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.

“Thank you,” I said to the clerk at the hardware store.

“Hey, no problem, ya know?” she replied.

It occurred to me that she had not jumped aboard the Rifftides Department Of Language Reform (DOLR) bandwagon. Despite our periodic efforts to encourage clarity of expression, Americans and other speakers of English continue in their wanton linguistic ways. I concluded that it’s time to rerun this item from more than three years ago.

The Rifftides Department Of Language Reform (DOLR) has been neglecting its duties. Its members claim that their failure to stop the misuse of “absolutely” and “no problem” (see this archives post) discouraged them. At a staff meeting on the subject, the DOLRers moaned that they despair of succeeding where Fowler, Strunk, White, Bernstein, Ciardi and other titans of proper English usage have failed. They pointed out that people still say, “ya know” every few seconds; still say and write, “they” when they should use, “he” or “she;” millions still bloat their sentences with “on a daily basis” and “on a national basis,” wasting words when they could streamline with, “daily” and “nationally.”

“Never give up,” I told them. “It’s God’s — or Webster’s — work.”

“Maybe we’re being too fussy, too pedantic,” they said. “Maybe the language is just taking its evolutionary course, and what sounds wrong today will be right tomorrow.”

“Shut up and watch this,” I explained.

The typography is by Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Thanks to Bobby Shew for calling this delightful wig bubble to our attention.

While I’m grumping about lousy usage, I’ll grump at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. They are among the newspapers and broadcast news outfits that seem to have succumbed to budget pressures by firing their copy editors. Folks, the past tense of sink is “sank,” not “sunk.” The past tense of swim is “swam,” not “swum.” Thank you.

Lester Perkins, the proprietor of Jazz On The Tube, sent an alert to a rare opportunity to watch and listen to Duke Ellington rehearsing a new piece. This was on the French Cote d’Azur in 1966. We see glimpses of Paul Gonsalves, Russell Procope, Cat Anderson, Buster Cooper, Jimmy Hamilton and the other members of the ’66 band, even one of Tom Whaley, Ellington’s indispensable arranger and copyist (at :37). The video clip melds smoothly from rehearsal into performance and features chorus after chorus of Johnny Hodges deep into the “The Old Circus Turn-around Blues.”

That track ended up as part of the eight-CD album Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington Cote d’Azur Concerts. The box is still around, expensive as a new CD set, but possible to find used at a reasonable price, or as an MP3 download. It’s worth the search, full of top-notch performances by one of the best of Ellington’s latter-day bands and by Fitzgerald at her peak.

I must confess that among the dozens (and dozens) of unsolicited email messages that pour into the Rifftides computer each day, I have paid little attention to those from the Litchfield Jazz Camp. That changed when one arrived with news that next year the camp moves from Kent to another Connecticut town. From the news release:

The camp will now be held at Canterbury School in New Milford, CT. The new campus allows the camp to offer a wide array of health and fitness options along with its time-honored, top quality music instruction.

Photographer Mark Vanasse’s picture of the new site is what caught my eye:

It reminded me a bit of the idyllic campus in the old Patrick McGoohan TV series The Prisoner, minus the presence of that threatening giant balloon.

The Litchfield camp’s music director is Don Braden, a saxophonist with a long discography and a track record in bands led by Roy Haynes, Freddie Hubbard, Betty Carter and Wynton Marsalis. The extensive faculty includes such veterans as Claudio Roditi, Matt Wilson, Wayne Escoffery, Helen Sung and Orrin Evans as well as established newer artists like pianist Carmen Staaf and bassist Luques Curtis. The Litchfield camp is administered by Litchfield Performing Arts, a charitable organization that describes its mission as “changing lives through the arts.”

“Charitable” doesn’t mean free, of course, but considering the high costs of summer camps these days, Litchfield’s charges seem reasonable, and a quarter of the camp’s students attend on needs-based scholarships totaling a value of about $100,000 each year. The camp’s website includes a video with information, and explanations from Braden, Jimmy Heath and others.

YouTube has a collection of videos from previous camps. Here’s a 2012 student group getting familiar with the blues via Duke Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used To Be,” including two choruses of collective improvisation.

Happy campers.

The Rifftides blogroll near the end of the right-hand column now includes a link to pianist-arranger-composer Mike Longo’s new website. Longo’s site is replete with practical tips to musicians about developing and refining their craft. By way of example, it also presents videos of his trio and his New York State Of The Art big band. Here, the band plays “No More Blues,” aka “Chega de Saudade.”

 

 

 

Longo’s site contains archive clips of him playing with his mentor and former employer Dizzy Gillespie and Gillespie’s longtime partner James Moody.

 

 

As interesting to musicians as the clips—perhaps even more interesting—Longo offers suggestions for improved practice and performance techniques. Some of them are specific, as in his adamant warning not to practice using a metronome. He begins the section by cautioning that the clicking of a metronome is not a pulse.

What is a pulse anyway? The sound of your heart beating. It produces a throbbing, pumping kind of feeling as opposed to the monotonous, soulless clicking of a metronome.

Elsewhere, Longo tackles mistaken guidance about the nature of harmonic content in jazz.

One of the problems musicians have when trying to learn how to solo over changes lies in the misconception regarding chords. Chords and harmony are two separate issues. Harmony can best be described as Motion. The motion of the tones of one voicing moving into the tones of another in a melodic fashion. Chords may best be described as arrested motion.

He follows with annotated examples of how great jazz improvisers use chords to develop flowing lines of melody. Such particulars may be of interest not only to professional and developing musicians, but also to laymen interested in deepening their knowledge of how jazz is made.

