If you never had the good luck to see Ray Nance,
Now, thanks to YouTube, you have the chance.

The item in the next exhibit was, I thought, the last Rifftides posting about Rod Levitt. Then Erik Lawrence sent the following message and his obituary of Rod, which is too thorough, touching and well written not to pass along to you. Erik refers to his late father, the multifaceted saxophonist, leader and educator Arnie Lawrence.

(Your piece was) So well put. I knew Rod when I was a child, as my father played alto in the last incarnation of the Rod Levitt Orchestra. Years later my family and I moved to Vermont and heard he lived nearby. We met and despite the beginning of his declining health he became very excited about a recreation of his music. I put together a group and we performed it twice in honor of his 75th birthday. I even convinced him to join the local ragtag big band, which he really enjoyed.
Jean called me as well and asked that I write an obituary based on an article I’d written about Rod in January 2006. I’ve copied it below.
I was blessed to know Rod and Jean. Bringing him and his music back to the stage stands as one of the greatest things I’ve ever done.
In Peace,
Erik
——————
Rod Levitt, In Memoriam
By Erik Lawrence
Rod Levitt, jazz trombonist, composer and arranger, 77, died quietly in his sleep late Tuesday night, May 8th, 2007 at his home in Wardsboro, Vermont after a courageous battle with Alzheimer’s Disease.
Born in September 16th, 1929 and raised in Portland, Oregon, Rod took his love for jazz and his trombone to the University of Washington. It was there he studied music theory, harmony and arranging. Many top bands come through the city of Seattle. It was there that he met a talented a young trumpeter, still in high school, named Quincy Jones. This association put Rod to work in young Quincy’s band, which featured another young jazz artist, singer Ernestine Anderson.
Four years in the Air Force allowed Rod to hone his arranging skills. He played piano and trombone and arranged for the 722nd Regiment Air Force band. They would play dances 5 or 6 nights a week.
Upon finishing his military career Rod made his way to NY, found an apartment and started picking up work as a versatile trombonist, continuing his graduate education at Mannes School of Music. The musician’s union building, local 802, was the place to meet other musicians and bandleaders and find out about work. On his way there one day he bumped into his old friend Quincy again. Quincy quickly offered Rod a gig on the road with the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra. And Rod was on his way.
He spent a year touring with Dizzy Gillespie, the “clown prince of bebop”. This included several recordings. Dizzy In South America offers a recorded interview with Rod and saxophonist Benny Golson. When asked recently whether Dizzy’s joking and showmanship caused his music to suffer Rod quickly said no. “You can’t hear that on records!”
Rod’s association with Gillespie carried on throughout much of his own career. But upon returning from this first tour he began to find work in town and his reputation brought him into the elite rank as a strong player with many tools, reading, improvising and arranging. Evidence of his work is clear on recordings from that time with Dinah Washington, Billy Eckstine, Benny Golson, Gil Evans and many others. A television show is now available showing Rod playing in an ensemble “in the round” under the direction of Gil Evans, featuring the groundbreaking quintet of Miles Davis with John Coltrane.
In 1958 Rod took a job playing in the symphony orchestra at New York’s famed Radio City Music Hall, which he maintained for thirteen years. In 1959 he caught the eye of the newest member of the legendary Rockettes. “Who is that man with the Trombone?” she asked on her very first day of work, “Rod Levitt!!! I have all of his records!” Rod and Jean Levitt were married in 1962. They never stopped giggling like school kids about meeting and finding one another.
With a good job and a strong work ethic Rod found opportunities for writing more and more for various musical settings. The recording industry was based primarily in New York and was still in infant stages of technology. Talented craftsmen were responsible for using skills creatively to make recordings that would stand the test of time.
The field of television was blossoming and work was available for musicians who could play and write for commercials (called “jingles”), theme music and soundtracks. Rod found he liked the challenge and diversity of writing music for commercials and moved in that direction. In this setting he had the opportunity to write for an orchestra or flute choir, a playful ditty, or a steamy jazz piece. He would make use of the best musicians and singers available. In a very challenging and competitive field, he was in demand as a top writer, creating the music for thousands of commercials for every product imaginable. The ad men who hired him would not always understand what was and wasn’t possible with music. Quoting Rod, “Sometimes they told you what they wanted, now that was dangerous!”
Despite the years and advancing Alzheimer’s, he could always sing the music he wrote and tell you exactly when he did what and with whom. Much of this is quite interesting. Once he flew to Chicago to record Mahalia Jackson in her living room. Another time he used the brilliant blind reedman Rahsaan Roland Kirk for a spot for Chemical Bank. During this time he also scored music for the film score Bush Doctor, featuring Hugh O’Brian.
This dedication to excellence and strong work ethic also produced the Rod Levitt Orchestra in the 1960’s, perhaps his crowning achievement. This eight piece ensemble earned its title of orchestra with the brilliant arrangements and the virtuosity it demanded of his players as strong readers, the ability to play several instruments, thus expanding his palette of musical ‘colors’ and top level improvising.
From 1962 through 65 Rod wrote prolifically for this group and recorded four celebrated albums. His Dynamic Sound Patterns is currently available on CD. These recordings put him in the pantheon of jazz arrangers. Jazz is a collective art form and only a very few receive the popularity and success they deserve. Critically a hit, he never was able to get enough attention with this ensemble. Though they never released a recording after 1966, the dedicated members played his music and he continued to write for the Orchestra for at least a decade more.
Soft spoken and very wise, Rod had done the nearly impossible in music many times over. He made a fine living, he stayed on a clean path of health, raised a family and he even retired! He lived out his last few years in rural Vermont with his bride Jean. When asked what retirement is like for a musician, he responded; “I practice every day. I pull out my arrangements and check them over (author’s note: these arrangments were perfect forty years ago). In fact I wrote a method book for the trombone. I call it Sure Way to Chops in 20 Minutes a Day. That’s the hawker in me coming out!” he said in an interview in January, 2006, harkening back to the jingle days.
Mr. Levitt is survived by his wife Jean, of Wardsboro, Vermont and son Barry, of Miami, Florida.

