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Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

It’s Jazz Appreciation Month: Hail Jazz Heroes!

Since 2001, the Jazz Journalists Association (over which I preside) has celebrated some 350 “activists, advocates, altruists, aiders and abettors of jazz,” as Jazz Heroes. The class of 2024 Jazz Heroes has just been announced, recognizing the good works of 33 people whose efforts extend from the Baja-San Diego borderland to Ottawa, Canada, through 27 U.S cities, from Akron to Tucson, rural Montana to

photo collage thanks to Melanie Nañez

the South Carolina Lowcountry, New York’s Capital Region as well as Brooklyn and Harlem, Newark, Chicago, the Bay Area, LA, NOLA, DC, Austin, Denver, Boston, Detroit, Indianapolis, Charlotte, Brattleboro, Hilton Head Island, Portland, Seattle — where there’s music, there’s jazz (and given more organizational resources, the JJA could celebrate 33 more . . .)

Jazz Heroes do the background work, sometimes acknowledged but seldom fairly compensated, that sustains as a vital cultural entity the past and present of an art form that reflects better than any other (I’ll argue) what people not much driven by commercial concerns do to keep themselves and their communities humming. Most serious jazz fans understand their connections to this music as more than a hobby, perhaps as much as a calling. It might be considered a lifestyle, or even a way of life.

Why these folks and and others (like me) love jazz more than (if not always instead of or to the exclusion of) other genres of music is a question for speculation, to what ends I’m not sure. I grew up on Chicago’s south side in the ‘50s, jazz was in the air but so was Sinatra, Elvis, show tunes, r&b, popular classical works, Lawrence Welk, tv and ad ditties, quasi-Jewish music and movie soundtracks. I’m temperamentally partial to narrative drama, heightened emotions, saturated colors, sudden (spontaneous? unpredictable?) action, an ethos that values imaginative engagement, emotional range and a whatever’s-necessary work ethic. Demographics + personal preferences = personal esthetics. Call that news? Seems tautological.

But what’s cool, maybe deserving of note, and demonstrated clearly by the JJA’s Jazz Heroes campaign is that this music, for many years reportedly representing a tiny and diminishing percentage of record sale and concert returns, holds sway beyond such metrics. Jazz may be deemed elitist or crass, the most elevated form of spontaneous creation or sheer noise, but it’s here, everywhere, ineradicable. Its proponents are working across many sectors of the arts world, from artist to audience, patron to promoter to presenter. Think too of the references to jazz — the sound, the iconography, the immortals — that pops up in advertising. See what jazz is used to sell, then consider how jazz-the-music may not be selling, but jazz-the-idea is.

[Yet — maybe that’s not quite true. André 3000 playing processed wood flutes is fine by me.

And in the last week thanks to Ashley Kahn’s DownBeat Blindfold Test of Cecile McLorin Salvant, I learned of Laufey. ‘“She’s the most famous jazz singer today,” said the most radically gifted jazz singer

to emerge in the past 15 years (talk about this elsewhere). I get it. Doesn’t everyone dig bossa nova? Isn’t kind of brave of this Icelandic-Chinese woman who turns 25 on April 23 to play guitar and piano and sing solo front a string ensemble, drawing uninitiated listeners into the pleasures of soft swing. To the the extent that she’s successful, maybe it’s heroic? Or is Laufey just codger-bait?]

Stardom is not requisite for JJA Jazz Heroes. Some have been brushed with fame: Marla Gibbs, for instance, who turned her earnings from high visibility tv roles into support of the Black arts and music movement of Los Angeles; Ahmed Abdullah, trumpeter traveling the spaceways with Sun Ra for decades, and co-directing the Brooklyn cultural center Sista’s Place; Charlton Singleton and Quentin Baxter of Grammy-winning Ranky Tanky, preserving by updating the Gullah traditions of the South Carolina Lowcountry. But others shine in relative isolation: Pianist Ann Tappan, who teaches from her home in Manhattan, Montana, a town of 2000, outside Bozeman; David Leander Williams, who became historian of Indianapolis’ Indiana Avenue, since no one else had; Arthur Vint, who’s established a cool club in Tucson, having learned how laboring in that temple of jazz, NYC’s Village Vanguard; trumpeter-composer-bandleader Iván Trujillo, who crosses the Mexico-U.S. border and jazz sub-genre lines, too, bringing traditional New Orleans jazz, free improvisation, electro-acoustic and classical music to binational Baja California-San Diego, recording with young players remotely during the pandemic.

I’m proud the JJA shines light on everyday heroes, who make the world go ‘round.

Who plays the saxophone? And why?

I love the sound of a saxophone, or rather the broad range of sounds available from this family of reeds

The author, who has never been very serious about his alto playing, with
apologies to Neil Tesser on tenor sax, Jim Baker on guitar;
photo by Lauren Deutsch

instruments. Breathy, vocal-like, smooth, light, penetrating, gritty or greasy, able to cry and/or croon (sometimes both at once), it strikes me as capable of the most personal of musical statements, although that’s probably a projection based on my imagination set free listening to these horns, mostly in the context of jazz, for more than half a century.

But in some ways the sax seems a throwback. By the time I started actively seeking out music, electric guitars had asserted their dominance and ubiquity as the instrument of a successful, popular musician. Pianos are classy and useful; electric keyboards, including synthesizers, offer many more dimensions of sound production, notably polyphony, than horn players can summon only with the most assiduous practice.

It’s not just a matter of volume — electric wind instruments have been available for decades, but remain curiosities. In pop music, the sax has become conspicuous by its absence. To hear any saxophonics beyond the inanities of Kenny G and soul licks of Maceo Parker, you simply have to turn to jazz — with which the sax is virtually synonymous, having a leading if not fundamental role.

So who plays the saxophone? The schedule of the upcoming Chicago Jazz Festival, Sept 1 through 4 in the city’s Millennium Park tells us: Pulitizer Prize-winner Henry Threadgill, heading his unique band Zooid. Donald Harrison, 2022 NEA Master and Big Chief of The Congo Square Nation Afro-New Orleans Cultural Group.

Miguel Zénon, a MacArthur and Guggenheim fellow and multiple-Grammy nominee. James Brandon Lewis, winner of the year’s Jazz Journalists Association Award as well as the DownBeat Critic’s poll for tenor saxophone players, and his alto-playing fellow honoree Immanuel Wilkins. J.D. Allen, a close runner-up in those and other ratings. Joel Frahm and Rob Brown, for decades New York-based sax stalwarts. Multi-talented New Orleans bandleader/performance artist Aurora Nealand.

Those gents are internationally or at least nationally known. That can’t be claimed so assuredly of Chicago’s own voracious, masterful sax players, but it should be. Greg Ward, Geoff Bradfield, Nick Mazzarella, Isaiah Collier and Lenard Simpson (from Milwaukee) are all playing the Jazz Fest. Each one has an audible identity, developed because one of the things that distinguishes saxophonists in jazz and adjacent creative music that they have something to say. They’re serious and use their horns to amplify their messages.

Chicago is a sax city. Although Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane weren’t born here, they all passed through, leaving a mark. Sonny Rollins had an important residence here. But dig this roll call of Chicago saxophonists, in no particular order:

Saxophonists at a 1988 reunion of students of the late Capt. Walter Dyett, Chicago public high school band director: from left, Clifford Jordan, John Gilmore, Johnny Griffin, E. Parker MacDougal, Eddie Harris, Ed Petersen, Von Freeman, Jimmy Ellis
photo by Lauren Deutsch

Franz Jackson, Bud Freeman, Gene Ammons, Johnny Griffin, Eddie Harris, John Gilmore, Eddie Shaw, Clifford Jordan, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Fred Anderson, Anthony Braxton, Douglas Ewart, John Klemmer, Edward Wilkerson, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Light Henry Huff, Don Myrick, Gene Dinwiddie, Steve Coleman, E. Parker McDougal, Pat Mallinger, Sharel Cassity, Diane Ellis, Jimmy Ellis, Clark Dean, Joe Daley, Art Porter Jr., Eddie Johnson, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Sonny Cox, Ira Sullivan, Pat Patrick, Ed House, Chris Madsen, J.T. Brown, Skinny Williams, John Brumbach, Vandy Harris, Edwin Daugherty, Mike Smith, Ari Brown, Boyce (Brother Mathew) Brown, Juli Wood, Eric Schneider, Frank Catalano, Roy McGrath, Dave Rempis, Mars Williams, Shawn Maxwell, Keefe Jackson, Chris Greene, Cameron Pfiffner, Mark Colby, Ken Vandermark, Fred Jackson Jr., Gene Barge, A.C. Reed, Mai Sugimoto, Hal Russel, Jeff Vega, Hal Ra Ru, and of course Von Freeman

The Freemans, from left: Bruz, Von, Chico, George; photo by Lauren Deutsch

— to whom the Fest opening suite, “Vonology” is dedicated by his advocate and protege guitarist Mike Allemana (recent collaborator with saxophonist Chico Freeman in a community celebration of Freeman family, including 95 year old uncle George).

Current elders of the saxophone who deserve reference include first and foremost Mr. Rollins (ret’d), Wayne Shorter (ret’d), Charles Lloyd, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Marshall Allen, Houston Person, and Charles McPherson. They purr, yowl, preach and persuade, a lot like they’re talking to you. They blow so you’ll listen.

Appreciating Charnett Moffett as a solo bassist

Saddened that bassist Charnett Moffett has died of a heart attack at age 54, I post this appreciation — also serving as a profile —

Charnette Moffett, from video of The Bridge

written in 2013 to annotate his solo bass (!) album The Bridge, which he described as “my most personal and challenging release so far.”

