Archives for 2011

The cycling schedule is full again. So are the rivers around here, swollen with snowmelt from the mountains, and roaring. Here’s some of what I saw on a ride this afternoon, a section of the Yakima roaring along muddy and almost into the fields and towns. In the upper center, you see an enormous tree that the force of the water tore out of the bank somewhere upstream.

Fifty yards from the river, all was serene. The view is west, toward the Cascades, where in spring the snow becomes water that runs down into the tributaries that fill the Yakima, which feeds the mighty Columbia.

The Columbia, as Woody Guthrie made everyone aware, rolls on.

The veteran writer and broadcaster Ted Panken has joined the burgeoning community of folks who blog about jazz. His weblog is called Today Is The Question. I have added it to the blogroll in the right-hand column. If you want to be sure Ted knows what he’s blogging about before you punch him up, read this first. It comes from pianist George Colligan’s jazztruth, whose address also goes into the blogroll. It’s getting crowded down there. You can’t blame anyone for wanting to get into so lucrative a field. Welcome to the club, gentlemen. Tip: periodic naps help.

We are happy to report that the artsjournal.com technical wizards have tracked down and liquidated the gremlin that was disabling the “Older Posts” function at the bottom of the main page. Now, when you click on that command, it will take you to the previous 20 posts. Click on it again, you will see another 20, and so on back through the mists of time to the primitive beginnings of this blog in June of 2005. There are two other ways to search Rifftides:

1. Scroll down to “Archives” in the right-hand column. Select the month and year you want to see.

2. Enter a name or term in the box under the artsjournalblog logo at the top of the right column and click on “Search.” I just tried it with Count Basie and came up 83 Rifftides items about Basie or mentioning him. Happy exploring.

Here’s a reward for paying attention to our little tutorial. The clip is from an episode of Art Ford’s Jazz Party, a program that survived for eight months of 1958 on WNTA-TV in New York. This kind of eclectic assemblage of musicians was still possible then. The tune is “I’ve Found a New Baby.” The players are Tyree Glenn, trombone; Coleman Hawkins, tenor saxophone; Johnny Windhurst, trumpet; Hank D’Amico, clarinet; Alex Templeton, piano; Mary Osborne, guitar; Teddy Charles, vibes; Morey Feld, drums; Doc Goldberg, bass.

Rifftides reader Charlton Price alerts us to an article that provides detail about Bruce Ricker’s days in Kansas City (see the post below) and the genesis of his film The Last of the Blue Devils. The piece is by Steve Paul in The Kansas City Star. It begins:

Some of the details remain hazy, but it was 1975 in a small midtown supper club where a crowd of serious jazz people gathered to celebrate the past.
Bruce Ricker, an attorney turned local activist and filmmaker, had been spending time here with a graying generation of musicians, recording their memories, stories and music from the heyday of Kansas City jazz.

And now he and his fellow filmmakers, John Arnoldy and Eric Menn, were showing a sprawling rough cut of the film…

To read the whole thing, go here.

In what may have been her motion picture debut, here is Ella Fizgerald at 25 in the 1942 Abbott and Costello comedy Ride ‘Em Cowboy. With her in the sequence are the Merry Macs singing and the Lindy Hoppers lindy-hopping. This was at about the time she had stopped fronting the Chick Webb band and moved into a solo career. Fitzgerald’s first professional ambition was to be a dancer. That’s not her job here, but check out her moves as she comes onto the set.

Rifftides Reader Andrew Dowd writes:

You may recall me as the fellow who hosts a jazz show on KMHD in Portland OR, on Saturday nights. A few weeks ago I got out an old dusty copy of The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Jazz Goes to Junior College, (Columbia CL1034, 1957), that I had in my collection and played a track from it on my show. I was glancing at the cover illustration, as I often do, and noticed that there is a photo of an old late-40’s black convertible with three children sitting in the front seat. I recall reading in either your bio of Paul Desmond (or in Fred M. Hall’s The Dave Brubeck Story) that this car belonged to Dave Brubeck and his wife and when it got old they abandoned it in the Brubeck back yard and that it became a “playhouse” of sorts for Dave’s sons. Could the photo on the cover of Jazz Goes to Junior College be this same car and Dave’s sons?

