Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation
Charlie Parker – Library of Congress
What does folkie chanteuse Madeleine Peyroux have to do with Charlie Parker, the alto saxophonist who has defined the past 60 years of vernacular instrumental improvisation, namesake of a two-day fest that’s NYC’s final free summer fling? Everything (not quite) is revealed in my new CityArts column . . .
photo from Jazz Foundation of America
Agnes Varis, a major progressive philanthropist funding the Jazz Foundation of America, Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera while fighting for reduced health care costs through perscription of generic drugs and supporting a broad array of Democratic and women’s issues, died of cancer July 29 at age 81. She was officially honored as “Saint of the Century” by Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana Mitch Landrieu at the JFA’s annual benefit concert “A Great Night in Harlem,” at the Apollo Theater in 2009.
According to the New York Times, Dr. Varis was pre-deceased by her husband Karl Leichtman in 2009, and leaves no immediate survivors. But hundreds of jazz players, newcomers and devoted audiences have been touched by Dr. Varis’ generosity. Her donations to the Jazz Foundation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina set up a Jazz in the Schools program employing elder musicians; it’s currently said to involve 350 of them in 17 states, including 120 in New York City playing free concerts in schools, nursing homes and hospitals. Her annual gifts to JALC (in 2010, $3 million) have led its fundraising efforts annually, paying for infrared lighting systems, a new stage and recording facilities. She underwrote tickets to the Met for senior citizens among other costs, reportedly to the aria of $21 million.
At birth, Agnes Koulouvaris was the youngest of eight children of Greek/Jewish immigrants; she attended Brooklyn college, studying chemistry and English. By profession, she turned into a hands-on businesswoman whose company Agvar Chemicals and Aegis Pharmaceuticals has, according to Bloomberg News, annual revenues between $50 million and $100 million. By conviction, she was a political activist, a “role model [and] mentor,” according to the Jazz Journalists Association’s citation of her as a recipient of its 2009 “A Team” Award, who “worked to break down barriers for women in business and in politics, having, for instance underwritten a women’s campaign school run by the Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Committee to train and encourage women running for elected office in New York State.” She gave support to services for battered women in Bergen county, and helped provide medicines to service workers who lost jobs as a result of the attacks of 9/11.
Among Dr. Varis’s many positions, she was Trustee of Tufts University and member of the Board of Overseers at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, Managing Director of the Metropolitan Opera, a member of the board of Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Jazz Foundation, and a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Her greatest efforts went towards reforms of prescription drug policies, which put her in direct philosophical conflict as well as business rivalry with Merck, Pfizer and other giants of the pharmaceutical industry behind the powerful lobbyist group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).
Among organizations she founded, one of the earliest was “New Jersey Business Executives against the Vietnam War.” Dr. Agnes Varis told Manuela Hoelterhoff of Bloomberg News she was motivated to “doing good.” Saint or not, the woman was clearly on the side of the angels.
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William Powell in "My Man Godfrey," 1937
Jazz the music will survive the wounds America has self-inflicted in the guise of deep cuts in government spending when economic growth has already slowed to a crawl. Jazz — as well as blues, rap, hip-hop, soul, bluegrass, chamber music and most rock ‘n’ roll — is fairly cheap to produce, given workers (musicians) who will accept pennies for hours spent doing what they love. So the devil’s advocate is moved to ask: “Are hard times good for jazz?”
Artists and audiences will suffer along with everyone else across genre preferences except, I guess, the societally maladjusted superrich — though they too may find the continental U.S. less, er, pleasant, with fewer environmental protections, food and water inspections, police and fire departments, worse roads and airports, increased unemployment, less healthy/less educated employees (who won’t be able to afford to buy whatever they’re selling) and more need of body guards. A lot of money can be a buffer against a lot of ills, but it won’t filter the air we all breathe, the future we’ll all share. And with greater income disparity between the wealthy and the rest, conflicts will not abate; they’ll escalate and multiply.
