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Alice Babs, the Swedish singer whom Duke Ellington once called “probably the most unique artist I know,” died today in her native Sweden. She was 90. Her breakthrough came in 1940 in the Swedish film Swing it magistern (Swing It, Teacher!) She went on to make her name in stage, motion picture and television work, singing in several genres and collaborating with violinist Svend Asmussen and other Scandinavian jazz artists. Her pure soprano voice and rhythmic ability brought her to Ellington’s attention in the early 1960s. She appeared with his band frequently, recorded with it and sang in his second and third sacred concerts. In 1972 King Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden departed from the tradition of appointing opera singers and honored Ms. Babs by naming her the Royal Court singer.

Here, she is featured with clarinetist Russell Procope in Ellington’s second sacred concert

Largely inactive in her later years, Ms. Babs had been under care for Alzheimer’s disease.

Dick Berk, a drummer admired as a developer of young talent and as a colleague of dozens of major jazz artists, died last Saturday at the age of 74. Berk had been undergoing dialysis treatment for some time in Portland, Oregon, his home in recent years. In his late teens he was Billie Holiday’s drummer, recording with her at the 1958 Monterey Jazz Festival. In 1960 he went from the Berklee School of Music to New York City, where he played with Charles Mingus, Freddie Hubbard, Monty Alexander and the Ted Curson-Bill Barron group, among others. His Los Angeles years in the late 1960s and early ‘70s saw him working and recording with a range of musicians including Cal Tjader, Ray Brown, Milt Jackson, Blue Mitchell, Georgie Auld, Nat Adderley and Phineas Newborn, Jr.

Berk’s own band, the Jazz Adoption Agency, nurtured such young talents as baritone saxophonist Nick Brignola, tenor saxophonist Jay Collins and trombonists Andy Martin and Mike Fahn. During his two long residencies in Portland, he gigged and recorded with pianist Jessica Williams and bassist Leroy Vinnegar and continued to encourage developing young players. As a sideline, he had acting roles in films, including Idiot’s Delight with Jack Lemon, and in the television shows Hogan’s Heroes, It Takes a Thief and Emergency.

From Berk’s L.A. period, let’s listen to him with Nick Brignola’s quintet: Brignola, baritone; Bill Watrous, trombone; Dwight Dickerson, piano; John Heard, bass. The piece is Horace Silver’s “Quicksilver.” Berk’s time throughout, the vigor of his solo and the strategic placement of his cymbal splashes give us an idea why so many superior players loved having him on the bandstand.

Dick Berk, RIP

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Before we leave our Slim Gaillard phase (at least for now), it seems appropriate to recall that he is a transcendental presence in Jack Kerouac’s definitive Beat Generation novel On The Road, published in 1957. One hallucinatory scene involves Sal Paradise, Kerouac’s roman à clef narrator, his traveling companion Dean Moriarty and Gaillard—or his apparition.

Nobody knows where Slim Gaillard is. Dean once had a dream that he was having a baby and his belly was all bloated up blue as he lay on the grass of a California hospital. Under a tree, with a group of colored men, sat Slim Gaillard. Dean turned despairing eyes of a mother to him. Slim said “There you go-orooni.” Now Dean approached him, he approached his God; he thought Slim was God; he shuffled and bowed in front of him and asked him to join us ; “Right-orooni,” says Slim; he’ll join anybody but he won’t guarantee to be there with you in spirit. Dean got a table, bought drinks, and sat stiffly in front of Slim. Slim dreamed over his head. Every time Slim said “Orooni,” Dean said, “Yes!” I sat there with these two madmen. Nothing happened. To Slim Gaillard the whole world was just one big orooni.

The website Schmoop, a word Slim might have invented had he thought of it, offers literary analysis of that On The Road passage.

Slim, in his simplicity of language, seems to provide something for Dean that few other characters can. Just as Dean speaks of “IT” to Sal without telling him what “it” really is, so Slim speaks in cryptic language (“orooni”) without any explanation. It may be that Slim fulfills the hero role for Dean that Dean does for Sal.

