The following announcement is posted on the JazzTimes web site:

Important Message From JazzTimes Management
By JazzTimes

To our readers and members of the jazz community:

JazzTimes has temporarily suspended publication of the magazine and has furloughed the bulk of its staff while it finalizes a sale of its assets. The brand and operation will undergo reorganization and restructuring in order to remain competitive in the current media climate. Print publishing is expected to resume as soon as a sale is closed. New information and statements will be posted at www.jazztimes.com as they become available.
Thank you for your patience during this challenging period.
JazzTimes Management

With the suspension last year of the Canadian magazine Coda, the absorption of Britain’s Jazz Review by Jazz Journal and the conversion of JazzIz to a quarterly, jazz listeners’ choices of major print information about the music are disappearing fast. The question, unanswerable at this point, is whether web sites and blogs can provide the same depth and width of coverage generations have received from jazz magazines. This is a small manifestation of the larger challenge facing free societies as newspapers shrink or disappear. A democracy can only suffer from diminution and fragmentation of the flow of information upon which we base our judgments.
Let us hope that JazzTimes survives its reorganization. More important, let us hope that we do not lose news organizations serving mass audiences. They help bind us together.

There is still no confirmation, and no denial, of reports that Jazz Times will go out of business as a print publication. General economic decline, the increasing loss of advertising life blood and the necessity to shrink staffs weaken all magazines and newspapers.
Nasty fiscal weather is even more threatening to publications that specialize in cultural affairs. In hard times, support for the arts is likely to top the list of cuts in advertiser, donor and personal budgets. In his blog’s Sunday Wax Bits, Marc Myers takes a perceptive look at the Jazz Times predicament and at alternatives to paper-based jazz information.

I don’t buy the argument that the slow demise of print is tied to the “dumbing down of America.” Fans today aren’t reading less about jazz. They’re just gravitating toward more essential content. What is essential? Content that’s timely, surprising and independent. Sadly, many jazz magazines in recent years have missed the mark on all three fronts with cost escalations, talent drains and advertiser synergy deals.

To read the whole thing, go to JazzWax

Unconfirmed reports continue to filter out of Silver Spring, Maryland, that Jazz Times magazine’s precarious advertising revenue position will force it to cease publication. In his latest post on the matter, my artsjournal.com colleague Howard Mandel quotes a recently dismissed Jazz Times associate editor as saying that “it’s doubtful the magazine would be able to survive in its present format.” To read Howard’s posts on the situation, go here.
Ira Sabin founded Radio Free Jazz in 1970 as an adjunct to his retail record business. I began contributing reviews and articles in 1975 when it was printed on newsprint in a tabloid format. I have no clear notion of how many hundred thousand words I published there before and after it morphed into the slick magazine that became Jazz Times, gave Down Beat a run for its money and consistenty won awards. For a variety of reasons, I haven’t contributed to Jazz Times in the past year or so, but if it disappears I will be saddened by a major loss to the community of listeners who value the music. I hope that efforts to save the magazine succeed.

The story about Dave Pell’s restoration of Lester Young’s Dolnet tenor saxophone brought a message from documentary producer Ken Koenig and one from Jim Harrod, moderator of the Jazz West Coast listserve. Each of their responses took the form of a photograph.
Mr. Harrod sent a copy of a Dolnet ad from an early-1950s issue of the magazine Jazz Hot.

Mr. Koenig took a photograph of Dave Pell with the resuscitated Dolnet, and Lester in the background, at the Los Angeles Jazz Institute’s A Swingin’ Affair festival over Memorial Day weekend. The most cursory examination of Mr. Pell’s head in comparison with his photo at the bottom of the previous exhibit will disclose that more than the saxophone has been restored.

The Rifftides staff thanks Mr. Harrod and Mr. Koenig.

The following article appeared in the Fall, 2008, issue of the British magazine, Jazz Review.

Lester Young drew on Louis Armstrong, Frank Trumbauer, Bix Beiderbecke and his own genius to create one of the most personal styles in music. In the 1930s he provided an evolutionary step between Armstrong and Charlie Parker. Flying weightlessly over bar lines, Young helped to free the jazz soloist from the arbitrary restrictions of time divisions and showed the way to the rhythmic and harmonic foundations of bebop. He became a hero of forward-looking musicians of several decades. Billie Holiday, his friend and musical alter-ego, called him the president of tenor saxophonists. His nickname became Prez.
More than seventy years after his first recordings with Count Basie, Young’s buoyancy, harmonic subtlety, flexibility with rhythm and distinctive tonal qualities keep his playing alive and fresh. Time has been less kind to one of the tenor saxophones that Prez used to make his music. In the course of his career, his main horn was the Conn he played with Basie. His second was a tenor presented to him in the 1950s in France by the Dolnet company, which had made reed instruments since 1888. He played it in the few years before he died.
The Conn is enshrined in the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, side by side with Billie Holiday’s artificial gardenia and a certificate of authenticity signed by Young.

