Archives for 2007

Rifftides reader Scott Mortensen has created two web sites worth investigating. One is dedicated to the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, a major figure in jazz since the 1960s. The site includes a discography, photos, a substantial biography containing links to information about Hutcherson’s recordings, and suggestions of additional resources for scholars and listeners.
Among the things Mortensen writes about Hutcherson are these:

Hutcherson’s work remains entirely compelling. He brings something special every time he plays. In recent years, it’s especially noticeable on his recordings as a sideman. If he doesn’t play on a particular track, you miss him. When he does play, everyone sounds better.
Hutcherson is not especially well-known for his composing skills, but I think he’s a terrific and terrifically-underrated jazz composer. At some point, another jazz musician should do a tribute CD and record nothing but Bobby’s compositions. I think it would be wonderful, and it would show the breadth and depth of Hutcherson’s composing abilities.

Mortensen’s Hutcherson site is not a scholarly endeavor devised to please academics and researchers. It is a fan’s appreciation of a musician who has certainly not fallen through the cracks but who deserves more attention than he gets.
Before you move on to the next section, take a few minutes to watch Hutcherson in tandem with his hero and greatest influence, Milt Jackson, not long before Jackson died.
You may have heard the recording of Bill Evans at the Montreux Jazz Festival in which, just as he begins playing, bells in the village chime polytonaly against the chords he is using. He says, “Ah, Charles Ives.” Jazz musicians have known and loved Ives for generations. Mortensen’s Ives web site contains a page called “Essays and Ruminations,” in which he hits on one of the basic reasons so many jazz players and listeners are drawn to Ives:

Ives’ music is not tidy. It can’t be contained by normal musical forms because these structures do not accurately represent the way that Ives perceives the world. (This is one of the reasons why Ives constantly tinkers with traditional forms: adding or removing movements from the four-movement symphony; creating “sets” from pieces that defy any conventional structure; recycling music again and again from a one work to another.) Ives’s music acknowledges that our perceptions of the world–and the understanding that we construct from those perceptions–are in a constant state of flux. It is never-ending process. Therefore, from Ives’ point of view, creating a work of art and presenting it as complete is disingenuous.

Mortensen’s Ives site includes a survey of the composer’s works, recordings of them, essays by Ives, books about him, quotes, FAQs and a news section. It is not a substitute for the site of the Charles Ives Society, but works hand-in-hand with it.
This sentence from the conclusion of the biography could use updating:

One thing is certain: nearly 50 years after his death, Ives’ influence is greater now than it has ever been.

Make that “more than 50 years after his death.” Ives died in 1954. Time flies when you’re having fun with Ives.

No blogging for the next few days. I’ll be visiting the town that is the model, more or less, for the one in Poodie James. If I’m not jailed or assaulted, I’ll be back in action on Monday.

Willie Tee (Wilson Turbinton) died yesterday in New Orleans, the same day on which his close friend Joe Zawinul died in Vienna, both of cancer. See the next item for a remembrance and a picture of them together. Willie’s death comes barely a month after that of his brother Earl, another member of the Turbinton-Zawinul-Adderley mutual admiration society. To read the New Orleans Times-Picayune story about Willie, go here.

In the endless parade of departing musicians, now we’ve lost Joe Zawinul, dead of skin cancer at seventy-five. The obituaries are stressing his fusion work with Miles Davis on In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew, his partnership with Wayne Shorter in Weather Report and all the hits they had; “Birdland,” the Heavy Weather album and the Grammy for the one called 8:30. As Herbie Hancock is being quoted everywhere, Zawinul was a force. Whatever world music is, Joe took it into the realm of artistry.

Joe Zawinul
Before he was a force, Zawinul was a nifty bebop piano player who came to New York from Austria in the late 1950s and captivated Maynard Ferguson and Dinah Washington and Ben Webster and Cannonball Adderley. He was with Cannonball from 1961 to 1970. After his “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” gave Cannon an enormous hit in 1966, the Adderley band was in New Orleans frequently, usually to perform, sometimes just to hang out with friends like Wilson Turbinton (Willie Tee) and his brother Earl and, always, to eat. During most visits, the band — or significant components of it–were guests on a radio program I did. Once, Joe came into the studio with Willie Tee. They played and laughed together at the Steinway, a pianist from uptown New Orleans and one from Vienna exchanging ideas and putting each other on in that fine southern way known as signifying.

