The Portland Jazz Festival’s news conference yesterday yielded no information about performers for the revived festival. A pledge of major support from Alaska Airlines on Tuesday brought the festival back from the dead. The demise of the event was announced in early September, but Alaska Air came zooming in “out of the blue,” as artistic director Bill Royston put it, to resuscitate the festival.

At the news conference, festival officials did not name headliners or other musicians for the festival, which is restored to its original dates, February 13-22, 2009. No time was set for the roster to be put in place. Royston’s festival co-founder Sarah Bailen Smith said, “We are putting on our track shoes. We are contacting our landlord, insurance company, all the artists and agents in New York and artists across the world.”

The bailout is a big enough municipal deal in Portland that The Oregonian has an editorial about it in this morning’s edition.

Rifftides Washington, DC, correspondent John Birchard went to the city’s leading jazz club to catch a veteran pianist. Here is his review.

Jamaican pianist Monty Alexander has arrived at Washington, DC’s Blues Alley for a four-night stand. If the US is looking for a source of renewable energy, we need seek no further than the bandstand in that venerable Georgetown jazz joint.

Gesturing to the wall behind
the piano, Alexander told the opening night audience that he was happy to return to Blues Alley. “I’m personally familiar with all these bricks,” he said. The gray-haired pianist is backed by bassist Hassan J.J. Shakur and drummer Herlin Riley. The trio swung the Frank Sinatra vehicle “Come Fly With Me” with extraordinary vigor, setting the tone for the first of two sets. Before the cheers could die down, the pianist was already laying out the rhythm for one of the calypsos inspired by his West Indies background. It turned out to be “Mama, Look-a Boo Boo.”

One of the most attractive items in Alexander’s eclectic repertoire is the Johnny Mandel-Paul Williams ballad “Close Enough for Love.” For the most part, he treated the song gently, but couldn’t resist sliding into medium four-four time for a few choruses before returning to ballad tempo. That’s the thing about Monty Alexander — the guy seems to have inexhaustible energy and he is prone to turning every tune into a tour de force. If James Brown was the hardest working man in show business, ol’ Monty is not far behind. In Riley and Shakur, he has a pair of kindred souls who exude joy in the romping, stomping style of their leader. Alexander is a crowd pleaser in the best sense of the term. A look around the club during his performance revealed no furrowed brow or look of glazed-eye boredom. The folks in attendance were having a good time, swept up in the music and getting their (considerable) money’s worth.

The Monty Alexander Trio appears at Blues Alley in two sets per evening through Sunday. (Oct 5)

                                                                                  –John Birchard

The Portland Jazz Festival reports that it is not dead after all. Nearly a month ago, the festival announced that a lack of major sponsorship and funding caused it to be canceled. Earlier this year, the telephone company Qwest dropped out as the event’s primary sponsor. With the economy limping, fuel costs high and revenues pinched, airlines are not thriving, but Alaska Air Lines is flying to the festival’s rescue, aided by a coalition of former and new sponsors. Alaska Air has promised to provide $50,000 a year for two years. Qwest has agreed to a contribution of $5,000. The resuscitated 2009 festival, February 13-22, will be built around the 70th anniversary of Blue Note Records.

Co-founder and artistic director Bill Royston (pictured) told the Portland Oregonian that Alaska’s offer came “out of the blue.” In a news release, his co-founder Sarah Bailen Smith added, “I’ve been astonished at how incredibly supportive this community has been since our announcement. Portland recognizes the value of the arts. It makes me proud to live here.”

Headliners for the 2009 festival were not announced. Royston told Rifftides that the festival will hold a news conference this afternoon. For details of the rescue package, see this story in this morning’s Oregonian.

It was nearly dawn after a round — several rounds — of music and conviviality during the 1969 New Orleans Jazz Festival. A few of us were sitting on the balcony of Bobby Hackett’s hotel room on Bourbon Street swapping stories and thinking it might be about time to call it a night. Hackett’s guests, in alphabetical order, were Count Basie, Jack Bradley, Willis Conover, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Paul Desmond and I. Dropping those names is a bit disturbing because all of their owners but Jack and I are memories. There was a good deal of laughter and — to use a phrase I wish hadn’t fallen out of fashion — shuckin’ and jivin’. We decided to extend the party and order breakfast from room service. Before we adjourned, we toasted the sun rising over the rooftops of the French Quarter. That was a good night.

Rifftides readers no doubt recognize all of those names except, perhaps, Bradley’s. Jack is a photographer, quite a good one. He used to do a fair amount of writing for jazz publications. I’ve never been entirely sure how he supported himself; probably not by writing about jazz and shooting pictures of musicians. I used to see him occasionally in New Orleans and, later, fairly often in New York. Here, Louis Armstrong and Jack are pictured together in 1963. I knew that this garrulous and engaging man was close to Armstrong and collected Armstrong memorabilia.  Until Niko Koppel’s story in the Sunday New York Times, I didn’t know the extent of that closeness or his collecting obsession.

