Rifftides Washington, DC correspondent John Birchard is attending one of the city’s major music festivals. Here is his report on the first night.

13th ANNUAL THE KENNEDY CENTER MARY LOU WILLIAMS WOMEN IN JAZZ FESTIVAL

May 15, 2008

Review by John Birchard

They tried to find a longer name for the festival. The above is the best they could come up with. But that’s the Kennedy Center… big, bulky and institutional. Still, once you get inside that huge marble box, some nice things take place, like Women in Jazz.

This year’s fest began with Grace Kelly. Not the Princess of Monaco, of course, but the
ridiculously talented young saxophonist from Boston. Kelly, an Asian American celebrating her 16th birthday (yes!), led a quintet made up of drummer Terri Lynne Carrington, another woman who made her mark early; pianist Doug Johnson, bassist Evan Gregor; and trumpeter Jason Palmer.

Kelly led her band through a program of mostly originals, demonstrating her rapidly maturing style on alto and a penchant for latin rhythms and sophisticated melodies that incorporate interesting twists and turns. She played curved soprano on one number, showing off a rounded, pleasing tone. The only two standards in the program were a fresh approach to Gershwin’s “Summertime” and a lovely reading of Monk’s “Round Midnight” in which she played alto accompanied only by bassist Gregor. All of her bandmates performed well, especially Palmer, whose taste and imagination kept his impressive chops under control in the service of the music. It was a thoroughly satisfying set.

Before last night, I had never heard of the singer Catherine Russell. It’s my loss. She is the daughter of the late Luis Russell, who served as Louis Armstrong’s band director back in the 30s, and the bassist/singer Carline Ray. Catherine is a wonderful, strong singer with
a particular interest in old-timey songs like “My Man’s an Undertaker (He’s Got a Coffin Just Your Size”), “The Joint is Jumpin'” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “New Orleans”.

She was accompanied by a fine trio of swing-oriented musicians – pianist Mark Shane, guitarist Matt Munisteri who contributed several tasty and soulful solos, and bassist Lee Hudson. Russell’s repertoire is choice, from “I’m Lazy That’s All” associated with Pearl Bailey to “I’m Just a Sucker for a Broken Nose” and her own original “Lucy”, about various addictions. Her set was full of delightful surprises and when she closed out roaring with “Kitchen Man”, she had earned the cheers of the capacity crowd.

Rounding out the evening was the Japanese pianist Keiko Matsui, whose music is a far piece from Catherine Russell’s. It’s a combination of electric instruments (keyboards, bass, guitar), heavy percussion (a two-man battery), and a mix of Latin rhythms and New Age harmonies. The program was built completely on Ms Matsui’s original compositions, which this listener found to be repetitive, but which the audience applauded enthusiastically.

Her band was tight and expert in the repertoire. Steve Reid was especially effective surrounded by a collection of percussion items all of which he used. Keiko Matsui has abundant technique and is attractive and personable. I was bored by the performance, but the audience ate it up, so who’s wrong here?

I took a break from writing this morning and went for a ride with my friend Bianchi Vigorelli (pictured).
Here in the lee of the Cascades, it was the first truly hot day of the year. Melted snow is rushing off the mountains, filling the rivers to the tops of their banks, running them fast and muddy, carrying along the occasional downed tree and drowned animal. The Yakima and the Naches are not at official flood stage, but they’re getting close. If I lived in one of the low-lying areas nearby, I’d be making evacuation plans.

Along the river banks, in the parks and through the towns, dogwoods, magnolias, apple trees and profusions of flowers are in full bloom. Large numbers of redwing blackbirds and cedar waxwings (pictured) 
have materialized — and platoons of people in shorts and tank tops. For the most part, I found it more edifying to watch the birds. The ride–a twenty-miler–was a warmup for a longer round trip on Sunday through the Yakima River Canyon, which will be free of motorized traffic that day. A few of the hills are long and challenging enough to be character builders, but for the most part it’s a leisurely cruise with a few hundred cyclists of all ages. Great fun. I wish that you could join us.

Have a good weekend.

