Now and then the Rifftides staff rummages through the archives, wondering what was on the blog early in its history. Yesterday we found a review from four years ago, to the day. It discusses an album by a musician whose death in January, 2009 gives the last line poignancy we could not have anticipated when the piece first appeared.

Fathead
One minute and twenty-six seconds into a blues called “Bu Bop Bass” on his new CD, Cityscape, the tenor saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman begins his solo with a phrase that consists of two quarter-note Fs, a quarter-note A and a half-note A–an interval of a major third in the key of F concert. How simple; except that it is not simple. It is complex, because Newman gives each note a customized time value that no annotator could capture on paper. They are Fathead Newman quarter notes and a half note. In addition, he gives the half note a slight downward turn, not so far that it becomes A-flat, just far enough that it’s a David Newman moan, a characteristic of his expression. Furthermore, he plays the phrase, as he does all of his music, with a tone that manages to be full and airy at the same time, not quite like anyone else’s tone. Newman has invested a one-bar phrase with his personality, so that anyone familiar with his work will know in that instant who is playing.
This sort of thing is what experienced musicians, fans and critics have in mind when they say that there was a time when they could recognize a soloist after a few notes. Except in the nostaligic minds of older listeners, that time is not gone, although it must be conceded that there are plenty of young soundalike players on every instrument. Is that a new phenomenon? Aside from specialists, could anyone really tell apart all of those disciples of Coleman Hawkins in the late 1930s and early forties, the herd of alto saxophonists in the 1950s who wanted to be Charlie Parker, the 1960s trumpeters who aspired to be clones of Freddie Hubbard? Imitators are eventually lost in the crowd. Individualists stand out.
On Cityscape, Newman places himself in the context of a seven-piece band similar to the six-piece Ray Charles outfit in which he became well known in the 1950s. He hasn’t recorded in that setting in a few years, and it’s good to hear again. The sound and feeling are reminiscent of the Charles days, but Newman and pianist-arranger David Leonhardt have collaborated to make the harmonic atmosphere fresh. Howard Johnson fills the crucial baritone saxophone chair. Benny Powell, often sidelined by illness the past few years, is on trombone. He and Johnson solo infrequently but well. With Winston Byrd on flugelhorn, they fill out the rich ensembles behind Newman’s tenor and alto saxophones. On alto in a piece called “Here Comes Sonny Man,” Newman recalls “Hard Times,” one of the records that made him famous with Charles.
This is basic music mining a rich tradition that grows out of jazz, rhythm and blues and the expansive territory band history of the American Southwest. No one alive does this sort of thing better than Fathead Newman.

(Originally posted on March 17, 2006.)

Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts grew up apart from his father, Pat. His dad was a saxophonist who devoted most of his adult life to the music and spacebound teachings of Sun Ra, the band leader who for many devotees of the avant garde epitomizes freedom and adventure in late 20th century jazz. Patrick’s wild baritone saxophone solos, often played far above the horn’s normal range, were for more than 30 years rousing components of Sun Ra’s concerts and recordings.
Governor Patrick has seldom spoken about his father, but nearly twenty years after his death, the governor and his family have donated Pat Patrick’s collection of scores, photographs and recordings to Berklee College of Music. In today’s Boston Globe, David Abel reports on the donation, the contrast between the free-spirited father and his studious son, and their spotty relationship. The online version of the story includes a video clip with the voices of father and son and samples of Pat Patrick’s playing with Sun Ra. To read it, go here.
This clip of the Sun Ra Arkestra in Berlin in 1986 will give you an idea of the difference between Pat Patrick’s working environment and that of his son in the statehouse. Patrick, Sr.’s baritone sets the riff :40 into the video. Don’t miss his duet with the trombonist beginning at 4:00. Take a deep breath and click on the Play symbol.

For quieter moment’s in Patrick’s career, you will find him in the reed section on Jimmy Heath’s Really Big CD, Blue Mitchell’s rare A Sure Thing and John Coltrane’s Africa Brass Sessions.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

For 15 years before he moved to the US from his native Brazil in 1993, Jovino Santos Neto was the pianist and arranger for Hermeto Pascoal, whom Miles Davis is said to have called, “the most impressive musician in the world.” Santos Neto lives and teaches in Seattle and travels to Brazil frequently, keeping up with developments in music there and maintaining his tie to Pascoal. His most recent trip was to join his mentor at a music camp in Ubatuba, on the coast between São Paolo and Rio de Janeiro. They were on the faculty teaching 25 or so professional musicians and advanced students, most of them from the United States. The participants pay as much as $2,000 tuition to improve their Brazilian music skills in lush surroundings.

