Archives for 2006

A last-minute contribution from a Rifftides reader who identifies himself only as John.

Worked: Don Pullen and the Chief Cliff Singers.

(Sacred Common Ground, a collaboration between the pianist’s avant garde African Brazilian Connection and a Native American vocal group. DR)

Didn’t (at least for me): Louis Armstrong and Leon Thomas.

(Louis Armstrong and Friends, a 1960s album including Thomas, a sort of free jazz yodeler; Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Tony Bennett and others in a small choir. The musical direction, sort of, is by Oliver Nelson, who on other occasions exercised control. The phrase “herding cats” has rarely been more appropriate. It’s a bit of a mess, but Armstrong’s warmth and charisma come through the melee. DR)

I would gladly give all my symphonies, had I been able to invent the locomotive. —Anton Dvořák

“Happy Go Lucky Local”…told the story of a train in the South, not one of those luxurious, streamlined trains that take tourists to Miami, but a little train with an upright engine that was never fast, never on schedule, and never made stops at any place you ever heard about. After grunting, groaning, and jerking, it finally settled down to a steady medium tempo. —Duke Ellington

Very good site!

Poishi

This week, Jackie Cain, the surviving member of the vocal duo Jackie and Roy, sang with some of their arrangements from nearly half a century ago. Ms. Cain’s angelic voice, an instrument of purity and tonal accuracy rarely equaled in any area of music, has seldom been heard since Roy Kral, her husband, died in 2002. Her re-emergence performing with a big band was an event. Here is a bit of Zan Stewart’s report from the Newark Star-Ledger.

Cain was spotlighted on several ballads, among them “Darn That Dream,” “I’m Glad There Is You,” and “Angel Eyes.” These were arranged with panache by Bill Holman, whose beguiling washes of sound both supported and surrounded Cain.

Here, the qualities of her voice and her strengths as a fine interpreter of classic material stood out. Her pitch was spot on. She moved lyrics and rhythms subtly, giving them a personal swing, and decided emotion. She was a little thin on top, though she held long high tones without wavering. Her middle and lower notes were full; she closed phrases with tight vibratos. For someone her age, 77, who has not sung regularly, Cain was first rate.

Singing again in public must be therapy for Jackie Cain after the loss of her husband and artistic partner of more than fifty years. It is bound to be therapy for her audiences. To read the rest of Stewart’s review, click here.

Eric Felten—trombonist, singer, bandleader and occasional Wall Street Journal contributor—is asking for Rifftiders’ suggestions, to wit:

The other day I heard a cut that I had heard a time or two before, “Shine On Harvest Moon,” with that remarkably odd combination of Jimmy Rushing and the Brubeck outfit. I found it weirdly compelling. It got me thinking about what other odd pairings have been made in jazz. Some have been great artistic triumphs—Coltrane/Hartman, anyone? And I imagine there have been others that have been disasters.

Often it seems the odd pairings (as in Coltrane-Hartman) are driven by record company decisions that have nothing to do with musical judgments and everything to do with getting contractual obligations out of the way.

I would be interested in your readers’ candidates for “oddest couplings that worked,” and “oddest couplings that didn’t.”

Send your nominations along. I’ll forward them to Eric and compile them for a Rifftides posting. Use the e-mail address in the right-hand column, please.
Eric may find those combinations—Brubeck and Rushing, Coltrane and Hartman—odd, but they worked perfectly. The Rushing collaboration album with the Brubeck quartet brought out a certain reserve, call it self-editing, in Brubeck that resulted in some of his most economical and attractive solos. It coaxed forth the bluesy side of Paul Desmond. Mr. Five By Five sang at the top of his game. It’s one of Rushing’s best latterday recordings. As for Coltrane, he was compounding his “sheets of sound” style in 1962 and was well on his way to the free approach that led to “A Love Supreme” and beyond (way beyond), but in the album with Hartman, he is supremely melodic in his solos on a collection of great ballads.

I saw a sign, beautifully hand-lettered, in front of a garden apartment not far from my house.

WELCOME:

FRIENDS

BUTTERFLIES

LADYBUGS

BEES

A good thought on a frigid January day.