After David Remnick took command as editor of The New Yorker in 1998, he curtailed the late Whitney Balliett’s contributions to the magazine, relegated him to writing about celebrities like Barbra Streisand and eventually dropped the pre-eminent jazz writer altogether. Characteristically, Balliett kept quiet about the slight, but he was hurt and humiliated. In their fury, some of his devoted readers unsubscribed and never forgave Remnick. The editor himself is a gifted writer. The Balliettomanes may be somewhat mollified by Remnick’s piece about a voluble eccentric dedicated to making people understand and appreciate jazz. The first sentence of Remnick’s profile of Phil Schaap in the May 19th issue of The New Yorker is almost as long as a Charlie Parker solo and perfectly captures Schaap’s magnificent fixation.

Every weekday for the past twenty-seven years, a long-in-the-tooth history major named
Phil Schaap has hosted a morning program on WKCR, Columbia University’s radio station, called “Bird Flight,” which places a degree of attention on the music of the bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker that is so obsessive, so ardent and detailed, that Schaap frequently sounds like a mad Talmudic scholar who has decided that the laws of humankind reside not in the ancient Babylonian tractates but in alternate takes of “Moose the Mooche” and “Swedish Schnapps.”

The article illuminates Schaap’s obsessive-compulsive persona, his exhaustive–and exhausting–knowledge of jazz, and the status of the music American culture owes so much and appreciates so little. To read Remnick’s profile of Schaap, go here. At the bottom of the online pages is an audio player, giving you the opportunity to listen to Schaap ruminating his way through a substantial portion of one of his broadcasts.

(Chet) was so sweet when he played, so mysterious. Somehow he was able to express the question mark of life with so few notes. In Italy, we’re more sentimental, and we felt that very much. –Enrico Pieranunzi

Well, if I could play like Wynton (Marsalis), I wouldn’t play like Wynton –Chet Baker

Chet Baker’s life of beauty and pain ended twenty years ago tonight on an Amsterdam sidewalk. He may have killed himself. That is unlikely, in my opinion. He may have fallen from his hotel window. He may have been thrown or pushed. Either way, as hard as Baker was on nearly everyone else in his life, he was even harder on himself. Far from the first gifted artist to burn himself out, Chet did it rather slowly compared with Charlie Parker, Bix Beiderbecke, Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe. It is a tribute to the toughness of his Oklahoma country genes that despite decades of self-abuse, he lived nearly fifty-eight years.

 Jazz is an art most of which disappears at the instant of its creation. We can be perversely grateful that Baker supported his destructive habit by recording whenever anyone asked him to. There may be a major jazz artist with a larger body of recorded work, but I can’t think who it might be. An astonishing percentage of it is good. He did some of his best playing on record in his final years, when the conventional wisdom was that he was a creative shadow of his young self. He made the brilliant Chet Baker in Tokyo  in concert less than a year before he died. It includes the ultimate version of his signature piece, “My Funny Valentine.”

Because YouTube has withdrawn most of its clips of Baker under threat of legal action, there is little internet video of him. This brief clip from a performance of “Nardis” is an exception. This web site is a grab bag of things Baker and has links to several clips, including scenes from his dreadful 1950s movie Hell’s Horizons. Be patient; the site has maddening buffering problems as the clips come up. This Jazz Icons DVD is the best bet for extended exposure to Baker playing on camera.

The best biography of Baker is probably yet to come because Jeroen de Valk is revising his substantial 1989 account of the trumpeter’s life. Those who think that Baker was trashed in James Gavin’s hateful Deep In A Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker are looking forward to a more balanced treatment in de Valk’s new edition.

The Chet Baker Foundation’s web site contains a touching remembrance of Baker by his former drummer and loyal friend Artt Frank, who is at work on his own book about Baker. Its background music is a wonderfully intimate version of Chet playing “My Funny Valentine.”

If I had the speed and fluidity of, say, Terry Teachout, I might have finished a spate of non-Rifftides writing assignments sooner–and a book or two on the side. As it is, there’s a good chance that I’ll return to blogging this very week.

