You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail. – Charlie Parker

He had just what we needed. He had the line and he had the rhythm. The way he got from one note to the other and the way he played the rhythm fit what we were trying to do perfectly. We heard him and knew the music had to go his way…. He was the other half of my heartbeat. – Dizzy Gillespie

Charlie Parker was born in Kansas City on this date in 1920. The Rifftides staff debated whether to observe the occasion by publishing a 5000-word essay tracing Parker’s musical heritage, analyzing the components of his style and evaluating his influence on several generations of musicians. You’ll be happy to know that we decided instead to take Bird’s advice in the film below and let his music speak for itself.
This is the only known clip of Parker actually playing. In several others he is seen performing to pre-recorded sound tracks. The man presenting 1951 Down Beat awards to Parker and Dizzy Gillespie is the columnist Earl Wilson, assisted by critic Leonard Feather. The rhythm section is Dick Hyman, piano; Sandy Block, bass; and Charlie Smith, drums. The piece is Tadd Dameron’s “Hot House.” The staff is aware that many of you have seen this clip. We are equally aware that you can’t see it too often.

Jack Brownlow has been dead nearly two years, but stories about him keep surfacing. Among his other attributes, the pianist was admired for his harmonic ingenuity, chord placement, taste and timing in accompanying instrumentalists and vocalists. At Brownlow’s memorial service in the fall of 2007, drummer Phil Snyder told several stories about his musical adventures with the man known to his friends as Bruno. He forgot to tell one, though, and sent it to share with Rifftides readers.

As you know, Bruno could play anything in any key. He knew the lyrics to almost every standard song. If they asked him, he also coached singers and advised them how to be better. That combination helped make him a singer’s dream piano player. But he hated to do it if they weren’t good.

One summer day in the ’70’s, he was in bassist Jim Anderson’s living room accompanying a singer who had stopped by to perform for Jack and consult with him about improving himself. When I walked in, Jack and the singer were in the middle of “On a Clear Day,” so I quietly sank into the beanbag chair in the corner facing the piano. The man singing was someone I had never heard or seen, a handsome guy with dark skin and curly hair nicely coifed. He had a Latin accent. He sang as if he were every woman’s desire, though there weren’t any women in the room, just Bruno and me. The singer used a lot of arm and hand gestures. He was facing the piano and couldn’t see me, but Bruno and I had eye contact.

This guy’s singing was terrible. Bruno was embarrassed and wouldn’t look at me. He turned his head to the left and faced the wall away from the singer. Bruno played no choruses. Finally, “On A Clear Day” was over. Bruno fiddled with the music on top of the piano. After uncomfortable silence, the singer asked him, “What do you think?” Bruno said nothing. “Let’s try something else,” the singer said.” “How about ‘Have You Met Miss Jones?”‘

Reluctantly, Bruno played an introduction and the singing began. It was a terrible rendition, with mispronunciations and scrambled phrasing. Finally, that was over, too. “Let’s do one more,” the singer pleaded. “Let’s do a ballad.” Bruno looked at me and rolled his eyes. With excitement, the singer said, “‘My Funny Valentine?’ Do you know that one Mr. Brownlow?” Bruno nodded. The singer launched into it and gave rubato a whole new meaning. Finally, “Valentine” was over. Bruno sighed and stood up.

“Well, Mr. Brownlow…what do you think?”

Bruno didn’t say anything. He briefly looked at me, and started to shuffle the music on the piano again.

“Mr. Brownlow? What do you think about my singing? “Do you think I have a great voice?”

Bruno had a difficult time telling an untruth about anything musical. At the same time, he didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. Finally, he looked at the man and said, “Great voice? No, I wouldn’t say you had a great voice. It needs some work.”

“How about my pitch?”

Still shuffling papers, Bruno stood up, then sat down again.

“Your pitch?”

“Yes! My pitch. You know…am I singing in tune?”

Again an uncomfortable pause. “In tune? No, not exactly. You could
work on that, actually.”

The singer was getting disturbed.

“How about my, how do you musicians put it, my swinging? Am I swinging? I think I was swinging.”

I was sitting behind the piano trying to keep quiet and not break up. Bruno was starting to sweat, which I’d never seen him do before.

“Swinging?” he said.

“Yes, yes, yes. You must understand swinging. Was I swinging?”

Silence. Bruno looked again at me. Quietly, every quietly, Bruno said, “A little bit.” He paused. Actually, I wouldn’t say that. Not swinging…not exactly swinging. No. I’d have to say no on that.”

The singer was upset. Bruno was clutching a bunch of music in his arms as if to protect himself from blows. I was lying back on the beanbag chair, but not comfortably. The room was very tense. Finally, the singer, who at this point was pacing back and forth, mumbled forcefully.

“Now wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You said I don’t have a good voice. Isn’t that right?”

Bruno looked away. “Well, that might be overstat… ”

“And then you said that my pitch was wrong, that I was out of tune. Right?”

“Well, I didn’t put it quite that way, but yes…”

“Then Mr. Brownlow, you said that I am not swinging at all. Isn’t that also what you said?”