And it may be that this offers more enlightenment.

Gaillard with Bam Brown on bass and Scatman Crothers on drums.

Vout.

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In a gathering of people even younger than I, when I mentioned Slim Gaillard three of them said in unison, “Who?”

“Flat Foot Floogie,” I explained, “Cement Mixer, Putti Putti,” “Matzoh ball Oroony,” and—just to make sure they understood—”Poppity Poppity Poppity Pop Go De Motorcycle.”

Their blank stares made me realize that there must be other folks in the 21st century in need of remedial cultural education. We’ll begin with an audiovisual aid.

That was Slim Gaillard on The Tonight Show. The music as he walked off was the theme during Steve Allen’s tenure as host of the program, so it was probably the mid-1950s. By then, Gaillard had behind him a couple of decades of success that began in the late ’30s with Slim and Slam, a duo of Gaillard and bassist Slam Stewart. Their big hits were “Flat Foot Floogie” and “Cement Mixer,” novelties executed with superb musicianship. Columbia’s The Groove Juice Special CD has 20 of their recordings. Later, Gaillard teamed with another bassist, Bam Brown. Their Laughing In Rhythm: The Best of the Verve Years has several tracks that include the great bop pianist Dodo Marmarosa and such other guests as Ben Webster, Dick Hyman, Ray Brown and Milt Jackson. Slim Gaillard at Birdland 1951 is a collection of performances when he was a regular at the New York club, with Art Blakey, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Terry Gibbs, Brew Moore and others sitting in.

Well aware of Gaillard’s musicianship, the fathers of bebop, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, were happy to be guests on his recording session in Los Angeles on December 29, 1945. Gaillard is the pianist and raconteur, Jack McVea the tenor saxophonist, with Bam Brown on bass with Zutty Singleton playing drums in this blues titled “Slim’s Jam.”

Accurate information about Gaillard’s earliest years is hard to come by. This Wikipedia article seems to have what is available. If you would like to sample Gaillard’s extensive output of recordings, YouTube has dozens of them. Go here. In his later years, Gaillard sometimes worked as an actor in television shows including Marcus Welby M.D., Charlie’s Angels and Mission Impossible. He continued to appear in clubs in the US and Great Britain. He died in London in 1991 at age 75.

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Since we first encountered her at Sweden’s Ystad Jazz Festival in 2012, Hannah Svensson has toured with pianist Jan Lundgren, formed a quartet with the harmonica player and composer Filip Jers and is preparing to release a new album. With Lundgren and Ms. Svensson on the CD will be the guitarist with whom she appeared in Ystad, her father Ewan. They performed together recently in recital at a guitar shop in Gothenburg on Sweden’s west coast. Mr. Svensson composed the piece several years ago and titled it “Weird Blues.” Now with lyrics, it is known as “The Blues Are Never Far Away.”

For more about the Svenssons and a video from their Ystad concert, go here.

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Despite a career that began in the 1940s, the Pacific Northwest pianist Jack Brownlow recorded only two albums under his own name. When he died in 2007 Bruno, as he was known to his friends, left a stockpile of tapes from rehearsals, casual encounters and record dates. It is unlikely that any of them will ever emerge on commercially available albums, but by special arrangement with the Brownlow estate we can now and then play a piece or two on Rifftides. Here is an untitled blues that Bruno invented—complete with his celebrated chord voicings—in Portland, Oregon, late one night in 1963. The bassist is Brownlow’s young protege Jim Anderson (1941-2004), who blossomed under Bruno’s tutelage.

For an obituary of Jack Brownlow, go here. For further Rifftides posts about him, enter his name in the Search box above the right column.

Have a good weekend.

