The posting about Willis Conover brought the following message from one of his Voice of America colleagues, John Birchard.

I came to VOA in 1993, hired as a news broadcaster on the late night shift. Because of my hours, I almost never saw Willis, except for once in a while when he would be out on the steps of the building chatting with the smokers. I never felt right about horning into his conversations, just to say I admired his work… but I did note his shrunken figure and face and the big horn rims.

Early on, I got the impression that quite a few people—in middle management and above—looked upon him as the tail that wagged the dog, that he was entirely too big, but there was nothing they could do about it. When he died, other than a fairly perfunctory obit, there was little to indicate that anything important had happened. VOA continued to run his tapes week after week, month after month. I don’t know the story of the efforts to get him the Presidential Medal of Freedom—or the manner in which he was treated in connection with the White House Jazz Festival, but I can imagine the kinds of small minds at work to bring him down to their level.

One personal anecdote: During the decade of the 70s, Quinnipiac College (now University) in Hamden, Connecticut, played host to an annual intercollegiate jazz festival, featuring college bands from all over the east and midwest. The performances were judged by a panel of professional musicians and others which, at various times, included Clark Terry, Jimmy Heath, Ernie Wilkins, Chico O’Farrill, Father Norman O’Connor and Jimmy Lyons. During those years, I was a talk show host in New Haven and the festival producers saw fit to have me emcee the programs each Spring. The festivals ran from Friday through Sunday nites. But I had to do my talk show on Fridays ’til 9pm, so each year the producers would have someone fill in for me for the first hour of the evening. One Friday evening, I walked into the back of the hall and heard a familiar voice from up on stage.

Of course, it was Willis. Not many in the audience really knew who he was, but I did. I was convinced I had just lost my gig. I trotted backstage and one of the producers gave Willis the high sign and he introduced me, gracious and appropriate as always. As he walked offstage and I walked on, we shook hands and I thanked him. Then, to the audience, I said, “I’m not sure you know just how intimidating it is to have the most famous jazz disc jockey in the world substituting for me. I’m proud to share the same stage with Mr. Conover and it’s an honor to have him here.”

Mr. Birchard still broadcasts the news for the Voice of America.
For an obituary of Willis Conover, go here.

The White House did once treat Conover with respect. In 1969 it chose him to organize the musical portion of the 70th birthday party that President Nixon gave for Duke Ellington. Willis recruited the all-star band and produced and narrated the concert. I took a picture of him that afternoon at the rehearsal in the East Room as he listened to Hank Jones, Gerry Mulligan, Paul Desmond, Clark Terry, Bill Berry, J.J. Johnson, Urbie Green, Jim Hall, Louis Bellson, Milt Hinton, Joe Williams and Mary Mayo. The concert was finally released on a Blue Note CD in 2002. I was honored to write the liner essay. Here’s a bit of it.

Hank Jones, Billy Taylor, and Dave Brubeck played beautifully, but the hands-down winner in the piano category was the 65-year-old Earl Hines, who in two daring minutes of “Perdido” tapped the essence of jazz. Ellington stood up and blew him kisses. Later, Billy Eckstine, who sang with Hines’ band before he had his own, walked up to his old boss and gave him an accolade: “You dirty old man.” The concert lasted an hour and a half, and the room was swinging. I looked around at heads bobbing and shoulders swaying and found Otto Preminger beaming and snapping his fingers Teutonically, one snap at the bottom of each downward stroke of his forearm.

Urged onto the platform, Ellington improvised an instant composition inspired, he said, by “a name, something very gentle and graceful—something like ‘Pat.’” The piece was full of serenity and the wizardry of Ellington’s harmonies. Mrs. Nixon, who looked distracted through much of the evening, paid close attention.

The evening was Ellington’s, gloriously so, but it was Willis’s connections, coordination, organizational skill and stewardship that put the icing on the birthday cake. It was one reason among many larger ones that he deserved, and still deserves, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Thanks so much for your piece about Willis Conover, and for all your other writing. I read your site regularly and am enlightened and informed every time.

My one experience with Willis Conover is worth sharing if only to mirror your sentiments. Years ago, probably 30 or so, a old family friend who lived in WC’s apartment building and was a good friend of his, asked me if I would like to visit WC and have a chat. I have always been a musician and for my entire life have done both music and my “day gig” as a school person. But in the history of western music I have no place and for anyone other than WC, I was simply another speck. He treated me as royalty, as a musical person in my own right and gave me so much counsel, encouragement, wit, humor, imagination, kindness and respect. What an amazing couple of hours I had with him. I have never forgotten WC and his extraordinary interest and kindness. They don’t make them like Willis Conover anymore.

