Archives for 2008

Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette have stayed together as the
Standards Trio for a quarter of a century. How? Why? Associated Press writer Charles J. Gans wondered, and spoke with the three. Here’s a little of what Jarrett told him:

If you meet the perfect other two people for your needs in a musical jazz situation, why would you force yourself to go around the corner and find two other people to play with?

Gans discloses the surprising information that except for one date when Paul Motian substituted on drums, Peackock and DeJohnette are the only two jazz musicians Jarrett has played with since 1983. To read his article, go here. To read the Rifftides take on the trio’s latest CD set, go here.

Marc Myers is devoting three days of his excellent Jazz Wax blog to a discussion of the Paul Desmond Quartet with Jim Hall. I have the honor of being his guest discusser. We talk about the RCA Victor recordings and the earlier Warner Bros album of the Desmond quartet. This is a link to the first installment.
I was surprised in searching the internet to see that although the individual RCA albums and single-CD compilations are generally available, the box set of the complete recordings is becoming hard to find. The Warner Bros album, originally titled First Place Again and once reissued as East Of The Sun, seems to be available only as a bootleg import CD. I suppose that is better than not having it available at all. Some recordings, like some books, should be in print forever.
A part of the Q & A with Myers concerns Desmond’s musical relationship with Dave Brubeck. I tried to give some insight, but language is inadequate to describe music. The best understanding of music, and therefore of musical relationships, is gained through listening. In the case of Desmond and Brubeck, this 1959 performance in Rome takes us a long way. The piece is “These Foolish Things,” whioh they transformed together for decades. It is a fine demonstration of Brubeck’s skill as an ideal accompanist for Desmond. Desmond’s solo is so good that when it ends even he seems pleased, a rare occurence.

Terry Teachout is making progress on his biography of Louis Armstrong. He just wrote a chapter in three days Take it from a writer; that’s blazing progress. He gives a sample on his blog. Among other things, it deals with Armstrong’s life on the road and with Henry “Red” Allen, recently a Rifftides subject. To read the excerpt on TT’s About Last Night, go here. I am looking forward to that book.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
–Martin Luther King, Jr.

One year ago, the pianist George Cables gave his listeners a moment of music so vivid that I was moved to write of it,

…he created that rarest of musical experiences, a concert performance that remains in the mind, whole and alive.

You may go here to read about that concert.
Cables’ playing that night was extraordinary, but it was plain to everyone in the audience that he was unwell–drastically underweight, moving to the piano with difficulty. On dialysis for years, he had undergone it that very day.
Dialysis was a part of his routine on the road until his illness made staying on the road impossible. Last fall, he underwent a simultaneous liver and kidney transplant. Cables has been recuperating at home. He has a long way to go to recovery, and an enormous medical debt to meet. To help, friends have arranged two nights of benefit performances at the Greenwich Village, New York, club called Sweet Rhythm. So far, twenty-three prominent musicians are donating their talents. No doubt there will be more. Here are details sent by the organizers:

The New York All-Star Benefit for George Cables
FRIDAY JANUARY 25 and SATURDAY JANUARY 26
SETS: 8, 10, MIDNIGHT, 2AM
$25 per set and $10 minimum
SWEET RHYTHM
88 7th Ave S
New York, NY 10014
(212) 255-3626

Kenny Barron,
Randy Brecker,
Michael Carvin,
Joe Chambers,
Sonny Fortune,
Billy Harper,
Winard Harper,
Louis Hayes,
Vincent Herring,
Pete LaRoca,
Peter Leitch,
Victor Lewis,
Ronnie Mathews,
Cecil McBee,
Eric Reed,
Rufus Reid,
James Spaulding,,
Steve Turre,
Cedar Walton,
Buster Williams,
Steve Wilson,
Lenny White,
Reggie Workman

Reservations are strongly advised
www.sweetrhythmny.com
If you can’t attend, and would like to contribute please visit: www.georgecables.com . The George Cables Healing Fund has been set up where all contributions (with the exception of PayPal deductions) go directly to George, or you can send a check in any amount payable to:
GEORGE CABLES
c/o JazzCorner.com
245 West 25th St. #2F
New York, NY 10001

There is little internet video of Cables, but this ten-minute clip of “Alone Together” at an Italian festival last summer captures him in fine fettle. The other players are identified in the box to the right of the little YouTube video screen.

