Archives for March 2010

Today is Ornette Coleman’s 80th birthday. In my admiration for Coleman’s independence, faithfulness to his vision and inspiration, I yield to no one–except my artsjournal colleague Howard Mandel, whose lengthy Jazz Beyond Jazz tribute today is replete with Coleman history and analysis and links to recordings and books. As addenda to Howard’s account of Coleman’s initial breakthrough with Contemporary Records, I offer this archive item and this followup entry.
Over the years, there is wide variety of instrumentation and sound in Coleman’s bands. For many devoted listeners, his original quartet remains the standard by which to assess the music of his other groups. Here is a clip of that band reunited in 1987 for a festival in Spain. Don Cherry is the trumpeter, Charlie Haden the bassist, Billy Higgins the drummer. Coleman’s solo is a fine example of his ability to improvise little melodies that are sometimes more fetching than the tunes he writes.

YouTube has three other pieces of video from that concert. To find them, go here.
When Coleman was less than a decade into his controversial career, I wrote about what stands as one of his most riveting recordings. In it, I addressed some of the issues swirling around him as the jazz community exalted and excoriated him. The piece was for Jazz Review, a radio program I did on WDSU in New Orleans in the sixties. It is included in Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers.

1966
Ornette Coleman, Live At The Golden Circle (Blue Note)
I think it’s safe to assume that most people, even most jazz listeners, are not familiar with the music of Ornette Coleman. You may have heard about the controversy that has ripped through music the past six years because of Coleman’s startling style and his influence on other players.
Ornette Coleman plays alto saxophone, self-taught, and he recently took a couple of years off to teach himself trumpet and violin as well. In the wake of his debut in the late fifties, there erupted a string of nonsense–played, written and spoken–which has continued and become even more absurd. One school of critics proclaimed that he had rejuvenated jazz and given it new direction. Another school said he was destroying jazz singlehandedly and that there was no hope for further good times in music. LeRoi Jones, Archie Shepp and a few dozen others in New York have decided that Coleman is a prophet of black supremacy. Coleman himself has been notably reticent on that point.
I think enough time has passed to make it clear that Ornette Coleman is neither genius nor fraud, merely a pretty fair alto player with his own vision. I was going to say, who hears a different drummer. But, as you will hear momentarily, Coleman’s drummer, Charles Moffett, is a basic, sort of old-timey drummer working in the avant-garde. And I assume that’s what Coleman wants, because in many ways he himself is a basic, old-timey player. He has freed himself from some restrictions of harmony and bar lines, but I don’t think he’s done it because of some desperate need to escape from formal restrictions.
Coleman is a naïve, brilliant musician whose jazz sense is as instinctive as it is learned, who has the blues in his bones and who is an extremely powerful rhythmic player. He is a man in whose name some of the most outrageous and powerful cults have sprung up. Coleman doesn’t deserve some of his self-appointed disciples. Nor does he deserve the burden of exaggerated praise that has proclaimed him some sort of messiah.
At any rate, here’s Ornette Coleman in his first recording in three years, with Charles Moffett on drums and David Izenzon on bass. This was recorded at the Golden Circle club in Stockholm. It’s call “Dee Dee.”
“Dee Dee” 9:10
If you’re unfamiliar with Ornette Coleman, this is a good record to begin with. If you have followed his career, it gives you an idea what he’s been up to since 1962. He is interesting to hear. How much lasting musical value there is in his playing, I just don’t know. I’ve been listening to him for five years, and I have often received tremendous emotional charges from his solos. I’ll continue listening. (1966)

I have. And I will.

No, not the Sidney Bechet “Sheik of Araby” kind of one man band, but the television news kind. Today, Howard Kurtz devotes his column in The Washington Post to a phenomenon brought about in broadcast news by the convergence of technology and economic hard times.

Scott Broom turns his tripod toward the wall of gray mailboxes, adjusts the camera, walks into the shot and delivers his spiel.
“Here’s how bad it is for the U.S. Postal Service,” the WUSA reporter says as a handful of customers at the Garrett Park post office look on. Invoking the organization’s growing deficit, which he just looked up on a laptop in his car, he puts a stamp on an envelope and declares: “At 44 cents a shot, that is a lot of peeling and sticking.”
Broom then thrusts the envelope toward the lens — and blows out the iris, which has to be reset so he can try the stand-up again. It’s one of the occupational hazards of being a journalistic jack of all trades — the equivalent of singing while playing the keyboard, guitar and drums.