Solo bass records are rare, and might seem to appeal mostly to bassists and bass aficionados. But on The Bridge Charnett Moffett, the charismatic bass virtuoso with an impressive past and equally brilliant future, has proven here — without benefit of a band — that his music can touch anyone who loves music, regardless of instrumentation or genre.

Alone with his upright bass, Moffett has created an engaging hour of organic, richly detailed and fundamentally physical sounds. He lays down 20 concise and immediately enjoyable performances, exploring motifs that have had true resonance for him throughout his formidable career.  He establishes his links to the lineage of iconic jazz bassists, and demonstrates his personal, advanced techniques for this heaviest of stringed instruments, the tether that, since its invention, has bound melody, harmony and rhythm together. He gives himself unstintingly to this project and, so doing, renews himself. 

In fact, this is Charnett’s process: He has never stopped growing throughout the three decades he has been at the heart of bravenew music. Receiving his first bass (a half-sized one) at age seven, recording that year– and then touring Japan with the Moffett Family Band–Charnett

has been at the ‘bottom’ of things (pun intended) from the beginning of his musical life. His father Charles was a drummer with Ornette Coleman, and so as a youngster Charnett was always around jazz royalty. He auditioned for Charles Mingus when he was nine.

He attended The High School of Music and Art (the “Fame” high school), Mannes College of Music and Juilliard, which he left at age 16 to hit the road in the band of Wynton Marsalis. In his 20’s he worked steadily with guitarist Stanley Jordan, the all-star Manhattan Jazz Quintet and legendary drummer Tony Williams in addition to recording under his own name for Blue Note. He’s been a collaborative sideman in quartet with Ornette and Denardo Coleman and Geri Allen, with Art Blakey, Harry Connick Jr., McCoy Tyner (for five years), Bette Midler, David Sanborn, Branford Marsalis and, most recently, Melody Gardot. Even when he’s been in a supportive role, Charnett’s focused and energetic solos have frequently inspired audience ovations.

The Bridge casts him as the beneficiary of musical wisdom passed along by such eminences as Ray Brown, Charles Mingus, Paul Chambers, Scott Lafaro, Stanley Clarke, Ron Carter, Bobby McFerrin and Sting, and he does this lineage proud. 

Moffett launches his CD program with “Caravan”, the Juan Tizol song that Duke Ellington made famous (with bassist Jimmy Blanton, among others). This was his feature with the Manhattan Jazz Quintet, a group that he joined when he was 17 and remained a key member of for 25 years. He follows it with the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby,” repertoire from the opposite pole of the pop music continuum, famously covered by his former musical comrade Stanley Jordan. Here Charnett offers a singular interpretation that evokes the original’s poignancy and includes a counterline Paul McCartney, the tune’s main composer, might envy.

“Black Codes from the Underground” is a composition from Wynton Marsalis’s now-classic album of the same name, which first positioned Charnett among his â€˜Young Lions’ peers, including not only the Marsalis brothers but also pianist Kenny Kirkland and drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts. The piece holds special memories for Charnett: he played it live at the Grammys in 1986, which was, of course, an enormous thrill for a teenager at an early point in his career. One of the glories of this track is Charnett’s embrace of the entirety of his instrument: the slap of wood as well as the throb of fiber and ringing tone. Then there is his fierce attack, and that indestructible repeating riff, reprised from the original rendition, which has earned jazz-hit status.

Charnett became a fan of Sting when Branford Marsalis and Kenny Kirkland joined his band, and cites the lyrical “Fragile” as a Sting composition that reflects how he himself feels about some of the difficult passages of life. Next is “Haitian Fight Song” by Charles Mingus, which Charnett took as a chance, as he says, “to utilize my own style, rather than to emulate his, and to pay my respects.”

Moffet’s “Kalengo” spotlights the age-old Western European classical technique of bow-tapping in alternation with conventionally bowed and plucked passages. â€œThe song is inspired by Chick Corea, but has an open harmonic structure and concept about modulation during improvisation that I learned from Ornette,” explains Charnett. “Bow Song” is another conjunction of influences: “It’s classical in orientation”, he acknowledges, â€œbut it was really inspired by Paul Chambers’ version of â€˜Yesterdays’ from his album Bass On Top, one of my favorites.” 

The idea of pairing the early 19th century Negro spiritual “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho” with 21st century Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”– “the oldest song on the record with the newest,” as Charnett mentions â€“ came from Mary Ann Topper, the co-producer of The Bridge, who was also a key figure in Charnett’s ’80s career breakout. â€œSkip Hop,” says the bassist, “is about having some fun. I remember a gig I did with Ornette in Belfast, where the musicians were playing bagpipes, and it was really swinging. It was an Irish jig … and I just slowed down the tempo for ‘Skip Hop.’ By the way,” he adds, â€œMoffett is actually an Irish name!”

It was also Ms. Topper who urged Charnett to record Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight,” “Well You Needn’t” and “Rhythm-A-Ning” as a medley. “That was challenging, but it came out nicely,” the bassist comments. “The Slump” which seems positively buoyant, was composed by Tony Williams, with whom Charnett toured and recorded in the late ’80s; “The Slump” was his feature with Williams’ band. “Oversun” is Charnett’s easy-does-it evocation of the self-contained call and response vocal gambit of one of his favorite musicians, Bobby McFerrin. “Swinging Etude” is another nod to Ornette Coleman: “Like McCoy Tyner, Ornette has been one of my most significant teachers,” Charnett asserts, and indeed, Tyner’s tour-de-force “Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit” comes next. It was Charnett’s feature while playing with the iconic pianist. 

“Truth” first appeared on Nettwork, Moffet’s 1991 Blue Note/Manhattan Records production. It demonstrates his remarkable ability to depict harmony, melody and rhythm as one entity, rather than as separate though intertwined strands. On this album’s title track, “The Bridge (Solo Bass Works),” Charnett takes his instrumental mastery and unique concept even further, having been inspired to imagine what Rimsky-Korsakov’s â€œFlight of The Bumblebee” might sound like on the bass. See our man working up this track in the studio by putting this CD into your computer and viewing the video included as “enhanced CD” content [click link on photo above].

By this point in the program we’ve heard the threads that run through every Moffett musical interpretation: muscle leavened by tenderness, vitality tempered by humility, daring matched by accomplishment. These qualities are again present in his rendition of Nat “King” Cole’s “Nature Boy”as well as in the snappy “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be,” a tribute to the late, great Ray Brown, who borrowed the Ellington song to use as his own theme. They are likewise found in the one over-dubbed track on The Bridge, “All Blues,” which makes reference to Paul Chambers, Miles Davis and Ron Carter, and in Charnett’s concluding original, “Free Your Mind,” which offers a taste of his unique deployment of electronics with the upright bass, a powerful effect in his live performances.

“‘Free Your Mind’ also previews Moffett’s Spirit of Sound album, recorded prior to The Bridge and scheduled for subsequent release. “Spirit of Sound, features my family band with a number of guests from the Motéma family,” says Charnett. “It represents the newest expression of my ensemble vision to date, whereas this solo project is my most personal and challenging release so far.”

Charnett’s 20 performances on The Bridge revel in the breadth of his creativity and musical identity, as indelible as the thrum of his thumb. “I wanted to do something that would express who I am, carry on the tradition of the greats who preceded me, and also contribute to the art form by challenging myself to construct my own standard of solo-bass excellence,” he states. “I think it’s imperative that an artist work in such ways.”

And so, thanks to this gifted bassist, we have it all: The connection between joy and effort, ambition and fulfillment, the past and the present. Complete even when totally alone, Charnett Moffett isThe Bridge.

Charnett Moffett’s most recently released album New Love (2021) features Jana Herzen, his wife, guitarist, singer-songwriter and founder of Motéma Music. Condolences to her and all Charnett’s family, friends and admirers.

Happy 90th to electronic music pioneer Herb Deutsch

Herb Deutsch, the trumpeter-pianist-Theremin player-composer-Moog synthesizer co-creator and jazz inspired improviser turns 90 today, February 9, 2022,

Robert Moog, l., and Herb Deutsch at the Moog modular synthesizer

and a hearty Happy Birthday to him! In celebration, Moog Music has produced a video interview with this emeritus professor of Hofstra University, where he taught composition and electronic music, as the first of a series titled Giants.

He’s been less often mentioned in the story of the revolution in musical possibilities wrought by physical architecture for generating and processing electronic sound waves than his friend the synth inventor Dr. Robert Moog, or West Coast designer Don Buchla, or their predecessor Leon Theremin. During the mid ’60s burst of electronic music by such visionaries as Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley and Morton Subotnick, Sun Ra, Herbie Hancock and Jimi Hendrix, Deutsch was there, leading an improvising electro-acoustic ensemble at Manhattan’s Town Hall and the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden.

Immediately as this text was posted came news of the death of composer, educator and Synclavier developer Jon Appelton at age 83; his electro-acoustic works include Human Music from 1970, a series of interactions with trumpeter Don Cherry. All due respects.

Hear Deutsch at 14:18 tell of developing the modular synth for such basics of sound-shaping as control over its attack and decay. He conceived the keyboard interface for triggering sonic events, and personally enfolded evocative social-political content into multi-dimensional narratives of sound organized in time.

That Deutsch was (and remains?) a jazz enthusiast dedicated to real-time improvisation puts the cherry on the top, as far as I’m concerned, of his reputation as a key figure in 20th century musical innovation and re-conception. His recordings collected on From Moog to Mac sort of a best-of, with “Jazz Images, a Worksong and Blues,” (1965 — credited as the first composition for a Moog) featuring bluesy piano and (overdubbed?) horn intersected interwoven with thick and thin electronic lines, unnaturally long fades, whirling sirens, white noise, delays and maybe backward tape. A Christmas Carol (1963) his prescient mix of found sounds, spoken word and haunting ambiance, was a contemporaneous response to the Alabama church bombing that killed four young girls and also drew profound comment from James Baldwin, John Coltrane and Dr. Martin Luther King. Deutsch’s composition still has power, and reminds me of Ilhan MimaroÄŸlu’s devastating Sing Me The Song of Songmy (1971), electronics, readings and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard’s band with Junior Cook and Kenny Barron.

