Archives for August 2011

Bill Crow sent an alert to a clip of the amazing musician Damian Draghici. Tricked by memory, I could have sworn that I had posted the video a few months ago, but the staff’s thorough search of the Rifftides archive turned up no trace of it. Draghici is a Romanian Gypsy as celebrated in his country for activism in behalf of the Roma people as for his mastery of the pan flute, an instrument rarely encountered in your average jam session. He studied at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, worked in Los Angeles and London and has toured extensively.

This performance is from a televised concert late last year in Bucharest. With Draghici are Eddie Daniels, clarinet; Randy Porter, piano; Scott Steed, bass; and Reggie Jackson, drums. Over the years, Charlie Parker’s (or possibly Miles Davis’s) “Donna Lee” has picked up velocity as musicians have mastered its linear complexity. This opening chorus probably sets a new land speed record.

For biographical information about Damian Draghici, go here.

Here’s something to engross you as you prepare for a new week. A man named Dan Cohen animates music in the most fundamental and entertaining way. You have no doubt heard the Miles Davis Sextet playing “So What” often enough that you can sing along with the solos. Well, in fairness, it would require a remarkably flexible voice to stay in unison with Coltrane, but enjoy singing along—or reading along—with Mr. Cohen’s tour of one of the great jazz recordings.

Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb, 1959.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Harry Connick and Branford Marsalis vowed to see that New Orleans musicians affected by the storm would get long-term help. Six years of their hard work and the cooperation of hundreds of others are about to make a tangible difference in the city’s musical community and beyond. A new center named in honor of Ellis Marsalis (pictured)—father of four famous sons in jazz and teacher of hundreds of musicians—is officially open and will be in full swing in the fall. In today’s New Orleans Times-Picayune, Keith Spera writes:

Were it not for Hurricane Katrina, there would be no Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.

“I was guilty of the same thing our city has been guilty of for 100 years: Resting on our traditions and thinking everything is going to keep on going status quo,” Connick said. “No one thought there would be a storm that would put the city under water. No one thought that the musical traditions would ever be in jeopardy.

“The storm really opened up a lot of dialogue.”

In the storm’s wake, housing was a more pressing concern. Connick and Marsalis partnered with New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity to develop the Musicians’ Village for musicians and others. From the outset, Connick said, the vision included a performing arts/community center.

The 72 single-family homes in the Village were built by thousands of volunteers. Habitat financed construction with donations and low-interest loans to the homeowners.

In a few weeks, the halls of the Marsalis center will ring with the music of its first class of students. To read Spera’s entire story, click here.

To see and hear Ellis Marsalis perform with his sons Branford, Delfeayo, Jason and Wynton, play this video.

Kristin Korb, you may recall, plays the bass as she sings or sings as she plays the bass. Take your pick; she does both equally well. This video is from a house-party concert she gave last year. The event was called Spring Soiree. The house provided a splendid view of the lights of Los Angeles. Korb’s colleagues in the rhythm section were her frequent pianist Llew Matthews, and drummer Matt Gordy. The clip gives a rare opportunity to hear former Stan Kenton alto saxophonist Mary Fettig, a veteran of touring with Airto Moreira and Flora Purim, Joe Henderson and Marian McPartland, among others. It also demonstrates that properly cared for, good old songs are never really old.

Ms. Korb recently married a Danish man and is moving to Copenhagen, which will be her headquarters and point of departure for touring.

I had hoped to include in the post below something from André Previn, who was Mr. Rasey’s colleague in the studios and, like him, is one of the few remaining members of the remarkable MGM orchestra of the 1940s and ‘50s. My request for a few words from Maestro Previn made its way to him a day late. He responded with this:

Thank you very much for your email. I have many remembrances of Uan, all of which are complimentary and flattering. He was not only the best trumpet player working at the film studios in Hollywood, but also a kind and good friend.

Please wish him the happiest of birthdays from me. I wish I could see him sometime soon.

With best regards,

André

My peripheral involvement in Bob Belden’s Miles Español project has refired a longstanding interest in music that combines Latin and jazz elements. A story by Larry Rohter in today’s New York Times added more fuel. It is about the restoration and DVD release of a film that played an influential role in bringing widespread attention to Latin music and, in particular, to the brand of salsa cooked up in New York’s Latin melting pot. Rohter begins by quoting the master percussionist Ray Barretto about his hopes for the film’s success in raising awareness. Then, he writes:

In 1971 Latin music barely existed on the margins of American consciousness. But Mr. Barretto, who died in 2006 at 76, was prescient. If salsa is today a globally popular and influential dance music style, that is due in no small part to “Our Latin Thing,” which documents a concert by the Fania All-Stars at the Cheetah club on 52nd Street in Manhattan on Aug. 26, 1971, and the chain of events it set in motion.

In the history of salsa music and Fania Records, which for many years were all but synonymous, “Our Latin Thing” and the Cheetah show occupy a singular position. It took another Fania All-Stars concert, this time for a crowd of more than 45,000 people at Yankee Stadium in 1973, to alert mainstream English-speaking America to the vast commercial potential of the Latin music market, but it was the Cheetah performance that may have been the ensemble’s artistic pinnacle.

