Hal Galper, E Pluribus Unum (Origin). You won’t be hearing Galper on your favorite easy listening station. The past few years, the pianist has used sonic density, astringent harmonies, massive technique and powerful swing to build intricate edifices. Galper’s music is demanding beyond even the muscular bebop he played when he was the pianist in Phil Woods’ quintet. The experienced listener who brings an open mind will be drawn in by a story teller creating layers of meaning with expressed and implied allusions to shared musical understanding. Bassist Jeff Johnson and drummer John Bishop, members of Galper’s working trio, agree so thoroughly with his ethos that the three achieve the accord suggested by name of the album. Several hearings (recommended) disclose the depth of their relationship and interaction
In Charlie Parker’s “Constellation,” the trio’s unity coalesces around swirls of sound spinning out of “I Got Rhythm” harmonies and suggesting the subject of the piece’s title. “How Deep is the Ocean” builds–and builds–and builds–on Irving Berlin’s melody and chord changes, moving into realms of complexity that Berlin never imagined when he wrote the song in 1932. Duke Ellington’s “Take the Coltrane” is as a free as a blues can be and still be the blues. Of Galper’s original compositions, the title of “Rapunzel’s Luncheonette” stimulates nearly as many images as the piece itself. The modal energy in his left hand supports wild sorties by the right up and down the keyboard. If McCoy Tyner happens to hear the piece, I should imagine he’ll be grinning.
Dedicated to Michael Brecker, “Soliloquy” is the kind of ballad the late tenor saxophonist thrived on, blending lyricism, nostalgia and power. Johnson’s solo is a high point of the album. “Wandering Spirit,” floating through a harmonic sequence that is less plain that it first seems, gathers intensity through Galper’s solo, subsides during a superb Johnson solo, and wanders away on Bishop’s cymbal splashes. “Invitation to Openness” suggests spontaneous mutual invention, with lines from the three musicians swimming and leaping together like dolphins at play.

Occasionally, a Rifftides reader sends a message compelling enough that it demands posting not as a comment but as a full-fledged item. In the blog’s five years, there have been few. Jeff Sultanof’s recent recollection of Gene Lees was one. A few days later, we have Peter Kountz’s tribute to Rob McConnell.
Dr. Kountz is head of Philadelphia’s Charter High School For Architecture + Design, an independent tuition-free public school that is the first of its kind in the United States. His background includes leadership of K-12 schools in Pittsburgh and Brooklyn and positions on the faculties of the University of Rochester and the University of Chicago, where he earned his PhD. A musician, writer and consultant, he also coaches professional musicians.

