Don Redman was an important big band arranger and leader in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. He was not a bebop musician, but Redman may well have provided a catalyst for the creation of modern jazz in Eastern Europe following World War Two. With the help of pianist Emil Viklický and the venerable Czech jazz expert Dr. Lubomír Doruzka in Prague, I have been researching the emergence of bebop in Czechoslovakia. I have much to discover and verify, but it is clear that music pioneered by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie appeared in Prague after Redman’s European tour in 1946, possibly because of it. The band included tenor saxophonist Don Byas, a key figure as the music evolved from swing to bop. Assuming that the band personnel was the same as that on this recording made in Switzerland during the 1946 European tour, Redman’s group also contained the young pianist Billy Taylor, rapidly developing as a bop player.

REDMANBYASTAYLOR

Jan Hammer, Sr., and other members of the Kamil Behounek big band from Prague heard the Redman band in Nürnberg, Germany, where they were also playing. Apparently, the American and Czech bands appeared opposite one another and the musicians interacted. One can imagine Byas, Taylor and others in Redman’s outfit showing the young Czechs the harmonic and rhythmic mysteries of bebop. Soon, Hammer and others formed a bebop quintet that played regularly in Prague’s Café Pygmalion until the Communist coup in 1948 resulted in a cultural freeze that sent jazz underground. Thanks to Dr. Doruzka, I have heard three pieces the group recorded in 1948. Their grasp of the idiom and level of achievement are impressive. Solos by Dunca Brož compare favorably with the playing of the best young American bop trumpeters of the period. The arranging in a piece by Brož called “Å ero” (“Slight Darkness”) is first-rate jazz impressionism. As I learn more about this intriguing period in European jazz, I will share it with you.

In the meantime, here’s a reminder about Don Redman: He was an arranger for Fletcher Henderson in the 1920s and a had a fine big band of his own in the ’30s. He was an accomplished alto saxophonist and clarinet player and always hired good musicians. He wrote two hits, “Cherry” and “Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good To You.” Redman was active through the 1950s and recorded with a big band as late as 1959. He died in 1964. I found one piece of video on YouTube. It is contrived nonsense in the usual style of Hollywood soundies of the period, but under the goofy duo singing “Nagasaki” you’ll hear an example of Redman’s scoring for saxophones. To view the clip, go here.

As the anonymous YouTube contributor suggests in his comment, the shorter of the two singers looks and sounds like Leo Watson. Can anyone among Rifftides Readers verifty his identity?

Go here for the 1929 McKinney’s Cotton Pickers recording of Redman’s “Gee Baby Ain’t I Good To You” with his alto sax solo and sui generis talking/singing vocal. It’s his arrangement, of course. In the photo that accompanies the recording, Redman is the short man in the middle.

Following a succession of deaths in the top ranks of jazz, it is a pleasure to tell you about an elderly musician who is getting attention because he is alive.The veteran rhythm guitarist and teacher Lawrence Lucie has passed the century mark. Here is an excerpt from today’s New York Times story about Lucie.

On the eve of his 100th birthday on Monday night, Mr. Lucie, sitting in a wheelchair, could not go 20 seconds without receiving an embrace, a pat on the back or a handshake from one of the many jazz connoisseurs gathered at the offices of the musicians’ union in Midtown Manhattan. The well-wishers were there to pay homage to his legacy.
And it is quite impressive.
He is the last living person to have performed with Duke Ellington at New York’s legendary Cotton Club. He played with Benny Carter at the Apollo Theater in 1934, the year it opened its doors to black customers. He played with Louis Armstrong for several years and was the best man at his wedding.

To read the whole thing, go here.

As nearly everyone in the jazz community knows by now, Joel Dorn died of a heart attack on Monday at the age of 65. Joel’s work as a producer covered a broad swath of popular music, but many of us admired him for the integrity of his efforts with jazz artists when he was a key figure at Atlantic Records and in his ventures as an independent producer. Among the musicians who respected him for his knowledge, taste, guidance and quiet, wacky humor were Roland Kirk, Charles Mingus, Fathead Newman and Eddie Harris.

Joel Dorn
Later, with his own label, 32, and for Rhino Records, he set high standards for jazz reissues. Dorn provided CD booklet preambles that were slightly off the wall and always perceptive. Here’s part of one for a Paul Desmond compilation:

To me, he’s always been a painter with a palette full of pastels and a real soft brush.He seems to whisper into the horn, never saying a wrong word. In all the years I was in the studio or hanging out in joints, I never saw Desmond. Never even met him. But then I never ran into Monet in those places, either.