To learn more about Erik Lawrence and hear the cavernous sound of his baritone saxophone, go here.

It was a phone call I wished never to receive and knew was inevitable. Rod Levitt’s wife Jean called to report that he died peacefully in his sleep the night of May 8. A composer and arranger of inventiveness, warmth and resourcefulness, a trombonist whose kindness and humor radiated in his playing, Rod had Alzheimer’s. He was not warehoused in an institution, as so many Alzheimer’s patients must be. Jean kept him with her at home in Vermont. She said that although much of his past had slipped away, he kept his horn near and played it this week even as he was declining.
“You know, his trombone, his music, were his life,” Jean said. She left out the most important element in his life, Jean.
Mrs. Levitt said that they kept printouts of the Rifftides pieces about him in a neat stack on his desk and that he often asked her to read them to him. She said he was moved by the comments from Rifftides readers. For background on Rod and links to his music, see this item from January, and this followup from Steve Schwartz about Rod in his final years. Here is a little of what I wrote about the importance of his albums:

They comprise a body of recordings that are fresh, evocative and enormously entertaining forty years later. The writing was daring, finely crafted and marinated in wit.

The bassist Bill Crow knew Rod more than a decade longer than I did. He sent this recollection.

When I got out of the Army in 1949 and returned to my studies at the University of Washington, I soon discovered the afternoon jam sessions that went on in the U.’s music annex. I was a bebop valve trombonist and sometime drummer in those days. I met Rod Levitt at one of those jams, and we hung out a little together on the Seattle music scene until the winter of 1950, when Buzzy Bridgeford, a drummer from Olympia, invited me to go with him when he went back to New York. I kept hearing about Rod, but when he came to New York, he didn’t hang with the same people I was interested in at that time. Whenever our paths crossed, we had a nice reunion, and he called me to play on a couple of his projects, which I enjoyed very much. I liked his playing and his writing, and always appreciated his sunny disposition.

Rod Levitt would have been seventy-eight in September.

As if our friend and fellow artsjournal.com blogger Terry Teachout weren’t polymath enough, he’s extending his cultural breadth. On his blog, About Last Night, he announces:

I’m writing an opera.

What?

I’M WRITING AN OPERA.

That’s what I thought he said. To get the details, go here.

The Rifftides staff is pleased to announced that (finally) we have posted a new group of Doug’s Picks in the right-hand column. A reminder: We now archive the Picks. To see past entries, click on “More Picks” at the end of the current crop.

