Archives for 2007

Louis Armstrong said that if you had to ask, you’d never know. That did not prevent Sid Caesar from attempting to answer the question on Your Show Of Shows in 1956.
Have a good weekend.

Duke Ellington’s urbanity and sophistication are part of jazz lore, but as the years go by there are fewer people who had direct exposure to his personality. Rare video of a 1963 interview provides a generous sample of Ellington’s charm. It also demonstrates the carefully crafted line of patter that served him both as effective public relations and as a layer of protection around a highly visible man who managed to keep himself private. Ellington spoke with Sven Lindahl of SVT, the Swedish broadcasting system.
The interview on SVT’s web site comes in two parts. This link takes you to part 1, in which Ellington gives elegant expression to his view of a future in which music would be without categories. To view part 2, you must go to this link and scroll up to “Duke Ellington del 2” in the menu labeled öppet arkiv on the right side of the screen.
Thanks to the musicologist Andrew Homzy of Concordia University in Montreal for leading the Rifftides staff to this valuable piece of history.

A few days ago, Rifftides alerted you to a concert posthumously honoring the Voice of America’s Willis Conover, whom we described as one of the most effective public diplomats in US history. Washington correspondent John Birchard, a veteran VOA broadcaster, attended the concert and sent this report.

I think Willis would have liked THE FIRST ANNUAL WILLIS CONOVER MEMORIAL CONCERT. He might have been a little uncomfortable with the title (he was pretty modest – for a radio guy), but the concert contained elements he would have appreciated: kids trying out their skills in the Blues Alley Youth Orchestra, the discovery of a “new” band, and the classics getting their due from the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra.
The concert was the brainchild of Harry Schnipper, the entrepreneur who has kept Washington’s Blues Alley nightclub alive through thick and thin. The Blues Alley Jazz Society and the Smithsonian Institution were the official “presenters” that arranged for the use of the Voice Of America auditorium for the event Saturday, April 28th. The purpose of the concert was “to memorialize the legacy of Willis Conover and his efforts to extend jazz music…through the radio waves of the Voice of America.”
The Blues Alley Youth Orchestra opened the evening. The Orchestra, now in its 20th year, is made up of 14- to 17-year-olds from the Washington area. The band is subject to all the challenges that young musicians must overcome: uncertain intonation and time, solos that wander into a cul de sac of confusion, and teen-age shyness about standing out from the crowd. And then, there will be moments when a youngster gets off a good chorus and sits down with an embarrassed grin at the applause. Congratulations to Blues Alley for sticking with this educational effort.
Next came one of those segments that jazz fans live for: the jaw-dropping surprise. I was not familiar with the U-S Military Academy’s Jazz Knights. Expecting a band of college students, the first surprise was these guys were grown-ups, career military musicians like the widely-known Airmen of Note, the Navy’s Commodores and the Army Blues, all stationed in the Washington, D.C. area. I’ve long appreciated those three bands as the top of the tree in their respective services. Well, make room for the Jazz Knights from West Point. All of the band members are sergeants, ranging from staff to master sergeant. The Knights hit with a bright original, “Without a Doubt”. Ensembles were crisp and tight. Alto saxophonist Derrick James made clear right away his claim on the audience’s attention with a fiery solo. James made way for trumpeter Vito Speranza, whose tone put me in mind of Pete Candoli and whose attack was confident, even swaggering. The audience responded with enthusiastic applause.
Mike Abene’s arrangement of the Brazilian-flavored “Estate” was a showcase for the soprano sax work of Mike Reifenberg. Sergeant Reifenberg has a full, liquid sound used with dramatic effect on the lovely melody. He also has chops to spare and brought them to bear during his improvisation.
Snappy brushwork from drummer Bob Jones propelled Abene’s arrangement of Karolina Strassmeyer’s “The Sweeper,” Eric Ordway’s trombone solo shifted the piece into overdrive. Ordway gets around on the unwieldy horn in the virtuosic manner of the late Frank Rosolino, which ain’t chopped liver. Another strong solo from Derrick James rounded out the performance.
The Jazz Knights don’t have a weak link. According to the information on their CD “Commissions 2006”, they do some traveling around the northeast, bringing free concerts to the public. If they show up in your neighborhood, you won’t be disappointed if you seek them out.
Master of ceremonies Dick Golden‘s warm presentation included portions of interviews Willis Conover did over the years on VOA with Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. As Ellington made his recorded exit with some typically charming remarks about Willis, the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra under David Baker began its portion of the show with “Take the A Train,” appropriate for the occasion but in a perfunctory performance. Baker’s own “Cotton Club Revisited” followed, then a Bob Mintzer arrangement of Herbie Hancock’s “Dolphin Dance”. The band didn’t strike sparks until it played Sonny Rollins’ “Doxy.” Trumpeter Kenny Rittenhouse soloed with funk and humor, producing smiles on band members’ faces and enthusiasm from the audience. The trumpeter seemed to inspire tenorman Tedd Baker and pianist Tony Nalker to some enjoyable solos.
But then it was back to re-creating jazz history with Frank Foster’s “Shiny Stockings”. Nice, but lacking in pizzazz. Technically, the band runs down the historical charts with authentic style. The members can clearly play their instruments, but when the night is over what have you got? As you might be able to discern from these remarks, I’m not a fan of jazz repertory bands. I’d much rather hear a bad-but-enthusiastic original than the most competent copy. And the very name of this band – the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra – seems like pretty heavy baggage to lug around.
I don’t know where Willis would come down in this debate, but throughout his long and distinguished career he seems to have emphasized the originals, the real thing,. Full disclosure: I am not an unbiased observer. I am a 14-year employee at the Voice of America, the senior news broadcaster in the English language division, a fan of the man and his marvelous impact on the world beyond our shores. He remains the single most important broadcaster in the 65 years VOA has been on the air.
Saturday night’s concert is a small down payment on what America owes Willis. I’m glad to report that Harry Schnipper promised there will be a 2nd annual Willis Conover Memorial Concert next April. As we used to say in radio, stay tuned.
John Birchard

