Welcome to the new, improved, more functional Rifftides. Artsjournal.com commander-in-chief Doug McLennan and his team spiffed us up as the pioneer site (aka guinea pig) in reformatting all of the artsjournal.com blogs. The Rifftides staff thanks them for a dazzling makeover.

There is a change in the comments procedure. You will still click on the “Comments” link below each item. That takes you to a simple form. After you have filled in the form, you will be asked to enter a couple of words in a box before you submit the comment. If all works as planned, that will end the tsunami of spam that has plagued us for months. The Rifftides staff encourages you to try it out.

You may also correspond using the “Contact me” link in the first of the two right-hand columns. Either way, please let us know how you like the new Rifftides. For your celebratory opening-day bonus, click on this link for video of a Thelonious Monk piece by pianist Jessica Williams.

Rifftides reader George Finch sent this message in reaction to a ten-year-old article in The
Atlantic. There has been so little essential change in jazz since 1997 that The Atlantic piece might have been written last week. It consists mainly of a conversation among authors Tom Piazza, the late Eric Nissensen and the magazine’s Ryan Nally. To read the article, go here.

 Just read Eric Nissensen’s book while I was in Boston, and happened to come across this article. Haven’t read Tom Piazza’s book, but Nissensen makes a lot of good points, although he goes overboard on Wynton and his “neo-conservatism”. I didn’t know that Marsalis was powerful enough to shape jazz. Also, Nissensen’s existentialist definition of jazz as almost pure process is a tad extreme, although a good searchlight. It is a creative process that defines itself as people create the music, but the process does not take place in a void. There seems to be a tradition that they work with, and the good ones will not be content just rehashing it. There will always be ” there must be something else”.

Well, enough. I am not a musician, just trying to learn and think things out. Where do you stand visa vis their chit chat, and who are some of the musicians forging new directions in jazz?

Marsalis did not shape jazz. He shaped himself, shaped Jazz At Lincoln Center and served as a role model to young musicians. Nissensen confused that with shaping jazz. I am not aware of musicians who are forging new directions in jazz, despite blather and ceaseless promotional claims, more of them from managers, agents, publicists and record companies than from musicians.

Unless I’ve missed something (always a possibility), the last time new directions were forged was the late fifties, early sixties – Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Miles Davis. Every “departure” since then has been imitation or elaboration. Fusing jazz and Latin, jazz and klezmer, jazz and blue grass, hip-hop, classical, folk, ragas, gamelan, etc., etc., etc., does not consitute newness. It constitutes fusion. Some of it is wonderful, but none of it amounts to innovations like those of Armstrong, Young, Parker, Gillespie, Evans, Coltrane, even Coleman. Playing without guidelines, which in the final analysis is impossible and which Ornette neither did nor claimed to do, is not a new direction.

There is a powerful and apparently unquenchable notion that to be worthwhile, music must break new ground. It is difficult enough, and should be satisfying enough, to play and write music well. To say that, is not to downgrade or discourage searching and experimentation. Even searches that lead nowhere and experiments that fail can be valuable and interesting. If a new direction is being forged, we will recognize it when the forging produces something so artistically powerful that it doesn’t need public relations to announce it or critics to analyze it.

For weeks, the CD reissue of Phineas Newborn, Jr.’s 1961 album A World of Piano! has been propped up near my computer as a reminder to post something about him. It is neither his birthday (December 14, 1931) nor the anniversary of his death (May 26, 1989), and no recently discovered Newborn recording has been released, but we need no special occasion to remember his astonishing talent.

Because he was sporadically troubled by emotional instability, Newborn’s career was spotty. He never got the recognition his virtuosity might have brought him if his health had been on an even keel. Still, from the time the young man from Memphis debuted with Lionel Hampton in 1950, musicians and informed listeners were aware that he was a phenomenon. He made a splash in New York in the mid-fifties when Count Basie and the producer-promoter John Hammond gave him a boost. He worked in a duo with Charles Mingus and played with the bassist on the soundtrack of John Cassevetes’ celebrated art film Shadows. His recordings on RCA, Atlantic, Roulette, Steeplechase, Pablo and a smattering of other labels remain available and sell steadily if modestly. Few serious jazz pianists are without Newborn shelves in their collections.

Through the ’60s and ’70s he recorded a series of albums for Contemporary, at first as a sideman with Howard McGhee and Teddy Edwards, then four under his own name. Concord Records, the custodian of the Newborn Contemporary CDs, has allowed several of them to drop out of the Original Jazz Classics catalogue. Some of them have resurfaced as imports and may be found, along with other Newborns, at this web site. It would be difficult to go wrong with any of them. There are, as far as I can determine, no Phineas Newborn albums worthy of fewer than four-and-a-half stars out of five. You will find his complete discography here.