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Anyone aware of the importance of jazz to the structure and fiber of American culture must be pleased by the news about Max Roach and reassured that his country treasures his contribution. (Pictured, Roach and President Jimmy Carter on the south lawn of the White House in 1977.) This week, the Library of Congress acquired the great drummer’s personal papers, musical scores, tapes and recordings. The Max Roach collection will be preserved in the library’s archives and available for research and study. There’s a lot to study. As bebop evolved, Roach (1924-2007) followed Kenny Clarke to become the music’s most powerful, inventive and influential drummer. The collection includes a piece of hotel notepaper on which he wrote,

I attended the University of the streets in the ‘Harlems’ of the USA. My professors were Duke Ellington, Sonny Greer, Baby Dodds, Louis Armstrong … My classmates were Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Charlie Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis …

His students were all of the drummers who followed him and the scores of musicians who profited from his leadership and example. His inheritors are those of us who play or listen to modern American music.

Here is a celebrated recording Roach by the 1950s quintet he co-led with trumpeter Clifford Brown. This is Brown’s composition “Joy Spring;” Roach, Brown, tenor saxophonist Harold Land, pianist Richie Powell and bassist George Morrow.

To visit the Library of Congress announcement about the acquisition of the Max Roach collection, go here.

Two memories of Max: Following a 1970s Dizzy Gillespie concert rehearsal that my camera crew and I covered at Lincoln Center, Dizzy invited me to have lunch with him, Max, Percy Heath, Billy Eckstine and Eckstine’s new young wife. We had just ordered when the restaurant’s sound system played an old Fats Waller record. Max developed a huge grin and sang along with the main phrase, “Your Feet’s Too Big.”

When I was writing notes for the reissue of Diz And Getz (Gillespie, Stan Getz, the Oscar Peterson Trio and Roach), I called Max, who was noted for his strong feelings about race and about jazz styles, to ask what he remembered about the session. “Stan Getz!” he said. “I never recorded with Stan Getz. Why would we record with him?

“But Max,” I said, “you’re on the record.”

“I don’t remember,” he said.

He may also have not remembered that he was the drummer on Getz’s first recordings for Savoy in 1946.

I have been enjoying the new book by pianist Bill Mays, a memoir of his half-century career in music. Written with panache and a fine sense of the absurd, it is packed with anecdotes about his experiences in jazz clubs and concert halls around the world and his extensive work in the movie and recording studios of Los Angeles and New York. There are stories about his encounters with artists and entertainers as various as Paul Anka, Barbara Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Placido Domingo and a raft of A-list jazz stars. Here’s a sample.

For a Beatles “revisited” project I was hired by a Japanese producer to arrange and play on several Lennon/McCartney tunes. My trio recorded several tracks , and I arranged additional tracks using a string orchestra and alto saxophone added to my trio. The producer and I both agreed that “overdubbing” the great Phil Woods would add a lot to the music. Phil responded initially to the request for his services with, “That’s just what the world needs: another Beatles tribute. Count me out!” We cajoled, we pleaded, and he relented—and sounded absolutely marvelous. With Phil bringing his one-of-a-kind sound and his own personality to the music, the Beatles never sounded better!

Mays writes about the time he severed the radial nerve in his left thumb in a kitchen accident. After surgery, his hand was in a cast for weeks.

Some months earlier I had agreed to appear at a party and play some four-hands piano music with Harold Danko. I called and told him not to worry, that the cast would be coming off the week of the party, and that I could still make the gig. Ever the prankster, Harold asked me to bring the cast that the doctor had removed with a surgical saw. Conspiring before the performance, we put the cast back on my hand, with just enough Scotch tape to hold it in place. Harold made an elaborate announcement about how I had injured my hand, had had surgery, was still in a cast, but that we both had faith that my hand could be “made whole” for the evening’s performance. He brought me onstage, did a “laying on of hands” and in his best Jimmy Swaggart faith-healer voice, commanded, in the name of the Almighty, that I be healed and realize full restoration. With a shout and a rap of his fist, my cast flew off and across the room. Looking incredulous, I shook my hand, shouting “I’m healed, I’m healed!” Whereupon we sat down and played some outrageously righteous boogie-woogie piano together.