But remember the Great Depression, aka the Swing or Big Band Era? Or more likely reading about it, hearing its stars? The orchestras of Ellington, Basie, Goodman, Shaw, Waller, Lunceford, the Dorseys, Glenn Miller and many more gave the huddled masses something to dance about. Great voices/soloists including Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Charlie Christian, Ella Fitzgerald, Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Fats Waller and so on emerged from the hoi polloi — seldom the swell’s class — to express themselves, conveying life beyond toil and trouble even while looking that stuff dead in the eye.
Whether the Swing Era is dated, as Gunther Schuller has it in his book of the same name, as starting in 1930 or as Wikipedia says 1935, launched by Goodman’s breakthrough three-week stand at LA’s Palomar Ballroom, the period encompasses both the lowest years of the 20th century in the U.S. and those producing the most enduring achievements of our popular arts (besides music, also songwriting, standup and slapstick comedy, fiction and the movies). Not that widespread depression is a must have for the creation of entertaining diversions — there was hot jazz throughout the Roarin’ ’20s prior to the stock market crash in ’29; there was cool jazz and an unprecedented explosion of other pop forms from the post-WWII late ’40s through the early ’70s, when the U.S. withdrawal in expensive defeat from Vietnam and a disgraced Republican president’s resignation let to national exhaustion (not to say “malaise“). But in the Swing Era, when the possibilities of big, fast money earned from bootleggers and their best-heeled customers evaporated with the bursting of a financial bubble and the legalization of booze, musicians seemed to feel liberated rather than oppressed, and set themselves to making life a bowl of cherrys, and meaning a function of swing.
I’m spitballing here, haven’t done any research, don’t know if there is statistical supported argument that upbeat music and sweeping entertainments really proliferated during the era of the breadlines, the dustbowl, hoboes riding the rails and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s stabs at Keynesian fiscal stimulation policies (which worked, when steadily applied). Yet the extravagant fantasies of Busby Berkeley musicals, the anarchy celebrated by the Marx Brothers, the escapism
approved by The Wizard of Oz and determination winning over travail in Gone with the Wind: is that the kind of stuff smugly self-satisfied people would favor? During the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s success in popular music was one of the few vehicles for personal survival, if not sure upward mobility — and strangely enough it proved to be that again in the late ’70s/early ’80s, when urban youth without ways out of deteriorated city centers re-purposed discarded turntables and scratched records in service of a musical movement that reflected life as they knew it, not just what they saw on tv. Maybe in the 20teens Americans will be thrown back on their own imaginations and easily accessed devices, to come up with some new music that boosts spirits, overcomes obstacles, soothes grief.
Necessity is the mother of invention — who said that? an ancient Roman — and when things are bleak, you gotta shake ’em off. (When things are ok, maybe the time’s right for more esoteric, self-reflective, edifying pursuits.) In the USA circa 2011, there are many under-employed musicians, and here’s betting in 2012 unless corporations start hiring, the recording industry revives and some genius develops a business model for the Web’s legion of content providers there will be even more. If those young players, smart people with sharp ears who want to have fun, connect their expressive energies to the rhythmic zeitgeist, they might attract eager multitudes who have just a dollar or two to spare on live performance rather than purchases from the iTunes store (because their old Macs are broken, and Steve Jobs won’t discount Apple products).
"Forgotten man" Godfrey wins scavenger hunt for rich, endearing brat Carole Lombard
It might be too late for us oldsters who can no longer crash on pals’ sofas over the course of protracted bus tours, whose disposable income is reserved for expensive medicines and treatments not covered by our costly health insurance plans, who haven’t the spark that can make living joyously without do-re-me seem like a lark. But we’ve had our glory years. Look what they got us — defeated while partying, victims of no-nothingism, bigotry and capital run amok.
Maybe a new generation won’t mind being burdened like citizens of a third world country, juggling multiple temp jobs to cover basics with verve leftover to blow passionately into the wee hours. Maybe there will be enough trust fund babies and derivatives brokers to finance a gutsy new style that rallies both them that’s got and those who don’t.
