Archives for 2008

ROD LEVITT, in Solid Ground (RCA Victor), toots his trombone at the head of a lively seven-man band in a parade of his own compositions…The band irreverently slices “Rio Rita” into a jazzy jigsaw puzzle.–TIME, June 3, 1966

I liked his playing and his writing, and always appreciated his sunny disposition.–Bill Crow, 2007

Rifftides reader Charles Landy wrote:

 Enjoy your blog immensely. Bought 3 Rod Levitt LPs on e-bay recently and found them (especially Insight) just as rewarding as you suggested. Have some Billy Byers and some other perhaps (to many jazz fans of recent vintage) lesser known musicians like Pete Rugolo, Tom Talbert, Ralph Burns, Marty Paich, Frank Capp, Nat Pierce, Carl Fontana, Jimmy Gourley, Don Fagerquist and Bob Florence. But would appreciate it if you could devote a blog day or small series to recommending other somewhat obscure but highly enjoyable artists and arrangers like Levitt.

Much of what makes Levitt interesting, of course, is that there is no one like him. Mr. Landy’s list covers arrangers, leaders and soloists, but I take it that “like Levitt” means he is asking about medium-sized groups. Six to eleven pieces allow arrangers freedom that the conventions and sheer size of sixteen-piece bands tend to limit. Medium-sized groups have been important since the beginnings of jazz. For Charles Landy and anyone else interested, I’ll mention a few recordings from various eras and styles, with brief comments, and links to recordings where possible.

“Go ‘Long, Mule” is a logical place to start in a survey of medium-sized groups, an investigation that could lead into dozens of interesting nooks and crannies. Fletcher Henderson organized the prototype of the big bands of the swing era. He eventually had fourteen pieces, but his first recording in the fall of 1923 was with six.
Eight months passed before he expanded to ten men. They included the young avant garde players Coleman Hawkins, Don Redman and Louis Armstrong. All of them and trombonist Charlie Green solo on Redman’s arrangement of “Go ‘Long, Mule” from October, 1924. To hear it, click here. Remastering is far from perfect in the three-CD box set A Study In Frustration: The Fletcher Henderson Story, but it’s the most Henderson available under one roof.

Red Norvo’s all-star nonet date of 1935 established no arranging landmarks, but it brought together a remarkable collection of players–Norvo, Bunny Berigan, Artie Shaw, Chu Berry, Jack Jenney, Teddy Wilson, George Van Eps, Artie Bernstein and Gene Krupa. Among the four pieces from the session is the remarkable “Blues in E-flat” with its masterpiece Norvo xylophone solo and very good choruses from Wilson and Berigan. The Norvo tracks are included in this CD.

In his series of combo recordings for RCA Victor in the late 1930s and early ’40s, Lionel
Hampton never had fewer than six pieces. He frequently had ten or eleven, and the players were the finest he could attract. Harry James, Dave Matthews, Babe Russin, Jess Stacy and Ziggy Elman–Hampton’s white colleagues from the Benny Goodman band–were likely to team up in the studio with Benny Carter, Johnny Hodges, Herschel Evans, John Kirby and Billy Kyle.
 Hampton’s goal was to produce the best music possible, and he succeeded in dozens of superior examples of small band swing. In the process, like Goodman and Norvo, he pioneered in bringing black and white musicians together. All of the Hampton Victor sessions are in an indispensable new Mosaic box set.

On a scale of orderliness, recordings by Hampton’s medium-sized groups were a degree or two above jam sessions. Duke Ellington’s were another matter. They were almost always led in name by members of his orchestra but, with few exceptions, Ellington did the “writing,” even if it was last-minute studio inventions for the ensembles.
Whether the putative leader was Johnny Hodges, Barney Bigard, Cootie Williams or Rex Stewart, the small group sessions had Ellington’s creative earmarks; plenty of opportunities for the soloists in arrangements notable for Ellington’s genius at tonal organization, even in impromptu situations. A pair of two-CD boxes called The Duke’s Men contains ninety-eight recordings made from 1934 to 1939 by medium-sized Ellington units. Some of them were lightweight, aimed at the pop market, but none is less than enjoyable, and they include classics like “Clouds In My Heart,” “The Jeep Is Jumpin’,” “Dooji Wooji” and “Stompy Jones.”

The first nine tracks on Johnny Hodges: Passion Flower are by a seven-piece Ellington group from 1940 and ’41. They are essential to any reasonably serious jazz collection. The players are
Hodges, Ellington Cootie Williams, Lawrence Brown, Harry Carney, Jimmy Blanton and Sonny Greer. The pieces are triumphs of small-group Ellingtonia: “Day Dream,” “Good Queen Bess,” “That’s The Blues Old Man,” Junior Hop,” Squatty Roo,” “Passion Flower,” “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be” and “Going Out The Back Way.” I can sing along with every note of “Going Out The Back Way.” It was the theme of my first radio program, Teen Talent Time, when I was seventeen. The engineer called it Teen Torture Time. But the theme song was terrific.

