Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Freddie Hubbard Is Gone

Freddie Hubbard died this morning in the Sherman Oaks district of Los Angeles. He was hospitalized there since he had a heart attack on November 26. Hubbard was 70. 

From the trumpeter’s first recording with the Montgomery Brothers in 1958, it 

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was evident that reports coming out of Indianapolis were true: the city had produced a remarkable trumpet player, one who might equal another twenty-year-old, Lee Morgan. After his arrival in New York, Hubbard quickly proved the point. The two were the enfants terribles of their generation of post-bop trumpeters. Hubbard succeeded Morgan in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, then went on to a solo career. Hubbard and Morgan admired and, in one celebrated recording, challenged one another. 

The precision, lyricism and harmonic ingenuity of Hubbard’s playing flourished on a wave of power. Initially, there was a large component of Clifford Brown in his work, but his gifts and his outsized personality overrode any possibility that Brown or anyone else, would dominate his style. There were low points in Hubbard’s career: when he answered the seductive call of supposed riches and made a few tepid crossover albums for Columbia, and after 1992 when his embouchure suffered permanent damage from an infected lip. Nonetheless, the dozens of recordings he made under his own name average high in quality, including the sets for Creed Taylor’s CTI label that took a pounding from many critics. The early Hubbard albums on the Blue Note label, packed with virtuosity and excitement, are uniformly excellent. Some of his most compelling solos are on other peoples’ dates, notably so with Bill Evans on Interplay and Oliver Nelson on The Blues And The Abstract Truth. 
After the difficulty with his chops, Hubbard was frequently featured in concert and on recordings with the New Jazz Composers Octet, a cooperative band spearheaded by trumpeter and arranger David Weiss, who idolized Hubbard and later became his manager. I heard them at the Vienne Festival in France in 2000. The band sounded wonderful and was clearly pulling for him, but Hubbard struggled on his signature pieces “Sky Dive,” “Red Clay” and “One of Another Kind.” I wrote about the festival for Gene Lees’ JazzLetter. 

Freddie Hubbard, the last great trumpet stylist and innovator in jazz, has been through a miserable few years. He failed to care for an infected split lip and attempted, with characteristic Hubbard bravado, to overblow through the problem. Surgery made it worse. He told me that royalties from his compositions have brought him a comfortable living, but that not being able to play well has kept him frustrated. For him there is agony in the solution, the dogged hard work to rebuild his embouchure. Although he knows that playing long tones saved other trumpeters, he said, “Man, that sh– is so boring.” Hubbard’s constitution and metabolism militate against boredom.

The compulsion to power his way through good times and bad resulted in glorious music and monumental frustration. I last spoke with Freddie in 2006 at a reception for National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters. He was in good spirits, if rather subdued, and seemed to have accepted that his chops weren’t coming back. We sat around remembering good times together in New Orleans and he favored me with a few unprintable Art Blakey stories. Later at a post-function concert that evolved into a sort of jam session, he was asked to sit in. He declined. 
Obituaries are beginning to appear on web sites. Newspapers will have them in the morning. This one from Billboard has the essential biographical details. 
No obituary can transmit the authority, muscle and emotional reach of Hubbard’s playing. Here he is in 1984 with Blakey, pianist Walter Davis, Jr. and bassist Buster Williams playing Benny Golson’s “I Remember  Clifford.”
  
To see and hear Freddie Hubbard twenty-two years earlier, when he was the fieriest member of The Jazz Messengers, visit this Rifftides archive installment.

Progress (+ -) Report

My PC-to-iMac conversion project is coming along nicely. I should have the new computer figured out any year now. It will be nice if that year turns out to be 2009.

 

Compatible Quotes: Computers

User, n. The word computer professionals use when they mean “idiot.” ~Dave Barry 

But they are useless. They can only give you answers. ~Pablo Picasso 

Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all. ~John F. Kennedy

Weekend Extra: Lester Young

With so little video of Lester Young, every foot of him performing on film is precious. Loren Schoenberg calls attention to a performance by Young that showed up recently on You Tube. Whoever submitted the clip from a kinescope of Art Ford’s Jazz Party television program provided no information beyond Young’s name. Ray Bryant is the pianist. The bassist is Vinnie Burke, who was on many of Ford’s shows. Does anyone recognize the drummer? We catch a glimpse of cornetist Rex Stewart, who does not play with Young on “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.” The sound is about a beat out of synchronization with the video. At the end of the piece, Ford introduces Sylvia Syms, whose song is chopped aborning. Such are the vagaries of You Tube; you take what you get. In this case, we are grateful to get Lester. This was most likely 1958 or ’59, shortly before he died.  

    

           

To be reminded how rich jazz was with major musicians fifty years ago and to see a substantial section of one of Ford’s broadcasts, click here.

CDs: Bley And Silver

While probing the mysteries of the Macintosh universe and meeting with frustrations, roadblocks and delights (man, this thing is FAST), I have continued to listen. Here are impressions of two of the CDs that have kept me company during my slam-bang self-tutorial and late-night iMac school. 


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Carla Bley And Her Remarkable Big Band: Appearing Nightly (Watt/ECM). Somehow, this album got by me when it came out in late summer. Since it arrived a few days ago, I’ve listened to it repeatedly, chuckling, occasionally laughing out loud and shaking my head at Bley’s ingenuity and the skill and good humor of her soloists. It had been too long since my last Carla Bley fix.  

