Louis Armstrong said that if you had to ask, you’d never know. That did not prevent Sid Caesar from attempting to answer the question on Your Show Of Shows in 1956.
Have a good weekend.

Duke Ellington’s urbanity and sophistication are part of jazz lore, but as the years go by there are fewer people who had direct exposure to his personality. Rare video of a 1963 interview provides a generous sample of Ellington’s charm. It also demonstrates the carefully crafted line of patter that served him both as effective public relations and as a layer of protection around a highly visible man who managed to keep himself private. Ellington spoke with Sven Lindahl of SVT, the Swedish broadcasting system.
The interview on SVT’s web site comes in two parts. This link takes you to part 1, in which Ellington gives elegant expression to his view of a future in which music would be without categories. To view part 2, you must go to this link and scroll up to “Duke Ellington del 2” in the menu labeled öppet arkiv on the right side of the screen.
Thanks to the musicologist Andrew Homzy of Concordia University in Montreal for leading the Rifftides staff to this valuable piece of history.

A few days ago, Rifftides alerted you to a concert posthumously honoring the Voice of America’s Willis Conover, whom we described as one of the most effective public diplomats in US history. Washington correspondent John Birchard, a veteran VOA broadcaster, attended the concert and sent this report.

I think Willis would have liked THE FIRST ANNUAL WILLIS CONOVER MEMORIAL CONCERT. He might have been a little uncomfortable with the title (he was pretty modest – for a radio guy), but the concert contained elements he would have appreciated: kids trying out their skills in the Blues Alley Youth Orchestra, the discovery of a “new” band, and the classics getting their due from the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra.
The concert was the brainchild of Harry Schnipper, the entrepreneur who has kept Washington’s Blues Alley nightclub alive through thick and thin. The Blues Alley Jazz Society and the Smithsonian Institution were the official “presenters” that arranged for the use of the Voice Of America auditorium for the event Saturday, April 28th. The purpose of the concert was “to memorialize the legacy of Willis Conover and his efforts to extend jazz music…through the radio waves of the Voice of America.”
The Blues Alley Youth Orchestra opened the evening. The Orchestra, now in its 20th year, is made up of 14- to 17-year-olds from the Washington area. The band is subject to all the challenges that young musicians must overcome: uncertain intonation and time, solos that wander into a cul de sac of confusion, and teen-age shyness about standing out from the crowd. And then, there will be moments when a youngster gets off a good chorus and sits down with an embarrassed grin at the applause. Congratulations to Blues Alley for sticking with this educational effort.
Next came one of those segments that jazz fans live for: the jaw-dropping surprise. I was not familiar with the U-S Military Academy’s Jazz Knights. Expecting a band of college students, the first surprise was these guys were grown-ups, career military musicians like the widely-known Airmen of Note, the Navy’s Commodores and the Army Blues, all stationed in the Washington, D.C. area. I’ve long appreciated those three bands as the top of the tree in their respective services. Well, make room for the Jazz Knights from West Point. All of the band members are sergeants, ranging from staff to master sergeant. The Knights hit with a bright original, “Without a Doubt”. Ensembles were crisp and tight. Alto saxophonist Derrick James made clear right away his claim on the audience’s attention with a fiery solo. James made way for trumpeter Vito Speranza, whose tone put me in mind of Pete Candoli and whose attack was confident, even swaggering. The audience responded with enthusiastic applause.
Mike Abene’s arrangement of the Brazilian-flavored “Estate” was a showcase for the soprano sax work of Mike Reifenberg. Sergeant Reifenberg has a full, liquid sound used with dramatic effect on the lovely melody. He also has chops to spare and brought them to bear during his improvisation.
Snappy brushwork from drummer Bob Jones propelled Abene’s arrangement of Karolina Strassmeyer’s “The Sweeper,” Eric Ordway’s trombone solo shifted the piece into overdrive. Ordway gets around on the unwieldy horn in the virtuosic manner of the late Frank Rosolino, which ain’t chopped liver. Another strong solo from Derrick James rounded out the performance.
The Jazz Knights don’t have a weak link. According to the information on their CD “Commissions 2006”, they do some traveling around the northeast, bringing free concerts to the public. If they show up in your neighborhood, you won’t be disappointed if you seek them out.
Master of ceremonies Dick Golden‘s warm presentation included portions of interviews Willis Conover did over the years on VOA with Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. As Ellington made his recorded exit with some typically charming remarks about Willis, the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra under David Baker began its portion of the show with “Take the A Train,” appropriate for the occasion but in a perfunctory performance. Baker’s own “Cotton Club Revisited” followed, then a Bob Mintzer arrangement of Herbie Hancock’s “Dolphin Dance”. The band didn’t strike sparks until it played Sonny Rollins’ “Doxy.” Trumpeter Kenny Rittenhouse soloed with funk and humor, producing smiles on band members’ faces and enthusiasm from the audience. The trumpeter seemed to inspire tenorman Tedd Baker and pianist Tony Nalker to some enjoyable solos.
But then it was back to re-creating jazz history with Frank Foster’s “Shiny Stockings”. Nice, but lacking in pizzazz. Technically, the band runs down the historical charts with authentic style. The members can clearly play their instruments, but when the night is over what have you got? As you might be able to discern from these remarks, I’m not a fan of jazz repertory bands. I’d much rather hear a bad-but-enthusiastic original than the most competent copy. And the very name of this band – the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra – seems like pretty heavy baggage to lug around.
I don’t know where Willis would come down in this debate, but throughout his long and distinguished career he seems to have emphasized the originals, the real thing,. Full disclosure: I am not an unbiased observer. I am a 14-year employee at the Voice of America, the senior news broadcaster in the English language division, a fan of the man and his marvelous impact on the world beyond our shores. He remains the single most important broadcaster in the 65 years VOA has been on the air.
Saturday night’s concert is a small down payment on what America owes Willis. I’m glad to report that Harry Schnipper promised there will be a 2nd annual Willis Conover Memorial Concert next April. As we used to say in radio, stay tuned.
John Birchard