During the 1970s Dorn and I encountered one another now and then in New York. He was a stimulating companion with sharp perceptions and a dry wit. One evening following a record release party, we were walking east on 44th street with the trombonist Eddie Bert and the writer Burt Korall. We were discussing the quality of reviews in Down Beat. I forget who delivered the last installment of the rant before Joel capped it. Affecting a Groucho Marx delivery, he said, “You pay five dollars for a review, you get a five-dollar review.”
Adjusted for inflation, the pay for reviews has gone up, but the Dorn principle still applies to an appalling percentage of them.
For a thorough and, as far as I can tell, accurate, report on his productive career, click here. For examples of his superb reissue work, try this Paul Desmond collection or these surveys of the Atlantic recordings of Rahssan Roland Kirk and Yusef Lateef.
Joel Dorn, 1942-2007.

Frank Morgan, an alto saxophonist who lost and then found himself, died yesterday in Minneapolis, his hometown. He was a few days short of his seventy-fourth birthday. In his last two decades he was productive and relatively contented, rid of his bedeviling habits and living with family members who cared about him.

Here is some of what I wrote about Morgan for one of his last CDs.

At eighteen, fully immersed in the L.A. jazz scene, he recorded with Wardell Gray and in his early twenties made his own album with Gray, Conte Candoli, Carl Perkins, Leroy Vinnegar, Howard Roberts and Larance Marable as his sidemen. His talent and hard work, his adoration and study of Charlie Parker, resulted in his sounding amazingly like his idol. Parker had burned himself out by then, dead of self-abuse in the spring of 1955 at the age of thirty-four. Morgan appeared to be headed for the same end. For the next thirty years, his addiction had him in prison much of the time. He did not entirely disappear from music, but to most listeners he was just a bright young alto player on a few old LPs and an entry in The Encyclopedia of Jazz. He became a featured soloist in bands at San Quentin and Chino and, later, with other recovering addicts at Synanon.
By the mid-1980s, he had had enough. He told writer David Grogan, “I couldn’t be Little Frankie, the child prodigy, forever, and I think I preferred facing defeat by heroin to facing whether I could really cut the mustard. Then I ended up falling in love with my drug habit.” He shook off the habit and wrote finis to his prison career. In 1985, he found himself in a recording studio. It didn’t take long for the first album of the new Morgan era to become a success. He’s been going strong ever since.

Morgan recovered from a stroke in 1998 and continued his career. Late last month, his doctors discovered that he had colon cancer. It was inoperable. He moved out of a hospital and spent his last days at home. According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, he knew that he was dying and said to his manager, “Ain’t it great to be alive?”

Tom Harrell, Dado Moroni, Humanity (Abeat). In six duets, the incomparable American trumpeter and the veteran Italian pianist achieve the most elusive of artistic goals, beauty through simplicity. Moroni’s title tune is good company for five classic standards. I’m glad that this is a CD, not a vinyl record, or I would surely wear it out listening repeatedly to Harrell’s solo on “Darn That Dream.”
The Harry Allen-Joe Cohn Quartet, Music from Guys and Dolls (Arbors). Not that he’s ever gone out of style, but musicians seem to be rediscovering Frank Loesser. Loesser’s “Guys and Dolls” songs are among his best. Allen and Cohn do nothing innovative or revolutionary with the songs from Loesser’s unforgettable Broadway musical. They simply improvise on them with affecting verve and imagination. Allen’s tenor saxophone often evokes comparisons with Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and Ben Webster. In this collection I hear a substantial Al Cohn component in his playing. Maybe something has rubbed off in his recent intensive work alongside Cohn’s guitarist son Joe. Rebecca Kilgore and Eddie Erickson are guests on several of the pieces, singly and together. Erickson is good. Kilgore is remarkable, one of the best interpreters of superior songs since Frank Sinatra.
Jennifer Higdon, City Scape, Concerto for Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Robert Spano (Telarc). My friend Jack Brownlow had a sixth sense for seeking out first-rate contemporary classical composers. Shortly before he died this fall, he sent me this CD containing two imposing works by Higdon, a protégé of Ned Rorem. He attached a post-it note reading, “24 Stars–a Masterpiece!” Bruno was not given to hyperbole. It’s a masterpiece.
Steve Nelson, Sound-Effect (HighNote). The vibes player with the weightless touch and endless harmonic resourcefulness teams up with a dream rhythm section of pianist Mulgrew Miller, basist Peter Washington and drummer Lewis Nash. The program includes, on the one hand, a lightning “You and the Night and the Music,” on the other Nelson’s impressionist ballad “Sound Essence.” Between those extremes of mood there are Freddie Hubbard’s waltz “Up Jumped Spring,” Ahmad Jamal’s “Night Mist Blues” in an irresistible medium groove, “Desifinado” perking along on Nash’s bossa nova beat, and the lovely, little-known James Williams waltz “Arioso.” A satisfying album.

