For the next few days, I’ll continue playing catch-up with CDs that accumulated, and may have reproduced, while I was working on Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond (See Doug’s Books on the right). John Bishop’s Origin and OA2 labels concentrate on jazz in the Pacific Northwest. That gives Origin a large pool of talented musicians from which to draw. The label issues so many CDs that it’s hard to keep up with them. The music ranges from mainstream to the near edge of the avant garde. The sampler Modern Jazz: A Collection of Seattle’s Finest Jazz offers an overview, but merely hints at the riches of the Origin catalog. Like many albums by Origin artists, the sampler consists exclusively of original compositions. However satisfying that approach may be to the artists’ egos and sense of integrity, and regardless of how many mechanical royalties they avoid paying to the Gershwin and Porter estates, it presents a challenge to listeners who subscribe to the Broadbent principle. As you may recall from yesterday, that principle involves pianist Alan Broadbent’s conviction that listeners need and appreciate familiar melodies and forms with which to orient themselves. Trombonist Michael Vlatkovich’s trio CD Queen Dynamo offers a double whammy—nine originals as points of departure for free playing. I wonder how many record store or internet browsers unfamiliar with Vlatkovich’s blowsy, often optimistic, music are likely to add it to their shopping carts based on track titles like “The Length of the Tail Doesn’t Really Matter But it Does Have to be Bushy.” The music is funny and cheerful, and Jonas Tauber is one hell of a bass player.
Notes on a few other Origin and OA2 CDs:
Marc Seales Band, A Time, A Place, A Journey. A professor of music at the University of Washington, Seales is one of the Northwest’s most popular jazz pianists. This set by his sextet, recorded at Tula’s night club, shows why. It tends toward Seales’s reflective aspect and includes a slow “Deep River” ending on a powerful tremolo that releases the tension of exhiliration beneath the spiritual’s surface.
Steve Korn, Points In Time. Korn is the drummer on Seales’s album. Seales is the pianist on Korn’s. Two saxophones with a rhythm section play originals that are gentle, modal, peaceful, suitable for meditation. The CD is interesting until, about half way through, a sameness sets in.
Randy Halberstadt’s Parallel Tracks has only pieces by others, among them Artie Shaw, Bronislaw Kaper, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Cole Porter and Frederic Chopin. Halberstadt wrote one of the best books on jazz improvisation, Metaphors For The Musician: Perspectives from a Jazz Pianist. Accompanied by bassist Jeff Johnson and drummer Gary Hobbs, he demonstrates with his refined touch, harmonic adventurism and humor that he knew what he was writing about.
Like Halberstadt, Johnson and Hobbs would be better known if they were based in New York. Johnson’s Near Earth is a successor to his Free CD of a few years ago and again presents the bassist in empathetic conjunction with the luminous saxophonist Hans Teuber and a drummer, in this case Tad Britton. The only standard tune is Johnny Mercer’s “Dream.” As in their originals, they take “Dream” out, but not so far out that they’re not near Earth.
Hobbs, who played in one of Stan Kenton’s last bands, is a thinking drummer whose arranging imagination is an important factor in his Of My Times. He blends horns and cello with each other and with conventional and unconventional rhythm section instruments for surprising effects, among them a sly funk version of “Oh, Suzanna,” langorous backdrops for Gretta Matassa’s vocal on “Besame Mucho” and the techno thrust of “Robot Love.” I would like to have heard fewer synthesizer features and rock derivatives and more of the lyricism of the title track, but Hobbs’s drumming is fascinating no matter what the context.
More tomorrow on items from the Origin storehouse

I think it’s about time to put to rest the matter of New York Times critic Ben Ratliff’s predicting the quality of a concert that hadn’t happened (Rifftides, June 15.) But not quite. The Portland, Oregon, writer Jack Berry offered us this thought:

The Ratliff flap is sad. But it’s not so much the need to be “edgy,” which some observers suggest is the Times‘ new obsession. Pop culture is all about the next thing. If it’s been done, it’s done. Jazz is classical music (for better and worse). Writers about classical music are supposed to check in and see what the primary performers are doing. And, in doing that, you can be “edgy.” It’s appropriate to drop music that has no shelf life and that’s where Ratliff should be working. Ah, when Mozart was pop, when jazz was pop….