To read a Rifftides posting about Conover, go here. You may search the archive (link in the right-hand column) with the keyword “Conover” and find several additional items.

A Rifftides reader chided me for not writing more often about cycling. My thought is that anyone’s cycling experiences are intensely interesting to himself and that everyone he tells about them will be bored.
However, since I have a new road bike, I don’t mind telling you that I took it out for a ride before supper. It made little sense to ride in a high wind, but sense and road cycling frequently part company. The manufacturer’s sales blurb for the bike claims:

This great roadster boasts Mavic’s Ksyrium Equipe wheels, too, which cheat the wind for free speed and are built to last.

I could have used a little more of Mavic’s wind cheating. I was cranking uphill against a 25-mile-an-hour west wind that became a north wind and stayed in my face when I turned at the intersection of two orchard country roads at the top of a steep hill. The hill sweeps down for half a mile to the valley floor. Fighting the gale, but with gravity on my side, I pedaled furiously down and gave a banshee whoop when, in spite of Aeolus’s interference, the speedometer registered 36 miles an hour. As I coasted to a hesitation for the four-way stop at the next intersection, a man pulled up beside me in a pickup truck and yelled with some heat, “What are you, nuts?”
I grinned. Then he shrugged and grinned, too, and we went on our ways.

Rifftides reader Bruce Tater came across a classic Warner Bros. cartoon from the Looney Tunes series. He called our attention to Three Little Bops, a perfectly preserved piece of 1950s hipness. Stan Freeburg is the narrator. Shorty Rogers did the music. Notice the stylized drawings of the nightclub audience. Don’t miss Shorty’s little sui generis muted solo near the end. Here’s the link.

Jessica Williams linked readers of her blog to the Before & After test she allowed me to give her for the current issue of Jazz Times. In the test, she reacted to recordings by ten pianists. To read some of the comments she received, go to Currents and scroll down.
Oddly, Rifftides has received no reaction to the article despite Ms. Williams’ unreserved assessments.

National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Saturday included a report by Howard Mandel on Sonny Rollins, who recently founded his own record label, Doxy. In a sound bite, Rollins asked Mandel not to identify him as a corporate executive of a record company. “Don’t do that to me man,” he laughed as he pleaded with Mandel. “No, I don’t want to screw anybody.” Then he talked about the contradiction between corporate thinking and jazz thinking.

The corporate culture is anathema to jazz. We don’t like cookie cutter, everything exactly the same way. We’re about creation, thinking things out at the moment, like life is. Life changes every minute. A different sunset every night; that’s what jazz is about.