With thanks,

peter kountz

Dr. Kountz’s achievements in education make him much more than a “school person.” To see them, go here.

Bill Kirchner, a musician who is also an educator, writer, editor and producer, knew Willis Conover. Like at least ninety-nine percent of jazz musicians, he is a fan of Johnny Mandel, one of whose arrangements recorded by Conover’s big band more than fifty years ago is responsible for setting off this chain of reminiscences about Willis. Bill writes:

Nice memories of Willis. I had fun hanging out with him in DC years ago.

There is a stunning, groundbreaking chart by Johnny (at age 21!) on that album of “The Song Is You” in ballad tempo, originally written in 1947 for, of all people, Buddy Rich. It is one of the first instances I know of in jazz scoring of genuine counterpoint. I tried to include it in the Smithsonian Big Band Renaissance box, but couldn’t get the rights from Universal.

Big Band Renaissance, produced by Bill Kirchner in the nineites, and its predecessor boxed set, Big Band Jazz produced by Gunther Schuller and the late Martin Williams in the eighties, are invaluable historical collections. They were released by The Smithsonian Collection of Recordings but were allowed to go out of print long ago. The copies still available are precious items.

To the complaint, “There are no people in these photographs,” I respond, “There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.” —Ansel Adams

Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there —Miles Davis

Rifftides Reader John Thomas noticed the recent postings about Johnny Mandel and kindly loaned me a CDR copy of a rare vinyl album containing Mandel’s arrangement of “The Song Is You.” The 1953 Brunswick LP has been out of print for at least forty years and reissued on CD only in a limited Japanese edition. It is called Willis Conover’s House of Sounds: Willis Conover presents THE Orchestra. THE Orchestra was a first-rate Washington, DC, band led by Joe Timer. It included wonderful players like Earl Swope, Jack Nimitz and Marky Markowitz. Conover was a local broadcaster whose accomplishments included helping to desegregate Washington by requiring that blacks be admitted to clubs in which he organized concerts.

Through most of the cold war, Conover was the host of Music USA on the Voice of America. He was never a government employee, always working under a free lance contract to maintain his indepence. While our leaders and those of the Soviet bloc stared one another down across the nuclear abyss, in his stately bass-baritone voice Willis introduced listeners around the world to jazz and American popular music. With knowledge, taste, dignity and no trace of politics, he played for nations of captive peoples the music of freedom. He interviewed virtually every prominent jazz figure of the second half of the twentieth century. Countless Eastern European musicians give him credit for bringing them into jazz. Because the Voice is not allowed to broadcast to the United States, Conover was unknown to the citizens of his own country. For millions behind the iron curtain he was an emblem of America, democracy and liberty. Gene Lees makes the case, to which I subscribe wholeheartedly, that,

…Willis Conover did more to crumble the Berlin wall and bring about collapse of the Soviet Empire than all the Cold War presidents put together.

In the January 2002 issue of his invaluable JazzLetter, Lees told Conover’s story, including an account of the attempts to have him presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The effort began when George H.W. Bush was president and continued into the current administration. Among those pushing for the honor when Willis was alive and after he died in 1996 were Lees, several other prominent writers and Leonard Garment, who was a White House counsel in the Nixon administration and had been a professional musician. The first President Bush, President Clinton and the second President Bush ignored all letters and presentations about Willis. Conover remains unrecognized by the nation for which he did so much. The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the award recently presented to Paul Wolfowitz and other administration figures for their parts in the iraq war.

The JazzLetter costs $70 a year. Sometimes it arrives considerably after the monthly dateline of the latest issue. It is worth the money and worth the wait. Gene writes about music and other matters with skill, erudition and passion. Much of his JazzLetter work eventually makes its way into his books, of which there is now quite a number. Lees and the JazzLetter do not have a website. They do have an e-mail address and a mailing address.

genelees@sbcglobal.net
Gene Lees JazzLetter
P.O. Box 240
Ojai, California 93024-0240

It may be that if you subscribe you can talk Gene into giving you a bonus copy of the issue about Conover. After I read it, I wrote the following letter, which ran in the February, 2002 issue

Dear Gene,

I want to tell you about my last lunch with Willis Conover, but the story needs background. In 1968, Willis was the MC for JazzFest, the New Orleans jazz festival. He did a splendid job. As board members of the festival, Danny Barker, Al Belletto and I fought hard to persuade the board to accept Willis’s proposal that he produce the 1969 festival. The other board members knew as little as most Americans knew about Willis. We educated them. Over a number of contentious meetings and the strong reservations of the chairman, Willis was hired. 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 been ever since. They tried at every turn to subvert the conditions of Willis’s contract, which gave him extensive, but not complete, artistic control. Because Willis was tied to his demanding Voice of America schedule in Washington, DC, much of the wrangling was by telephone and letter. He flew down to New Orleans frequently for meetings, which he despised as much as I did. He did not need all of that grief. He pursued his stewardship of the festival because he had a vision of how the music he loved should be presented.

