Rifftides reader Ian Bradley writes:

I have been meaning to write for a while to say how much I enjoy reading Rifftides. I was prompted to write following your two most recent posts on Bill Finegan and Billy Strayhorn. Whilst Glenn Miller’s music is often denigrated in jazz circles – criticised for something it never set out to be – I always thought there was lot in there to listen for.

I was fascinated to read – in David Hajdu’s Strayhorn biography, I think – that Billy Strayhorn had listened to, knew and appreciated all of Finegan’s work for the Miller band. I am sorry to think that only until a couple of days ago, we still had with us the man who created that legendary arrangement of “Little Brown Jug” – and that there existed such friendship between two such great arrangers. Add that I think Bill Finegan tutored and offered much to the young Nelson Riddle and you have the three greatest writers of a time when that sad disjuncture between popular music and jazz, written and improvised work, did not exist–and popular music was all the richer for it. 

( Mr. Bradley blogs at The Record Shows. — DR)

Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington’s creative alter-ego, continues to connect with old audiences and find new ones. His music is for everyone, but it is no surprise
that Strayhorn’s story and songs move the gay community, in which he has become a symbol and icon. The Gay Mens Chorus of Los Angeles paid tribute to Strayhorn last year near the fortieth anniversary of his death on May 31, 1967. Video of that ninety-minute production is now streaming in full on the internet. The chorus sings Strayhorn’s music with the swing and nuance it deserves.

Alan Broadbaent wrote the choral arrangements and the big band charts, led the band and played piano on some pieces. The rhythm section is Broadbent’s trio with bassist Putter Smith and drummer Clayton Cameron. Saxophonists Gary Foster and Bob Sheppard and trumpeter Steve Hofsteter are among the band members. The guest vocalist, enthusiastically received by the audience, is Tierney Sutton. Among the highlights, despite the distractions of strange pseudo-Fosse choreography, is the trio’s exploration of Strayhorn’s “Upper Manhattan Medical Group.” Jazz listeners will also appreciate Broadbent’s piano accompaniment and arrangement of “Lush Life” for Billy Porter, who narrates the evening and is an effective singer of Strayhorn’s songs.  Click here to go to the Gay Mens Chorus of Los Angeles site, then click on the May 5, 2007 video at the bottom of the screen. Once it is running, double click on the picture to make it full screen. Do this when you have a spare hour and a half to enjoy it.  

Here is a rare and much shorter video of Strayhorn performing his most famous composition with the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

 

 

For part of a documentary about Strayhorn, and Ellington’s reaction to his death, go here. If you wish to fully explore Strayhorn’s life and career, read Lush Life, the biography by David Hajdu. Not long after Strayhorn died, Ellington and his band recorded this heartfelt tribute. The CD of Strayhorn compositions is one of the best albums of Ellington’s later career.

Great artists pay homage to Billy Strayhorn’s God-given ability and mastery of his craft. Because he had a rare sensitivity and applied himself to his gifts, he successfully married melody, words and harmony, equating the fitting with happiness. — Duke Ellington

 ‘A’ Train was born without any effort – if was like writing a letter to a friend. — Billy Strayhorn

Bob Brookmeyer sent this message today:

Bill Finegan passed peacefully on today with his son James and his daughter Helen by his side. He was a hero, a dear friend and one of the most gifted arrangers we have ever had. Somewhere an orchestra sounds better.

Finegan was an arranger who gave Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey some of their most
substantial music. In 1952 he and Eddie Sauter formed the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra, which was famous for its musicianship, wit and a couple of hits that included its theme song, a panoramic arrangement of “Doodletown Fifers.” At one time or another, the band included musicians of the quality of Nick Travis, Urbie Green, Eddie Bert, Mundell Lowe, George Duvivier, Eddie Costa and Don Lamond. This CD has a cross-section of the band’s work.

