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Jim Wilke keeps producing broadcasts on his Jazz Northwest that are hard to resist, so it’s hard to resist alerting you to them. Here’s his announcement about tomorrow’s program.

The poll-winning, critically acclaimed international clarinet star Anat Cohen played two concerts with The Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra in February. The concerts, billed as “A World Viewof Jazz” were among the highlights of the 20th anniversary season of the SRJO, co-directed by Clarence Acox andMichael Brockman. The sold-out Sunday concert at Kirkland Performance Center was recorded for Jazz Northwest and will be broadcast on Sunday, March 15 at 2 PM PDT on 88.5 KPLU and stream at kplu.org.

Born in Tel Aviv where she began her music education, Anat Cohen came to the US to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston. There she came in contact with musicians from Latin America and developed a great love for music of Brazil, Cuba, Argentina and Colombia. She plays music representative of those countries and others in this concert with the SRJO. She is particularly adept at Brazilian music including choro, the predecessor of samba and bossa nova.

Recently, two sets of Rifftides readers have told me that they look forward to the photographs that occasionally pop up here when I remember to take a camera on cycling expeditions or other excursions around the Pacific Northwest. I’m happy to oblige now and then, but not—I promise—to the extent of making the blog resemble a FaceBook page. In this case, obliging was easy because spring has come to the valley. As evidence, above is the apricot tree in the little orchard on the Rifftides world headquarters south forty. It went from buds to full bloom in about four days. The peach tree won’t be too far behind.

Despite the paucity of snow in the mountains over the winter, the nearby canal was full and yesterday we cranked up the neighborhood irrigation system for the season. We know what it’s like in other regions, and we know how lucky we are.

Have a good weekend.

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Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.

You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.

Any musician who says he is playing better either on tea, the needle, or when he is juiced, is a plain, straight liar. When I get too much to drink, I can’t even finger well, let alone play decent ideas. … You can miss the most important years of your life, the years of possible creation.

Charlie Parker died 60 years ago today.

But, as John O’Hara said when he heard that George Gershwin was gone—I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to. Neither do you.

Charlie Parker, alto saxophone; Miles Davis, trumpet; Duke Jordan, piano; Tommy Potter, bass; Max Roach, drums. New York, 1947

Thank you for Charlie Parker.

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When the news is discouraging, when—to quote James Moody quoting his grandmother—”Folks is dyin’ what ain’t never died befo’,” it’s good to have someone to turn to for reassurance. Whether in the close jazz community or in the great world at large, we need the balance and wisdom of an adviser who can place things in perspective.

And who do we call? No, we don’t have ghosts to bust; we want to banish the feeling that the center is not holding. Of course: we call Mr. P.C.

Dear Mr. P.C.:

Is there really a “Jazz Industry”? That makes it sound like there are thousands of people slaving away at their craft for little or no compensation. How is that possible in America? Is that why they call it “The land of the free”? I know that’s more than one question, but this is so disturbing.

—Olympia Oliphant

Dear OO:

I’m sure you know that there are great jazz musicians all around the world, but apparently you don’t recognize the threat they pose to American jazz wages and job security. There is indeed a jazz industry in America, and it has to set wages low so they won’t be undercut by artists abroad.

Do you really want to see our gigs outsourced—songs sung in undecipherable Indian accents; cheap Chinese licks flooding the market; charts written from right to left, performed by underfed children working long hours in unsafe clubs? It’s not fair to them, it’s not fair to you, and it’s not fair to America, where jazz was born and must remain.

That’s why the industry—of the jazz musician, by the jazz musician, and for the jazz musician—protects you by keeping your pay at bare subsistence level.

If you think that was helpful, wait until you see the rest of Mr. P.C.’s new column. It and his entire archive of columns are posted at All About Jazz, where he is a regular feature.

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The sad notes keep coming. Trumpeter Lew Soloff died early today. His daughter, Laura Solomon, reported on her Facebook page that Soloff was with her and her family on their way home from a New York restaurant when he collapsed with a massive heart attack . He was 71. Born in New York City, a trumpeter from age 12, Soloff developed into a stalwart in jazz who was also in demand in New York’s studios. He reached his greatest general renown as a member of Blood, Sweat and Tears from 1968 to 1973. In the jazz community, he was respected for his strength and reliability in brass sections and for the imagination, daring—and idiosyncracy—of his solos.

