Rifftides is extending its reach in southern regions. Welcome to new Rifftides readers in Mexico, Peru and Djibouti.

For years, I have thought that the only film showing Charlie Parker at work was a well-known 1952 clip of Parker with Dizzy Gillespie when they appeared on a television program to receive a magazine award and played “Hot House.” It turns out, happily, that I was wrong. A website called Dailymotion has filmclips and videotape sequences of a number of musicians, jazz and otherwise, including two with Bird.
In Dailymotion’s Parker video, we see him at first listening with great appreciation to Coleman Hawkins play what seems to be “I Got It Bad And That Ain’t Good,” then sharing the performance with the great tenor saxophonist. An up-tempo blues follows—Parker with pianist Hank Jones, Bassist Ray Brown and drummer Buddy Rich. It’s nearly as much fun watching Bird dig Buddy’s solo as to see and hear his own playing. Another piece has the rhythm section with Lester Young, Bill Harris, Harry Edison, Flip Phillips and Ella Fitzgerald. The video quality is crisp, the sound clear. To see the clip, go here. If you do not have a high-speed internet connection, it may download slowly.
The knowledgeable Jim Harrod of the Jazz West Coast listserve says that the clip is “from NORMAN GRANZ PRESENTS IMPROVISATION released in Japan on 9/26/1997 by Toshiba EMI, release number TOVW-3258, VHS. I believe it has also been released on DVD. The entire film runs 64 minutes and includes footage from 1966, 1977 and 1979.”
The footage of Parker and the other stars of Granz’s Jazz At The Philharmonic troupe is, of course, from the early 1950s. Parker died fifty-one years ago next Sunday, on March 12, 1955. My internet search turned up references to the DVD on web sites, apparently Russian, whose links did not work. Maybe you’ll have better luck. If you know where the DVD can be obtained, let us know, please.
To see part of the Parker-Gillespie “Hot House” clip, go here.
As long as I’m directing you to the Dailymotion stash of videos, I should mention Billie Holiday’s “Fine and Mellow” from the 1957 CBS program The Sound of Jazz. If you have never seen the look on Holiday’s face as her friend Lester Young plays his perfect blues chorus, go here.

With all the back-and-forth about Maynard Ferguson’s band and outreach, music ed and so on, I wonder why the military bands are never mentioned? These ensembles are comprised of some of the best players and composers/arrangers on the planet and probably do more to keep students interested in jazz than most others. Granted, their concerts are free (a competive advantage), but it’s nice to see some of our tax dollars going into worthy endeavors.
Dennis E. Kahle

The armed forces jazz bands are not mentioned often enough. That’s true. But, “never?” Here’s part of a recent Rifftides posting.

Buddy DeFranco, approaching his eighty-fourth birthday, played in concert with the U.S. Army Blues Jazz Ensemble. Made up of sergeants of various stripes and led by Chief Warrant Officer Charles Vollherbst, the Blues (named for their dress uniforms) is one of the best big jazz bands at work, military or civilian. It has a stompin’ rhythm section, impressive brass and wind sections, fine soloists, and arrangers with skill and imagination. Staff Sergeant Liesl Whitaker’s lead trumpet work places her among the best in that demanding, punishing craft.

To read the whole thing, go here.

From Ciardi’s A Browser’s Dictionary (1980):

Hip Mod. Slang (and prob. becoming passé). Aware, knowing, up on, in the know. [Earlier hep with the same senses, perhaps modified from the military usage for counting cadence, itself a modification of “left” as in hep-ri’-hep (because “hep” is easier to say with great expulsive force. MMM* attests hep in this military usage by 1862; with the sense “aware, knowing,” as of 1903; the sense shift being from military alertness to alertness in any sense.

Ciardi being Ciardi, that wasn’t enough information about the word. He added,

J.L. Dillard, Where Our words Come From,asserts a straight-line connection between West African hipi and mod. slang hippie; but this assertion addresses only the present form hip without considering earlier hep, it suggests no conceivable line of transmission, and must be dismissed as a fetch based on surface resemblance only by a Negro scholar who is a bit overzealous in his otherwise admirable desire to show how much Africa culture has contributed to American life—as it has done richly, though that contribution is not assisted by willful etymology.]