There are more photos from Ubatuba on Santos Neto’s Facebook page.
Before his Brazilian trip, Santos Neto gave the world premiere of a new composition for piano and two flutes. His fellow performers at Symphony Space in New York were Tara Helen O’Connor (the taller of the two flutists) and Alice Jones. The piece is Agradecendo (Being Thankful).

To read a brief Rifftides review of Santos Neto’s most recent CD, go here.

PDXV, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (Heavywood).
Five years ago, Trumpeter Dick Titterington brought together for one engagement saxophonist Rob Davis, pianist Greg Goebel, bassist Dave Captein and drummer Todd Strait. They discovered that their combination worked and decided to keep it going. For their name, the quintet added the Roman numeral V to the FAA acronym for the airport in Portland, Oregon, their home base. PDXV quickly developed cohesiveness, stylistic range and an identifiable sound that make them more than just another hard bop quintet. They center their repertoire in pieces by mainstream icons including Thelonious Monk, Joe Henderson, Harold Land and Kenny Dorham. In these two albums they leaven their post-bop traditionalism with tunes from modernists Gary Dial, Steve Swallow, Tom Harrell, Dick Oatts, Fred Hersch, Stanley Clarke and the French trumpeter Nicolas Folmer.
All of the members are strong soloists, as they demonstrate from the outset. Vol. 1, a concert recording, opens with Land’s 1972 composition “Step Right Up to the Bottom,” a kaleidoscope of chord changes, time shifts and variations in dynamics that launch Davis into a gutsy, compact tenor solo. He establishes an improvisational line of inquiry picked up by Titterington and continued in solos by Goebel, Captein and Strait. It is a good introduction to the group and a demonstration of the like-mindedness that gives PDXV its solidarity. Their flawless execution of Land’s challenging material at a metronome pace of 200 leaves no doubt about the players’ chops. Virtuosity is an important part of the package, but dazzle does not seem to be their goal. Titterington’s and Goebel’s lyricism is notable in “Red Giant” by Oatts, as is Davis’s on soprano in Swallow’s quirky “Outfits.”
The blend of the horns comes as close as anything I’ve heard lately to the benchmark of unity established decades ago by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Their merger is remarkable in Vol. 2 with Davis on tenor for a romp through Monk’s “Trinkle Tinkle” and even more striking when he is playing soprano in unison with Titterington on Folmer’s entrancing “I Comme Icare.” In the Monk tune, Goebel manages an amusing tip of the turban to Thelonious without resorting to imitation or parody. For this club date, Strait sent in a sub, Randy Rollofson, not a soloist of Strait’s incisiveness or melodic bent but a fine time keeper with a penchant for strategically placed cymbal splashes behind the soloists. Captein, known to many for his recordings with the Jessica Williams Trio, combines compelling work in the rhythm section with post-Scott LaFaro facility and imagination as a soloist.
You Tube has several short video clips of PDXV, each featuring a member in a solo, but ony one complete performance. It is of Nicolas Folmer’s “Iona.” With three of his compositions on their two CDS, it is clear that the band has high regard for the young Frenchman’s work. This was at the 2007 Cathedral Park Jazz Festival in Portland.

PDXV will be in concert at The Seasons in my town next weekend, with singer Rebecca Kilgore making it a sextet for part of the evening. It’s an intriguing combination; a vocalist admired for the purity of her interpretations of standard songs, and a hard-charging band of rebop adventurers. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Following the Ornette Coleman birthday posting three items down, Alan Broadbent sent the following:

Now, this one’s absolutely true, I was there and it’s never made the books.
Monk’s quartet came to NZ on his “64 world tour and I and my friend Frank Gibson had good seats at Auckland’s beloved Town Hall to see him. After the concert I was elected to drive Larry Gales in my ’53 Ford Prefect to the Musician’s Union where we held a little party for the band. Well, would you believe it, there was Thelonious all by himself standing in a corner, keeping to himself. Mostly, I think, because everyone must have been afraid to approach him. I remember him wearing a turban and occasionally doing a little twirl, which must have been somewhat intimidating to everyone, not the least me. Frank started nudging me. “Go on, Alan, go ask him something.”

