Archives for January 2014

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Anyone aware of the importance of jazz to the structure and fiber of American culture must be pleased by the news about Max Roach and reassured that his country treasures his contribution. (Pictured, Roach and President Jimmy Carter on the south lawn of the White House in 1977.) This week, the Library of Congress acquired the great drummer’s personal papers, musical scores, tapes and recordings. The Max Roach collection will be preserved in the library’s archives and available for research and study. There’s a lot to study. As bebop evolved, Roach (1924-2007) followed Kenny Clarke to become the music’s most powerful, inventive and influential drummer. The collection includes a piece of hotel notepaper on which he wrote,

I attended the University of the streets in the ‘Harlems’ of the USA. My professors were Duke Ellington, Sonny Greer, Baby Dodds, Louis Armstrong … My classmates were Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Charlie Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis …

His students were all of the drummers who followed him and the scores of musicians who profited from his leadership and example. His inheritors are those of us who play or listen to modern American music.

Here is a celebrated recording Roach by the 1950s quintet he co-led with trumpeter Clifford Brown. This is Brown’s composition “Joy Spring;” Roach, Brown, tenor saxophonist Harold Land, pianist Richie Powell and bassist George Morrow.

To visit the Library of Congress announcement about the acquisition of the Max Roach collection, go here.

Two memories of Max: Following a 1970s Dizzy Gillespie concert rehearsal that my camera crew and I covered at Lincoln Center, Dizzy invited me to have lunch with him, Max, Percy Heath, Billy Eckstine and Eckstine’s new young wife. We had just ordered when the restaurant’s sound system played an old Fats Waller record. Max developed a huge grin and sang along with the main phrase, “Your Feet’s Too Big.”

When I was writing notes for the reissue of Diz And Getz (Gillespie, Stan Getz, the Oscar Peterson Trio and Roach), I called Max, who was noted for his strong feelings about race and about jazz styles, to ask what he remembered about the session. “Stan Getz!” he said. “I never recorded with Stan Getz. Why would we record with him?

“But Max,” I said, “you’re on the record.”

“I don’t remember,” he said.

He may also have not remembered that he was the drummer on Getz’s first recordings for Savoy in 1946.

I have been enjoying the new book by pianist Bill Mays, a memoir of his half-century career in music. Written with panache and a fine sense of the absurd, it is packed with anecdotes about his experiences in jazz clubs and concert halls around the world and his extensive work in the movie and recording studios of Los Angeles and New York. There are stories about his encounters with artists and entertainers as various as Paul Anka, Barbara Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Placido Domingo and a raft of A-list jazz stars. Here’s a sample.

For a Beatles “revisited” project I was hired by a Japanese producer to arrange and play on several Lennon/McCartney tunes. My trio recorded several tracks , and I arranged additional tracks using a string orchestra and alto saxophone added to my trio. The producer and I both agreed that “overdubbing” the great Phil Woods would add a lot to the music. Phil responded initially to the request for his services with, “That’s just what the world needs: another Beatles tribute. Count me out!” We cajoled, we pleaded, and he relented—and sounded absolutely marvelous. With Phil bringing his one-of-a-kind sound and his own personality to the music, the Beatles never sounded better!

Mays writes about the time he severed the radial nerve in his left thumb in a kitchen accident. After surgery, his hand was in a cast for weeks.

Some months earlier I had agreed to appear at a party and play some four-hands piano music with Harold Danko. I called and told him not to worry, that the cast would be coming off the week of the party, and that I could still make the gig. Ever the prankster, Harold asked me to bring the cast that the doctor had removed with a surgical saw. Conspiring before the performance, we put the cast back on my hand, with just enough Scotch tape to hold it in place. Harold made an elaborate announcement about how I had injured my hand, had had surgery, was still in a cast, but that we both had faith that my hand could be “made whole” for the evening’s performance. He brought me onstage, did a “laying on of hands” and in his best Jimmy Swaggart faith-healer voice, commanded, in the name of the Almighty, that I be healed and realize full restoration. With a shout and a rap of his fist, my cast flew off and across the room. Looking incredulous, I shook my hand, shouting “I’m healed, I’m healed!” Whereupon we sat down and played some outrageously righteous boogie-woogie piano together.

Mays is donating proceeds from sales of his self-published memoir to the Musicians Assistance Program of the American Federation of Musicians, a fine cause. For information about how to obtain the book, see his website.

