Speaking of the cinema, Charlie Shoemake, lightning vibraharpist and late-night TV movie browser, sent a message after he read yesterday’s posting about the name of our adventure in blogging.

Concerning the “Hollywood Stampede’ session, tell your readers if (truly out of left field) they should stumble sometime in the wee hours of the morning across a 1945 “B” movie entitled The Crimson Canary (Noah Beery Jr.) to grab onto it because they’ll see Coleman Hawkins, Howard McGhee, Oscar Pettiford, Sir Charles Thompson, and Denzil Best playing “Sweet Georgia Brown” (“Hollywood Stampede”). I had it on Beta tape years ago but now can’t find it, though I continue to search. The band sounds absolutely great and Pettiford, in particular, takes a classic solo. The plot of the movie has Noah Beery Jr. as a dixieland trumpet player on the lam for a murder he didn’t commit. While ducking the law, he pops into this club and who should be appearing….you guessed it.

Charlie isn’t the only one who can’t find The Crimson Canary. I did a deep-dive Google search through a dozen or more web retailers who brag about their stocks of hard-to-get films. No one offered it for sale on DVD, VHS, Beta or cellophane strips. (Does anyone but Charlie still have a Beta deck?) If you know where to find The Crimson Canary, tell us all, please.

Jerry Jazz Musician has a long interview with the author about Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He incorporates photographs and sound clips. While you’re there, roam around the JJM site and see all the good things he’s up to, but don’t forget to return to Rifftides. Please bring friends back with you.

Now that you ask, the name Rifftides was inspired by a 1945 Coleman Hawkins piece, “Rifftide.” The tune was part of the celebrated 1945 Hollywood Stampede session that included trumpeter Howard McGhee, one of the bebop kiddies Hawk nurtured. Thelonious Monk had played with Hawkins the year before. Monk later recorded the tune and called it “Hackensack.” Either way, it’s based on the harmonic structure of “Oh, Lady Be Good,” but copyright law doesn’t cover chord changes, and George Gershwin’s estate earned no royalties. Nor can titles be copyrighted, so I stole Hawkins’s and pluralized it.

The public television station where I live finally got around to airing the first installment of the new PBS series Legends of Jazz, three weeks after most of the rest of the country saw it. Given the near-absence of jazz on TV, it was welcome. The program presented tenor saxophonist James Moody, clarinetist Paquito d’Rivera, festival impressario George Wein and singers Jon Hendricks and Nancy Wilson, all named jazz masters by the National Endowment for the Arts.
The hour was as much a panel discussion with the host, pianist Ramsey Lewis, as it was a musical event. It served as a preview of and promotion for a thirteen-week series of half-hour shows that will air in the fall. Lewis moderated with relaxation, thoughtful questions and camaraderie that arose from mutual respect between him and his guests. “Wait a minute,” he said to Hendricks, “back up a couple of sentences and tell us about Art Tatum.” That prompted the story of the great pianist grooming the thirteen-year-old Hendricks’ talent in their mutual hometown of Toledo in the early 1930s.
Wein told about cajoling Duke Ellington into reaching for something special at the Newport festival in 1956. The result was “Diminuendo in Blue” and “Crescendo in Blue” with Paul Gonsalvez’s celebrated 27-chorus tenor saxophone solo in the “wailing interval.” Moody talked about the thrill of coming out of the service in 1946 and into Dizzy Gillespie’s big band on 42nd Street.

Knocked me out, ’cause I’d be sitting in the band with Diz and I’d look up and there sitting at the bar were Benny Goodman, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins—and in the band, Thelonious Monk, Ray Brown, Milt Jackson.

Then, Moody played a piece indelibly associated with the bebop era, Gillespie’s “Woody’n You.” He was accompanied by the superb rhythm section of pianist Billy Childs, bassist Dave Carpenter and drummer Roy McCurdy. They also backed Hendricks in his over-the-hills-and-dales vocalise on Monk’s “Rhythm-a-ning.” In an inexcusable slight, Childs, Carpenter and McCurdy were never introduced until the last seconds of the show, in a fly-by roll of the credits.
D’Rivera told of growing up in a household in Cuba in which all kinds of music were played and studied, so that by the time he was a professional clarinetist and saxophonist he made no distinction among categories. He was equally at home with classical concertos, Afro-Cuban claves and Charlie Parker bop tunes. He demonstrated his range in a virtuoso performance of an unaccompanied, and unidentified, classical piece that melded into a jazz duet with bass guitarist Oscar Stagnaro. Stagnaro got the same anonymous treatment as Childs, Carpenter, McCurdy and the classical piece. Surely, when the fall series airs, the producers will have corrected those little injustices.
Asked about her influences, Nancy Wilson emphasized—above all others—Little Jimmy Scott. Her performance of “God Bless The Child,” with Lewis at the piano, confirmed that there is much more of Scott in her lineage than of the song’s composer, Billie Holiday.
As the program was winding down, Wein introduced Renee Olstead, a fifteen-year-old sitcom star and singer whom he identified as emblematic of his belief that young people will embrace jazz and guarantee its future. Ms. Olstead sang “Taking A Chance On Love,” credibly, then told Lewis that she is making a project of converting her contemporaries to jazz. That brought a round of “Yeah” and applause from the veterans.
It was a charming and engaging program. It lacked the intensity, focus and video artistry of the immortal 1957 The Sound of Jazz on CBS-TV, Ralph Gleason’s Jazz Casual series of the sixties and the Jazz At The Maintenance Shop programs directed by John Beyer for PBS in the late seventies and early eighties. But, after all, it was a pilot and a promo. We may hope that when the series hits in the fall, it will reflect the values of those earlier programs—creative camera work for directors who know how to use it, good sound, lighting without gimmicks, and a minimum of explanation (The Sound of Jazz, the best program of its kind, ever, had almost no talk). In his notes for the long-playing record of the music from that show, Eric Larabee wrote that because of the artistic, if not commercial, success of the television program, there was talk of a series. He said that Whitney Balliett and Nat Hentoff, the critics whose taste and instincts guided the show, should remain in charge.