Even if I am fighting my way out of a thicket of deadlines, as I am at the moment, when a Jim Ferguson CD arrives, I stop what I’m doing and listen to it. Fortunately for the viability of the exchequer, that doesn’t happen often. The most recent Ferguson album came the day before yesterday. The previous one arrived seven years ago.
The new CD is Mundell Lowe & Jim Ferguson, Haunted Heart (Lily’s Dad’s Music). The record company, if that’s not too grand a term, is Ferguson’s. He is Lily’s dad. Lily is pictured in the painting on the cover. Ferguson is self-effacing in that way, and also in giving credit; you’ll notice that he put Mundell Lowe’s name first. That no doubt reflects the respect he has for the guitarist, who was a mainstay of jazz in New York before Ferguson was born in 1950. Ferguson has spent much of his working musical life in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is in considerable demand in recording studios and television as a singer and as a bassist. Like Jay Leonhart and Kristin Korb, he sings and plays the bass at the same time. If I owned a concert hall, I’d hire the three of them to perform together. For now, however, I am content to listen to the magic that he and Lowe discovered a few years ago when they first toured together.
In his fine notes for the album, Richard M. Sudhalter writes, “A high tenor male voice is a rarity in professional music these days, and the tendency is not to take it seriously…..” Ferguson must be taken seriously because his musicianship is as powerful in his singing as in his playing. From the instant vocal swing he achieves on the propulsion of Lowe’s four-bar introduction of “Gone With The Wind” to the close of the CD with one unelaborated chorus of “I’ll Be Seeing You,” Ferguson’s singing is without flaw. His bass playing finds the right groove on every one of the eleven songs, and it seems to me that his swing, singing and playing on “Mean To Me” combine in a little masterpiece. His bass work is as agile as he wants to make it, but in solo he does not indulge in fingerboard gymnastics. Ferguson and Lowe work beautifully together. Lowe’s skill and inventiveness are firmly intact as he approaches his eighty-sixth year. That is evident in his solo features, “There’s A Small Hotel” and his own “Big Star, Little Star.” This is a kind and quality of chamber music we don’t hear much any more, two masters of the art just playing, with no gimmick and no intent beyond making music.
The songs include “Haunted Heart,” “My Foolish Heart,” “Detour Ahead” and Mose Allison’s “I Don’t Worry About A Thing,” which Ferguson personalizes simply by being Ferguson. He is almost unbearably moving in his vocals on Bill Evans’ and Gene Lees’ “Waltz For Debby” and that modern classic by Johnny Mandel and Paul Williams, “Close Enough For Love.”
It’s a joy to see Dick Sudhalter’s byline again. If you’re a Rifftides regular, you know what he’s been going through. If you’re not, there are several archive pieces about him, including this one. For background on Jim Ferguson beyond that in Dick’s notes, see this biography.

Pete Candoli was an iron man in an iron-man calling. He played lead trumpet in the big bands of Tommy Dorsey, Glen Miller, Stan Kenton, Les Brown, Count Basie, Freddy Slack, Tex Beneke, Jerry Gray, Charlie Barnet and Woody Herman…among others. He became famous as Superman With A Horn in Woody Herman’s First Herd of 1945 and ’46. Later, he co-led a group with his younger brother Conte. He was a mainstay in the recording studios and on the sound stages of Hollywood. News of Pete Candoli’s death January 11th at the age of 84 was made public today. Conte died in 2001.

