Archives for 2008

…Fellow artsjournal.com blogger Terry Teachout has the kind of news every author welcomes. To share it, go here…and be sure to watch the celebratory video of Terry’s subject in glorious action.

Congratulations, TT. I know how good it feels.

John Coltrane

In the August 21 Wall Street Journal, Nat Hentoff tells of a New York second grade teacher, Christine Pasarella, who uses John Coltrane as a classroom role model in her work of drawing out the intelligence of her students. He reports Mrs. Pasarella saying that when she played Coltrane’s recordings…

“…the children were drawn to the range of feelings in the songs as I gave them the backgrounds of the compositions.

“‘Alabama,’ for example, was about Martin Luther King and racial discrimination; and while ‘My Own True Love’ concerned a man and a woman, John Coltrane’s ‘Love Supreme’ expressed a love for humanity.”

Hentoff writes:

This reminded me that in one of my conversations with Coltrane he said he was searching for the sounds of what Buddhists call “Om,” which he described as the universal essence of all of us in the universe. He also told me regretfully, “I’ll never know what the listeners feel from my music, and that’s too bad.”

Ms. Passarella’s second-grade students, she says, would have told him how moved they were by not only the ballads “but the more avant-garde recordings, such as ‘Interstellar Space.'” She notes that, through her teaching, “I have discovered that young children have open, welcoming minds, and the more pure and emotional the music, the more they connect. Soon they were hooked on John Coltrane’s music.”

When the students learned that Coltrane’s home was not far from their school, they became even more interested. To read all of Hentoff’s column, click here.

Bud Shank

All About Jazz reports that Against The Tide, the documentary about alto saxophonist Bud
Shank, has won a major film making award. Rifftides discussed the film in April. From the AAJ story:

The Telly Awards honor the very best local, regional, and cable television commercials and programs, as well as the finest video and film productions, and work created for the Web.

To read it all, go here.

Rifftides World Headquarters has welcome summer visitors and resounds with telecasts of Olympics events. Nonetheless, the staff makes time for listening. We don’t award medals, but here are brief impressions of four recent CDs that placed high with the judges.

Danilo Perez, Across The Crystal Sea (EmArcy). Inevitably, this collaboration of the pianist
with Claus Ogerman recalls Bill Evans With Symphony Orchestra (1965), which Ogerman also arranged. More than half of the themes come from classical composers–de Falla, Rachmaninoff, Massenet, Sibelius, Distler. Ogerman’s “Another Autumn” holds its own in that heavy company. Perez’s playing is shaded with subtlety, showing a distinct Evans leaning in touch, chord voicings and development of melodic lines. On two tracks, “Lazy Afternoon” and “(All of a sudden) My Heart Sings,” Cassandra Wilson sings simply and beautifully.

The Modernity of Bob Brookmeyer: The 1954 Quartets (Fresh Sound). Finally, the first of the valve trombonist’s dates with pianist Jimmy Rowles, bassist Buddy Clark and drummer Mel
Lewis is on CD. Originally on Norman Granz’s Clef label, this remains one of the great soloist-plus-rhythm-section encounters of the second half of the twentieth century. Six years later, they reassembled for the equally successful The Blues Hot and Cold (Verve), which has yet to make it to compact disc. The second session here is another superb 1954 Brookmeyer quartet, originally on the Pacific Jazz label, with pianist John Williams, Red Mitchell or Bill Anthony on bass and the remarkable drummer Frank Isola. This combination release is a basic repertoire item.

Jan Lundgren,
Soft Summer Breeze (Marshmallow). In his ninth CD for the Japanese label, the Swedish pianist applies to standards by Ellington, Monk, Shearing, Porter and Berlin and others his distinctive touch and ingenuity with chords. Lundgren, bassist Jesper Lundgaard and drummer Alex Riel include superior interpretations of two rarely-played jazz classics, Al Cohn’s “Tasty Pudding” and Tadd Dameron’s “Soul Train.” Lundgren opens with an unaccompanied “Mood Indigo” that emphasizes his continuing accumulation of harmonic wisdom. More of his ingeniuty with chord voicings is on display in his introduction to “Darn That Dream” and his solo on the half-forgotten Eddie DeLange ballad “Velvet Moon.”

Derrick Gardner, A Ride To The Other Side (Owl). If the title leads you to expect free jazz,
forget it. This young trumpeter and his group, The Jazz Prophets, will remind you of Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Bill Hardman and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, and perhaps the Farmer-Golson Jazztet. Mainstream hard blowing contrasts with post-bop ballad relief in Gardner’s “God’s Gift” and “Just A Touch.” There is fine playing throughout by all hands, with exceptional work by Gardner, trombonist Vincent Gardner and pianist Anthony Wonsey.