A few clips of Newborn playing with the monumental bassist Al McKibbon and drummer Kenny Dennis have shown up on You Tube. They all seem to come from the Jazz Scene USA televison program hosted by Oscar Brown, Jr., in the early 1960s. If you’re unfamiliar with Newborn, try “Oleo” for an introduction to the piston-perfect technique of his fast playing and “Lush Life” for proof that his harshest critics were wrong when they accused him of being without feeling.

As for the pronunciation of Newborn’s first name, it has been solidly established by family and close friends that he preferred “Fín-uhs” (as in “finest”).

A frisky spirit makes my trombone sing.–Chris Barber

 Never look at the trombones. You’ll only encourage them.–Richard Strauss

 

Julian Priester is a musician of uncommon breadth as a composer, leader
teacher and–most notably–a highly individual and subtle trombone soloist . Priester is quiet and self-effacing, but he could justifiably boast about having satisfied such contrasting leaders as Duke Ellington and Sun Ra, Cal Tjader and John Coltrane, Lionel Hampton and Dave Holland, Bo Diddley and Max Roach, among others. Since he immersed himself in academia thirty years ago, opportunities to hear Priester live have been rarer than when he was in the thick of the New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco jazz scenes.

 

Last night, I had had one of those rare opportunities. Priester and pianist Dawn
Clement, his teaching colleague and former student at Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts, brought their quartet to The Seasons. The concert was superb throughout, but in three extended pieces following the intermission, it went beyond that. Five years ago Priester’s CD In Deep End Dance, was striking for the rapport between the sixty-seven-year-old trombonist and the pianist then in her early twenties. Their empathy has deepened. Last night with the collaboration of bassist Geoff Harper and drummer Jose Martinez, the power of their performance built through the evening until, on the final number, the swing feeling reached a happy intensity that raised it above the “having a good night” category. The piece was Priester’s “First Nature.” For the musicians and the audience, it became a memorable experience in ¾ time, one nobody in the room is likely to forget.  

 

Last year, Priester, Clement, Harper and Martinez recorded much of the music they played last night. Harper told me that “First Nature” reached the same height at the record session in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio as it did at The Seasons. That CD will be out later this year. I look forward to it.

 

Coincidentally, two new CDs involving Clement arrived a few hours before last night’s concert. One is her own album, Break, with drummer Matt Wilson and bassist Dean Johnson. The other is soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom’s Mental Weather, also with Wilson, and bassist Mark Helias. I’ll be listening further to both, but a couple of hearings of each persuade me further that Dawn Clement is one of the most interesting pianists to emerge in years. In the precision and interaction of her work with Bloom, she fully employs both her classical technique and her jazz soul. It seems to me that in Bloom’s extensive discography, Mental Weather is one of the finest things she has done. 

Moscow, Idaho
The program bloat that kept some Friday concertgoers in their seats until early Saturday dissipated by Saturday night. The final Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival concert was trim and full of excitement provided by two big bands. The ad hoc performance hall in a field house the size of a dirigible hangar was outfitted with dance floors on either side. Throughout the evening, the floors were crowded with members of the hip-hop generation grooving to music with roots in the swing era.
The Lionel Hampton band and the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra performed separately and together. The Hamptonians included members closely associated with Hampton before his death in 2002, among them the impressive young trombonist Clarence Banks, vibraharpist Chuck Redd and the entertaining drummer Wally “Gator” Watson. In addition to its instrumentals, the band backed pianist and singer Dee Daniels in two soul-inflected vocals and Jon Hendricks scatting that most basic of Hampton jump tunes, “Hey Bob A Rebop.”
Artistic director John Clayton, his alto saxophonist brother Jeff and Jeff Hamilton, the festival’s apparently inexhaustible house drummer, unleashed their explosive big band in a set alive with deep swing and superb solo work. Charles Owens and Ricky Woodard had a testosteronic tenor battle on “Jazz Party.” 89-year-old Snooky Young
riveted the audience–and his fellow band members–with his plunger trumpet solo on “I Be Serious ’bout Dem Blues,” which also had exciting choruses by Jeff Clayton, Woodard, the veteran trombonist George Bohanon and the 21-year-old guitar discovery Graham Dechter. John Clayton dedicated “Squatty Roo” to the late bassist Ray Brown, who for years was a mainstay of the Hampton festival. Trumpeters Clay Jenkins and Gilbert Castellanos were impressive and distinctively different from one another on that classic Johnny Hodges “I Got Rhythm” variant. The piece incorporated a passage of quiet intensity from the rhythm section of Hamilton, pianist Tamir Hendelman and bassist Christoph Luty, who in their other life are the Jeff Hamilton Trio. Singer Kevin Mahogany was at the top of his bass-baritone game sitting in on “Route 66” and “One For My Baby.”
Following intermission and the introduction of outstanding student soloists from the Hampton Festival’s extensive educational activities, came a rare event. The big bands together played two of the arrangements from First Time!, the 1961 recording by the Count Basie and Duke Elllington bands. Ellington’s and Billy Strayhorn’s “Battle Royal” (those “Rhythm” changes again) was highlighted by a good-natured, often hilarious, drum competition between Watson and Hamilton. In the gorgeous Thad Jones ballad “To You,” George Bohanon soloed movingly in the trombone spot filled by Quentin “Butter” Jackson on the Ellington-Basie recording.
Finally (well, almost finally), Chuck Redd, playing Lionel Hampton’s vibes, led the way into “Flyin’ Home,” thirty-two men swinging hard on Hamp’s theme song. As they eased into “What A Wonderful World,” backing the recorded voice of Hampton singing, the big screens in the hall showed a montage of photos of this year’s festival performers in action. Then the bands segued into “Happy Birthday” in honor of Hampton’s 100th and the crowd of 5,000 joined in. The montage dissolved into video and still photographs of Hampton through the years as confetti and streamers wafted down onto the crowd, sparkling in the lights that swept the auditorium. It was a spectacular finish.
As for the reason Lionel Hampton involved himself with the festival in the first place, after the festival University of Idaho Provost Doug Baker summed up the importance of the educational component,.

