You don’t rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles. – Stan Getz

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other’s ideas. – Stan Getz
The saxophone is an imperfect instrument, especially the tenor and soprano, as far as intonation goes. The challenge is to sing on an imperfect instrument that is outside of your body. – Stan Getz
Let’s face it–we’d all sound like that if we could. – John Coltrane

Over at JazzWax, Marc Myers is conducting a multi-part interview with Laurie Verchomin, the “Laurie” of Bill Evans’s famous composition. During the final year-and-a-half of his life, when he was in physical deterioration and creative resurgence, Evans and Verchomin had a romantic and intellectual relationship of depth and intensity. His years of drug addiction had doomed him, and he knew it. She dedicated herself to him in his final months. This is one of the exchanges in the second installment of the interview.

JW: Why was someone as gifted and as in control as Evans so hopelessly addicted to something so obviously destructive?

LV: I never did figure that out. That part of him was a really deep place. I don’t know why someone like Bill would be so persistently self-destructive. It’s such a conundrum. It’s such a riddle. For me it’s still a mystery. The only way to understand Bill was to realize that destruction and creativity exist simultaneously. Because Bill was so intensely creative, he had an intensely destructive side. He told me he never could do anything halfway. It all had to be to the extreme. He felt the same way about his addictions.

To read transcripts of the first and second installments of the Laurie Verchomin interview, go to JazzWax.

Months ago, Bill Kirchner sent a note about examples he was using in one of his New School classes for emerging composers. I set it aside, meaning to enlarge upon it. I just came across the tickler file reminding me. Clearly, my tickler system needs work. Here is Kirchner’s message. Where possible, I’ve added links.

Yesterday, I brought some scores/recordings to my New School comp/arr class for the students to check out. Among them were Bob Brookmeyer’s “The Nasty Dance” (an undersung masterpiece for Mel Lewis’s 1982 big band featuring Joe Lovano)*, two recent big-band pieces by Mike Gibbs (“Rumour Has It” and “Gather the Meaning”), and Holman’s classic “What’s New?” for Stan Kenton.
Holman once remarked that he wrote the “What’s New?” chart after hearing the 3rd and 4th Bartók String Quartets. If you play a recording of the opening to the 3rd Quartet and then the Kenton recording, you’ll hear the similarity.

*(Unforgivably out of print — DR)
In his play-by-play notes to the Mosaic box set, Stan Kenton: The Complete Capitol Recordings of the Holman and Russo Charts (out of print), Will Friedwald quotes Holman on the gestation of his arrangements of “What’s New?” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” another piece Kenton wanted for his Contemporary Concepts album.

Holman: The idea for these two tunes was to write long charts, based on standard tunes, but to make them like an original piece. Just use the changes or a (melodic) fragment to tie it together; in other words, make them like an original – although you don’t get royalties for it! But they were double the length of the usual chart. You could stretch out and do what you want. I remember the day we were all in New York, as part of the ’54 All Star Concert Tour with the Kenton guys plus Shorty Rogers and his Quintet. They were going to continue on but I was going to stay there. I remember Shorty, Jack Montrose and I were walking down 48th Street where all the music stores were. We started looking through some scores and I found Bartok’s Third and Fourth Quartets.
I remember after the band left and I finally got down to writing these charts I was looking through the Bartok things and I got an idea for “What’s New.” Sometimes looking at something like that can give you an idea – not necessarily something that’s specifically in there – but just puts something you can use into your head. Just an approach. Stan said to make ’em long and not worry bout keeping the melody going all the time. The standard changes are there so you can follow them if you’re used to listening to jazz that way.

“What’s New” is the lead track on Contemporary Concepts, generally considered the best album of Kenton’s career. Recorded in 1955, it also includes “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “Stella By Starlight,” “Cherokee,” “Stompin’ at the Savoy” and “Yesterdays,” all arranged by Holman, and Gerry Mulligan’s arrangement of his own “Limelight.”
Bill Kirchner is no newcomer to admiration for the older arranger. Years ago, preparing a piece about Holman, I asked several arrangers about him. Kirchner said,

Bill Holman is “Mr. Line.” His linear concepts are among the most important innovations ever used in a jazz orchestra. His chart on “What’s New” on the Contemporary Concepts album for Kenton is a masterpiece.”

And so it is, a perennial example for arrangers and a joy for listeners. The producers of the CD reissue added four tracks from Kenton’s “Opus” genre, respectable journeyman works whose unintended effect is to emphasize the brilliance of the original Contemporary Concepts charts.

Bill Evans was born 80 years ago today. He enriched music.

