Web server problems resulting in massive slowness interfered with Rifftides today and, evidently, with all other blogs under the artsjournal.com umbrella. As a result, it was not possible to prepare and post new items. I would be happy to report that the crack Rifftides technical staff wrestled the problem to the ground and eliminated it, but there is no Rifftides technical staff. The difficulty seems to have fixed itself, and we’re back up and running, witness the next exhibit. I believe the standard jargon in such situations involves apologizing and regretting any inconvenience, although to my knowledge, no one has claimed inconvenience.
I will post as often as possible in the next day or two, but I am simultaneously careening toward the deadline for my next Wall Street Journal article. The crunch is on.

I regret any inconvenience.

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Bobby Shew sent a link to a performance by a guitarist named Doug Smith. After listening to Smith’s introductory story about his dad, no former Marine could be expected to ignore the video. Anyone who can finger-pick Sousa’s famous piccolo part in “Stars and Stripes Forever” while also playing the harmony and melody must be taken seriously. This is an opportunity to see and hear a man who enjoys his work.

I must confess to having known nothing about Doug Smith before Mr. Shew alerted me to him. I learned plenty from his impressive website.

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As pointed out in the previous exhibit, Americans and Canadians are taking a three-day holiday to observe Labor Day, which this year is Monday, September 1. On this occasion established nearly a century-and-a-half ago, they do their best to get sunburned, exhausted and happy—the latter with or without the aid of beer, which sells in oceanic quantities as summer winds down and people populate beaches, mountain meadows, national parks, RV camps and back yards.

There are several versions on the web of Cannonball Adderley’s quintet or sextet playing his brother Nat’s “Work Song.” The relatively rare one that you are about to see and hear is from a concert in Switzerland in 1963. Nat composed the piece remembering those who once performed forced labor on section gangs. Inevitably, though, disc jockeys and bloggers decide that it is compatible with a holiday that honors all working folks.

Here are the Adderleys, Joe Zawinul, Sam Jones and Louis Hayes with “Work Song.”

Enjoy the holiday. Don’t get sunburned.

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This is Labor Day weekend or, if you prefer the Canadian spelling, Labour Day weekend. Monday will see official observance of the day established in Canada in 1872 and the US in 1887 to honor the economic and social contributions of working people. It long ago expanded to a three-day holiday weekend that marks the unofficial end of summer, the return of children to school and huge sales at department stores, automobile dealerships and sellers of electronics. Millions of Americans celebrate Labor Day by grilling and consuming pieces of meat marinated in or covered with barbecue sauce.

So, what could be more appropriate than to honor the laboring classes with two versions of Lil Hardin Armstrong’s classic composition. The first, from 1927 is by the man she was married to at the time and his Hot Five. The second, cooler, with the title and the beat altered, was recorded 41 years later.

Louis Armstrong (tp); Kid Ory (tb); Johnny Dodds (cl); Lil Armstrong (p); Johnny St. Cyr (bj). November 9, 1927.

Paul Desmond, alto saxophone; Herbie Hancock, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Airto Moreira, drums; Joe Beck, guitar; Wayne Andre, Paul Faulise, Bill Watrous, Kai Winding, trombone; John Eckert, Joe Shepley, Marvin Stamm, trumpet; Ray Alonge, Tony Miranda, French horn; Don Sebesky, arranger. November 20, 1968.

Tomorrow: A rather different piece of Labor Day music .

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News has arrived that my notes for the new Jan Lundgren solo piano CD have been submitted to the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for a possible Grammy nomination. I hasten to emphasize that a submission is not a nomination. The essay required some of the most exhaustive research I have ever done for an album annotation. It involved the pleasure of listening repeatedly to All By Myself and investigating the history of each of its 14 pieces, classics from what we have all come to call the great American songbook. I thought I knew something about the backgrounds of “‘Round Midnight” and “My Heart Stood Still,” to mention two of the tracks. Yet, surprising information surfaced about each of them and most of the others.