 

Learn to write well, or not to write at all.–John Dryden, Essay on Satire

Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman’s name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer – and if so, why?–Bennett Cerf

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.–Thomas Mann

Nine years ago, the clarinetist, improvisational whistler and musical educator Brad Terry hosted in the United States three young musicians he had worked with in Poland. I mean young.

Mateusz Kolakowski, the pianist, was thirteen. In this picture from that period, we see him with Terry. Bassist Michal Baranski and drummer Tomek Torres were fifteen. Terry toured the country with them in his old Dodge van, overnighting in RV parks and driveways and playing whenever they could, sometimes in paying gigs. They even stopped in Montana and jammed with Buddy DeFranco. Here is some of what I wrote about them in the November, 1999 Jazz Times:

Baranski and Kolakowski have facility, harmonic acuity and solo skills that would do credit to players ten years older. The steadiness and propulsiveness of Torres’ timekeeping complements his partners’ imaginative playing. Torres has been a pianist since the age of seven. He also plays guitar. He won first place in the 1997 Polish national Young Drummers competition. Baranski started on piano when he was seven, moved to cello and was laureate of Poland’s National Chamber Competition in 1993. He started playing bass at the age of 12. Kolakowski, born in 1986, has won prizes in several classical piano competitions devoted to the music of Chopin and Paderewski.

“The most astounding thing about these kids is that at 13 and 15, they already have a sense of ensemble,” pianist Roger Kellaway says. “They really listen to each other. And look out for the bass player.”

Look out, indeed. The other day, Brad Terry sent me a link to a video clip of Baranski, who is now twenty-four, playing in Prague with the trio of the young Czech guitarist David Doruzka. To see and hear his development by way of an intriguing treatment of Gershwin’s “Who Cares,” click here.

As for Baranski’s former trio mates, Kolakowski is still pursuing Chopin, Paderewski and jazz. Torres, though he is Polish, is exploring his Latin heritage.

As a bonus, here is more of Baranski, this time with the excellent Polish singer Aga Zaryan.

Now, back to work on my long essay about Oscar Peterson. It will show up with the next batch of Jazz Icons DVDs. Have a good weekend. 

One of the pleasures of my trips to New York has been to drop in to the Waldorf-Astoria during
the cocktail hour to hear Daryl Sherman. She has perfect taste in songs, seems to know every good one ever written, plays the piano with a repertoire of satisfying and often surprising chord changes, and sings like an angel. I mentioned the experience in this post early in the life of Rifftides.

Well, the rule of all good things has caught up with Daryl and those who became addicted to her at the Waldorf. Stephen Holden broke the news in this morning’s New York Times.

As of Sunday evening, those sounds will be stilled. A few weeks ago, Ms. Sherman received word that for economic reasons her tenure at the cocktail terrace between the Empire and Hilton Rooms would end. Saturday and Sunday’s performances are four-hour laps, from 3:30 to 7:30 p.m.

Last year, the Hilton hotel chain, which owns the Waldorf-Astoria, was sold to the Blackstone Group of investors. Such sales almost always entail streamlining the operations and cutting back expenses.

To read Holden’s entire story, go here.

If other New York hotels aren’t beginning vigorous bidding to be Sherman’s next stand, they’re nuts. Listen to this CD to understand why the Waldorf’s self-inflicted loss should be somebody’s gain.  

While the staff at Rifftides world headquarters labors over outside writing obligations, Washington, DC correspondent John Birchard fills the gap with his impressions of a concert by a major pianist and his new trio.

KENNY BARRON TRIO AT THE KENNEDY CENTER

May 3, 2008

Review by John Birchard

Any lingering suspicion that jazz is a purely American art form could have been wiped away last night (May 3), as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, presented the Kenny Barron Trio, made up of Philadelphia’s Barron at the piano, Kiyoshi Kitagawa of Osaka, Japan on bass and the drummer Francisco Mela from Bayamo, Cuba. We caught the first of two sets in the Center’s Family Theater, an intimate box that features excellent acoustics and steeply-angled seating with good sight lines throughout.

