Since it was Saturday, there was less people in the streets.

I raved from the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival about a performance of a solo piano piece written by Frederic Rzewski. 
 
Darcy James Argue (seen here), on his blog Secret Society, also raves about Rzewski. Here are the first two sentences from his review of a recital of Rzewski’s music.

In a lot of ways, Frederic Rzewski is a man out of time. Almost everything about him is anachronistic or contradictory or both — he’s a straight-up virtuoso composer-pianist in the Lisztian tradition, an old-school rugged bohemian whose chosen instrument remains a powerful symbol of class privilege, a distinctively American composer who has lived abroad for over 30 years, a gifted improviser who has recorded with fellow bohemians Steve Lacy and Irene Aebi, a student of arch elitists like Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions who fell in with the wild boys of the New York School crowd (John Cage, Christian Wolff & co.), went on to write some influential early proto-minimalist works, and who in recent decades has returned to an austere 12-tone pitch vocabulary that would seem at odds with his proletarian politics.

Whew. The rest of it is just as breathless, just as informative, although not many of the other sentences are quite that long. To read all of it, go here. Argue’s blog is a good way to look in on parts of the New York scene that you might not know about otherwise. I’m adding it to Other Places in the center column.

Just wanted you to know that FINALLY we have a website. It’s still in formation and we welcome any suggestions. It was created by Brian Chauley, former Fellow at Brubeck Institute and now assistant to the Exec. Director. We hope to do more by the addition of a newsletter and more photographs, and current news re: concerts etc. So visit us at davebrubeck.com.

Happy Spring to All!

Dave and Iola

Well, English usage fans, you are not alone. Our item the other day on needless, overused or just plain annoying words and phrases encouraged a torrent of them from you. To revisit the original piece and see the responses so far, click here. You’ll have to scroll up to get to the beginning.

Have a pleasant weekend and, as the sainted John Ciardi used to say, good words to you.
 

There has been a lot of attention the past few days to a study at Johns Hopkins Medicine on what happens in the brain when jazz musicians improvise. One of the conclusions by Dr. Charles Limb, one of the researchers, who is also a saxophonist:

Jazz is often described as being an extremely individualistic art form. You can figure out which jazz musician is playing because one person’s improvisation sounds only like him or her,” says Limb. “What we think is happening is when you’re telling your own musical story, you’re shutting down impulses that might impede the flow of novel ideas.

We can all think of soloists whose flow of novel ideas is impeded, but that’s not the point of the study’s findings. Rather, it is this:

It appears, they conclude, that jazz musicians create their unique improvised riffs by turning off inhibition and turning up creativity.

That may seem to be pointing out the obvious, but the details are fascinating. Four pianists served as subjects for the research by improvising on keyboards strapped to their laps as they lay in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, an fMRI. Don’t try that at home. Johns Hopkins does not disclose whether the pianists swung. Reports about the study, many of them perfunctory, have turned up in newspapers everywhere. To read the complete Johns Hopkins news release that fueled those stories and to get leads to further information, go here. You may be surprised to learn what your medial prefrontal cortex has been up to.

Book tip: For more on the growing understanding of how the brain works, read The Body Has A Mind Of Its Own by New York Times Science writer Sandra Blakeslee and her son Matthew. They write with clarity, wit and a sense of discovery.

If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes. — Pablo Picasso

I never sit down and write. I just sorta let things form in my brain. — Mose Allison

Friends who loved Dennis Irwin and listeners who admired him came forward with help when his cancer and lack of health insurance became known in January. But the bassist died in New York City Monday shortly before the biggest of several benefits for him. He was fifty-six. Details of Irwin’s life and career are in this story on the JazzTimes website. During the height of the fund-raising effort, jazz video producer Bret Primack put together a mini-documentary about Irwin. To see it, click here.

Phil Bodner, a reed specialist who played on hundreds of studio
recording sessions in and out of jazz in New York, died in late February at the age of ninety. Among the projects he worked on were the Miles Davis-Gil Evans Porgy and Bess album and dates with Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. Best known for his section work on several instruments, Bodner was a talented soloist who late in life recorded as a leader and clarinetist with sidemen including Hank Jones, Gene Bertoncini and Dick Hyman. For more on Bodner, go here.

What with remaking Rifftides, traveling, speechifying, spring planting and taking out the garbage (boy, I miss Lennie Bruce), new picks have had to wait. No more. There they are, in the middle column.

From the second section of Strunk and White’s English usage bible The Elements Of Style:

 

Omit needless words.

Harold Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker, wrote in a memo to his staff, “The next writer around here who uses ‘upcoming’ will be outgoing.”

That’s a good word to put at the top of a list of needless, overused and annoying words and phrases. Here is the first dozen.

upcoming

absent  (as a preposition)

area (as an adjective)

as it were

at this point in time

case in point

if you will

like (as an interjection)

ongoing

the likes of

that said

y’know

Edwin Newman of NBC News recalled the time a man he was interviewing told him, “Well, y’know, y’never know, y’know.”

The Rifftides staff solicits your suggestions for additions to the list.

