A memorial service for broadcaster, editor and jazz historian Paul Blair will be held this evening, January 30 at St Peter’s Church in Manhattan. Thanks to Jim Eigo, here is full information:

Paul’s family and friends from elementary school, college, Peace Corps in Malawi, Voice of America, the New York Jazz community, are remembering Paul with words and songs.

Speakers:
Amandus J. Derr , Senior Pastor of St. Peter’s Church
Yessy Blair and Nick Blair
Ellen Miller from PS 16 and West High of Rochester, NY
Bob Abel / Charlie Meliska, Wooster College, OH
John Geraghty / Sandra Lauffer, PCV in Malawi
Barry Maughan, VoA (eulogy read by Nicholas Blair)
Howard Mandel of Jazz Journalists Association (JJA)

Musicians Set 1
Bob Dorough
Bill Mays
Pheeroan akLaff
Steve Berger
Pat O’Leary
Bob Mover
Scott Robinson

Music set 2:
Cecilia Coleman Big Band:
Peter Brainin, Bobby Porcelli, Stephan Kammerer, Geoff Vidal, Stan Killian, Frank Basile, Jeff Wilfore, Hardin Butcher, Kerry MacKillop, John Eckert, Don Sickler, Matt McDonald, Mike Fahn, Sam Burtis, Joe Randazzo, Tim Givens, Jeff Brillinger, David Coss, and Cecilia Coleman.

The family of Paul Blair thanks all friends who expressed their condolence and love.

Special thanks to Gwen Calvier and her staff at Hot House Jazz magazine
St. Peter’s Church, 619 Lexington Avenue at 54th Street, New York, NY 10022

For a summary of Paul’s life, career and contributions to jazz, see Howard Mandel’s remembrance on the Jazz Journalists Association website.

The Rifftides post about radio has taken on a life of its own with a chain of reader comments. To catch up with them, go here, and feel free to add yours.

One of those commenters, the veteran audio engineer (and discriminating listener) Jim Brown, has launched an internet page. He intially designed it as an aid for a jazz appreciation class he taught. Several sections serve as guides to listening, reading and viewing, complete with helpful internet links. You will find it here

After Gary Foster informed me of Clare Fischer’s death at 83 on Friday, I went to the LP shelves, got out Dizzy Gillespie’s 1960 recording A Portrait of Duke Ellington and listened to all of it. For perhaps the hundredth time, I was moved by the originality that Fischer brought to the daunting task of recasting pieces by the acknowledged master of jazz composition. In an irony of Fischer’s career, the understated brilliance of his arrangements for that remarkable collection went uncredited. The album notes did not mention him. They mentioned no one in the band but Gillespie. Over the years, despite Norman Granz’s Verve Records keeping it a secret, the identity of the arranger slowly made its way through the jazz underground. When finally it became general knowledge that the charts were Fischer’s, few in jazz were surprised.

By then, his writing and piano playing were greatly admired among musicians. Fischer’s vocal arranging for the Hi-Los in the late 1950s and early ‘60s had attracted attention that increased as he wrote for George Shearing, Cal Tjader, and Bud Shank, among others, and for his own instrumental and vocal groups. His playing was some of the most compelling of the many pianists who developed in the wake of Bill Evans. He himself became an influence on Herbie Hancock and other younger pianists. Don Heckman traces Fischer’s career in this Los Angeles Times obituary.

The Gillespie album, his work on several Hi-Los recordings, his albums as pianist and arranger with Tjader, his collaborations with saxophonist Foster and his own big band albums, are essential to serious collections. There is a selection of them here. Thesaurus has some of his finest writing for big band. The sublime Songs For Rainy Day Lovers, long out of print, still turns up on sites, including this one, that specialize in LPs.

In an episode from live Los Angeles television of the early 1960s, Fischer is the pianist in Bud Shank’s quartet and the composer of the piece they play. Larry Bunker is the drummer, Gary Peacock the bassist. Fischer also wrote “Carnival,” the tune that begins and ends the segment.

Clare Fischer, RIP

Jerry Gonzalez Y El Comando de la Clave (Sunnyside)

Since Jerry Gonzalez changed his base of operations from New York to Madrid a decade ago, the trumpeter and congero has worked with many musicians while seeking a satisfactory combination of players for his own band. In Los Comandos de la Clave, he seems to have found it. This is his most stimulating album since the Fort Apache Band’s Rumba Para Monk in 1989.

