Archives for 2013

Almost two years ago I disclosed with some excitement that videotape existed of portions of a television performance of Focus, the classic collaboration between Stan Getz and the brilliant composer and arranger Eddie Sauter. The Rifftides staff tracked down the clip and posted it. I hope that you got a chance to see it because whoever put the video on YouTube seems to have been in violation. The copyright holder took offense. New Zealand Reader Tom King forwarded this report from his friend John Goodchild:

At the time I did look at the video and thought the sound was quite good (although the image was about what you would expect from a 1963 tele-recording). I went back to Rifftides to have another look at it. However, unfortunately all you get when you try to view it is a note saying that the clip has been removed because of “multiple copyright issues”! So you now know the recording exists but you can’t watch it. Sorry about that.

Let us hope that the copyright roadblock can be removed and the video restored. As discussed in that October, 2011 post, Focus is one of the great albums of the second half of the last century, regardless of genre. Here is a sample, “I’m Late, I’m Late.” The drummer, dancing with wire brushes, is Roy Haynes. There is no video. Close your eyes and make your own pictures. You might just see the Mad Hatter.

Revision, as of September 11 at 9:40:33 AM PDT. Tom King sent the bad news yesterday. Now another Rifftides reader, Mike Kaiser, sends the good news. See the link he provided in the third comment below.

. . .this is my dilemma. I’m a guy who makes things up as I go along, so nothing is ever finished; there are so many layers. So when you solo, yeah, you might get into one thing, but then, hey, everything has implications! You can hear the next level. And that’s how I feel about improvising—there’s always another level.

No one is original. Everyone is derivative.

I’ll know when I find the ultimate sound.

I wanted to be able to write for the symphony orchestra. I wanted to write for the movies. I wanted to write for television. I wanted to be able to do it with great speed, great accuracy, and that’s what I did.

Jazz, to me, has to be loose. You can’t be tight. When you get too tight in jazz, it isn’t making it. Same thing with Duke Ellington. He let his band be relaxed, be loose, take it easy. Nobody gets excited here. You’re late. Okay, so you’re late. Let’s play.

Response to the recent Rifftides post about courtesy titles in news stories made it clear that readers care about ethical practices affecting the news reports they read, hear and watch. A post from 2006, in the Pleistocene era of this blog, dealt with journalism ethics at large. Here it is again, revised a bit because of changes: For one, FACS (the Foundation for American Communications) no longer exists. For another, the book Journalism Ethics: Why Change? is out of print, available only from used book outlets or in public libraries.

Originally posted on April 24, 2006

After my daily journalism days ended, I spent several years educating professional journalists about issues they cover in economics, science, the environment, foreign affairs and other fields. One of our key areas at the nonprofit Foundation For American Communications was ethics. That resulted in a book edited by me and my assistant Dale Shaps that is still read by reporters, editors, producers and others in journalism who know how difficult it is, day in and day out, to be balanced, accurate and fair.

Over several years, FACS did a series of educational conferences on ethics for journalists. The programs attracted some of the leading figures in American news organizations as students, teachers, speakers and panelists. A few of them were Richard Harwood of The Washington Post; former National News Council President Norman Isaacs; Jeff Greefield, then of ABC News; William Henry III of TIME: Bud Benjamin of CBS News: and David Lawrence, president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Jesse Mann, an ethicist and philosophy professor at Georgetown University, often led the participants through thinking about moral reasoning and newsgathering. At one of our sessions, Dave Lawrence, when he was publisher of The Detroit Free Press, confessed that he hadn’t fully connected the obligation to be accurate with ethics until he was the subject of a front page profile in a national newspaper. Lawrence said that the reporter made mistakes of fact that got past the copy desk and the editors. By being on the receiving end of the news process, he said, he acquired a greater understanding of why so many readers, listeners and viewers question the reliability of what they read, see and hear in the news.

All of that came to mind when I read DevraDoWrite‘s latest installment. It had to do with her hometown newspaper’s short profile of her husband, John Levy. Devra had a David Lawrence experience. Here’s some of what she wrote:

What could have been a lovely feature story in Friday’s Pasadena Star News was, sadly, full of factual errors, and worse, it was woefully short on substance. Errors included my age — I am 50 years old, 44 years younger than John, not 55 years younger than John which would make me 39 (and no, I don’t wish it were so); and we won’t even mention that there is no jazz musician I know of named Jim Hail. Okay those are two errors that are personal to me and I’m feeling snarky, but there are many other errors and a few misquotes as well. Whether due to shoddy/sloppy journalism practices or lack of experience I can’t say for a fact, but I do have an opinion.