More reviews to come. In the meantime, your comments, please.

Film animation married to jazz improvisation goes back to the 1930s and the advent of sound films. This collaboration of the cartoon figure Betty Boop and the real Louis Armstrong is one of the most famous early examples. Social sensitivity was not a consideration.

In 1949, the art advanced–or at least changed–dramatically when two Canadians, painter Norman McLaren and pianist Oscar Peterson, got together. They made Begone Dull Care, in which McLaren painted and otherwise altered the surface of film stock to create a classic abstract visual expression of the Peterson trio’s music.

For an analysis of the technique McLaren used in Begone Dull Care, read this essay by Paul Melancon.

In this century, the Israeli artist Michal Levy, who is also a saxophonist, was inspired by John Coltrane to construct animation reflecting her conviction that “the structural approach of Coltrane to music is associated with architectural approach. The musical theme defines a space and the musical improvisation is like someone drifting in that imaginary space.” She chose as her vehicle the beginning and ending theme and Coltrane’s solo from the 1959 recording of “Giant Steps.”

To see another film animation by Michal Levy, to music by the avant garde pianist and composer Jason Lindner, go here.

Last month,  Michaëlle Jean, Governor General of Canada, named pianist Paul Bley a member of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest civilian honor. The official announcement cited him for “his contributions as a pioneering figure in avant-garde and free jazz, and for his influence on younger jazz pianists.”

 

Bley was at the center of changes in jazz in the late l950s. The Canadian pianist has continued for half a century as an instigator of transformation. At the same time, he has been a gravitational force helping to restrain unstructured or loosely structured jazz from flying off into space as random noise. He is pictured recently at the right and below as a young man. The sidemen in Bley’s Los Angeles band of 1958 and ’59 were alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Billy Higgins. They became the Ornette Coleman Quartet, providers of oxygen to fire up the free jazz movement that had been smoldering for a decade. Recordings of Bley’s band at the Hillcrest Café are reissued on CD under Coleman’s name.

 

Thanks to Rifftides reader Brian Nation of the Vancouver, B.C., Jazz Society for directions to a transcribed conversation with Bley. On the Vancouver Jazz Society’s web site, Bley tells soprano saxophonist Bill Smith that after the groundbreaking job at the Hillcrest, he had a band with bassist Scott LaFaro and vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson. After a time, he felt compelled to return east just as, earlier, he felt compelled to leave Canada. Here is an excerpt from what he tells Smith about his 1959 visit to Massachusetts and the effect it had on his career. He made the trip with his wife Carla (they later parted), also a pianist and composer: 

Ornette and Don had gone to Lennox School of Jazz and I’d done a couple of months at this club. I’d heard that they were at Lennox and that this was the final year of Lennox and I thought it was a very exciting idea. So one night around 9:30 I told the band that I was going to say goodbye to them right now, and that they could finish the year without me. I just walked out of the club, got in a car with Carla and we drove directly non-stop to Lennox. We realized that if we drove non-stop we would get there for the last day of Lennox and we thought that it was extremely important to do this. After the Hillcrest job I was in the process of taking in this new information and playing with other musicians in Los Angeles. At the same time as working steadily I would go on my night off and sit in with everybody to see how I could relate what I’d learned with other players. After being offered every job in Los Angeles as well as having my own job, it was another case of having to leave. It was Montreal all over again. There was nothing left to accomplish.

We drove to Lennox. Got there at 10 or 11 o’clock at night. Got to the jam session of the final night. This was the last jam session of the last night of the final year of Lennox. Everything was the last. The last set and the last tune. The car was still sweating from the trip. We left everything in the car, came in and I tapped Ran Blake on the shoulder, introduced myself to him and said “May I sit in?” Ran is an extremely social, wonderful person, and said yes. I had a chance to play with whoever it was. Sort of an all-star line-up. Everybody was there. Jimmy Giuffre was there, Ornette, everybody was there. I had a chance once again to see if I could relate what I’d learned. Because I was playing a tempered instrument, you see, so that if anybody was to ask what was going on in free music I was in a perfect position to tell them something that they could relate to, because they could not relate to any information regarding microtonal music.
But they could relate to everything involving the well tempered scale. I had one tune to play and I played like my life depended on it. I’ve only done that about four times in my life, where you play one song where your life depended on it And in fact it did. That last tune on the last set led to my next four years’ employment in New York. I got the job with Jimmy Giuffre based on that set. I got the job with George Russell based on that set; the two piano album. There was a phone call directly from his being in the audience that night. For Jazz in the Space Age with Bill Evans and myself and the orchestra. I got reinvited to play with Charles Mingus as a direct result of that set. Everything but the Sonny Rollins job was all out of that set. If a traffic light had been red instead of green at one intersection across the country it would have been too late. We slept under John Lewis’ piano that night and headed for New York the next morning.

