A career in print and broadcast journalism may have hardened my conviction about the importance of a free press in a democracy, but it seems to me that every American should see the motion picture Good Night, and Good Luck. George Clooney, the film’s guiding spirit, the son of a television journalist, understands why Edward R. Murrow’s exposure of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt in the 1950s was a courageous and patriotic act. Murrow’s and Fred Friendly’s pursuit of McCarthy inspired the Senate investigation that brought McCarthy down. It also cost Murrow his authority at CBS News and ultimately drove him out of the news division that he largely created and that he inspired for twenty-eight years. During that time he became a symbol of excellence in broadcast news.
CBS head William S. Paley’s demotion of Murrow established the primacy of network profit over news integrity. It set up conditions for the MBA mentality that meshed with technology and the rise of cable networks to produce the broadcast and cable news we have today in which, with few exceptions, the line between information and entertainment has been blurred beyond distinction. The other day, I tuned in to the last half hour of the Today Show to get the latest on Iraq, the White House investigation and the peril facing earthquake survivors in the Himalayas as winter moves in. I was treated to the spectacle of the Today Show principals, including the newscaster, cavorting and joking in Halloween costumes. They broke for a clownish weather report, but they scrubbed the newscast. Why distract viewers from Halloween hilarity and depress them with the state of the world?
Paley cannot be blamed directly for the deterioration of the Today Show or of NBC News. He did not run NBC or ABC, he competed with them. But when he neutralized Murrow, he helped to create the atmosphere that brought about this Today Show debacle. Over on ABC the next day, Good Morning America presented news, but before and after her reports the news anchor, Robin Roberts, diluted her credibility by joining in fun and games with hosts Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer, journalists who now spend much of their air time as entertainers. Roberts crossed, and stomped on, that fine line. I wonder if she knew it. Harry Smith seems to have maintained his dignity, or most of it, on the CBS Early Show. Could that be why viewers have relegated him to third place among the network morning programs? Can the democracy survive if the flow of information is choked with trivia? See Good Night, and Good Luck and think about that question.

Good Night and Good Luck’s period atmosphere is supplied, in part, by Diane Reeves singing standards. She is important to the movie as a dramatic element. On the sound track and on camera, she does some of her finest work in the uncomplicated setting of a rhythm section and a tenor saxophonist. Reeves and her record producers have rarely seemed to understand that she is at her best just singing songs, without elaborate orchestral trappings, overlays of soul or forced emotion. The film’s sound track CD is the purest recorded expression in years of her remarkable talent.

As articulate with words as he is at the piano, Bill Charlap gave a talk preceding his concert at the Earshot Jazz Festival in Seattle the other night. He spoke about the music that he, bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kenny Washington were about to perform, songs of George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein. In conversation with Seattle Times jazz critic Paul deBarros, Charlap contrasted Gershwin with Beethoven. Beethoven was a development composer, he said, and demonstrated how Beethoven married melody and harmony as he developed beyond the opening theme of his Fifth Symphony.
“With Gershwin,” Charlap said, “the melody and the harmony were not welded together, but they were cast.” He illustrated with the harmonic structure of “A Foggy Day” and Gershwin’s chord choices. He used “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” to point out Gershwin’s use of the seventh interval, “so American, so forthright.”
Asked where the standard songs of thirty-five or forty years from now will come from, Charlap pointed out that the musical theater that produced Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, Kern and Arlen no longer exists, that Bernstein was the last of it. Stephen Sondheim’s songs “don’t quite meet our needs,” he said, “nor do the chords of Bob Dylan and R.E.M.”
The trio’s concert was splendid. I covered it for Jazz Times. I’ll let you know when the review is up on the JT website.
DeBarros mentioned Charlap’s recent duo CD with his mother, the singer Sandy Stewart, and came up with a question that turned out to be a straight line:

DeBarros: How many pianists get to accompany their moms?

Charlap: How many singers give birth to their accompanists?

Top 10 Sources has honored Rifftides by including us in its list of the top ten jazz sites on the web. To see the company we’re in and what the other nine sites are up to, go here. Thanks to Quentin Palfrey and all of the Top 10 Sources folks.