Confession: Until recently, I could not get with Robert Schumann. I found him dull. The nineteenth century composer and pianist is, by general agreement, in the front rank of German romanticism, so I assumed that the shortcoming was mine. I was right. I wasn’t paying attention. What caused me to turn the corner on Schumann was “Waldesgesprach,” a piece of his lieder based on the work of the poet Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff. I heard the song for the first time at a recital by Phil Grothaus, a tenor, and Andrea Prentice, a pianist, who live in my town.
Sub-confession: I’ve also never cared much for lieder, art songs set to poetry, usually German. That began to change a few years ago when I acquired a boxed set of Schubert lieder sung by the astounding Dieter Fischer-Dieskau with Gerald Moore at the piano (This CD is a generous sampler). I had always loved Schubert, but was put off by anyone’s lieder. Fischer-Dieskau turned that. Now, I am hooked on “Waldesgesprach” and warming to Schumann because of Mr. Grothaus’s and Ms. Prentice’s charming negotiation of its intriguing harmonies, which to my ear put Schumann far ahead of his time. He wrote it in 1840 during a flurry of lieder composition.
This experience helped me to understand why composers whose harmonic palettes I admire, among them Brahms, Faure and Elgar, were inspired by Schumann. I can’t imagine that Debussy and Ravel did not also study him. Go here to listen to recordings, in their entirety, of several artists’ interpretations of the song. They include Fischer-Dieskau with Alfred Brendel at the piano. See how you like it. If you think it took me too long to open my ears to Schumann, you’ll be right.
What does this have to do with jazz? Nothing, unless you accept that there is no such thing as jazz harmony. All harmony in jazz was first used by the great composers from before Bach to Stravinsky. To extrapolate loosely, you might say: no Schumann–no Tadd Dameron.
For a comprehensive biography and a nifty picture of Schumann, go here.
This CD has Fischer-Dieskau with his ideal accompanist Gerald Moore (every classical singer’s ideal accompanist) singing “Waldesgesprach” and several other pieces of Schumann lieder even better than he did with Brendel.

Carol Sloane, long one of my favorite singers, now also my favorite new blogette, is telling marvelous stories. Do yourself a favor. Go to her blog, read both parts of Jimmy Rowles’ adventures with Placido Domingo and her tale of introducing Cannonball Adderley to the music of Mstislav Rostropovich.

The news of Alvin Batiste’s death of an apparent heart attack early Sunday morning came as I was preparing to write a few words about his new CD. A great clarinetist, a masterly transmitter of the jazz tradition, Batiste was scheduled to play Sunday at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival with Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr., two of the legion of Louisiana musicians who learned from him. As head of the music department at Southern University in Baton Rouge, much of Batiste’s teaching was in that four-year institution, but in recent years he was also the primary teacher of jazz instrumental music at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA).
He teamed with NOCCA’s founder, his lifelong friend Ellis Marsalis, to help shape the abilities of Connick, the Marsalis brothers (Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo and Jason), drummer Herlin Riley, saxophonist Donald Harrison and dozens of other young New Orleans musicians who have become prominent in jazz.
The first black soloist with the New Orleans Philharmonic, Batiste was thoroughly grounded in the formal rules of music and brilliant in breaking them. As effective in free music as he was in traditional jazz and bebop, Batiste jammed with Ornette Coleman during Coleman’s New Orleans sojourn in the 1950s. Along with Ellis Marsalis, Harold Battiste, Ed Blackwell, James Black, Melvin Lastie, Al Belletto, Warren Bell, Jr. and a few others who fell under the spell of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and other pioneers of bebop, he helped establish modern jazz in the city.
In my encounters with Batiste in New Orleans over the years, I found him kind and gracious, with an endearing soft humor. In Batiste the educator those qualities were wrapped around a core of iron; he once ejected Branford Marsalis from the Southern University jazz band for insufficient commitment. Marsalis later said that the experience concentrated his focus. He went on to become one of the deepest improvising musicians of his generation.
Batiste’s Cd titled Alvin Batiste is an initial release in the Honor Series on the Marsalis Music label. It was produced by Branford Marsalis, who plays saxophone on three of its tracks. Riley is the drummer. The other name musician is guitarist Russell Malone. They are supported by two youngsters Marsalis recommended, pianist Lawrence Fields and bassist Ricardo Rodriguez, both impressive in this fast company. Singer Edward Perkins appears on four tracks. Batiste has played farther out than he does in this collection, but the CD provides a broad acquaintance with his scope, his daring and the depth of his fat sound. Seven of the ten compositions are Batiste’s, including “The Latest,” based on John Coltrane’s “Countdown” and the funky anthem “Salty Dogs,” which was adopted years ago by Cannonball Adderley. Exchanging phrases on “My Life Is A Tree,” Batiste and Marsalis, on tenor sax, are continuations of the same line of thought. Batiste’s bebop foundation is in stimulating evidence in the “Cherokee” derivative called “Bat Trad.”
Batiste’s concentration on music education kept him occupied. As a result, there is precious little of him on recordings. We may consider the CD Alvin Batiste a posthumous gift.