I was flattered that producer Dick Bank asked me to do the writing, happy to be involved in a minor way with so important an achievement, and to be given carte blanche concerning length (the essay is more than 5,000 words). Liner notes aside, Jan Lundgren thinks—and I agree—that the album is the best recorded work of his more than two decades as a professional pianist. It is a milestone in his career.

Is a liner note writer walking a thin ethical line when he mentions a project with which he is connected? I don’t think so. This isn’t a review. I’m sharing good news. I want to share it with Rifftides readers.

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From Philadelphia comes news of the death of John Blake, Jr., a violinist who combined his classical training, love for the African-American musical tradition and sense of adventure to become prominent on the forward edge of jazz in the 1970s. Blake was 67. He made his mark recording with tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp and soon won the Violinist Deserving Wider Recognition category in the Down Beat Critics Poll. His fame widened when he toured with Grover Washington, Jr’s band and then with pianist McCoy Tyner in several of Tyner’s groups. He worked with a variety of artists including Duke Ellington, Steve Turre, Cecil McBee, James Newton and Billy Taylor. In recent years, Blake devoted much of his time and energy to the development of musical interest in young people in his native Philadelphia.

Here is Blake in 2001 with Taylor, bassist Chip Jackson and drummer Winard Harper in a program at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

For an obituary of Blake, see this article in The Philadelphia Inquirer. It includes video that shows Blake’s affinity for young people.

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Following the Bill Evans birthday piece three days ago, a note from Alan Broadbent about Evans reminded me of a Rifftides post from five years ago. The piece placed Evans in the context of his work in the 1950s with George Russell. It appeared on the occasion of Russell’s death, and it included video of some of Evans’ most stimulating playing. This appeared on July 29, 2009.

George Russell died Monday night. Here are some of the facts of his life, outlined by the Associated Press.

BOSTON (AP) — Jazz composer George Russell, a MacArthur fellow whose theories influenced the modal music of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, has died. His publicist says Russell, who taught at the New England Conservatory, died Monday in Boston at age 86 of complications from Alzheimer’s.

Russell was born in Cincinnati in 1923 and attended Wilberforce University. He played drums in Benny Carter’s band and later wrote ”Cubano Be/Cubano Bop” for Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra. It premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1947 and was the first fusion of Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz. Russell developed the Lydian concept in 1953. It’s credited as the first theoretical contribution from jazz.
Russell is survived by his wife, his son and three grandchildren. A release says a memorial service will be planned.

The first sentence of that AP story barely suggests Russell’s importance. There will be much more written and spoken about him in the next few days by scholars and historians, as there should be. The work he did, particularly in the 1950s and ’60s, had major influence on the thinking and performance of musicians who were shaping new ways of approaching the music. On a radio program I did in the sixties, I devoted five weeks of broadcasts to Russell’s music. This was the introduction to that series on Jazz Review on WDSU-FM in New Orleans in September and October of 1966.

Over the next few programs we’re going to consider the recorded work of George Russell – not only because Russell’s music is interesting, absorbing listening, but also because of his influence of the development of jazz in the sixties, an influence, I believe, more profound and widespread than is generally recognized even by many musicians. It may well develop that Russell is having an impact on the course of jazz as great as, or greater than, that of such imitated innovators as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.

Russell believes that 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.

In 1953 he completed his Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization. The system is built on what he calls pan-tonality, bypassing the atonal ground covered by modern classical composers and making great use of chromaticism. Russell explains that pan-tonality allows the write 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. Hence, pan-tonality.

That’s a brief and far from complete reduction of George Russell’s theory, on which he worked for ten years. It’s all in Russell’s book, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Jazz Improvisation.

Freedom within restrictions, however broad.
Discipline.

Improvising Russell’s way demands great technical skill. Listening to his recordings, one is struck by the virtuoso nature of the players. Some of their names: Bill Evans, Paul Bley, Don Ellis, Dave Baker, John Coltrane, Art Farmer, Steve Swallow, Eric Dolphy. Evans is featured soloist in Russell’s 1960 Decca recording, Jazz In The Space Age, the most thorough application of Russell’s theories to a large band. If you’re not familiar with Russell, all that talk about concepts and theories and pan-tonality and chromaticism may have led you to expect something dry and formidable. On the contrary, there’s a sense of fun and airiness in the music. The humor is subtle, but it’s there. And, I should add, it’s more evident after several hearings.

