In January, after looking over the lineup for this year’s New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, which was laden with rock and pop, I wrote:

More than five years after Katrina, with the city recovering but much of it still resembling a post-war nightmare, a party called a jazz festival symbolizes New Orleans’ determination to recover. That speaks of a spirit that rises from within New Orleanians and cuts through a malaise of failed leadership, politics and bureaucracy. For eight years, I was a New Orleanian. I understand that spirit. It grows out of the curious combination of laissez faire and obstinance that animates folks whose blood has a component of coffee with chicory.


Partying, food, boogying and getting down are wonderful. Few Orleanians would disagree with any of that…

…It is clear that popular taste no longer embraces jazz as a central element. It is equally clear that the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is here to stay as a kaleidoscope of entertainment. It would be welcome if the city also had room for a festival that honored and nurtured the music that is the living symbol of the New Orleans spirit. Somehow, jazz ended up with a bit part in what the natives still call JazzFest.

To read all of that piece, which includes early JazzFest history, go here:

The festival wound up last weekend. How did it work out? It depends on whom you ask, of course. The bookkeepers in the JazzFest front office may be ecstatic, those who wanted to hear jazz less so; columnist Brian Ross, for instance. Here’s some of what he wrote on The Huffington Post.

Jazz may get top billing on the signage and the posters at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, but it rides the back of the bus on the fairgrounds.
There’s a reason for this too… (Shhhh…) Jazz doesn’t make the festival much money.

The smallish jazz tent at “Jazz Fest” was relegated to a location directly behind the big ACURA main stage where the blow-back of the mega-speakers blaring alternative pop bands like Arcade Fire muddled the music of The Mingus Big Band and others.

Only a festival with the namesake Jazz was positioned for that kind of disrespect. Not Gospel. Not Blues. Not Cajun.

To read all of Ross’s report, go here.

If you attended JazzFest, please use the comment box below to share your impressions with fellow Rifftides readers.

A Rifftides archive browser who identifies himself only as Hank wrote to take me to task:

I feel certain you are friends with Miller Williams. My main comment
is that if you are going to publish online his poetry, it seems you
would want to get it right. There are numerous errors in the poem I
found on this site, from formatting to punctuation to capitalization.
Not meaning to get on your case about this, but I did notice it. I
send this respectfully.

Over the past six years, I have posted two of friend Williams’s poems. I checked the one about Slow Drag Pavageau, posted in 2006, and found that it was accurately transcribed. Whew.

Hank was right to get on my case about the other one. I plead guilty to all three of his charges. Since few readers are likely to go back to items put up six years ago, I apologize to Professor Williams and attempt to make restitution by reposting the piece, complete with an added photograph and updated links. This first ran on July 22, 2005. The atrocities it refers to were in a string that continues with little sign of letup, unless the recent event in Abbottabad was a turning point. We can hope.

Following the most recent rounds of atrocities—Iraq, London—a friend wanted to talk. He did not have comforting insights into mankind’s oldest philosophical question, nor did I. I don’t know whether Miller Williams has the answer, but this distinguished American poet ponders it beautifully. With his permission, here is one of his finest poems.

Why God Permits Evil:
For Answers to This Question
Of Interest to Many
Write Bible Answers, Dept. E-7

—ad on a matchbook cover

Of interest to John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas
for instance and Job for instance who never got

one straight answer but only his cattle back.
With interest, which is something, but certainly not

any kind of answer unless you ask
God if God can demonstrate God’s power

and God’s glory, which is not a question.
You should all be living at this hour.

You had Servetus to burn, the elect to count,
bad eyes and the Institutes to write;

you had the exercises and had Latin,
the hard bunk and the solitary night;

you had the neighbors to listen to and your woman
yelling at you to curse God and die.

Some of this to be on the right side;
some of it to ask in passing, Why?

Why badness makes its way in a world He made?
How come he looked for twelve and got eleven?

You had the faith and looked for love, stood pain,
learned patience and little else. We have E-7.

Churches may be shut down everywhere,
half-written philosophy books be tossed away.

