Pianist Billy Childs and vocalist Alicia Olatuja, their flight delayed for hours by snowstorms in the east, made it to Portland barely in time for Childs’ concert of songs by Laura Nyro (1947-1997). The material came from Childs’ 2014 Nyro tribute album Map To The Treasure. Olatuja and vocalist Becca Stevens each sang several Nyro songs. Olatuja made a major impression with “Been On a Train.” Childs introduced the piece as, “a powerful song.” In an impressive act of vocal drama, Olatuja (pictured right) made doubly powerful the story of a witnessed death.

Stevens was effective in “And When I Die” and “Stoned Soul Picnic,” Nyro songs that became anthems for a generation of young people in the late 1960s and the ‘70s. Supported by Childs’ atmospheric piano and arrangement, she was exquisite in “Upstairs By a Chinese Lamp,” and in Nyro’s beseeching “Save The Country,” a reaction to the unrest, uncertainty and inequality of the civil rights era and the Viet Nam conflict. The focus of the concert was on Nyro’s material and the singers, but Childs allotted himself enough solo opportunities to remind the audience of his preeminence among contemporary pianists. He also featured guitarist Peter Sprague as a guest artist and major soloist on several pieces. Wild, at times barely restrained, Sprague’s work on “Map to the Treasure” matched the virtuosity of Childs’ own solo. Throughout the concert, both of them interacted to great effect with bassist Ben Shepherd and drummer Donald Barrett.

Ms. Stevens and pianist Taylor Eigsti opened for Childs and company. Their initial festival collaboration earlier in the week was obscured in an acoustically impaired church. The Newmark Theatre’s sonority and superior sound system brought Stevens’ clear voice to the fore. Now, it was possible to understand every syllable of the lyrics of Eigsti’s songs “Magnolia” and “Plane Over Kansas.” The piano was in bold relief for his accompaniments and the brilliance of his solos. Their short set concluded with Duke Ellington’s “Prelude To a Kiss.” Stevens interpretation of Irving Gordon’s words added poignancy to, “My love is a prelude that never dies.”

The Portland Jazz Festival swings into its final weekend this evening with Julian Lage hosting fellow guitarists John Stowell and Dan Balmer, and bassist Dave Captein in a tribute to the late Jim Hall.

In one of those scheduling coincidences that make for hard consumer choices at the Portland festival, the adventurous pianist Hal Galper will be playing at the same time as Lage. His trio includes bassist Jeff Johnson and drummer John Bishop.

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There will be a funeral Service for Clark Terry next Saturday at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City’s Harlem. The trumpet and flugelhorn giant died last Sunday in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where he and his wife Gwen lived for many years after they left New York. Terry will be buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

From the time we first met when he was in the house band at the New Orleans Jazz Festival in the late 1960s, CT and I spent time together whenever we found ourselves in the same town. Conversations with him were full of laughter and, for me, learning. Here’s a section of what Clark told me about an early job with Fate Marable, who decades before had hired Louis Armstrong to play in his band on Mississippi River steam boats. This is from Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers.

‘Fate was an old man then, but he was still leading bands on those Mississippi steamers. He used to get a big kick out of playing tunes in weird keys. You’d go on this gig and you’d be accustomed to playing something in F, he’d play it in F-sharp and laugh through the whole tune while you struggled. It was good training.’

Marable’s sense of the unusual extended to non-musical matters and may have given rise to a colorful addition to the language. Terry says the river boats were equipped with axes to be used in the event it became necessary to chop an exit from a flaming cabin or passageway. Marable used the implement instead of a pink slip.

‘Whenever Fate would get ready to make a change in the band, he’d tell the rest of us to come early. Then, when the cat he was going to fire would come at the regular time, he’d find an ax on his chair. I’ve never heard any other explanation of the term, so it seems logical that’s where it came from. Cat got the ax.’

