Archives for April 2011

Jazz historian, composer, arranger, bandleader, educator and short sleeper Bill Kirchner writes:

You’ve probably seen—or will see—the new “Jazz” U.S. postage stamp just issued. A year ago, I was a paid consultant on the design of it. The graphic artist’s original design included a trumpeter, saxophonist, pianist, and bassist—no women, no singer. I successfully lobbied for a female singer–my foremost contribution to American culture (smile).

This was the stamp being introduced in New Orleans on the day it was issued, March 25. The man in the light suit is Paul Rogers, who designed it.

On his website, Rogers wrote about the project.

Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and about a dozen others have been honored with stamps in the past, and in 2008 Michael Bartalos designed a wonderful Latin Jazz stamp, but there has never been a single stamp to pay tribute to America’s original art form, jazz. It’s always an honor to design a postage stamp, and because I love jazz and have great respect for the history of the music, this one was very special to me.

To read about and see the stages of Rogers’ creation of the design, including detail about how the singer became part of the scheme, go here.

The Treme Brass Band was part of the stamp’s unveiling ceremony, so why not let them end our story?

Now, I’m homesick. And I miss Ed Bradley.

The violinist Billy Bang, who created himself as a jazz musician out of the trauma of the Vietnam war, died yesterday at 63. Inhabited by his combat experiences, his emotions wounded, Bang found relief and rehabilitation by returning to the violin he had studied as a child. He pursued an intensity of expression that helped him evade his demons. He became one of the most centered players in the free movement, inspired by John Coltrane and by the violin playing of Ornette Coleman and Leroy Jenkins. The great swing violinist Stuff Smith also influenced him. For complete obituaries of Bang, go here and here. Below is an encore of the Rifftides review of Bang’s last album.

Billy Bang, Prayer For Peace (TUM). In an album mostly of his own compositions, the violinist opens with Stuff Smith’s “Only Time Will Tell.” Bang and trumpeter James Zollar might be summoning the spirits of the seminal jazz violinist Smith (1909-1967) and his Onyx Club sidekick of the 1930s, Jonah Jones. The rest of the CD is redolent of the music Bang has made with Sun Ra, Don Cherry, the bassist Sirone and others in the avant garde, and of his love for John Coltrane. That is not to say that it is experimental or inaccessible. Even at its most daring, Bang’s music has always had an engaging old-timey quality that he transmits to those who play with him, including Zollar, bassist Todd Nicholson, pianist Andrew Bemkey and drummer Newman Taylor-Baker, the band of young musicians he has employed for some years. The title tune, just short of 20 minutes, runs in a tranquil modal course that reflects the quest for peace that Bang has promoted with music since his experience in the Viet Nam war. Bang’s danceable version of “Chan Chan,” the Afro-Cuban anthem made famous by the Buena Vista Social Club, is among the pleasures here. The Finnish record company TUM lavished commendable care on the sonic production and packaging of this CD.

Also see artsjournal.com colleague Howard Mandel’s remembrance of Bang.

The first section following the introduction of my 1989 book Jazz Matters is titled “A Common Language.” It ends with this:

Like every art form, jazz has a fund of devices unique to it and universally employed by those who practice it. Among the resources of the jazz tradition available to the player creating an improvised performance are rhythmic patterns, harmonic structures, material quoted from a variety of sources and “head arrangements” evolved over time without being written. Mutual access to this community body of knowledge makes possible successful and enjoyable collaboration among jazzmen of different generations and stylistic persuasions who have never before played together. It is not unusual at jazz festivals and jam sessions for musicians in their sixties and seventies to be teamed with others in their teens or twenties. In the best of such circumstances, the age barrier immediately falls.

If I were to write that today, I’d change “sixties and seventies” to “eighties and nineties.” The aging population contains a number of active jazz octogenarians and nonagenarians. Jimmy Heath at 85, Joe Wilder at 89 and Dave Brubeck at 90 are three cases in point. Toots Thielemans, 89, is another. Thielemans recently played a duo gig at Sculler’s in Boston with Kenny Werner, who is 59. One evening, they asked Grace Kelly to sit in. She is 18. This is what happened.

