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This piece ran on Rifftides eight years ago. In those early days of the blog, I hadn’t learned how to add pictures and relied on words to create images.

Any day now could be the last good one of the year for cycling, so I said goodbye to work and took advantage of a late October afternoon so perfect that to have left it out there by itself would have been a shame. Deciding not to pit the road bike against heavy, skitterish Friday traffic, I left it in the shed and headed the mountain bike toward the system of canals that criss-crosses this agricultural valley. I dropped onto the path along a canal a block from my house and entered instant peace and quiet, except for the dogs that charge with intent to kill the moment they sense a cyclist.

Is there an animal psychologist out there who can tell us what it is about bicycles that drives dogs temporarily insane? Fortunately, there’s a leash law that keeps dogs mostly behind fences in town. In the country, you can usually get up a head of steam and outrun a farm dog, but a couple of weeks ago, a big black brute roared out of a yard and was gaining on me. When he came alongside and started nipping, I yelled as loud as I could (that’s loud), “Go home.” To my relief–and from the expression on his face, to his astonishment–he went home.

Nothing like that happened today. The only annoyances were piles of mud dredged out of the canals by ditch riders cleaning up after a summer of irrigation, and the extra shirt I threw on under my jersey. The air seemed cool when I started, but the temperature quickly rose on the steep hills. Russet and red leaves along parts of the path crackled under my tires. A crow circled along in the clear sky above me for a few hundred yards, reprimanding me for some offense. Two horses looked up as I passed their pasture. Apple harvest was over in most of the orchards. One pear farmer apparently decided that his crop wouldn’t bring him enough to make picking worthwhile. The pears lay beneath his trees where he let them fall, in the first stages of returning into the earth.

On a stretch up near the valley rim, a squirrel darted across the path fifty feet ahead. To my right, I saw a bigger creature move along the edge of an expansive lawn. The man paused to pump his air gun, then stalked the squirrel. He stopped, took aim, got off a shot, shook his head, and resumed gliding slowly along the edge of his property. Not wanting to distract him, I stopped and watched for ten minutes as he pursued his quarry with no less concentration than a sahib on safari. He took two more shots, but it was clear that the varmint had escaped. As he turned around, I said, “Hold your fire.”

“Oh,” he said, “I didn’t see you.”

“I know. I didn’t want to startle you and be your next victim.”

He felt like talking. He said he couldn’t keep flowers and couldn’t grow vegetables. The squirrels dig them up and eat them. They undermined a stone walkway he built. It was sinking, he said. He pointed to two pieces of equipment, a loader and a hay rake. One of his sons was storing them there, but he told him he’d have to move them, so the son found a buyer who gave him fifty dollars for the loader and a hundred for the rake, but the buyer hasn’t come for them.

“You see that shed,” he said. “I put that there years ago to store my tools while I built the house. I intended to tear it down when the house was done, but now it’s full of my grandson’s stuff. I told him he’d have to get it out of there next year. I want this area clear so I can plant it in lawn. That camper my son put there has got to go.” His gaze swept over his property. “I’ve got a lot of lawn, two acres of it. That area there, I cleared,” he said, pointing to a space ten by twenty feet bordered with creosoted timbers. “My other son had this old Mustang. It sat there for a long time, then some fella from Australia came along and paid him ten thousand dollars for it. Shipped it back to Australia with three or four other Mustangs. I guess they like old Mustangs down there.

“I’ve had this place since 1941. Retired from the mill fifteen years ago. Raised three kids here. After we had the first one, a daughter, the doctor told my wife she couldn’t have any more children. Seven years later, we had a son. He was fine. She was fine. Shows you what doctors know. Fourteen years after that, we had another son. What happiness. She was fifteen when we met, I was seventeen. Got married when she was twenty and I was twenty-two. I love it out here. It’s quiet. Away from the road. I’ve got a long driveway. Got that ditch running by. Nearest neighbor is clear over there, but his property runs right up against mine. We get along.”

He gestured at the orchard across the canal. “The old man who owned that had property ran clear into town, down by the freeway where the mall is. He used to stop by here when he was in his eighties, and I’d say, ‘I’m going in and get you a coke,’ and we’d just sit here by the canal and talk, for hours sometimes. He’s gone now.”

I extended my hand. We exchanged names. “I ride by here now and then,” I said. “We’ll talk again.”

“We sure will,” he said. “You take care.”

I rode home feeling good. The dogs seemed friendlier.

Immediately outside the west wall of Rifftides world headquarters is a magnificent Sunset Maple. Each fall, the tree puts on a show. The show is in its final act. With luck, we have a week before the curtain of leaves falls. In the meantime, this is what we wake up to.