Finegan once said, ”From the time the late Eddie Sauter and I started this band, everything went wrong but the music.” To read more, go here.  

Bill Finegan was ninety-one.

Here’s something I’ve been saving for a slow day–that is, a day when I haven’t prepared a new posting. It’s Freddie Hubbard in 1962 at age twenty-four, getting famous with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. To many, this was the Blakey band. It had Wayne Shorter, Curtis Fuller, Cedar Walton, Reggie Workman and Hubbard. Watch for Blakey’s smile when Hubbard tears into the second chorus of his solo with that beautifully placed allusion to “Why Don’t You Do Right?”

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It’s too bad this is cut short after Hubbard, but with YouTube, you take what you get.

If someone wants to play music you do not have to get a ruler or whips to make them practice.–Thelonious Monk.

They would tell me to practice, and they would get on my case, but only because they knew that’s what I wanted to do. They never really did pressure me. They wouldn’t have made me take lessons if my heart wasn’t in it. I was 3 or 4 years old, and I wanted it.–Taylor Eigsti

The Rifftides staff has no more intention of making this blog a birthday watch than of making it a death watch, although there is an endless supply of both phenomena. However, on the Jazz West Coast listserve, Desne Villepigue pointed out that yesterday was the eighty-fourth anniversary of Hal McKusick’s appearance in the world, and that is worth noting. McKusick was one of the most rewarding alto saxophone soloists of the fifties and sixties. He is still active as a player, teacher and inspirer of young musicians.

The screen below brings you his 1958 recording of Charlie Parker’s “Now’s The Time.” There was no movie camera in the studio; we should be so lucky. The visuals are album covers. This arrangement for four saxophones incorporates a harmonized transcription of Parker’s solo on the original 1945 Savoy recording of the piece. It predates by fourteen years Supersax, the group that became famous for this sort of thing. The other saxophonists are Frank Socolow, alto; Dick Hafer, tenor; and Jay Cameron, baritone. Solos are by McKusick, pianist Bill Evans and bassist Paul Chambers. The drummer Connie Kay. Contrary to YouTube‘s information, trumpeter Art Farmer is not present.

Farmer is on several other tracks of the CD, which is a cross-section of music from McKusick’s fine series of albums for Decca. To learn more about McKusick, see Marc Myers’ series of interviews with him on JazzWax.  

 

Butch Warren was a fixture on Blue Note albums in the
1960s. One of the bright young bassists of his generation, he recorded with Herbie Hancock, Dexter Gordon, Jackie McLean, Thelonious Monk and others. Then he disappeared.

Reporting for MSNBC, Antoine Sanfuentes found Warren, traced his success, downward trajectory and attempt to re-etablish his career. The piece includes a link to a video profile of Warren. Thanks to Larry Appelbaum for calling our attention to it.

For more on Warren, from The Washington Post, go here and here.

A Los Angeles man and wife, Doug McIntyre and Penny Peyser, last night premiered Trying To Get Good, a film about the trumpeter, singer and outrageous humorist
Jack Sheldon. They and others know that Sheldon is one of the most gifted musicians alive. They hope that the film will help bring him general recognition that he has deserved since the early 1950s. From Gary Goldstein’s story in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times:

The couple spent more than five of their nearly six wedded years cobbling together this labor of love about Jack Sheldon, the best jazz trumpeter you may have never heard of despite his ubiquitous, over half-century presence on the Los Angeles entertainment scene. One of the pair’s wishes for the film is that it helps Sheldon, now 76, achieve a wider respect and fan base, particularly from those less-embracing East Coast jazz critics. “Maybe they’ll drop their West Coast bias for five minutes and just listen to what Jack’s playing,”

To read all of Goldstein’s story and his sidebar review of the Sheldon film, click here. Let’s hope that the film makes it to DVD soon.

Late last year, this Rifftides posting recalled the first time I heard Sheldon.

