Doug,
I was really saddened to hear about his passing. Huge inspiration to me as a young player. I’d toss the following into your list (see below). I’ve always had a preference for the records that were a little more angular and less Blue Note-boogalocentric.
Bluesnik
(includes great playing by Pete LaRoca)
4 5 6
(excellent earlier McLean, with great versions of “Why Was I Born” and “Sentimental Journey”–showing a knack for Sonny Rollins-like sense of phrasing. Album has solid contributions for Mal Wadron and Mobley too! Listen closely, Art Taylor’s hi-hat pedal needs to be oiled)
Right Now!
(Especially notable for Clifford Jarvis’ s hard-swinging drumming and McLean’s tune “Eco”, burning!)
I’d also throw in the curveball of the 1967 session Demon’s Dance
(which features Woody Shaw, Jack DeJohnette and two great tunes: Shaw’s “Sweet Love of Mine” and the gorgeous ballad “Toyland”).
Tim DuRoche

Jackie McLean
Jackie McLean died in Hartford, Connecticut on the last day of March. He was 74. When he was a teenager, McLean’s goal in life was to sound just like Charlie Parker on the alto saxophone. Despite his determination to be a Bird clone, he became one of the most recognizable of the post-Parker alto saxophonists. There was a distinguishing cry in his playing, achieved in part by tuning his horn a tad sharp and in part by building on his deep love of the blues. His first recording was with Miles Davis on the Dig date in 1951. McLean worked with Davis through the early 1950s, was on a memorable album as part of George Wallington’s quintet in 1955, recorded on his own for Jubilee and Prestige and in 1959 made the first of his thirty-one albums for Blue Note.
If you have yet to discover Jackie McLean, the few albums listed here will constitute an introduction to his adventurous and exhuberant music.
Lights Out
Jackie’s Bag
A Fickle Sonance
Destination Out!
Let Freedom Ring
Oscar Treadwell
On March 10, we reported that the exceptional jazz broadcaster Oscar Treadwell had returned to the air in Cincinnati and on the internet. The news staff of WXVU, his station, sent this report, dated April 2.

Long time Cincinnati jazz host Oscar Treadwell has died. He began his career in 1947 in Reading, Pennsylvania. His longtime love of jazz led to friendships with many musicians including Dave Brubeck, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Thelonious Monk wrote a song for him called “Oska T.” Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie wrote “An Oscar for Treadwell” in honor of their friend. OT began broadcasting in Cincinnati in 1962 on WZIP. He also broadcast on WNOP and WGUC. His Sunday night program on WVXU has been on the air since last August. He often weaved poetry and vintage interviews into his program. Tonight at nine you can hear an interview Lee Hay did with OT when he was returning to the airwaves. His regular Sunday night program will follow that interview tonight. Treadwell was 79.

To hear the interview and then Jazz With OT, go here at 9:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time tonight. The station also has an archive of Treadwell’s broadcasts.
For more about OT, go to the Oscar Treadwell website.

When a voice behind me whispered low,
‘That fellow’s got to swing.’
—Oscar Wilde, Hélas (1903)

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.
—Duke Ellington (1932)

John Birchard of the Voice of America writes:

I read your new material on Willis Conover and VOA. When I joined the staff in ’93, Willis was in decline with cancer. As I worked ights, I didn’t see him often and, in fact, never had a conversation with him. It was my impression that a fair number of staff people kinda resented his status – his renown, his separateness from the “regular” employees.
Following his death, I was appalled that VOA continued to run his tapes for months and months. After some time had passed, I spoke with the then-Deputy Director of VOA, Alan Heil, asking what was going to happen to the program. He said they would hold auditions for a successor. I applied, knowing that whoever followed Willis would suffer by comparison, but feeling that they should have a “live” replacement and continue the great tradition.
Months went by and I was never given the courtesy of a response to my audition, and I learned a couple of other aspirants were treated the same. Management finally signed Russ Davis and put him on the air with a taped show with no publicity or promotion…a shabby epilogue to one of the great careers in broadcasting.
One final Willis anecdote: For most of the 1970s, I was emcee for the annual Quinnipiac College Jazz Festival, which featured the top college jazz bands along the eastern seaboard. Each year, festival organizers invited a distinguished panel of judges to critique the bands – people like Ernie Wilkins, Clark Terry, Chico O’Farrill, Rev Norman O’Connor, Jimmy Lyons, etc. At the time, I worked as a talk show host in New Haven. The festival ran Friday thru Sunday evenings and I couldn’t make the first hour of the Friday show because I was on the air. The organizers would run in a substitute for me for that hour. One Friday night, I believe it was in 1972, I arrived at
the festival site, walked in the hall and heard a very distinctive voice over the PA…yes, it was Willis. I made my way backstage, anxious that I might have lost my gig. When he was given the high sign from the wings, he introduced me. I walked onstage, took the mic and said to the audience, “Do you know how intimidating it is to try to follow the most famous jazz disc jockey in the world?”.
I don’t know if the audience realized who he was – but I sure did. It’s a memory I shall treasure lways.