Terry never got the ax from Marable or from any of the other famous leaders for whom he worked. After a stint in a Navy band during World War II, he played with Lionel Hampton, George Hudson, Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson, Charlie Ventura, Count Basie and Duke Ellington, the association that made him one of the best known soloists in jazz. With Ellington, Terry blossomed. Duke’s genius for recognizing and capitalizing on the characteristics of his sidemen has rarely had more startling results than in the case of Clark Terry.

Ellington sensed in Terry something of the New Orleans tradition. When Ellington was preparing A Drum Is A Woman, his suite in which New Orleans plays a large part, he chose Terry to portray Buddy Bolden. Bolden’s style is entirely legendary; no recordings of him are known to exist. Terry recalls protesting the assignment.

‘I told him, ‘Maestro, I don’t know anything about Buddy Bolden. I wouldn’t know how to start.’ Duke said, ‘Oh, sure, you’re Buddy Bolden. He was just like you. He was suave. He had a good tone, he bent notes, he was big with diminishes, he loved the ladies, and when he blew a note in New Orleans, he’d break glass across the river in Algiers. Come on, you can do it.’ I told him I’d try, and I blew some phrases and he said, ‘That’s it, that’s Buddy Bolden, that’s it, sweetie.’ That’s how Maestro was. He could get out of you anything he wanted. And he made you believe you could do it. I suppose that’s why they used to say the band was his instrument. The Buddy Bolden thing is on the record, and Duke was satisfied. So as far as I’m concerned, that was Buddy Bolden.’

We’re going to miss you, CT.

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In the student competition held in connection with the festival, first-place prizes went to alto saxophonist Joel Steinke and singer Jacob Houser, both from Edmonds-Woodway High School near Seattle. Backed by the trio of pianist George Colligan, a Portlander transplanted from New York, they each played two numbers as they opened for bassist Christian McBride.

McBride’s trio had the bright young sidemen Christian Sands on piano and Ulysses Owens, Jr., on drums. Their three-way exchanges on the Ellington-Tizol standard “Caravan” and on Sands’ waltz-time “Sand Dunes” were compelling. McBride is a larger-than-life personality whose stage presence complements his ability to play with absolute command of the bass at any tempo. Dazzling even when his blizzards of notes amounted only to blizzards of notes, he counterbalanced displays of virtuosity with depth and earnestness as he bowed the melody of Rodger and Hammerstein’s “I Have Dreamed.”

McBride introduced Freda Payne as a surprise guest. She sang “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most” and “I’d Rather Drink Muddy Water” in carbon copies of what she had done two nights earlier at Jimmy Mak’s club (see the report). A natural raconteur, McBride recruited the audience to participate by clapping time on “a 1970s R&B hit” whose title he did not announce and, it turned out, did not need to. Called back for an encore, he said “Gonna lay a little Thelonious Monk on ya.” There was no detectable Monk melody in what followed, but he, Sands and Owens had great fun playing the blues and earned—guess what?—that’s right, a standing ovation. The Portland audience is generous with those.

These days, the 88-year-old Lou Donaldson’s alto saxophone solos consist mostly of quotes as sound gags, and clichés from his own and other peoples’ recordings. His repartee, long on wryness and glancing reflections on human failings—his own and others’—is as sharp as ever. With guitarist Eric Johnson, drummer Fukushi Tainaka and Hammond B3 organist Pat Bianchi, Donaldson made his way through a set long on jokes, blues singing (“Whiskey Drinking Woman”) and extended solos by Johnson, Bianchi and Tainaka. He had Johnson, with a wireless transmitter on his guitar, wander around the audience for a lengthy traveling solo on Donaldson’s 1967 hit “Alligator Boogaloo.” All of this endeared Donaldson to the audience, which evidently arrived knowing what to expect.

The Bill Charlap Trio is a chamber group of a quality customarily found only in equally long-lived classical ensembles. In their years together, pianist Charlap, bassist Peter Washington and drummer Kenny Washington have achieved singleness of purpose and unity of thought to a degree rare in any musical idiom. At the Portland festival, they applied their wisdom, experience and empathy in a recital of pieces from Frank Sinatra’s vast repertoire. From the opening “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” to the closing “One For The Road,” their balance, restraint and swing, their regard for the material and one another, combined in an hour and a half of absorbing playing—and listening.

