The interaction between or among jazz soloists has often been described as like a conversation. A brilliant young man about whom I am trying to learn more — his name, for instance — has taken that simile literally, given it substance and put it on YouTube. Watch this, and smile your way into the weekend.

You may remember the tenor saxophonist Jim Pepper for “Witchi-Tai-To,” an American Indian peyote chant he learned from his Kaw grandfather. Pepper set it to music and it became a crossover hit. The song persists as a staple in the repertoires of pop and so-called world music groups on several continents. It has a place in efforts to raise Native American pride and awareness, for which Pepper, with his Kaw and Creek heritage, has become a symbol.

When I knew Pepper in Portland, Oregon, in the early 1960s, he had a big sound with rough edges and was primed to jam at a moment’s notice. He could be combative on the stand and off. The muscle and heft of rhythm and blues ran through his playing. He took chances with harmony, which is to say that he often refused to let conventional chord guidelines interfere with his conception. Looking back a few years later, it was easy to see that Pepper was primed for the rock-jazz fusion milieu he jumped into in New York in the middle of the sixties. Free Spirits, the band with Pepper, guitarist Larry Coryell, drummer Bob Moses, singer Columbus Baker and electric bassist Chris Hills, had an impact on rockers including Jimi Hendrix and The Velvet Underground. The 1967 Free Spirits album Out of Sight and Sound disappeared for years but recently resurfaced as a CD. Pepper worked later with such adventurers on the jazz frontier as Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, Dewey Redman and Bill Frisell. Here’s part of a 1968 Don Heckman interview with Pepper:

Don: Let me ask you the standard question. Where do you think jazz is going to go?
Jim: It seems like it’s just about ready to just roll over for the third time and die. But that’s hard to say. The rock music may help it out some, but the musicians themselves in their performance will really have to help. Maybe the younger musicians; if the older musicians move over, then something else will happen. I don’t think that people like to go to clubs and see Brooks Brothers suits anymore. Those days are gone, I think.

Discouraged by what he felt as low esteem for jazz in the United States, Pepper moved to Europe in his last years. He became popular there, particularly in Austria. He died back home in Portland in February, 1992, at the age of fifty. I have not seen Sandra Osawa’s highly praised documentary, Pepper’s Pow Wow,which seems impossible to find on DVD. If you’re interested in the VHS edition, go to this web page and scroll down. Few music outlets stock the albums Pepper made under his own name. One is 1987’s Dakota Song, in which he included sensitive performances of standard songs that demonstrated he wasn’t all swagger and boistrousness. Another is Comin’ and Goin’, recorded with John Scofield, Don Cherry, Nana Vasconcelos and Colin Wolcott in 1984. It includes a version of “Witchi Tai To” and just reappeared on CD at a confiscatory import price.
There may not be much of Pepper’s music available, but the folks at Harvard University’s radio station evidently have a substantial collection of it. They are billing what they call a Jim Pepper Orgy this Friday, January 12, from 6:00 am to 8:00 pm EST. It will be hosted by a woman with the intriguing name of Jesse Morgan Righthand. If you are in the Boston area, you can hear WHRB at 95.3-FM. If you are elsewhere, go to the station’s web site and click on “Tune In.”
Jim Pepper is often strong medicine. Strong medicine can make you well. If you’re hearing Pepper for the first time, let us know your impressions.

In The New York Times, Ben Ratliff reports on Sunday night’s memorial service for tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, at which a number of Redman’s colleagues performed.

The pianist Ethan Iverson and the bassist Reid Anderson, both of the trio the Bad Plus, with (Matt) Wilson on drums, got off a version of (Ornette) Coleman’s “Broken Shadows” that demonstrated the slippery harmonic mobility Mr. Redman played so easily. And Joshua Redman, Dewey Redman’s son, played a startling piece on tenor saxophone, unaccompanied, and very unlike the rest of his music: it was slow and minor and wary, using the horn’s full range, putting space between short phrases.

To read all of Ratliff’s story, go here. For a rare recording of the Redmans together, seek out Dewey’s 1992 CD African Venus, and hear the contrast between the styles of father and son.

In her blog, DevraDoWrite picks up the Erroll Garner thread, posting reminiscences of her husband, the ageless 94-year-old John Levy, who played bass on a Garner recording date in 1945.