“From the very beginnings of Moog music,” says Deutsch, “Bob and I understood one thing very clearly: The designer of the instrument must understand the needs of the artist, must understand the minds and the creativity and the thoughts of the artist. And the artist should then recognize the designer’s ability to produce what that artist needs. . . .This instrument has changed the way people think about what music should be.”

POSTSCRIPT Beyond jazz — I was curious as an early teenabout weird electronic music in continuum with other unconventional, experimental and hyper-expressive arts. I found the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center album, started listening and didn’t stop. I was delighted when attending Syracuse University to be able to play (study? learn?) at its Moog studio, which took up a loft in Crouse Hall. I don’t know if it’s still there. Here’s my bit on that experience, soundtrack from ’71.

If I’ve put this up before, forgive me. Is it over-wrought? I’m currently going nuts with a Korg Minilogue and Monotribe and Arturia Microfreak.

Jazz Autumn: Returns, galas and even awards

If all “jazz” shares a single trait, it’s that nothing will stifle it. Adjusting to covid-19

Ari Brown greets fan at Hyde Park Jazz Festival; photo by Michael Jackson for Chicago Reader

strictures, Chicago (just for instance) in the past two months has been site of:

  • A stellar Hyde Park Jazz Festival;
  • Herbie Hancock’s homecoming concert at Symphony Center;
  • audiences happily (for the most part – no reported incidents otherwise) observing appropriate covid restrictions in intimate venues where I’ve been — including Constellation, the Jazz Showcase, Hungry Brain and Fitzgerald’s;
  • a heartening multi-kulti success — Japanese taiko drums and shamisen hooking up with Brazilian percussion trio and guitarist, Ukrainian bandura improviser, string quartet, jazz rhythm team all led by brassman Orbert Davis in the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic‘s return to in-person (as well as streamed, and free of charge) performance;
  • the fourth annual Afro-Futurism weekend at Elastic Arts;
  • An AACM 55th Anniversary concert by the Great Black Music Ensemble at the Logan Center;
  • the Jazz Institute of Chicago staging a “projection promenade” featuring performers in front of large-scale digital photo exhibits, in three lots along south side Cottage Grove Avenue.

Most of those events were free of charge to attendees (not the jazz clubs of course, but prices haven’t risen and are low by, say, New York City standards), simply required advance registration, and have benefitted from generous arts support from the City of Chicago, which has truly stepped up to bat in terms of channeling funds to small and dispersed organizations as well as major central ones. As I understand it, commercial enterprises as well as not-for-profits have received financial support.

Kudos to Mark Kelly, who has just retired as director of the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) for energetic, creative responses to the challenges of his tenure — pandemic included. But it should be made clear that the efforts mentioned above resulted from efforts of many actors across a broad and deep, if under-heralded, local artistic ecosystem. And I barely scratched what’s happening here, just glossing over music highlights, not addressing the Film Fest, Humanities Fest, Lyric Opera’s MacBeth, re-opening of Steppenwolf and other theaters, the Art Institute’s Kertész exhibit, and so on.

Guess I’m sounding boosterish. Be that as it may, financial insecurities are ever-present for arts

presenters, non-profit or commercial, and so fundraising events continue, sometimes in unusual formats. Another for instance: The Jazz Institute, of which I’m secretary of the board, holds its annual fundraiser November 4 — and all the world is invited to attend free of charge.

It’s wholly virtual, offering insiders’ perspectives and on-site videos hosted by reedsman Rajiv Halim and vocalist-educator Bobbi Wilsyn, singer Meagan McNeal, trumpeter Corey Wilkes and more. Of course donations are strongly encouraged; it takes ever more cash to produce music free of charge in Chicago Park district facilities city-wide, to run Artists-in-Residence programs in local schools, a high school big band competition, and after-school programs (which have graduated successive waves of exciting new musicians). But the JIC will be happy if you simply tune in to watch fresh videos of the student jam sessions held at the Jazz Showcase; Awards being presented to Chris Anderson of the Fulton Street Collective loft venue and Joan Colasso, director of the Timeless Gifts Youth Program; a tour of local jazz shrines with voice-over by Maggie Brown (daughter of Oscar Brown, Jr.). Check it out. Get acquainted.

Will it raise a sou? We shall see. The distinctly different Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, co-led until just recently by trumpeter Davis and his business partner Mark Ingram, held its all-online, not-cheaply-ticketed virtual gala back in June with Kurt Elling as a collaborative guest (Rhapsody Snyder was introduced as new Executive Director on the webcast), and announced income from it of $85,000, $10k over its goal. So yes, these can be important sources of unrestricted funds.

Orbert Davis leads Chicago Jazz Philharmonic in Chicago Immigrant Stories III, with Tatsu Aoki (shamisen) and his daughters playing taiko drums and flute, and (not in this photo) Geraldo de Oliveria with Dede Sampaio and Luciano Antonio; and Ivan Smilo, bandura and vocals. Photo from CJP

Speaking of which — >>DIGRESSION WARNING<< — congratulations to all 52 jazz and improvised music practitioners receiving support of between $25,000 to $40,000 for creative residencies from Jazz Road, a South Arts initiative funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This round reaching many artists I’ve long admired, including Chico Freeman, Ernest Dawkins, Mars Williams, Josh Abrams, Adegoke Steve Colson, Craig Harris, Elio Villafranca, Nasheet Waits, Kip Hanrahan, Michele Rosewoman, Meg Okura, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Melvin Gibbs and Jason Moran. Congrats also to pianist Kris Davis, eminent composer, saxophonist and band-leader Wayne Shorter, and pianist Danilo Perez (a principal in Shorter’s long-running, now suspended quartet), named Doris Duke Performing Artists ($275,000 comes with this honor).

Not to overlook rare recognition (not from the Jazz Journalists Association) for music journalists. The 52nd annual ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Awards for outstanding print, broadcast, liner notes and new media coverage of music honored (among others) Daphne A. Brooks for “100 Years Ago, ‘Crazy Blues’ Sparked a Revolution for Black Women Fans,” published in The New York Times; Fat Possum Records and No Sudden Movements for their release of the documentary Memphis ’69, with performances by Sleepy John Estes, Bukka White and Fred McDowell; Ted Gioia for his appreciation of jazz critic Whitney Balliett, “The Music Critic Who Tried to Disappear,” published by City Journal; Frank J. Oteri of New Music USA’s New Music Box for the podcast, “Valerie Coleman: Writing Music for People” and John Kruth for his article, “Ceremonies Against the Virus: Bachir Attar of the Master Musicians of Jajouka,” published by the online journal, Please Kill Me. Monetary awards of $250 to $500 accompany this recognition. As a two-time Deems Taylor Award-winner, I can attest to its value as an uplift.

City of Chicago, music promoter

Lollapalooza 2021 had some 385,000 attendees (without significant Covid-19 outbreak, fortunately) but featured little of host Chicago’s indigenous talent or styles. And that’s just wrong, declared Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events commissioner Mark Kelly, launching the month-long Chicago in Tune

Mark Kelly, photos © Lauren Deutsch

“festival” at a reception August 19. Here’s the still-evolving event calendar of hundreds of local music performances — of every conceivable genre, free and ticketed, outside or in, most requiring vax proof and/or masks — running on through Sept 19, in every city neighborhood.

Chicago, Kelly asserted, has never officially or adequately embraced and supported (he didn’t say it — but allow me: or exploited for publicity’s sake) its homegrown music communities comprising artists and audiences of boogie, blues, jazz, gospel, r&b, house, hip-hop, rap, folk, rock, Mexican mariachi, Polish polka band, Latin jam sessions, singer-songwriter performance, contemporary composers, virtuosic instrumentalists and improvisational ensembles.

At his direction DCASE had planned 2020 as “The Year of Chicago Music” and responded to Covid-19 shutdowns by extending that initiative into ’21. Yet the shutdowns continued, and the matter of sustaining or improving the lot of Chicago music writ large was for Kelly, a one-time jazz drummer retiring from his position in October, becoming more urgent.

So in an unusual effort to broadly stimulate the existing musical ecosystem (not incidentally, a potential tourist draw) and project our brand in the class of New York, New Orleans, Nashville, Austin, Detroit while also productively de-centralizing it — his department in the administration of Mayor Lori Lightfoot has coordinated partial-to-full underwriting and promotion of grants to artists and shows in dozens of venues and public spaces across this third-biggest (by area as well as population) U.S. metropolis.

Included are the ARC Music Festival in Union Park (September 4 & 5), Pitchfork Music Festival Chicago in Union Park (September 10–12), the punk Riot Fest in Douglass Park (September 17–19) — and “Music Lives Here,” a public art initiative installing graphic markers at 50 musically noteworthy sites. The City’s own production centerpiece: over Labor Day weekend an evening each, free of charge in Millennium Park, for jazz, blues, house and gospel, a necessary adaptation of Chicago’s former multi-days fests.

As a native and as a music journalist, I subscribe to the notion that Chicago has a unique and highly significant place in the past and ongoing development of American if not indeed world-wide music. The case for this is well known, so I won’t detail it here.*

However, for all the glories of sounds come from Oz-on-the-Lake in just the last 100 years, say, including its eminence in commercial endeavors like music publishing, jingle production and harp manufacture and establishment of prestigious institutions including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Lyric Opera, in the aftermath of the late 1960s consolidation and relocation of major record labels to Los Angeles and New York City few sizable business structures have emerged (pace JAM Productions) to loudly, systematically advance the cause of local music either throughout or beyond the city’s limits.