The concert was a succession of memorable moments. A few of them: Charlap’s unaccompanied performance of Rodgers and Hart’s “It Never Entered My Mind” melded into the trio as they sustained the mood in “It’s Only A Paper Moon.” They concluded the piece with a blues ending and, after all of Charlap’s and Peter Washington’s sophisticated harmonic changes, the surprising openness of a major chord. Sinatra made a recording of “Stardust” that consisted of only the song’s introductory verse. Charlap played the verse thoughtfully by himself, perhaps with Sinatra’s version in mind. The Washingtons joined in the chorus, firmed up the swing and then the three wound down to a final eight bars of lyricism. With wire brushes on snare drum, Kenny Washington demonstrated in “There’s A Small Hotel” that he is a modern master of what someone once called that tough, straight art.

“In The Still Of The Night,” taken at a fast clip, incorporated bass and drum solos during which Charlap listened intently, absorbing every nuance and occasionally nodding in understanding or approval. After the first chorus of “On A Slow Boat To China,” the tempo kicked up to near the edge of insanity, exciting the audience and leading them to demand an encore. They got two; “Only The Lonely” played by Charlap alone, and a trio performance of, appropriately, ‘One For The Road.” There was a standing ovation.

The concert was one of those listening experiences that one wishes he could take home and play back.

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With the theme of the Portland Jazz Festival centered around the 100th anniversary of Frank Sinatra’s birth, two artists with top billing focused on interpreting songs associated with Sinatra. Mini-concerts by winners of the festival’s student competitions preceded some of the featured performers. Warming up the audience for Kurt Elling, a 20-voice choir (pictured below) from Battle Ground High School in Washington, sang two pieces. They included a spirited expansion of the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross version of “It’s Sand, Man” from the Count Basie book.

Elling’s outsized self-regard has often overwhelmed the songs he sings. But in Portland, following a laudatory introduction spoken by pianist Bill Charlap, he concentrated on the substance of 15 pieces from Sinatra’s repertoire and was all the better for it. Backed by the Art Abrams Swing Machine, Elling sang with power, elegance and little of the forced hipness that sometimes mars his work. In “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “Witchcraft,” “All The Way” and, particularly, “Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me,” he came uncannily close to summoning up Sinatra’s essence. Elling conducted the band, setting the tempos with no-nonsense finger snaps. He allotted generous solo spots to alto saxophonist John Nastos and trumpeter Buzz Graham.

For all of the effectiveness of the band, however, the high point of the concert came after Elling called Charlap from the wings. Their voice-piano duets on “Lucky To Be Me” and “In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning” were perfection. Charlap’s “Wee Small Hours” interlude, a moment of pure impressionism, led the two to a quiet ending that left a hush in the hall—until loud, sustained, applause broke out. After the emotional impact of his ballads with Charlap, Elling’s swaggering “My Kind Of Town” and “The Lady Is A Tramp” with the big band were anti-climaxes.

There was more of Charlap to come before the weekend ended, but first another pianist, five years younger, took the stage of the intimate Winningstad Theater. Vijay Iyer’s trio has attracted attention through heavy radio play, cover stories in the major jazz magazines and several successful CDs, including the recent Break Stuff. Iyer, bassist Stefan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore work in the tradition of rhythmic and improvisational interdependence established by the Bill Evans Trio. As they adjust to one another, they develop streams of time. In Thelonious Monk’s “Work,” none of the three played with a 4/4 beat, but a satisfying undercurrent of 4/4 feeling emerged from their interaction. Crump’s solo on the piece was typical of his work throughout the set; he was faithful to the form and harmonic structure while within them he made rhythmic departures and invented melodies. In any given piece, whether employing brushes, sticks or mallets, Gilmore makes the drum set another melody instrument.