In 1946, Woody Herman and his Woodchoppers recorded nine tracks that are glories of the medium-sized oeuvre (I’ve always wanted to use that word). The
Woodchoppers were a ten-piece unit from Herman’s First Herd: Herman, clarinet and alto sax; Sonny Berman and Shorty Rogers, trumpet; Bill Harris, trombone; Flip Phillips, tenor sax; Red Norvo, vibes; Jimmy Rowles, piano; Billy Bauer, guitar; Chubby Jackson, bass; Don Lamond,drums; arrangements by Ralph Burns, Rogers and Bauer. Because of the popularity of Herman’s band, the horn soloists and Norvo were among the most famous in jazz. Their solos are at a high level on the Woodchoppers tracks, the swing and spirit of the band irresistible, the arrangements ingenious, the execution full of harmonic and rhythmic daring. Rowles solos little, but his profoundly individual approach to accompaniment is vital to the success of these recordings.

“Igor,” “Fan It” and “Lost Weekend” are on a two-disc First Herd set called Blowin’ Up A Storm,” but the only CD collection I can find that has all of the studio Woodchoppers tracks is Mosaic’s The Complete Columbia Recordings of Woody Herman And His Orchestra & Woodchoppers (1945-1947). The other pieces are “Steps,” “Four Men On A Horse,” “Nero’s Conception,” “Pam,” “I Surrender Dear” and “Someday Sweetheart.” The Mosaic box includes alternate takes that allow the listener to hear how the pieces developed as the musicians achieved artistic and sonic balance. This is exquisite music. 

In the next installment, we’ll enter the bebop era and, possibly, get through the 1950s.

Since it was Saturday, there was less people in the streets.

I raved from the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival about a performance of a solo piano piece written by Frederic Rzewski. 
 
Darcy James Argue (seen here), on his blog Secret Society, also raves about Rzewski. Here are the first two sentences from his review of a recital of Rzewski’s music.

In a lot of ways, Frederic Rzewski is a man out of time. Almost everything about him is anachronistic or contradictory or both — he’s a straight-up virtuoso composer-pianist in the Lisztian tradition, an old-school rugged bohemian whose chosen instrument remains a powerful symbol of class privilege, a distinctively American composer who has lived abroad for over 30 years, a gifted improviser who has recorded with fellow bohemians Steve Lacy and Irene Aebi, a student of arch elitists like Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions who fell in with the wild boys of the New York School crowd (John Cage, Christian Wolff & co.), went on to write some influential early proto-minimalist works, and who in recent decades has returned to an austere 12-tone pitch vocabulary that would seem at odds with his proletarian politics.

Whew. The rest of it is just as breathless, just as informative, although not many of the other sentences are quite that long. To read all of it, go here. Argue’s blog is a good way to look in on parts of the New York scene that you might not know about otherwise. I’m adding it to Other Places in the center column.

Just wanted you to know that FINALLY we have a website. It’s still in formation and we welcome any suggestions. It was created by Brian Chauley, former Fellow at Brubeck Institute and now assistant to the Exec. Director. We hope to do more by the addition of a newsletter and more photographs, and current news re: concerts etc. So visit us at davebrubeck.com.

Happy Spring to All!

Dave and Iola

Well, English usage fans, you are not alone. Our item the other day on needless, overused or just plain annoying words and phrases encouraged a torrent of them from you. To revisit the original piece and see the responses so far, click here. You’ll have to scroll up to get to the beginning.

Have a pleasant weekend and, as the sainted John Ciardi used to say, good words to you.
 

There has been a lot of attention the past few days to a study at Johns Hopkins Medicine on what happens in the brain when jazz musicians improvise. One of the conclusions by Dr. Charles Limb, one of the researchers, who is also a saxophonist:

Jazz is often described as being an extremely individualistic art form. You can figure out which jazz musician is playing because one person’s improvisation sounds only like him or her,” says Limb. “What we think is happening is when you’re telling your own musical story, you’re shutting down impulses that might impede the flow of novel ideas.

We can all think of soloists whose flow of novel ideas is impeded, but that’s not the point of the study’s findings. Rather, it is this:

It appears, they conclude, that jazz musicians create their unique improvised riffs by turning off inhibition and turning up creativity.

That may seem to be pointing out the obvious, but the details are fascinating. Four pianists served as subjects for the research by improvising on keyboards strapped to their laps as they lay in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, an fMRI. Don’t try that at home. Johns Hopkins does not disclose whether the pianists swung. Reports about the study, many of them perfunctory, have turned up in newspapers everywhere. To read the complete Johns Hopkins news release that fueled those stories and to get leads to further information, go here. You may be surprised to learn what your medial prefrontal cortex has been up to.

Book tip: For more on the growing understanding of how the brain works, read The Body Has A Mind Of Its Own by New York Times Science writer Sandra Blakeslee and her son Matthew. They write with clarity, wit and a sense of discovery.