By way of his splendid JazzWax blog, Marc Myers alerts the Rifftides staff that our little slice of bandwidth gets a bit of notice. In my naiveté, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a blog rating service, but Marc points to Invesp Consulting. If you go there, you will see several segments in which Rifftides is rated at or near the top. We follow only Wynton Marsalis and Contemporary Jazz in “The Ultimate Rank,” place first in “Top Jazz Blogs By The Number Of Incoming Links,” place first in “Top Jazz Blogs By Google PR” (!), and rank high in several other categories, as does JazzWax. Every line in the Invesp list is a link to a blog, making it easy to use the page as a point of departure for exploring.
Thanks to all Rifftides readers for being aboard as we navigate the tides, shoals and high seas of our fifth year.

Rashied Ali, a drummer who applied his advanced technique to free jazz, died today in New York. He was 76. Born Robert Patterson, Ali became a disciple and close colleague of his fellow Philadelphian John Coltrane. He played on some of the most uninhibited recordings of Coltrane’s final years, including the astonishing Interstellar Space, a series of free duets. I was on a selection committee for Grammy nominations in 1974, the year Impulse! Records released Interstellar Space. Pianist Billy Taylor, one of the other members of the committee, said during the listening session, “I can’t imagine two people making more music than that.” It was a tour de force for both musicians. In this video clip from an Eastern European television program, Ali discusses Coltrane’s impact on his life and music.

Here is Ali with his quintet in June of 2008. The other players are tenor saxophonist Lawrence Clarik, trumpeter Josh Evans, pianist Greg Murphy and bassist Joris Teepe.

Rashied Ali, RIP.

Les Paul, who affected the course of popular music in profound ways, died today at the age of 94. Jazz devotees may remember the guitarist most fondly from the days in the 1930s when he collaborated with Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge and Art Tatum, or his involvement with Jazz At The Philharmonic and a memorable 1944 blues duet with Nat Cole. He went on to star on radio and television, invent equipment, come up with innovative recording techniques and zoom to the top of the pop charts with hit records. I thought about importing video clips to illustrate Paul’s career, but I could not improve on the nine-minute obituary the producers of PSB’s The News Hour with Jim Lehrer put together on this evening’s newscast. With the gratitude of the Rifftides staff, here it is:

John Stowell, Solitary Tales (Origin). The CD’s title suits the guitarist, a peripatetic performer who roams the world. I recently heard a musician say, “You never know where he’ll show up.” Although Stowell often plays with others, some of his most stunning work, as here, is unaccompanied. He alternates acoustic and electric guitars, but when he is plugged in he keeps his amplifier volume low and his attack subtle. The listener is more likely to be involved with the gentle insistence of Stowell’s long lines and development of harmonic possibilities than concern with which instrument he’s playing.
He opens with Cole Porter’s “Everything I Love,” mining it for chords to alter, phrases to stretch or contract and, following a contemplative solo, a coda that swings the track to a close. He plays pieces by Bill Evans, Steve Swallow and Ornette Coleman and six of his own compositions. “Funny Man,” an Evans tune rarely played by others, gets a series of single-note-line runs that Stowell builds on Evans’s intriguing chord structure. Swallow’s impressionistic “Willow” is another highlight. Stowell’s treatment of Coleman’s “Blues Connotation,” has deep inflections in the bass notes, time that pulses beneath the surface, and wry commentary hinting at call-and-response. Of his own pieces, “Fun With Fruit” and “Laughing River” are as intriguing as their mysterious titles. This could be party music, I suppose, if you were having a very quiet party. For full enjoyment, it requires–and rewards–close attention
In this video clip, Stowell plays a medley of two Wayne Shorter pieces,”Fall” and Nefertiti,” not included in Solitary Tales.

When Stowell is at his home base in the US Pacific Northwest, he frequently performs with two of that region’s world-class musicians, bassist Jeff Johnson and drummer John Bishop. In this video, tenor saxophonist Rick Mandyck joins them in a piece with the misleading title, “Turgid,” which is on their Scenes CD.

When The National Endowment for the Arts study on Public Participation in the Arts came out a few weeks ago, the survey’s bad news about the size of the jazz audience caused ripples of concern. It showed that over a six-year period, the number of Americans attending jazz events dropped to a low of 7.8%. In a population of 301 million, that translates to attendance of 2,347,800 each year at jazz clubs, concerts and festivals. As if that weren’t discouraging enough to those worried about the state of jazz, the audience for live jazz is growing older. According to the study, in 1982 the median age of listeners at live performances was 29. In 2008, it was 46.
Over the weekend, Terry Teachout’s Wall Street Journal column about the NEA study amplified those ripples of concern into waves as his piece was picked up by web sites and blogs. What are the implications of the numbers above and of the study’s other statistics of decline? Teachout, also an artsjournal.com blogger, wrote:

I suspect it means, among other things, that the average American now sees jazz as a form of high art. Nor should this come as a surprise to anyone, since most of the jazz musicians that I know feel pretty much the same way. They regard themselves as artists, not entertainers, masters of a musical language that is comparable in seriousness to classical music–and just as off-putting to pop-loving listeners who have no more use for Wynton Marsalis than they do for Felix Mendelssohn.