Two things I would never have known if Rifftides readers hadn’t told me about them:

1. Alto saxophonist Grace Kelly was named one of Glamour Magazine’s top 10 college women for 2011. It takes some of us non-Glamour readers a while to get the word. Here’s Glamour’s video about Ms. Kelly. Sorry about the ads. They’re part of the package.

Other Glamour top 10 college women include a scientist, a cycling champion, a nature protection advocate and a songwriter. To see the article about Ms. Kelly, go here. She and her quintet will be at the Portland Jazz Festival and at The Seasons in late February. I’m planning to report here on several festival events and the Kelly concert the same week at The Seasons.

2. In Germany since 2002, there has been a band called the Puredesmond Quartet. If you’re wondering why they chose that name, watch this:

The quartet’s website, with a German-or-English language option, has information about the band’s origins, philosophy and recording history.

It occurs to me that I should mention something about the Grammy Awards. The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences presented them Sunday evening in a proceeding that was televised with impressive, even spectacular, production values. These were the winners in the jazz category:

Best improvised jazz solo
“Orbits” — Wayne Shorter (pictured), soloist
Best jazz vocal album
Liquid Spirit — Gregory Porter
Best jazz instrumental album
Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue — Terri Lyne Carrington
Best large jazz ensemble album
Night in Calisia — Randy Brecker, Wlodek Pawlik Trio & Kalisz Philharmonic
Best Latin jazz album
Song for Maura — Paquito D’Rivera and Trio Corrente

Congratulations to all.

The jazz winners did not appear on the telecast, but received their awards in a pre-broadcast ceremony out of sight of the millions who watched the main event. That is how NARAS, with rare exceptions, has buried jazz and classical music at the Grammy ceremonies for the past couple of decades.

I was unable to watch the television broadcast. Then, thinking that I should know something about the acts (term chosen advisedly) that NARAS deemed airworthy, I went to YouTube and watched Macklemore, Lorde, Daft Punk, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and a few others in clips from the show. The only sensible conclusion is that what they do is primarily concerned with entertainment, social commentary, drama, shock and awe, and with music hardly at all. There is no use being worked up about it unless you want to get exercised about the societal and commercial values generating a cultural atmosphere that nourishes demand for such entertainment and makes it popular and profitable. It’s been a losing battle since at least “Three Little Fishies” and “How Much is That Doggie in the Window.”

Music of substance and lasting value is available. Those who prefer it can seek it out, wishing all the while, perhaps, that musicians who devote their lives to perfecting their art and craft in jazz trios or string quartets or symphony orchestras could be rewarded with even a small percentage of the adoration and money lavished on obscene hip-hop performers or vocalists who specialize in bumps, grinds and pelvic thrusts.

Maybe it’s just a phase we’re going through and modern equivalents of the big bands or the bossa nova or Frank Sinatra or the Brubeck Quartet or Miles Davis or whatever you miss most will come back to the Grammys. I’m an optimist, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

The Los Angeles Times has a complete list of Grammy winners.

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Cowichan is a region on Vancouver Island in the Canadian province of British Columbia.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a German composer. Put them together and you get a promotional video. It is not the Rifftides custom to present promotional videos, so please do not send yours unless it is this brilliant, melodic, mouthwatering and noncommercial.

Let’s all move to Cowichan.

Thanks to friend Hal Strack for alerting me to the Cowichan video. Brigadier General Strack, United States Air Force (retired), was a lifelong friend of Paul Desmond. Early in their pre-military careers he worked as a tenor saxophonist in bands with Paul. In an illustration from Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, he’s pictured here in 1941 playing a solo. He told me that the song was “Singing The Blues.” Without Hal as a resource, my biography of Desmond would have been significantly thinner. See the 19 Strack entries in the index of the book. Incidentally (ha), Take Five is now available as an ebook, complete with index and all the photographs.

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Rifftides outgoing traffic has slowed in the past few days because the proprietor&#151or is it perpetrator?—has been nose-to-the-grindstone, meeting a deadline for a liner essay to accompany the tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander’s next album. The young Alexander (pictured) spent his first round of salad days in Chicago. The CD commemorates that period and the Chicago jazz tradition. The performances are by Alexander’s current band, which includes one of his college teachers—the veteran pianist Harold Mabern—bassist John Webber and drummer Joe Farnsworth. Trumpeter Jeremy Pelt joins on a few tracks. Alexander’s first gig was in an organ trio backing singer Lenny Lynn. It was sink-or-swim on-the-job ear training. In the course of research, I came across evidence of Alexander’s progress on the bandstand. It’s a track from a 1998 Lenny Lynn album that features guitarist Dave Specter and on a few tracks, the fledgling tenor man. The organist is Rob Waters, the bassist Harlan Terson, the drummer Mike Schlick. I thought you might find it interesting.

