Marc Myers is doing good things on his new blog JazzWax. His most recent posting is about a listening session with fellow blogger Terry Teachout. Before that, he and Danny Bank tell the sad story of Billie Holiday’s last recording session. To read both pieces, go here.

Recent Rifftides visitors are from all sectors of the United States, including most major cities, and smaller places with wonderful names like Blooming Glenn and Avondale, both in Pennsylvania; Bloomington, Indiana; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Newton, Lower Falls, Massachusetts; and Morro Bay, Camarillo and Altadena, California — to name a few. There are also lots of Canadian Rifftides readers, from Surrey, British Columbia in the west, to La Baie, Quebec in the east.
In the past few hours, folks have also checked in from:
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Vienna, Austria
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Szcecin, Zach Odniopomorskce, Poland
Zurich, Switzerland
Milan, Italy
Reykjavk, Iceland
Barcelona, Spain
Stockholm, Sweden
Viskafors, Sweden,
Arhus, Denmark
Saint-Laurent-de-Condel, France
Saint-Hymer, Basse-Normandie, France
Belfast, Ireland
Stoke-on-Trent, England
London, England
Melbourne, Australia
Camberwell, Australia
Sydney, Australia
San Juan, Puero Rico
The Rifftides staff welcomes you all and encourages your comments by way of the comments function at the bottom of each entry or the e-mail link in the right-hand column.

Gap Mangione sent this message:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUh1SlrtEG0
http://youtube.com/watch?v=W-8CNslGOPc
I’ve never been able to listen to this second one with dry eyes; especially the final 58 seconds.
May he rest in peace…
Gap

Rifftides Washington, DC, correspondent John Birchard alerts us to a tribute concert by an international quintet of major jazz musicians who were affected by the Voice of America’s Willis Conover. If you live in the DC area, make your reservation early.

Willis Conover

The Voice of America and the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival are hosting a concert in memory of VOA jazz host Willis Conover and in observance of the 50th anniversary of Dizzy Gillespie’s first State Department-sponsored trip.
The concert is free and open to the public and will take place on Monday, September 17th at 7:30 PM in the Cohen Auditorium (at VOA). Cuban-born jazz great Paquito D’Rivera, who himself was influenced by Conover’s broadcasts heard in Cuba, will lead a quintet made up of another Cuban-born musician and three other players from former Soviet Bloc countries:
Performers: Paquito D’Rivera, Musical Director, Alto Saxophone, Clarinet (Cuba); Milcho Leviev, Piano (Bulgaria); George Mraz, Bass (Czech Republic); Valery Ponomarev, Trumpet (Russia); and Horacio Hernandez, Drums (Cuba).
Seating is limited and will be allotted on a first-come, first-served basis. Please e-mail reservations to publicaffairs@voa.gov by Sept. 13th. For details, go here.
Prior to this event at 3:00 PM, George Washington University’s Elliott School will hold a forum entitled “Duke, Dizzy and Diplomacy.” For more information, visit the Elliott School calendar.

The Rifftides archive contains several items about Conover, his importance, and the failure of the US government to posthumously award him recognition that he deserved when he was alive. For the first of those pieces, click here, then use the keyword “Conover” to browse the archive for followup comments.

News from the publisher: less than two weeks off the press, Poodie James has gone into a second printing. Many thanks to Rifftides readers who have helped to make that possible.
As an excerpt from the novel posted on Rifftides makes clear, Poodie is deaf and mostly mute. After she read that passage, Iola Brubeck sent this comment:

I enjoyed the excerpt. A number of years ago Dave played a benefit for the Theater of the Deaf in Connecticut. They described some of the sensations that you put so well in words….the feeling of the vibrations, both in their feet and in their bodies. Also, at one time, Dave shared a program with the deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who often appears as soloist with symphony orchestras. Her rhythmic sensitivity is unmatchable.

Like Poodie, Dame Evelyn feels frustration over the frequent concentration by those with full hearing on a deaf person’s deafness rather than on his qualities and abilities. Here is some of what she wrote on her web site:

I hope that the audience will be stimulated by what I have to say (through the language of music) and will therefore leave the concert hall feeling entertained. If the audience is instead only wondering how a deaf musician can play percussion then I have failed as a musician. For this reason my deafness is not mentioned in any of the information supplied by my office to the press or concert promoters. Unfortunately, my deafness makes good headlines. I have learnt from childhood that if I refuse to discuss my deafness with the media they will just make it up. The several hundred articles and reviews written about me every year add up to a total of many thousands, only a handful accurately describe my hearing impairment. More than 90% are so inaccurate that it would seem impossible that I could be a musician. This web page is designed to set the record straight and allow people to enjoy the experience of being entertained by an ever evolving musician rather than some freak or miracle of nature.
Deafness is poorly understood in general. For instance, there is a common misconception that deaf people live in a world of silence. To understand the nature of deafness, first one has to understand the nature of hearing.

