Posting will be light, if at all, for the next few days. For one thing, the Rifftides staff will be employed in prepping and painting the larger of the two sheds at Rifftides world headquarters. For another, The Seasons Fall Festival is underway, there’s a lot of jazz and classical music to be heard, and I’ve been pressed into service to read a few short Carl Sandburg poems when The Bill Mays Trio and the Finesterra Trio collaborate. Among other joint efforts, they will combine Charlie Parker and J.S. Bach and play a movement of the Mendelssohn D-Minor Trio.
The big question: Will the jazz and classical cats agree on where “one” is?

Charlie Shoemake, the vibraharpist, leader and teacher, checks in with a story pertinent to the Rifftides discussion about swing and jazz values.

Thought you would get a laugh out of a true anecdote that concerns the current topic in your column. 40 years (or so) ago I was playing a night at Dontes in North Hollywood with the guitarist Ron Anthony. (George Shearing, Frank Sinatra). In the group that night was a drummer named Nick Martinis (member of Pete Jollys’ trio for many years among other west coast names) who was (and is) well known for his off-center personality and remarks.
Before the group hit the stand for the first set Nick said to all of us standing at the bar…..”Well cats, do we swing tonight or DO WE HIDE ‘ONE’?” That concept has been around for close to half a century now and yet many of today’s younger players still think of it as “the new thing.” Whenever I hear a group playing like that now I always think of Nick and laugh. It’s certainly a valid concept but I’ll always feel (probably because of my generation) that acheiving what Percy Heath and Kenny Clarke (or Paul Chambers and Philly Joe) did with the time is much more difficult. Old fashioned or not.
Charlie Shoemake

In the right-hand column under Doug’s Picks, we have three CDS, a DVD and a book. One of the CDs is old and up to date. The book is old with a message that’s never out of date.

Saxophonist, composer, bandleader and educator Bill Kirchner writes from New Jersey:

I’ve read all the comments with interest–fortunately, they all come from thoughtful persons. Otherwise, discussions like this can be insufferable.
My favorite rejoinder in such discussions comes, I believe, from drummer Paul Wertico: “It don’t mean a thing if all it does is swing.” I can think of some truly stupid music I’ve heard that swings quite well. The moral is that jazz–and all good music–needs to do something *besides* swinging.
In recent decades, there have been jazz artists who have used the term “swing” almost as a weapon, with a kind of phallic posturing. As critic Larry Kart perceptively wrote: “Warmth, soul, and swing are among the hallmarks of a Ben Webster or a Dexter Gordon, but for them these things seem not be sought after in themselves. Instead
they are an inevitable byproduct of the act of playing jazz, virtues that arise as a matter of course when one makes musical and emotional contact with the material at hand.”
The Dizzy Gillespies and Miles Davises of the world never indulged in phallic posturing about swinging. They simply played great music, and it worked on all levels, including swinging. And there are many different ways to swing–not just boom-chicka-boom. Miles’ 1970 LIVE-EVIL, for example, swings mightily to my ears (considerable
thanks to Jack DeJohnette, among others), even though it comes from a period of Miles’ career that some doctrinaire folks refuse to regard as jazz. We’re still discovering new ways of swinging, thank God–at
least, many of us are.

If you are new to this discussion of swing and what constitutes jazz, you can go here to catch up and follow the links back through the previous postings.

We have posted several new comments about Mel Narunsky’s communique concerning what is and is not jazz, including a new one from Mr. Narunsky himself. You will find them here, appended to the original message. We also received a mini-essay from the bandleader, arranger, composer, trombonist, vocalist and libationologist Eric Felten, who has given the matter considerable thought. Here is Mr. Felten’s meditation on the groove:

The question of swinging, and whether it can coexist with a post-modern jazz sensibility brings to mind a phenomenon that I have witnessed repeatedly — a modern unwillingness to let swing time settle into a groove.
Here’s what I mean: When jazz musicians take on funk or hip-hop or Latin idioms, they seem to recognize that the repetitive quality of the rhythm is an essential part of the music. In other words, the music has a “groove” (indeed, when some prominent jazz musicians put together hip-hop-influenced ensembles, they call them their “groove bands.” For there to be an effective and affecting groove, the rhythm has to lock into some degree of consistency and repetition, whether in funk, hip-hop or Latin styles.
And I would argue that the same is true for the swing idiom. And yet, it is as though a couple of generations of jazz musicians have been brought up to think that there is something lame or uninventive about a consistent, repeated swing groove. It is rare that I hear a modern rhythm section go for more than four bars (well, really, even just two) without in some way “breaking up the time.” Subverting the swing groove is now as reflexive a gesture as “playing outside.” So much so that I think many players feel uncomfortable in a steady swing groove just as “outside” harmonies have become so ingrained in our ears that they are the new diatonic, if you will.
Let me be clear, by the way, that I am not saying there should be no more breaking up of straight-ahead time. Sadly, so much discussion of jazz falls into false dichotomies and accusations of apostasy. I once wrote an article arguing that melody has been neglected in modern jazz and I was denounced for 1) declaring that jazz was dead (which I never said in the slightest) and 2) declaring that no one should ever do anything other than play the melody (again, which I never even suggested), and 3) saying that there is no one on earth left who knows how to play a melodic solo (again, not what I said).
So, in this case let me emphasize that what I am saying is that there is power in “groove” including the groove known as swing. Groove-Power is easily recognized when jazz players are crossing over into other idioms, but all too often forgotten when they are working in a straight jazz context. I long to get lost in a swing groove as hypnotic as any hip-hop or trance loop. This is not a retro manifesto: I would suggest that there is untapped potential to reassert the power of the jazz groove in a modern context. And I would further suggest that “breaking up the time” would be far more musically interesting if it were used more sparingly — that is, if some real time were established before the breaking of it begins.
And lastly, I would suggest that jazz musicians wouldn’t have to go so far afield in search of the satisfactions of grooving if they were more willing to develop the grooves in their own backyard.
cheers,
Eric

Mr. Felten’s right to use “cheers” for his closing is hard-won. His How’s Your Drink column appears most Saturdays in The Wall Street Journal. Just think of all that testing and tasting.

Reaction to Mel Narunsky’s forthright declaration that it don’t mean a thing if–well, you know–is posted following his manifesto. Frankly, I thought there would be more comment, and I hope that there will be.
There is a fortunate byproduct of this discussion. I clicked on the link in the ID at the end of DJA’s pithy comment and found that DJA is Darcy James Argue, a young composer, arranger and leader of an eighteen-piece band in New York. Argue is drawing praise from Bob Brookmeyer and attracting to his band musicians of the quality of trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, pianist Mike Holober and tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin. I recommend site seeing, and hearing. You will find streaming demo performances at the site. Click on “Live Archive” in the right column. Be patient; the pieces take time to download, even with broadband. I’m not sure whether Mr. Narunsky will agree, but it sounds to me as if swing is being committed by Argue and his colleagues. Of course we could always argue (small a) about what swing is.

Quite apart from nailing down a definition of swing, Ornette Coleman agreed to talk with Ben Ratliff of The New York Times about the nature of music itself. To his credit, Ratliff got the perenially unorthodox musician to emerge, even briefly, from the cloud of vagueness in which he has customarily hidden from attempts to get him to be specific about art in general, and his in particular. He mentioned to Ratliff his early saxophone influence, Charlie Parker.

With regard to his Parker worship, he kept the phrasing but got rid of the sequences. “I first tried to ban all chords,” he said, “and just make music an idea, instead of a set pattern to know where you are.”

The full report is in Friday morning’s Times.

This is Chico Hamilton’s eighty-fifth birthday. I spent some of it listening to his new recordings, admiring his taste and versatility and marveling at the undiminished energy he pours into his drum set, an instrument that challenges the physical resources of players a quarter his age.
Like many listeners, I first knew of Hamilton when the Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker, Carson Smith and Hamilton became an overnight phenomenon in late 1952. But his experience goes back to the beginning of the 1940s and encompasses work with Duke Ellington, Slim Gaillard, Lester Young, Lena Horne, Nat Cole, and Ella Fitzgerald, among others, before he joined Mulligan. In 1955, he formed his own quintet. It used cello, flute and guitar in soft textures and driving swing and set Hamilton on a course of leadership and innovation from which he has not diverged in more than half a century. He is known for discovering and developing musicians. When I heard him in Los Angeles not long ago at the helm of the latest edition of his band, Hamilton’s intensity, swing and radiant pleasure in performing made him the youngest man on the bandstand.
This morning on NPR’s Morning Edition, Ashley Kahn interviewed Hamilton, told his story and played some of his music. To hear Ashley’s piece, go here and click on “Listen.”
Happy birthday, sir.