Barron eased into the program with Luis Bonfa’s “Manha de Carnaval”, first as an unaccompanied solo, then with a comfortable medium bossa nova rhythm. The pianist moved through the changes, making marvelous, unexpected chord
substitutions as he explored the familiar tune. Mela is an interesting drummer. His time is loosey-goosey and he plays around the beat but never loses it. He has a light but firm touch and uses humor in his fills and solos. Bassist Kitagawa reminds this listener of Charlie Haden in that he usually keeps to the lower register on his instrument, playing firm time with occasional, tasteful decorations inserted in appropriate spots. As for the international aspects of their backgrounds, the two could well have come from Detroit or Central Avenue in L.A. Their playing reveals no “foreign” accents.

The standard “How Deep is the Ocean” followed, taken at a medium tempo. Barron seemed to be thoroughly warmed up, as he spun out a number of finger-busting runs during his solo. The leader introduced each tune with remarks that displayed a warmth and sense of humor, but were not long-winded. Rather like his piano work, his ad libs got straight to the point. An original came next – “Lullaby”, a waltz with interesting twists and turns in the melody. Barron followed that with a Monk tune, “Ask me Now” played as a ballad. In so doing, he gave the tune a chance to breathe and he played Monk without trying to sound like Monk. That was refreshing.

In the only “commercial” note of the evening, Barron mentioned that the original titled “Calypso” will be found on his new CD, The Traveler, coming out later this month. This Calypso is one of the few that doesn’t sound like “Saint Thomas”. It has surprising hesitations built into the melody, but the rhythm is pure infectious Caribbean. Barron exercised his considerable Latin chops on this one.

Inspired by a wedding anniversary visit to Tahiti – the Barrons’ 45th, he pointed out – he expressed another attractive original known as “Cook’s Bay”, with a light Latin beat. The piece has the sort of lilting sound that makes one want to visit that part of the world to see what caused Barron to come up with it. “Cook’s Bay” rounded out the set and prompted a loud and long ovation from the sold-out house.

Barron returned to the stage alone and, for an encore, performed the old Eubie Blake-Andy Razaf standard “Memories of You” in what might be described as a delicate stride. It was a captivating performance that demonstrated just how much jazz history Kenny Barron has at his fingertips. He is not an overwhelming player in the manner of Oscar Peterson. But think of all the great players who have hired him over the years and sung his praises, from Dizzy Gillespie to Stan Getz. He is in the middle of the mainstream, but his touch at the keyboard, his rich knowledge of chords, his taste, inventiveness and subtle soul make him, in this listener’s book, a national treasure. It was a joy to spend a couple of hours in his company.

Mrs. Rifftides and I spent her birthday far from the madding crowd–and from blogging. We arrived at the Sleeping Lady Mountain Retreat just after a hundred or so conferees had checked out. The sixty-seven enchanted acres on Icicle Creek in the foothills of the
Cascades were almost exclusively ours for a day and night. Winter–several feet of it–was still evident on the peaks above us, but down below we had spring and no obligations.

We wandered the paths, played horseshoes (badly), climbed the hills among clumps of yellow flowers, briefly tested the elliptical trainer in the exercise room, and had a world-class dinner. The entrée was ono, the fish whose name means “delicious” in Hawaiian, brilliantly prepared by the young chef Rene Nuňez. From our table at the Kingfisher Dining Lodge, we had the unexpected treat of seeing Sleeping Lady’s founder and grande dame, Harriet Bullitt, alight from the cable tram that carries her over the creek between her house and the retreat. Later, Mrs. R and I chatted for an hour in the Grotto Bar over a Three Rivers syrah. Back in our room, rustic in its three-star way, we drifted off to sleep to a bullfrog serenade from the pond next door.

There is no television in the rooms at Sleeping Lady. Smoking is not allowed inside or out. Good. Background music at breakfast included recordings by Oscar Peterson, Kenny Burrell and a pretty good trumpet player with a Harmon mute (Sal Marquez?) imitating Miles Davis.
We would rather have done without it. The music intruded on the nature that surrounded us. We were glad to leave it behind, stroll along the creek and see the morning sun illuminate
 Dale Chihuly’s nine-foot glass sculpture, “Icicle,” mounted atop a boulder. One does not need music every hour of the day. I remember once asking Jim Hall, “What are you listening to these days?” “Silence,” he said. Bravo. Nearly three years ago, we had a Rifftides discussion about the virtues of silence. To read it, click here.