To read a Rifftides posting about Conover, go here. You may search the archive (link in the right-hand column) with the keyword “Conover” and find several additional items.

A Rifftides reader chided me for not writing more often about cycling. My thought is that anyone’s cycling experiences are intensely interesting to himself and that everyone he tells about them will be bored.
However, since I have a new road bike, I don’t mind telling you that I took it out for a ride before supper. It made little sense to ride in a high wind, but sense and road cycling frequently part company. The manufacturer’s sales blurb for the bike claims:

This great roadster boasts Mavic’s Ksyrium Equipe wheels, too, which cheat the wind for free speed and are built to last.

I could have used a little more of Mavic’s wind cheating. I was cranking uphill against a 25-mile-an-hour west wind that became a north wind and stayed in my face when I turned at the intersection of two orchard country roads at the top of a steep hill. The hill sweeps down for half a mile to the valley floor. Fighting the gale, but with gravity on my side, I pedaled furiously down and gave a banshee whoop when, in spite of Aeolus’s interference, the speedometer registered 36 miles an hour. As I coasted to a hesitation for the four-way stop at the next intersection, a man pulled up beside me in a pickup truck and yelled with some heat, “What are you, nuts?”
I grinned. Then he shrugged and grinned, too, and we went on our ways.

Rifftides reader Bruce Tater came across a classic Warner Bros. cartoon from the Looney Tunes series. He called our attention to Three Little Bops, a perfectly preserved piece of 1950s hipness. Stan Freeburg is the narrator. Shorty Rogers did the music. Notice the stylized drawings of the nightclub audience. Don’t miss Shorty’s little sui generis muted solo near the end. Here’s the link.

Jessica Williams linked readers of her blog to the Before & After test she allowed me to give her for the current issue of Jazz Times. In the test, she reacted to recordings by ten pianists. To read some of the comments she received, go to Currents and scroll down.
Oddly, Rifftides has received no reaction to the article despite Ms. Williams’ unreserved assessments.

National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Saturday included a report by Howard Mandel on Sonny Rollins, who recently founded his own record label, Doxy. In a sound bite, Rollins asked Mandel not to identify him as a corporate executive of a record company. “Don’t do that to me man,” he laughed as he pleaded with Mandel. “No, I don’t want to screw anybody.” Then he talked about the contradiction between corporate thinking and jazz thinking.

The corporate culture is anathema to jazz. We don’t like cookie cutter, everything exactly the same way. We’re about creation, thinking things out at the moment, like life is. Life changes every minute. A different sunset every night; that’s what jazz is about.

To hear Mandel’s profile of Sonny Rollins at seventy-six, click here.

The past couple of days I have been listening to two CDs containing fresh old music and enjoying it as much as if hearing it for the first time.
LaFaro
Scott LaFaro had a rich musical life before he joined the Bill Evans Trio in 1959 and helped change the role of the bass in interactive improvisation. In 1957 when he was twenty-one, LaFaro was playing in Chicago with Pat Moran, a young pianist from Oklahoma who had studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory and been infuenced by Bud Powell and Horace Silver. During the short time LaFaro was with her trio, Moran recorded a trio album and another adding the singer Bev Kelly. They have been combined in a CD just issued by Fresh Sound. LaFaro has often been quoted about his dissatisfaction with most of his early recordings:

I don’t like to look back, because the whole point in jazz is doing it now. I don’t even like any of my records except maybe the first one I did with Pat Moran on Audio Fidelity.