But no, I take it back: poverty and strife aren’t good for anything, war’s worst of all. And as Billie Holiday sang, the ones who worry about nothin’ are the children who’ve got their own.
Pianist Herbie Hancock has been appointed a “goodwill ambassador” by UNESCO. The 71-year-old multiple Grammy winner, Chicago-born child prodigy, Miles Davis’ keyboards man ushering open-form improvisation, electronic instruments and studio procedures into the past half-century of jazz-based music and talent scout with global interests joins an international coterie that currently includes Nelson Mandela, Pierre Cardin, Claudia Cardinale, Forest Whitaker, Jean Michel Jarre and royal personages from Belgium, Jordan, Morocco and Thailand.
A composer, interpreter, performer, soloist and bandleader of serious, sophisticated and also commercial crossover success — one of the rare musicians who is both artist and entertainer, leader and accompanist, classicist and innovator — Hancock will “use music to cross cultural boundaries and promote literacy and creativity among youth around the world.” He calls for April 30 to be recognized as “international jazz day” and will lobby for UNESCO to cite jazz on its World Heritage List of “936 properties forming part of the cultural and natural heritage which the World Heritage Committee considers as having outstanding universal value.”
Hancock’s evergreen-hip, vamp- and ostinato-based tunes such as “Watermelon Man” (written in 1962, re-arranged in ’73), “Chameleon” (issued in ’73, basis of garage jam sessions ever since), “Rockit” (the ’83 injection of hip-hop turntablism to the future-funk mix, marketed with an eye-grabbing video) and “Cantaloupe Island” (from the 1963 recording, Hancock and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard sampled to make US3’s “Cantaloop” a dancefloor smash in ’93) have intrigued musicians as well as listeners over four decades. So has his virtuosic, spontaneous pianism, which runs the gamut: cool-to-the-point-of-minimal, inquisitive, expansive and engaged, rhythmically energized or rhapsodic, post-modernly self-conscious or really, truly, freely free (hear him with Miles at the Plugged Nickel, 1966.
Hancock’s 1998 album Gershwin’s World is an excellent example of his range. It includes his performance of Gershwin’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in G, second movement and Prelude in C# Minor with soprano Katheleen Battle, alongside renditions of “St. Louis Blues” with Steve Wonder playing harmonica, “Embraceable You” sung by Joni Mitchell, a piano duet with Chick Corea and a couple of relatively straightahead tracks for a combo with saxophonist Wayne Shorter, his collaborator of nearly 50 years. But even that recording skips several of Hancock’s interests.
Besides popularizing the Fender Rhodes electric piano on Davis productions Filles de Kilimanjaro and In A Silent Way, Hancock introduced synthesizers (at first programmed and played by Dr. Patrick Gleeson) to jazz with his Mwandishi band. He’s worked with Latin percussionists (“Watermelon Man” was originally a hit for Mongo Santamaria). He’s had a longtime interest in Brazilian music, recording with Milton Nascimento, on video with Gal Costa and Antonio Carlos Jobim. River: The Joni Letters was only the second jazz recording ever to win the Grammy nod for Album of the Year, in 2008.
My desert island choice of Hancock’s music is Maiden Voyage, released in 1965. Discovering it when I was 16 led me to his just-previous Emperyan Isles and many subsequent recordings by Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams (his colleagues in Miles’ great quintet), Hubbard, Bobby Hutcherson, Sam Rivers, Dexter Gordon, and more. In this clip he wades in gradually, is bouyed by Carter (bass) and Willians (drums), then welcomes Hubbard and saxophonist Joe Henderson.
Hancock has been in the front line of modern jazz piano evolution, following from Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor to Andrew Hill, Joe Zawinul, McCoy Tyner, Paul Bley, Mal Waldron, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett. On Crossings and Sextant he entered synthesized spheres only Sun Ra had dared before. He’s said his early adoption of multiple keyboards and processors was informed by his college studies of electrical engineering.