That’s the kind of research I like. Have a good weekend.

If you have been following the myriad formal and informal critiques of Terry Teachout’s Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, you will be interested in Ethan Iverson’s long interview with Teachout (pictured left). The book has attracted great praise and not a little denigration. I recommended it here as important for Teachout’s exhaustive research and for his usual grace and clarity in the writing of Ellington’s story. Others have expressed reservations. They include Iverson, who generally lauded the biography but faulted some of Teachout’s musical analysis of Ellington works.

Iverson (pictured right), the pianist of The Bad Plus, is not only a gifted musician but also the proprietor of Do The Math, one of the most erudite weblogs. He followed his criticism of the book by conducting an extensive interview with Teachout. First, however, he posted his critique. He called it “Reverential Gesture.” I suggest that you read it before you read the transcript of the interview. “Reverential Gesture” is here. The interview, posted two days later, is here. It is a meeting of intellectual equals with, as it turns out, passionate mutual interests in and knowledge about both music and a certain branch of modern American literature.

To whet your interest, here from the Iverson interview is Teachout on a vital point about the importance of evaluating Ellington’s music—indeed, any work of art—on its own terms.

An important secondary theme in my Ellington book is when classical musicians first discovered jazz and started writing about it. It matters. I don’t deprecate the significance of the fact that Constant Lambert, Percy Grainger and Aaron Copland understood what Ellington was early in his career. But some people think that in order to take Duke Ellington seriously as a composer, we have to believe that he was successful as a composer of large-scale works. The idea, I guess, is to push him up into the classical-music arena: he played in Carnegie Hall, therefore he’s serious. And that’s completely wrong. Duke Ellington is serious because he is Duke Ellington. He’s serious because of the work itself. It’s interesting that he wanted to write the suites. It’s interesting that he wanted to play in Carnegie Hall. That tells you important things as him as a person. But jazz does not usually profit from being compared directly to classical music, at least not on that level of generality. Most of the time, such comparisons do not illuminate jazz in any way. I wouldn’t have made them in Duke if Ellington himself hadn’t forced the issue by writing pieces like Harlem, Reminiscing in Tempo and Black, Brown and Beige. Jazz is a completely successful form of expression in and of itself, the same way the mystery novel is. It’s not better because you can come up with a highbrow comparison for it. It doesn’t ennoble it. George Balanchine thought that Fred Astaire was the great American dancer, but that didn’t make Astaire a better dancer. He didn’t need Balanchine’s approval to be great. He was already great.

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It is late on Martin Luther King Day to be posting an MLK tribute, but it would be an even more serious oversight not to do so. To one who reported on the civil rights movement in the American South and was sometimes in the midst of its demonstrations, marches, brutality and occasional elation, the images and emotions never entirely fade. Nor does the melding of sadness and adrenalin-driven urgency in our New Orleans newsroom on the April evening in 1968 when a wire service bulletin announced that King had been assassinated.

There are many songs that summon the atmosphere of those years; “We Shall Overcome,” “Up to the Mountain,” “A Change is Gonna Come” among them; but a decade before the murder, one piece of music encapsulated the frustrations and yearnings that seethed within repressed black Americans and would come to the surface in the 1960s. Sonny Rollins’s “Freedom Suite” had no words. It needed none. In the notes to the Rollins box set The Freelance Years, Zan Stewart quotes the saxophonist (pictured ca 1958) about what led to the suite.

‘About that time, I had been getting a lot of acclaim in the music business,’ he said. (He was placing highly in polls in Down Beat and Metronome, his records were selling and he worked as much as he liked.) ‘But when I attempted to get an apartment in desirable areas of New York City, I found I couldn’t, basically because of ethnic bias. I was quite upset about it and decided to write the piece and do the album.’

Rollins went into the Riverside studio with bassist Oscar Pettiford and drummer Max Roach. Here is “Freedom Suite.”

Freedom Suite is a singular accomplishment of Rollins’s early career. It deserves a place in any comprehensive collection of American music.

1.

Seattle beat San Francisco and goes to the Super Bowl to play Denver (to puzzled readers outside the US—It’s football. This is a big deal, like the World Cup).

2.

So far, we don’t have snow, but we have beautiful January sunsets. That’s Mount Adams just above the rose arch, through the apricot tree.

