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Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

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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Great new jazz photography #2: Lauren Deutsch’s Made in Chicago portfolio

Occidental Bros Dance Band International: Nathaniel Braddock, guitar; Makaya McCraven, drums, Joshua Ramos, bass, Greg Ward, alto sax.

“Made in Chicago” is true of the photography of Lauren Deutsch, and also the name of the four-day-long collaborative jazz festival she’s organized in Poznan, Poland for the past 12 years as artistic director (formerly with Wojceich Juszcsak) on behalf of the Jazz Institute of Chicago. The theme of this year’s fest was “Freedom.”

The photos here of Chicago-based musicians (click to enlarge), in which Deutsch tries to capture the sound of the music through camera movement, were taken in May 2017.

Alto saxophonist Greg Ward

Singers Dee Alexander and Grazyna Auguscik, first time working together  as Let Freedom Sing: Love and Freedom to the Ends of the Earth

Ben LaMar Gay, cornetist

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Great new jazz photography: Marc PoKempner portfolio from New Orleans

Photos of musicians making music — visualizations stirred in the photographers by watching sounds manifest — are exciting, and as different in style as the photographers and musicians themselves. Marc PoKempner ‘s portfolio from New Orleans of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band with Cuban drummers at the Music Box Village, a non-profit community arts garden, is the first of a series of great new jazz photos I’ll post over the next few days.

Ronell Johnson (trombone), Branden Lewis (trumpet)

Alexey Marti (drum), Ronell Johnson (trombone), Shannon Powell (drum), Damas “Fanfan” Louis (drum), Tanio Hingle (bass drum), Kyle Roussel (melodica), Kerry “Fatman” Hunter (snare drum), Ben Jaffe (tuba)



Clint Maedgen (sax)

Kerry “Fatman” Hunter (snare drum), Kyle Roussel (percussion), Shannon Powell (drum), Damas “Fanfan” Louis (drum), Charlie Gabriel (sax), Ben Jaffe (tuba)

Ronell Johnson (trombone), Tanio Hingle (bass drum) Charlie Gabriel (sax), Kerry “Fatman” Hunter (snare drum) Ben Jaffe (tuba)

Check back for photos by Lauren Deutsch, Dee Kalea, Sánta István Csaba, Michael Jackson and we’ll see who else. . .

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NEA supports jazz and US arts nationwide

The NEA funds traditional American cultural activities such as mule-cart tours of Green River Utah besides free hi-def webcasts of Jazz at Lincoln Center concerts – NEA Arts.gov/no copyright infringement is intended

The National Endowment of the Arts, arguably the most misunderstood and beleaguered doing-good office of the federal gov’t (excluding the NEH, EPA, Consumer Financial Bureau, Civil Rights Division of the Justice Dept., and a few others) has issued its 2017 funding report, highlighting that its monies (monies from we US taxpayers) flow to communities in all 50 states and five territories.

Included is support for 36 jazz-related projects, most generated in the usual cities but also to entities based in Baton Rouge LA; Hartford CT; Pinecrest and Tallahassee FLA; Geneva, Rochester, Saratoga Springs and West Park NY; Bethlehem, Easton and Hershey PA, and Burlington VT.

Most of the biggest grants — such as the $55k to the Thelonious Monk Foundation of Jazz’s “Peer-to-Peer Jazz Education” tour of public performing arts high schools in San Diego, Fargo and Sioux Falls; $50k to Newark Public Radio (that’s WBGO) to produce and broadcast “Jazz Night in America,” $50k to Jazz at Lincoln Center for production of hi-def, freely accessed concert webcasts — benefit audiences beyond the immediate local sphere of the receiving organizations.  The smallest grants ($10k) go to performance series in the smaller cities, and production of ambitious recorded projects by NEA Jazz Master Anthony Braxton.

Here for download is the complete list of jazz projects – Jazz Awards 2017 FINAL — some of which mix chamber music, dance and poetry with music.

Having just named the four NEA Jazz Masters (pianist Joanne Brackeen, guitarist Pat Metheny, vocalist Dianne Reeves, advocate/producer Todd Barkan) to be inducted in 2018, the Arts agency is looking ahead, despite being targeted for extinction by the federal budget proposal. As posted on its grant webpage:

The President’s FY 2018 budget proposes the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, with a request for $29 million intended to be used for the orderly shutdown of the agency. This budget request is a first step in a very long budget process. We continue to accept grant applications for FY 2018 at our usual deadlines and will continue to operate as usual until a new budget is enacted by Congress.

The fight over the budget proposal is expected to last months, until FY 2018 begins on Oct. 1, 2017. If you value what the NEA does, tell all your Congress-people to restore operating funds to the NEA (and NEH and Corporation for Public Broadcasting) as well as resist cuts in the safety net provided by the US government (elected by US citizen tax-payers) for the ill, elderly and impoverished. Urge friends to do the same.

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Whatever happened to International Jazz Day?

April 30 — yesterday — was celebrated as the sixth annual International Jazz Day with a global webcast from Havana, hosted by Will Smith, headlined by pianist Herbie Hancock and including a couple of dozen top notch musicians from the U.S., Russia, Cameroon, France and Korea as well as Cuba. Did you know?

Advance publicity and followup coverage has been but a dot on the attention focused on IJD last year, when President Barack Obama hosted a splendiferous Jazz Day in the White House. Considering the leader of the regime replacing Obama’s administration, it’s no surprise our government did not note the event — though after all, it represents one of the most successful exports, cultural or otherwise, ever coming from America.

