Music allows the great opportunity to play with people who turned you on and you love.

To most jazz critics I was basically Kenny G.

It turns out that rumors of the imminent death of the IAJE were accurate. Following its financially disastrous 2008 conference in Toronto, the International Association of Jazz Education has canceled its 2009 conference and is about to file for bankruptcy. The huge meeting of musicians, educators, producers, record company executives and others from every precinct of jazz was to have been held in Seattle next January.

The IAJE grew from a music educators’ collective into a behemoth whose organizational weaknesses allowed it to topple of its own weight. For years, there have been grumblings among musicians, critics, bookers and producers that IAJE had gained too much power over careers and the business of jazz. Until Toronto, few knew of the fragility of the organization.

Be on the alert for attempts to fill the role of an outfit that, for all its faults, once a year brought together from around the world a substantial portion of the jazz community. Seattle Times music critic Paul deBarros, a veteran IAJE watcher, wrote in today’s paper:

In a good year, the conference attracts 7,000 to 8,000 people, a must-attend for anyone involved in jazz.

Rumors that the organization was in trouble surfaced after this year’s dramatically underattended conference in Toronto, down 40 percent.

To read all of de Barros’s article, click here.

Carol Sloane’s individualism as a singer grows, in part, out of her adoration of Carmen McRae. In the confusion of the past week, I overlooked Sloane’s tribute to McRae on what would have been Carmen’s eighty-eighth birthday. Here is some of what she wrote:

When she laughed, the room vibrated; when she spewed venom, people, animals and birds hastily fled the scene.

Carol’s assessment nails the yin and yang of the phenomenon that was Carmen McRae. To read all of her tribute to McRae and see the stately photograph she chose to accompany it, go here.

My own encounters with Carmen were few but unforgettable. The first was in 1956. Gus Mancuso and I were in San Francisco for his first recording session for Fantasy. We had just checked into a musicians’ hotel in the Tenderloin, not far from the Blackhawk.
We were in the elevator on the way up to our floor. The car stopped and in walked a woman looking like this. She rode one floor and got out.

“My God,” Gus said after the door closed, “that was Carmen McRae.”

“Why didn’t you say something to her?” I said.

“I couldn’t,” he told me. “I was speechless.”

At the New Orleans Jazz Festival in 1968 or ’69, I was assigned to introduce McRae at a concert. Before her set we spent a few moments chatting. After the concert, we socialized briefly with other people. Four years later, I had moved to New York. Late one night after I got off the air, I went up to Harlem where McRae was appearing at the Club Barron with her trio. I arrived as she was starting the last song of a set, went to the bar and ordered a drink. A couple of large men who were not quite sober looked me over, uttered comments that could not have been interpreted as words of warm greeting, and began edging closer.

The moment the song ended, Carmen walked briskly over to me and said, “We know each other, don’t we. It’s good to see you again.” She aimed the power of her glare at the aggressive welcoming committee. “Let’s have a seat,” she said. We went to a table. Before the break ended, Dizzy Gillespie walked in, carrying his trumpet case. He joined us and when the next set started, Dizzy sat in with Carmen. It was an unforgettable collaboration.

When that set was over and it was time for me to go, Carmen asked one of the heavies who had started moving in on me to see that I got into a cab. He escorted me to the street, hailed a taxi and waited until the cab pulled away.

When I next saw Carmen, several years later, I said, “I owe you one.” She smiled softly. And that was that.

The long computer nightmare and its peripheral bad dreams are over. Well, almost over. In the resurrection and reinstallation of the machine and the replacement of a connected printer/scanner/fax that blew out in the process, one of my two telephone lines crashed. That, however, is a small matter compared with relief that the hard drive lives. Not to have had backup was foolish. I was fortunate to survive what could have been a massive loss of files.

Hard drives are fragile, fickle, unpredictable creatures. If you don’t have backup for yours, please get it. There are lots of options. My computer technician and savior recommended Simple Drive, a satellite hard drive made by a company called SimpleTech. Full disclosure: neither my tech nor I has stock, relatives or financial interest in the company.

Tomorrow, onward and upward with never a backward glance at the recent unpleasantness.