Quint Davis, the director of the New Orleans JazzFest, sums up Batiste’s importance in this interview with WDSU-TV. The New Orleans Times Picayune combines an obituary and a wrapup of the concert that replaced Batiste’s appearance at the festival.
Branford Marsalis will play with his quintet this week at The Seasons. I look forward to reminiscing with him about his friend and mentor.

The bassist David Friesen, an explorer, does not rule out the customary jazz trio instrumentation of piano, bass and drums; he had a superb trio with pianist Randy Porter and drummer Alan Jones. But for him the traditional configuration does not define the trio concept. Friesen has led trios in which the other instruments were Bud Shank’s alto sax and Clark Terry’s flugelhorn; Paul Horn’s flute and Jeff Johnson’s bass; Larry Koonse’s guitar and Joe LaBarbera’s drums; John Stowell’s guitar and Jeannie Hoffman’s piano; Gary Barone’s trumpet and Jones’s drums.
The other night at The Seasons, the sidemen in Friesen’s trio were pianist Greg Goebel and saxophonist Rob Davis, young musicians little known outside the Pacific Northwest but with the talent to make larger waves. With Goebel at a nine-foot Steinway to his right and Davis on a stool to his left, Friesen sat center stage cradling his Hemage electric bass in cello position, leading the trio through a concert of thirteen of his compositions. The harmonic depth, intense rhythm and subtle interaction they employed mesmerized a small audience. It is hard to imagine that after the first couple of tunes anyone thought about the absence of a drummer. The irresistible swing on a piece called “Wrinkle” came in great part from Friesen strumming his bass the way Freddie Green strummed his guitar for Count Basie, and getting the same result, quiet power. Davis’s sound on tenor saxophone has an agreeable graininess, on soprano a fullness unlike the strangled tone that so many soprano saxophonists cultivate. His soprano solo on “Goal in Mind,” which is built on what my notes call “sort of old-timey” harmonies, concentrated joy in flowing lines of spontaneous composition.
In Friesen’s solos, technical mastery is in the service of lyrical expression. He applies just enough virtuosic display to impress the listener, but cuts it considerably short of being a hip cornball. Unlike many jazz tunes, Friesen’s pieces are generally not based on the chords of standard songs, but on original harmonic structures loaded with challenges. Goebel and Davis thrived on the complexities. Concentrating on the lower register of the Steinway in “One Last Time,” Goebel’s solo rumbled with harmonic surprises that elicited a whoop from Friesen and earned sustained applause from the audience. Even in the blues, Friesen finds ways to be different. The trio played an eleven-bar blues and a ten-bar blues and, at the end, a standard twelve-bar blues with what Friesen identified as “funny changes.” It still felt like the blues, but the sophisticated harmonies gave it a wry character all its own. Indeed, everything the trio played was colored with a pronounced individuality. Friesen has not recorded with this group. I hope that he will.
In the meantime, there is plenty of Friesen on CD. His web site has an extensive discograhy. His newest release, a duo with the late pianist Mal Waldron, has been on hold since it was recorded at a hotel engagement in Los Angeles in 1985. They worked together regularly in the eighties and developed remarkable empathy, which is captured admirably in this live date. You can hear Davis and Goebel in good form with PDXV, a quintet based in Portland, Oregon. The band also includes trumpeter Dick Titterington, bassist Dave Captein and drummer Todd Strait. Their first CD on Titterington’s Heavywood label is called, logically enough, PDXV Jazz Quintet of Portland, OR, Vol. 1.

Hotel Pianist no longer blogs, thanks to having been outed by a numbskull fellow blogger. From time to time, though, she sends e-mail messages. This is the latest one:

Musician Jokes
I have two musician jokes for you today:
1. I’m often bored enough to drool at the piano. One way I try to counteract this boredom is by pretending I’m the “bass player” after I improvise a piano solo; I’ll do a little solo with my left hand while comping with my right. Last week, a saxophonist friend of mine came to listen in the lobby. When I started to play with my left hand, she joked: “Bass solo! Time to start talking.”
2. There’s a little joke among jazz musicians at jam sessions. You go up to someone and say, “You sounded good. HOW’D I SOUND?” Well, tonight a man came in who embodied this joke, but he wasn’t a jazz musician – he was a drunk who occasionally does some sort of work for the restaurant management.
He sat down next to me and asked, “How do I look?” In my dreams, I replied, “You have a face only a mother could love,” but in actuality I shrugged, “Fine.”
Then he requested “Someone To Watch Over Me.” I started to play this lovely tune and, of course, he started to warble over it. He could barely remember any of the words, but after I had played the last chord, there was the inevitable question from him: “How do I sound?”
I’m glad he stopped with that; I was worried the next question would be, ‘How do I SMELL?”