Archives for February 2008

If you live in or plan to visit the Washington, DC, area, you may be interested in this communique from a Rifftides reader:

There is a fabulous exhibit titled “Jam Session: America’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World” coming up at the Meridian International Center in Washington, DC. Aside from material covered in Penny Von Eschen’s book*, there will be previously-not-publicly-shown photos on display. Here is a link to the exhibit:
Katja

*Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Harvard)

Whether sponsored by the State Department or off to see the world on their own, the Dave Brubeck Quartet practiced their share of cultural diplomacy in the 1950s and ’60s. You Tube, that never-ending source of surprises and occasional frustrations, has come up with video of the DBQ on a 1962 Australian television program. The story goes that the tape of the show was lost for more than two decades and barely saved from destruction once it was found. It includes contrived conversations that, like the host’s introductions, sound scripted. Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Gene Wright and Joe Morello appear amused by the awkward show-biz schtick. Their playing is correspondingly light-hearted.
The program includes a rarity in the Brubeck canon, a guest vocalist, Laurie Loman, who manages to lose track of the number of bars in “When You’re Smiling.” Unfazed, Desmond follows with a solo on a song he may have been playing for the first time. He works in a quote from “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” perfect for the circumstances. The program is divided into seven You Tube segments, all of which you will find on this page.
Brubeck disbanded the quartet in 1967, so he could devote his time and energy to composing long-form works. The next year he completed his oratorio The Light In The Wilderness, which he still presents when he can marshal the musical troops it requires. He gave the piece its fortieth-anniversary performance last night in Athens, Georgia. As usual, his wife is on the road with him. In The Atlanta Journal-Constituion Bo Emerson has a story about Brubeck working with an orchestra and chorus to prepare the piece.

Iola Brubeck is in the adjoining room at the Holiday Inn in Athens, working on a laptop, busy writing the history of the man she married 65 years ago. A laptop? Dave Brubeck doesn’t mess around with that kind of keyboard. Says his longtime conductor Russell Gloyd, “Dave has trouble with the pause button on his tape player.”
The tape player may outfox him, but Brubeck handles larger forces with aplomb. During a weeklong residency at the University of Georgia, which continues through Friday, he will (with Gloyd’s assistance) command a 140-voice choir, a full-sized symphony orchestra, a big band, a jazz vocal ensemble and his quartet.

To read all of Emerson’s story, go here.
Comment On The Australian Video

In 1962 I was still at school in New Zealand,and I flew up from my home
town to Auckland in a DC-3 so I could see the concert.
They must have gone to New Zealand either before or after the Australia
tour.
I still have the program somewhere!
John Pickworth

Dave Frishberg asks in one of his songs, Do You Miss New York? Yes, I do, every day. So it was a pleasure to get a small New York fix from an unexpected source, an e-mail ad from a clothing store. The tour through a favorite part of lower Manhattan made me homesick for one of my many former hometowns. To take it yourself, click here. Rifftides has no stock in or connection with Ralph Lauren Rugby, but for making me feel good Ralph gets a plug. Full disclosure: I once bought a shirt there. On sale.

Several years ago, I quit the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in frustration over the academy’s treatment of jazz. I returned my dues statement with the notation that I needed the $75 more than Celine Dione did. If anything, jazz has been shoved further down the ladder since then. The jazz categories in the awards list start at number 45, and they begin with what the academy members obviously think is the most important, “Best Contemporary Jazz Album,” often populated with oatmeal-music nominees, but — to give due credit — this year it had albums of greater substance than usual. The winner in that category was Herbie Hancock’s River:The Joni Letters, which also won the overall album-of-the-year award for all categories.
Clearly, the academy voters were paying tribute to Joni Mitchell at least as much as they were recognizing Hancock, but the outcome is good for both of them. It may even stir a bit of general interest in jazz, although I’m skeptical about that. As I pointed out in this month’s Picks, River contains some of Hancock’s and saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s best playing together, but that’s not why it won the big award. It won because the academy has a pop mentality and its members regarded River as a pop album. Good. No harm done, and maybe something will rub off on other jazz artists, but I’m not going to deprive myself of oxygen while I wait for that to happen.
The only other jazz Grammy winner Rifftides reviewed was Maria Schneider’s sublime Sky Blue. One track, “Cerulean Skies,” won the award for best instrumental composition. Go here for a lengthy appreciation of Sky Blue and Ms. Schneider.
Michael Brecker’s posthumously released Pilgrimage won as best jazz instrumental album. I did not review the CD, but following Brecker’s death in January of 2007, there were several Rifftides items about him, including this long, loving tribute by Randy Sandke.

