Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond has been awarded second place in the performing arts category for an IPPY, a 2006 Independent Book Publishers Award.
Here are the finishers:
Winner:
Vivian Perlis and Libby Van Cleve, Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington (Yale University Press)
Finalists:
Doug Ramsey, Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond (Parkside Publications)
Weathervane Theatre, Nights of Northern Lights:40 Seasons of the Weathervane Theatre
I don’t think that Desmond would have been discouraged about losing to Charles Ives and Duke Ellington. Nor am I. Hearty congratulations to Ms. Perlis, Ms. Van Cleve and Yale. I can’t wait to read their book.

Rifftides reader Bob Walsh writes:

What ever happened to guitarist Mundell Lowe? I saw him often in the studio band of Merv Griffin in New York. I met him at Monterey when he was a fixture in backup groups. He later took over after Monterey impresario Jimmy Lyons’ s forced retirement. I recall that he was married to vocalist Betty Bradley, who vastly improved as a singer after she wed Mundell. As a very young man, he was a guitarist with the Sons of the Pioneers, along with Ohio-born Leonard Sly (later known as Roy Rogers). He fit into any setting but never seemed to have an identifiable style or “voice.” Reminds me that Marian McPartland was passed over many times for Monterey until John Lewis finally concluded she was no longer playing back others’ voices and had found what was distinctively her own.

The last I heard, Mundell Lowe, at eighty-four, was working as much as he cared to. I think the Betty you have in mind is Bennett, who was a terrific singer long before she met Lowe. They live in southern California. Earlier, she was married to Andre Previn and in the early fifties dated Paul Desmond (Take Five, pages 205 and 206). I didn’t know about Lowe’s being with the Sons of the Pioneers, but that doesn’t surprise me. Many fine jazz guitarists are from the Southwest or deep South—Lowe is from Mississippi—and many played country music, among them Jimmy Raney, Herb Ellis, Charlie Christian and Hank Garland, not to overlook the amazing Thumbs Carllile. As for the question of Lowe’s style and voice, he gets by on thorough musicianship, taste, intense swing and the undiluted admiration of his fellow musicians. All of his attributes, plus the lift of his rhythm guitar, are on this CD, a trio with Ray Brown on bass and Previn playing piano.
In case you are skeptical that there is a Thumbs Carllile, go here, scroll down and sample “Me and Memphis.”
Roy Rogers was a good singer, better than Gene Autry. I wish that I still had a 78 rpm record of him singing a song called, I think, “Moaning Low.” It seems to be missing from all of the Rogers CD reissues. Rogers recorded near misses like “Cleanin’ My Rifle (and Thinkin’ of You)” and lightweight novelties (“Gay Ranchero,” “Pistol Packin’ Mama). ” But “Everything Changes,” “Green Green Grass of Home,” “Blue Shadows on the Trail” and his skilled yodeling on “My Little Lady” compensate for a lot of dross. Country music today could use a stiff shot of Rogers’ unpretentious, straightforward approach. This album has generous samples of Rogers from all phases of his career.

You’ve had nearly a month to memorize those old picks, so they’re gone. You’ll find the new Doug’s Picks in the right-hand column.

In jazz histories, as in all histories of human activity, small errors are repeated and become the standard version of events. Don Payne, the bassist on Ornette Coleman’s first album, sent the following addendum to the Rifftides piece on Johnny Mandel’s contribution to a Coleman compositon and the record deal that led to Coleman’s emergence.

We soon did a one a.m. audition at the club. It was attended by John Lewis, Percy Heath, Milt Jackson and Connie Kay–the Modern Jazz Quartet. They brought Les Koenig, the owner of Contemporary Records. On the spot, he signed us, on a handshake, to a two-record deal. I remember Koenig taking Ornette by the arm and saying, “If I don’t get you, Atlantic will.” That first LP, now a classic, was Something Else: The Music of Ornette Coleman. That is history.

Payne’s account differs significantly from the liner-note version, which says that bassist Red Mitchell suggested to Coleman that he take one of his compositions to Koenig, Coleman demonstrated the tune by playing it on his alto sax and Koenig signed him then. In light of the outcome–Coleman’s fame–does it matter which version is true? Only if you think that accuracy in history is important.
After Coleman’s two Contemporary albums, Atlantic did get him. He made eight albums for Atlantic before moving on to Columbia, then a variety of labels.

Bill Crow did not stop collecting jazz anecdotes when he published Jazz Anecdotes and From Birdland to Broadway. He has a column of anecdotes every month in Allegro, the newspaper of New York’s Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. With Bill’s permission, here is one that deserves circulation beyond the 802 membership. The Rifftides staff has added links to music by the principals.

Bassist Don Payne, who now lives in Florida, was three years out of the Army in 1958. He moved into a cottage in the Hollywood hills where he and a group of local musicians that called themselves “The Jazz Messiahs” often rehearsed, trying to develop their own sound. Don Cherry, the trumpet player with the group, introduced them to Ornette Coleman, who had written some interesting originals. One day they were working on “The Blessing,” one of Ornette’s tunes. Walter Norris had worked out the harmonies, and they were playing it over and over to memorize it. Suddenly the door opened and Payne’s next door neighbor walked in. After nodding hello, he took a sheet of music paper and quickly wrote down the tune they had been playing, and added an improvement to the chords at the end of the bridge. He reached over Walter’s shoulder and put the music in front of him on the piano, bowed and smiled to the other musicians and went back out the door. Walter played what he had written and said, “This works!” He turned around to say thank you, but the man was already gone. He asked, “Who was that?” Don said, “That’s my neighbor, Johnny Mandel.”