Willie Tee and Joe Zawinul at WDSU, New Orleans, ca 1967
After the taping or after the Adderleys’ gig, we would all go in search of good things to eat, never a challenge in the French Quarter. Here’s a memory from the Cannonball chapter in Jazz Matters: Reflection on the Music and Some of its Makers.

One of his favorite restaurants in New Orleans was Vaucresson, a little place on Bourbon Street that specialized in a kind of Creole soul food, nicely spiced and very rich. It was just down the street from Al Hirt’s, in those days a jazz club with a name policy, where the quintet played at least twice a year.
After the gig, or sometimes between sets, Cannon and the band would install themselves at the largest table in the place, inevitably to be joined by fans, friends, family and assorted French Quarter regulars. The enduring image is of Cannonball surrounded by people, simultaneously laughing, expounding, questioning and consuming, inevitably taking time for just one more dish.
“Yes, Mama,” he’d tell the proprietress, “I think there’s room for the bread pudding.”

On one of those occasions, with Joe grinning and shaking his head, Cannon told the story of “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.” They made the recording in a studio full of guests who were fed and served drinks as if the setting were a club. The issued take was not the one he wanted. He thought the band was better on an earlier version, the one that had a Zawinul solo so hot, so funky, that a woman in the audience yelled, “Play it, you little white darlin’.” A Capitol Records executive, nervous in the racial climate of the sixties, rejected the take.
Maybe they’ll put it on the memorial album. Joe would like that

Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill gave the world The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) in 1928. When it was running in Berlin, the artist George Grosz said, “You would hear those songs wherever you went in the evening.” Long before Louis Armstrong made “Mack the Knife” a universal hit, theater critics were calling The Threepenny Opera the greatest musical of all time. Walter Kerr wrote, “I think the most wonderfully insulting music I have ever come across was composed by the late Kurt Weill for Bert Brecht’s Threepenny Opera.” The producer Harold Prince said, “Many have tried to imitate it. No one has succeeded.”
From the Threepenny Opera web site:

In their opera “by and for beggars,” composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950) and playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) transformed saccharine, old-fashioned opera and operetta forms, incorporating a sharp political perspective and the sound of 1920s Berlin dance bands and cabaret. Weill’s acid harmonies and Brecht’s biting texts created a revolutionary new musical theater that inspired such subsequent hits as Cabaret, Chicago, and Urinetown. The show’s opening number, “Mack the Knife,” became one of the top popular songs of the century.
The opening night audience at Berlin’s Theater am Schiffbauerdamm didn’t quite know what to expect when the curtain rose on The Threepenny Opera on August 31, 1928, but after the first few musical numbers they began to cheer and call for encores. The show was a brilliant hit, and Threepenny-fever spread throughout Europe, generating forty-six stage productions of the work in the first year after the Berlin premiere. In 1931, a film version directed by G.W. Pabst entitled Die 3-Groschenoper opened, making an international star of Weill’s wife, Lotte Lenya, who repeated her portrayal of Jenny Diver from the show’s first production.

