Archives for 2009

As I write this, Dizzy Gillespie has been dead a few hours and KLON-FM is playing his recordings one after another. I’m sipping a red wine as close as I could find to the one he and I drank a lot of on a fall afternoon of listening and laughter in 1962 in his hotel room in Cleveland. I’m trying to summon the feelings of desolation and loss requisite when a friend and idol dies. 

But there’s so much joy in his music, so much of his irrepressible spirit, so much of his foxy wisdom and humor, that John Birks Gillespie won’t allow me to sustain grief for more than a few seconds. At the other end of the phone line, up in Ojai, Gene Lees tells me that after someone called with the news, he stopped working, couldn’t write; a man who’s written yards about Birks, who wrote a book called Waiting For Dizzy. 

I stare out into the rain, thinking about the next to last time I saw Diz in Los Angeles, backstage at the Universal Amphitheater following a middling concert by his quintet He was standing against a wall, relaxed, leaning on a broomstick loosely covered with bottlecaps, his famous rhythmstick. He shrugged and grinned. The shrug and the grin said, “What the hell, you can’t win ’em all.”

I think about the day I was walking down Broadway in New York and heard his unmistakable voice from the midst of the traffic roar. A car pulled up to the curb. Dizzy got out, bowed low and said, “Get in, please, you’re coming with us.” And we spent a crazy hour touring midtown Manhattan while Birks entertained everyone in and within hearing distance of the car with his descriptions of people, buildings and city life. Over the years, I had a least a dozen such experiences with Dizzy, and each of them had the warmth, spontaneity and unpredictability of his music. Multiply that by the hundreds, probably thousands, of people he treated with the same generosity and affection, and you begin to comprehend the dimesions of love and pleasure he created not only with his music but his being. 

The last time I saw him in L.A., at the Greek Theater, he had just led his big band through two hours of perfection. There were moments that night when his trumpet had the glory, the impossible virtuosity, of the strongest performances of his youth. This time backstage there was a bear hug and a little dance and he said, “Rams, you dog, if I’d known you were out there, I’d have tried to play something.” 

Daz McSkiven Voutzoroony, Slim Gaillard called him. Young trumpet players called him God. “It’s all in Arbans,” all in the famous trumpet exercise book, he used to say when he was asked about his technique. Right. And everything William Faulkner needed was in Webster’s dictionary. Birks and Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, Oscar Pettiford, and a few others transformed jazz in the 1940s and the power of their transformation influenced American music in all of its aspects, from pop hits and supermarket Muzak to the tonal values and breathing habits of symphony trumpet sections. Gillespie’s mastery of rhythm has been an inspiration to players of every instrument, including drums. Show me a jazz drummer born after 1920 who doesn’t worship Diz and I’ll leave you to listen to some mediocre drumming. 

Driving home through the storm tonight, I played a new compact disc by a group of musicians including the young trumpeter Tom Williams. As Williams blew phrases Clifford Brown developed after hearing Fats Navarro, who learned from Dizzy, who studied Roy Eldridge, Louis Armstrong’s great successor, I reflected on the “end of an era” clichés we hear when a great person dies. The end of an era, possibly. But not the end of a tradition. Thanks, Birks. See you in the land of Oobladee.

With pianist Bill Charlap at the helm, the other all-stars are guitarist Peter Bernstein, tenor saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, drummer Lewis Nash, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, bassist Peter Washington and alto saxophonist Steve Wilson–a cross-section of the cream of the modern jazz mainstream. Their new CD, titled Mosaic, includes that Cedar Walton composition and

pieces by Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, Thelonious Monk and other musicians associated with Blue Note through the years. A companion disc, contains the original recordings of the pieces from the Blue Note archive by Monk, Hancock, Joe Henderson, Art Blakey, McCoy Tyner, Grant Green, Horace Silver and Bobby Hutcherson. 