If I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.—Eubie Blake (1887-1983) on his 96th birthday.

Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.—Groucho Marx

To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am.—Bernard Baruch

Researching key signatures in performances of “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,” I made a discovery. Everyone else out there may have known about Olaf Polziehn, but he was new to me. After I heard him play the piece (in E-flat), further research turned up these facts: Polziehn is 40 years old. He was born in Ludwigsburg, Germany. He is professor of jazz piano at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, Austria. That is where the expatriate American composer, arranger and trombonist Ed Partyka is chairman of the jazz department, Dena DeRose is a professor of voice and Ed Neumeister a professor of composition, arranging and trombone. Clearly, things are happening in Graz.

Polziehn has played with, among others, Bob Mintzer, John Riley, Harry Allen, Scott Hamilton, Patti Austin and Warren Vaché. In the video of his unaccompanied version of “Wrap Your Troubles…,” we see the only a three-quarters view of the back of his head. So here, on the right, is what he looks like. Now, press play and you’ll hear what he sounded like at the Stride + Swing Piano Summit in Switzerland in 2008.

If you’re curious, the original key of Billy Moll’s, Harry Barris’ and Ted Koehler’s “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” (1931) was C. If you’d like to hear a splendid version in B-Flat, click here for Hampton Hawes with Harold Land, Scott LaFaro and Frank Butler from Hawes’ album For Real.

Here is Thelonious Monk in Japan with Charlie Rouse, Butch Warren and Frankie Dunlop. Monk is in a dancing mood. That’s the bonus in this splendid performance of “Evidence.” The staff recommends full-screen viewing.

Now, how can you not have a good weekend?

Miscellany accumulates, each unrelated matter of some importance but too small for an item of its own. The solution—hardly an innovation—is to put them all in the same container, call it Odds And Ends and get the jumble out of my mind and into yours.

Following last Monday’s fundraiser at the New York’s Village Vanguard for northern Japan’s earthquake and Tsunami victims and today’s at Vitello’s in Los Angeles, Seattle’s Jazz Alley announces a similar humanitarian event. For singer Gail Pettis’s engagement April 19 and 20, the club will donate cover charges to the Japanese Red Cross. Her band will be stars of the Pacific Northwest jazz community: pianist Darin Clendenin and bassist Clipper Anderson Tuesday night; pianist Randy Halbertstadt and bassist Jeff Johnson Wednesday night; drummer Mark Ivester both nights. For details, see this article. For a Rifftides revew of Pettis’s latest CD, go here. For a clip of her singing with Halberstadt, go to this archive post.

Speaking of pianists from the Northwest (barrrrruuuumpah), Jim Wilke will feature Carmen Staaf on his Jazz Northwest broadcast this Sunday in a concert recorded during last fall’s Earshot Jazz Festival. Here are details from Jim’s announcement.

The pianist’s early training and experience was at the Washington Middle School and Garfield High School jazz programs. Since leaving Seattle, Carmen Staaf has completed a double degree program at Tufts University (anthropology) and New England Conservatory (music), taught piano for four years at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, won the 2009 Mary Lou Williams Women In Jazz Pianist Competition in Washington DC, and is now active member of the New York City jazz scene, performing and touring with her trio as well as with other groups. Her trio is also featured this week on NPR’s JazzSet.

In this Earshot Festival performance, she is joined by her New York trio mates, Kendall Eddy on bass and Austin McMahon on drums. Selections from the concert will also be issued as a new Carmen Staaf Trio CD on April 15, so this broadcast also serves as a preview of the new CD.

Jazz Northwest broadcasts Sunday, April 10 at 1 PM (PDT) on 88.5, KPLU and at the same time streams live on the web at kplu.org. Staaf’s trio is the rhythm section on Jeff Chang’s excellent debut CD, reviewed in October in this Rifftides roundup.

I haven’t done a tabulation, but my estimate is that 63.5% of all news releases and PR blurbs accompanying review copies of albums contain the phrase, “the likes of.”

His career includes performances with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.