Conte and Pete Candoli

Rifftides Readers sometimes send useful tips. Here are three:
Pianist Emil Viklický called our attention to this YouTube clip of him and two other Czech musicians sitting in with Dizzy Gillespie’s band in a 1990 concert. In a moment of geographic confusion, Diz introduces them as our “Yugoslav brothers.” The other Czechs are saxophonist Jiri Stivin, who plays a startling solo on pennywhistle, and trumpeter Juraj Bartos. Paquito D’Rivera is also aboard, on clarinet and alto. The bassist is John Lee, the drummer Ignacio Berroa. Does anyone recognize the tenor saxophonist? There is a guitarist whom we hear but never clearly see. Dizzy introduces the piece as “Straight, No Chaser.” That melody line never materializes, and they end with “Billie’s Bounce,” but we get ten entertaining minutes of the blues in F and a reminder that no one was better than Gillespie at setting riffs behind a soloist.
Saxophonist David Liebman
sent the following radio information:

I am being interviewed on the Musician’s Show tomorrow (Wednesday-Jan 16 at 6PM-Eastern time in the U.S.) on the illustrious jazz station WKCR-FM broadcast from Columbia University in New York. I will be playing the music that shaped my aesthetic over the years. As I write now, I am putting together the music, which will include my first influences and teachers (Elvis, Tristano, Charles Lloyd) to the main saxophonists (Wayne Shorter, Trane, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Lee Konitz, Joe Henderson); Miles and Bill Evans of course; world and classical music (Chopin, Beethoven and Bartok) as well as a few of my things and one track from a live gig that Quest just did a few months ago (Richie Beirach, Ron McClure, Billy Hart). Quest is playing Birdland in New York Feb 6-9. The show is three hours and hopefully the interviewer will be cool. You can google it and tune in anywhere in the world I believe. (I assume it will be archived).

To hear the program, tune in 89.9 FM in New York or listen on the web by going here.
Saxophonist, composer, arranger, bandleader and broadcaster
Bill Kirchner’s next Jazz From The Archives on WBGO radio will feature the singer and bassist Jim Ferguson, a world-class musician who might be better known if he lived in New York or Los Angeles. Ferguson is based in Nashville, Tennessee. Kirchner writes:

We’ll hear recordings of Ferguson performing solo, with two quartets (accompanied by tenor saxophonist Chris Potter, pianists Pat Coil or Stefan Karlsson, and drummer Jim White), and in duo with the veteran guitarist Mundell Lowe. The show will air this Sunday, January 20, from 11 p.m. to midnight, Eastern Standard Time.

In the New York area, WBGO is at 88.3 FM. On the internet, go here. Before the week is out, I expect to have a Rifftides item about the Mundell Lowe/Jim Ferguson CD.

It was a piano weekend in apple, wine and snow country in the shadow of the Cascade mountains. Two of the premier jazz pianists of the twenty-first century played here. Fresh from Los Angeles, Jan Lundgren had just recorded for Fresh Sound Records a trio CD of the music of Ralph Rainger. Bassist Chuck Berghofer and drummer Joe LaBarbera, who were on the record session, did not make the trip north.
The Swedish pianist had one rehearsal Saturday afternoon with Seattle bassist Jon Hamar and Don Kinney, principal percussionist of the Yakima Symphony Orchestra and a seasoned jazz drummer. In an interview at the rehearsal, Kinney told a television reporter, “Sixteen bars into the first tune, I felt as if I’d been playing with this guy all my life.” That’s how the three sounded Saturday night at The Seasons performance hall. It was a demonstration that under the right circumstances, the universal language common to experienced jazz musicians can bind the best of them together even on short notice.
Lundgren chose one of Rainger’s best-known songs, “Easy Living,” a cross-section of great American songbook pieces by Rodgers, Gershwin, Porter, Kaper, Ellington, Monk and Don Redman, and a pair of traditional Swedish songs including “Ach Warmeland du Skona” (aka “Dear Old Stockholm”). He dazzled the audience with his technique and his warmth. All hands got plenty of solo time, and the ad hoc Lundgren trio got a standing ovation.
Sunday afternoon,Jessica Williams
played a private concert at the home of a fan who is also a pianist. On a small grand piano in a big living room packed with guests, she marked a return to her fascination with Thelonious Monk. One of the most engaging and skilled of Monk interpreters, Williams told her listeners that she had made an effort to move away from his music because for a time she wondered “where Jessica had gone.” Not far, evidently; she and Monk were in perfect synch, the qualities of each on full display, nowhere more powerfully than in her composition “Monk’s Hat.” She premiered a new section of her recent “Freedom Suite,” dedicated to the young Americans who serve in the Iraq war. “This is not a political statement,” she said. “It’s a tribute to those boys and girls.” The melody, in long tones over an ostinato figure, was a meditation, a reflection, quite unlike anything else she played in the recital. Williams found a spellbinding medium-tempo groove for “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.” The two-hour recital ended with “I Love You, Sweetheart Of All My Dreams,” a 1926 pop chestnut that Monk once recorded unaccompanied. It was laced with his humor, her humor and stride passages that might have come from James P. Johnson. Williams’s altered changes would certainly have made James P. sit up and take notice–and smile.

