I am working tonight in an airport hotel. Tomorrow morning, I shall clamber aboard an airplane and head for Quantico, Virginia, and a reunion with a bunch of guys who took their commissions away from the Marine Corps a long time ago. Most of us haven’t seen each other since. Someone told me that our first reunion event is a twenty-mile forced march with eighty-five-pound field packs followed by hors d’oeuvres and white wine. I think it was a joke—the white wine part. While I’m in the Quantico-Washington-Baltimore-Annapolis area, I’ll do a few book interviews and a signing or two. If anything happens that I think you might find interesting, I’ll post at once. In the meantime, I have prepared a few tidbits that will appear over the next few days. Watch this space. Bring friends.

I made a one-day trip to the Centrum Port Townsend (Washington) jazz festival over the weekend for a book signing and to hear as much music as I could take in. Copies of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond moved quite nicely, thank you.
The music I heard was in the four-hour Saturday afternoon concert in Fort Warden State Park’s McCurdy Pavilion (no, it’s not named for Roy McCurdy). The opener was bassist Christian McBride’s quartet with saxophonist Ron Blake, drummer Terrion Gully, and pianist John Beasley subbing for Geoff Keezer. McBride stunned the packed house with his virtuosity and swing. Blake never fails to impress me, particularly on tenor sax, and he was in great form. Gully is a young powerhouse. With little notice, no rehearsal time with the band and barely a sound check, Beasley more than held his up his end. But it was a disappointment that, with a perfectly good Steinway concert grand sitting there, he spent most of his time on a Fender-Rhodes electric piano and a synthesizer.
In his introduction of pianist Kenny Barron, John Clayton emphasized Barron’s keyboard touch. Then, in four duets with violinist Regina Carter, Barron demonstrated his touch, time and exquisitely honed harmonic sense. The crowd responded with long, loud enthusiasm to the duo’s sensitive approach to “Don’t Explain,” and again to the set closer, “Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise,” also a highlight of their Free Fall CD.
Clayton wrapped up the afternoon conducting a spirited set of Count Basie pieces by the festival big band that included tenor saxophonist Ricky Woodard, trumpeter Byron Stripling and drummer Gary Hobbs. Bruce Forman supplied rhythm guitar and proved that he understands the mixture of strength and subtlety with which Freddie Green propelled the Basie band. Pianist Bill Mays proved that he understood Basie. Carmen Bradford sang three songs with the band and captivated the crowd. By the time the band signed off with “One O’clock Jump,” jumping had been persuasively defined and Clayton seemed to have firmly established himself as the festival’s new artistic director. Not all of the bitterness has dissipated after the clumsy dismissal of Bud Shank in that role a year ago, but attendance and enthusiasm seem to indicate that the Port Townsend festival is viable.

In Rifftides a month or so ago, you may have read,

Jazz albums should have program notes. Listeners want and deserve information about the music.

You can read the rest of that post by clicking here. I admit self-interest; I sometimes write album essays. Nonetheless, as a listener, I count on program notes to fill me in on the backgrounds of players, composers and arrangers and, often, on the music itself. Writers of liner notes, definitely including this one, depend on discographers. Discographers are unsung heroes.

Discography. The systematic cataloguing of sound recordings. Data for listings, in which aspects of the physical characteristics, provenance, and contents of sound recordings themselves (with their containers and any accompnaying written and iconographic materials) as well as from logbooks, lists, and catalogues compiled by the record producer or manufacturer, journals and other printed materials, and oral sources.—New Grove Dictionary of Jazz

Simply put, the discographer finds out who recorded, when, where and with whom. If that seems trivial, it is not. Much of jazz history has taken place in recording studios and much of it would be lost if discographers did not painstakingly dig it out, verify it and make it available. For purposes of study, jazz recordings are the equivalent of classical scores or popular sheet music. Accurate information about them is not only desirable, it is essential. Perhaps the best analogy is the field of baseball statistics. Two of the pioneers among discographers, in the 1930s, were the Frenchman Charles Delaunay and the Briton Hilton Schleman. They were followed by Charles Edward Smith, Frederic Ramsey, Brian Rust, Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen, Walter Bruyninckx and Tom Lord, all authors of general discographies. There are also many discographers specializing in specific styles, periods and individual musicians.
I’m singling out a pair of contemporary general discographers who, it seems to me, are making a valuable contribution. They are Michael Fitzgerald and Steve Albin. The difference between Fitzgerald-Albin and nearly everyone else in the field is that they offer their work on the internet. On their website, they make a persuasive case that the web is the best tool for discography, better than print, better than the CD-ROM. They write in “A Philosophy of Jazz Discography”:

Online discographies are ever malleable, readily accepting additions and corrections and immediately substituting the new version for the old.