To hear Mandel’s profile of Sonny Rollins at seventy-six, click here.

The past couple of days I have been listening to two CDs containing fresh old music and enjoying it as much as if hearing it for the first time.
LaFaro
Scott LaFaro had a rich musical life before he joined the Bill Evans Trio in 1959 and helped change the role of the bass in interactive improvisation. In 1957 when he was twenty-one, LaFaro was playing in Chicago with Pat Moran, a young pianist from Oklahoma who had studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory and been infuenced by Bud Powell and Horace Silver. During the short time LaFaro was with her trio, Moran recorded a trio album and another adding the singer Bev Kelly. They have been combined in a CD just issued by Fresh Sound. LaFaro has often been quoted about his dissatisfaction with most of his early recordings:

I don’t like to look back, because the whole point in jazz is doing it now. I don’t even like any of my records except maybe the first one I did with Pat Moran on Audio Fidelity.

We can hear why he made that exception. The strength, authority, swing and harmonic ingenuity in LaFaro’s bass lines are gripping. Moran, drummer Johnny Whited and Kelly are fine, but LaFaro–beautifully recorded and dominating the right stereo channel–demands the listener’s attention, particularly on the trio session. When Evans found LaFaro and combined him with drummer Paul Motian, he was able to put into operation the trio concept he had been hearing in his head for years. These recordings make it easy to understand how excited Evans must have been the first time he heard LaFaro.
Previn
In 1960 MGM released a feature motion picture more or less based on the Jack Kerouac novel The Subterraneans. The movie about a bunch of San Francisco beatniks was so-so, maybe not quite that good, but it had a superb Andre Previn orchestral score, Previn’s compositions for small jazz groups and wonderful playing by a bakers dozen of the best musicians of the period. Gerry Mulligan had a part as a priest who played the baritone saxophone. Art Farmer, Art Pepper and Shelly Manne played themselves, as did Previn, Red Mitchell, Dave Bailey, Russ Freeman, Bob Enevoldsen, Bill Perkins and Buddy Clark. Jack Sheldon is heard in solo with the orchestra and in a quintet with Pepper, Freeman, Mitchell and Manne.
The film has all but disappeared and is apparently impossible to find on DVD or VHS. The sound track, fortunately not only has survived but is expanded for a CD reissue that includes twice as much music as the original release. This increases the small available number of recordings Mulligan’s group made when Art Farmer was his trumpet player and adds a few tracks to the legacy of Previn’s trio with Manne and Mitchell. Previn’s main theme, “Why Are We Afraid,” made its way into the repertoires of a few musicians in the sixties. It is puzzling why so memorable a melody failed to become a standard.

There will be a concert this weekend in Washington, DC, honoring Willis Conover, the Voice of America jazz broadcaster who was one of the most effective public diplomats in US history. The nation he served did little while he was alive to recognize his contributions and since he died in 1996 has done less. Efforts to persuade President Clinton, then President Bush, to award him a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom have gone nowhere. To read a Rifftides posting about Conover, go here. You may browse the archive (link in the left-hand column) and find several items.
There are those in Washington not in the administration who know the value of what Conover accomplished. They include people at the VOA and at the Smithsonian Institution and, apparently, all of the Blues Alley Jazz Society. Here is the announcement about Saturday night’s concert.

Blues Alley Jazz Society invites you to the First Annual Willis Conover Memorial Concert, featuring the U.S. Military Academy “Jazz Knights” and the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra. Whereas H.R. 57 officially proclaimed jazz as America’s indigenous musical art form, we seek to memorialize the legacy of Willis Conover and his efforts to extend jazz music during the Cold War era through the radio waves of the Voice of America. It is our hope that you will join us in making Washington, D.C. the home of jazz music during this component of the Third Annual Big Band Jam.
The Willis Conover Memorial Concert will be held from 7:00 – 9:00 p.m. on Saturday, April 28th at the Voice of America Stage. You are asked to arrive at 6:00 p.m. with photo identification as the Voice of America building is a federal facility. Some street parking is available, and attendees are encouraged to utilize the Colonial Parking service located at 6th and C Streets, SW. Reservations are required due to security issues; visit the Big Band Jam Web site to make a reservation.

Willis Conover at the White House, 1969
Under Doug’s Picks in the right column, you will find mention of a new book about Conover.

