A couple of weeks ago, the Italian plum tree in our little orchard broke off at the base of its trunk and fell over, loaded with hundreds of perfect purple plums. Before the hired man chopped it up and hauled it away to a useful end in someone’s fireplace, I harvested the tree’s final crop and stashed it in bushel baskets.
This evening, I pulled a chair up to the dissecting table in the garden shed, switched on the radio and set to work cutting the plums, removing the pits and putting the halves into dehydrators. My timing was lucky. Terry Gross replayed her interesting 2000 interview with Robert Moog, the synthesizer inventor who died on Sunday, and Northwest Public Radio followed Fresh Air with Franz Schubert’s Quintet in C.
If one of the primary aims of jazz improvisation is the creation of melody, could there be a more inspirational concentration of examples than in this astonishing work? Each of the four movements is awash in melodies that implant themselves in the listener’s mind. The melodies are sustained by Schubert’s harmonic genius, as bold as Beethoven’s; visionary in the early Nineteenth Century. Any developing jazz player would benefit by paying close attention to the little melodies, as fleeting as thought, in the brooding Adagio, and to the ripping chromatic dance tune of the Scherzo that Shubert contrasts with the movement’s funereal slow section. They are examples to aspire to as surely as those of Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Lester Young, Art Farmer, Paul Desmond, Bobby Hackett, Miles Davis and the other great melodists in jazz.
Solos by Armstrong reflect his love of the Italian operas that were a living part of New Orleans when he was learning. Charlie Parker quoted melodies from classical composers, including Wagner, that he absorbed from radio, records and live performances. Desmond had a fund of Stravinsky phrases on which he worked variations and permutations. How many teachers in the high school and college programs turning out the majority of today’s prospective jazz players immerse their students in melodic geniuses of classical music as well as those of jazz?

One of my favorite quotations about writing could apply just as well to jazz soloing.

No writer ever truly succeeds. The disparity between the work conceived and the work completed is always too great and the writer merely achieves an acceptable level of failure.
–Phillip Caputo

The Los Angeles drummer and leader Dick McGarvin responded to Benny and Miles with this communique:

When Lights Are Low Priced
In the early 1990s, I decided I wanted to do WHEN LIGHTS ARE LOW with my group. However, all my music books had the one with the Miles Davis bridge. And I didn’t have a recording of the correct version so I could take it down off the record.
Then I remembered – Benny lives in LA. Why not go to the source? I got out my Local 47 directory and called the number – kind of expecting to reach an office or a business manager. But, it was Benny who picked up the phone. I identified myself, told him why I was calling. He was very gracious…and grateful that I wanted to do his tune correctly and said he’d be happy to send me a leadsheet.
I figured there’d be some kind of charge for it. At the very least, I wanted to reimburse him for the postage. So I asked him how much it would be. And Benny said, “Fifteen hundred dollars!” There was a moment of silence and, realizing he was kidding, I said, “Would you take a check?”
We laughed – and he said there would be no charge…on one condition. And I said, “What’s that?” He said, “I’ll send it to you ONLY if you let me send you some of my other songs, as well.” And I thought – yeah, I can handle that.
Some days later, a packet arrived containing WHEN LIGHTS ARE LOW and half a dozen other Benny Carter originals.
God Bless him.

No one who knew Benny will be surprised by his generosity or his humor.

Some time ago, Eric Felten wrote in response to this item about Benny Carter. It’s about time that I posted his note and commented on it.

Just listening to his playing is a complete post-doctoral course in the power of melodicism in improvisation. Personally, I’m devoted to the session with Ben Webster and Frank Rosolino. When I first heard it I was giddy with the shock that anything so wonderful as a meeting of Ben, Frank and Benny existed. It still leaves me shaking my head.

You correctly mention that “When Lights Are Low” is Benny’s best-known tune. But it is still amazing to me the extent to which it is his best-incorrectly-known tune. Call it on the bandstand and 9 out of 10 players do the Miles bridge. Now when Miles chose to replace Benny’s bridge with the A section in a new key, that was an interesting and valid jazz permutation on the tune. But how many players nowadays know that that bridge was a permutation? How many know the original bridge (which has wonderful changes over which to blow)? Playing that tune is a rough and ready way of finding out whether musicians have taken the time to listen to Carter, or whether the Miles 50s canon (worthy as it is) is as far back as their jazz education goes.

Kudos on the fine job you’re doing with the site. I’m enjoying it a lot.

