The preceding item about using good music as punishment has an unintended connection to a piece in one of Gene Lees’ latest JazzLetters. With Gene’s permission, here it is.

TORTURE
Kenny Drew’s angst over the state of popular music put me in mind of a news story that came out about a year ago.
The Associated Press carried a report on a U.S. military prison near Kabul in Afghanistan that specialized in torturing prisoners. The Human Rights Watch group, based in New York City, after interviews with so-called “detainees” (if you don’t call them “prisoners” you can do anything you want to them), describes how prisoners were chained to walls or hung upside down or kept in total darkness for days and subjected interminably to loud music. And what kind of music was it? “Loud rap, heavy metal music, or other sounds blared for weeks at a time.”
A prisoner born in Ethiopia and raised in England said that he was exposed to Eminem and Dr. Dre for seeming endless hours
What? No Mozart? No Bach? No Debussy or Duke Ellington or Charlie Parker or Bill Evans or Miles Davis or Frank Sinatra?
The prisoner said he could her people knocking their heads on the walls and screaming.
No kidding.

You won’t find Gene Lees Ad Libitum & JazzLetter on the internet. It is published the old fashioned way, with ink and paper. The legend at the end of the September, 2005 issue reads:

The JazzLetter is published 12 times a year at PO Box 240, Ojai, California 93024-1240. $70 per year U.S. and Canada, $80 for other countries. Subscribers may buy introductory gift subscriptions for friends for $35.

Oh, about the September 2005 issue coming out in August, 2006. The JazzLetter shows up in batches, sometimes four or five issues at once. Whatever the dates on the issues you receive, what is in them will be timely and timeless. It is an unusual publishing practice, but the JazzLetter is an unusual publication, forthright, beautifully written and ranging through subjects of interest to intelligent, aware readers, whether or not the topics relate directly to jazz. I have every copy since it started, March 15, 1982. If seventy dollars a year sounds high, I maintain that the Scott LaFaro and Herb Geller issues Lees just sent out are worth that much and more.

To provide harmonic guidance, bands in early jazz, swing and bebop included banjos, guitars or pianos. There were exceptions, notably some of the New Orleans bands that rode in the beds of trucks or marched for funerals and parades, That practice continues with outfits as traditional as the Onward and Olympia brass bands and as up to date as the Dirty Dozen. In general, though, after 1930, as jazz became more and more a soloist’s art, players depended on pianists or guitarists to supply the chordal basis for improvisation.

The harmonic aspect of bop was often complex, even unto altered changes for the most basic material–the blues and pieces based on simple standard songs like “I Got Rhythm” and “Oh, Lady Be Good.” When the baritone saxophonist and arranger Gerry Mulligan unveiled a band without a chording instrument, it seemed to some listeners incomplete. Others thought it brought openness and freshness to a music that had grown increasingly involved and demanding. Mulligan’s quartet with trumpeter Chet Baker, bassist Carson Smith and drummer Chico Hamilton was a popular success in the pre-rock-and-roll early 1950s, and came to have a lasting influence in the music. Before the decade was out, Ornette Coleman was further reducing dependence on chording instruments, in fact on chords themselves, with instrumentation identical to Mulligan’s save that Coleman played alto rather than baritone sax. Groups patterning themselves on Mulligan’s emerged through the years. Paul Desmond’s quartet with guitarist Jim Hall and later with Ed Bickert may have been the most successful.

Fascination with the Mulligan quartet and its achievements continues in the new century. Three fairly recent CDs make the point. Trumpeter John McNeil’s East Coast Cool (Omnitone) is the newest and most experimental, taking Mulligan’s concept beyond conventional song-form harmony into freedom that often verges on Coleman territory. He includes only one piece, “Bernie’s Tune,” from Mulligan’s repertoire. In it, he expands the famous introductory triplet phrase by half, then doubles it, takes the bridge into waltz time and elasticizes the meter in the improvised choruses. The metric foolery in this and other selections is possible not only by way of McNeil’s celebrated instrumental and cerebral virtuosity, but also that of baritone saxophonist Alan Chase, bassist John Hebert and the magical drummer Matt Wilson.

The rest of the twelve pieces, except for Kenny Berger’s Mulligan-like “GAB,” are by McNeil. Some have what sound (deceptively) like conventional chord changes. Some seem to have none, but depend on rhythmic regularity. Throughout, there is a large dollop of McNeil’s wryness and wit, but they never overwhelm his musicality. “A Time To Go,” which apparently means to poke fun at the conventions of accessible melodicism in the West Coast Jazz of the 1950s, is nonetheless melodic and accessible. “Delusions” alternates between sections of uplift and menace and features amazing extended press-roll dynamics by Wilson.