But one wonders if the miracle can happen twice. Part of the reason that Balliett and Hentoff were let alone was that no one in high authority really understood what they were up to. Now the secret is out and there will be many hazards.

Larabee was right. No successor to The Sound of Jazz, let alone a series, emerged. That does not mean that it couldn’t happen. Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Ben Webster, Vic Dickenson, Gerry Mulligan and all of the other musicians but two who populated The Sound of Jazz are gone. Only the master guitarist Jim Hall is thriving. Clarinetist Jimmy Guiffre survives in ill health. Still, we have important players of several generations with us today. Let us wish the people in charge of Legends of Jazz the understanding, integrity and lack of interference required to gather the cream of today’s jazz artists and present this music on television in the best possible way, simply and naturally. Ms. Olstead’s teenaged peers—and the rest of us—might just dig it.

The Coleman Hawkins DVD recommendation in Doug’ Picks (right-hand column) mentions an unidentified vibes player. Rifftides reader Russ Chase says the vibist is Harry Sheppard. Barry Feldman, the producer of the CD, confirms it. Sheppard worked in the 1950s with Billie Holiday, Cozy Cole and Sol Yaged and in the ‘60s with Benny Goodman, Doc Severinsen and Georgie Auld. In recent decades, he has been in Houston, where, according to his website, he remains gainfully employed in music at the age of seventy-seven. After listening to one of Sheppard’s CDs, Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times, “Mr. Sheppard wrings unexpected tones out of his instrument. He juxtaposes a floating vibrato, quick skittering notes and a marimba like percussive tremolo.” Sheppard is reported to be a four-mallet man these days, but at the Hawkins session he used two mallets and still managed to skitter impressively.
Unlike Pee Wee Russell, Charlie Shavers, J.C. Higginbotham and others whom viewers might recognize on the DVD, Sheppard and guitarist Dickie Thompson never became household names, let alone household faces. Thompson is easy to identify once you know to look for that rarity, a left-handed guitarist. He had a distinctive style founded on crisp swing and worked for years in the trio of organist Wild Bill Davis. I came across photographs of him on bassist Ed Friedland’s web site. They show Thompson playing last year in Tucson, where he settled but apparently did not retire. At eighty-seven, Thompson was sporting a nifty red guitar and had less hair than in the late fifties—in fact, no hair—but otherwise looked remarkably unchanged. It used to be said that jazz was a young man’s art. Not if you’re Dickie Thompson or those amazing upper octagenarian pianists Hank Jones and Marian McPartland.

A reader of Rifftides or Take Five (both, I hope) has been listening to Jim Hall’s 1974 Concierto CD in which Hall’s sidemen are Paul Desmond, Chet Baker, Roland Hanna, Ron Carter and Steve Gadd. She sent a message asking a question at which musicians tend to guffaw when civilians ask it, one that arises out of genuine interest and does not deserve scorn. Here’s the exchange:
Q: The track “Concierto de Aranjuez” is hauntingly beautiful. Do the musicians totally improvise, or do they each have a kind of musical outline around which they create? You can guess from the question I’m not a musician, but it’s something I’ve wondered about.
A. Except in the most unfettered avant garde improvisation, there must be a plan or the result will be random noise, which, come to think of it, describes the most unfettered avant garde improvisation. Virtually every piece of music has some sort of tonal organization, whether or not there is a formal chord structure. In the case of “Concierto” on the Jim Hall album, the musicians improvise around the simple and quite lovely harmonies that Joaquin Rodrigo wrote into the adagio section of his famous “Concierto de Aranjuez.”
Jazz musicians frequently get questions about whether they know what they’re doing. In Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, I included an old Down Beat piece of mine that tells how Paul dealt with the question on one occasion. it’s on page 214. Here is the pertinent passage.