Soloff made his first professional breakthrough with the Machito orchestra and went on to play with Maynard Ferguson, Gil Evans, Joe Henderson, Clark Terry, George Russell, Urbie Green and the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra, among many other prominent bands. Millions were familiar with his solo on the Blood, Sweat and Tears hit “Spinning Wheel.” Here’s the version from Woodstock in 1969. The video quality is substandard, but the sound is fairly good, and the solo is typical Soloff of the period, that is, full of the excitement and adventurous turns that endeared him to listeners and his colleagues.

Here’s Soloff in an extended solo with the Mingus Big Band in 1992. His musicianship is clear, and so is the idiosyncracy.

For an obituary, see this JazzTimes article. Lew’s daughter is quoted as saying that plans for a memorial service will be developed.

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On his Jazz Northwest broadcasts, Jim Wilke frequently features recordings of live performances that we feel compelled to tell you about. One of them will be aired later today. Here is Mr. Wilke’s announcement about a tribute to a great musician by a band of distinguished colleagues.

Kenny Wheeler (1930-2014) was born in Toronto but lived in London from the 1950s on, playing trumpet and flugelhorn and composing in a unique style that ranged from soft lyricism to explosive free expression. His many recordings for ECM and CAM Jazz are widely praised by critics and studied by musicians. In a pair of concerts at The Royal Room in Seattle, Steve Treseler and Ingrid Jensen co-led a Tribute to Kenny Wheeler featuring two evenings of his music. Joining Ingrid Jensen on trumpet and Steve Treseler on tenor sax were Geoffrey Keezer on piano, Martin Wind on bass and Jon Wikan on drums, with vocalist Katie Jacobson.

Jazz Northwest is recorded and produced by Jim Wilke for 88.5 KPLU. The program airs every Sunday afternoon at 2 PM Pacific and streams at kplu.org. A podcast of each show is available after the broadcast at jazznw.org

This Tribute to Kenny Wheeler was produced by Earshot Jazz, John Gilbreath, Executive Director, and was recorded by Jim Wilke for NPR’s Jazz Night in America, and KPLU’s Jazz Northwest. NPR music shot a video of the evening. The musicians also spent a day in the studio recording this music for a future release.

For a Rifftides remembrance of Kenny Wheeler, go here.

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In the year of his 70th birthday, Dizzy Gillespie toured extensively in Europe with prominent jazz artists who had played with him in various phases of his career. On February 27, 1987, he gave a concert at the Theaterhaus in Stuttgart, Germany. It included a set by his quintet with Sam Rivers, tenor saxophone; Ed Cherry, guitar; John Lee, electric bass; and Ignacio Berroa, drums. It also had a memorable interlude with pianist Hank Jones and Gillespie playing a duet on the trumpeter’s incomparable ballad “Con Alma.” Here, the quintet opens with the Gillespie composition “Tanga.”

The entire concert was carried by ZDF-TV, the German public television service and hosted (in German) by pianist George Gruntz. It also featured Slide Hampton, Johnny Griffin, Jon Faddis, Arturo Sandoval, Eddie Gomez and Ed Thigpen. To see and hear the entire hour and 23 minutes, go here.

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The influential jazz producer, record company head and author Orrin Keepnews died today at his home in El Cerrito, California. He would have been 92 tomorrow. Keepnews guided the recording careers of Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, Wes Montgomery, Sonny Rollins and many other leading jazz artists of the 20th Century. The announcement of his death came from his son Peter Keepnews, who with his brother David had flown from New York to their father’s bedside two days earlier. Keepnews is pictured with his four Grammy statuettes, two for albums he produced, two for album annotations that called on his skill as a jazz journalist.

In the late 1940s, as managing editor of The Record Changer, Keepnews wrote one of the first extensive articles about Monk, then an obscure pianist. With Bill Grauer, Keepnews founded Riverside Records in 1953. They signed another pianist, Randy Weston, to Riverside a year later, and in 1955 signed Monk, whose series of Riverside albums brought him to prominence. Successful Riverside albums followed by other artists, including Evans, Montgomery, Rollins, Cannonball Adderley and Abbey Lincoln. After financial struggles and Grauer’s death, Riverside went out of business in the early sixties. Keepnews went to to co-found the Milestone label and then Landmark.