As explained by Irina Bokova, director-general of UNESCO which produces IJD in organizational collaboration with the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, “Jazz is great music because it carries strong values. Jazz is about freedom, about dignity and civil rights. . . Through jazz, we improvise with others, we live better together, in dialogue, in respect.” So maybe it’s better to keep the music at arms length from the current political heavies. After all, the U.S. no longer has voting rights in UNESCO, since we are $300 million in arrears for our dues since 2011, though Obama and John Kerry, his Secretary of State, in 2015 urged Congress to restore funding the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture, now 70 years old.

Regardless of political issues, the music performed in the beautiful Gran Teatro de la Habana Alicia Alonso (billed as the oldest theater in Latin America) exemplified jazz’s virtues and reinforced the importance of Afro-Cuban influences on jazz, which we commonly think of as born in that Caribbean capital, New Orleans. Opening with a renditions of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Manteca” (co-written by Cuban conguero Chano Pozo and big band arranger Gil Fuller), the concert had multiple highlights including Esperanza Spalding’s bass obbligato to  Youn Sun
Nah’s smoldering vocal on
“Besame Mucho” (which also featured an affecting solo by violinist Regina Carter), electric bassist-vocalist-bandleader Richard Bona’s lively number, Cuban vocalist Bobby Carcasses’s scat chorus, a tribute to Cuba’s native changui style (from the province of Guantanamo), electric bassist Marcus Miller’s role in diverse combos, and the extraordinary Cuban pianists Chucho Valdes and Gonzalo Rubalcaba duetting on and beyond “Blue Monk.” Congrats to music director John Beasley, who sat with me in 2013 for an NPR interview about what’s involved putting this all together.

IJD 2017 event map

IJD events were this year held in 190-some countries on all seven continents. The star-studded global webcast has been, of course, the most prominent event right along, though its advance planning is evidently so complex that announcement of where it’s taking place seems to come later and later. This year the information that Havana was the site didn’t come until April 10 — short lead time for many news organizations. As I write this post, neither DownBeat nor JazzTimes has a report from yesterday. Nothing in the New York Times, Washington Post, the LA Times or the Guardian. There’s bit from the PRNewswire published by Market Watch, a note on the blog of KNKX (Seattle) and an overview on eNews Channel Africa which mentions the attendance at the concert of Miguel Diaz-Canel, Cuba’s vice president of Cuba’s State Council and a rumored potential successor to President Raul Castro, scheduled to leave office in February 2018

With Irina Bokova’s second term as UNESCO director-general coming to an end and our federal support (even by lip service) of the initiative dim compared to Obama’s warm welcome of it in 2016, one might worry that IJD will lose crucial support.   Let’s hope not, as it has indeed been a beacon of enlightened international creativity and collaboration. Herbie Hancock, in his closing remarks, vowed we will see an IJD again next April 30. Eager for details! Tell us where sufficiently in advance and we’ll spread the word.

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How Charles Lloyd stays marvelous

Bill Frisell (l) and Charles Lloyd- David Bazemore Photo

During the 50 years since his breakthrough album Forest Flower (released in February 1967, recorded live at the Monterey Jazz Festival the summer before) — comparable in some ways to The Epic success of Kamasi Washington – saxophonist-flutist Charles Lloyd has been unusually popular for an adventurous jazzman. He showed how he’s done that, accomplished a long career while expressing himself freely, with his on-tour Marvels at Chicago’s Symphony Center Friday night (4/21), and it’s worth unpacking.

Lloyd, 79, and his empathic, considerably younger quintet (guitarist Bill Frisell and pedal steel guitarist Gary Leisz are in their mid 60s; bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Eric Harland in their late 30s) play instrumental, mostly improvised, sometimes dense and abstract music. At Symphony Center the ensemble was spontaneous and artistic, its members entertaining each other as well as the visibly diverse audience, casting a spell that entertained the merely curious as well as deep-dyed fans, across age and races.

from l: Tomas Fujiwara, Mary Halvorson, Jason Roebke, Tomeka Reid

The crowd (perhaps 1800 in a theater holding 2500) responded with such an ovation — and the musicians themselves seemed so delightfully energized — that an encore turned into a full second set, with guitarist Mary Halvorson, who had been in cellist Tomeka Reid’s quartet that opened the show, sitting in. (Reid, in full bloom with record releases and residencies, is a hometown favorite — just celebrated by the Jazz Journalists Association as Chicago’s 2017 Jazz Hero, and yes, I had a hand in that. She, Halvorson, bassist Jason Roebke and drummer Tomas Fujiwara performed original compositions that resolved their quirky lines and turns with satisfying repetitions). So here are aspects of Lloyd’s presentation and performance that have worked for him for decades, and might be considered for adoption or adaptation.