Several Rifftides readers have written that they regret not having been at the International Association of Jazz Educators bash in New York. Many of them were disappointed at not hearing the conversation between Ira Gitler and Sonny Rollins. Because of that session’s overlap with one I did, there was no chance for me to hear it. I thank DevraDoWrite for alerting us to a way to get tapes or CDs of that interview and dozens of other IAJE presentations.
None of the major concerts is available, for obvious permissions and copyright reasons, but several of the educational sessions included demonstrations that amounted to mini-recitals. Among them are the Marvin Stamm-Billl Mays “Art of Duo Playing” and Fred Hamilton’s guitar master class. If you click here, you will go to a printable PDF file listing all of the sessions available on audio. It includes an order form and the mailing address. I’m ordering the Rollins CD today.
If you can’t open the PDF file, here is the contact information you’ll need:
On-Site Recording Productions
5551 Fremont Street
Emeryville, CA 94608
phone (510)985-0335
fax (510)985-0335
onsiterecording@earthlink.net
On-Site tells Devra that it is working on a way to order directly from its web site, but doesn’t yet have it in operation. I presume that they’ll take telephone orders.

The web site jazzstandards.com has added a Paul Desmond page with a biography and links to Desmond CDs and books. The site offers resources to researchers and entertainment to browsers. Fair warning: one thing leads to another on jazzstandards.com. Be prepared to spend time.

In the current issue of The Village Voice, critic Francis Davis assesses venerable jazz survivors. Here’s his lead:

The votes are in: Monk and Coltrane at Carnegie Hall in 1957, my choice as the best jazz CD released in 2005, is the winner in JazzTimes‘ critics’ poll, scoring 165 points to 87 for Dizzy and Bird at Town Hall in 1945—my runner-up as well. Number three with 73 points is Coltrane at the Half Note in ’65, followed by the highest-ranking living performers: Sonny Rollins (40 points) and Wayne Shorter (34), both septuagenarians.

Who could’ve imagined that finally becoming part of a critical consensus would leave me feeling so blue?

And for good reason. To read Davis’s Voice piece, go here.

Once in a while, the Rifftides staff checks the traffic report to see where our postings are being read. The most recent sampling includes:
Cremorne, Victoria, Australia
Manchester; London; Elsfield, Oxfordshire;
and Hampstead Norris, West Berkshire, England
Bors, Vastra Gotaland, Sweden
Beijing, China
Clarkson, Ontario, Canada
Tigery, Ile-de-France
Dozens of places in the US, from Tavares, Florida, to Port Angeles, Washington
Several places identified by the site meter only as “Unknown Country.” That’s mysterious.
We are not alone.
Thanks for being here. Let us hear from you, wherever you are. The e-mail address is in the right-hand column. There is also a comment link at the end of each item.

A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.

—Samuel Johnson

No writer ever truly succeeds. The disparity between the work conceived and the work completed is always too great and the writer merely achieves an acceptable degree of failure.

—Phillip Caputo

Tim DuRoche’s response is also posted as a comment to Dave Frishberg’s Page Three story, but I didn’t want to risk its being lost in the blog backwater. He wrote:

I read Page Three a while back when I was doing a profile of Dave for a Portland magazine that went broke before they ever published their first issue. Here’s my piece on him:

DAVE FRISHBERG: Shooting from the Hip

“I’m from the old school

The proper and the prude school

Where it’s stiff upper lip

stay quietly hip”

—Dave Frishberg, “The Hopi Way”

Portland, Oregon takes great pride in its hipster indie-cred, in a certain low-slung holster of free-and-loose, artistic, frontier-justice ideals, a cool DIY ingenuity. To many in the younger ranks, a 72-year-old, four-time Grammy-nominated songwriter with a body of witty, poignant songs that make you think of (as well as tap your foot to) subjects as obtuse as attorneys named Bernie, long-gone ball players, Oklahoma toads, and the legislative process might seem the absolute antithesis of Johnny-on-the-spot hip.

But then again they’ve probably never met Dave Frishberg, jazz pianist, composer and one of our most enduring beau ideals of Beat-meets-Bing Crosby, cultivated cool.

