This is a plea for abandonment of an irritant that infests the English language. The phrase is “if you will.” Just now on a news program, an economic spokesman for one of the US presidential candidates (which one doesn’t matter; this is not a political comment) said, “if you will” nine times in the course of a ten-minute interview. In not one of those instances did “if you will” clarify, explain or inform. It only muddied understanding and interrupted thought. I think that I’ll adopt the practice of a friend. Whenever someone he’s speaking with says, “if you will,” he interrupts with, “I won’t.”

Two editors of The Daily Telegraph in London have corraled several hundred language misusages and obfuscations into a delightful little volume titled She Literally Exploded: The Daily Telegraph Infuriating Phrasebook. Sample entries:

 

 

 They, them, their     Instead of he, him, his/she, her. A failure of pronouns to agree with verbs is a glaring grammatical error, but is embraced to avoid specifying sex: The caller withheld their number.

Basis     Used to form a cumbersome adverbial phrase instead of an adverb: on a daily basis, instead of daily; on a voluntary basis, instead of voluntarily.

Concerns     After the stabbing, teachers’ representatives voiced concerns over classroom discipline. 

 

 

Not long ago in a Recent Listening in Brief posting, I brushed by the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra’s new CD. Brevity by no means indicated a lack of enthusiasm for the latest recorded work of that remarkable institution. Will Friedwald, the jazz critic of The New York Sun, is another VJO enthusiast. He attended the band’s recent performance at New York’s 92nd Street Y in the summer concert series overseen by pianist Bill Charlap. Here is some of what he wrote about Thad Jones and Jim McNeely:

Fifty years ago, when Jones was playing in Count Basie’s trumpet section, he had a hard time getting the Count to play his music. When he did, Basie felt obliged to “dumb” Jones’s music down — he regarded it as too complex for mainstream audiences, especially for dancers, who essentially wanted everything in foot-patting foxtrot tempo. This, naturally, was a big part of what impelled Jones to launch his own big band (in collaboration with the drummer Mel Lewis).

If Jones’s charts seemed radical in their day, when they’re compared with the more deliberately complex and concert-styled works of Mr. McNeely, they now seem amazingly straightforward and swinging. Not that Jones’s charts were simplistic or lacking in intricacy; as Mr. Charlap pointed out, “Little Pixie” is, on the surface, a basic variation on “I Got Rhythm,” but it’s got as much going on as a Stravinsky ballet.

To read all of Friedwald’s column, go here.

Summer has us in its grip. The Rifftides staff is regrouping. Assuming that you are being patient, we thank you for your patience.

Our patience will achieve more than our force. — Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France.

 

Turn thy complexion there, Patience, thou young and rose-lipp’d cherubin; Ay, there, look grim as hell! — Shakespeare, Othello

 

Patience and fortitude,

Patience and fortitude,

Patience and fortitude,

And things will come your way. — Patience and Fortitude, lyrics by Johnny Mercer

Johnny Griffin, a tenor saxophonist whose technical command set standards for his instrument and who refused to compromise his art, died today at his home in the village of Mauprevoir in France. From Ben Ratliff’s obituary of Griffin in today’s New York Times:

His height — around five feet five — earned him the nickname “The Little Giant”; his speed in bebop improvising marked him as “The Fastest Gun in the West”; a group he led with Eddie Lockjaw Davis was informally called the “tough tenor” band, a designation that was eventually applied to a whole school of hard bop tenor players.

And in general, Mr. Griffin suffered from categorization. In the early 1960s, he became embittered by the acceptance of free jazz; he stayed true to his identity as a bebopper. When he felt the American jazz marketplace had no use for him (at a time he was also having marital and tax troubles), he left for Holland.

At that point America lost one of its best musicians, even if his style fell out of sync with the times.

When the man admired as the Little Giant celebrated his eightieth birthday in May, Rifftides posted this retrospective. It includes a CD recommendation and a link to video of Griffin in action.

Lately, I’ve been missing Tom Talbert. I went into the archive to see what Rifftides had to say about him following his death a little more than three years ago. Here is one paragraph of the remembrance:

Tom died on Saturday, a month short of his eighty-first birthday. An elegant, soft-spoken man, he was an early and drastically overlooked composer, arranger and band leader on the west coast before West Coast Jazz was a category. His mid-to-late-1940s Los Angeles bands included Lucky Thompson, Dodo Marmarosa, Hal McKusick, Al Killian, Art Pepper, Claude Williamson and other musicians who were or went on to become leading soloists. Talbert’s writing for large ensembles was ingenious and subtle. The best of it, “Is Is Not Is,” as an example, rivaled George Handy’s iconoclastic work for the Boyd Raeburn band. The recordings Talbert made shortly after World War Two sound fresh today. Art Pepper fell in love with Tom’s treatment of “Over the Rainbow” and adopted the song as his signature tune.

To read the whole thing, go here. Then, see what the distinguished critic Larry Kart had to say about Talbert. To read more about Tom Talbert and hear excerpts from the National Public Radio Jazz Profiles program about him, click here.