Mr. Bradley archived just about anything from Armstrong that he could save — discarded letters, eyeglasses, handkerchiefs, even clothes that did not fit properly after Armstrong lost weight. In addition, he paid Armstrong’s valet and housekeeper for goods and ephemera that the musician gave to them. “It was important to preserve everything that he spoke and he did,” Mr. Bradley said. “He was the genius of the 20th century.”

Now, Jack is passing his extensive Armstrong collection to an institution that will preserve it and show it to the public. To read the whole story, go here.

If you need a reminder of why it is easy to be obsessed with Louis, watch this video. It’s also a nice way to remember Paul Newman.

Please see the center column for the new batch of recommendations. It took a while, but you may find that they were worth waiting for.

Researching an article that involves Ernestine Anderson, I came across this video of her rehearsing in Hungary in 1994 with Milt Jackson. It is one of several YouTube clips from the same occasion. The Hungarian musicians are not identified.

Alto saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón is one of twenty-five winners of 2008 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowships. The grants were announced today. Each of the awards is for $500,000 over five years, to be used in any way the recipient decides. Although not officially described as “genius grants” by the MacArthur foundation, that is what the fellowships have come to be called.

This year’s fellows include writers, scientists, an architect, a farmer, and artists in various fields. Zenón was cited for “drawing from a variety of jazz idioms and the indigenous music of his native Puerto Rico to create a new language of complex, yet accessible sounds that overflow with emotion.”

For a Rifftides review of Zenón’s most recent recording, go here. In the video below, Zenón is with pianist Luis Perdomo, bassist Hans Glawischnig and drummer Henry Cole playing for a good-natured New York audience.

             

Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker, was chosen by MacArthur for “offering both highly specialized and casual readers new ways of thinking about the music of the past and its place in our future.” Ross has a first-class blog called The Rest Is Noise.

For biographical sketches and photographs of all twenty-five MacArthur fellows, go here. If you are interested in applying for one of next year’s grants, forget it. Candidates don’t know that they are in the running. They are chosen in secret by a committee whose members’ identities are also secret. Some years ago when I had business at the MacArthur Foundation headquarters in Chicago, I jokingly offered to fill out an application. The executive director said he would be glad to put me on a list of those to be notified when they are not chosen.

I know, I know; Doug’s Picks is overdue for new entries. They’ll be coming along, but the Rifftides staff is engaged in a number of projects, including preparation of a reading from Poodie James, with strings. More about that later. Among other things, I’m writing the notes for a forthcoming CD co-led by Charlie Shoemake and Terry Trotter. It is a delight. I’m not at liberty to tell you about it except to say that its title is Inside and the music, uncompromising but accessible, is a delight. It will be released later this year.

In any case, since Norma Winstone’s latest CD is one of the current picks (see the center column), it seems fitting to let you know that Bill Kirchner (pictured) has prepared a Winstone spectacular for his next broadcast, which will be streamed on the internet. Here is his announcement:

Recently, I taped my next one-hour show for the “Jazz From The Archives” series. Presented by the Institute of Jazz Studies, the series runs every Sunday on WBGO-FM (88.3).

Britain’s Norma Winstone (b. 1941) is not exactly a “well kept secret” (though that’s the title of one of her albums), but she’s much less known than she deserves to be, given her stature as one of the finest vocalists in current jazz. She’s capable of singing everything from standards to challenging original material. And she’s a first-rate lyricist as well.

We’ll hear Winstone with trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, reed players Tony Coe and Klaus Gesing, pianists Jimmy Rowles, John Taylor, and Glauco Venier, bassist George Mraz, drummer Joe LaBarbera, and Wheeler’s big band.

The show will air this Sunday, September 28, from 11 p.m. to midnight, Eastern Daylight Time. NOTE: If you live outside the New York City metropolitan area, WBGO also broadcasts on the Internet at www.wbgo.org.

Dave Frishberg’s friendship and collaborations with Dick Sudhalter go back more than three decades. He sent this appreciation.

I want to say something about Dick Sudhalter and the sadness of his passing . I’m staggered by Sudhalter’s contributions to jazz literature and criticism. There are plenty of good writers who write about the music, but for my money Sudhalter and Benny Green stand out as the enduring literary giants of the genre. Both of them were involved with “classic” jazz and swing music, both of them were excellent professional musicians, and both of them could, with authority and elegance, write critically about the heart of music . They were widely informed and narrow-minded — requisites of good criticism, as I see it. My favorite jazz literature: Green’s The Reluctant Art and Sudhalter’s Lost Chords. I find myself going back again and again to those books and never failing to enjoy them.

You find Sudhalter’s writing in the unlikeliest places. In the series of large spiral-bound piano albums published by Reader’s Digest in 1980s , e.g. Treasury of Best Loved Songs, and Popular Songs That Will Live Forever, I found the annotations to be sophisticated and beautifully written. Sure enough–turned out to be by Sudhalter. (Incidentally, the piano arrangements in this series are all by Dan Fox, and they are easy to play and very hip.) Sudhalter also annotated a lot of the Mosaic reissue packages, and his comments are essential to the enjoyment of those collections. Richard wrote with power, grace, and precision; his literary style just sang right out as if it were music. He sure will be missed.

Please do not miss Terry Teachout’s newly posted remembrance, in poetry and video, of Richard M. Sudhalter. Go here.