alone, watching the incomparable Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb . . .

Thanks to Peter Sellers, Peter Bull (still Russian ambassador?), Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George for a great one-sided phone call. No confidence there will be such diplomatic efforts.

Dr. Strangelove was on a double bill with The War Game, directed by Peter Watkins. Nothing funny about it.

 

Musical Interlude: “War” from the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, globetrotting sons of the late Chicago music visionary Celan Phil Cohran. Seems to be calling for peace.

One last laugh? The Tramp as der Fuhrer.

Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha.

Encore: the ever pertinent Tom Lehrer.

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The Jazz & Blues Art Box — instant collection, rare data trove

Two hundred and thirty dvds of concerts and 96 interviews from the International Jazzfestival Bern (Switzerland), 1983 to 2002, 20 yearbooks plus a 344-page large format graphics-rich volume, in a cabinet on wheels standing almost 4 feet tall, 3 feet wide, 15 inches deep. Released as a one-time-only edition with a promise of no reissues and the dvds (in PAL format, playable on my Mac) constituting a single unit never to be split up. Cost: $8,400 USD. The Jazz & Blues Art Box is a phenomenon unto itself, the ultimate gift for the connoisseur and/or an instant collection of stellar performances and oral histories for a school or library.

There’s nothing else like it I know of. In some ways it’s comparable to Audubon’s original Birds of America, known as “the Double Elephant Folio” for comprising approximately 40″ x 30″ plates depicting their subjects in life-size, but those 435 plates (87 sets of five published by 1838, costing $870 in the day’s currency) would have been easier to get an overview of in a single sitting. The Jazz & Art Art Box would take something like 400 hours — more than 10 work weeks — to sit through just once, start to finish.

Based on the one dvd I’ve sampled —  a Max Roach quartet gig from 1980 (like the band below, but with Tyrone Brown on bass rather than Calvin Hill) which I was given at the New York City introduction last month of the J&BAB, a reception at the New School at which Wynton Marsalis (who has played the Fest, with at least three sets in the

box), jazz fest producer George Wein, Box annotator Hank O’Neal and executive producer Hans Zurbrügg presided onstage, talking between screened excerpts — the quality of sound, multi-camera videos and interviews is impressive. (Here’s the promotional video with a couple brief samples that explains how the whole project came together). The musicians being grilled, from what I’ve seen, aren’t asked dumb questions; as they’re being treated well, they come up with fresh answers. The big book is handsomely laid out and its text seems substantive, too. The J&BAB is a beautiful thing.

Zurbrügg, its prime mover, is a Swiss entrepreneur and amateur trumpeter who founded the Jazzfestival Bern (IJFB) in 1976, still owns and produces it. His artistic focus has been definitively mainstream, including modernists but few who go very far out. As a result, the dvds spotlight many veterans from the swing-to-bop era such as Benny Carter, Jay McShann, Stéphane Grappelli, Dorothy Donegan and Freddy Green, along with post-WWII leaders such as Buddy de Franco, Betty Carter, Freddie Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, Chick Corea, Art Blakey, Dizzy Gillespie and so forth. There are blues acts — B.B. King, Linda Hopkins, Carrie Smith, Fats Domino, Sammy Price — and Latin jazz figures (Eddie Palmieri, Paquito d’Rivera, Mario Rivera).

Caveat: I have not delved deeply into this material. The J&BAB is not being provided to critics for review, perhaps due to the mailing costs (joke). Nevermind: While it would clearly be a luxury to live with one of these cabinets, available for dipping into whenever the mood struck, considering how much there is in it the J&BAB really ought to be accessible not to individuals, rather to communities. Generations of users will ultimately judge the collection’s value.

But individuals can’t begin to evaluate unless one is at hand. I’m told no Box has yet been purchased for delivery in, say, Chicago. Will an upper level jazz program here (at Northwestern University, U of Chicago, University of Illinois-Chicago, DePaul U, Roosevelt U, Columbia College), the Harold Washington Library or perhaps the independent Newberry Research Library step up to the opportunity? It may depend on what else $8400 can buy. However: Pro-rate the price tag over a couple decades, consider the number of folks who might access it (simultaneously!) and the objet petit becomes reasonably obtainable. We know jazz and blues as arts can’t be contained, yet the Jazz & Blues Art Box is a treasure chest that will grow more valuable with age. To procure one? Now’s the time.

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Great new jazz photography: Sánta’s faces of Northsea Jazz Fest

Jon Faddis

The faces of jazz musicians Sánta István Csaba hears, sees and snaps are indelibly expressive — like the memorable phrases, inspired improvisations and magical connections these players play, so meaningful to listeners in the moment, remembered or recorded. JazzTimes magazine has published some of Sánta’s images from the Northsea Jazz Festival in early July — here are more, not included in that publication.

Malika Tirolien of Bokanté

Northsea, held in the Hague, is a multi-stage, non-stop, international showcase of bands on tour now. Having worked with him elsewhere, I can imagine Sánta not pushing but simply slipping through the crowds to get his closeups that serve as both portraits and candids, typically from an unimpeded perspective. Many music photographers complain about the microphones, cables and other on-stage detritus that detracts from the heart of the matter. Somehow, Sánta sneaks around that stuff or makes it disappear.