Two duets by McNeil and Chase sound totally improvised, but with McNeil you can’t always be certain what is worked out and what is off the cuff. In “Duet #2,” the trumpet discreetly uses what I presume to be tape-loop echo while Chase, closely miked, manipulates the saxophone’s keys without blowing into the instrument, producing a hollow effect something like that of the drums called boo-bams. The track is intriguing and judiciously short; too much of this would have been precious. Other highlights: a piece called “Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto,” built of twelve-tone rows, also brief and effective; a truly beautiful semi-free ballad called “Wanwood;” and “Waltz Helios,” which is wistful and touching. McNeil extends Mulligan’s concept into regions of free and modal jazz without going so far out as to lose the cogency or the sense of fun that helped make Mulligan’s quartet a model upon which to buld.

News From Blueport by the Andy Panayi Quartet (Woodville Records) closely observes the Mulligan ethos and repertoire. With trombonist Mark Nightingale, bassist Simon Woolf and drummer Steve Brown, baritone saxophonist Panayi approximates the edition of the Mulligan quartet that had Bob Brookmeyer on trombone. Veterans of British studios and jazz clubs, they achieve the Mulligan-Brookmeyer blend. Except in short stretches of Bill Crow’s title tune, the band does not deviate from straight time or leave conventional harmonic arenas. Yet, it is not a mere replication of the Mulligan group. However skillfully Panayi has adapted certain of Mulligan’s mannerisms, he occasionally departs into growls, honks and slurs that announce his individuality.

Nightingale plays the slide trombone, not the valve version of which Brookmeyer is the undefeated champion. A precisionist of the J.J. Johnson school, he nonetheless glories in his instrument’s ability to whoop and holler. The tune list is predominantly from the Mulligan book–“Blueport,” “Line for Lyons,” “Sun on the Stairs,” “Festive Minor” and others–but it also has nice changes of pace in Jimmy Rowles’ “The Peacocks,” Pepper Adams’ “Reflectory” and “Em ‘N En,” a Nightingale line based on “There Will Never Be Another You.” Woolf and Brown are new to me. Their work in support is admirable, and Woolf demonstrates both ardor and technique, including plenty of double stops, in his bass solos. This is a Mulligan tribute album that will introduce many non-Britains to four impressive musicians. This CD seems to be hard to find in the U.S. The link above is to a British seller.

The Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava’s Full Of Life (CamJazz) also embraces Mulligan, but with more subtlety than the Payani group and less overt adventuresomeness than McNeil’s. Rava is one of many European trumpeters influenced by Chet Baker and Miles Davis. He also has some of the free radical genes of players like Kenny Wheeler and Don Cherry. Javier Girotto is the baritone saxophonist. Although his soloing is more elliptical than Mulligan’s, and he works within a narrower dynamic range, when he and Rava heat up their counterpoint on “Surrey With the Fringe on Top,” they achieve a symbiosis remarkably like that of Mulligan and Baker.

The CD contains no Mulligan compositions, but Rava pays tribute with “Moonlight in Vermont,” using the essential outline of Mulligan’s famous version with Baker. It is a langourous, reflective, enchanting performance, but “Nature Boy” outdoes it for sheer passion that reaches the simmering intensity of slow flamenco in Rava’s solo and in Girotto’s on soprano saxophone. As for the rest of the tunes, Rava’s and Girotto’s originals are as intriguing as some of their titles; “Boston April 15th,” as an example, “Happiness is to Win a Big Prize in Cash” as another. Those pieces, “Miss MG,” “Full of Life,” “Visions” and “Mystere” have harmonic structures that inspire lovely solos from both horns and, often, daring ones from Rava. Like Kenny Wheeler, he is prone to making surprising interval leaps into the stratosphere without sacrificing his lyricism.

Bassist Ares Ravolazzi and drummer Fabrizio Sferra present further evidence that superb rhythm section players are everywhere in Europe these days. Full of Life is an apt title for this consistently satisfying album.

In the notes for Bill Evans: The Secret Sessions, I observed of certain Free Jazz or New Thing players,

The movement did attract a fair number of poseurs enchanted by the idea of playing music without having to know anything about it. Today, most of them are otherwise employed.

At least, they had instruments.
The blogger known as Shrinkucci, who is a drummer and a psychologist, posts an interesting story about a young man who, because he wants to be, believes himself to be a great drummer. To read it, go here.

