Archives for 2005

Dick McGarvin writes from Los Angeles:

Your blog about watching the silent television images of the New Orleans disaster while listening to Miles’ recording of “Basin Street Blues” was quite moving. And, having played that recording many times, I could hear it without even taking the album off the shelf.

Richard Tabnik writes:

heard the ‘new’ bird and diz?
amazing…if that had come out 60 years ago, the entire concept of saxophone would be different
whew!

From the August 8 Rifftides posting:

Throughout, Gillespie’s control, range, harmonic ingenuity, melodic inventiveness and time—above all, his time—are breathtaking. In these performances, he and Parker give profound meaning to Dizzy’s frequently-quoted description of Bird as, “the other half of my heartbeat.”

To read the whole entry, go here.

For a while last night, I watched the latest images of New Orleans with the television babble turned off. From the CD player came the 1963 Miles Davis recording of “Basin Street Blues,” its muted trumpet solo a long, slow memory of loss, Victor Feldman’s piano choruses laced with hope. The music provided more optimism that the city would revive than the combined banalities of all of the officials, preachers and celebrities the cable channels keep looping through their coverage. Then, it was sound up on the TV and back to the reality jolt that we all need if resolve to resurrect the city is to overcome fiscal, social and political obstacles. For ten minutes, though, Miles calmed the spirit, and Vic Feldman buoyed it, and that helped ease the ache of witnessing the anguish of a place I know and love.

Several days ago, DevraDoWrite posted a piece about the all-but-forgotten guitarist Brick Fleagle. I then sent her a message that mentioned another important, now obscure, musician with an unusual name. She researched Fud Livingston and came up with a fascinating report. Here is a little of what she discovered.

Fud Livingston (né: Anthony Joseph Livingston). Born April 10, 1906, in Charleston, S.C., USA, he died on March 25, 1957, in New York, NY. USA. Fud originally studied Piano, Clarinet and Sax. His first professional experience came as a member of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, where for five years he played sax and did arranging. After Whiteman, he worked with Freddie Rich and with Andre Kostelanetz, and others.

There was much more to Livingston. To read what Devra found, go to DevraDoWrite. Then, listen to Livingston’s advanced 1927 arrangement of his “Imagination” for the Charleston Chasers, a band that included Pee Wee Russell and Red Nichols. Richard Sudhalter’s Lost Chords has thirty-six mentions of Livingston and includes transcriptions of parts of “Imagination.”

A Rifftides reader writes:

While you admit that the problems New Orleans faced and knowledge of what was necessary go back to Camille and beyond, indeed had to have been known 300 years ago when the city was built, the only person who comes in for blame is, guess who?, George W. Bush.

This is really so tiresome. It seems to me a lot of people for a long time have been playing fast and loose with protecting New Orleans from a bad storm, and, sadly, the worst has come to be. Last week was not exactly the finest hour for a lot of folks: the Mayor of New Orleans and his police department; the governor of Louisiana, and the directors of FEMA and DHS. And New Orleans flood and hurricane protection has been underfunded for decades. But what do liberals care anymore? (And I say
this as someone who proudly called himself one for years, until liberalism slowly, since the late 60s, wandered into the swamp of bad ideas). Denounce Bush and, as Lenin said, everyone will know everything.

Doug Responds:
However you care to tie Lenin’s statement to current events and politics, this is what he actually said in a speech in October, 1917, when soldiers and workers led by his Bosheviks were storming the Winter Palace.

Our idea is that a state is strong when the people are politically conscious. It is strong when the people know everything, can form an opinion of everything, and do everything consciously. – V. I. Lenin

As things turned out, that admirable idea of openness was not an operating principal of the Bolsheviks after they morphed into the Communist Party and formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Claiming the virtues of a free flow of information and assuring it in a political system are quite different matters. Governmental power wants secrecy. A free people is reluctant to allow secrecy. So far in our nation, the people have won that ceaseless struggle, but, as Wendell Phillips said 153 years ago, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. That applies to threats from inside, even at the top, as well as to those from outside.

Following up on yesterday’s posting about the lack of preparedness for Katrina, Rifftides reader Garret Gannuch points us toward an October 2001 Scientific American article. The piece by Mark Fischetti provides additional detail about what it will take to help nature rebuild parts of the Mississippi Delta and to protect New Orleans from the river and Lake Pontchartrain. The challenge is rooted as deeply in human nature as in physical and fiscal difficulty.