For five Saturdays, engineer Charlie Flatt played and I talked about Russell’s music, reaching back to 1947 and his “Cubano Be-Cubano Bop” for Gillespie and up to his 1963 quintet album The Outer View. The survey included the classic “All About Rosie,” commissioned by Brandeis University in 1957, the smalltet recordings for RCA, Russell’s series of Riverside albums and the remarkable suite New York, New York, a work recorded in 1958 and 1959 that brought together, among other players, Evans, Coltrane, Bob Brookmeyer, Art Farmer, and Phil Woods, all interesting young musicians who went on to be among the most influential in jazz.

For a sense of Russell and New York milieu in which he operated in the late 1950s, video of a 1958 edition of The Subject Is Jazz brings together several of the musicians who played his music. It includes a version of Rusell’s “Concerto For Billy The Kid,” with a Bill Evans solo not as electrifying as the one on this recording. Nonetheless, it presents Evans in the context of Russell’s work, and it is followed by critic Gilbert Seldes interviewing Russell about his concept. The program also has two pieces featuring Billy Taylor. If you stay with it for all 24 minutes, you’ll see credits for the musicians. And, yes the trumpeter identified as Carl Severinsen is Doc Severinsen. You may never have thought of him as a bebopper, but listen to those solos.

Was George Russell a force in opening jazz to greater freedom In the late fifties and early sixties, as I suggested 43 years ago, or did his Lydian Chromatic Concept synthesize ideas that were already in the air? Some of each, perhaps. Either way, he created some of the most stimulating music of his day, up to, including and beyond his collaboration with avant garde trumpeter Don Cherry. I am less enchanted with his later electronic works, but I’m going to dig them out and give myself another chance with them. After all, it’s George Russell; there may be more than met the ear the first time around.

Following that 1966 series of radio programs about Russell, I sent him a transcript, not knowing whether he would ever see it. I heard reports from New York that he was discouraged and had left the US to live in Europe. A few months later he sent me a letter from Stockholm.

It is like I have waited a lifetime to hear someone say the things which you did concerning my music (and if I never hear them again I will not feel that my efforts in jazz have gone unrewarded). I received the transcript at the right moment, too, for I was in one of those states of flux that I’ve come to accept as a necessary but painful part of artistic growth. It is very trying during these times to keep one’s self-confidence and I must admit that my morale was sagging more than a little bit. But your sensitive views of my music worked wonders.

Closing a long letter, Russell wrote that he hoped we would meet one day. We never did.
(For an obituary containing insights into Russell’s methods see the article by Brian Marquard and Michael Bailey in today’s Boston Globe)

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Mike Harris is one of several Rifftides readers who sent reminders that this is Bill Evans’ 85th birthday. Over a decade in the 1960s and ‘70s, Mr. Harris surreptitiously recorded the pianist at the Village Vanguard in New York. His recordings make up the eight-volume box set Bill Evans: The Secret Sessions. In a note, he suggested, “—perhaps worth a mention?”

This anniversary of the most influential jazz pianist of the second half of the twentieth century is worth more than a mention. From my notes for The Secret Sessions:

After young Bill Evans (1929-1980) got out of the Army in 1954, he became an indispensible sideman on the New York jazz scene. He recorded his first trio album late in 1956 and little more than a year later had begun to enhance his reputation through brilliant work with Miles Davis. Acting on insights gained from the music of Debussy and other impressionist composers, he enriched his chords beyond those of any other jazz pianist. Comparisons that come to mind are harmonies that Bil Evans and Robert Farnon wrote for large orchestras and with some of the mysterious voicings of Duke Ellington. Even in his earliest work he stretched and displaced rhythm and melody and hinted at modes and scales as the basis for improvisation.

