Barry Finnerty, a guitarist who worked with Michael Brecker in the Brecker Brothers band of the late 1970s, has posted a lengthy reminiscence about his friend. It includes this paragraph:

He used to take his humility to extremes sometimes… he would complain to me that he hated his own playing, was tired of all his licks, that he felt he was doing nothing but endlessly repeating himself on every solo he took. I couldn’t sympathize with him too much on that one. I’d tell him, “I should be able to repeat myself like that!” Besides, I would console him, he was the only one that could tell! There was one lick he used to play a lot that actually became kind of a private joke between us. It was a lightning-fast pentatonic scale riff in groups of 6, going up chromatically… I figured it out and started to play it in my solos, giving him a wink out of the corner of my eye, and then he would do the same to me when it was his turn. Once he came into a club where I was playing, and I spotted him in the back…and when it came time for my solo, I cranked up the distortion and looked him right in the eye as I blasted out the lick for the first thing I played! It cracked him up.

To read all of Finnerty’s essay, which includes the little-known story of Brecker’s redemption from drugs, go to his web page.

They’re asking for ludicrous, ridiculous kinds of tunes. It could be “Johnson Rag,” or “Don’t you have any Russ Morgan pieces?” or they’re always getting your tunes mixed up with someone else’s, so you get requests for “Green Eyes” or “Frenesi” or “In The Mood.” And they get some very terse replies like “No,” or “He quit the business,” or “I’ll play that when I get to the big band in the sky.” It becomes a kind of standup routine. Certainly anyone has a right to ask for anything, but I can’t for the life of me think why I have to do those tunes.

–Woody Herman, 1976, from Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers.

Please adjourn to the exhibit in the right-hand column under the sign reading Doug’s Picks for the Rifftides staff’s latest recommendations. The Louis Armstrong book is a holdover because no one on the staff has had time to read a new book. Hey, it was the holidays.

Bill Crow writes from New York:

So sorry to hear of Floyd’s passing. When I returned to the Seattle area after 3 years in the Army, I met Floyd and Quincy and Gerald Brashear and Buddy Catlett and Kenny Kimball and Ray Charles. We played a lot together in the music annex of the University of Washington. I was a valve trombonist and Buddy Catlett was a good alto player. Neither of us had any idea of playing the bass at that time.
I loved Floyd’s playing and his sweet nature. He could have made a national name for himself. Certainly Quincy would have seen to that. But he preferred Seattle and his life there. RIP sweet Floyd.

Jim Wilke of Jazz After Hours also produces and hosts Jazz Northwest on KPLU, a Seattle-Tacoma radio station. Next Sunday, December 28, at 1 pm Pacific time, 4 pm Eastern, he will devote Jazz Northwest to memories of Floyd Standifer and to Floyd’s music. KPLU is at 88.5 on the FM dial. Or go here for streaming internet audio. The hour will include comments from musicians who worked closely with Standifer, among them Jay Thomas, Clarence Acox, Bill Anschell, Butch Nordall and Michael Brockman. The program will be available as a podcast at kplu.org following the broadcast.

From Seattle comes news that Floyd Standifer died Monday night. The trumpeter, saxophonist and vocalist went into the hospital in late December for treatment of a shoulder problem. Doctors discovered that his shoulder pain came from cancer that had spread to his lungs and liver, and that his circulation was defective. Two weeks following a leg amputation, his heart gave out. He was seventy-eight.

Standifer spent most of his career in the Pacific Northwest, but musicians everywhere–particularly trumpet players–knew of him. His Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra colleague and former trumpet student Jay Thomas said today, “Floyd was always, as far back as I can remember, Seattle’s pride and joy. As a lyrical trumpeter, on a good night he had few peers.”
In a December Rifftides piece about a recent Standifer concert, I mentioned his tour of duty in the trumpet section of the great Quincy Jones band of the late 1950s and early ’60s.

On the Quincy Jones DVD in the new Jazz Icons series, Standifer solos in the trumpet section with Clark Terry, Benny Bailey and Lennie Johnson. When Jones formed the band, he hired Floyd along with two more of Quincy’s Seattle pals, bassist Buddy Catlett and pianist Patti Bown.

After the premature end of the Jones band, Standifer returned to his place as a mainstay of Seattle’s music establishment, playing trumpet, flugelhorn and tenor saxophone, and singing. Thomas recalls the late saxophonist Freddie Greenwell–another Seattle musician respected in national jazz circles–saying that he considered Standifer one of the best singers in the country.