To read all of the long transcription of Bley’s interview with Bill Smith, click here.

For more on the advent of Ornette Coleman, see this and this from the Rifftides archive.

The Rifftides staff is pleased to announce that the new Doug’s Picks are on display in the center column. Your comments are invited and treasured…and usually posted.  

At eighty, Herb Geller is playing alto saxophone even better than when he was a key jazz figure in the 1950s and ’60s. He is performing not with the gravity of Brahmsian old age but with full vigor. Nor has he lost the force of his convictions, witness this political song for which he wrote words and music.

In the interest of fairness, the Rifftides staff searched long and hard on the internet for John McCain campaign music to balance Geller’s Obama production. It seems that no jazz artist has come up with a McCain song. This was the closest thing we found to a serious pro-McCain campaign ditty. Like Geller’s, it is not an official campaign song.

 

 

Back to Herb Geller, the nonpolitical version. He has lived in Germany for decades and travels throughout Europe playing with a variety of rhythm sections. Last fall he was in Lisbon, Portugal. To see him in action and hear his solo on “Come Rain or Come Shine,” click here. Unfortunately, the YouTube video ends just as a young guitarist starts to develop an interesting solo.

A British company is releasing a two-CD package tracing Bix Beiderbecke’s influence on musicians of his era. Proceeds from sale of the set will be devoted to medical care of Dick Sudhalter, a musical descendant of Beiderbecke and his greatest biographer. Sudhalter is in bad health with MSA (muscular system atrophy) and getting worse. He needs help. From the Jass Masters news release:

The CD set contains a number of tracks that are being re-issued for the first time since their original release on 78 rpm record. In addition, several sides are transferred from un-issued test pressings and are being released for the first time ever. The recordings have
been faithfully restored using the latest digital techniques while at the same time paying respect to sound of the original recordings. The CD set is completed by two in-depth booklets (one of 28 pages and one of 36 pages) outlining each track and providing detailed information on the bandleaders and musicians responsible for the music heard on each CD; both booklets are replete with many rare photographs, some reproduced in print for the first time.

All profits from this CD set will go towards helping to meet the medical expenses for respected author and jazz musician Richard Sudhalter, who has done much
to bring Bix’s life and music to wider audiences. His works include Bix, Man and Legend, which was written in collaboration with Philip R. Evans and first published by Arlington Press in 1974, Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945, (Oxford University Press, 1999) and Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael (Oxford University Press, 2002). Sudhalter is also a much acclaimed musician whose Bix-influenced cornet and trumpet solos have graced numerous recordings.

For details about the 51 tracks in the CD set and for ordering information, click here. For a Rifftides posting about Sudhalter, his predicament and the benefit concert for him nearly two years ago, click here. He needed help then. Now, he needs it even more.

It is now called the JVC Jazz Festival, but it still takes place in Newport, Rhode Island. If the festival no longer has the jazz purity of its beginnings in the 1950s, at least it has survived. It continues to include major jazz artists among the tangential pop figures who attract the big crowds that pay the bills. In today’s Boston Globe, Steve Greenlee summarizes the two days of Newport and evaluates the highlights as if he were scoring Olympic events.

Gold medal: Sonny Rollins. The titan of the tenor sax hadn’t played Newport in more than 40 years, but last night he owned it, with a hard-blowing set that closed the festival. He improvised endlessly on the repeating two-bar figure that serves as the framework of “Sonny Please.” He played ahead of time and against time, punctuating phrases with quick jabs, shrieks, and honks. Be it burner or ballad, he blew and blew, and he never ran out of ideas.

Greenlee even awards gold, silver and bronze medals to elements of the audience.To read his entire report, click here.

In an interview a few days before the Newport performance, Rollins told Rick Massimo of the Providence Journal why he has kept bassist Bob Cranshaw in his band for more than four decades…

…because he maintained the fixed portion of it, and that would allow me to extemporize freely and the song would still be maintained. It was a contrast; if he had the fixed part, then I could go into all of my wild dreams.

…and why he rarely works with pianists.

