Archives for 2008

Someone known to me only by the e-mail handle “Bloorondo” pointed out links to a pair of Dave Brubeck video performances new to me and, perhaps, to you. The first, “All The Things You Are,” was at a concert in Berlin in 1972 when Gerry Mulligan was the saxophonist in the Brubeck Quartet and Paul Desmond joined them on tour. Jack Six was the bassist, Alan Dawson the drummer. Brubeck, Mulligan and Six are turned out in seventies fashions, including lots of hair. Be sure to notice Brubeck’s trousers; not that you could help it. Dawson’s and Desmond’s wardrobes and hairdos are, as usual, restrained. Desmond is wearing his frequent attire of later years, The Suit (see Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, page 257). The playing by all hands is at a high level, with interesting Desmond/Mulligan counterpoint at the end. Camera work, direction and audio quality are good. To watch it, click here.

“In Your Own Sweet Way” is by the classic Brubeck Quartet with Desmond, Eugene Wright and Joe Morello. My guess is 1964, but it could be a year or two either way. This is a notably lyrical performance by Desmond, with the kind of assistance from Brubeck that led Desmond to frequently praise him as an ideal accompanist. The Wright-Morello mutual admiration society is in session. Click here.

Welcome to the new, improved, more functional Rifftides. Artsjournal.com commander-in-chief Doug McLennan and his team spiffed us up as the pioneer site (aka guinea pig) in reformatting all of the artsjournal.com blogs. The Rifftides staff thanks them for a dazzling makeover.

There is a change in the comments procedure. You will still click on the “Comments” link below each item. That takes you to a simple form. After you have filled in the form, you will be asked to enter a couple of words in a box before you submit the comment. If all works as planned, that will end the tsunami of spam that has plagued us for months. The Rifftides staff encourages you to try it out.

You may also correspond using the “Contact me” link in the first of the two right-hand columns. Either way, please let us know how you like the new Rifftides. For your celebratory opening-day bonus, click on this link for video of a Thelonious Monk piece by pianist Jessica Williams.

Rifftides reader George Finch sent this message in reaction to a ten-year-old article in The
Atlantic. There has been so little essential change in jazz since 1997 that The Atlantic piece might have been written last week. It consists mainly of a conversation among authors Tom Piazza, the late Eric Nissensen and the magazine’s Ryan Nally. To read the article, go here.

 Just read Eric Nissensen’s book while I was in Boston, and happened to come across this article. Haven’t read Tom Piazza’s book, but Nissensen makes a lot of good points, although he goes overboard on Wynton and his “neo-conservatism”. I didn’t know that Marsalis was powerful enough to shape jazz. Also, Nissensen’s existentialist definition of jazz as almost pure process is a tad extreme, although a good searchlight. It is a creative process that defines itself as people create the music, but the process does not take place in a void. There seems to be a tradition that they work with, and the good ones will not be content just rehashing it. There will always be ” there must be something else”.

Well, enough. I am not a musician, just trying to learn and think things out. Where do you stand visa vis their chit chat, and who are some of the musicians forging new directions in jazz?

Marsalis did not shape jazz. He shaped himself, shaped Jazz At Lincoln Center and served as a role model to young musicians. Nissensen confused that with shaping jazz. I am not aware of musicians who are forging new directions in jazz, despite blather and ceaseless promotional claims, more of them from managers, agents, publicists and record companies than from musicians.

Unless I’ve missed something (always a possibility), the last time new directions were forged was the late fifties, early sixties – Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Miles Davis. Every “departure” since then has been imitation or elaboration. Fusing jazz and Latin, jazz and klezmer, jazz and blue grass, hip-hop, classical, folk, ragas, gamelan, etc., etc., etc., does not consitute newness. It constitutes fusion. Some of it is wonderful, but none of it amounts to innovations like those of Armstrong, Young, Parker, Gillespie, Evans, Coltrane, even Coleman. Playing without guidelines, which in the final analysis is impossible and which Ornette neither did nor claimed to do, is not a new direction.

There is a powerful and apparently unquenchable notion that to be worthwhile, music must break new ground. It is difficult enough, and should be satisfying enough, to play and write music well. To say that, is not to downgrade or discourage searching and experimentation. Even searches that lead nowhere and experiments that fail can be valuable and interesting. If a new direction is being forged, we will recognize it when the forging produces something so artistically powerful that it doesn’t need public relations to announce it or critics to analyze it.