Many state and local governments have elections tomorrow. Politicians making last- minute speeches might benefit from this 500-year-old wisdom.

Words which do not satisfy the ear of the hearer weary him or vex him, and the symptoms of this you will often see in such hearers in their frequent yawns. You, therefore, who speak before men whose good will you desire, when you see such an excess of fatigue, abridge your speech, or change your disourse; and if you do otherwise, then instead of the favor your desire you will receive dislike and hostility—Leonardo da Vinci

The tenor saxophonist and composer Alex Coke wrote me from his home in Austin, Texas, asking if I would listen to his new CD. After going to his website, I replied, with misgivings, that if he sent the album, I would. Music advertised as being on a social mission is almost certain to end up on the stack of CDs that I might some day get around to. I find that few such pieces are in a league with certain works of Ligeti, Schulhof, Penderecki, Sonny Rollins’ “Freedom Suite,” Ellington’s “Black, Brown and Beige,” a couple of songs by Woody Guthrie and Beethoven’s “Eroica.”
Coke’s IRAQNOPHOBIA/Wake Up Dead Man is on VoxLox, a small label explaining that its “documentary sound art advocates for human rights and acoustic ecology. Our human rights recordings present exile, refugee, disaporic, and indigenous voices muted or censored by mainstream media.” That kind of description would ordinarily guarantee an album a reservation on the some-day stack. But a promise is a promise. I listened. The creed the company wears on its sleeve did not prepare me for what I heard—music that needs no mission statement to be effective as music. It has variety, melodic and harmonic interest, humor and depth. I reacted to it much as I did to Witness, a Dave Douglas album of a few seasons ago whose music was “about” profit-oriented greed, environmental irresponsibility, “rampant poverty” and protest of “a system that co-opts and marginalizes almost every unique and original thought that confronts it.” Not that I discount protest music. In a Jazz Times review of Witness, I wrote, in part:

Songs are effective vehicles for the delivery of outrage, and the history of protest music is only slightly shorter than the history of music itself. Musical expression of political protest reached its greatest concentration in the 20th century, which provided not only inexhaustible fodder for it but also the technical means of delivering protest messages to the masses. From Joe Hill and the I.W.W. through Woody Guthrie to Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Rage Against the Machine, music has shaped the way that populations think about issues. Can anyone doubt the influence of popular music on America’s civil-rights struggle or its turn against the Vietnam War? Further examples abound in Pakistan, Czechoslovakia, Indonesia and dozens of other countries.

Nonetheless, as I listened to Coke’s music, the messages about domestic ills (prisons and social justice) and foreign-policy mistakes (the Iraq war) receded. They were not lost but were superseded by accomplished writing, improvising and ensemble playing. The pieces incorporate elements of Southern blues, modern mainstream jazz, avant garde classical music, free jazz and middle-Eastern songs. There are intentionally jarring notes, but only a few incongruous ones, most of them in a silly unbridled trombone solo in the “Iraqnophobia” section. Even the track’s title, “The Shreik of Araby,” is out of keeping with the overall seriousness of the project. But that is a mercifully brief blemish on an album that is impressive for its quality, music that can stand on its own, aside from the message.
For a profile of Alex Coke go to this story in the Austin Chronicle.

Early tomorrow, I’m headed back to Seattle and the Earshot Jazz Festival to cover the Bill Charlap Trio for Jazz Times. I’ll be traveling light; that is, without the laptop, so the probability of new Rifftides posts is small for the next couple of days. Unlike some foresightful bloggers, this one has no contributing editor backing him up. So, enjoy all of the arts journal.com mavens listed in the right-hand column, and come back soon.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music… and of aviation—Tom Stoppard

Bob Brookmeyer periodically posts Currents, his reflections—not all of them ascerbic—on music, life, love, war and other matters. The next one is often a long time coming. The last one was on July 5, shortly after a club gig in New York.