In emulation of Art Kane’s photograph Harlem 1958, widely known as A Great Day in Harlem, Great Day photographs have been made in cities all across the United States. Here, by permission of the Art Kane Archive, is the original.

© Art Kane Archive

Not all of the copycat shots involve jazz. Baseball and hip-hop have also got into the act. The latest jazz entry is Indianapolis, which has produced major musicians including J.J. Johnson, Freddie Hubbard, Slide Hampton, David Baker, Joe Hunt, David Young and the Montgomery brothers, Wes, Buddy and Monk. The Indianapolis shoot is set for this Sunday, June l. For details, go here.

For background on the original Great Day in Harlem photograph and interactive identification of the musicians in the shot, go to the art kane web site and click on Harlem 1958. See this piece from the Rifftides archive concerning the film about the 1958 photograph and the events surrounding it.

More than one hundred musicians have signed up for the Indianapolis photo shoot, luncheon and (of course) jam session.  If you’re going to be there on Sunday, have a great day.

Today is Dave McKenna’s 78th Birthday. He plays the piano.

 

Happy Birthday.

The other night at The Seasons, I heard four nineteen-year-olds and was impressed. One of
them, the alto saxophonist Logan Strosahl, has been intriguing me for a couple of years. The others, who comprise The Uptown Trio, were new to me except for the bassist, Jeff Picker, whom I had previously heard with Strosahl.

All are beneficiaries of extensive high school jazz education and winners of prizes for excellence, all freshmen at prominent institutions of learning. Strosahl, from Seattle, is wrapping up his first year at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Picker, from Portland Oregon, is at the Manhattan School of Music, along with drummer Jake Goldbas of Hartford, Connecticut. The pianist, Sam Reider is a San Franciscan who attends Columbia University in New York. Anyone keeping a future file would do well to add those names. If these players keep developing at their current pace and intensity, it is likely that we’ll be hearing from them.

At The Seasons, they were equally adept in standard pieces and in–or on the border of–free playing. Strosahl has remarkable energy, technique and harmonic acuity. He tore up Dizzy Gillespie’s “Anthropology.” Following an ingenious Reider introduction, Strosahl electrified the house in his exploration of Matt Dennis’s “Everything Happens To Me.” In “The Disintegration,” the Uptown Trio was impressive in its ability to achieve abstraction without sacrificing continuity and form, then Strosahl melded with them as the piece morphed into a blues for a powerful quartet effort that ended the concert.

I have been unable to locate an internet sample of Strosahl’s playing, but on The Uptown Trio’s MySpace page, there are four performances including “The Disintegration.” Picker, Reider and Goldbas are businessmen as well as players, an essential attribute for survival in the twenty-first century jazz trade. On their own, they have lined up a month-long tour with appearances in major west coast jazz clubs including Yoshi’s in San Francisco, Kuumbwa Jazz in Santa Cruz and Catalina in Los Angeles. The schedule is on their MySpace page.

Another name for that future file: Nick Sokol, a young tenor saxophonist whose band has the unusual instrumentation of tenor and alto saxes, piano and drums; no bass. Sokol opened for Strosahl and the Uptowners with a four-part suite that ranged from lacy, vaguely Oriental, impressionism through free four-way improvisation to Brahmsian gravity. The piece had style and texture. I’d like to hear it again.

 From 1949 to 1963, the Black Hawk was San Francisco’s premier jazz club. It presented a
cross section of the world’s best musicians. Like legions of other fans, I spent some of the most rewarding listening hours of my life being inspired in the Black Hawk’s uninspiring surroundings and have written about it frequently. Here are the opening paragraphs of the notes for volume 5 of Shelly Manne and His Men At The Blackhawk.

