The DVD choice is now among the new batch of Doug’s Picks in the right-hand column. It took a while to get it there because isolating nearly two hours of viewing time during the holiday weekend turned out to be impossible. When I finally got to it, I enjoyed it so much more than I thought I would that I watched it twice.

Hey, do you want to read some nifty short stories? Go here. You may get hooked. Don’t forget to come back, please.

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.–Benjamin Franklin

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.–Abraham Lincoln

Jason Crane writes concerning the Doug’s Picks item about John La Barbera (right-hand column):

If I’m not mistaken, Joe is a co-owner of Jazz Compass with Clay Jenkins, Tom Warrington and Larry Koonse. The label has put out a crop of high-quality releases. It’s refreshing to see the players taking control of their musical destiny.

Mr. Crane is not mistaken. Jazz Compass is an intelligently run independent company, five years old, with a catalogue of fourteen CDs by its owners, as well as John La Barbera and drummer Steve Houghton. With major labels abandoning, downgrading or diluting jazz, companies owned and operated by musicians are helping to keep the music available. They have the laudable effect of also allowing musicians to keep more of the money they earn. Distribution is a problem, but it is one that Jazz Compass, Artist Share and other independent CD organizations are solving by way of the internet.

In the right column under Doug’s Picks, you will find three new CD entries and a timely book tip. A new DVD entry will follow before the week is out, if I can get ahead of the apricot and cherry harvesting long enough to watch the one I have in mind. The birds got most of the Royal Annes and Bings, but I spent an hour and a half picking pie cherries this morning, ending up with enough for one pie. We had it for dessert this evening. It was sensational. Last year, our one apricot tree was barren. This year, it came back like a champ, producing the biggest, sweetest cots I’ve ever known.

Deborah, who may or may not have a last name, wrote a few days ago about her encounter with “I Remember Clifford” and followed up with this message.

Thank you for helping to educate me!
Regarding the John Lewis-Wonderful World of Jazz album … I have twice given it to other jazz newbies, but new CDs of the album can no longer be bought in the US.
Please, will you suggest another jazz album I could give as an introduction to the genre for my friends who express an interest?

One place you can buy the Lewis CD in the United States is here, at prices ranging from reasonable to outrageous.
I could suggest a hundred or more introductory albums for your friends, but I like your challenge of picking just one. Tomorrow, it might be another, but today it’s The Lester Young Story, a bargain four-CD box set that contains many of the great records that Young made from his period of genius with Count Basie in the 1930s to his death in 1959.
Why Lester Young? In the development of the art of jazz soloing, he was the link between Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. At his best, he was sublimely lyrical, inventive, swinging and richly satisfying. No one who truly wants to be interested in jazz should fail to become intimately acquainted with Young. John Lewis, by the way, revered Lester and played piano for him in the early 1950s. Many of their recordings together are on this CD, but the comprehensive box set above is the place to start.

Our colloquy on annoying, useless, stupid and redundant words and phrases could probably go on forever, but it won’t. It’s time to wrap it up with these entries from Rifftides readers.

Any time soon.

Ramping up.

Heart-wrenching.

(From Gene Lees)

Add to the list of unnecessary expressions:
“To utilize” means nothing more than “to use.” I can’t think of a single instance where “utilize” would be more clear or more precise than the word “use.” There seems to be no reason to utilize the longer word at all. But I could care less.

(From Dave Frishberg)

Your mention of “data” reminds me of my pet peeve. That word is plural (the singular being datum). People consistently use a singular verb with it though (The data is based on on a large sample size, rather than: The data are …) One last pet peeve: comprise. That word is NOT followed by “of.”

(From Jeff)

I hate marketers who turn nouns into verbs. (e.g. leverage, network, and task). I, like Ted O’Reilly, get NAUSEATED by people who say they are NAUSEOUS.

(From Scott Faulkner)

As a Brit I’d rather not get into a debate about ‘mispronunciations.’

