In a moment of enthusiasm or weakness, I agreed to give a speech. The deadline is looming, and if I don’t set aside other things and prepare, a large roomful of listeners will be hearing me read my driver’s license. Blogging will have to slow for a while. As it turns out, this isn’t a bad time for reduced activity because the artsjournal.com publishing platform is on the verge of undergoing updating that will require pauses and delays. I’ll post when possible. Please stay tuned. If the speech turns out all right, I’ll share some of it with you. If it doesn’t, you’ll never hear about it again.

Marc Myers writes.

Wonderful post on George Russell. Hal McKusick told me a great story re: where he found Russell in the mid-1950s and how he brought him back onto the scene.
“Not long afterward I walked into a drugstore in Greenwich Village. There, behind the counter working was George Russell. I asked him what he was doing there. George had written ‘Cubano Be Cubano Bop’ for Dizzy [Gillespie], which was one of the first combinations of Afro-Cuban rhythms and jazz in 1947. He also had written ‘Ezz-Thetic’ in 1951 for Lee [Konitz]. Both arrangements were huge.
“George told me he had a wife to support and that nothing was happening for him in the music business. Then he said he had hit upon something called the Lydian Theory. He asked if I wanted to hear it. I agreed, so I met him at his apartment nearby the next day.”
To read the rest of the story, go to Jazz Wax.

In 1966 on Jazz Review on WDSU-FM in New Orleans, I devoted five programs to a survey of George Russell’s music. It opened with these words:

Over the next few weeks we’re going to consider the recorded work of George Russell, not only because Russell’s music is interesting, absorbing listening, but because of his influence on the development of jazz in the sixties–an influence, I believe, more profound and widespread than is generally recognized, even by many musicians.
Russell believes jazz must develop on its own terms, from within. He believes that to borrow the concepts of classical music and force jazz into the mold of the classical tradition results in something perhaps interesting, perhaps Third Stream music, but not jazz. Faced with this conviction that jazz musicians must look to jazz for their means of growth, Russell set about creating a framework within which to work.

Then followed a discussion of Russell’s Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization, which allows the writer and the improviser to retain the scale-based nature of the folk music in which jazz has its roots, yet have the freedom of being in a number of tonalities at once. For more on that, go to Russell’s web site.
Listening to the recordings of George Russell’s small bands of the 1950s and ’60s is as stimulating now as when I first heard them. They have some of the finest early work of Bill Evans, Art Farmer, Hal McKusick and others. What a welcome surprise it is, all these years later, to see performances of some of the music Russell wrote for the group he called his Smalltet. A kinescope of the final program of The Subject Is Jazz, a series that ran on WNBC-TV in New York in 1958, has popped up on YouTube. It includes the Smalltet doing “Concerto For Billy The Kid,” the piece that first brought Bill Evans to the attention of many musicians and listeners. Russell also appears, chatting with host Gilbert Seldes about his approach to music. The musicians include Evans, Farmer, Doc Severinsen, Gene Quill, Tony Scott, Barry Galbraith and Jimmy Cleveland. To see the entire program, go here. “Concerto For Billy The Kid” comes up about six minutes into the show.
The RCA album The George Russell Smalltet Jazz Workshop was reissued on CD in the late 1980s. It has gone out of print, but a few copies are still available for a small fortune. Now in his mid-eighties, Russell retired from teaching at the New England Conservatory four years ago. He continues to compose. This article by Ed Hazell brings us nearly up to date.

Next door — that is, in the right-hand column — you will find recommended new listening, viewing and reading under the heading Doug’s Picks. Your comments are always welcome. For now, please use the e-mail address, also in the right-hand column, under Contact.

From time to time I’ll be posting parts of letters I wrote to Jack Brownlow over a period of twenty-five years or so. To my surprise, after his death a collection of them showed up among his effects. I had forgotten much of what I wrote him in our correspondence. This excerpt from New Orleans was on a WDSU-TV memo form :

August 13, 1980
To: Bruno
From: DR
I was walking through Jackson Square at the noon hour today and heard someone playing vibes. I wandered over in front of St. Louis Cathedral to see what was happening. There on a platform were (so help me) Milt Jackson, Monte Alexander, Lou Donaldson, Bob Cranshaw and Grady Tate. I had thought it was Milt when I heard the music from afar but figured that some French Quarter jugglers were playing a record to perform by. You could have knocked me over.
It turns out that Michelob is sponsoring a ten-city tour of free Jazzmobile concerts. Tomorrow night they play in Armstrong Park. Monte Alexander was playing his buns off.* I thought Lou Donaldson was dead. He sounded great. So it was old home week. I knew all of these guys except Donaldson in New York, and they were as surprised as I was. Sad thing; it got no advance publicity, so there were just a few tourists standing around in the hot sun trying to figure out what was going on.