Dozens of jazz artists have recorded “Mack the Knife.” Gil Evans gave us memorable impressions of “Bilbao Song” and “Barbara Song.” Once in a great while someone with esoteric tastes tackles “Pirate Jenny” or “Love Song.” Still, for all its riches and potential for interpretation, until recently there have been, to my knowledge, only two entire jazz albums of music from the score of this twentieth century milestone, both on long-playing vinyl. One was by the Australian Jazz Quartet (Bethlehem Records, 1958, long out of print). The other was by pianist André Previn and trombonist J.J. Johnson with bassist Red Mitchell and drummer Frank Capp, recorded for Columbia in 1960. Despite the material and the big names, this superb album, at once lively and mordant, has never been reissued on CD. If you’re lucky, you might snag a copy of the LP on e-bay or elsewhere on the internet.
The relatively new (2005) album of music from The Threepenny Opera came to my attention by chance when the Chicago pianist Jeremy Kahn sent Rifftides a comment about something else entirely. I looked him up on the web, found his site, and discovered that he and his quartet had a CD called Most Of a Nickel: Music From The Threepenny Opera. I listened to the samples and arranged to get a copy. I have been listening to it for days. Kahn and his colleagues find both the acid bitterness and the subtle beauty of Weill’s music and, by extension, the mocking parody of Brecht’s story. Even if you knew nothing about the background of the music, I think you would be captured by the bittersweet tango of “Ballad of Immoral Earnings;” the understated longing of Jim Gailloreto’s tenor saxophone in “Love Song;” the delicacy of his flute in “Solomon Song;” “Cannon Song’s” intimations of joy, with hints of militarism from Eric Montzka’ drums; the forthrightness of “Barbara Song.” There are three short versions of “Mack The Knife,” one devoted to Kahn’s piano, its voicings rich with minor key irony; one for Gilloreto, who conjures an unaccompanied solo fantasy on the song’s primary phrase without once resorting to quoting Sonny Rollins; one for Larry Kohut’s bass, also unaccompanied.
Some CDs are too long. This one is too short. It has eleven of the twenty-four pieces in the Weill score. Kahn’s quartet leaves you wanting more from The Threepenny Opera. A second volume would be welcome.

Sonny Rollins is seventy-seven years and three days old. I thought of acknowledging his birthday on Friday, but Rifftides traffic is down on weekends and I wanted to point more of you to his web site for previously unissued recordings of Rollins’s work from 1956 with the Max Roach-Clifford Brown Quintet. The site will be playing a different piece each day now through September 18. Today’s recording is identified as “Lover,” and it is, harmonically, but the riffish melody is George Handy’s “Diggin’ Diz,” first recorded by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie ten years earlier. Rollins is superb, but Brown–less than a month before he died in a car crash–is astounding. The piano solo by the underappreciated Richie Powell, who also died in the accident, is worth your attention.
Coming up on the Rollins site:
September 11: I’ll Remember April
September 12: Jordu
September 13: Nice Work If You Can Get It
September 14: Get Happy
September 15: Take the ‘A’ Train
September 16: Darn That Dream
September 17: What’s New
September 18: Lover Man
To hear “Diggin’ Diz,” click here and follow the easy instructions.
The Rollins site also offers a link to this piece of video from 1968, with Sonny, pianist Kenny Drew, bassist Niels Henning Orsted-Pedersen and drummer Tootie Heath. Listen to Rollins’s long opening cadenza and see if you can figure out what tune he’s anticipating. The YouTube sidebar menu offers several other Rollins clips, including three of his quartet with Jim Hall.
Happy post-birthday, Sonny.

Stumbling around the internet, I was pleased to find that Henry “Red” Allen’s World On A String is still available on CD, as well it should be. A few years after the 1957 album appeared, the young trumpeter Don Ellis called Allen, “the most avant garde trumpet player in New York.” Allen’s slurs, slippery phrasing, unconventional interval leaps and surprising stabs may have aroused fellow feeling in Ellis, but the great New Orleanian first made his mark in the 1920s, sounding essentially as he did the rest of his life. He died in 1967.
World On A String has Allen’s house band from the Metropole, plus tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, his colleague from the Fletcher Henderson band of the early thirties. The others are trombonist J.C. Higginbotham, clarinetist Buster Bailey, pianist Marty Napoleon, guitarist Everett Barksdale, Lloyd Trotman on bass and Cozy Cole on drums. All of them play at the highest level from the beginning, “Love is Just Around the Corner,” to the end, a classic “Sweet Lorraine.” Along the way are several standards, including the title tune and a blazing “‘Swonderful,” plus a blues and the signature piece “Ride, Red, Ride” with Allen vocals, always a treat. This is a basic repertoire item.
A year later, Allen led an all-star group on the immortal CBS television program The Sound of Jazz. Hawkins was aboard, along with Vic Dickenson, Rex Stewart, Pee Wee Russell, Milt Hinton, Nat Pierce, Danny Barker and Jo Jones. They performed Earl Hines’s “Rosetta,” captured in good sound and with superb camera work. You can see a substandard dub of the piece if you click here, but the entire program should be in every serious jazz collection. This DVD version claims to be the complete show, without the omissions or technical flaws of previous releases.