You can read all of the explanation, find out how to use their system, which Albin developed and calls Brian (after Brian Rust), and roam through the listings by going to his site, which is cleverly named www.jazzdiscography.com. Fitzgerald and Albin have more than fifty musicians in their discography and are planning on adding many more. They include the famous (Frank Sinatra, compiled by Albin) and the semi-obscure (John Neves. Before you go, for those new to discograpy entries, here’s a sample from the www.jazzdiscography.com listing for Sir Charles Thompson, compiled by Bill Gallagher.

Date: March 2, 1945
Location: Los Angeles
ldr- Coleman Hawkins; t- Howard McGhee; tb- Vic Dickenson; ts- Coleman Hawkins; p- Sir Charles Thompson; g- Allan Reuss; b- Oscar Pettiford; d- Denzil Best
Rifftide (Coleman Randolph Hawkins)
Hollywood Stampede – 03:07 (Coleman Randolph Hawkins)
I’m Through With Love – 03:11 (Gus Kahn, Joe Livingston, Matty Malneck)
What Is There To Say – 03:17 (Vernon Duke, E. Y. “Yip” Harburg)
Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams – 03:04 (Harry Barris, Ted Koehler, Billy Moll)
“Hollywood Stampede” is mistitled on the Extreme Rarities issue (#1008) as “Sweet Georgia Brown.” “Hollywood Stampede” also appears in the film “Crimson Canary.” “Rifftide” was unissued but a tape exists.

I wonder how many of you knew that Coleman Hawkins’s middle name was Randolph. I didn’t. Nor did I know, until I read this entry, that “Rifftide” was recorded again after the famous Hawkins Capitol date of February 23, 1945, with Vic Dickenson added. That sort of thing is trivia to some, valuable information to others. Enjoy your visit to Michael Fitzgerald’s site. Hurry back, if you can tear yourself away.

Fellow artsjournal.com blogger, indefatigable all-purpose arts critic and small-town New Yorker Terry Teachout is visiting home, down where Missouri meets Tennessee, Arkansas and Kentucky. He customarily refers to it as Small Town USA, but by giving us a link to the hometown paper, he’s blown the town’s cover. Tourists will be piling in there by the busload, hoping for a glimpse of his birthplace. Terry is giving a speech there, and the local paper interviewed him in advance.

Teachout noted he wrote his first story for publication for the Sikeston High School newspaper, Bulldog Barker, and plans to talk Tuesday about how the world of journalism has changed, especially by the Internet and new media, since he began writing,
“When I started doing this, I wrote on a manual typewriter. Nobody had a computer,” Teachout said.

You can read the whole story here.
TT’s mention of typewriters recalled my typewriter story from the same period. In 1975, I had just taken over the news department of KSAT-TV in San Antonio. We were drastically underequipped and misequipped. When I wrote my first budget, I put in for ten IBM electric typewriters to replace the broken-down manuals the reporters battled every day. The general manager supported me, but the president of the broadcasting company went through the roof. “A bunch of journalists don’t need that fancy equipment,” he said. “They’d just break it.”
Such was the speed of the electronic revolution in TV that within a couple of years, film was out, tape was in, the reporters went from manual typewriters to computers and were doing live reports from the field by microwave.

It is unlikely that there will be a new posting today. The Rifftides staff is on deadline. But, you never know, we could finish early and file something. Watch this space.
As always, we appreciate it when you tell people interested in jazz and other matters about our venture and direct them to Rifftides. Thanks.

I am adding the writer and musician John Robert Brown’s website to the Other Places list in the right-hand column, and not just because he wrote this:

Occasionally a publication changes one’s thinking. Take Five is such a book. I am old enough to have attended several of Desmond’s concerts back in the 1950s. Doug Ramsey’s account rekindled my respect, taught me more than I had ever imagined about its subject, propelling me into a Desmondmania that set me on a revisionist crusade of buying old Brubeck CDs and raving to my friends about my re-discoveries.