On Rob McConnell
By Peter Kountz

I can’t say that I knew him well or that we were real friends. If I knew Rob McConnell at all, I knew him as a brilliant artist and musician, whose gifts were often rivaled by his complicated personal qualities and his battles with the demons of self-deprecation. I followed RMcC’s work for the last 25 years and I had the honor of producing in Pittsburgh in January of 1999, one of the last complete concerts the full Boss Brass did before RMcC downsized to the Tentet. Back to that concert in a moment.
The brilliance of Rob McConnell’s artistry, musicianship, and craft was not so much his charisma as a band leader or his underappreciated proficient and inventive valve trombone playing, but rather what he was able to hear and imagine as a composer and arranger and how these “sound ideas” were put together for the Boss Brass and the Tentet, and accompanying artists like the Hi Lo’s, Mel Tormé, or the Singers Unlimited.
There were other bands beside the Boss Brass, bands with marvelous sounds grounded in accessible melodies and harmonies, dressed in exciting arrangements and richly intricate rhythms, all with a delightful ease of listening. I am safe in saying, however, that there was never any band quite like the full Boss Brass with its additional brass (French Horn and sometimes tuba), woodwinds (clarinet, bass clarinet and flute) percussion (vibraphone, congas) and keyboards (organ); with its complex and daring arrangements, most with wry humor thrown in; with its extraordinary display of collective and individual virtuosity, with the power and precision of the ensemble itself; and with the unfailing delight and swing that came through even in the recordings. So is there one recording that gives all this–and more–to the listener, you ask? Yes there is, I say, and it is the penultimate Boss Brass recording, Even Canadians Get the Blues (Concord Jazz). It is all there.
Apart from his family and his oldest friends, I am not certain anyone knows the full answer as to who Rob McConnell was, assuming there is one. Here, I want to offer some impressions of who and how he was, based on my encounters and experiences with RMcC. I was always struck with how kind and thoughtful he could be, not necessarily how kind he always was. His standards were very high, so high, in fact, that most music students (undergraduate and graduate) could not easily get to where he wanted them to be; he was not a natural teacher and did not really like the act of teaching, so his music became his teaching instrument. Life for him may have seemed to others simple and full of fun, but it was always far from that in reality. He really did love his family, though enduring personal relationships came with great difficulty for him and one never knew how or why he/she made it to the RMcC persona-non-grata list.
Like Duke Ellington, he composed and arranged for people he knew who were artist-musicians and players and who could meet every musical challenge he put forward. He could be as grumpy as he was thoughtful. He was his own worst enemy and his impatience with mediocrity was as intense as his full-blown intolerance of certain people and certain facts and realities in the business; he may have been a twin of Gene Lees. Rob McConnell loved being Canadian and he got the blues a lot but he had a great time composing, arranging, and playing the blues. He took himself a lot more seriously than most people realized because he worked so hard to keep everyone thinking the opposite, sometimes to the point of embarrassing himself. Mostly he liked who he was though it wasn’t easy, especially when it came to being successful.
So now about that Pittsburgh concert and the lessons learned. A well-known physician and jazz musician whom I knew in Pittsburgh when I worked there died suddenly and my wife and I were asked to join a small group of friends and family to plan a public tribute to his work and his music. When it was decided to have a benefit concert in our friend’s honor to create an endowment with The Pittsburgh Foundation to fund a scholarship for a deserving young jazz musician, I was given the task of choosing the artists and producing the concert. The “Friends Group” joined hands in sponsorship with the Pittsburgh Jazz Society and jazz impresario Tony Mowod of WDUQ-FM and we were on our way. I knew instantly that the concert should be by Rob McConnell and the Boss Brass. I went to work selling the idea. That wasn’t as easy as it might appear. I bought CD’s and gave copies to “The Friends” and, through the music it seems, I was given the green light. All this was before I had contacted Mr. Boss Brass himself. In those days of RMcC’s pre-luddite tendencies, everything was done by letter fax, that is to say, the correspondent would write a letter and or a request, and then fax it to the McConnell home office which, to this day, I believe the saintly Margaret McConnell oversaw.
Without going back and reading the correspondence (all of which I have saved) I remember that my experience working with “His Tromboneness,” which I happily and perhaps naively called him, was easy, efficient, warm, business-like and very professional. We agreed on the date (January 26, 1999), the fee, the venue, the logistics, the cause, and even part of the program set list, though I had been warned that no one ever suggested to the Great One that he consider a suggested program. Okay, I thought, I trust this guy. And I really did. And, as it turned out, he trusted me. I asked him to open the program with his arrangement of Loonis McGlohan’s composition, “Songbird,”* and close the program with his arrangement of Gene Puerling’s, “Nightfall.”** Both of these arrangements are for winds only (no rhythm or keyboards) and both are fiercely difficult ensemble pieces in almost free rhythm, with no room for individual errors; every note for every part has to be right and fall in the right place at the right time.
His Tromboneness said, fine, we can do this. The bus arrived, I met it, and took things from there. While making sure that everything was in order -the show began at 8:00pm–I stayed behind the scenes. Much to my surprise, RMcC asked me to work with him on the sound check, which I did, and he listened carefully to my comments and suggestions and, to my amazement, responded to each one. We served an early dinner to the artist-musicians (and that they were) and gave them all room to relax. I put the check in His Tromboneness’s hands, and moved forward to show time.
The band walked on stage and we began on the dot at 8:00pm with “Songbird;” beautifully played, beautifully realized, and followed by a rich and full program. As I remember, there were at least 12 pieces on the set list (with introductions and comments from Mr. BB) and a generous intermission. RMcC used his final comments to thank the sold-out audience “for coming, for listening and for remembering Howard,” the physician/musician we honored that night. Then came “Nightfall.” Was there ever anything so beautiful, so perfectly played and so right? I don’t think so. And as the band got on the bus after packing up and putting down a Canadian brewski or two, His Tromboneness said to me, “Peter, this was the best produced, best managed, and most fun Boss Brass concert ever and we will always remember it.” As will I.
The Cheyenne Native Americans have a beautiful Prayer for the Dead: Go on into the Light and do not look back. We will take care of everything here. And, as “Nightfall” has come, so we will.
Rest in the Light, Your Royalness, and know how grateful we are for your life and music.
* “Songbird” — heard on All in Good Time (Sea Breeze CD-SB-105)
** “Nightfall” –heard on Our 25th Year (Concord Jazz-CCD-4559)
Philadelphia
2-3 May 2010

In an auxiliary message, Peter Kountz added:

One important element for me in writing the piece is that there is likely to be very little extended recognition of RMcC on the American side, and in Canada he PO’d so many people, not many good folks are going to care.
I want people to realize some things about this amazing, gruff artist-musician in our midst who just kept making extraordinary music.

…because everyone should listen to it now and then.
The first tenor saxophone solo is by Lester Young. The trumpet is Harry Edison. The second tenor solo is by Herchel Evans. Prez has the tag.