To read all of Kurtz’s column, go here. It made me think about about standard practice in many television markets during my early years in broadcast journalism, before the digital revolution produced tiny cameras.
In 1963, I went to the Benson Hotel in Portland, Oregon, to interview Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota. He was chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. American troop levels in the Viet Nam war had tripled and tripled again and I had lots of questions for him. I drove the KOIN-TV van to the hotel and schlepped the gear into the lobby only to learn that a power disturbance had fried the system that controlled the elevators. They were all out of commission. I hauled the big Pro 600 Auricon conversion 16-millimeter film camera (pictured) up six flights of stairs, knocked on the door of Mundt’s suite, said I was from Channel 6 News and explained that I had to go back down for the rest of the equipment.
In three subsequent trips, I wrangled the enormous wooden tripod, the lights and their stands, amplifier, cables and sound apparatus up six stories. As I brought each new batch of paraphernalia into their room, Senator and Mrs. Mundt sat on the sofa sipping coffee. Small, round people with kind faces, they watched my exertions with interest and patience. I forget what Senate business took Mundt to Portland, but he did not have the entourage of staff people today’s ranking politicians seem unable to do without. If he had, I would have recruited them to help carry the gear.
As I positioned the lights, set the zoom lens for a two-shot, focused and prepared to displace Mrs. Mundt on the sofa for the interview, the senator said, “Will the reporter be here soon?”
I told him that I was the reporter and crew.
“Oh,” he said. “That isn’t how they do it in Washington.”
It is now.

Nearly two years ago, I wrote about a Benny Carter masterpiece that received raves from musicians and critics after Count Basie recorded it for Roulette in 1960. Kansas City Suite went out of print as an LP, had a brief revival as a Capitol CD in 1990, sold poorly and has all but disappeared.
Basie’s so-called “new testament” band included Thad Jones, Joe Newman, Frank Wess, Frank Foster, Marshall Royal, Benny Powell, Al Grey and the great latterday Basie rhythm section. They gave Carter’s work a memorable performance. Despite clamoring by insistent bloggers (present company not excepted) for a new reissue, the Basie version is so rare as to be nearly a myth. One internet search for “Kansas City Suite” turned up an ad for hotel rooms. The recording is available only as a used LP, if you’re lucky enough to find one, or an MP3 download. The Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra revived the suite for a concert in 2008, but live performances of the music are all too infrequent. Fortunately, one movement was captured on video while Carter was alive.
At the Berlin Jazz Fest in 1989, Carter and the WDR Big Band played the opening movement of the suite, with John Clayton conducting. Notice Clayton looking boyish and Carter, who was eighty-two, only slightly older.

The latest selection of Doug’s Picks is posted in the center column, featuring a treasured vocal-piano collaboration, a new young trumpeter, an old free jazz band, a bassist at the helm of an exciting quartet, and a book that recaptures a special place at the end of New York’s last golden age of jazz.

If you are a fan (sic) of the kind of language misuse eloquently exposed by the poet Taylor Mali in this recent Rifftides piece, you may enjoy the following video, a commercial for accountants.

Thanks to Bill McBirnie for calling that to our attention.

I was unable to cover the Portland Jazz Festival this year, to my regret. For reasons of economy, the festival came in compact form; one week instead of two. Jack Berry of Oregon Music News tells me he thinks that smaller was better. Berry wrote about two of the festival artists. This is some of what he had to say in advance about Pharaoh Sanders, for forty years among the freest of the free.

So this is your cup of tea or it isn’t. Sanders was playing with John Coltrane on Live in Seattle and more than one acquaintance of mine considers that to be one the most astonishing experiences of their lives. Pharoah chatter on the Internet includes a rebuttal to Whitney Balliett’s putdown, that it’s noise, not music. Call it what you want, was the rejoinder, if it’s noise it’s noise of surpassing power and frequent beauty.

To read all of that piece and see video of Sanders playing in a tunnel, go here.
Berry’s Sanders concert review includes this observation:

No one, prior to the Golden Age and beyond, has teased so many strange sounds out of a tenor saxophone as the Pharoah. Echo effects, warbles, ululations and splintered multi-sonics abounded. Others have gotten percussive sounds from the instrument by just fingering the pads (not blowing) but his are really loud. I kept looking at the bass player to see how he was doing that but he wasn’t (at that moment) doing anything.

Here is the link to the full review.
As the Portland festival wrapped up last night, Berry heard trumpeter Dave Douglas and the band Douglas calls Brass Ecstasy, four horns and a drummer.