Being a lad of 17 and discovering all kinds of new things to listen to in jazz, even in 1964 New Zealand, I had been listening to Ornette and Charlie, trying to comprehend the new “free form” jazz. I had read the term in Down Beat, I believe.

Well, I made my way through the crowd toward his little corner of the world and looked up at what seemed to me a giant of a man in more ways than one. After gingerly introducing myself, I somehow managed to tell him I was listening to Ornette and asked him if he had an opinion about this new “free form” music.

Thereupon he looked down at me and said in a low, quiet voice….

“Well…. first you said FREE….. then you said FORM.”

Whereupon I thanked him and melded back into the crowd.

On this CD, Broadbent plays Monk’s “‘Round Midnight.” I hoped to find video of him performing a Monk piece but had no luck. Instead, here he is with Charlie Haden’s Quartet West in a 1999 concert in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Haden, bass; Broadbent, piano; Ernie Watts, tenor saxophone; Larance Marable, drums. Bizarrely, the YouTube clip identifies the tune as “The Long Goodbye.” Maybe they’d had too many Heinekens. The piece is, in fact, Charlie Parker’s “Dexterity.”

Mr. Broadbent adds that rumors of Larance Marable’s death are greatly exaggerated.

Larance suffered a stroke a few years back, but, although he can’t speak and is infirm, his friends might like to get in touch with him at West Side Health Care where he is very much alive.

Aware that Rifftides occasionally posts accounts of cycling adventures and that the readership includes dedicated cyclists, Jack Tracy forwarded this valuable piece of advice from an unidentified newspaper.

It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something. – Ornette Coleman

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time. – Ornette Coleman

Today is Ornette Coleman’s 80th birthday. In my admiration for Coleman’s independence, faithfulness to his vision and inspiration, I yield to no one–except my artsjournal colleague Howard Mandel, whose lengthy Jazz Beyond Jazz tribute today is replete with Coleman history and analysis and links to recordings and books. As addenda to Howard’s account of Coleman’s initial breakthrough with Contemporary Records, I offer this archive item and this followup entry.
Over the years, there is wide variety of instrumentation and sound in Coleman’s bands. For many devoted listeners, his original quartet remains the standard by which to assess the music of his other groups. Here is a clip of that band reunited in 1987 for a festival in Spain. Don Cherry is the trumpeter, Charlie Haden the bassist, Billy Higgins the drummer. Coleman’s solo is a fine example of his ability to improvise little melodies that are sometimes more fetching than the tunes he writes.

YouTube has three other pieces of video from that concert. To find them, go here.
When Coleman was less than a decade into his controversial career, I wrote about what stands as one of his most riveting recordings. In it, I addressed some of the issues swirling around him as the jazz community exalted and excoriated him. The piece was for Jazz Review, a radio program I did on WDSU in New Orleans in the sixties. It is included in Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers.

1966
Ornette Coleman, Live At The Golden Circle (Blue Note)
I think it’s safe to assume that most people, even most jazz listeners, are not familiar with the music of Ornette Coleman. You may have heard about the controversy that has ripped through music the past six years because of Coleman’s startling style and his influence on other players.
Ornette Coleman plays alto saxophone, self-taught, and he recently took a couple of years off to teach himself trumpet and violin as well. In the wake of his debut in the late fifties, there erupted a string of nonsense–played, written and spoken–which has continued and become even more absurd. One school of critics proclaimed that he had rejuvenated jazz and given it new direction. Another school said he was destroying jazz singlehandedly and that there was no hope for further good times in music. LeRoi Jones, Archie Shepp and a few dozen others in New York have decided that Coleman is a prophet of black supremacy. Coleman himself has been notably reticent on that point.
I think enough time has passed to make it clear that Ornette Coleman is neither genius nor fraud, merely a pretty fair alto player with his own vision. I was going to say, who hears a different drummer. But, as you will hear momentarily, Coleman’s drummer, Charles Moffett, is a basic, sort of old-timey drummer working in the avant-garde. And I assume that’s what Coleman wants, because in many ways he himself is a basic, old-timey player. He has freed himself from some restrictions of harmony and bar lines, but I don’t think he’s done it because of some desperate need to escape from formal restrictions.
Coleman is a naïve, brilliant musician whose jazz sense is as instinctive as it is learned, who has the blues in his bones and who is an extremely powerful rhythmic player. He is a man in whose name some of the most outrageous and powerful cults have sprung up. Coleman doesn’t deserve some of his self-appointed disciples. Nor does he deserve the burden of exaggerated praise that has proclaimed him some sort of messiah.
At any rate, here’s Ornette Coleman in his first recording in three years, with Charles Moffett on drums and David Izenzon on bass. This was recorded at the Golden Circle club in Stockholm. It’s call “Dee Dee.”
“Dee Dee” 9:10
If you’re unfamiliar with Ornette Coleman, this is a good record to begin with. If you have followed his career, it gives you an idea what he’s been up to since 1962. He is interesting to hear. How much lasting musical value there is in his playing, I just don’t know. I’ve been listening to him for five years, and I have often received tremendous emotional charges from his solos. I’ll continue listening. (1966)

