• Home
  • About
    • Doug Ramsey
    • Rifftides
    • Contact
  • Purchase Doug’s Books
    • Poodie James
    • Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond
    • Jazz Matters
    • Other Works
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal
  • rss

Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Al Cohn

February 14, 2006 by Doug Ramsey

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.

Related

Filed Under: Main

Comments

  1. Tim DuRoche says

    February 14, 2006 at 10:05 am

    I saw one Cohn’s last gigs (in Minneapolis with a pickup group), he wasn’t in the best of spirits, in fact on lower register notes, his tone took on a flouncy Buddy Tate quality. But I was impressed at the time by his decorum, shined shoes, and dry humor.
    During a break an older audience member reminded me that Zoot had played with the same drummer some years before and during a lull had turned to him and said, “hey can you just play a. . . um….better.”

  2. Don Frese says

    February 15, 2006 at 12:40 pm

    Al Cohn is one of those musicians who, as they age, seem to discard everything superfluous to what they are doing. Al, and others like him, become just pure song. By the way, I think Lou Levy was really onto something new and wonderful with his last two recordings, also hard to find: Lunarcy and Ya Know. Its a damn shame when anybody decent has to die; with folks like Al and Lou with their wonderful talent, it is even more so.

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

Subscribe to RiffTides by Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

Archives

Recent Comments

  • Rob D on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • W. Royal Stokes on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Larry on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Lucille Dolab on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside
  • Donna Birchard on We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside

Doug’s Picks

We’re Back: Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s New Trio Album for Sunnyside

As Rifftides readers have undoubtedly noticed, it has been a long time since we posted. We are creating a new post in hopes  that it will open the way to resumption of frequent reports as part of the artsjournal.com mission to keep you up to date on jazz and other matters. Pianist Denny Zeitlin’s stunning new trio album […]

Recent Listening: The New David Friesen Trio CD

David Friesen Circle 3 Trio: Interaction (Origin) Among the dozens of recent releases that deserve serious attention, a few will get it. Among those those receiving it here is bassist David Friesen’s new album.  From the Portland, Oregon, sinecure in which he thrives when he’s not touring the world, bassist Friesen has been performing at […]

Monday Recommendation: Dominic Miller

Dominic Miller Absinthe (ECM) Guitarist and composer Miller delivers power and subtlety in equal measure. Abetted by producer Manfred Eicher’s canny guidance and ECM’s flawless sound and studio presence, Miller draws on inspiration from painters of France’s impressionist period. His liner essay emphasizes the importance to his musical conception of works by Cezanne, Renoir, Lautrec, […]

Recent Listening: Dave Young And Friends

Dave Young, Lotus Blossom (Modica Music) Young, the bassist praised by Oscar Peterson for his “harmonic simpatico and unerring sense of time” when he was a member of Peterson’s trio, leads seven gifted fellow Canadians. His beautifully recorded bass is the underpinning of a relaxed session in which his swing is a force even during […]

Recent Listening: Jazz Is Of The World

Paolo Fresu, Richard Galliano, Jan Lundgren, Mare Nostrum III (ACT) This third outing by Mare Nostrum continues the international trio’s close collaboration in a series of albums that has enjoyed considerable success. With three exceptions, the compositions in this installment are by the members of Mare Nostrum. It opens with one the French accordionist Galliano […]

Monday Recommendation: Thelonious Monk’s Works In Full

Kimbrough, Robinson, Reid, Drummond: Monk’s Dreams(Sunnyside) The subtitle of this invaluable 6-CD set is The Complete Compositions Of Thelonious Sphere Monk. By complete, Sunnyside means that the box contains six CDs with 70 tunes that Monk wrote beginning in the early years when his music was generally assumed to be an eccentric offshoot of bebop, […]

More Doug's Picks

Blogroll

All About Jazz
JerryJazzMusician
Carol Sloane: SloaneView
Jazz Beyond Jazz: Howard Mandel
The Gig: Nate Chinen
Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong
Don Heckman: The International Review Of Music
Ted Panken: Today is The Question
George Colligan: jazztruth
Brilliant Corners
Jazz Music Blog: Tom Reney
Brubeck Institute
Darcy James Argue
Jazz Profiles: Steve Cerra
Notes On Jazz: Ralph Miriello
Bob Porter: Jazz Etc.
be.jazz
Marc Myers: Jazz Wax
Night Lights
Jason Crane:The Jazz Session
JazzCorner
I Witness
ArtistShare
Jazzportraits
John Robert Brown
Night After Night
Do The Math/The Bad Plus
Prague Jazz
Russian Jazz
Jazz Quotes
Jazz History Online
Lubricity

Personal Jazz Sites
Chris Albertson: Stomp Off
Armin Buettner: Crownpropeller’s Blog
Cyber Jazz Today, John Birchard
Dick Carr’s Big Bands, Ballads & Blues
Donald Clarke’s Music Box
Noal Cohen’s Jazz History
Bill Crow
Easy Does It: Fernando Ortiz de Urbana
Bill Evans Web Pages
Dave Frishberg
Ronan Guilfoyle: Mostly Music
Bill Kirchner
Mike Longo
Jan Lundgren (Friends of)
Willard Jenkins/The Independent Ear
Ken Joslin: Jazz Paintings
Bruno Leicht
Earl MacDonald
Books and CDs: Bill Reed
Marvin Stamm

Tarik Townsend: It’s A Raggy Waltz
Steve Wallace: Jazz, Baseball, Life and Other Ephemera
Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest
Jessica Williams

Other Culture Blogs
Terry Teachout
DevraDoWrite
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
On An Overgrown Path

Journalism
PressThink: Jay Rosen
Second Draft, Tim Porter
Poynter Online

Related

Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in