Desmond and an old friend were about to reminisce, but one of the Musicarnival actresses had a question.
“I don’t want to show my ignorance,” she chirped, “but do you know what you’re going to play before you sit down, or do you just sort of make it up as you go along?”
Desmond gave her a long look to be sure he wasn’t the victim of a put-on, decided he wasn’t, and explained.
“First of all, I never sit down. But I do try to follow a general plan, which we’ve all discussed on the plane. Chords and things.”
“Oh, you mean sort of like harmony.”
“Yeah, something like that.”

Yesterday, I renamed Arnold Schoenberg, called him Aaron. I must have confused him with a character in one of his stage pieces. It’s fixed now. An attentive reader, Chris Schneider, caught the mistake and sent this charming reprimand.

Geez, and I thought his name was *Moses* Schoenberg …
Anyone who makes a mistake like that deserves to be subjected to the Schoenberg joke in my additional lyrics for “The Wonder of You” (that’s the Ellington/George song of that title, *not* the Elvis one).
Quote:
I’ve whistled ‘Pierrot Lunaire,”
I’ve jockeyed in the June air;
I’ve moped about in moon air, all blue.
The worlds may fall asunder,
But nothing’s like The Wonder of You.
(©2002 Chris Schneider)
– – – – – –
Having made more than my own share of misnaming typos, I’m full of sympathy.

Thanks. I feel so much better

Reacting to Tuesday’s posting about the Wingspread conference on ways to grow the market share of jazz, Rifftides Reader Jan Brukman thinks it unlikely that jazz will exceed its three percent share of the market (an optimistic estimate) for music recordings, but he doesn’t think it will disappear.

As string quartets will never die, neither will jazz, and for the same reasons. They are classical forms; if you stray too much from the classical forms, however, you get experiments, which real people cannot hear. No amount of education can transcend that, as arrogant idiots like Charles Wuorinen never found out.

That is how many jazz people feel about Ornette Coleman, but Coleman has as enthusiastic a following as does Wuorinen among afficionados of music on the edges of modern classicism. Wuorinen is an American composer who uses the twelve-note system developed by Arnold Schoenberg and expanded by Milton Babbitt. He often writes electronic music. His best known pieces are Time’s Encomium, which brought him a Pulitzer prize, and Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky. “Best known” does not mean familiar. I wonder how many people have heard a Wuorinen work. He also won a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur “genius” grant. The New York Times once wrote, “Charles Wuorinen has taken the decrees of 12-tone music and made them sing.” Dissenting somewhat, The New Yorker critic Alex Ross wrote of Wuronen’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a collaboration with Salman Rushdie:

Although Wuorinen has not renounced the twelve-tone writing with which he made his name, he, too, now deposits triads in his scores as if they were pillow mints, and even indulges in pastiches of jazz and blues. Schoenberg once believed that atonal music could have the same emotional range as tonal music; Wuorinen, surrendering to psycho-acoustic reality, uses dissonant complexity to express the terror of war and quasi-tonal passages to express love and reconciliation. Passages of the latter type are, admittedly, tentative and fleeting. This comedy growls and thrashes more than it sings and dances.

That paragraph, which has dissonant complexity of its own, is from a piece about the conductor James Levine. You can read the whole thing in Ross’s The Rest is Noise, a blog I cannot recommend highly enough. I am adding it to the Other Places list in the right-hand column.

Gordon Sapsed reports on British radio and clubs not quite keeping jazz at arms’ length and not quite embracing it.

Here in the UK the London radio station Jazz FM recently changed its name to Smooth FM. Explaining the change the owners said, “it’s a sad fact of life that Jazz FM has never made a profit in 15 years of existence …..the station will continue its commitment to broadcast 45 hours of specialist jazz programming each week ….. but there is an enormous appetite for artists such as Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Alicia Keys, George Benson, Michael Buble and Diana Krall who will fill the daytime schedule…… In-depth research shows that 40% of our listeners prefer the name ‘Smooth FM” and two thirds of non-listening Londoners are put off tuning in because of the name Jazz FM. 42% say they do not tune in because ‘they were not into jazz music.”
Meanwhile, here in the Southampton area, the Concorde Club (usually thought of locally as the Concorde Jazz Club) has undergone a multi-million pound refit but maintained a jazz policy by keeping jazz away from the money-earning Thursday Friday and Saturday nights. ‘Clubbing’, with dancing to D.J.s and tribute bands (clones of Elvis, The Stones,The Beatles and such) provides the funding to make jazz affordable on other nights. Jazz is just one part of the club’s overall image

Back in the USA, as one of those clone bands is probably singing, a veteran New York jazz pianist who has had trouble finding work told me about a gig she was offered. The conditions were that she play nothing but Sinatra hits and Italian songs…for no pay. She declined. At least, the club owner didn’t ask her to pay him. That has been happening in several cities, a rather radical redefinition of market share.

Have I mentioned lately that I wrote a book called Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond? You can buy it from the publisher and get free shipping. Please do.

Doug Ramsey explores every facet of Desmond’s public and private lives in this intimate, often hilarious and very thorough biography, a book that is very hard to put down. —Ken Dryden, allaboutJazz.com

See the entire review here.