The Rifftides staff was surprised and pleased to find Rifftides praised in Beckey Bright’s “Blog Watch” column in today’s Wall Street Journal. Ms. Bright also singles out Ethan Iverson’s Do The Math and Jeffrey Siegel’s Straight No Chaser. Her other topic today is weddings. 

Gap Mangione writes from Rochester, New York, about the deaths of saxophonist Gerry Niewood and guitarist Coleman Mellett in last Thursday’s plane crash near Buffalo. The three were to have played a concert that night in Buffalo with Chuck Mangione: 

We gathered at the hotel Thursday night. Chuck flew in from Florida to conduct and play a concert with the Buffalo Philharmonic. Janet and I drove in so that we could have a Valentine’s dinner that night and so that I could play and solo in the concert on Friday. Kevin Axt (bass player) and Dave Tull (drummer) flew in from LA via Philadelphia (with a dicey landing in Phila.) and lead trumpet Jeff Kievit, who handles Chuck’s orchestra library, drove up from New Jersey so that he wouldn’t have to deal with carrying all the cases of music books on a plane — the one the others were on.

Kevin, Dave, Jeff, Janet and I met in the lobby and were excited, happily anticipating the fun of doing an orchestral concert with all its challenges and opportunities. 

But a very joyful evening turned horrifically tragic in a way of which nightmares are made…

 
Although Gerry Niewood usually played and recorded with Chuck, he played on my last three CDs and had great solos on all of them. He also has played concerts with my big band in Rochester and Buffalo. We’ve played together in a variety of settings and formats, mostly with Chuck, for more than four decades. 

Gerry Niewood            Coleman Mellett

Coleman Mellett had a way of playing extremely difficult music of all genres and styles, with creativity and capability well beyond his 33 years. It was truly a joyful musical treat to be next to him on stage as we were for the 2007 Friends and Love concert at the Eastman Theater (with Gerry) and the November 2008 pair of concerts with the Syracuse Symphony. We would groove off of one another, reaching for things musically, and nodding and smiling when we got there. 

The world lost two most wonderful people and two magnificent musicians.

Three days of music are echoing in my head. My notebook is full. As I drive through the gorgeous Columbia River Gorge on the way back to Rifftides World Headquarters, I’ll be thinking about how to boil down hours and hours of listening into a cogent report or two. For now, suffice it to tell you that the Portland Jazz Festival, saved more or less at the last moment from extinction, rallied, is a success and has matured into one of the finest jazz festivals in the world. As I motor along, I may be a bit distracted by scenery like this.

In the next day or two, I will also post thoughts about drummer, composer, band leader and mensch Louie Bellson, who died on Saturday.

(Portland, Oregon) – At the Portland Jazz Festival between concerts and after hours, much of the talk among musicians is about the death of Gerry Niewood. The saxophonist was one of 50 people who died in a plane crash Thursday night near Buffalo, New York. He and guitarist Coleman Mellett were on their way to Buffalo to perform with Chuck Mangione’s band. Mellett was also killed in the crash.

Niewood was a childhood friend of Mangione. He and the trumpeter played together in youth bands and became even closer musically at the Eastman School of Music in their native Rochester. Niewood was not on the celebrated Mangione Feels So Good album, but his association with Mangione’s huge success brought him attention and admiration among fellow musicians. That never translated into wide popular acceptance after he became a leader of his own group. He developed a successful career as a free-lancer on several reed and woodwind instruments and through the years rejoined Mangione for tours and in concerts recreating what became known as their Friends and Love music, which has retained popularity through four decades.

Respected for his technique and solid tonal qualities on all of his instruments, Niewood said in a 2006 interview with Rochester’s City Newspaper, “I don’t start to play until I hear something that I want to play. I try to develop it and have that thread of continuity. I’m not big on the use of pyrotechnics. I’m a melodic player, a rhythmic player, a harmonic player. I’m not a flashy player.”