It was a good day in the Pacific Northwest.

If you are planning your weekend activities, you may wish to work in these presentations by two leading champions of jazz on the air (and the web).

On his Sunday broadcast of Jazz Northwest this week, Jim Wilke will feature a musician who achieved recognition and critical acclaim in his days on the national scene, then moved back to the Northwest to concentrate on music education. Jon Pugh, the trumpeter in tenor saxophonist Don Lanphere’s quintet three decades ago, is still making music in the Seattle area. Here’s part of Mr. Wilke’s announcement

Jonathan Pugh grew up in Wenatchee and his first musical memories include standing by his Dad as he led the band at his Summer youth circus. Later, he connected with Don Lanphere in Wenatchee and studied with him during his teen years. It was mutual inspiration as Jonathan became a regular member of the Lanphere Quintet, touring and recording eight albums with the sax legend during his resurgent career.

Jonathan started on trumpet, but today focuses on the mellower cornet. He presently teaches in the Edmonds Schools. Joining him in this Art of Jazz concert from the Seattle Art Museum are Dave Peterson on guitar, Jon Hamar on bass and Max Wood on drums, all notable for their tone and swing. Jazz Northwest airs on Sundays at 2 PM PST and is streamed at kplu.org.

Here’s Pugh with Lanphere (1928-2003) at the Bellevue Jazz Festival near Seattle three decades ago, and Marc Seales, piano; Chuck Deardorf, bass; and Dean Hodges, drums. I sent him a message asking the name of the tune in the video. He replied:

…pretty sure this is one that never got recorded or named………….Don would write amazing bebop lines based on chord changes from different record albums………….he might have just called it “black 1-1” (black album cover, side 1, track 1).

In New York, saxophonist-composer-arranger-bandleader-educator-broadcaster (whew) Bill Kirchner is preparing his Sunday Jazz From the Archives about a clarinetist who was, to borrow Duke Ellington’s famous phrase, beyond category. Here is Bill’s promo blurb:

Clarinetist Pee Wee Russell (1906-1969) spent much of his career playing in Dixieland-style settings. But his highly unorthodox playing defied categorization, and in the 1960s he recorded a series of albums for the Impulse label that showed him at his most unique. Among other things, he performed compositions by Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Oliver Nelson.

We’ll hear Pee Wee in a quartet with valve trombonist Marshall Brown, bassist Russell George, and drummer Ronnie Bedford; a reunion concert with an old friend, trumpeter Henry “Red” Allen, and a rhythm section of pianist Steve Kuhn, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummer Marty Morell; and a big band arranged and conducted by Oliver Nelson.

Kirchner’s Jazz From the Archives airs Sunday at 11 pm EST on WGBO-FM at 88.3 on radios in the Newark/New York area. The program will also be streamed on the web at http://www.wbgo.org/.

“Unorthodox,” Bill wrote above in describing Russell’s playing. Oh, yes. With his phrasing, dynamics, tonal manipulation, slurs, slips, slides, silences and surprises, Pee Wee was avant garde decades before the appearance of Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton or John Carter. Here he is, playing a B-flat blues in a club performance the year before he died. Jimmy McPartland is the trumpeter, with Art Hodes, piano, Rail Wilson, bass, and Harry Hawthorn, drums.

You may have noticed that, as of yesterday, Rifftides looks different and, I think, better. The clean, crisp, spacious redesign is by artsjournal.com commander-in-chief Doug McLennan (pictured), who is making similar changes to all or most of the blogs under the artsjournal umbrella. You may see further examples of his handiwork by going to the AJ home page, which has connections to an array of weblogs concerned with music, theatre, literature, dance, the visual arts and all manner of cultural interests.

One slight change to keep in mind; links in comments from readers now appear in boldface black. They turn blue and active when you touch them with your cursor.

The improved design has collateral benefits, too. Doug McLennan describes one:

One of the great things about the new design is that it’s responsive—that is, it shrinks to fit tablets and smart phones. Pretty great reading on the smaller devices, actually. Check it out.

Let us know how you like it.

David Sherr’s comment on the Jimmy Rowles drawing of Art Tatum in the post below included mention of Rowles’s George Shearing drawing. He offered to share it, but it is not possible to include pictures with comments as it is in posts by the Rifftides staff, so here’s a new exhibit of Jimmy’s wit, wisdom and sketch ability. Thanks to David Sherr, Charlie Shoemake and Bill Crow, all of whom submitted the drawing from their collections. Pictured left, Sir George being knighted by Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace in 2007 and below, portrayed by Rowles, one of his biggest fans.