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

This Conn saxophone, number 444,4444, is the saxophone I used with the Count Basie band in 1936 and later. With this horn I recorded “Twelfth St. Rag,” “Song of the Islands,” “Lester Leaps In,” and “One O’Clock Jump”–among other numbers.

Young’s Dolnet tenor sax fared less well. Following his lonely death at forty-nine in 1959 from the effects of alcoholism, the horn went to his younger brother Lee, successful in Los Angeles as a drummer, studio musician and music director for Nat King Cole. Lee Young consigned the horn to his basement, where it remained until after he died on July 31, 2008, at the age of ninety-one.
Among Lee Young’s friends in the L.A. music community was Dave Pell, one of a legion of tenor players idolizing Lester and patterning their playing on his. Like Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Frank Wess, Al Cohn, Brew Moore, Alan Eager, Paul Quinichette and dozens of other tenor players, Pell emulated Lester’s tone, harmonic approach and melodic concept in improvisation. In the early 1950s he formed the Dave Pell Octet, recruiting as sidemen fellow members of Les Brown’s popular dance band. The Brown band had jazz leanings that Pell expanded in the octet. As west coast jazz was on the rise, Pell’s group blazed no trails but recorded a substantial series of albums with excellent playing by the Brown troops, including superb solo work by the trumpeter Don Fagerquist and plenty of solos by Pell. Other Los Angeles musicians who appeared on the octet’s albums over the decade included Art Pepper, Jack Sheldon, Bob Gordon, André Previn, Pepper Adams, Mel Lewis and Bob Enevoldsen. Shorty Rogers Bill Holman and Jerry Fielding contributed to the band’s book.
Through the 1960s and ’70s, Pell worked as a musician in the Hollywood studios and as a producer who oversaw the recording of more than 400 albums. In 1978, his love for Lester Young resurfaced in the form of a band devoted to his hero’s music. He called it Prez Conference, after a piece that Holman had written for the Stan Kenton band. The group recorded two albums for GNP Records. One featured Joe Williams singing songs that Young recorded. Pell, two other tenors and a baritone saxophonist played classic Prez solos on the pieces, orchestrated by Holman for the four horns.The other long-playing record had the same approach, without Williams but with trumpet solos by Young’s Basie band mate Harry “Sweets” Edison. The albums sold well. The band appeared at the 1979 Monterey Jazz Festival and played on a package tour of Japan with the Modern Jazz Quartet and the Hi-Los. Fifteen tracks from the two albums are reissued on a GNP CD, Prez And Joe.
Pell’s friend and golfing buddy Lee Young followed Prez Conference’ progress, attended its performances in the L.A. area and occasionally sat in for its drummer, Frank Capp.
Pell, now eighty-three, recalled, “We had a regular golf game with Lee, his son Junior, and a bass player we found named Ray Brown, who was a golf nut, too. We’d play a foursome every Friday morning. I couldn’t play as well as these guys, but I’d go along just to hear the Lester Young stories. Lee would always say, ‘You know, I’d love to give you the horn.’ I’d say, ‘Well, give it to me.’ And he’d say, ‘I can’t. Lester’s children want the horn. They want to put it in a museum’
“When Lee died, Lee, Jr., called me and said, ‘Come and get the horn.’ Lee willed it to me, but when I die it goes back to the Young family. They’re okay with that. They know it should be played. And I’m going to learn to play it, no matter how badly it behaves.”
That presented a challenge. When Pell got the horn, he was shocked at what more than a half-century of basement damp had done to it.
“It had fifty-six years of rust,” he said. “I took the thing home, and I said, ‘Gee, maybe I can play the mouthpiece.’ The mouthpiece plays just sensational. Just perfect. It sounds like Prez,” he laughed.
Pell took the Dolnet to Steve Smith, a saxophone technician at United Band Instrument Company in Los Angeles, hoping to have it back in time to play it at a Prez Conference revival concert at the San Jose Jazz Festival in August (of 2008).
“Steve looked at me and said, ‘You won’t get this back for two or three months.’ The rust on the horn itself comes off easy. You just dip it in solvent and all the rust disappears. But where the screws go in the sockets, it’s another matter. When I called him after one week and said, ‘How’s it going?’ he said, ‘I’ve done six screws.’ So, it’s really going to be a project.”
Pell used Lester’s mouthpiece at the San Jose Festival. “All the saxophone players there came over and asked if they could touch it,” he said with a smile. For the occasion, Prez Conference included its original drummer, Frank Capp; the young Los Angeles pianist John Proulx; bassist John Shifflet; and three northern California saxophonists, Kris Strom and Matt Kesner on tenor and Aaron Lington on baritone. They played the Holman arrangements, with coloratura soprano Bonnie Bowden on some pieces doubling the lead parts an octave higher. Pell says that he, the band and the audience were delighted with the success of the concert.
The rebirth of Lester Young’s horn has inspired a new phase in the career of his octogenarian disciple. When Prez’s Dolnet tenor is back in commission, Pell plans to record it in a new CD with the reconstituted Prez Conference and take the band on the road.
(Only the photo of Lester Young’s Conn tenor saxophone appeared in the Jazz Review article.)