Hancock’s understanding of jazz-funk-fusion and openness to producer Bill Laswell’s hip-hop beats, and most recently his song collections with casts of famed singers, have kept him in the public eye. So have his mid ’80s PBS/BBC video show Rockschool, his movie work (Blow Up, Death Wish, Round Midnight), his chairmanship of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, his sponsorship of emerging talent like guitarist Lionel Loueke and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire. Wynton Marsalis first recorded for Columbia Records in Herbie Hancock’s band.
I dig Hancock’s lesser-known Village Life, a duet with Senegalese griot Foday Musa Suso, and recommend Gershwin’s World and River. His current album, The Imagine Project, is ultra multikulti, with collaborators Dave Matthews, Céu, Pink, John Legend, The Chieftains, Los Lobos, Tinariwen, K’Naan, Anoushka Shankar. It appeals to a different crowd than that to which the pianist played on his just concluded European tour featuring tenor saxist Shorter and bassist Marcus Miller, Davis’s late-career electric bassist and producer.
In September Hancock has several California dates with his his piano-guitar-bass-drums quartet, and in November he’s scheduled three Pacific Northwest performances with orchestras of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue. He is also the current “creative chair for jazz” of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His activities as a UNESCO goodwill ambassador are not yet posted. Presumably he’ll keep doing what he’s been doing, even more selflessly and world-wide.
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Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/Herbie+Hancock+promote+jazz+ambassador/5149545/story.html#ixzz1T7ljT2bY
Jamaaladeen Tacuma – photo supplied by artist, no copyright infringement intended
Jamaaladeen Tacuma, free-funk electric bass virtuoso, protege of Ornette Coleman and one of the dancingest musicians on the planet, has been named one of 12 Philadelphia artists receiving $60,000 fellowships from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. Two other musicians are also 2011 Pew fellows: electronic music improviser Charles Cohen and exploratory folk/rock/goth guitarist Chris Forsyth.
The Pew’s level of financial support is comparable to the Herb Alpert Award ($75k) though not as much as the MacArthur Fellows Program ($500k over five years), more than a Guggenheim Fellowship (reportedly averaging around $43k in 2008) and more than the National Endowment for the Art’s Jazz Masters each receive as lifetime achievement prizes ($25k).
While Alperts, MacArthurs, Guggenheims and foreign prizes such as Denmark’s JazzPar (discontinued in 1984) have in recent years been bestowed on assertively experimental, innovative and avant-garde improvisers — and Tacuma can stand as an equal among them — he is still a surprising grant recipient. On the face of things, a 55-year-old electric bassist with the verve to get people on their feet might seem too “pop” for foundation money. However, Forsyth and Cohen are uncommon award winners, too. Pew fellows do not apply but are selected through a nomination process.
Tacuma’s latest album demonstrates the breadth and depth of his interests: For The Love of Ornette is self-produced, only available through the artist’s own means of distribution and fun to listen to, dramatic and varied, but far from the formulas of pop music. Ornette is (of course) Ornette Coleman, the internationally acclaimed American iconoclast, mentor/inspiration to Tacuma (among legions of others), subject of a suite on the album and featured throughout the album playing alto saxophone. He is the very prophet of “free jazz.”
“Fellas, can you hear me?” Coleman says to Tacuma’s ensemble of seven, opening the title track of Tacuma’s album. “Forget the note and get to the idea.” That’s a characteristic dictum of the “harmolodic” world-view Coleman has pro-offered and Tacuma has practiced some 35 years, since the relentless “freely” improvised electronic funk rave-up Dancing In Your Head, released in 1977. There are other worthy contributors to For the Love of. . . including Tony Kofi on tenor saxophone, Wolfgang Puschnig on flute and the double-reed hojak, and Yoichi Uzeki playing piano, Coleman’s concept dominates this album.
What “free” means in this context is that music isn’t ruled by rules — categories, conventions, constraints — but is foremost an expression an individual’s personal views and truths, in conjunction, usually, with other individuals’ equally unique statements. Furthermore: All those individuals (participatory listeners included) can come together through collective improvisation.
