There was a sad changing-times story this week in New York City, where it was big news. Elaine’s, the Upper East Side restaurant that for nearly five decades has been a meeting place and hangout for writers, theater and film people and a few musicians, is closing. Elaine Kaufman, who founded the restaurant, died last December. She left it to her manager, Diane Becker, who said business had dropped to the point where she can’t keep it going. The last meal—and the last drink at the long bar where Elaine held court and sometimes managed the place like a top sergeant—will be served late the night of Thursday, May 27. For details of the closing and the history of the place, see these stories in The New York Daily News and The New York Times.

Paul Desmond discovered Elaine’s shortly after Kaufman opened it in 1963. It was a place where he could quietly drink, spend time with friends and nurture the notion that he was writing a book, one chapter of which actually appeared. I spent my share of late nights there with Paul. When my Desmond biography was published, it is where we held the book’s coming out party. An evening at Elaine’s was likely to involve stimulating conversation with a rotating cast of characters and, sometimes, unscheduled entertainment. Here’s an excerpt from the biography.

Tim Ryan, the television sportscaster then with NBC, was one of many acquaintances who occasionally sat with Desmond at Elaine’s. He was there with Paul late one night in the mid-seventies when a couple of customers duked it out.

Ryan said, “I think I was having coffee and Paul was having another Dewars. Two drunken patrons in the back part of the front room started punching each other. They threw a couple of chairs. They were too smashed to do much harm, but they were creating a major distraction. Elaine came back from her perch at the bar and ordered a pair of waiters who were watching, to separate the guys. The waiters wouldn’t go near the fight. Now Elaine was furious not only with the amateur boxers, but with the waiters as well, and started yelling obscenities at all of them. Finally, she waded in, grabbed the brawlers by their necks and pulled them apart. While all this was going on, she never stopped swearing; ‘This is the last time you bastards will ever be in this joint,’ and other more colorful phrases, and she threw them out. It was Elaine at her most volatile and best. I don’t recall ever seeing those waiters again. Paul and I had a ringside seat. We enjoyed it enormously.”

With Elaine’s gone, my next visit to New York will be less interesting, but I’ll probably get more sleep.

Bill Kirchner is a saxophonist, arranger, composer, teacher, editor and historian who finds time to also be a broadcaster. Since 2002, he has been a host on Jazz From The Archives, a highlight in the schedule of WBGO-FM, the Newark, New Jersey, jazz station. He has devoted 99 programs to the work of other leading musicians. There is a list of those shows on Kirchner’s website. This Sunday, for his 100th broadcast, he will feature his own music. From his announcement:

I want it to be full of surprises, so all I’ll say is that there will be some unique and memorable performances played with some great musicians over a span of four decades. The settings range from duo to studio orchestra, and much of the music is from previously unaired recordings.

Jazz From The Archives airs from 11 pm to midnight EDT on 88.3 in the New York metropolitan area, and online at www.wbgo.org. Click on “Listen Now.”

Kirchner edited the massive and invaluable Oxford Companion to Jazz. In tribute to that accomplishment, blogger Steve Cerra put together a video incorporating photographs of many of the musicians covered in the book and some of the writers who contributed to it. Steve accompanied his pictorial essay with the Bill Holman band playing Holman’s celebrated arrangement of “Just Friends.” The final portrait in the sequence is of Bill Kirchner.

Woody Shaw died 22 years ago this month. A trumpeter of power, taste, a subtle harmonic sense and admirable originality, Shaw was long burdened with critiques that described him as a disciple, if not a copy, of Freddie Hubbard, who was six years his senior. This recording they made together—out of print, expensive and worth finding—says otherwise. Before becoming a leader in the late 1970s, Shaw worked with Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Joe Henderson, Max Roach, Dexter Gordon and Gil Evans, among others.

 

Here he is with his quartet at a concert at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1985, when he was 40. His rhythm section was Stanley Cowell, piano; David Williams, bass; and the 19-year-old Terri Lynn Carrington, drums. This is Shaw’s “Ginseng People.”

 

The Shaw video came from Steve Provizer, the Boston trumpeter, writer, broadcaster and proprietor of the interesting weblog Brilliant Corners, which has long had a link in the Rifftides blogroll. In his current posting, Provizer ponders what he sees as a general decline in the number of comments by readers of jazz blogs.

The members have voted and the Jazz Journalists Association awards ceremony will be held on June 11 in New York City. Winners will be announced in 39 categories of musicians, writers, bloggers, videographers and photographers. Nominees for Lifetime Achievement in Jazz are Jimmy Heath, Muhal Richard Abrams, Paul Motian, Phil Woods and Wayne Shorter; for Musician of the Year, Esperanza Spalding, Jason Moran, Joe Lovano, Sonny Rollins and Vijay Iyer.

 

Rifftides is pleased to again be nominated for Blog of the Year, an award it won in 2010. The competition is stiff: Patrick Jarenwattanon’s A Blog Supreme, Ethan Iverson’s Do The Math, Howard Mandel’s JazzBeyondJazz and Marc Myers’s JazzWax. Good luck to all.

 

For details and a list of nominees in all categories see the JJA website.

Bruce Ricker, the producer-director of a series of documentaries about American musicians, has died. He succumbed to pneumonia on Friday, May 13, at a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 68. Ricker’s most recent release was last year’s Dave Brubeck: In His Own Sweet Way. Among his other films were the stories of Jim Hall, Tony Bennett, Johnny Mercer and Thelonious Monk. He also produced the 1997 TV special Eastwood After Hours: Live at Carnegie Hall.

 

Born in Staten Island, New York, Ricker began his film career while practicing law in Kansas City in the early 1970s. He found that pianist Jay McShann was still playing. That discovery inspired the idea for his first documentary. The Last of the Blue Devils was about jazz survivors of the Kansas City of the 1930s, when the city was as an incubator of swing era musicians, among them Count Basie, Lester Young and the emerging Charlie Parker. Ricker formed a company, Rhapsody Productions, to produce it. Reviewing the movie in 1980, Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times:

As an informed documentary should be, ”The Last of the Blue Devils” is as much shaped by the filmmaker’s response to his subject as the subject itself. Mr. Ricker is both a fan and a historian. More important, he has the apparent gift for bringing the best out of these musicians, including Count Basie, Big Joe Turner, Jay McShann and Ernie Williams.

In partnership with Eastwood in later films, Ricker refined his documentary technique beyond that of The Last of the Blue Devils. It grew more intimate and revealing. Here is a clip from Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser (1988)), produced by Ricker and directed by Charlotte Zwerin. Monk and his longtime tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse discuss chord changes to “Boo Boo’s Birthday.”

 

Ricker’s Brubeck documentary, broadcast last December on Brubeck’s 90th birthday, has not been released on DVD.

The Miguel Zenon Quartet with Luis Perdomo, piano; Hans Glawischnig, bass; and Henry Cole, drums, play “¿Que Sera de Puerto Rico?” in 2009 at the Teatro Central de Sevilla, Spain. This was the year following Zenon’s winning one of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowships popularly known as “genius grants.”