That’s the name of a piece Italian trumpeter and fluegelhornist Franco Ambrosetti’s quartet played on a Swiss television program in 1977. With him were pianist Hal Galper (USA), bassist Dave Holland (UK) and drummer Daniel Humair (France). Galper accurately describes the performance as “burnin’.”
To see and hear “Hot Diggety Dam!” go to Galper’s web site and scroll down to the daily motion screen. Trumpeters may be fascinated by closeups that show Ambrosetti’s embouchure. It’s off-center. It may be unorthodox, but it works for him.

It is a pleasure to announce that Libros Libertad has added a banner headline to the Poodie James page at the publisher’s web site:
Poodie James
By Doug Ramsey
LIBROS LIBERTAD’S BEST-SELLING BOOK!
Thanks to all who made that possible.

Marc Myers is doing good things on his new blog JazzWax. His most recent posting is about a listening session with fellow blogger Terry Teachout. Before that, he and Danny Bank tell the sad story of Billie Holiday’s last recording session. To read both pieces, go here.

Recent Rifftides visitors are from all sectors of the United States, including most major cities, and smaller places with wonderful names like Blooming Glenn and Avondale, both in Pennsylvania; Bloomington, Indiana; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Newton, Lower Falls, Massachusetts; and Morro Bay, Camarillo and Altadena, California — to name a few. There are also lots of Canadian Rifftides readers, from Surrey, British Columbia in the west, to La Baie, Quebec in the east.
In the past few hours, folks have also checked in from:
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Vienna, Austria
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Szcecin, Zach Odniopomorskce, Poland
Zurich, Switzerland
Milan, Italy
Reykjavk, Iceland
Barcelona, Spain
Stockholm, Sweden
Viskafors, Sweden,
Arhus, Denmark
Saint-Laurent-de-Condel, France
Saint-Hymer, Basse-Normandie, France
Belfast, Ireland
Stoke-on-Trent, England
London, England
Melbourne, Australia
Camberwell, Australia
Sydney, Australia
San Juan, Puero Rico
The Rifftides staff welcomes you all and encourages your comments by way of the comments function at the bottom of each entry or the e-mail link in the right-hand column.

Gap Mangione sent this message:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUh1SlrtEG0
http://youtube.com/watch?v=W-8CNslGOPc
I’ve never been able to listen to this second one with dry eyes; especially the final 58 seconds.
May he rest in peace…
Gap

Rifftides Washington, DC, correspondent John Birchard alerts us to a tribute concert by an international quintet of major jazz musicians who were affected by the Voice of America’s Willis Conover. If you live in the DC area, make your reservation early.

Willis Conover

The Voice of America and the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival are hosting a concert in memory of VOA jazz host Willis Conover and in observance of the 50th anniversary of Dizzy Gillespie’s first State Department-sponsored trip.
The concert is free and open to the public and will take place on Monday, September 17th at 7:30 PM in the Cohen Auditorium (at VOA). Cuban-born jazz great Paquito D’Rivera, who himself was influenced by Conover’s broadcasts heard in Cuba, will lead a quintet made up of another Cuban-born musician and three other players from former Soviet Bloc countries:
Performers: Paquito D’Rivera, Musical Director, Alto Saxophone, Clarinet (Cuba); Milcho Leviev, Piano (Bulgaria); George Mraz, Bass (Czech Republic); Valery Ponomarev, Trumpet (Russia); and Horacio Hernandez, Drums (Cuba).
Seating is limited and will be allotted on a first-come, first-served basis. Please e-mail reservations to publicaffairs@voa.gov by Sept. 13th. For details, go here.
Prior to this event at 3:00 PM, George Washington University’s Elliott School will hold a forum entitled “Duke, Dizzy and Diplomacy.” For more information, visit the Elliott School calendar.