Even though the reporter did request (and receive) a free copy of Men, Women and Girl Singers, John’s life story written entirely by yours truly (as John himself told her), I guess she didn’t have time to read it or any of the materials on the web site. However, she did interview John for two hours, consulted twice at length with his publicist, even called me with questions, and there is so much she could have written about.

To read all of Devra’s piece, go here.

It is almost instinctual among news consumers to conclude that when errors are made in print, radio and television news, they stem from political or ideological bias. I have found in working for decades in all three media—and now in this strange new digital one—that a large majority of working journalists want to get it right and want to be fair. (The question of ethical instincts among bloggers, most of whom are not journalists, is a subject for another occasion. Maybe, someday.) An overwhelming fact of life in the daily journalism business is that in a tighter, faster, news cycle with newsroom budgets being slashed by corporate ownerships that no longer regard news as a responsibility and a privilege but as a budgetary burden, with fewer reporters and editors cranking out more news, there will be more mistakes. That excuses nothing. The professional obligation to be informed, fair and accurate is a constant. In the preface to Journalism Ethics: Why Change? I wrote:

Consciously or not, journalists practice ethics every day of their working lives. How much time to devote to a story, whether to include a name, whether to disclose a source, what to show on the screen: these are value judgments and involve ethical decisions as surely as massive arguments over fairness, balance and maintenance of the watchdog function of the press made possible by the First Amendment to the Constitution.

To many journalists, talking about matters of fairness and ethics is akin to inviting censorshop. But unless they make conscious efforts to view those decisions in an ethical framework, journalists will not fully understand their professional obligations and opportunities.

Twenty years later, I would add that the new owners of news organizations, many of them from industries with no connection to journalism traditions, must somehow come to understand that their new corporate assets carry an obligation to more than their stockholders. They have become gatekeepers of the free flow of information upon which the democracy depends. We will all be affected by how—and whether—they accommodate the pressures of the market to that responsbility.

David Lawrence retired at 56 as publisher of The Miami Herald. He is a leading national advocate for children, especially in the area of early childhood development.

John Levy died in January, 2012, at the age of 99.

Yes, yes, I know. Sonny Rollins is 83 today, and Rifftides is joining the celebration late. There is a reason but no excuse. We jump on the birthday bandwagon by bringing you Rollins playing an extended version of a tune his mother remembered from her girlhood in the Virgin Islands. “St. Thomas” has been an essential and beloved part of his repertoire for more than 50 years. The rhythm section Is Kenny Drew, piano; Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, bass; Albert “Tootie” Heath, drums. The video is from Denmark in 1968. Happy birthday to a great musician and a great American.

For a couple of hundred years, newspapers used courtesy titles. Many papers that equated Abraham Lincoln with the devil often wrote about “Mr. Lincoln” or “The President,” even as their editorials pilloried him. Up until about the time of Ronald Regan, in news columns and in radio and television newscasts, whoever was president received the respect of title. The operating theory in most of US journalism was that the office warrants respect regardless of the politics and policies of its occupant.

Sometime in the 1970s or early ‘80s, liberationists of various persuasions pressured news organizations (or, if you insist, “the media”) to drop “Mrs.,” ”Miss,” “Mr,” “Dr.” and so forth. Their argument was that the titles offended an emerging sense that such distinctions are discriminatory, offensive to equality. Listening to the news on National Public Radio this morning, I found myself wincing every time anchors and field reporters called the president “Obama.” Today, after the first reference, we rarely hear or see titles, even when the second reference is to the President of The United States.

Among the few exceptions in print are The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Christian Science Monitor. I must acknowledge NPR’s Morning Edition Saturday host Scott Simon. Mr. Simon uses titles when he refers to people in news stories and interviews.