We can hear why he made that exception. The strength, authority, swing and harmonic ingenuity in LaFaro’s bass lines are gripping. Moran, drummer Johnny Whited and Kelly are fine, but LaFaro–beautifully recorded and dominating the right stereo channel–demands the listener’s attention, particularly on the trio session. When Evans found LaFaro and combined him with drummer Paul Motian, he was able to put into operation the trio concept he had been hearing in his head for years. These recordings make it easy to understand how excited Evans must have been the first time he heard LaFaro.
Previn
In 1960 MGM released a feature motion picture more or less based on the Jack Kerouac novel The Subterraneans. The movie about a bunch of San Francisco beatniks was so-so, maybe not quite that good, but it had a superb Andre Previn orchestral score, Previn’s compositions for small jazz groups and wonderful playing by a bakers dozen of the best musicians of the period. Gerry Mulligan had a part as a priest who played the baritone saxophone. Art Farmer, Art Pepper and Shelly Manne played themselves, as did Previn, Red Mitchell, Dave Bailey, Russ Freeman, Bob Enevoldsen, Bill Perkins and Buddy Clark. Jack Sheldon is heard in solo with the orchestra and in a quintet with Pepper, Freeman, Mitchell and Manne.
The film has all but disappeared and is apparently impossible to find on DVD or VHS. The sound track, fortunately not only has survived but is expanded for a CD reissue that includes twice as much music as the original release. This increases the small available number of recordings Mulligan’s group made when Art Farmer was his trumpet player and adds a few tracks to the legacy of Previn’s trio with Manne and Mitchell. Previn’s main theme, “Why Are We Afraid,” made its way into the repertoires of a few musicians in the sixties. It is puzzling why so memorable a melody failed to become a standard.

There will be a concert this weekend in Washington, DC, honoring Willis Conover, the Voice of America jazz broadcaster who was one of the most effective public diplomats in US history. The nation he served did little while he was alive to recognize his contributions and since he died in 1996 has done less. Efforts to persuade President Clinton, then President Bush, to award him a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom have gone nowhere. To read a Rifftides posting about Conover, go here. You may browse the archive (link in the left-hand column) and find several items.
There are those in Washington not in the administration who know the value of what Conover accomplished. They include people at the VOA and at the Smithsonian Institution and, apparently, all of the Blues Alley Jazz Society. Here is the announcement about Saturday night’s concert.

Blues Alley Jazz Society invites you to the First Annual Willis Conover Memorial Concert, featuring the U.S. Military Academy “Jazz Knights” and the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra. Whereas H.R. 57 officially proclaimed jazz as America’s indigenous musical art form, we seek to memorialize the legacy of Willis Conover and his efforts to extend jazz music during the Cold War era through the radio waves of the Voice of America. It is our hope that you will join us in making Washington, D.C. the home of jazz music during this component of the Third Annual Big Band Jam.
The Willis Conover Memorial Concert will be held from 7:00 – 9:00 p.m. on Saturday, April 28th at the Voice of America Stage. You are asked to arrive at 6:00 p.m. with photo identification as the Voice of America building is a federal facility. Some street parking is available, and attendees are encouraged to utilize the Colonial Parking service located at 6th and C Streets, SW. Reservations are required due to security issues; visit the Big Band Jam Web site to make a reservation.

Willis Conover at the White House, 1969
Under Doug’s Picks in the right column, you will find mention of a new book about Conover.

During a 2005 trip to New York to promote Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, one of my rewarding encounters was with the longtime broadcast journalist Bill Vitka. After we talked about Desmond for CBS Radio News, Vitka mentioned that he had recently interviewed Kurt Vonnegut. He said Vonnegut told him that Desmond was his favorite musician. Back home, I arranged for Vonnegut to be sent a copy of the book. Vitka and I planned to get together with the great writer on a later visit to New York. My next New York trip was brief and hectic. I decided to set up the meeting when the three of us could have a relaxed visit. Then Vonnegut fell and suffered the brain injury that led to his death on April 11.
In the course of preparing a story about Vonnegut, Bill stayed in touch with him. Last November Vitka delivered to the author a copy of the feature profile that he developed out of their interview. He took his younger son, Sean, with him to Vonnegut’s townhouse on Manhattan’s East Side . What follows is the story of that visit. Bill sent it to me in an e-mail message. I asked his permission to share it with you.