The association one has with brass bands is exuberance and there was that in spades. But “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” was so richly mournful that the emotional range of this instrumentation was astonishingly extended.

For all of Jack’s review of Douglas and company, click here.

As a young adult, Paul Breitenfeld adopted the last name Desmond. Over the years, to amuse himself and confound others, he concocted several reasons for the change. He sometimes said he did it because he thought that in the event that he ever made records, the shorter name would fit better on 78 rpm labels. In truth, the inspiration came when he and his friend and fellow saxophonist Hal Strack were at Sweets Ballroom in Oakland, California. Hal’s story is in Chapter 6 of a certain book.

“We were listening to Gene Krupa’s band, sometime in 1942,” Strack said. “Howard Dulany had just left as the singer. The guy who replaced him had some kind of a convoluted Italian name and they decided that just wasn’t going to work for a vocalist. I mean, it was more difficult than Sinatra. So, he changed his name to Johnny Desmond. We were standing there listening to the band and discussing the fact that this had happened, and Paul said, ‘Jeesh, you know that’s such a great name. It’s so smooth and yet it’s uncommon.’ He said, ‘If I decide I need another name, it’s going to be Desmond.'”
Over the years, when asked where he got the name, he gave a variety of answers, often delivered with his enigmatic grin: from the telephone book, from the unon directory, from a newspaper, from a girl friend. He delivered these harmless put-ons with charm, conviction and the ring of sincerity. The telephone-book answer took on a life of its own and is endlessly repeated in stories about Desmond.

Now, a little family history: Because of a condition that indisposed his mother, Paul did part of his growing up in New Rochelle, New York, in the home of his father’s brother Frederick Breitenfeld and his family. He became close to his cousins Rick and Ruth. Rick provided much of the research material that went into the Desmond biography. Ruth’s married name is Barton. Her son Fred has extensive Broadway, motion picture and cabaret credentials as composer, song writer, orchestrator, director and actor. See his web site for full information and MP3s of some of his work. He never met his famous second cousin, but had one memorable telephone conversation with him when Fred Barton was an 18-year-old majoring in music at Harvard. He writes:

I was visiting my Uncle Rick and Aunt Mary Ellen in December 1976 — and I had competed to write the music for Harvard’s Hasty Pudding show (my life’s dream, at the time — I wasn’t thinking big!) — anyhow, I was rejected and was beyond morose.
Rick and Mary Ellen sent a tape of the songs to Paul, and while I was visiting he called them to chat, and they suddenly put me on the phone with him. We were both a little tongue-tied, since we’d never spoken before, but we had a great chat. Paul told me that my retro-stride songs reminded me of his father…. and he assured me that I would win the competition the next year. Well, I DID win the competition the following year, and I (within the context of being typically Breitenfeldian-atheist) I had to think he was somehow winking at me “I told you so.”
If only I’d been born earlier, or he’d lived longer, we’d have gotten to know each other in New York. A friend of mine plays at Elaine’s Sunday nights — I’m going to make it a hang-out.

Here is an intriguing sample of Fred Barton’s writing. It’s called “Psychobirds.” Desmond might well have grinned at this.

I wrote “Psychobirds” at USC when I was getting my master’s in Film Scoring at USC (I’m happy to announce I won the annual Harry Warren scholarship; I was old-school and retro, of course, so Warren’s daughter Cookie Warren went for my stuff. She tragically died with her husband and two grandchildren in a plane crash within a month of the Award ceremony — I still have a book of her father’s songs she gave me, inscribed “YOU’D BETTER MAKE IT! — Best, Cookie Warren” — I’m trying, Cookie, I’m trying…..)
I was studying with David Raksin, and for one assignment, he put together a fake “main title” sequence for an imaginary movie called “Psychobirds,” based on the style of the Psycho/Vertigo films, with various geometric graphics doing various dramatic things, and part of the idea was to “hit” the main events and titles — so the piece was written to those hits. We would routinely record with a small ensemble drawn from the USC musicians du jour. Raksin was one of the funniest and smartest people I ever met, and since I’d actually heard of (and seen) “Laura,” etc. and knew all of his arcane references from the past, I was something of a teacher’s pet. He started out helping Charlie Chaplin in the earliest days — helping to turn the tune “Smile” into a film score….. (before it was a song.) One of his memorable quotes: “Madonna gives cheap vulgarity a bad name.”