This is an actual Craigslist item:

Another significant Canadian contributor to jazz is gone. Barely more than a week after Gene Lees died comes news that Rob McConnell lost his long struggle with cancer Saturday in a Toronto hospital. A valve trombonist, arranger, composer and leader, McConnell made his Boss Brass one of the significant big bands of the latter part of the twentieth century and into the first decade of this one.
Here he is with the Boss Brass on a visit to the US west coast in 1981. Rob introduces the piece and soloists. “Jimmy” is pianist Jimmy Dale. Terry Clarke is the drummer, Don Thompson the bassist. A complete list of the band members runs at the end of the clip.

The Toronto radio station Jazz.FM91 has posted a biography, as well as news about the McConnell documentary that it will air and stream on the web this evening. To read a star.com obituary, go here.
Rob McConnell, RIP

A few years ago, Gene Lees and I fell into serious agreement. It happened in one of our long talks over a glass of wine, or two, at the big table just off the kitchen in his and Janet’s house in Ojai. We were kicking around the peculiar effect that popular acceptance of an artist often has on the perception of critics and fellow musicians. We discussed the Modern Jazz Quartet, Cannonball Adderley, the Dave Brubeck Quartet and Diana Krall, all of whom during their struggle upward were lauded by writers and colleagues.

In each instance, when the musician began selling significant numbers of records and moved from subsistence work in clubs into the remunerative realm of the concert circuit, reviewers who wrote praise the year before suddenly detected compromised artistic standards. Among envious musicians, the logic seemed to go like this: if I haven’t made it big and those people have, they must have sold out.
Diana Krall was the most recent example. She had rather quickly gone from moderate recognition to stardom. The predictable post-success sniping was underway, but Lees and I thought that her playing put her high in the second tier of current jazz pianists and that she might someday edge into the first rank. We agreed that her singing, always good, had improved in intonation, time feeling and maturity of expression. Attractiveness and the naturalness of her stage presence were adjuncts to her popularity, we said, not the cause of it. Salud! Then we probably went on to argue about something.

Not long after that, Gene met Ms. Krall and wrote about her in 1999 for Jazz Times. The piece was a character study. It was built on their conversations, the quotes arranged and set in the text in that incomparable Lees way. He makes the reader an eavesdropper, a technique light years beyond substituting transcribed verbatim interviews for writing. The narrative sections were straightforward, like this one:

She has a strong face, and when the stage lights hit it, it radiated, looking like a flower above her black pantsuit. She is an outstanding pianist. (Even if she grouses about what she considers a limited technique; but compared to what, Art Tatum?) She sits slightly sideways at the keyboard, to face the audience, as Nat Cole used to do; maybe she picked it up from his movies and TV shows. Again she got a standing ovation. Whether she likes it or not, she is the glamour girl of jazz. I just hope her singing success doesn’t take her away from the piano, as it did Nat Cole.

It hasn’t. To read the entire article, go here.

I thought about that conversation and that article the other day when one of those Jazz On The Tube e-mail links showed up. It turned out to be to a section of Ms. Krall’s 2001 Live in Paris DVD, which I had never seen. She is with a large orchestra conducted by Alan Broadbent. John Clayton is the bassist, Jeff Hamilton the drummer, Anthony Wilson her regular guitarist, and we get a couple of glimpses of the marvelous John Pisano on acoustic guitar. If this is selling out, I’ll take it.

A man named Paul Sonnenberg has posted a medley of songs with Gene Lees’ lyrics. If you go here, you’ll learn as much about Mr. Sonnenberg as I know. If you watch the video below, you’ll see and hear him sing the songs, largely in tune, with a feel for the Brazilian samba idiom and with, for the most part, the correct English lyrics. In “Quiet Night of Quiet Stars,” it should be, “…how lovely,” not “…so lovely,” but that’s quibbling. Here’s Paul Sonnenberg doing nice work.

Rifftides is going to move on from Gene Lees, at least for the moment, and on to other matters. My plan for next time is to catch up with a few recent CDs.

Tributes to Gene Lees continue, for good reason. A line from Longfellow applies: “Dead he is not, but departed – for the artist never dies.”
Terry Teachout remembers Gene in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Had Gene been born sooner, he would surely have been as famous and successful as the top songwriters of the ’30s and ’40s. But he came along after the cultural tide of jazz had started to ebb, and by the time his songs were making their mark, rock ‘n’ roll was in the process of replacing jazz as the lingua franca of American popular music.

And

Part of what made Gene’s essays so valuable was that he wrote them not as a coolly objective observer but as a man immersed in the culture that he chronicled. More often than not, his subjects were his friends, and he had seen them at their best and, on occasion, their worst.

To read all of Terry’s “Sightings” column, go here.

Following Gene Lees’ passing, the Canadian tenor saxophonist, pianist, composer, arranger and educator Phil Dwyer sent a story about how he acquired one of Gene’s books.