To read all of Evelyn Glennie’s “Hearing Essay” and explore her site, click here.

A message from Sue Mingus, widow of Charles:
I believe it was in Rifftides that someone recently quoted one of Charles Mingus’s sons talking about his father telling him to jump off a shed and then not catching him. That was an old joke I heard about 50 years ago in Paris– not very funny– about a father teaching his son, who is up in a tree, a cynical message about not trusting anyone. I think the story got twisted in someone’s memory from tree to shed and fact to fairy tale.

Several major jazz bassists – including Oscar Pettiford, Ray Brown, Sam Jones, and Percy Heath – also played the cello. Ron Carter doubles on cello. For the most part, Carter employs it as a midget replica of his main instrument, soloing by plucking the strings, as did his predecessors. Indeed, Heath referred to his re-tuned cello as a baby bass.
Improvising while bowing the cello is another matter. Fred Katz, who became well known in the 1950s for his work with the Chico Hamilton Quintet, demonstrated that there was a place for the arco cello in improvisation despite the instrument’s challenges, which include its relative slowness. The cello’s small, fast, cousin the violin has had a role virtually from the beginning of jazz. In Roger Kellaway’s glorious Cello Quartet recordings, Ed Lustgarten was brilliant at reading and interpreting the solos Kellaway wrote for him, but he was not an improviser. After the mainstreamers pioneered the instrument, players like David Eyges, Hank Roberts, Trinstan Honsinger and Tom Cora gave the cello a role in avant garde jazz. Recently, Erik Friedlander Peggy Lee, Alisa Horn and Matthew Brubeck, among others, have further helped to move the cello toward the circle of fully-accepted jazz instruments, using all of its capabilities.
If you do an internet search for Brubeck, you’ll get a link that describes the territory he has staked out. It says, “improvising cellist Matt Brubeck’s website.” The youngest son of Dave and Iola Brubeck has a master’s degree in cello performance from Yale and has worked in a range of symphony and classical chamber settings. His recorded debut as a bowing and plucking improvising cellist came in 1991, when he was thirty, on his father’s Quiet As The Moon. His impressive performances included a duet with his dad on a theme from Dave’s mass, “To Hope: A Celebration.” He has worked with musicians as various as Tom Waits and the eclectic Oranj Symphonette, with which he plays an passionate opening cadenza on Mancini’s “Dreamsville.” Brubeck’s resume is sprinkled with mentions of duo associations. The most recent is his partnership with the Canadian pianist David Braid.
In their CD called Twotet/Duextet, the musicians play five pieces by Brubeck and three by Braid. Matt Brubeck’s facility with the instrument, bowing or plucking, seems to allow him to play whatever occurs to him. His full, deep sound takes on an edge of dramatic urgency when he improvises with the bow, as he does to great effect in “Mnemosyne’s March” and several other tracks. In “Sniffin’ Around,” he employs his cello as a baby bass a la Percy Heath, occasionally letting the strings slap wood as bassist Milt Hinton used to do.
I usually rail against debut CDs in which musicians restrict themselves to original material, not only because it gives the listener nothing familiar to relate to, but also because so often the music is weak. In Twotet/Deuxtet, the songs are light years beyond the wispy excuses for blowing that fill so many jazz CDs. Their melodies have strength, the harmonic structures have substance. Even the rhythmic offbeats that open a free piece of instant composition called “Improvisation” develop a melody. It may not be instantly hummable, but it is distinctive. A pair of ballads, Braid’s “Wash Away” and Brubeck’s “It’s Not What it Was,” have melodies that might have been written by Stephen Foster. Brubeck’s “Huevos Verdes y Jamón” has a Hispano-Caribbean lilt worthy of Sonny Rollins or Chick Corea, Braid’s “Mnemosyne’s March” Brahmsian gravity and beauty of line.
I had never heard – never heard of – Braid before Twotet/Deuxtet showed up the other day. Now, I’m compelled to catch up with his previous work, particularly his sextet made up of Canadian all-stars Terry Clarke, Mike Murley, Steve Wallace, Gene Smith and John MacLeod. Braid’s tone, touch, chord voicings and imagination make him one of the most interesting new pianists I’ve encountered in a long time. In researching him, I discovered that I’m not alone. It turns out that when Gene Lees first heard Braid, he wrote, “If Bill Evans were alive, I’d send Braid’s CD to him.”
Alisa Horn is the cellist in pianist Bill Mays’ new group The Inventions Trio. She is a protégé of trumpeter Marvin Stamm, the other member of the trio. I wrote nearly a year ago about Mays convincing classical string players that they could swing when he recruited the cellist and violinist of the Finisterra Trio to perform Bach’s “Two-part Invention #8” with an overlay of Charlie Parker’s “Ah-Leu-Cha.” Horn has been convinced, too. The conviction didn’t come easily. She is added to the duo in which for several years Mays and Stamm have been melding jazz and classical music. A classicial cellist ingrained with the notion that improvisation should be avoided at all costs because it could lead to (gasp) mistakes, she was terrified at the recording session. Here’s some of what Horn wrote in a news release that came with the advance copy of The Inventions Trio CD.