Some place on the South Side of Chicago
a lady with wrinkled hose and a small gray

bun of hair sits straight with her knees together
behind a teacher’s desk on the third floor

of an old shirt factory, bankrupt and abandoned
except for this just cause, and on the door:

Dept. E-7. She opens the letters
asking why God permits it and sends a brown

plain envelope to each return address.
But she is not alone. All up and down

the thin and creaking corridors are doors
and desks behind them: E-6, E-5, 4, 3.

A desk for every question, for how we rise
blown up and burned, for how the will is free,

for when is Armageddon, for whether dogs
have souls or not and on and on. On

beyond the alphabet and possible numbers
where cross-legged, naked, and alone,

there sits a pale, tall, and long-haired woman
upon a cushion of fleece and eiderdown

holding in one hand a handwritten answer,
holding in the other hand a brown

plain envelope. On either side, cobwebbed
and empty baskets sitting on the floor

say In and Out. There is no sound in the room.
There is no knob on the door. Or there is no door.

©1999 by Miller Williams

Williams wrote and read the inaugural poem at the beginning of President Bill Clinton’s second term in 1997, four years after Maya Angelou was the inaugural poet as President Clinton began his first term. In a PBS program, The Inaugural Classroom, a 12th grader asked Williams how it felt to be compared to Angelou.

“She writes opera and classical music,” Williams said, “and I write jazz and blues.”

The late poet John Ciardi summed up Williams this way:

Miller Williams writes about ordinary people in the extraordinary moments of their lives. Even more remarkable is how, doing this, he plays perilously close to plain talk without ever falling into it; how close he comes to naked sentiment without yielding to it; how close he moves to being very sure without ever losing the grace of uncertainty. Add to this something altogether apart, that what a good reader can expect to sense, coming to these poems, is a terrible honesty, and we have among us a voice that makes a difference.

“Why God Permits Evil” appears most recently in Williams’s collected poems, Some Jazz a While. To learn more about Miller Williams, go here.

Lately, readers have asked how to sign up for Rifftides RSS feeds and be notified of new posts and comments. On the right side of the blue bar at the top of the screen, you will see a pair of symbols like this. Click on the one next to “Posts” or the one next to “Comments,” or both, and then click on “Subscribe.” Voila!

Rifftides reader Debra Kinzler’s notice that a quartet of Clifford Jordan’s admirers will revive his Glass Bead Games prompts me to post a slightly revised version of a 2007 piece about a landmark recording that became unavailable for too long. Ms. Kinzler informs us that tenor saxophonist Seamus Blake, pianist Eric Reed, drummer Billy Drummond and bassist Dezron Douglas will perform Jordan’s work in an engagement May 17-22 at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in New York. She describes the 1974 album as “monumental,” an adjective that passes the hyperbole test. Here’s what we posted when it became known, after the LP had all but disappeared, that the music would finally make it to CD.

Glass Bead Games: A Reissue Event

Clifford Jordan, one of the great (term used advisedly) tenor saxophonists of the second half of the twentieth century, in 1974 made a magnificent album called Glass Bead Games. Billy Higgins was the drummer on all twelve tracks. Cedar Walton and Stanley Cowell shared piano duties. Sam Jones and Bill Lee were the bassists in the two editions of Jordan’s quartet represented on the album. Sonny Rollins, who rarely provides blurbs, called Glass Bead Games “Clifford Jordan at his best…with a great band!”

The album consisted entirely of Jordan compositions, a practice often adopted for the wrong reasons. Jordan followed it for the right ones; he was an accomplished and original composer, and he was inspired by Herman Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game. His music captures something of the mystery and strange energy of that story. The playing by all hands–but particularly by Jordan–is exceptional. Issued as a double LP on the Strata East label, the album finds Jordan maintaining his commitment to mainstream values while edging into the freedom of new music pioneered by colleagues like Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. He achieved a balance that might have served as an example for some of the space cadets who took the new music so far out that it became inaccessible to most listeners.

Glass Bead Games has not been generally available in its entirety for years. I have heard of copies of the LP set going at auction for as much as $100.00. From time to time, CDs of the album have been available from Japan at high prices. Now that she has acquired the rights to it, Jordan’s widow Sandra (he died in 1993) has made Glass Bead Games available at a reasonable price, apparently only from this source. Its reappearance is an important reissue event. I did an A/B comparison of the original LPs to the CD and was relieved to find that the sound quality has not been digitally distorted.
(First posted October 9, 2007)

Debra Kinzler gets the final words—a biographical sketch of Jordan.