I have. And I will.

No, not the Sidney Bechet “Sheik of Araby” kind of one man band, but the television news kind. Today, Howard Kurtz devotes his column in The Washington Post to a phenomenon brought about in broadcast news by the convergence of technology and economic hard times.

Scott Broom turns his tripod toward the wall of gray mailboxes, adjusts the camera, walks into the shot and delivers his spiel.
“Here’s how bad it is for the U.S. Postal Service,” the WUSA reporter says as a handful of customers at the Garrett Park post office look on. Invoking the organization’s growing deficit, which he just looked up on a laptop in his car, he puts a stamp on an envelope and declares: “At 44 cents a shot, that is a lot of peeling and sticking.”
Broom then thrusts the envelope toward the lens — and blows out the iris, which has to be reset so he can try the stand-up again. It’s one of the occupational hazards of being a journalistic jack of all trades — the equivalent of singing while playing the keyboard, guitar and drums.

To read all of Kurtz’s column, go here. It made me think about about standard practice in many television markets during my early years in broadcast journalism, before the digital revolution produced tiny cameras.
In 1963, I went to the Benson Hotel in Portland, Oregon, to interview Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota. He was chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. American troop levels in the Viet Nam war had tripled and tripled again and I had lots of questions for him. I drove the KOIN-TV van to the hotel and schlepped the gear into the lobby only to learn that a power disturbance had fried the system that controlled the elevators. They were all out of commission. I hauled the big Pro 600 Auricon conversion 16-millimeter film camera (pictured) up six flights of stairs, knocked on the door of Mundt’s suite, said I was from Channel 6 News and explained that I had to go back down for the rest of the equipment.
In three subsequent trips, I wrangled the enormous wooden tripod, the lights and their stands, amplifier, cables and sound apparatus up six stories. As I brought each new batch of paraphernalia into their room, Senator and Mrs. Mundt sat on the sofa sipping coffee. Small, round people with kind faces, they watched my exertions with interest and patience. I forget what Senate business took Mundt to Portland, but he did not have the entourage of staff people today’s ranking politicians seem unable to do without. If he had, I would have recruited them to help carry the gear.
As I positioned the lights, set the zoom lens for a two-shot, focused and prepared to displace Mrs. Mundt on the sofa for the interview, the senator said, “Will the reporter be here soon?”
I told him that I was the reporter and crew.
“Oh,” he said. “That isn’t how they do it in Washington.”
It is now.

Nearly two years ago, I wrote about a Benny Carter masterpiece that received raves from musicians and critics after Count Basie recorded it for Roulette in 1960. Kansas City Suite went out of print as an LP, had a brief revival as a Capitol CD in 1990, sold poorly and has all but disappeared.
Basie’s so-called “new testament” band included Thad Jones, Joe Newman, Frank Wess, Frank Foster, Marshall Royal, Benny Powell, Al Grey and the great latterday Basie rhythm section. They gave Carter’s work a memorable performance. Despite clamoring by insistent bloggers (present company not excepted) for a new reissue, the Basie version is so rare as to be nearly a myth. One internet search for “Kansas City Suite” turned up an ad for hotel rooms. The recording is available only as a used LP, if you’re lucky enough to find one, or an MP3 download. The Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra revived the suite for a concert in 2008, but live performances of the music are all too infrequent. Fortunately, one movement was captured on video while Carter was alive.
At the Berlin Jazz Fest in 1989, Carter and the WDR Big Band played the opening movement of the suite, with John Clayton conducting. Notice Clayton looking boyish and Carter, who was eighty-two, only slightly older.