Archives for February 2006

DevraDoWrite is trying to answer a question from one of her blogees. This is it:

In 1966, the Hampton Hawes trio (with Red Mitchell & Donald Bailey) recorded ‘live’ for Contemporary Records at Mitchell’s Studio Club in Los Angeles (the ‘Mitchell’ in question was no relation to Red, the bassist). Two LP albums were subsequently issued: The Séance and I’m All Smiles. My question is: Do you – or does anyone among your many readers happen to recall the address of this particular club?

Phil Woods and Ray Bryant also recorded at Mitchell’s. I have no further clues.

If you direct your attention to the right-hand column and scroll down, you will come upon the new batch of Doug’s Picks. At the top of that column in “About,” the Rifftides staff makes the assumption that people who follow jazz are also interested in other matters. The book pick this time around may be, at least in literature, the ultimate Other Matter.

Nice piece of writing by Ben Ratliff in today’s New York Times. He covered the concert in which 87-year-old Gerald Wilson took over the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. Ratfliff reports that Wilson “hijacked the evening.”

Mr. Wilson made the show an exclamation point. He stalked the front of the stage, his white mane turned to the audience and his piercing eyes trained on the band. His body was tuned to the music — dislodging rich, overstuffed harmonies of brass and reeds and quelling them, socking his right fist into his left hand to drive the rhythm section harder, ending songs crisply.

To read the whole thing, go here.

The Portland Jazz Festival ends on Sunday, but the main events took place last weekend. Here are samples of my impressions, from a long review for Jazz Times.

McCoy Tyner’s trio with bassist Charnett Moffett and drummer Eric Gravatt played the opening concert. Before a capacity audience in the gargantuan grand ballroom of the Portland Hilton, Tyner pulled out the stops, meaning that on a dynamic scale of 10, he kept the music between 8.5 and 10. A monster sound system, suited to a rock concert in a stadium, grossly over amplified Moffett’s bass so that Gravatt had no choice but to compensate with full drum power. What could Tyner do but lean into the piano with all of his considerable strength, exaggerating his natural tendencies.

On Dee Dee Bridgewater:

The one American song was Neal Hefti’s “Girl Talk.” Bridgewater announced it as strictly for the women in the audience. She sang it in French, then English. As it progressed, she morphed from sophisticated Parisienne into a Della Reese/Pearl Bailey persona and converted the song into a sketch about picking up a man in a bar, taking him home to bed, then dismissing him without their ever learning one another’s names. If that sounds earthy and outrageous, it was, explicitly so, with illustrative body language. It was ”just between us girls” and it was very funny.

On Bill Frisell:

Scherr and Roberts, the cellist, began a series of unison chromatic lines leading into another segue transition. Suddenly Frisell’s guitar was in solo on a peaceful melody as the strings made a transition from free playing to a folk melody. Behind them, Scherr raised the intensity with an arco solo, then the activity decreased back toward peacefulness, but it was a more troubling peace, a dissonant, polytonal, Schoenbergian peace that didn’t end but melded into Frisell playing heavy guitar over a slow, insistent waltz beat.

To read the whole thing, go to the JazzTimes website.
Have a good weekend.

Doug:
Fine commentary on Earl Hines’ rightful place in jazz legend. You might also have mentioned how indebted Nat Cole was to the Fatha and how Nat is also often unrecognized today for the giant he was–most people seem to remember him as just a singer.
He exhibited the same joy and exuberance in his playing that Hines did and need not have ever sung a note in order to be always remembered.
Jack Tracy