Instead of using the exquisite bridge that Carter wrote for the piece, Davis simply repeated the first eight bars, but in a-flat rather than e-flat. Why he did so is a puzzle. He played in Carter’s big band in the mid-forties and must have known the tune. It could hardly have been because the bridge was too complicated for John Coltrane, Red Garland and Paul Chambers. When I discussed this years ago with Marian McPartland, she became indignant. She said, “Oh! How could he have done that to Benny’s song?”
Good question. If you want to hear the bridge as written, you’ll find it on this album. If you want to hear the Miles Davis rewrite, it is on this one.

Years before his death at the end of July, disillusionment, indigence, homelessness and mental illness stilled Lucky Thompson’s tenor saxophone. His life began to unravel in the sixties. In the early seventies, he played little, then stopped. Kind strangers who admired his music saw after him in his last years.
I never knew Mr. Thompson, never saw him in live performance, but his work reached me from the first time I heard it on Charlie Parker’s 1946 Dial recordings. On “Moose The Mooche,” “Yardbird Suite,” “Ornithology” and “A Night in Tunisia,” Thompson’s solos suggested elements of Coleman Hawkins and Don Byas, but the surge and thrust of his invented lines and the swagger in his delivery—particularly on the master take of “Tunisia”—set him apart from other tenor players. He was not, srictly speaking, one of the early bebop artists, but his playing fit perfectly with theirs. Later, I went back a step to 1944 to listen to Thompson on Count Basie’s “Taps Miller” and “Avenue C” and found that he was a fully formed soloist at twenty, mixing smoothness and roughness in perfect balance.
If I were to recommend essential Thompson recordings to people unfamiliar with him, I would start with the Parker Dials, then refer them to the 1954 Miles Davis Walkin’ session on Prestige, which has some of Thompson’s greatest solos. Of his own albums, I suggest Tricotimsm (1956) on Impulse! and Lucky Strikes (1964) on Prestige. Tricotism includes bassist Oscar Pettiford and pianist Hank Jones, with both of whom Thompson had special rapport. The album is hard to find. Here is one possible source. Jones, with bassist Richard Davis and drummer Connie Kay, is also on Lucky Strikes. In it, Thompson plays soprano saxophone in addition to tenor, and the album may well be his masterpiece.

Jim Brown writes from Chicago:
I concur that Lucky Strikes and Tricotism are primo Lucky Thompson, and probably his best, but don’t forget his very important contributions to Cuban Fire, Johnny Richards fine mid-50’s work for the Kenton band. Richards had been around for quite a while by then, but this was his first major work. It may be the one for which he is best remembered, and with good reason. I also like his writing for Adventures in Time.

Thanks for reminding me about the Phil Woods DVD, and Phil’s Quincy Jones CD. I’ve just ordered both… I noticed them first a few weeks back when I ordered the Bill Holman Live release. BTW, ‘Rifftides’ has become a daily reference for me. Thanks!
Ted O’Reilly
Ted O’Reilly is a distinguished Toronto broadcaster and producer.

Just read your review of Blanchard’s set at Yoshi’s. I saw the band’s last set at Jazz Alley on the 7th. I’m still sorting out my own reaction to the music that evening. Certainly an entertaining show, and really a treat to see Aaron Parks continued growth.
Cheers,
Bruce Moore
Bruce Moore is a photographer in Seattle. You can see some of his images of the Blanchard Band here.

My recommendation of Bud Guthrie’s Field Guide to Writing Fiction (right column, under Books) did not arise out of whim. Unless you use your computer strictly for, say, logartihmic calculations, you are writing. Now that anyone on the web can decide to be a journalist, editor and publisher, writing with clarity and simplicity is more important than ever. (Don’t do as I do, do as I say.) That responsbility came to mind again today as I was reading Jay Rosen, a professor, gadfly and multiblogger from New York University who has been a conscience of journalism for twenty years. Rosen captured me with the introduction to his blog:

We need to keep the press from being absorbed into The Media. This means keeping the word press, which is antiquated. But included under its modern umbrella should be all who do the serious work in journalism, regardless of the technology used. The people who will invent the next press in America–and who are doing it now online–continue an experiment at least 250 years old.

Here is some of what Rosen wrote a year and a half ago in a blog piece called Journalism Itself Is A Religion.

We’re headed, I think, for schism, tumult and divide as the religion of the American press meets the upheavals in global politics and public media that are well underway. Changing around us are the terms on which authority can be established by journalists. The Net is opening things up, shifting the power to publish around. Consumers are becoming producers, readers can be writers.

To read all of Rosen’s long essay, go here, and then go here.
I am adding Rosen’s PressThink to the Other Places list in the right-hand column.

Kindly notice that the right-hand column is populated with new entries in the Doug’s Picks category. Enjoy.
Postings today will be light, possibly nonexistent. Travel and too much time away have overtaken me. Other duties call. I could use a nap. Or two.