There were no parts to read on this session because Erroll, like many of the great musicians, didn’t read or write music. He picked standard tunes and we figured out little interludes, intros and endings, talked down the solo choruses and then recorded. We did all four sides in a single three-hour session in those days; none of this elaborate re-recording and punching in individual notes or mixing in a different solo.

To read the entire story of the session, including how John got his bass up thirty flights of stairs, go here. The Savoy tracks that Levy made with Garner are still around, on this CD set. They demonstrate that there was no essential difference between the way the pianist played at the start of his career and at the end. The whole amazing apparatus was in place and fully operational from the beginning.

The Erroll Garner item on Rifftides the other day touched something in the readership. Comments are still rolling in. You’ll find them by clicking on “Comments,” at the end of the original post. This one from Hans C. Doerrscheidt in Germany included links:

Thanks for the YouTube link of the great E.G! I remember finding the Concert By the Sea CD in the grab-box near the cashier in a supermarket (in a German small town!) in the early 90s. I’ve loved it ever since.
There’s a great DVD available of Erroll’s gig at the British Jazz 625 TV show from the mid-60s.
A lot of times I’ve read the anecdotes about Erroll using a phone book to add height to the stool, and only when watching the DVD I finally understood that it was actually to achieve his fairly unusual playing position – arms almost straight, hips on or above keyboard level – rather than because of his fairly small stature. (For a contrast on the other end of the “unusual playing position” scale, compare this Glenn Gould clip.

Gould: another force of nature. And if you are a student of piano keyboard positions, you know about Bill Evans. Here’s a refresher course.

This is short notice, but Rifftides just received notification that there will be a memorial service this evening for the late tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman. Readers in or near New York City may wish to know. The service will be at 7:30 p.m. at Saint Peter’s Church, Lexington Avenue and 54th Street.

Among those expected to perform in Redman’s memory are his son Joshua, Cameron Brown, Charles Eubanks, Pat Metheny, Charlie Haden, Frank Kimbrough, Geri Allen, Jack DeJohnette, Joe Lovano, Reid Anderson, John Betsch, John Menegon, Judy Silvano, Leroy Jenkins, Mark Helias,Matt Wilson, Teri Roiger, Ethan Iverson, Pheeroan AkLaff and Sheila Jordan. That’s
quite a lineup in tribute to a soloist who carried the rugged Texas tenor sax tradition into the avant garde and never lost its traces.
Redman died on September 2 in Brooklyn.

Erroll Garner died thirty years ago, almost to the day. I don’t know whether the National Public Radio station I listen to was aware of that, but the past few days during morning news programming, the producers cued up a few seconds of Garner’s piano as transitions between local and national segments. The news was mostly grim, but Garner was full of cheer and optimism, as he was in life. Even in fifteen-second bursts, he got the day off to a good start. I cannot think of another jazz pianist after Fats Waller who made serious music with so much happiness.
Garner is not often mentioned these days in discussions of major pianists but, unquestionably, he was one. As when he was alive, the tendency among critics–but not among pianists–is to dismiss him as a naïf, an instinctual primitive who never learned to read music, as if reading music is more important than making it. He didn’t read because he didn’t have to. He didn’t learn the names of chords because the chords presented themselves to him before he knew they had names. In harmony, melody and rhythm, Garner was complete, and he was one of the few pianists who could improvise convincing variations based on melody lines alone. I don’t buy the argument that if he had learned to read it would have diluted his originality. Nothing could have done that. What would reading have done for him, brought him studio session work? He didn’t need it. He was a star before he was thirty, a huge popular success by the end of the 1950s, the only jazz musician the impresario Sol Hurok ever booked.
As a recording artist, Garner was remarkably consistent. I cannot recall one of his albums that was substandard, but it is easy to recommend one in which he has no moment that is less than inspired. It is his most famous, Concert by the Sea. The recorded sound is less than perfect, in fact notably less than perfect. The piano had not been visited by a tuner. It doesn’t matter. That night in 1955, Garner was a force of nature. Close second: Campus Concert, taped at Purdue University in 1964, also with his faithful sidekicks bassist Eddie Calhoun and drummer Kelly Martin. This one has a priceless back-to-back double-header “Lulu’s Back in Town” followed by “Almost Like Being in Love;” as much swing and joy as it is legal to pack into eight-and-a-half minutes.
To see Garner at work, visit this video clip from 1962, when he was at the height of his fame. Yes, that’s a telephone book he’s sitting on. He took the Manhattan directory on the road with him. It gave him just the right height. Watch Calhoun concentrating on Garner’s hands as he tries to anticipate what the boss is leading up to in his Rachmaninoffian introduction.
Have a good weekend.