  • Play with the best. Lloyd learned this early on — perhaps from his first nationally-known employer, drummer Chico Hamilton, who always hired distinctive sidemen (Buddy Collette, Jim Hall, Paul Horn, Eric Dolphy, Fred Katz, Gabor Szabo, Larry Coryell). Lloyd proved he understood by assembling a band with then-obscure pianist Keith Jarrett, drummer Jack DeJohnette and bassist Ron McClure — whose careers were all launched by Forest Flower, too. Lloyd expects the contributions and interactions of his band members to follow from his leads and set up his solos. He selects them for imagination and deftness; they respond quickly, supporting his moves, free to pursue their own paths through grounds he’s laid out. His sidemen get it: in conversation backstage, Harland vowed that he only sounded good because the rest of the band made music so well. Over the years Lloyd’s collaborators have included pianists Michel Petrucciani, Bobo Stenson, Don Friedman, Cedar Walton, Jason Moran, Brad Mehldau and Geri Allen; drummers Billy Hart and Billy Higgins; bassists Dave Holland, Cecil McBee, Marc Johnson, Palle Danielson, Robert Hurst, Buster Williams and Larry Grenadier; guitarist John Abercrombie and percussionist Zakir Hussain. That’s a roll call of great listeners who play, each with something to say.
  • Choose memorable material, old and new, then mix it up. Lloyd inserted familiar if seldom performed melodies such as Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s “In My Room” (the saxophonist toured and recorded with the Beach Boys), Ornette Coleman’s “Focus on Sanity” and “Ramblin’,” and his own “Sombrero Sam” (from his album Dreamweaver, which preceded Forest Flower) in his set as if to punctuate his looser modal episodes. The bold themes caught the ear (and gave the players interesting basis from which to stretch); the sketchier passages drew us into deeper meditation. In the encore, as Halvorson’s flurries of trebly, pearl-dry notes sparkling amid the sustained and pitch-bent tones of Frisell and Leisz and rhythm section pulsations, a field of tones unfurled like the introductory alap of a raga unfurled, implying to me the Beatles’ “Within You Without You.” Lloyd didn’t state that theme, but I recalled how he turned “Here, There and Everywhere” into a quasi samba on his ’67 album Love In. He ended the Marvels’ concert with a seriously sensuous rendition of “Prelude to a Kiss,” which Duke Ellington composed in 1938.
  • Have fun, don’t fear rhythm. Lloyd kept the music moving, aided immensely by Rogers and Harland, of course. Jazz bass-and-drums teams today are often busy and seldom rigid — they want to be able to turn immediately to any option, so they may lay down a grooving backdrop rather than establishing and emphasizing one identifiable beat (unlike most hip-hop, say). Onstage but off-mike, Lloyd was unobtrusive but attentive to the set’s overall rhythm — percussion accents, ensemble tempos, flowing pace — at Harland’s side shaking rattles when he felt the need. Sensing his players’ climaxes as they came on, he’d step out from behind them to pick up his tenor and blow. Playing his alto flute on what I’ve id’d as “Sombrero Sam,” he swung his hips like a cool beatnik at a dance club. Being in the moment, unselfconscious, with the music, Lloyd inspired his musicians and listeners alike to do the same.

Not everyone can project the natural, perhaps innate feeling for jazz of Charles Lloyd. He’s had a singular background, which can’t be duplicated.  Claiming African, Mongolian, Cherokee and Irish ancestry, from age nine he showed interest in jazz and pursued his opportunities, hearing swing-to-bop on the radio (Lester Young’s airiness survives in Lloyd’s sound and phrasing), working in commercial r&b/blues bands. Hometown associates included trumpeter Booker Little, pianist Phineas Newborn and tenor saxophonist George Coleman, now also an NEA Jazz Master.

Arriving at University of Southern California when he was 20 to study with a Bartok specialist, Lloyd fell in with Ornette Coleman’s circle and joined Gerald Wilson’s Orchestra. In bands led by Hamilton (in ’60) and Cannonball Adderley (’64), he observed progressive ideas presented in accessible formats, and pursued the search for new/ancient “world” music pioneered Yusef Lateef and John Coltrane. He was 30 during the Summer of Love,  and Forest Flower was a breezy, lyrical, high energy album embraced by hippies, promoting him quickly, internationally. That very year his quartet made an unprecedented tour of the Soviet Union — and from there to now, some down time but also many great steps in between. ((For more info, check out Josef Woodard’s biography Charles Lloyd: Wild Blatant Truth.)

Charles Lloyd, in a sunny mood

Lloyd’s basic orientation has held. He has his own voice, amalgamated from many sources, filtered through his experience, perspective, personality, preferences and perhaps whims, but hewing to fundamental dictums. Perform with the best available collaborators, even if you have to discover them yourself. Select songs people will remember — and you don’t need to have composed them all. Play the music, from within, keeping in mind that there are listeners you want to attract and satisfy. Keep the music moving. Live long and with a little bit of luck prosper. Don’t take your too seriously, and yet. . . Emerging from dressing rooms after the performance, Lloyd commented dryly on the multiple nominations (Lifetime Achievement in Jazz, Musician of the Year, Mid-Sized Band of the Year, Tenor Saxophonist of the Year) he’s received for 2017 JJA Jazz Awards: “Maybe I have some potential.”

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Butch Morris’s workbook for spontaneous composition published

The deathbed wish of composer-cornetist Lawrence Douglas “Butch” Morris (1947-2013) was that his detailed documentation of Conduction®, the method he devised to enable spontaneous composition for ensembles of literally any type employing codified hand-signals, be published in hardcover. This has come to pass. On April 24 and May 1, events in New York City will launch The Art of Conduction, an elegant workbook from art-world publisher Karma with photos of Morris and his text, making his innovative work available for use by anyone/everyone, regardless of previous musical background.

After his untimely demise a core coalition of friends and admirers of Butch (I was both, initially as a journalist, eventually as a neighbor, sometimes hanging out) as well as his son Alexandre rallied to produce his book, and they are celebrating its limited-time availability (small print run, reprinting not assured). The book, 224 pages of writings, photos and illustrations, will debut April 24  (5:30 pm) at Tilton Gallery on Manhattan’s upper east side, introduced by its editor Daniela Veronesi, professor of linguistics at Free University of Bolzano, Italy, and Alessandro Cassin, who guided it into print. Butch’s great friends saxophonist David Murray and trombonist Craig Harris, with bassist Melissa Slocum, will be there to perform Harris’s “The Original LA Dawgs” (Butch Morris was born and raised in Long Beach. Harris employed basic techniques of Conduction® in his piece “Breathe,” performed at 2017 Winter JazzFest).