I couldn’t agree more with the former editor of Down Beat about Nat Cole’s greatness as a pianist. In addition to the qualities Mr. Tracy mentions, Cole’s keyboard touch and advanced harmonic concept influenced almost all modern jazz pianists who came after him, including Bud Powell, Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans. Considering the impact those three alone had on the course of jazz piano, it is clear that the multiplier effect of Cole’s example pervades the music. He had other influences—Teddy Wilson, Billy Kyle—but Hines was his primary inspiration, and Cole often acknowledged him. Hines’ effect on Cole is directly apparent on the earliest King Cole Trio recordings on Decca. There are even more refined examples of it in his “Body and Soul” solo from the first Jazz At The Philharmonic concert in 1944, in “Lester Leaps In,” and most dramatically in “Tea for Two.” You can also plainly hear Hines in the way Cole comps at JATJP behind Shorty Sherock, Jack McVea, Les Paul, and Illinois Jacquet on “Rosetta.” On the same album, his exchange of two-bar phrases with Les Paul in a chase sequence on the blues demonstrates the exuberance Jack mentions, as well as Cole’s lightning musical reflexes and his love of risk-taking. Nat Cole’s spectacular, and deserved, popular success as a singer eclipsed his role as a pianist, but his enduring musical importance came at the keyboard.
I’m glad that Jack raised this point about Cole. It sent me to the shelves to dig out the JATP album. I hadn’t heard it in years. I haven’t had more listening fun in weeks, even unto the tenor sax honks and squeals of McVea and Jacquet. Sixty years later, they seem not gratuitously outrageous, but amusing. I suspect that is how they were intended. Not the least of the CD’s pleasures is hearing the young trombonist J.J. Johnson making the transition from swing to bop.

Doug,
In a confluence of recent Rifftides topics…
I took my 11-year-old step son and 4-year-old daughter to a Maynard Ferguson Big Bop Nouveau concert at a local high school last night. The high school’s big band opened for them.
During the first tune, after a couple of solos and the traditional after-solo applause, my daughter leaned over to me and asked, “are they going to play straight through, or stop between songs?” I said, “no, they will stop between songs,” to which she replied, “then why are we clapping while the music is still playing?”
Jeff Albert

My kind of 11-year-old.

In my Maria Schneider report a few weeks ago, I speculated about the economics of moving large congregations of musicians around the country. It turns out, according to DevraDoWrite, that the speculation was on target. The difference between Devra and me is that she has the inside facts. A sampling:

Having been Maria’s manager at one time, I know that she pays her musicians well (especially compared to some other leaders) and that on occassion she has netted less on a gig than anyone else in the band. I have even seen her take a loss (yes, pay out of her own pocket) because for the sake of the music she wants more rehearsal time and pays for that as well. Add in manager and agent commissions and an artist’s slice of the pie is often just a sliver.

Devra’s posting has a review of the Los Angeles concert that included the new commission piece Schneider debuted there. To read the whole thing, go to Maria Schneider at Disney Hall.

Under Other Places in the right-hand column, you will find a new link, to Jazz Scene, a site operated by the British journalist David Fishel. Jazz Scene is rather like an internet radio station over which the listener has scheduling control. Mr. Fishel’s specialty is interviews with musicians. He intersperses the conversations with music by his guests, rather as Rebecca Kilgore did in her short-lived and lamented On The Road series. His current subject is the Italian pianist Enrico Pieranunzi. In his “Show Files” link, he has programs with musicians as varied as Dianne Reeves, Svend Asmussen, Charlie Hunter, Horace Silver, Marilyn Crispell and Roger Kellaway. Good listening.
Even though Terry Teachout’s About Last Night is linked under AJ Blogs, I linked him again in Other Places just to be sure you don’t miss his and Our Girl In Chicago’s terrific omnibus nexus of culture. Visit them often, but please come back. Bring your friends.