Through our Washington, DC, correspondent John Birchard, Rifftides has updated you from time to time on the fight against the Bush administration’s attempt to dismantle or downgrade the English language broadcasts of the Voice Of America. Birchard reports that there has been, if not an all-out victory, significant progress.

Concerning the battle to keep the English language news division at VOA alive: we won!
A two-year battle with our own management ended when Bush signed a budget bill that included specific language restoring the funds for English news as well as some language services that had been targeted for extinction (Russian, etc.). Not only that, the Congress included language (and funds) to restore some short- and medium-wave transmissions which will begin to expand our terribly shrunken reach.
Heroes in this tedious fight are the Chair of the Foreign Ops Subcommittee on Appropriations, Rep Nita Lowey of NY, and the ranking Republican on the subcommittee Frank Wolf of Virginia. But beyond their work, we found another member of Congress to whom we now refer as Our Lady on the Hill, Rep Betty McCollum, D of MN. She’s a former Peace Corps volunteer who was (and remains) a fan of VOA. She’s been a key defender for us and we can’t thank her enough for her efforts.
When I came to VOA fifteen years ago, I never expected to be involved in politics, nor did I want to. But this fight for survival has forced me (and a number of others) to learn the ropes of Washington behind-the-scenes legislative work. Like the making of sausage, it’s a process better left to the imagination.
And it’s not over. In February, when the fiscal ’09 budget is unveiled, we fully expect that management will again try to shut us down. But this time we don’t have to re-invent the wheel. We’ve done the research, cultivated the contacts, gotten on a first-name basis with the committee staffers who make things happen in the halls of Congress and know the battle goes not to the swift but to the plodding, every-day scut work where you win some, lose some and come back to fight another day. And never give up.
That’s your Washington report for today.
John Birchard

For John’s previous report, go here. This discussion started following a Rifftides piece about the VOA’s honored jazz broadcaster Willis Conover. If you search the archive (right-hand column) for Conover’s name, you will find other posts on the matter.

In the 1950s and early sixties, there was a vogue for combining jazz and poetry. It wasn’t new. Poets as far back as Langston Hughes in the 1920s read their work in collaboration with jazz musicians, usually in the privacy of homes, rarely in public. Thirty years later the idea sprang up again in beatnik pads in San Francisco and New York’s East Village, then spread to coffee houses, night clubs, recordings and on at least one occasion, a Los Angeles concert hall. For David Amram’s recollection of the role that he, Jack Kerouac and Philip Lamantia played in the New York phenomenon, go here. In the west, Alan Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, Kenneth Patchen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Rexroth were at the heart of the movement, along with musicians including Charles Mingus, Allyn Ferguson and Fred Katz. Here is a little of what Rexroth wrote at the time about jazz poetry.