(From Gordon Sapsed)

Disinterested is often correctly brought up in word misuage discussions. I looked up the word today in the American Heritage Dictionary online and learned:
“Oddly enough, ‘not interested’ is the oldest sense of the word, going back to the 17th century. This sense became outmoded in the 18th century but underwent a revival in the first quarter of the early 20th. Despite its resuscitation, this usage is widely considered an error.”
(From Garrett Gannuch)

An odd one is the phrase “is that” inserted without logic or neccessity, creating phrases like:
“What you’re forgetting is, is that I didn’t graduate.”
I call this the double “is.” You hear it all the time in conversations on the radio.
(From Bill Crow)

Being the chief of the language police has some heavy resposibilities for you in this era. One thing that I would suggest is to advise all of your readers to avoid the stock channel (CNBC) at all costs. Today, after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates a quarter of a point, one of the commentators stated that it “was pretty much exactly” what he expected.
(From Charlie and Sandi Shoemake)

I have resigned as chief of the language police. The criminals are winning.
As John Ciardi would say if he were still with us, good words to you.

It was not my intention to open a forum covering the range of abuse of the English language. At some point, we’ll have to move on, but this is too much fun to cut off yet. If we had stopped, I wouldn’t have been able to mention what happened at dinner tonight in Seattle. I thanked the waitress for her good service. She said, “Hey, no problem.” When did we lose “You’re welcome?”
I like this one from Noel Silverman in New York.

High on my list are “any and all,” and “each and every,” both needlessly redundant, except that “needlessly redundant” is itself needlessly redundant, or at very least redundant.
Then there’s “ya know what I’m sayin,” and its partner in obfuscation “ya know what I mean,” both of which seem overwhelmingly to be used by people who either haven’t thought about what they’re saying or, having thought about it, have failed to convey what they mean.
For closers, I would nominate “She goes…then he goes…” in relating a conversation. Then I go.

Ted O’Reilly chimes in from Toronto, expanding the discussion to include pronunciation.

And, if we can get into mispronunciations, the word “patina” is, correctly, PAT’-in-uh, not pa-TEENA’.

All right, I’ll see your patina and raise you one data. Data is of Latin derivation and properly pronounced DATE’-uh, not DAT’-uh, although you wouldn’t know that from listening to most people who work in the data field.
For previous entries in this fiesta of annoying phrases and words, go here and here.

It’s Jazz And Other Matters, remember? We’ll get back to jazz before long. Rifftides readers have my mind on words, and Seattle has my mind on the splendid weather they’re having here and the hike I took around Green Lake. When the weather is good, as it is most Junes, there is no more breathtakingly beautiful city.
Next time you’re here, don’t miss Ravenna Park, an urban treasure even many Seattleites have yet to discover. I pulled into one of the park’s few parking spots, lunched on a Clif Bar and an apple, then hiked into woods so deep, green and dense, I might have been in the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula. For a half hour, the only other living creatures I saw were two crows trying to steal a morsel from a squirrel. The squirrel kept the food and escaped into the foliage. The crows squawked at the bushes for five minutes. It was a good day for a remarkably spunky squirrel. I enjoyed it, too.

A Rifftides reader named Deborah writes in response to the Clifford Brown item:

Ah. The penny just dropped.
I am a fairly new listener to jazz, and sometimes I feel like I’ll never get up to speed. The first album I ever bought was John Lewis-The Wonderful World of Jazz and it remains an all-time favorite.
One of the songs on the album is “I Remember Clifford” by Benny Golson. It is performed by Lewis on piano, Jim Hall on guitar, George Duvivier on bass, and Connie Kay on drums. It is a tender goodbye, see-you-down-the-road kind of song that stops just short of being melancholy.
Was this song composed in tribute to Clifford Brown?

It was, shortly after Clifford died, and has been a part of the standard repertoire ever since. The Lewis album, from 1960, is a classic. That was a fine way to start your listening career.

Reaction has begun coming in to the more or less lighthearted Rifftides posting about annoying, overused phrases. Here’s a note from Bill Holman.

Doug,
Your response to “if you will’ is the same as mine. Nancy is still taken aback when, while we’re watching TV, I blurt “I won’t!”.
How about “as we speak”? (seems to be fading)

Here’s one from Gene Lees.

“If you will” is used by every reporter and anchor I can think of. And in the case of Wolf Blitzer’s show, as much as five or six times in an hour.
Literally, as I heard today in a story about the floods back east: “People were walking literally up to their waist in water.” Disentangle that.
Hopefully, and its cousins such as thankfully, as in “Thankfully no one was hurt.”
If it was up to me . . . .
I wish they would have . . . .