What if I play a WRONG NOTE? During the session, I almost had a breakdown worrying about a shift that I had “missed” during an improvisation. No one else in the studio even heard the mistake or noticed it at all and these are some of the most experienced and well-trained ears in the business! (I was) almost in tears, worried over this horrible imperfection. Bill and Marvin looked at me and just said, “No one is ever perfect and that isn’t what this is about. Screw it!”
Since that moment, I have a new outlook on my music and the meaning of “perfect” has changed. Now I understand that perfection is an individual’s perception of what the music is and this idea applies to both classical and jazz styles of playing.

Horn is exquisite in the trio numbers on the CD, which include Debussy’s “Girl With The Flaxen Hair and “Mays’ three-movement “Fantasy for Cello, Piano and Trumpet,” an important new work. She is impassioned in Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise,” and has a stunning introductory moment in the first movement of the “Fantasy.” Mays and Stamm, collaborators for years, have developed an empathy that verges on the mysterious. Their duo numbers on this album are among their finest work. In the trio pieces, Alisa Horn complements their magic. She does not sound like a newcomer to improvisation.
The Inventions Trio will be a part of The Seasons Fall Festival next month, along with James Moody, Miguel Zenon, David Friesen, Karrin Allyson, Matt Wilson, Martin Wind, the Finisterra Trio and the Yakima Symphony Orchestra. I look forward to hearing them in live performance.

Two of the leading pianists in modern jazz are now man and wife. Bill Charlap and Renee Rosnes were married last week. For details go to this New York Times story. The Rifftides staff offers hearty congratulations.

Announcing the publication of Poodie James the other day, I included an excerpt from the only episode in the novel in which Poodie reacts to music. To read it, go here and you will see that the music, at a dance, is “Caldonia,” played by Woody Herman’s band. After it became a hit in 1945, Herman kept the piece in his book for the rest of his life. As frequently happens to music that stays in a band’s repertoire, “Caldonia” got faster and faster as the years went by.
By 1964, “Caldonia” was jet-propelled. In this video, the music is going by so fast that no improviser could achieve profundity in his solo. Who cares. The point at this tempo is to swing and make people happy. Watch Woody as a succession of his soloists tears into the blues, and see how happy they make him. In order, you’ll see and hear the upstate New York terrors of the tenor saxophone Joe Romano and Sal Nistico, trumpeter Billy Hunt, trombonists Phil Wilson and Henry Southall, and bassist Chuck Andrus. The astounding drummer is Jake Hanna. Take a deep breath and click on this link.
When you have recovered, go here and listen to the 1945 recording of “Caldonia” by Herman’s First Herd.

Mr. JazzWax, aka Marc Myers, tracked down the venerable baritone saxophonist Danny Bank, one of the few Charlie Parker sidemen still with us, to talk about Bird. Among Bank’s anecdotes:

“One morning, sometime in 1951, I think, I took out one of the Sonatas for Woodwind by Hindemith and used it to practice. That night, after I played on two or three recording dates that day, I went to Birdland to hear Charlie play.
“As soon as he saw me come into the club, he started to pay the Hindemith Sonata I had played earlier while laughing through his mouthpiece. Bird had been listening to me through the walls! His ear was so amazing that he played what I practiced from memory when he saw me that night.

