Archives for 2008

The Portland Jazz Festival reports that it is not dead after all. Nearly a month ago, the festival announced that a lack of major sponsorship and funding caused it to be canceled. Earlier this year, the telephone company Qwest dropped out as the event’s primary sponsor. With the economy limping, fuel costs high and revenues pinched, airlines are not thriving, but Alaska Air Lines is flying to the festival’s rescue, aided by a coalition of former and new sponsors. Alaska Air has promised to provide $50,000 a year for two years. Qwest has agreed to a contribution of $5,000. The resuscitated 2009 festival, February 13-22, will be built around the 70th anniversary of Blue Note Records.

Co-founder and artistic director Bill Royston (pictured) told the Portland Oregonian that Alaska’s offer came “out of the blue.” In a news release, his co-founder Sarah Bailen Smith added, “I’ve been astonished at how incredibly supportive this community has been since our announcement. Portland recognizes the value of the arts. It makes me proud to live here.”

Headliners for the 2009 festival were not announced. Royston told Rifftides that the festival will hold a news conference this afternoon. For details of the rescue package, see this story in this morning’s Oregonian.

It was nearly dawn after a round — several rounds — of music and conviviality during the 1969 New Orleans Jazz Festival. A few of us were sitting on the balcony of Bobby Hackett’s hotel room on Bourbon Street swapping stories and thinking it might be about time to call it a night. Hackett’s guests, in alphabetical order, were Count Basie, Jack Bradley, Willis Conover, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Paul Desmond and I. Dropping those names is a bit disturbing because all of their owners but Jack and I are memories. There was a good deal of laughter and — to use a phrase I wish hadn’t fallen out of fashion — shuckin’ and jivin’. We decided to extend the party and order breakfast from room service. Before we adjourned, we toasted the sun rising over the rooftops of the French Quarter. That was a good night.

Rifftides readers no doubt recognize all of those names except, perhaps, Bradley’s. Jack is a photographer, quite a good one. He used to do a fair amount of writing for jazz publications. I’ve never been entirely sure how he supported himself; probably not by writing about jazz and shooting pictures of musicians. I used to see him occasionally in New Orleans and, later, fairly often in New York. Here, Louis Armstrong and Jack are pictured together in 1963. I knew that this garrulous and engaging man was close to Armstrong and collected Armstrong memorabilia.  Until Niko Koppel’s story in the Sunday New York Times, I didn’t know the extent of that closeness or his collecting obsession.

Mr. Bradley archived just about anything from Armstrong that he could save — discarded letters, eyeglasses, handkerchiefs, even clothes that did not fit properly after Armstrong lost weight. In addition, he paid Armstrong’s valet and housekeeper for goods and ephemera that the musician gave to them. “It was important to preserve everything that he spoke and he did,” Mr. Bradley said. “He was the genius of the 20th century.”

Now, Jack is passing his extensive Armstrong collection to an institution that will preserve it and show it to the public. To read the whole story, go here.

If you need a reminder of why it is easy to be obsessed with Louis, watch this video. It’s also a nice way to remember Paul Newman.

Please see the center column for the new batch of recommendations. It took a while, but you may find that they were worth waiting for.

Researching an article that involves Ernestine Anderson, I came across this video of her rehearsing in Hungary in 1994 with Milt Jackson. It is one of several YouTube clips from the same occasion. The Hungarian musicians are not identified.

Alto saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón is one of twenty-five winners of 2008 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowships. The grants were announced today. Each of the awards is for $500,000 over five years, to be used in any way the recipient decides. Although not officially described as “genius grants” by the MacArthur foundation, that is what the fellowships have come to be called.

This year’s fellows include writers, scientists, an architect, a farmer, and artists in various fields. Zenón was cited for “drawing from a variety of jazz idioms and the indigenous music of his native Puerto Rico to create a new language of complex, yet accessible sounds that overflow with emotion.”