While we’re at it, why not listen to Rowles? Here he is with one of his favorite duet partners, Al Cohn, on tenor saxophone, from their increasingly rare 1977 album Heavy Love.

Many stories about jazz heroes are apocryphal. This is one is true.

One night in the late 1930s, Fats Waller And His Rhythm were playing at the Yacht Club on 52nd Street in Manhattan. Art Tatum, the other half of the Tatum-Waller mutual admiration society, came in to listen. When he first moved to New York, Tatum’s almost superhuman virtuosity at the piano had bowled over every pianist in town, including Waller. Introducing his friend to the audience, Fats said,

I just play the piano, but God is in the house tonight.

The line became a part of underground jazz lore. Then in 1972, producer Don Schlitten used it as the title of a Xanadu LP of Tatum recordings from the early forties, since reissued as a High Note CD. Tatum influenced virtually every pianist who came of age in the thirties and forties. Through the decades he has inspired or discouraged legions more. Among those who fell under his spell was Jimmy Rowles (1918-1996), who frequently heard Tatum in Los Angeles after Rowles moved there from Spokane in 1940. Tatum had a profound effect on Rowles: the young man determined not to be try to be like Tatum, which would have been impossible, but to find his own way. He did. Jimmy told me that, like nearly everyone else who listened to it, when he heard Tatum’s 1933 recording of “Tea for Two,” he thought it was by two, possibly three pianists.

Jimmy Rowles had an avocational sideline as a sketch artist. His visual art radiated the piquant view of life that also characterized much of his piano playing. His drawings made their points through suggestion, subtle references, humor. Mostly, he gave them to friends, often as Christmas cards. Anybody who has a Rowles drawing is likely to have it on a wall in a frame. That is what the vibraharpist and Rowles protégé Charlie Shoemake did with Jimmy’s Tatum drawing. Mr. Shoemake has kindly shared it with Rifftides. He gave Rifftides permission to share it with you.

In response to the Rifftides post about the death of Al Porcino, reader Dick Vartanian sent a comment:

I remember Al Porcino well and had deep regard for his playing. But does anyone remember a equally great countryman of his named Conrad Gozzo?

Jack Greenberg responded with this:

Everyone who is my age (70 years old) and plays trumpet remembers Conrad Gozzo. As the most sought after lead trumpet player in Hollywood up until his death in 1964, his recorded output is enormous, especially when one considers that he only lived to the age of 42.

Like Porcino, as Dick Vartanian indicates, Gozzo was of Italian descent. His big band career began with Isham Jones in 1938, when he was 16. He played lead trumpet with Red Norvo, Claude Thornhill, Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Tex Beneke, Bob Crosby and Boyd Raeburn— part of a very long list. In a rare photograph, we see Gozzo second from the left, with Maynard Ferguson. After he moved to Los Angeles in 1947, Gozzo was sought after in recording and movie studios for the power, accuracy and brilliance of his lead work. From the 1953 Shorty Rogers album Cool and Crazy (reissued on Short Stops), here’s Gozzo sharing the double lead with Ferguson in Rogers’ “Infinity Promenade.” Solos are by Art Pepper, alto sax; Rogers, trumpet; and Jimmy Giuffre, tenor sax.

When Gozzo died of a heart attack in 1964, he was a member of the NBC Holywood staff orchestra.

With a 1962 Indiana University master’s degree in saxophone, Jamey Aebersold might have carved out a career as a performer. He has never stopped playing, but a casual request set him on a course that led to success as the best-known third-party teacher in jazz. In 1966, a student at a workshop asked Aebersold, who is also a pianist, to record accompaniments that would help him practice. That recording and a companion book morphed into How to Play Jazz and Improvise, the first volume of 133 Aebersold play-along albums designed to help musicians at all levels teach themselves. Most of the CDs or downloads have a several standard songs or jazz originals, books of lead sheets and professional accompaniment on the CDs. Using them, a fledgling horn player can work out with, in this example, Kenny Barron, Ron Carter and Grady Tate. That may be a higher-quality rhythm section than the student would find in his hometown and one that never complains about going over a tune ten times in a row.