I hope the faddist elements of this new medium will die away. The ignorant and the pretentious, the sockless hipsters out for a fast buck or a few drinks from a Village bistro, will soon exhaust their welcome with the public, and the field will be left clear for serious musicians and poets who mean business. I think that it is a development of considerable potential significance for both jazz and poetry. It reaches an audience many times as large as that commonly reached by poetry, and an audience free of some of the serious vices of the typical poetry lover. It returns poetry to music and to public entertainment as it was in the days of Homer or the troubadours.
Things are beginning to get out of hand. The other day Ralph Gleason, the jazz critic, said to me that he expected any day to see ads in the trade papers: “JAZZ POET: blues, ballad, upbeat, free verse or rhyme. Have tux. Will travel.” And T.S. Eliot touring the kerosene circuit with Little Richard and the Harlem Globetrotters. Crazes are usually pretty empty, sterile things. It would be a pity if incompetents looking for a fast buck turned this into a temporary social disease like pee-wee golf or swallowing goldfish.

That didn’t happen. Rather, the movement had a brief period of attention, then faded into a subterranean region of the culture. Could it resurface into the mainstream? Maybe so, if Robert Pinsky, the former poet laureate of the United States, continues his interest in jazz and poetry. Pinsky combined forces the other night with the veteran drummer Andrew Cyrille. Paul Lieberman reported on their performance in The Los Angeles Times.

Pinsky, who proved to be a populist poet laureate by inviting Americans to send him their favorite verses, indeed teaches at Boston University. But the plan did call for him to try one exercise out of the jazz world, not academia: a round of “trade fours” with the drummer, Cyrille. Normally, musicians throw a few bars back and forth, “just have a conversation,” the drummer noted, the wrinkle here being that Pinsky would throw him couplets instead, two-line rhyming poems, such as one by J.V. Cunningham that went, “This Humanist, whom no belief constrained, / Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.”

To read all of Lieberman’s story, go here.
In 1957, Kenneth Rexroth recorded an album of his jazz poetry in San Francisco at The Cellar, a Chinese restaurant converted into a nightclub. The performance by Rexroth with a group that included tenor saxophonist Brew Moore and bassist Ron Crotty is reissued on this CD. It discloses that Pinsky was not the first poet to trade fours with jazz players. This essay from the Rexroth Archives contains the poet’s observations on the form.

As far as I know, Pete Winslow never recorded his poetry, with or without a jazz group, but I played once while he read. Pete and I were in journalism school together at the University of Washington. He edited the campus humor magazine and sometimes wrote poetry for it under the pseudonym Eleanor H. Browning. He was a tall, skinny guy with short hair and horn-rimmed glasses. He often seemed to be smiling, even when he wasn’t. This badly reproduced picture from the yearbook will give you an idea of the seriousness with which he took his job as editor of Columns, the humor magazine. After graduation, Pete worked for the Seattle Post Intelligencer, I for The Seattle Times. Before long, I left for the Marine Corps. Four years later, I was a civilian again and in my first television job in Yakima, Washington, where, strangely enough, I have settled after four decades as a journalism gypsy. But I digress.
Bob Mitchell and, I both trumpet players, used to sit in at the Enchanted Gardens of the Chieftan Hotel in the heart of downtown Yakima with an all-girl trio from Los Angeles, The Three Vees. One night in 1960 or ’61 I looked into the audience from the bandstand of the Enchanted Gardens and, to my considerable surprise, saw Pete Winslow, smiling. Really smiling. When the tune ended, we had a reunion. He presented me with a copy of his first book of poetry, Whatever Happened To Pete Winslow? (Tolle House, 1960) and signed it. I asked him if he’d like to read some of his work to the Enchanted Gardens audience of cowboys, used car salesmen, secretaries and orchardists. He said he would. I cleared it with Mitch and the Three Vees–Verna, Paula and Mary Ann. They were game for anything. It was that kind of band.
We played behind him, listened closely, filled when he paused, reacted when he emphasized passages and, in general, sounded as if we had rehearsed. Pete became the sixth member of the band. It could have been a disaster, but it worked. We enjoyed it and so did the crowd. No one threw anything. Pete went on to establish something of a reputation in San Francisco’s North Beach. Although he read in coffee houses toward the end of the brief heyday of the beatniks, he never really qualified as a beat poet. Perhaps his work was too cheerful, too surrealistic I don’t remember which of his poems Pete read that night at the Chieftan. He may have included this one, which has gained a small amount of fame:

FORM
Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater
Is trochaic tetrameter.