Berry is writing a biography of the tenor saxophonist Jim Pepper.

During the more than two years I was mostly closeted writing Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, CDs kept materializing in my mailbox. There wasn’t much I could do about them but write an occasional review. When I emerged from isolation, I sampled many and paid close attention to a few. In the next few days, I’ll share with you my imprssions of some of them.
Now that any eighteen-year-old tenor player is likely to be a record company, the CDs come pouring in. Some weeks, self-produced albums by fledgling musicians outnumber those by players with track records (so to speak). More often than not, these maiden voyages are launched on waves of compositions by the leader, but I have encountered no new jazz composer with Herbie Hancock’s ability to sustain an album of original material. When I see on the back of an album a list of tunes written by someone six months out of Berklee, my inclination is to consign the CD to the box reserved for things I may get around to some day. I’m with Alan Broadbent, who spoke years ago about the importance to performer and listener alike of improvisation based on recognizable music.

“There’s a joy, an intellectual bliss that derives from being able to discern the form of something and to hear how somebody is playing on it,” Alan told me years ago when I was preparing the notes for his Pacific Standard Time. “A lot of listeners who know a tune sense its form and feel that they’re a part of it. They can feel the tension. They can hear how the tune is being reharmonized. That’s part of the joy of the art of it, for listeners to be able to use their minds, so it’s not just mood music.”

Still, once in a while something intrigues me into hearing a collection of originals by a young musician. In the case of Alex Heitlinger’s Green Light, the hook was the presence in Heitlinger’s sextet of the remarkable trumpeter Greg Gisbert. Heitlinger is a 24-year-old Colorado trombonist who played in symphony orchestras in the Rocky Mountain region and around the Southwest. He recently moved to Jersey City to be close to the New York scene. His jazz playing has elements of whimsy that remind me of Bill Harris and Roswell Rudd. His flights of fancy extend into his writing on “Crazy Jake,” which sounds like George Russell visiting a 1920s Berlin cabaret, and “Pondering,” with a melody perfectly suited to the title. “Missing You” is a waltz with a bittersweet cast and nicely harmonized horn parts behind Art Lande’s piano solo. “The Foot,” whose line is more a series of impressions than a melody, opens up space around a vamp for the horns to sputter and splatter at will, which they do entertainingly and not to excess. Lande, Heitlinger, saxophonist Peter Sommer and Gisbert solo lustily, with bassist Dwight Kilian and drummer Jill Fredericksen strong in support. This one was a pleasant surprise.
More tomorrow on recent (well, relatively recent) CDs.

Don’t miss DevraDoWrite’s update on Bill Crow, bassist, anecdotist, musicians’ champion and good guy. Excerpt:

Bill Crow was a musical chameleon in his youth, playing trumpet, baritone horn, alto sax drums, and valve trombone. He didn’t take up the bass until he was in his early 20s. Within a few years he was playing bass with Stan Getz, Marian McPartland, and Gerry Mulligan, to name just three, and he never looked back.

Read the whole thing, and see a great recent picture of Bill, here.

The Czech Frantisek UhliÅ™ is one of the greatest bassists in the world. He works frequently in the trio of his countryman pianist Emil Viklicky, another great European player about whom most Americans know little. I just ran across a brief note I made when I was in Prague twelve years ago, helping American economists teach market economics to Czech journalists newly released from communism.

June 10, 1993: Went to Agartha last night to hear Frantisek Uhlir, the wonderful bassist. Earlier in the day one of his fans told me he is better than George Mraz. Maybe, maybe not, but he is superb, world class. Uhlir is a short, powerful, chubby man with a pleasant round face. His tone is round, too, and centered, and he is fast, agile and swinging.

Vicklicky’s trio with Uhlir and the Slovakian drummer Laco Tropp backs the multi-instrumentalist Scott Robinson on Robinson’s lovely Summertime CD released last year on the Czech label Cube Metier. In my Jazz Times review of the album and one by Robinson of Louis Armstrong compositions, I wrote:

One of the best contemporary pianists, Viklicky’s soloing and comping, his touch, voicings and intervals have a good deal in common with fleet, tasteful pianists like Tommy Flanagan, Jimmy Rowles and Bill Charlap. His individuality is deeply informed by the music of his native land, and particularly by that of Moravia.