And then when I went to Chicago, that’s when I had these outer space experiences and went to the other planets. — Sonny Blount (Sun Ra)

…even if this story is revisionist autobiography … Sonny was pulling together several strains of his life. He was both prophesying his future and explaining his past with a single act of personal mythology.– John F. Szwed, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (Pantheon, 1997)

Sun Ra: Space Is The Place (1974)

Sun Ra Arkestra: Face The Music (1990)

Here’s a calendar item for those in, or planning to be in Boston on April 1.
Joe Lovano (pictured), Hal Galper and Jack Walrath will headline a concert at the Berklee College of Music. Proceeds will benefit the Herb Pomeroy Scholarship Fund. Pomeroy, trumpeter, arranger, and Berklee teacher for four decades, died last August. Among the school’s alumni whose compositions and arrangements will be played by the Berklee Concert Jazz Orchestra are Alan Broadbent, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Michael Gibbs and the longtime Berklee teacher John LaPorta. For more information, go here and scroll down.

Following Teo Macero’s death on February 19, most news stories and obituaries concentrated on his role as the producer of Miles Davis’s Columbia recordings. Beginning in 1959 with Kind of Blue,  Macero edited or oversaw Davis’s sessions, which included those for Sketches Of Spain, In A Silent Way, and Bitches Brew, some of the most influential albums of the past fifty years. With exceptions, notably in the editing of In A Silent Way, Macero got along well with Davis. “We had our battles,” Macero said after Davis’s death in 1991:

There were times when he wouldn’t speak to me and I wouldn’t speak to him. It’s like a husband and wife. There are times when you just like to be left alone.

Kind Of Blue and Sketches Of Spain became two of the best-selling jazz albums in history.
It was barely noted in most of the articles, and not at all in some, that Macero was himself a gifted musician who won a scholarship to the Juilliard School and emerged as a daring composer of atonal acoustic and electronic music. He was also a talented and highly individual tenor saxophonist prized by Charles Mingus, among other important jazz artists of the 1950s. After he joined Columbia as an editor then moved up to producer, his playing took a back seat and he became one of the label’s busiest recording executives. Nonetheless, Macero did not give up his saxophone. The drummer Kenny Harris, who moved from England to New York then settled in Bermuda, had a playing encounter with Macero. He writes Rifftides from Hamilton, Bermuda.

When I was playing at Elbow Beach in the 60’s I also had a jazz show on ZBM radio on Saturday afternoons. Teo was vacationing here and had read in the newspaper that Jim Hall was to be a guest on my show. He called me as he wanted to speak to Jim – Jim was not in the studio as the interview had been recorded earlier in the week and he had gone back to New York. Teo came into Elbow Beach one evening and asked if he could sit in with the band. He borrowed a tenor saxophone and played in his usual style. Everyone in the nightclub left. Everytime I saw him in New York after that he would always say to me “If you want to clear a nightclub, give me a call.”

It’s an amusing story, but if Macero was playing “in his usual style,” the Elbow Beach patrons walked out on some fine music. He is prominent on Jazzical Moods, a 1954 album co-led by bassist Mingus and alto saxophonist John LaPorta, and also featuring the young trumpeter Thad Jones. It was a remarkable gathering of far-sighted adventurers whose music foreshadowed jazz departures made later in the decade.

Teo Macero, 1925-2008.

Someone known to me only by the e-mail handle “Bloorondo” pointed out links to a pair of Dave Brubeck video performances new to me and, perhaps, to you. The first, “All The Things You Are,” was at a concert in Berlin in 1972 when Gerry Mulligan was the saxophonist in the Brubeck Quartet and Paul Desmond joined them on tour. Jack Six was the bassist, Alan Dawson the drummer. Brubeck, Mulligan and Six are turned out in seventies fashions, including lots of hair. Be sure to notice Brubeck’s trousers; not that you could help it. Dawson’s and Desmond’s wardrobes and hairdos are, as usual, restrained. Desmond is wearing his frequent attire of later years, The Suit (see Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, page 257). The playing by all hands is at a high level, with interesting Desmond/Mulligan counterpoint at the end. Camera work, direction and audio quality are good. To watch it, click here.

“In Your Own Sweet Way” is by the classic Brubeck Quartet with Desmond, Eugene Wright and Joe Morello. My guess is 1964, but it could be a year or two either way. This is a notably lyrical performance by Desmond, with the kind of assistance from Brubeck that led Desmond to frequently praise him as an ideal accompanist. The Wright-Morello mutual admiration society is in session. Click here.

Welcome to the new, improved, more functional Rifftides. Artsjournal.com commander-in-chief Doug McLennan and his team spiffed us up as the pioneer site (aka guinea pig) in reformatting all of the artsjournal.com blogs. The Rifftides staff thanks them for a dazzling makeover.

There is a change in the comments procedure. You will still click on the “Comments” link below each item. That takes you to a simple form. After you have filled in the form, you will be asked to enter a couple of words in a box before you submit the comment. If all works as planned, that will end the tsunami of spam that has plagued us for months. The Rifftides staff encourages you to try it out.

You may also correspond using the “Contact me” link in the first of the two right-hand columns. Either way, please let us know how you like the new Rifftides. For your celebratory opening-day bonus, click on this link for video of a Thelonious Monk piece by pianist Jessica Williams.