“Bix Lives,” read the graffiti after cornetist Bix Beiderbecke died in 1931. “Bird Lives,” began appearing on walls in New York within days of Charlie Parker’s death in 1955. Neither Beiderbecke nor Parker, however, inspired an establishment of religion. So far, the only jazz musician to be declared a saint is John Coltrane. In Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers, the chapter on Coltrane included this:

For a complex variety of reasons, few of them musical, a legendary John Coltrane was created in the years immediately after his death in 1967. The legend persists, and it exists alongside the music as if on a separate plane. Coltrane the legend is a divinely inspired mystic who ultimately transcended music to deliver to the world a spiritual message of love and salvation. The legend comes complete with an appropriately mystical name for Coltrane, Ohnedaruth, evoking the mists, incense and chants of some great Zen beyond, from which Trane is sending back vibrations.
I have been in the pads of youngsters who have constructed little shrines not unlike those of Japanese or Italian working class homes. But the centerpiece is not a lithograph of Buddha or Jesus. It is a print of the cover photograph from Coltrane’s album A Love Supreme. In the late sixties and early seventies, the time of flower children, Haight-Ashbury, Vietnam, and burgeoning drug use, Coltrane became a convenient object of the search for heroes. And his early death seemed to qualify him, among those in need of martyrs, for the company of Dr. King, Malcolm X and Robert Kennedy.

One of the manifestations of the zeal surrounding Coltrane’s memory was the creation in San Francisco, four years after his death, of the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church. It exists thirty-five years later. Evelyn Nieves of The Washington Post visited the church and reports that its founder and members are serious and dedicated in their adoration of Coltrane.

Last Sunday’s service was typical: lots of music and listening. “The first part of our service is quiet meditation,” said Johnson, as a boombox on the floor played John Coltrane Live at the Village Vanguard.
The house-band members took their places in front of a seven-foot-tall Byzantine-style painting of Coltrane holding a saxophone with flames coming from it. Bishop Franzo King, in white robes with a fuchsia skullcap and cummerbund, took a seat in front of a conga drum, his soprano sax in hand.

To read the whole report, go here.

Ken Dryden writes:

I enjoyed reading Paul Blair’s comments about the late Willis Conover. What ever happened to his jazz collection–is it still in the VOA archives or was it disposed of with his estate, donated to an archives, etc.? Maybe Paul should get busy on a Conover bio.
I just picked up a DVD of the 1969 New Orleans Jazz Festival, whose lineup he was instrumental in putting together (before politics turned it into a commercial multi-cultural event with significantly less jazz content). He’s shown emceeing a group (Clark Terry, Zoot Sims, Jaki Byard, Milt Hinton and Alan Dawson, plus a deservedly obscure singer on one song) in the Court of Two Sisters courtyard, a place legendary for its awful food, even though it is a picturesque setting.

As Mr. Dryden knows, but perhaps others do not, Conover was central to the success of the 1969 New Orleans jazz festival, a milestone event of its kind. He produced it. Here is a little of what I wrote about it in the Rifftides piece that initiated this periodic Conover retrospective and the subsequent discussion of the peril facing the Voice of America’s English language broadcasts.

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.

For more on the ’69 JazzFest and Conover, go here. Also, read Charles Suhor’s accounts in Jazz In New Orleans: The Postwar Years Through 1970.