To read the review of both albums, go here.

This may be a subject better suited to Nancy Levinson’s Pixel Points than to Rifftides, but here goes: what has happened to house design? I don’t mean high-end design by top-rung architects working with wealthy clients, but design of houses for ordinary folks. Not far from where I live, a small orchard has disappeared—almost overnight, it seems—and been replaced by a half-dozen houses that will probably sell for a couple of hundred thousand dollars each. They are builder houses, not so much designed as extruded; featureless, bland, sited cheek-by-jowl on their lots with their backs to views, their fronts looking at each other across a cul de sac, two of the four walls devoid of windows except for tiny ones looking out of bathrooms. The forbidding doors of two-car garages dominate the house fronts. Variations on this depressing theme characterize a high percentage of new housing built in the United States.
In contrast, a mile or so away, is a three-acre former farm also now populated with houses. Those houses were bought by an entrepeneur and moved there when a hospital expanded and forced them out. They appear to have been built in the late 1930s and forties, with light, openess and welcoming characteristics in mind. None of them is grand, but each is an individual. Some are on a new curving short street, others face a busy thoroughfare. Together, they have the friendly aspect of a village. The houses on the old orchard land have all the charm of a clump of prefab classrooms on the back lot of an overcrowded high school.
In their book A Pattern Language (Oxford), Christopher Alexander and his fellow architects of the Center for Environmental Structure long ago set out principles not only for design of houses but also of neighborhoods, towns and regions. A few headings from the book hint at what they suggest for dwellings:
Light on Two Sides of Every Room
Opening to the Street
Connection to the Earth
Garden Seat
Sitting Circle
Alcoves
Natural Doors and Windows
Low Sill
Pools of Light
Front Door Bench
Windows Which Open Wide
Small Panes
Flow Through Rooms
Little in A Pattern Language is technical. Most of it is based in taste and common sense. Driving around new subdivisions, I can’t help wondering about the supply of both among many of today’s home homebuilders—and why buyers settle for lousy design.

It is clear from responses I am getting that some of you are working journalists and that others have an interest in the news process. So, I am adding Tim Porter’s First Draft blog to the list of Other Places in the right-hand column. Porter has a solid background as an editor and, later, as an independent thinker about journalism problems. He has valuable insights into the big issues. He is unforgiving of bad writing and clichés. And he must be a good guy; he lives in Mill Valley, California, perhaps the favorite of my many former home towns. First Draft is worth a look.

The Jazz Institute of Chicago website has the transcription of a valuable 1981 interview with Bill Perkins by the indefatigable British print and broadcast journalist Steve Voce. Perkins was one of the great tenor saxophonists who grew out of Lester Young. In the fifties, Stan Getz said of him, “Perk is playing more than any of us.” I have always assumed that by “any of us,” Getz meant not just himself, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Paul Quinichette, Brew Moore and dozens of others who worshipped Lester, but tenor saxophonists in general. Perkins adored Young, but he was on a constant search beyond Young, beyond himself, so that he could get deeper inside himself and his music. He worked incessantly and intensely to become a more expressive player. And he seemed never to be satisfied with his own playing. More than once I have seen his fellow musicians’ mouths fall open in astonishment at some daring passage he played, only to have him come off the stand shaking his head in disgust at what he considered a failed attempt. His self-deprecation was no act. Here’s some of what he told Voce.

As you know the attraction to Los Angeles for the musicians was the chance to make money in the studios. It was a very enticing thing. But in recent years because of the sheer number of musicians there they’ve made their own thing musically. And still you can’t possibly make a living as a jazz musician in Los Angeles. I think I took the studio work too seriously. I’d go to each job with the attitude that it was supposed to be a work of art and I’d wind up going home almost on the point of tears because I thought I’d played badly. But, as my dear friend Ernie Watts pointed out, it’s not art it’s craft at best, and if you look at it that way it won’t be so painful to you. Here’s a man half my age educating me!