There are feisty independent labels such as Aerophonic, Alligator, BluJazz, Delmark, International Anthem, Southport, and The Sirens (of course with dislocations across the music industry, they, too have struggled). We have worthy non-profits — the Jazz Institute of Chicago, Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, South Side Jazz Coalition, AACM, Hyde Park Jazz Society, Hyde Park Jazz Festival (2021 program live/in-person Sept 25-26), Elastic Arts, Experimental Sound Studio and Hot House among them — and dedicated performance locales including the Jazz Showcase, the Green Mill, Fulton Street Collective, Constellation and the Hungry Brain, Rosa’s Lounge, Kingston Mines, Buddy Guy’s Legends, Andy’s, Winter’s, Promontory, Space, Fitzgerald’s, Epiphany, City Winery, concert halls such as Symphony Center and the Harris Theater, special series programmed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Du Sable Museum, Navy Pier and the Shedd Aquarium. For decades we’ve had immersive multi-stage, week or weekend-long free of charge festivals celebrating Chicago jazz, blues, house and gospel in downtown’s Grant and Millennium parks, continuing if pared down next weekend on the Frank Gehry-designed stage of Pritzker Pavillion.

Roscoe Mitchell-Famadou Don Moyé Art Ensemble of Chicago Large Ensemble, Sept 2019, Pritzker Pavillion; photo ©Marc PoKempner

This year’s reduced iterations of those fests amount to three hoursfor each genre on one of four days Sept 3 to 6. Jazz night Sept. 4 (programmed with the Jazz Institute, the board of which I sit on) features our righteous elder statesman saxophonist Ari Brown, trumpeter Marquis Hill and vocalist Lizz Wright with their bands. Among ancillary events catching my eye, produced independently of the City but underwritten in some measure with tax dollars, is the Rockwell Blues and Jazz Street Stroll, scheduled for mid-day Sept 4, organized by Delmark Records to showcase several of its artists.

Municipal endorsement and underwriting for both profit- and not-for profit spaces nurturing creativity seems to me a very good thing at this moment. Infusing Chicago with music, hearing for ourselves what we have, enjoying it as much together as is safe and wise, letting each other and the world at large know what this place, in all its variety, sounds like at this time — I find those worthy goals. We’re facing a Covid-19 surge with indoor masked mandates imposed again (including for kids about to re-enter the schools) and continued gun violence, among other ills. Music won’t fix those problems, but may help us live with them.

Photo-journalist Marc PoKempner attended one Chicago In Tune show last Friday: Saxophonist Ernest Dawkins leading the Live the Spirit Residency Tentet in “Redefining Frederick Douglass,” at Douglass (Frederick and Anna) Park. He reported the crowd was small but ardent, the music intense and Khari B‘s readings of Douglass’s oratory powerful.

from left: Alexis Lombre, Ernest Dawkins, Steve Berry, Junius Paul, Corey Wilkes © Marc PoKempner
Spoken word artist Khari B, reeds player Kevin King © Marc PoKempner
Crowd with social distancing at Douglass (Frederick and Anna Park, © Marc PoKempner

So much more is yet to come, including a homecoming concert on Sept. 2 at Symphony Center by the great Herbie Hancock, age 80, pianist/composer/Grammy winner, “creative chair” for jazz of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, namesake of the formerly-known-as-Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador and face of International Jazz Day. I’ve adored his music since the mid ’60s– from his Maiden Voyage through the ’60s with Miles et al to his experimental, exploratory Mwandishi albums like Sextant,

hip-scratch-funk-nuts “Rockit,” tributes Gershwin’s World and River: The Joni Letters. I won’t miss it.

But best about this all is that Mark Kelly said Chicago In Tune would not be a one-off, but only the beginning of the City’s turn to identifying music as key to our culture for our own benefit. Considering the Chicago-steeped legacies of an enormous and highly diversified creative contingent (my can’t-help-it-must-cite list is below, merely a scratch at what’s happening or happening here), it’s high time.

*Quick list, off the top of my head, roughly chronological, by no means comprehensive, focused on the deceased and hugely influential Chicago-born or associated music makers: Jelly Roll Morton, Johnny and Baby Dodds, Louis Armstrong, Lil Hardin, Earl Hines, Bix Beiderbecke, Eddie Condon, Alberta Hunter, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Thomas A. (aka “Georgia Tom,” when he developed proto-rock “hokum” with Tampa Red) Dorsey, Lionel Hampton, Mezz Mezzrow, Jimmy McPartland, Bud Freeman, Jimmy and Mama Estelle Yancy, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Boy John Lee Williamson, Mahalia Jackson, Milt Hinton, Art Hodes, Dinah Washington, Nat “King” Cole, Eddie South, Steve Allen, Mel Torme, Capt. Walter Dyett, Johnny Griffin, Sam Cooke, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Otis Spann, Willie Dixon, Junior Wells, Otis Rush, Magic Sam, Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, Hound Dog Taylor, Magic Sam, Koko Taylor, Big Walter Horton, Cary Bell, Carmen McRae, Wilbur Ware, Richard Davis, Ralph Shapey, Shulamit Ran, the Staples Singers, Ahmad Jamal, Eddie Harris, Malachi Favors, Andrew Hill, Wilbur Campbell, Barrett Deems, William Russo, Sir Georg Solti, Sun Ra, Marshall Allen, John Gilmore, Phil Cohran, Muhal Richard Abrams, Fred Anderson, Jodie Christian, Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, Leroy Jenkins, Ann Ward and other distinguished members of the AACM, Ira Sullivan, Nicky Hill, Oscar Brown Jr., Lee Konitz, Hal Russell, Willie Pickens, Geraldine de Haas, the Chi-Lites, Jerry Butler, Curtis Mayfield, Earth Wind & Fire, the Freemans (Von, George, Bruzz, and living Chico), John Prine, Steve Goodman — sorry, going on and on but as a native son, I can’t help it — Gene Chandler, the Shadows of Knight, the Buckinghams, the Flock, Minnie Ripperton, and among the living: Mavis Staples, Jeff Tweedy, Wilco, Tortoise, Kanye West, Liz Phair, Common, Chance the Rapper, Jennifer Hudson, Orbert Davis, Julian Priester, Rufus Reid, Amina Claudine Myers, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Thurman Barker, Wadada Leo Smith, Douglas Ewart, Mwata Bowden, Ari Brown, Steve Coleman, Foday Musa Suso, Adam Rudolph, Hamid Drake, Robert Irving III, Thaddeus Tukes, Joel Ross, Ben LaMar Gay, Makaya McCraven, Isaiah Collier, Michael Zerang, Billy Branch, Lurrie Bell, Jimmy Johnson, Dee Alexander, Kurt Elling, Miguel de la Cerna, Ernie Adams, Dana Hall, Avreeayl Ra, Bobby Broom, Nicole Mitchell, Erwin Helfer, Myra Melford, Jim Baker, Edward Wilkerson Jr., Mars Williams, Brian Sandstrom, Steve Hunt, Ken Vandermark, Dave Rempis, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Savoir Faire, Pat Mallinger, Cameron Pfiffner, Paul Wertico, Tomeka Reid, Mike Reed, Margaret Murphy Webb, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Amir ElSaffar, Brad Goode, Mike Allemana, Nick Mazzarella, Maggie Brown, Fareed Haque, Howard Levy, K-Rad, Greg Ward, Joanie Pallatto and Sparrow, George Fludis, Erin McDougald, Josie Falbo, Zvonimir Tot, Tatsu Aoki, Chris Foreman, Geoff Bradfield, Matt Ullery, Josh Abrams, Josh Berman, Augusta Reed Thomas, Rachel Barton Pine, Victor Garcia, Katie Ernst, Kahil El Zabar, Ernest Dawkins, Rajiv Halim and a zillion others.

Jazz beats the virus online

Chicago presenters of jazz and new music, and journalists from Madrid to the Bay Area, vocalist Kurt Elling, trumpeter Orbert Davis and pianist Lafayette Gilchrist discussed how they’ve transcended coronavirus-restrictions on live performances with innovative methods to sustain their communities of musicians and listeners, as well as their own enterprises were in two Zoom panels I moderated last week .

The Show Goes On – Online on February 18 convened Chris Anderson of the Fulton Street Collective, trumpeter Davis of Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, vocalist extraordinaire Elling and his business partner Bryan Farina, Marguerite Horberg of HotHouse, Olivia Junell of Experimental Sound Studio and Steve Rashid of Studio 5 under the auspices of the Jazz Institute of Chicago. They’ve all produced live-streams, pitched to international as well as local audiences, achieving unprecedented results.

ESS started quickly last March with its Quarantine Concerts, and Fulton Street Collective’s Jazz Art Record Collective quickly followed suit; HotHouseGlobal has mounted five nights of music connecting Havana and Chicago musicians, among other far-reaching programs; Chicago Jazz Philharmonic engaged eager music students from the Cuban province Matanzas and launched and International Masters of Improvisation Workshop; Studio 5 conceptualized and has realized the very entertaining Into the Mist, an unique combination of website design and real-time, interactive Zoom play as a 90-minute immersive and interactive event, offered once a week (next on March 5);

Elling sang from his porch and the otherwise locked-down Green Mill, one of his performances from isolation reaching 180,000 listeners!

The Jazz Journalists Association (of which I’m president) followed up on Feb. 21 with Reviewing “Live” in the Age of Covid. Are these live-streams being reviewed? Do special techniques apply? Is there a market for such analysis? Is live-streaming changing jazz journalism, and here to stay?