From Bill Kirchner:

Words Frequently Misused By Otherwise Literate Persons:
1) disinterested (when they really mean uninterested);
2) compliment (when they really mean complement);
3) masterful (when they really mean masterly).

Fifty years ago today at The Seattle Times, as I ripped copy from the wire machines my eye went to a story in the latest Associated Press national split. A young trumpeter named Clifford Brown had been killed early that morning in a car crash. My heart stopped for a beat or two. My stomach churned. I felt ill. I was attempting to master the trumpet and, like virtually all aspiring trumpet players, idolized Brown. The life of a majestically inventive musician had ended violently on a rainy highway in Pennsylvania. He was four months short of his twenty-sixth birthday. When I think about his loss, I still feel ill. There has never been a jazz musician who worked harder, lived cleaner, and accomplished or promised more in so short a lifetime. His practice routine encompassed taping himself as he worked out on trumpet and piano. I have listened to some of those tapes. It is moving to hear Brown pursue–and achieve–perfection as he brings complex ideas to fruition through the persistent application of his technical mastery, to hear him sing a phrase and then play it repeatedly until he has polished it nearly to his satisfaction. Like most first-rank artists, he was never truly satisfied with his performance. To listeners, however, Brown’s solos are among the glories of twentieth century music. To trumpet players, his work remains an inspiration. His passion, power, lyricism and flaweless execution constitute a model whose pursuit is bound to bring improvement.
In Today’s Washington Post, Matt Schudel summarizes Brown’s life and contributions. For a fuller account, read Nick Catalano’s biography of Brown. Fortunately, Brown recorded copiously during his few years of playing. Most of his work remains in print. This album captures him at his peak with the group he and drummer Max Roach co-led. This box set covers highlights from his recordings for several labels. If you don’t know Clifford Brown’s work, I suggest that you move immediately toward the nearest CD shop or website.

In 1975, Mike Levy, the publisher of Texas Monthly, and Gregory Curtis, a staff writer, visited me in my office at KSAT-TV in San Antonio. They were on a tour to create good will for the fledgling magazine, which was even then attracting national notice for its quality. In the course of the conversation, Curtis asked me if I would write for Texas Monthly. I jumped at the chance, became a regular contributor, then for twenty-five years a contributing editor, sending in articles and reviews long after I left Texas. Curtis eventually became editor of the magazine and stayed at its helm for nineteen years. We developed a close friendship, as he did with most of his writers. They respected him for his intelligence and journalistic savvy, and for giving a damn about them as well as about their work. During Greg’s run, Texas Monthly won five National Magazine Awards. The Columbia Journalism Review named him one of the ten best magazine editors in the country.
Sometimes, when people learn that I was connected to Texas Monthly, they ask me what made it a great magazine. I have never been able to get beyond cliches; focus, local knowledge, judgment, fact-checking, close editing. Greg, however, understands the reasons for Texas Monthly’s success. I just found on his website a piece he wrote when he bowed out in 2000. He is unsparing of himself for early mistakes, but makes it clear that he knew from the beginning what kind of magazine he did not want.

There was an editorial formula we could have used that would have solved our newsstand problems. In the eighties, I listened in terrified fascination, as if a surgeon were teaching how to perform a lobotomy, to a city magazine editor explaining that he had no choice but to put a yuppie couple on the cover of every issue. “The yuppie couple wants a weekend getaway. The yuppie couple looks for the best hamburger,” he said. “You can even do serious issues: The yuppie couple buys a gun for fear of crime.” When those issues were on the stands, he said, “sales went through the roof.” They may have, but I hated yuppie-couple covers–all those phony-looking models trying to express surprise or pleasure or fear. Most of all, I hated making our magazine look like all the other city magazines in America.

For the whole article, go here. Reading Curtis’s philosophy about shepherding Texas Monthly helps understanding of magazines in general and, in particular, what it takes to make a good one. When you’re through, go to the top, click on “Home,” then roam around Greg’s site. You will discover an editor who can write. In the lower left corner, there are links to several of his pieces. This is from one about horses.

A horse is an animal that weighs half a ton, has a brain the size of a tomato, and is instinctively alarmed at the approach of any predator, including man. Horses can be trained and they can become affectionate toward humans, but they never develop the slavish trust and devotion of dogs. Horses are prey and their trust in us is always provisional, maintained shakily on top of their fear, which can rise up as panic in an instant.