A pianist (“I never tell people I’m a musician, because they might think I’m responsible for what’s on the radio.”) with an unassuming, avuncular wryness, Frishberg is unparalleled in his musings on the vagaries of daily life and the seismic impact of love, death, nostalgia, and the state of the world. Known for penning such things as Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just A Bill,” featuring a mopey, lil’ animated legislative writ, as well as such well-traveled tunes like “My Attorney Bernie,” “Blizzard of Lies,” “Heart’s Desire,” “Peel Me a Grape,” I’m Hip” (with Schoolhouse Rock mastermind Bob Dorough), Frishberg (once called the “e.e. cummings of jazz”) is a master of curveball lyricism and hip delivery. His tunes have been performed by vocal greats like Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Michael Feinstein, Diana Krall, Mel Torme, Anita O’Day, Cleo Laine, and Jackie & Roy among others, and his sly sense of right place/right timeness even landed him a role as a piano-playing pawn in Henry Jaglom’s 1986 film Someone to Love (with a gargantuan Orson Welles).

Now better known for his songwriting and singing, Frishberg initially wanted to be one of the boys in the band—fielding chord changes and supporting the song, a Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance team-player. Growing up in St. Paul, MN in the ’30s and ’40s, nurtured on the golden days of baseball, bebop and writers like James Thurber, S.J. Perelman, and Robert Benchley, Frishberg understood the triumvirate of America’s great gifts to the world—baseball, jazz and democracy (concerning the waning currency of the latter, listen to his “My Country Used to Be”). But a nice, Midwestern boy didn’t just up and become a jazzman.

We forget that jazz was the original “alternative” music. It was lowlife crazy-cool, outsider, indie and DIY to the nth (long before that was necessarily a good thing), and definitely the kind of thing your parents didn’t want you doing. As Frishberg has written, “You choose music, you say goodbye to. . .a predictable future. . .My parents listened to my pianistics with puzzled disapproval, and I once overheard my dad telling his friends that I wanted to be a ‘klezmer’ . . .a low class performer, a clown, maybe a step above organ grinder.”

After earning a degree in journalism, spending two years in the Air Force, and doing time in the ad-world, Frishberg landed in New York. NYC in 1957 was a hotbed of jazz and the arts—a wild creative frenzy of activity between the clubs (Village Vanguard, The Five Spot, The Shalimar, and the Half Note), the studios, and after-hours haunts like painter David X. Young’s famed loft, where the cream of the jazz elite stretched out and blew. With a regular gig at the Half Note, Frishberg was in the thick of it—developing into a wonderful, on-call pianist able to traffic in an array of jazz piano styles. Throughout the 1960s, he worked with an A-list of jazz’s greatest, including Ben Webster, longstanding confreres Al Cohn/Zoot Sims, Carmen McRae, Jimmy Rushing Roy Eldridge, and Gene Krupa, to name a few.

And it was during the ’60s he began writing his own tunes, inspired by the model of the great Frank Loesser, a masterful lyricist and composer known for such shows as Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, as well as “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” “On a Slow Boat to China” and “Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition.” Loesser himself advised the would-be songwriter that his “role was less that of the poet, but more that of the journalist. . . [guiding] the listener through the song.”

From his first published work (“Peel Me a Grape” for Anita O’Day) onward, Frishberg produced songs firmly rooted in jazz with breezy echoes of Loesser—clever, well-crafted songs rich in everydayness and a tasty topicality (minus the ur-satire of say, Tom Lehrer or the cloying smartiness of Randy Newman). This droll and playful, felicitous ease is in evidence as far back as the 1968 tune “Van Lingle Mungo,” a lovely paean to ballplayers’ names—essentially a long, elliptical list-poem. . .”Heeney Majeski, Johnny Gee, Eddie Joost, Johnny Pesky, Thornton Lee, Danny Gardella. . . .”

In 1971, Frishberg “took a left” and moved to Los Angeles, where he fell in with the studio/jazz scene there. Once there he worked on a short-lived variety show hosted by Gene Kelly and subsequently with the great songwriter Bob Dorough on the ABC Schoolhouse Rock franchise. LA has a habit of weighing on the soul (to misparaphrase saxophonist Paul Desmond, “It’s like living in a house where everything’s painted red”), so after 15 years he moved to the less imposing environs of Portland, feeling it was a better place to raise his children (his second son was born here).

These days Frishberg rarely does his bit—that is, singing his songs around Portland—preferring instead to work as a sideman-named-Dave with saxophonists or singers. It’s in those moments, however, you realize just how underrated he is as a piano player. Relentlessly musical and undeniably swinging, he plays tickle-and-pounce, left hand-right hand, cat-and-mouse games with tunes—suggesting moments of Harlem stride, Count Basie-esque chugging momentum, and the pre-bop sublimity of players like Joe Bushkin, Jess Stacy, John Bunch, or a less heavy-handed Dave McKenna. And it’s a delight.