The nastiness took its toll. When it was over, Willis was depleted, demoralized, bitter and barely consoled that he had produced a milestone festival. In the course of the battle, he and I became allies and close friends. As a purgative, he was going to write a book about his New Orleans experience, but I’m glad he didn’t; the issue is dead and so are many of the dramatis personae. Charlie Suhor covers much of the 1969 story in his book Jazz In New Orleans (Scarecrow Press). One night Willis and I were alternately commiserating and acting silly at the bar of the Napolean House over a couple of bottles of Labatt, his favorite Canadian ale. After a moment of silence, he turned to me and said in that deep rumble, “I love you, man.” The moment is one of my most precious memories. We were friends and confidants after my family and I moved to New York, where he had an apartment, and remained so after I left for other cities and we didn’t see each other for years at a time.

In 1996, not long after the scandalous treatment you described Willis receiving at the White House jazz festival, I was in Washington for a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. It was about a month before he died. Willis invited me to lunch at the Cosmos Club, where he maintained a membership. I doubt if, at the end, he could afford it, but it was important to him to be there, to feel a part of the old Washington he loved. He was at the door of the club when my cab pulled up. In the year since I had last seen him, he had shrunk into an Oliphant caricature, his horn-rimmed glasses outsized on his face, his shoulders and chest pinched, sunken.

Even his leonine head seemed smaller. His hair and his face were mostly gray. He led me to the elegant dining room, on the way introducing me to a couple of men. He had momentary difficulty remembering one of their names. At the table, Willis launched into a diatribe against his old New Orleans enemy, but gave it up and started reciting some of his limericks. He wrote devastatingly funny and wicked topical limericks. But this day it was all by rote. He was strangely absent, and his speech was irregular, partly because of the ravages of the oral cancer he survived and partly, I thought, because he must have had a stroke. I could not lead him into any topic long enough for a conversation to develop, so I sat back and tried to enjoy the limericks. He seemed to want to entertain me, and I imagine he was deflecting any possible attempt on my part to be sympathetic or maudlin.

I was due at a meeting and, after coffee, Willis asked the waiter to call a taxi for me. He walked me to the door and we stood silently in the entry of that magnificent old building. When the cab arrived, I had to say something. I didn’t want it to be “goodbye,” so I said, “I love you, man.” Willis swallowed and blinked. I gave him a hug and climbed into the cab. As it made a left turn out of the drive, I looked over at the entrance. Willis had disappeared into the Cosmos.

Doug

I intended to mention in the Rifftides ad hoc survey of recent trio CDs some by the Italian pianist Enrico Pieranunzi. Pieranunzi is another pianist who has retained the Bill Evans ethos and used it as the foundation for a style of his own. As if to remind me, today the mailbox disgorged the reissue of a selection of film music by Ennio Morricone, used for improvisation by Pieranunzi, bassist Marc Johnson and drummer Joey Baron. The album has U.S. distribution from Sunnyside Records and is available here.
Much of Pieranunzi’s work, including the first Morricone CD and Play Morricone 2, is on CamJazz, a classy Italian label. He, Baron and Johnson, Evans’ last bass player, work together with unity of purpose. They give the music, by turns, intensity and ease that perfectly suit the Morricone pieces. It may surprise listeners who associate Morricone’s music only with the mournful soundtracks of spaghetti westerns that some of his themes are as hip as bebop originals. The CamJazz catalogue is worth exploring for other Pieranunzi CDs, among them his recent duets with Jim Hall, the restlessly exploratory dean of modern jazz guitar. There is also a Pieranunzi collaboration with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian. Enrico Brava, John Taylor, Kenny Wheeler, Lee Konitz and the intriguing pianist Salvatore Bonafede are other CamJazz artists.

A Rifftides reader writes:

Keep up the great work on your site. It’s a beacon of taste and
erudition in the sometimes dispiriting world of jazz criticism.

All right. Another day or so.