The artsjournal.com shop foreman tells me there is a good chance that the Rifftides comment section will be repaired and back in action by the end of the week. In the meantime, please use e-mail (that’s a link) to send your comments.

While the Rifftides comment capability is being repaired, we are relying on e-mail to receive your comments. Jim Brown writes from Santa Cruz, California:

From my rather distant perspective as a Baker fan, this very real spat seems to be the result of a big corporate entity (You Tube) being intimidated by the threat of a lawsuit based on copyright of material that they don’t care a whit about. While the wonderful jazz on YouTube is a delight to jazz fans, it isn’t even a pimple on the back side of owners of that site, and the potential costs of defending a lawsuit isn’t worth the hassle as compared with the loss of advertising on what must certainly be a minority audience.
Yes, an owner of copyright would be exercising lousy business judgement about this material being on YouTube — legal purchased copies are virtually always of significantly better quality. What these copyright owners OUGHT to be pursuing is setting up (or improving) legal distribution of the material they own, for profit or otherwise. I gladly purchase every jazz video I can find of artists I enjoy, and having clips on YouTube causes me to search them out!
Another important point re: the pimple aspect of this. The costs of mastering and distributing program material of interest to an audience that is a tiny minority of the public and limited avenues for distribution can easily exceed the income received from sales. About five years ago, my partner and I released two well recorded and well produced CD’s of Carmen McRae that got 4 and 4 1/2 stars in Down Beat. The musicians and the estate were paid. For a while, the CDs were in retail outlets like Tower and Borders. While I’ve got what I consider to be a very fair relationship with my partner, my share of the profits (about $700) have yet to approach my costs in recording the material. We have the rights to a third CD which is all Carmen accompanying herself at the piano, as well as to a fine performance by Sylvia Syms. Although both are mastered and ready to press, we currently don’t have a commercially viable way to distribute them that will pay the artists and have a chance of paying our costs!
Jim Brown
I want to thank you so much for your comments on the Baker controversy. I’m a friend of Naftali/Bob Levin and of Itsartolie, who had the best jazz channel on You Tube, and who was shut down because of this. He presented musicians in the most respectful and elegant way. If you ever watched his channel, you know this, of course.
Lorraine Jones

In the following communique, I have taken the liberty of minor editing in the interests of clarity or good taste.

Removing Chet Baker Performances from U-tube….WTF. This Guy is Almost completely forgotten as far as I’ve seen except for “My Funny Valentine”. I can’t tell you the last time I saw a CD ‘Bin-Slot’ in a Music Store for Chet Baker…..Really!! And these Idiots can’t seem to realize this is FREE Advertizing…Subscribers doing this for FREAKIN’ FREEEE!!! What is this Chet Baker Foundation ? Where did they come from ?? I read that Baker died almost a Pauper and NOW he has a Foundation?????? RU kidding me??????
CopyRight My A__….and this LEVIN ‘Suit’ prolly doesn’t realize it’s 2008….NOT 1958 either. I guess anywhere there’s a potential to squeeze a few PITTANCE you’re gonna have a few **wish Types recognize that potential. They can all go to hell!…. and removing Chet Baker from You Tube is completely INDEFENSIBLE. I hate them.
Thanks,
John
Lol. You did the best you could for both clarity and good taste, but alas, liquor wins every
time.
Bob Levin

I’m curious about how you determined that Al Porcino was playing lead on the clips in question. He is sitting on the left side of the section (looking at the band) and thus not in the lead chair. I agree with you that Al is formidable — in fact I think he’s probably my all time favorite lead player from the ’50’s and ’60’s, but it appears to me that the guy next to Al is playing lead.
Jack Greenberg

For the answer, we went to a Jones-Lewis expert:

At the time, Al was the lead player. Lynn Nicholson (formerly with Maynard Ferguson) probably was playing second, Earl Gardner third, and Frank Gordon fourth (the jazz chair). All except Frank were capable of playing lead and probably did so at some point–those guys like to pass parts around the section in order to give the lead player some rest.
Al was also breaking in Earl as a lead player, and Earl went on to be the resident lead player (with T&M, and later both Mel and the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra) for many years–until recently, in fact.
Bill Kirchner
God, what a pleasure to wake up this morning and click on Thad Jones and Mel Lewis in Germany! Has there ever been a better big band drummer than Lewis? Most of my favorite big band records of the 60’s have something in common – Mel in the drum chair: Terry Gibbs’ Hollywood Dream Band and Gerald Wilson are two examples.
And I first became aware of Thad’s solo work when he was part of the Thelonious Monk Town Hall ’59 band, always going unexpected places in his cornet solos.
When Thad-n-Mel’s first LP came out (on Solid State), I dropped the needle on “Once Around” and in moments the hair was rising on the back of my neck! Talk about head-long momentum from bar one… and then Mel’s brief-but-extraordinary solo and fills at the end…perfecto.
I had the pleasure of emceeing a big band night at the New Haven (CT) Coliseum back in the 70s. The program was Stan Kenton’s band and Thad-n-Mel. Kenton was fine, but when Jones-Lewis came on, they set fire to the place. In his first solo, Jon Faddis entered from the stratosphere and took it up from there. And Billy Harper scorched the earth. I was goggle-eyed with amazement and delight. The writing, the spirit of that band were something to behold – just a buncha guys hangin’ out at an old funky night club in the Village on Monday nights. Thanks for reviving a flagging spirit.
John Birchard

I wanted to add this to the last comment posted about Sue Raney:
Joe Morello told me Paul Desmond did not like chick singers. I wonder if Sue Raney could have been an exception. Joe does enjoy her singing.
If Sue happens to read this, I’ m very eager for another newly recorded CD. And, maybe even a visit to us here in NYC.
Jerry Bogner

Back in the antediluvian era of jazz blogging (early 2005), there weren’t many of us. Terry Teachout thinks that when Rifftides debuted, it was the first jazz blog. Maybe so. At any rate, now there are jazz blogs galore. Some are promotional vehicles for musicians, record companies, magazines, talent agencies–the gamut of music business interests. Others deal with substance. Some of the substantial ones are linked under Other Places in the Rifftides right-hand column.
A new blog that shows promise was launched a few days ago by a man named Bob Levin. It is called Jazz My Two Cents Worth. I am adding an Other Places link to it. Mr. Levin’s current topic is a decision by YouTube to remove Chet Baker videos put up by a contributor known as Itsartolie. The spat involves one Chet Baker foundation in Oklahoma and another in Canada, claims of copyright violation, and competing claims of copyright ownership. Mr. Levin, hoping for a cooperative solution, is offering to be a mediator.

If the Chet Baker Foundation in Oklahoma chooses to do nothing about this, then it’s a legitimate question to ask how much they actually care about their mission. If they contact the Canadian (foundation) side of the coin to find out who has the rights to this material, and a fight ensues, we know that jazz must continue to fight jazz in order for jazz to be preserved. It’s life through the looking glass. And if both Chets (foundations) get it worked out and YouTube is unresponsive, then I’ll be happy to write a post about YouTube trying to kill jazz while allowing its many virulently racist and anti-Semitic posts to remain.
We will also know the truth if someone from Chets (foundations) tries to contact Itsartolie. I’ll be happy to help with that.

YouTube has apparently removed all of its video clips of Chet Baker playing. At least one Baker fan is uninterested in the legal fine points. To read more about all of this, go to Jazz My Two Cents Worth.

Gone From YouTube, But Not Forgotten
If you have comments on this, please send an e-mail message. The Rifftides comments section is in the shop for repairs.

When the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra flourished, one of the complaints by the guys in the band was that Jones didn’t assign himself enough solos. They loved to hear him play. Who wouldn’t? A video has just surfaced in which at a 1970s concert in Germany the band plays “Cherry Juice” and Thad takes the first solo, on flügelhorn. No wonder they liked to hear him play. The other soloists are the little known tenor saxophonist Larry Schneider and the better known pianist Harold Danko. The lead trumpeter is the formidable Al Porcino. To see and hear “Cherry Juice,” click here.
On the same occasion, the Jones-Lewis band played “My Centennial,” featuring long, satisfying solos by Pepper Adams on baritone saxophone and Mel Lewis on drums. This time, Thad sets the pace with a cowbell. Bill Kirchner, reliable chronicler of the Thad and Mel band, informs us that although the YouTube headline says 1978, the performance was in 1976. For “My Centennial,” go here. Feel free to dance.