During a 2005 trip to New York to promote Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, one of my rewarding encounters was with the longtime broadcast journalist Bill Vitka. After we talked about Desmond for CBS Radio News, Vitka mentioned that he had recently interviewed Kurt Vonnegut. He said Vonnegut told him that Desmond was his favorite musician. Back home, I arranged for Vonnegut to be sent a copy of the book. Vitka and I planned to get together with the great writer on a later visit to New York. My next New York trip was brief and hectic. I decided to set up the meeting when the three of us could have a relaxed visit. Then Vonnegut fell and suffered the brain injury that led to his death on April 11.
In the course of preparing a story about Vonnegut, Bill stayed in touch with him. Last November Vitka delivered to the author a copy of the feature profile that he developed out of their interview. He took his younger son, Sean, with him to Vonnegut’s townhouse on Manhattan’s East Side . What follows is the story of that visit. Bill sent it to me in an e-mail message. I asked his permission to share it with you.

I grieved when Vonnegut died.

His voice is still on my phone machine.

He had called several times — while I was working on an interview/feature for the Network — to make sure I got things right.
On Meeting Kurt Vonnegut (11/18/06)
When Sean and I were ushered into Kurt Vonnegut’s townhouse on New York’s East Side, what we found was a home.
His wife, Jill Krementz, had to wake him. We were expected but not at that hour (3 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon).
Vonnegut was a redwood, hair like gray broken branches. He smiles. Extends his hand. Tell us to make ourselves at home, then politely he plants himself in a soft, upholstered chair that he knows well.
He’s sizing us up, subtle to the point of being sly. I catch his eye sometimes as he drinks us in.But malice, any kind of ill will, seems so foreign to his nature as to be a distance measurable in light years. All I feel is a sensation of disarmament. My defenses stand down, willingly conquered.
Sean is quite animated. He does much, if not all, the talking for a patch. Vonnegut is curious about his schooling, asking questions and Sean answers, enjoying the attention — but more then that — he rises to meet someone who would address him as an equal. Sean is 17.
There is an out-of-time character about Vonnegut, not unlike Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five. He isn’t tethered to the 21st century or to the last, but outside of both. He speaks with a kindness, even innocence as though he hasn’t grown up.
At this moment, I can’t imagine the source of the razor wire, which I know can be found in his writing. His jokes, satire — gallows humor — doesn’t seem to fit the man.
If he comes to know us by our answers, I come to know him by his questions. Our name, Vitka, he hasn’t heard before. What nationality is it? Where did we come from? Our parents, perhaps my parents and grandparents — who were they? I oblige. He rewards us with details of his own family. There is, like us, a Catholic bloodline. He says his grandparents were so consumed by Darwin that they became free thinkers. They abandoned religion. He had asked us about belief. He was curious about the Byzantine rite on my Mother’s side. Did the priests marry? As we – Sean and I — draw closer to our past, Vonnegut draws more from his own childhood. He recalls blues musicians from the South who performed on his family’s lawn. Jazz and Blues. Joe Heller’s name comes up. He misses Joe.
Vonnegut is now 83, an age when so many that you know are gone.
His family, he said, came over before the wave that brought my family to Ellis Island. They were entrepreneurs. They had money. They were smart. They invested. They did well.
At some point I realized that he could feign sleepiness, even laziness, to disguise casualness with a purpose. He was working.
He talks about teaching. He’s been talking to Sean about the classroom for fifteen minutes or so and he mentions that John Irving was one of his students at the Iowa Workshop. What did you teach your students, about writing, I ask? He answers that it takes two. A writer is writing for a reader. (as much as a reader needs a writer.) It’s not enough to write. Someone has to read what you write (as though it would be incomplete otherwise).
He talks about reporting. One of his first jobs was just that in Chicago. He would talk to a guy on the phone, filing the story, telling him that Joe Whatzit, age 48, was arrested for disorderly conduct and drunkenness at the corner of Waverly and Blastoff. “See,” he says, “everything in the first sentence is right out there. The reader doesn’t want to find out on page 48 that Lizzie was black. He wants to know right away.” You can’t — shouldn’t — cheat the reader is the lesson. Would, to do otherwise, mean the writer is cheating his or herself?
At first I think he will smoke the Pall Mall cigarette he has pulled from the pack, drawn from beneath the sweater which I am sure he slept in, but instead he is stroking it, as though a man petting a cat. Over the course of an hour, he does this but does not light it
He talks about the golden age of radio. (I work in radio) I mention someone at the CBS Broadcast Center who had said he remembered Orson Wells and the Mercury Theater. So I picture him planted in front of a radio, a machine the size of refrigerator — listening intently and laughing. Because he likes jokes. Because, I suspect, he likes people. Because we are fools. Because we make mistakes. Because, in Vonnegut’s universe, it doesn’t matter — but it does. He doesn’t want to hurt people and he doesn’t want people hurt but the human race continues to find original, if not ingenuously cruel methods to inflict pain. And he’s looking at 17-year-old Sean as he talks about radio. I mention Fred Allen but he is addressing Sean and says “Say good night, Gracie.”

