Marc Chénard, the jazz editor of La Scena Musicale, sent me his review of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, thus acquainting me for the first time with an impressive Canadian magazine. La Scena Musicale publishes a relatively new English edition,The Music Scene, as well as its established French version. The Fall 2005 issue includes not only Chénard’s book review, but also his interesting piece contrasting the careers of Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman.

Rollins, one of the rare surviving masters of the bop and hard-bop eras, is a champion of the great American song book tradition, a veritable walking fakebook of evergreens and jazz standards composed by other greats like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, as well as a few of his own (“Oleo,” “Valse Hot” and the pernnial jazz calypso “St Thomas”). Ornette Coleman, conversely, was thrust on the scene amid controversy, heralded as the instigator of “Free jazz,” a term that until it appearance in the late 1950s meant “music with no cover charge.”

The bulk of the magazine deals with classical music. The cover story is a verbatim interview with the mezzo soprano Cecilia Bartoli. The Q&A transcription format is lazy journalism, in lieu of writing. For the most part, the mezzo soprano Cecilia Bartoli gives predictable answers to softball questions, but she does offer an insight into the technical challenge a mezzo faces in roles not written with her kind of voice in mind.

CB: If you look in the original score of Don Giovanni or Nozze di Figaro, Mozart wrote those roles for sopranos; mezzos didn’t exist as a category. For Elvira, you need a flexible voice, but also with a nice, warm color in the middle. Fiordligli has to sing the difficult “Come scoglio”; you need the range up to a high C. But in Act 2, you have this incredible “per pietá,” whilch is really a masterpiece. It is written in the low register, so if you are a lyric soprano, it is good for the first aria but not the second. I sing a role that suits my instrument. In Mozart, it is clear you need once voice for Elvira, and a different one for the Queen of the Night—and I am not planning to sing Queen of the Night! (laughs)

I was taken with the critic Norman Lebrecht’s column about the rise and possible fall of the child soprano Charlotte Church, now nineteen. He compared the pressures on her with those on other child stars, including Judy Garland, Michael Jackson, Yehudi Menuhin, Evgeny Kissin, Mozart, Nadia Comaneci ”and any chess master you care to name.”

As much as the voice, Charlotte’s attraction was her naturalness, her determination to stay close to roots and friends in Cardiff, her sense of mischief. The grim-faced gutter press made a fetish of her frolics, anointing her Rear of the Year at 16, and dogging her dalliances with boys and drink. Charlotte played along with the pack, relishing the sales potential of celebrity, disporting herself on a beach lounger for the benefit of long lenses. She went on-line at the tabloid Sun to discuss ex-boyfriends with its prurient readers. She had the illusion of being in control and, at 19, the world at her feet. Who could begrudge that?

But listen to the single and the smile fades. Taken from her first pop album, Tissues and Issues – her previous CDs were, by some stretch of corporate imagination, designated Classical – “Call My Name” is an unremarkable heavy pounder and the delivery is commendably energetic. The voice, however, has deepened and coarsened, gritting around in a low-alto register and lacking stamina for the longer phrase. Too many fags, too much booze, perhaps. At this rate, there won’t be enough left in the box to sing “Goodnight Irene” when she’s thirty. As for that tremulous vibrato, it has turned into a nasty old wobble much in need of remedial tuition.

Nice uses of alliteration in that first paragraph, hard to do without being a cornball. La Scena Musicale and The Music Scene are well worth a look. You can find them in PDF form by going here.

For two days, indispensable functions of my computer have been performing erratically, requiring constant attention and consuming so much of my time and thought that further postings are going to have to wait. I trust that denizens of the digital world will understand. See you soon, I hope.