Before we crossed the Cascades for home, we shopped amid the kitschy Bavarian charm of the village of Leavenworth. An hour was enough.

Back at my desk, I’m facing deadlines for three pieces of work that, as of today, are officially overdue. That means blogging will have to take a back seat for a while. Until it resumes, please check out the archive. You’ll find the link to it in red, in the center column.

Silence is a source of great strength.–Lao Tzu

One of the greatest sounds of them all – and to me it is a sound – is utter, complete silence.–Andre Kostelanetz

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own. –George Bernard Shaw

Emil Viklický, Ballads And More (ARTA).

Writing the other day about František Uhlíř triggered a search through recently arrived CDs for
the latest collection by Emil Viklický’s trio. Viklický is the pianist in whose group Uhlíř has long been the bassist. He has collaborated with his contemporary George Mraz, another virtuoso Czech bassist, on two albums combining their beloved Moravian folk music with the jazz forms of which they are masters.

I have been listening to Ballads And More all day and marveling at Viklický’s ability to fold into his thoroughly modern jazz conception the sensibility that originates in his Moravian heritage and is fed in great part by his adoration of the Czech national hero Leos Janáček. Viklický injects a suggestion of minor-key Moravian reflection even into major-key standards like “I Fall In Love Too Easily” and “Polka Dots And Moonbeams. There is much more than a suggestion in his own “Highlands, Lowlands.” The program includes pieces by Cole Porter, Richie Beirach, Keith Jarrett, Harold Arlen and Pat Metheny (the touching “Always and Forever”). Jimmy Rowles’s “Peacocks” follows Billy Strayhorn’s “A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing,” songs so suited to one another that I’m surprised musicians don’t regularly pair them.

Uhlíř is brilliant throughout. European bassists trained in the academy tend to have flawless command of the bow. Uhlíř’s arco solo on “Peacocks” is a stunning example. Drummer Laco Tropp’s melodic mallets solo on Sammy Cahn’s and Saul Chaplin’s seldom-played “Dedicated To You” leads into a Viklický solo in which for a few bars his dazzling technique gleams through the ballad relaxation. Tropp evidently doesn’t have an exhibitionist bone in his body. He settles for playing great time.

If your neighborhood is one of the few that still has a record store, Ballads And More may not show up in it. The Czech company ARTA’s physical distribution is not world-wide. The internet, so far, is.

If you’d like to see Viklický, Uhlíř and Tropp in action, go here.  

Jimmy Giuffre could play the tenor saxophone with a rhythm and blues raucousness that
reflected his Texas origins. For a time in the 1950s, though, the low-register intimacy of his clarinet was one of the most identifiable sounds in jazz. Giuffre died last Thursday of complications from the Parkinsons disease that for years had limited his activity in music.

Featuring Jim Hall’s guitar and Ralph Peňa’s bass or Bob Brookmeyer’s valve trombone, he rooted his trio in blues, folk music and standard songs. In this video clip from the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958, Giuffre plays tenor saxophone. In the early 1960s, Giuffre morphed his group into a risk-taking trio of adventurers. With pianist Paul Bley and bassist Steve Swallow he explored the expanding harmonic and expressive boundaries of free jazz, in the process taking his clarinet into the stratosphere as well as the basement of its range.

A gifted composer from his college days onward, Giuffre was a major contributor to the Third Stream music that aimed to forge a synthesis between jazz and classical forms. But for all his inventiveness, hard work and dedication, for all the admiration and respect he earned well into the 1990s, a Giuffre work from early in his career is his most recognizable monument.

That piece, of course, is “Four Brothers,” a 1947 hit for Woody Herman’s Second Herd and a staple in the repertoires of big bands ever since. The arrangement featured Stan Getz, Zoot Sims Herbie Steward and Serge Chaloff — and the legion of saxophonists who have followed them in several subsequent Herds. Herman died twenty-one years ago, but the arrangement is a part of every appearance by the band that still tours under his name. Click here for a performance of “Four Brothers” by one of the last editions of the band with Herman at the helm.

