Archives for 2007

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Whitney Balliett
Writing about jazz generally takes one of two paths, analysis or appreciation. Whitney Balliett was not a musicologist, but one of the field’s most gifted appreciators. His descriptions of what he heard, saw and felt in music are among the best twentieth century English prose in any field. Consider this passage about Thelonious Monk.

His improvisations were attempts to disguise his love of melody. He clothed whatever he played with spindly runs, flatted notes, flatted chords, repeated single notes, yawning silences, and zigzag rhythms. Sometimes he pounded the keyboard with his right elbow. His style protected him not only from his love of melody but from his love of the older pianists he grew out of — Duke Ellington and the stride pianists. All peered out from inside his solos, but he let them escape only as parody.

Musicians and academic analysts often found more poetry than accuracy in some of Balliett’s lyrical descriptions of performances and called him to account for evaluations like his contention that Max Roach didn’t swing. But it was easy to forgive him anything when he created sentences like these from an account of Pee Wee Russell’s clarinet playing.

By this time, his first chorus is over, and one has the impression of having just passed through a crowd of jostling, whispering people.

In his final chorus, he moves snakily up toward the middle register with a series of tissue-paper notes and placid rests, adopting a legato attack that allows the listener to move back from the edge of his seat.

Balliett’s skill at describing music was matched by his ability to capture the those who make it, as in this passage about Earl Hines at the piano.

Hines–tall and quick-moving, with a square, noble face–is a hypnotic performer. His almost steady smile is an unconscious, transparent mask. When he is most affected, the smile freezes–indeed, his whole face clenches. Then the smile falters, revealing a desolate, piercing expression, which melts into another smile. He tosses his head back and opens his mouth, hunches over, sways from side to side, and rumbling to himself, clenches his face again, tears of sweat pouring down his face. His face and his manner are his music–the sort of perfect, non-showman showmanship that stops the heart.

Balliett was not enamored of the avant garde of the sixties, writing that “It depends not on mere emotion but on an armored passion.” Nonetheless, he went to hear its leading figures and gave it a balanced assessment.

At its worst, then, the new thing is long-winded, dull, and almost physically abrasive. At its best–in the hands of Ornette Coleman or (Cecil) Taylor–it howls through the mind and heart, filling them with an honest ferocity that is new in jazz and perhaps in any music.

Balliett was the jazz critic of The New Yorker for forty years under its brilliant editor William Shawn. The magazine’s new owners forced Shawn out in 1987. As the editorial leadership went through changes, Balliett was downgraded, finally reduced to doing short profiles. Not long after he was relegated to a quickie sketch of Barbra Streisand, he disappeared from The New Yorker altogether, one of the magazine’s greatest assets flung away. In his last decade, he wrote occasional articles for other magazines and a few memorable pieces for The New York Review of Books.
Most of Balliett’s work for The New Yorker was anthologized in books. Two of the most recent are American Musicians II: Seventy-one Portraits in Jazz and Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2001.
After having read him all of my adult life, I finally met Balliett in 1997, prepared to tell him what his work had meant to me. He derailed me with kind words about something I had written. I managed to get back on track with praise that embarassed him. We had occasional encounters when I was in New York. After our last conversation, I had no doubt that The New Yorker’s rejection had done serious damage to his spirit.
Yesterday, I learned with sadness that Whitney Balliett was ill. Today, he died. He was eighty years old. I shall miss him.

The second half of a remarkable concert I told you about last October is going to hit the airwaves and cyberspace this weekend. Here is the announcement from Jim Wilke:

Jazz meets classical music in Part 2 of a concert by The Bill Mays Trio and members of Finisterra on Jazz Northwest on Sunday February 4 at 1 pm Pacific time, 4 pm Eastern time, on KPLU. The New York based jazz trio is joined by members of a Seattle chamber group in music by Ravel, Bach & Bird as well as original music by Bill Mays and Matt Wilson. Narrator Doug Ramsey joins the group on two selections, one including the poems of Carl Sandburg. The concert was recorded last Fall at The Seasons in Yakima. Jazz Northwest is produced by Jim Wilke exclusively for broadcast on 88.5, KPLU and kplu.org

A rehearsal with the Mays trio and Finisterra. I am
lurking behind Mays at the piano. On seeing the photograph,
Matt Wilson sent a message: “Man, do I have a gorgeous left
leg or what???”
You can hear the program at 88.5 fm in the Seattle area, or in KPLU’s streaming audio on your computer.