I wonder who those “likes” were. This fuzzy usage isn’t confined to flackery. You may see it in nearly any context. I once read in a history book that Abigail Adams, the wife of the second US president, maintained her interest in politics after John Adams’s term and was supportive of “the likes of Thomas Jefferson.” Ah, yes, there were so many like Jefferson, it’s hard to keep them straight.

When the world was young, before the digital revolution, a few major record companies and a few independent labels recorded jazz. Each of the majors and some of the independents released a handful of long playing vinyl albums a month. It was possible for a reasonably conscientious critic to keep up with what was happening in jazz, at least with what was making it to records. Even after compact discs became common in the mid-1980s, the number of releases did not drastically change. As the technology became more accessible and cheaper, however, and the traditional systems of marketing, sales and distribution broke down, musicians began taking their careers—including making and selling records—into their own hands.

That was in many ways a significant step forward in the movement toward freedom of the artist from the strictures of contracts and royalty arrangements of the companies. Some major labels and independents disappeared. Some morphed together into enormous multi-label complexes. A few independents became processors packaging and distributing CDs made by musicians who otherwise have no connection to the labels. By the new century, it was relatively inexpensive and not too demanding technically for a musician to become his own record operation and to use CDs as announcements or business cards.

Now, an established reviewer is likely to receive, unsolicited, dozens of CDs a week. My personal record (hah) is 15 in one day. Sometimes the albums come directly from musicians, sometimes from publicists who constitute a cottage industry accommodating the desire and legitimate need of artists to call attention to their work. The frustrating fact of life that results for the reviewer, is that there are not enough waking hours to sample—let alone give a full hearing to— the embarrassment of what may be riches flowing into his mailbox. Of course, I will listen to the latest CD by Sonny Rollins, Joe Lovano or Dave Holland, the newest Mosaic box, the previously unissued Kenny Dorham. It is much less a sure thing that I will pull from the stacks of beckoning review copies a collection of originals by one of this spring’s new Berklee, NEC or Monk Institute graduates. All of this is just to tell you that if you are a musician who has sent a CD, I cannot promise you that I will review it. I can’t even promise you that I will hear it. Like so much in life, that isn’t fair.

I wish that there were a way to absorb music. Alas, listening is still a linear activity.

Although there is a link to his website in our blogroll (at the extreme south end of the right column), it has been too long since we’ve caught up with Darcy James Argue and his Secret Society. That big band of brash young New Yorkers is less of a secret these days than when we first encountered it a couple of years ago. Now, they win polls and sell records. They also occasionally travel out of town.

If you’re interested in knowing something of the thinking of one element of the young artists who are helping to shape the future of music, this video from January at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, makes a few disclosures. The band’s roster follows the clip. The piece is Argue’s “Phobos.” He is the conductor. Jon Wikan gets things underway and ends them with his cajon, the box-like Peruvian percussion instrument of which he has become a master.

Winds:
David DeJesus,
Rob Wilkerson,
Sam Sadigursky,
Mark Small,
Josh Sinton.


Trumpets:
Seneca Black,
Tom Goehring,
Matt Holman,
Nadje Noordhuis,
David Smith.


Trombones:
Noah Bless,
Tim Sessions,
Kevin Moehringer,
Jennifer Wharton.


Guitar:
Sebastian Noelle.


Piano & Keyboards:
Red Wierenga.


Bass:
Matt Clohesy.


Drums & Percussion:
Jon Wikan.

Since the previous exhibit doesn’t give you a clear look at Jon Wikan’s cajon, here’s a picture of one.

And here is a link to a Wikipedia article about the instrument’s nature and history.

Today is the 84th anniversary of Gerry Mulligan’s birth. He died in 1996 at the age of 68. There are many contexts in which to remember Mulligan—as a precocious teenaged arranger for Tommy Tucker, Elliott Lawrence and Gene Krupa; one of the key figures in the Birth of the Cool recordings; the leader of groups from quartets to big bands; a writer who made the Stan Kenton band swing; and, of course, a splendid baritone saxophonist. Here he is in Rome in 1956 with his sextet: Bob Brookmeyer, Zoot Sims, Jon Eardley, Bill Crow and Dave Bailey, playing to a backdrop of appreciative orchestra members.