In Portland, a group of musicians and friends who knew Niewood stood at the Arts Bar of the Portland Center for the Performing Arts listening to the John Gross Trio with Dave Frishberg and Charlie Doggett. Between tunes, much of the talk was about Niewood. Joe Lovano was particularly warm in his admiration for his fellow saxophonist’s musicianship. Judy Cites, the tour manager for Mangione’s band when Niewood was a member, recalled him as one of the most natural and unaffected people she has known.

From Rochester, a longtime friend of Niewood adds a memory from their early careers. The friend is Ned Corman, head of a national organization called The Commission Project, which is devoted to jazz education for children from grade school through college age. In his days as a saxophonist, Mr. Corman worked with Niewood and the Mangione brothers.

Some of the best music I was part of was a ten-piece band Chuck Mangione led in the late 60’s.  Chuck and Sam Noto were the trumpet section.  I don’t remember the trombone section. Gap Mangione, Frank Pullara and Vinnie Ruggerio were the rhythm section. Gerry, Joe Romano and I were the saxophone section.  Gerry was also part of the FRIENDS AND LOVE concert, perhaps the only time I was fortunate to make music with Marvin Stamm.  A  piece of information little known beyond Penfield High School music students: Gerry did his student teaching at PHS and Denonville Middle School. Students took lots of pride that Gerry was their teacher as well as a star with Chuck Mangione. 

Gerry Niewood was 65. For an obituary, go here.

Addendum, February 16: For an interesting insight into Niewood’s and Mellett’s lives as itinerant musicians, see Nate Schweber’s piece in today’s New York Times.   

Early this morning, I’ll be off to Portland, Oregon, one of my favorite former home towns. I lived there for three years long ago when my television news career was getting into gear — the second-gear phase, I suppose. The occasion is the first weekend of the Portland Jazz Festival, rescued from the budget shortfall that canceled it for a time. For details of the bailout go here. It has nothing to do with the Obama stimulus plan. For the festival lineup, go here. 

Dave Frishberg writes with important information on a matter raised in the previous entry. 

I’m reading the Rifftides discussion about Blossom Dearie and Bill Evans, and who influenced who. I’d like to add my comment:
During the late sixties I played a couple weeks solo opposite the Bill Evans Trio at the Village Gate on Bleecker St, and had some conversations with Bill. I asked him how he came upon his piled-fourths voicing of chords, and his immediate answer was that he heard Blossom Dearie play that way and it really knocked him out. Then he did a little rave review of Blossom, naming her as one of his models of piano playing. It was such a surprising response that I never forgot it.

A decade or so later Blossom and I were doing a two-piano act, and I got to see what he was talking about. Blossom showed me some voicings she was using,  and then I sat down at the same piano and tried them out but it didn’t sound like Blossom. I told her, “It sounds better when you do it.”  She said, “Oh well, I know this piano, I’m used to it.” The truth is she seemed to get her special sound out of any piano. Also, she could play softer than anyone I ever heard. The accompaniment she gave herself was all carefully composed, and she played it note for note every night.  Why not? It was perfect.

When Blossom Dearie died at 82 over the weekend, we lost a brilliant musician whose subtle artistry and private nature conspired to limit her popularity. There was nothing about her “teacup voice,” as Whitney Balliett described it, or her sophisticated harmonic sense at the piano that could have led to mass adoration. Nonetheless, for decades she was idolized by a substantial base of listeners charmed by her singing and of musicians who admired her integration of vocal performance with self-accompaniment. No singer has been better at playing for herself. 

Blossom’s piano playing was probably influenced a lot by Ellis Larkins. She voiced like he did, and had that same delicate touch. Bill Evans’ early playing reflected a lot of Lennie Tristano… I’m sure he must have heard Blossom when she was around the Village, but I think he worked his ideas out pretty much by himself. 