It is a pleasure to find Poodie James mentioned with fellow artsjournal.com blogger Alex Ross’s landmark book The Rest Is Noise. Richard Kamins of the Hartford Courant managed to put my little novel and Alex’s study of twentieth century music under the same roof in his column “See! Hear!”

In a moment of enthusiasm or weakness, I agreed to give a speech. The deadline is looming, and if I don’t set aside other things and prepare, a large roomful of listeners will be hearing me read my driver’s license. Blogging will have to slow for a while. As it turns out, this isn’t a bad time for reduced activity because the artsjournal.com publishing platform is on the verge of undergoing updating that will require pauses and delays. I’ll post when possible. Please stay tuned. If the speech turns out all right, I’ll share some of it with you. If it doesn’t, you’ll never hear about it again.

Marc Myers writes.

Wonderful post on George Russell. Hal McKusick told me a great story re: where he found Russell in the mid-1950s and how he brought him back onto the scene.
“Not long afterward I walked into a drugstore in Greenwich Village. There, behind the counter working was George Russell. I asked him what he was doing there. George had written ‘Cubano Be Cubano Bop’ for Dizzy [Gillespie], which was one of the first combinations of Afro-Cuban rhythms and jazz in 1947. He also had written ‘Ezz-Thetic’ in 1951 for Lee [Konitz]. Both arrangements were huge.
“George told me he had a wife to support and that nothing was happening for him in the music business. Then he said he had hit upon something called the Lydian Theory. He asked if I wanted to hear it. I agreed, so I met him at his apartment nearby the next day.”
To read the rest of the story, go to Jazz Wax.

In 1966 on Jazz Review on WDSU-FM in New Orleans, I devoted five programs to a survey of George Russell’s music. It opened with these words:

Over the next few weeks we’re going to consider the recorded work of George Russell, not only because Russell’s music is interesting, absorbing listening, but because of his influence on the development of jazz in the sixties–an influence, I believe, more profound and widespread than is generally recognized, even by many musicians.
Russell believes jazz must develop on its own terms, from within. He believes that to borrow the concepts of classical music and force jazz into the mold of the classical tradition results in something perhaps interesting, perhaps Third Stream music, but not jazz. Faced with this conviction that jazz musicians must look to jazz for their means of growth, Russell set about creating a framework within which to work.

Then followed a discussion of Russell’s Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization, which allows the writer and the improviser to retain the scale-based nature of the folk music in which jazz has its roots, yet have the freedom of being in a number of tonalities at once. For more on that, go to Russell’s web site.
Listening to the recordings of George Russell’s small bands of the 1950s and ’60s is as stimulating now as when I first heard them. They have some of the finest early work of Bill Evans, Art Farmer, Hal McKusick and others. What a welcome surprise it is, all these years later, to see performances of some of the music Russell wrote for the group he called his Smalltet. A kinescope of the final program of The Subject Is Jazz, a series that ran on WNBC-TV in New York in 1958, has popped up on YouTube. It includes the Smalltet doing “Concerto For Billy The Kid,” the piece that first brought Bill Evans to the attention of many musicians and listeners. Russell also appears, chatting with host Gilbert Seldes about his approach to music. The musicians include Evans, Farmer, Doc Severinsen, Gene Quill, Tony Scott, Barry Galbraith and Jimmy Cleveland. To see the entire program, go here. “Concerto For Billy The Kid” comes up about six minutes into the show.
The RCA album The George Russell Smalltet Jazz Workshop was reissued on CD in the late 1980s. It has gone out of print, but a few copies are still available for a small fortune. Now in his mid-eighties, Russell retired from teaching at the New England Conservatory four years ago. He continues to compose. This article by Ed Hazell brings us nearly up to date.

Next door — that is, in the right-hand column — you will find recommended new listening, viewing and reading under the heading Doug’s Picks. Your comments are always welcome. For now, please use the e-mail address, also in the right-hand column, under Contact.