Since the late 1980s Louisiana’s senators have made various pleas to Congress to fund massive remedial work. But they were not backed by a unified voice. L.S.U. (Louisiana State University) had its surge models, and the Corps had others. Despite agreement on general solutions, competition abounded as to whose specific projects would be most effective. The Corps sometimes painted academics’ cries about disaster as veiled pitches for research money. Academia occasionally retorted that the Corps’s solution to everything was to bulldoze more dirt and pour more concrete, without scientific rationale. Meanwhile oystermen and shrimpers complained that the proposals from both the scientists and the engineers would ruin their fishing grounds.

Mr. Bush said yesterday that “bureaucracy’s not going to stand in the way of getting the job done for the people.” Let us hope that he and the Congress are able to unify the myriad special interests—political, governmental, bureaucratic, industrial and scientific—that have collided to discourage correction of what man has done to the Mississippi. Here’s a bit more from Fischetti’s Scientific American piece. Remember, he wrote this four years ago.

If Congress and President George W. Bush hear a unified call for action, authorizing it would seem prudent. Restoring coastal Louisiana would protect the country’s seafood and shipping industries and its oil and natural-gas supply. It would also save America’s largest wetlands, a bold environmental stroke. And without action, the million people outside New Orleans would have to relocate. The other million inside the bowl would live at the bottom of a sinking crater, surrounded by ever higher walls, trapped in a terminally ill city dependent on nonstop pumping to keep it alive.

To read all of Fischetti’s article, go here.

Demonstrating the principle enunciated in the first item in the right-hand column, we have a tip from the same helpful Rifftides reader who raised the question about President Bush. He alerts us to a reliable source in the U.S. for the Buddy De Franco CD discussed in Doug’s Picks (also on your right). It is Worlds Records. Thank you, helpful reader.

During my coverage of the aftermath of hurricane Camille in 1969, I talked with experts who predicted that some day New Orleans would not be so “lucky.” Eventually, they said, unless massive preventive steps were taken, there would be a storm so big that the levees would not hold, the pumps would fail, the city would be inundated, the death and destruction would be like something out of the Old Testament. No one said that the devastation would be unimaginable; they were imagining it. There have been warnings ever since. There were warnings even before Camille.
In its October, 2004, issue, The National Geographic published an article by Joel K. Bourne, Jr., reporting on predictions by scientists and engineers of a disaster that would someday strike New Orleans. The piece included this vision:

A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

Last fall when that article appeared, what it described had not happened. This fall, it has. Bourne wrote about protective action recommended by the Army Corps of Engineers and a coalition of scientists, environmentalists and business people—and about the Bush administration’s refusal to commit to the spending it would have taken to start correcting the problem. The President said the other day that no one could have envisioned the levees giving way. Read the Geographic’s stark account. Then, decide whether the leaders of this administration understood what the experts were telling them and, if so, why they did not insist on immediate Congressional approval of flood-control funding.
This is not a question of hindsight being the best foresight. It is a scandalous rejection of foresight that was based on experience, evidence and expertise. It has gone on for decades at all levels of government; parish, city, state and federal. When the relocation, burials, cleanup and rebuilding are done, will there be leadership to put a plan in place to protect New Orleans from the next category 4 or 5 storm? That storm will come.

For anyone partial to Roy Hargrove, this would be a fine week to be in New York. He is appearing Wednesday through Sunday at The Jazz Gallery with his quartet (pianist Danny Grisett, bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Greg Hutchison). Each night, Hargrove will perform with a different fellow trumpeter. His guests will be, in this order, Darren Barrett, Claudio Roditi, Tom Harrell, Nicholas Payton and Marcus Belgrave. Hargrove can be uneven, but when he is inspired—especially playing ballads on flugelhorn—he creates melodies on a level with some of the greatest jazz soloists of any era. All five nights at the Jazz Gallery are virtually guaranteed to be interesting, but it is most intriguing to anticipate on the same stand Hargrove and Harrell, two of the most inventive trumpeters of our time. This pairing could fairly be called an event.