From the back and at that distance, it is impossible to say whose sons the boys are. It is not the same car. According to a friend who knows cars, the one on the cover is a 1950 Mercury convertible. The Brubeck road warrior vehicle was a 1949 Kaiser Vagabond sedan. Its picture and the story of those impecunious early days of few gigs and long drives is in Chapter 24 of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond (the link is another shameless attempt to sell books). When funds for accommodations lagged behind the band’s compensation, bassist Bull Ruther and Desmond occasionally spent the night in the Kaiser. They are seen here with it in 1952 in Newark, New Jersey, as Ruther watches Paul on a milk break.

Jazz Goes to Junior College is an underrated album by the quartet, surprisingly hard to find and never reissued as a single CD. It has shown up recently as part of a CD that contains three of the band’s late-fifties Columbia LPs. Below is one track from the album. The visual is not the album cover but a publicity shot distorted and tinted a bilious green, and it shows Ruther and drummer Herb Barman rather than Norman Bates and Joe Morello. Close your eyes and ignore it; the music is what matters. Desmond’s and Brubeck’s solos put a significant dent in the theory that white guys can’t play the blues. They end with an example of the spontaneous counterpoint that in the 1950s was an important aspect of their partnership.

Intial reports that Snooky Young died on May 5 were in error. He died on Wednesday, May 11, at home in Newport Beach, California. He was 92. The cause of death was a lung disease that developed recently.

Young was that rare combination, a great lead trumpeter who was also a soloist of exceptional imagination, taste and humor. He began as a professional musician when he was a teenager in Dayton, Ohio. At 20, he joined the Jimmie Lunceford band and in the course of his career played key roles in virtually every big jazz band of importance except Duke Ellington’s. He was with Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Benny Carter, Gerald Wilson, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, Thad Jones-Mel Lewis, Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland and the Capp-Pierce Juggernaut.

A wizard of high notes and the plunger mute, Young was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2008. His widest exposure came during 20 years in the brass section of Doc Severinsen’s Tonight Show band. Loved by his fellow musicians, viewers and Tonight’s host Johnny Carson, Young was occasionally featured on the program. In this clip, he sings and plays one of the Lunceford band’s signature tunes from the days when jazz often led the hit parade.

Young was the consummate sideman but he had a moment of glory as co-leader with the stalwart alto saxophonist Marshall Royal on a 1989 album called Snooky & Marshall’s Album. It had the remarkable rhythm section of Ross Tompkins, Freddie Green, Ray Brown and Louie Bellson—and Young at the top of his game.

Services are scheduled for May 25 at noon at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Snooky Young, RIP.

In January, after looking over the lineup for this year’s New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which was laden with rock and pop, I wrote:

More than five years after Katrina, with the city recovering but much of it still resembling a post-war nightmare, a party called a jazz festival symbolizes New Orleans’ determination to recover. That speaks of a spirit that rises from within New Orleanians and cuts through a malaise of failed leadership, politics and bureaucracy. For eight years, I was a New Orleanian. I understand that spirit. It grows out of the curious combination of laissez faire and obstinance that animates folks whose blood has a component of coffee with chicory.


Partying, food, boogying and getting down are wonderful. Few Orleanians would disagree with any of that…

…It is clear that popular taste no longer embraces jazz as a central element. It is equally clear that the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is here to stay as a kaleidoscope of entertainment. It would be welcome if the city also had room for a festival that honored and nurtured the music that is the living symbol of the New Orleans spirit. Somehow, jazz ended up with a bit part in what the natives still call JazzFest.

To read all of that piece, which includes early JazzFest history, go here:

The festival wound up last weekend. How did it work out? It depends on whom you ask, of course. The bookkeepers in the JazzFest front office may be ecstatic, those who wanted to hear jazz less so; columnist Brian Ross, for instance. Here’s some of what he wrote on The Huffington Post.

Jazz may get top billing on the signage and the posters at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, but it rides the back of the bus on the fairgrounds.
There’s a reason for this too… (Shhhh…) Jazz doesn’t make the festival much money.