Regardless of the hat he chooses to wear, there’s an ever-present special reserve of warm humor, musicality, and an affinity for vivid storytelling in the work of Frishberg—revealing a left-field romantic with a gentle sense of irony. And this mashup of Plains-prophet wit (a la Hoagy Carmichael), a keen Ring Lardneresque eye for cupidity, and a deferential big-city urbanity (playing free-and-loose with our expectations of status quo) might just be what we need to keep us honest and indie of spirit.

Best,

Tim DuRoche

PS: Shelly Manne’s 2-3-4 is one of my favorite albums ever (Raksin’s “Slowly” is superb).

The Rifftides staff is racing a deadline for a large article that, unlike the blog game, will result in remuneration. More on that later. Posting this week will be done in proportion to progress on the project. We know that you understand.

I will be a guest this (Monday) evening on Michael Atleson’s Point of Departure program on WPMG, Portland, Maine. We will discuss Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, recent CDs and whatever else comes up. Air time is 9:00 pm EST, 8:00 pm Central, 6:00 pm PST. In the Portland listening area, go to 90.9 FM. Elsewhere, you can hear the show by going to WPMG’s web site and clicking on “Listen.” Hope you can join us.

Before Dave Frishberg the pianist became Frishberg the celebrated songwriter, singer and wit, he was a journeyman musician. When he had established himself in New York in the late 1950s, he played with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, Ben Webster, Jimmy Rushing, indeed, a cross section of the best jazz artists of the day. In the course of working into the jazz community, however, he took the jobs he could get.
Pianist Jack Reilly recently sent me an account that Frishberg wrote some time ago about one of his early New York gigs. I was so taken with it that I asked Dave if it had been published. He said that it had only been circulated now and then among friends. What would he think about its appearing in Rifftides, I wondered. Here is part of his reply:

I’ve never considered putting something out on the internet—in fact this is the first time it’s been proposed to me. All in all, I would be pleased to see the piece in Rifftides, and there’s a good chance that my audience—(retired dance band musicians) and your readership might overlap to some degree.

With Mr. Frishberg’s permission, you will find in the next exhibit his account of a moment of Greenwich Village history that, alas, can never be recaptured because of the passing of many of the central characters.
But first, in the unlikely event that you don’t know his work, I refer you to two essential Frishberg CDs, one in which he sings many of his best-known songs, the other concentrating on his piano playing. Just click the links to find them.