The Chicago Jazz Archive is maintaining a list of New Orleans musicians found safe. The list is short but growing. Deborah Gillaspie, the archive curator, asks that anyone with verified reports of survivors e-mail her. She emphasizes that the CJA is not searching for missing people, only reporting on musicians who have been found. Ms. Gillaspie says, “Please don’t email or call ASKING about people.”
Among those located: Al Belletto, Henry Butler, Fats Domino, Johnny Vidacovich, Bill Summers, Irvin Mayfield and Banu Gibson. Go here to see the list so far.
Rather than duplicate effort, we direct you once again to the comprehensive set of links to blogs covering Katrina and its aftermath at Terry Teachout’s Arts Journal About Last Night. He and his blog partner Laura Demanski (aka Our Girl in Chicago) are offering a valuable service by constructing this clearinghouse of information to supplement traditional news sources.

Seattle’s Earshot Jazz magazine has a nice article by Philip Coady on Lucky Thompson. It includes stories about Clark Terry’s visits to his old friend before Thompson died. Coady also describes Ellis and Branford Marsalis going to Thompson’s hospital room and drawing out a man who had been mostly silent for years.

Branford played for Lucky, and in a moment none of us will ever forget, Lucky asked for something. In my years of visiting Lucky, I was always trying to discover what I could bring for him from the “outside.” “Is there anyting I can do for you?” I asked. But Lucky always replied, “Just be happy. That’s all I want.” This was repeated hundreds of times. Frankly, I had just never heard Lucky ask for anything—until this moment.

He asked Branford to play some more. “I’d like to hear more,” he said. This was coming from a man who hadn’t asked for anything in years.

Go here to read the piece and all of Earshot’s online pdf edition. Be patient. It takes a moment for the pdf to download.

“Don’t buy gas if you don’t need it.”
—George W. Bush

Among the many New Orleanians I have been worrying about is Al Belletto, the leader of the Al Belletto Sextet and, in recent years, also of a booting big band. Calls to him and his companion Linda Rhodes in the city and to their vacation retreat in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, went nowhere; the 504 and 601 area codes are a memory. I kept wondering if I would see them in one of those endless loops of television footage.
I answered the phone yesterday and heard, “This is Belletto and Linda. We’re in Dallas. We’re okay.”
When Katrina was aiming down New Orleans’ throat, they got out of town and headed for their place in Mississippi. Then, the storm turned eastward. It scoured virtually all of Bay St. Louis, including their house, off the landscape. By then, they had gone inland. After twenty hours stranded in McComb, Mississippi, they started driving slowly west and in a couple of days made the one-day trip to Dallas. They found refuge in the home of Al’s son and his family. Al thinks that they will be living there for a long time.
Belletto’s horns and books of arrangements for the sextet and the big band were in his house in the city. He thinks it likely that his house and Linda’s were swept away or ruined beyond restoring and that everything in them is gone. His and Linda’s lives are altered beyond description. The difference between them and hundreds, probably thousands of others, is that they have their lives. In the wake of Katrina, that is what New Orleanians consider good fortune.

Rummaging through biographical facts, I was reminded that the great pianist Jimmy Rowles and Minnie Pearl, the comic doyenne of country music both died in early 1996. That recalled a story Rowles told over lunch one day a few weeks before his death.
When he was Ella Fitzgerald’s accompanist, he said, they were on one of those 1960s television daytime variety shows; Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin. Another of the guests was Minnie Pearl in full array, the straw hat with price tag dangling, the flour sack dress, the exaggerated southern drawl. Her pianist didn’t show. The producer suggested that Jimmy accompany Minnie Pearl, and he agreed. She asked him, “Waal, Jimmih, what dew yew think we oughta dew?”
After a long pause, Rowles said, “How about ‘Lush Life’?”

In the right-hand column under Doug’s Picks, you will find all new selections except for Food. We shall stay with crab cakes for now. I would appreciate suggestions from you folks about new culinary entries. The e-mail address is also on the right.

From the web site of San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club of California comes a transcript containing what may be the most unexpected question ever asked the head of a country in a public forum. The club’s speaker last November was Václav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic. At the end of a question and answer session covering the European Union, Turkey, Iraq and the nature of elections in his post-Communist nation, this was the exchange:

Q: If you could be any jazz pianist, who would you be?

