Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...
Why? Because it’s been too long since you’ve heard it.
What, you’ve never heard it? Good. I envy your coming to it for the first time. Here’s Count Basie from The Complete Decca Recordings. February 4, 1939. Harry Edison wrote the tune. He has the trumpet solo. Jack Washington is the baritone saxophonist. We get Lester Young (pictured) twice. His eight bars following Edison’s solo launched a thousand tenor saxophonists.
Now, you’re bound to have a happy weekend.
Much of the post-election analysis overflowing the airwaves, newspapers and internet has to do with how the demographics of the United States have shifted. The change away from decisive political dominance by white 
people was underway long before the first Obama election in 2008. Since, it has accelerated. All signs are that the change will continue. Still, it is hard for many to accept, as a fact of evolving democracy, the shifting makeup of the population in our free land of immigrants and their descendants. I thought about that as I read, watched and listened to the news and the pundits and remembered an anecdote posted on Rifftides four years ago. It may still have relevance. I wish that it had less.
After The Election
November 5, 2008 By Doug RamseyWhen I was in college and involved in the jazz community in Seattle, I helped to arrange a concert in my home town. Some of the musicians who traveled to the interior of the state to perform in that conservative agricultural community were black. One of my closest childhood friends came to the concert. Afterward, I took him to a party for the musicians. In the course of the socializing, I danced with a newer friend, the pianist Patti Bown. When I returned to the table, my old buddy told me, with considerable heat, that he was ashamed I had touched a black woman, although that was not the term he used to describe her.
I had not thought about that evening in decades. It came back to me last night as I listened to the next president of the United States speak to the world. I hope that my friend was watching, too.
Memo, or tweet, to Ben Ratliff:
I owe you one.
Somehow, I managed never to have heard of Cécile McLorin Salvant until Mack Avenue, a record company, sent a message announcing that it has signed her. The announcement included a link to a Sunday New York Times story by Mr. Ratliff. In a long article packed with praise from him and others, he wrote:
Her voice clamps into each song, performing careful variations on pitch, stretching words but generally not scatting; her face conveys meaning, representing sorrow or serenity like a silent-movie actor.
…â€uh-oh, and hm! and what?†I thought, quoting Mr. Ratfliff intepreting one of her facial expressions; “I’d better look into this.” To read all of his article, go here.
The next step was to see if I could find a sample of her singing. I found this, recorded four years ago somewhere in France, with bassist Alain Guiraud and guitaritst Renaud Maret. The videographer was shooting through a glass darkly, but the audiographer, if that’s a term, was up close and Ms. McLorin Salvant, singing a great song, was personal.
This YouTube page and two following it, have a few dozen clips of Ms. McLorin Salvant, including an eccentric, cliff-hanging version of “I Only Have Eyes For You.†It’s going to take a while to catch up with her.
Addendum: The Times piece online includes an embedded video of Ms. McLorin Salvant performing “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” with Aaron Diehl’s trio.
I am a radical, having a nature that leads me to perpetual revolt.
One thing I can’t understand is why people have such trouble with modern music. It seems to me to be perfectly intelligible. When I hear one of my pieces again, or listen to the record, I don’t see why people could find this perplexing in any way. Yet audiences can’t make head or tail of it… I finally said the hell with that whole point of view and decided to write what I really always hoped to write, and what I thought was most important for me. I’ve taken that point of view ever since.
Elliott Carter went his own way writing music that was often difficult to play and, for many audiences, difficult to hear. Eventually, he captured listeners and became one of the most honored American composers. Carter died yesterday in New York at 103 in the Greenwich Village apartment where he had lived since the 1940s. In an interview a few years ago, he said:
As a young man, I harbored the populist idea of writing for the public. I learned that the public didn’t care. So I decided to write for myself. Since then, people have gotten interested.
They became so interested that he won two Pulitzer Prizes and, virtually until the end, was in demand by orchestras who commissioned his compositions. Although he did not compose for jazz musicians, Carter was an influence on many, particularly those who also tended toward Charles Ives, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartok and other iconoclastic 20th Century composers. For a comprehensive Carter obituary, go here.
Let’s listen in its entirety to Carter’s String Quartet No. 2, which in 1960 brought him his first Pulitzer Prize.
This recording by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic has superb performances of Carter’s Concerto For Orchestra and three pieces by Carter’s mentor, Charles Ives.
To see and hear Carter discuss his early years in music, click here for an interview he gave when he turned 100 and here for his recent encounter with Alisa Weilertstein when she consulted with him as she prepared to record his Cello Concerto.
When we were quite young, my wife and I attended a New York Philharmonic concert of the Concerto For Orchestra. At its conclusion, Bernstein brought Carter onstage for a bow and a standing ovation. How splendid he looked, we said, for a man his age. He was 66. What a break for listeners that he had 37 more productive years.
If you have been wondering how New York City’s jazz clubs are faring following the onslaught of of Tropical Storm Sandy, Nat Chinen reports in The New York Times on several of them.