Mays is donating proceeds from sales of his self-published memoir to the Musicians Assistance Program of the American Federation of Musicians, a fine cause. For information about how to obtain the book, see his website.

Two things I would never have known if Rifftides readers hadn’t told me about them:

1. Alto saxophonist Grace Kelly was named one of Glamour Magazine’s top 10 college women for 2011. It takes some of us non-Glamour readers a while to get the word. Here’s Glamour’s video about Ms. Kelly. Sorry about the ads. They’re part of the package.

Other Glamour top 10 college women include a scientist, a cycling champion, a nature protection advocate and a songwriter. To see the article about Ms. Kelly, go here. She and her quintet will be at the Portland Jazz Festival and at The Seasons in late February. I’m planning to report here on several festival events and the Kelly concert the same week at The Seasons.

2. In Germany since 2002, there has been a band called the Puredesmond Quartet. If you’re wondering why they chose that name, watch this:

The quartet’s website, with a German-or-English language option, has information about the band’s origins, philosophy and recording history.

It occurs to me that I should mention something about the Grammy Awards. The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences presented them Sunday evening in a proceeding that was televised with impressive, even spectacular, production values. These were the winners in the jazz category:

Best improvised jazz solo
“Orbits” — Wayne Shorter (pictured), soloist
Best jazz vocal album
Liquid Spirit — Gregory Porter
Best jazz instrumental album
Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue — Terri Lyne Carrington
Best large jazz ensemble album
Night in Calisia — Randy Brecker, Wlodek Pawlik Trio & Kalisz Philharmonic
Best Latin jazz album
Song for Maura — Paquito D’Rivera and Trio Corrente

Congratulations to all.

The jazz winners did not appear on the telecast, but received their awards in a pre-broadcast ceremony out of sight of the millions who watched the main event. That is how NARAS, with rare exceptions, has buried jazz and classical music at the Grammy ceremonies for the past couple of decades.

I was unable to watch the television broadcast. Then, thinking that I should know something about the acts (term chosen advisedly) that NARAS deemed airworthy, I went to YouTube and watched Macklemore, Lorde, Daft Punk, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and a few others in clips from the show. The only sensible conclusion is that what they do is primarily concerned with entertainment, social commentary, drama, shock and awe, and with music hardly at all. There is no use being worked up about it unless you want to get exercised about the societal and commercial values generating a cultural atmosphere that nourishes demand for such entertainment and makes it popular and profitable. It’s been a losing battle since at least “Three Little Fishies” and “How Much is That Doggie in the Window.”

Music of substance and lasting value is available. Those who prefer it can seek it out, wishing all the while, perhaps, that musicians who devote their lives to perfecting their art and craft in jazz trios or string quartets or symphony orchestras could be rewarded with even a small percentage of the adoration and money lavished on obscene hip-hop performers or vocalists who specialize in bumps, grinds and pelvic thrusts.

Maybe it’s just a phase we’re going through and modern equivalents of the big bands or the bossa nova or Frank Sinatra or the Brubeck Quartet or Miles Davis or whatever you miss most will come back to the Grammys. I’m an optimist, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

The Los Angeles Times has a complete list of Grammy winners.

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Cowichan is a region on Vancouver Island in the Canadian province of British Columbia.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a German composer. Put them together and you get a promotional video. It is not the Rifftides custom to present promotional videos, so please do not send yours unless it is this brilliant, melodic, mouthwatering and noncommercial.

Let’s all move to Cowichan.