The Jazzmobile organization is still going strong. So are Alexander, Donaldson, Cranshaw and Tate. Milt Jackson died in 1999.
* A critical term I have since abandoned.

There is a temporary change in the method of posting comments to Rifftides. Until further notice, please send your comments in the form of e-mail to the contact address in the right hand column.
For months the Rifftides comments function has been invaded by spammers. Some days we have been assaulted by batches of as many as 250 porn spams in a few hours. That is annoying enough but, worse, your legitimate comments are not getting through. ArtsJournal.com world headquarters is working on a fix, but for now we are disabling the Rifftides comment function. Please use e-mail instead. I’ll let you know when the normal comment function is restored.
Some of the most interesting Rifftides posts have been from readers. Let us hear from you. If you have sent recent comments and received no response or your comments have gone unposted, please resend them.

Both Bill Kirchner and Ty Newcomb forwarded this link to a segment from the Dick Cavett show in 1973. Bill Cosby tells Cavett and Jack Benny about his brief career as a drummer. Go here.

Decades before there was Lincoln Center, much less Jazz At Lincoln Center, the midtown Manhattan area encompassing Lincoln Square and San Juan Hill was a jazz incubator. New York Times reporter John Strausbaugh’s video report on that piece of cultural history includes cameos by JALC curator Phil Schaap and a couple of Thelonious Monk’s childhood friends. To see it click here, then select “Jazz In New York” from the illustrated menu below.

I object to background music no matter how good it is. Composers want people to listen to their music, they don’t want them doing something else while their music is on. I’d like to get the guy who sold all those big businessmen the idea of putting music in the elevators, for he was really clever. What on earth good does it do anybody to hear those four or eight bars while going up a few flights?
–Aaron Copland, Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music
The chief results of piped-in noise, as far as Miss Manners can see, are self-absorbed slaesclerks who don’t attend to their customers and half-shouted conversations that ought to be nearly whispered. We have gotten so used to it, that silence has come to be considered somewhat frightening–an admission of social failure, or the world’s being empty. It is now possible to make anyone confess anything–not by torture, but by looking at them in silence for so long that they will tell all, just to break it.
–Judith Martin, Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else.–Lily Tomlin

Mr. Jazz Wax has a two-part conversation with Hal McKusick about Charlie Parker’s 1953 recording with Dave Lambert’s vocal group and a chamber ensemble put together by Gil Evans. McKusick played clarinet. The project turned out to be a bit of a mess but, as McKusick explains, not because of Parker.

Bird blew through everything. Every take was a beaut. The vocalists were trying to get it together, and Dave was struggling. He’d rehearse them the best he could in between takes to get them on track. Simplicity would have been better for Dave–a unison line with fewer singers rather than so many harmonies. It was too ambitious. The vocals wound up stepping all over Gil’s instrumental charts–but not Bird’s solos.

To read the whole thing, go here.
Mr. Jazz Wax, Marc Myers, recommends that his readers download the music
from i-Tunes. Some of us troglodytes still like CDs. You can find the issued, alternate and short takes–and there were a lot them–in this massive boxed set containing everything Bird recorded for Verve. For the completist or for someone who wants to know more about the latter days of Parker’s creative life, it’s a lovely way to spend a snowbound evening.
Make that several snowbound evenings.

Joel Miller, Tantramar (ArtistShare). The Canadian saxophonist and composer, summoning up scenes from his New Brunswick boyhood, pulls off the neat trick of creating pleasant sketches that have depth. The swagger of Miller’s tenor sax soloing and the complexity of the intertwining sextet lines he wrote make “Syriana” one of many highlights, the clever writing and allusion to Miles Davis in “Anonymity” another. The CD includes atmospheric vocal touches by Miller and Amelia MacMahon and an infectious gospel-cum-R&B romp called “Big Tiny.” Great fun.

