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Following a long illness, Jackie Cain died Monday afternoon in her New Jersey home. She was 86. She and Roy Kral combined their talents in 1946. They incorporated the spirit of bebop in their work with Charlie Ventura’s sextet, capturing the public imagination with “East of Suez” and “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” Recorded with Ventura at a concert in Pasadena, California, in 1949, the records received widespread radio airplay in the days when that was still a route to jazz stardom. Following their marriage, the duo steadily gained popularity as Jackie and Roy, a collaboration that lasted until Kral’s death in 2002. The Ventura sextet also brought other young musicians to prominence. Here are Jackie and Roy in Pasadena with Ventura, tenor saxophone; Boots Mussulli, alto sax; Conte Candoli, trumpet; Bennie Green, trombone; Kenny O’Brien, bass; and Ed Shaughnessy, drums.

Jackie and Roy’s success as a team overshadowed Ms. Cain’s ability as a soloist. The purity of her voice, her flawless intonation, the intelligence and musicality of her phrasing, made her one of the finest jazz-oriented vocalists of her generation.

Private funeral services have been scheduled for pianist Joe Sample in Houston, Texas, on Saturday. He died of lung cancer in a Houston hospital on September 12 at the age of 75. There will be a wake and public viewing from 6 :00 to 9:00 p.m. on Saturday at the Our Mother of Mercy Church.

Sample’s career began in Houston, his home town, when he and friends formed a band at first called The Swingsters, then The Nighthawks. In 1961, when he was 22, it became The Jazz Crusaders. By 1972, the quintet had become increasingly oriented toward popular music and dropped the word Jazz from its name. They collaborated with Diana Ross, Joni Mitchell and Ray Charles, and toured with Charles Tom Scott’s L.A. Express and The Rolling Stones. As The Crusader’s pop audience grew, jazz listeners continued to cherish the band’s early work melding soul and funk elements with hard bop. From the Jazz Crusaders’ album recorded at The Lighthouse in 1968, here is Sample’s unorthodox setting of The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.” The band: Sample, piano; Stix Hooper, drums; Buster Williams bass; Wilton Felder, tenor saxophone; and Wayne Henderson, trombone.

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Tip 1. Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest program on Sunday will broadcast the tribute given pianist and composer George Cables at this summer’s Centrum Jazz Port Townsend festival on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Mr. Wilke recorded the concert in July. For years, as performer and teacher, Cables has been an integral part of the festival and its jazz workshops. From Mr. Wilke’s announcement:

Three pianists, Geoffrey Keezer, Benny Green and Dawn Clement take solo turns playing compositions by George Cables, and guitarist Anthony Wilson also contributes a piece associated with George Cables. The program ends with the master pianist playing one of his own compositions.

L to R, Green, Clement, Keezer, Cables, Wilson

George Cables honed his craft as a sideman before beginning his own career as a leader and soloist. Among the many influential leaders he played with are Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, Bobby Hutcherson, Freddie Hubbard, Woody Shaw and, perhaps most notably, Dexter Gordon and Art Pepper. He has recorded on dozens of albums and CDs, the most recent being his own Icons and Influences (HighNote).

Jazz Northwest will air at 2:00 PM PDT on Sunday on KPLU, 88.5 FM, and stream on the internet at KPLU.org.

To whet your appetite, here is Cables in concert last fall with bassist Abraham Laboriel and drummer Dennis Mackrel, playing “I Should Care.”

Tip 2. Later on Sunday, WBGO-FM in Newark, New Jersey will broadcast the last of Bill Kirchner’s contributions to its Jazz From The Archives programs. The station is dropping the long-running series at year’s end. Here is some of Mr. Kirchner’s preview of the show.

I’ve decided to focus on my proudest achievement in 45 years as a professional jazz musician: the music of my own Nonet, which was a working, touring,
 NYC-based band between 1980 and 2001. The Nonet recorded five albums–one of them a 2-CD set. The band included some of NYC’s finest jazz musicians and, I daresay, developed a unique identity. All of the three reed players “doubled” extensively on woodwinds, the two trumpeters doubled on flugelhorns, and the bass trombone provided a rich “bottom”; all this combined with a versatile rhythm section. As critic Larry Kart put it: “A musical coat of many colors, Kirchner’s Nonet sounds at times as though it were twice its actual size.”
The program will air this Sunday, September 14, from 11 p.m. to midnight, EDT on 88.3 FM in the Newark-New York City area. WBGO also broadcasts on the Internet at wbgo.org.