Bennie Maupin was on the New York jazz scene as a saxophonist and bass clarinetist in New York in the 1960s and ’70s, most famously as a member of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew cast and of Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi group. He worked off and on with Hancock for twenty years. In Penumbra (Cryptogramophone), he nods briefly toward those jazz fusion days, but the loveliest music on the CD is in the Castor and Pollux interrelationship of Maupin on bass clarinet and bassist Darek Oles. The highlight is “Message to Prez,” which builds langorously into a colloquy of low-register counterpoint and, finally, perfectly intoned unison on the dance-like melody.
Oles uses his unAmericanized Polish name, which is Oleszkiewicz, for his album Like a Dream (Cryptogramophone). Like George Mraz, Frantisek Uhlíř and so many other Eastern European bassists, Oleszkiewicz has prodigious technique and a full sound. He also has good time and a rich improvisational imagination. In three different combos, his sidemen include pianists Brad Mehldau and Adam Benjamin, guitarist Larry Koonse and, briefly but vigorously, Bennie Maupin on tenor saxophone. All of the tunes but “You Don’t Know What Love Is” are Oleszkiewicz’s. The mood of the CD matches its title.
Oles joins pianist Alan Pasqua and drummer Peter Erskine for Pasqua’s My New Old Friend (Cryptogramophone). Pasqua intersperses the title tune and other originals among several standards. He has a knack for ingeniously deconstructing melodies at the beginnings of the tunes and reassembling them for the final choruses. Pasqua’s sure touch and skill as a tonal colorist center the music, but the strength of Oles’ bass lines and Erskine’s restrained power interacting with the piano make this an integrated trio. Anyone inclined to doubt that Pasqua comes out of Bill Evans is invited to listen to “One More Once.”
The leader of The Jeff Gauthier Goatette is an acoustic and electric violinist, whose other instrument is listed as “effects.” In One and the Same (Cryptogramophone), guitarist Nels Cline and pianist David Witham also play effects, meaning electronics. When all of the effects and all of Alex Cline’s drums are working at once, as in a piece called “Water Torture,” the result resembles random noise of the universe, the perfect accompaniment for astral travel. Nearly everywhere else in the album, the Goatette commits melody. Even in “Water Torture,” there is an interval of lovely free improvisation between Gauthier’s violin and Joel Hamilton’s arco bass. Two pieces by the late Eric von Essen are particularly moving. Gauthier, not incidentally, is the moving force behind Cryptogramophone.
When von Essen died in 1997, he had become one of the busiest bassists in Los Angeles and a favorite of not only Gauthier and the Cline brothers but also of established mainstream musicians like Jimmy Rowles, Lou Levy and Art Farmer. In addition to bass, von Essen played guitar, piano, cello and chromatic harmonica, but his legacy to Cryptogramophone, and therefore to all of us, is that of a prolific composer. Cryptogramophone has released three CDs of songs from the dozens he left, played by musicians with whom von Essen worked. It is no coincidence that those players were–and are–at the core of the Los Angeles jazz community. Except for Bennie Maupin, they include everyone mentioned in the above paragraphs, plus Alan Broadbent, Putter Smith, Kendall Kay, Dave Carpenter, Stacy Rowles, Larry Koonse, Tom Warrington, Kate McGary and several others. The three volumes of The Music of Eric Von Essen constitute a living document of the harmonically demanding, yet intriguing and accessible compositions of this extraordinary musician.
Four years ago, Paul Conley did a substantial feature about Von Essen for National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Sunday. You can listen to it by going to the NPR archive. Click here.

Rifftides reader Mel Narunsky writes regarding
Recent CDs, Part 4:

From a modern moldy fig
I know I’m going to get a lot of flak from this, but as an old timer, let me be among the first to acknowledge that, with a few exceptions here and there, I am one of those who do not “accept that jazz values can exist apart from standard song forms and harmony, and without being tied to a steady 4/4 pulse” – the exceptions mainly being some new recordings from the older, familiar musicians – many of whom joined the “funky”, “smooth”, “fusion”, “jazz rock” , “electronic” and other types of watered-down jazz at the end of the 1960s which became so successful commercially when discovered by the non-purists.
I now approach all jazz recordings made by musicians with whom I’m not familiar with much trepidation. My old ears and brain are unable to cope with improvisations that I find impossible to follow, ergo I don’t enjoy the experience. In most cases I find the sounds very ugly. The question has been asked before, and I ask it again: whatever happened to beauty in music? Similarly, I find it difficult to listen to contemporary so-called “classical” music. I think of it as anti-music.
But the worst aspect of the jazz in question is that it simply doesn’t swing.
And Duke Ellington was quite right when he said, “It don’t mean a thing……”

Let’s hear other viewpoints on this matter. To respond, click on the “Comments” link at the end of this post.