If that merely whetted your appetite for Mulligan’s music, Lester Perkins of Jazz On The Tube has assembled 13 Mulligan videos. You may view them here.

The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra played to a packed Village Vanguard in New York in its Japan earthquake and tsunami benefit performance on Monday Night. The event streamed live on the internet and had hundreds of viewers, many of them in Japan. Guest artists included Barry Harris, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Lew Tabackin, Lou Soloff and, in a memorable flugelhorn solo on Slide Hampton’s Frame for the Blues, Tom Harrell. The evening’s three sets may be viewed again on this page of the VJO’s website.

The VJO organization is continuing to encourage donations for earthquake/tsunami relief and has set up a special page on its website for making them. Please go to this web address for instructions.

On Saturday, April 9, in Los Angeles, Vitello’s Jazz Club and the Los Angeles Jazz Society are teaming in a 12-hour performance to raise funds to benefit victims of the triple disaster. Peter Erskine, Joe LaBarbera, Terry Trotter, Larry Koonse, Bob Sheppard, the Wayne Bergeron big band, Chuck Berghofer, Tamir Hendelman and the Yellowjackets will be among the musicians donating their talents. The L.A. Jazz Society will transmit all the money collected to the Japanese Red Cross. Dick McGarvin, a favorite radio host of southern California jazz listeners, will be the MC. For time, location and further details, see Vitello’s website.

In the wake of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated northern Japan, artists and arts organizations around the world are helping with relief for the Japanese jazz community. One of the biggest efforts is taking place in New York City. If you live in or near Manhattan or will find yourself there this Monday evening, April 4, please consider joining the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra at the Village Vanguard. The band and the venerable club are joining forces in the fund-raising and inviting prominent guests, including Tom Harrell, Barry Harris, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Roy Hargrove, Marvin Stamm, Rufus Reid and Jerry Dodgion. Others will be added. For details and a list of guest artists, see the VJO’s website.

The three sets of the benefit will be streamed live at this web address.

In the meantime, here is the orchestra at the North Sea Festival in Holland in 2008 with “Mean What You Say,” a staple of the band’s repertoire by one of its founders, Thad Jones. Solos are by Terell Stafford, flugelhorn, and Gary Smulyan, baritone saxophone. The music justifies the effort of adjusting your eyes and ears to the catch-as-catch-can quality of the location video and audio.

There’s a fresh dump of snow and avalanches have closed some roads in the Cascades, but in our little orchard, spring has—well, you know.

Hundreds of CDs have piled up around Rifftides world headquarters. At a meeting, the staff voted whether to write, long, exhaustive analytical reviews of three of them or highlight many more in an effort to keep up with a jazz scene that—take our word for it—is not dying, at least not in terms of sheer recording output. Short and pithy won the vote over learned, diagnostic and likely to put you to sleep. This survey will go on intermittently, with other matters popping up, as usual.

Sean Smith, Trust (Smithereen).
In Smith’s career of more than 20 years as a bassist, he has been so busy with Bill Charlap, Gerry Mulligan, Clark Terry, Tom Harrell, Art Farmer, Peggy Lee, Jacky Terrasson and others that he has taken time to be the leader on only two previous albums. His first CD in ten years features his new quartet with saxophonist John Ellis, guitarist John Hart and Smith’s longtime colleague Russell Meissner on drums. The group stirred anticipation with web videos that popped up a few months ago. Their album more than meets expectations raised.

Admired as a composer by Charlap, Phil Woods, Bill Mays and others who have recorded his music, Smith wrote all 12 of the tunes. Unlike many albums laden with originals, Trust has variety, from the harmonically demanding Wayne Shorter tribute called “Wayne’s World” to the sunny waltz “Bush League,” to “Voices,” an affecting ballad. On “Voices,” Smith’s solo highlights the darkness and heft of his tone and his ability to play successions of high notes as music, not the strain of acrobatic exercise. Ellis’s tenor sax tone and his phrasing are key to the success of the piece.