In the act of playing music, it is impossible to separate the process from the product. Or, it was. In an important piece of journalism, Eric Felten turns a floodlight on the technological airbrushing of live performances in an effort to insure perfection. Felten’s Wall Street Journal essay emphasizes that two recent massive public events in the United States masked actual performance. One was the Super Bowl, with Jennifer Hudson singing “The Star Spangled Banner.” The other was President Obama’s inauguration, where Yo-Yo-Ma, Itzhak Perlman and associates played “Simple Gifts.” In both cases, the performers mimed over pre-recorded sound tracks. Here are two paragraphs from Felten’s article, which is headlined, “That Synching Feeling.” 

Response to the Rifftides post on hard bop has created a lively discussion. You can read the comments here. In addition to the Savoy CD called Hard Bop that was, more or less, the focus of the piece, the commenters mention or allude to other albums. If you’re thinking of expanding the hard bop (if there is such a thing) section of your library, or starting one, here are a few worthy candidates. Other nominations will be accepted in the “Comments” section. The links will take you to Amazon.com pages that in most cases provide audio samples. 

You get that right-tickin’ rhythm, man, and it’s ON!

So easy, when you know how.

One never knows, do one?

Rifftides reader and occasional correspondent Red Colm O’Sullivan writes from Ireland (where else, with a name like that?): 

And here’s another frequently used term that has no meaning whatsoever: “Hard Bop”. I have NO IDEA what that MEANS (as opposed to supposed to mean).

That brought to mind something I wrote for a 2000 compilation CD on the Savoy label. The two-disc album was called The Birth of Hard Bop. It was made up of music recorded in 1956 by groups under the leadership of Donald Byrd, Lee Morgan and Hank Mobley. Among the players are Horace Silver, Kenny Clarke, Arthur Taylor, Barry Harris, Doug Watkins and three people who could by no stretch be considered hard boppers — Hank Jones, Ronnie Ball and John LaPorta. The essay begins:

The urge to put ideas in boxes will not be denied. Accordingly, one day in the early 1950s someone, presumably a critic, dreamed up a box called “hard bop.” The inventor no doubt intended the term to be a synonym for “soul” and “funk.” He or she may also have meant it to distinguish jazz played primarily by black people on the East Coast from jazz played primarily by white people on the West Coast. It seemed important to critics in those days to make that distinction. To some, it still seems important. At any rate, “hard bop” came to signify jazz that had rhythmic drive, leaned on blues harmonies, drew inspiration from church gospel music and was hot, not cool. 

Unfortunately for box theory, try as you will to contain music, it flows around, into and out of boxes. Strict hard bop constructionists cannot force this album’s lyrical “I Married An Angel” into the category with any greater justification than they can jawbone Clifford Brown’s “Daahoud” (the Pacific Jazz version) into the shape of West Coast Jazz. Nearly half a century later, the music in this collection swings on in the category that matters most: the one labeled “Good.”

The notes then discuss the musicians and the 21 tracks on the CDs. 

In a posting a few months ago, I outlined the problem that all who write about music must face: keeping up. Nothing has changed, except that more CDs than ever are stacked throughout the office and music room. A colleague says he told a caller demanding to know when his album would be reviewed that his desktop looked like the Manhattan skyline, “and your CD is on the 44th floor.” Following are recommendations for three CDs retrieved from the jewel box skyscrapers. 

Aaron Irwin Group, Blood and Thunder (Fresh Sound New Talent). In a tray card photograph, we see the 30-year-old alto saxophonist drinking a glass of milk and looking about eighteen. Irwin’s compositions and arrangements have a concomitant freshness about them, and resourcefulness. His writing tends to make his quintet sound bigger. There is no piano; Ben Monder’s guitar has the chording assignment. Chris Cheek’s tenor sax adds a third melody voice. Both solo with economy and plenty of unexpected turns, as does Irwin. Matt Clohesy is the bassist, Ferenc Nemeth the drummer. 

Hank Crawford, another of the cadre of Ray Charles saxophonists who went on to their own fame, died on January 29. David “Fathead” Newman and Leroy “Hog” Cooper, Crawford’s colleagues in the Charles band, died earlier last month. Crawford’s alto, Newman’s tenor and Cooper’s baritone saxophones were integral to Charles’s big band in the 1950s and early ’60s. 