Clubs form the core infrastructure of jazz in New York, and many of the leading showcases or incubators — the Blue Note, the Village Vanguard, the Jazz Standard, the Jazz Gallery, Cornelia Street Café, Smalls, the Zinc Bar, the 55 Bar — are in the part of Manhattan that recently came to be known as the dead zone. Jazz fans regard these rooms as an always-on utility, so their closing was felt even in a city confronting more pressing concerns. The power failure downtown meant canceled bookings and many thousands of dollars in lost revenue, a serious hit in a business of slim margins.
To read the details, click here.
Ed Bickert will observe his 80th birthday on November 29, but some of his admirers are starting the celebration early. They will honor the 
guitarist, one of Canada’s foremost jazz artists, Tuesday evening, November 6, at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto. Among the celebrants will be members of the music’s Canadian elite; Don Thompson, Lorne Lofsky, Mike Murley, Neil Swainson, Terry Clarke, Steve Wallace and many others. Veteran CBC jazz broadcaster Katie Malloch will host the event. The network will record the festivities and broadcast them nationwide on Bickert’s birthday.
Bickert’s decades of work with Moe Koffman, Rob McConnell, Phil Nimmons and as one of Canada’s most reliable studio musicians earned him great admiration. In the 1970s Paul Desmond—at the urging of his longtime
guitar colleague Jim Hall—began using Bickert as a sideman and recording with him. The guitarist moved into the international spotlight as a member of what Desmond enjoyed calling “The Canadian Quartet,†which also included Don Thompson on bass and Terry Clarke or Jerry Fuller on drums. In his liner notes for The Paul Desmond Quartet Live, recorded at Bourbon Street in Toronto, here’s what Desmond wrote about Bickert:
When I work with Ed, I find myself turning around several times a night to count the strings on his guitar… how does he get to play chorus after chorus of chord sequences which could not possibly sound better on a keyboard? Or, in some cases, written for orchestra? This all becomes more impressive when I play a tape of Ed’s for a guitar player and suddenly realize, between the hypnotized gaze of fascination and the flicker of disbelief, that what I had cherished as a musical phrase is also totally impossible to play on guitar.
When I was writing Take Five: The Public and Private Live of Paul Desmond, I talked with Bickert about the experience from his viewpoint. He and Thompson used the same adjectives, “loose,” “easy-going.”
“We sort of jelled right away and it felt really good,” Bickert said. “The music that Paul played was always melodic and pleasant, as opposed to the angry fireworks kind of things that a lot of people were doing. That suited me just fine. Paul was such an easy-going person, and it was contagious for the rest of us going along that route.”
Bickert retired a few years ago, but not before he made this European festival appearance with bassist Dave Young and drummer Terry Clarke.
While we’re at it, here’s another beautiful Bickert performance, with Don Thompson, bass, and Claude Ranger, drums. Thanks to Ted O’Reilly for alerting me to this. The video quality is a bit dodgy. The sound and the playing are not.
For more about Desmond, Bickert, The Canadian Quartet and a strange recording episode, go here, then here. Finally, Bickert’s colleague Steve Wallace has a heartfelt tribute—with videos—on the CBC website.
This is a busy week for birthdays of major jazz artists: On Tuesday it was Clifford Brown’s. Today belongs to 
two
musicians who have been in the vanguard of the legion of alto saxophonists—often called Bird’s children—who were inspired in the 1940s by Charlie Parker. One of the children, Herb Geller (pictured right) turns 84. The other, Phil Woods (pictured left), is 81 today. Both are traveling the world and performing regularly. Mr. Geller plays tomorrow night at Birdland in Hamburg, Germany, where he lives. Here he is about a year ago with pianist Pedro Guedes at the Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon as part of the Dose Dupla concerts.
Three months ago, Phil Woods appeared with his quintet at Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola in New York City. His colleagues are Bill Mays, piano; Bryan Lynch, trumpet; Steve Gilmore, bass; Bill Goodwin, drums. The piece is a beautifully crafted Mays arrangement of “The Very Thought of You.â€
I wanted to show you the maple tree on the west side of the house at its peak of fall glory. The question was, whose version of “Autumn Leaves†should accompany it? I considered those by Miles Davis, Eva Cassidy, Eddie Higgins, Doris Day, Cannonball Adderley, Sarah Vaughan, Nat Cole—including one of Cole singing the song in Japanese—and a couple of dozen others. In the end it came down to Bill Evans, from Portrait In Jazz, recorded on December 28, 1959, with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian.
Halloween is nearly over here in the western US, but the trick-or-treaters are still ringing doorbells in Hawaii, the Marshall Islands, Guam, the Philippines and, for all I know, Tokyo and Beijing. We plied 115 ghosts, ghouls, goblins, vampires, cowboys, ballerinas, spidermen and fairy princesses with candy—a new record. I’m told that this is the best jack o’lantern I’ve ever carved. But, she says that every year. Happy Halloween.