Marc Copland, New York Trio Recordings, Vol. 2, Voices (Pirouet). Copland employs harmonic audacity even as he creates an air of calm. He is abetted by the rhythm team of bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Paul Motian, musicians in their seventies whose skill and daring set standards for those in their twenties. Copland applies his pianistic and conceptual skills so that no matter how far he takes the listener beyond expected limits of harmony, nothing sounds “wrong,” merely intriguing, often breathtaking. With one exception, the tunes are by Copland and Peacock. Peacock’s “Albert,” presumably with the late pianist Albert Dailey in mind,” has a jaunty Ornette Coleman flavor. Copland’s “River’s Run” has what it takes to start showing up as a jazz standard. Copland, Peacock and Motian offer, in addition to the originals, an inspired performance of a classic, Miles Davis’s “All Blues.”

Jack Sheldon, It’s What I Do (Butterfly).
It’s what those who know that he is a great trumpeter wish Sheldon would do more often on record. He is accomplished in singing and in blue comedy, but he does neither here. Sheldon simply (ha) performs with amazing flexibility, his distinctive bebop harmonic sensibility and the round, gorgeous tone that made hearts ache in movie theaters forty years ago when he played “The Shadow Of Your Smile” on the soundtrack of The Sandpiper. The tunes are by Coltrane, Davis, Monk, Strayhorn and Parker. Sheldon calls his excellent band The California Cool Quartet, which may lead to an assumption that this is warmed-over west coast jazz from the fifties, laid back and nonchalant. It is not. It is emotionally hot and timeless.

Larry Young, Unity (Blue Note). Unity was the 1965 album that brought Young to prominence and established that there was a place for the Hammond B-3 organ on the cutting edge of jazz. Elvin Jones is the powerhouse drummer on a session that also includes trumpeter Woody Shaw and tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson at their peaks of creativity. This reissue in Blue Note’s Rudy Van Gelder series is a basic repertoire item and a terrific way to jolt yourself out of the winter doldrums.

Dennis Irwin, the stalwart bassist of The Vanguard Orchestra and hundreds of recordings, has cancer and no medical insurance. Irwin is fifty-six years old. Friends and admirers are organizing a series of benefits for him, beginning next Sunday following the Super Bowl. It will begin at 10 pm at the Lower Manhattan jazz club called Smalls, 10th Street and Seventh Avenue, just down the street from the Village Vanguard. Musicians are encouraged to sit in. For information, go to this page at the Smalls web site and scroll down to February 3.
There will be an Irwin benefit with the Vanguard Orchestra on Monday, February 18 at the Village Vanguard, 178 Seventh Avenue South.
Tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano is organizing still another benefit for Irwin at Lincoln Center’s Allen Room on Monday, March 10. Details are being formulated. Lovano reports that big names will be involved.
Organizers of the Smalls benefit say that those who cannot attend but would like to help Irwin may send checks made out to Sixteen As One Music, with the notation “Dennis Irwin” on the memo line, to:

Sixteen As One Music, Inc

888-C Eighth Ave. #160

New York, NY 10019

Irwin played with Red Garland in Dallas while he was still a student at North Texas State. Since he arrived in New York in 1975, he has anchored the rhythm sections of Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Mose Allison, Chet Baker, the Mel Lewis Orchestra, Johnny Griffin and John Scofield, among other groups. His power of propulsion and impeccable note choices are important in small bands like the one led by drummer Matt Wilson in this recording and large ones like the Vanguard Orchestra in this CD.

The Rifftides discussion earlier this month about jazz and poetry brought this response from Angela J. Elliott in England.

Jazz poetry is not dead and it doesn’t smell funny either. Well, at least it seems that way in the USA. There appears to still be an interest in it beyond the hip hop and rap idiom. Over here in Blighty I play to jazz audiences who seem to think that the spoken word at a jazz venue means you can’t sing. Only at a literary bash can you expect an honest and fair reception.
I came across jazz poetry by way of Langston Hughes and Ken Nordine. I sit in on a lot of rehearsals with my partner, bassist Louis Cennamo, and as a published author I found that the only things I could write whilst listening were poems inspired and informed by the jazz I was hearing. I guess this is how Hughes did it. Anyway, from that small beginning I’m planning gigs with a fellow poet and have managed to pull together a six-man band including vibes and two horn players. Things are looking up!

Ms. Elliott’s web site has information about her and a link to samples of her poetry. You’ll find an additional Rifftides post about poetry here.