When you begin to teach jazz, the most dangerous thing is that you tend to teach style…I had eleven piano students, and I would say eight of them didn’t even want to know about chords or anything – they didn’t even want to do anything that anybody had ever done, because they didn’t want to be imitators. Well, of course, this is pretty naive…but nevertheless it does bring to light the fact that if you’re going to try to teach jazz…you must abstract the principles of music which have nothing to do with style, and this is exceedingly difficult. So there, the teaching of jazz is a very touchy point. It ends up where the jazz player, ultimately, if he’s going to be a serious jazz player, teaches himself.

—Bill Evans

Jazz is like writing. It can be learned, but it can’t be taught.

—Paul Desmond

A nice appreciation of Evans.
Is Monk really sui generis? I think there is a second piano tradition born of the Harlem pianists like James P. Johnson, and it runs to Duke and then to Monk, and appears in amalgamated form with the other tradition in folks like Elmo Hope and Barry Harris.
And there may be one exception to your observation about styles not set before 1960 developing in the shadow of Kind of Blue. I think Jackie McLean had a distinct style before and after Kind of Blue. Frankly, I can’t stand his early work, which always sounded strained, frantic and involved the worst sort of change-running — a sweaty steeplechase from chord to chord. I don’t think there was a musician who greater benefited from Kind of Blue’s influence. McLean responded to the greater demand that modal jazz placed on the soloist to create a body of work on Blue Note from 1960-1966 that is extraordinary. I have them all in my collection, and dutifully pulled them all out when he died, and they are as fresh and as exciting as they were 40-45 years ago. A Fickle Sonance still blows me right across the room, the same way it did when I first heard it on Symphony Sid‘s show in 1963.
Don Frese

I rarely pass along promotional announcements, but this one is too intriguing not to deserve an exception.

STANLEY CROUCH, GEORGE AVAKIAN AND MICHAEL JAMES WITH CHRISTOPHER LYDON TONIGHT AT 7 PM (EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME) TO DISCUSS DUKE ELLINGTON, NEWPORT JAZZ AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY
On Open Source On WGBH 89.7
Open Source airs Monday through Thursday from 7pm-8 pm on WGBH 89.7 and streams at wgbh.org/listen
On July 7, 1956, Duke Ellington played the Newport Jazz Festival. Paul Gonsalves soloed for six minutes on “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” the crowd exploded, an album was cut and our century – the American century, the Jazz century – found its high point. Christopher Lydon says, “Fifty summers after the Newport Suite and Paul Gonzalves’ 27 choruses of blues, we’re going savor a golden moment in American life with (music critic and author) Stanley Crouch; the Columbia record producer George Avakian; the Newport impresario then and now, George Wein; and with Duke Ellington’s ever-eloquent and all-witnessing nephew Michael James.”

Crouch, Avakian and James are articulate men of, shall we say, firm opinions. Lydon is a skilled interviewer. It would be surprising if they were boring on the subject of Ellington.

Bill Evans was born on this day in 1929. Gratitude for that gift to music is not merely in order, it is mandatory. Here is a little of what I wrote a decade ago in an essay for the CD box, Bill Evans: The Secret Sessions.

The evolution of jazz music as a distinct form of creative expression is contained in only eight decades of the 20th century. The maturing of the art of jazz piano improvisation is an index to the astonishing speed of that development. It took less than 40 years, and its main current ran from James P. Johnson through Fats Waller, Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson, Nat Cole, Bud Powell and Bill Evans, with Art Tatum standing apart as an unclassifiable phenomenon.

Today, I might add Jelly Roll Morton at the beginning of the list and Thelonious Monk as the other great unclassifiable.

Acting on insights gained from the music of Debussy and other impressionist composers, he enriched his chords beyond those of any other jazz pianist. Comparisons that come to mind are with harmonies that Gil Evans and Robert Farnon wrote for large orchestras and with some of the mysterious voicings of Duke Ellington. Even in his earliest trio work he stretched and displaced rhythm and melody and hinted at modes and scales as the basis for improvisation.
With the 1958 Miles Davis sextet that included saxophonists John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones (replaced before very long by Jimmy Cobb), Evans had enormous influence in determining the course that mainstream jazz follows to this day. Although in his own groups he was to remain within the song form all his life, at this time Evans clearly accelerated Davis’s change from a repertoire of popular songs and jazz standards to pieces with fewer chord changes and greater demands on the taste, judgment and imagination of the soloist.
Davis saw ways of using the pianist’s approach to open up and simplify harmonies. By applying modal changes, the two men even transformed a twelve-bar blues, already the simplest traditional jazz form. By 1959, their work together helped lead to the landmark Davis sextet recording, Kind Of Blue. (It is fair to say that of important players and writers whose styles were not set before 1960, most developed in the shadow of that album.) Their modal and scalar approach to improvisation profoundly influenced John Coltrane’s turn toward fewer harmonic guideposts. Independently, at about the same time, alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman was solong on melodic lines, which he wrote without key centers, modes or scales. Taken together, the two methods led to Free Jazz or The New Thing, the avant garde jazz of the 1960s.