Thanks to friend Hal Strack for alerting me to the Cowichan video. Brigadier General Strack, United States Air Force (retired), was a lifelong friend of Paul Desmond. Early in their pre-military careers he worked as a tenor saxophonist in bands with Paul. In an illustration from Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, he’s pictured here in 1941 playing a solo. He told me that the song was “Singing The Blues.” Without Hal as a resource, my biography of Desmond would have been significantly thinner. See the 19 Strack entries in the index of the book. Incidentally (ha), Take Five is now available as an ebook, complete with index and all the photographs.

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Rifftides outgoing traffic has slowed in the past few days because the proprietor&#151or is it perpetrator?—has been nose-to-the-grindstone, meeting a deadline for a liner essay to accompany the tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander’s next album. The young Alexander (pictured) spent his first round of salad days in Chicago. The CD commemorates that period and the Chicago jazz tradition. The performances are by Alexander’s current band, which includes one of his college teachers—the veteran pianist Harold Mabern—bassist John Webber and drummer Joe Farnsworth. Trumpeter Jeremy Pelt joins on a few tracks. Alexander’s first gig was in an organ trio backing singer Lenny Lynn. It was sink-or-swim on-the-job ear training. In the course of research, I came across evidence of Alexander’s progress on the bandstand. It’s a track from a 1998 Lenny Lynn album that features guitarist Dave Specter and on a few tracks, the fledgling tenor man. The organist is Rob Waters, the bassist Harlan Terson, the drummer Mike Schlick. I thought you might find it interesting.

That’s the kind of research I like. Have a good weekend.

If you have been following the myriad formal and informal critiques of Terry Teachout’s Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, you will be interested in Ethan Iverson’s long interview with Teachout (pictured left). The book has attracted great praise and not a little denigration. I recommended it here as important for Teachout’s exhaustive research and for his usual grace and clarity in the writing of Ellington’s story. Others have expressed reservations. They include Iverson, who generally lauded the biography but faulted some of Teachout’s musical analysis of Ellington works.

Iverson (pictured right), the pianist of The Bad Plus, is not only a gifted musician but also the proprietor of Do The Math, one of the most erudite weblogs. He followed his criticism of the book by conducting an extensive interview with Teachout. First, however, he posted his critique. He called it “Reverential Gesture.” I suggest that you read it before you read the transcript of the interview. “Reverential Gesture” is here. The interview, posted two days later, is here. It is a meeting of intellectual equals with, as it turns out, passionate mutual interests in and knowledge about both music and a certain branch of modern American literature.

To whet your interest, here from the Iverson interview is Teachout on a vital point about the importance of evaluating Ellington’s music—indeed, any work of art—on its own terms.

An important secondary theme in my Ellington book is when classical musicians first discovered jazz and started writing about it. It matters. I don’t deprecate the significance of the fact that Constant Lambert, Percy Grainger and Aaron Copland understood what Ellington was early in his career. But some people think that in order to take Duke Ellington seriously as a composer, we have to believe that he was successful as a composer of large-scale works. The idea, I guess, is to push him up into the classical-music arena: he played in Carnegie Hall, therefore he’s serious. And that’s completely wrong. Duke Ellington is serious because he is Duke Ellington. He’s serious because of the work itself. It’s interesting that he wanted to write the suites. It’s interesting that he wanted to play in Carnegie Hall. That tells you important things as him as a person. But jazz does not usually profit from being compared directly to classical music, at least not on that level of generality. Most of the time, such comparisons do not illuminate jazz in any way. I wouldn’t have made them in Duke if Ellington himself hadn’t forced the issue by writing pieces like Harlem, Reminiscing in Tempo and Black, Brown and Beige. Jazz is a completely successful form of expression in and of itself, the same way the mystery novel is. It’s not better because you can come up with a highbrow comparison for it. It doesn’t ennoble it. George Balanchine thought that Fred Astaire was the great American dancer, but that didn’t make Astaire a better dancer. He didn’t need Balanchine’s approval to be great. He was already great.