*(Mitford M. Matthews, A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles)

“Good Morning,” he said, “this is John Ciardi prowling around your breakfast table and peering into your cereal bowl to find a whole cluster of words there.” It was his introduction to one of the pieces he did on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition in the 1980s. To hear the whole thing, go here and click on “Listen. ”
If you like that one, go here for five NPR podcasts of Ciardi sending “good words to you.” (This page is a slowwwwww loader. Be patient)

He published 38 books, 12 of them for children, one a translation of Dante. He was a fine poet.

Measurements
I’ve zeroed an altimeter on the floor
then raised it to a table and read three feet.
Nothing but music knows what air is
more precisely than this. I read on its face
Sensitive Altimeter and believe it.
Once on a clear day over Arkansas
I watched the ridges on the radar screen,
then looked down from the blister and hung like prayer:
the instrument was perfect: ridge by ridge
the electric land was true as the land it took from.
These, I am persuaded, are instances
round as the eye to see with,
perfections of one place in the visited world
and omens to the godly
teaching an increase of possibility.
I imagine that when a civilization
equal to its instruments is born
we may prepare to build such cities as music
arrives to on the air, lands where we are
the instruments of April in the seed.

From John Ciardi: Selected Poems ©1984
Ciardi died in 1986 at the age of seventy. Damnit.

Art Kane’s 1958 photograph of fifty-eight musicians in front of and on the steps of a Harlem brownstone ran in Esquire magazine, which called it A Great Day In Harlem. It became one of the best known snapshots in the world, already famous for decades when Jean Bach made a film about it in 1994. Now, in her late eighties, she has expanded the film and brought the picture and its subjects even more renown. Ms. Bach, the brilliant film editor Susan Peehl and director Matthew Seig added nearly four hours of new material to the production. Like the picture that inspired it, the film is not a polished product. It is a rough and ready masterpiece that makes the most of the materials at hand, rather like a jam session solo.

At the IAJE meeting in January, Ms. Bach gave me a copy of the updated two-DVD release of A Great Day In Harlem. Over this past weekend, I finished watching it. One of its most appealing qualities is that, after the viewer has seen the main body of the production, he can dip into the nearly four hours of new features when its convenient, without fear of losing continuity. Navigation is easy by means of menu features that give the option of using alphabetical listings or—for computer users—browsing through the Kane photo with arrow keys and highlighting individual musicians to bring up their stories.

Some of the new segments are interviews with the musicians from the photo who were still alive when the film was being made, among them Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Art Farmer, Bud Freeman, Horace Silver and Max Kaminsky. Most of the others in the picture were gone by then, including Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Red Allen, Pee Wee Russell, Rex Stewart, Thelonious Monk, Roy Eldridge, Count Basie and Sonny Greer. Their surviving colleagues—and sometimes the vital and knowledgeable Jean Bach herself—tell their stories, all fifty-eight of them. In their recollections, Chubby Jackson is effusive, Sonny Rollins thoughtful and writer Nat Hentoff savvy and often amused.

The cumulative effect, whether or not the viewer is a hard-core jazz fan, is a sense of the yeastiness of what may have been the last golden era of jazz. Pioneers of the form were still at work, sometimes on the bandstand with musicians a generation or two, or three, younger. A natural companion to A Great Day In Harlem, the 1957 CBS television program The Sound Of Jazz, illustrates the generational compatibility, respect and understanding that marked the New York jazz scene through the fifties and into the early sixties. Ms. Bach’s film draws from the kinescope of that landmark show for scenes, for instance, of Count Basie listening raptly to Thelonious Monk, of Gerry Mulligan playing with Ben Webster and Rex Stewart.

Bill Charlap and Kenny Washington, who didn’t exist when Kane took the picture, reflect on the legacy of their predecessors in an interview highlighted by Washington’s uncanny impression of the character and mannerisms of Jo Jones, an idol of Washington and virtually all other drummers. The new DVD set also includes a mini-documentary about the making of the film, with hilarious sidebars about the travails of fund-raising, locating musicians and trying to coax accurate information from failing memories. Ms. Bach gracefully and affectionately corrects Art Blakey’s confident representations of facts that are clearly wrong, including his claim to have owned the brownstone that was the setting for the photograph. There is a brief feature about Kane, who committed suicide in the 1990s, apparently because of health worries. In addition, Jean Bach guides the viewer through an exhibit of the many “Great Day” photo imitations; A Great Day In Philadelphia—San Diego—New Jersey—Haarlem (Netherlands), et al—even A Great Day In Hip-Hop.