On his website The Bill Evans Web Pages, Jan Stevens writes:

Needless to say, he changed the way we all hear jazz –whether this is realized or not — and of course, he changed the very foundations of chord- voicing and improvisation forever. A very private and reserved soul who nevertheless reached out through his own naked self-expression, Bill was able to somehow create a fresh and vibrant soundscape that remains illuminating, if not downright spiritual to all who can really get inside of it and hear it at the highest levels.

And:

Make no mistake: Bill Evans was, of course, firmly within the jazz tradition and its ongoing aethetic, and was proud of it. Besides his legendary ballad playing, he could swing like crazy with his own trios, and it’s impossible to imagine certain albums by Miles or Mingus or Chet Baker or Cannonball Adderley or Kai and J.J. and many others without him. Yet, aspects of some of his best work transcend jazz as we know it –sometimes even confounding and delighting those who are not amenable to jazz to begin with. (Try out an early “My Foolish Heart” or almost anything from the “You Must Believe in Spring” album on your uninitiated, musically-intelligent friends and see what happens.)

To read all of Jan’s tribute, go here and find disclosures of what Evans might have done had he lived.
Bill Evans died on September 15, 1980. He was fifty-one years old. In a habit of anticipation developed during the course of his career, I still go to the mailbox in hopes that a new Bill Evans album will appear.

There is less than a month until a concert in New York to benefit Dick Sudhalter, the multi-talented musician and writer who needs all the help his friends (I am one) and admirers can give. Here is what I wrote in June about Dick’s dilemma.

Richard M. Sudhalter, the gifted cornetist, biographer of Bix Beiderbecke and invaluable jazz historian, needs help. Following a massive stroke nearly three years ago and a recent diagnosis that he has MSA (multiple system atrophy), Dick’s medical bills have mounted to proportions that he cannot begin to manage.
Sudhalter wrote Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contributions to Jazz 1915-1945. Following racist attacks by ignoramuses when it was published in 1999, it is now beginning to get the credit due it as one of the most valuable historical and analytical studies about jazz. He also wrote superb biographies of Beiderbecke and Hoagy Carmichael. Three books of their quality would be accomplishment aplenty for anyone. But Sudhalter is also a superb cornetist in the Beiderbecke tradition and beyond it. His contributions to the music and to the general culture are profound.
Friends are organizing a benefit concert to be held at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York on September 10, but Dick’s financial situation is crushing now. He is due to go to the Mayo Clinic for treatment. It’s going to be expensive. I am sending a check. I hope that you will also help, to whatever extent you can.

The concert will start at 7 pm at the church at Lexington Avenue and 54th Street. Tickets at the door or in advance are forty dollars. Please consider donations above that amount.
Dan Levinson and Randy Sandke are organizing the concert. If you go, you will hear Harry Allen, Dan Barrett, Eddie Bert, Bill Crow, Jim Ferguson, Dave Frishberg, Wycliffe Gordon, Marty Grosz, Becky Kilgore, Bill Kirchner, Steve Kuhn, Dan Levinson, Marian McPartland, Joe Muranyi, David Ostwald, Nicki Parrott, Bucky Pizzarelli, Scott Robinson, Randy Sandke, Daryl Sherman, and the Loren Schoenberg Big Band. There will no doubt be additions to that list. Tickets are available in advance–and donations can be sent by using this address:
Dorothy Kellogg
P.O. Box 757
Southold, NY 11971
You can also order tickets online with a credit card by visiting PayPal and using this account:
danlevinson@aol.com
Because of the MSA, Dick is unable to speak understandably. His ability to read and write are not affected. He would be delighted to hear by e-mail from friends who may have fallen out of touch. If you are in a position to offer him work–articles, reviews, essays, liner notes–hire him. He is a brilliant writer and he needs the money.

This is a vacation week. Blogging will be intermittent at best, but I will, of course, be thinking of all of you, wherever I may be.
I hope that you, too, are enjoying the summer. Unless, of course, you are in the southern hemisphere, in which case I hope that you are enjoying the winter.

Thanks to Ty Newcomb for alerting me to a remarkable performance of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.” The tenor player is an ugly cat, but he has Trane’s solo down cold (term used advisedly). To hear and witness it, go here. Do not ask where you can hear this player in live performance. You can’t.
Have a good weekend.