For a Rifftides review of Zenón’s most recent recording, go here. In the video below, Zenón is with pianist Luis Perdomo, bassist Hans Glawischnig and drummer Henry Cole playing for a good-natured New York audience.

             

Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker, was chosen by MacArthur for “offering both highly specialized and casual readers new ways of thinking about the music of the past and its place in our future.” Ross has a first-class blog called The Rest Is Noise.

For biographical sketches and photographs of all twenty-five MacArthur fellows, go here. If you are interested in applying for one of next year’s grants, forget it. Candidates don’t know that they are in the running. They are chosen in secret by a committee whose members’ identities are also secret. Some years ago when I had business at the MacArthur Foundation headquarters in Chicago, I jokingly offered to fill out an application. The executive director said he would be glad to put me on a list of those to be notified when they are not chosen.

I know, I know; Doug’s Picks is overdue for new entries. They’ll be coming along, but the Rifftides staff is engaged in a number of projects, including preparation of a reading from Poodie James, with strings. More about that later. Among other things, I’m writing the notes for a forthcoming CD co-led by Charlie Shoemake and Terry Trotter. It is a delight. I’m not at liberty to tell you about it except to say that its title is Inside and the music, uncompromising but accessible, is a delight. It will be released later this year.

In any case, since Norma Winstone’s latest CD is one of the current picks (see the center column), it seems fitting to let you know that Bill Kirchner (pictured) has prepared a Winstone spectacular for his next broadcast, which will be streamed on the internet. Here is his announcement:

Recently, I taped my next one-hour show for the “Jazz From The Archives” series. Presented by the Institute of Jazz Studies, the series runs every Sunday on WBGO-FM (88.3).

Britain’s Norma Winstone (b. 1941) is not exactly a “well kept secret” (though that’s the title of one of her albums), but she’s much less known than she deserves to be, given her stature as one of the finest vocalists in current jazz. She’s capable of singing everything from standards to challenging original material. And she’s a first-rate lyricist as well.

We’ll hear Winstone with trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, reed players Tony Coe and Klaus Gesing, pianists Jimmy Rowles, John Taylor, and Glauco Venier, bassist George Mraz, drummer Joe LaBarbera, and Wheeler’s big band.

The show will air this Sunday, September 28, from 11 p.m. to midnight, Eastern Daylight Time. NOTE: If you live outside the New York City metropolitan area, WBGO also broadcasts on the Internet at www.wbgo.org.

Dave Frishberg’s friendship and collaborations with Dick Sudhalter go back more than three decades. He sent this appreciation.

I want to say something about Dick Sudhalter and the sadness of his passing . I’m staggered by Sudhalter’s contributions to jazz literature and criticism. There are plenty of good writers who write about the music, but for my money Sudhalter and Benny Green stand out as the enduring literary giants of the genre. Both of them were involved with “classic” jazz and swing music, both of them were excellent professional musicians, and both of them could, with authority and elegance, write critically about the heart of music . They were widely informed and narrow-minded — requisites of good criticism, as I see it. My favorite jazz literature: Green’s The Reluctant Art and Sudhalter’s Lost Chords. I find myself going back again and again to those books and never failing to enjoy them.

You find Sudhalter’s writing in the unlikeliest places. In the series of large spiral-bound piano albums published by Reader’s Digest in 1980s , e.g. Treasury of Best Loved Songs, and Popular Songs That Will Live Forever, I found the annotations to be sophisticated and beautifully written. Sure enough–turned out to be by Sudhalter. (Incidentally, the piano arrangements in this series are all by Dan Fox, and they are easy to play and very hip.) Sudhalter also annotated a lot of the Mosaic reissue packages, and his comments are essential to the enjoyment of those collections. Richard wrote with power, grace, and precision; his literary style just sang right out as if it were music. He sure will be missed.

Please do not miss Terry Teachout’s newly posted remembrance, in poetry and video, of Richard M. Sudhalter. Go here.

Richard M. Sudhalter gave elegance and exactness to speech, writing and music-making.