The film is informative, entertaining and uplifting. Whatever misgivings you may have about where jazz is headed, A Great Day In Harlem is almost sure to make you happy about where it has been.

“Jazz is where you find it.” That is the opening sentence in the first paragraph of an essay in Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. Here is the rest of the paragraph.

The Polish novelist and essayist Leopold Tyrmand, who spent much of World War Two as a forced laborer in Germany, tells of hearing the music of Benny Goodman from a hand-cranked phonograph in a rowboat in the middle of a river. The phonograph was operated by a Nazi soldier afraid of being thought an American spy or sympathizer if he listened openly. With difficulty, Tyrmand talked his way into the soldier’s confidence, and a strangely matched pair of fans spent a Sunday afternoon spelling one another at the oars and digging Benny.

Owen Cordle, a correspondent for that excellent newspaper the Raleigh, North Carolina, News and Observer, may not feel as isolated and certainly not as endangered as Tyrmand and Hitler’s soldier did. Cordle lives in a small suburb of Raleigh where high-quality jazz does not run rampant. He reports, however, that great music materialized there the other night. Owen sent the message below to share the experience with Rifftiders. It confirms my frequent observation that it is possible to be surprised by fine music almost anywhere in the United States. I have supplied a few informational links.

Doug,
Lou Marini showed up last Saturday night at the Lotus Leaf, a small Vietnamese restaurant in Cary, NC, as part of a dinner party booked by Frank Corbi, his former saxophone teacher. There was no publicity other than an e-mail message from the owner to the musicians who regularly perform there that Lou and Frank were coming and that they might bring their horns. Guitarist Richard Fitzgerald, who was performing there with singer Deb Trauley, had done a little preemptive homework — just in case.
Dinner orders placed, Lou and Frank headed for the corner where Richard and Deb were set up. Richard launched “T-Bone Shuffle” and the horns tore into it, Lou on alto, Frank on tenor. Knowing Lou’s history as a member of Blood, Sweat & Tears, the original Saturday Night Live band and the Blues Brothers band (he was in both Blues Brothers movies), I was primed for a heavy R & B scene. But Lou proved a fierce bebopper. With Frank in his lively, oblique Lester Young bag, this was as close to Bird and Pres as I’ve ever come. I was knocked out.
This may sound odd, but part of the joy came from watching Lou grab bits and pieces of the heads and sometimes feel his way through the first improvised chorus or part thereof and then nail the chord changes solidly the next time around. He was fallible and human but a quick study. And that was the beauty of it — recovery, ingenuity, memory and the musical ear in action on the wing. He played lots of blistering runs and varied the entrances and exits of his phrases. You could catch Bird’s vibrato once in a while. He showed intense drive. In the words of the “Cannonball” Adderley title, this was “spontaneous combustion.”
Frank’s tenor — full of quotes and circling runs and behind-the-beat phrases — took the harmony to places it had rarely been before. He can make the oddest note fit. It was lovely and floating. He was the Four Brothers to Lou’s Bebop Brother.
Richard called the tunes, started an intro and let the horns find the melody and weave counterlines: “I Remember You,” “Have You Met Miss Jones,” “Blue Monk,” “Autumn Leaves,” “Tenor Madness,” “There Will Never Be Another You” …
Sometimes the spirit of a thing can give you hope and heal you even when the source isn’t perfect. Such was the case here. I wouldn’t have changed a note.
(For the record: Frank lives in Cary. Lou’s dad., who was also present, now lives in Raleigh. Frank and the Marinis lived in Ohio during Frank’s teaching days.)
(I sent you this because jams of this caliber and spontaneity don’t happen too much anymore, especially where I live.)
Owen

In addition to his work for the News and Observer, Owen Cordle reviews music for JazzTimes magazine.