A favorite story about Al Cohn: A friend who hadn’t seen him for a long time ran into Cohn on the street in New York and said, “Hey, Al, where are you living these days?”
“Oh,” Al said, “I’m living in the past.”
I’ve been having a couple of Al Cohn days. As executor of the estate of Jack Brownlow, last week I was going through things in his house. I came across two thick three-ring binders labeled “Letters” and was surprised to discover that Bruno had saved every letter I wrote him over several decades. In them, I found reports of events I had forgotten about. Because some of the letters concern matters Rifftides readers may find of interest, from time to time I’ll post portions of them. The one below was written from Los Angeles following a road trip. It now includes links to some of the people and places it mentions. I have also added illustrations. Some of the opinions I express have changed in seventeen years, and I now have lots of John Corigliano’s music. The puzzling salutation follows the practice Bruno and I adopted of using a first name to set up the use of a last name that more or less resembles another word. Silly? Corny? Sure it is, but that’s how we were.

November 13, 1990
Dear Vincent,
I guess it’s about time you were Herring from me. My week in New York was packed with activity–journalistic, foundational, touristy and musical. I’ll tell you only about the music I heard and about the New York Marathon. That Sunday it was false summer. . .77 degrees.. .and the town was full of people from all over the world running in or watching the marathon. It was exciting, like an enormous fiesta, or carnaval in Rio, although I don’t recall seeing any bare-breasted women. I stood at the southeast corner of Central Park and watched the runners come around the final sweep. People were standing six deep along the roadway, shouting encouragement in 17 languages. I shouted encouragament in only six. Why show off?
When an exhausted runner faltered or slowed to a walk, the crowd would shout, “go, go, go,” “vaya, hombre,” “corre, madre,” “lun, lun, lun,” “laufen zie, laufen zie.” Cruel, I thought; it was certainly no laufen matter to the poor guy in agony out there. I stood there for a couple of hours watching. It was fascinating, hypnotic. I was inspired, for a few minutes, to train for next year’s marathon.
The first night in New York, I agonized over the possibilities: Mehta and the NY Philharmonic at Lincoln Center, Dutoit and the Montreal at Carnegie Hall, the Knicks at Madison Square Garden or chamber music at the Merkin Concert Hall. The choice was easy, actually; the first three were sold out. I’m glad they were, because the concert at Merkin was superb. It was a tribute to William Schuman on his 80th birthday and he was there in that 400-seat hall, which was maybe two-thirds full. He chose “In Sweet Music” and “Night Journey.” They were the two pieces of his that he most wanted to hear. He got great rounds of applause after each, standing and blowing kisses to the musicians, who played the music beautifully. Wonderful pieces, too.
Also in the audience was
John Corigliano, who got to hear a fantastic performance of his Sonata For Violin And Piano. Sidney Harth is a big, amazingly fat, man who plays the violin both delicately and with incredible passion. What a performance. I don’t have any of Corigliano’s music, but I heard the NY Phil premier his First Symphony on a broadcast a few weeks ago and liked it . He’s tonal but, within tonality, adventurous as hell, outrageous even, moreso than del Tredici. Good as all that was, the highlight of the concert was the Ives Trio, an astounding piece of music. I’m sure you’re familiar with it. At any rate, it was a thrill to see William Schuman. There was a reception afterward, and anyone in the audience was free to go to it, but what would I have said to Schuman or Corigliano? “Far out, baby. The end, y ‘know? Straight ahead, man. You sure write good for an old cat. You know Hovahness personally?”
So, I went downtown to Bradley’s and listened to Geoff Keezer with Peter Washington on bass and Steve Nelson, vibes. You’ll be happy to know that Keezer is even more impressive in person and that he looks not 21, but about 12. Lots of Bud Powell and Monk in his playing, more than I’ve detected on records. The place was crowded, so I was put at a table near the piano with a couple of guys one of whom took it upon himself during a break to give Keezer advice. Your true calling, he said (based on what I can’t imagine), is to go to Hollywood and write scores for movies. You could outdo Herbie Hancock, he said. Out of embarassment and in fear that Keezer would think I was with this oaf, I stared at the floor and once when I glanced up saw that Keezer was also staring at the floor. Later, after the oaf had left, I said to Keezer, do not go to Hollywood, do not score motion pictures, keep on playing bebop. “Of course,” he said.