For weeks, the CD reissue of Phineas Newborn, Jr.’s 1961 album A World of Piano! has been propped up near my computer as a reminder to post something about him. It is neither his birthday (December 14, 1931) nor the anniversary of his death (May 26, 1989), and no recently discovered Newborn recording has been released, but we need no special occasion to remember his astonishing talent.

Because he was sporadically troubled by emotional instability, Newborn’s career was spotty. He never got the recognition his virtuosity might have brought him if his health had been on an even keel. Still, from the time the young man from Memphis debuted with Lionel Hampton in 1950, musicians and informed listeners were aware that he was a phenomenon. He made a splash in New York in the mid-fifties when Count Basie and the producer-promoter John Hammond gave him a boost. He worked in a duo with Charles Mingus and played with the bassist on the soundtrack of John Cassevetes’ celebrated art film Shadows. His recordings on RCA, Atlantic, Roulette, Steeplechase, Pablo and a smattering of other labels remain available and sell steadily if modestly. Few serious jazz pianists are without Newborn shelves in their collections.

Through the ’60s and ’70s he recorded a series of albums for Contemporary, at first as a sideman with Howard McGhee and Teddy Edwards, then four under his own name. Concord Records, the custodian of the Newborn Contemporary CDs, has allowed several of them to drop out of the Original Jazz Classics catalogue. Some of them have resurfaced as imports and may be found, along with other Newborns, at this web site. It would be difficult to go wrong with any of them. There are, as far as I can determine, no Phineas Newborn albums worthy of fewer than four-and-a-half stars out of five. You will find his complete discography here.

A few clips of Newborn playing with the monumental bassist Al McKibbon and drummer Kenny Dennis have shown up on You Tube. They all seem to come from the Jazz Scene USA televison program hosted by Oscar Brown, Jr., in the early 1960s. If you’re unfamiliar with Newborn, try “Oleo” for an introduction to the piston-perfect technique of his fast playing and “Lush Life” for proof that his harshest critics were wrong when they accused him of being without feeling.

As for the pronunciation of Newborn’s first name, it has been solidly established by family and close friends that he preferred “Fín-uhs” (as in “finest”).

A frisky spirit makes my trombone sing.–Chris Barber

 Never look at the trombones. You’ll only encourage them.–Richard Strauss

 

Julian Priester is a musician of uncommon breadth as a composer, leader
teacher and–most notably–a highly individual and subtle trombone soloist . Priester is quiet and self-effacing, but he could justifiably boast about having satisfied such contrasting leaders as Duke Ellington and Sun Ra, Cal Tjader and John Coltrane, Lionel Hampton and Dave Holland, Bo Diddley and Max Roach, among others. Since he immersed himself in academia thirty years ago, opportunities to hear Priester live have been rarer than when he was in the thick of the New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco jazz scenes.

 

Last night, I had had one of those rare opportunities. Priester and pianist Dawn
Clement, his teaching colleague and former student at Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts, brought their quartet to The Seasons. The concert was superb throughout, but in three extended pieces following the intermission, it went beyond that. Five years ago Priester’s CD In Deep End Dance, was striking for the rapport between the sixty-seven-year-old trombonist and the pianist then in her early twenties. Their empathy has deepened. Last night with the collaboration of bassist Geoff Harper and drummer Jose Martinez, the power of their performance built through the evening until, on the final number, the swing feeling reached a happy intensity that raised it above the “having a good night” category. The piece was Priester’s “First Nature.” For the musicians and the audience, it became a memorable experience in ¾ time, one nobody in the room is likely to forget.  

 

Last year, Priester, Clement, Harper and Martinez recorded much of the music they played last night. Harper told me that “First Nature” reached the same height at the record session in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio as it did at The Seasons. That CD will be out later this year. I look forward to it.

 

Coincidentally, two new CDs involving Clement arrived a few hours before last night’s concert. One is her own album, Break, with drummer Matt Wilson and bassist Dean Johnson. The other is soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom’s Mental Weather, also with Wilson, and bassist Mark Helias. I’ll be listening further to both, but a couple of hearings of each persuade me further that Dawn Clement is one of the most interesting pianists to emerge in years. In the precision and interaction of her work with Bloom, she fully employs both her classical technique and her jazz soul. It seems to me that in Bloom’s extensive discography, Mental Weather is one of the finest things she has done. 