The Jazz Standard is a very fine place and the people who work there are unfailingly gentle and helpful. However, they — and all jazz clubs — suffer from the fear of silence. The minute we stop playing, ON comes the music from somewhere, and it won’t stop until we get on the stand — sometimes not even then. It’s an established tradition and a vile one.

To read the whole thing, go here.
Serious musicians generally share Brookmeyer’s irritation with canned music in clubs and other public places. In my experience, most of them are distracted by it and incapable of closing their ears to it. This has come up before on Rifftides.

The truth is, I don’t want to hear Desmond, or any other music, in the Safeway, at the gas station, in Starbucks, the Mexico City subway, The Gap or the dentist’s office, certainly not on the street, and not often in my car. I don’t have an Ipod and don’t want one. I want a little peace and quiet now and then.

To read the whole thing, go here.
And to read a followup, go here.

In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness—Mahatma Ghandi

Rifftides reader Doug Freeman reports from Los Angeles that he has finished reading Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.

Perhaps more than any biography I’ve read, yours leaves me wanting to know this man, to hang with him as you were fortunate enough to do.

Mr. Freeman has a question.

The regret I’m most left with after finishing your wonderful book, though, is not to be able to hear his speaking voice. I’m wondering if any of the on-air interviews you cited are hearable anywhere. Or any other evidence of his vocal pattern. We know his musical rhythm so well, and thanks to your book I have a decent sense of his life rhythm, but given his gift for the English language, it sure would be nice to know his speaking rhythm.

We’re in luck. On his web site, the San Francisco saxophonist Mel Martin has a Real Audio clip of Paul’s interview with Charlie Parker on disc jockey John McClellan’s program in Boston in 1954. To listen to it, go hereTake Five.

My problem is that I appeal to everyone that can do me absolutely no good—Rodney Dangerfield

They say you should be nice to everyone on your way up because you might need them on your way down. I haven’t seen anyone I know on the way down—Jack Sheldon

The posting about Willis Conover brought the following message from one of his Voice of America colleagues, John Birchard.

I came to VOA in 1993, hired as a news broadcaster on the late night shift. Because of my hours, I almost never saw Willis, except for once in a while when he would be out on the steps of the building chatting with the smokers. I never felt right about horning into his conversations, just to say I admired his work… but I did note his shrunken figure and face and the big horn rims.

Early on, I got the impression that quite a few people—in middle management and above—looked upon him as the tail that wagged the dog, that he was entirely too big, but there was nothing they could do about it. When he died, other than a fairly perfunctory obit, there was little to indicate that anything important had happened. VOA continued to run his tapes week after week, month after month. I don’t know the story of the efforts to get him the Presidential Medal of Freedom—or the manner in which he was treated in connection with the White House Jazz Festival, but I can imagine the kinds of small minds at work to bring him down to their level.

One personal anecdote: During the decade of the 70s, Quinnipiac College (now University) in Hamden, Connecticut, played host to an annual intercollegiate jazz festival, featuring college bands from all over the east and midwest. The performances were judged by a panel of professional musicians and others which, at various times, included Clark Terry, Jimmy Heath, Ernie Wilkins, Chico O’Farrill, Father Norman O’Connor and Jimmy Lyons. During those years, I was a talk show host in New Haven and the festival producers saw fit to have me emcee the programs each Spring. The festivals ran from Friday through Sunday nites. But I had to do my talk show on Fridays ’til 9pm, so each year the producers would have someone fill in for me for the first hour of the evening. One Friday evening, I walked into the back of the hall and heard a familiar voice from up on stage.

Of course, it was Willis. Not many in the audience really knew who he was, but I did. I was convinced I had just lost my gig. I trotted backstage and one of the producers gave Willis the high sign and he introduced me, gracious and appropriate as always. As he walked offstage and I walked on, we shook hands and I thanked him. Then, to the audience, I said, “I’m not sure you know just how intimidating it is to have the most famous jazz disc jockey in the world substituting for me. I’m proud to share the same stage with Mr. Conover and it’s an honor to have him here.”

Mr. Birchard still broadcasts the news for the Voice of America.
For an obituary of Willis Conover, go here.