Although most modern jazz pianists don’t acknowledge the fact or don’t know it, modern jazz piano begins with Earl Hines. For the most dramatic evidence, listen closely to Hines in the 1920s, especially in the mind-blowing “Weatherbird” duet with Louis Armstrong or his QRS recordings from 1928, “Chicago High Life,” for instance. (Follow the link, then scroll down to hear it.) You can bet that Bud Powell studied that chording left hand and those “trumpet” passages in the right hand and knew them inside out. Hines is recognized by older musicians, historians and critics as one of the most important figures in American music. It is a mystery why younger musicians, who could benefit from familiarity with his playing, don’t study it. Fortunately, there is at least one exception. Nearly twenty-three years after Hines’s death at seventy-nine, Harold Danko has recorded a tribute to the seminal musician whom his sidemen quite justly nicknamed Fatha when he was in his twenties.
Danko includes an obscure 1923 Hines composition, “Congaine” into which he fits references to Powell, as if to emphasize the line of descent. The album is called Hinesight. It is a collection of a dozen Hines pieces played by Danko, bassist Michael Formanek and drummer Jeff Hershfield. Danko, too little appreciated as one of the most adventurous and far-sighted post-Bill Evans pianists, is on the faculty of the Eastman School. He brings an educator’s zeal to his Hines project. His interpretations, however, are about as far from academic exercises as one can imagine. He makes 7/4 time for “Deep Forest,” 5/4 for “You Can Depend on Me” and a leisurely samba 6/4 for “Ann, Wonderful One” sound as if Hines meant them to be played that way. “Rosetta” gets a snappier bossa nova treatment and a slight revision of its chord changes.
Danko plays three of the QRS pieces, “Stowaway,” “A Monday Date” and “Blues in Thirds,” a trademark composition that Hines revisited all of his life and relished filling with surprises. It is a splendid CD. I can imagine Earl hearing that rollicking “Congaine” and, all smiles, giving Danko one of his patented compliments, “Well done, young man, well done.”
After hearing a Hines performance in New Orleans in 1980, I wrote that he was, “if anything, an even more ferociously experimental creator than he was at twenty-three.” Here is a little more from that chapter of Jazz Matters.

Rummaging in the basement of the keyboard, applying rococo layers of chords in the middle and a lightning scattering of tenths on top, erecting arhythmic passages that somehow continue the beat, taking pauses that suggest a gliding eagle surveying possibilities, Hines is in full cry, eyes closed, head back, grimacing in intellectural strain and the ecstacy of creation. Possessed of a tone with the brilliance of polished metal and fingers with the speed of pistons, he indulges himself in the surprises he loves: runs, curlicues, doodads, pizzazz, castles in the air, tension, release, single and multiple explosions, harmonic excursions into unknown territory, feats of metric foolery. Conversation stops and the noisiest drunken life underwriter is compelled to listen. Other pianists look anxious; this is clearly impossible, and the impossibility has nothing to do with technique. That is why there has never been a successful Hines imitator. The imitation would have to go beyond notes. The most meticulously written transcription could not capture the joyous rage, the abandon, the whimsy.

This CD, recorded a couple of years earlier in New Orleans at Le Club, has moments of Hines at the top of his game, with a dynamite ”Blue Skies” and a “Wolverine Blues” full of tremolos and cascades that might have made even Jelly Roll Morton smile at what his young admirer did with his tune.

In the next day or so, I’ll post impressions of the Portland Jazz Festival, including performances by McCoy Tyner, Miguel Zenon, Bill Frisell, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Dave Peck and Lynn Darroch.
We’re overdue for new Doug’s Picks. Watch this space or, more accurately, the space in the right-hand column.
And let us hear from you. The Rifftides staff loves to get your comments.

Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond has been running neck and neck with Frank Sinatra: The Life as best-selling book on jazz at the Barnes and Noble website. Yesterday we were first. Today we’re second.
And you thought the Winter Olympics were exciting.

Signing books at the Portland Jazz Festival Saturday evening, I was pleased to meet Joe Maita, the proprietor of the web site called Jerry Jazz Musician. He reminded me that I took part in his exercise asking a number of musicians, writers and other people in the jazz community to designate recording sessions they wish they had attended. The other respondents for Joe’s first installment were Ingrid Jensen, David Liebman, Jane Ira Bloom, Lalo Schifrin, Herman Leonard, Lee Tanner, Buddy Bregman, Bill Moody and Tim Brooks. Here is the first part of Ms. Jensen’s answer:

It’s all Miles dates for me. From Kind of Blue, to Nefertiti, Amandla and beyond. If I were to pick one session (actually sessions) it would be the Plugged Nickel. Even before reading Wayne Shorter’s book (Footprints) I found fresh energy and heavy inspiration from the playing of the entire band, especially Wayne.

From Jane Ira Bloom:

I wish I could have been sitting in a front row table at the Village Vanguard when Bill Evans recorded The Village Vanguard Sessions with his trio with Paul Motion and Scott LaFaro.

To see everyone’s reply, click here.