As I have emphasized here on more than one occasion, medium-sized bands can provide some of the greatest satisfactions in jazz. The arrangements of eight modern classics by members of the band and pianist Renee Rosnes (Mrs. Charlap) add to the successes in the genre. They respect the originals while introducing new touches–a bit of note-bending in the line of Hancock’s “Dolphin Dance,” the full-bodied orchestration of Grant Green’s theme in “Idle Moments,” a feeling of suspended animation leading into the main section of Joe Henderson’s “Inner Urge.” As for soloists, these are some of the best of their generation. They perform accordingly. Payton 

impresses me more with the content of his improvisation on this record than anything I have heard from him in years. His solos here have the story-telling quality that separates first-tier jazz soloists from the herd. Charlap achieved that literary attribute long ago, but

on some of these tracks he gets into an edginess, particularly on Monk’s “Criss-Cross,” that adds an element he has seldom displayed. Maybe it’s Monk’s spirit that brings out chance-taking; Payton and Wilson also dive in with abandon on this piece. 

Well, it’s all good, and I look forward to hearing what the Blue Note 7 have added to the repertoire since they made this album last year.

DeRose has kept “The Ruby and the Pearl” in her repertoire for a dozen years or more. She recorded it in her first album in 1996 and has deepened not only her interpretation of the lyric but also her improvisation. The track contains the first of several instances of DeRose’s vocalizing in unison with her single-note lines on the piano, something she does superlatively in the tradition of Joe Mooney. The fun reaches its apogee in “Laughing at Life,” which DeRose gives a straightforward treatment without the edge of irony in Billie Holiday’s version. Following her first vocal chorus, she begins riffing on a phrase and the trio turns the piece into a virtual blues, to the hilarity of all concerned. She brings to “I Can’t Escape From You” a melancholy reading enhanced by Wilson’s subtle cymbal splashes. 

Derose plays a reflective out-of-tempo introduction before she takes “In Your Own Sweet Way” into a comfortable ¾ swing wth a fine bass solo by Wind. It has a chorus by DeRose that makes me wonder why she isn’t more frequently mentioned as a leading piano soloist. It is the only non-vocal track on the CD. As in his work in the trios of two other pianists, Bill Mays and Denny Zeitlin, Wilson keeps the attention of his colleagues and his listeners, layering in little packages of rhythmic surprise as he lays down perfect time. “When Lights Are Low,” “Detour Ahead,” “I Fall in Love Too Easily” and “We’ll Be Together Again” round out the album, all at a high level of satisfaction in this welcome recording.

This spring will see the release on DVD of a documentary film that dramatizes the degree to which we’re all in this troubled world together. The film uses music to make that point and the further one that music can help heal our differences. Its producer, Mark Johnson, took video and sound equipment around the world. He spent ten years filming musicians and singers in South Africa, Moscow, New Orleans, Tibet and scores of other places, then melding their work into Playing For Change: Peace Through Music. I have seen only this clip of the documentary and was moved by it.

The list of musicians scheduled to perform includes Howard Alden, Donna Byrne, James Chirillo, Bill Crow, Armen Donelian, Bob Dorough, Paquito D’Rivera, Jim Ferguson, Carol Fredette, Marty Grosz, Sy Johnson, Dick Katz, Bill Kirchner, Steve Kuhn, Dan Levinson, Boots Maleson, Marian McPartland, Ray Mosca, Joe Muranyi, Sam Parkins, Ed Polcer, Loren Schoenberg, Daryl Sherman, Nancy Stearns, Carol Sudhalter, Ronny Whyte, Jackie Williams, and Marshall Wood.

 

Between performances, Albert Haim, Dan Morgenstern, Pat Phillips, and Daryl Sherman will talk about Dick. Terry Teachout will play some of his favorite records.

The concert is open to the public.

Sudhalter was the ranking Bix Beiderbecke expert among jazz musicians of the second half of the twentieth century and the first years of this one. He wrote the definitive Beiderbecke biography and was a student and close friend of cornetist Jimmy McPartland, who succeeded Bix in the Wolverines.  Sudhalter appeared more than once on Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz program on National Public Radio to discuss Beiderbecke and play duets with Ms. McPartland on tunes Bix wrote. To hear one such program, from 2000, go here and click on “Listen Now.”

The trumpeter died December 29. For a Rifftides appreciation of his career, go here.