When the 2014 NEA Jazz Masters awards are presented tomorrow at Lincoln Center in New York, Aebersold will receive one for jazz advocacy. The National Endowment for the Arts says that the award goes to, “an individual who has contributed significantly to the appreciation, knowledge, and advancement of the art form of jazz.” Previous winners in the category have included critics and authors Nat Hentoff and Dan Morgenstern, personal manager (and bassist) John Levy, producer Orrin Keepnews, recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder and club owner Lorraine Gordon.

In addition to his play-along business, Aebersold has continued as a jazz educator, conducting summer workshop sessions at the University of Louisville. When he is teaching, he keeps his alto saxophone handy to illustrate points——and work in a little blowing time. The rhythm section is Steve Crews, piano; Tyrone Brown, bass; and Jonathon Higgins, drums.

Aebersold will collect his Jazz Masters Award tomorrow evening. If you are not on the guest list or can’t make it to New York, you can watch the ceremony streamed live on the internet at 7:30 p.m. on the arts.gov and Jazz at Lincoln Center websites.

When they practice with Aebersold albums, musicians the world over eagerly anticipate his tempo countoffs and sometimes imitate them on the job. If you’ve never heard one, you’re in for a treat as he sets the time for the accompaniment to “Ornithology.” The rhythm section is again Barron, Carter and Tate. Feel free to play, or scat, along.

Pianist Keith Jarrett is one of the four new NEA Jazz Masters who will accept their awards at Lincoln Center Monday evening. In its advance publicity, the National Endowment for the Arts says that Jarrett has a “talent for playing both abstractly and lyrically, sometimes during the same song.” True as that assessment is, it doesn’t begin to describe the brilliance of his work when he is at his peak of inspiration, as in the most recent recording with his trio—one of five albums he released last year—or when he’s in full flight in one of his celebrated solo concerts. Nor does the news release touch on Jarrett’s relationship with his audiences, whom he says are vital to the success of his live performances. However, if his listeners misbehave by, say, coughing or hoisting a camera, he may dress them down in anger—or walk off the stage.

In this short pre-ceremony interview provided by the NEA, Jarrett discusses what he expects of audiences, the three decades of his trio with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, his spontaneous wordless vocals, and how he came to jazz in the first place.

Here is Jarrett with his standards trio in a 1993 Tokyo performance of “I Fall in Love Too Easily” that demonstrates not only their celebrated cohesiveness but moments of Jarrett’s magnetism when he is playing unaccompanied.

Oh, what the heck, it’s the weekend. You have plenty of time. Here they are again with as delightful a performance of Sonny Rollins’s “Oleo” as I’ve heard since the 1954 original with Rollins and Miles Davis.

Jarrett, saxophonist Anthony Braxton, bassist Richard Davis and saxophonist-producer-educator Jamey Aebersold will receive their awards in New York in a ceremony that will be streamed live on the internet at 7:30 p.m. EST Monday on the arts.gov and Jazz at Lincoln Center websites.

There has been disagreement for more than forty years about whether the saxophonist, composer and sometime pianist Anthony Braxton is a jazz musician. With many others, he long insisted that the music he wrote and played was not jazz, but in 1993 he told author Cole Gagne…

…even though I have been saying I’m not a jazz musician for the last 25 years; in the final analysis, an African-American with a saxophone? Ahh, he’s jazz!

Maybe that concession is part of what led the National Endowment for the Arts to name Braxton one of the four NEA Jazz Masters for 2014. He, pianist Keith Jarrett, bassist Richard Davis and musician-entrepreneur Jamey Aebersold will receive their medals and their $25,000 awards on Monday evening. In a moment, we’ll hear one of Braxton’s controversial early recordings. But it may be helpful to first see and hear him discuss his approach to music.

In 1969, when he was 24, Braxton recorded, on one of his arsenal of saxophones, For Alto, a two-LP album of unaccompanied performances. Braxton dedicated three of the album’s pieces to John Cage, Cecil Taylor and Leroy Jenkins, indications of his leanings away from the mainstream of jazz and toward the unfettered expression musicians were pursuing in the wake of Ornette Coleman’s, and Taylor’s, emergence. Here is “To Pianist Cecil Taylor.” You will see schematic drawings of roughly the kind Braxton has included in most of his album packages through the years. It may take this video a few seconds to come up on your screen.

The NEA Jazz Masters ceremony, attended by the glitterati of the arts world, or at least of New York’s jazz community, will be streamed live from Lincoln Center. It will be on the web at 7:30 p.m. Monday on the arts.gov and Jazz at Lincoln Center websites.