Everything is fine with the horn..play it everyday…recording a new CD, and it records sensationally, with Johnny Vana. Did a concert tonight in Palm Desert with Med Flory and Don Shelton..and we sounded just like 3 brothers.
Am booked at Sweet and Hot Festival with my tribute to Lester Young in August with Bonnie Bowden singing Billy Holiday songs and Prez Conference. It was kinda hard trying to make friends with the horn because of the problems of 56 years of rust. However it sounds so good,and I love it,

For a project connected with his Jazz At The Philharmonic operation, the impresario Norman Granz filmed Lester Young with trombonist Bill Harris, Pianist Hank Jones, bassist Ray Brown and drummer Buddy Rich. Although they bypass the melody, the piece is “Pennies From Heaven.” For decades, there has been speculation, but no proof, that because of technical audio requirements, they are lip-synching to a performance they previously recorded. That could account for the general amusement and for a couple of what seem to be slight deviations of the sound from the picture.

Thirty-two years ago today, Paul Desmond bid his girlfriend goodbye as she set off for London, urging her to have a good holiday. That was on Friday. He would be fine, he told her; he had friends coming the next day. But his only companion that weekend was the lung cancer that had ravaged him during the past year. His housekeeper found him dead on Monday, Memorial Day.
Marian McPartland said, “It’s just like Paul to slip quietly away when everyone’s out of town, not to bother anybody.” Dave Brubeck still says, “Boy, do I miss Paul Desmond.” Details of Paul’s passing–and his life–are in Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.
Here he is at the 1975 Monterey Jazz Festival two years before his death.

Bill Mays and Red Mitchell constituted one of the great piano-bass duos of the 1980s. Musicians and dedicated listeners still talk about their gigs at Bradley’s in New York’s Greenwich Village. Their album Two of a Mind has been out of print for years, although it shows up from time to time on web sites including this one, at prices ranging from high to heart-stopping. In 1982, Mays and Mitchell made two programs that ran on KCET, the Los Angeles public television station. Four pieces from those programs have just materialized on YouTube. Here are two of them, both written by Thelonious Monk.

How did Mitchell get that sound, clear and precise, yet the size of Grand Central Station? His tone was always big, but after 1966 when he changed his bass tuning from fourths to fifths (as violin, viola and cello are tuned), it became enormous. He explained it to Gene Lees:

If you tune an instrument in fourths, you get a scale that is shorter physically. The top notes are lower, the bottom notes are higher in pitch. If you tune an instrument in fifths, you get a bigger scale. The top notes are higher, the low notes are lower.

There’s more to it than that; the tuning in fifths also effects how the notes sustain, or ring. For detail, read the entire interview with Mitchell in Lees’ indispensable book Cats of Any Color. It is fascinating for the fluidity, profundity and coherence of Mitchell’s ideas about music and life.
Mitchell died in 1992. Mays is thriving.

Red played the most gorgeous melodic solos of anybody on any instrument. I think maybe he and Lester Young were in the same league. The fact that it was coming out of a string bass was mind-boggling. — Jim Hall

Simple isn’t easy. — Red Mitchell

There is little question that the 1940-41 edition of the Duke Ellington orchestra, the so-called Blanton-Webster band, was Ellington’s finest. Legions of Ellington lovers have listened to it so often that they can sing along with its arrangements and the solos by Webster, Ray Nance, Johnny Hodges, Ellington and the other members.
Still, I’ve always had a soft spot for the band Ellington took on the worldwide road in the 1960s until shortly before he died in 1974. The musicianship was extraordinary, of course, and there was something endearing about its laid-back collective attitude. A video displaying both aspects has shown up on Google. Paul Gonsalves, Harry Carney, Cootie Williams, Booty Wood and Russell Procope are among the sidemen. The film runs about 40 minutes, so you might want to save it for when you have time to settle in and enjoy it. This is Ellington in La Bussola, Focette (near Viareggio), Italy, in July, 1970, four months after the release of the recording of his New Orleans Suite.