Terry ended his column with this:

No, I don’t know how to get young people to start listening to jazz again. But I do know this: Any symphony orchestra that thinks it can appeal to under-30 listeners by suggesting that they should like Schubert and Stravinsky has already lost the battle. If you’re marketing Schubert and Stravinsky to those listeners, you have no choice but to start from scratch and make the case for the beauty of their music to otherwise intelligent people who simply don’t take it for granted. By the same token, jazz musicians who want to keep their own equally beautiful music alive and well have got to start thinking hard about how to pitch it to young listeners–not next month, not next week, but right now.

Fellow artsjournal.com blogger Howard Mandel, responding to Teachout, charges him with “forecasting the death of jazz.” In his column, Teachout does not do that. But, having set up the straw man, Mandel knocks it down with a series of illustrations that jazz is flourishing, all encouraging. You can read them in his new posting at Jazz Beyond Jazz.
“How to pitch it” is Teachout’s key phrase in his conclusion. Let’s take that to mean improvements in presentation, audience education and marketing. If jazz musicians find ways to reach larger audiences without watering down their art, it will be good for them and the future of the music. Calculated attempts to increase audience by forcing hybridization of the music itself have neither elevated its quality nor achieved permanent increases in attendance figures and record sales for uncompromised music. Such amalgams as disco jazz, soft jazz, smooth jazz and other varieties of near-jazz have done wonders for Kenny G and John Tesh, but little for players of undiluted jazz.
In a barroom discussion of such compromises, the guitarist Jim Hall once said, “Where do I go to sell out?” That was decades ago. You’ll notice that he hasn’t sold out. It may be that the NEA study illuminates what serious artists have always known even as they dreamt of popular acceptance, fame and wealth. The pianist John Lewis articulated it, and his quote has been popping up in the wake of the study: “The reward for playing jazz is playing jazz.”
In the introduction to Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers, I reflected on the matter of the jazz audience. Here’s an excerpt:

For a few years in the 1940s and 1940s, when the big band phenomenon resulted in a congruence of jazz and popular music, jazz records sometimes became best sellers. That happened not because the music was jazz, but because it was popular despite its being jazz. The high artistic quality of a hit like Erskine Hawkins’s “Tuxedo Junction” or Charlie Barnet’s “Cherokee” was coincidental. In succeeding decades when an anomaly like Stan Getz’s “Desifinado” or Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” made the top forty, there was a revival of the old hope, born during a few unreproduceable years of the swing era, that jazz could again be a part of mass culture.
It is understandably painful to jazz musicians to witness the enormous popularity of inferior music based on jazz, and to see many of its practitioners become wealthy. A talented musician working for union scale might feel despair to read in one day’s newspaper that Bruce Springsteen, the rock star, earned an estimated $56 million in 1986-87, and in the next day’s edition find Springsteen quoted, “Chuck (Berry) played in a lot of strange keys, like B-flat and E-flat,” these “strange keys” actually being two of the least complicated. Like so much in life, commercial dominance by the slightly talented and musically ignorant is not fair. It may be time, however, as the brilliant alto saxophonist Phil Woods has suggested, for jazz players and listeners to accept the fact their music is art music, that commerce is commerce, and that the more sophisticated and artistically complete jazz becomes, the less likely it is to be a wide commercial success.
Because of its enormous strength, vitality and creative energy, jazz has from its beginnings influenced trendy popular offshoots. Fusion, crossover and the so-called New Age or earth music of the 1980s are only the latest manifestations of a tradition that goes back at least as far as the soupy sweet bands and chirpy pop songs of the l920s. Indeed, the popular music of the past sixty years in virtually all of it forms, especially including rock, would not have existed had there been no jazz. This could fairly be called a mixed blessing.
Still, despite the occasional brief popular acclaim of a jazz artist, the mother lode of American music remains untapped by most Americans.

Like Terry Teachout, I don’t know how to interest young people in jazz. I tend to think, based on observation and anecdotal information, that rather more of them listen to jazz than the NEA study suggests. Study results often lag behind current realities. I hope that’s the case here. I am sure of one thing; the de-emphasis and, in many cases, elimination, of arts education in public schools has done enormous damage to audience-building for music, literature, theatre and the visual arts. There are many more contributing factors, including the spread of instant communication with the result that young people are conditioned to instant gratification rather than slow, deep appreciation. That is a worldwide cultural and societal problem. I don’t know how to solve it, either.
Go here to read a summary of the NEA study.

The Boston Globe‘s Steve Greenlee reports from the resuscitated Newport Jazz Festival that he found the weekend’s best music in the festival’s outlying precincts.