I’ll be unbloggable, and possibly sleepless, in Seattle for a couple of days of meetings at the University of Washington, and some book business. There are worse places to be in springtime, when the cherry trees bloom in the UW quad, the showers lighten, and people smile more.
In the meantime, visit the Rifftides archive and investigate what the other artsjournal.com bloggers have to offer you (links in the right-hand column).

Another location recording by Dave Frishberg?

What do you mean, another? There hasn’t been one since Do You Miss New York? That was four years ago.

Ah, the one with “Jaws” and “The Hopi Way.” How can he top that?

Top it? Why does he have to top it? Music isn’t a contest, a quest to set records (heh heh). Can’t he just make a CD with a few new songs and a few old ones and tie ’em together with a theme?

What’s the theme?

Nostalgia. You know, “The Dear Departed Past.”

Oh. Of course. Any new baseball songs?

Several, and he spins them together in a story about the White Sox scandal in 1919 and Christy Mathewson (“Matty”). One of them, “Play Ball,” is a nifty waltz. “Van Lingle Mungo” and “Dodger Blue” are there, too.

Hmm.

I forget to mention the boxing song, “Who Do You Think You Are, Jack Dempsey?”

How’s his piano playing?

Terrific. Nice little solos. Sympathetic accompanist. Listens to the singer. He does his best “Listen Here” on record.

Okay. What’s the album called?

Retromania: Dave Frishberg At The Jazz Bakery. Good cover shot; Frishberg and a bunch of old sports magazines. He wrote the liner notes. Sample: “I’m nostalgic about stuff that hasn’t even happened yet.”

The Rifftides discussion of the perilous situation of the Voice of America’s English language broadcasting has a running sidebar about Willis Conover. Conover was the VOA’s free lance jazz voice, one of the United States’ most effective instruments of public diplomacy during the Cold War. Ironically, although he was a hero to millions behind the Iron Curtain—teaching them about jazz and, as an unintended bonus, to speak English—he was unknown to most Americans and unrecognized by the government of the nation to which he attrracted incalculable good will. Since Willis died in 1996, a number of people who understand the importance of his contribution have tried to see that he is awarded a posthumous presidential medal of freedom. The Clinton administration ignored the entreaties. The Bush White House has shunned them with equal ignorance and indifference. Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq war, gets a medal of freedom. Willis Conover, who provided masses of people under Soviet bondage with hope and artistic object lesson in the meaning of freedom, does not.
Until the pianist, singer and songwriter Dave Frishberg sent the following story, I was unaware of the extent to which the VOA itself failed to recognize the importance of the man who brought so much credit to the agency and its country.

When Willis Conover was living in in New York around 1970 he assembled a big band under the direction of Bill Berry, and presented the band in a series of Sunday afternoon concerts at the Roosevelt Hotel. I was playing piano in the band, and that’s when Willis and I met.
In April, 1984 when I was playing in Washington DC, he invited me to lunch and told me to meet him at the Voice Of America studios. When I checked in at the security desk in the lobby, none of the security personnel had heard of Willis Conover, and I was denied access to an elevator. They looked in every possible phone directory and his name was nowhere to be found. I explained loudly that Willis Conover was THE VOICE in the Voice Of America, but they stared at me with mounting mistrust. A man walked by and heard me arguing with the security people and told me he was going up to VOA and would tell Willis that I was in the lobby. When Willis came down to get me, I told him “These security guards don’t even recognize your name!” He smiled and said , “I know. Ridiculous, isn’t it?”
Dave Frishberg

To read the full Willis Conover story, go to this Rifftides posting from the archive. For more on Conover’s relationship with the Voice, go to the next exhibit.

Paul Blair, now an editor, free lance writer and licensed New York City tour guide, was a colleague of Willis Conover at the Voice Of America in the 1980s. He hosted a daily VOA broadcast. Blair sent Dave Frishberg the following recollection after reading Dave’s story in the previous Rifftides posting. We’re bringing it to you with their permission.