The White House did once treat Conover with respect. In 1969 it chose him to organize the musical portion of the 70th birthday party that President Nixon gave for Duke Ellington. Willis recruited the all-star band and produced and narrated the concert. I took a picture of him that afternoon at the rehearsal in the East Room as he listened to Hank Jones, Gerry Mulligan, Paul Desmond, Clark Terry, Bill Berry, J.J. Johnson, Urbie Green, Jim Hall, Louis Bellson, Milt Hinton, Joe Williams and Mary Mayo. The concert was finally released on a Blue Note CD in 2002. I was honored to write the liner essay. Here’s a bit of it.

Hank Jones, Billy Taylor, and Dave Brubeck played beautifully, but the hands-down winner in the piano category was the 65-year-old Earl Hines, who in two daring minutes of “Perdido” tapped the essence of jazz. Ellington stood up and blew him kisses. Later, Billy Eckstine, who sang with Hines’ band before he had his own, walked up to his old boss and gave him an accolade: “You dirty old man.” The concert lasted an hour and a half, and the room was swinging. I looked around at heads bobbing and shoulders swaying and found Otto Preminger beaming and snapping his fingers Teutonically, one snap at the bottom of each downward stroke of his forearm.

Urged onto the platform, Ellington improvised an instant composition inspired, he said, by “a name, something very gentle and graceful—something like ‘Pat.’” The piece was full of serenity and the wizardry of Ellington’s harmonies. Mrs. Nixon, who looked distracted through much of the evening, paid close attention.

The evening was Ellington’s, gloriously so, but it was Willis’s connections, coordination, organizational skill and stewardship that put the icing on the birthday cake. It was one reason among many larger ones that he deserved, and still deserves, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Thanks so much for your piece about Willis Conover, and for all your other writing. I read your site regularly and am enlightened and informed every time.

My one experience with Willis Conover is worth sharing if only to mirror your sentiments. Years ago, probably 30 or so, a old family friend who lived in WC’s apartment building and was a good friend of his, asked me if I would like to visit WC and have a chat. I have always been a musician and for my entire life have done both music and my “day gig” as a school person. But in the history of western music I have no place and for anyone other than WC, I was simply another speck. He treated me as royalty, as a musical person in my own right and gave me so much counsel, encouragement, wit, humor, imagination, kindness and respect. What an amazing couple of hours I had with him. I have never forgotten WC and his extraordinary interest and kindness. They don’t make them like Willis Conover anymore.

With thanks,

peter kountz

Dr. Kountz’s achievements in education make him much more than a “school person.” To see them, go here.

Bill Kirchner, a musician who is also an educator, writer, editor and producer, knew Willis Conover. Like at least ninety-nine percent of jazz musicians, he is a fan of Johnny Mandel, one of whose arrangements recorded by Conover’s big band more than fifty years ago is responsible for setting off this chain of reminiscences about Willis. Bill writes:

Nice memories of Willis. I had fun hanging out with him in DC years ago.

There is a stunning, groundbreaking chart by Johnny (at age 21!) on that album of “The Song Is You” in ballad tempo, originally written in 1947 for, of all people, Buddy Rich. It is one of the first instances I know of in jazz scoring of genuine counterpoint. I tried to include it in the Smithsonian Big Band Renaissance box, but couldn’t get the rights from Universal.

Big Band Renaissance, produced by Bill Kirchner in the nineites, and its predecessor boxed set, Big Band Jazz produced by Gunther Schuller and the late Martin Williams in the eighties, are invaluable historical collections. They were released by The Smithsonian Collection of Recordings but were allowed to go out of print long ago. The copies still available are precious items.

To the complaint, “There are no people in these photographs,” I respond, “There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.” —Ansel Adams

Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there —Miles Davis

Rifftides Reader John Thomas noticed the recent postings about Johnny Mandel and kindly loaned me a CDR copy of a rare vinyl album containing Mandel’s arrangement of “The Song Is You.” The 1953 Brunswick LP has been out of print for at least forty years and reissued on CD only in a limited Japanese edition. It is called Willis Conover’s House of Sounds: Willis Conover presents THE Orchestra. THE Orchestra was a first-rate Washington, DC, band led by Joe Timer. It included wonderful players like Earl Swope, Jack Nimitz and Marky Markowitz. Conover was a local broadcaster whose accomplishments included helping to desegregate Washington by requiring that blacks be admitted to clubs in which he organized concerts.