As for equality, I have never heard the argument for courtesy titles put better than the late Norman Isaacs put it in 1985. A former chairman of the National News Council and former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), Mr. Isaacs (pictured) was the keynote speaker at the first of a series of journalism ethics conferences that I put together for the Foundation for American Communications (FACS). His audience was a roomful of high-powered editors, publishers, reporters, journalism critics and educators. Here is an excerpt from his talk:

Do courtesy titles matter? A Howard University professor recently came up to me and said, “I don’t know of a black man or woman of substance who doesn’t wince when seeing his or her name in print and who is referred to only by the last name after the first full name reference. It takes their minds back to the days when we were all called ‘boy.’” I was taken by surprise by his candor and passion on the subject, yet I shouldn’t have been surprised. I have run into so many snide and negative comments about the practice that I feel we do great damage to the psyche of the citizenry at large. What does a young boy think when his father accomplishes something of merit and is called “Wilson” in the newspaper report? Can the boy address his teacher by only a last name? The Roper organization has done two recent polls on this matter. Both show widespread disapproval of the absence of courtesy titles. More telling, the disapproval is remarkably high among women who do not have college degrees. Do editors care? I pray so. I hope they care more about the families who buy their newspapers than the young staff reporters who hold such strong ideas about what newspaper policies ought to be.

Mr. Isaacs went on to quote studies that Kristen McGraff, president of Minnesota Opinion Research Incorporated, did for the ASNE and the Associated Press Managing Editors.

She traced a large part of the credibility gap to the young transient reporters on staff. Young transients, she said, often have views and opinions that counter the views and opinions of people who buy and read the newspaper. This is also true of the millions who watch TV. The credibility gap is real and it runs damn deep.

In 2013 are young transient reporters committed to social change still driving the idea that courtesy titles in print and broadcast news are undemocratic? Do three decades with courtesy titles all but banished mean that they are gone forever? The name of that conference was Journalism Ethics: Why Change? The question it implied is worth asking today, when ratings and circulation are declining:

Why not change?

Gerald Wilson celebrated his 95th birthday yesterday. He looks back on a career studded with achievement as a trumpeter, bandleader, composer and pioneering arranger. Early on in his writing Wilson achieved the unexpected, incorporating daring classical harmonic techniques in his big band arrangements and making them accessible to general audiences. He is the personification of a lifelong learner. Following big successes capped by a sold-out tour with Ella Fitzgerald, Wilson dissolved his successful post-World War II big band because he thought he needed more study. From my notes for Mosaic’s 5-CD set of Wilson’s Pacific Jazz recordings (out of print but available as an MP3 download), here is a section about that period in the forties when he had reached the top.

He thought he had got there too soon. In 1947, he disbanded. “I decided when I closed with Ella that I was going to have to study some more. I wanted to be able to write anything,” he told NPR’s Jazz Profiles. “I wanted to be able to write for the symphony orchestra, I wanted to write for the movies, I wanted to write for television. I wanted to be able to do it with great speed, great accuracy, and that’s what I did. But I didn’t stop playing.”

Wilson holed up with scores, analyzing works by Stravinsky, Debussy, Falla, Ravel, Kabalevsky, Khatchaturian, Bartok. In a prodigy of self-teaching, he absorbed the techniques of those classical masters. He would apply their lessons for all the years of his long career. He achieved each of his goals, including works for symphony orchestra, motion pictures and TV, but especially writing prolifically for big bands, his own and others. Half a year into his study exile, he got a call from another leader asking him for help. It was Duke Ellington. He wrote for Ellington off and on for most of the rest of Duke’s life, and occasionally filled out the trumpet section when Ellington needed an additional horn. Later in 1948, he joined Count Basie, playing and writing. “That was study, too,” he says, “sitting where swing really happened. That great rhythm section was really the common denominator for swing.” After Basie disbanded in 1949, Wilson joined Dizzy Gillespie’s big band. For Basie he wrote the lovely ballad “Katy” and with Basie composed “St. Louis Baby.” For Gillespie he arranged “Guarachi Guaro” which became influential in the development of Latin jazz in the forties and had a second life when Cal Tjader adapted it in the fifties. During all of that extracurricular activity Wilson continued studying and preparing for his next steps.

The next steps included the 1950s Wilson band loaded with soloists including Joe Pass, Bud Shank, Carmel Jones, Richard Groove Holmes, Harold Land, Joe Maini and a broad cross section of the cream of Los Angeles musicians. Video from those days is scarce, but here are the closing moments from one of Frank Evans’ TV shows. Wilson’s band plays one of his favored forms, a blues waltz, “Blues for Yna Yna.” Wilson solos on trumpet, Teddy Edwards on tenor saxophone, Jack Wilson on piano.