Jaki Byard, Sunshine of My Soul (Prestige Original Jazz Classics). Byard, piano; David Izenson, bass; Elvin Jones, drums.
I wrote in a blurb for the 2001 reissue of this album, “Byard was one of the most disciplined and one of the least inhibited of all jazz improvisers.” With Ornette Coleman’s bassist and John Coltrane’s drummer, he spreads sunshine even as they hurtle headlong through space without guideposts in “Trendsition Zildjian,” eleven minutes of total improvisation. The track is amazing even in the context of this amazing recording. Made in 1967, its music will always be new. No one has solved the mystery of Byard’s murder in 1998 and no one has explained the mystery of his genius. Genuis is like that.
Mike Wofford, Live at Athenaeum Jazz (Capri). Wofford, piano; Peter Washington, bass; Victor Lewis, drums.
Reviewing Wofford’s first album, Strawberry Wine, in 1967, I described him as “an excellent piano player who is much under the spell of Bill Evans.There are some tracks on which Wofford’s individuality shows. His approach includes humor, a quality many musicians his age have avoided like the plague.” Thirty-eight years later, Wofford is still in the Evans tradition in terms of his touch, chord voicings, implied rhythms, and ability to generate a floating quality. But his individuality shows here on every track, as it has for decades. His mastery and, yes, humor, are priceless on Ellington’s “Take the Coltrane.” Wofford is based in San Diego. This was recorded just up the road in La Jolla. His sidemen are two of New York’s finest. They deserve to be in his company.
Dave Peck, Good Road (Let’s Play Stella). Peck, piano; Jeff Johnson, bass; Joe LaBarbera, drums.
Hiring Bill Evans’ last drummer and one of the leading exponents of the Scott LaFaro school of bass playing for this date, Peck clearly had no intention of disguising Evans’s influence. From the pianist’s ethereal introduction of “Yesterdays” through his composition “The First Sign of Spring,” which hints at Evans tunes, to the slowly decaying final chord of “She Was Too Good to Me,” Evans hovers benevolently over Peck’s stimulating session. The trio is beautifully integrated, sounding as if they had been working together night after night. “Just in Time,” “What is This Thing Called Love” and “On Green Dolphin Street” are swingers. Peck is reflective in two of Ellington’s loveliest ballads, “Low Key Lightly” and “The Star Crossed Lovers.” Good Road seems to me his best work on records.
Bobo Stenson, Goodbye (ECM). Stenson, piano; Anders Jormin, bass; Paul Motian, drums.
Tord Gustavsen, The Ground (ECM). Gustavsen, piano; Harald Johnsen, bass; Jarle Vespestad, drums.
In the lavish clarity of ECM’s sound, these CDs present impressive Scandinavian pianists. With Paul Motian as his drummer, Stenson, a Swede, would seem to be courting an Evans sensibility. Motian is too perpetually hip to encourage a return to those glorious days of yesteryear, although the trio comes closest to Evans in “Yesterdays.” Stenson has certain similarities to Evans in touch and harmonic voicings, but generally his work is more informed by Scriabin-like gravity—until the last piece. In Ornette Coleman’s “Race Face,” everyone scurries amiably and the pianist treats us to outré intervals. Great fun.
Fun does not come to mind in describing the work of Gustavsen. Beauty does. In the words of Guardian reviewer John Fordahm, the Norwegian “likes space, silence and ambiguity.” His music’s dreamy qualities have crossed him over into the feel-good, soft-jazz market, but his trio’s playing has enough harmonic density, backbone and guts that he’s never going to be mistaken for George Winston.
Quickly, then (I can’t stay up all night again), here are other piano trio CDs that I’ve allowed to move to the top of the stack:
Peter Beets, New York Trio, Page 3 (Criss Cross). Beets, piano; Reginald Veal, bass; Herlin Riley, drums.
Fine young mainstream Dutch pianist. Third CD on Criss Cross. Getting better all the time.
Jo Ann Daugherty, Range of Motion (BluJazz). Daughterty, piano; Lorin Cohen or Larry Kohut, bass; guitar, saxophones, trumpet, trombone.
Ms. Daugherty is from Missouri and lives in Chicago. There is only one trio track on her CD. The horns and guitar are all good, and so are her tunes, but that trio track, “Harold’s Tune,” is a gem. I had never heard of her when I put the disc on. I love surprises like this. Jo Ann Daugherty deserves—no, we deserve—a trio album, pronto.
Alexander Schimmeroth, Arrival (Fresh Sound). Schimmeroth, piano; Matt Penman, bass; Jeff Ballard, drums.
Schimmeroth is a young German living in New York. His sound is full-bodied, his timing and note placement exquisite. This is an impressive debut.
David Hazeltine, Modern Standards (Sharp Nine). Hazeltine, piano; David Williams, bass, Joe Farnsworth, drums.
One of the great pros among jazz pianists under fifty, always swinging, always satisfying.
Hod O’Brien, Live at Blues Alley, First Set, Second Set (Reservoir). O’Brien, piano; Ray Drummond, bass; Kenny Washington, drums.
O’Brien was active in New York in the fifties and remains an inspired exponent of the bebop style founded by Bud Powell. Drummond and Washington inspire him to some of his best playing.

Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them, well, I have others—Groucho Marx