Marc Myers’ current venture on his blog JazzWax is a conversation with the respected writer Dan Morgenstern, who says:

You have to be very careful not to let the bonds between you and musicians cloud what you’re saying. If you’re a writer, your responsibility always is to the reader or listener. If you shortchange your audience, you’ll lose your credibility. I tried to avoid such conflicts by simply not writing about bad performances unless I had to. At that point, I’d always frame my remarks by saying that the artist didn’t have a particularly good night rather than completely trashing him.

Dan Morgenstern
Morgenstern is director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. This year, he won a Jazz Masters Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, only the second writer to be so honored; Nat Hentoff received the award in 2004. To read all of Dan’s JazzWax interview, which includes news about a Louis Armstrong CD never before issued, go here.

Jazz historian Ted Gioia has launched an ambitious new web site. It is called Jazz.com. It encompasses a blog, a forum and an interview section. Its Encyclopedia of Jazz Musicians feature has enormous potential for listeners, musicians and researchers, indeed for the entire jazz community. In its initial appearance, the Encyclopedia is missing a number of notable musicians, but it solicits readers to suggest improvements. As it expands and undergoes refinements, it could become invaluable. Welcome to the web, jazz.com.

Truth is rarely pure, and never simple. — Oscar Wilde

Simple isn’t easy. — Red Mitchell

Rifftides reader Duncan Reid responds to our recent suggestion that trumpeter Jack Sheldon gets less recognition than his talents warrant.

A thought on Jack Sheldon’s lack of recognition. Like Cal Tjader, Vince Guaraldi, Shorty Rogers, Jim Hall, Conte Candoli, Paul Horn, Jimmy Giuffre and many others, he is white and based on the West Coast. Many critics, mostly on the East Coast and in Europe, have felt and still feel that white musicians do not play authentic jazz. The late French critic Hughes Panassie said just that. Moreover, I was told by the late Al Mckibbon that Leonard Feather’s assessment of Cal was as follows, “Sunny and Californian with no weight at all.”
Ken Burns and Wynton Marsalis are among those with that attitude. You’ll remember, as I assume you viewed the film Jazz, that aside from a brief segment on Brubeck and a few passing comments on Mulligan and a few others, Mr. Burns completely ignored West Coast jazz. In my opinion, much of what was said about white musicians was racist and derogatory. For instance, (historian) Gerald Early said that all the greatest jazz musicians are black because, “you got to have that feeling, you know, you got to have that feeling.” (Critic) Nat Hentoff said, “West Coast jazz is white and bland.” Of course, neither man was speaking the truth, just their perception. Wynton Marsalis just avoided talking about white musicians, save for Bix and a brief comment on Goodman. That is quite an accomplishment, considering the film lasted 18 1/2 hours. All of this lit a fire under me and is one reason I started writing a biography on Cal Tjader three years ago. Hopefully I can finish sometime next year.

Ramsey comments:
I agree that, despite the continued availability of most of his best work, Tjader’s contributions are too little recognized. A thorough Tjader biography would be an important addition to the literature. Whatever animus toward Tjader Al McKibbon may have attributed to Leonard Feather, in the 1960 edition of The Encyclopedia of Jazz, Feather wrote,

Despite his increasing identification with Latin music, Tjader is still active in regular jazz and is a first-class performer with, as John S. Wilson has said, “a light touch and a propulsive approach.”

Certainly, Ken Burns’ Jazz series, for all of its virtures, had willful blind spots, too many to enumerate. To point out a few, Burns gave the slightest acknowledgement of the existence of Jack Teagarden and Bill Evans, white musicians of enormous importance. He was, however, an equal opportunity slighter; he also all but ignored Teddy Wilson and Benny Carter.
Jim Hall and Jimmy Giuffre have not been based on the West Coast in decades. They have both lived in the northeastern United States for more than thirty years. Paul Horn lives in Arizona and British Columbia. Shorty Rogers, Vince Guaraldi and Conte Candoli are no longer alive. But, as Robert Benchley said when he was informed of the death of George Gershwin, I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.

I don’t mind being the butt of a joke, if it’s a funny joke. –Kenny G

I hear that Kenny G is going make a jazz album. It will be called ‘Round Noon. –Brad Terry