In that December piece, I alluded to the Northwest Jazz Workshop, a sort of musicians co-op to which Floyd and I belonged in the mid-1950s. I was eighteen, struggling to become a jazz player. In a rehearsal band that mixed professionals with strivers like me, I found myself seated in the trumpet section next to Floyd. My previous big band experience involved Sousa marches. Confronted with the third trumpet part in an arrangement of Shorty Rogers’ “Elaine’s Lullaby,” I was terrified. It contained sixteen bars of chord symbols and otherwise empty space–a solo for the third trumpet. I looked at the old man next to me. He was twenty-four, ancient to someone my age. Floyd saw the look in my eyes, put his hand on my knee and said, “Don’t think about it, just play.” When it came time to cross that sixteen-bar Mojave Desert, I just played. At the end of the run-through, Floyd gave me a big smile. I have no idea what was in the solo, whether it was adequate or a disaster, but I will never forget that smile. And it is most unlikely that I will forget Floyd.

For a summary of Floyd Standifer’s life and career, read this 2002 article by Jessica Davis in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

A little research discloses that the man who did that brilliant dual-personality lip-synch performance to Charlie Parker’s and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Leap Frog” is named Jeremiah McDonald. He has other clips on YouTube, none of them based in jazz. Still, jazz listeners who dig Spike Jones (there are more of them than you might think) will get a nostalgic charge from McDonald’s treatment of this classic by Doodles Weaver, the Jones band’s all-purpose nut.
For more about Jeremiah McDonald, aka The Reverend Cornelius Blow, go here.

After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that’s how I ended up just being a saxophone player. –Ornette Coleman
I am an improviser…I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it all, it is all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised. –Joe Zawinul

George Cables played a concert at The Seasons performance hall the other night. It was the kind of evening his listeners have come to expect, flowing with the inventiveness, technical skill and joy that Cables has demonstrated in a four-decade career with Art Pepper, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard and Art Blakey–a few names from the long list of his colleagues. Cables, bassist Chuck Deardorf and drummer Don Kinney gave two stimulating trio sets in the acoustically blessed former sanctuary of The Seasons.

Not long after intermission, Cables glided into Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” without accompaniment. Alternating between strict tempo and the rhythmic give-and-take of rubato, he began erecting a monument. Now bringing all of his formidable technique into play, now easing the dynamics, he never abandoned Monk’s imperishable melody altogether. He surrounded it with lightning flashes, parted the clouds to flood the themes with sunlight, swooped and soared above, below and around the tune. Symphonic, operatic and funky, he brought in Monk dissonances, roistering Fats Waller cadences, supersonic Art Tatum runs and a touch or two of Cecil Taylor delirium. He went on building, gathering intensity for five minutes, six minutes, seven. It may have been longer; the distraction of looking at a watch was out of the question. Deardorf and Kinney were mesmerized along with the audience. When Cables eased out of his rapture into the earth-bound hominess of “Blue Monk” and nodded them in, it took a momentary effort of will for the sidemen to join him aboard the blues train.
Cables has recorded a similar approach to “‘Round Midnight” in the CD called A Letter to Dexter. It is a fine version. It is not the equal of what he did last Saturday night at The Seasons, when he created that rarest of musical experiences, a concert performance that remains in the mind, whole and alive.

If you follow the links at the ends of Rifftides items, you’ll know that the distinguished Toronto broadcaster Ted O’Reilly commented on the recent Rod Levitt item. In his restrained way, O’Reilly wrote, in part:

Wow, yeah! Rod Levitt. In the ’60s RCA Canada did not release those LPs in Canada, but John Norris was running the jazz department at the main Sam The Record Man store and astutely imported some US copies. I got them all for the radio station where I worked, and played the hell out of them all.

That prompted Mr. Jazzolog to respond with a comment of his own:

What a treat to run the names and sounds of both Rod Levitt and Ted O’Reilly through my head on the same page! One of the worst parts of moving from the Buffalo area down into the wilds of southeast Ohio a number of years ago was not hearing Ted’s wonderful radio show out of Toronto anymore. He’s the kind of DJ who segues from Jelly Roll Morton to the Art Ensemble of Chicago without batting an earplug. Great to see his comment! Now, how about someone reflecting on the work of Tom Talbert…whose last CDs I’m scrambling through the Net to find?

Someone did so a year-and-a-half ago, shortly after Talbert died. From the Rifftides archives:

An elegant, soft-spoken man, he was an early and drastically overlooked composer, arranger and band leader on the west coast before West Coast Jazz was a category…The recordings Talbert made shortly after World War Two sound fresh today. Art Pepper fell in love with Tom’s treatment of “Over the Rainbow” and adopted the song as his signature tune.

To read the whole thing, complete with leads to some of Tom Talbert’s recordings, go here.

Tenor saxophonist Mark Turner offers a heartfelt, forthright evaluation of Michael Brecker, including this:

I saw him put his horn on at clinics and soundchecks and–cold, without warming up–instantly play the most f——- incredible sh–, stuff that most saxophonists simply cannot deal with.

Okay, I cleaned it a little up for a family audience. To read all of Turner’s unexpurgated throughts about Brecker, go to The Bad Plus web log, Do The Math. Pianist Ethan Iverson writes most of the blog. It is worth frequent visits. I have added its link to Other Places in the right-hand column.