During my years of labor at KGO-TV in San Francisco, I never passed the parking lot a block away at Turk and Hyde without regretting the injustice of a world that puts more value on the storage of automobiles than on preserving historical landmarks. To be accurate the Landmark Preservation Commission never actually got around to trying to save the Black Hawk or even mounting a brass plaque at space number five, the approximate location of the door where Elynore Caccienti and Susan Weiss collected one-dollar entry fees and dispensed wisdom. All right: the matter never came to a vote, never even came up for discussion.

Nonetheless, officially recognized or not, history was made in the dust and dimness of that temple of gloom. “I’ve worked and slaved to keep this place a sewer,” Guido Caccienti used to say of the joint he ran with his partner, George Weiss. In the 1950s when the club was in its florescence, Count Basie set a new world record for compacting musicians by cramming sixteen men onto the Black Hawk’s little stand, adding Joe Williams, and still finding room to swing. Cal Tjader’s and Dave Brubeck’s groups were more or less headquartered at the Black Hawk and did some of their best live recording there. The first ten-inch LP by the Gerry Mulligan Quartet was made in September, 1952, while Mulligan, Chet Baker, Carson Smith and Chico Hamilton were at the Black Hawk refining their alchemy. The Miles Davis Quintet with Hank Mobley recorded two albums there, commemorating that regrettably short partnership. Although he recorded it in a hall a few blocks away, it was during a Black Hawk engagement that Thelonious Monk made a solo piano album notable for the beauty and serenity of his playing.

I bring this up because video has materialized that reveals the interior of the Black Hawk in all its–er–glory. The film was made for the pilot of a TV series that never materialized. It features the Brubeck Quartet in three numbers, with an introduction by Mort Sahl, the comic who was a fan of the band and a close friend of Paul Desmond until Mrs. Sahl and Desmond became even closer. That, of course, is another story, discreetly told in Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. But, in a cheesy effort to sell a book, I digress. At any rate, the video is slightly misleading about the nature of the club because the producers somehow persuaded Guido that it was necessary to present an orderly aspect. The random distribution of miniscule tables gave way to chairs arranged in rows, as in a concert hall. The chairs are occupied not by casually dressed and relaxed Black Hawk regulars but by properly attired civilians, possibly extras hired for the occasion. Nothing was done, thank goodness, to replace the dust-laden heavy velvet curtain behind the band stand.

The band is the classic Brubeck Quartet with Desmond, Gene Wright and Joe Morello. YouTube doesn’t give us a date, but the repertoire and the appearances of the players suggest 1957 or ’58. The band opens with “The Duke” as background for Sahl’s intro and follows with a splendid “St. Louis Blues” and a perfunctory “I’m In A Dancing Mood.” During the blues we have the opportunity to see as well as hear the camaraderie between Wright and Morello. To see the video, click here.

 Four years ago, another club went up at the corner of Turk and Hyde. Here’s a description from its web site:

222 Club was established in April 2004. It sits on a corner next to a parking lot and lots of action. We are a lounge with a beautiful basement, refreshing cocktails, delicious food, rotating dj’s, live bands and rotating art. Happy Hour Tuesday thru Saturday from 6-9pm $3.00 Well $2.00 PBR Positive Vibes Only~ We are happy people…..xoxoxoxox

The hugs and kisses are a nice touch, but I’ll bet the 222 Club isn’t hiring the Basie band.

Early in his career, pianist Billy Taylor made a difference in jazz by developing an individual
approach to the use of chords. His concept fit well with that of the beboppers who in the second half of the 1940s were a new and powerful force in the music. Some swing musicians with open ears and open minds–notably Ben Webster–were also intrigued by Taylor’s full-bodied harmonic notions.

Taylor arrived in New York in 1942, fresh out of college, a devotee of Art Tatum. In 1944, he went to work for Webster, the great Duke Ellington tenor saxophonist. In 1949 and 1950, he was the house pianist at Birdland backing a variety of musicians, among them Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, Stan Getz and Milt Jackson. By 1951, his ideas and popularity had blossomed to the point where he graduated from sideman to leader of his own trio. Previously unreleased music by that group has shown up on Taylor’s web site. I’m going to give you a link to it, but those unfamiliar with how Taylor developed may be interested in a bit of background. Here is some of what I wrote in the booklet for the CD reissue of Billy Taylor Trio, a collection of pieces he recorded in 1952 and 1953.