Blogging must sometimes take a back seat to gainful employment. I’m roundin’ third and headin’ home* in one deadline project, an essay and play-by-play account of the music for the Anita O’Day entry in the next Jazz Icons series**. It has been an adventure in research into the two European concerts on the DVD. As soon as that wraps up, I’ll begin notes for Bud Shank’s final CD, then a piece about Emil Viklický’s forthcoming trio CD with George Mraz and Lewis Nash. I may even get in a little work on my alleged next novel. While all that’s going on, I hope to bring you a few items of interest. Thanks for your patience.
*For puzzled readers not in the US, that is a quaint allusion to baseball.
**Here are the titles, coming out in October:
Coleman Hawkins– Live in ’64- (w/ Sweets Edison)
Art Blakey– Live in ’65- (w/ Freddie Hubbard)
Max Roach – Live in ’68
Jimmy Smith– Live in ’65 & ’69
Woody Herman- Live in ’64
Anita O’Day– Live In ’63 & ’70
Art Farmer– Live In ’64- (w/ Jim Hall)
Boxed Set featuring bonus performances, including a one-hour unseen Coleman Hawkins concert from the Adolphe Sax Festival in Belgium in 1962.

Sometime in the final decade of the last century (man, that’s beginning to sound like a long time ago) I was on assignment in Portland, Oregon, and dropped into the restaurant of the elegant Heathman Hotel to hear pianist Dave Frishberg and singer Rebecca Kilgore. A cornetist was sitting in with them that night. On the spot, Jim Goodwin became one of my favorite living players of the instrument. His solos had echoes and intimations of Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, Ruby Braff, Max Kaminsky and Wild Bill Davison. He wrapped all of that into a style of great individuality, intimacy, forthright conviction and humor. You can hear it in Double Play, his 1992 duo album with Frishberg. Goodwin was fairly well known in traditional jazz circles, but his playing had a universal quality that should not relegate him to a pigeonhole.
I say “had” because Goodwin died, far too young, last month. Frishberg wrote an obituary of the friend whose work he championed and offered it to Rifftides. I don’t know where else it was published, but I’m delighted to present it here. I am including Dave’s information at the end, in italics, about donations and a party. I think Jim would have approved of a party.

JIM GOODWIN OBITUARY

James R. (Jim) Goodwin, the son of Katherine and Robert Goodwin, was born March 16, 1944 in Portland, OR, and died April 19, 2009 in Portland. Jim was a natural musician with no formal training. Practitioners and admirers of traditional jazz on both sides of the Atlantic have long regarded him as somewhat of a legend, and his heroic cornet playing, influenced by Louis Armstrong and Wild Bill Davison, was warmly appreciated by his musical colleagues as well as by audiences who listened and loved it.
Jim was a star first baseman at Hillsboro High– a left-handed line-drive hitter. After high school he served in the Oregon National Guard, then trained on Wall Street for a career in finance, returned to Portland, joined Walston & Co., and became for a time the nation’s youngest stockbroker. Jim then put aside the financial career and began to devote his life to playing jazz on the cornet.
During his forty-year career as a cornetist and pianist, Jim had long residencies in Breda, Holland and Berkeley, California, as well as in his home town of Portland. He played with many prominent musicians of the “old school”, including Joe Venuti, Manny Klein, Phil Harris, and Portland’s Monte Ballou (Jim’s godfather). He toured extensively in Western Europe and became probably better known there than in the US. During his long residence in the Bay Area he played regularly at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel and at Pier 23, as well as in three World Series with the Oakland A’s pep band. Before his recent return to Portland, he spent several years living in rural Brownsmead, OR, near Astoria.
Jim became a pioneer in the Portland micro-brewing industry when, together with Fred Bowman and Art Larrance, he established the Portland Brewing Company. During the 1990s he and Portland pianist Dave Frishberg played regular duet performances at the company’s Flanders Street Pub, and the two made an internationally acclaimed CD on the Arbors Jazz label.
In recent years Mr. Goodwin was on the Board of Directors of Congo Enterprises, and he served briefly as CFO of that company, leaving office months before the scandal became headline news.
**********************
Forest Park was very dear to Jim. He spent a lot of time there hiking and running.
Donations can be made to:
Forest Park Conservancy
1507 NW 23rd Avenue
Portland, OR 97210
Tel: 503-223-5449
Include a note stating that the donation is “in honor of James Goodwin”.
Donations may be made online at www.forestparkconservancy. A space is provided to enter the honoree’s name.
There will be a party honoring Jim on Saturday, September 19th. For more information contact Retta Christie.