The Rifftides archive contains several items about Conover, his importance, and the failure of the US government to posthumously award him recognition that he deserved when he was alive. For the first of those pieces, click here, then use the keyword “Conover” to browse the archive for followup comments.

News from the publisher: less than two weeks off the press, Poodie James has gone into a second printing. Many thanks to Rifftides readers who have helped to make that possible.
As an excerpt from the novel posted on Rifftides makes clear, Poodie is deaf and mostly mute. After she read that passage, Iola Brubeck sent this comment:

I enjoyed the excerpt. A number of years ago Dave played a benefit for the Theater of the Deaf in Connecticut. They described some of the sensations that you put so well in words….the feeling of the vibrations, both in their feet and in their bodies. Also, at one time, Dave shared a program with the deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who often appears as soloist with symphony orchestras. Her rhythmic sensitivity is unmatchable.

Like Poodie, Dame Evelyn feels frustration over the frequent concentration by those with full hearing on a deaf person’s deafness rather than on his qualities and abilities. Here is some of what she wrote on her web site:

I hope that the audience will be stimulated by what I have to say (through the language of music) and will therefore leave the concert hall feeling entertained. If the audience is instead only wondering how a deaf musician can play percussion then I have failed as a musician. For this reason my deafness is not mentioned in any of the information supplied by my office to the press or concert promoters. Unfortunately, my deafness makes good headlines. I have learnt from childhood that if I refuse to discuss my deafness with the media they will just make it up. The several hundred articles and reviews written about me every year add up to a total of many thousands, only a handful accurately describe my hearing impairment. More than 90% are so inaccurate that it would seem impossible that I could be a musician. This web page is designed to set the record straight and allow people to enjoy the experience of being entertained by an ever evolving musician rather than some freak or miracle of nature.
Deafness is poorly understood in general. For instance, there is a common misconception that deaf people live in a world of silence. To understand the nature of deafness, first one has to understand the nature of hearing.

To read all of Evelyn Glennie’s “Hearing Essay” and explore her site, click here.

A message from Sue Mingus, widow of Charles:
I believe it was in Rifftides that someone recently quoted one of Charles Mingus’s sons talking about his father telling him to jump off a shed and then not catching him. That was an old joke I heard about 50 years ago in Paris– not very funny– about a father teaching his son, who is up in a tree, a cynical message about not trusting anyone. I think the story got twisted in someone’s memory from tree to shed and fact to fairy tale.