On May 1, guitarist Brandon Ross, cornetist Graham Haynes, bassist Stomu Takehishi and sound designer Hardedge will perform at 5:30 at Karma Gallery in the East Village –Morris’ old stomping grounds — where Black February, Vipal Monga’s film about Butch will be shown,

Veronesi and Cassini again on hand with the book. At 9 pm at the cozy club NuBlu Ross and Haynes will join the NuBlu Orchestra, which Morris conducted in two recordings (two, big fun both). Poet Allan Graubard, whose writing appears in The Art of Conduction, will read at both May 1 events.

I’m quite proud of having written the preface to The Art of Conduction — that essay caps my coverage of Butch Morris going back to a Village Voice article in the 1980s, pieces in DownBeat and Ear magazine, two NPR reports and a chapter in my book Future Jazz. To provide further context for Butch and the book, here are some excerpts from that chapter, which also involves David Murray and Henry Threadgill, another of Butch’s running buddies (2016 Pulitzer Prize for Music winner-Threadgill’s 2017 album Old Locks and Irregular Verbs is his stunning tribute to Morris).

Threadgill, left; Morris, right. -WNYC

Murray and Morris met in California in ’71, as youngsters in drummer Charles Moffett’s rehearsal band. Morris was then playing cornet in the era’s open-ended jazz idiom, though his sound had the coloristic sensitivities of a lyrical rather than technique-oriented, brassy virtuoso.

Morris picks up his horn less frequently in the ’90s, but when he does he’s apt to spin the instrument backwards and jam its mouthpiece into its the bell, or turn it upside down to whistle across the holes at the bottom of the valves. He’ll try anything his curiosity suggests. He’s manufactured music boxes to showcase one of his jewel-like tunes; he enjoys the high-wire exposure of an acapella cornet concert; he’s played brass duets with J. A. Deane on electrically modified trombone and recorded atmospheric trios with keyboardist Wayne Horvitz (who uses advanced electronics) and drummer Bobby Previte.

Conducting David Murray (right) big band w/ Steve Coleman (seated) – Sweet Basil’s, Greenwich Village, circa 1984, photo by Lona Foote

However, since the early ’80s, Butch Morris has liked best of all to hone a role he created for himself: improvising conductor. Audiences may now recognize him best from behind. His hair, thinning at the crown, rises in front to a dramatic peak; his thin shoulders tense; his left hand, and the baton in his right, lift to focus the attention of the musicians before him. He stands ready to make music from a few scribbled measures—or none at all—the quick wits of his players and what appear to be charade gestures, the syllables of his language of conduction.

Morris didn’t pull the concept of conduction fully formed out of the thin air; he’s got a conventional jazz musicians’ background. He grew up in Watts amid music; his father, a career Navy man, had swing and big band records and liked to visit Johnny Otis’s club in their neighborhood. His mother helped him at the piano. His older brother Wilbur (now a bassist for David Murray and with his own quartet, Wilberforce), was originally a drummer who kept up with bop, ’50s funk, and the new(er) thing. Butch’s sister brought home Motown singles. At dinner together the family listened to a radio show that offered “bebop to boogie, rhythm and blues and rock ‘n’ roll.”

He followed the public school music curriculum, and benefitted from dedicated teachers with high standards, including saxist Charles Lloyd who taught a music appreciation class. . . Morris made the school orchestra and after-class sessions; he wigged out on the Miles Davis-Gil Evans version of Porgy and Bess, and “before I got out of high school I’d taught myself flute, french horn, trombone, and baritone horn—I was still playing trumpet in the marching band, orchestra, and studio band, too—while at home I taught myself the mechanics of piano. . .”

from left: Craig Harris, trombone; Roy Campbell or Graham Haynes cornet?; Jack Jeffers? tuba?; Edward Blackwell drums?; Ken McIntyre alto sax, Butch Morris conducting, David Murray, tenor sax; photo by Lona Foote

[After serving in the US Army as a driver in Germany and medic in Viet Nam] Morris got involved with Horace Tapscott, whose influence in the black community of Watts parallels that of Muhal Richard Abrams on the South Side of Chicago. “It had crossed my mind when I was in the service that I was creating a personal way of improvising,” Morris remembers “and I had to find the environment in which I could improvise best. I wasn’t a bebopper, I wasn’t a post-bopper and I wasn’t a free-bopper, so I had to create the environment. My development of it didn’t start until later, but in his band Horace used to make little gestures that meant certain things for us to do that weren’t on the page, and I started to think about how that could be expanded.

“In ’70, ’71 I decided this is it. I started putting music down on paper, calling up cats, and saying, ‘Come on, let’s rehearse,” and they’d say, ‘Oh, I can’t, groan’—and I’d go physically get the cat because unless I did I was never going to hear how these ideas of mine sounded.” As he became serious about music, he wearied of Los Angeles. “Sooner or later you come to grips with working and whether you have something to offer or not. You go where you can work and be recognized.” Morris went north.

“When I was in college, studying conducting in Oakland, and I asked my teacher ‘How do you get the orchestra to go back to letter B?’ and she said, ‘You don’t do that,’ I knew I had a profession. But basically, I got the idea of conducting improvisation from Charles Moffett,” the Fort Worth-born and -bred drummer best known for his association with Ornette Coleman. . .