In company with Cuban and Spanish players who feel rhythm as he does, Gonzalez unleashes his gusto, propensity for chancy high-wire walking and mastery of melodic improvisation. However important melody and harmony are to his conception, rhythm is at its heart. That is particularly evident on “Obsesión,” “Avisale a mi Contrario” and a stunning “Love For Sale,” but it extends to a treatment of “Tenderly” that honors the implication of the tune’s name while imparting a soft urgency. The fullness of Gonzalez’s flugelhorn sound is vital to “Tenderly’s” success, as it is to “In A Sentimental Mood,” done primarily with percussion accompaniment and vocalese by bassist Alaín Perez. As Gonzalez plays obbligato, the Ellington tune’s final choruses flow through a hypnotic group vocal on the repeated word “sentimiento.” Perez now becomes one of the few electric bassists capable of making me reconsider my reservations about the instrument. The impressive Cuban pianist Javier Masso, known as “Caramelo,” and drummer Kiki Ferrer round out the basic quartet. On selected tracks, vocalist Diego el Cigala, cajonista Israel Suarez (“Piraña”), and Alberto “Chele” Cobo playing clave join the band. Piquant nicknames abound in this group. When he lays down his trumpet or flugelhorn, Gonzalez’s congas are prominent in the percussion section.

For its intensity, power and variety, I would single out as the highlight Gonzalez’s and the Comandos’ thematic and metrical development of John Coltrane’s “Resolution”, but the entire album is a highlight. That’s why I voted for it as 2011’s best Latin album in the recently released Rhapsody critics poll. In the video of an extended performance of “Resolution” that just popped up on the web, the quartet come close to topping themselves.

In the days ahead, I’ll be writing about some of the other CDs that I voted for in the critics poll but have not reviewed.

Radio has no interest in music. It is in the advertising business. The record industry has no interest in music. It is in the business of selling pieces of plastic. It is a gigantic machine, almost entirely owned now by international conglomerates, whose only purpose is to accrue profits. It is indifferent to what is on its plastic discs, except insofar as it induces the undiscriminating to buy them. It virtually ignores the discriminating audience because the undiscriminating are so much more numerous.—Gene Lees, The Modern Rhyming Dictionary.

Radio was the tiny stream it all began with. Then came other technical means for reproducing, proliferating, amplifying sound, and the stream became an enormous river. If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, “regardless whether we want to hear it,” it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don’t know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can’t tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying.”—Milan Kundera, Ignorance

Creativity shouldn’t be following radio; it should be the other way around.—Herbie Hancock

There have been several inquiries about whether we are affected by the winter storms in this part of the world. Yes. My shoveling muscles are affected. Driving can be interesting. But when you wake up to sights like these, who cares if there’s a foot of snow.

Way off in the distance in the upper right is Mount Adams.

Such scenery inevitably leads to thoughts of this:

Woody Herman’s First Herd, recorded in December, 1945. The trumpet solo was by Sonny Berman, the trombone by Bill Harris. Neal Hefti’s arrangement was advanced for the time—his final chords still sound advanced—but there is no doubt that Woody’s vocal was what made the record a hit. If you’d like to hear the recording in better than 78-rpm quality, Mosaic did a splendid job of remastering it for this box set.

The careers of Johnny Otis and Etta James emphasize Duke Ellington’s often-quoted truth: There are two kinds of music—good music and the other kind. In only slightly different language, Igor Stravinsky offered the same wisdom. Otis died early this week at the age of 90, James today at 73. For decades, they made good music. Ms. James invested everything she sang with the power and sensibility of the blues. Her huge hit, Mack Gordon’s and Harry Warren’s “At Last,” was a standard ballad made popular by Glenn Miller in 1942. With the passion of her 1961 version Ms. James made it her own. In The New York Times, Peter Keepnews traces her life and music.