Mr. Brown is, among other things, chairman of the Clarinet and Saxophone Society of Great Britain. Some of the articles on his site are devoted to reed players and instruments, and some are simply fascinating reading for people with a general interest in jazz and other matters. Here he is on interviewing Maria Schneider at a big convention of jazz people:

Her Thursday evening concert in the massive Imperial Ballroom of the Manhattan Sheraton, though pitted against three other simultaneous events, was signed ‘house full’. Currently, Maria Schneider is big news. I had arranged to meet her during the afternoon, after a radio interview, in a public area.
Though she had seen me waiting, and acknowledged me, I couldn’t get near for the many enthusiasts wanting to speak to her. When eventually we did meet (it took fifteen minutes), the interrupting fans made it difficult to greet her, and impossible to escort her to the interview lounge. Eventually Schneider coached me in the correct body language. “Look at me and keep talking,” she advised. “Then we won’t be interrupted.”

Click here to read the interview. Then, roam around Mr. Brown’s site. Don’t miss his disquisition on how to pronounce the name of the letter H. It’s under the “General” heading. And I couldn’t resist showing you this lead from an article in his classical section.

A Ford Transit van parked in a leafy side street in north Leeds catches my attention. Finished professionally in silver and black, it bears the words: The Keyboard Academy. The piano keys painted on the side of the vehicle leave no doubt that music teaching is involved. Plainly, this is no van ordinaire.

There’s no pun like a bilingual pun. It’s in a piece about a mobile piano school.

Rifftides is not a way station for announcements, but if something comes up that I think you’d want to know about, well, of course. This is from trumpeter Marvin Stamm.

If you are of a mind – and awake – please tune tonight – July 26 – to JaiJai Jackson’s new jazz radio show at www.xradio.biz/lasvegas from 8-10pm West Coast Time…. just scroll down to “Woman of Jazz” and listen in!
JaiJai (Chubby Jackson’s daughter) will be interviewing me and playing tunes from The Stamm/Soph Project Live at Birdland and from By Ourselves, my duo CD with pianist Bill Mays.

The Stamm/Soph Project includes Mays, drummer Ed Soph and bassist Rufus Reid, with guitarist John Abercrombie on several tracks. Mays’ “In Her Arms” and Reid’s “When She Smiles Upon Your Face” are highlights. Consider both CDs recommended with enthusiasm.

Regarding the Rifftides posting about the late Tom Talbert, and comments in later editions, Larry Kart writes from Chicago:

I bought Bix Duke Fats when it came out (in the days when you could listen in your local record shop to things by people you’d never heard of before) and since have acquired everything (I think) of Talbert’s that has been issued. He was special. Among other things, I love the way he could set up particular soloists in order to draw out their gifts—e.g. George Wallington and Aaron Sachs on Bix Duke Fats. Joe Wilder, too, of course, but there I think Talbert was working with what was evident to all, while with Wallington and Sachs, Talbert perhaps zeroed in on parts of their musical souls that lay a bit below the surface or had not been showcased as effectively before—e.g. what Talbert referred to, wonderfully, as Wallington’s “slow-smiling wit.”

While I never had the pleasure of meeting Talbert, his notes to Bix Duke Fats suggest that he must have been a very witty, sophisticated man. I remember in particular his remark about Bix being a “moderne” experimentalist as a composer, in contrast to a full-fledged modern artist like Picasso, who was not experimenting but realizing exactly what he was going for. That distinction made a big impression on my unformed adolescent mind. (BTW, I notice that the CD booklet for Bix Duke Fats removes both the reference to Bix being “moderne” and the contrast to Picasso.)

Larry Kart’s new book is Jazz In Search of Itself (Yale). I’ve mentioned it before. It deserves at least two plugs.

To your right, you will find a brand new batch of Doug’s Picks.

In his newsletter, Blowing My Own Horn, the pianist Hal Galper (Cannonball Adderley, Phil Woods, his own trio) writes,”In truth, I’m a free player in bebopper’s clothing.”

You might find my history of free playing illuminating. In my early Boston days (the 1960’s) I had the good fortune to apprentice with Sam Rivers for 6 years. At the time with Phil Morrison on bass and Tony Williams on drums, followed by my old partner in crime Steve Ellington. We were playing free inside the tunes trying to make them accessible to our audiences by hiding how free we were playing by keeping a groove while still trying to be melodic. (It was many years later that Tony brought the concept, and Sam, into Miles’s band [Davis – ed.]). Eventually we recorded a quartet album for Blue Note, A New Conception.

To read the whole thing in printable PDF format, go here. The Rifftides staff also recommends Galper’s website for its news and his forthright views.