I just discovered that I had a defective link to Ethan Iverson’s Do The Math, the blog of The Bad Plus. I fixed the link. Use it to see Iverson’s tribute to the late British critic Richard Cook and read Cook’s evaluation of one of Horace Silver’s milestone recordings. I was startled to see how young Cook was. Dead at fifty. Enjoy life, folks.
The veteran Pennsylvania jazz broadcaster Russ Neff has launched a blog. Like his program, it’s called My Favorite Things. Neff’s first postings are based on archive interviews with George Shearing and Ray Brown.
Other Matters
If you’ve had nothing better to do, you may have been following every detail of the mens-room adventures of Idaho Senator Larry Craig and the apparent suicide attempt of film personality Owen Wilson. Society of Professional Journalists President Christine Tatum doesn’t mention Craig in her most recent Freedom Of The Prez posting, but this paragraph applies to his ordeal.

I completely get the public personality-or-official lecture delivered in Media Law 101. Heck, I even get the far more advanced versions gleaned over the course of my career. You cast yourself into the limelight or get yourself elected to public office, and you ask for the scrutiny. You ask for the criticism, the leering, the praise, the fawning, the constant flashbulbs, the boatloads of letters and e-mail and the stupid guy begging for an autograph while you’re in a public restroom. Once you enter that white-hot public spotlight, you can’t leave it whenever you choose.

She deals directly with the unfortunate Mr. Wilson’s being circled not only by the tabloid sharks but also by an appalling number of supposedly responsible journalists.

But journalists. What’s their responsibility when an Owen Wilson has a breakdown and asks the media (and, by extension, the general public) to allow him to heal in private? He’s no Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan or Nicole Ritchie driving under the influence on public streets. He’s not even a Britney Spears, who has an incredible knack for taking her wackiness public.
Might this be a time when we let a prominent person who apparently struggles with depression have the solace and privacy he needs? I certainly hope so.

So do I. To read all of Tatum’s posting, go here.

For a long time, the Doug’s Books section on the right side of your screen ended with:

His next book is a novel that has nothing to do with music.

The section now begins (bells, whistles, horns, raucous whoops and shouts, please):

Doug’s most recent book is Poodie James, a novel published in 2007.

The official publication was a few days ago. The book is now available. Preview readers have been extraordinarily kind. You can see some of their comments if you go to this page at the publisher’s web site. In a convenient coincidence, that is also the place where you can place an order for Poodie. Please do. If you order directly from Libros Libertad, a pioneering new house in Vancouver, British Columbia, you will support their efforts to make a difference in the way writers of serious fiction and poetry reach their readers. In other words, if you buy from Libros Libertad, the publisher makes a little more money.
At the Libros Libertad site, you’ll find an excerpt from Poodie James and a link to a longer biography of the author than you’ll see on Rifftides. I wrote earlier that the book has nothing to do with music. That is true in the sense that music is not a central theme and no central character is a musician. It is unlikely that any book of mine could avoid music altogether. Here is a short excerpt from a scene in which Poodie, who is deaf, attends a dance.

The rhythm surging through his body made him happy. Poodie wondered if the dancers got the sensation from hearing the music that he did from feeling it, radiance in the belly, warmth around the heart. The first piece ended. Poodie applauded with the others.
Now the leader was singing into a microphone. The first words went by too fast for Poodie to see them, but then the man sang, “Caldonia, Caldonia, what makes your big head so hard?” On each syllable the drummer hit the bass drum with the pedal and a smaller drum with his sticks. When the words came around again, Poodie laughed. Seeing him, the drummer laughed too. During slow pieces, Poodie could feel just a thump now and then, but on the fast ones the thunder of the drums rolled against him. Sometimes, when all of the men played at once, a wave came through the air and along the floor. It pushed into his chest and up through his feet and made his heart beat faster.

Fair warning: Poodie James has no car chases. It has a terrific train wreck, though.

Rifftides reader Wade Nelson of River Forest, Illinois, writes:

After reading a piece about George Russell, I hauled out a 1957 LP by Hal McKusick called Jazz Workshop that I hadn’t listened to in many years. Arrangements by Russell, Giuffre, Evans, Mandel, Albam and Cohn. Very fine music.