Or this one:

UNDERGROUND RUBIYAT
A book of verses, underneath the Bau-
delaire, some bread, a real Guernsey cow,
mooing beside me, darling Filthy Bess – –
Ah, Filthy Bess were Mary Pickford now!
That great inverted bowl there, on the floor;
Why did I walk so quickly through the door?
Now stains and bits of cabbage spot the wall
Where moving Fingers writ the football score.
Come, spill the soup! And in the mire I sing,
You bitter varmint, waiting sentencing.
The bird of time has taught a turtle how
To stutter, and–the turtle’s stuttering!

Pete died at the age of thirty-seven of complications following surgery. He wrote a novel, Mount Gogo, which seems to have disappeared, and five volumes of poetry, none in general circulation today but all available if you look hard enough. They are Whatever Happened to Pete Winslow? The Rapist and Other Poems, Monster Cookies, Mummy Tapes and Daisy in the Memory of a Shark.
Pete was a good guy. I miss him. For more about Winslow, see this article at Poetry Bay.
During those Enchanted Gardens days, Bobby Mitchell had a part-time job as a garbage man; there wasn’t much steady work for jazz trumpet players in Yakima. Nor is there now. A fine player, he eventually solved the problem by getting out of town and working with Count Basie and Earl Hines. He is on several Basie CDs from the late 1970s, including this one. He is the featured soloist on this video clip of the Basie band at Montreux in 1977. Mitch died a few years ago. I miss him, too.

Here is part of a Rifftides piece from last March:

When I listen to the two-track analog stereo recordings Roy DuNann made for the Contemporary label shortly after the perfection of stereo in the 1950s, I curse the boneheads who, because they could, introduced multi-track, multi-microphone recording. Digital capability then came along with 587-channel mixing boards and made post production a sci-fi adventure that compounded all of the engineering wizards’ sins. Red Mitchell was right; simple isn’t easy. That applies to everything in life, especially audio engineering. Rudy Van Gelder, nominated by acclamation as the god of jazz recording, was better in early stereo than after he got all the toys. For one thing, in the fifties his pianos sounded more like pianos.

I concluded that piece,

Last I heard, Roy DuNann was still with us, living in Seattle. Won’t someone bring him out of retirement?

DuNann has not come out of retirement, but It developed that the jazz journalist Thomas Conrad found him five years earlier and wrote a long piece about him for Stereophile magazine. Whether reading about audio gear and techniques makes you quiver or you’re a listener who simply relishes quality sound, this warm-hearted article will make you feel good. It includes a sidebar list of some of the best albums DuNann recorded at Contemporary. To read Tom’s piece, click here.
Last fall, Rick Chin and other members of the Pacific Northwest chapter of the Audio Engineering Society invited DuNann, now well into his eighties, to come to a meeting and talk about his achievements. Clarinetist William O. Smith, who was on several Contemporary albums that DuNann recorded, also spoke. To visit the AES website and listen to an MP3 of that meeting (in excellent sound, of course), go here. You’ll find the MP3 links at the bottom of the page about the meeting, which also has photos of DuNann, Smith and Conrad. When Rick Chin sent me a message about this, he wrote, “The files are rather large in the interest of fidelity.” I hope that your computer can accommodate them. Long live two-track stereo.

If you go to the right-hand column and scroll down to Doug’s Picks, you will find five new recommendations. To browse back through more than a year-and-a-half of recommendations, click on “More Picks” at the end of the current batch.