Clifford Jordan (1931 – 1993) was born in Chicago. He was a self-taught musician who claimed his biggest musical influence was Lester Young. He played his first professional gig with Max Roach, eventually leaving Chicago to replace Sonny Rollins in the Max Roach quintet. He later worked with Sony Stitt, Charles Mingus, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, Randy Weston and J.J. Johnson, among many others. His style of tenor sax playing was powerful and soulful and he was often thought to be the tenor saxophonist of his generation to carry on the torch of “Lester Young.” Clifford Jordan’s music was often misunderstood and undervalued, staying that way even at the time of his passing at the premature age of 61.

New Orleans is the only place I know of where you ask a little kid what he wants to be and instead of saying “I want to be a policeman,” or “I want to be a fireman,” he says, I want to be a musician.”—Alan Jaffe

I was just like the rest of the kids, wanted to now all about that new music called jazz. I was a second-line kid. That meant I’d follow the big bands down the street and, man, what a thrill when Tio or George Baquet would let me carry their cases while they played!—Albert Nicholas

If I had grown up in any place but New Orleans, I don’t think my career would have taken off. I wouldn’t have heard the music that was around this town. There was so much going on when I was a kid.—Pete Fountain

Five years ago, I wrote about Tom Sancton’s book Song For My Fathers being assigned reading for Tulane University’s incoming students. That venerable school chose it to give the freshmen a shared intellectual experience that would stimulate discussion. Not incidentally, it would also acquaint them with a profound aspect of the culture and caché of Tulane’s home, New Orleans.

A respected correspondent, an overseas bureau chief and a clarinetist who mastered the traditional music of his hometown, Sancton has now adapted the book as a theatrical experience. The stage presentation will run in a St. Charles Avenue theater for two weekends this month. This preview is enough to make me want to drop everything and hurry down to a place that, during my eight years there, got into my blood and won’t get out.

For Sancton in a different context—trading fours with Wynton Marsalis at the 2002 Marciac Festival in France—go here. Sancton, clarinet; Marsalis, trumpet; Charles Bremner, piano; Adrian Dearnell, bass; Philippe Camus, drums.

This is the latest of our periodic efforts to keep up with recorded music. Some of these CDs are recent. Some have been languishing in the holding pen for months. Some are timeless standard repertoire items that the Rifftides staff believes everyone should know about. The album titles in blue italics are links.

Joshua Redman, Aaron Parks, Matt Penman, Eric Harland, James Farm (Nonesuch)
For the most part, leaderless cooperatives in jazz have assembled to record and then gone their separate ways. Some of those brief encounters produced enduring music. The 1937 Teddy Wilson- Harry James-Red Norvo-John Simmons “Just a Mood” comes to mind; Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Getz with the Oscar Peterson Trio in 1953; John Lewis, Bill Perkins, Jim Hall, Percy Heath and Chico Hamilton in the Grand Encounter session of 1956; Cal Tjader and Getz in 1958; Ron Carter, Sadao Watanabe, Hank Jones and Tony Williams for Carnaval in 1993.

It is less common for prominent leaders and soloists to join forces as a working group. Saxophonist Redman, pianist Parks, bassist Penman and drummer Harland combined for the 2009 Montreal Jazz Festival, stayed together, and are on an ambitious world tour under the name James Farm. All of them contribute compositions. After 20 years of prominence, Redman’s virtuosity is well known. Penman’s strength and the depth and surge of Parks’s playing may come as a revelation to many. The power from these four dynamos throbs beneath the surface. With their degree of intensity, they don’t need volume to transmit urgency. Tension and release operate in harness. The unity of harmonic sophistication among Parks, Redman and Penman combines with Harland’s subtle use of rhythmic muscle to bring elation to the bucolic meander of Parks’s “Bijou”. Flavored by Harland’s accent bursts, “Chronos” recalls Bartók in its Slavic country-folk spirit, if not in its inconclusive ending. Overall, the album has a fine balance between peacefulness and strength.