“Charles would lead his ensemble rehearsals with no music, he would just conduct, with a relatively underdeveloped vocabulary of gestures. I knew it could be taken further. Now, Charles is an energetic cat and what he did was musical, man. It was like: You—play. Now you—do what he’s doing.’ But he would never talk to us, it was all gestures. And I thought, ‘Damn, this is some interesting music. This is great. I’m going to pursue this.'”

. . . His emergence as a jazz conductor dates to the debut of David Murray’s big band, which the late Public Theater producer Joseph Papp encouraged to form in ’78. Initially helping Murray compose and orchestrate for that concert, Morris soon stepped in front of the big band to “create music on the spot” with a gestural vocabulary he used to satisfy a desire for instant decision-making that few jazz arrangers have ever been able to indulge. . .

“I see all my activities working together, but it takes a while,” says Morris, who sports a wispy Fu Manchu goatee. “First of all, change, diversity and variety are central to my nature, and secondly, I use them for my livelihood.

“I compose whatever my little heart desires,” Butch claims. “But I’m not meandering. I’ve got a goal: My whole idea is to create music for improvisers. I like to bring together people who might not necessarily play with each other, or who play in different styles and improvise in completely different ways. I rarely write, that is, notate, everything. I get tired of playing the same arrangements so I constantly re-arrange tunes to figure out their other harmonic and tonal possibilities. I’d hate to work with a band for three years and always play the same charts. I mean, even [Duke Ellington’s] ‘Take The A Train’ varied over the years. . .

at the Akbank Festival in Istanbul, Butch conducted an ensemble including ney virtuoso Sulieman Ergüner and his ensemble of Sufi musicians

“There’s a history for improvisers, a body of common knowledge among jazz musicians,” Morris states. “There’s a whole repertoire of songs that have been used as a basis for improvisation, like the blues. We can just call a key, and it doesn’t have to have a name—we can make music, right? Well, if I point to you, and you’re an improviser, and as part of my vocabulary you understand that when I point to you you’re supposed to improvise—that’s a beginning. You play until I ask you to stop. And if I hear something that you play that I want you to repeat or develop, I have a gesture I’ll give you for that. If I want you to continue on that same frame on a longer curve, I have a gesture for that. If I want someone to do or emulate something that you’re doing, I have a gesture for that. It continues to grow, my vocabulary for improvisers.

“I have to figure out how to get the best from an improviser, put them in that light, then start to push them in another direction and see how flexible they are. A lot of improvisers are not flexible. They know how to improvise in a particular style, but they don’t venture too far from that style. . . .

“Through my gestural vocabulary the improvisers and audience start to hear the music happen. You don’t just hear the music happen, you start to hear it happen, and then all of a sudden, it happens.

Having taught his vocabulary to the clique of jazz improvisers David Murray drew on (some of whom have become aspiring composers themselves), after the big band’s concert at the New York Kool Jazz festival of ’85 Morris determined to concentrate on less tune- and solo-oriented, more suite-like and ensemble applications of his gestural direction, involving instrumental combinations of his own design. On February 1, 1985, at the Kitchen Center for Music, Video and Dance, he created what he considers a historically important “full conduction, which is an improvised duet between ensemble and conductor based on subject matter, in which the conductor works out his gestures and relays them to the ensemble, and the ensemble in turn interprets the gestural information.”

I’ve written at length about Current Trends in Racism in Modern America, A Work In Progress, “my first attempt to have a full conduction in the United States,” Morris called it, proudly. And that’s not the point here: The Art of Conduction is.

Butch Morris from Long Beach always took a long view. When he was around 40, he said, “If I’m not reaching for something as powerful as my heritage has been—” he considered Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie and Jelly Roll Morton among his predecessors as improvising, composing, conducting instrumentalists—”then it’s not going to be meaningful in the long run. I want to create something as powerful as my heritage, and something very magical at the same time.”

Morris’ music had the magic, as its recordings preserve (most abundantly on Testaments, a 10 CD set 16 highly varied full conductions, with Butch’s extensive written commentary). Now we’ve got a book that crystalizes his concept – his bid to contribute powerfully to our heritage.

It is a difficult and remarkable thing to sustain much less extend the works of an innovative artist beyond their lifetime, requiring the desires and resources of their survivors, beyond any perceivable valuations of the artist’s output. Morris’s devotees have invested themselves in his legacy out of a lot of love but The Art of Conduction is no vanity project. Morris conceived his book — which he carried with him in the form of notes that he worked on constantly — to be functional, not to be gazed upon but used, to make and change music (theater, dance, poetry, too). So add Conduction® as codified by Butch Morris to your skill-set. What you do with it will be your own. It may be ordered  in individual or bulk quantities at orders@artbook.com.

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Aretha Franklin’s got it at 75

I saw Aretha Franklin last night from the Chicago Theater’s nosebleed seats, unable to make out her features but sure from the moment she first raised her voice that she’s a national if not global treasure, as compelling at 75 — her birthday was March 25 — as half a century ago, in her breakthrough year 1967.

Skinnier than she looked singing “The Star Spangled Banner” at the Lions-Viking game last year, wearing an above-the-knees, sleeveless, collarless dress of gauzy white, in a wig that fell like Michelle Obama’s real hair, on gold heels she finally kicked off at the end of her two-hour concert, Aretha revisited several of her earthy, worldly, gospel-drawn and jazzy hits from then — “Baby I Love You,” “Chain of Fools” “Do Right Woman – Do Right Man” and “Respect” (her encore), from her breakout albums I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) and Lady Soul.