The Rifftides staff is awash in deadline assignments that yield even more than this blog pays, so we’re bound to keep at them. When the waters subside, my plan is to begin surveying some of the CDs that have come in on the tide recently (is this aquarian metaphor getting out hand?). For now, please roam the archives (see the right-hand column) for items of interest that you may have missed.
Oh, yes; the headline up there is “Kenny Barron.” He is on my mind because I’m going to introduce him this weekend in his solo concert on the nine-foot Steinway at The Seasons. For an idea why I am anticipating the prospect of hearing Kenny live after too long a dry spell, check out this video clip of his solo on “I Can’t Get Started.” The band is the Stan Getz quartet with Barron, bassist Rufus Reid and drummer Victor Lewis in Vienna, probably in 1989. Getz smiles (!) and prompts Barron to take two bows. No wonder. The video quality is blurry. The sound is not. You’ll be glad.

Mark Stryker, the jazz columnist of the Detroit Free Press, read the Clifford Brown posting and wrote:

Given Soupy’s Detroit connections, I once wrote a story about Soupy and the Clifford tape not long after it first surfaced in 1996. There’s no link but I’ve copied some details below, as well as some of Soupy’s other memories.

Comedian Soupy Sales, a television pioneer, began rooting around his Beverly Hills garage in 1994 at the request of a documentary producer at the A&E network. Eventually, he exhumed a film canister containing a handful of episodes of “Soupy’s On,” his five-day-a-week, late-night variety show, which aired live from 1953 through ’59 on WXYZ-TV (Channel 7) in Detroit.There, nestled among the pie-in-the-face comedian’s collection of goofy characters like Wyatt Burp and Ernest Hemingbone and Charles Vichysoisse, was five minutes of priceless jazz history — the only surviving film of Clifford Brown, one of the greatest trumpeters in jazz.

The film features Brown — or “Brownie” as he was known to friends and fans — roaring through the Eubie Blake ballad “Memories of You” and George Gershwin’s “Lady Be Good” in early 1956, just months before he was killed in an auto accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike at the age of 25. Brown segues between the two tunes without a break, and the segment concludes with a brief interview with Sales. “When we’d come into Detroit, we’d play the Rouge Lounge at that time, but we’d always do maybe five minutes or so to promote the gig on Soupy’s show,” says drummer Max Roach, who, with Brown, led an influential quintet from 1954-56 and also played on Charlie Parker’s seminal bebop records in the ’40s.”In this particular instance, Clifford just ran down and did it with the rhythm section that was on Soupy’s show. But it’s an unusual tape in that all you see is Clifford from different angles. You can see the way Clifford’s chops and embouchure are and the way he used his right hand; it’s a fabulous study in the way Clifford dealt with the the trumpet. It’s just unbelievable.”

As word of Sales’ Indiana Jones-like discovery spreads through the jazz community — and videotape copies of the Brown film are traded like talismans — speculation has become rampant among musicians and fans: What other treasures lie buried in Soupy’s archives? The answer, tragically, is almost nothing, even though Soupy’s On featured the most remarkable collection of jazz talent in television before or since.A short list of the jazz giants who performed on the program includes: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Chet Baker, Coleman Hawkins, Gerry Mulligan, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, Lee Konitz, Illinois Jacquet, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines and Thelonious Monk. Miles Davis, who lived in Detroit for five months in 1953-54, was a regular, as were Detroit-bred stars such as Pepper Adams, Tommy Flanagan and Yusef Lateef. But these were the days before videotape, and unless a program was shot on film or saved via a kinescope — a film of the TV screen — it simply vanished. That was the fate of “Soupy’s On,” except for a few episodes that Sales had a friend film in order to document his comedy characters. It’s serendipity that Brown happened to be on a program that survived. “Don’t forget, you’re talking about 1955, and nobody ever thought about taping stuff like that in those days,” says Sales, 70, speaking from a hotel in Huntington, W.Va., where he was performing.

Other than Brown, the only jazz musicians captured on Sales’ private films are pianists Eddie Heywood Jr. and Erroll Garner; Heywood is a minor figure, and film of Garner is plentiful. Even the shows near the end that were actually videotaped were all erased in the ’60s by the station in order to recycle tape.