Jamaaladeen Tacuma talks about himself
The logical basis of harmolodics is often doubted by musicians trained in Western classical style, though its precepts as articulated by Coleman uncover zen-like wisdom in allusion and contradiction, and would appear to be applicable across many performing arts. Tacuma may have an inherent inclination to realize harmony, melody and motion as inseparable elements of lively musical self-expression — Coleman took him as a harmolodic natural when they first met, and relied upon him for his electrically-infused projects from 1976 through ’87. They have not recorded together for 24 years.
In the ’80s Jamaaladeen released several albums of his own with infectious rhythms, hot licks and classical accents from winds and string sections. Readers of my book Miles Ornette Cecil – Jazz Beyond Jazz and articles over the years (even before I was managing-edited Guitar World, 1982 – 83) know of my enthusiasm for Tacuma’s bass playing and upbeat, direct immediacy. He’s one of those rare and valuable people who bring bounce to life, apparently possessed with bold, joyous engagement. He seems to have been overlooked by the jazz press and public over the past decade (perhaps because he lives in Philadelphia, heading his large family). If so, it’s the press’s fault — he’s been busy, popular at festivals in Europe, recording with an array of collaborators ranging from phenomenological atonalist Derek Bailey to black rockateer Vernon Reid, opera singer Wilhelmina Fernandez to Belgian Arabic hip-hop stylist Natacha Atlas.
Tacuma’s foundational, rubbery, striding sounds give a lift to almost every situation, and he puts himself into some odd ones, seldom sounding predictable, never dull. Here’s hoping the Pew Award gives him a bit of financial security and an extra infusion of energy he’ll pass on to the rest of us.
Take a night-time jazz cruise with saxophonist Avram Fefer, guitarist Joe Cohn and rhythm in New York Harbor on Wednesday nights for respite from NYC – I detail it and other unusual musical staycations for July in my new City Arts New York column. If you’ve got 10 minutes, check out my dark video of Avram and Joe’s quartet and the Statue of Liberty.
This weekend it’s into (across) the Harbor again, for an electronic music lecture/dem, car-less biking and ocean breezes on Governor’s Island. Or listening to a favorite Lovin’ Spoonful song (avec musique concrete).
eyeJAZZ report embedded
The National Endowment for the Arts has been directed by the US House Appropriations Committee in its report to Interior 
 to continue the American Jazz Masters Fellowships and dump its proposed American Artists of the Year honors. The report also supports continuation of the NEA’s National Heritage Fellowships program (but not its Opera Honors) and recommends a 2012 NEA budget $19.6 million less than it got in 2011, $11.2 million below what the NEA asked for.
“The Committee does not support the budget request proposal to eliminate the National Heritage Fellowship program and the American Jazz Masters Fellowship program,” reads the report (on page 106) published July 11. It goes on:
The National Heritage Fellowship program, which was created in 1982, has celebrated over 350 cultural leaders from 49 states and five U.S. territories, focusing national attention on the keepers of America’s deep and rich cultural heritage found in communities large and small, rural and urban. Similarly, the American Jazz Masters Fellowship, also created in 1982, has bestowed appropriate national recognition on a uniquely American art form Congress has proclaimed a national treasure. Accordingly, the Committee directs the NEA to continue these popular honorific fellowships in the same manner as it has in the past.The Committee believes the proposal to establish a separate NEA American Artist of the Year honorific award is not warranted and could be perceived as an attempt to circumvent clear, long-established congressional guidelines prohibiting direct grant funding to individual artists.
Also in the report (starting on page 105 of the pdf), the Committee asserts its support for the “longstanding collaborative relationship between the NEA and the States [Arts Agencies],” funding state partnerships with $46 million, which includes a $10 million set-aside for rural communities.