Several versions of a joke usually beginning something like, “A note walks into a bar….” are floating around the internet. Buddy DeFranco forwarded the most elaborate I’ve seen. The Rifftides management makes no claims about the reliability of the musicology in this tale:

A C, an E-flat, and a G go into a bar. The bartender says: “Sorry, but we don’t serve minors.” So, the E-flat leaves, and the C and the G have an open fifth between them. After a few drinks, the fifth is diminished: the G is out flat. An F comes in and tries to augment the situation, but is not sharp enough.
A D comes into the bar and heads straight for the bathroom saying, “Excuse me. I’ll just be a second.”
An A comes into the bar, but the bartender is not convinced that this relative of C is not a minor.
Then the bartender notices a B-flat hiding at the end of the bar and exclaims: “Get out now! You’re the seventh minor I’ve found in this bar tonight.”
The E-flat, not easily deflated, comes back to the bar the next night in a 3-piece suit with nicely shined shoes. The bartender (who used to have a nice corporate job until his company downsized) says: “You’re looking sharp tonight, come on in! This could be a major development.” This proves to be the case, as the E-flat takes off the suit, and everything else, and stands there au naturel.
Eventually, the C sobers up, and realizes in horror that he’s under a rest. The C is brought to trial, is found guilty of contributing to the diminution of a minor, and is sentenced to 10 years of DS without Coda at an upscale correctional facility. On appeal, however, the C is found innocent of any wrongdoing, even accidental, and that all accusations to the contrary are bassless.
The bartender decides, however, that since he’s only had tenor so patrons, the soprano out in the bathroom, and everything has become alto much treble, he needs a rest – and closes the bar.

Reaction to the Bush administration’s cockeyed attempt to emasculate the Voice of America through budget cuts is getting shocked attention not only among policy analysts at home but also from members of the VOA’s audience abroad. Here is part of a letter from a New Delhi man named Vijay Kranti to The Washington Times, a heavily conservative newspaper. Earlier, the Times‘s editorial page urged the White House to abandon its plan to cut English language news broadcasts by slashing VOA’s funding.

I wonder if the U.S. policy-makers ever knew that the total population of shortwave radio listeners in India alone is more than total number of U.S. voters on any given day. Unlike me, most of these listeners live in areas where they have just “zero” or not enough access to TV, FM or Internet. Shortwave radio has, for decades, been their main source of information. And it is going to stay with them till the day technology offers them a low-cost battery-operated direct to home TV.
It may be news to U.S. policy-makers that thanks to radio networks like VOA, millions of these listeners world over are better informed about America and the world situation as compared to an above-average American citizen.

To read the whole thing, go here and scroll down to the second letter. If you are concerned about the administration’s attempt to stifle a government agency that sends objective and balanced news and information to a world in which the United States needs understanding, tell your senators and representatives. Congress can stop this repressive campaign against open expresion.

John Stowell’s solo on “Blues on the Corner” should be transcribed by every serious guitar player on the planet.
On second thought, make that every serious player.
Bill Kirchner

Jeff Albert’s story the other day about his daughter’s innocently perceptive question brought this followup.

Doug,
My favorite father/daughter story comes from my friend, the great drummer Allen Schwartzberg from New York. Quite a few years ago he took his eight-year-old daughter to hear an evening outdoor concert of Rostropovich and the National Symphony. Sitting together under the stars, before the concert was about to begin, Allen pointed to the television cameras and explained to her that the concert was going to be broadcast live all over America. To which she replied, “You mean we’re gonna miss it?”
Alan Broadbent

Not that you would, but don’t miss Terry Teachout’s essay about going home again. This will give you a hint of what it’s about, although it’s about much more.

“Thanks, Carol, I’d love to, but…” But the truth is that I don’t play anymore, Carol, I haven’t touched a bass in years, it wouldn’t be fun for either one of us, maybe some other time. Long pause. Deep breath. “But promise me one thing—don’t make me take any solos.”

He also writes this:

The trouble with good advice is that nobody ever takes it. Kind friends warned me that a book tour is the only thing more humiliating than falling in love with someone who likes you back, but that didn’t stop me from hitting the road and watching every single word they said come true. The TV people hadn’t read my book; the newspaper reporters had, and hated it. As for the in-store appearances, the worst one was in a small town where I did an early-morning guest shot on the local radio station, then went to the mall and sat for five straight hours without signing a single copy.