HOW HISTORY ALMOST HAPPENED AT THE PAGE THREE
By Dave Frishberg
Around the time I first came to New York, during the late fifties, I got a call from a piano player named Johnny Knapp. He asked if I would be interested in replacing him with the band at The Page Three. It was a two piece band–piano and drums. “You have to play a continuous show,” he told me, “the hours are 9pm to 4am, and the pay is seventy-five a week.” I told him I would be interested.
The Page Three was a cabaret on Seventh Avenue a block south of the Village Vanguard and, situated there, it was an ideal gig for me. I was living right across the street on Waverly Place, and I could dash out of my apartment five minutes before we hit, and even dash back and forth during intermissions. I took the gig.
I thought I was hip, but I wasn’t ready for The Page Three. When I first walked in it took me a while to realize that most of the staff and many of the customers were dressed as the opposite sex. It was like a museum of sexual lifestyles. I knew nothing of this.
The musical part was equally intimidating. The policy was continuous entertainment, and although we must have been provided with intermissions, my memory is that the drummer Jimmy Olin and I were never off the stage. Six entertainers did three shows a night. They rotated out of a stable of ten so that each entertainer worked four or five nights a week. This was a hell of a lot of music and paper to deal with, since everybody needed rehearsals, and some of the performers came with thick books of arrangements.
Kiki Hall was the MC. After the first rehearsal I had to take Kiki’s music home and work on it. He did risque patter and naughty lyrics, and there was a lot of ad lib accompaniment and stops and starts, and it all went by very fast. Kiki did Noel Coward material like “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” and “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington,” and some Dwight Fiske material, and other stuff I had never heard of. He was ruthless about the piano part, tolerated no mistakes, and demanded extra rehearsals during the week. He was a pain in the ass.
The hostess, Jackie Howe, was a solidly built woman with a big friendly smile who always dressed in a tweed business suit. She liked jazz musicians, and she sang obscure songs like “Mississippi Dreamboat” and “Like a Ship in the Night.” I was learning a lot of unfamiliar and interesting material.
The rest of the cast was a jumble of characters, talented and untalented: There was Kerri April, who dressed in a tuxedo and made up his face to look like a woman, and Laurel Watson who was a terrific rhythm and blues singer, and Bubbles Kent, a female body-builder who did a strip dance to “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails.” Tiny Tim, who was just beginning to do his act, was from time to time a member of the cast, although during the months I worked there he appeared only a couple of nights, subbing for one of the other acts. I remember the occasions chiefly because of the fact that Jimmy Olin and I were able to get off the stage for a cigarette or two while Tiny accompanied himself on the ukelele or whatever it was. Jimmy and I would listen from the front bar, and we had some good laughs, but the fact was that in the context of The Page Three staff, entertainers, and clientele, Tiny Tim didn’t seem all that bizarre.
The Unique Monique was especially unrewarding to play for. She was a beautiful blonde Viking who was apparently buffaloed by the prospect of singing a song, and seemed to have borrowed someone else’s hands and feet for the ordeal. She sang “Guess Who I Saw Today,” and at the end she would jab a finger toward some poor guy sitting at a front table and give him the “I saw YOOOOO,” on the major seventh, dismally out of tune.
What Jimmy and I looked forward to each night was Sheila Jordan. Sheila was magic. The customers would stop gabbing and all the entertainers would turn their attention to Sheila and the whole place would be under her spell. She was doing “If You Could See Me Now” and “Baltimore Oriole” and some of the other material that she subsequently put on record.
During my time at The Page Three I began to grasp the fundamentals of how to be a helpful accompanist and by the time I was ready to move on even Kiki Hall was pleased and confident with the way I played for him. In fact when I told him I was leaving to join Sol Yaged at the Metropole Kiki threw a tantrum. “Oh, no! Who’s going to play my Noel Coward material?”
“I got just the guy,” I told him.
About a week earlier I had met the pianist Herbie Nichols, who was a unique jazz stylist, very advanced and adventurous and as unorthodox and original as Thelonious Monk. But I heard Nichols play in a conventional situation, and I immediately understood that this guy could be musical and appropriate in all kinds of contexts. I sounded him about the Page Three. He was interested.
Sure enough, Herbie was a hit with the cast, and became the new pianist. I stopped in one night to dig him, and Jackie Howe gave me the big smile and the OK sign. Herbie sounded like a million bucks and everybody
was happy.
A few weeks later I dropped by The Page Three after my gig. When Kiki Hall saw me he began hissing “It’s your fault!”, and Jackie Howe had to restrain him from going for my throat. The Unique Monique was on stage, and she seemed even more lost than usual. “I saw YOOO..” she sang on that dismal major seventh, and the pianist resolved the chord a half step down so Monique’s note became the tonic. It was shocking and unearthly, and the customers began to laugh. . Monique stumbled off the stage in tears. I looked at the pianist and I didn’t recognize him. Herbie Nichols had sent a sub. The other singers were sitting in a booth, all very upset, and they were refusing to go on. Kiki was climbing the walls, and Bubbles Kent had gone home.
Sheila Jordan greeted me with a big smile. “You really missed something tonight,” she said. “You should have heard Kiki’s show. You should have heard “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.” It was really out there! You know who that is on piano, don’t you? You don’t? That’s Cecil Taylor,” she told me. “Herbie sent him to sub. He’s been here all night, played for everyone. You’ve never heard a show like this in your life.”
I thought that over for a moment, wishing I had it on tape. Then a thought hit me. “Sheila,” I said. “Dare I ask? Could it be true? Did Tiny Tim perform tonight?”
“No, damn it,” she said. “Wouldn’t that have been priceless.”
“Well, Tiny Tim doesn’t use piano anyway,” I said, “so it wouldn’t have happened.”
Sheila said, “Oh yes it would have happened. Cecil would have played. Cecil would have insisted on playing.”
Herbie Nichols came back the next night and I assume all was forgiven. Herbie died not long after this took place.. My path and Sheila’s path still cross once in a while, and naturally I go into my Page Three routines. I can still get a laugh with my Monique imitation, but the Page Three survivors list is dwindling, and there are few of us left to share the memories, real and imagined.. But I keep the stories going, and I have been known in weak moments to announce that I once saw Cecil Taylor play for Tiny Tim. So let the word go forth now that it never happened. I only wish it had happened. Of course, I’m assuming that they never got together privately.