Moscow, Idaho
The program bloat that kept some Friday concertgoers in their seats until early Saturday dissipated by Saturday night. The final Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival concert was trim and full of excitement provided by two big bands. The ad hoc performance hall in a field house the size of a dirigible hangar was outfitted with dance floors on either side. Throughout the evening, the floors were crowded with members of the hip-hop generation grooving to music with roots in the swing era.
The Lionel Hampton band and the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra performed separately and together. The Hamptonians included members closely associated with Hampton before his death in 2002, among them the impressive young trombonist Clarence Banks, vibraharpist Chuck Redd and the entertaining drummer Wally “Gator” Watson. In addition to its instrumentals, the band backed pianist and singer Dee Daniels in two soul-inflected vocals and Jon Hendricks scatting that most basic of Hampton jump tunes, “Hey Bob A Rebop.”
Artistic director John Clayton, his alto saxophonist brother Jeff and Jeff Hamilton, the festival’s apparently inexhaustible house drummer, unleashed their explosive big band in a set alive with deep swing and superb solo work. Charles Owens and Ricky Woodard had a testosteronic tenor battle on “Jazz Party.” 89-year-old Snooky Young
riveted the audience–and his fellow band members–with his plunger trumpet solo on “I Be Serious ’bout Dem Blues,” which also had exciting choruses by Jeff Clayton, Woodard, the veteran trombonist George Bohanon and the 21-year-old guitar discovery Graham Dechter. John Clayton dedicated “Squatty Roo” to the late bassist Ray Brown, who for years was a mainstay of the Hampton festival. Trumpeters Clay Jenkins and Gilbert Castellanos were impressive and distinctively different from one another on that classic Johnny Hodges “I Got Rhythm” variant. The piece incorporated a passage of quiet intensity from the rhythm section of Hamilton, pianist Tamir Hendelman and bassist Christoph Luty, who in their other life are the Jeff Hamilton Trio. Singer Kevin Mahogany was at the top of his bass-baritone game sitting in on “Route 66” and “One For My Baby.”
Following intermission and the introduction of outstanding student soloists from the Hampton Festival’s extensive educational activities, came a rare event. The big bands together played two of the arrangements from First Time!, the 1961 recording by the Count Basie and Duke Elllington bands. Ellington’s and Billy Strayhorn’s “Battle Royal” (those “Rhythm” changes again) was highlighted by a good-natured, often hilarious, drum competition between Watson and Hamilton. In the gorgeous Thad Jones ballad “To You,” George Bohanon soloed movingly in the trombone spot filled by Quentin “Butter” Jackson on the Ellington-Basie recording.
Finally (well, almost finally), Chuck Redd, playing Lionel Hampton’s vibes, led the way into “Flyin’ Home,” thirty-two men swinging hard on Hamp’s theme song. As they eased into “What A Wonderful World,” backing the recorded voice of Hampton singing, the big screens in the hall showed a montage of photos of this year’s festival performers in action. Then the bands segued into “Happy Birthday” in honor of Hampton’s 100th and the crowd of 5,000 joined in. The montage dissolved into video and still photographs of Hampton through the years as confetti and streamers wafted down onto the crowd, sparkling in the lights that swept the auditorium. It was a spectacular finish.
As for the reason Lionel Hampton involved himself with the festival in the first place, after the festival University of Idaho Provost Doug Baker summed up the importance of the educational component,.

The clinics and competitions are the major part of the festival for the students. It is inspiring to see them grow during the week and to see the joy of the musicians teaching them.

Being among those 10,000 children, watching them in rapt attention, hearing them play, dodging them in hallways, on campus paths and downtown streets as they darted from event to event, made for a stimulating, rejuvenating, week.

Snooky Young, whose one solo at the Lionel Hampton Festival was a highlight of the entire week, has been exciting people with his trumpet playing since he was a teenaged member of the Wilberforce Collegians. During the swing era, when it was not unusual for sidemen to become famous, he was one of the best known members of Jimmie Lunceford’s influential band. He went on to work with Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Les Hite, Benny Carter, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis band, Gerald Wilson, Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland and the Tonight Show band. Young was the prototype of the great lead trumpeter who was also a distinguished soloist. One memorable night on the Tonight Show, Johnny Carson wished Young a happy birthday and brought him down front to play and sing. You can see and hear him in his triumphal moment in this video clip.