Briefly, then, the premise of these pieces seems to be that nostalgia is what it used to be, only more fun. The title composition, “Appearing Nightly at the Black Orchid,” was a commission from the 2005 Monterey Jazz Festival. It begins with Bley unaccompanied at the piano. She synthesizes a set that she might have played at the Monterey bar where she worked as a teenaged cocktail pianist in the 1950s. In one minute and twenty-seven seconds, she melds into a coherent whole, phrases from “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “My Foolish Heart,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “Night and Day,” “Here’s That Rainy Day,” “Stella By Starlight” and “Sweet and Lovely.” Then the suite begins. Whether or not it fufills the CD booklet’s tongue-in-cheek claim that it is “A Carla Bley Masterpiece in Four Parts,” it is serious jazz orchestration at a high level. The leader’s usual array of superior soloists has a field day with it. 
Bley was commissioned by a band on the Italian island of Sardinia to write the CD’s first two pieces, “Greasy Gravy” and “Awful Coffee,” around the theme of food. There are plenty of allusions to support the proposition…”Salt Peanuts,” “Watermelon Man,” “Tea for Two,” “You’re the Cream in My Coffee, ” “Chopsticks,” “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries” and “Hey, Pete, Let’s Eat Mo’ Meat.” Bley’s “Someone to Watch,” also loaded with quotes, and Ray Noble’s “I Hadn’t Anyone ‘Til You” wrap up the album. The recording took place before an audience at a night club in Paris, so, naturally, Bley felt obligated to work in an orchestrated quote from “April in Paris.” 
Lest I leave you with the impression that the CD is a variety of musical vaudeville, I assure you that there is a master arranger at work here. For all the fun and games, Bley’s canny use of voicings often makes thirteen horns sound like at least four more. She builds dramatic contrast between the horn sections one moment and achieves tight integration among them the next. There is a surprise of one kind or another around nearly every corner.
Bley’s settings for soloists inspire their creativity and swing. Trumpeter Lew Soloff, trombonist Gary Valente, drummer Billy Drummond and saxophonists Andy Sheppard, Wolfgang Puschnig and Julian Arguelles stand out. Steve Swallow drives the band and provides much of its texture and color. Playing electric bass, he retains the sound, soul and propulsiveness he had on the acoustic instrument he left behind decades ago, while gaining a guitar-like fluency in the upper register. He is a remarkable musician. 
I don’t know whether this CD is a masterpiece. I do know that it’s an hour of superbly written and performed music that can lift spirits. 

Horace Silver And The Jazz Messengers (Blue Note). Horace Silver made a stir with Stan

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Getz and with his own trio album in the first half of the 1950s. But this is the set that sent him into the consciousness of listeners around the world when it was released in 1955. Silver’s infectious piano playing, the brilliance and directness of his compositions and the chemistry of the quintet he co-led with drummer Art Blakey propelled him into a successful career that has lasted more than half a century. 
The album is one of the pillars of the hard bop movement and a de riguer item in any halfway serious collection. Trumpeter Kenny Dorham and tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley, iconic soloists, constituted one of the great horn partnerships of the fifties; Silver, Blakey and bassist Doug Watkins a rhythm section that inspired musicians everywhere. Silver’s eight compositions, including “The Preacher,” “Doodlin’,” “Creepin’ In,” and “Room 608,” are classics, basic repertoire items for serious jazz players and listeners. If you are one of the thousands of travelers stranded by the Northern Hemisphere’s dreadful holiday weather, I wish you the good luck of having Horace Silver and Jazz Messengers on your iPod.

The Bill Evans Christmas Serenade

Christmas week is underway, time to listen to the only vocal performance Bill Evans is know to have recorded. I wish I had thought of posting the audio clip, but full credit goes to Jan Stevens of The Bill Evans Web Pages. Rifftides reader Russ Neff called it to our attention. Click on this link. When you get to the Bill Evans site, click on the word “Here” in the first panel. Prepare to smile.

Weekend Extra: Two Violins With “Four Brothers”

All I can tell you about this is that the violinists are Katica Illenyi and Csaba Illenyi.The Hungarian Wikipedia entry did not help me learn more. I only wish that Jimmy Giuffre had heard this version of his best-known composition and arrangement. 

             

Thanks to Bobby Shew for calling this to our attention.

There Will Be A Brief Pause

Posting will resume after I have spent a little time getting to know my new iMac. After beginning on a KayPro 2 and spending more than twenty years with PCs, I have switched to Macintosh. So far, it is exhilarating, but there is a lot to learn. I feel like the audience in the commercial that announced the advent of the Mac twenty-four years ago.

 

Dave Brubeck, 88 Keys, 88 Years, Another Honor

On Tuesday, Dave Brubeck was inducted into the California Hall of Fame along with elevenBrubeck.jpg others including actors Jane Fonda and Jack Nicholson, fitness maven Jack LaLanne, musician and producer Quincy Jones, chef Alice Waters and — posthumously — Theodore Geiss (Dr. Seuss), scientist Linus Pauling, architect Julia Morgan, and Dorothea Lange, the photographer best known for documenting the human toll of the Great Depression.

Brubeck turned eighty-eight on December 6. Paul Conley of Capital Public Radio in Sacramento, California, spoke with him yesterday about the honor and about his plans. To hear the conversation and see Conley’s video of Brubeck, click here.