Tip 3. This is one to put on your calendar for next Friday, and Fridays thereafter, from 9 to 11 am EDT. Jason Crane (pictured), whose program The Jazz Session has been an internet pleasure for several years, now does a radio version of the show. It will be on the Pennsylvania State University radio station known as The Lion. That’s at 90.7 FM for those who listen in the State College, PA, area. Others may hear it on the web at http://thelion.fm.

View. After living in major metropolitan areas most of my adult life, I must confess to now and then missing their excitement, variety, hustle and surprises. For the most part, I’ve liked everywhere we’ve been, even Cleveland in the early 1960s. We left before the Cuyahoga River caught fire. I wasn’t overly bothered by the Los Angeles Traffic, New York’s grumpiness, the New Orleans humidity or San Francisco’s August fog. All of those places had plenty of compensations. Occasionally, I wonder what I’m doing in the agricultural hinterlands of the Pacific Northwest.

Then my friend Vig takes me for a ride. Vig is my bicycle, full name Vigorelli Bianchi. We come to the top of a rise, I look off toward the foothills of the Cascades, and I stop wondering.

Have a good weekend.

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In the September 8 Rifftides post about this week’s passing of Gerald Wilson, I mentioned his enhanced harmonic palette and its importance to modern jazz arranging (Photo courtesy of Gordon Sapsed). It is one aspect of the Wilson craftsmanship that continues to influence those who write for big bands. When I was working on the essay that accompanies the Mosaic box set of his Pacific Jazz recordings, Mr. Wilson and I discussed his development of eight-part harmony. He applied it to the piece he wrote in honor of the Spanish bullfighter Santiago Martín, known as El Viti (born in 1938).

“El Viti was a great matador,” Gerald says, “different from any other I ever saw. He never smiled, and he was tough. I tried to trace a picture of him, as it gets down into a unique part where his stuff in the ring would get wild but not overbearing. It was a place for me to use my eight-part harmony. You’ll hear the brass playing it, with two different times going at once. You know, I invented eight-part harmony.”

Here, the muted trumpet is by Wilson, the only instance of his playing with his band on a recording. Anthony Ortega is the alto saxophone soloist.

Again, from the Mosaic notes:

Multi-part harmony in modern classical music starts with Debussy and Ravel and reaches monumental proportions in Bartok, Stravinsky, Ives and Scriabin. I asked the composer and orchestrator Jeff Sultanoff about the use of eight-part harmony in jazz, and about Wilson’s role in it.

“As Gerald defines it,” Sultanof said, “it means that in an eight-part brass section, all parts are different, no doubling octaves and such. He was probably the first to do this, although other arrangers had tried similar things. I can think of Pete Rugolo as an immediate example, but he did not start doing it until about 1946, whereas Gerald claims he was doing it as early as 1945. I can also think of Ellington and Strayhorn who did not voice ensembles in the ‘standard’ way. There are isolated examples of it in Eddie Sauter and Bill Finegan’s work, but I don’t recall anyone doing it on a regular basis before Gerald.”

In 1966 Duke Ellington recorded Wilson’s arrangement of “El Viti,” also known in the Ellington book as “The Matador,” in the Verve album of Côte d’Azur Concerts. It was one of 16 arrangements Wilson supplied Ellington over the years.

At Côte d’Azur, Ellington used the piece as a showcase for trumpeter Cat Anderson. Here, as the band plays, film from the bullring shows El Viti at work.

On his Jazz Profiles blog, Steve Cerra revisits his comprehensive post about Gerald Wilson. It reproduces a substantial portion of my notes, but not the descriptions and analyses of “El Viti” and the 94 other tracks in the Mosaic box. To read Steve’s post, go here.

The Wilson Mosaic CD box set is long out of print. Copies may be found for upwards of 400 American dollars on Amazon and eBay, but Amazon offers an MP3 version for considerably less.

A personal aside: A few years ago at the Monterey Jazz Festival, friend Orrin Keepnews and I wandered into the Turf Club, the artists hangout not far from the main stage. There was Gerald in his baseball cap and his irrepressible smile, sitting with his wife. He waved us over, and we four sat chatting, laughing and sipping for nearly an hour. The good feeling lingers from the last time I spent with that remarkable man.

Word has come that Gerald Wilson died today in Los Angeles. A swing era trumpeter, he became the pioneering leader, composer and arranger of a modern big band that was a significant presence for more than sixty years. Wilson enriched the language of large ensembles by employing expanded harmonic structures. He was noted for, among other things, his colorful music inspired by Mexican bull fighting. For an obituary, see Don Heckman’s article in today’s Los Angeles Times.