Trumpeter Marvin Stamm has put up a video page on his web site. It has clips from a concert by his quartet with pianist Bill Mays, bassist Rufus Reid (see the current DVD in Doug’s Picks in the right column) and drummer Ed Soph. Guitarist John Abercrombie is guest soloist on one of the seven pieces and in the ensemble on others. Except for a couple of fades to black, the videos are complete performances by a solid group that deserves wider exposure.
The Stamm quartet rarely plays in New York. It has two appearances there this month, January 10 at the Kitano Hotel at Park Avenue and 38th Street and January 12 at the Sheraton Hotel during the annual conference of the International Association of Jazz Educators. If I could be at the IAJE this year, these would be musts.

There were good days with Charles, but there were some stormy days. His temper is well known. I used to make him cry simply by telling him how nasty he was. It’s amazing how he could change, storming one minute like he was going to kill someone and blubbering with remorse the next. But he had beauty, a little child’s beauty, about him.

–John Handy in Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers

This is some of what I wrote in a lengthy Jazz Times review more than three years ago when The Marsalis Family: A Jazz Celebration was released as a CD.

Together, the elder brothers are astonishing in their trumpet-soprano counterpoint flurries on “Nostaligic Impressions.” Following Wynton’s wry spoken comment about brotherhood, they have a spirited instrumental conversation in Branford’s “Cain and Abel.” The conversation grows in intensity and becomes an argument before it is resolved more satisfactorily than Cain’s with Abel.
“Struttin’ With Some Barbecue” is no mere indulgent tip of the hat to the tradition, but a reminder that this stuff is in the Marsalises’ New Orleans bones. In his salad days, Ellis worked his share of traditional gigs. He shows that he retained the lessons and knows how to make them work in his modern style. Wynton’s two choruses are full of Louis Armstrong’s spirit, Delfeayo’s simply full of spirit, with one of those piquant runs out of key. I keep zapping the CD player back to Branford’s soprano choruses on “Barbecue.” With his logical construction, audacious ideas and broad, unrestricted tone so unlike the squeezed soprano sound of many post-Coltrane players, this classic solo transcends stylistic categories.
Reservations about aspects of Wynton’s and Branford’s recent work slip into the shadows when I listen to this family gathering.

To read all of the review, go here.
I finally got around to watching the DVD of the concert, which marked establishment in 2001 of a chair in father Ellis’s name at the University of New Orleans. The video version adds a two-Steinway romp through “Caravan” by Ellis and his former student Harry Connick, Jr., a home boy and honorary Marsalis. In an interview, Branford identifies Jason, the drummer, as the “accident baby” who came along twelve years after the third son, trombonist Delfeayo. Marsalis pal Roland Guerin is on bass throughout. Lucien Barbarin sits in on trombone for “Saint James Infirmary.”
With interviews interspersed, the DVD takes a semi-documentary approach. The talk is brief, often witty, and to the point of the music and the natures of the family members. The video I watched was the Public Television version running a bit less than an hour. The commercially released edition is sixteen minutes longer and has additional music including “Caravan,” “Limehouse Blues” and “The Party’s Over.” The production values are solid and unpretentious, the lighting, sound and camera work admirable, with fine directing by Phillip Byrd.
The Marsalis brothers were raised by Ellis and his wife Delores to be staunch individualists. Each is in his own musical world. Branford tells the interviewer that he and Wynton have different approaches to music, that he did not want to do this concert, because he thought it wouldn’t work.
It worked. No one set out to blaze trails in this get-together, just to play well and enjoy one another. Watching an admirable family make good music together was a fine way to start the new year.

At the end of her slightly dyspeptic little essay on the exhorbitant cost of eating out, DevraDoWrite adds this reminder, which I heartily endorse. I should have posted it myself.

…if you are a jazz lover in New York with $5 and a free lunch hour on Wednesday, January 3rd – 1-2 PM, make your way over to Saint Peter’s Church (E. 54th St. & Lexington Ave.) for the MIDTOWN JAZZ AT MIDDAY concert featuring soprano saxophonist BILL KIRCHNER and pianist JUNIOR MANCE. I can’t think of a better way — or more affordable — to spend a lunch hour at the start of the year!