Several major jazz bassists – including Oscar Pettiford, Ray Brown, Sam Jones, and Percy Heath – also played the cello. Ron Carter doubles on cello. For the most part, Carter employs it as a midget replica of his main instrument, soloing by plucking the strings, as did his predecessors. Indeed, Heath referred to his re-tuned cello as a baby bass.
Improvising while bowing the cello is another matter. Fred Katz, who became well known in the 1950s for his work with the Chico Hamilton Quintet, demonstrated that there was a place for the arco cello in improvisation despite the instrument’s challenges, which include its relative slowness. The cello’s small, fast, cousin the violin has had a role virtually from the beginning of jazz. In Roger Kellaway’s glorious Cello Quartet recordings, Ed Lustgarten was brilliant at reading and interpreting the solos Kellaway wrote for him, but he was not an improviser. After the mainstreamers pioneered the instrument, players like David Eyges, Hank Roberts, Trinstan Honsinger and Tom Cora gave the cello a role in avant garde jazz. Recently, Erik Friedlander Peggy Lee, Alisa Horn and Matthew Brubeck, among others, have further helped to move the cello toward the circle of fully-accepted jazz instruments, using all of its capabilities.
If you do an internet search for Brubeck, you’ll get a link that describes the territory he has staked out. It says, “improvising cellist Matt Brubeck’s website.” The youngest son of Dave and Iola Brubeck has a master’s degree in cello performance from Yale and has worked in a range of symphony and classical chamber settings. His recorded debut as a bowing and plucking improvising cellist came in 1991, when he was thirty, on his father’s Quiet As The Moon. His impressive performances included a duet with his dad on a theme from Dave’s mass, “To Hope: A Celebration.” He has worked with musicians as various as Tom Waits and the eclectic Oranj Symphonette, with which he plays an passionate opening cadenza on Mancini’s “Dreamsville.” Brubeck’s resume is sprinkled with mentions of duo associations. The most recent is his partnership with the Canadian pianist David Braid.
In their CD called Twotet/Duextet, the musicians play five pieces by Brubeck and three by Braid. Matt Brubeck’s facility with the instrument, bowing or plucking, seems to allow him to play whatever occurs to him. His full, deep sound takes on an edge of dramatic urgency when he improvises with the bow, as he does to great effect in “Mnemosyne’s March” and several other tracks. In “Sniffin’ Around,” he employs his cello as a baby bass a la Percy Heath, occasionally letting the strings slap wood as bassist Milt Hinton used to do.
I usually rail against debut CDs in which musicians restrict themselves to original material, not only because it gives the listener nothing familiar to relate to, but also because so often the music is weak. In Twotet/Deuxtet, the songs are light years beyond the wispy excuses for blowing that fill so many jazz CDs. Their melodies have strength, the harmonic structures have substance. Even the rhythmic offbeats that open a free piece of instant composition called “Improvisation” develop a melody. It may not be instantly hummable, but it is distinctive. A pair of ballads, Braid’s “Wash Away” and Brubeck’s “It’s Not What it Was,” have melodies that might have been written by Stephen Foster. Brubeck’s “Huevos Verdes y Jamón” has a Hispano-Caribbean lilt worthy of Sonny Rollins or Chick Corea, Braid’s “Mnemosyne’s March” Brahmsian gravity and beauty of line.
I had never heard – never heard of – Braid before Twotet/Deuxtet showed up the other day. Now, I’m compelled to catch up with his previous work, particularly his sextet made up of Canadian all-stars Terry Clarke, Mike Murley, Steve Wallace, Gene Smith and John MacLeod. Braid’s tone, touch, chord voicings and imagination make him one of the most interesting new pianists I’ve encountered in a long time. In researching him, I discovered that I’m not alone. It turns out that when Gene Lees first heard Braid, he wrote, “If Bill Evans were alive, I’d send Braid’s CD to him.”
Alisa Horn is the cellist in pianist Bill Mays’ new group The Inventions Trio. She is a protégé of trumpeter Marvin Stamm, the other member of the trio. I wrote nearly a year ago about Mays convincing classical string players that they could swing when he recruited the cellist and violinist of the Finisterra Trio to perform Bach’s “Two-part Invention #8” with an overlay of Charlie Parker’s “Ah-Leu-Cha.” Horn has been convinced, too. The conviction didn’t come easily. She is added to the duo in which for several years Mays and Stamm have been melding jazz and classical music. A classicial cellist ingrained with the notion that improvisation should be avoided at all costs because it could lead to (gasp) mistakes, she was terrified at the recording session. Here’s some of what Horn wrote in a news release that came with the advance copy of The Inventions Trio CD.

What if I play a WRONG NOTE? During the session, I almost had a breakdown worrying about a shift that I had “missed” during an improvisation. No one else in the studio even heard the mistake or noticed it at all and these are some of the most experienced and well-trained ears in the business! (I was) almost in tears, worried over this horrible imperfection. Bill and Marvin looked at me and just said, “No one is ever perfect and that isn’t what this is about. Screw it!”
Since that moment, I have a new outlook on my music and the meaning of “perfect” has changed. Now I understand that perfection is an individual’s perception of what the music is and this idea applies to both classical and jazz styles of playing.

Horn is exquisite in the trio numbers on the CD, which include Debussy’s “Girl With The Flaxen Hair and “Mays’ three-movement “Fantasy for Cello, Piano and Trumpet,” an important new work. She is impassioned in Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise,” and has a stunning introductory moment in the first movement of the “Fantasy.” Mays and Stamm, collaborators for years, have developed an empathy that verges on the mysterious. Their duo numbers on this album are among their finest work. In the trio pieces, Alisa Horn complements their magic. She does not sound like a newcomer to improvisation.
The Inventions Trio will be a part of The Seasons Fall Festival next month, along with James Moody, Miguel Zenon, David Friesen, Karrin Allyson, Matt Wilson, Martin Wind, the Finisterra Trio and the Yakima Symphony Orchestra. I look forward to hearing them in live performance.