Among the Bill Evans albums Keepnews produced were those of the pianist’s trio at the Village Vanguard in New York in 1961. They were among the most influential jazz recordings of the period and helped to determine directions that jazz took as it developed through the rest of 20th century and into the 21st. Evans showed his regard for Keepnews by titling one of his compositions as an anagram of “Orrin Keepnews”—“Re: Person I Knew.”

For an extensive biography, see Nate Chinen’s obituary in The New York Times.

I will miss Orrin as a close friend of more than half a century.

Note: the first version of this post had an error in the title of “Re: Person I Knew.” It has been corrected.

For those Mount Hood devotees who enjoyed seeing the mountain’s west side the other day, here’s how it looks facing east. This is the view from the town of Mount Hood, Oregon,

The original post misidentified Mount Adams as Mount Hood. The real Mount Hood replaces that shot. Apologies to fans of both mountains in the Cascades chain and thanks to Rifftides readers Larry Peterson, Paul Morris and Karen Merola Krueger for catching the goof (me).

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Trumpeter Nicholas Payton’s kaleidoscopic talent was on full, and generally satisfying, display with his trio at the Newmark Theatre. He frequently accompanied himself with his left hand on an electric piano as he played the trumpet held in his right. Sitting at the junction of an angle formed by the electric piano and a concert grand, he turned from one to the other, and occasionally played both at once. He sang soulfully in falsetto or a low baritone. He played bebop and hinted at hip-hop. He paid homage to New Orleans, his hometown, with a parade beat and lyrics that mentioned red beans, Mandina’s and Tipitina’s.

In the veteran drummer Bill Stewart and young bassist Vicente Archer, Payton has band mates fully up to the challenges of their leader’s quick-change artistry. Pieces called “Two,” “Three” and “Six” from Payton’s album Numbers were vamps that opened spaces for improvisation. Payton, Stewart and Archer filled the spaces with unflagging energy. When it was his job to keep time, Archer played walking bass lines to great effect. When he soloed, there was clarity in his sound and logic in the melodies he invented. On Thelonious Monk’s “Straight No Chaser” Payton ended one of his trumpet-electric piano excursions with a run up to a trumpet note well above high C, then pivoted to the grand piano for a solo full of chromatic modulations, riffs and repeats. Stewart slashed and burned behind Payton, then followed with a drum solo that was both fiery and constructed with geometrical logic.

Payton sang “ When I Fall In Love,” with intonation all over the place, apparently on purpose, although the nature of the purpose was unclear. He ended the song on trumpet with flutters followed by lovely long tones. When Payton held the trumpet in both hands, reared back on the bench and concentrated his considerable energy and creativity in the construction of a jazz solo—as he did in variations on phrases from Benny Golson’s “Stablemates”—he made it clear that he is one of the trumpet’s contemporary jazz masters. Given his development of other specialties, it will be interesting to see where his eclecticism is taking him.

For the trio’s encore, Payton announced a piece from his next album, which is to be called Letters. “The name of it, he said, is…”

…“A,” shouted most of the audience. It was an attractive song of standard construction that ended with a soft and welcome trumpet solo.

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The Portland Jazz Festival is in the final week of its 12-day run, with performances by headliners Julian Lage, Hal Galper, Sheila Jordan, Laurence Hobgood, Ron Carter and bluesman Lucky Peterson. Also scheduled: a plethora of Portland and Northwest artists, among them David Friesen, Pink Martini’s Phil Baker, Clay Giberson and Darrell Grant with Marilyn Keller. For the schedule of remaining events, go here.

These are impressions of some of the music I heard before I returned to Rifftides world headquarters:

Young Lions Revisited is a band of players in their twenties and thirties, mostly based in Portland and devoted to the spirit of the hard bop revival that Wynton Marsalis spearheaded in the early 1990s. Its co-leaders are tenor saxophonist Devin Phillips, who moved to Portland from New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and drummer Christopher Brown, a Portland native. Pianist Matt Tabor is a student and protégé of Portland pianist and educator Darrell Grant. Bassist Dylan Sundstrom from Tacoma, Washington, lives in Portland. Their PDX concert included two guest tenor saxophonists, the veteran New Yorker Ralph Bowen and Kamasi Washington, who is based in Los Angeles. (Pictured left to right, Bowen, Phillips and Washington.)