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down… some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today—Aaron Copland

Well, American composers are the best composers. At this time in the world, we are where the energy is. We are the most diverse, the most iconoclastic, the most maverick, and the most skillful—David Del Tredici

I don’t hate work, composing is not work for me, it’s my pleasure; it’s my life. So why should I stop? If something is pleasurable and exciting and rewarding, why should one stop?—Gunther Schuller

In a 1995 Jazz Times review of a Sylvia Syms CD, I wrote:

Sylvia Syms had a vibrato like a telephone wire in a breeze. She sometimes slid around both sides of a note before she settled on it. She often added the syllable “uh” to the end of a word (“ridin’ on the moon-uh”). She could pounce on a consonant and ignore the vowel next door. Some of her power notes were pure brass and there were moments when she sounded alarmingly like Carol Channing.

Hey, nobody’s perfect, but to many discerning listeners, musicians and singers, Sylvia Syms was. This live recording has all the reasons: passion, drama, phrasing, interpretation of lyrics, a solid but flexible time sense and the ability to keep an audience in the palm of her hand.

Frank Sinatra admired Syms so much that he conducted an album for her. It has never made it to CD, but the LP is available. Syms was not the British film star of the same name, but in her treatment of songs and in the way she related to her audiences, she was a vocal actress. This 1991 appearance in England gives an idea why Sinatra called her “the world’s greatest saloon singer.” 

 

The year following that performance, Syms died of a heart attack on the bandstand of the Oak Room in the Algonquin Hotel in New York. She was seventy-four.

McFarland

In the course of writing about Gloria Cheng’s new CD (in the next exhibit), I mentioned Gary McFarland’s collaboration with Bill Evans, a basic repertoire item in every serious CD collection of twentieth century music. Bill Kirchner includes it in his survey of a dozen essential tracks from a variety of McFarland’s and others’ recordings. Kirchner’s preamble places in perspective this brilliant musician, called by Gene Lees an adult prodigy, who was taken from us in a senseless bar room prank. To see Bill’s list and comments, go to this page on Ted Gioa’s web site.

 

Claxton

The stock-in-trade of Steve Cerra’s new blog, Jazz Profiles, is cannily-selected pieces about musicians and others in jazz. His lead story at the moment is Scott Timberg’s 1999 article about William Claxton. If you recognize these photographs, you probably know about Bill Claxton. But you may not know as much as you’ll find if you go here.

 

Journalism

I haven’t written as much here recently as I should have about an important Other Matter, journalism. To say that there is upheaval in the profession, craft, calling–whatever it is–doesn’t begin to cover the uncertainty of its transition to the next phase of the business. Ah, business; yes, that’s what it is. Wherever journalism is headed, an essential element is sure to be citizen journalism. What’s that? For a discussion that includes, appropriately, a video definition, see Jay Rosen’s Press Think. Be prepared to follow several important links. Then come back to Rifftides, please.

Warne Marsh & Kenny Drew In Copenhagen (Storyville). Recorded in 1980, Marsh–a tenor sax master of subtlety and liquid imagination–plays in a quartet with Drew, one of the brightest graduates of Bud Powell’s college of bebop piano knowledge. Marsh has a few “oops” moments in note choices, but hearing him think his way out of them is part of the fun. This CD has one of Marsh’s most stimulating explorations of “Star Eyes,” a song that inspired him for decades.

The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, Monday Night Live At The Village
Vanguard (Planet Arts). In a continuum that started with Thad Jones-Mel Lewis and ran through the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra, the VJO carries on a solid tradition of elevated musicianship, unfettered swinging and good, clean fun. Imperishable arrangements by Jones, Bob Brookmeyer and Jim McNeely provide extended opportunities for the band’s galaxy of soloists. Among the players are Dick Oatts, Terell Stafford, Scott Wendholt, John Mosca, Rich Perry, Ralph Lalama, Gary Smulyan and McNeely.

Reptet, Chicken Or Beef? (Monktail). The method in their madness is sometimes concealed in over-the-top shenanigans, but there’s plenty of artistry, discipline and technique in this second CD by the Seattle sextet. They meld a wild combination of musical ingredients into tight arrangements that in some of their more structured moments recall the combo writing of Rod Levitt, in others jump bands of the early forties and, in many, nothing but Reptet.

Gloria Cheng, Piano Music of Salonen, Stucky, and Lutoslawski (Telarc). Cheng specializes in music of twentieth and twenty-first
century composers. Her brilliant playing of Witold Lutoslawski’s 1934 sonata discloses his early inspiration in the impressionistic lyricism of Ravel and Debussy, a revelation to me. Steven Stucky’s and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s pieces–written in recent years–in turn show their debts to Lutoslawski. Cheng soars through these demanding compositions with touch, articulation and dynamics that may overcome any resistance you have to contemporary “classical” music. The deftness and feeling she brings to the “Chorale” section of Salonen’s Three Preludes reminded me of something. I dug out The Gary McFarland Orchestra with Special Guest Bill Evans from 1963 and listened to “Night Images.” Sure enought, the moods, if not the styles, of Salonen’s and McFarland’s pieces complement one another perfectly. It’s all music, folks.

For previous entries in this Recent Listening series, go here and here.