In my Maria Schneider report a few weeks ago, I speculated about the economics of moving large congregations of musicians around the country. It turns out, according to DevraDoWrite, that the speculation was on target. The difference between Devra and me is that she has the inside facts. A sampling:

Having been Maria’s manager at one time, I know that she pays her musicians well (especially compared to some other leaders) and that on occassion she has netted less on a gig than anyone else in the band. I have even seen her take a loss (yes, pay out of her own pocket) because for the sake of the music she wants more rehearsal time and pays for that as well. Add in manager and agent commissions and an artist’s slice of the pie is often just a sliver.

Devra’s posting has a review of the Los Angeles concert that included the new commission piece Schneider debuted there. To read the whole thing, go to Maria Schneider at Disney Hall.

Under Other Places in the right-hand column, you will find a new link, to Jazz Scene, a site operated by the British journalist David Fishel. Jazz Scene is rather like an internet radio station over which the listener has scheduling control. Mr. Fishel’s specialty is interviews with musicians. He intersperses the conversations with music by his guests, rather as Rebecca Kilgore did in her short-lived and lamented On The Road series. His current subject is the Italian pianist Enrico Pieranunzi. In his “Show Files” link, he has programs with musicians as varied as Dianne Reeves, Svend Asmussen, Charlie Hunter, Horace Silver, Marilyn Crispell and Roger Kellaway. Good listening.
Even though Terry Teachout’s About Last Night is linked under AJ Blogs, I linked him again in Other Places just to be sure you don’t miss his and Our Girl In Chicago’s terrific omnibus nexus of culture. Visit them often, but please come back. Bring your friends.

Although most modern jazz pianists don’t acknowledge the fact or don’t know it, modern jazz piano begins with Earl Hines. For the most dramatic evidence, listen closely to Hines in the 1920s, especially in the mind-blowing “Weatherbird” duet with Louis Armstrong or his QRS recordings from 1928, “Chicago High Life,” for instance. (Follow the link, then scroll down to hear it.) You can bet that Bud Powell studied that chording left hand and those “trumpet” passages in the right hand and knew them inside out. Hines is recognized by older musicians, historians and critics as one of the most important figures in American music. It is a mystery why younger musicians, who could benefit from familiarity with his playing, don’t study it. Fortunately, there is at least one exception. Nearly twenty-three years after Hines’s death at seventy-nine, Harold Danko has recorded a tribute to the seminal musician whom his sidemen quite justly nicknamed Fatha when he was in his twenties.
Danko includes an obscure 1923 Hines composition, “Congaine” into which he fits references to Powell, as if to emphasize the line of descent. The album is called Hinesight. It is a collection of a dozen Hines pieces played by Danko, bassist Michael Formanek and drummer Jeff Hershfield. Danko, too little appreciated as one of the most adventurous and far-sighted post-Bill Evans pianists, is on the faculty of the Eastman School. He brings an educator’s zeal to his Hines project. His interpretations, however, are about as far from academic exercises as one can imagine. He makes 7/4 time for “Deep Forest,” 5/4 for “You Can Depend on Me” and a leisurely samba 6/4 for “Ann, Wonderful One” sound as if Hines meant them to be played that way. “Rosetta” gets a snappier bossa nova treatment and a slight revision of its chord changes.
Danko plays three of the QRS pieces, “Stowaway,” “A Monday Date” and “Blues in Thirds,” a trademark composition that Hines revisited all of his life and relished filling with surprises. It is a splendid CD. I can imagine Earl hearing that rollicking “Congaine” and, all smiles, giving Danko one of his patented compliments, “Well done, young man, well done.”
After hearing a Hines performance in New Orleans in 1980, I wrote that he was, “if anything, an even more ferociously experimental creator than he was at twenty-three.” Here is a little more from that chapter of Jazz Matters.

Rummaging in the basement of the keyboard, applying rococo layers of chords in the middle and a lightning scattering of tenths on top, erecting arhythmic passages that somehow continue the beat, taking pauses that suggest a gliding eagle surveying possibilities, Hines is in full cry, eyes closed, head back, grimacing in intellectural strain and the ecstacy of creation. Possessed of a tone with the brilliance of polished metal and fingers with the speed of pistons, he indulges himself in the surprises he loves: runs, curlicues, doodads, pizzazz, castles in the air, tension, release, single and multiple explosions, harmonic excursions into unknown territory, feats of metric foolery. Conversation stops and the noisiest drunken life underwriter is compelled to listen. Other pianists look anxious; this is clearly impossible, and the impossibility has nothing to do with technique. That is why there has never been a successful Hines imitator. The imitation would have to go beyond notes. The most meticulously written transcription could not capture the joyous rage, the abandon, the whimsy.

This CD, recorded a couple of years earlier in New Orleans at Le Club, has moments of Hines at the top of his game, with a dynamite ”Blue Skies” and a “Wolverine Blues” full of tremolos and cascades that might have made even Jelly Roll Morton smile at what his young admirer did with his tune.