The smallish jazz tent at “Jazz Fest” was relegated to a location directly behind the big ACURA main stage where the blow-back of the mega-speakers blaring alternative pop bands like Arcade Fire muddled the music of The Mingus Big Band and others.

Only a festival with the namesake Jazz was positioned for that kind of disrespect. Not Gospel. Not Blues. Not Cajun.

To read all of Ross’s report, go here.

If you attended JazzFest, please use the comment box below to share your impressions with fellow Rifftides readers.

A Rifftides archive browser who identifies himself only as Hank wrote to take me to task:

I feel certain you are friends with Miller Williams. My main comment
is that if you are going to publish online his poetry, it seems you
would want to get it right. There are numerous errors in the poem I
found on this site, from formatting to punctuation to capitalization.
Not meaning to get on your case about this, but I did notice it. I
send this respectfully.

Over the past six years, I have posted two of friend Williams’s poems. I checked the one about Slow Drag Pavageau, posted in 2006, and found that it was accurately transcribed. Whew.

Hank was right to get on my case about the other one. I plead guilty to all three of his charges. Since few readers are likely to go back to items put up six years ago, I apologize to Professor Williams and attempt to make restitution by reposting the piece, complete with an added photograph and updated links. This first ran on July 22, 2005. The atrocities it refers to were in a string that continues with little sign of letup, unless the recent event in Abbottabad was a turning point. We can hope.

Following the most recent rounds of atrocities—Iraq, London—a friend wanted to talk. He did not have comforting insights into mankind’s oldest philosophical question, nor did I. I don’t know whether Miller Williams has the answer, but this distinguished American poet ponders it beautifully. With his permission, here is one of his finest poems.

Why God Permits Evil:
For Answers to This Question
Of Interest to Many
Write Bible Answers, Dept. E-7

—ad on a matchbook cover

Of interest to John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas
for instance and Job for instance who never got

one straight answer but only his cattle back.
With interest, which is something, but certainly not

any kind of answer unless you ask
God if God can demonstrate God’s power

and God’s glory, which is not a question.
You should all be living at this hour.

You had Servetus to burn, the elect to count,
bad eyes and the Institutes to write;

you had the exercises and had Latin,
the hard bunk and the solitary night;

you had the neighbors to listen to and your woman
yelling at you to curse God and die.

Some of this to be on the right side;
some of it to ask in passing, Why?

Why badness makes its way in a world He made?
How come he looked for twelve and got eleven?

You had the faith and looked for love, stood pain,
learned patience and little else. We have E-7.

Churches may be shut down everywhere,
half-written philosophy books be tossed away.

Some place on the South Side of Chicago
a lady with wrinkled hose and a small gray

bun of hair sits straight with her knees together
behind a teacher’s desk on the third floor

of an old shirt factory, bankrupt and abandoned
except for this just cause, and on the door:

Dept. E-7. She opens the letters
asking why God permits it and sends a brown

plain envelope to each return address.
But she is not alone. All up and down

the thin and creaking corridors are doors
and desks behind them: E-6, E-5, 4, 3.

A desk for every question, for how we rise
blown up and burned, for how the will is free,

for when is Armageddon, for whether dogs
have souls or not and on and on. On

beyond the alphabet and possible numbers
where cross-legged, naked, and alone,

there sits a pale, tall, and long-haired woman
upon a cushion of fleece and eiderdown

holding in one hand a handwritten answer,
holding in the other hand a brown

plain envelope. On either side, cobwebbed
and empty baskets sitting on the floor

say In and Out. There is no sound in the room.
There is no knob on the door. Or there is no door.

©1999 by Miller Williams

Williams wrote and read the inaugural poem at the beginning of President Bill Clinton’s second term in 1997, four years after Maya Angelou was the inaugural poet as President Clinton began his first term. In a PBS program, The Inaugural Classroom, a 12th grader asked Williams how it felt to be compared to Angelou.

“She writes opera and classical music,” Williams said, “and I write jazz and blues.”