Dick’s perfection of expression came in natural flows, whether he was writing,
 playing the cornet or chatting over dinner. Gene Lees observed that Dick was the only person he knew who always spoke in perfect sentences and paragraphs. Sudhalter’s mastery of language is everywhere in his biographies of Bix Beiderbecke and Hoagy Carmichael and his monumental study Lost Chords. Currents of coherence, logic, passion and humor are equally evident in his playing.

A few years ago, a stroke robbed Dick of the ability to play and caused halting speech. Then a disease called multiple system atrophy (MSA) attacked him and, over a few years, shut down his body. He lost speech and the use of his limbs. The disease left his intellect intact but destroyed his ability to communicate, the thing he did extraordinarily well. Friends and admirers around the world donated to a fund for his medical expenses and there was a benefit concert, but MSA is progressive and incurable. Dick died in a New York hospital shortly after one o’clock this morning.

He sometimes used trumpet and he had a distinctive way with the flugelhorn, but he preferred cornet, the instrument his hero Beiderbecke stayed with despite the trumpet’s having come to dominance in jazz. Dick was a man out of his time in other ways, too. In an era of increasingly casual dress, he preferred the bespoke tailoring he learned to love during his London years as a UPI correspondent. He was open-minded about new developments in jazz,

but had a firm attachment to the emotional and intellectual straightforwardness of Bix and the Chicago School. You can hear it on all three of his instruments in this CD with friends including Dave Frishberg, Daryl Sherman, Dan Barrett and Bill Crow, among others. (In the picture, Dick, on the left, is with Crow.) Sudhalter is exclusively on cornet in The Classic Jazz Quartet with Dick Wellstood, Joe Muranyi and Marty Grosz — a gathering of four spirits aligned in their love for music, writing and clowning.

Because of its subtitle, Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contributions to Jazz, 1915-1945 was reflexively attacked by partisans who chose to see it as an effort to diminish the importance of black musicians. Had they bothered to read the book, they would have found that Sudhalter does quite the opposite while balancing the historical record of achievement in jazz and providing deep insights into the nature of the music. As a player, Bix was his hero and primary influence, but Dick also wrote beautifully about Louis Armstrong in, among other places, the notes for Heart Full of Rhythm, Vol.2, a CD with some of the music Armstrong recorded for Decca. Here’s a small sample of his ability to draw on the present in illuminating a performance from the past.

Pianist Bill Evans used to insist that excision of sentimentality yielded the purest form of romanticism. My bet is he’d have been delighted with what Louis does to “Once in a While.” Even on paper its lyric teeters precariously on the edge of bathos. Yet Louis manages (how? what’s the secret?) to strip away the self-pity and make it affecting, even poignant.

A few months after Dick’s stroke, I was in the lounge above the front lobby of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York. His close friend Daryl Sherman was playing Cole Porter’s piano and singing. She told me that Dick was going to try to be there, but not to count on it; he was having some bad days. Soon, though, I saw him making his slow way across the room to where our friend Jill McManus and I were listening to Daryl. He was impeccably turned out in sport coat, slacks and tie, just the right late-afternoon outfit for the proper New York gentleman of the 1940s, a decade in which I think he would have preferred to be living. When Daryl took a break, the four of us sat chatting. Dick’s wit and incisiveness shined through the slow speech, but he tired quickly and returned to the apartment to rest.

After that encounter, we talked by telephone a few times. Then, he could correspond only by e-mail — then, only through relays from other people — then, not at all. One can only imagine how it was for this most articulate of men to be imprisoned within himself, unable to express ideas or emotions.

Dick wanted to go, I’m sure of that. His ordeal is at an end. Knowing that it was inevitable and coming soon did not prepare me for this depth of sadness. His music, his books, the good luck of his friendship, will enrich me for the rest of my life.

Our mutual close friend Terry Teachout was extremely helpful to Dick in his last year or two. For Terry’s tribute, go here.