A: I will never be a jazz pianist in my life. Nevertheless, I think that jazz music for us is very important, and I must say that in the early 1960s, the beginning of jazz clubs in the Czech Republic, in Prague, was part of the culture of revolution which brought about the 1960s and the Prague Spring and all of that – so jazz plays a very important part in our lives.

Klaus thinks jazz is so important that in February of 2004, he initiated regular concerts of the music at Prague Castle, the Czech counterpart of the White House. With his selection of honored performer at the first of those concerts, he disclosed his levels of taste and sophistication in jazz. Klaus’s choice was the veteran pianist Emil Viklický, who appeared with his regular sidemen, bassist František Uhlíř and drummer Laco Troop. The Italian trumpeter Franco Ambrosetti was guest soloist. It was as if George W. Bush were to personally arrange for a concert in the East Room by Kenny Barron’s trio, or Bill Charlap’s, with Tom Harrell or Clark Terry sitting in for a few tunes.
I’ll pause while you collect yourselves.
(Pause)
That Prague Castle concert was recorded. Shortly after a recent tour of Japan, Viklický sent Rifftides a message about the concert’s aftermath, a new concert honoring another famous Czech musician, and a quaint story about Paul Desmond. I have edited his message only lightly in order to retain its charm and the sense of his voice.

The decision to issue recorded material on the CD came directly from President Klaus just shortly after the concert. The funny thing was that the president was leaving for China /official State visit/ on that very night!!! at 23.30. We have played an encore “The Slow Boat to China” about 22.10 and Vaclav Klaus was still sitting in the first row and enjoying himself tremendously. He really is and always was a true jazz lover for many years. I remember him in seventies as scientist/economist visiting SHQ band of Karel Velebny in Reduta Jazz Club. Karel Velebny was a key figure of czech modern jazz – everybody was in his band — George Mraz, Jan Arnet, Jan Konopasek. I have stayed with Karel´s band from 1974 up to his death in 1989 – just shortly before the collapse of communism.

There is a new CD coming out from Prague Castle – George Mraz’s 60th
birthday. Multisonic asked me to help with mixing and arranging things since George himself is not here in Prague. I will push Multisonic owner, Mr.Karel Vagner, to have better distribution for abroad.

While siting in plane from Nagoya for many hours, my 66 years old drummer Laco Tropp told me a story about Paul Desmond from Berlin festival in 1965: Paul have played there with Brubeck´s quartet and have met Czech musicians backstage. He was very curious to meet them and was hanging with Czech musicians quite a lot of time. Admiring especially their sense of humor. Especially Karel Velebny was a great personality / puns and jokes all the time/. Paul went to bars and restaurants with Czech guys, drinked beers with them, mostly talking with Karel. Laco Tropp is not very good in English, so he didn’t understand topics of the conversation. But he said Desmond really spend hours with Czech guys. Karel Velebny was quite OK with languages, unfortunately we can’t ask him anymore. Paul and Karel were very similar types – fragile, glasses, clever, mostly smilling, very good with words…

Best wishes,
Emil

Francis Davis, the jazz critic of The Village Voice, likes the new Sonny Rollins album, about which I have enthused a couple of times. On the other hand:

The problem is the string-of-solos format: When Rollins goes first, everything else is anticlimactic, and when he goes last, as is more often the case, the wait seems forever—you wish he’d give trombone and piano their own features and grab the spotlight. Why have Bob Cranshaw play electric bass if all you ask him to do is walk? The constant buzz is a distraction, and an upright would blend more handsomely with the wood in Rollins’s cello-like lower register.

Davis goes on to write:

Why am I so wild about Without a Song, then?

For his column-length answer, salted with personal anecdotes and an amusing run at Down Beat, go here.