JD Allen, Victory! (Sunnyside).
The pianoless trio worked for Sonny Rollins, Jimmy Giuffre, John Coltrane, Joe Henderson, Joe Lovano and Branford Marsalis and it works for Allen. The young tenor saxophonist’s brevity, though not his style, gives him more in common with Guiffre than with his other predecessors. Through the succession of short pieces that make Victory! a sort of suite, Allen’s sound and passion recall Coltrane, but his ability to capsulize cogent statements puts him in a category apart from most of Coltrane’s longwinded successors. Bassist Gregg August and drummer Rudy Royston are close in support and in empathy. Royston’s strategically placed cymbal splashes are a delight.

Bill Anschell, Figments (Origin).
Anschell’s liner notes say that he recorded this solo piano album mostly late at night. It has the qualities of nocturnal reminiscing—relaxation, free association, bemusement. His moods and treatments range from the pointillism of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” through the beefy swing of “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” to the dreamscape of “All My Tomorrows.” Along the way he constructs a fantasia on “Spinning Wheel” and checks out Fats Waller, the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, and Rodgers & Hart.

Herb Geller, At The Movies (Hep). When this showed up three years ago, I carefully put it where I’d be sure to find it and write a review the following week. I found it yesterday. So much for that filing system. The good news is that this is classic work by the veteran alto saxophonist— full of melody leavened by Geller’s bebop piquancy, and with a rhythm section sparked by bassist Martin Wind and pianist Don Friedman. The album has “Close Enough for Love,” “Laura,” “Invitation” and other standards that began life in film. Geller and Friedman take an exhilarating romp through “Ding Dong The Witch is Dead” from The Wizard of Oz. Unexpected surprises: themes from Taxi Driver and Marnie combined in a waltz and “Troubled Waters,” a gorgeous ballad from the 1934 Mae West picture Belle of the Nineties. Geller was only 79 when he made this satisfying album. How is he doing this year? See this recent post.

Peter Schärli, Ithamara Koorax, O Grande Amor (TCB). Koorax’s soft voice is an instrument of tonal precision, innate swing and variety of emotional inflection. She joins Swiss trumpeter Schärli’s trio (pianist Hans-Peter Pfammatter and bassist Thomas Dürst) in a collection of songs mostly by writers from Koorax’s native Brazil. The exception is Pfammatter’s “Wedileto,” which holds its own with pieces by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Ary Barroso, Vinicius de Moraes and other major Brazilian composers. Koorax and Schärli share the use of quietness to achieve expressive power. Each of their solos on the title tune is a prime example of that ability. The way the Swiss swing with Koorax through the samba rhythms of Baden Powell’s “Deixa” and Fernando Lobo’s “Zum Zum” suggests that there must be favelas in Geneva, Bern and Zurich.

Hampton Hawes, The Green Leaves of Summer (Contemporary). This is not a reissue. It has been on CD since 1990 and LP since 1964, when it was recorded. Thanks goodness it is still available, as it should be always. It is the album that marked Hawes’s return to—ahem—civilian life and reflects his joy at that circumstance. The pianist was feeling elated and free because President John F. Kennedy had granted him a presidential pardon after five years of a 10-year Federal sentence for possession, an indiscretion he evidently never repeated. With Steve Ellington on drums and Monk Montgomery on bass, Hawes enriched film composer Dmitri Tiomkin’s title tune with enhanced harmonies and recorded memorable versions of seven other tunes, including “St. Thomas,” “Blue Skies,” “The More I See You” and two remarkable blues performances. This is one of those basic repertoire items mentioned above.

We’ll have more recent-listening reviews soon.

Well, fairly soon.

Eventually.

Stay tuned.

Has anyone else noticed that radio and TV weather people report or predict “warm temperatures” or “cold temperatures.” Temperatures are not warm or cold. Air is warm or cold. Temperatures are high or low, or somewhere in between. Please, weather people.

And another thing, as Andy Rooney would say: Gene Lees, refusing to submit to the PC usage “weatherpersons,” called them “weatherthings.” Boy, do I miss him.