Another independent book store is dying of competition from the internet and chain stores and from the rising cost of big city real estate. This time, the victim is one of the world’s great book stores. At the end of April, Dutton’s, in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, will be no more. That will be a sad day for dedicated readers and for thousands of authors, including this one, who launched their books with signings at Dutton’s. The friendly store on San Vicente Boulevard is where Jazz Matters first saw the light of day. From today’s story in The Los Angeles Times:

In an interview, author John Rechy, who recently appeared at Dutton’s for his memoir, “About My Life and the Kept Woman,” spoke of the store’s importance.
“Every non-million-selling writer has had his coming-out there,” he said. “They had every single book that you would want.”
Author Carolyn See described the store’s decline and looming closing as “just sickening.”
She said she prized the spot as a neighborhood meeting place, not just for literati but also for local dog walkers. “If you weren’t the drinking kind,” See said, “you could go there the way you’d go to a bar.”

To read the whole story, go here. Condolences to Doug Dutton, whose love of books, readers and writers is a calling, not just a business. For more than two decades, his store has been a refuge from a publishing industry and big box stores that market books the way McDonald’s markets hamburgers.

Your itinerant correspondent is back from the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival, catching his breath, attacking stacks of mail and, generally, taking care of business. We’ll have a final installment about the festival in the next posting, probably tomorrow.

In the meantime, a diversion. A serious listener among you discloses that he was unaware of the uncanny similarity of Thelonious Monk’s “Straight No Chaser” to the main theme of Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. For him, and for anyone who knows the Monk piece but not the Strauss, I recommend a National Public Radio feature about Till Eulenspiegel. It begins with Los Angeles Philharmonic music director Esa Peka Salonen discussing the piece and leads into a full performance of one of the most delightful compositions of the twentieth century. The big, probably unanswerable, question is whether the similarity is coincidental or Monk was inspired by Strauss. For the NPR program, click here and then click on “Hear The Performance.” The “Straight No Chaser” soundalike theme comes at 3:59 into the clip.
For a video performance of “Straight No Chaser” by the Cannonball Adderley Quintet, go here.

I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer. — Richard Strauss
I don’t conside myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can’t develop any further. But I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself. — Thelonious Monk