I grieved when Vonnegut died.

His voice is still on my phone machine.

He had called several times — while I was working on an interview/feature for the Network — to make sure I got things right.
On Meeting Kurt Vonnegut (11/18/06)
When Sean and I were ushered into Kurt Vonnegut’s townhouse on New York’s East Side, what we found was a home.
His wife, Jill Krementz, had to wake him. We were expected but not at that hour (3 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon).
Vonnegut was a redwood, hair like gray broken branches. He smiles. Extends his hand. Tell us to make ourselves at home, then politely he plants himself in a soft, upholstered chair that he knows well.
He’s sizing us up, subtle to the point of being sly. I catch his eye sometimes as he drinks us in.But malice, any kind of ill will, seems so foreign to his nature as to be a distance measurable in light years. All I feel is a sensation of disarmament. My defenses stand down, willingly conquered.
Sean is quite animated. He does much, if not all, the talking for a patch. Vonnegut is curious about his schooling, asking questions and Sean answers, enjoying the attention — but more then that — he rises to meet someone who would address him as an equal. Sean is 17.
There is an out-of-time character about Vonnegut, not unlike Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five. He isn’t tethered to the 21st century or to the last, but outside of both. He speaks with a kindness, even innocence as though he hasn’t grown up.
At this moment, I can’t imagine the source of the razor wire, which I know can be found in his writing. His jokes, satire — gallows humor — doesn’t seem to fit the man.
If he comes to know us by our answers, I come to know him by his questions. Our name, Vitka, he hasn’t heard before. What nationality is it? Where did we come from? Our parents, perhaps my parents and grandparents — who were they? I oblige. He rewards us with details of his own family. There is, like us, a Catholic bloodline. He says his grandparents were so consumed by Darwin that they became free thinkers. They abandoned religion. He had asked us about belief. He was curious about the Byzantine rite on my Mother’s side. Did the priests marry? As we – Sean and I — draw closer to our past, Vonnegut draws more from his own childhood. He recalls blues musicians from the South who performed on his family’s lawn. Jazz and Blues. Joe Heller’s name comes up. He misses Joe.
Vonnegut is now 83, an age when so many that you know are gone.
His family, he said, came over before the wave that brought my family to Ellis Island. They were entrepreneurs. They had money. They were smart. They invested. They did well.
At some point I realized that he could feign sleepiness, even laziness, to disguise casualness with a purpose. He was working.
He talks about teaching. He’s been talking to Sean about the classroom for fifteen minutes or so and he mentions that John Irving was one of his students at the Iowa Workshop. What did you teach your students, about writing, I ask? He answers that it takes two. A writer is writing for a reader. (as much as a reader needs a writer.) It’s not enough to write. Someone has to read what you write (as though it would be incomplete otherwise).
He talks about reporting. One of his first jobs was just that in Chicago. He would talk to a guy on the phone, filing the story, telling him that Joe Whatzit, age 48, was arrested for disorderly conduct and drunkenness at the corner of Waverly and Blastoff. “See,” he says, “everything in the first sentence is right out there. The reader doesn’t want to find out on page 48 that Lizzie was black. He wants to know right away.” You can’t — shouldn’t — cheat the reader is the lesson. Would, to do otherwise, mean the writer is cheating his or herself?
At first I think he will smoke the Pall Mall cigarette he has pulled from the pack, drawn from beneath the sweater which I am sure he slept in, but instead he is stroking it, as though a man petting a cat. Over the course of an hour, he does this but does not light it
He talks about the golden age of radio. (I work in radio) I mention someone at the CBS Broadcast Center who had said he remembered Orson Wells and the Mercury Theater. So I picture him planted in front of a radio, a machine the size of refrigerator — listening intently and laughing. Because he likes jokes. Because, I suspect, he likes people. Because we are fools. Because we make mistakes. Because, in Vonnegut’s universe, it doesn’t matter — but it does. He doesn’t want to hurt people and he doesn’t want people hurt but the human race continues to find original, if not ingenuously cruel methods to inflict pain. And he’s looking at 17-year-old Sean as he talks about radio. I mention Fred Allen but he is addressing Sean and says “Say good night, Gracie.”

A working journalist since 1972, Bill Vitka has been a correspondent for CBS News and NBC News. To hear his 2006 Vonnegut profile, go to this archive podcast of the CBS News Weekend Roundup hosted by Dan Raviv and advance the timing slider to 33:59. Or listen to the entire hour and hear how little things have changed in the world, which might have saddened but not suprised Vonnegut.