OH, yes.
To read it all, go here. Then, come back.

You may be interested in where some of your fellow readers are following Rifftides. A recent check of the site meter finds them all over the world, in places including:
â–ªMickleover, Derby, United Kingdom
â–ªMere, Warrington, United Kingdom
â–ªBrussels, Belgium
â–ªBarcelona, Spain
â–ªArche, Limousin, Spain
â–ªCceres, Extremadura, Spain
â–ªMijas, Andalucia, Spain
â–ªMontreal, Quebec, Canada
â–ªHamilton, Bermuda
â–ªTokyo, Japan
â–ªKuguta, Chiba, Japan
â–ªParis, France
â–ªNantes, Pays de la Loire, France
â–ªZurich, Switzerland
â–ªPenrose, New Zealand
▪The United States, from Wenatchee, Washington to Fenton, Missouri, to West Henrietta, New York, and hundreds of spots in between—large and small. Welcome to you all.
Wenatchee, my home town (funny I should mention that), is The Apple Capital of the World and the Buckle of the Power Belt of the Northwest. The masthead of The Wenatchee World has made that clear since long before I began my career in journalism launching copies of the newspaper onto subscribers’ porches. I will be visiting Wenatchee tomorrow. The occasion is the annual Wenatchee Jazz Workshop, an annual event that brings student players together with a faculty of world-class musicians. I have been asked to speak preceding a concert featuring the Jeff Hamilton Trio with Tamir Hendelman and Cristof Luty, trombonist Bruce Paulsen, tenor saxophonist Tom Peterson, trumpeter Gilbert Castellanos, and the Wenatchee Big Band. The kids are in good hands. I’m looking forward to hearing them and their visiting teachers.

DevraDoWrite is trying to answer a question from one of her blogees. This is it:

In 1966, the Hampton Hawes trio (with Red Mitchell & Donald Bailey) recorded ‘live’ for Contemporary Records at Mitchell’s Studio Club in Los Angeles (the ‘Mitchell’ in question was no relation to Red, the bassist). Two LP albums were subsequently issued: The Séance and I’m All Smiles. My question is: Do you – or does anyone among your many readers happen to recall the address of this particular club?

Phil Woods and Ray Bryant also recorded at Mitchell’s. I have no further clues.

If you direct your attention to the right-hand column and scroll down, you will come upon the new batch of Doug’s Picks. At the top of that column in “About,” the Rifftides staff makes the assumption that people who follow jazz are also interested in other matters. The book pick this time around may be, at least in literature, the ultimate Other Matter.

Nice piece of writing by Ben Ratliff in today’s New York Times. He covered the concert in which 87-year-old Gerald Wilson took over the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. Ratfliff reports that Wilson “hijacked the evening.”

Mr. Wilson made the show an exclamation point. He stalked the front of the stage, his white mane turned to the audience and his piercing eyes trained on the band. His body was tuned to the music — dislodging rich, overstuffed harmonies of brass and reeds and quelling them, socking his right fist into his left hand to drive the rhythm section harder, ending songs crisply.

To read the whole thing, go here.

The Portland Jazz Festival ends on Sunday, but the main events took place last weekend. Here are samples of my impressions, from a long review for Jazz Times.

McCoy Tyner’s trio with bassist Charnett Moffett and drummer Eric Gravatt played the opening concert. Before a capacity audience in the gargantuan grand ballroom of the Portland Hilton, Tyner pulled out the stops, meaning that on a dynamic scale of 10, he kept the music between 8.5 and 10. A monster sound system, suited to a rock concert in a stadium, grossly over amplified Moffett’s bass so that Gravatt had no choice but to compensate with full drum power. What could Tyner do but lean into the piano with all of his considerable strength, exaggerating his natural tendencies.