Maintaining a jazz core, Owens and his band freshened rhythm and blues and led the way to rock and roll. Even his slimmest works were underpinned with solid musicianship. He was an accomplished pianist, vibraphonist, drummer and singer. Most of the rockers inspired by Otis had neither his level of artistry nor the desire to achieve it. His obituary in The Los Angeles Times quoted him addressing that point:

“Today’s musicians are better technically,” Otis said in 1979, “but that’s not a virtue in itself. What’s important is the emotional impact…. Most rock or disco today doesn’t stir up anything in my heart — not the way a Picasso does, not the way the blues or gospel does.”

To read the entire article, go here.

Here’s Otis on his television program in 1959 with his biggest hit and, at the end, banter with a guest.

To see the entire half-hour program, including Otis with his band, his vocalists, a duet with Lionel Hampton, and live commercials, go here. The video struggles to get started, but it settles down after a minute or so. It’s worth the wait.

For a review of Otis’s career that puts him in just the right perspective, see the JazzWax piece that Marc Myers posted this morning.

In his debut commentary today on CBS This Morning, Wynton Marsalis recalled that he was in the second grade in 1968 when Martin Luther King was assassinated. He talked about being immersed in the black culture and life of New Orleans in the late 1960s, about having a poster of Malcolm X over his bed, about being angry well into his teens, about thinking that King was an Uncle Tom.

My job in New Orleans when Marsalis was a little boy involved reporting on the events and movements of those days when the Civil Rights Law had been on the books for nearly four years, black people were struggling for what the Congress had given them on paper, and much of the southern power structure was fighting—often violently—to see that they didn’t get it. By way of my reporting and my connection with the jazz community, I knew Wynton’s father Ellis, many other black musicians and hundreds of ordinary and extraordinary black citizens in the South. I understood something of their rage and frustration. I also knew of the tolerance, hope and humor that helped see them through that dark time.

Wynton’s CBS essay, a beautifully produced piece of television, recounts the incident that began to turn around his attitude toward MLK. It goes on to draw a bigger conclusion about this life that we’re all in together and what we owe one another. It is worth watching. To see it, go here.

Using as his point of departure a review of Ricky Riccardi’s recent book about Louis Armstrong’s final decades, Steve Provizer concentrates on Armstrong’s debt to grand opera. In his Brilliant Corners blog, Provizer writes about the great man’s trumpet tone as perhaps his defining characteristic.

Hundreds of gifted and proficient trumpet players have come and gone through jazz history, but no one has ever had that tone. Not even close. Yes, others have had an identifiable sound, but their tone basically falls within the parameters of a given historical era. Give me the name of an early jazz player, a swing era player, a bop player, a free player, a neo-mainstream player and I can name you other trumpeters from that era who had a sound that was very similar.

Even though he always talked about his debt to his mentor Joe Oliver, Armstrong seems not to have been subject to that need for identification. His tone rides over jazz history as freely as his solos rode over orchestras and rhythm sections. I believe that Armstrong’s singular tone sent a unique message to the listener: “I am making myself completely vulnerable to you. While part of me is acting (and Armstrong’s acting talent was unassailable, if underutilized), part of me will die if you don’t love what I am giving to you.”

Armstrong’s genius also included melodic invention and revolutionary uses of rhythm that made jazz a soloist’s art and changed the music forever. Given those facts, one could argue that singling out tone as his central quality is out of balance in evaluating his overall contribution. Nonetheless, Provizer’s argument is persuasive enough that it deserves serious consideration. To read his essay, including the case that Armstrong’s latterday performances were “operatic in intention,” go here.

If you need to be reminded of that glorious tone—or of the origin of jazz singing—listen to this 1959 performance in Stuttgart, Germany.

The All-Stars with Pops were Trummy Young,trombone;
 Peanuts Hucko, clarinet;
 Billy Kyle, piano; Mort Herbert, bass; and Danny Barcelona, drums.