The article includes an embedded performance excerpt from the “Our Latin Thing” film. To read it, go here.

It was time to put up a new post. With a house full of guests, ideal summer weather and the attractions of all outdoors, I looked for an easy out. The solution begins with a perfect trumpet chorus, then gets better.

The gorgeous arrangement was by Russell Garcia.

At this hour in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Laurie Verchomin is celebrating the 82nd anniversary of Bill Evans’ birth. She is at Alberta College reading from her book about the brief, intense relationship with the pianist that inspired him to write “Laurie.” The composition became a central part of Evans’ repertoire in his final years. Ms. Verchomin was with him on his final day in September,1980. On the left, we see Evans with photo booth shots of Laurie.

For a Rifftides mention of the book, go here. For Roger Levesque’s story in the Edmonton Journal about Ms. Verchomin and this evening’s event, go here. For a performance of “Laurie” by Evans, Mark Johnson and Joe La Barbera in Rome in 1979, don’t go anywhere. Play this video.

Gordon Jenkins (pictured) wrote the music and Joe Bishop the words to “Blue Prelude” in 1933. Shortly after, the Isham Jones band introduced the song on record. In the reed section was a young saxophonist and clarinetist named Woody Herman, who ultimately became leader of a cooperative band that some of Jones’ members formed after Jones retired in 1936. That group, in turn, became the first of Herman’s own bands, known as The Band That Plays the Blues. Herman was so attached to “Blue Prelude” that he made it his theme song. The recording with his vocal was a minor hit in 1939 and ‘40.

Over the years, performers in a variety of genres have recorded the piece. Among them are Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Peggy Lee, Judy Garland, Helen Humes with Bill Doggett, Sonny Stitt, Sonny Criss, Charlie Ventura, The Moody Blues, Linda Ronstadt and Nina Simone. Simone’s version is in a three-way tie with Garland’s and Humes’ as the most wrenching. Gretta Matassa’s approach to the song is right in there with Peggy Lee’s as the hardest swinging. Here’s Matassa singing “Blue Prelude” last year in a Beverly Hills, California, appearance. The trio is Mike Garson, piano; Bob Leatherbarrow, drums; and Matassa’s bassist of longstanding, Clipper Anderson. This is one of those rare web videos that you can watch full screen without losing significant picture quality.

The Rifftides staff is springing—well, easing—(all right, slouching) back into action after near-total immersion in the Miles Español project described three items down. Here is a pleasant way to do it.

Word from Sweden is that the Ystad Jazz Festival organized and supervised by pianist Jan Lundgren in his hometown was a sold-out success. The four-day festival concluded last Sunday. I had hoped to cover it for you, but was unable to make arrangements. Maybe next year.

Fortunately for all of us, the Norwegian bassist Arild Andersen arranged with Swedish Radio P2 to play on his website a recording of Lundgren’s mellow concert on Saturday with Andersen, trumpeter Peter Asplund and the remarkable Korean singer Youn Sun Nah. Brush up your Swedish for the opening announcement, after which Lundgren introduces the tunes and musicians in English. To hear the entire hour-and-a-half, click here, then on the SverigeSRadio box. Afterward come back, please, for a Rifftides archive special.

The news from Ystad arrived in a conversation with Dick Bank that also included discussion of a recording that is a high point in Lundgren’s career as a pianist and in Mr. Bank’s as a record producer. It is Lundgren’s album with bassist Chuck Berghofer and drummer Joe La Barbera of songs by Ralph Rainger. When the CD was released two-and-a-half years ago, it received enthusiastic reviews, but in narrow precincts of the press and the web. It deserved more attention and still does. Therefore, below is that Rifftides rarity, a rerun.

This post is from December, 2008.

The release of a new CD, The Film Music Of Ralph Rainger, is the occasion for my piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. Coupled with an article about the contemporary motion picture composer A.B. Rahman, it is headlined, Another Who Has Been Unjustly Forgotten and begins: 

For years, Jack Benny opened his CBS radio and television broadcasts with “Love in Bloom.” The comedian’s violin butchery of his theme song became a running coast-to-coast Sunday night gag. As a result, the piece became even more famous than Bing Crosby had made it with his hit record in 1934. Generations of listeners and viewers heard Bob Hope close his NBC shows with “Thanks for the Memory,” which he introduced in a movie, “The Big Broadcast of 1938.” The song was inseparable from Hope’s career. 

Ralph Rainger, the man who wrote those songs, was a pianist and recovering lawyer from Newark, N.J., who also composed such standards as “Easy Living,” “If I Should Lose You,” “Here Lies Love,” “Moanin’ Low,” “June in January,” “Please” and “Blue Hawaii,” most often with lyricist Leo Robin. Rainger and Robin turned out dozens of songs for Hollywood movies. They were frequently on the hit parade with Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter and the Gershwins. George Gershwin died at age 38, Rainger at 41. But while Gershwin’s fame increased after his death, Rainger’s name faded. With their beguiling melodies and challenging chord progressions, Rainger’s works are frequent vehicles for improvisation. Yet, in my experience, most musicians who play those songs respond with puzzled looks when asked who wrote them. That might have been the case with bassist Chuck Berghofer, pianist Jan Lundgren, drummer Joe La Barbera and the incomparable vocalist Sue Raney until producer Dick Bank recruited them to record the CD “The Film Music of Ralph Rainger” (Fresh Sound). 