Sales was the biggest TV star in Detroit in the ’50s, making a reported $100,000 a year by 1958. His noontime show for kids, “12 O’Clock Comics,” was so highly rated that he replaced “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” on the ABC network for eight weeks during the summer of 1955.”Soupy’s On” ran from 11 to 11:15 p.m. in the early days, growing eventually to a full 30 minutes. Each show featured sketch comedy, talk and a healthy dose of jazz. The show’s theme song was Charlie Parker’s bebop anthem “Yardbird Suite.”Detroit’s thriving club scene ensured a steady stream of top jazz performers, who Sales says were paid scale — $25 — to appear on the show. There was never any rehearsal. A soloist would choose a standard and a key that everyone was comfortable with and just play, says Jack Brokensha, who played drums and vibes with the Australian Jazz Quintet in the mid-‘ 50s and left the road to become a staff musician at WXYZ during the final year of “Soupy’s On.””It was live TV, and you only got two or three minutes per tune. And I remember one night Thelonious Monk played ‘Round Midnight’ and you couldn’t stop him, and we had to roll the credits over him,” says Brokensha of Bloomfield Hills.

Though not a musician, Sales was an aficionado who hung out in clubs and knew jazz like an insider. The show’s original producer and director, Peter Strand, remembers that Sales’ knowledge of the music led to the kind of incisive interviews you never see today.”It was not idle chat. Soupy knew why they wrote what they wrote, so they opened up and could be themselves,” says Strand, now of Glenview, Ill.Sales says he knew at the time that the nightly parade of jazz stars was special. “That always occurs to people who star in their own shows . . . and it’s only afterwards that everybody else says, ‘We should’ve saved that.’

Soupy Sales remembers a few of the jazz greats who appeared on “Soupy’s On.

“Ella Fitzgerald, vocalist: “Ella was wonderful. She was just the sweetest lady who ever lived. She was like sugarcoated; you just wanted to hug and kiss her. Anything you wanted she did.
“Duke Ellington, bandleader: “With Duke, you were in the presence of greatness, you know. He sat down and played “Satin Doll” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.”

Chet Baker, trumpet: “There you’re looking at a potential big movie star. He was like another James Dean had he kept himself straight. He had such a beautiful face, and he was really a nice guy, a great personality, and he could sing. It was a shame to watch a man destroy himself in front of your very eyes.”

Billie Holiday, vocalist: “Some people had a concern when we had her on. They said, ‘You gonna let that junkie on?’ And I said: ‘Listen, I have her on ’cause she’s a great singer. I don’t care what she does in her private life.’ She came on and sung her ass off. . . . She sang ‘Fine and Mellow’ and ‘Lover Man.’ I’ll never forget that.”

Stan Getz, tenor sax: “He was so whacked out. He said, ‘Just let me know when you want me to go up there.’ And he’d play, and we could not get his attention ’cause he played with his eyes closed. He got through and said, ‘How was it?’ And I said, ‘We went off the air five minutes ago.’ “

Milt Jackson, vibes: “He once was doing the show, and he pulled out a glasses case, and a joint fell on the floor, and I stepped on it. Afterwards, I said, ‘You look underneath my shoe, you’ll see something you dropped.’ He said, ‘Oh, thank you so very much.’

Thanks for keeping the blog — it’s become part of my everyday routine.

Mark Stryker

For years, I have heard reports that when the great trumpeter Clfford Brown appeared on a Detroit television program hosted by the comedian Soupy Sales, his performance was recorded. A kinescope has surfaced to confirm the reports. The guest shot with Sales produced what seems to be the only film or videotape of Brown playing. A couple of untypical fluffs at the beginning of “Oh, Lady Be Good” indicate that he had no time to warm up, but once Brownie got underway, his technique, imagination, power and spacious tone were in full operation. Minimal information accompanying the YouTube clip dates the appearance as early 1956, putting it within six months of Brown’s death in a June, 1956 auto crash. What an astonishing musician he was.
A brief conversation with Sales gives us an inkling of Brown’s gentleness and warmth. Sales and his set designer must have been two of the few people in the world to refer to Brown as “Cliff.”
A fair number of performances by Bud Powell exists on video, filmed in French and Scandinavian clubs in 1959, ’62 and ’63. The DVD called Bud Powell in Europe contains most, if not all of them. During this period, the seminal bebop pianist was enjoying relatively good health and stability following years of mental disequilibrium. As I wrote in the essay that accompanied a Powell CD,

…through the 1940s and much of the early ’50s, he performed at a level of energy and inspiration no other pianist could match. Occasionally through the years until his death in 1966, the old incandescence flashed briefly. Even when the uncanny rush of his creative ideas was interrupted and the flame of his almost superhuman energy had lowered, Powell’s sound…the way he touched the piano, the way he voiced chords..was intact.