In a post to come, I will have reflections on Wilson’s considerable contributions. In the meantime, here is the best known of his bull fighter series, “Viva Tirado,” this version featuring Joe Pass as guitar soloist, Carmell Jones on trumpet and Teddy Edwards playing tenor saxophone.

Gerald Wilson, 96, RIP

Web server problems resulting in massive slowness interfered with Rifftides today and, evidently, with all other blogs under the artsjournal.com umbrella. As a result, it was not possible to prepare and post new items. I would be happy to report that the crack Rifftides technical staff wrestled the problem to the ground and eliminated it, but there is no Rifftides technical staff. The difficulty seems to have fixed itself, and we’re back up and running, witness the next exhibit. I believe the standard jargon in such situations involves apologizing and regretting any inconvenience, although to my knowledge, no one has claimed inconvenience.
I will post as often as possible in the next day or two, but I am simultaneously careening toward the deadline for my next Wall Street Journal article. The crunch is on.

I regret any inconvenience.

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Bobby Shew sent a link to a performance by a guitarist named Doug Smith. After listening to Smith’s introductory story about his dad, no former Marine could be expected to ignore the video. Anyone who can finger-pick Sousa’s famous piccolo part in “Stars and Stripes Forever” while also playing the harmony and melody must be taken seriously. This is an opportunity to see and hear a man who enjoys his work.

I must confess to having known nothing about Doug Smith before Mr. Shew alerted me to him. I learned plenty from his impressive website.

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As pointed out in the previous exhibit, Americans and Canadians are taking a three-day holiday to observe Labor Day, which this year is Monday, September 1. On this occasion established nearly a century-and-a-half ago, they do their best to get sunburned, exhausted and happy—the latter with or without the aid of beer, which sells in oceanic quantities as summer winds down and people populate beaches, mountain meadows, national parks, RV camps and back yards.

There are several versions on the web of Cannonball Adderley’s quintet or sextet playing his brother Nat’s “Work Song.” The relatively rare one that you are about to see and hear is from a concert in Switzerland in 1963. Nat composed the piece remembering those who once performed forced labor on section gangs. Inevitably, though, disc jockeys and bloggers decide that it is compatible with a holiday that honors all working folks.

Here are the Adderleys, Joe Zawinul, Sam Jones and Louis Hayes with “Work Song.”

Enjoy the holiday. Don’t get sunburned.

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This is Labor Day weekend or, if you prefer the Canadian spelling, Labour Day weekend. Monday will see official observance of the day established in Canada in 1872 and the US in 1887 to honor the economic and social contributions of working people. It long ago expanded to a three-day holiday weekend that marks the unofficial end of summer, the return of children to school and huge sales at department stores, automobile dealerships and sellers of electronics. Millions of Americans celebrate Labor Day by grilling and consuming pieces of meat marinated in or covered with barbecue sauce.

So, what could be more appropriate than to honor the laboring classes with two versions of Lil Hardin Armstrong’s classic composition. The first, from 1927 is by the man she was married to at the time and his Hot Five. The second, cooler, with the title and the beat altered, was recorded 41 years later.

Louis Armstrong (tp); Kid Ory (tb); Johnny Dodds (cl); Lil Armstrong (p); Johnny St. Cyr (bj). November 9, 1927.

Paul Desmond, alto saxophone; Herbie Hancock, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Airto Moreira, drums; Joe Beck, guitar; Wayne Andre, Paul Faulise, Bill Watrous, Kai Winding, trombone; John Eckert, Joe Shepley, Marvin Stamm, trumpet; Ray Alonge, Tony Miranda, French horn; Don Sebesky, arranger. November 20, 1968.

Tomorrow: A rather different piece of Labor Day music .

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News has arrived that my notes for the new Jan Lundgren solo piano CD have been submitted to the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for a possible Grammy nomination. I hasten to emphasize that a submission is not a nomination. The essay required some of the most exhaustive research I have ever done for an album annotation. It involved the pleasure of listening repeatedly to All By Myself and investigating the history of each of its 14 pieces, classics from what we have all come to call the great American songbook. I thought I knew something about the backgrounds of “‘Round Midnight” and “My Heart Stood Still,” to mention two of the tracks. Yet, surprising information surfaced about each of them and most of the others.

I was flattered that producer Dick Bank asked me to do the writing, happy to be involved in a minor way with so important an achievement, and to be given carte blanche concerning length (the essay is more than 5,000 words). Liner notes aside, Jan Lundgren thinks—and I agree—that the album is the best recorded work of his more than two decades as a professional pianist. It is a milestone in his career.