Godoggone writes:

Not sure “Zog” was the best possible caveman name for this particular topic. Google that and see what you get…

That name I made up had a naggingly familiar ring to it. My apologies to King Zog’s descendants and to Albanians everywhere. Strictly unintentional.

From the Rifftides staff to all: Best wishes for a happy and prosperous new year (that is a link).

The question is no doubt as old as artistic expression. Imagine a viewer of the first paleolithic paintings in the Great Hall of the Bulls in the Cave of Lascaux:

Well, of course Zog is brilliant, but have you seen how he drags his mate around by her hair? It’s hard to see how such a rotten guy can make those beautiful pictures.

Can you hate Wagner’s Teutonic superman beliefs and love “Siegfried Idyll,” abhor Ezra Pound’s fascist propaganda and admire The Cantos, be appalled by Stan Getz’s gratuitous cruelty and be enchanted by his ballads?
The Rifftides item about a video performance by the Israeli saxophonist and political polemicist Gilad Atzmon prompted Marc Edelman, the proprietor of Sharp Nine Records, to send a communique raising the ancient conundrum of disjunction between art and its maker and accusing me of (yikes!) equanimity:

If you’re interested in getting a better idea of what’s been coming out of Gilad Atzmon’s mouth when he doesn’t have a saxophone stuck in it, you might want to check out fellow blogger David Adler. David is a knowledgeable writer on music (and a guitarist, as well) and politically is one of the most reasonable people I’ve come across on the web. A secular, left-of-center Jew – and not shy in the least about criticizing Israel – he does not share your equanimity about Atzmon’s pronouncements. Here’s a link to start – and you can follow the embedded links as well.

Atzmon’s web site includes a section entitled “Politics,” in which he discusses his controversial beliefs about Israel and Palestine. If you Google his name, you will find plenty of disagreement with his accusations against his native Israel.
David Adler edits Jazz Notes, the journal of the Jazz Journalists Association, and writes about music for a number of other publications. Sharp Nine is the label of Joe Locke, David Hazeltine, Dena DeRose, Brian Lynch, and the cooperative group One For All, among others.

Back home after a warm, sunny nine-day Christmas visit with our son at his house on a Southern California beach, I cleared a path through the snow to reach the house. We rested a day, then piled into the car. Today, we drove south, crossed the mighty Columbia River, rendezvoused for lunch in Oregon with a cousin I hadn’t seen in twenty years, then drove the hundred miles back. It was all terrific, but that’s enough travel for a while, thank you. I am making my way through the accumlated letters, packages, e-mail and telephone messages. If your correspondence is among them, you’ll have a reply next year.
A happy 2007 to all.

Gilad Atzmon, the fiery Israeli multi-instrumentalist, is sometimes identified as a purveyor of world music when he is not being attacked or praised for political activity that involves aggressive criticism of Israeli policies. Neither of those facets of his existence is involved in a video clip called to our attention by Rifftides reader Don Emanuel, who posted it on YouTube.
Here, Atzmon is a stunning post-bop alto saxophonist with a profound appreciation of John Coltrane. Listen to his occasional variations on the main theme from Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” in this live peformance.

There are two types of people — those who come into a room and say, “Well, here I am!” and those who come in and say, “Ah, there you are.”

— Frederick L. Collins, author (1882-1950)

Mark Stryker, the music critic for the Detroit Free Press, writes:

I really appreciated your post about David Berger – a gifted and underrated musician. Now, guess where he lives – on a street on the Upper West Side named “Duke Ellington Boulevard.” It’s really 106th Street, but it’s also named for Ellington. Berger didn’t know this when a real estate agent showed him the apartment. He called his girlfriend at the time and she said, “Take it. It’s an omen.” The relationship didn’t last but, as I once put it in a story, perhaps too obviously, Ellington’s music remains Berger’s mistress.
Something else I remember Berger telling me. When he was a teenager, he used to go hear the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Band every week at the Vanguard. Thad was his idol and mentor. One night in the late ’60s he was in the kitchen when some Ellington veterans came in to say hello. (I think one was Jimmy Hamilton). After they left, Thad says to Berger, “Duke Ellington – greatest band in the world. ” Berger protested: “But your band’s the greatest!” And Thad says, “No, no, no. My band’s not one-tenth of what Duke Ellington and Count Basie are.”
I think Thad was selling himself a bit short, but I know what he meant.

In the right-hand column, you will find a new set of Doug’s Picks, none having to do with Christmas or Hanukah but satisfying for holiday listening, viewing or reading. Enjoy.