“Graham Ewan,” a duet with Hart, is a brief demonstration of Smith’s skill with the bow, a lull in the proceedings. If Catherine of the Italian Renaissance Medicis inspired “Ditty for Ms. de’ Medici”, she must have danced a mean soft shoe between intrigues and poisonings. It’s a happy piece. Ellis’s tenor playing on “’de Medici,” “What’d You Say?” and a few other tunes is so distinctive that it leads one to wonder why he didn’t leave the soprano in its case. There is no law that, in the wake of Coltrane, every saxophonist must double on soprano. In Ellis’s case, he’s eroding his comparative advantage.

Often in albums led and produced by bassists, the sound designs make it clear who’s in charge, sometimes to the point of ear pain. This one will not have you lunging for your tone controls. Sound reproduction and balance match the quality of the music.

Cuong Vu, Leaps Of Faith (Origin).
Like Smith’s, Vu’s is a pianoless quartet, but the instrumentation is rather different: his trumpet, two electric basses and drums. He begins with three standards, “Body and Soul,” “All The Things You Are” and “My Funny Valentine,” assuring listeners that he is about more than 21st century space music. It’s a clever strategy. Vu, bassists Stomu Takeishi and Luke Bergman and drummer Ted Poor bring plenty of adventurism to the classic ballads, but Vu’s long lines and lyricism carry over into the collective improvisation of his title tune. Then he edges “Leap of Faith” further and further out until it vaporizes in the exosphere of electronic distortions. Vu’s musicianship is so solid that when he mixes jazz, pop, street grunge and amplified random noise, it somehow works, is even reassuring. That is as true of his calming treatments of the Beatles’ “Something” and Jackson Browne’s “My Opening Farewell” as it is of his kaleidoscopic “I Shall Never Come Back.”

Brian Lynch, Unsung Heroes (Hollistic MusicWorks).
“Unsung” is right. Lynch pays tribute to his trumpet predecessors or contemporaries Tommy Turrentine, Joe Gordon, Charles Sullivan, Idrees Sulieman, Charles Tolliver, Claudio Roditi and Louis Smith. Known to few but the most committed and attentive listeners, all have earned respect of their peers and critics. In some cases, Lynch plays compositions by his heroes. In others he composes pieces in their honor. In all, his arrangements are as impressive as is his playing in a tight sextet that includes alto saxophonist Vincent Herring, tenor saxophonist Alex Hoffman, pianist Rob Schneiderman, bassist David Wong and drummer Pete Van Nostrand. Among highlights of the album, which is itself a highlight, are Lynch’s treatment of Sulieman’s “Saturday Afternoon at Four” and his own “RoditiSamba.”with memorable solos by him and Herring. Hoffman’s gliding, muscular work comes as a pleasant revelation. The CD is a followup and companion to Lynch’s 2000 album Tribute to the Trumpet Masters.

Ambrose Akinmusire, When the Heart Emerges Glistening (Blue Note).
Always approach the latest universally heralded trumpet prodigy with caution; that’s my motto. Caution, however, dissipates rapidly in the face of Akinmusire’s musicianship, the evenness and warmth of his sound, his passion and the unity of his quintet. Though his mastery of the horn is stunningly complete, music comes before virtuosity. Displays of trumpet fireworks are incidental, as in “The Walls of Lechuguilla.” “Regret,” as affecting slow playing as I’ve heard recently, has little to do with virtuosity, nearly everything to do with expressiveness. Akinmusire’s duet on “What’s New” with pianist Jason Moran, who produced the album, is pure invention, a la Tony Fruscella, until near the end when he lands on the last few bars of the melody. Tenor saxophonist Walter Smith III; pianist Gerald Clayton; bassist Harish Raghavan; and drummer Justin Brown are finely in tune with Akinmusire and one another. His band of young men are significantly beyond hard bop or post bop emulation. This is——to reach back for a phrase used by swing era musicians who wished to bestow high praise——original stuff.

More to come.

On the blog known as Brew Lite’s Jazz Tales, Bruno Leicht just posted a piece about jazz vocalese. It is centered on the recordings of Annie Ross and includes a rare video clip of her singing “Twisted,” with Count Basie accompanying. It’s a treat.