A working journalist since 1972, Bill Vitka has been a correspondent for CBS News and NBC News. To hear his 2006 Vonnegut profile, go to this archive podcast of the CBS News Weekend Roundup hosted by Dan Raviv and advance the timing slider to 33:59. Or listen to the entire hour and hear how little things have changed in the world, which might have saddened but not suprised Vonnegut.

Rifftides reader Jon Foley recommends a YouTube clip of the Dave Brubeck Quartet with the comment, “They were in a good mood that night!”
They sure were. I thought that we had linked to this performance before, but I can find no trace of it in the archive. The clip isn’t dated, but it is amost certainly from the quartet’s 25th anniversary reunion tour in 1976. The piece is “Three To Get Ready.” I have no idea what set off the merriment, but the silliness was contagious and brought out Brubeck’s inner Cecil Taylor. To join in the fun, click here.

If you are new to Blogville and wonder what those underlined words in blue are all about, you should know that they are links. When you click on a link, you are spirited away from Rifftides to another place on the internet that amplifies, explains or demonstrates the linked term. Happily for Rifftides, all you have to do is close out of the linked site to get back to home base.
Perhaps you’d like to try it. Click on this link. You will be rewarded.
(Pause)
Welcome back. That was Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five in 1927, playing “Hotter Than That.” It is a recording not discussed as often or as deeply as other Hot Fives; “West End Blues” or “Cornet Chop Suey,” as examples. The jazz scholar William R. Bauer is doing something about that. Professor Bauer is writing a book that will analyze Armstrong’s early work and pay particular attention to the astonishing cornet and vocal solos in “Hotter Than That.” The book, The Early Recordings of Louis Armstrong: The Codification of Jazz Performance Practice, will be published by Scarecrow Press in 2008.
That makes two important Armstrong books in the works. My artsjournal.com colleague Terry Teachout (see the item titled Coherence) is writing a full-scale Armstrong biography, also targeted for publication next year. If you had no reason to look forward to 2008, you now have two reasons.

From time to time, Rifftides Washington, DC correspondent John Birchard reports on musical events in the US Capital City.

NO STEREOTYPES, PLEASE
The Smithsonian Jazz Café hosted a 70th birthday celebration for guitarist Gene Bertoncini on Friday, April 20th. What words come to mind when you think of Bertoncini? Taste, quiet beauty, delicacy? All true. But it was a different Gene Bertoncini on display Friday night. The Café was packed and LOUD. The place attracts a blend of true jazz fans, tourists looking for a meal and a place to sit down after a week of schlepping through national landmarks and monuments, and folks looking for something different to do on a Friday night. The mix is not conducive to the nurturing of hothouse flowers.
One can’t be sure what he was thinking as he stepped before the chattering crowd, but what came out of Bertoncini’s guitars was surely designed to deal with the evening’s reality. We got a side of the man we hadn’t heard before. Tasteful, yes. Elegant, sure. But also strong and swinging. He turned up the amp and appeared to have fun.
Accompanied by two Washington area musicians – bassist Tommy Cecil and drummer Chuck Redd – Bertoncini scored with standards such as “I’ll Remember You”, “Gone With the Wind” and a nice medley, “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” and “It Might as Well be Spring”.
The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”, long a part of Bertoncini’s repertoire, closed the first set and showed the guitarist still willing to take risks and solve self-imposed challenges. He tried a solo version of Strayhorn’s “Lush Life”, but it drowned in a sea of babble and laughter. Not the time or the place for subtlety.
The closer for the second set was Miles Davis’s “Milestones”. Bertoncini played the hell out of it, piling chord upon chord, finding odd voicings to lead in fresh directions, conducting interplay with Cecil and Redd with head nods, eye contact and grins.
As I headed for home, I was thinking about this “different” side of a musician I had long ago pigeonholed. And, I thought, “Who’s limited here – him or me?” You don’t get to be 70 years old and perform as a professional jazz musician all these years by being a hothouse flower. You adapt, you overcome, you live to play another day.
So, hats off to the Birthday Boy – and to all who earn a living making art in difficult circumstances.