You probably suspect that I’m going to use the foliage as an excuse to play a piece of music, and you’re right. It’s from a television special, Those Ragtime Years, narrated by Hoagy Carmichael. It aired on November 22, 1960, on NBC’s Project 20. This was the finale, Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” played by four pianists—from left to right in the video, Ralph Sutton, Dick Wellstood, Eubie Blake and Carmichael. The Sidney DeParis band joins them for the final chorus.

Canada might give serious thought to making that piece its national athem.

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The governing principle of the Dayna Stephens album recommended in the post below brought to mind the philosophy of Red Mitchell (1927-1992). “Simple isn’t easy,” the great bassist often said. He wrote a song and made an album using that title. The album is a quirky jewel of his discography, as endearing as when it first appeared 30 years ago. It’s Mitchell all the way; just Red, his bass, his piano, his singing and his compositions. In addition to the title tune, the songs include “I’m a Homeboy,” “Let’s Emulate the Japanese” and “Where’s Don Ellis Now?”

Where’s Red Mitchell now?—now that we need his wit, his incomparable bass playing and his songs promoting love and understanding?

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Billie Holiday’s recording of “Strange Fruit,” shocked listeners in 1939. Seventy-five years later, the song’s portrayal of racist lynching retains its disturbing power as commentary on a shameful part of the American past. Trumpeter, bandleader, blogger and broadcaster Steve Provizer’s radio drama about the singer and the history of the record is debuting this fall. It will air on stations across the country. The story involves not only Holiday, but also the song’s composer, and the club and record label owners who had the courage to act on their belief in “Strange Fruit.”

Mr. Provizer (pictured right) says, “I would like to emphasize that I hope the program can be used in educational and non-profit settings to stimulate conversations on racism and culture.” He has granted Rifftides permission to give readers a link to a page at PRX (Public Radio Exchange) where you can listen to the quarter-hour drama. Click here.

Steve Provizer will discuss the background of the program and play excerpts on the Morgan White, Jr. show on WBZ, the CBS station in Boston. The show is scheduled for Saturday, November 8 at 11 p.m. EDT. It will be streamed live on the internet at this site.

Queries still arrive about where to buy Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. As hardened Rifftides readers know, but newcomers may not, new clothbound copies are history, unless you are lucky enough to spot one on the shelf of your corner bookstore. And if your town still has a corner bookstore, congratulations. Desmond—pictured left with Dave Brubeck and Gene Wright—loved technological advances; he would no doubt be at least this happy if he knew that his biography has gone digital. Please see this announcement from a year ago for details.

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‘Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world. — William Shakespeare

 

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.   — Emily Dickinson

 

There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics and the Great Pumpkin. — Linus Van Pelt

From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-legged beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us! – Scottish saying

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Conventional wisdom in jazz is that the harmonies in the bridge section of Rogers and Hart’s “Have You Met Miss Jones?” inspired John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.” Recently Mark Gilbert, the editor of the British magazine Jazz Journal suggested that a more likely source was composer Harry Warren’s “Chica Chica Boom Chic,” from the 1941 film That Night In Rio. Pianist Jan Lundgren followed up with a letter to the magazine calling Gilbert’s proposition a “sensational discovery.” Lundgren said his analysis showed that the way Warren (pictured right) used moving key centers in major thirds in the final strain of the novelty movie song is “more or less exactly the way Coltrane used the sequence in the first important three bars of “Giant Steps.”

Let’s listen to and watch Carmen Miranda and Don Ameche perform the song. The section in question comes near the end of the movie clip, at 2:37. You needn’t bother digging into your record collection for the comparison. Coltrane’s 1959 recording of “Giant Steps” follows.

It is unlikely that we will ever know whether Coltrane was familiar with “Chica Chica Boom Chic,” but Gilbert’s and Lundgren’s speculation is intriguing.

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The clock says it’s still the weekend (barely) way out west.

John Marshall, the American expatriate who is the longtime principal trumpet of the WDR Big Band in Germany, sent links to performances from his recent quintet tour in Germany, Switzerland and Holland. His front line partner was Grant Stewart, the Canadian tenor saxophonist based in New York. Their rhythm section had Leo Lindberg, piano, Kenji Rabson, bass; and Phil Stewart, drums. Here they are at the Jazz Schmiede in Düsseldorf on September 19 with Duke Ellington’s “Warm Valley” (1940), a ballad seldom played by contemporary musicians, who may not realize what they are missing.

To the right of the YouTube screen showing “Warm Valley” are links to other videos by Marshall’s quintet with Stewart. Marshall visits the US a couple of times a year, but that may not be often enough to remind his countrymen of the talent he exported to Germany. His website fills in a number of blanks.