In the spring of 1990, I was playing in New York, at a club call Visione’s (in the Village) with David Friesen and Alan Jones. It was the middle of a long (seven weeks) tour. It would ultimately be the last tour for the group, which had formed in 1987. For me, the New York stop was a highlight not only because it was New York, but also because my new girlfriend was traveling down from Toronto to meet up with me for the two days we were there. The tour had been a little tense, so it was great to have someone else to talk to for a few days!
Anyway, we’re playing at Visione’s and I popped across the street on the break to grab a slice, I don’t remember which place (50/50 chance it was some kind of “Ray’s”) and was standing on the street eating it when this twitchy fellow approached me….”Hey, man, where did you get that pizza?” Bear in mind I am standing about 20 feet from the pizza store at this point…..”Man, I’m starving, I’ve been out selling these books all day, can you spare a couple of dollars for a brother to get a slice?”
“Books?” says I, “What books do you have for sale?”
He opened the bag up, and I could see maybe 7 or 8 copies of The Will To Swing.
“Sell me a book” I said, vaguely aware that I was probably skating over some kind of moral blue-line at this stage.* “How much?”
“Ten dollars, brother”
I only had a twenty, so I passed him the twenty, and he reached into his pocket, where he had a roll of bills certainly more substantial than I did. He peeled off a ten for my change and passed it over with a sparkling new copy of the book. By this time I’m starting to feel a little weird about the whole thing, the books were almost certainly “hot”, I didn’t know Gene at the time but had several mutual friends, etc, but it all went down so fast and completely out of the blue that I was mostly thinking about what a great deal I was getting on this book which I had been hoping to get (I rank myself as a 10/10 when it comes to being an Oscar fan). Anyway, the deal was done and it was time to head back in for the second set.
As I turned to cross the street and return to Visione’s, the book guy stopped me…….”Hey man, what about the couple of dollars for the pizza?”
Too weird.
*Hockey metaphor; not sure if that translates

.

The vicious work of a hacker or several hackers rendered Rifftides and all of the other artsjournal.com blogs inaccessible to most of you for the past four days. If you called up our web address, you were probably greeted with a red box containing a warning that if you continued, your computer would blow up, you would break out in a rash, your crops would fail and your dog would die. Or something like that. We were victims of a malware (malicious software) seige that took days to break. 

Since the Rifftides entry about Gene Lees’ death on April 22, we have received a flood of comments. They are posted in the comments section at the end of that piece. A couple of days later, Gene’s friend Jeff Sultanof sent me a message that he intended as a private communiqué. I was moved by it and persuaded Jeff to revise it as a guest column. My intention was to post it four days ago, but the malware Darth Vader made that impossible.
Jeff is a composer, orchestrator, editor and researcher of great standing in the community of professional musicians, critics and academics. He is an expert on the music of Robert Farnon, Harry Warren, Miles Davis and Gerald Wilson, to name a few musicians whose work he has studied, edited and taught. While it flourished, he was a major contributor to jazz.com and would have written about Gene for that estimable site if it was still publishing new material. The Rifftides staff is honored to present Mr. Sultanof’s thoughts about Gene. On the off chance that some readers might not know them, I have taken the liberty of inserting links to a few names. Consider them footnotes.