I couldn’t agree more. McKusick was in an elite cadre of musicians during a golden age of jazz in New York in the late 1950s and early ’60s. He had a distinctive tone on alto saxophone and a personalized adaptation of Charlie Parker’s style. He worked often with George Russell, recording with Russell and in various combinations with Art Farmer, Bill Evans, Eddie Costa, Paul Chambers, Milt Hinton, Barry Galbraith and others. He is the alto soloist on George Russell’s seminal recording of “All About Rosie.” There is a good cross-section of McKusick’s small groups from 1957 and ’58 on the compilation CD Now’s The Time.
Through the late fifties until 1978, McKusick was a CBS staff musician. I encountered him as a member of the band on the Arthur Godfrey radio program when I was doing a television news story about Godfrey. Godfrey’s band also incuded pianist Hank Jones, guitarist Remo Palmieri and trombonist Lou McGarity. I don’t know how they felt about Godfrey’s singing or his ukelele playing, but they all seemed glad to have the work. That kind of employment for New York musicians no longer exists. Since studio work ended, McKusick, now eighty-three, has made his living as a private teacher.

The Rifftides staff directs your attention to the right-hand column and the exhibit entitled Doug’s Picks. All the picks are new. We invite your comments, as always.

Labor Day Weekend’s Detroit International Jazz Festival is looming, and Mark Stryker of the Detroit Free Press is profiling some of its headliners. In today’s column, pianist Herbie Hancock tells Stryker about his early experience with Miles Davis.

“After a couple of months of trying to play what I thought would please Miles, I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to let this out.’
“So the next gig, which I think was in Chicago, I just played what I really wanted, and if it clashed with something Miles did, I threw it in there anyway.
“After the set I thought I was going to get fired. Miles walked up and said” — and here Hancock imitates Davis’ famous raspy whisper — ” ‘Why didn’t you play like that before?’
“Miles wanted to hear me. That set me free.”

Here’s a little of what Stryker writes about Hancock:

Hancock’s go-for-broke attitude electrifies the bandstand. Very little in jazz matches the anticipation that rises when Hancock starts a solo, because to a degree unusual even in an art based on improvisation, you never know what’s going to happen — and there’s a chance you’re about to hear the greatest piano solo you’ve ever heard.

To read the whole thing, go here, Perhaps you’ll be as astonished as I was by the size Hancock’s performance fees.

The Rifftides piece about Charles Mingus brought a response from pianist and composer Jill McManus in New York.

Jill McManus

I knew Mingus! I was introduced to him one night when I took my mother, in from England, to the old Half Note in the ’70s. I seem to remember it was pouring. We were waiting in line, chilled and dripping, chatting with Rev John Gensel when Mingus plunged in, and John introduced us. Mingus was charming, looked at them, one on either side of me, smiled and said, “Hmm, good Christian girl.” (!!) ( think I lowered my eyebrows.) He and John then proceded to a contest of crushing beer tops with the thumb of one hand, and Mingus won.
Mingus heard me play the early set at the Village Gate one night and was complimentary, and always greeted me warmly except once: The Jazz Sisters band was to open for him downstairs at the Gate. We were a sextet, and his group was a quintet. We got a great response, the only female jazz group of its kind in that day. Word was sent that Mingus resented being upstaged by a band bigger than his, but after his pout we were invited to his dressing room for cake. He was actually very nice.
I sat in with Mingus once at the Vanguard ( I was a beginner player, had been studying with Roland Hanna) one night when he was having a spat with Jaki Byard. Jaki was simmering at the bar, and Mingus called me up. Wow. I struggled to stay in place with Danny Richmond’s crazy style and dropping of bombs. Think I came out a couple of beats late on “Star Eyes.” But Mingus said “Come back and play anytime.”
The last vision – Mingus was in a wheelchair at Bradley’s with a group of friends. I went up to him and reached out to shake his hand, not realizing he was paralyzed. I was so chagrined I almost cried. But he nodded and I saw he forgave me. One night not long after that I dreamed that he was on a big boat leaving shore — it was foggy — I was trying to reach out to him to say goodbye — it was too far — too late to jump across. The boat disappeared into the fog. I think he died that night, and I learned of it a day or so later.
Some years later I met his oldest son, Charles III, at an art opening on the East Side. He told me about the time his father put him on the roof of a shed, and said “Jump, I’ll catch you. Trust me.” The little kid jumped and Mingus stepped back and let him crash to the ground, saying, “Never trust anybody.” The saddest story…

Jill McManus’s previous Rifftides contribution was in a team report on last fall’s benefit concert for Richard Sudhalter. In addition to composing and playing music, she writes about it for the Newark Star-Ledger.
McManus’s Symbols of Hopi (Concord, 1984) featuring her compositions and piano, David Liebman, Tom Harrell, Marc Johnson, Billy Hart and American Indian percussionists, is one of the important recordings of the 1980s still not reissued on CD.