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Kristin Korb, Finding Home (Double K)

Korb, whose singing matches the high quality of her bass playing, releases Finding Home after previewing some of its pieces this summer at the Ystad Jazz Festival in Sweden. The nine songs she wrote for the album recount the changes in her life after she moved in 2011 from Los Angeles to Denmark, her new husband’s native land. Most of them project celebration, optimism and the elation of new love. A samba, “It’s Spring,” has a lyric that includes, “Something in my heart I cannot contain/Light and joy depleting all the dark and pain.”

Yet, the pain lingers. Over the insistence of a New Orleans street beat in “Happy For Me,” she gives her voice an edge and addresses her family back home; “Why can’t you be happy for me. Come on and be happy for me/You know you wanna be happy for me. Why can’t you ever be happy for me?” The amusing “Up Again” traces Korb’s determination to master pronunciation of the notoriously tricky Danish language. The bluesy title tune concludes, “With no drama, no fuss/Ain’t nobody here but the band and us/And how am I finding it?/I’m finding home.”

Among the chapters of Korb’s autobiographical story-telling, the album opens up generously for improvisation by the bassist, a protégé of Ray Brown, and eight sidemen who appear in various combinations. Her rhythm section companions on all tracks are pianist Magnus Hjorth and drummer Snorre Kirk, the young Danes who accompanied her to great effect in Ystad. Other Københavners who solo impressively are tenor saxophonist Karl-Martin Almqvist, guitarists Jacob Fischer and Paul Halberg, trumpeter Gerard Presencer, and a wonderfully blowsy trombonist named Steen Nikolaj Hansen. They reinforce the impression that Scandinavian musicians today are among the most interesting jazz players anywhere. Finding home, Korb finds herself in good company.

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Joshua Redman, Trios Live (Nonesuch)

Redman opens with an unaccompanied tenor saxophone introduction to “Mack the Knife.” The fluidity, power and quixotic imagination of his playing prepare his listeners for the album’s hour of adventure. At New York’s Jazz Standard and Washington DC’s Blues Alley, he is in the intimate company of just bass and drums—and of audiences who listen closely and respond with enthusiasm. When Redman is in the midst of rhythmic displacements and chord substitutions on the Kurt Weill piece, the zest and daring of the young Sonny Rollins come to mind. Rollins’ spiritual presence is evident here and there throughout, but Redman’s individuality is striking. He packs his extended coda to “Never Let Me Go,” with melodic inventions like no one else’s.

Gregory Hutchinson’s drumming on both club dates inspires, nudges and occasionally goads the saxophonist. High in the audio mix, in several instances Hutchinson is an equal partner in inventiveness as he and Redman reflect and reinforce one another’s ideas. Matt Penman is the bassist on the four tracks from the Jazz Standard. Reuben Rogers is on the three from Blues Alley. They are equal partners with Redman and Hutchinson in the generation and exchange of energy that permeates these performances. In two tracks on soprano sax, Redman creates excitement, but his originality on soprano doesn’t quite equal that of his tenor work. He is tenor sax machismo personified in Thelonious Monk’s “Trinkle Tinkle” and in the album’s most unlikely entry, Led Zeppelin’s “The Ocean.”

For a Rifftides review of Redman, Rogers, Hutchinson and pianist Aaron Goldberg at the 2014 Ystad Sweden Jazz Festival, go here.

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Of the dozens of young tenor saxophonists inspired by Lester Young (see the previous post), Zoot Sims (1925-1985) may have reached prominence at the youngest age. His 19th birthday was five months ahead of him when he recorded with pianist Joe Bushkin for the Commodore label in early 1944. That was three years before he joined Herbie Steward, Stan Getz and Serge Chaloff in Woody Herman’s celebrated Four Brothers saxophone section. By the middle of 1950, Sims had recorded with an aspiring jazz singer named Harry Belafonte, toured and recorded in Sweden and visited France in Roy Eldridge’s quintet.

In the early fifties he went back to his native southern California and became an essential figure in the burgeoning Los Angeles jazz scene, then returned to New York as a member of Gerry Mulligan’s sextet. The little known film below was made in France at the Cannes Jazz Festival in 1958. Toward the end of his life, a bit of the brashness and tenderness of his early hero Ben Webster reappeared in Sims’ work, but at Cannes, his approach was still redolent of Lester. For the occasion, Zoot borrowed trumpeter Donald Byrd’s rhythm section—Walter Davis, Jr., piano; Doug Watkins, bass; and Arthur Taylor, drums. He played “I’ll Remember April,” a piece that he favored throughout his career

Thanks to Rifftides reader and blogging colleague John Bolger for calling that Sims performance to my attention. John is the proprietor of the informative Dave Brubeck Jazz website.

The Al Cohn Memorial Collection at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania sends a reminder that the 2014 Zoot Fest will take place there on November 9. Bill Mays, Larry McKenna, Warren Vache, Lew Tabackin, Joe Cohn, Bill Crow, Bill Goodwin, Steve Gilmore and other friends of Zoot will be playing. Go here for full information about players and programming at this major educational fund raising event in memory of Zoot.