I believe Willis had, by the spring of 1984, left (or been left by) the New York wife and more or less settled in Washington for good. Apparently this was his final spouse, some sort of exotic and difficult European princess. I think he had a little apartment somewhere up on Capitol Hill but he’d never reveal his home address or number. He was quite Ellingtonian in many ways, always eager to keep the various aspects of his life separate from one another.
VOA still broadcasts from those aging facilities at 330 Independence Ave. SW, across from the Mall from where the Museum of the American Indian has lately been built. He’d have been working daily from a cramped little studio on the second floor. What you have to understand is that Willis was never a fulltime government employee. Instead, he had some kind of lucrative long-term contract as an outside vendor, selling his services to VOA but not actually a civil servant like the rest of us. No one else ever used his personal studio, or could have. Perhaps you’ll recall how crowded it was with LPs and tapes, literally spilling out of huge metal cabinets, arrayed in such a way that only he could ever locate anything. Anyway, this explains why no rent-a-guard at the VOA entrance would have been ableto locate Willis in a staff directory – but why anyone who’d been working awhile in the building knew exactly where to find him.
The rest of us all used studio engineers from a rotating pool of old timers. But Willis had his own personal engineer, someone who’d be available whenever he felt like recording shows at any time of the day or night. These tended to be youngish guys from the Polish, Bulgarian and Latvian Services who’d grown up hearing Willis and were worshipful of him – but who’d always quit after six or eight months because they couldn’t get used to either his hours or his temperament. At that point, they’d be returned to the pool of regular engineers, where they sit around and retell Conover anecdotes to one another and anyone else who’d listen.
Willis’ personal assistant/secretary for many years was a lovely older woman named Nita Brasch. The only photo on the desk in her basement office was (at his instruction, I’m sure) a framed shot of Meredith d’Ambroiso, for whom he obviously had the hots. I do want to emphasize how kindly and generously this guy treated me over the seven years I worked at VOA. Once, at a Duke Ellington Society conference, he actually stood up and introduced me at some length to fellow attendees. He’d brought along a tall, impossibly slender but not terribly young Russian-language broadcaster to that gathering as his own guest. He gestured toward her at one point and whispered to me, “That’s not chopped liver!” I also remember him telling me one day – though can’t recall the context – that his forties had been an especilly active decade for him sexually. My own heartthrob at this point was a broadcaster in the Indonesian Service. (It was because of this woman that I resigned from VOA in 1988; I pursued her all the way to Jakarta, where I ended up living for ten years – and subsequently married someone else.) Not knowing of this relationship, he invited this young woman into his private studio one day and detained her with compliments and questions for nearly an hour. As she left, he autographed a photo to her personally, one showing him interviewing Ellington. I still have it.
Willis stayed on top at VOA through some very effective politicking with top brass who’d been around for many years. I always fancied that Willis regarded me as the person most likely to succeed him, and I believe others in the building had similar thoughts. But in fact the whole idea of VOA broadcasting jazz really died when Willis did. There’s no real jazz on government air any more. After all, the commies have been soundly beaten and European musicians are now the world’s most adventuresome. In retrospect, maybe he knew that he’d never be succeeded. He did take care to polish his own legend, though. Whenever Nita received an interview request, she’d send out a press packet thick with previous pieces written about Willis. Surely this explains why the same anecdotes (triumphal airport welcomes in Eastern Erope, etc.) are repeated in one profile after another.
A few years ago, Terry Ripmaster, a guy in New Jersey, was working on a Conover bio. We spoke on the phone once or twice around 1999. I don’t know if he ever finished the manuscript or found a publisher. But I can relate one story unlikely to appear in such a book. Once when my four-year old son was visiting me at VOA, I took him into the men’s room, a huge marble-encrusted affair. My son was chatting with great animation. Although we thought we were alone in there, Willis was seated in one of the stalls – and he obviously thought that someone was addressing him. His response was to ask, loudly, “What?” Given the resonance of his voice plus the impressive echo within those confines, it sounded like God himself was addressing us. My son, scared into silence, proceeded to pee on the floor.
Paul Blair

To visit Mr. Blair’s SwingStreets website featuring news about and ways to take his walking tours of New York, go here. If you roam around the site long enough, you’ll find a way to play full-length examples of New York jazz from various eras. To go directly to that feature, click here and scroll to the bottom of the page. It is easy to let the music seduce you into entrapment there. Don’t forget to come back to Rifftides.