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It is late on Martin Luther King Day to be posting an MLK tribute, but it would be an even more serious oversight not to do so. To one who reported on the civil rights movement in the American South and was sometimes in the midst of its demonstrations, marches, brutality and occasional elation, the images and emotions never entirely fade. Nor does the melding of sadness and adrenalin-driven urgency in our New Orleans newsroom on the April evening in 1968 when a wire service bulletin announced that King had been assassinated.

There are many songs that summon the atmosphere of those years; “We Shall Overcome,” “Up to the Mountain,” “A Change is Gonna Come” among them; but a decade before the murder, one piece of music encapsulated the frustrations and yearnings that seethed within repressed black Americans and would come to the surface in the 1960s. Sonny Rollins’s “Freedom Suite” had no words. It needed none. In the notes to the Rollins box set The Freelance Years, Zan Stewart quotes the saxophonist (pictured ca 1958) about what led to the suite.

‘About that time, I had been getting a lot of acclaim in the music business,’ he said. (He was placing highly in polls in Down Beat and Metronome, his records were selling and he worked as much as he liked.) ‘But when I attempted to get an apartment in desirable areas of New York City, I found I couldn’t, basically because of ethnic bias. I was quite upset about it and decided to write the piece and do the album.’

Rollins went into the Riverside studio with bassist Oscar Pettiford and drummer Max Roach. Here is “Freedom Suite.”

Freedom Suite is a singular accomplishment of Rollins’s early career. It deserves a place in any comprehensive collection of American music.

1.

Seattle beat San Francisco and goes to the Super Bowl to play Denver (to puzzled readers outside the US—It’s football. This is a big deal, like the World Cup).

2.

So far, we don’t have snow, but we have beautiful January sunsets. That’s Mount Adams just above the rose arch, through the apricot tree.

It was a good day in the Pacific Northwest.

If you are planning your weekend activities, you may wish to work in these presentations by two leading champions of jazz on the air (and the web).

On his Sunday broadcast of Jazz Northwest this week, Jim Wilke will feature a musician who achieved recognition and critical acclaim in his days on the national scene, then moved back to the Northwest to concentrate on music education. Jon Pugh, the trumpeter in tenor saxophonist Don Lanphere’s quintet three decades ago, is still making music in the Seattle area. Here’s part of Mr. Wilke’s announcement

Jonathan Pugh grew up in Wenatchee and his first musical memories include standing by his Dad as he led the band at his Summer youth circus. Later, he connected with Don Lanphere in Wenatchee and studied with him during his teen years. It was mutual inspiration as Jonathan became a regular member of the Lanphere Quintet, touring and recording eight albums with the sax legend during his resurgent career.

Jonathan started on trumpet, but today focuses on the mellower cornet. He presently teaches in the Edmonds Schools. Joining him in this Art of Jazz concert from the Seattle Art Museum are Dave Peterson on guitar, Jon Hamar on bass and Max Wood on drums, all notable for their tone and swing. Jazz Northwest airs on Sundays at 2 PM PST and is streamed at kplu.org.

Here’s Pugh with Lanphere (1928-2003) at the Bellevue Jazz Festival near Seattle three decades ago, and Marc Seales, piano; Chuck Deardorf, bass; and Dean Hodges, drums. I sent him a message asking the name of the tune in the video. He replied:

…pretty sure this is one that never got recorded or named………….Don would write amazing bebop lines based on chord changes from different record albums………….he might have just called it “black 1-1” (black album cover, side 1, track 1).

In New York, saxophonist-composer-arranger-bandleader-educator-broadcaster (whew) Bill Kirchner is preparing his Sunday Jazz From the Archives about a clarinetist who was, to borrow Duke Ellington’s famous phrase, beyond category. Here is Bill’s promo blurb:

Clarinetist Pee Wee Russell (1906-1969) spent much of his career playing in Dixieland-style settings. But his highly unorthodox playing defied categorization, and in the 1960s he recorded a series of albums for the Impulse label that showed him at his most unique. Among other things, he performed compositions by Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Oliver Nelson.