The Rifftides staff proudly presents the latest assortment of Doug’s Picks — three big bands, a rare Lennie Breau video and the only holdover, a book about Breau to complement the DVD. Please direct your attention to the exhibit in the middle of your screen.

A few days short of a year ago, I told you about four 19-year-old musicians worth keeping an ear on. Three of them were the Uptown Trio, who appeared in concert supporting the gifted alto saxophonist Logan Strosahl. I wrote:

Anyone keeping a future file would do well to add those names. If these players keep developing at their current pace and intensity, it is likely that we’ll be hearing from them.

I remarked in the review that pianist Sam Reider, bassist Jeff Picker (his real name) and drummer Jake Goldblas were taking the business aspect of their careers into their own hands, contacting clubs and lining up tours. Good young players not adopted by record companies and booking agents must do that to get work.
The Uptown Trio, based in New York, has arranged a west coast tour early next month, with dates at important clubs in Los Angeles, Oakland and Portland. To see their schedule and hear a bit of their music, go here.

From a news release just received:

May 21, 2009
Washington, DC – The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) today announced the recipients of the 2010 NEA Jazz Masters Award – the nation’s highest honor in this distinctly American music The eight recipients will each receive a $25,000 grant award and be publicly honored in an awards ceremony and concert on Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center.
The eight 2010 NEA Jazz Masters are:
Muhal Richard Abrams, pianist, composer, educator, New York, NY
Kenny Barron, pianist composer, educator, Brooklyn, NY
Bill Holman, composer arranger, saxophonist, Los Angeles, CA
Bobby Hutcherson, vibraphonist, marimba player, composer, Montara, CA
Yusef Lateef, saxophonist, flutist, oboist, composer, educator, Amherst, MA
Annie Ross, vocalist, New York, NY
Cedar Walton, pianist, composer, Brooklyn, NY
George Avakian, a jazz producer, manager, critic, and educator from Riverdale, New York, will receive the 2010 A.B Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Award for Jazz Advocacy.

Congratulations to all. To see the complete NEA announcement, click here. To read last week’s Wall Street Journal profile of George Avakian by Will Friedwald, click here.

We are the masters at the moment, and not only at the moment, but for a very long time to come. — George Bernard Shaw
No art is less spontaneous than mine.
What I do is the result of reflection
and the study of the great masters. — Edgar Degas


A couple of years ago – maybe it was three – I linked Rifftides readers to a video so clever that it’s worth bringing to you again. Now that the staff has mastered the art of embedding, this time you see it right here on our screen; no linking required. When it finishes, you will see links to other creations by the same performer, who, for a reason perhaps known only to him, calls himself “Weeping Prophet.” Thanks to reader Paul Paolicelli (his real name) for reminding us of this skillful piece of work. The music is “Leap Frog” by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, with Thelonious Monk, Curly Russell and Buddy Rich (1950).

All of the tracks from the “Leap Frog” session and a wide range of Parker’s other Verve recordings are in this CD set.

We did not intend Rifftides to be an obituary service. It would be simpler to avoid its seeming like one if treasured musicians would stick around. We cannot ignore their passing.
The latest loss is Buddy Montgomery, who died today at the age of 79. The youngest of the Montgomery brothers, he outlived guitarist Wes and bassist Monk by many years. Admired among musicians for his creativity as a pianist and vibraharpist, his example affected a number of younger players. The prolific pianist David Hazeltine credits Montgomery as a primary influence. In the course of a career that began in the late 1940s in his hometown of Indianapolis, Montgomery played with Big Joe Turner, Slide Hampton, Miles Davis, George Shearing, and The Mastersounds (with his brother Monk). He recorded often with his brothers and led several groups of his own.
The Montgomery Brothers’ Groove Yard album is one of their most celebrated. The cover shows (l to r) Wes, Monk and Buddy. An extensive compilation of other music they recorded for the Riverside label has the deceptively similar name of Groove Brothers. Among Buddy Montgomery’s own CDs, Here Again is a standout. Go here for a full-length sample; Montgomery with his rich harmonies on piano playing “My Ideal.” Jeff Chambers is the bassist, Ray Appleton the drummer.