Chatting with full confidence and ease onstage, lifting an arm occasionally in triumph or solidarity and two-stepping playfully, she also sang her luscious “Day Dreaming” from 1972 (“This song was about a tall, tempting Temptation,” she confided to the 3600 listeners in attendance), Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark” (which she recorded in 1963, before her recognition as Queen specifically of soul), later tidbits including “Freeway of Love,” a 12-bar blues asserting the sweetness of someone age 16, and a visit to church on “Precious Memories,” during which she soared freely over her guest artists the 

Williams Brothers (as Aaron Cohen, who wrote the book on Aretha’s Amazing Grace, points out in his Tribune review, she returned without a blink to a more secular groove).

Ok — but how did she sing? Divinely. Sometimes like Sarah Vaughan, moving vowels through pitch intervals like an Escher staircase shifting dimensions of up and down, in and out, pure and fine-grained. Often like a great trumpeter or saxophonist — Louis Armstrong, Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, Lester Young — unleashing a beautiful silvery flash of tonality that captures all the rest of what’s going on in something akin to a sun flare. Always with firm rhythmic command, able to float her phrases, though they seemingly have body and weight, in unpredictable skeins through, above and around five backup singers and an orchestra of 15 (including three keyboardists, two percussionists, a woman drummer and woman in the horn section), asserting her passion in measures stretched to hold them, never losing the beat, arriving where and when she intended.

The performance was well-paced, starting with a warmup man, an orchestral overture of some themes she didn’t sing (“Jump To It” was one I knew),her first moment onstage in a fur she shed almost instantly, then songs pouring forth in varying beats and attention to dynamics. “Skylark” was especially remarkable to me — not a song crowds demand of her, but clearly among her personal favorites, a melody she served up as a sumptuous marvel, like molasses flavored birdsong.

How I go on! Aretha had a picture projected on a screen dangling over the musicians of herself with Barack Obama (to cheers, of course), ran a brief clip from (but didn’t stop singing during) the 1974 film Claudine (starring Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones with music by Gladys Knight and the Pips, produced by Curtis Mayfield), and gave a shout out to the Reverend Jesse Jackson (“He’s still doing it!” she exulted of his political activism) and his son Jesse Jr. (“It’s nice to see him out,” Aretha intoned dryly about the ex-Congressman on supervised release after imprisonment for fraud and campaign malfeasance charges).

She spoke of loving Chicago, recalling favorite soul food restaurants. She cuddled up for a chorus or two in an overstuffed armchair centerstage, losing no vocal power, precision or place in her story. She seemed to be having fun — an attitude I don’t recall from the last time I saw her perform in Chicago, at the Park West in 1985 (broadcast as a Soundstage special, available on video). Her audience, from my vantage, appeared to be largely but not exclusively middle-aged and white, and universally thrilled to have been amid the crowd in her presence. I think of women singers who’ve represented (and challenged) their cultures by dint of indomitable voices and personas — Uum Kulthum, Celia Cruz, Edith Piaf, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald, Betty Carter, Barbra Streisand. That’s an old school list? Ok, add your Queen Bey. There is no dethroning Aretha Franklin.

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Flyover country? Nonsense in jazz, politics, crime fiction

There’s no such thing as “flyover country” — except in the minds of careless or ignorant people who ought to know better. For instance:

  • Jazz lives throughout the US and the world, not only in New York City;
  • Illinois presidential race voters chose Hilary Clinton by a wide margin (due largely to Democratic bastion and jazz hub Chicago) although the man who beat her nationally does not seem to have much on-the-ground experience with anywhere except his own properties,
  • and yes, the capital of the Midwest has crime fiction writers to boast of, too, despite rumors to the contrary.

Eric Beetner – LitReactor

Here’s what stirred me up about this: “Chicago has a great heritage of crime, but not much in the way of crime fiction,” Eric Beetner, LA-based author, goofed up big-time in his opening remarks at the first Murder and Mayhem conference on crime fiction held in downtown Roosevelt University on Saturday, March 11. He meant, of course, to be funny, kicking off a day of well attended and much better informed panel discussions. But it culminated, after all, in a discussion between Sara Paretsky, whose pi V.I. Warshawski lives near Wrigley Field, and William Kent Krueger, author of mysteries set in northern Minnesota, often around Native American reservations.

I like Beetner’s Rumrunners, a quick and dirty read and I suspect his comment was based on little thought (“I only had so much time,” he told me when I called him on it). BUT! Chicago has been home of crime writers and site of their works from Theodore Dreiser, W.A. Burnett, Ben Hecht, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Meyer Levin, Jonathan Latimer, Chester Gould (the man who invented Dick Tracy!) and Iceberg Slim to Scott Turow, Erik Larson, author and editor Stuart Kaminsky and of course Ms. Paretsky, who co-founded the crime writers’ organization Sisters in Crime.

Chicago-oriented authors who spoke, further confirming that writing in or about this woefully gun-laden city plagued by income inequality and racial tensions, is still vital, included Michael Harvey, Sean Chercover, Danny Gardner, Marcus Sakey and Alverne Ball (full schedule of speakers here).

Within the conference discussion ranged over such issues as levels and degrees of violence, how to work with historical fiction, use and abuse of genre conventions, etc. A business-oriented group, including Chicago agent Danielle Egan-Miller, editorial director of Crooked Lane Books Matt Martz and book/entertainment publicist Dana Kaye (who co-produced Murder and Mayhem with author Lori Rader-Day). Another unusually focused on the value of libraries to authors, for direct sales, publicity platforms and extending books’ lives. The Book Cellar sold works by panelists to the 200-some attendees — readers and writers, clearly.