I wrote this piece before Katrina sent New Orleans into agony. I almost held it back until the city revives. But that is likely to be years. Because I believe in the indomitable spirit of a place that is a part of my heartbeat and because WDSU’s news department is doing the kind of great work it always did in times of crisis, I offer this little recollection of the Crescent City in better times.
For a few years in the 1960s, when broadcasting companies still operated both radio and television stations, I had the good fortune to work for WDSU in New Orleans. The station was founded on the notion that public service was at least as important as profit. Edgar Stern, who owned the company, and A. Louis Read, who ran the TV, AM and FM stations, were committed to having the best broadcast news operation in the south, which they did. We covered the civil rights struggle, including school desegregation, not only for local viewers and listeners, but also for the network. NBC News had no bureau in the south then, and we frequently fed the Huntley-Brinkley show major stories on civl rights, Louisiana politics, Jim Garrison’s Kennedy assassination investigation, oil rig fires and hurricanes, among other things that happened in the best news town I ever worked in. I anchored the 6 pm and 10 pm television newscasts and did a fair amount of reporting.
Five nights a week, between the TV newscasts, I conducted a radio discussion program, Closeup, that had guests and invited telephone calls from listeners. This was years before Rush Limbaugh and his ilk laid waste to the idea of civil conversation on the radio. When I suggested that we try the same show on television, the station carved out a slot following the Tonight Show. We found, to our surprise, that a small late-night audience would watch a program whose only visual interest was two or three people discussing ideas and events, with calls from disembodied voices on a speaker phone.
Among the guests were politicians, sports stars, musicians and French Quarter characters. One memorable night during the New Orleans Jazz Festival, Jaki Byard, Danny Barker and Paul Desmond came on. I persuaded Byard and Barker to play a couple of piano-guitar duets. How I wish that I had a tape of that program. Desmond, sans horn, sat and grinned in that Cheshire-cat way. Another time, the guests were Woody Herman, George Wein and Sweet Emma Barrett the Bell Gal. Advertising revenues did not exceed the overtime costs of keeping the studio live and the technical staff on duty after midnight, and after a few weeks, Closeup bit the dust. Still, it was the sort of thing with which WDSU was willing to experiment.
Stern, Read and their radio manager Hal Wheelahan indulged my wish to do a jazz program on the radio. For several years, I taped a weekly hour that ran Saturday nights on WDSU-FM and AM. Jazz Review had reviews, plenty of music and visits from New Orleans musicians—Paul Barbarin, Alvin Alcorn, Monk Hazel, Al Belletto, Willie and Earl Turbinton, Eddie Miller, Pete Fountain frequently and, once, the magisterial trumpeter Red Allen. When they were in town, Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Rich, Cannonball and Nat Adderley, Joe Zawinul, Gary Burton, Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson and other itinerant players dropped by. Jazz Review was well sponsored and more than paid for itself. The FM station had a signal that powered across the Gulf Coast flatlands as far as Alabama and up into parts of Georgia. I was astounded to learn years later that the governor of Georgia was a regular listener, long before he became president.
(I’m getting to the Charlie Parker part.)
The theme music for Jazz Review was Charlie Parker’s two perfect choruses on “Funky Blues” from the Jam Session #1 album on Verve. Googling recently, I came across a 2001 interview by the Boston broadcaster Christopher Leydon with the great writer Whitney Balliett. In the program, Balliett is reluctant to be analytical in answering Leydon’s questions. He maintains that music of the quality of Parker’s, Pee Wee Russell’s and Ben Webster’s is laden with secrets. He implies that it cannot be dissected. Leydon plays Parker’s solo for Whitney, who calls it one of his favorite pieces of music.
“He preaches the first couple of measures,” Ballilett says. “Now, that’s full of secrets.”
You can go here to listen to WBUR’s audio stream of the broadcast. Exactly six minutes into it, you’ll get that incredible solo. Whenever I hear Bird play those magical twenty-four bars, they conjure up for me a time in New Orleans when a commercial broadcasting operation had a community-spirited mission and a sense of adventure. If there is one like it anywhere today under the deregulated earnings-driven corporate pressures of 21st Century broadcasting, I’d be happy to know about it.

The new Sonny Rollins CD is out, the one I raved about after I heard the advance a couple of months ago.

Rollins is amazing on the title track and “Where or When.” Stephen Scott’s piano solos, dazzling and capricious, run Sonny a close second. Trombonist Clifton Anderson has a good night, and Bob Cranshaw demonstrates that a great player can give electric bass lines the definition, clarity, and swing of the acoustic instrument.

The album is Without A Song: The 9/11 Concert. Rollins plays with the force of the emotions he took into his concert four days after he witnessed the attacks on the twin towers, a story told by Bob Blumenthal in his notes for the CD. Sonny is elemental in this performance.