At 82, Herb Geller is still living in Germany, still touring in Europe, with occasional—too rare—visits to his US homeland. Here he is last February in Aberdeen, Scotland, at a club called the Blue Lamp. His rhythm section is pianist Paul Kirby, bassist Martin Zenker and drummer Rick Hollander. They play Billy Strayhorn’s “Johnny Come Lately.”

What’s the reason for posting this performance? Listen.

Several days ago in the course of conducting a web search, Vicki Overfelt came across a 2008 Rifftides mini-review of a Rosa Passos album, Romance. She used the comment function to ask if anyone could help her find the object of her search. She wanted the words to “Desilusión,” a song Passos wrote with lyricist Santiago Auserón and recorded on her 2006 CD Rosa. Skeptical that other trollers might find her plea so long after the initial item, we nonetheless posted the query.

Lo and behold, yesterday Rubén González sent a message from Rosario, Argentina, with the Spanish lyrics to “Desilusión.” We thank Sr. González. To see the original review in its Recent Listening, In Brief setting and the chain of correspondence containing the lyrics, go here.

Please take advantage of the Rifftides archives. You might find something you’ve been looking for or get a surprise. You can enter a term in the box to the left of “Search” just below the artsJournalblogs logo at the top right of the page. Or you can scroll down to “Archives” in the right-hand column, choose a month—or several months—and just rummage around. There are more than six years of posts to roam in. Enjoy.

The animated digital robot spoofs springing up on the internet include several aimed at the jazz-insider culture, in particular at the hipper-than-thou talk exchanged among students of the art who may be ever so slightly over-educated and just too cool—but not too cool for words. There are plenty of words in these cartoons. One of the most inviting targets for robot satire is the school of musicians who pattern themselves on the playing and teachings of Lennie Tristano and his accolytes. If you haven’t encountered the Tristano film, it might be a good idea to watch it before you get to the video below. The cartoon comes in two parts, here and here. It’s advisable to have impressionable young children out of the room. Following the viewing, come back to Rifftides for the next exhibit.

The deadly serious, quasi-religious devotion of those who are “so lucky to be Tristanoites” is prime material for lampooning. Whether Tristano (1919-1978) would be amused, we’ll never know. But it would be unfortunate if people seduced by the cleverness of the cartoons concluded that Tristano’s music was less than important. It occurred to members of the Rifftides staff that some of the younger fans of these little films may miss the point that the subject is the Tristano cult, not Tristano. Some readers may never have heard his music. We can fix that. Here he is in solo in Copenhagen in 1965.

The concert from which that piece came is on this DVD.

If you’d like to invite Tristano into your record collection, I suggest that Intuition is a good place to start. The CD has the 1949 Capitol recordings that led composer and historian Bill Kirchner to write that they are “among the greatest in the history of recorded jazz—triumphs of conception and execution by a group of musicians who had been in close collaboration for a year.” That group included saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh and guitarist Billy Bauer. Intuition also contains 1956 sessions with saxophonists Marsh and Ted Brown and pianist Ronnie Ball, Tristano students all.

Those cartoon robots’ ribbing of the Tristanoite disciples may be something to laugh at. Tristano’s music is something to hear.

Trummy Young and Johnny Mercer wrote “Travelin’ Light.” Billie Holiday owned it. This version with an unidentified pianist was made in Paris in 1959, the year she died. It is one of her most affecting treatments of a song that became one of her signature pieces.

For more about Billie and “Travelin’ Light,” including her original recording of the song and an unusual version by Chet Baker, visit Bruno Leicht’s new blog entry.

The logical followup to the piece below about Chris Byars’ hero Lucky Thompson is a piece by Thompson. Here’s a film from Paris in 1959 at the Blue Note. The rhythm section is Bud Powell, piano; Pierre Michelot, bass; Jimmy Gourley, guitar; Kenny Clarke, drums. The compostion is Dizzy Gillespie’s and Charlie Parker’s “Anthropology.” The video clip ends before the tune does, but this is a rare opportunity to see the great tenor saxophonist in action with a band of his peers.