–John Birchard

The British musician Graham Collier is an astute observer and a good writer. (Rifftides recently reviewed one of his early recordings.) In the current entry on his web site, Collier comments favorably on artsjournal.com blogger Terry Teachout’s review in Commentary of Alyn Shipton’s massive A New History of Jazz. Unfortunately Teachout’s review is available on line only to Commentary subscribers. Part of it is quoted later in this posting. Collier questioned TT’s observation that “it is by no means clear that post-modern jazz is itself sufficiently coherent to be grasped as a unified phenomenon continuous with pre-1970 predecessors.”
Here’s what Graham Collier wrote in response to Teachout’s proposition:

To expect what has happened in jazz in the last 50 years to be as coherent as what happened before is to miss the wood for the trees. There was a change in jazz in the period between the mid 1950s and the mid 1960s which opened up the music in such a way that it will never be the same again, and this change made any “coherence” impossible. For me the pivotal point was Miles Davis’s 1959 album Kind of Blue, but other musicians, such as Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane, were each trying to open up the music in their own way.
The result has been the possibility of musicians developing their own way, showing influences (such as that of Ellington, Mingus and Gil Evans in my music) but realising that there is now room for unique jazz voices to develop. To invert my previous analogy, there are now lots and lots of individual trees and no wood will ever emerge.

My guess is that close listeners familiar with the first decades of jazz hear incoherence in plenty of new music after, say, 1958, the year of Ornette Coleman’s Something Else. If we need a benchmark year, ’58 is as good as any for the apparent start of a shift away from strict observance of traditional harmony and, to an extent, from melody and rhythm. (In Coleman’s case, the shift was not nearly as radical as those who professed shock or outrage over it seemed to think it was.) You could make a case that the beginnings of a shift came in 1949, when Lennie Tristano recorded “Intuition” and “Digression.” Although those free pieces did not start a movement, they forecast it. Pick a year. How about 1946? Shorty Rogers told me that to kill time between shows at the Paramount Theater in New York, members of Woody Herman’s First Herd stood in a circle in the basement playing what fifteen years later came to be called free jazz. But who knew? Rogers said, “We’d never have dreamed of doing that in public.” If we’re dealing in forestry metaphors, the Herman Herd example is a case of a tree that fell, or grew, with no one hearing it.
Abandonment of approved guidelines governing coherence has been a fact of musical life throughout history. Otherwise, we’d be listening to clubs on hollow logs. Beethoven would have done things as Mozart did, Stravinsky as Brahms did.
I wonder if Graham Collier missed a larger point that Terry Teachout was making or suggesting in his Commentary piece, which is that when one is in the midst of any area of human activity, it is impossible to put it in historical perspective. It may be helpful to read Teachout’s line about coherence in its fuller context at the end of his long review. Here are the final few paragraphs.

In recent years, many jazz musicians have looked for the answers to such questions in a famous remark made by the pianist Bill Evans and quoted in A New History:
“Jazz is not a what, it is a how. If it were a what, it would be static, never growing. The how is that the music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists in the time it is created. And anyone who makes music according to this method conveys to me an element that makes his music jazz.”
Alyn Shipton clearly understands the implications of this remark, and the catholicity with which he describes pre-1970 jazz promises an equally clear understanding of later styles. “In what follows,” he writes in his introduction, “I have attempted to examine what was being described as jazz throughout its history, and I have taken a very broad view of how jazz should now be defined.” But, despite this broad perspective, he does not succeed in integrating postmodern jazz into his narrative.
His failure to do so reinforces my own belief that it is not yet possible to write a coherent historical survey that includes post-1970 stylistic developments. Not only are we too close in time to the jazz of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s to write about it with detachment, but it is by no means clear that postmodern jazz is itself sufficiently coherent to be grasped as a unified phenomenon continuous with pre-1970 predecessors.
Still, even if the many kinds of music that we continue to call “jazz” no longer have enough in common to be discussed collectively, most listeners and critics, myself included, stubbornly persist in viewing them as parts of a whole, unified (in Bill Evans’s words) not by their “whatness” but by their “howness.” Perhaps some jazz scholar as yet unborn will be able to explain to our children why we were right to do so.