Here’s a video clip of an unlikely collaboration, complete with a little refresher course in jazz history.

The Chicago pianist and self-described bon vivant Jeremy Kahn writes:

I was lucky enough to have crossed paths with Max Roach on a couple of different occasions: Once was for a workshop of an Amiri Baraka play about Bumpy Johnson, the black gangster in the twenties. It was performed by NYU students, one of whom was Muhal Richard Abrams’s daughter Richarda. The first time, though, was for 3 plays by Sam Shepard at LaMama for which Max was supplying the music. Permit me a middle-aged memory:
When the phone rang, I was engaged in the kind of personal business that under-employed guys in their twenties tend to engage in quite a bit. Picking up the phone with my good hand, the voice said “Jeremy Kahn? This is Max Roach.” I played along with this weak ruse while I tried to figure out which of my friends was doing this fairly convincing impersonation.
Much to my amazement, it turned out to actually be Max. He wanted me to be involved with the Shepard plays, along with Bobby Watson, Curtis Lundy and a drummer whose name I don’t recall. He was Max’s gofer, and Max seemed to delight in tormenting him.
During rehearsals, we smoked large amounts of reefer and hash totally out in the open. I mean, after all, we were jazz musicians, right? When called upon to play, Max would just count off a tempo and told us to jam. Sometimes he would sing a rhythmic figure and say “Do it in F minor”. At one point we said. “How about back and forth between F minor and G-flat major? Like this?” And he said, “Yeah, yeah; that’s good.” Max ended up winning an Obie award for his “Original score”, but was very gracious about acknowledging our contributions.
He was a great guy and a great hang 99% of the time, but, when he got pissed, he had a terrifying temper.
It was my privilege to have met him.

For a Rifftides remembrance of Max Roach, click here.

2007 is turning out to be a bonanza year for a Charles Mingus sextet that existed for a few months forty-three years ago. All of the band’s members are dead. Its music is gloriously alive. The high point so far is a remarkable two-CD set capturing a performance that might have been forgotten except for a lucky discovery. On a neglected shelf, Sue Mingus, indefatigable preserver of her husband’s legacy, found tapes of a concert the sextet played at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in March of 1964. Blue Note has released the music as Charles Mingus Sextet with Eric Dolphy: Cornell 1964.
With the promethean bassist were pianist Jaki Byard, saxophonists Eric Dolphy and Clifford Jordan, trumpeter Johnny Coles and drummer Dannie Richmond. They were red-hot and full of joy at the Cornell engagement, which took place nearly a month earlier than the Town Hall concert that launched the band’s celebrated European tour. Fresh from eight weeks at the Five Spot Café in Mahattan, Mingus had whipped the sextet and its repertoire into shape, achieving a combination of togetherness and abandon that can result only from long, steady work on the bandstand. This is a further reminder that the restrictive 21st century economy of the music business robs jazz of opportunities for creative development. When is the last time a major jazz group had a two-months’ run in a club?

Charles Mingus, 1964
Mingus’s emotional downs were often horrendous, hard on his sidemen, his listeners and himself. I once wrote:

If Mingus rose to towering rages, he also reached the sustained joy achievable only by musicians of the highest rank. It is a fact that all the musicians he abused, all those he screamed at and humiliated in public — even those he assaulted — forgave him, worked with again, and in most cases gave him credit for their development.