Artistic director John Clayton has packed the main concerts of the Lionel Hampton festival with so much talent that when the evenings end, the posted 10:30 p.m. closing time is a distant memory. Friday’s concert theme was “Masters and Mentors.” It wrapped up at 12:45 a.m after an energetic, often hilarious, vocal set by Jon Hendricks, his daughter Aria and the impresssive emerging singer Sachal Vasandani. Vasandani was affecting in a slow “How Am I To Know” and joined the Hendrickses to summon up the sound and spirit of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross in “Centerpiece” and “Everybody’s Boppin’.” The ranking master of the evening waspianist Hank Jones, playing beautifully in his 90th year. His two-piano duet partners, sixty-odd years younger, were Gerald Clayton and Taylor Eigsti. Each of the three also played a solo piece. John Clayton joined him on bass and Jones performed “Satin Doll” with notable vigor, Clayton bowing a solo.
Opening the concert, Hamond B3 organist Atsuko Hashimoto and drummer Jeff Hamilton backed the venerable tenor saxophonist Red Holloway. Holloway’s patented choruses had some members of the audience singing along. Hashimoto and Hamilton developed a tidal wave of swing in their tag ending to “It’s The Good Life,” leading Holloway to ask, “How do you follow that?” He answered with “Shiny Stockings” and the suggestive “Locksmith Blues,” recruiting the audience in a call and response routine.
Not many years ago Sara Gazarek regularly attended the festival as a student musician. Her career on the rise, she returned Friday night as a professional, singing three songs, with particularly good articulation and smooth control in “More.” Dee Daniels, a perennial artist at the Hampton Festival, followed with three pieces in her powerful gospel-influenced style. Then Gazarek and Daniels, fellow Seattlites, collaborated in a duet on “You Are My Sunshine.” Pianist Josh Nelson contributed a fine solo.
Next up were two new trombonists and one revered veteran. Ismael Cuevas and Ryan Porter, young Los Angeles players discovered by Clayton, each played an original composition. In his “Baila Hacia Este,” Cuevas employed sunny, dancing phrases. With his big, blowsy tone, Porter drew broader strokes in “Sortie.” Then Curtis Fuller arrived for a stunning solo on “Caravan,” a feature from his days with Art Blakey. The set ended with the three combined in a medium-tempo blues, trading phrases in a rousing trombone conversation. They were backed by pianist Bill Charlap, bassist Peter Washington, guitarist Graham Dechter and Hamilton, a fully employed and unfailingly interesting house rhythm section.
Now, attempting to stay abreast of a festival with too much music: Thursday night’s concert began with bebop by the festival all-star rhythm section and ended with a set of irresistibly funky pieces by Roy Hargrove’s RH Factor. In between, listeners in the University of Idaho’s Kibbie Dome heard bright young players, including a surprising chamber group. Charlap, Dechter, Washington and Hamilton warmed the crowd with Dizzy Gillespie’s “Groovin’ High.” Hamilton, a listening drummer, paid Dechter the compliment of building a solo break around a phrase the guitarist created near the end of his improvisation. The house band’s Friday night feature was “Stompin’ At The Savoy,” with a solo by Washington that deserved the extended applause the near-capacity crowd gave him.
The vibraharpist Warren Wolf joined the all-stars both nights. Thursday, he played pieces closely associated with the festival’s namesake. Wolf estabished a melodic approach to the familiar changes of “How High The Moon” for two lyrical choruses before he introduced complexity, double-time flourishes and lightning speed with the mallets. He began his long solo on “Indiana” at top speed, incorporated a couple of effective stop-time choruses and couldn’t resist a “Donna Lee” quote near the end. Wolf illuminated his Friday night set with the quartet in a sensitive duet with Charlap on the verse to “Lush Life.” For a sample of this stimulating young player’s approach to the vibes, click here.
The rhythm section stayed in place to accompany three alto saxophonists, one whose professional career is launched, two in their teens. Seventeen-year-old Isaiah Morfin tore into his “Praise The Lord” with an unaccompanied virtuoso cadenza, then a solo with Charlap, Hamilton and company that was a melange of Jimmy Dorsey high notes, Jackie McLean bebop, Earl Bostic expansiveness, Ornette Coleman abstraction and, possibly, other alto players I missed because they went by too fast. When Isaiah finds Morfin, he could be formidable. Tia Fuller, riding on success with her CD Healing Space and a tour with the pop singer Beyonce, was fast, modal and immersed in shifting meters on “Breakthrough.” At her workshop earlier in the day, Fuller mentioned admiration for Kenny Garrett that was apparent in her energetic performance. Then came Grace Kelly, a high school sophomore who at fifteen has arrived at maturity, personal and musical poise and a completely formed conception. I encountered her in a jam session at this festival last year and struggled to accept that this little girl was producing bebop of the quality I was hearing. Later, a CD confirmed that the impression was not generated by the wine I was drinking. A year older, Ms. Kelly is even better. Her playing on “Filosophical Flying Fish” and in jamming with Morfin and Fuller on “Flyin’ Home” was among the best at the Hampton festival, regardless of style or age.
With her set of four pieces mostly from the 2006 CD I’ll Be Seeing You, violinist Regina Carter thrilled the audience–and kept the full attention of the musicians and assorted hangers-on in the backstage listening area. The ingenious arrangements for her quintet, the swing and sense of adventurous fun, were infectious. The band turned “Little Brown Jug” and “A Tisket, a Tasket” into chance-taking excursions through time-worn material harmonically updated to a state of freshness and surprise. Pianist Xavier Davis, clarinetist Darryl Harper, bassist Matthew Parrish and drummer Alvester Garnett were in synch with Carter’s skill and her enthusiasm. Davis’s chord choices in support of Carter’s heartbreakingly beautiful solo on Ravel’s “Pavanne For A Dead Princess” evoked Bill Evans, as did his own solo. The band’s closer was a transcription of Charlie Shavers’ arrangement for the John Kirby Sextet of Grieg’s “Anitra’s Dance,” uncannily accurate, swinging and delightful. This was forty minutes of superior chamber music.
Following intermission (now you’re beginning to believe that these were long concerts), festival favorite Roberta Gambarini sang three songs with the house rhythm section minus Bill Charlap. Her accompanist Tamir Hendelman took over the piano. Impeccable and musicianly as usual, Gambarini did lively versions of “Nobody Else But Me” and “I Hadn’t Anyone ‘Til You,” and a contemplative “Day Dream” enhanced by her remarkably faithful impression of a trombone solo, produced by clever microphone technique, hand placement and voice projection. Gambarini and Hendelman are all over the festival schedule, not only in concerts but also giving workshops and master classes.
Roy Hargrove opened his set with a plaintive flugelhorn solo belying the excitement that he and his RH Factor were about to unleash. Flugelhorn back on its stand, trumpet armed and ready, he launched into a set of latterday rhythm and blues laced with inventive jazz solos by Hargrove and the other members of an inspired funk band.Thin as a whip, dressed in cap, shades, plaid shirt, jeans and red sneakers, Hargrove bopped, hopped and glided around the stage when he wasn’t playing. When he was playing, he was brilliant and when he sang, he was very good. Some years ago, I heard the first edition of RH Factor. I found it strained, fragmented, overamplified, annoying. This band is the real thing, an embodiment of rhythm, focused but loose, musical, enormously invigorating, great fun. Hargrove did not announce the names of the tunes. It didn’t matter. Pianist Gerald Clayton, baritone saxophonist Jason Marshall, alto saxophonist Bruce Williams and guitarist Todd Parsnow all soloed impressively, as did bassist Lenny Stallworth and drummer Jason (JT) Thomas. But it was the unified R&B totality of the group that made Hargrove’s forty-five minutes memorable.
In after-hours sessions at the main festival hotel, Hargrove and most of the members of his band jammed with guitaristJohn Stowell, alto saxophonist Grace Kelly, members of the all-star Russian group so prominent at the Hampton festival, pianist Kuni Mikami, and trombonists Greg Schrader and Ismael Cuevas, to mention only a few. At one point, Stowell found himself as, in effect, the eighth member of the Hargrove band. Known for the sensitivity and finesse of his playing, for a few tunes he was as hard a hard bopper as Hargrove and his colleagues. Stowell raised a few eyebrows.