On Gene Lees

By Jeff Sultanof

Gene’s death brings up so much for me, because he was a giant of a man. But as you also know, Gene was far from a simple person, and I saw many sides of him; anyone close to him saw them too. So I thought I would share some reflections of my relationship with Gene. Several of us were close to him and considered him a close friend. That was a challenge at times, as his anger and stubbornness sometimes frustrated us so that we didn’t speak to him for periods of time.
I knew about Gene for a long time before I finally met him. In either High Fidelity or Stereo Review (they are a blur in my mind at this moment), he wrote these incredible articles that I devoured when I was a young teenager. He discussed the kind of music I loved, and wrote about it so eloquently. I well remember a column he wrote praising an album called Threshold by Pat Williams, and it was his rave that got me to pick up a copy at the late lamented Sam Goody store at Rockefeller Center. The album was as wonderful as he said, so I followed him wherever he wrote. I bought his books of essays from the JazzLetter, and eventually I subscribed.
I finally met him when I was in the midst of a project that I now call my exercise in futility: the editing and cleaning up of the music of Robert Farnon. Nobody wanted to do it, nobody wanted to pay for it, yet it needed to be done. Farnon wasn’t going to live forever, and many of his pieces were unavailable in the United States. The man who was considered one of the finest composer/arrangers in the world, praised by Andre Previn and John Williams had a body of work which was a mess. If it was to be played, it needed some tender loving care. I visited him in England and soon his scores began to arrive at my doorstep. We sent scores back and forth, my sending him newly-copied and edited full scores, he correcting and making them definitive by putting down what he actually wanted. I wrote to Gene and told him about this project, and he asked me to come visit if I ever got out to California. Upon arriving in Los Angeles, I made the first of many trips north to Ojai soon after. We had lunch, and at the end, he asked me whom I wanted to meet; he would call for me. I immediately thought of his neighbor Roger Kellaway, who arrived five minutes later as he had many questions about Farnon’s music. Gene put me on the phone with Johnny Mandel, who asked if I had “Lake of the Woods” (I did). He called Jo Stafford to ask if I could come to see Paul Weston (I spoke to him on the phone later that day).
Gene and I communicated regularly from that point on. He asked me to write about Budd Johnson when he found out that Budd was the director of our jazz band and I was his assistant. This became a contribution to the Jazzletter, the first professional article of mine on American music that was published in the United States. He next wanted an article on George Handy. These two pieces were the most important prose works I’d written up to that point. He taught me how to refine my writing, to make it clearer, how to draw the reader in. He was delighted that I knew a great deal about film and film music history, and we discussed his close friend, the brilliant Hugo Friedhofer at length (“He would have liked your seriousness,” he told me). I located copies of films that he wanted to see. Whenever I was in California, he, I and Janet would be up till all hours talking, arguing and laughing. He eventually shared a lot of confidences with me.
When he was asked by a conductor friend of his to come up to Montreal and sing in concert, he got Roger Kellaway to write arrangements and accompany him. I asked if I could write something, and wouldn’t you know he told me that I should do “Desafinado.” I was in shock, but I sat down and did it. I offered to copy parts for all of the arrangements. I was no fool; it was a way for me to study the work of Kellaway and Allyn Ferguson. He obtained an arrangement by Claus Ogerman that originally had a board fade and needed an ending. I happily supplied it.
During a dinner a few days before the concert, I was saying how I was lucky to be part of this concert because my work wasn’t as good as either Kellaway’s or Ferguson’s. Gene lit into me. “Every arranger wants to be in the club of those who really have talent, and many never make it. Others keep beating themselves over the head worrying about it. Jeff, you’re in the club, so stop it already.” Kellaway grinned at this and nodded in agreement. After many years of writing arrangements for print which I’d never heard and nobody ever told me were good or terrible, I finally felt with that one statement that I had made it, something I’d desperately wanted since I was a little boy and my room was filled with the sounds of Nelson Riddle, Billy May, Don Costa and the many others who I hoped I would know when I went into the music business. As it turned out, I did get to know Riddle and many others of my heroes.
It was Gene who introduced me to Marion Evans, master arranger and teacher of J.J. Johnson, Pat Williiams and Torrie Zito. Marion took to me like a long lost buddy, and when I was asked to write something for the Palm Beach Pops, I called him to have lunch with me and to look at my score. He had just retired from developing computer programs for Wall Street firms and probably hadn’t looked at a score page in years, but he invited me up to Connecticut. That day I got the best orchestration and arranging lesson in my entire life, and when he was through, Marion said, “I didn’t realize you were such an accomplished writer,” in that quiet, southern drawl of his. It was Gene who told me, “You realize that that statement is like winning the Academy Award.” It wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for Gene.
I also saw his ugly side; as you know, simple things would make him fly into a rage. Disagreements with him by colleagues including the late Richard Sudhalter would bring out the warrior who would write on and on in the Jazzletter that these people were wrong and how could they be so misguided. I once asked my friend Richard how one handled being attacked that way. “It’s just Gene,” he said. “We’ve all been through it. I’ll call him or he’ll call me in a couple of months and straighten it all out.” I myself got a phone call I’ll never forget. He insisted that he would never confide in me again. I asked him what happened. After screaming and going on a bit, he insisted that I’d told someone something that was not for their ears. Patiently and quietly, I laid out my case why I was not the one who’d said anything, and when he calmed down, he figured out who the culprit was. He quietly apologized, asked me how I was and said he’d talk to me later. Amazing!
He was deeply burned by Jobim. He explained that in order to write the lyrics to Jobim’s songs, he learned Portuguese so that he could give the actual meaning of the songs in English. As you know, several of them are brilliant. He always felt they should have made him more money, and always spoke of researching each copyright so that he could figure out how much was owed to him. He probably was owed quite a bit, but between the original copyrights and the rights for different groups of countries, these waters were muddy indeed, and he didn’t have the patience to do the research himself. Jobim wound up getting most of his songs back in the U.S., and even wrote English lyrics for his new songs, which weren’t very good. Jobim treated him quite shabbily, to hear Gene tell it; he wrote of this in the JazzLetter. So often in a conversation, he would bring up Jobim, and I could tell that this was one of the great disappointments of his life.
It was Gene’s hatred of rock that probably alienated many influential people who could have hired him. Who knows how many songs he heard that he turned down, pissing off people along the way? This reminds me of Bernard Herrmann’s remark to a filmmaker who wanted Herrmann to score his new picture. Herrmann, an outspoken man himself, said, “Why do you show me this garbage?” If I could have given a gift to Gene, it would have probably been a hooked rug with that quote. I know that he would have laughed.
When he turned philosophical, he considered himself a failure. He believed that he was preaching to a congregation that was dying off, and that younger people didn’t care about the music he loved. I assured him that many young people did, and that his writings would be treasured by new generations because right or wrong, he was passionate about music and words and wanted to tell us as much as he could about those created these artistic miniatures called songs. Gene’s love of language inspired many who read his books and heard his presentations. Deep passion about any art form is to be treasured; many writers want to show off what they know rather than how an artwork made them feel and teach us why it is or was important. If Gene reminds us of anything, it is that to really write well about art, you must know as much about it as possible and draw the reader in so that he/she must hear or see the material at hand just to see if he/she agrees with the writer. Gene was hardly complacent, and many of his articles demand your participation rather than asking nicely. Sometimes he was way off base and wrote from pure emotion, but more often than not, he could back up his opinion in any number of ways. He knew that being polite often doesn’t work, especially today. If we jump in the water and swim with Woody, Alan, Frederick, Dizzy and any number of other people he wrote about, at least it was better than just looking at the water with a cigarette and a drink in your hand. Life’s too short anyway.
You, Teachout and a few others are left to hold up this rickety old house with little more than spit and chewing tobacco, and we’ve just lost one of those whose spittoon was overflowing. More power to you, and let’s think of Gene with a smile once in awhile. Let’s get out his books and remind ourselves why we loved them. Let’s not forget his search for a truth, maybe not a truth that everyone could agree with, but at least an opinion that is well argued and makes sense. In this time of great insanity in our beloved United States, we need this more than ever.