At the risk of alienating my piano-playing friends — and I’ve played with some great piano
players — the piano is a very dominating instrument. I guess this goes back to when I was 7 years old and I was able to play and get into myself without any other instrument. The jazz bands in New Orleans — you see these guys marching down the street, there’s no piano…

The kind of music without a piano is more gritty, more real, hard jazz. It allows me to feel more free in my improvisations. The piano is very leading. You can lead a band here, you can lead to this chord, this mood. Everything is fed by a piano. I find that very restricting.

For more of the Massimo interview, go here.

For classic examples of Rollins not being led or fed by a piano, listen to A Night At The Village Vanguard and Way Out West, both from 1957 and as fresh as this morning.

The Frishberg, Sullivan, Wellstood item in the next exhibit brought quick responses from two men who knew Wellstood well. The first was Ted O’Reilly, the Toronto broadcaster who produced a few Wellstood recordings.

Wellstood was one of the brightest men I ever met, never mind how great a pianist he was. And great he was, and not afraid to play the way he did: as a stride/swing player in the bop era, and do it so well! (I’ve thought of him as the Ruby Braff of the piano…) I think I made more records with Wellstood at the piano than anyone else — two with reedman Jim Galloway, two solo releases, and Stridemonster, piano duets with Dick Hyman. I’m glad I knew him, and wish he were still around.

Dave Frishberg wrote:

Did you know Wellstood? I did, although our paths crossed only infrequently. In the early ’60s, my wife Stella (whom you met in New Orleans) and I stayed with Kenny Davern for a couple of days in Brielle NJ, where he and Wellstood played on a boat. One morning, Dick and Kenny and I played with gloves, bat and ball on a big athletic field. All three of us threw our arm(s) out. That was the day I got to know Wellstood, watched him play the piano at his cottage.

Wellstood was always one of my idols, although I never tried to play like him. He was a schooled pianist who could play Chopin, Bach, etc. One night I took Ben Webster (who was a piano freak) to hear Wellstood play solo at a jazz club around the corner from the Metropole. Ben was knocked out, gave Wellstood an enthusiastic hug and many shouts of approval. Also in the audience was Louis Armstrong (!) and party, and I was introduced to him twice at his table by both Wellstood and Webster. A memorable evening for me. I think the club was in the 40s between Fifth and Seventh Aves, a jazz club that popped up and soon disappeared.

Dick was a brilliant guy, brilliant like Dick Sudhalter, and undoubtedly among the best writers of all jazz musicians, a humorist on a very high level. You must have that Jazzology 2CD set of The Classic Jazz Quartet, and you probably remember the liner notes that each of those guys wrote: Joe Muranyi, Marty Grosz, Sudhalter, and Wellstood — they all write beautifully. Wellstood’s writing reminds me of Woody Allen and SJ Perelman. By the way, that’s a recording I go back to listen to pretty often. There’s another CD on Arbors of Dick playing solo in Dublin that I think is Wellstood at the top of his game.

Now that Dave asks, yes, I knew Wellstood. We became acquainted through the mail. In the 1960s, he sent me an indignant and very funny post card about my review of one of his records, quoting the offending line. By return mail, I pointed out that he had misread and misquoted the line. He then sent a letter of apology, also funny.

We got together occasionally during my New York years in the first half of the seventies. After the late newscast, I frequently went to Hanratty’s on Second Avenue to hear him. Once, I took Paul Desmond. Desmond was delighted by his playing. Wellstood was surprised and flattered that Desmond came to hear him. Dick came to our table during his breaks. I anticipated scintillating exchanges between two world-class wits, but they just sat there complimenting one another.

During a listening session one afternoon, I played Gerry Mulligan the Wellstood album called Alone. Mulligan was impressed by Dick’s composition “Dollar Dance” and his playing on it. I suggested that the two of them should record it together. Mulligan liked the idea. So did Dick, and for a while it seemed that they were going solve contract issues and find a way to make a duo album. That was my one venture into musical match-making. The date never happened. I can still hear in my mind how the two of them would have hit if off.

As Frishberg indicated, Wellstood was a gifted pianist who could handle the classics, and jazz up to, through and beyond bebop. He could play anything. He preferred traditional styles.  He was the first stride pianist, maybe the only one, to take on John Coltrane’s modern harmonic obstacle course “Giant Steps.” He recorded it in 1975, when it was still mystifying much of the jazz world. He tore it up. It’s on his CD This Is The One…Dig! 

I’m with Ted O’Reilly. I wish Wellstood were still around.