Bruno, now terrified about what this guy was going to do next, tried to ease his pain.

“Well, well, a little bit of swinging, I suppose…toward the end there…”

“STOP!” said the singer.

Again there was uncomfortable, really uncomfortable, silence in the room. Bruno didn’t move. I didn’t move. The singer quit pacing, looked at Bruno and said,

“I come here to sing for you and for you to judge my singing. You tell me that my voice is bad, my pitch is bad, and my rhythm is bad. What else is there?”

Again, there was a pause. Bruno was trying to find something positive to say. Finally, he blurted,

“Your posture is EXCELLENT!”

For more on Jack Brownlow, go here and here.

If I had known of Ethan Iverson’s conversation with Lee Konitz about Lester Young, I would have included a link to it in the previous exhibit. On his blog, Do The Math, Iverson, the pianist and polymath of The Bad Plus, posts what amounts to a Prez master class with Konitz. The alto saxophonist has been intimately familiar for more than sixty years with Young’s early work, so familiar–it turns out–that as he and Iverson listened to the recordings, he could sing along with most of Prez’s classic solos from the Count Basie years.
Here is part of their discussion after they had listened to Lester’s solo on “Twelfth Street Rag.”

Lee sang this longish, fastish solo impeccably. He looked quite sad at the end.
LK: How can you talk about these jewels? Each one seems better than the next. Ethan, why are you exploring Lester Young now?
EI: I’m trying to fill in some holes in my playing. But also, the more I listen to Lester Young, the more I hear how amazing he is.
LK: Same thing here. I love him more all the time.
EI: This tune is corny, in a way, but they make it so hip.
LK: When you can play like this, the material becomes almost less important – it’s just a springboard for pure improvisation and pure music.

Iverson includes in his blog piece transcriptions of Young solos and MP3 players that allow the reader to hear them. Unfortunately, the only way I could hear and see them at the same time was to open two copies of the blog and position them side by side on the screen. It is worth the effort. Even if you are not a skilled sight reader, it is fascinating to follow along on the manuscript as Prez unrolls his creations. To go to Do The Math and Iverson’s comprehensive 10-part Lester Young symposium with Lee Konitz, click here.
Here is a final thought about Lester Young–for today, at least. It comes from the late tenor saxophonist Bill Perkins and has to do with Prez’s subtle trailblazing harmonic approach. It suggests a lineage that may surprise conventional thinkers. When I spoke with him in 1996 as I prepared notes for his superb CD Perk Plays Prez, Perkins said:

Harmonically, Prez was getting outside, in his way. In “Taxi War Dance,” for instance, he gets into a whole different mode, scale-wise. He was the first man I knew to use, rather than third scales and triads, fourths and fifths and big jumps. I can’t think of another player who did that. Everybody does it now, but he was unique with that. Bix Beiderbecke used some very interesting jumps in his melodies–big jumps–and his sound was beautiful. I think that might have had an influence. Prez loved Bix.

Lester Young was born 100 years ago today and died in his 49th year in March, 1959. Billie Holiday called him the president of the tenor saxophonists. His nickname became Prez, and he called nearly everyone else Prez. There is an endless list of musicians who played as they did mostly because of Young. It includes soloists as various as Parker, Artie Shaw, Paul Quinichette, Paul Desmond, Wardell Gray, Dexter Gordon and Brew Moore, to name a few of hundreds. Moore carried his discipleship so far as to declare, “Anyone who doesn’t play like Lester Young is wrong.”
Among Lester’s stylistic children are virtually all of the Brothers who came through the Woody Herman band, starting with the tenor players of the first Four Brothers section–Zoot Sims, Stan Getz and Herbie Steward–and continuing with Al Cohn, Bill Perkins, Gene Ammons, Richie Kamuca, Dick Hafer, and on and on and on. No one could count the grandchildren and great-grandchildren because Young’s inheritors are players of all instruments, whether or not they are aware of their gifts from him. His way of playing is part of the lingua franca of jazz.
Here are a few observations in a book I wrote called Jazz Matters:

In the early 1930s, Lester Young was removed from the Fletcher Henderson band for not playing like Coleman Hawkins. But from his first recordings with Count Basie in 1936, Young’s lightness, buoyancy, rhythmic daring and harmonic subtlety established him as a hero of forward-looking musicians. He provided an evolutionary step between Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker in the freeing of the jazz soloist from the arbitrary restrictions of time divisions. In his solos, Young flew weightlessly over bar lines. He saw deeply into chord changes. He helped lay the rhythmic and harmonic keystones of bebop.

Young was drafted in 1944, even though he was in bad health and admitted he had used marijuana for the past decade. The Army confiscated his horn, refused to let him play in the camp band, and later arrested him on drug charges. He was dishonorably discharged, but first he was imprisoned for ten months at an Army base in Georgia, an experience with devastating emotional consequences. In spite of his experience in the military, his attempts to recover from its dehumanizing effects, and his efforts to build his own withdrawn world of sweetness and love, Young was capable of playing tenor sax with inventiveness, relaxation and swing never achieved by any other jazz soloist.