We’ll hear Pee Wee in a quartet with valve trombonist Marshall Brown, bassist Russell George, and drummer Ronnie Bedford; a reunion concert with an old friend, trumpeter Henry “Red” Allen, and a rhythm section of pianist Steve Kuhn, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummer Marty Morell; and a big band arranged and conducted by Oliver Nelson.

Kirchner’s Jazz From the Archives airs Sunday at 11 pm EST on WGBO-FM at 88.3 on radios in the Newark/New York area. The program will also be streamed on the web at http://www.wbgo.org/.

“Unorthodox,” Bill wrote above in describing Russell’s playing. Oh, yes. With his phrasing, dynamics, tonal manipulation, slurs, slips, slides, silences and surprises, Pee Wee was avant garde decades before the appearance of Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton or John Carter. Here he is, playing a B-flat blues in a club performance the year before he died. Jimmy McPartland is the trumpeter, with Art Hodes, piano, Rail Wilson, bass, and Harry Hawthorn, drums.

You may have noticed that, as of yesterday, Rifftides looks different and, I think, better. The clean, crisp, spacious redesign is by artsjournal.com commander-in-chief Doug McLennan (pictured), who is making similar changes to all or most of the blogs under the artsjournal umbrella. You may see further examples of his handiwork by going to the AJ home page, which has connections to an array of weblogs concerned with music, theatre, literature, dance, the visual arts and all manner of cultural interests.

One slight change to keep in mind; links in comments from readers now appear in boldface black. They turn blue and active when you touch them with your cursor.

The improved design has collateral benefits, too. Doug McLennan describes one:

One of the great things about the new design is that it’s responsive—that is, it shrinks to fit tablets and smart phones. Pretty great reading on the smaller devices, actually. Check it out.

Let us know how you like it.

David Sherr’s comment on the Jimmy Rowles drawing of Art Tatum in the post below included mention of Rowles’s George Shearing drawing. He offered to share it, but it is not possible to include pictures with comments as it is in posts by the Rifftides staff, so here’s a new exhibit of Jimmy’s wit, wisdom and sketch ability. Thanks to David Sherr, Charlie Shoemake and Bill Crow, all of whom submitted the drawing from their collections. Pictured left, Sir George being knighted by Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace in 2007 and below, portrayed by Rowles, one of his biggest fans.

While we’re at it, why not listen to Rowles? Here he is with one of his favorite duet partners, Al Cohn, on tenor saxophone, from their increasingly rare 1977 album Heavy Love.

Many stories about jazz heroes are apocryphal. This is one is true.

One night in the late 1930s, Fats Waller And His Rhythm were playing at the Yacht Club on 52nd Street in Manhattan. Art Tatum, the other half of the Tatum-Waller mutual admiration society, came in to listen. When he first moved to New York, Tatum’s almost superhuman virtuosity at the piano had bowled over every pianist in town, including Waller. Introducing his friend to the audience, Fats said,

I just play the piano, but God is in the house tonight.

The line became a part of underground jazz lore. Then in 1972, producer Don Schlitten used it as the title of a Xanadu LP of Tatum recordings from the early forties, since reissued as a High Note CD. Tatum influenced virtually every pianist who came of age in the thirties and forties. Through the decades he has inspired or discouraged legions more. Among those who fell under his spell was Jimmy Rowles (1918-1996), who frequently heard Tatum in Los Angeles after Rowles moved there from Spokane in 1940. Tatum had a profound effect on Rowles: the young man determined not to be try to be like Tatum, which would have been impossible, but to find his own way. He did. Jimmy told me that, like nearly everyone else who listened to it, when he heard Tatum’s 1933 recording of “Tea for Two,” he thought it was by two, possibly three pianists.