His ups could generate glory, and that’s what we get in the Cornell concert. Mingus and the band are happy, even giddy. Their virtuosity is wrapped in good feelings. Exuding raw energy in his bass work, Mingus is the coach and cheerleader urging everyone on.
“Stride it now, baby, take it back a few years, uh huh,” Mingus mutters to Byard during the pianist’s second solo chorus on “Take the ‘A’ Train.” His urging is additional fuel for the stride and boogie woogie fire that Byard builds before he slides into bebop time. Clifford Jordan follows with five hallelujah choruses levitated by Ellingtonian unison puncuations from Dolphy and Coles. Dolphy delivers one of his patented bass clarinet solos, full of wild interval leaps, inflected with speech patterns and intimations of birdsong . Coles, a great trumpeter who never got his due, begins the round of “‘A’ Train” solos reflective and thoughtful, with a touch of irony in his quotes. The performance includes a bass-drums conversation between Mingus and Richmond, as remarkable for its hilarity as for its intensity. In the midst of it, one of them exclaims, “Ya-hoo,” an emblem of the elation this track–indeed, the entire concert–generates. Byard’s swirl of solo piano on “ATFW You,” a tribute to Art Tatum and Fats Waller, opens the concert and sets the tone of exuberance.
The state of grace remains throughout the CDs, even in half-hour versions of “Fables of Faubus” and “Meditations,” Mingus compositions that arose out of his frustration and anger over political and social conditions in America. He performed “Meditations” with the sextet at Town Hall, then almost nightly during the month-long tour of Europe in April of ’64, and later that year with different personnel at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco and at the Monterey Jazz Festival. It was recorded on several of those occasions, but I have never been more moved by its solemnity and power than in this concert debut. The other premiere at Cornell was “Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk,” a piano piece that Mingus refined for the sextet during the Five Spot gig. As for “Faubus,” the racist Arkansas governor inspires ridicule and good-natured derision rather than anger in this performance loaded with punning quotes that include Mingus’s allusion to “Pick Yourself Up” and Byard’s whimsy in a series of variations on “Yankee Doodle.”
Mingus wrote the blues “So Long Eric” to wish Dolphy godspeed. Dolphy was to leave the group following the European tour. He and the others could not have known that in three months their astonishingly gifted colleague would be dead at thirty-six of a heart attack brought on by diabetes. Dolphy’s mercurial flute work is the centerpiece of “Jitterbug Waltz.” Mingus features Coles as “Johnny O’Coles, the only Irishman in the band” in a fast ¾ version of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” The news that he is going to play that unlikely tune and be the only soloist seems to come as a surprise to Coles. He scuffles a bit at the beginning, but by the end solves the piece’s Gaelic mysteries in a powerful chorus. It’s all great fun. And great music.
Rifftides reader Don Frese writes that he had the good fortune to hear the band live:

God, I was so lucky to see this group once at the 5 Spot just before the tour. It was a wonder the joint was still standing after, the performances were so intense. The second set was Parkeriana, the pastiche of Dizzy’s “Ow” and other tunes associated with Charlie Parker, and the last set was “Meditations.” I was in tears at the end.

Mingus Observed
Mr. Frese also provided a link to a video clip of the sextet rehearsing a portion of “Meditations” in Stockholm during the tour. To see and hear it, click here.
Mingus The Icon
Ten days from now, the Jazz Icons series of DVDs will release a new set of seven discs including the Mingus sextet videotaped during the ’64 tour of Scandinavia. Other DVDs in the release feature John Coltrane, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Dexter Gordon and Wes Montgomery.
Mingus’s Basses
Shortly after The New York Times article in late July about the widows of Charles Mingus and Art Pepper, Nigel Faigan, a Rifftides reader in New Zealand, wrote on the Jazz West Coast listserve:

I was interested to read about Susan Mingus and unreleased tapes. BUT I was dismayed to read that Mingus’s Bass is leaning in a corner of the apartment. CM owned a beautiful French bass – if that is sitting unplayed for all those years, it may be suffering. Could someone find out whether the bass is being played. Like any instrument, it will suffer from disuse.

The Rifftides staff asked Sue Graham Mingus. This is her reply:

Charles’s lion’s head bass is being played by Boris Kozlov, and has been for the past six or seven years. One bass was given to Red Callender and another to Aladar Pege, the Hungarian bassist. The only other bass here is the one whose right shoulder was cut off and reversed by a master Italian bass repairman who lived down the block from Charles’ studio on East 5th Street in the late Sixties and who accomplished this feat over a period of six months. Charles came up with this astonishing idea in order to facilitate bowing — this was his “bowing bass.”

–Sue Mingus

A Mingus Book

Further reading: Tonight at Noon, Sue Mingus’s absorbing account of her life with Charles.

Coming soon: meditations on Charles Mingus, who is proliferating posthumously this year. I had hoped to finish the piece tonight, but it is demanding more than I had intended to give it and night is rapidly heading toward morning. To borrow Dave Frishberg’s line, I gotta get me some Zzzzs.
Stay tuned.