Through most of the cold war, Conover was the host of Music USA on the Voice of America. He was never a government employee, always working under a free lance contract to maintain his indepence. While our leaders and those of the Soviet bloc stared one another down across the nuclear abyss, in his stately bass-baritone voice Willis introduced listeners around the world to jazz and American popular music. With knowledge, taste, dignity and no trace of politics, he played for nations of captive peoples the music of freedom. He interviewed virtually every prominent jazz figure of the second half of the twentieth century. Countless Eastern European musicians give him credit for bringing them into jazz. Because the Voice is not allowed to broadcast to the United States, Conover was unknown to the citizens of his own country. For millions behind the iron curtain he was an emblem of America, democracy and liberty. Gene Lees makes the case, to which I subscribe wholeheartedly, that,

…Willis Conover did more to crumble the Berlin wall and bring about collapse of the Soviet Empire than all the Cold War presidents put together.

In the January 2002 issue of his invaluable JazzLetter, Lees told Conover’s story, including an account of the attempts to have him presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The effort began when George H.W. Bush was president and continued into the current administration. Among those pushing for the honor when Willis was alive and after he died in 1996 were Lees, several other prominent writers and Leonard Garment, who was a White House counsel in the Nixon administration and had been a professional musician. The first President Bush, President Clinton and the second President Bush ignored all letters and presentations about Willis. Conover remains unrecognized by the nation for which he did so much. The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the award recently presented to Paul Wolfowitz and other administration figures for their parts in the iraq war.

The JazzLetter costs $70 a year. Sometimes it arrives considerably after the monthly dateline of the latest issue. It is worth the money and worth the wait. Gene writes about music and other matters with skill, erudition and passion. Much of his JazzLetter work eventually makes its way into his books, of which there is now quite a number. Lees and the JazzLetter do not have a website. They do have an e-mail address and a mailing address.

genelees@sbcglobal.net
Gene Lees JazzLetter
P.O. Box 240
Ojai, California 93024-0240

It may be that if you subscribe you can talk Gene into giving you a bonus copy of the issue about Conover. After I read it, I wrote the following letter, which ran in the February, 2002 issue

Dear Gene,

I want to tell you about my last lunch with Willis Conover, but the story needs background. In 1968, Willis was the MC for JazzFest, the New Orleans jazz festival. He did a splendid job. As board members of the festival, Danny Barker, Al Belletto and I fought hard to persuade the board to accept Willis’s proposal that he produce the 1969 festival. The other board members knew as little as most Americans knew about Willis. We educated them. Over a number of contentious meetings and the strong reservations of the chairman, Willis was hired. The ’69 festival turned out to be one of the great events in the history of the music. It reflected Willis’s knowledge, taste, judgment, and the enormous regard the best jazz musicians in the world had for him.

I won’t give you the complete list of talent. Suffice it to report that the house band for the week was Zoot Sims, Clark Terry, Jaki Byard, Milt Hinton and Alan Dawson, and that some of the hundred or so musicians who performed were Sarah Vaughan, the Count Basie band, Gerry Mulligan, Paul Desmond, Albert Mangelsdorff, Roland Kirk, Jimmy Giuffre, the Onward Brass Band, Rita Reyes, Al Belletto, Eddie Miller, Graham Collier, Earle Warren, Buddy Tate, Dickie Wells, Pete Fountain, Freddie Hubbard and Dizzy Gillespie. The festival had style, dignity and panache. It was a festival of music, not a carnival. An enormous amount of the credit for that goes to Willis. His achievement came only after months of infighting with the chairman and other retrograde members of the jazz establishment who did not understand or accept mainstream, much less modern, jazz and who wanted the festival to be the mini-Mardi Gras that it became the next year and has been ever since. They tried at every turn to subvert the conditions of Willis’s contract, which gave him extensive, but not complete, artistic control. Because Willis was tied to his demanding Voice of America schedule in Washington, DC, much of the wrangling was by telephone and letter. He flew down to New Orleans frequently for meetings, which he despised as much as I did. He did not need all of that grief. He pursued his stewardship of the festival because he had a vision of how the music he loved should be presented.