©2006 Dave Frishberg

Our posting about pianist Denny Zeitlin’s recording debut on Jeremy Steig’s 1963 Flute Fever coincided with critic Owen Cordle’s review in the Raleigh News and Observer of a rarity, a new CD by the flutist. Sample sentence:

Steig is a busy soloist, and his tonal palette ranges from ravishing pure sounds to guitarlike overdriven grunge.

To read the whole thing, go here.
Zeitlin apparently has a cache of Flute Fever LPs and offers them for sale on his web site, autographed, for fifteen dollars…a low price for a collectors item.

While he was in New York to accept his award as a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, John Levy talked with National Public Radio’s Sara Fishko. The result was a beautifully produced seven-and-a-half-minute piece that highlights the emotional side of a 93-year-old man who went from bassist to respected artists manager. It ran yesterday. If you missed it, click on this link to NPR’s All Things Considered.

I completed the Yakima-Seattle-New York-Seattle-Yakima odyssey Tuesday evening, only slightly the worse for wear, now rested and restored. Here’s a wrapup of some of my experiences at the IAJE conference and elsewhere in New York:
Buddy DeFranco, approaching his eighty-fourth birthday, played in concert with the U.S. Army Blues Jazz Ensemble. Made up of sergeants of various stripes and led by Chief Warrant Officer Charles Vollherbst, the Blues (named for their dress uniforms) is one of the best big jazz bands at work, military or civilian. It has a stompin’ rhythm section, impressive brass and wind sections, fine soloists, and arrangers with skill and imagination. Staff Sergeant Liesl Whitaker’s lead trumpet work places her among the best in that demanding, punishing craft. Sergeant First Class Graham Breedlove of Lafayette, Louisiana, in addition to being a resourceful trumpet soloist, wrote a masterly piece in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina’s devastation. “Nola’s Lament/Nola’s Return” parallels, in a thoroughly modern idiom, traditional New Orleans funeral music, with a mournful first section and a joyous return. Few non-New Orleans drummers get it right when they attempt a Bourbon Street parade beat. In the turnaround between the two sections, Sergeant First Class Steve Fidyk of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, nailed it.
Eyes closed, a listener might have thought he had been transported to 1949, so finely tuned were DeFranco’s clarinet chops and his creativity. He made his way through a cross-section of patented bop patterns on “I Got Rhythm” changes as he warmed up with “Lester Leaps In.” But in “Mr. Lucky,” a staple item of his repertoire that might have encouraged coasting, he reached for surprising intervals and melodic turns. Then came George Gershwin’s “Soon” in an arrangement by Master Sergeant James Roberts of Washington, DC, the band’s guitarist. Building on the kaleidoscopic impressionism and time shifting of Roberts’ introduction, DeFranco constructed a solo of breathtaking logic and lyricism, a timeless solo, one that must be among the best of tens of thousands he has played since he turned professional in 1939. In his cadenza on the final piece, Rob Pronk’s “Don’t You Ever Learn,” DeFranco muffed a note in a downward glissando. He played the cadenza again. He still wasn’t happy. He played it a third time, to perfection, and came out of it grinning like a schoolboy. It was an endearing self-correction that a less seasoned player might not have had the nerve to make. Jazz Master, indeed.
It is impossible to predict the course of an artist’s career, but here’s a name to file away: Logan Strosahl. He is a sixteen-year-old alto saxophonist with the Roosevelt High School Jazz Band from Seattle, Washington. Strosahl has the energy of five sixteen-year-olds, rhythm that wells up from somewhere inside him, technique, harmonic daring with knowledge to support it and—that most precious jazz commodity—individuality. If he learns to control the whirlwind and allow space into his improvising, my guess is that you’ll be hearing from Logan Strosahl.
I signed copies of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond at the Tower Records store at IAJE, which was impressively managed by Tower’s Larry Isacson. Toward the end of the session I shared the table with Maria Schneider. We sold a respectable number of Desmond books, but the line of fans buying CDs for Maria to sign was along the wall of the store, out into the Hilton hallway and halfway to 54th Street. It seemed never to get shorter. A Grammy and four Grammy nominations will do that. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving—or nicer—person. Maria’s one-on-one conversation with NEA Jazz Master Bob Brookmeyer, her mentor, was a high point of the events I attended. She opened with a sound montage of Brookmeyer arrangements that covered decades, then discussed music with him composer-to-composer. The wisdom, affection and humor were palpable. The room was packed. Toward the end of the two hours, Clark Terry took over from Maria for an emotional reunion of two men who made it plain that when they say they are brothers, it is not just rhetoric.