…it is the first all-Rainger album since pianist Jack Fina managed to reduce Rainger’s tunes to dreary cocktail music in a 1950s LP. Mr. Lundgren, a brilliant Swedish pianist, plumbs the songs’ harmonic souls. He illuminates even the prosaic “Blue Hawaii,” which — to Rainger’s horror — became a huge hit in 1937. “It will disgrace us,” he told Robin. “It’s a cheap melody . . . a piece of c-.” 

Bill Crow sent this followup to the August 4 Rifftides item:

I talked to Clark yesterday on the phone (my call interrupted his practicing the trumpet). He’s been home from the hospital for a couple of days and says he is concentrating on healing up. Sounded wonderful.He laughed a long time when I told him a joke. He’s an expert at hanging in there, and I hope that he hangs in for a long time.

Blogging here has slowed in the past few days and may not pick up markedly for a few more. The Rifftides staff is on deadline for an historical essay to accompany Bob Belden’s Miles Español film project. The research has had to be deeper, wider and more intense than I imagined when I said yes to the assignment. No regrets, though. A few years ago, William Zinsser wrote an inspirational book called Writing to Learn. I thought I knew a thing or two about the subject at hand, but as I write this, boy, am I learning—about the roots of African, Spanish and Caribbean music, how they intertwined and nourished early jazz, about how those traditions informed what we heard from Miles Davis and Gil Evans and led to much of what we hear today. A bonus: I’ve come to know Jelly Roll Morton even better.

Belden’s Miles Español will result in a compact disc, but it is primarily a video venture. Many of the musicians worked with Miles. A few of the players are Chick Corea, Jack DeJohnette, Chano Domínguez, John Scofield, Alex Acuña, Ron Carter and Jerry Gonzalez. All 36 are named in the credits of this 10-minute preview.

Hasta la mañana (mas o menos)

This item from trumpeter Mike Vax has popped up in various places on the web in the past couple of days. It is dated August 3.

I just talked with Gwen Terry. Clark Terry had surgery on his right leg to remove some blockage and the operation went very well. I will be talking with Clark tomorrow and will give him all the good wishes that I know will come from many of you. Please keep him in your thoughts and think good things for him. After all – any surgery at age 90 is a major thing.

Gwen says that Clark sends his best to all his friends and fans around the world!

That is good to hear. So is this.

That was at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland on July 14, 1977. The other musicians were Ronnie Scott, tenor saxophone; Milt Jackson, vibes, Oscar Peterson, piano; Joe Pass, guitar; Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, bass; Bobby Durham, drums. CT is the sole survivor of that group.

I wonder how many of his fans know about Terry’s crucial role in prodding New Orleans to pay proper homage to its most celebrated cultural figure. Here’s the story from the Terry chapter in Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. I wrote the piece in 1978.

Terry’s ties to the city have been more spiritual than personal, but his admiration for a New Orleans hero led to one of the most important gestures of his life. A few blocks from the Super Dome a monument to Louis Armstrong is nearing completion. It might very well not have been built without Terry’s inspiration.

New Orleans’s Armstrong Park has been a project of the administration of former mayor Moon Landrieu, who deserves full credit for paying tangible tribute to the city’s greatest artist. But impetus for the idea came in 1969 on a bus ride during the second New Orleans JazzFest. As a musicians’ tour was passing Jane Alley, Armstrong’s birthplace, Terry deplored the fact that while New Orleans seemed to have statues of half the Latin American presidents in history, there was none of the city’s most famous son. Then and there, he started a fund to commission a statue. His first dollar was symbolic. His organizing ability and leadership were much more. Nine years later, that statue is on the verge of becoming the centerpiece of an entire park dedicated to Armstrong’s memory. The park’s completion slowed in the six-month transition between Landrieu’s administration and that of Mayor Ernest Morial. But assuming Morial, the city’s first black mayor, gets behind the project, Armstrong Park should be the New Orleans equivalent of Copenhagen’s celebrated Tivoli Gardens and open by 1980.

Well, it may still be a while before the park is the US Tivoli Gardens, but it was formally dedicated on April 15, 1980 by Landrieu (then US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development), Morial and Armstrong’s widow Lucille. The statue of Armstrong is the centerpiece.

For more on Clark, including the story of how he became Buddy Bolden, see this Rifftides archive piece.

The subtitle above may seem like a redundancy, and for too many musicians, it is. Fellow artsjournal blogger Howard Mandel’s newest post offers a question—

“Are hard times good for jazz?”

—and answers it at some length, complete with a classic 1930s film clip. The reader comments are also interesting. To see the piece, click here.

Nice work, Howard. I wish I’d thought of that.