I am adding Greg Curtis’s website to the list of Other Places in the right-hand column. I haven’t mentioned his book. It’s a good one. It’s not about Texas, magazines or horses. It’s about the Venus de Milo.

“That said…”
.”..the likes of…” (He has played with the likes of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and Andres Segovia.)
“…looking to…” (The President is looking to cut taxes.)
“…Indeed.” Mindlessly intoned by anchors as a way of demonstrating sophisticated understanding. Or something.
“At the end of the day…”
“…if you will.” (I won’t.)

Terri Hinte has been fired by Concord Records. Her name will not mean a thing to most of you, but her work has indirectly benefited serious jazz listeners for decades. The news of her dismissal is of intense interest to many writers because Ms. Hinte is the very model of what a record company publicist should be– deeply knowledgeable about the music and its players, intelligent, responsive, resourceful, helpful in countless substantive ways. She went to work for Fantasy, Inc. in 1973 and was its director of publicity since 1978.

The Fantasy complex of labels contains much of the most important recorded jazz from the 1940s on, as well as significant collections of blues and pop. In addition to Fantasy itself, Prestige, Riverside, Milestone, Contemporary, Pablo, Debut, Galaxy and Stax are under the Fantasy umbrella. Among the artists on those labels are Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Wes Montgomery, Cal Tjader, Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Gerry Mulligan, Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald, Sonny Rollins, Art Pepper, Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie. The list is much longer, but those names give you an idea of the importance of the Fantasy catalog.

Far from simply sending out review copies and news releases, as many companies do, Terri Hinte made it her business to know the extensive and varied catalog inside out and to understand the importance of the hundreds of musicians who recorded for its labels over more than five decades. Her newsletters and advisories were light years beyond the puffery that passes for publicity in too many precincts of the music business. They contained news that writers about the music, and those who broadcast it, could and did use, resulting in better informed listeners. Her phone calls often brought writers valuable story ideas. The catalogs she produced are valuable reference works packed with information.

Concord bought Fantasy eighteen months ago, fueling speculation among jazz professionals and listeners about what would happen to the invaluable recordings in the Fantasy archives. The dismissal of Ms. Hinte has only increased nervousness about Concord’s intentions concerning the future of those treasures. Concord’s timing was interesting; it let her go on the eve of her recognition with a special A-Team award from the Jazz Journalists Association, which named her “De Facto Curator of Fantasy Records.”

In the current issue of Billboard, reporter Dan Ouellette quotes Concord President Glen Barros.

“We’re committed to jazz and the jazz catalog we’ve invested in.” He adds that he has “tremendous respect” for Hinte as “a great caretaker, proponent and spokesperson” for jazz. “However, when companies merge, there are unfortunate consequences,” Barros says. “But I don’t think Terri’s departure means that we have any less respect for the Fantasy catalog.”

Many musicians, including Sonny Rollins, came to depend on Ms. Hinte for counsel and guidance. She has been Rollins’s only publicist for twenty-eight years. Now, she plans a career as a free lance writer, editor and publicist, continuing to work with Rollins. The Rifftides staff wishes her well.

For a sample of Ms. Hinte’s considerable writing ability, on a subject you may not expect, go here.

A Rifftides Reader who identifies himself only as David P. sent a link to his internet radio website, which is called Poolside Jazz: Cooler Than The Cool Side Of The Pillow. The music I heard there in a half-hour visit was cool only in the slang sense. In succession, David P. played Fletcher Henderson’s “Queer Notions,” Gil Evans’ “The Time of the Barracudas,” Sonny Rollins’ “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” Dizzy Gillespie’s “Woody ‘n You,” Jelly Roll Morton’s “Sweetheart ‘O Mine” and Bud Powell with “Confirmation.” All hot. All good.

Barbara Nessim, the artist known for her Rolling Stone, TIME and New York Times Magazine covers, among other works, has a fascinating website tracking her output from the beginning of her career in the 1960s to the present. It includes a piece of video showing Nessim’s hands as she invents place cards for one of her dinner parties. I haven’t seen a more effective on-screen demonstration of improvisatory graphic art since the 1955 Henri-Georges Clouzot film, The Mystery of Picasso.
A tour of Nessim’s site stimulates thoughts about lines: her ability to express complete ideas in one or two sweeping lines, and the thin, shifting and indefineable line between commercial art and “serious” art. The parallels with jazz are obvious.