This panel comprised freelance writers Jordannah Elizabeth (Baltimore-based), Paul de Barros (Seattle) and Andy Gilbert (Berkeley — both those latter two JJA board members); Seattle Times news editor/former features editor Melissa Davis; publicist Ann Braithwaite (of Boston-area Braithwaite & Katz Communications); Henry Wong, director of the Baltimore listening room An die Musik, which in past months has produced some 200 live-stream performances, and Gilchrist, who has live-streamed from An die Musik (video remains available for $5) as well as the Village Vanguard. Also speaking up were Spanish jazz journalist Mirian Arbalejo, MinnPost Artscape columnist Pamela Espeland, KNKX Jazz Northwest program host Jim Wilke and Amsterdam News writer Ron Scott, who said he felt it imperative to report more than ever on issues regarding social justice for Black Americans.

We learned that coverage of live-stream performances from mainstream media almost entirely consists of advance listings rather than reviews; that traditional print publications continue to grapple with declining revenues and content wells (there’s more news than can fit) besides digital platform challenges; that live-streams, unlike in-person performances, give reviewers the opportunity to re-watch but may also be judged on video production values; that individuals, professional or not, use social media to comment on live-streams in real time — and that news of the pandemic, social and political turmoil throughout 2020 have led many writers as well as musicians and indeed people in all professions to refocus, as best they can.

Panelists in these Zooms discussions were unfailingly candid and thoughtful (there may be something about staring at yourself in a grid with your peers that encourages best self-projection). No one indulged in whining about how life’s so different now that we’ve been victimized by Covid-19. Everyone was intent on people over profits, creating, producing, promoting and commenting seriously on musicians’ and venues’ online efforts in order to serve the art form in its many dimensions, most specifically addressing its local/global communities and constituents.

Almost a dozen presenters, more than half a dozen music journalists and media-purveyors, three musical artists (and special thanks to Lafayette for representing the concerns of many on the Show Zoom — view the JJA 2020 Awards Winners Live-Streaming party to hear others’ takes on the issues). They represent the grit, imagination, energetic devotion to their labors and the spirit fundamental to keeping not just jazz but all our arts alive today. Without exception they predict that hybrid models of presentation melding some sorts of live-streaming with some sorts of live, in-person shows (when those can resume), are the future. Hear them out! Or in the more urgent onscreen-version of radio/tv’s “Stay tuned” — Keep close watch!

Boogie-man Helfer bounces back from covid-depression

Erwin Helfer, the 84-year-young Chicago pianist of heartfelt blues, boogie, rootsy American swing and utterly personal compositions, has told his tale of covid-19-related profound depression, hospitalization, treatment and recovery to the Chicago Sun Times.

Erwin Helfer and the author; photo by Marc PoKempner

I’m a longtime friend, ardent fan and two-time record producer of Erwin’s, and had lunch with him soon after the article ran. He was in fine fettle — a great relief to me and the rest of the large, devoted community that’s been deeply concerned about his health since April, when his troubles became evident. Shockingly (no pun intended) it took electroconvulsive therapy to get Erwin Helfer back on track.

Caroline Hurley’s reporting is appreciated. Two minor corrections: Erwin was raised on Chicago’s South Side in the late ’30s and 1940s, moving with his family to a north suburb when he was in 7th grade (circa 1948), and he never met boogie-woogie’s founding father Jimmy Yancey (who died in 1951), though he did eventually accompany and record with Mama Stella Yancey, Jimmy’s widow.

Erwin Helfer and Mama Estelle Yancey, circa 1983; photo by Lauren Deutsch,

But Hurley’s main focus is spot on: The coronavirus can have a devastating affect even on those not infected. It can change how we think, and not for the better.

Helfer was beset, I learned back in April talking to him on the phone, with the darkest of demons. He’d never previously struggled with mental health issues, he generally takes care of himself, but he’d come to feel he was doomed — ill, although tests showed otherwise; ruined financially, though there was no reason to think so, and of toxic danger to his friends, a highly diverse coterie, including some of whom live nearby, all of whom were eager to express their love by supportively checking in, doing errands, bringing food, offering transportation and eventually urging him to seek medical help, which at first he resisted.

But it was obvious to associates such as Ivan Handler (mentioned in the Sun-Times) from his weekly meditation group and Erwin’s loyal producer Steven Dolins of The Sirens Records that he’d let his place and himself go. No one seemed able to cut through his insistence that he was dying and would be better off that way. He had lost — well, let’s say “misplaced” — his typically light touch and good-humored centeredness, attributes many people have relied on to enhance our own spirits and peace of mind.

A source of musical fun, originality and continuity, Erwin has for the more than 40 years I’ve known him (and well before) been a warm, modest, generous, open-minded yet tradition-revering entertainer, collaborator, creator and teacher. He’s a mensch, without arrogance or pretensions. Throughout his career he’s encouraged, championed, recorded and recorded with several somewhat obscure but eminently worthy pianists including Billie Pierce of New Orleans, Speckled Red of St. Louis, and most recently Chicago’s Barrelhouse Chuck Goering, who died in 2016.

Erwin has often played benefits for social causes, house parties and the like; most recently he’d brought joy and comfort weekly to audiences at the Hungry Brain, with an 8 pm set requiring no admission fee. His sets feature a mix of tunes he learned firsthand from past-masters such as Cripple Clarence Lofton and Little Brother Montgomery, familiar themes by Duke Ellington and Hoagy Carmichael, eight-to-the-bar renditions of “Swanee River” and “Jambalaya,” and his own melodies, interspersed with reminisces and corny, often ribald jokes. He prefers to play solo, but happily makes music with people he likes and trusts.

At Katerina’s, circa 2012, from left: Lou Marini, bass; ? guitarist; Erwin Helfer, piano;
Katherine Davis, John Brumbach and Sam Burckhardt, saxes. Photo by Marc PoKempner

In March he’d completed recording sessions for what will be his eighth album from The Sirens, and was looking forward to new project in which his original compositions, which imbue blues structures with impressionistic nuances, would be interpreted by some of his admirers among Chicago’s younger, nominally avant-garde musicians.

However, when the weekly gig Erwin often rode his bike to was suspended due to the coronavirus closings, and students could no longer come to his home (on a street the city marks as “Erwin Helfer Way“) for their lessons, Erwin’s isolation got to him.

Erwin Helfer Way album cover, 2013

As a performer usually in intimate venues (he has also concertized at the Old Town School of Folk Music, in Millennium Park for the Chicago Blues Festival, on regular tours in Germany and during annual visits to the Augusta Heritage Center’s Blues Week in Elkins, West Virginia) he’s ultra-adept at reading and absorbing an audience’s vibe, working in the moment with the people around him to maximize pleasure. That kind of interaction, a true give-and-take, is essential to performing musicians.

Don’t discount the “take” part. Performers need audiences. Most of them can (must) learn to shrug off an unreachable crowd or uninspired night, but if no engagement with other people is possible at all it’s like water withheld from someone parched. The thirst just gets worse, and there’s no substitute. Playing for and by oneself may seem solipsistic, pointless, futile.

A lot of nudging from his closest friends led Erwin to be admitted to Rush University Medical Center’s inpatient psychiatry program. After an initial regimen of drugs, he responded well to electroconvulsive therapy, aka “shock treatment.”

“They wanted to give me 12 sessions,” Helfer told me, “but I only had 11. I was okay after eight. They put me out for them — you don’t feel it. I don’t need to go back, like for a booster, but I’m taking medication, and I have a once-a-month phone appointment with a shrink. I feel great — I feel like I’ve been reborn.”

The day I visited, there was a lot of renewal going on in Helfer’s house. He was having his roof re-done. Katherine Davis, a blues singer Erwin’s worked with for years, was puttering around — she’s taken up residence in his finished attic. Katherine has helped Erwin — an animal lover who titled one of his piano tunes “Pooch Piddle” — acquire a dog and a cat. As we ate sub sandwiches he talked about a how-to-play-blues-piano book he intends to publish, and the modernist instrumentalists he wants to let loose on his songs such as “Day Dreaming,” “Within” and “Stella.”

“I think I’m a better composer than pianist,” he said. “That’s one thing — since my depression I haven’t been playing. And I may not play again. I haven’t been feeling like playing, and I don’t feel it in my fingers. The doctors said my playing might or might not come back. If it doesn’t, I’m okay with that. I think I’ve made my statement.”

“You might have more statements to make,” I suggested.

“What about?” He seemed genuinely curious.

“Maybe you’ve got something to say about what happened to you.”

“That’s a point,” Erwin considered agreeably. “People have been saying to me, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry you had to go through that!’ Well I’m not sorry — I think it’s the best thing that could have happened to me, considering where I am now. Everything seems fresh to me. But how are things with you?”

Since I’ve been trying to learn “Day Dreaming,” I asked Erwin a technical question about the composition. He tried to talk me through the chord pattern, but I told him he was going too fast and I couldn’t match the melody to what he was saying.

“I’ll show you,” he said, and went to the electric keyboard he’s taken to jobs when there’s no acoustic instrument onsite. “Hmmm, it’s not plugged in. Okay, I’ll show you on the piano.”

I cleared a couple boxes off the piano bench, and opened the fallboard so he could get at the keys. He showed me the opening of “Day Dreaming,” an unusual phrase coming up from the bass clef, the execution of which requires both hands.

“Day Dreaming” cover version recorded and posted by Caleb M.

Then I asked him about “After Hours,” a classic he often mentions from the stage was once called the Negro National Anthem. He demonstrated his approach to it, too.

Erwin’s fingers are not especially long, and his reach isn’t particularly broad, but his hands went directly to notes he’s pressed and gestures he’s practiced for eons, moving naturally if not quite precisely to summon the songs. I watched from over his shoulder. He looked up at me. “You think I can get my chops back?”

“Hell yes,” I said. “You haven’t played in four months! Your fingers know where to go, you’re just rusty. Play some, and you’ll be back.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I had that thought, too. I asked the bass player and drummer I was working with to come over. So we’ll see . . . .”