Not that we’re trying to be Johnny Mandel completists, but Rifftides reader Russell Chase wrote to remind me of the 1956 Fantasy LP Elliot Lawrence Plays Tiny Kahn and Johnny Mandel Arrangements. Terri Hinte of Fantasy discloses that the music in that album is now included in an OJC CD titled The Elliot Lawrence Big Band Swings Cohn & Kahn. Why Mandel didn’t make it into the title this time around is unclear (one syllable too many?), but five of the arrangements are his, “TNT,” “Blue Room,” “Who Fard That Shot?,” “My Heart Stood Still” and “Jeepers Creepers,” all Mandel in his big band arranging prime.
Al Cohn and Zoot Sims were in the band, well known and headed toward outright fame. Others members: Urbie Green, Hal McKusick, Nick Travis and Eddie Bert, along with the splendid bass-and-drums team of Buddy Clark and Sol Gubin supporting Lawrence, a more than capable pianist. This may have been the best of Lawrence’s several excellent bands. Mandel, Cohn and Kahn had a sterling collection of players to write for. The musicians gave the arrangements spirited readings. Recommended.

In the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal, artsjournal.com’s commander in chief, Doug McLennan, asked serious questions about the viability of the nonprofit business model for arts organizations—questions that will resonate with many jazz societies, and not just the big ones.

What to do? Many nonprofits are already playing with a for-profit mentality, coyly stepping up to the line separating it from nonprofit practice — sometimes even stepping over it while hoping nobody notices. Major museums mount fashion exhibitions that are sponsored by industry players. Public TV and radio run promo spots that they call “underwriting” rather than the “ads” that they are. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts rents out its collection to a Las Vegas casino.

Don’t expect institutions like MoMA or the Los Angeles Philharmonic to announce an IPO anytime soon. But increasingly, for many arts groups, the nonprofit model has become a straitjacket, one they are struggling to escape. The scale of for-profit behavior by many nonprofit arts organizations today wouldn’t have been allowed 20 years ago. Yet even stretching traditional nonprofit status to the point of breaking, the current model looks unsustainable, both financially and artistically.

I can’t link you to the piece. If you subscribe to the WSJ online edition, you can go to the paper’s web site and search for “Culture Clash.” If you are not a WSJ reader, you could look it up at the lilbrary.

library (liۢ brerۢ ē) n., pl. -brar·ies 1. a place set apart to contain books, periodicals, and other material for reading, viewing, listening, study, or reference, as a room, set of rooms, or building where books may be read or borrowed.—Random House Dictionary of the English Language

(In case, in this electronic world, you’ve forgotten.)
Artsjournal.com is the umbrella organization under which Rifftides flourishes. Well, under which we exist. The Rifftides staff recommends that you visit artsjournal.com for a compilation of news from the wider arts world. We check it out every day.

NOTICE TO RIFFTIDES READERS: THIS ITEM IS UPDATED WITH INFORMATION ADDED SINCE THE ORIGINAL POSTING.
A Rifftides reader asks:

Can you point us to recordings of the Mandel arrangements you mentioned in your recent posting? (I’m having trouble locating “TNT”, “Keester Parade” and some of the others.)