The nastiness took its toll. When it was over, Willis was depleted, demoralized, bitter and barely consoled that he had produced a milestone festival. In the course of the battle, he and I became allies and close friends. As a purgative, he was going to write a book about his New Orleans experience, but I’m glad he didn’t; the issue is dead and so are many of the dramatis personae. Charlie Suhor covers much of the 1969 story in his book Jazz In New Orleans (Scarecrow Press). One night Willis and I were alternately commiserating and acting silly at the bar of the Napolean House over a couple of bottles of Labatt, his favorite Canadian ale. After a moment of silence, he turned to me and said in that deep rumble, “I love you, man.” The moment is one of my most precious memories. We were friends and confidants after my family and I moved to New York, where he had an apartment, and remained so after I left for other cities and we didn’t see each other for years at a time.

In 1996, not long after the scandalous treatment you described Willis receiving at the White House jazz festival, I was in Washington for a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. It was about a month before he died. Willis invited me to lunch at the Cosmos Club, where he maintained a membership. I doubt if, at the end, he could afford it, but it was important to him to be there, to feel a part of the old Washington he loved. He was at the door of the club when my cab pulled up. In the year since I had last seen him, he had shrunk into an Oliphant caricature, his horn-rimmed glasses outsized on his face, his shoulders and chest pinched, sunken.

Even his leonine head seemed smaller. His hair and his face were mostly gray. He led me to the elegant dining room, on the way introducing me to a couple of men. He had momentary difficulty remembering one of their names. At the table, Willis launched into a diatribe against his old New Orleans enemy, but gave it up and started reciting some of his limericks. He wrote devastatingly funny and wicked topical limericks. But this day it was all by rote. He was strangely absent, and his speech was irregular, partly because of the ravages of the oral cancer he survived and partly, I thought, because he must have had a stroke. I could not lead him into any topic long enough for a conversation to develop, so I sat back and tried to enjoy the limericks. He seemed to want to entertain me, and I imagine he was deflecting any possible attempt on my part to be sympathetic or maudlin.

I was due at a meeting and, after coffee, Willis asked the waiter to call a taxi for me. He walked me to the door and we stood silently in the entry of that magnificent old building. When the cab arrived, I had to say something. I didn’t want it to be “goodbye,” so I said, “I love you, man.” Willis swallowed and blinked. I gave him a hug and climbed into the cab. As it made a left turn out of the drive, I looked over at the entrance. Willis had disappeared into the Cosmos.

Doug

I intended to mention in the Rifftides ad hoc survey of recent trio CDs some by the Italian pianist Enrico Pieranunzi. Pieranunzi is another pianist who has retained the Bill Evans ethos and used it as the foundation for a style of his own. As if to remind me, today the mailbox disgorged the reissue of a selection of film music by Ennio Morricone, used for improvisation by Pieranunzi, bassist Marc Johnson and drummer Joey Baron. The album has U.S. distribution from Sunnyside Records and is available here.
Much of Pieranunzi’s work, including the first Morricone CD and Play Morricone 2, is on CamJazz, a classy Italian label. He, Baron and Johnson, Evans’ last bass player, work together with unity of purpose. They give the music, by turns, intensity and ease that perfectly suit the Morricone pieces. It may surprise listeners who associate Morricone’s music only with the mournful soundtracks of spaghetti westerns that some of his themes are as hip as bebop originals. The CamJazz catalogue is worth exploring for other Pieranunzi CDs, among them his recent duets with Jim Hall, the restlessly exploratory dean of modern jazz guitar. There is also a Pieranunzi collaboration with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian. Enrico Brava, John Taylor, Kenny Wheeler, Lee Konitz and the intriguing pianist Salvatore Bonafede are other CamJazz artists.