Playing is my way of thinking, talking, communicating. – Lionel Hampton
Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind. – Lionel Hampton

Tuesday evening’s opening event of the Lionel Hampton International Jazz Festival was in the University of Idaho Auditorium, a hall intriguing for its neo-Gothic architecture and superb acoustics. Called Hamp’s Gala, the concert presented students of the Lionel Hampton School of Music. The first half was classical, the second jazz.
Following the university orchestra playing the final two movements of Schubert’s Symphony No. 5 came five recital pieces. They included virtuoso trombone playing by Jenny Kellogg in Ferdinand David’s “Concertino” and ended with Josiah Stocker’s peformance of “Four Pieces For Piano” by the contemporary American composer Frederic Rzewski. I must confess to having known nothing of Rzewski, but after hearing Stocker’s presentation of this work with its riveting rhythms, insistent repetitions and complex interior harmonies, I am going to seek out more of the composer’s music.The intensity, rapid tempos and open structure of the Rzewski work make demands on the pianist’s technique and on his ability to maintain focus on the music through the blizzard of notes. Young Mr. Stocker brought it off impressively. There is on You Tube a video clip of Rzewski himself playing an excerpt from “Four Pieces,” but – fair warning – the audio qualilty is lousy and the clip cuts off abruptly before he gets to the harmonic density of the middle section. Don’t judge the piece by that clip. The web site samples of this recording of “Four Pieces” seem to be more representative. Among the few things I’ve learned about Rzewski today in hasty research is that his name is pronounced zheff-skee.
Following intermission, Daniel Bukvich of the Hampton School faculty directed the Jazz Choir I in an overture and two pieces of his composing. The overture was a wild thing that opened with a percussion ensemble onstage, then the 175 men and women of the choir swarming down the aisles through the audience and onto the stage, singing, clapping and grooving as they went. The jubilation continued through “Inferno,” which Bukvich set to text from Dante, and his own “Song of the River.” Then Vern Sielert led a big band that played three pieces highlighted by an expansion of Jelly Roll Morton’s 1926 “Black Bottom Stomp,” a period piece that is timeless. Jenny Kellogg, who flawlessly played the classical piece in the first half, had what Sielert described as “the world’s shortest trombone solo” (two bars); from Ferdinand David to Ferdinand Joseph Lamenthe in one concert. Sielert’s Jazz Band I also delivered stirring performances of the tricky “Linebacker” by Fred Sturm and Dick Grove’s “You Rotten Kid,” a flagwaver from the Buddy Rich book. The festival was off to a spirited start.
Further reports are coming. Stay tuned.