Jimmy Rowles had an avocational sideline as a sketch artist. His visual art radiated the piquant view of life that also characterized much of his piano playing. His drawings made their points through suggestion, subtle references, humor. Mostly, he gave them to friends, often as Christmas cards. Anybody who has a Rowles drawing is likely to have it on a wall in a frame. That is what the vibraharpist and Rowles protégé Charlie Shoemake did with Jimmy’s Tatum drawing. Mr. Shoemake has kindly shared it with Rifftides. He gave Rifftides permission to share it with you.

In response to the Rifftides post about the death of Al Porcino, reader Dick Vartanian sent a comment:

I remember Al Porcino well and had deep regard for his playing. But does anyone remember a equally great countryman of his named Conrad Gozzo?

Jack Greenberg responded with this:

Everyone who is my age (70 years old) and plays trumpet remembers Conrad Gozzo. As the most sought after lead trumpet player in Hollywood up until his death in 1964, his recorded output is enormous, especially when one considers that he only lived to the age of 42.

Like Porcino, as Dick Vartanian indicates, Gozzo was of Italian descent. His big band career began with Isham Jones in 1938, when he was 16. He played lead trumpet with Red Norvo, Claude Thornhill, Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Tex Beneke, Bob Crosby and Boyd Raeburn— part of a very long list. In a rare photograph, we see Gozzo second from the left, with Maynard Ferguson. After he moved to Los Angeles in 1947, Gozzo was sought after in recording and movie studios for the power, accuracy and brilliance of his lead work. From the 1953 Shorty Rogers album Cool and Crazy (reissued on Short Stops), here’s Gozzo sharing the double lead with Ferguson in Rogers’ “Infinity Promenade.” Solos are by Art Pepper, alto sax; Rogers, trumpet; and Jimmy Giuffre, tenor sax.

When Gozzo died of a heart attack in 1964, he was a member of the NBC Holywood staff orchestra.

With a 1962 Indiana University master’s degree in saxophone, Jamey Aebersold might have carved out a career as a performer. He has never stopped playing, but a casual request set him on a course that led to success as the best-known third-party teacher in jazz. In 1966, a student at a workshop asked Aebersold, who is also a pianist, to record accompaniments that would help him practice. That recording and a companion book morphed into How to Play Jazz and Improvise, the first volume of 133 Aebersold play-along albums designed to help musicians at all levels teach themselves. Most of the CDs or downloads have a several standard songs or jazz originals, books of lead sheets and professional accompaniment on the CDs. Using them, a fledgling horn player can work out with, in this example, Kenny Barron, Ron Carter and Grady Tate. That may be a higher-quality rhythm section than the student would find in his hometown and one that never complains about going over a tune ten times in a row.

When the 2014 NEA Jazz Masters awards are presented tomorrow at Lincoln Center in New York, Aebersold will receive one for jazz advocacy. The National Endowment for the Arts says that the award goes to, “an individual who has contributed significantly to the appreciation, knowledge, and advancement of the art form of jazz.” Previous winners in the category have included critics and authors Nat Hentoff and Dan Morgenstern, personal manager (and bassist) John Levy, producer Orrin Keepnews, recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder and club owner Lorraine Gordon.

In addition to his play-along business, Aebersold has continued as a jazz educator, conducting summer workshop sessions at the University of Louisville. When he is teaching, he keeps his alto saxophone handy to illustrate points——and work in a little blowing time. The rhythm section is Steve Crews, piano; Tyrone Brown, bass; and Jonathon Higgins, drums.

Aebersold will collect his Jazz Masters Award tomorrow evening. If you are not on the guest list or can’t make it to New York, you can watch the ceremony streamed live on the internet at 7:30 p.m. on the arts.gov and Jazz at Lincoln Center websites.

When they practice with Aebersold albums, musicians the world over eagerly anticipate his tempo countoffs and sometimes imitate them on the job. If you’ve never heard one, you’re in for a treat as he sets the time for the accompaniment to “Ornithology.” The rhythm section is again Barron, Carter and Tate. Feel free to play, or scat, along.