On Dee Dee Bridgewater:

The one American song was Neal Hefti’s “Girl Talk.” Bridgewater announced it as strictly for the women in the audience. She sang it in French, then English. As it progressed, she morphed from sophisticated Parisienne into a Della Reese/Pearl Bailey persona and converted the song into a sketch about picking up a man in a bar, taking him home to bed, then dismissing him without their ever learning one another’s names. If that sounds earthy and outrageous, it was, explicitly so, with illustrative body language. It was ”just between us girls” and it was very funny.

On Bill Frisell:

Scherr and Roberts, the cellist, began a series of unison chromatic lines leading into another segue transition. Suddenly Frisell’s guitar was in solo on a peaceful melody as the strings made a transition from free playing to a folk melody. Behind them, Scherr raised the intensity with an arco solo, then the activity decreased back toward peacefulness, but it was a more troubling peace, a dissonant, polytonal, Schoenbergian peace that didn’t end but melded into Frisell playing heavy guitar over a slow, insistent waltz beat.

To read the whole thing, go to the JazzTimes website.
Have a good weekend.

Doug:
Fine commentary on Earl Hines’ rightful place in jazz legend. You might also have mentioned how indebted Nat Cole was to the Fatha and how Nat is also often unrecognized today for the giant he was–most people seem to remember him as just a singer.
He exhibited the same joy and exuberance in his playing that Hines did and need not have ever sung a note in order to be always remembered.
Jack Tracy

I couldn’t agree more with the former editor of Down Beat about Nat Cole’s greatness as a pianist. In addition to the qualities Mr. Tracy mentions, Cole’s keyboard touch and advanced harmonic concept influenced almost all modern jazz pianists who came after him, including Bud Powell, Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans. Considering the impact those three alone had on the course of jazz piano, it is clear that the multiplier effect of Cole’s example pervades the music. He had other influences—Teddy Wilson, Billy Kyle—but Hines was his primary inspiration, and Cole often acknowledged him. Hines’ effect on Cole is directly apparent on the earliest King Cole Trio recordings on Decca. There are even more refined examples of it in his “Body and Soul” solo from the first Jazz At The Philharmonic concert in 1944, in “Lester Leaps In,” and most dramatically in “Tea for Two.” You can also plainly hear Hines in the way Cole comps at JATJP behind Shorty Sherock, Jack McVea, Les Paul, and Illinois Jacquet on “Rosetta.” On the same album, his exchange of two-bar phrases with Les Paul in a chase sequence on the blues demonstrates the exuberance Jack mentions, as well as Cole’s lightning musical reflexes and his love of risk-taking. Nat Cole’s spectacular, and deserved, popular success as a singer eclipsed his role as a pianist, but his enduring musical importance came at the keyboard.
I’m glad that Jack raised this point about Cole. It sent me to the shelves to dig out the JATP album. I hadn’t heard it in years. I haven’t had more listening fun in weeks, even unto the tenor sax honks and squeals of McVea and Jacquet. Sixty years later, they seem not gratuitously outrageous, but amusing. I suspect that is how they were intended. Not the least of the CD’s pleasures is hearing the young trombonist J.J. Johnson making the transition from swing to bop.

Doug,
In a confluence of recent Rifftides topics…
I took my 11-year-old step son and 4-year-old daughter to a Maynard Ferguson Big Bop Nouveau concert at a local high school last night. The high school’s big band opened for them.
During the first tune, after a couple of solos and the traditional after-solo applause, my daughter leaned over to me and asked, “are they going to play straight through, or stop between songs?” I said, “no, they will stop between songs,” to which she replied, “then why are we clapping while the music is still playing?”
Jeff Albert

My kind of 11-year-old.

In my Maria Schneider report a few weeks ago, I speculated about the economics of moving large congregations of musicians around the country. It turns out, according to DevraDoWrite, that the speculation was on target. The difference between Devra and me is that she has the inside facts. A sampling:

Having been Maria’s manager at one time, I know that she pays her musicians well (especially compared to some other leaders) and that on occassion she has netted less on a gig than anyone else in the band. I have even seen her take a loss (yes, pay out of her own pocket) because for the sake of the music she wants more rehearsal time and pays for that as well. Add in manager and agent commissions and an artist’s slice of the pie is often just a sliver.

Devra’s posting has a review of the Los Angeles concert that included the new commission piece Schneider debuted there. To read the whole thing, go to Maria Schneider at Disney Hall.