The 30th annual presentation of the Sacred Music of Duke Ellington took place on December 28, 2018 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle before a capacity audience.  Featuring vocal soloists Stephen Newby (pictured left) and Nichol Veneé Eskrdge (pictured right), the Northwest Chamber Chorus and the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra conducted by Michael Brockman, Ellington’s rich score filled every corner of the great cathedral.  The concert was recorded for radio and Part 1 will be broadcast on Jazz Northwest on Sunday, January 13 at 2 PM Pacific time on 88.5 KNKX, and simulcast worldwide on knkx.org.   Part 2 will air on the same program on February 3.

Duke Ellington composed music for three Sacred Music concerts late in his life, premiering in 1965, 1967 and 1973.  The music was performed in great cathedrals in San Francisco, New York, London and elsewhere.  New music was mixed with a few Ellington classics in appropriate new arrangements to make up the suites. This Seattle performance draws from all three suites.

SRJO Ellington Sacred Concert at St. Marks Cathedral

(Photos: Jim Levitt)

We learned today that trombonist Urbie Green died last Monday, December 31, in the Poconos mountain region that he called home for many years. He was 92. A musician idolized by his contemporaries—and particularly by fellow players of the trombone—Green’s earliest big band years included stretches with Frankie Carle and Gene Krupa. His work with Woody Herman in the early 1950s brought him widespread attention and frequent mention in jazz polls and surveys. Green was a member of the all-star band that played at the White House at an elaborate party that President Richard Nixon gave Duke Ellington in 1969 on Ellington’s 70th birthday. Much of the music that night was captured for Blue Note Records. Ufortunately, someone–presumably Blue Note–has blocked us from embedding videos containing that performance and others. We see Green on the right above, on that occasion with fellow trombonist J.J. Johnson. To hear them collaborating—raucously—on a solo in Gerry Mulligan’s vigorous arrangement of Ellington’s “Prelude To A Kiss,” click here

Green solos at that White House occasion on another Ellington standard, “I Got It Bad.” Click here for the audio.

Urbie Green—reminding us why he continues to inspire trombonists around the world, and is likely to do so for decades. RIP.

Quotes To Inspire A Lovely 2019

New Year’s Day – Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. — Mark  Twain

The only way to spend New Year’s Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears. — W.H. Auden

Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go. — Brooks Atkinson

May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions. —Joey Adams

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice. —T.S. Eliot

Now’s The Time —Charlie Parker

Plans have changed for a service in memory of trumpeter Roy Hargrove, who died on November 3.  Frank Stewart of Jazz at Lincoln Center sent the announcement:

The life and work of Roy Hargrove will be honored at a musical celebration on Tuesday, January 8  at Jazz At Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall on Broadway at 60^thStreet, New York, New York. Doors will open at 6:30 pm and the event will begin promptly at 7pm. Originally scheduled to take place at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the festivities will take place at Jazz at Lincoln Center after the conclusion of the 2019 Jazz Congress.

Rifftides readers have asked the staff to again present Jack Brownlow’s Christmas recital.  It first appeared here in December of 2015. We are delighted to do so. To see the post and hear his music, just click here and enjoy it.

Merry Christmas 2018.

It can be discouraging, but we are resigned to keeping you up to date on the deaths of prominent musicians. The latest bad news is about the pianist John Williams, who died On December 14 in Wilmington, North Carolina. Williams achieved substantial renown in the 1950s for his work with several prominent leaders and for leading his own trio. Inevitably, he was occasionally misidentified as another John Williams who was once a jazz pianist but became known primarily as a composer for movies and a conductor of pops orchestras. The jazz John Williams died following one of several bad falls at home. In a post 7 years ago we addressed the name confusion and provided a bit of Williams’s history.

(From the Rifftides archive: January 22, 2011)

The man on the left  is John Thomas Williams, the pianist who worked with Stan Getz, Bob Brookmeyer, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn and Cannonball Adderley in the ’50s. The man on the right is John Towner Williams, who had a brief career as a jazz pianist and went on to Star Wars and The Boston Pops, among other associations.

For a few decades, the jazz John Williams took side trips into successful careers in banking and government. He lives in Florida and, at 82, still plays gigs, mostly solo piano. When I spoke with him this morning, he sounded content, although he allowed that he wouldn’t mind having the “No” John Williams’s royalty income. To further dissipate confusion, here’s a rerun of a Rifftides piece about him that first appeared on April 18, 2006. It contains a link to a reissue CD of Williams’ widely praised trio records.

THAT John Williams

During long stretches of 1953 and ’54, John Williams was the pianist in Stan Getz’s quintet and quartet. Wiliams is often described in biographies as a disciple of Bud Powell who was also influenced by Horace Silver. That is true. It is also true that oxygen influences flame, a fact that tells us nothing about the differences among flames. In the population of pianists influenced by Powell and Silver, Williams was identifiable by a keyboard touch that produced a spikey, percussive, rollicking forward motion, an infectious swing. Almost in contradiction, at the same time he somehow achieved a smoothness of phrasing that invested his improvised lines with the logic of inevitability. He managed to make his listeners anticipate what was coming in a solo and yet surprise them when he got there.

Williams’ first album under his own name was John Williams, a ten-inch LP on the Emarcy label, recorded in 1954. His trio had Bill Anthony on bass and the unique Detroit drummer Frank Isola, fellow members of the Stan Getz group. Williams jokes today that he often wonders who got the third copy of the album after he and his mother each bought one. It may not have been a big seller, but it quickly became a favorite of musicians and, after Emarcy pulled it, of collectors. In the 1990s, a broker of rare LPs who sold to Japanese LP zealots told me that a mint copy of John Williams was going in Japan for upwards of $300. I blush to confess that I sold him my beat-up copy for considerably less than that, making him wait while I first copied it to tape. As we listened, I hummed along to Wiliams’ solos, so embedded in my brain had they become over four decades of nearly wearing out the album.

It was a puzzle, given the LP’s iconic status, why Emarcy did not reissue it on CD, and why Verve did not bring it out after the company acquired the Emarcy catalog. A good guess is that the decision was made by accountants. Time has cured that ill. Copyright laws in Spain declare that after fifty years, recorded material is fair game (I’m not sure that’s the exact wording of the law). So, the resourceful Fresh Sound label has put on one CD John Williams and the pianist’s second Emarcy album, a twelve-inch LP called John Williams Trio, recorded in 1955. This belated event probably doesn’t do much for the inflated price of the original LPs, but it is a boon to the substantial number of Williams fans who have been clamoring for a reissue. It may also gain him new fans.

The second album, done in three sessions with shifting personnel among bassists and drummers, doesn’t have quite the concentrated charm of the ten-inch 1954 session. That is in part, I suspect, because Frank Isola is on only one track. Nonetheless, it has wonderful moments. Taken together, the twenty tracks capture John Williams when his playing was full of freshness, vigor and peppery lyricism. By all accounts, including the evidence of an appearance with Marian McPartland on Piano Jazz, it still is. He has never stopped playing, but he took a few decades off to become a banker and, for twenty years, a city commissioner of Hollywood, Florida. In conversation, Williams tends to deprecate his playing in the 1950s as inadequate, an evaluation that flies in the face of the wisdom of his employers–StanGetz, Bob Brookmeyer, Cannonball Adderley, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims among them–and of listeners who have been stimulated by his work for half a century.

To remind you of John Williams’ work, or familiarize you with it when he was at his peak of recognition, let’s listen to him with his trio in the early ’50s. Ernie Farrow is the bassist, Frank Isola the drummer. They play Dizzy Gillespie’s “Manteca.” To hear it, go here.

John Williams, RIP