In the next day or so, I’ll post impressions of the Portland Jazz Festival, including performances by McCoy Tyner, Miguel Zenon, Bill Frisell, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Dave Peck and Lynn Darroch.
We’re overdue for new Doug’s Picks. Watch this space or, more accurately, the space in the right-hand column.
And let us hear from you. The Rifftides staff loves to get your comments.

Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond has been running neck and neck with Frank Sinatra: The Life as best-selling book on jazz at the Barnes and Noble website. Yesterday we were first. Today we’re second.
And you thought the Winter Olympics were exciting.

Signing books at the Portland Jazz Festival Saturday evening, I was pleased to meet Joe Maita, the proprietor of the web site called Jerry Jazz Musician. He reminded me that I took part in his exercise asking a number of musicians, writers and other people in the jazz community to designate recording sessions they wish they had attended. The other respondents for Joe’s first installment were Ingrid Jensen, David Liebman, Jane Ira Bloom, Lalo Schifrin, Herman Leonard, Lee Tanner, Buddy Bregman, Bill Moody and Tim Brooks. Here is the first part of Ms. Jensen’s answer:

It’s all Miles dates for me. From Kind of Blue, to Nefertiti, Amandla and beyond. If I were to pick one session (actually sessions) it would be the Plugged Nickel. Even before reading Wayne Shorter’s book (Footprints) I found fresh energy and heavy inspiration from the playing of the entire band, especially Wayne.

From Jane Ira Bloom:

I wish I could have been sitting in a front row table at the Village Vanguard when Bill Evans recorded The Village Vanguard Sessions with his trio with Paul Motion and Scott LaFaro.

To see everyone’s reply, click here.

At this time the fashion is to bring something to jazz that I reject. They speak of freedom. But one has no right, under pretext of freeing yourself, to be illogical and incoherent by getting rid of structure and simply piling a lot of notes one on top of the other. There’s no beat anymore. You can’t keep time with your foot. I believe that what is happening to jazz with people like Ornette Coleman, for instance, is bad. There’s a new idea that consists in destroying everything and find what’s shocking and unexpected; whereas jazz must first of all tell a story that anyone can understand. —Thelonious Monk

Now, can you tell me a story? —Lester Young (after listening to a pyrotechnic display by a young hotdog saxophonist).

Doug,
We’ve had our political disagreements in the past, but your post on the Voice of America was spot on. I read the editorial in the Washington Times yesterday and was appalled at the cuts. The funding (peanuts, when you think about it) should be dramatically increased, for all of the reasons you mentioned. How quickly we forget. The VOA was a beacon for freedom for Eastern Europe in the days of the Iron Curtain and could well serve the same purpose today. Sometimes the President’s policies are simply bewildering to this conservative.
I plan to join you in making my displeasure known. Hope other readers will do the same.
Willis Conover is a most deserving candidate for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I met him back in the mid-’70s when I was writing for CashBox and Down Beat. A true gentleman. Why we so neglect our cultural heritage and its leading citizens is a mystery to me. But that’s a whole nuther story.
—Steven Marks

The Bush administration’s attempt to use the war on terrorism as an excuse to destroy the Voice of America angers me. I sent the message below to my senators and congressman and a few other senators who I thought might understand what’s at stake. I hope that you will consider taking similar action. Most of the senators’ and representatives’ web sites provide easy ways to send them e-mail messages.

I urge you to fight the Bush administration’s budget cuts that would result in the Voice of America stopping or reducing English Language news broadcasts. At a time when the US image around the world is soiled, we need continuation of the objective shortwave news programs whose very existence has informed millions about our nation, not to mention helping them learn English so that they might better understand what The United States of America stands for. This proposed budget cut would effectively disable one of the few official cultural exchange vehicles left to us. Please discuss this with your Senate and House colleagues and do all that you can to preserve the VOA.

I am unaccustomed to doing this sort of thing, in great part because a life in journalism has conditioned me to maintain public objectivity in matters of public policy. However, objectivity in this matter won’t get me, or you, or the United States anywhere. For the facts in the story so far, and quotes from both sides, go here.
Even on the opinion page of The Washington Times, rarely noted for reservations about Bush policies, the alarm is going up about this misguided move.
Now that the administration is chipping away at the VOA with the apparent aim of dismantling or neutering it, I don’t suppose there is a snowball’s chance that one of the Voice’s major heroes will get a presidential medal of freedom posthumously. Willis Conover still deserves it, as he did when he was alive. To read why, go here.

This weekend, I will be in Oregon for the third Portland Jazz Festival. Headliners are McCoy Tyner, Ravi Coltrane, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Stefon Harris, Miguel Zenon, Eddie Palmieri, Susan Werner and Bill Frisell’s Unspeakable Orchestra. With live audiences, I’ll be conducting two Jazz Times Before & After sessions, one with Zenon at 10:30 Saturday morning, the other with Frisell at 1:00 Sunday afternoon. If you are not familiar with the Before & After audio quiz, go here. For a detailed festival schedule, go here.
At 7:00 Saturday evening, preceding the Bridgewater concert, I’ll be signing copies of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. It would be wonderful to say hello to Rifftiders who attend the festival.