RIP Annie Ross: Her last stand with Jon Hendricks

Annie Ross, who died July 21 at age 89, sold “Loch Lomond” as a seven-year- old in the Little Rascals with brass equal to her hero in “Farmers Market” hawking beans. The child of Scottish vaudevillians, she was maybe never shy. In 2002 I reported on her last stand with fellow vocalese icon Jon Hendricks, at the Blue Note in Manhattan for the newspaper City Arts.

The second-to-last set ever to be sung by Hendricks and Ross, two-thirds of the vocal trio once hailed as “the hottest new group in jazz” was delightful, sad, instructive and substantial, all at once.

Annie Ross, a doyenne of lyric interpretation, and Jon Hendricks, a bard of bop vocalese, appeared at New York’s Blue Note for five nights on a double bill with the quartet New York Voices, in what was publicized as their final goodbye after decades of chilly relations. Hendricks had been less than discreet, and perhaps given to exaggeration, about some of his partner’s old bad habits in an interview for an English newspaper. Ross, probably best known in recent years for her role as a seen-it-all, done-it-all saloon singer in Robert Altman’s 1993 film Short Cuts, had announced she’d take no more guff from the guy she’d first joined (along with the late Dave Lambert) in 1956 to “sing a song of Basie.”

Back then, English expatriate and child movie star Ross had already secured her reputation by putting witty narratives to saxophonist Wardell Gray’s solos on “Twisted” and “Farmer’s Market.”

She quit Hendricks and Lambert in 1962, relocating to London where she briefly ran a nightclub and worked in films and on television.

Hendricks, who grew up in Toledo, Ohio as a protege of Art Tatum, has enjoyed a varied career for half a century, highlighted in the ’90s by his portrayal of a trickster spirit in Wynton Marsalis’s oratorio Blood on the Fields.

Ross and Hendricks first reunited for a singing gig in 1999, and since then have come together for special bookings, to delve into Lambert, Hendricks and Ross material and do their own speciality numbers, as well.

So there were two complicated lifetimes of jazz singing onstage, supported by a self-deprecating rhythm trio led by guitarist John Hart, and though their voices clung together as close as braids of twine, the artists generated little warmth for each other — only professional regard.

Hendricks, dapper in tailored suit and bowler hat, made the announcements, and Ross, in a red dress, exuded the merest hint of aloof attitude. They began by trading choruses on the saucy “Home Cookin'”; she walked off for his forlorn but articulate version of “Just Friends,” and returned to race through “Charleston Alley.” Hendricks essayed one original tune in which he whistled up a winsome solo, pretending to play a conductor’s baton like a flute; he departed for Ross’s always amusing “Twisted,” which she acknowledged had gained new life through a recording by Joni Mitchell.

Then Ross nailed the hilarious, lugubrious novelty number “One Meat Ball,” and engaged Hendricks like a sparring partner on an upbeat, feisty blues. Their finale was a rampaging “Cloudburst,” on which each demonstrated an extraordinary grasp of rhythm, deftness of mind and quickness of tongue.

Neither Hendricks nor Ross has as much command of vocal tone as they did when younger, but that’s the inevitable exchange with age for experience. Character, gumption and personality they both showed aplenty.

Annie Ross and Jon Hendricks, at an NEA Jazz Master ceremony
at 2014 Jazz at Lincoln Center

They are veterans of a golden time for jazz, an era in which the music’s popularity was at an unsuspected peak, and its urbanity was unchallenged. They exemplify jazz’s sophistication, swing and, each in their own ways, class. They demonstrated enduring grit, if not chops, for the much younger and unstrained New York Voices to aspire to. Their final Sunday night performance, which started around 1 a.m., reportedly was just as strong. Aficionados of American song could only hope this unmatched duo will someday mend its rift, and that Jon Hendricks and Annie Ross might appear again as partners, if never more as friends.

Post-script: As the photo above by Sánta Csába Istvan shows, Annie Ross and Jon Hendricks seemed quite cordial when they met at a reception celebrating the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters, at Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2014. He had been named an NEA Jazz Master in 1993 and Ross was so designated in 2010.

Love movies, jazz, and thinking about them? A treat

Movies, jazz and reading remain my favorite solitary diversions, and Fresh Air critic Kevin Whitehead enables immersion in all three with Play The Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film,

his entertaining, provocative, deeply informed look at some 120 flicks and a handful of tv shows relating tales that mirror or inform American culture.

From The Jazz Singer (1928), long cited as the first motion picture with sound (it wasn’t exactly, but launched the form) to Bolden, a too-little distributed imagining of the first jazz star, whose music is “ghosted” by Wynton Marsalis, Play The Way You Feel digs into the narrative fictions about jazz’s origins (New Orleans, Birth of the Blues, Kansas City), Swing Era, early and modern jazz stars (the Hollywood bios of, besides Buddy Bolden, W. C. Handy, Irving Berlin, Red Nichols, George Gershwin, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, the Dorsey Brothers, Glenn Miller, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, sort-of Dexter Gordon), artists’ conflictual strivings (Young Man with the Horn, A Man Called Adam, The Gig, Mo Better Blues, Sweet and Lowdown, Whiplash, LaLa Land), and jazz as an all-encompassing milieu (Stormy Weather, Some Like It Hot, High Society, The Connection, New York, New York, The Cotton Club, Treme).

“Jazz and the movies are natural allies,” Whitehead asserts, and “Jazz musicians would seem perfect movie heroes.’ Yet “in general, these films get little respect. . .” and “[o]n the jazz side, their reputation is even worse.” In a curated overview (supported by a 129-item YouTube playlist), he re-discovers and saves some (Broken Strings, for instance, an all-black-cast independent production of 1940, and Second Chorus, also from ’40, starring Artie Shaw with Fred Astaire and Burgess Meredith vying for Paulette Goddard), and eviscerates others (he’s none too fond of Robert Altman’s Kansas City and bypasses Altman’s Short Cuts, in which singer Annie Ross is significant).

He mentions but doesn’t dig into jazz documentaries, and excludes (perhaps regretfully, but the book could only be so long) works in which the jazz soundtrack, however crucial, is non-diegetic — not heard by the characters, as with Stan Getz’s score to Micky One, and Miles Davis’ for Elevator to the Gallows). The only obviously jazz-centric films he’s overlooked are Dingo, with Miles Davis, and Cabin in the Sky (Ethel Waters, Lena Horn, Ellington, Armstrong). Except for Three Little Bops (1957) he ignores classic jazz animation (Mickey Mouse’s debut in Steamboat Willie, the Fleischer studio’s Betty Boop cartoons) and jazz abstractions (Jammin’ the Blues), to focus on films more obviously and intentionally “about” jazz, and dwells most of all on character and plot development in which general perceptions of our indigenous musical art/entertainment are revealed.

For instance, women are most often subsidiary to the male protagonists of jazz films, whether temporary distractions (Paris Blues), naive or catty (Orchestra Wives), slinky sirens (Lauren Bacall, Lena Horne), or homey-types (June Allyson, as Glenn Miller’s wife). Considering the all-but- forgotten, decades-ranging Syncopation (1942), Whitehead notes the climactic moment when the long-marginalized heroine, an amateur musician and fan, gets to play with famed singer Connee Boswell, who is sitting at the bar.

“Kit digs Boswell’s vocal so much she nudges the band’s pianist off the bench to grab a solo in her usual bluesy style, lightly modernized, winning a blink of approval from Connee,” Whitehead writes. “This is one of the rare moments in jazz films where women make music together. . .One hopes the band has noticed Kit sounds better than the regular pianist.” (Incidentally and ironically, audio for this encounter is gone from the film as posted on YouTube, due to ongoing legal complications re the Boswell Sisters’ estate).

He contextualizes, too, the quality of Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators (with Marilyn “Sugar Kane” Monroe”) in Billy Wilder’s cross-dressing farce:

“They’re remarkably good for 1929. Rehearsing ‘Running Wild’ while crowded together in a moving train carriage, they play hot riffs with spark and varied dynamics. On stage, Sugar is a fine sultry singer; behind her Kewpie doll vocal on ‘I want to be Loved by You’ the Syncopators show they can play sweet as well as hot. The arranging is good, the violins are in tune, the brass blend smoothly, and the rhythm section has a light touch. [But they] lack memorable soloists. That new tenor saxophonist with the low Eve Arden voice plays in a somewhat corny sub-Bud Freeman style, and that new bassist with the throaty laugh seems eternally distracted, fingers barely moving on the fingerboard.”

Whitehead notes stereotypes and recurrent themes, acknowledged and unacknowledged alike, zeroing in on the conflicts over tradition and generational change, authenticity (the black elder conferring credibility on a young white protagonist is a common thread), appropriation, race, class, gender expectations and societal taboo-breaking that have fed motion pictures and jazz-as-it-happens, developing in parallel, for over a century. He’s particularly good, and always clearly descriptive, describing the music and analyzing the appearances of genuine jazz figures (Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Holiday, Rex Stewart and Hoagy Carmichael among them) in pivotal if typically secondary roles.

Whitehead, who is — full disclosure — a respected colleague and good friend, has previously written Why Jazz?, the best introductory handbook, and New Dutch Swing, a close study of the advanced improvisation scene in the Netherlands in the 1990s. As with his album reviews on Fresh Air, he is always thoroughly knowledgable about his topics, with incisive perspective delivered kindly but not soppily — he can cut with the snarkiest of puppies.

I’m taken with his digging up little known features — All Night Long, a jazz version of Othello, for instance, and John Cassavetes’ detective-jazz pianist television series Staccato, among other finds. I’m disappointed he neglects the great Lindy Hop dance scene and Marx Brothers’ positive embrace of blackface (I can make the case for it) in A Day At the Races, and the jazz wending through Francis Ford

Coppola’s The Conversation, which I think of as big points in jazz narrative, but that’s his call and our mild argument. The author’s scholarship seems strong (he’s formerly taught at University of Kansas), but this book is for a general audience. The dictum that furnishes his title — “Play the way you feel” — is truly core to the jazz ethos, and throughout this book, though one could argue with specifics, there’s no doubt Kevin Whitehead as a critic watches, listens, thinks and writes holding fast to that same imperative.