Make that two pieces by Thompson. This is from a 1957 French television broadcast. The song is “I’ll Remember April.” Michelot and Clarke are again in the rhythm section. This time the pianist is Martial Solal. Thompson’s ingenious exploitation of the chords is an example of the harmonic inventiveness that won him the admiration of musicians from the 1940s to this day.

Chris Byars, Lucky Strikes Again (Steeplechase).
This album by a gifted saxophonist, composer and arranger has several things to recommend it.

It presents 10 pieces written and arranged by Lucky Thompson (1924-2005), a saxophonist whose brilliance and originality as a player and writer failed to make him as well known as equally gifted contemporaries like Miles Davis, Stan Getz and Milt Jackson. Byars painstakingly transcribed most of the arrangements from recordings of a 1961 Thompson concert broadcast in Germany. Others, he arranged based on Thompson quartet records. Pieces like “Old Reliable,” “Could I Meet You Later?” “Another Whirl” and other discoveries are substantial additions to known compositions by Thompson.

Byars’ arrangements for an octet cast the tunes in the not-small, not-big format that offers tonal colors impossible in a quartet or quintet, with flexibility and subtlety difficult to achieve with the weight of a standard 15- or 16-piece big band. His sidemen include some of New York’s finest club and studio jazz musicians. Among them are trumpeter Scott Wendholt, alto saxophonist Zaid Nasser and trombonist John Mosca. Byars’ own playing evidences affection for Thompson’s, without indulgence in slavish imitation. His treatment of “Just One More Chance,” a major Thompson recording, is impressive.

The music reflects lessons Thompson learned from his contemporary Tadd Dameron, an arranger whose work was a pervasive influence in jazz from the late forties to the mid-sixties and has never lost its freshness. As Mark Gardner points out in his interesting album notes, Dameron’s example helped form Quincy Jones, Gigi Gryce, Benny Golson and Oscar Pettiford. With this work, Byars can claim a place in that line. He deserves credit for reminding listeners, by way of this stimulating collection, of Lucky Thompson’s importance.

Shortly after Thompson’s death six years ago, Rifftides posted a summary of Thompson’s career and a guide to some of his recordings. To see it, click here.

Tony Emmerson’s blog Prague Jazz has come out of hibernation after several months of dormancy. It was, and presumably again will be, a prime source of information about music in one of eastern Europe’s great centers of culture. The main re-entry item is an interview with saxophonist Julian Nicholas, like Emmerson a native of the UK who has developed strong ties to the Czech Republic. The interview is capped with video of Nicholas in performance with the Emil Viklický Trio. The quirky cinematography is presumably by way of Viklický’s unmanned camera perched on his piano. The sound quality is good. To read the interview and see the performance, go here.

A friend just pointed out that this is the birthday of Joe Henderson (1937-2001). The Rifftides time clock says that I’m punched out for the holiday, but to post a remembrance of Joe I’m sneaking past the security guards and putting up this remarkable performance of a piece associated nearly as closely with Henderson as with the man who wrote it, Kenny Dorham. The initial recording of “Blue Bossa” was in 1963 with Dorham on Page One, Henderson’s debut as a leader. It was one of a remarkable series of Blue Note albums they made together. Perhaps it is not out of the question to imagine that during this 1994 performance in Munich, Henderson was thinking of his old pal. He is the only soloist, soaring on the support he gets from bassist George Mraz, drummer Al Foster and pianist Bheki Mseluku and ending with a quixotic coda—two of them, in fact.

Here’s a cheery version of Irving Berlin’s classic holiday song. It’s by Jimmie Lunceford’s band, recorded in 1939. The vocal and exuberant trombone solo are by Trummy Young. Have patience, please. It takes the Garrard disc jockey a while to get it cued up, giving you nearly 15 seconds to read the record label.

Happy Easter.

For reasons involving the configuration of the new publishing platform, Rifftides had to put off posting a new batch of Doug’s Picks. The crack artsjournal.com technical team has eliminated the barrier and in the right-hand column you will find the staff’s recommendations of new CDs by a pianist leading a big band, a pianist leading a trio and the welcome reissue of classic Stan Getz quintet recordings. We are also alerting you to a delightful Erroll Garner DVD and a book that takes a seriously lighthearted approach to use of the language.