To hear what Wilson has been up to lately—particularly in regard to his remarkable harmonic imagination—I recommend his 2011 album Legacy.

If you, too, did not make it to Detroit over the weekend for the city’s jazz festival, reading about it may be small consolation. Nonetheless, Mark Stryker’s account in The Detroit Free Press conveys his excitement and covers the highlights as he heard and saw them. Stryker is not a sports reporter, but he named a most valuable player.

■MVP Award: The majestic drummer Billy Hart brought his extraordinary ability to both respond to and spontaneously shape a band’s conception to three performances with three different groups. Freedom, discipline, daring, passion, swing, broken rhythm, orchestral textures, interactive sparring, shocking dynamics, astounding creativity and authority. Want to know what jazz is really about? Listen to Billy Hart. (With the Saxophone Summit, David Weiss’ The Cookers, Quest)

(photo by Romain Blanquart, Detroit Free Press)

For all of Stryker’s story, click here. Don’t miss the highlighted sidebars and slide shows.

Here is Hart with his quartet at Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola in New York earlier this year with a lovely medium-tempo blues in G, title unknown. From left to right in the video: Ethan Iverson, Mark Turner, Ben Street, Billy Hart.

Go here for a recent Rifftides review of the Hart quartet’s new album.

Monday, September 2, is Labor Day in the United States. Congress established it in 1894 as a national holiday to honor working people. Decades ago, the observance expanded into a long weekend during which Americans celebrate the end of summer by going to beaches, swimming pools, mountains, campgrounds, parks and backyard barbecues. Detroit honors the occasion by holding a massive who’s-who jazz festival, one of the biggest in the world. It is not unlikely that during the course of the festival, somebody will perform a piece that was written with labor, rather than a respite from labor, in mind. On a 1962 broadcast of Jazz Scene USA, Cannonball Adderley introduced what was already becoming a jazz standard.

Happy Labor Day

Rifftides reader Fred Augerman writes:

Hi Doug, I was kind of surprised that there was no mention of the passing of Stan Kenton, which was on August 25, 1979!

Here’s Shelly Manne’s very poignant tribute at the time of Stan’s passing.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
He was a friend to all musicians.

He was like a Father.

He was like a psychiatrist.

He was the guy next to you on the bus.

He ate the same lousy food you did at a rest stop.

He waited with you for the room to be made up at the hotel after 300
miles of road.

He was the guy that taught you to make the job at any cost.

He taught you responsibility.

He was the guy that braved the elements in shirtsleeves

He was the guy who was first to fix a flat tire in the rain.

He was the guy in K.C. who held a busted water pipe with his hands, to
keep clothes and music from getting ruined until help came.

He was understanding to wives on the road.

He was a dedicated musician, composer, arranger.

He was a developer of talent.

He wrote to show off the ability of all his men.

He treated all equal.

He remembered everyone’s name, fan and musician alike.

He could go without sleep for days.

He was loyal.

He was dynamic.

He was vital.

He would lift his arms and make you want to play.

He would laugh at himself.

He could reach a whole audience with a smile.

He could enter a room and you would know he was there without
looking.

He invented charisma.

He was an innovator.

He was a gambler with music.

He was an explorer.

He was a living monument to music.

He was a great educator.

He was a great leader.

He was loved by all.

He loved all.

He was a friend to all.

He was indestructible.

Stan Kenton is dead. He will never be forgotten, and we will miss
him.

——Shelly Manne

Manne’s drumming is an essential ingredient in Kenton’s hit record “Viva Prado,” recorded in September of 1950. The composition and arrangement are by Shorty Rogers. Soloists are Milt Bernhart, trombone; Bud Shank, alto saxophone; and Maynard Ferguson, trumpet.

Reminding us all that today is Charlie Parker’s 93rd birthday, Rifftides reader Mark Mohr sent a message. We have been going through a siege of major losses in jazz, so it is of considerable comfort to be cheered by Mr. Mohr’s message, which, in its entirety, is:

By special arrangement with the publisher, Rifftides readers may acquire autographed copies of Doug’s novel Poodie James at a reduced price. To see a description of the book, read an excerpt and learn how to order, click on Purchase Doug’s Books on the blue border above. The special price will be in effect until the limited supply runs out.