The clinics and competitions are the major part of the festival for the students. It is inspiring to see them grow during the week and to see the joy of the musicians teaching them.

Being among those 10,000 children, watching them in rapt attention, hearing them play, dodging them in hallways, on campus paths and downtown streets as they darted from event to event, made for a stimulating, rejuvenating, week.

Snooky Young, whose one solo at the Lionel Hampton Festival was a highlight of the entire week, has been exciting people with his trumpet playing since he was a teenaged member of the Wilberforce Collegians. During the swing era, when it was not unusual for sidemen to become famous, he was one of the best known members of Jimmie Lunceford’s influential band. He went on to work with Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Les Hite, Benny Carter, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis band, Gerald Wilson, Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland and the Tonight Show band. Young was the prototype of the great lead trumpeter who was also a distinguished soloist. One memorable night on the Tonight Show, Johnny Carson wished Young a happy birthday and brought him down front to play and sing. You can see and hear him in his triumphal moment in this video clip.

Another independent book store is dying of competition from the internet and chain stores and from the rising cost of big city real estate. This time, the victim is one of the world’s great book stores. At the end of April, Dutton’s, in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, will be no more. That will be a sad day for dedicated readers and for thousands of authors, including this one, who launched their books with signings at Dutton’s. The friendly store on San Vicente Boulevard is where Jazz Matters first saw the light of day. From today’s story in The Los Angeles Times:

In an interview, author John Rechy, who recently appeared at Dutton’s for his memoir, “About My Life and the Kept Woman,” spoke of the store’s importance.
“Every non-million-selling writer has had his coming-out there,” he said. “They had every single book that you would want.”
Author Carolyn See described the store’s decline and looming closing as “just sickening.”
She said she prized the spot as a neighborhood meeting place, not just for literati but also for local dog walkers. “If you weren’t the drinking kind,” See said, “you could go there the way you’d go to a bar.”

To read the whole story, go here. Condolences to Doug Dutton, whose love of books, readers and writers is a calling, not just a business. For more than two decades, his store has been a refuge from a publishing industry and big box stores that market books the way McDonald’s markets hamburgers.

Your itinerant correspondent is back from the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival, catching his breath, attacking stacks of mail and, generally, taking care of business. We’ll have a final installment about the festival in the next posting, probably tomorrow.

In the meantime, a diversion. A serious listener among you discloses that he was unaware of the uncanny similarity of Thelonious Monk’s “Straight No Chaser” to the main theme of Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. For him, and for anyone who knows the Monk piece but not the Strauss, I recommend a National Public Radio feature about Till Eulenspiegel. It begins with Los Angeles Philharmonic music director Esa Peka Salonen discussing the piece and leads into a full performance of one of the most delightful compositions of the twentieth century. The big, probably unanswerable, question is whether the similarity is coincidental or Monk was inspired by Strauss. For the NPR program, click here and then click on “Hear The Performance.” The “Straight No Chaser” soundalike theme comes at 3:59 into the clip.
For a video performance of “Straight No Chaser” by the Cannonball Adderley Quintet, go here.

I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer. — Richard Strauss
I don’t conside myself a musician who has achieved perfection and can’t develop any further. But I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself. — Thelonious Monk