(Photo of Dick Sudhalter courtesy of Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University) 

 

John McNeil and Bill McHenry have reemerged with their quartet, cleverly timing their next appearance and new affiliation with the fuss surrounding that other current phenomenon, a massive worldwide financial crisis. Here’s the announcement popping up in e-mail in-boxes from Truckee to Tokyo.

This Friday, Sept. 19th at Cornelia St. Café

The John McNeil/Bill McHenry Quartet Returns!

The boys took a brief hiatus to recover from the rigors of their recent New England tour. Dealing with surging, underwear-throwing crowds night after night takes a physical and psychological toll that is hard for normal Americans to imagine. After a few weeks away from the glare of publicity, however, the boys are refreshed and ready to participate in FONT (Fest. of New Trumpet Music) and to once more dispense their life-giving improvisations to the jazz public.

In more news, the band is now under the corporate sponsorship of Lehman Bros., a prestigious Wall Street firm, and this solid financial backing should help raise the public awareness of the McNeil/McHenry brand of spiritual and physical healing. Good times ahead!

John McNeil — Trumpet

Bill McHenry — Tenor

Joe Martin — Bass

Jochen Rueckert — Drums

One set, starting at 11:00 -ish $10.00 cover Cornelia Street Caf̩, Cornelia St. betw. Bleecker & 6th Ave, Manhattan (212) 989 Р9319 http://corneliastreetcafe.com/

If you live in Sweden, China, Brazil, New Zealand, Poughkeepsie or some other farflung locale where Rifftidesiacs dwell, and find it inconvenient to be in New York tomorrow night, here’s a consolation prize by the McNeil-McHenry Band. The tune is “Batter Up,” written by Russ Freeman and first recorded by him with Chet Baker’s quartet in 1953.

Scenes along the way on this morning’s road bike ride through Cottonwood Canyon and environs 

Rifftides Washington, DC, correspondent John Birchard watched a DVD of the Modern Jazz Quartet’s 1994 35th Anniversary Tour and sent this review.

 

The 57 minutes were recorded at the Freiburg, Germany, music festival in 1987 and the evening shows the guys in average (that is to say brilliant) form.

 

The program opens with a vigorous “Rocking in Rhythm” from the Ellington songbook, featuring stop-time passages for each member. It seems that in their later years together, the four grew somehow both tighter and looser. The ensembles were ultra-crisp from so many performances, yet the feeling is one of relaxed, flowing conversation.

 

Milt Jackson handles the announcements and they are models of economy, no wasted words. The program resumes with “Echoes”, a lovely ballad that picks up momentum with the MJQ’s patented chugging two-feeling. Was there ever a better ballad player on vibes than Jackson? 

 

“Kansas City Breaks”, dedicated to Charlie Parker, follows, then a rather fussy version of “Django”. The quartet must have played “Django” ten thousand times or more over the years and John Lewis often re-arranged the piece to keep it fresh. This arrangement tinkers with the structure rather more than necessary.

 

Gershwin’s “Summertime” is next, then “Bags Groove”, another piece that the group surely performed in the thousands of times. But, at least for this listener, it has never grown stale. The medium blues showcases the strengths of the MJQ – John Lewis’ infectious, epigrammatic comping and his deceptively simple solos… Jackson’s never-ending supply of great blues choruses…Percy Heath’s ferocious, stomping four-to-the-bar time… and Connie Kay, head slightly bowed and turned to the left as he listened, laying down the foundation upon which the others built their soul-satisfying structures. 

 

The DVD ends with the group’s encore — “A Day in Dubrovnik”, one of Lewis’ compositions inspired by European cities. Lewis introduces it in his soft, almost apologetic way, saying it’s an extended piece that describes in music the flavor of the old Adriatic city  — the arrival of tourists in the afternoon, the night life and the quiet of the morning. Lewis wrote several attractive European-sounding themes for the piece, as he had done before in such compositions as “Spanish Steps” and “Vendome”. It is my own shortcoming that I cannot appreciate this part of John Lewis’ talent as much as I do his more straight-ahead jazz writing and playing. But I can tell you the Freiburg audience was vocal in its appreciation of “Dubrovnik” and the group, of course, played it well. Not my cup of tea, but the rest of the DVD is top-notch MJQ. 