Dick Wellstood has been on my mind. Maybe it’s because I heard Dave Frishberg play the piano the other night at The Seasons. Frishberg was in concert singing his inimitable songs and accompanying himself, but he opened up plenty of space for piano solos. Before he became famous for performing his songs, Frishberg worked with Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Ben Webster, Jack Sheldon and Carmen McRae, among other demanding leaders. He was, and is, a versatile and idiosyncratic pianist who wraps several jazz eras into a style of his own. A couple of times on Saturday night, he pulled off stride passages that Wellstood would have appreciated.

In the mid-1940s when Wellstood was a young man working toward a career as a pianist, he was under the spell of Joe Sullivan (pictured). Sullivan (1906-1971) came from Chicago and
began recording in 1927. By 1933, he was Bing Crosby’s accompanist and established as one of the brightest of the young pianists influenced by Earl Hines, James P. Johnson and Fats Waller. He in turn influenced Wellstood, who had cards printed that read, “Perhaps you can help me to meet Joe Sullivan. My name is Dick Wellstood.” He distributed the cards in musicians’ hangouts. Finally, the cornetist Muggsy Spanier told Wellstood where Sullivan lived. According to clarinetist Kenny Davern’s account of the meeting, quoted in Edward N. Meyer’s Giant Strides: The Legacy of Dick Wellstood, the pianist knocked on Sullivan’s apartment door well after midnight.

Soon this disheveled figure in slippers and a bathrobe comes shuffling through. Joe opens the door and says, “Yeah?” Dick says, “Hi, my name is Dick Wellstood and Muggsy Spanier said to say hello.” And Joe Sullivan said, “Tell Muggsy Spanier to go f___ himself,” and slammed the door right in Dick’s face.

Nonetheless, Wellstood remained a steadfast admirer of Sullivan. Here is one reason, Sullivan’s 1933 recording of “Gin Mill Blues.”

There is little video of Wellstood performing, but this clip from a concert in Germany in 1982, five years before he died, catches him in full stride, concentration and swing.

New: Torben Waldorff, Afterburn (ArtistShare). The Danish guitarist accomodates his early rock leanings to absorption with expansive jazz of the kind that thrives in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn and is spreading around the world. Waldorff, tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin and pianist-organist Sam Yahel are leaders among the articulate standard bearers of the movement. They play off one another with fiery inventiveness and with grace that allows the music to breathe. Bassist Matt Clohesy and drummer Jon Wikan are fully immersed in the new sensibility. All of the compositions but one are by Waldorff. The one is Maria Schneider’s “Choro Dancado,” first recorded on her Concert in the Garden CD. The curve of its Brazilian melodic shape and the elegance of its harmonies inspire a superb performance. Waldorff’s chromaticized “Skyliner” (unrelated to the old Charlie Barnet piece) is another high point.

Old: Art Farmer, Modern Art, UA/Blue Note. This 1958 session paired the trumpeter with
tenor saxophonist Benny Golson in what amounted to a preview of their cooperative band The Jazztet. The pianist was Bill Evans in a brilliant sideman appearance before he left Miles Davis and formed his own trio. Art’s twin brother Addison was the bassist, Dave Bailey the drummer. Farmer and Golson had a nearly symbiotic relationship, but it was Evans who inspired Farmer to some of his best playing on record. The pianist’s own solos on “The Touch of Your Lips” and “Like Someone in Love” are masterpieces. The young, developing, McCoy Tyner was the pianist when Golson and Farmer launched The Jazztet in 1959. This CD tantalizes the listener with intimations of the glories that might have flowered in that group if Evans had been aboard. It is one of the most satisfying recordings of the l950s.

In his JazzWax, Marc Myers has a fascinating four-part interview with Bill Holman. I’m no enthusiast of transcribed verbatim interviews, but Myers’s introductions, questions and production values make the format work, and in the great arranger he has a subject whose articulateness and wit carry the reader along. Two excerpts:

I used to think that writing a jazz arrangement was like stream of consciousness, the same as a jazz solo. You just started playing and built on what you just played. Then you go on to the next thing and never repeat yourself. After a few years it finally dawned on me that the ear wants to hear something it recognizes, so I started concentrating on the shape of an entire piece, the form, and how it builds to a climax. As a writer, you also want to avoid getting to the climax too soon. If you do, you’ll kill yourself trying to top it in the arrangement. And the result is monotony.

Writing music and arranging never gets easy. I’ve had students ask me, “How long does it take before it gets easy?” I tell them, “Never.” As soon as you get to one point in your development, you’re looking at the next level.

To read the four parts in order, go to JazzWax and scroll down to July 29. Start with part 1 and scroll back up through parts 2, 3, 4 and an addendum.