Webster encouraged Taylor’s use of rich chords in accompaniment. Taylor was inspired harmonically by Duke Ellington’s piano introduction to “In a Mellotone,” which he heard when he was a student. “That wiped me out,” Billy says. “I said, ‘what’s he doing? So I figured it out. It was A-flat ninth in the left hand and an octave with a fifth, A-flat, E-flat and A-flat, in the right hand. I liked it and began fooling around with it, added a couple of things to it: one voicing in one hand and another voicing in the other.

“When I came to New York, that was a part of my approach. Most horn players said, ‘That’s in my way,’ because they were used to being accompanied around middle C, in the lower part of the piano. I was an octave higher. Ben was a former pianist. He liked it and encouraged me to do it.” Over the next decade, Taylor refined his chord-plus-octave style.

By the time he had realized his ambition to form a permanent trio and went into the Prestige studio in late 1952, the sophisticated technique was in his musical grain. By then, a Taylor harmonic invention might be built like this: B-flat, C-ninth, E and G or G-13th in the left hand, C, E, G and C in the right hand. “I was harmonically oriented,” he says, a masterpiece of understatement. “In those days a lot of these harmonies were not common. I was very proud that I was able to establish then.”

For a 1951 Taylor engagement at George Wein’s Storyville club in Boston, Taylor worked with
bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Marcus Foster. The music that surfaced recently was broadcast on a radio program hosted by another young man destined to become a jazz institution, the critic Nat Hentoff. To hear several pieces by the trio and Hentoff’s carefully scripted comments, go here, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the start button on the video screen. I recommend at least one listening in which you concentrate on Mingus’s compelling bass lines. At the end of the Taylor trio performance, you’ll see a short biography that incorporates an interview by Ed Bradley of CBS’s 60 Minutes.

Taylor will be eighty-seven years old in July. He was scheduled to be at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, this week to perform and to discuss his life, music and career, but the event has been postponed. For details, go here.

I think one of the best things you can do, no matter what you play, is to take up piano. Music is based on chord changes and harmonies, and you can get ’em more out of an instrument like piano, where you can hear all the notes at once. —Zoot Sims

To me, the piano in itself is an orchestra. –Cecil Taylor

I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea. –Oscar Peterson 

When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean. –Thelonious Monk

Tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin recently entered his eighty-first year, still living and playing at full–or nearly full–speed. Martin Gayford today observed Griffin’s longevity and vigor in a piece in the British newspaper the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt:

 

He was described by Richard Cook in his Jazz Encyclopaedia as “the fastest tenorman of them all”. He has slowed down a little, but not that much. “I got so excited when I played and I still do,” he has said. “I want to eat up the music like a child eating candy.”

There was always, however, more to Griffin’s style than simply speed. Whatever you are playing, he once advised a fellow musician, you should always play the blues – meaning, always play with feeling. He has a richness of sound that is characteristic of the great jazz tenor saxophone tradition.

To read all of Gayford’s article, go here. Griffin mentions to Gayford the importance in his early New York days of being around three pianists, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Elmo Hope. When I interviewed him for JazzTimes in 1995, he expanded on his experience with them in what he called “my conservatory of music.”

 

“These guys were like triplets,” Griffin says. “They loved each other and they were always at one another’s houses. So much respect. So much music. For some strange reason, they adopted me, and that’s how I got my education. For instance, we’d all go to Monk’s when he was rehearsing his band with Ernie Henry and the cats from Brooklyn. I heard so much music, it stayed with me forever. They didn’t give me any instruction, they just played.