The 20014 NEA Jazz Masters will receive their awards in a ceremony at New York’s Lincoln Center Monday evening, January 13. The four recipients are pianist Keith Jarrett, saxophonist Anthony Braxton, bassist Richard Davis and— in the jazz advocacy category—publisher, recording executive and musician Jamey Aebersold. They will be the 32nd group in the jazz community to be so honored since the National Endowment for the Arts established the recognition program in 1982. The affair will include performances by young musicians cited by the NEA as rising stars, among them vibraharpist Warren Wolf and bassist Yasushi Nakamura, There will be appearances by several former medal winners including Jimmy Heath, David Liebman, Roy Haynes and Annie Ross. The ceremony will be streamed live on the internet at 7:30 p.m. on the arts.gov and Jazz at Lincoln Center websites.

Over the next three days, Rifftides will post sketches about and performances by the new Jazz Masters, beginning with Davis. The bassist was a powerful presence on the New York jazz scene in the 1960s and ‘70s and remained in demand in clubs and studios there even after 1977, when he moved to the Midwest and a professorship at the University of Wisconsin. To give you an idea of the scope of Davis’s abilities, here are two brief segments from my notes for his 1972 album The Philosophy of the Spiritual:

If you were watching a few seasons ago when the National Educational Television network broadcast a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert of Igor Stravinsky conducting some of his works, you saw the maestro emerge from the wings and bow toward a bassist added for the special occasion. At the conclusion of the concert, Stravinsky paused as he left the stage to put his hand on the bassist’s shoulder, a tribute to the slender, elegant black man many musicians consider the world’s greatest bass player. He is Richard Davis.

The following Monday night, Davis was jammed between the saxophone section and a wall of the Village Vanguard, Max Gordon’s funky little wedge-shaped basement in New York. The Vanguard is a far cry from Symphony Hall, but it’s Valhalla to aficionados of the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra…

Davis was the bassist for the Jones-Lewis band from 1966 to 1972, which many musicians, listeners and critics believe to have been the orchestra’s peak years. During that time, as a freelancer he was in constant demand for concerts and recording sessions with artists as varied as Earl Hines, Eric Dolphy, Frank Sinatra and John Lennon. I’ve always been partial to the photograph above of Davis playing his lion-headed bass at the recording session for Phil Woods’ Musique Du Bois (1974). The dream rhythm section was Davis, pianist Jaki Byard and drummer Alan Dawson.

From The Philoslophy of the Spiritual, here he is (left channel) with fellow bassist Bill Lee (right channel), pianist Chick Corea, guitarist Sam Brown, drummer Sonny Brown and Frankie Dunlop adding subtle percussion touches.

Next time, we’ll consider NEA Jazz Master Anthony Braxton.

New York’s Winter Jazzfest opens a five-day run tomorrow, celebrating its tenth year featuring musicians who operate on the leading edge of the music. The atmosphere of adventurism does not necessarily indicate that the artists are all young revolutionaries. Among the dozens of seasoned players appearing in clubs and concert halls throughout Manhattan will be Gary Bartz, Craig Handy, Miguel Zenon Don Byron, Matt Wilson and Jason Moran. For their Wednesday Town Hall concert, Moran and fellow pianist Robert Glasper plan a four-hand tribute to the 75th anniversary of the Blue Note label’s first recording session, which featured Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis.

Relatively new jazz scene arrivals playing the festival include Darcy James Argue’s big band, guitarist Mary Halvorson, singer Gretchen Parlato, saxophonist Sharel Cassity, pianist Aruan Ortiz and a vocal ensemble called Roomful Of Teeth, which ties with the band Mostly Other People Do The Killing in the festival’s intriguing-name sweepstakes. At post time, the festival’s website listed one hundred groups. To see a schedule and lists of performers and locations, go here.

New York is the still the jazz capital of the world. For residents of the Apple or visitors, this looks like a splendid—if exhausting—way to survey the state of the music. The event is packed with young and youngish artists making waves that excite fans their ages and younger and frustrate many older listeners who have rigid convictions about what constitutes jazz. There is a wide range of musicians and styles, but the prevailing direction is forward, not back.

In what may or may not serve as a preview of Mary Halvorson’s appearance at the Winter Jazzfest, here she is with her quintet in one of National Public Radio’s Tiny Desk concerts. Halvorson, guitar; Jonathan Finlayson, trumpet; Jon Irabagon, alto saxophone; John Hebert, bass; Ches Smith, drums.