Inevitably, several pieces lifted from the Powell DVD have popped up on YouTube in various states of video and audio quality, from barely adequate to okay. Powell was in good shape, if not at his peak of genius. You will hear in “Anthropology” and, particularly, in “Get Happy,” the harmonic voicings that inspired pianists in the forties and inform chord theory in jazz to this day. And you will hear the nearly uninterrupted flow of creativity that characterized his melodic lines. He is accompanied by Kenny Clarke, the father of bebop drumming, and bassist Pierre Michelot. On “Anthropology,” tenor saxophonist Lucky Thompson joins them. It may not be Bud in his prime, but here’s the line that ended that liner note essay:

It is always instructive to study even the lesser works of the masters.

Barry Finnerty, a guitarist who worked with Michael Brecker in the Brecker Brothers band of the late 1970s, has posted a lengthy reminiscence about his friend. It includes this paragraph:

He used to take his humility to extremes sometimes… he would complain to me that he hated his own playing, was tired of all his licks, that he felt he was doing nothing but endlessly repeating himself on every solo he took. I couldn’t sympathize with him too much on that one. I’d tell him, “I should be able to repeat myself like that!” Besides, I would console him, he was the only one that could tell! There was one lick he used to play a lot that actually became kind of a private joke between us. It was a lightning-fast pentatonic scale riff in groups of 6, going up chromatically… I figured it out and started to play it in my solos, giving him a wink out of the corner of my eye, and then he would do the same to me when it was his turn. Once he came into a club where I was playing, and I spotted him in the back…and when it came time for my solo, I cranked up the distortion and looked him right in the eye as I blasted out the lick for the first thing I played! It cracked him up.

To read all of Finnerty’s essay, which includes the little-known story of Brecker’s redemption from drugs, go to his web page.

They’re asking for ludicrous, ridiculous kinds of tunes. It could be “Johnson Rag,” or “Don’t you have any Russ Morgan pieces?” or they’re always getting your tunes mixed up with someone else’s, so you get requests for “Green Eyes” or “Frenesi” or “In The Mood.” And they get some very terse replies like “No,” or “He quit the business,” or “I’ll play that when I get to the big band in the sky.” It becomes a kind of standup routine. Certainly anyone has a right to ask for anything, but I can’t for the life of me think why I have to do those tunes.

–Woody Herman, 1976, from Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers.

Please adjourn to the exhibit in the right-hand column under the sign reading Doug’s Picks for the Rifftides staff’s latest recommendations. The Louis Armstrong book is a holdover because no one on the staff has had time to read a new book. Hey, it was the holidays.

Bill Crow writes from New York:

So sorry to hear of Floyd’s passing. When I returned to the Seattle area after 3 years in the Army, I met Floyd and Quincy and Gerald Brashear and Buddy Catlett and Kenny Kimball and Ray Charles. We played a lot together in the music annex of the University of Washington. I was a valve trombonist and Buddy Catlett was a good alto player. Neither of us had any idea of playing the bass at that time.
I loved Floyd’s playing and his sweet nature. He could have made a national name for himself. Certainly Quincy would have seen to that. But he preferred Seattle and his life there. RIP sweet Floyd.

Jim Wilke of Jazz After Hours also produces and hosts Jazz Northwest on KPLU, a Seattle-Tacoma radio station. Next Sunday, December 28, at 1 pm Pacific time, 4 pm Eastern, he will devote Jazz Northwest to memories of Floyd Standifer and to Floyd’s music. KPLU is at 88.5 on the FM dial. Or go here for streaming internet audio. The hour will include comments from musicians who worked closely with Standifer, among them Jay Thomas, Clarence Acox, Bill Anschell, Butch Nordall and Michael Brockman. The program will be available as a podcast at kplu.org following the broadcast.

From Seattle comes news that Floyd Standifer died Monday night. The trumpeter, saxophonist and vocalist went into the hospital in late December for treatment of a shoulder problem. Doctors discovered that his shoulder pain came from cancer that had spread to his lungs and liver, and that his circulation was defective. Two weeks following a leg amputation, his heart gave out. He was seventy-eight.