Four months of jazz adaptation, resilience, response to epidemic

In early March – only four months ago – I flew between two of the largest U.S. airports, O’Hare and JFK, to visit New York City. I stayed in an East Village apt. with my daughter and a nephew crashing on her couch.

The Jazz Standard (DoNYC)

We ate barbecue at a well-attended Jazz Standard performance by drummer Dafnis Prieto’s sextet, and the next day I went to a celebration of Ornette Coleman’s birthday, his demise five years ago and his ongoing spirit, hosted by his son Denardo at the Coleman’s midtown loft.

Noted improvisers David Murray, Graham Haynes, Craig Harris, Kenny Wessel and a gang from Philadelphia including Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Charlie Ellerbee and Bobby Zankel were there, bumping elbows instead of shaking hands or hugging, because of what we’d heard about Covad-19.

Ornette Coleman, seated, birthday party, 2014 —
Denardo Coleman behind him in blue shirt
photo by Sánta István Csaba

Afterwards, Denardo called it “the last great party on earth.”

At the event we were all a little nervous but still together. Within five weeks one guest, 84-year-old bassist Henry Grimes, had succumbed to complications brought on by the disease exacerbating previous conditions.

Henry Grimes, photo by Sánta István Csaba

By then — mid-April — with the world-wide coronavirus pandemic sweeping through jazz and every other U.S. performing arts sphere as an ill wind, musicians and jazz support organizations had hastened to batten down the hatches.

The Jazz Standard, like all other clubs across the country, was closed; concerts, tours and soon summer festivals were cancelled; record release promotions were scrubbed or postponed. That’s pretty much how it’s remained.

Some individuals – pianist Fred Hersch being a leader among them, having begun in late March to perform a “Tune of the Day” solo, free-of-charge on Facebook – quickly turned to live streaming from their homes or studios, with tip jars or donate buttons pinned to their platforms’ pages.

Catching on, ambitious live-streamed shows were mounted. For instance, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s April 15 gala “Worldwide Concert for Our Culture” and the International Jazz Day Virtual Global Concert sponsored by UNESCO in partnership with the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz were tent-pole events meant to proudly and loudly proclaim that jazz is here to stay, unbowed. Then attention turned to addressing those in distress – which, given the economic slowdown accompanying the health crisis, may be just about everyone.

So the Jazz Foundation of America scheduled its #TheNewGig, a Musicians’ Emergency Fund Concert fundraiser in mid-May with stars including Wayne Shorter promising to make appearances from afar, and videos from the JFA archives of Sonny Rollins, the Herbie Hancock Sextet and the Count Basie Orchestra, among many others. The JFA (disclosure: I’ve been a supporter almost since it’s start) also set up a Covid-19 Relief Fund as did the Recording Academy’s affiliated charitable foundation MusiCares.

BandCamp, the DIY musicians’ favorite platform for tracks and album sales, continues to designate days on which they renounce fees so the entirety of payments for recordings go to the music-makers.

Taking matters into their own hands, players have sought and some have offered tutorials on how to live-stream, how to teach music online and how to hold virtual fundraisers, among other potentially productive efforts. JazzOnTheTube, a website and list-serve reaching some 30,000 subscribers daily, has published several useful, free ones. From early March on, there have been an increasing number of such demonstrations of the jazz community taking care of itself and its own.

One such is the Jazz Coalition, organized to provide juried $1000 commission grants to members’ nominees from all over the globe. Having quickly raised more than $70,000 from individuals contributing at least $100 or whatever they can to the cause (disclosure: I chipped in), the Coalition’s burgeoning membership has come from all sectors of the jazz ecosystem, including booking agents, publicists, record company representatives, producers, presenters, educators and journalists as well as internationally renowned musicians. Everyone is intent on making sure we and our hallowed, ever-relevant, genuinely essential jazz culture survives. On May 21 the first 48 grantees were announced.

Many Jazz Coalition constituents have their own endeavors to guide income to the musical freelancers (aka, independent contractors, seldom qualifying for unemployment assistance) who typically depend on gigs booked one-at-a-time, at best a few months in advance. Such freelancers still suffer the disadvantage of not know what venues will open on what schedule, or if and when they do, audiences will brave infection to gather and listen.

The alternative is found in the myriad webpages like Jazz at Lincoln Center’s listing players’ online performances scheduled on platforms like Zoom, Facebook and Twitch.tv. Chicago’s jazz radio station WDCB has its Virtual Concert Calendar, alt.weekly Dig Boston is doing it. . . . I stopped researching when it became clear there are too many of these to name, and none is actually comprehensive. How could any single such listing be?

I’ll note, however, that Fred Hersch has migrated from Facebook to Patreon to produce weekly 15-to-20 minute “custom content”. Other thoughtfully curated streaming series:

  • Live From Our Living Rooms;
  • Act4Music;
  • The Jazz Gallery’s Lockdown Sessions, and other streams;
  • WBGO’s The Checkout Alone Together series;
  • Jazz i Norge;
  • Experimental Sound Studio’s Quarantine Concerts;
  • HotHouseGlobal, on which I mc’d a program called “Chicago Experimental” in mid-May, and on June 18 produced the 2020 Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Awards Winners Live-Streaming Party, with almost 30 all-stars in small groups candidly discussing current events, feelings and activities, interspersed with music highlights from JJA galas of the past. Without false modesty, I believe this document will be a rich source for future jazz scholars.

Also, harpist Brandee Younger and bassist Dezron Douglas have been doing a weekly Friday 11am brunch set from their apartment. 

Although the web empowers us to tune in to live-streams from wherever they originate, many such schedules, events and support opportunities for musicians, too, are locally focused. Billboard magazine’s resource guide for music professionals helpfully lists some potential avenues of support, which might help with rent, mortgages, health care or mental health counseling, state-by-state.

The National Endowment of the Arts (which postponed its annual celebration of Jazz Masters, to have taken place in April for the first time at SFJazz), has also created a page on its website listing resources for artists and arts organizations, It offers valuable information for freelancers, but still the NEA’s funding continues to flow mostly to non-profit presenting groups rather than individual artists.

For-profit jazz-presenting businesses — the clubs, concert halls and festivals – that have ongoing expenses like rent and personnel despite having no customers may have been qualified to apply for Federal, state or municipal loans or grants, though what was made available seems unequal to the need. In the light of this, small performance spaces that previously considered each other as rivals have banded together in the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA). Cooperative groups of former competitors may be a winning concept during this period. Together, they (we) can leverage numbers and strengths to lobby for necessary attentions and assistance, hoping performance can flourish in such spaces again.

That’s wished for in part because the live-streaming format isn’t perfect. A sense of genuine presence is unavoidably missing even for solo performers, despite its projection of a strange intimacy.

A musician’s face, especially a horn player’s, may be visualized on screen much closer to the viewer/listener than it would be even in the tiniest club; scrutiny, given the typical one-camera set-up, becomes intense. I’ve seen drummers video themselves from a vantage just an inch beyond their floor toms or ride cymbals, which puts an auditor as close to the struck surfaces as the drummer her/himself. Pianists, bassists and guitarists typically favor fuller-body shots, but they, too, tend to be as near as the other end of the bench or the next chair.

For groups, a latency lag of indeterminate moments requires musicians trying to connect through uplinks from their own rooms to anticipate each other even better than they ever have before. Won’t this necessarily affect the already subjectively collective projections of swing and groove? Click tracks audible to remotely deployed players through their headphones (but not to the rest of us) have been employed, as by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra on “”Quarantine Blues” posted April 24, to address the issue,

and some platforms tout themselves as having less delay — though any of the connections in a live-streamed internet production can affect data flow. Demand for real synchronicity remains significant, and I predict this problem might be solved before there’s a vaccine to fight the pandemic.

There are other, complicated procedures for reducing the time lags. Some home-made music videos exhibit terrific editing, imaginative arrangements and choreography, such as the virtuosic vocal turn by Jacob Collier on Cole Porter’s “Fascinating Rhythm.”

Creativity is rampant. Everyone is digging in, seeking ways forward, trying out new ideas, sharing what they’ve learned. Yet while musicians and fans alike await the re-opening of jazz clubs (perhaps even more than they long for the return of larger, ostensibly more prestigious venues), beyond an occasional burst of irrational exuberance there’s general agreement that re-openings should depend on virus control. Few are over-eager for in-person attendance.

One of my favorite local venues, iconic Chicago saloon the Green Mill, jumped the gun on June 6 and 7, holding street concerts that attracted socially un-distanced, erratically masked audiences. City officials visited on June 8 to issue a warning against doing it again.

Saxophonist Eric Schneider, guitarist Andy Brown outside the Green Mill, June 7, 2020;
photo by Harris Meyer

The club had already been dark for five weeks, and media coverage might have helped the Mill to offset the cost of a fine, though none was forthcoming anyway. And the issue was rendered moot when Mayor Lori Lightfoot allowed Chicago to enter “phase four” of a five-stage re-opening plan. The Mill welcomed musicians, staff and customers inside on June 26, though at 44% capacity, with no vocalists or horns allowed.

It hasn’t been and probably never will be easy to completely transform jazz, which thrives on live, close collaborations, into something satisfying to hear or watch on phones’ or tablets’ screens. Yet jazz people are by definition improvisers. We’ve always faced hard times with creativity, buoyed by resilience. Our music is adaptable, a healing force, and it won’t be quieted.