With pleasure. I’ll give you sources for those and others. Click on the blue links to find the CDs.
Not his earliest, but some of Mandel’s best compositions and arrangements of the forties were for Artie Shaw’s superb—and short-lived—bebop band. “Krazy Kat” and “Innuendo” are in Artie Shaw and His Orchestra 1949 (Music Masters), along with Mandel’s arrangement of “I Get a Kick Out of You.”
His arrangement of Count Basie’s “Low Life” is on Count Basie: Low Life (Jazz Club). “Low Life” is also in the Mosaic boxed set The Complete Clef/Verve Count Basie Fifties Studio Recordings, as is Mandel’s “Straight Life.”
“Not Really the Blues” is part of a Capitol Woody Herman compilation, Keeper of the Flame. Mandel once told me that Herman recorded the piece at a slower tempo than he had in mind. Mandel kicked it off considerably more briskly the other night in his JWC3 concert. Nonetheless, Herman’s is a great performance of a brilliant arrangement. The musicians in Herman’s Third Herd (mid-1950s) loved the chart so much that they often prevailed on the old man to play it two or three times a night. Later in the fifties, Herman recorded Mandel’s “Sinbad the Sailor” for the Everest label. If you buy the most recent reissue that contains “Sinbad,” the CD called Herman’s Heat & Puente’s Beat, be aware that the music is wonderful, but the album is a discographical mess; titles don’t match the tracks. “Sinbad” is listed as track 17. It is, in fact, track 13. Track 17 is Neal Hefti’s “The Good Earth.”
“Keester Parade,” “TNT” and “Groover Wailin’” are on Cy Touff, His Octet & Quintet (Pacific Jazz), one of the best albums by any medium-sized band. It is neck and neck in the Mandel sweepstakes with his arrangements in Hoagy Sings Carmichael (Pacific Jazz), a showcase not only for Carmichael but also for the alto saxophonist Art Pepper. The Touff session personnel included trumpeter Harry Edison, who was so impressed with “Keester Parade” that he later borrowed (ahem) Mandel’s melody and called it “Centerpiece.”
Also in the fifties, Mandel made arrangements of “Stella by Starlight” and his composition “Tommyhawk” for a Chet Baker sextet that included valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, and Bud Shank playing Baritone saxophone. They are in an album called Chet Baker Big Band (Pacific Jazz), in which the biggest band has eleven pieces. A master of writing for strings, some of Mandel’s earliest and loveliest work in that idiom was also for Baker—arrangements of “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” “Love,” “I Love You” and “The Wind” in Chet Baker & Strings (Columbia). Mandel’s score of the 1958 film I Want To Live is on the movie soundtrack recording. The motion picture is available on DVD. He wrote superb arrangements of “Black Nightgown” and “Barbara’s Theme” for Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band (Mosaic) in the 1960s.
Mandel’s later career as a song writer and composer-arranger for motion pictures and television grew out of his years of writing for jazz groups. The pieces mentioned are remarkably fresh and undated.

In the Rifftides posting about Joe Locke, I used poetic license in suggesting that without electricity the vibraharp, or vibraphone, amounts to a metallic marimba. Two readers who know what they’re talking about make it clear that my poetic license should not be renewed. The first is Charlie Shoemake, a veteran vibist of more than forty years admired for, among other things, his mastery of harmony and his ability to play with speed approaching that of light.

Sorry to correct you but Red Norvo,Gary Burton, and I do not use the
vibraphone with electricity. In other words: no motor. I don’t know
Red’s or Gary’s reason, but in my case it was my years with George Shearing.
When I first joined him he said that for his famous ensemble sound, he
wanted the vibes played with no motor but that I could turn it on when I took a
solo. Sometime during my seven year hitch I just forgot to turn it on—permanently. The result was that I was now a Charlie Parker/Bud Powell-inspired vibes player with a different sound than Milt Jackson’s
because of no motor, and a different sounding vibes player than Gary
Burton and his students (Dave Samuels/Dave Freidman) because of the
different musical content.

That’s the jazz vibraphone instruction 101 for today.

Not quite. Now comes Gary Walters, a jazz pianist who teaches music at Butler University in Indianapolis.

For the first time, I felt compelled to write after your comments discussing electric vs. acoustic instruments. You had me until you suggested that a vibraphone without electricity was a marimba. I’m sure you know it’s not quite that simplistic. A vibraphone has bars made of soft metal alloys and a good marimba has bars made from rosewood or other extremely dense woods. That, combined with the appropriate length of resonator tube, creates a warm, woody sound that I think is beautiful and distinct from the warm, soft metal sound produced by a vibraphone with its motor turned off. Many great vibraphonists that you can name as easily as I play with the motor either on or off because it adds another texture to their means of expression. But the marimba, with a soft mallet—every bit as warm and “woody” as the “real” bass you favor!
Thank you for allowing me to clarify and please, keep up the great writing!

I promise never to oversimplify again.
Of course, that’s an oversimplification.

It is well that there is no one without a fault; for he would not have a friend in the world.