Iyer’s advanced keyboard technique and his willingness—or eagerness—to take chances resulted in moments of adventurousness like one in which the trio’s mutual time play morphed into repetition of a snatch of melody. It might have seemed the antithesis of swing, except that it swung hard, right up to an abrupt ending that left the listener breathless. It is worth noting that from the first of their set Iyer, Crump and Gilmore had the audience. The attention of the listeners was riveted on the music, with none of the whooping and whistling often in evidence at this festival, in fact at most jazz performances in recent years. Toward the end of the set, Iyer spoke his thanks to the audience over a quiet trio vamp with closing chords that somehow brought to mind the romanticism of Edward McDowell’s piano sketches. Then he moved the vamping into churchy chords that, with Gilmore’s offbeats, hinted at Ray Bryant. This is an interesting band.

Next time: Christian McBride Trio, and Charlap on Sinatra

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At the Portland Jazz Festival, Freda Payne reached into her jazz, pop and soul background for the ingredients of an eclectic evening. Her performance summarized a career that began in the 1950s when she was a Detroit teenager. Payne appeared at Jimmy Mak’s, a club near downtown that serves as an official festival venue. Playing to an audience overflowing with standing listeners, she worked with a quintet led by the veteran Portland drummer Mel Brown. Payne opened her late set with Cole Porter’s classic standard “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” (1943) moved to Kenny Rankin’s 1991 “Haven’t We Met?” then Hampton and Burke’s “Midnight Sun” (1947). Her intonation tended toward flatness early in the proceeding, but settled as the concert progressed.

Buoyed by the Brown rhythm section’s drive, Payne intensified the feeling as she moved on to Merle Haggard’s “Whatever Happened to Me?” and Styne and Cahn’s “I Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out To Dry”. Bassist Ed Bennett and pianist Clay Giberson were Brown’s rhythm accomplices. Tenor saxophonist Rob Davis and trumpeter Derek Sims rounded out the band. Davis’s solo on “Midnight Sun” was a high point.

A welcome touch: Payne made it a point to credit the composers and lyricists of all the songs she sang, a nicety that Frank Sinatra also practiced in his concerts. She skillfully managed the rhythmic subtleties required to be convincing in the Ivan Lins Latin standard “The Island.” Possibly encouraged by the fellow SRO standee who yelled “Woo-woo” in my ear following every song, she called on her immersion in soul and blues in a closing tryptich of “I’d Rather Drink Muddy Water,” “Save Your Love For Me” and “St. Louis Blues.” Payne’s passion and authenticity in the idiom have earned her the respect of several generations of jazz musicians. One of them is bassist Christian McBride, who invited her to sing two songs in his band’s concert two nights later. In Payne’s gig at Jimmy Mak’s, Sims’s flugelhorn solo on the blues all but brought down the house. It was so—well, so bluesy—that I was tempted to join in with the “Woo-woo” guy.

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Clark Terry has died at 94 following his long battle with the effects of advanced diabetes. His wife Gwen posted the announcement this morning on her Facebook page.

Our beloved Clark Terry has joined the big band in heaven where he’ll be singing and playing with the angels. He left us peacefully, surrounded by his family, students and friends. Clark has known and played with so many amazing people in his life. He has found great joy in his friendships and his greatest passion was spending time with his students. We will miss him every minute of every day, but he will live on through the beautiful music and positivity that he gave to the world. Clark will live in our hearts forever.

With all my love, Gwen Terry

Mrs. Terry’s announcement did not include information about when her husband died died or plans for services. For a thorough obituary, go here.

Here is a reminder of the gifts that made CT one of the best known and most admired jazz artists of the modern era. He leads a septet at the 1977 Montreux Jazz Festival with Oscar Peterson, piano; Milt Jackson, vibes; Ronnie Scott, tenor saxophone; Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, bass; Joe Pass, guitar; and Bobby Durham, drums.