In any case, whether or not his political characterizations of market forces and of what “passes as jazz today” are accurate, Collier lays out an unavoidable truth facing all creative artists who depart from accepted norms.

The only problem for these individuals – who exist in every part of the world – is getting heard. And finding an audience among the increasingly market-led neo-conservative, re-creative and tribute-led music which passes as jazz today.

Just in case you have lost track of the famous white plastic Grafton alto saxophone that Charlie Parker played for a time, here’s a reminder. The horn, actually cream-colored and made of acrylic, was among items sold at Christie’s in London when the Chan Parker Collection was auctioned in 1994. Chan, never legally Parker’s wife, was the mother of two of his children and inherited most of his possessions when he died in March, 1955.
As part of the pre-bidding activity, alto saxophonist Peter King played the horn, with the auction tag dangling from it. Rifftides reader Don Emanuel sent this link to a video of King demonstrating the alto with his regular rhythm section of the time, pianist Steve Melling, bassist Alec Dankworth and drummer Steve Keogh. The eight-minute clip has more than curiosity value. King can play.
The city of Kansas City, the birthplace of Charlie Parker, won the bidding at $144,500. The saxophone is in the collection of the American Jazz Museum in KC.

It was the kind of success that resists analysis, but it undoubtedly involved the contrast presented by (Dave) Brubeck and (Paul) Desmond, the pianist openly touching on the pensive, the boisterous, and the bombastic, the saxophonist a self-effacing master of a coolly detached, liquid lyricism.

–Stuart Broomer, pianist and critic, Amazon.com review

The word bombastic keeps coming up, as if it were some trap I keep falling into. Damn it, when I’m bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic. Take it or leave it.

–Dave Brubeck, quoted in Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers.

Regarding the poll described in this item, a singer who requests anonymity for reasons of “career protection and seemliness” writes:

Your Jamie Cullum piece is spot-on, but it is worth noting that, unlike those many jazz singers who self-produce, Cullum is on a prominent European label (and a label with the savvy to rig polling). There are plenty of singers out there on labels who are just plain awful. I’m sure the need to attract the interest of label execs does help to filter out many of the awful singers who put out their own discs. But it certainly doesn’t ensure that there will be any baseline of quality.

The Brits, by the way, seem to have a particular taste for bad pseudo-jazz singing. Robbie Williams, anyone?

In any case, you’re absolutely right that we’re in for a fascinating stretch watching how the jazz world changes as it becomes ever easier for product to flood the rather miniscule market for the music. I too wonder what sort of new gatekeeping processes might develop, because they will have to. Otherwise the noise of all those recordings will drown out the ability to listen for anything good.

Carol Sloane has joined the ranks of bloggers, telling stories accumulated during her career as one of the best singers on earth. Her first entry has an introduction and a gripping story about the time she went to prison. I look forward to regularly reading SloaneView.I have added it to the links in Other Places in the right-hand column.

A new jazz radio station in England, theJazz, recently conducted a poll of its listeners to determine–as they put it–the “best ever jazz record.” This was the result, as reported on the BBC web site.

TOP TEN

1. Miles Davis – So What

2. Dave Brubeck – Take Five

3. Louis Armstrong – West End Blues

4. John Coltrane – A Love Supreme

5. Miles Davis – All Blues

6. John Coltrane – My Favourite Things

7. Weather Report – Birdland

8. Jamie Cullum – Twentysomething

9. Duke Ellington – Take The ‘A’ Train

10. Miles Davis – Blue In Green

If you go to the web site of theJazz and examine its list of the top 500 records, you will discover that recordings by Jamie Cullum, a young British singer and pianist, placed 29, 32, 33, 46, 53 and 54. Do listeners to theJazz hear something that puts him in a league with Davis, Brubeck, Coltrane and Ellington? Or is there just the slightest chance–shocking to suggest it, I know–that there was a bit of ballot stuffing by Jamie Cullum interests?
This sort of thing accentuates the absudity of surveys and polls that rank the popularity of art. It may encourage some of us to reevalute the wisdom of taking part in, for instance, critics polls.