Jazz is a small community, but I would never have imagined a connection between Ornette Coleman and Johnny Mandel.
I called Don Payne this afternoon to fill in a couple of blanks. He said that The Jazz Messiahs was Don Cherry’s group. Don Friedman was the original pianist, replaced by Walter Norris when Friedman moved to New York. James Clay was the tenor saxophonist, Billy Higgins the drummer. After Clay left to join Red Mitchell, Ornette came in on alto saxophone. The quintet’s showcase performance at a Hollywood club led to Coleman’s being offered a record deal. The band eventually went pianoless and became the Ornette Coleman Quartet. Payne left Los Angeles to join guitarist Mundell Lowe, then Ralph Sharon’s trio backing Tony Bennett.
Payne’s memories of the circumstances leading to the emergence of Ornette Coleman are at odds with conventional accounts, which he says perpetuate initial reporting errors that distort history. Eventually, we’ll have more of Payne’s recollections of that yeasty period.

The Trumpet As Metaphor

You must stir it and stump it,
And blow your own trumpet,
Or trust me, you haven’t a chance.—W.S. Gilbert

With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance. —Norman Mailer

The very essence of leadership is that you have to have vision. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.—Theodore Hesburgh

Reading, hearing and seeing stories this week about the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival triggers memories of the festival’s beginnings and of the years I lived in the Crescent City (please, not The Big Easy). JazzFest, as it was christened at its birth in the late 1960s, began as the purest of jazz festivals, integrated with a judicious smattering of associated events involving Louisiana food and culture. The 1968 and ’69 festivals, along with certain years at Newport and Monterey, were among the music’s milestone large events. They were not big money makers and they did not fit some New Orleans movers’ and shakers’ vision of what a festival should be in a city whose motto is “Let The Good Times Roll.”
From an earlier Rifftides piece about Willis Conover, who produced the 1969 JazzFest:

The ’69 festival turned out to be one of the great events in the history of the music. It reflected Willis’s knowledge, taste, judgment, and the enormous regard the best jazz musicians in the world had for him.
I won’t give you the complete list of talent. Suffice it to report that the house band for the week was Zoot Sims, Clark Terry, Jaki Byard, Milt Hinton and Alan Dawson, and that some of the hundred or so musicians who performed were Sarah Vaughan, the Count Basie band, Gerry Mulligan, Paul Desmond, Albert Mangelsdorff, Roland Kirk, Jimmy Giuffre, the Onward Brass Band, Rita Reyes, Al Belletto, Eddie Miller, Graham Collier, Earle Warren, Buddy Tate, Dickie Wells, Pete Fountain, Freddie Hubbard and Dizzy Gillespie. The festival had style, dignity and panache. It was a festival of music, not a carnival. An enormous amount of the credit for that goes to Willis. His achievement came only after months of infighting with the chairman and other retrograde members of the jazz establishment who did not understand or accept mainstream, much less modern, jazz and who wanted the festival to be the mini-Mardi Gras that it became the next year and has remained since.

To read more about Conover’s role in the festival, go here.
In 1970, George Wein’s Festival Productions company took over JazzFest from the locals who created it, renamed it the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and—with promotional skill and canny marketing—made it the world-famous party it is today. The fact that the bash is overwhelmingly pop, secondarily heritage and minimally jazz doesn’t bother the promoters and doesn’t bother New Orleans. It was probably inevitable in the city that care forgot, that JazzFest would become a big, fat, swirling celebration full of R&B, rock, gospel, Zydeco and soul. The headliners this year are Bob Dylan, Dr. John, Herbie Hancock, The Meters, Dave Matthews, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Keith Urban and Fats Domino. Perhaps you’ll have no trouble finding the one jazz name in that list.
In the aftermath of Katrina, with much of the city resembling a post-war nightmare, a party called a jazz festival symbolizes New Orleans’ determination to recover. That speaks of a spirit that rises from within New Orleanians and cuts through a malaise of failed leadership, politics and bureaucracy. For eight years, I was a New Orleanian. I understand that spirit. It grows out of the curious combination of laissez faire and obstinance that animates folks whose blood has a component of coffee with chicory.
Partying is wonderful. Food is wonderful. Boogying and getting down is wonderful. Few Orleanians would disagree with any of that. But this is the city that gave us Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, Henry “Red” Allen, Barney Bigard, Raymond Burke, Danny Barker, Paul Barbarin, James Black, Johnny Vidacovich, Al Belletto, Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison and the Marsalises.
Clearly, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is here to stay as a kaleidoscope of entertainment. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the city also had room for a festival that honored and nurtured the music that is the living symbol of the New Orleans spirit. Somehow, jazz ended up in a minor role at what the natives still call JazzFest.

Today, favorite blogette DevraDoWrite is celebrating the first anniversary of her web log. Many happy returns.
If you’d like to learn how Devra likes to horse around, go here.

Within a half hour of returning from a trip late this afternoon, I got into the appropriate duds, jumped on the mountain bike and took a twelve-mile ride before supper. The route was a favorite, along one of the irrigation canals carrying the water that allows this high desert valley to bloom. For long stretches, the margins of the path are graced with lilacs, clouds of lilacs, in parks, yards, the borders of orchards, vacant lots. The blossoms range from purest white through pink, lavender, mauve and magenta down to an indigo that approaches black.
The light slanted across the lilacs as the sun lowered toward the peaks of the Cascade range. The scent of the blooms intensified in the evening air and, without having been near a glass of wine, I came home in a state of slight intoxication.

The next few days will find me consorting with friends from educational endeavors long ago; in other words, a college reunion. I leave you with the two items below. The first is brief, a bit of welcome news. The second is long, intended to bring to your attention a musician who deserves it.
I’ll be traveling without benefit or burden of the old laptop. Hey, we all need breaks now and then from the digital world . Without them, we might need digitalis.
Have a good weekend.