There is plenty of snow on the ground, but it’s melting, skies are blue and spring is on the way in Moscow, Idaho as the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival moves into its second day. Dozens of professionals and more than 10,000 student musicians overflow the town and the University of Idaho campus for this 41st year of the festival, an early celebration of Hampton’s 100th birthday, April 20. Hampton’s key role over the years as a performer and enthusiastic supporter of the festival’s educational aspect led to the event being named for him in 1985.

For students from elementary to college age, there are workshops and adjudication sessions all day every day of the festival. In the workshops, they benefit from instruction, advice and, in many cases, the opportunity to play with professionals. Bassist John Clayton this year assumes the festival leadership from its founder, Lynn Skinner. Among the pros he has brought in are Roy Hargrove, Roberta Gambarini, Bill Charlap, Wycliffe Gordon, Peter Washington, Jeff Hamilton, John Stowell, Jon Hendricks, Tia Fuller, Regina Carter, Hank Jones, Madeline Eastman and Curtis Fuller. That is a partial list. Many of them teach as well as perform at major concerts in the University’s Kibbie Dome, a massive athletic facility shaped like a quonset hut. It sits on a hill overlooking the campus. Using huge curtains and creative lighting, the festival designers have managed to make a sizeable area of the dome’s field house into a performance hall. They haven’t quite achieved intimacy, but good sight lines and sound systems can make you forget that your seat is on the straightaway of a running track.

Last night’s opening concert began with the quartet of young Russians I told you about in yesterday’s posting (scroll down to read that item). They again performed “Strode Road” with an affecting combination of finesse and raw energy. Then the concert turned toward its assigned theme, “New Orleans In The House.” The festival’s all-purpose rhythm section, pianist Bill Charlap, bassist Peter Washington, drummer Jeff Hamilton and guitarist Graham Dechter, played an energetic “Broadway.” The young violinist Aaron Weinstein joined them for “Juicy Lucy” and “Three Little Words.” The richness of Weinstein’s tone, his hard swing and exuberance, brought to mind Joe Venuti. Exit Weinstein, enter trombonist Wycliffe Gordon, who growled, whooped, slurred and sang his way through “Basin Street Blues” and “Sweet Georgia Brown.” In Weinstein’s and Gordon’s sets, there were extensive solos from the all-stars, with stunning choruses from Charlap on “Three Little Words.”

Cornetist Ed Polcer headed up a group with Gordon, tenor saxophonist Houston Person, drummer Joe Ascione, bassist Christoph Luty and John Cocuzzi on piano and vibes. The repertoire had little connection with New Orleans but plenty to do with the legacies of Lionel Hampton, Red Norvo and Bunny Berrigan, which is why Polcer calls his band Lionel, Red And Bunny. Judy Kurtz was the energetic singer. Polcer’s plunger solos were more reminiscent of Berrigan in enthusiasm than in style. Cocuzzi’s vibes tribute to Hampton was “Midnight Sun,” played with a distinctive harmonic approach.

Following intermission, Clayton introduced the hard-core New Orleans part of the program, a forty-five-minute set by Dr. John. It was party time in the dome. Often playing piano with his left hand and organ with his right, his heavily amplified quartet generating the volume of a big band, Dr. John delivered several of his hits, including a “Makin’ Whoopee” even more soulful than his recorded version. When his set ended, he wasn’t through. The Polcers and the Dr. Johns combined for a full-fledged jam on “Down By The Riverside” and the good times continued to roll for the concert closer.

A new feature of the Hampton Festival this year is the addition in the Kibbie Dome of a place for student musicians to play each night following the main concerts. It is called Hamp’s Club. Adjudicators of the daytime student competitions select outstanding soloists to jam in the club, adding to the joy of competitive victory the challenge and stimulation of practical experience.