If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes. — Pablo Picasso

I never sit down and write. I just sorta let things form in my brain. — Mose Allison

Friends who loved Dennis Irwin and listeners who admired him came forward with help when his cancer and lack of health insurance became known in January. But the bassist died in New York City Monday shortly before the biggest of several benefits for him. He was fifty-six. Details of Irwin’s life and career are in this story on the JazzTimes website. During the height of the fund-raising effort, jazz video producer Bret Primack put together a mini-documentary about Irwin. To see it, click here.

Phil Bodner, a reed specialist who played on hundreds of studio
recording sessions in and out of jazz in New York, died in late February at the age of ninety. Among the projects he worked on were the Miles Davis-Gil Evans Porgy and Bess album and dates with Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. Best known for his section work on several instruments, Bodner was a talented soloist who late in life recorded as a leader and clarinetist with sidemen including Hank Jones, Gene Bertoncini and Dick Hyman. For more on Bodner, go here.

What with remaking Rifftides, traveling, speechifying, spring planting and taking out the garbage (boy, I miss Lennie Bruce), new picks have had to wait. No more. There they are, in the middle column.

From the second section of Strunk and White’s English usage bible The Elements Of Style:

 

Omit needless words.

Harold Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker, wrote in a memo to his staff, “The next writer around here who uses ‘upcoming’ will be outgoing.”

That’s a good word to put at the top of a list of needless, overused and annoying words and phrases. Here is the first dozen.

upcoming

absent  (as a preposition)

area (as an adjective)

as it were

at this point in time

case in point

if you will

like (as an interjection)

ongoing

the likes of

that said

y’know

Edwin Newman of NBC News recalled the time a man he was interviewing told him, “Well, y’know, y’never know, y’know.”

The Rifftides staff solicits your suggestions for additions to the list.

And then when I went to Chicago, that’s when I had these outer space experiences and went to the other planets. — Sonny Blount (Sun Ra)

…even if this story is revisionist autobiography … Sonny was pulling together several strains of his life. He was both prophesying his future and explaining his past with a single act of personal mythology.– John F. Szwed, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (Pantheon, 1997)

Sun Ra: Space Is The Place (1974)

Sun Ra Arkestra: Face The Music (1990)

Here’s a calendar item for those in, or planning to be in Boston on April 1.
Joe Lovano (pictured), Hal Galper and Jack Walrath will headline a concert at the Berklee College of Music. Proceeds will benefit the Herb Pomeroy Scholarship Fund. Pomeroy, trumpeter, arranger, and Berklee teacher for four decades, died last August. Among the school’s alumni whose compositions and arrangements will be played by the Berklee Concert Jazz Orchestra are Alan Broadbent, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Michael Gibbs and the longtime Berklee teacher John LaPorta. For more information, go here and scroll down.

Following Teo Macero’s death on February 19, most news stories and obituaries concentrated on his role as the producer of Miles Davis’s Columbia recordings. Beginning in 1959 with Kind of Blue,  Macero edited or oversaw Davis’s sessions, which included those for Sketches Of Spain, In A Silent Way, and Bitches Brew, some of the most influential albums of the past fifty years. With exceptions, notably in the editing of In A Silent Way, Macero got along well with Davis. “We had our battles,” Macero said after Davis’s death in 1991:

There were times when he wouldn’t speak to me and I wouldn’t speak to him. It’s like a husband and wife. There are times when you just like to be left alone.

Kind Of Blue and Sketches Of Spain became two of the best-selling jazz albums in history.
It was barely noted in most of the articles, and not at all in some, that Macero was himself a gifted musician who won a scholarship to the Juilliard School and emerged as a daring composer of atonal acoustic and electronic music. He was also a talented and highly individual tenor saxophonist prized by Charles Mingus, among other important jazz artists of the 1950s. After he joined Columbia as an editor then moved up to producer, his playing took a back seat and he became one of the label’s busiest recording executives. Nonetheless, Macero did not give up his saxophone. The drummer Kenny Harris, who moved from England to New York then settled in Bermuda, had a playing encounter with Macero. He writes Rifftides from Hamilton, Bermuda.

When I was playing at Elbow Beach in the 60’s I also had a jazz show on ZBM radio on Saturday afternoons. Teo was vacationing here and had read in the newspaper that Jim Hall was to be a guest on my show. He called me as he wanted to speak to Jim – Jim was not in the studio as the interview had been recorded earlier in the week and he had gone back to New York. Teo came into Elbow Beach one evening and asked if he could sit in with the band. He borrowed a tenor saxophone and played in his usual style. Everyone in the nightclub left. Everytime I saw him in New York after that he would always say to me “If you want to clear a nightclub, give me a call.”

It’s an amusing story, but if Macero was playing “in his usual style,” the Elbow Beach patrons walked out on some fine music. He is prominent on Jazzical Moods, a 1954 album co-led by bassist Mingus and alto saxophonist John LaPorta, and also featuring the young trumpeter Thad Jones. It was a remarkable gathering of far-sighted adventurers whose music foreshadowed jazz departures made later in the decade.

Teo Macero, 1925-2008.