It might have been a source of both amusement and satisfaction to Giuffre if, before he died, he saw affirmation that his composition was officially enshrined in American popular culture when it was played on the sidewalks of Disneyland by Mickey’s Toontown Tuners. And I hope that he knew about this version from Hungary, but definitely not from hunger, by a pair of violinists and an impressive big band. “Four Brothers” long ago went global.

Jimmy Giuffre, 1921-2008.

From time to time Rifftides Washington, DC correspondent John Birchard favors us with reviews of musical events in his bailiwick. Here is his latest.

JAZZ AT VOA

Willis Conover Memorial Concert with a Tribute to Quincy Jones

April 26, 2008

Review by John Birchard

Quincy Jones is an icon, a legend. Heavy-laden with honorary doctorates, awards, Grammys (27 of them), Kennedy Center Honors, he is lauded for his work with Frank Sinatra, Barbara Streisand and Michael Jackson. Almost lost in the mists of time is the
reason Jones came to the attention of such artists: his enormous talent for composing and arranging for a big jazz band.

Last night, at the Voice of America auditorium in Washington, DC, those compositions and arrangements were brought back to life in a concert dedicated to the memory of VOA’s long-time host of jazz programs, Willis Conover. The Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, under the direction of David Baker, presented a program of Quincy Jones charts that was – to borrow Mr. Jones’s middle name – a Delight.

I’m not a particularly big fan of jazz repertory bands and recreation of the hits of the past. But there are exceptions and this night was one of them. The program began with “Pleasingly Plump”, a medium-tempoed swinger that contains the essential elements of Jones’s work: a relatively simplicity in the writing, an attractive melody voiced in harmonies that are still fresh as the day they poured from his pen and a momentum that flows from beginning to end. It was obvious to this observer that the members of the SJMO were enjoying themselves with Jones’s music.

The band was crisp, well-rehearsed and the soloists were fired up. During the course of the evening, effective contributions came from trumpeters Tom Williams and Kenny Rittenhouse, trombonist Bill Holmes, saxophonists Scott Silbert, Charlie Young and Lyle Link, and the rhythm section of pianist Tony Nalker, bassist James King and drummer Ken Kimery.

The only non-Jones chart – Lester Young’s “Tickle Toe” – was arranged by Al Cohn, so there was no sag in quality. The rest of the night was devoted to Jones’ memorable sounds – “Jessica’s Day”, “Soul Bossa Nova” with piquant piccolo work from Scott Silbert and Charlie Young, and “The Quintessence” featuring a passionate solo from lead alto player Young, in a piece made memorable by another alto man, Phil Woods, back in the day.

The Smithsonian band performed at a high level throughout, but the highlight for this listener was its reading of “The Witching Hour”, which brought cheers from the audience. Jones’s chart is a model of big band writing, rich in harmonies, building through chorus after chorus and providing an inspirational setting for the soloists.

Other choice moments included the lovely ballad “Grace”, and Jones’ arrangements on Bobby Timmons’ “Moanin'”, the blues “Walkin'” and the swing era anthem “Air Mail Special” to wrap up a special evening. Somewhere, Willis Conover was smiling.

You may have heard but not seen FrantiÅ¡ek Uhlíř, the Czech bassist who works in the Emil Viklický Trio. The Rifftides staff is anticipating a copy of a new recording by Uhlíř’s own trio, a group he has been touring with for five years. In the meantime, video of the Uhlíř trio has shown up on YouTube. The band includes Jaromir Helesic on drums and Darko Jurkovic, one of the few guitarists who plays the instrument by tapping it with the fingers of both hands. The video was made in the historic Knoxoleum in Burghausen, Germany. This is an opportunity for those of us outside Europe to withess in action one of the world’s great bassists–and an intriguing guitarist whose easy execution belies the intensity of his music. Click here for their performance of “Maybe Later.”

In the center column under Doug’s Picks you will find a new roundup of recommended listening, viewing and reading.