Gene Lees ad Libitum & JazzLetter (its full name) has always been strictly a print venture. There are intentions, but no firm plans, to give it a web presence. The first step is a JazzLetter web site offering subscriptions, back issues and Gene’s books. Janet Lees says that more information will eventually follow.

Gene Lees died today. We lost a writer unsurpassed at illuminating music and the world that musicians inhabit. I lost a cherished colleague whose work inspired me, a dear friend whose companionship brightened my existence. For a formal biography, see his entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia. My remarks are more personal.

Gene’s books about Oscar Peterson, Woody Herman, Henry Mancini, Johnny Mercer and Lerner and Lowe are among the finest biographies of our time, regardless of category. He was completing a biography of Artie Shaw. I have read some of the manuscript. It is definitive. The collections of pieces from his invaluable publication Gene Lees’ JazzLetter are essential books for anyone interested in music. The titles indicate his range: Meet Me at Jim and Andy’s, Singers and the Song, Cats of Any Color: Jazz Black and White, You Can’t Steal a Gift: Dizzy, Clark, Milt and Nat, Friends Along the Way: A Journey Through Jazz. Jazz Lives is Gene’s book of essays about 200 musicians from Spiegle Willcox to Christian McBride, illustrated with photographic portraits by John Reeves, who made the one of Gene that you see here.

Some of Gene’s lyrics are ingrained in our culture, words to songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim (“Quiet nights of quiet stars, quiet chords from my guitar…”) and Bill Evans (“In her own sweet world, populated by dolls and clowns and a prince and a big purple bear…” and so many others. Gene shared his wordsmith knowledge in The Modern Rhyming Dictionary: How to Write Lyrics. He sang, and sang well, in personal appearances and on records.

Here are a few of the things I wrote about Gene in the foreword to the second edition of Singers and the Song.

Most writing about jazz and popular music, as sophisticated readers recognize with a wince, is done by fans who have become writers. Most are cheer leaders, press agents without portfolio who leave in their wakes evaluations and pronouncements supported by raw opinion and nerve endings. …Gene Lees brings to jazz writing the skills of a trained and experienced journalist. …He was beaten into the shape of a newspaperman by tough editors who demanded accuracy and clear story-telling.

When in 1959 the opportunity came for Lees to become editor of Down Beat, he was mature in journalism and music. He brought to Down Beat a professionalism in coverage, editing, and style and elevated it significantly above its decades as a fan magazine.

Lees founded his JazzLetter in 1981. He has written, edited, and published it with the rigor of an old fashioned-managing editor who enforces high standards of accuracy, clarity and fairness–he once threw out one of his own pieces at press time on grounds of lack of objectivity–and with the passion of an editorial page editor who cares about his community. …Like all good editors, he knows his readers and the community they comprise. He knows that his community is part of the world, and he knows how the two interact.

Gene wrote like an angel. This is the opening of his classic essay, “Pavilion in the Rain.”

On warm summer nights, in that epoch between the wars and before air conditioning, the doors and wide wooden shutters would be open, and the music would drift out of the pavilion over the converging crowds of excited young people, through the parking lot glistening with cars, through the trees, like moons caught in the branches, and sometimes little boys too hung there, observing the general excitement and sharing the sense of an event. And the visit of one of the big bands was indeed an event.

He had strong opinions about everything. We argued. Arguing was half the fun of knowing Lees. Every argument with Gene was a win for me because I had learned from him.

I hope that he wouldn’t mind my adapting his final lines of “Waltz For Debby.”

When he goes they will cry
As they whisper good-bye
They will miss him I know
But then so will I.

In response to yesterday’s Rifftides post, music critic Mark Stryker (pictured) of the Detroit Free Press sent a message that included a column he wrote earlier this year. With his permission, we bring it to you.