I’ve included his photos on this blog previously, and will again, as he has assigned himself an urgent quest to document his heroes, frequently traveling substantial distances on a nickel (not a dime), getting very close after coming very far.

Ambrose Akinmusire

Just looking at the individuals Sánta portrays, one can get a sense of their sounds. Is Jon Faddis a joyous player? Absolutely — in the tradition of Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. I haven’t heard Malika Tirolien but know from the set of her lips that her voice and delivery have an edge. Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire’s music, in my experience, has been, like his gaze, thoughtful and penetrating; as the photo shows, he’s youthful but has depths, too. As for Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava, whose visage conveys age, yes, and perhaps experience: Even with his eyes closed and focus so clearly on what’s happening in his mind, we get that he’s not contemplating anything banal, instead absorbing information and perhaps transforming it into comprehension that’s profound.

I’ve always wondered how my photographer friends and colleagues take in the music while they are engaging their visual skills. When I’m listening with the intent of writing, I usually take notes, but they are reckless scribblings, not polished or thought-through — I get to do that later.Revision, it’s become ever clearer to me, offers great opportunity.

Enrico Rava

Photographers have no such grace period. They must capture their impression simultaneously with the gesture, laugh, grimace, asserted concentration or perhaps, yes, sound that inspires it. That’s why jazz photography — the documentation of a moment that could not be foreseen and will never come again — can be so great. Thanks to those including but not limited to Sánta, Dee Kalea, Lauren Deutsch and Marc PoKempner who keep this rare art alive and vital.

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Great new jazz photography — Dee Kalea’s campaign

Dee Kalea of Creative Music Photography is old school, in that she’s created black and white images of jazz musicians in performance, closeup, usually one-to-a-frame.

Ornette Coleman by Dee Kalea, Creative Music Photography

The passion she’s captured, however, is timeless. How she became alert to the precise moment of creative rapture, and intimate with the music beyond the musicians themselves, is a story she tells best herself, in her intro and slide show for the Indegogo campaign she’s mounted to raise funds for printmaking, support of public presentations and archival preservation of her work.

Here’s its start — Dee claims Ornette Coleman as her stepfather, a childhood and youth surrounded by musicians as family friends. Contribute to her campaign! It’s drawing to a close. . .

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Great new jazz photography: Geri Allen by Sánta István Csaba

Pianist-composer Geri Allen, at age 60 a cancer victim, was photographed several times recently by Sánta István Csaba. He caught glimpses of her spirit and mourns her deeply.

Geri Allen (6/12/57 – 6/27/17), photographed 4/4/17 in Cully, Switzerland

“I saw her about five weeks ago here in Torino,” Sánta writes from where he now lives, “and in April in Switzerland. She was in a good mood and smiling. So unbelievable.”

Geri Allen in Cully, Switzerland, 4/4/17

Geri Allen, NYC 11/28/2012

Geri Allen with Enrico Rava in Torino, Italy, 5/19/17

Geri Allen and McCoy Tyner, Cully, Switzerland, 4/4/17

I was fortunate to have met Geri Allen in soon after she’d arrived to New York City in the early 1980s, having graduated from Howard University. I interviewed her for National Public Radio and DownBeat, for which she talked with one of her heros, pianist Hank Jones (they were both from Detroit, but generations apart; that discussion is in my book Future Jazz). I heard Geri often, as a leader and side-person, at clubs in NYC; in quartet with Ornette Coleman at the SFJazz Festival where the entr’acte featured a body-piercer (that episode is in Miles Ornette Cecil – Jazz Beyond Jazz), and most recently in trio with Terri Lyne Carrington and David Murray (as a “power trio,” they recorded  Perfection). She received many honors; the Jazz Journalists Association presented Geri Allen with a Jazz Hero Award in 2016 for her work as an educator in Pittsburgh and before that at Howard, New England Conservatory and University of Michigan.

Among my favorites of her recordings are The Printmakers, her debut as a leader; Open on All Sides in the Middle, featuring her mentor Marcus Belgrave among other aces; Etudes with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian (if I recall right, I wrote the liner notes), and and Eyes in the Back of Your Head, with Ornette.

Someone told me — it might have been Geri herself — that she’d been very nervous to work with Ornette, as she had been to engage with Hank Jones; she was extremely self-effacing. But when they first met to play the iconoclastic saxophonist leaned over her shoulder as she sat the piano and quietly said something like, “Don’t worry, just play, I’ll take care of everything.”

She had deep regard for her predecessors and elders, serving greatly to restore luster to the music and artistic reputations of Mary Lou Williams and Erroll Garner, among others. Since 2015, Geri Allen had been performing along with NEA Jazz Master McCoy Tyner; Sánta captured them together three months ago.

Of the photographer: He’s Transylvanian-born and a globetrotter, who shoots wherever he goes and has especially fascinating galleries of images of gypsy life and undeveloped parts in his native land. Sánta István Csaba’s exhibition of close-up portraits of jazz greats, which I wrote of in February when they were hung at Müpa Budapest art center in Budapest, is currently being mounted for display at the Bucharest Jazz Festival, Romania.

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