“I’d hear something Monk played on, say, ‘Coming On The Hudson,’ and I’d say, ‘Wait a minute, hold it, T. What is that?’ And he’d say, ‘Oh, that’s a D-something cluster. But it’s only relative. Everything is relative.’ Later on, I realized what that meant. The chord is literal, but it’s also something that you live. Music can be mathematics, but it’s also the relationship between things. It’s life.”

Griffin still lives in the French countryside near Vienne in south central France. His 198-year-old stone house is called Chateau Bellevue, “beautiful view.” Here’s a bit more from the JazzTimes piece.

 

Inside, through the blue-gray of darkening air the tenor saxophonist is gazing toward the village across the Vienne River, three quarters of a mile down the hill. Behind the town is the rising bul of the Massif Central. A center of the ceramics industry, this are of dry hills is also know for its livestock. One of the walls of Griffin’s courtyard is the back of a neighbor’s cattle barn.

To reach gigs, Griffin drives an hour to the train station at Angoulème, Limoges or Poitiers, takes a high-speed train 150 miles northeast to Paris and flies from Orly airport to Los Angeles, Tokyo, Chicago, New York, Paris or wherever there is a demand for world-class tenor playing.

The June, 1995, article is not archived on the JazzTimes web site. Your library may have it. If you are unfamiliar with Griffin, I suggest not wasting a moment to seek him out. For a starter CD, you could do little better than this 1957 album with Sonny Clark, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; and Kenny Dennis, drums.

For a video sample of Griffin at work with Gérard Badini’s big band, click here. YouTube has several other clips of Griffin playing in a variety of settings.  

George Moore, who runs Dave Brubeck’s office, sent this message:

 

If you are suffering from bruised or broken ribs, PLEASE WAIT TO OPEN THIS LINK.

 

Then, rummaging around on the internet, I found this companion piece of video.

Now, no matter what kind of day you were having, you’ll have a better one.

I’m not sure why it took me so long to find out about the Industrial Jazz Group, but life is full of unintentionally delayed gratification. I’m also not sure why it took me so long to come across Amedei chocolate, Norma Winstone, the writing of James Salter or the psychic rewards of gardening.

In any case, Andrew Durkin–the Industrial Jazz Group’s leader, pianist and composer– intrigued me with an e-mail message asking if I would be willing to hear a CD by his band. So that the disc would not disappear into an impenetrable landscape of stacks of unbidden review copies, never to be seen again, I asked him to send it with a note reminding me to listen right away. What turns out to be the fifth CD by this whimsical, musical, fifteen-piece band showed up with the reminder. I listened right away, give or take a few days. Within moments, I was grinning, then laughing, then shaking my head at the complexity of the music and the skill with which the IJG performed it.

The humor is both subtle and slapstick, the musicianship consistently impressive. The band’s comprehensive web site reflects the wackiness of the music but also practices modern marketing by linking to a company store offering T-shirts, mugs, a mouse pad, a thong and a one-piece baby garment. Maybe that’s the industrial aspect of the band.

On the site, Durkin writes that he doesn’t see the value of lists of influences but admits to being under the sway of Frank Zappa, Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus. Unopposed to lists, I will point out that he might also have mentioned Stravinsky, Archie Shepp, Spike Jones, Carla Bley, Raymond Scott, Satie, the AACM, Charles Ives and the Marx Brothers. The CD that arrived is called — don’t ask me why — LEEF. According to the nearly unreadable
information on the CD envelope (cleverly printed in white on yellow) it was recorded “mostly live” in concert in Amsterdam. The singer, Jill Knapp, is excellent. I presume that it is she whom we see cavorting in the promotional video to which you will find a link on this page.

Fair warning: a couple of the tracks have language that is less shockingly foul than boringly and repetitively foul. It gives the kids a chance to talk dirty in public and doesn’t last long. (Perhaps I should have mentioned Lennie Bruce in that list of possible influences.)

But it’s the music that matters most. The music is good.