Very nice piece on Billy Childs’ new album. I’m anxious to hear it. Billy just wrote a Violin Concerto that was premiered by Regina Carter and the Detroit Symphony in January. I wrote a short preview/profile of Billy in advance of the performance. There’s no link, but I’ve copied it below.
By Mark Stryker
Detroit Free Press
Pianist and composer Billy Childs’ musical tastes were forged as a teenager in the early ’70s, when musical fusions were as ubiquitous as bell-bottoms. Progressive rockers like Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Gentle Giant and Yes covered classical compositions and wrote 20-minute works from a stew of influences. Jazz groups like Weather Report and Chick Corea’s Return to Forever walked an electric-acoustic fault line, creating ambitious marriages of funk, jazz and rock. Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and the London Symphony recorded with jazz-rock guitarist John McLaughlin. Leonard Bernstein wrote a mass that had everything in it but the kitchen sink.
“It was an era of inter-genre respect, curiosity and tolerance,” says Childs, 52. “It shaped my desire to mix genres.”
Childs’ fusion aesthetic underscores his new Concerto for Violin written for the Detroit-born jazz star Regina Carter and co-commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. DSO music director Leonard Slatkin will lead the world premiere starting Friday as part of the DSO’s annual Classical Roots celebration of black composers and performers.
An elegy in two movements, the concerto draws its emotional inspiration from the Iraq War and the loss of innocent life. Essentially a classical score, the piece also leaves room for the soloist to improvise in a jazz-inspired idiom.
Childs made his name as a jazz pianist with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, vocalist Dianne Reeves and others, but he has increasingly been defined as a composer for orchestra and chamber ensembles. Since 1992 his résumé has filled with commissions from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dorian Wind Quintet, Los Angeles Master Chorale, American Brass Quintet and others. He won a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship for composition. Childs still works as a pianist, arranger or producer; lately he’s been on the road with pop-jazz trumpeter Chris Botti. But the projects closest to his heart are his classical commissions and his Jazz Chamber Ensemble, a sextet with piano, bass, drums, harp, guitar and saxophone (doubling clarinet and flute), augmented at times with strings and winds.
Childs is as comfortable channeling the 20th-Century modernism of Hindemith, Bartok and Stravinsky as he is the contemporary post-bop of Corea and Herbie Hancock. The streams flow together on the 2005 CD “Lyric” by the Jazz Chamber Ensemble. Though some of the music slips into a generic pastoralism, the best works balance perfumed melody, impressionist harmony, detailed counterpoint, intuitive form and improvisation. The 9-minute “Into the Light” unfolds in three sections that suggest a continuous crescendo. Rippling piano provides a ground for singing flute and violin lines, with strings, guitar and harp underneath. There are Ravel-like interludes for string quartet and a piano improvisation over Latin rhythm that ascends to even greater intensity when the ensemble returns with new material.
“A lot of times when people know both classical and jazz worlds really well, when they create it’s either one or the other,” says Carter. “But with Billy’s writing it’s become one. It’s like a bilingual child who has created his own language.”
Carter had been smitten with Childs’ writing for years, dating to a concert she heard in which Reeves and an orchestra performed his arrangements. Carter was struck by his challenging writing for strings and the way he married strong rhythms and grooves with emotion. She asked Childs to write a piece for her, but it took years for him to work it into his busy schedule. Carter and Childs share the same manager, who approached the DSO about commissioning the piece; the work fits seamlessly into Slatkin’s agenda of championing sophisticated fusions of classical and vernacular music. The University of Notre Dame, Oakland East Bay Symphony and Boston Pops are co-commissioners.
Born in Los Angeles, Childs was surrounded by R&B, pop and jazz at home. Piano lessons at age 6 didn’t take, but he became obsessed with the instrument at 14 while attending boarding school. Returning home to finish high school, he began intensive formal study of classical piano, jazz piano, arranging and theory. Heroes as diverse as Corea, Keith Emerson and Hindemith shaped Childs’ desire to work on a broader canvas. So rather than attend an elite jazz school, he studied classical music as a composition major at the University of Southern California. Still, he had enough vocabulary as a jazz pianist to tour briefly with trombonist J.J. Johnson at 19 and start working with Freddie Hubbard a year later.
Stylistic crossbreeding has become viral today, but Childs knows he’s part of a jazz-classical continuum that stretches back at least as far as Scott Joplin’s ragtime opera “Treemonisha.” The line continues through Gershwin and Ravel, mid-century “Third Stream” composers like Gunther Schuller and John Lewis and the fusions of Childs’ youth. “We’re in that tradition, but this is our twist on it,” he says.
“I try to combine the genres at an organic level. I don’t like to ask an instrument to do something that has not traditionally proven to be comfortable. If I use a string quartet, I’m going to write idiomatic string quartet music. If I have a drummer, I’m not going to notate every note for the drummer to play. I try to make it the responsibility of the composition to pull off the marriage. I might have a motif in the string quartet that repeats and then someone will improvise over that. Or I might have a fugue but assign it to the bass, piano, guitar and drum set so drums are intrinsically involved.”
In his earlier works Childs consciously used traditional classical structures like sonata form and theme-and-variation, but now he allows each work to create its own form.
“The hardest part for me — and the most important part — is coming up with really good, strong melodic material. A good melody will draw a listener in and make the piece interesting, and a solid structure will engage the listener for a long period of time.