Although Louis Armstrong may have been the first soloist to erase bar lines and smooth out jazz improvisation with long, logical, flowing passages, Prez is the man who brought total relaxation to the process and yet managed at the same time to extend the boundaries of rhythmic propulsion. No one had ever done more swinging while creating beautiful ideas.

YouTube does not allow us to embed their video of Lester as featured soloist with the Basie Band at the Randall’s Island jazz festival in 1938. He is in the silent film but the sound track dubbed in is one of his great solos with Basie on “I Got Rhythm” chord changes. Click here to see and hear him.
Toward the end of his life, Young’s oblique approach to melodies and his ultra-relaxed rhythm could create the impression that he was having trouble finding his way. To the contrary, his habit of lagging behind the beat was the product of assurance and of comfort with his surroundings. There are wonderful instances of that in this new compilation of latterday Lester. But there is no more memorable example than in his 1957 reunion with Billie Holiday, whose deep friendship and musical empathy with Young went back to the 1930s. Creating just twelve uncomplicated bars of music, Prez finds the essence of beauty and the blues. This is the famous “Fine and Mellow” from the 1957 CBS-TVprogram The Sound of Jazz. Ben Webster has the first tenor saxophone solo, Lester the second.

Best moment of the day, ten minutes ago:
Coming to the end of a long bicycle ride, I passed a church playground not far from the house. A boy of about three ran out of the mass of children on swings and jungle gyms and yelled, “Hey.”
“Hey,” I replied.
“Can you go home?” he said.
“I’m going home,” I told him.
“Can you get your girl friend and come back and play?”
She was tempted, but she had just put a pie in the oven.

In the e-mail today came yet another news release using one of the favorite clichés of record company publicists. It announced the release of “the sophomore album” of a young saxophonist. A sophomore is a second-year student at a high school, college or university. You could look it up. The word is not a synonym for “second.” The saxophonist’s fourth release, I presume, will be his senior album, the fifth his post-graduate album, the sixth his post-doctoral album.
Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style is still available. Their 12th principle of composition is, “Use definite, specific, concrete language.” Please.
This concludes today’s rant.

The world may have known about it, but I just stumbled upon a rich cache of Elis Regina video clips on YouTube. They come from a 1973 Brazilian television special. The program seems to have been available on a DVD that quickly disappeared from the market. Amazon, CD Universe, Netflix and several other sources say it is currently unavailable and, according to Amazon, “we don’t know when or if this item will be back in stock.” That is a pity, because in the clips Regina, at age 28, is brilliant in every song, giving clear evidence why she was beloved in Brazil and idolized by singers and musicians throughout the world.
The video of “Ladeira da Preguiça,” a happy song, is a good introduction to the series of 20 clips. They run the range of emotions and expressivity that Regina commanded to an extent equaled by few musicians in any idiom. The trio is headed by pianist Cesar Camargo Mariano, her second husband and the father of her daughter Maria Rita, now also a star in Brazil. The bassist and drummer are not identified. Elis Regina died in 1982 at the age of 36.

This is a link to the complete Elis Regina YouTube collection from the TV special. Be prepared to fall in love.

Browsing the works of my fellow artsjournal.com bloggers this morning, I discovered in his blog Overflow a piece by Harvey Sachs that illuminates the condition of American popular culture in the new century. Mr. Sachs, the distinguished biographer of Arturo Toscanini and Artur Rubinstein, recently repatriated to the US after decades overseas. He posted this item nearly two months ago, but it has a long shelf life. Here is an excerpt:

I had heard of Michael Jackson, knew that he was an entertainer — knew, even, that he was odd looking and that he had a sister who had bared a breast, accidentally or otherwise, before the television cameras during some sort of sporting event. (None of my friends in Europe, where I was living at the time, could understand why this had created a scandal. “Was her breast ugly?” was the closest any of them, male or female, could come to fathoming the issue.) What I did not know, however, was that at some point during my long absence from the country this Jackson fellow had replaced Jesus Christ as the primary object of worship for most Americans.
Fortunately, I was traveling in the Midwest from Friday until Tuesday morning, thus I had the incredible privilege of taking in an enormous quantity of television “news” in hotel lobbies and breakfast rooms, in restaurants, and in a few private homes. My imagination was fired by the rare chance to see how the early prophets of a new religion manipulate the masses. And on Saturday, when I realized what was about to happen, I began to tremble all over.

To read the whole thing, click here.
Welcome back to the United States, Mr. Sachs.

No one ever accused Stan Getz of phoning in a solo. Not infrequently, however, he gave the appearance of detachment as he played while surveying the audience with eyes wide open. When he closed those cool blue eyes and leaned into a solo, something special was likely to happen. In Italy in 1961, cameras caught an instance of Getz fully committed. Video of the event surfaced not long ago. The tune is Dizzy Gillespie’s “Woody ‘n You.” Ray Brown is on bass, Ed Thigpen on drums. The pianist is Lou Levy, Getz’s friend since their days in Woody Herman’s Second Herd and always one of his favorite playing partners. The audio track has a couple of dropouts, but your ear will fill them in.