At this time the fashion is to bring something to jazz that I reject. They speak of freedom. But one has no right, under pretext of freeing yourself, to be illogical and incoherent by getting rid of structure and simply piling a lot of notes one on top of the other. There’s no beat anymore. You can’t keep time with your foot. I believe that what is happening to jazz with people like Ornette Coleman, for instance, is bad. There’s a new idea that consists in destroying everything and find what’s shocking and unexpected; whereas jazz must first of all tell a story that anyone can understand. —Thelonious Monk

Now, can you tell me a story? —Lester Young (after listening to a pyrotechnic display by a young hotdog saxophonist).

Doug,
We’ve had our political disagreements in the past, but your post on the Voice of America was spot on. I read the editorial in the Washington Times yesterday and was appalled at the cuts. The funding (peanuts, when you think about it) should be dramatically increased, for all of the reasons you mentioned. How quickly we forget. The VOA was a beacon for freedom for Eastern Europe in the days of the Iron Curtain and could well serve the same purpose today. Sometimes the President’s policies are simply bewildering to this conservative.
I plan to join you in making my displeasure known. Hope other readers will do the same.
Willis Conover is a most deserving candidate for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I met him back in the mid-’70s when I was writing for CashBox and Down Beat. A true gentleman. Why we so neglect our cultural heritage and its leading citizens is a mystery to me. But that’s a whole nuther story.
—Steven Marks

The Bush administration’s attempt to use the war on terrorism as an excuse to destroy the Voice of America angers me. I sent the message below to my senators and congressman and a few other senators who I thought might understand what’s at stake. I hope that you will consider taking similar action. Most of the senators’ and representatives’ web sites provide easy ways to send them e-mail messages.

I urge you to fight the Bush administration’s budget cuts that would result in the Voice of America stopping or reducing English Language news broadcasts. At a time when the US image around the world is soiled, we need continuation of the objective shortwave news programs whose very existence has informed millions about our nation, not to mention helping them learn English so that they might better understand what The United States of America stands for. This proposed budget cut would effectively disable one of the few official cultural exchange vehicles left to us. Please discuss this with your Senate and House colleagues and do all that you can to preserve the VOA.

I am unaccustomed to doing this sort of thing, in great part because a life in journalism has conditioned me to maintain public objectivity in matters of public policy. However, objectivity in this matter won’t get me, or you, or the United States anywhere. For the facts in the story so far, and quotes from both sides, go here.
Even on the opinion page of The Washington Times, rarely noted for reservations about Bush policies, the alarm is going up about this misguided move.
Now that the administration is chipping away at the VOA with the apparent aim of dismantling or neutering it, I don’t suppose there is a snowball’s chance that one of the Voice’s major heroes will get a presidential medal of freedom posthumously. Willis Conover still deserves it, as he did when he was alive. To read why, go here.

This weekend, I will be in Oregon for the third Portland Jazz Festival. Headliners are McCoy Tyner, Ravi Coltrane, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Stefon Harris, Miguel Zenon, Eddie Palmieri, Susan Werner and Bill Frisell’s Unspeakable Orchestra. With live audiences, I’ll be conducting two Jazz Times Before & After sessions, one with Zenon at 10:30 Saturday morning, the other with Frisell at 1:00 Sunday afternoon. If you are not familiar with the Before & After audio quiz, go here. For a detailed festival schedule, go here.
At 7:00 Saturday evening, preceding the Bridgewater concert, I’ll be signing copies of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. It would be wonderful to say hello to Rifftiders who attend the festival.

The great tenor saxophonist, composer, arranger and wit Al Cohn died 18 years ago tomorrow. He and his frequent tenor sax partner Zoot Sims were so closely associated, so compatible in every respect that they were often mentioned as if they were a single entity named Alan Zoot. As quick and inventive with words as he was with notes, Cohn was celebrated for his bon mots. Here are a few:

On being offered a Danish beer of the brand called Elephant—“Oh, no, I drink to forget.”

Handing a banknote to a drunken panhandler, then pulling it back—“Wait a minute, how do I know you won’t spend this on food?”

Acquaintance: Where are you living these days?
Cohn: Oh, I’m living in the past.

“Free jazz—like playing tennis without a net.”