Two nights later I went to the Blue Note for a Blue Note Records party. The band turned out to be Jerry Bergonzi, Joey Calderazzo, Adam Nussbaum and Dave Santoro. Bergonzi is a marvelous tenor player who worked with Brubeck a few years ago and has grown tremendously. Calderazzo is a stompin’ young piano player who has worked with Miles on organ and has a couple of records out on Columbia, Santoro is a very good bass player of whom I ‘d never heard. Nussbuam, however, was the star as far as I was concerned. He is a hell of a drummer. He played a sixteen-bar intro to one piece that was pure Blakey. A tribute, I guess, since Art had just died. A surprising and truly enjoyable evening.
The next night Orrin Keepnews and I went to dinner at El Parador, a favorite restaurant, it turns out, for both of us from the days when we lived in New York. Orrin was in NYC from San Francisco to work on some Bluebird reissues for RCA/BMG and to do a Nat Adderley session for his own label, Landmark. We were both staying at the Algonquin. Then we went to the Village Vanguard to hear Clark Terry, who had Victor Lewis, Don Friedman and a bass player whose name I’ve forgotten. All were playing very well, indeed. Clark and I had a reunion, with lots of laughing and hugs.
In the audience was Nellie Monk, Thelonious’s widow, who never goes anywhere, but came out for this because Monk thought so much of Clark. Orrin and Nellie hadn’t seen each other for 19 years and they had a great reunion, as did Nellie and Clark. Nellie told Orrin a lot about Monk in the final years, things nobody knows. I was not a party to that private conversation.
CT asked me if I was still playing the flugelhorn he got for me years ago. I didn’t lie; I said yes. In fact, I played it tonight with a new Tommyy Newsom CD. Tommy Newsom? Yes, his album, with Conte Candoli, Snooky Young, Dave Stone, Ed Shaughnessy and Ross Tompkins. Newsom adored Zoot and plays like him, without quite the passion, swing or harmonic stuff. But he plays well. It’s a nice CD on the LaserLight label.
On Thursday, I went to part of the Nat Adderley session. Nat, Vincent Herring, Jimmy Cobb, Walter Booker and a fine young pianist from Brooklyn named Rob Bargad, who replaced Larry Willis. Herring, especially on “Arriving Soon,” sounded so much like Cannonball it was almost ghostly. Happy ghost. His sound is not quite as expansive as Cannon’s, but then neither, as Orrin pointed out, is his body. Nat and I hadn’t seen one another, except for about three minutes once, since the days when the Adderley band used to spend so much time in New Orleans in the sixties. He greeted me warmly. He and I weren’t as close as Julian and I and the other day he asked me where Cannon and I used to go all the time. I told him I couldn’t remember specifically, but that it inevitably had to do with food. “Well,” he said, “I’d like to have come along.” I think he genuinely had felt left out, and I was kind of guilty about it and told him so and that seemed to make him feel okay. It wasn’t as if we were ditching little brother, but Nat apparently saw it that way. I thought he and (Joe) Zawinul were sometimes leaving us out of things. We humans are a sensitive bunch, aren’t we?
The band sounded good. Bookie is not a great bass player, particularly in terms of sound, but he has a lot of heart, works his fanny off, and Nat digs having him on the band. Which is nice, I think. Jimmy Cobb works as hard as Bookie and is a great drummer. Herring is astounding. I assume you have heard him. He has two or three records under his own name.
As for CDs, I have two of the Blakeys you mentioned. One For All is good. Brian Lynch’s feature is beautiful trumpet playing. Phillip Harper, who is on I Get A Kick Out Of Bu, struggles through every tune. You asked how fusion nonsense gets on otherwise good records. It’s because not only the producer but also the artist believes it will result in money. It is not mere rhetoric when I say that all of that fusion/crossover/new age crap sounds alike. I have sat on my stool in front of the CD player auditioning review copies, playing tracks from dozens of albums because I think that if a record company sends it I have an obligation to at least sample it. So I’ve heard a lot of it. It sounds alike in terms of harmonic structure, rhythmic patterns, sound mix, instrumentation and imbecility. And when a good musician like Dave Weckl or John Patitucci is the guilty party, it’s that much sadder.
I haven’t heard anything lately that I like better than the newest Artie Shaw reissue CD on Bluebird, Blues In The Night, with Lips Page, Roy Eldridge and some incredible Eddie Sauter charts. The digital remastering is masterly, so to speak. Keepnews strikes again.
Cheers,
DR

Sometimes I miss New York.