—William Hazlitt

I’m heading home after a Southern California week split between Jazz West Coast 3 and decompressing. The Santa Ana winds came back and it was 72 degrees at the beach at 10 o’clock last night. Somehow, I don’t think it will be that way in the Pacific Northwest.
It is unlikely that I will post again today. Remember, please, that the Rifftides staff is always glad to hear from you. The e-mail address is in the right-hand column.

The final session at the L.A. Jazz Institute’s Jazz West Coast 3 festival was an event so rare that musicians and attendees were buzzing about it from the moment they arrived. It was the appearance of Johnny Mandel leading a big band in a concert of his compositions and arrangements. Mandel has been a hero of musicians since the late forties, more than fifteen years before “The Shadow of Your Smile,” “Emily” and other pieces made him one of the few writers of quality songs to become a popular success in the second half of the twentieth century.
Although he was being honored as a legend of the west, Mandel’s fame is worldwide. His jazz charts for Artie Shaw, Count Basie, Woody Herman, Maynard Ferguson, Chet Baker, Hoagy Carmichael, Buddy Rich and Gerry Mulligan are imperishable goods, gems of the repertoire. With Mulligan, Bill Holman, Thad Jones, Neal Hefti, Gerald Wilson, Bob Brookmeyer and Al Cohn, he is one of the icons of jazz writing in the fifties, perhaps the last golden age of that demanding craft. His scoring for films and his arranging for singers (Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, Shirley Horn, Anita O’Day, Mel Torme, Andy Williams, Natalie Cole, Diana Krall) constitute a gold standard for the field. His oldest works are as fresh as this morning.
Leading a band of seventeen hand-picked musicians, Mandel gave the audience “Keester Parade,” “Low Life,” three pieces from his score for the motion picture “I Want To Live, his famous arrangement of Tiny Kahn’s “TNT,” “Not Really the Blues,” the theme from M*A*S*H* and Kim Richmond’s kaleidoscopic treatment of Mandel’s “Seascape.” There were also performances of “Emily” and “The Shadow of Your Smile” and guest appearances by Pinky Winters and Bob Efford. Ms. Winters sang Dave Frishberg’s lyrics to Mandel’s “You Are There,” accompanied by only the composer at the piano. Together, without embellishment, they created magic, something at which this masterly singer has excelled for many years to recognition that comes nowhere near her level of artistry. Efford, best known as a baritone saxophonist, played the clarinet roles of Artie Shaw and Woody Herman in Mandel arrangements.
It was obvious that each member of the band was thrilled and flattered to be asked to play for Mandel. Collectively and as soloists, they performed at a fine edge of inspiration. Under his minimal but firm conducting, the horn sections were perfection in their reproduction of the unity, dynamics and rhythmic jazz essences of the writing. As for soloists, singling out a few would be to ignore the rest without justification. The players are listed below.
At seventy-nine, Mandel is a slight man with a low voice and a calm manner. He speaks quietly and regards a conversation partner with frank interest. Directing the band, he sometimes turns and watches the audience with the same intense curiosity. One of the most successful and admired musicians of his time, he exhibits no smidgen of ego. “The thing about John,” one of his friends said, “Is that he doesn’t know he’s Johnny Mandel. He thinks he’s just one of the guys.” The guys may think that, too, but they revere Mandel. They play for him with love, enthusiasm and no reservations of the kind that sidemen often have about leaders. He has that in common with Holman. I have never heard a player utter a disrespectful remark about either.
Mandel found the Jazz West Coast 3 experience rewarding enough that he is thinking of getting a book of arrangements together, organizing a band and playing a few gigs. That would be something to look forward to.
The band playing the compositions and arrangements of Johnny Mandel, October 2, 2005:

Reeds: Kim Richmond, Lanny Morgan, Tom Peterson, Doug Webb, Bob Carr

Trombones: Dave Ryan, Andy Martin, Scott Whitfield, Bryant Byers

Trumpets: Roger Ingram, Bobby Shew, Carl Saunders, Ron Stout

Piano: Bill Mays

Bass: Chris Conner

Guitar: John Pisano

Drums: Kevin Kanner

Guests: Bob Efford, clarinet; Pinky Winters, vocal

Eleven years after the first of impresario Ken Poston’s Jazz West Coast extravaganzas, I spent the weekend at the Los Angeles Jazz Institute’s Jazz West Coast 3, subtitled Legends Of The West. The attendees were fewer and grayer than eleven years ago. The music to which they remain devoted was consistently good and, at its best, splendid and undated. I spent part of the time preparing for a reading, panel and book signing and was unable to hear all of the four days of music, but took in as much as possible.
I arrived Friday evening in time for an all-star tribute to Bud Shank, an alto saxophone mainstay of west coast jazz in its heyday of the 1950s who survives as a fiery grand old man of the instrument. Following the tribute, Shank took command of a hard-driving rhythm section of pianist Bill Mays, bassist Chris Conner and drummer Joe LaBarbera. In the decade or more since he gave up the flute to concentrate on alto, Shank has become increasingly expressive, even rambunctious. He stayed true to his latterday form in several apperances during the weekend. His stylistic flute successor, Holly Hoffman, approximates Shank’s admired tonal qualities, swings hard and improvises lovely melodies, as she did to great effect in the tribute.
Herb Geller, Shank’s alto sax contemporary, traveled from his home in Germany for the event. He played a set of his compositions that included pieces from his unproduced musicals, Playing Jazz and another based on the life of the 1920s entertainer Josephine Baker. Geller’s songs for the theater have dramatic content appropriate to the idiom and translate beautifully for improvisation. He and Mays played for and off one another with elan, hard swing and humor. Mays was, hands down, winner of the event’s iron man competition, playing piano in five bands, wowing the audience with his energy, creativity and—not at all incidentally—sight-reading in situations in which he was a last-minute recruit.
Two recreated bands that looked on paper as if they might be exercises in nostalgia had surprising vitality. I thought when I heard it decades ago that the recorded music of the French horn player John Graas was stodgy and pretentious, but an octet headed by a Graas successor, Richard Todd, performed a delightful hour of Graas’s compositions and arrangements. Maybe I was missing something the first time around or—as I suspect—Todd and his colleagues booted the arrangements into rhythmic life.
In the fifties, Allyn Ferguson’s Chamber Jazz Sextet created a following for its ingenious incorporation into a jazz ensemble of classical forms and techniques . At JWC 3, the 2005 version of the band—reinforced to an octet—gave a program in which harmonic depth and textures buoyed arrangements that had swing and humor. I was particularly taken with Ferguson’s fifty-year-old variations on 250-year-old dance movements from J.S. Bach’s secular chamber works.
The eighty-four-year-old drummer Chico Hamilton looks and carries himself like a man twenty years younger. In a panel discussion, he spoke expressively about his fifties quintet, noted for combining delicately balanced instrumentation and tonal qualities with blues feeling and exploratory improvisation. Later, he performed with his current quintet, eschewing his celebrated brushwork dynamics in favor of sticks, drumming with nearly military precision. His band’s performance verged on rhythm and blues and often entered it entirely.
The saxophonist, actor and wry humorist Med Flory presented a big band session of the kind he has led since the early fifties. The genius of Flory’s self-deprecatory leadership lies in creating the impression of flying by the seat of his pants, barely holding the band together, but almost invariably getting it to swing amiably. He provided plenty of solo space for his sidemen, which gave trombonists Andy Martin and Scott Whitfield, trumpeters Bob Summers and Ron Sout, saxophonists Lanny Morgan, Doug Webb and Jerry Pinter and pianist John Campbell opportunities to shine. Like all Flory perfomances, this one melded entertainment with serious music, to the enhancement of both.
I’ve been up too late too many nights in a row, listening and hanging out, a satisfying facet of these gatherings. It’s time to catch up on missed bedtime hours, lulled to sleep by the Malibu surf rolling onto the beach outside the gracious house in which I am fortunate to be a guest. I’ll have a final Jazz West Coast 3 report tomorrow. It concerns a legend of the west, east, midwest, south and north.