It was a fine day for the ritual of draining, coiling, labeling and storing the hoses. The canal has been dry and the irrigation water off since Tuesday. That news is of no importance whatever and has nothing to do with the usual topics of this blog. Hoping to find a connection (hah), I searched for music inspired by hoses and found nothing but a semi-bawdy saloon song that ended up being about a garden hose only after implying that it was about something else. Therefore, we offer a song the first syllable of whose title is the word in question. The song, from Harry Belafonte’s best selling 1956 Calypso album, expresses the elation we felt around here after all those hoses had been stored for the winter.

 

 

 

Stumbling across that track from the Belafonte album was a reminder of what a refreshing presence he was in popular music after he decided to pursue folk music rather than jazz; in an appearance in the late forties he was once backed by the Charlie Parker quintet. The album and its big hit, “The Banana Boat Song” (“Day-oh”) launched Belafonte into a major career that included film acting as well as singing.

First, from an upstairs window looking across the valley. This is a fine time of year to live in the high desert at the foot of the Cascades.

Next, in the exquisite 1948 original adapted by Ralph Burns from a movement of his Summer Sequence suite for the Woody Herman Ochestra. This is the recording that sent young Stan Getz on his way to tenor saxophone fame. A YouTube contributor identified as ZOrkaz added the autumnal photographs.

If Johnny Mercer had written nothing but, “There’s a dance pavilion in the rain, all shuttered down, a winding country lane all russet brown,” he would be in the lyricist hall of fame for evocative imagery. Jo Stafford sang Mercer’s lyric with the perfection of simplicity. Her husband, Paul Weston, wrote the arrangement.

Stafford’s “Early Autumn” is in her collection The Big Band Sound, released on the Westons’ Corinthian label in 1993 and, happily, still available.

There is no evidence that Miley Cyrus was influenced by Jo Stafford.

Rifftides reader Ted Hodgetts writes from Ontario, Canada, with a reminder that Clark Terry’s prolonged, expensive, illness continues. CT’s medical bills are accumulating at an accelerating rate. The Jazz Foundation of America set up a special fund to help with, among other things, the substantial cost of aides who give care. The health workers make it possible for him to remain at home, where he continues to support and advise developing young musicians. For details about his situation and how to help, see CT’s website. Don’t miss his illustrated blog entries about visits from prominent colleagues and aspiring jazz artists. As you browse, you’ll be treated to an audio montage of Clark Terry solos.

If you need a reminder of the joy and power he pours into his music, here he is in 2000 with his quintet at the Jazzwoche Burghausen in Germany. You may never hear a hipper arrangement of “Over The Rainbow.”

Clark Terry, flugelhorn; Dave Glasser, alto saxophone; Don Friedman, piano; Marcus McLaurine, bass; Sylvia Cuenca, drums

It’s a bit late to recognize Christopher Columbus on his holiday but at this writing it’s still Columbus Day in the Pacific time zone. The banks and the post office were closed for the day in the land that Columbus discovered. Substantial parts of the federal government have been shut down for two weeks and our elected leaders in Washington are in political confusion. According to the latest news, there may be hope that the nation won’t go into default this week.

But, in the unforgettable words of Thomas Waller, “Son, don’t let it bother you.” Let’s try to put all that nonsense aside for the moment and remember Ammiráglio Colombo with a history lesson from Mr. Waller And His Rhythm.

Fats Waller, piano; Gene Sedric, tenor sax; Herman Autrey, trumpet; Al Casey, guitar; Charles Turner, bass; Yank Porter, drums. April 8, 1936.

Happy Columbus Day.

Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond is moving along briskly in its new digital life as an ebook. The hardcover edition has sold out. Used copies are going for as much as $335 on book and auction sites, but new clothbound copies are history. The electronic transformation is good news on several counts:

The book will continue to be available. For now, it is on Kindle. Publisher Malcolm Harris of Parkside Publications tells me that he expects to have it up on Apple and Barnes & Noble soon.

The ebook edition has all of the features of the hardbound, including the nearly 200 photographs, the chapter notes, the solo transcriptions, the discography, the extensive index and Dave and Iola Brubeck’s foreword.

The ebook edition is easily portable. The most frequent complaint about the five-pound, 10-and-a-half-by-11-inch original was, “How am I supposed to read this thing on an airplane?” Now you can, after the pilot says it’s okay to fire up your Kindle, iPad, Nook or Sony Reader.

 The ebook sells for less than a third of the list price of the original hardcover edition.

Among other honors, Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and the Jazz Journalists Association Book of the Year Award. Here are a few of its plaudits:

Scrupulously researched and written with an attractive combination of affection and candor, it casts a bright light on Desmond’s troubled psyche without devaluing his considerable achievements as an artist. “Any of the great composers of melodies—Mozart, Schubert, Gershwin—would have been gratified to have written what Desmond created spontaneously,” Mr. Ramsey says. Strong words, but Take Five makes them stick. —Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal

The telling is lyrical, funny, nostalgic, provocative, and allusive — just like a Paul Desmond solo.”
 —Gary Giddins, author of Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of its Second Century

Doug Ramsey, the saxophonist’s friend for 20 years before Desmond’s death in 1977, constructs the full person as well as digging out much more of his writing than was known. A major piece of jazz scholarship, the book cuts no corners. —Ben Ratliff, The New York Times

Desmond was fascinated by electronic technology. We can only imagine his delight if he knew that his life story had been digitized.

To order the Kindle edition, please go here. To listen to Paul sounding the way he looks above, play this video.

Summertime, CTI, 1968. Paul Desmond, alto saxophone; Herbie Hancock, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Airto Moreira, drums; Joe Beck, guitar; Wayne Andre, Paul Faulise, Bill Watrous, Kai Winding, trombone; John Eckert, Joe Shepley, Marvin Stamm, trumpet; Ray Alonge, Tony Miranda, French horn; Don Sebesky, arranger.