With the 1958 sextet that also included saxophonists John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, bassist Paul Chambers, and initially, drummer Philly Joe Jones (replaced before very long by Jimmy Cobb), Evans had enormous influence in determining the course that mainstream jazz follows to this day. Although in his own groups he was to remain within the song form all of his life, at this time Evans clearly accelerated Davis’s change from a repertoire of popular songs and jazz standards to pieces with fewer chord changes and greater demands on the taste, judgment and imagination of the soloist.

That was “Flamenco Sketches.” For an appearance at Umbria Jazz in Italy in 1978, Evans reunited with Philly Joe Jones, the drummer with whom he had formed a strong partnership in the Davis sextet 20 years earlier. The bassist was Marc Johnson, a regular member of Evans’ last trio. The piece is Jimmy Rowles’ “The Peacocks,” a staple of Evans’ latterday repertoire.

For Bill Evans in a variety of settings, go to this YouTube page and begin browsing through dozens of audio tracks and videos.

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Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest broadcast on Sunday afternoon will feature the Jensen sisters, trumpeter Ingrid and saxophonist Christine. Their prestigious rhythm section has pianist Geoffrey Keezer, bassist Martin Wind and drummer Jon Wikan. Wilke recorded the quintet at the Centrum Jazz Port Townsend festival in July.

From Jim’s announcement:

The sisters grew up in Nanaimo, BC and have gone on to successful musical careers. Christine Jensen now lives in Montreal where she composes for and leads her own jazz orchestra. Ingrid is based in New York, leads her own groups and plays with the Maria Schneider Orchestra and other ensembles. Both have recorded numerous CDs and tour internationally.

The program airs at 2 PM PDT Sunday on KPLU-FM, 88.5, Seattle-Tacoma, Washington. It will stream on the web at kplu.org. (Photo by Jim Levitt)

From the other coast, saxophonist, bandleader and broadcaster Bill Kirchner (pictured) sends word that the Newark/New York station WBGO will drop the venerable Jazz From The Archives at the end of December. Kirchner has two shows in the works before the series ends. Here is part of his announcement.

For my final two shows (August 17 and September 14), I’ve decided to focus on my proudest achievement in 45 years as a professional jazz musician: the music of my own Nonet, which was a working, touring,
NYC-based band between 1980 and 2001. The Nonet recorded five albums–one of them a 2-CD set. (go here for a listing of them).

The band included some of NYC’s finest jazz musicians and, I daresay, developed a unique identity. All of the three reed players “doubled” extensively on woodwinds, the two trumpeters on fluegelhorns, and the bass trombone provided a rich “bottom”; all this combined with a versatile rhythm section. As critic Larry Kart put it: “A musical coat of many colors, Kirchner’s Nonet sounds at times as though it were twice its actual size.”

Bill’s show will air this Sunday, August 17, from 11 p.m. to midnight, Eastern Daylight Time.

NOTE: If you live outside the New York City metropolitan area, WBGO also broadcasts on the Internet at http://www.wbgo.org/.

Have a good weekend.

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The jet lag is pretty much gone now, and I’m settling back into a normal routine, or as normal as routines get around here. Before memories begin to fade, I will post a few illustrated impressions of the Ystad festival that did not make it into the Rifftides posts from Sweden or my Wall Street Journal report, and perhaps a few of our visit to Copenhagen, which was too short. For the next day or two, however, I’m on deadline for liner notes to accompany Houston Person’s next album.

For the moment, I leave you with film from 85 years ago, a performance by Red Nichols and His Five Pennies. It’s a rare glimpse of a popular 1920s jazz band in action, professionally filmed with good sound. It shows us Nichols, Pee Wee Russell and Eddie Condon when they were in their early-to-middle twenties, years from becoming institutions. Those who think of Russell as an eccentric clarinetist may be surprised at his relatively straightforward playing here. The film showcases Condon’s singing, not to mention his lightfooted returns to the bandstand, but don’t miss the swing he generates on rhythm banjo. He was always much more than a curmudgeonly front man who ran a nightclub.

The musicians: Red Nichols (cornet), Tommy Thune and John Egan (trumpet), Herb Taylor (trombone), Pee Wee Russell (clarinet), Irving Brodsky (piano), Eddie Condon (banjo and vega lute) and George Beebe (drums).