Standifer spent most of his career in the Pacific Northwest, but musicians everywhere–particularly trumpet players–knew of him. His Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra colleague and former trumpet student Jay Thomas said today, “Floyd was always, as far back as I can remember, Seattle’s pride and joy. As a lyrical trumpeter, on a good night he had few peers.”
In a December Rifftides piece about a recent Standifer concert, I mentioned his tour of duty in the trumpet section of the great Quincy Jones band of the late 1950s and early ’60s.

On the Quincy Jones DVD in the new Jazz Icons series, Standifer solos in the trumpet section with Clark Terry, Benny Bailey and Lennie Johnson. When Jones formed the band, he hired Floyd along with two more of Quincy’s Seattle pals, bassist Buddy Catlett and pianist Patti Bown.

After the premature end of the Jones band, Standifer returned to his place as a mainstay of Seattle’s music establishment, playing trumpet, flugelhorn and tenor saxophone, and singing. Thomas recalls the late saxophonist Freddie Greenwell–another Seattle musician respected in national jazz circles–saying that he considered Standifer one of the best singers in the country.

In that December piece, I alluded to the Northwest Jazz Workshop, a sort of musicians co-op to which Floyd and I belonged in the mid-1950s. I was eighteen, struggling to become a jazz player. In a rehearsal band that mixed professionals with strivers like me, I found myself seated in the trumpet section next to Floyd. My previous big band experience involved Sousa marches. Confronted with the third trumpet part in an arrangement of Shorty Rogers’ “Elaine’s Lullaby,” I was terrified. It contained sixteen bars of chord symbols and otherwise empty space–a solo for the third trumpet. I looked at the old man next to me. He was twenty-four, ancient to someone my age. Floyd saw the look in my eyes, put his hand on my knee and said, “Don’t think about it, just play.” When it came time to cross that sixteen-bar Mojave Desert, I just played. At the end of the run-through, Floyd gave me a big smile. I have no idea what was in the solo, whether it was adequate or a disaster, but I will never forget that smile. And it is most unlikely that I will forget Floyd.

For a summary of Floyd Standifer’s life and career, read this 2002 article by Jessica Davis in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

A little research discloses that the man who did that brilliant dual-personality lip-synch performance to Charlie Parker’s and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Leap Frog” is named Jeremiah McDonald. He has other clips on YouTube, none of them based in jazz. Still, jazz listeners who dig Spike Jones (there are more of them than you might think) will get a nostalgic charge from McDonald’s treatment of this classic by Doodles Weaver, the Jones band’s all-purpose nut.
For more about Jeremiah McDonald, aka The Reverend Cornelius Blow, go here.

After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that’s how I ended up just being a saxophone player. –Ornette Coleman
I am an improviser…I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it all, it is all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised. –Joe Zawinul

George Cables played a concert at The Seasons performance hall the other night. It was the kind of evening his listeners have come to expect, flowing with the inventiveness, technical skill and joy that Cables has demonstrated in a four-decade career with Art Pepper, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard and Art Blakey–a few names from the long list of his colleagues. Cables, bassist Chuck Deardorf and drummer Don Kinney gave two stimulating trio sets in the acoustically blessed former sanctuary of The Seasons.

Not long after intermission, Cables glided into Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” without accompaniment. Alternating between strict tempo and the rhythmic give-and-take of rubato, he began erecting a monument. Now bringing all of his formidable technique into play, now easing the dynamics, he never abandoned Monk’s imperishable melody altogether. He surrounded it with lightning flashes, parted the clouds to flood the themes with sunlight, swooped and soared above, below and around the tune. Symphonic, operatic and funky, he brought in Monk dissonances, roistering Fats Waller cadences, supersonic Art Tatum runs and a touch or two of Cecil Taylor delirium. He went on building, gathering intensity for five minutes, six minutes, seven. It may have been longer; the distraction of looking at a watch was out of the question. Deardorf and Kinney were mesmerized along with the audience. When Cables eased out of his rapture into the earth-bound hominess of “Blue Monk” and nodded them in, it took a momentary effort of will for the sidemen to join him aboard the blues train.
Cables has recorded a similar approach to “‘Round Midnight” in the CD called A Letter to Dexter. It is a fine version. It is not the equal of what he did last Saturday night at The Seasons, when he created that rarest of musical experiences, a concert performance that remains in the mind, whole and alive.