Opening for Lee Konitz, The Young Lions began with Marsalis’s “Delfeayo’s Dilemma.” Phillips and Washington demonstrated contrasting conceptions within the post-Coltrane tough-tenor tradition; Washington gruff and headlong, Phillips with equal urgency and smoother phrasing. Bowen joined in for “Summertime” with a searching solo that seemed based in a mode rather than in Gershwin’s harmonies. Tabor’s solos on this and other pieces suggested an intriguing sense of touch and dynamics. He’s someone to keep an ear on.

The three tenors lined up for a tune whose title was unannounced but whose harmonies hinted at Miles Davis’s “Milestones.” In their solos, Washington and Phillips chattered through the changes. Bowen came closer to spinning out a story. The high point was in their three-way tenor sax coda, a collective triumph. The mini-concert ended with Paul Barbarin’s “Bourbon Street Parade.” Phillips the New Orleanian, not surprisingly, nailed the street feeling, abetted by Brown’s parade-beat drumming. It was a joyful ending to a short set.

Konitz, 87, brought Dan Tepfer, the 33-year-old pianist with whom he has collaborated so intriguingly over the past few years. Portland bassist Tom Wakeling and drummer Alan Jones rounded out the quartet. With no rehearsal and an unwritten tune list based on a pre-concert conversation, the four played as if they had been together for months. Konitz (pictured with Jones) was feeling elocutious. He opened with the first of several monologues. It had to do with Russia and ended with advice for Vladimir Putin; “He should try something new.”

He took the advice to heart himself, abstracting “Stella By Starlight” in a duet with Tepfer. “Improvisation means it should be different from the last time you did it,” he explained before they began. In the course of his solo, he took a pause and a few people in the audience began to applaud. Konitz removed the horn from his mouth and extended both hands palms out as Tepfer continued to outline the harmonies. Then, with the audience instructed in listening etiquette, Konitz finished the solo. It was not the final lesson of the evening.

In “I’ll Remember April,” Konitz vocalized in harmony with Tepfer’s introduction before he began playing his horn. He was sitting in a chair center stage, and it was possible to see that he kept time with both feet, the right one on all four beats, the left one on 2 and 4. After Konitz made new melodies, he and Tepfer vocalized, singly and in counterpoint. It was the first installment of what amounted to ear training that continued on and off through the rest of the concert. Konitz urged the audience to hum a basic note that he provided. He and Tepfer played “Alone Together.” He then asked if anyone would like to improvise. Midway in the theater, two women took him up on it and scatted alternating phrases, in tune and with good time. Konitz ended the piece vocalizing like a cantor.

Introducing the next tune, Konitz said that it was based on “What Is This Thing Called Love,” “and it’s called…” A man in the audience finished the sentence…”Subconcious Lee.”

By now, Konitz had dispatched Tepfer to the wings to bring out “the bass player and drummer, if you can remember who they are.” Wakeling played walking bass as Tepfer and Jones found one another’s time feeling, then produced a diversionary phrase that Konitz adapted and refashioned, and the quartet was off on an adventure. Through “Body and Soul,” there was more vocalizing by Konitz and Tepfer, exquisite brush work by Jones behind Tepfer’s piano solo and Konitz calling forth the huge tone that he has developed in his later years. Jones made dynamic use of sticks to introduce “Cherokee,” in which Konitz played random phrases and Jones had a full-out solo.

Konitz announced that he felt like playing “Kary’s Trance,” his composition based on “Play, Fiddle, Play,” a 1932 popular song that was a hit for Arthur Tracey, the Street Singer. Wakeling said he didn’t know it. They played it anyway and within a chorus or two, Wakeling knew it. Ending the song, Tepfer and Konitz played the complex melody in unison, and Konitz wound it up vocalizing another cantorial ending. So the evening went, with the audience engaged as the fifth member of the band and everyone, including Konitz, having a splendid time.

There are those whose who moan that Konitz no longer plays like the 20-year-old Lennie Tristano sideman he was in the late forties or with the shimmering brilliance of his work with Stan Kenton and Gerry Mulligan in the early fifties. If they had been in the Winningstad Theatre the other night, they might be persuaded that the experience and wisdom of old age can bring its own rewards, including laughter.