Moscow is full of jazz this week. Moscow, Idaho, that is, host of the Lionel Hampton International Jazz Festival. They’re not fooling about the international part. This afternoon the little Nuart Theater on Main Street was full of music from this town’s namesake. A quartet of Russians mostly in their early twenties included bassist Darya Chernakova; Nikolay Sidoernko, piano; Roman Sokolov, tenor saxophone; and Aleksandr Ivanov, drums. The concert was part of the Moscow-to-Moscow exchange program that for years has been one of the most stimulating features of the Hampton Festival.
The musicians of the Open World Russian Jazz Stars have years of intensive classical training but are at the point where–as their translator put it–they are “tending toward jazz.” They did more than tend toward it today. They played fully-realized performances of Sonny Rollins’s “Strode Road” and Miles Davis’s “Solar” with a pronounced post-bop vocabulary and fine swing. I arrived too late to hear their entire hour, but those pieces were first rate. Chernakova, a pianist from the age of three, switched to bass two years ago. How she developed so much technique on the instrument in so short a time may remain a Russian secret.
One of today’s twenty-five workshops for students was called “Hands On! Vocal Fun Shop.” It was populated by twenty or so thirteen-year-olds. What made it fun was Madeline Eastman, who in slightly more than an hour had the kids keeping proper time, counting, syncopating, scatting, yodeling and laughing. No one had more fun that Eastman, as she brought out the shy boys and girls while reigning in the wise guys, showoffs and hyperactives. After one young man had sung well, then strutted around like a touchdown king in the end zone, she cautioned him, “Hey, no boasting. Be cool.” He became cool…for a minute or two. The workshop kids learned something about singing. More important, they learned about cooperation, listening and mutual support in the act of creating music together..
In the remaining time I’ll be at the Hampton Festival, I’ll report on as many of the small and large events as I can take in. The large ones start tonight with a concert called “New Orleans Is In The House.” The all-star rhythm section backing many of the performers for the next few days is Bill Charlap, piano; Peter Washington, bass; Jeff Hamilton, drums; and Graham Dechter, guitar.

Jessica Williams sent a link to a video clip of Garner, one of her piano heroes, with his trio in 1966. The subject line of her message was, “You’ll Love This.”
The message was, “Is this cool or what?”
It’s cool. Go here to see and hear it.

In jazz improvisation, speed for the sake of speed is often self-defeating. Beyond a certain velocity, fingers tend to outrun brains. The automatic pilot kicks in and a musician ends up merely–as a standard phrase in the critic’s lexicon has it–running the changes. Even Art Tatum and Charlie Parker had episodes of auto-pilotitis when fast tempos produced visceral excitement and little else.
Saturday evening at The Seasons, I heard the Bill Charlap Trio play “In The Still Of The Night” at a clip unmeasurable by a metronome unless it could register well over 320 beats a minute. Following Charlap’s piano introduction spiced with allusions to Thelonious Monk, he, Peter Washington and Kenny Washington were off like synchronized rockets.

Through chorus after chorus, despite the tempo Charlap fulfilled Lester Young’s ideal for soloists; he told a story, never falling into content deficit. That wasn’t the only fast performance of the evening. The trio took Irving Berlin’s “The Best Thing For You,” Cole Porter’s “All Through The Night,” George Gershwin’s “Nice Work If You Can Get It” and Charlie Parker’s “Passport” at rapid tempos, but “In The Still Of The Night” must have come close to setting a new land speed record for piano trios.

 

 

 

Bill Charlap   Peter Washington   Kenny Washington

It seemed to me that in medium-tempo pieces and in ballads, there was more subtle interaction among Charlap’s piano, Kenny W’s drums and Peter W’s bass than when I have heard the band before. Porter’s rarely heard “Where Have You Been” was achingly beautiful. As in the trio’s recent Village Vanguard recording, George Wallington’s “Godchild,” drew on Gerry Mulligan’s famous Birth Of The Cool arrangement. The encore–only two days late–was “My Funny Valentine,” taken slowly. In an effective departure, Charlap interpolated the song’s verse as a solo interlude,.
If Keith Jarrett hadn’t taken the name, The Standards Trio could describe Charlap’s group. Their repertoire is largely based in classic American songs to which audiences relate. Within those recognizable frameworks, Charlap and the Washingtons create new music. It’s a formula whose success is enhanced by three superior musicians whose decade of experience together results in unusual empathy. Every time I’ve heard them lately, they’re better. And faster.

This week, I’ll be reporting from the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival in Moscow, Idaho and the Portland Jazz Festival in Oregon. It will be the first Hampton festival completely under the direction of its new major domo, John Clayton. Because the events overlap, I’ll be getting to Portland for only the last two days of the festival’s ten. The good news is that I’ll get to hear Nancy King (with Kurt Elling and Steve Chrisopherson), Anat Cohen and Joshua Redman.