The passing of Saul Zaentz yesterday at 92 brings to mind the crucial part he played in expanding Fantasy Records from a vital, colorful, but minor independent label into a pop hit-maker and a major repository of jazz recordings from the late 1940s on. He is being remembered in obituaries around the world as the producer of Amadeus, The English Patient, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and other major motion pictures. For a thorough review of his life and career, see this piece in The New York Times.

Zaentz’s importance to jazz was as the head of Fantasy. When the label’s founders, the brothers Max and Sol Weiss, decided to sell the company in 1967, it went to Zaentz, their longtime right-hand man. Under Zaentz and Fantasy president Ralph Kaffel, the label’s star hit-maker was Creedence Clearwater Revival, a rock band that became a massive success and sold millions of albums. The profits the band’s recordings earned for Fantasy set up Zaentz not only to form the Saul Zaentz Company and get into film production, but also to buy the catalogs of the Prestige, Riverside, Contemporary and Pablo labels.

For several years, Fantasy owned one of the world’s richest concentrations of mainstream jazz recordings. Until Zaentz and Kaffel sold Fantasy to Concord Music in 2004, they maintained the integrity of that catalog. In the past ten years, Concord has branched into pop, rock, soul, hip-hop and other areas of popular music. Uncompromising jazz has assumed a smaller role. Much of the jazz catalog that Concord acquired from Fantasy is now available only as digital downloads.

That catalog contained essential recordings by a roster that included Thelonious Monk, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Woody Herman, Art Blakey, Cal Tjader, Vince Guaraldi, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Count Basie, Art Pepper and Duke Ellington, among dozens of key jazz artists. Merely sampling the highlights of the former Fantasy catalog could take hundreds of hours of listening. In remembrance of Saul Zaentz, from that precious lode we have chosen one track from an album by a Fantasy artist whom he championed long before the multimillion-seller pop hits and the Oscar-winning movies.

Thanks, Saul.

Al Porcino, a powerful lead trumpeter for several big bands, died on New Years Eve. He was 88. His wife said that he succumbed to complications following a fall in his house in Munich. Porcino had lived in Germany since the late 1970s, frequently augmenting American bands touring in Europe, as well as leading his own large ensemble.

After debuting in 1943 with Louis Prima when he was 18, Porcino played with swing bands led by Tommy Dorsey, Georgie Auld and Gene Krupa. He made the transition into the bebop era with Woody Herman’s First Herd and went on to work with Stan Kenton and Chubby Jackson. Porcino rejoined Herman and Kenton in the 1950s. Following his move to Los Angeles in 1957, he co-led a band with Med Flory and played lead with Terry Gibbs. He was frequently employed for the sound tracks of motion pictures and toured with singers including Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Mel Tormé and Judy Garland. He also recorded with the Bill Holman band and with Count Basie.

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Porcino had extensive stints with Thad Jones and Mel Lewis. From Danish television, we see and hear him playing lead in Jones’s “Central Park North.” Solos are by Jones, flugelhorn; Snooky Young, trumpet; Jerome Richardson, soprano sax; Lewis, drums.

Porcino’s fame was primarily as a commanding lead player who teamed with the drummer to drive a band. He occasionally improvised on recordings, including with Charlie Parker, but according to The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz, his own favorite recorded solo was from early in his career, 16 bars in this 1946 Gene Krupa recording of Sibelius’s “Valse Triste”.

Finally, here’s Al Porcino reuniting with Med Flory and leading their reconstituted big band at a Los Angeles Jazz Institute concert in 2008. Flory has the alto saxophone solo. The sound is of less than prime digital quality, but Porcino’s piquant personality comes through loud and clear

Well, maybe piquant wasn’t the right adjective. Al was rather mild in that clip. If you want the full-bore Porcino, listen to this interview with Don Manning of KBOO-FM in Portland, Oregon. It was probably in the early 1990s. Warning: Before you play the interview, be sure that children and other impressionable people are out of the room. “Strong language” doesn’t begin to cover it.

There seems to be a Ray Charles aura abroad in 2014; several Rifftides readers have called my attention to a remarkable 1974 performance by Charles, his band and the Raelets. The headline on the clip reads, Ray Charles Plays the Slow Blues in Madrid.

“Slow” doesn’t begin to describe the tempo. At roughly 30 beats to the minute, a 12-bar chorus takes about a minute and a half. But that’s not the point. The point is the depth of Charles’s distillation of blues feeling. Be sure to stay for the other-worldly coda that he coaxes out of his Fender-Rhodes.

The acoustic pianist behind Charles was Ernie Vantrease. The guitarist is not identified.