The staff thanks Mark Stryker for loaning Rifftides his work.

Billy Childs, Autumn In Moving Pictures: Jazz Chamber Music, Vol. 2 (artistShare).
There is a long history in jazz of strings in small-group chamber music. In a 1935 concert, Artie Shaw played a piece that he composed for clarinet and string quartet. It brought him attention that helped lead to his first big band. Ralph Burns integrated strings, flute and French horn with his piano, Ray Brown’s bass and Jo Jones’ drums, for his exquisite 1951 collection Free Forms. Later highlights of the genre were Gary McFarland’s album of subtle chamber music with pianist Bill Evans and The October Suite from 1966, with McFarland’s compositions and strings arrangements for pianist Steve Kuhn. Along the way there was distinguished music with small string ensembles by Jack Weeks and Clare Fischer for albums by Cal Tjader, Fischer’s own Songs For Rainy Day Lovers (included in this CD), Manny Albam’s writing for the piano of Hank Jones and the Meridian String Quartet, and violinist Harry Lookofsky’s magnificient 1959 Stringsville with Hank and Elvin Jones, Bob Brookmeyer and Paul Chambers.
Add to that distinguished list Autumn In Moving Pictures, the new CD by pianist Billy Childs. Childs is a pianist and composer whose talent far outstrips the recognition he has received for his own work and his associations with Freddie Hubbard, J.J. Johnson, Yo Yo Ma, Eddie Daniels and a galaxy of other musicians. He melds his rhythm section with saxophone or clarinet, harp, guitar, and, on some pieces, winds and the Ying String Quartet. The album’s nine tracks amount to a suite inspired when Childs found himself amidst the blazing beauty of fall in New England. Knowing of that stimulation, the listener may easily conjure images of turning leaves, crisp air, rainfall and – in the case of a track inspired by a William Carlos Williams poem – a red wheelbarrow.
However, without reference to what they are “about,” Childs’ inventions support themselves by dint of compositional craft and the musicianship of the players. The sonorities and harmonic fullness he achieves in blends of the instruments have much in common with French impressionists of the Twentieth century. He dramatically establishes that influence in the opening piece, “The Path Among the Trees,” with Brian Blade’s cymbal splashes and brushes on drums providing urgency, and guitarist Larry Koonse in a handsome solo. Childs’ writing for a passage of the string quartet alone is elegiac, giving way to urgency underscored by the insistency of Blade’s drumming. He uses Carol Robbins’ harp to carry most of the first chorus of the theme of Bill Evans’ “Waltz for Debby” before his piano slips in to finish the chorus and he introduces Bob Sheppard’s clarinet, Koonse’s guitar, Scott Colley’s bass and Antonio Sanchez’s drums. He develops a kaleidoscopic treatment that involves solos by individual instruments, combinations of intersecting lines, counterpoint, quick climaxes, changes of tempo and, finally, a peaceful – perhaps autumnal – piano resolution of the theme on a triad.
“Prelude in E-minor” is not Chopin’s, but a composition by Childs that returns to impressionism, with the harp prominent and specific references to Ravel. “A Man Chasing the Horizon” is full of vigor, with Childs bluesy in a section that highlights interaction among him, Sanchez and Colley before the strings and Sheppard enrich the ensemble and raise the intensity. Childs takes full advantage of the harmonic possibilities implicit in the familiar melody of Fauré’s “Pavane.” There is magic in his voicings around the French horn in the piece’s final ensemble. The 16th-note pitter-patter of “Raindrop Patterns” is the purest programmatic expression in the album. In this instance, even not knowing the title, listeners might think of rainfall or, during Sheppard’s impassioned soprano saxophone solo, a storm. “The Red Wheelbarrow” features reflective guitar by Koonse, who shines throughout the CD, as, indeed, do all of the musicians.
The publicity material sent with the album goes to pains to present this music as a successor of the third stream and fusion movements of the second half of the last century. If that marketing approach persuades people to listen to it, there is no harm done. If it drives away listeners put off by those labels, that’s a shame. Childs’ work needs no label. Of the two categories of music defined by Duke Ellington, this falls gloriously in the first: good.
Until this album materialized, I was not aware that Childs had made a Volume 1 of Jazz Chamber Music. It is called Lyric. I look forward to hearing it.

Hear Ye! The latest selection of Doug’s Picks is posted in the center column. It includes recommendations of new and old music on CD, a DVD documentary about a revered figure and a stimulating — even provocative — book.