 

The disc is a reminder of what we have lost with the passing of these gifted men. They each recorded with other artists, and often the recordings were very good to excellent. But together they created a unique body of work, a blend of delicate strength and refined funk that stands alone.

 

                                                                — John Birchard

 

 

The scourge of heroin addiction among jazz musicians of the 1940s and 1950s is central to dozens of stories, novels, poems, plays and movies, most of them dreadful, overwrought clichés. Bad art aside, the monkey on the backs of musicians was real. It rode many of them to their graves. Unhorseing the habit required triumphing over more than the punishing chemical consequences of withdrawal. It meant also withstanding social pressure to conform in tight little communities of addicts whose lives were governed as much by the drug as by music.

It is impossible to exaggerate the courage of musicians who purged themselves of heroin addiction. Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Don Lanphere and others managed to survive a legion of colleagues who committed the slow suicide of slavery to heroin. However much the long-term effects of drug damage may have ultimately shortened their life spans, when they got clean they added productive decades.

Sonny Rollins is also a victor over drug addiction. There is power in the story of his struggle. As the recent Chicago Jazz Festival got underway with the 78-year-old Rollins as a headliner, Neil Tesser told Rollins’s story in an article in the Chicago Reader. The piece is called “How
Sonny Defeated the Dragon.” Rollins told Tesser about temptation in Chicago when he went there in 1955 after being released from the narcotics hospital at the federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky. One night when he thought he had accumulated enough fortitude, he went to a prominent jazz club known as a gathering place of addicts.

“When I got there, I saw a lot of old friends, a lot of the guys: ‘Hey Sonny, let’s go get high,'” Rollins says. “I had to be strong enough to withstand that. And that’s where I faced my Goliath. It was hard, man, because some of these guys knew I was not that far from using drugs. It was one of these biblical-like temptations. I resisted–my palms got sweaty and everything, but I resisted. I went back to my custodial job, but I thought, ‘I gotta get back into music.’ It was very difficult, because to tell the truth, I just escaped that first time; I just was able to resist all my friends offering these free drugs. But I thought, ‘I’m a musician and I have to be strong enough to be around drugs,’ because that was the scene.”

To read all of the story, go here. The online piece incorporates two audio clips of Rollins playing with the Clifford Brown-Max Roach quintet. One of them is a twenty-two-minute “Get Happy” with Rollins full of confidence and wit, and astonishing work by Brown. Thanks to Harris Meyer for tipping me to the Chicago Reader story.

In 1963, eight years after he rescued himself, Rollins appeared, hale and hearty, with his quartet on Italian television. Jazz had changed, in part because of the freedom introduced by Ornette Coleman.  With Rollins were Coleman’s trumpet pal Don Cherry; bassist Henry Grimes and drummer Billy Higgins. The tune is Thelonious Monk’s “52nd Street Theme,” in an eccentric sculpted arrangement by Rollins. As you will see, they didn’t call Higgins Smiling Billy for nothing. At the end, the lights go up, Sonny almost smiles, a big band plays them off and we get a quick shot of a woman who may have been the hostess of a variety show.

I think as long as people can hear a record and hear people like Lester Young on a recording, there will always be a great inspiration for somebody to try to create jazz. – Sonny Rollins

No one is original. Everyone is derivative. — Sonny Rollins

There was a period which I refer to as the ‘Golden Age of Jazz,’ which sort of encompasses the middle thirties through the sixties, we had a lot of great innovators, all creating things which will last the world for a long, long time. — Sonny Rollins

I guess I’m fortunate that I’m still around and I emphasize “I guess” because you never can tell what musicians would be playing had they been around as long as I have. – Sonny Rollins