The late poet John Ciardi summed up Williams this way:

Miller Williams writes about ordinary people in the extraordinary moments of their lives. Even more remarkable is how, doing this, he plays perilously close to plain talk without ever falling into it; how close he comes to naked sentiment without yielding to it; how close he moves to being very sure without ever losing the grace of uncertainty. Add to this something altogether apart, that what a good reader can expect to sense, coming to these poems, is a terrible honesty, and we have among us a voice that makes a difference.

“Why God Permits Evil” appears most recently in Williams’s collected poems, Some Jazz a While. To learn more about Miller Williams, go here.

Lately, readers have asked how to sign up for Rifftides RSS feeds and be notified of new posts and comments. On the right side of the blue bar at the top of the screen, you will see a pair of symbols like this. Click on the one next to “Posts” or the one next to “Comments,” or both, and then click on “Subscribe.” Voila!

Rifftides reader Debra Kinzler’s notice that a quartet of Clifford Jordan’s admirers will revive his Glass Bead Games prompts me to post a slightly revised version of a 2007 piece about a landmark recording that became unavailable for too long. Ms. Kinzler informs us that tenor saxophonist Seamus Blake, pianist Eric Reed, drummer Billy Drummond and bassist Dezron Douglas will perform Jordan’s work in an engagement May 17-22 at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in New York. She describes the 1974 album as “monumental,” an adjective that passes the hyperbole test. Here’s what we posted when it became known, after the LP had all but disappeared, that the music would finally make it to CD.

Glass Bead Games: A Reissue Event

Clifford Jordan, one of the great (term used advisedly) tenor saxophonists of the second half of the twentieth century, in 1974 made a magnificent album called Glass Bead Games. Billy Higgins was the drummer on all twelve tracks. Cedar Walton and Stanley Cowell shared piano duties. Sam Jones and Bill Lee were the bassists in the two editions of Jordan’s quartet represented on the album. Sonny Rollins, who rarely provides blurbs, called Glass Bead Games “Clifford Jordan at his best…with a great band!”

The album consisted entirely of Jordan compositions, a practice often adopted for the wrong reasons. Jordan followed it for the right ones; he was an accomplished and original composer, and he was inspired by Herman Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game. His music captures something of the mystery and strange energy of that story. The playing by all hands–but particularly by Jordan–is exceptional. Issued as a double LP on the Strata East label, the album finds Jordan maintaining his commitment to mainstream values while edging into the freedom of new music pioneered by colleagues like Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. He achieved a balance that might have served as an example for some of the space cadets who took the new music so far out that it became inaccessible to most listeners.

Glass Bead Games has not been generally available in its entirety for years. I have heard of copies of the LP set going at auction for as much as $100.00. From time to time, CDs of the album have been available from Japan at high prices. Now that she has acquired the rights to it, Jordan’s widow Sandra (he died in 1993) has made Glass Bead Games available at a reasonable price, apparently only from this source. Its reappearance is an important reissue event. I did an A/B comparison of the original LPs to the CD and was relieved to find that the sound quality has not been digitally distorted.
(First posted October 9, 2007)

Debra Kinzler gets the final words—a biographical sketch of Jordan.

Clifford Jordan (1931 – 1993) was born in Chicago. He was a self-taught musician who claimed his biggest musical influence was Lester Young. He played his first professional gig with Max Roach, eventually leaving Chicago to replace Sonny Rollins in the Max Roach quintet. He later worked with Sony Stitt, Charles Mingus, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Randy Weston and J.J. Johnson, among many others. His style of tenor sax playing was powerful and soulful and he was often thought to be the tenor saxophonist of his generation to carry on the torch of “Lester Young.” Clifford Jordan’s music was often misunderstood and undervalued, staying that way even at the time of his passing at the premature age of 61.

New Orleans is the only place I know of where you ask a little kid what he wants to be and instead of saying “I want to be a policeman,” or “I want to be a fireman,” he says, I want to be a musician.”—Alan Jaffe

I was just like the rest of the kids, wanted to now all about that new music called jazz. I was a second-line kid. That meant I’d follow the big bands down the street and, man, what a thrill when Tio or George Baquet would let me carry their cases while they played!—Albert Nicholas

If I had grown up in any place but New Orleans, I don’t think my career would have taken off. I wouldn’t have heard the music that was around this town. There was so much going on when I was a kid.—Pete Fountain