Henry Grimes wasn’t the first jazz death attributed to the coronavirus. That distinction belongs to Marcelo Peralta, an Argentine-born multi-instrumentalist/composer/arranger who lived in Madrid (March 5, 1961 – March 10, 2020, as reported by Mirian Arbalejo in the Jazz Journalists Association series of international articles JazzOnLockdown, which I edit). Nor, sadly, will Grimes, Guiseppi Logan, Wallace Roney, Mike Longo, Bucky Pizzarelli or Lee Konitz be the last.

Their music will endure, however, as will jazz itself. Thanks to its African-American origins, its roots in the blues, it’s openness to every other influence and its profound sense of rhythm, the sound has withstood insults, suppression, under-financing and the distractions of glitz. Today it can be found everywhere, its tenets welcoming everyone who wants to freely sing or play how they truly feel (as Ornette Coleman, among a century’s worth of prophets and icons, would put it), for our own enrichment and the pleasure of others. Don’t despair. Jazz will surely outlive the damn virus.

Revered jazz elders, deceased: portraits by Sánta István Csaba

As a generation of jazz elders leaves our world — some hastened by the pandemic — their faces as photographed by Sánta István Csaba become even more luminous, haunting, iconic.

Guiseppi Logan, multi-instrumentalist (May 1935 – April 2020)
Henry Grimes, bassist (Nov 1935 – April 2020)
Pianists Geri Allen (June 1957 – June 2017) and
McCoy Tyner (Dec 1938 – March 2020)
Wallace Roney, trumpeter (May 1960 – March 2020)
Lee Konitz, alto saxophonist, improviser (Oct 1927 – April 2020)
Bucky Pizzarelli, guitarist (Jan 1926 – April 2020)

Originally from Transylvania and currently living in Turin, the northern Italian area with heaviest covid-19 infections, Sánta reports that he is healthy, employed at the reception desk of a nearby school, and has recently been honored with a Hungarian Press Photo Award. However, with the lockdown, that Awards ceremony has been indefinitely postponed.

Future Jazz past: Hal Willner, circa 1992

The death of funny, smart, idiosyncratic, unique music producer Hal Willner at age 64 saddens me.

Hal Willner, photo by  David Andrako

We were East Village neighbors in the go-go ’90s, flush with ideas to try in the future. Here’s my entry about him from Future Jazz (Oxford U Press, 1999).

CONCEPT PRODUCER AS VISIONARY

“My projects happen mostly by accident,” claims Hal Willner, soundtrack producer of Robert Altman’s films including Short Cuts, based on short stories by the late American “dirty realist” writer Raymond Carver and Kansas City, a paean to jazz during that town’s Depression era apotheosis. Incidents in Carver’s fiction, Altman’s films and Willner’s total-concept soundtrack design might seem to share only temporal connection, yet nothing in any of them occurs out of nowhere.

Considering Willner’s unusual accomplishments — he’s longtime music director of the television staple Saturday Night Live, the man behind the musical guests romantic sax star David Sanborn introduced on the short-lived but fondly remembered tv program Night Music, and producer of albums in which rock ‘n’ roll, jazz and new music notables have emerged from obscurity, made career comebacks, or stretched their talents in unpredictable directions — “mostly by accident” is no explanation.

 Willner had prepared, perhaps unconsciously, to realize music in narrative terms — and vice versa — since his youthful fascination with old-time radio shows in which stories were told through sound. As a teenager in the late ’60s and early ’70s, he appreciated “concept albums with beginnings, middles and ends that somehow transcended the music and became almost visual.””And you know the producer Joel Dorn, right?” he asked me on afternoon, sitting in his apartment on Avenue B in New York City’s East Village. “I had an internship with him in Philadelphia, and he used to make records like this with jazz artists. Remember the spin-through-the-radio-dial on Yusef Lateef’s Part Of The Search, and the story behind Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s Case Of The 3-Sided Dream in Audio Color? I think it’s a real loss nobody makes albums like that anymore.”

These albums foreshadowed Willner’s creation of a genre-defying genre in which re-interpretations of a noted composer’s work by widely diverse musicians reveal unexpected implications.

His ouevre as a concept album producer includes tributes to Federico Fellini’s film composer (Amacord Nino Rota),  iconic iconoclast Thelonious Monk (That’s The Way I Feel Now),  Kurt Weill (Lost In The Stars), songs from vintage Disney films (Stay Awake) and the brooding bassist Charles Mingus (Weird Nightmare).

Willner also produced career peaks for rock chanteuse Marianne Faithful (Broken English Strange Weather and Easy Come, Easy Go) and song-speaker Leonard Cohen (the live concert for the documentary I’m Your Man), albums of readings by poet Allen Ginsberg and satirist William Burroughs set to hip downtownesque music; works by admired if lesser-known jazz musicians (the Beaver Harris-Don Pullen 360 Degree Music Society’s A Well-Kept Secret) and a restoration of long lost tapes by comic social critic Lenny Bruce. The list is the wish fulfillment of a man with broad tastes, an encyclopedic memory for jazz and pop, a sense of larger structures (naturally, he’s listened to classical European chamber and symphonic music), and very good connections.

Willner’s unplanned way began in high school.

“I was into radio programs like Inner Sanctum and the Orson Welles productions, then I got interested in records like the Beatles’ white album, the first Blood Sweat and Tears, Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and Miles Davis’s Sketches Of Spain. They took me somewhere, they were like journeys through dreams. In fact, I was going to call the Monk album Monk’s Nightmare until Steve Lacy suggested the title we used.”

Anyway, “Weird Nightmare” was the title of a Charles Mingus composition, and perfectly fit Willner’s 1992 Mingus production.

  “Mingus is a logical choice for me to make — his music works with this kind of approach. I try not to think of too many possible subjects, and I’ve never done anyone who’s not dead, because then you have a complete career to work with. I’d like to do an Ellington; it would be a great excuse to immerse myself in his music, study it and become more expert.” That’s why he did Kurt Weill.

“I originally intended just to examine the music of Nino Rota with one artist,” Wilner says of his first cast-of-hundreds album production. “But I got a vision in the night to do it with Carla Bley, Jaki [Byard] and Muhal Richard Abrams. Then Chris Stein and Deborah Harry [of the band Blondie] wanted to be involved, and when the record came out it got all this attention. I thought ‘This is going to be my record production high water mark. It won’t get better than this.’

One of Harry Partch’s instruments

“Then after Monk died I was sitting in Carnegie Hall at some jazz fest memorial to Monk, getting freaked that Terry Adams from NRBQ and Donald Fagen from Steely Dan and all these other people who really had a love of Monk weren’t performing, and that the jazz people who were playing Monk’s music were making it boring. Monk’s music was never boring. When Oscar Peterson came on, that was it — he had even put Monk down. So there was my Monk idea. And after that, the question was ‘Who else?'”

Willner has by now called on stylists as disparate as New Orleans’ voice of r&b Aaron Neville and East Village punk saxophonist/composer John Zorn to participate on his albums, which come off as less eclectic than visionary. He’s mixed music scene such outsiders as the self-styled “Peruvian songbird” Yma Sumac with such insiders as Beatles drummer Ringo Starr. He’s effected arguably obvious but never before attempted pairings such as soprano saxist Steve Lacy with drummer Elvin Jones, and surprisingly powerful meetings such singer Betty Carter and saxophonist Branford Marsalis with blues bassist Willie Dixon. He’s provided invaluable a&r suggestions to bands with their own distinctive sounds — from Los Angeles barrio homeboys Los Lobos to NYC downtown new jazz vaudevillians the Jazz Passengers.

Many of Willner’s mixes and matches immediately announce themselves as inspired. Sting sings Weill’s “Mac The Knife.” The Marsalis brothers play a medley of melodies from early Fellini. Sun Ra’s Arkestra swings “Pink Elephants On Parade” from Dumbo.

On the Mingus tribute, arrangements by black rock guitar star Vernon Reid, reedist Henry Threadgill and pianist Geri Allen, among others, use the justly intoned musical instruments of the late composer Harry Partch, some under portions of Mingus’s exaggerated autobiography read by Robbie (the Band) Robertson, novelist Hubert {Last Exit To Brooklyn) Selby Jr. and gangsta rapper Chuck D.

Willner says his ideas are always at the service of undervalued or misapprehended 20th century classics.

“I look for music that has influenced or can influence different types of musicians, and music that can break down so it flows from Todd Rundgren to solo Randy Weston to Zorn with Arto Lindsay and Wayne Horvitz to Terry Adams to Eugene Chadbourne’s Shockabilly to [New Orleans’ guitarist] Mark Bingham with John Scofield and Steve Swallow, without seeming like a novelty,” he says. “That’s one of my favorite sequences on the Monk album. Check it out.”

Sheer pleasure in making the never-before happen seems to motivate Willner, who for most of the ’80s and ’90s lived modestly next door to Charlie Parker’s final home in Manhattan’s East Village. His personal style is self-depreciating, and he brings a fan’s respect to his productions’ subjects. That’s generally won him kudos from critical purists, though some pop musicians feel a need to defend their versions of beloved jazz against possible complaint.

Cover of Weird Nightmare

“I like Hal’s records; whether or not serious-minded people approve of them is irrelevant,” said Elvis Costello, who sang the challenging title track of Willner’s Mingus tribute Weird Nightmare. “There’s a place for different interpretations of great music; having different musicians keep the music alive by playing it cannot diminish any version which to some ears is truer or closer to the original. Whatever comes out of my work on the Mingus record will be because of my love of his music — not to promote myself.”

Same with the producer, really, though he doesn’t completely abjure the spotlight. On Monk’s “Misterioso,” after tenor saxist Johnny Griffin blows a fervent solo over Carla Bley’s swirling orchestral chart, Hal Willner himself chimes in, credited as The Voice of Death.

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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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