There’s lots of crime in Chicago — as well as political intrigue, sports action, social change, artistic creativity — and quite a bit of crime writing, too. It’s been historical, literary, theatrical, cinematic, hard-boiled, cozy, procedural, legalistic, written by insiders and outsiders. There’s bound to be more.

Don’t assume nothin’s happening between coasts or beyond where you are and mostly hear about. What goes on in the heart of the heart of the country otherwise may come as a surprise.

howardmandel.com

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Spring break with Budapest jazz, photos

I went to Budapest for spring break — to introduce a photo exhibit by my Transylvanian-born friend  Sánta István Csaba and help jury the 10th annual Müpa Budapest Jazz Showcase/Talent Exchange, held in the modernist musem and multi-theater complex on the east bank of the icy Danube Feb 3 – 5.

Viktor Tóth played alto briefly to open the photo exhibition – (and Saturday night at the Budapest Jazz Club) – photo by Janos Posztos Müpa Budapest

As I wrote in my  DownBeat article, the sound of the 12 sets I heard was jazz as we think of it now — virtuosic horns, piano/keyboards and/or guitar, upright or electric basses and drums; vocalists singing standards, spicing up r&b grooves, toying with electronics; popular rhythms addressed through personal perspectives.

There was a faint aura of the music of the Roma — gypsies — in the air, emanating not only from the quartets led by pianist Gyula Balogh and drummer Toni Snétberger, with members from that community. It was hard to define — no overt Django Reinhardt, figurations or repertoire, but a tinge of darkness and interiority in those bands, and what I imagined was witchy wailing by singer Petra Kész with her performance art-like trio Cymbal Rush (video of that show below).

On walls, from left: Anthony Braxton, Chico Hamilton, Charles McPherson . . . Carla Bley, Charles Lloyd, Frank Wess. Photos by Sánta István Csaba

Still, as in the Saturday night jam session at the Budapest Jazz Club – a very cool hangout which advertised Jeff “Tain” Watts, Joe Lovano and Steve Coleman as coming attractions supplementing local groups, the vibe was familiar from my travels in Armenia, the Azores, Berlin, Cuba, Denmark, Gambia, Italy, St. Petersberg, Tampere, Trinidad, Ukraine as well as the States. Whatever a community’s resources, there are commonalities in the jazz world everywhere, this capital of Central Europe most definitely included.

Second grouping of Jazzonance portraits in Müpa

The singing in English, allusions to Monk (as I took the approach of alto saxophonist Gábor Baris’s Version), reverence for Coltrane (especially by alto/soprano saxist Tamás Ludányi) and interest in Herbie Hancock bleeding over to pop stars such as J Dilla (by drummer David Hodek, grooving with American pianist Paul Cornish and bassist Joshua Crumbly) and Betty Wright (smoldering singer Janka Vörös’ finale), with Santa’s 2.5 x 2 meter closeups of U.S. jazz masters on the walls  –“Jazzonance” was Müpa’s exhibit title  — and companionable journo/jurists from Sofia, Slovenia, London, plus Budapest-based freelancer Kornél Zipernovszky and the generously great Hungarian guitarist Gyula Babos – let me feel almost at home, while refreshed by particular differences.

Such as the architecture — 19th and 20th century glories, variously preserved, restored or abandoned. Proud museums, palaces and six-story apartment buildings with ground-floor retail shops and cafés, on concentric circular boulevards. The Gellert Hill Cave, thermal baths and church in St. Ivan’s grottos. Trams running up each side of the river, the Danube’s bridges rebuilt since Nazi destruction in WWII. The old market, stalls hung with paprika-colored sausages, an instructive display of wild mushrooms tucked in a corner.  The Castle District of hilly Buda, overlooking the plain of Pest.

Past winners of the Talent Exchange in the Gala Concert finale, singing and blowing on a swinging arrangement of Lerner and Loewe’s “Almost Like Being in Love” backed by the Franz Liszt Academy of Music’s Senior Big Band, directed by Attila László. Photo by Sántá István Csaba

All contrasting with but complementary to the Jazz Showcase/Talent Exchange (wherein some of the Hungarians travel to perform at London’s 606 Club, and others are booked into events via the Hungarian Jazz Federation, part of the European Jazz Network). Müpa’s decade-old program struck me as an effort rooted in an artistically sophisticated city, one cognizant of its complex, conflicted past and evidently eager to thrive in the present, the better for whatever’s to come.

Muhal Richard Abrams, portrait in Jazzonance exhibit by Sánta István Csaba

As usual, creative music with drive and feeling seems to well up as a significant if not essential ingredient in a culture, with such ambitions embraced towards those very ends. The basics of individual expression amid group collaborations performed for the entertainment and enlightenment of general audiences have been well established here. The integration of attractive, useful ideas coming from myriad sources is, at least superficially, high. I had just a quick visit, and no doubt experienced a mere slip of what’s happening in Budapest. But I liked what I heard and saw.

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Trump’s biggest first threat to the arts: Ending net neutrality

Occupy’s chart explaining net neutrality. Get it?

Terrible as it will be for the Trump administration to kill the National Endowments of the Arts and Humanities, gutting net neutrality seems to me an even more damaging attack on the arts, independent and upstart media and America’s commons.

By nominating as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission ex-Verizon lawyer and avowed net neutrality foe Ajit Pai, Trump will further commodify the internet we now all use for free, allowing biggies like Netflix and Comcast to pay for fastest service (meaning others get slower service) and exert who knows what other kinds of controls over what’s been an open space, equally accessible to all. This will hurt artists, audiences, producers, journalists, providers of cheap thrills — but the rich get richer. . .