Is a liner note writer walking a thin ethical line when he mentions a project with which he is connected? I don’t think so. This isn’t a review. I’m sharing good news. I want to share it with Rifftides readers.

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From Philadelphia comes news of the death of John Blake, Jr., a violinist who combined his classical training, love for the African-American musical tradition and sense of adventure to become prominent on the forward edge of jazz in the 1970s. Blake was 67. He made his mark recording with tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp and soon won the Violinist Deserving Wider Recognition category in the Down Beat Critics Poll. His fame widened when he toured with Grover Washington, Jr’s band and then with pianist McCoy Tyner in several of Tyner’s groups. He worked with a variety of artists including Duke Ellington, Steve Turre, Cecil McBee, James Newton and Billy Taylor. In recent years, Blake devoted much of his time and energy to the development of musical interest in young people in his native Philadelphia.

Here is Blake in 2001 with Taylor, bassist Chip Jackson and drummer Winard Harper in a program at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

For an obituary of Blake, see this article in The Philadelphia Inquirer. It includes video that shows Blake’s affinity for young people.

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Following the Bill Evans birthday piece three days ago, a note from Alan Broadbent about Evans reminded me of a Rifftides post from five years ago. The piece placed Evans in the context of his work in the 1950s with George Russell. It appeared on the occasion of Russell’s death, and it included video of some of Evans’ most stimulating playing. This appeared on July 29, 2009.

George Russell died Monday night. Here are some of the facts of his life, outlined by the Associated Press.

BOSTON (AP) — Jazz composer George Russell, a MacArthur fellow whose theories influenced the modal music of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, has died. His publicist says Russell, who taught at the New England Conservatory, died Monday in Boston at age 86 of complications from Alzheimer’s.

Russell was born in Cincinnati in 1923 and attended Wilberforce University. He played drums in Benny Carter’s band and later wrote ”Cubano Be/Cubano Bop” for Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra. It premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1947 and was the first fusion of Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz. Russell developed the Lydian concept in 1953. It’s credited as the first theoretical contribution from jazz.
Russell is survived by his wife, his son and three grandchildren. A release says a memorial service will be planned.

The first sentence of that AP story barely suggests Russell’s importance. There will be much more written and spoken about him in the next few days by scholars and historians, as there should be. The work he did, particularly in the 1950s and ’60s, had major influence on the thinking and performance of musicians who were shaping new ways of approaching the music. On a radio program I did in the sixties, I devoted five weeks of broadcasts to Russell’s music. This was the introduction to that series on Jazz Review on WDSU-FM in New Orleans in September and October of 1966.

Over the next few programs we’re going to consider the recorded work of George Russell – not only because Russell’s music is interesting, absorbing listening, but also because of his influence of the development of jazz in the sixties, an influence, I believe, more profound and widespread than is generally recognized even by many musicians. It may well develop that Russell is having an impact on the course of jazz as great as, or greater than, that of such imitated innovators as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.

Russell believes that jazz must develop on its own terms, from within. He believes that to borrow the concepts of classical music and force jazz into the mold of the classical tradition results in something perhaps interesting, perhaps Third Stream music, but not jazz. Faced with this conviction that jazz musicians must look to jazz for their means of growth, Russell set about creating a framework within which to work.

In 1953 he completed his Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization. The system is built on what he calls pan-tonality, bypassing the atonal ground covered by modern classical composers and making great use of chromaticism. Russell explains that pan-tonality allows the write and the improviser to retain the scale-based nature of the folk music in which jazz has its roots, yet have the freedom of being in a number of tonalities at once. Hence, pan-tonality.

That’s a brief and far from complete reduction of George Russell’s theory, on which he worked for ten years. It’s all in Russell’s book, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Jazz Improvisation.

Freedom within restrictions, however broad.
Discipline.

Improvising Russell’s way demands great technical skill. Listening to his recordings, one is struck by the virtuoso nature of the players. Some of their names: Bill Evans, Paul Bley, Don Ellis, Dave Baker, John Coltrane, Art Farmer, Steve Swallow, Eric Dolphy. Evans is featured soloist in Russell’s 1960 Decca recording, Jazz In The Space Age, the most thorough application of Russell’s theories to a large band. If you’re not familiar with Russell, all that talk about concepts and theories and pan-tonality and chromaticism may have led you to expect something dry and formidable. On the contrary, there’s a sense of fun and airiness in the music. The humor is subtle, but it’s there. And, I should add, it’s more evident after several hearings.