Doug Ramsey is the John Steinbeck of apple country. Rich with sweet detail of the unique landscape of Washington State, Poodie James pulses with Steinbeck’s sense of character—the hurt ones, their tormentors, and everyone in between. This novel will take your heart.
—Jack Fuller, author of The Best of Jackson Payne

Poodie James is a very good book. Not only is it handsomely and lyrically written, but Ramsey’s snapshots of small-town life circa 1948 are altogether convincing, and he has even brought off the immensely difficult trick of worming his way into the consciousness of a deaf person without betraying the slightest sense of strain…A quarter-century ago, Poodie James would have had no trouble finding an East Coast publisher, and it might even have made its way into the hands of a Hollywood producer, since it could easily be turned into a very nice little movie along the lines of The Spitfire Grill.
—Terry Teachout, Commentary

Fascinating characters vividly brought to life in a setting of the Columbia River country in a time now vanished. The writing is unfailingly exquisite, the story irresistible.
—Gene Lees

The piece below ran earlier this month. After it was posted for a few days, the videos were removed. No one at Rifftides or the Oregon Coast Council for the Arts has been able to find out why. Several readers have asked what happened and whether we can restore the videos. The answers are: I don’t know and, yes. Let’s hope that the mystery remover doesn’t strike again.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Originally posted August 3, 2013

In one of my Rifftides posts on last October’s Oregon Coast Jazz Party, I told you a little about the remarkable program in which Bill Mays traced the development of modern jazz piano. Here’s that section from October 12, 2012

Bill Mays’ History of Jazz Piano concert for a morning audience covered pianists from James P. Johnson to Herbie Hancock. Teddy Wilson, Bill Evans and Bud Powell were among the 13 whose styles Mays summoned without surrendering his individuality. Tommy Flanagan and Sonny Clark had to be set aside when time ran short. I had the privilege of providing narration leading into each of Bill’s segments. That put me in the second best seat in the house in the curve of the nine-foot Steinway as Mays poured himself into interpreting some of the pianists who influenced his development. It was a great experience, with a responsive audience, and so much fun that we’re thinking of doing it again sometime, somewhere.

When the program ended, Bill and I were satisfied enough with it that we sought out the house audio crew to see if they had recorded it. They hadn’t. Well, that was the end of that, we said, although as noted at the conclusion of the report, we hoped that we could do it again. We still do. It turns out that the concert hadn’t quite disappeared. Yesterday we discovered that the festival management had a snippet of it videotaped.

But wait, there’s more. The following morning, Bill played a trio set with Portland bassist Tom Wakeling and Washington, DC, drummer Chuck Redd. Here’s some of what I wrote about it:

The Sunday morning wrap session began with Mays updating and expanding the repertoire of his CD Mays at the Movies. He, Wakeling and Redd concentrated on music from films he admires, has written for, or on whose soundtracks he played. The admiration category included the classics “Laura,” “The Very Thought of You” and “Smile.” His own “Cool Pool” was a Miles Davis “All Blues” clone that he wrote for a producer who didn’t want to pay a heavy licensing fee to use the Davis original.

Holly Hofmann, the gifted flutist who serves as the Oregon Coast Jazz Party’s music director, explains that she has only short portions of the festival concerts videotaped for use in promotion and marketing. Gratitude for small favors is in order, but it’s too bad that there aren’t full-length videos for the archives.

Go here for information about the 2013 festival October 4-6.

A week after her death at 95, Marian McPartland is still on my mind. She’ll be there for a long time. In his biography of the pianist published earlier this year, Shall We Play That One Together? Paul de Barros did a splendid job of blending the facets of McPartland’s personality. He contrasts her famous elegance and charm with determination and crudeness never evident on Piano Jazz, the radio program that made her famous. As de Barros tells it in a Seattle Times blog post, getting Marian’s confidence and trust was a long and often frustrating process. Here is an excerpt:

On the radio, Marian is self-deprecating, gracious and genteel, but in person she could be imperious, demanding, highly critical – sometimes even derisive and mean – and certainly not shy about sharing what was on her mind. Her conversational style was combative. If she didn’t have a good answer, she would offer a clever quip instead, or answer questions with questions. She was particularly vague about dates – a biographer’s nightmare – and when I would press her, she would argue, “Does it really matter?” Or if she didn’t know a precise date, she would sometimes just make one up. In published interviews, she had variously said she moved to New York in 1949, 1950 and 1951. I explained that writing a biography without dates was like playing a tune without the chord changes. “It’s the map, Marian, the timeline is the map.” But she honestly didn’t care. “I never knew when I did all these things I would be required to remember them,” she complained sarcastically.