The important thing about Perk—all musicians who played with him in later years remarked on it—was his unceasing self-renewal as an artist. A coterie of fans constantly barraged him with requests that he play as he did in 1956; specifically, as he did on the marvelous Grand Encounter with John Lewis, Jim Hall, Percy Heath and Chico Hamilton. But, like Hall, he kept growing, exploring, taking harmonic and rhythmic chances, never entertaining the thought of remaining static. That made it difficult for admirers whose antennae were pointed backward, but he treated more open-minded listeners to some of the most adventurous playing in all of jazz. His exploratory, occasionally boggling, conception comes through in his last recordings with the Bill Holman Band, and there is a lot of it in CDs with the Danny Pucillo Quartet on Pucillo’s Dann label and in Silver Storm with Bud Shank’s sextet on Raw Records. Still, Perkins never lost his love for Lester Young and was persuaded late in his life to recreate some of Young’s most famous solos on Perk Plays Prez on the Fresh Sound label.
In part because he was on the west coast, in part because it is demanding to follow a moving target, Perk’s daring late work eluded taste-making critics. Anyone who examines his ouvre of the late nineties and early 21st century will witness astonishing music-making. I rarely tell musicians what I think they should do. Generally, they don’t need or want to hear it. But in 2002, when we are all in the same place, I suggested to Perkins and the guitarist Jim Hall, another giant incapable of not looking ahead, that they collaborate on new music. They liked the idea. That would have been something to hear. If only it had happened before Perk died in August of 2003.

Leo Boucher in Houston sent a message about my comments Wednesday on Ben Ratliff’s New York Times piece predicting a boring concert at the JVC Festival.

I read it differently. I don’t think he meant that those players are boring or that the concert would be boring. I think he meant that it is an example of boring, uninspired programming. My guess is that that’s why he didn’t name the pianists; he wasn’t dissing them, but the festival programmers. I look forward to reading your blog.

Nate Dorward, a Canadian reviewer and blogger, wrote much the same, and added:

I think a better word would have been “unimaginative” or “safe”: heartfelt tributes originated by the musicians themselves are one thing, but the way festival programmers (and record labels) constantly turn jazz into unimaginatively packaged tributes to a pantheon of past greats is frustrating for many jazz fans. It would be far more respectful of the individual geniuses of Weston, Allen, Barron and Caine to give them each a concert to themselves and let them play whatever music struck their fancy.

I don’t know how far I’m going to go with the Food section under Doug’s Picks, but Jack Wright of Boston responded to the first entry.

For your asparagus recipe, allow me to recommend a favorite pinot gris of mine. The label is Big Fire, the winemaker is R. Stuart & Co of McMinnville, OR. That’s what I’ll be drinking when I make your recipe. I look forward to reading Rifftides fervently.

Ah, those Oregon pinots—gris and noir. Salud.
Another Bostonian, the respected critic Bob Blumenthal, had a thought about Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.

Am I the only one who has said that your Desmond book reminds me of nothing so much as the recent Albert Ayler “spirit box”? And I mean that in a good way, but these are two saxophonists who don’t normally share the same thought.

I can hear Desmond giving his conspiratorial chuckle at the thought. He rather liked Ornette Coleman, even if he did say that listening to Ornette was like living in a house where everything was painted red.
The master trumpeter Marvin Stamm writes concerning my evening at the Garage Restaurant in Greenwich Village:

I am glad you had the opportunity of hearing Virginia Mayhew play while on your recent NYC sojourn. I have been doing several gigs with her these past few months and am enjoying her playing immensely. She’s a beautiful player and a lovely person to work with. She’s an excellent musician who knows what she wants, yet allows each player plenty of latitude for their own musical input. She’s certainly showing me a thing or two about playing in odd meters!

I have had unbelievable luck lately. Just this morning, I got an e-mail message notifying me that I have won a million Euros in the Royal Spanish Sweepstakes Lottery, another from the son of a murdered bank official in Kenya who will make me rich for helping him invest his inheritance, and one from a merchant in Dubai who led a selfish life, but now that he is dying of a particularly hideous form of cancer, wants to give his fortune to charity and would like me to help him dispose of it. As if that weren’t enough, I’ve been offered a huge stockpile of Viagra at bargain prices. What opportunities the internet brings.
Have a nice weekend.