The final night of the conference, Chick Corea, Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette played in the cozy setting of the grand ballroom of the New York Hilton. The room is approximately the size and dimensions of two football fields. It was overflowing, every seat filled and people standing jammed to the walls on both sides and in the back. And yet, the three wizards managed to achieve intimacy as they moved through “Solar,” “Milestones” and “But Beautiful.” Corea, always the conceptual arsonist, seemed to be firing the ideas at first. Gomez was being excessively acrobatic at the top of the bass. The set settled into a cooperative three-way exchange of the kind achieved on a good night by players who have profound knowledge and appreciation of each other’s work.
Out of the hotel, into a cab and over to Columbus Circle to grab a bite at Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola, publisher Mal Harris and I had no idea who was playing. We also had no reservation, but Dizzy’s honcho Todd Barkan succumbed to our disappointment at the initial turndown and installed us on stools along the wall. To our intense satisfaction, the band turned out to be Lewis Nash’s quartet with pianist Renee Rosnes, vibraharpist Steve Nelson and bassist Peter Washington. It was Detroit week at the club and the quartet played a set of pieces by Thad Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Milt Jackson, and one each by John Clayton and Tadd Dameron from Jackson’s repertoire. Nash’s unaccompanied introduction to Flanagan’s “Eclypso,” using only his fingers and the palms of his hands across the drums, was electrifying. The dignified woman on the next stool was moved to break her silence. “My gosh,” she said.
The playing by all hands was exciting, culminating in Jackson’s blues “SKG,” which included Nash’s New York debut as a scat singer. Full of harmonic knowledge as well as rhythm, Nash was not pulling a stunt. He was making music. The piece swung so hard that Barkan was grooving in his seat as he waited to make his post-set announcement. The gumbo was good, if not quite New Orleans quality. The panoramic view of the rainy city through the floor-to-ceiling windows was pure New York. It was a fine end to a long, rewarding day and an IAJE conference so packed with opportunities that no one could take advantage of more than a small percent of them.
Finally, with a couple of hours to spare on Sunday before we left for the airport, Mal and I hiked rapidly through the suddenly freezing New York streets to the Museum of Modern Art. We were particularly interested in the exhibit called The Forty-Part Motet, a work by the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff. She recorded the Salisbury Cathedral Choir singing the 1575 Thomas Tallis work Spen In Alium Nunqua Habui, composed in 1575 in honor of Queen Elizabeth The First’s fortieth birthday. Cardiff assembled the singers in an oval in groups of five, each singer recorded on a separate microphone. In the museum, the oval is recreated with a single speaker for each singer. If you stand in the middle of the oval, the choir wafts over and around you from all sides. If you walk slowly past the speakers inside the perimiter of the oval, you hear the individual voices singing their parts. Most, but not all, sing in tune. If you find an especially intriguing baritone or a bewitching soprano, you can concentrate on his or her voice. This is ultimate surround sound. I’d love to hear, say, the Bill Holman Band or the Vanguard Orchestra, or the U.S. Army Blues Jazz Ensemble recorded this way. Is the Cardiff installation art? It’s in the Museum of Modern Art, isn’t it?
Other pieces of interest in the lightning tour of MoMA:
William Kentridge’s Felix In Exile, a wall projection video of Kentridge’s animated drawings, a disturbing impressionistic story of South African bondage and freedom.
Peter Fischli’s The Way Things Go, another piece of video art, this one displayed on monitors. It shows an endless Rube Goldberg chain of actions and consequences involving fire, ice, explosions, water, oil, tires, metal balls, tipping cans of liquid, dropping weights, catapulted objects. It’s fascinating and exciting. A couple of small boys seated on the floor near where I was standing erupted in glee every time there was a new burst of flame or an explosion. Better than a car chase. Is it art? I refer you to the previous question.