Clark Terry, RIP

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As usual at the Portland Jazz Festival, no one can take in more than a slice of the music filling this city of 610,000. A friend and I paused at a crosswalk to hear a musician, tip basket at his feet, serenading passersby with his bass clarinet. He was no Eric Dolphy and he wasn’t officially a part of the festival, but he was providing some of the music heard everywhere in Portland, from street corners to bars, clubs, restaurants, hotel lobbies and theaters.

Trying to hear as much music as possible in my four days here, I began with pianist Taylor Eigsti and singer-guitarist Becca Stevens sharing an evening with Joel Harrison and his Free Country Ensemble. Pictured below, left to right: Eigsti, David Binney, Ted Poor, Harrison

They played in the venerable First Congregational Church in the heart of downtown. Stevens is a pop and folk singer who performs frequently with jazz artists, among them pianists Brad Mehldau and, notably, Eigsti. Their rhythm section included drummer Kendrick Scott and the young bassist Zach Ostroff. Eigsti introduced the trio’s opening piece with a vigorous attack that culminated in a run of fists up the keyboard before he settled into the rich chording and cleanly articulated single-note lines that make him one of the most impressive pianists to have emerged in the new century. Throughout the set, Scott’s propulsiveness and crisp placement of accents made his drumming a compelling center of attention. Ostroff’s bass work was largely lost to the booming acoustics of the high-ceilinged sanctuary.

Ms. Stevens’s first song was the Burke and Van Heusen standard “But Beautiful.” She did one chorus with an extension that featured her improvised vocalese, an aspect of her work that the audience made clear it adored. The remainder of the set was songs written by Stevens or Eigsti, some as collaborations. It was difficult to determine whether her variable intonation was a flaw or an intentional feature of her style, which tends toward the folk tradition. Her vocal lines in unison with her guitar were cleanly in tune. Eigsti’s “Play With Me” has demanding intervals, which Ms. Stevens nailed. The audience included knots of 20- and 30-somethings who were loud and vocal in their appreciation; there was a lot of woo-hooing and whistling. They were all, apparently, Stevens fans and left en masse when the Taylor-Eigsti set ended.

Joel Harrison’s Free Country Ensemble concentrates on songs by Johnny Cash, Woody Guthrie, Merle Haggard and other specialists in Americana. Harrison plays country-rock-pop guitar with jazz tinges. Ted Poor is a straight-ahead jazz drummer able to flex among several idioms. Michael Bates was the bassist. Alto saxophonist David Binney goes a long way toward justifying the “Free” in the name of the band. Binney’s solo on the spiritual “I’ll Fly Away” was beyond outside, but when he came back to earth, his blend with Harrison’s guitar was exquisite. Eigsti’s piano made the group a quintet. His full-bodied accompaniments and improvisations enriched the proceedings. “Wayfaring Stranger” was replete with guitar atmospherics, drones and loop effects supported by unfettered exchanges between Bates’s bass and the slash and chatter of Poor’s drums. As I was leaving to head across town to another concert, Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman” was getting a Harrison makeover.

More coming from Portland

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The Rifftides staff is off to Portland, Oregon for the first four days of the ten-day PDX Jazz Festival. I have been recruited to moderate a Saturday panel discussion about Frank Sinatra’s influence on jazz musicians. In my primary role as observer, I’m looking forward to hearing a diverse cast that includes newcomers like the French singer Cyrille Aimée and the young saxophonist Hailey Niswanger, as well as oldcomers like alto sax giants Lou Donaldson, 88, and Lee Konitz, 87.

In between: Hal Galper, Nicholas Payton, Marc Cary, Ron Carter, Taylor Eigsti, Vijay Iyer, Sheila Jordan, Benny Green, Bill Charlap, Stanley Jordan, Jackie Ryan, Julian Lage, Tain Watts and Freda Payne, to single out a few. Whew. For complete details, see the festival website. Blogging from Portland will be as often as time and endurance allow. Stay tuned. A visit to Portlandia is never less than interesting because the community spirit is——well, see the picture on your right.