Two of the leading pianists in modern jazz are now man and wife. Bill Charlap and Renee Rosnes were married last week. For details go to this New York Times story. The Rifftides staff offers hearty congratulations.

Announcing the publication of Poodie James the other day, I included an excerpt from the only episode in the novel in which Poodie reacts to music. To read it, go here and you will see that the music, at a dance, is “Caldonia,” played by Woody Herman’s band. After it became a hit in 1945, Herman kept the piece in his book for the rest of his life. As frequently happens to music that stays in a band’s repertoire, “Caldonia” got faster and faster as the years went by.
By 1964, “Caldonia” was jet-propelled. In this video, the music is going by so fast that no improviser could achieve profundity in his solo. Who cares. The point at this tempo is to swing and make people happy. Watch Woody as a succession of his soloists tears into the blues, and see how happy they make him. In order, you’ll see and hear the upstate New York terrors of the tenor saxophone Joe Romano and Sal Nistico, trumpeter Billy Hunt, trombonists Phil Wilson and Henry Southall, and bassist Chuck Andrus. The astounding drummer is Jake Hanna. Take a deep breath and click on this link.
When you have recovered, go here and listen to the 1945 recording of “Caldonia” by Herman’s First Herd.

Mr. JazzWax, aka Marc Myers, tracked down the venerable baritone saxophonist Danny Bank, one of the few Charlie Parker sidemen still with us, to talk about Bird. Among Bank’s anecdotes:

“One morning, sometime in 1951, I think, I took out one of the Sonatas for Woodwind by Hindemith and used it to practice. That night, after I played on two or three recording dates that day, I went to Birdland to hear Charlie play.
“As soon as he saw me come into the club, he started to pay the Hindemith Sonata I had played earlier while laughing through his mouthpiece. Bird had been listening to me through the walls! His ear was so amazing that he played what I practiced from memory when he saw me that night.

I just discovered that I had a defective link to Ethan Iverson’s Do The Math, the blog of The Bad Plus. I fixed the link. Use it to see Iverson’s tribute to the late British critic Richard Cook and read Cook’s evaluation of one of Horace Silver’s milestone recordings. I was startled to see how young Cook was. Dead at fifty. Enjoy life, folks.
The veteran Pennsylvania jazz broadcaster Russ Neff has launched a blog. Like his program, it’s called My Favorite Things. Neff’s first postings are based on archive interviews with George Shearing and Ray Brown.
Other Matters
If you’ve had nothing better to do, you may have been following every detail of the mens-room adventures of Idaho Senator Larry Craig and the apparent suicide attempt of film personality Owen Wilson. Society of Professional Journalists President Christine Tatum doesn’t mention Craig in her most recent Freedom Of The Prez posting, but this paragraph applies to his ordeal.

I completely get the public personality-or-official lecture delivered in Media Law 101. Heck, I even get the far more advanced versions gleaned over the course of my career. You cast yourself into the limelight or get yourself elected to public office, and you ask for the scrutiny. You ask for the criticism, the leering, the praise, the fawning, the constant flashbulbs, the boatloads of letters and e-mail and the stupid guy begging for an autograph while you’re in a public restroom. Once you enter that white-hot public spotlight, you can’t leave it whenever you choose.

She deals directly with the unfortunate Mr. Wilson’s being circled not only by the tabloid sharks but also by an appalling number of supposedly responsible journalists.

But journalists. What’s their responsibility when an Owen Wilson has a breakdown and asks the media (and, by extension, the general public) to allow him to heal in private? He’s no Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan or Nicole Ritchie driving under the influence on public streets. He’s not even a Britney Spears, who has an incredible knack for taking her wackiness public.
Might this be a time when we let a prominent person who apparently struggles with depression have the solace and privacy he needs? I certainly hope so.

So do I. To read all of Tatum’s posting, go here.