Marian also had the habit of correcting my pronunciation. “It’s Dee-lius,” she jeered, when I first mistakenly called her favorite composer “Dell-ioos,” After two weeks of such browbeating, I was so frustrated I was ready to abandon the project altogether and fly home.

de Barros stayed around. McP came around. The resulting book is one of the best of all jazz biographies. To read Paul’s account of what it took to make it work, go here.

Then come back and listen to McPartland’s 1956 recording of “I Could Write a Book” with Bill Crow on bass and Joe Morello on drums.

Sidebar: It was that kind of work by Morello with wire brushes that led Paul Desmond to recommend to Dave Brubeck that he hire the drummer after Joe Dodge left the Brubeck Quartet. Brubeck did, that very year.

Reminder: Ambiance: The Many Facets of Marian McPartland, produced by jazz journalist Ken Dryden, will air on the Chatanooga, Tennesee, station WUTC-FM Thursday, August 29th, starting approximately at 8:20 pm EDT. It will follow the news magazine Round & About. The two-hour program will include music from throughout her career, drawn from a variety of LPs and CDs, along with a few surprises. It will also include excerpts from Ken’s first of several interviews with the pianist, recorded in 1988. The program will be streamed live at www.wutc.org but will not be archived as a podcast.

I don’t know whether “Love Thy Neighbor” is the most unlikely song John Coltrane ever recorded, but his 1958 version is one of the most delightful. Mack Gordon and Harry Revel wrote it for the 1934 movie We’re Not Dressing, a classic of the shipwreck survivor genre. Bing Crosby sang it beautifully in a contrived sequence that also involved Carole Lombard, Ethel Merman and Leon Errol. Listen to Crosby’s bluesy phrasing and inflection in the verse. He was, after all, a friend of Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong.

When Coltrane and pianist Red Garland grew up, the Great American Songbook was not a museum collection. It was woven into the popular culture. They heard wonderful songs like “Love Thy Neighbor” on the radio and on jukeboxes. It was natural for Coltrane to bring them into his repertoire even as he was developing what Ira Gitler indelibly labeled Trane’s “sheets of sound” approach. The trumpeter is the nearly forgotten melodist Wilbur Harden. Paul Chambers is the bassist, Jimmy Cobb the drummer in this 1958 recording.

Happy Sunday

Wayne Shorter, Without A Net (Blue Note)

About seven minutes into Shorter’s first soprano saxophone solo on the monumental “Pegasus,” someone in the band says, “Oh, my God!” The interjection stands as reaction not only to that track by Shorter’s quartet and the Imani Winds but also to his quartet throughout the album. “Pegasus,” commissioned by the Imani Winds, is the piece de resistance of this collection of performances recorded in concert on a 2011 tour. Weaving together the quartet improvising and the wind ensemble reading his demanding score, Shorter achieves intense energy and a successful synthesis of two genres that is rare enough to be noteworthy. It is the centerpiece of the album, but he and the rhythm section are stunning in the eight tracks without the Imani.

The abiding impression is that the Shorter quartet has found a degree of consistent unity few working bands achieve even occasionally. In their decade or so together, Shorter, pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade have reached the blessed state reflected in the title of one of the CD’s tunes, “S.S. Golden Mean.” However, they depart from the classic description of the golden mean as a happy medium, a state of balance. They allow extremes, surprises, explosions of the unexpected. The four seem wide open to anything, eager to capitalize on the next chance one of them takes. The ability to land on their feet is better insurance than a net. “Zero Gravity to the 10th Power” and “(The Notes) Unidentified Flying Objects” find Shorter on tenor sax reacting to and developing ideas generated by the rhythm section. In “Orbits,” “Plaza Real,” the old movie song “Flying Down to Rio,” indeed throughout, the collective improvisation frequently creates edge-of-the-seat anticipation that Shorter, Perez, Patitucci and Blade satisfy even after repeated hearings.

On the eve of his 80th birthday, August 25, Shorter has made his mark many times over. This album is not about making a new one, except in the sense that it finds him and his remarkable quartet at a level of togetherness verging on ESP.