When I was covering the White House and Watergate in 1973, I flew out of the Westchester County airport in White Plains, New York, to Washington on Sunday nights or Monday mornings and stayed in DC until late Friday. UPITN put me up at a place near its bureau south of the capitol, the Airline Inn. For a few weeks, Al Cohn was also staying there. He was polishing the orchestration for the musical Raisin, which was breaking in before it moved to Broadway. Most mornings, Al and I met for breakfast and talked about his work, my work, music, the state of the world, anything and everything. Then, he was off to the theater and I was off to a hearing room on the hill or a briefing by the White House press secretary. Those breakfasts with Al are among my fondest memories. After that I didn’t see him often, except in passing at a festival or in a club.

In the eighties, I was living and working in Los Angeles. Toward the end of 1988, a few weeks before he died, Al played at a place in Toluca Lake, the Money Tree. The rhythm section was pianist Ross Tompkins, drummer Nick Martinis and, as I recall, Chuck Berghofer on bass. Despite his obvious deterioration, Al’s playing was the most moving I had ever heard from him. The pianist, Lou Levy, heard Al much more extensively than I did, beginning in the 1940s when they were with Woody Herman. He had the same impression of Cohn’s playing at the Money Tree. Al was deep, measured and thoughtful that night, and swung with astonishing power. He sat with us between sets. We talked about Zoot. He told us that the last time they played together, when Zoot was dying, he was astonished that his friend could get on the stand, let alone lift the horn, but that he played as if he were twenty-five. “I don’t know where it came from,” Al said.

I know. It came from the same place in Al, the heart.

If you are thinking of building a Cohn collection—a splendid idea—here are three CDs you might start with:
You ‘n Me, one of his finest collaborations with Zoot.
Nonpareil, with a quartet including Lou Levy.
Heavy Love, a masterpiece of duo playing, with pianist Jimmy Rowles.

We’ll be moving on to other matters now, but you’ll find interesting comments on the Maynard Ferguson dispute or discussion, or whatever it was, here and here.

In the 1940s and early 1950s, a stretch of Central Avenue in Los Angeles was prime jazz territory. Hampton Hawes, Eric Dolphy, Don Cherry, Vi Redd and Billy Higgins learned and developed in clubs and jam sessions there, alongside veterans including Dexter Gordon, Roy Porter, Charles Mingus and Jack McVea. In recent years, fortunes along Central have declined, but help is on the way. A story by Jean Merl in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times gives details.

Nearly half a century has passed since Central Avenue slipped out of the limelight as the jazz mecca and heart of African American Los Angeles.
Long gone are the bustling eateries, shops and nightspots that had lined the once-vibrant street, then known to locals as simply “the Avenue.”
The famed Dunbar Hotel, which was host to such musical greats as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Lena Horne in the 1930s and ’40s, currently houses low-income residents and social service agencies.
The neighborhood now is predominantly Latino and poor, with careworn storefronts, most sporting signs in Spanish.
But city officials hope to recapture some of the Avenue’s past glory with a $500,000 revitalization plan approved by the Community Redevelopment Agency.

To read the whole thing, go here.

Regarding John Salmon’s communique about Maynard Ferguson, a musician and historian writes:

Doug:
John Salmon would have made his case for Maynard Ferguson better without the hyperbolic prose. For example:
1) “Some, like his Roulette era albums of 1958-1962, and are unrivaled by anyone, including Basie and Ellington.”
I think that Ferguson’s ’57-’65 bands were among the best of their time, but I’ve never heard even the most hyper-partisans of MF make a claim like Salmon’s. “Endless taste wars” indeed, Mr. Salmon–I suspect that Maynard himself would blush.
2) “I love Maria Schneider, but name one kid drawn into jazz by her music.”
As a musician who teaches jazz at three universities and does clinics on three continents, I’ve observed much student interest in Maria’s music.
3) “And many of the guys in her bands came up through MF’s bands.”
I know most of Maria’s players (male *and* female, by the way) personally, and I know of only two who are MF alumni: Tim Ries and Keith O’Quinn. I may be missing at most one or two. A number of others are Woody Herman, Gerry Mulligan, and Buddy Rich alumni.
—Bill Kirchner

And one is a graduate of the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra. Tenor saxophonist Rich Perry was with Jones-Lewis, then the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra, and now plays in the current incarnation of those bands, The Vanguard Orchestra, as well as in Schneider’s.