CD: Tom Harrell, Prana Dance (High Note) 

As New Orleans makes its slow way back from the devastation of hurricane Katrina and the fumbling federal and state crisis response, there are rays of hope on the cultural front. The jazz journalist Larry Blumenfeld, who has become a semi-permanent New Orleans resident, writes about it in The Wall Street Journal. 

Once alight with bulbs that spelled out “Armstrong,” the large steel archway above North Rampart Street, across from the venerable Donna’s Bar & Grill, was dark much of the past decade, largely rusted. Beneath it, the main gate to a park named for trumpeter Louis Armstrong had been padlocked for more than three years, save for the occasional special event. Just inside, Congo Square — where two centuries ago enslaved Africans and free people of color spent Sundays dancing and drumming to the bamboula rhythm, seeding the pulse of New Orleans jazz — had been effectively off limits. The adjacent Mahalia Jackson Theater of the Performing Arts, home to opera and ballet performances for more than 30 years, sat empty and in need of repair after taking on 14 feet of water in 2005. 

It would be hard to find a more potent symbol of the tenuous state of musical life and cultural history in a city largely defined by both. But earlier this month, shortly after dusk, Mayor C. Ray Nagin flipped a switch — just a prop, it turned out, for dramatic effect — and on went the lights of the arch and the park’s streetlamps. As the Original Pin Stripe Band played “Bourbon Street Parade,” a small mock second-line parade wound its way around a bronze statue of Armstrong and over to a sparkling Mahalia Jackson Theater for a free concert, the first in a series of events spanning 10 days and a broad range of performing arts. 

  

Terry’s ties to the city have been more spiritual than personal, but his admiration for a New Orleans hero led almost a decade ago to one of the most important gestures of his life. A few blocks from the Super Dome a monument to Louis Armstrong is nearing completion. It might very well not have been built without Terry’s inspiration. 

New Orleans’s Armstrong Park has been a project of the administration of former mayor Moon Landrieu, who deserves full credit for paying tangible tribute to the city’s greatest artist. But impetus for the idea came in 1969 on a bus ride during the second New Orleans Jazzfest. As a musicians’ tour was passing Jane Alley, Armstrong’s birthplace, Terry deplored that fact that while New Olreans seemed to have statues of half the Latin American presidents in history, there were none of the city’s most famous son. Then and there, he started a fund to commission a statue. His first dollar was symbolic. His organizing ability and leadership were much more. Nine years later, that statue is on the verge of becoming the centerpiece of an entire park dedicated to Armstrong’s memory. The park’s completion slowed in the six-month transition period between Landrieu’s administration and that of Mayor Ernest Morial. But assuming that Morial, the city’s first black mayor, gets behind the project, Armstrong Park should be the New Orleans equivalent of Copenhagen’s celebrated Tivoli Gardens and open by 1980.

Landrieu (then U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development), Morial and Armstrong’s wife Lucille dedicated Armstrong Park on April 15, 1980, nine years after Armstrong’s death. It has a long way to go to become the Tivoli Gardens of America, but the developments Blumenfeld describes give hope that it will blossom despite the city’s setbacks.

Dave Frishberg lives very much in the present but makes no bones about his fascination with the past. After all, his last CD was titled Retromania. So it’s no wonder that the producers of a new piece of musical theater sought out Frishberg to write the words and music. Anyone familiar with “I’m Hip,” “My Attorney Bernie,” “Peel Me a Grape,” “Listen Here” or his dozens of other songs knows that he’s prepared to capture irony, whimsy and tenderness. 

…a dimly lit room in the Scottish Rite Center provided a fitting atmosphere for “Vitriol & Violets,” which tracks the careers and friendships of the 1920s Algonquin Round Table. The story presents a lot of characters to follow, but the witticisms flow freely, the songs by Dave Frishberg are alternately hilarious and deeply poignant, and a cast featuring Adair Chappell (charmingly acerbic as Dorothy Parker), Joe Theissen, Isaac Lamb and others pulls it off with appropriate panache.