The Jazz Journalists Association announced its annual awards last night in New York. Roy Haynes was honored for lifetime achievement in jazz. Sonny Rollins was named musician of the year, Dafnis Prieto up and coming musician of the year, Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, album of the year. And there was this:
Best Book About Jazz
Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond (Parkside), by Doug Ramsey
Many thanks to JJA’s members. Recognition by one’s colleagues is the most valuable and humbling honor possible.
To see the complete list of forty-one winners, go here.

After Fathers Day activity (a present, a card, a few phone calls) subsided, I listened to two CDs, one because the publicist for the band keeps calling and asking if I’ve heard it, the other because I try never to go longer than a month without a Harry Allen fix.
Harry Allen
Allen is a thirty-nine-year-old tenor saxophonist from Rhode Island who managed to grow up in the post-Coltrane era without absorbing a detectable trace of John Coltrane’s influence. His Encyclopedia of Jazz entry says that his favorites are Ben Webster, Stan Getz and Scott Hamilton. Hamilton, twelve years older than Allen, is another Rhode Islander. He, too, is Coltrane-free. Maybe it’s something in the salt water taffy up there. Whether or not it was Allen’s or Hamilton’s aim, by not playing like Coltrane they got attention in a world crowded with Coltrane clones.
In Allen’s latest album, Hey, Look Me Over, co-led with guitarist Joe Cohn, his Getz influence is notably apparent in “Danielle,” a ballad by Cohn’s father Al, whose tenor sax spirit is also present in Allen’s playing. They include three of Al’s tunes in the CD, and Allen is torrid on “Travisimo.” It seems to me that Allen’s Ben Webster component is channeled through Zoot Sims, who in his last years increasingly exhibited Webster’s gruff tenderness. But he invests full-bore Zootness in his solo on “With the Wind and the Rain in Your Hair.”
Since he debuted in the late 1980s, Allen has recorded twenty-eight albums as a leader and appeared on dozens of others. He and Cohn have worked together for fifteen years and developed, among other elements of their ESP, an uncanny approach to counterpoint. It is demonstrated to a faretheewell throughout “Pick Yourself Up.” That track and their romp on Charlie Christian’s and Benny Goodman’s “Seven Come Eleven” make me realize how much I miss the improvisational counterpoint that seems to have largely faded from jazz since Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, Clark Terry and Bob Brookmeyer, Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz employed it.
Cohn is an ingenious soloist, a resourceful accompanist and, when he is moved to practice it, an effective rhythm guitarist. Throughout the album, bassist Joel Forbes and drummer Chuck Riggs, the other regular members of Allen’s quartet demonstrate that having a working band can assure benfits of rhythm and cohesiveness. This is a consistently satisfying group.
The Reptet
The album the squeaking-wheel publicist kept plugging, nicely but persistently, is Do This! by a Seattle band, The Reptet. In common with Harry Allen’s group, they do not have a piano. Nor do they have a guitar, which leaves the sextet free of a chording instrument to provide harmonic guidance. That leads to some soloists being cast adrift on the waters of free jazz without a paddle, but there is a redeeming sense of joy, whimsy and almost reckless abandon in much of the skilled ensemble writing and playing. Some of it has echoes of Hindemith, Milhaud, and, in keeping with that line of musical thought, voicings remarkably like those in certain pieces by the Dave Brubeck Octet. There are also elements of street-corner brass bands, third stream composers and the Charles Mingus of Tijuana Moods, to single out only three of the disparate influences I think I hear.
Much of the writing is by the trumpeter Samantha Boshnack, with additional pieces by reed players Tobi Stone and Izaak Mill and bassist Benjamin Verdier. The other members are trombonist Ben O’Shea and drummer John Ewing. Stone, Mills, O’Shea and Ewing have stimulating solo moments. I admit that I was moved to listen to The Reptet by, in addition to the phone calls, the fact that four of the compositions are titled “Zeppo,” “Harpo,” “Chico” and “Groucho.” I am happy to report that they live up to their names. And, yes, “Harpo” gets an introduction by an actual harp. I also like the occasional unexpected, but quite discreet, group and individual vocal touches that include shouts and moans. Great fun.