The Committee lauds the Blue Stars Museums program that gives free museum admission to “all active duty, National Guard and Reserve military personnel and their families from Memorial Day through Labor Day,” as well as what it calls “cost-effective, well-managed” initiatives with “broad geographic reach” (specifically, the Big Read, Challenge America and Shakespeare in American Communities) that extend the arts to under-served communities. Furthermore, it “views the NEA’s newest initiative — known as Our Town — as an economic development and revitalization proposal more properly aligned with the goals and objectives of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.” The report cites the Committee’s concern that Our Town funding would “gravitate states’ arts agencies to concentrate funds toward large urban centers with strong existing arts infrastructures at the expense of State Arts Agencies which are better positioned to reach underserved populations.”
While the Committee believes that the NEA is well-positioned to provide expertise to HUD and other Federal agencies on promoting the arts in large and small communities . . . as competition for Federal dollars grows, limited direct grant funding dollars with- in the NEA should be devoted to core programs with a proven record of success.”
Consequently, Our Towns gets $2 million, $3 million less than the NEA requested.
The total budget recommendation for the NEA is $135,000,000. The Committee recommends the same amount of support (and equal cuts from the 2011 budget level and the 2012 request) for the National Endowment of the Humanities. For comparison: the price of one F-35 Lightning !! fighter plane from Lockheed Martin is currently estimated at $156 million.
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David Simon – photo ©Paul Schiraldi; Clark Peters – Pinterest
“Life is glorious and vibrant and joyous at points, but it is essentially tragic. That’s not a unique David Simon perspective.” So sayeth David Simon, (pictured left; right is a Mardi Gras Indian portrayed by Clarke Peters), executive producer with Eric Overmyer of Treme, in a long interview on Salon conducted by Matt Zolar Seitz.  The HBO series about New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which ended its second season last Sunday night, is unique as a musical drama for its grounding of psychologically acute and entertaining characterizations in a verifiably real social context — an accomplishment attributable to Simon’s hard-boiled yet compassionate philosophy and journalistically-influenced creative practices. It’s all laid out in the interview, which also makes a strong case for the centrality of cities to the future of America.
“Do Watcha Wanna,” the season finale of Treme, had everything I watch the series for:
The American Composers Orchestra readings of short symphonic works by jazz-oriented composers which I wrote of in my CityArts column and posted about here are now available to hear, thanks to Lara Pelligrinelli at NPR’s A Blog Supreme. The 23rd annual BMI/New York Jazz Orchestra concert, featuring “New Works for Big Band” and the naming (not yet publicized) of the winner of the 11th Annual Charlie Parker Jazz Composition Prize. I’m looking for a third item regarding really large scale opportunities for jazz composers (and listeners), but the student competitions, festival appearances, and other emanations of a tradition which by the logic of the marketplace ought to be pretty much over are too plentiful to start to mention (ok, here’s one: Savannah’s 6th Annual Patriotic Big Band Salute on July 4 starring Jeremy Davis and the Fabulous Equinox Orchestra).
Jazz and its evolution goes on everywhere – as bass guitarist/bandleader/composer/producer Yacoub Abu Ghosh explained and demonstrated to me in Amman, Jordan last March. Ghosh and his Stage Heroes performed at their weekly gig at Canvas Cafe Restaurant Art Lounge. His new album As Blue As The Rivers of Amman is due to drop July 2.
The American Composers Orchestra gave eight jazz-oriented composers a year to work up five minute pieces and composer-mentors to help, then staged readings conducted by George Manahan during one of the busiest weeks of the jazz summer. Read about it in my latest CityArts column.
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The National Endowment for the Arts’s final designated Jazz Masters are all worthy: drummer Jack DeJohnette, saxophonist Von Freeman, bassist Charlie Haden, singer Sheila Jordan and trumpeter-educator-organizer-gadfly Jimmy Owens have had long and profoundly influential if not broadly celebrated or financially rewarded creative careers. So much the worse that this 30 year program highlighting genuine American artistic heroes has been zeroed out in the 2012 budget, to be replaced by proposed “American Artist of the Years Awards” that will toss jazz musicians into a mix including every kind of artist working in the performing arts (defined as dance, music, opera, musical theater and theater), with a de-emphasis on long-demonstrated artistry (I’ve blogged about this in detail previously).