For five Saturdays, engineer Charlie Flatt played and I talked about Russell’s music, reaching back to 1947 and his “Cubano Be-Cubano Bop” for Gillespie and up to his 1963 quintet album The Outer View. The survey included the classic “All About Rosie,” commissioned by Brandeis University in 1957, the smalltet recordings for RCA, Russell’s series of Riverside albums and the remarkable suite New York, New York, a work recorded in 1958 and 1959 that brought together, among other players, Evans, Coltrane, Bob Brookmeyer, Art Farmer, and Phil Woods, all interesting young musicians who went on to be among the most influential in jazz.

For a sense of Russell and New York milieu in which he operated in the late 1950s, video of a 1958 edition of The Subject Is Jazz brings together several of the musicians who played his music. It includes a version of Rusell’s “Concerto For Billy The Kid,” with a Bill Evans solo not as electrifying as the one on this recording. Nonetheless, it presents Evans in the context of Russell’s work, and it is followed by critic Gilbert Seldes interviewing Russell about his concept. The program also has two pieces featuring Billy Taylor. If you stay with it for all 24 minutes, you’ll see credits for the musicians. And, yes the trumpeter identified as Carl Severinsen is Doc Severinsen. You may never have thought of him as a bebopper, but listen to those solos.

Was George Russell a force in opening jazz to greater freedom In the late fifties and early sixties, as I suggested 43 years ago, or did his Lydian Chromatic Concept synthesize ideas that were already in the air? Some of each, perhaps. Either way, he created some of the most stimulating music of his day, up to, including and beyond his collaboration with avant garde trumpeter Don Cherry. I am less enchanted with his later electronic works, but I’m going to dig them out and give myself another chance with them. After all, it’s George Russell; there may be more than met the ear the first time around.

Following that 1966 series of radio programs about Russell, I sent him a transcript, not knowing whether he would ever see it. I heard reports from New York that he was discouraged and had left the US to live in Europe. A few months later he sent me a letter from Stockholm.

It is like I have waited a lifetime to hear someone say the things which you did concerning my music (and if I never hear them again I will not feel that my efforts in jazz have gone unrewarded). I received the transcript at the right moment, too, for I was in one of those states of flux that I’ve come to accept as a necessary but painful part of artistic growth. It is very trying during these times to keep one’s self-confidence and I must admit that my morale was sagging more than a little bit. But your sensitive views of my music worked wonders.

Closing a long letter, Russell wrote that he hoped we would meet one day. We never did.
(For an obituary containing insights into Russell’s methods see the article by Brian Marquard and Michael Bailey in today’s Boston Globe)

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Mike Harris is one of several Rifftides readers who sent reminders that this is Bill Evans’ 85th birthday. Over a decade in the 1960s and ‘70s, Mr. Harris surreptitiously recorded the pianist at the Village Vanguard in New York. His recordings make up the eight-volume box set Bill Evans: The Secret Sessions. In a note, he suggested, “—perhaps worth a mention?”

This anniversary of the most influential jazz pianist of the second half of the twentieth century is worth more than a mention. From my notes for The Secret Sessions:

After young Bill Evans (1929-1980) got out of the Army in 1954, he became an indispensible sideman on the New York jazz scene. He recorded his first trio album late in 1956 and little more than a year later had begun to enhance his reputation through brilliant work with Miles Davis. Acting on insights gained from the music of Debussy and other impressionist composers, he enriched his chords beyond those of any other jazz pianist. Comparisons that come to mind are harmonies that Bil Evans and Robert Farnon wrote for large orchestras and with some of the mysterious voicings of Duke Ellington. Even in his earliest work he stretched and displaced rhythm and melody and hinted at modes and scales as the basis for improvisation.

With the 1958 sextet that also included saxophonists John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, bassist Paul Chambers, and initially, drummer Philly Joe Jones (replaced before very long by Jimmy Cobb), Evans had enormous influence in determining the course that mainstream jazz follows to this day. Although in his own groups he was to remain within the song form all of his life, at this time Evans clearly accelerated Davis’s change from a repertoire of popular songs and jazz standards to pieces with fewer chord changes and greater demands on the taste, judgment and imagination of the soloist.

That was “Flamenco Sketches.” For an appearance at Umbria Jazz in Italy in 1978, Evans reunited with Philly Joe Jones, the drummer with whom he had formed a strong partnership in the Davis sextet 20 years earlier. The bassist was Marc Johnson, a regular member of Evans’ last trio. The piece is Jimmy Rowles’ “The Peacocks,” a staple of Evans’ latterday repertoire.

For Bill Evans in a variety of settings, go to this YouTube page and begin browsing through dozens of audio tracks and videos.