Two days following Cedar Walton’s passing, we have lost another splendid pianist, one of the world’s best known and best loved jazz artists. Marian McPartland died in her sleep just before midnight Tuesday in her home on Long Island, New York. A message from family members reports that she passed away, “smiling, knowing that she was surrounded by family and friends.” Ms. McPartland was 95.

She developed from a shy English schoolgirl into a major influence in the music. It is the story of talent, determination and unforced charm overcoming prejudices in jazz against women and, in some quarters in the 1940s, against foreigners having the presumption to play “our” music. For a comprehensive survey of her life and importance, see Peter Keepnews’s McPartland obituary in today’s New York Times. Paul de Barros’s recent McPartland biography is highly recommended. For thoughts about her growth into a substantial jazz player, here is a portion of my notes for her 1982 trio album Personal Choice.

A pleasing and popular jazz artist since her earliest exposure on the New York and Chicago club scenes, year by year she has increased her command of the piano and looked more deeply into her art. McPartland’s piano playing has always been beautiful. Now, it is also lean, tough and full of surprises.

It is no coincidence that during the past decade, her period of most intense artistic development, she has been heavily involved with extracurricular activities. Her National Public Radio program “Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz” is into its third season as one of the most successful live jazz series ever presented. It has brought her into close contact with many of her fellow pianists, ranging in style from Eubie Blake to Chick Corea. Her cable TV series, “Women in Jazz,” has been shown all over the country. She has also remained extremely active in music education on the primary, secondary and college levels, conducting workshops and seminars. Despite all these commitments…possibly in part because of them…Marian continues to grow as a player, moving closer and closer to the essence of jazz. It is inconceivable that anyone today could write of her “woman’s touch, as a Down Beat reviewer did, disparagingly, in the early 1970s. The concept does not apply. She has the technique, the forthright inventiveness, the expressiveness of a first-rank jazz pianist. Gender is irrelevant.

Great Day in Harlem photo by Art Kane

“I feel I have more freedom at the keyboard now to experiment with new ideas,” Marian says. “I think I’m getting better, and I want to keep on getting better. It’s rewarding to know there has been some improvement. It’s nice to be in this business because chances to be creative are never-ending. There’s always more than you can do. You can’t say, “well, I’ve done everything; now I’m going to retire, give myself a gold watch, and go to Florida to play Shuffleboard.”

She kept getting better—and bolder. On her show, she once got into a free jazz give-and-take with the iconoclastic pianist Cecil Taylor. “I’ve become a bit more — reckless, maybe,” she said when she was 80. “I’m getting to the point where I can smash down a chord and not know what it’s going to be, and make it work.”

Given her importance, there is surprisingly little on film or videotape of Marian performing. Here, she plays her composition “Afterglow” at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1974.

For a more robust aspect of McP’s playing—in a jam session with Jimmy McPartland, Joe Venuti and others—watch this video from 1975.

In New York, I occasionally encountered Marian on the street or the Times Square shuttle. Once on the train, she sat down next to me with a serious expression and said, “I saw what you wrote.” In Down Beat, I had reviewed one of her albums and complimented her liner notes, with something like, “I wish she’d mind her own business. Do I run around playing the piano?” She stared at me as the subway rattled along. “Oh, oh,” I thought, ‘here it comes.’” She said, “I laughed at that for a good five minutes.”

One night at the Algonquin Hotel, where Alec Wilder lived for years, Marian, Willis Conover, Paul Desmond, my wife and I ringed our chairs around Alec for one of his evenings holding court in the lobby that served as his living room. Marian and Alec adored one another. As always on those occasions, their good feeling set the tone with his good-natured grumpiness and her laughter. I wish that we could do it again.

 

In late summer each year, the Rifftides staff photographer puts a camera in the bike bag and heads out to orchard country to see how the apples are coming along.

It seems there will be a crop.

 

 

 

Some apples are taking on color sooner than others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In six weeks or so, that gorgeous fruit will begin showing up in your neighborhood grocery store.

Do I miss New York (and all those other places)? Well, yes, but there are compensations.

 

Speaking of apples, here’s your bonus:

 

Charlie Parker, alto saxophone
Charlie Byrd, guitar;
Bill Shanahan, piano
Merton Oliver, bass
Don Lamond, drums
Unknown, bongos

Howard Theater, Washington, DC, October 18, 1952