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Michael Cuscuna alerted us to a video on the Mosaic Records site in which Wayne Shorter tells about his only meeting with Lester Young. It was in the late 1950s, most likely 1958. Shorter had played briefly with Horace Silver before he began his two years of service in the US Army, but at 25 he was still largely unknown. Ahead of him was his early career as a tenor saxophonist, composer, and sideman with Maynard Ferguson, Art Blakey and Miles Davis. To see and hear him tell his Lester story, click on the arrow in the frame below. Following the clip is one of Lester Young in 1958, around the same time as his encounter with PFC Shorter. He died at 49 the following year.

The Daily Jazz Gazette page on the Mosaic website features a rotating selection of videos and other jazz-related items. Warning: You may find it addictive.

Fats Waller, piano and vocal; Gene Sedric, tenor saxophone; Heman Autrey, trumpet; Al Casey, guitar; Charles Turner, bass; Yank Porter, drums. April 8, 1936. RCA Records.

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Greg Curtis, author, former editor of Texas Monthly, former TIME magazine special correspondent, knowledgeable jazz listener and occasional Rifftides reader, writes about meeting Dexter Gordon. He encountered Gordon at a used record store in San Francisco in the late 1970s.

I was aware that there was some discussion going on in small groups here and there around the store when I saw a very tall, elegant black man in an immaculate trench coat and a blue beret riffling through the records in a corner of the store. I recognized that it was Dexter Gordon. No one else was approaching him.

I went up, and being sure to give him plenty of room to duck away from me, introduced myself and said I had heard him a few days ago in Austin. He had played at the Armadillo World Headquarters there about a month before. We saw many jazz acts there—Count Basie, Sam Rivers, Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Stephane Grappelli, Sonny Rollins, and probably more. Extraordinary, looking back, that so many of the greats performed there. He was very gracious and quite willing to talk. Did the concert go all right? Yes. The crowd was so young. Did they like it? Yes. Then he asked me if I knew about the Texas tenor Budd Johnson. Thank God, I did. And then, I’ll never forget, because Dexter had a beautiful, deep voice, he said, “Very great. Very great.” Just those words in his voice were very moving. I then said good-bye and left him. An indelible memory.

It’s a lovely story. Veteran Rifftides readers will suspect that publishing it is a reason (no excuse is needed) to present Gordon’s music. That is only partly correct. It is also an occasion to present Budd Johnson’s music. First, here’s Gordon in the period when Greg met him. Dexter lived in Copenhagen for a time, and his musical headquarters was the Club Montmartre. More often than not, his colleagues were Kenny Drew, piano; Niels-Henning Ørsted-Pedersen, bass; and Alex Riel, drums. The more or less bilingual Dexter introduces the tune.

Budd Johnson (1910-1984 is one of the great under-recognized figures in jazz. From his earliest days in Dallas as a teenaged professional, he became influential as a composer, arranger, leader and tenor saxophonist. In the soprano saxophone’s renaissance in the 1960s he was one of its most striking individualists. Open to new ideas, Johnson welcomed the innovations of bebop and wrote for Boyd Raeburn, Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie and Woody Herman when they leading their big bands out of the swing era.

In this 1979 performance, you may detect qualities that inspired Dexter Gordon’s admiration. Hank Jones is the pianist, Gene Ramey the bassist, Gus Johnson the drummer.

The tenor saxophonist providing obbligato toward the end was Arnett Cobb. For a superb exposition of Johnson’s playing and writing, hear his Budd Johnson and the Four Brass Giants, with Nat Adderley, Harry Edison, Ray Nance and Clark Terry.

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If you were not one of the four- or five-hundred people who attended pianist Benny Green’s concert at the Oregon Coast Jazz Party last weekend—or perhaps especially if you were—here’s a Rifftides listening tip. Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest broadcast on Sunday will present Green’s trio with bassist David Wong and drummer Rodney Green. Mr. Wilke recorded their concert this summer on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. This is from his announcement of the program:

…Green leads his trio in an exciting concert airing on Jazz Northwest on Sunday October 12 at 2 PM Pacific on 88.5 KPLU and streaming on kplu.org. The concert was recorded last July at Centrum’s Jazz Port Townsend for this broadcast.

Benny Green is a powerful pianist with a deep sense of swing. Not surprising, because he came up as a sideman in two great universities of the road, as a member of Betty Carter’s group and with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Another pivotal experience was being chosen by Oscar Peterson for the Glenn Gould International Protégé Prize which included extensive mentoring by Oscar Peterson.

For the Rifftides account of the exhilarating Green-Wong-Green appearances in Oregon, go here.