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Boston, it would be kinder not to let you see this, but February out here is treating us rather differently from what you are enduring. Most years at this time eastern Washington State is likely to be covered in white.

Today, it was winter on the calendar but spring in the valley. The high temperature was in the sixties. I took the bicycle along a road halfway up Ahtanum Ridge, looked west and saw snow only on the summit of Mount Rainier, 14,400 feet high and 60 miles away (in the middle of the photograph). That’s good news for stir-crazy cyclists but bad news for skiers and for orchardists and other growers. Without a substantial snow pack in the mountains, this big old agricultural region faces the possibility of a severe water shortage this summer. That could mean we’ll all have fewer and more expensive apples, peaches, pears, cherries, asparagus and—god forbid—hops for beer making.

Boston: too much snow? Send it west.

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Clark Terry has gone into hospice care after years of illness in which he was able to stay at home. The great trumpeter is 94 and suffers from extreme complications of diabetes. A fund raising campaign in and beyond the jazz community made his home care possible. This afternoon, Billboard posted the hospice news with a message from CT’s wife Gwen, a brief summary of his career and video of a memorable appearance as his alter ego, the blues singer celebrated as “Mumbles.” To read the Billboard piece, go here.

When I learn of further developments in Clark’s situation, I will keep you informed. In the meantime, this Rifftides piece posted on his 90th birthday contains two performance videos and observations about the importance of one of the most gifted and beloved of all jazz artists.

CLARK TERRY IS 90
Posted on December 14, 2010

Today is Clark Terry’s 90th birthday. Admired for his trumpet, flugelhorn, singing and blues mumbling, Terry has been an idol of trumpet players since the teenaged Miles Davis took him for a role model in St. Louis in the 1940s. From his days with Charlie Barnet, Count Basie and Duke Ellington through his national prominence in the Tonight Show band and his long career as a leader and soloist, CT has been an inspiration to generations of musicians. It is a rare set in which Terry doesn’t include something by Ellington, whom he invariably calls Maestro. Here’s CT with his quartet at the Club Montmartre in Copenhagen in 1985. Duke Jordan is the pianist, Jimmy Woode the bassist, Svend E. Noregaard the drummer.

From Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of Its Makers, here is a passage from the chapter on Terry:

With Ellington, Terry blossomed. Duke’s genius for recognizing and capitalizing on the characteristics of his sidemen has rarely had more startling results than in the case of Clark Terry.

Ellington sensed in Terry something of the New Orleans tradition. When he was preparing A Drum Is A Woman, his suite in which New Orleans plays a large part, he chose Terry to portray Buddy Bolden. Bolden’s style is entirely legendary; no recordings of him are known to exist. Terry recalls protesting the assignment.

“I told him, ‘Maestro, I don’t know anything about Buddy Bolden. I wouldn’t know where to start.’ Duke said, ‘Oh, sure, you’re Buddy Bolden. He was just like you. He was suave. He had a good tone, he bent notes, he was big with diminishes, he loved the ladies, and when he blew a note in New Orleans, he’d break glass across the river in Algiers. Come on, you can do it.’ I told him I’d try, and I blew some phrases, and he said, ‘That’s it, that’s Buddy Bolden, that’s it, Sweetie.’ That’s how Maestro was. He could get out of you anything he wanted. And he made you believe you could do it. I suppose that’s why they used to say the band was his instrument. The Buddy Bolden thing is on the record, and Duke was satisfied. So as far as I’m concerned, it was Buddy Bolden.”

On this auspicious day in Clark Terry’s long life, let us indulge ourselves in one of his great summit meetings. At the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1977, he, Dizzy Gillespie, Eddie Lockjaw Davis and the Oscar Peterson Trio joined forces for the incomparable “Ali and Frazier,” introduced on this video by the impresario Norman Granz.

“Ali & Frazier” is also on this CD.
Happy birthday, CT.