Pere Ubu of “Ubu Roi” by Alfred Jarry

The threat has occurred before, and only was averted by President Obama appointing an FCC chairman who supported net neutrality. Maybe if the open internet became subject to manipulations of corporate media under Trump, it could be turned around — but I’m still trying to figure out how television broadcasting once limited to three networks supported by advertisers and publicly supported PBS has become 800 channels on cable of bs costing upwards of $100 per month if you want the best stuff — and much of it has commercials, as well.

Well, net neutrality is a big, complex, abstract issue, not likely to attract a lot of marchers and not as clearly, immediately, obviously a danger to Americans as threats to ACA-users’ health insurance, womens’ health care, Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security cutbacks, reversal of environmental protections and regulations governing financial dealings, attacks on the public school system, reinstatement of bigotry against minority groups including immigrants, and oh yes, Rick Perry caring for the nuclear arsenal. But it’s one of those things we’ve been taking for granted that can be snatched away, and we’ll all be hurt when it happens, no doubt with unintended consequences trending towards income inequality and perhaps censorship. Entropy rules! Yet despots can put a brake on freedom and liberty.

howardmandel.com

 

Doris Duke Performing Artists of jazz beyond jazz

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Announced yesterday: the third annual Doris Duke Performing Artist and first ever Impact Awards, providing substantial financial honorarium to 13 “jazz” musicians whose works take seriously the mission of exploration and experimentation, as well as dancers and “theatre” artists.

Saxophonist/composers Oliver Lake, Steve Lehman and Roscoe Mitchell as well as pianists Craig Taborn and Randy Weston and transformative harpist Zeena Parkins are recipients of the Artist awards, which comprise $275,000 total “investments” to each of them, featuring dedicated amounts for audience development and for “creative exploration during what are commonly retirement years.” Pianist/composer/AACM co-founder Muhal Richard Abrams, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, saxophonist-composers Steve Coleman and Matana Roberts, guitarist Ben Monder, Cuban-born pianist Aruán Ortiz and vocalist Jen Shyu, an improviser with a specialty in endangered traditional styles of Southeast Asia, have been given Impact awards of $80,000 each.

Without exception, all these honorees are jazz convention-challengers, if not outright game-changers (one might argue that Randy Weston, the 88-year-old son of Brooklyn who grew up loving Monk and bebop and over the course of his career has emphasized the African ancestry of jazz, represents more continuity with jazz traditions that the others, but I don’t buy that notion: none of the musicians reject “jazz” history in any way, all are expanding upon traditions they understand, have experience in and respect). Rather than being mainstream maintainers, each of these Awardees is a conceptualist who has created his/her own approach by study, experimentation and interactions with like-minded others.

Several have personal connections: Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell have been associated since the beginning in 1965 of the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), which Oliver Lake (as originally a member of the related Black Artists Group of St. Louis), and Matana Roberts have also been involved in. Steve Lehman has studied with George E. Lewis, trombonist and institutional biographer of the AACM, and Steve Coleman is a Chicagoan who grew up in AACM vicinities and has been at the center of his own loosely convened M-BASE musicians’ collective. Jen Shyu has sung with Coleman.

Akinmusire and Taborn, recorded respectively by Blue Note and ECM, recently released albums that have received considerable critical acclaim (including a Pianist of the Year Award for Tabor from the Jazz Journalists Association, which is celebrating Randy Weston  for his Duo of the Year with saxophonist Billy Harper). Only Zeena Parkins, currently a visiting professor at Mills College, has operated primarily outside “jazz-jazz,” having emerged from the NYC downtown improvisers world, toured with Bjork, etc. (I’m just pointing this out — it in no way disqualifies her from this Award!)

Doris Duke, tobacco heiress, in her will stipulated support for dance, theatre and jazz — these Awards are the result. As posted on the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation website, “The award is a deeper investment in the potential of dedicated artists, empowering them through the freedom of unrestricted support while celebrating past achievement.” Funds are made available over a three-to-five year period, and —

Doris Duke Artists will have access to Creative Capital’s goal assessment tools; financial and legal counseling; and conferences with peer-to-peer learning opportunities. Doris Duke Artists will also be able to allocate a portion of their funding to cover costs of professional development services including workshops to help artists expand their skills and practices (from strategic planning to fundraising to promotion); phone-in clinics that offer support for the business areas of artistic practices (legal, financial, tech, PR and business advice); memberships that provide opportunities for crowdfunding and fiscal sponsorship partners, as well as pro-rated fees for insurance or health care.

Nice deal, going to musicians who can have ongoing powerful impact on their peers and audiences, too. Previous Doris Duke Artists in jazz include Don Byron, Bill Frisell, Vijay Iyer, John Hollenbeck, Nicole Mitchell in 2012; Anthony Braxton, Billy Childs, Amir ElSaffar, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Miya Masaoka, Myra Melford and William Parker (2013).

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Howard Mandel

I'm a Chicago-born (and after 32 years in NYC, recently repatriated) writer, editor, author, arts reporter for National Public Radio, consultant and nascent videographer -- a veteran freelance journalist working on newspapers, magazines and websites, appearing on tv and radio, teaching at New York University and elsewhere, consulting on media, publishing and jazz-related issues. I'm president of the Jazz Journalists Association, a non-profit membership organization devoted to using all media to disseminate news and views about all kinds of jazz.
My books are Future Jazz (Oxford U Press, 1999) and Miles Ornette Cecil - Jazz Beyond Jazz (Routledge, 2008). I was general editor of the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz and Blues (Flame Tree 2005/Billboard Books 2006). Of course I'm working on something new. . . Read More…

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