To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer – Farmers Alamanac, 1978

The only thing God didn’t do to Job was give him a computer – I.F. Stone

The doctor reports that the computer did not have heart failure or, as I feared, a complete loss of memory, just a clogged artery. He hopes that it will be recovered enough to get back to work tomorrow (Tuesday) or the day after. Thanks to all for your concern.

The Rifftides main computer crashed today. The ECTs (Emergency Computer Technicians) took it to the hospital for extensive tests. Results won’t be known for at least three days. It may need a heart transplant and has no health insurance, but suggestions of a benefit concert are premature.

This message is coming to you by means of a Big Chief tablet and a number 3 pencil. The Rifftides Staff hopes to be back in full operation no later than Monday. Please be patient. In the meantime, we refer you to the archive. Click on “Archive” in the center column. There are all kinds of blasts from the past there. For starters, here’s one of the earliest.

In his eighty-eighth year, Dave Brubeck is going to have to add another shelf to his trophy room–or another trophy room. His most recent honor came yesterday from the US State Department. Here’s a paragraph from the Reuters report in The New York Times.

“As a little girl I grew up on the sounds of Dave Brubeck because my dad was your biggest fan,” U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said at the ceremony where Brubeck received the department’s Ben Franklin Award for public diplomacy.

To read the whole story, click here.

It is admirable that the State Department is honoring Brubeck for the valuable cultural diplomacy he and his quartet practiced with government sponsorship as recently as the 1980s. But what is the policy of The United States today in using culture to reach out to the world? Sad to report, official cultural diplomacy is largely dormant at a time when the country’s international image is at its lowest point in decades. I recently delivered a speech entitled “Jazz Roots In The Bill Of Rights.” Cultural diplomacy was not the main theme of the talk, but this paragraph touched on it.

Not long after the Berlin Wall came down, the United States Information Agency asked me to go to Eastern Europe as part of its US Speakers program. That program no longer exists because the USIA no longer exists. The Clinton administration killed the agency in a budget move. The function shifted to the State Department and under the Bush administration, nothing has been done with it. Cultural diplomacy exists on paper, but it is not being practiced. That’s a shame because there is intense interest in the world in how democracy and the concept of individual freedom work. We have laid aside a tremendously effective tool for making friends in the world by the simple, inexpensive means of sending Americans abroad to talk about America.

Let us hope that the next administration will understand the importance and impact of what the USIA did–when there was a USIA–and revive the agency or create one like it.

Have I mentioned that Dave Frishberg has a web site? He has. I am putting a link to it high on the Other Places list in the center column. The site has a discography, lots of photographs and a catalog of the songs he’s written, from “Wallflower Lonely, Cornflower Blue” (1963) to “Who Do You Think You Are, Jack Dempsey?” (2004). It also has a Written Word section that includes a page called Colleagues And Characters, who include the unlikely–George Maharis, Scatman Crouthers, Malcolm X, Ava Gardner–and the likely, Carmen McRae, Benny Goodman, Kenny Davern, Ben Webster.

Ben was very emotional and his feelings were close to the surface. I knew that Ben was famous for unpredictable outbursts of anger and violence, but I never saw him pull any of those stunts,
perhaps because he was trying to abstain from hard liquor at that time. He did drink beer–Rheingold. When he drank he was quick to weep. He would ask Richard (Davis) to play solos with the bow, and then he would stand listening with tears rolling down his cheeks. He would get tearful when he spoke of his mother. Once he told me that he missed Jimmy Rowles, who was back in California, and as he told me about his friendship with Rowles he began to cry. One night at the Half Note we heard radio reports of rioting in Harlem, and Ben wept openly as he listened.

To reach Colleagues and Characters, click here, but take my advice: if you have an appointment soon or were thinking of getting some Z’s, wait a while. Frishberg is hard to put down.

After he saw the Al and Zoot post (two exhibits down the page), the fine singer Bob Stewart suggested that we watch another video of Al Cohn performing with him. It captures a moment of spontaneity that creates a surprise and a big smile from Cohn. The rhythm section is Hank Jones, George Mraz and Ronnie Bedford. To see the clip, click here.

From the same engagement, Stewart sings “Caravan,” which contains a typical Al Cohn solo: perfect.