As I wrote the day Paul Motian died, Rifftides was not conceived as an obituary blog, but when an important musician leaves, I feel an obligation to observe the passing. I failed to do that when Gordon Beck died at 75, also in November. To many, Beck was best known as a pianist who frequently collaborated with singer Helen Merrill, and as a member of Phil Woods’ European Rhythm Machine in the 1970s, but his contributions to jazz were much more extensive. The Irish flutist Colm “Red” Sullivan, a frequent Rifftides correspondent who has lived in Brazil for the past year or so, is a great admirer of Beck. This week he contributed an appreciation to Ethan Iverson’s Do The Math blog. Here is some of what he wrote:

He is most usually compared, or considered in relation to, Bill Evans – but I feel that’s less than half the story. As a soloist he was less narrative driven than a Tommy Flanagan (along with Russ Freeman, always one of his personal favourites, though) or a Barry Harris: not so much text in solo (as with, say, Sonny Rollins or Dexter): his music is all about colour and light, shards of amazing brilliance – and he did have that glorious and singing keyboard sound.

To read all of Red’s detailed and thoroughly informed essay about Gordon Beck, go here.

In this 1991 video, Beck supplies the lyrical opening and closing choruses of a vigorous and adventurous version of Bill Evans’ “Waltz For Debby.” It’s the Gordon Beck-Kenny Wheeler Quintet with Wheeler, trumpet; San Sulzman, tenor saxophone; Dieter Ilg, bass; and Tony Oxley, drums.

For more about Beck, including his discography of more than 100 recordings, visit his website.

Ken Dryden, estimable liner note author and Allmusic.com reviewer, writes in response to yesterday’s post about the Rhapsody critics poll.

Doug, please share your method of winnowing the huge list of new releases and reissues down to a manageable list from which to make your final picks, I think everyone would be interested. I know it is easier for me if I highlight possible picks monthly for possible inclusion on my new arrival log.

One thing I always have to note is that not all of us have had time to hear or even obtain some of these CDs listed by other writers over the course of a year.

Ken, as responsible reviewers trying to stay on top of a jazz scene in the throes of a perpetual population explosion, ideally you and I would listen to everything. In boxes on my office floor (shelf space is a golden memory) are approximately 600 CDs—most of them unsolicited. Assuming that each of them runs an hour, by listening steadily 40 hours a week for 15 weeks I could hear them all, if the men in the white coats hadn’t taken me away by week 10. By the end of the 15th week, a few hundred more albums would have shown up.

I log everything that comes in on a computer spread sheet and put Xs by the albums that are self-evident musts; a new Sonny Rollins, an Armstrong reissue, something by Charlap, Pelt, Jarrett, Mahanthappa or d’Ambrosio, to pull a few names out of the air. The little yellow things in the photograph are notes to myself about prospective review points. The CDs sticking up at an angle are albums I have sort of, maybe, decided to write about. Now that every recent Berklee or North Texas graduate is a record company sending CDs or downloads as business cards, I make choices by name recognition, instinct or the influence of something as subjective as package design or the readability of the accompanying news release. It’s amazing to me that most of these fledgling musicians seem to have press agents. (Did Bird have a press agent?) Well, we don’t want to overlook the next Parker, Evans or Coltrane, but we can’t hear everything.

As for your second point, I know one reviewer whose goal is to have a copy of every jazz record ever made. Samuel Beckett could have based a play on that. I’m willing to resign myself to missing a few.

I keep swearing to swear off critics polls. I fail when Francis Davis persuades me to take part in his. For years, Francis ran the Village Voice jazz critics poll. This year he moved the operation to the Rhapsody website and recruited more than 120 jazz critics, writers and broadcasters. Who knew there were so many jazz critics? Well, the definition is stretched, but the results are interesting.

The Winner

Here is some of what Davis wrote in his essay about the Beacon Theater (New York) concert that produced the winning Sonny Rollins album:

Exchanging nods of astonishment with the New York cognoscenti (including numerous devotees of free improvisation whose ears usually go numb at the mere suggestion of a recognizable melody or blues riff) as I exited the Beacon that night, the thought occurred that if Rollins were to approve a commercial release, there might be no need for a poll. I could simply introduce a resolution naming it Album of the Year by unanimous consent. Going into this year’s poll, the only question seemed to be Road Shows, Vol. 2’s margin of victory.

Here are the top ten finishers and their recordings.

1. Sonny Rollins, Road Shows, Vol. 2 (Doxy/Emarcy)
2. Ambrose Akinmusire, When the Heart Emerges Glistening (Blue Note)
3. Joe Lovano Us Five, Bird Songs (Blue Note)
4. Miguel Zenón, Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook (Marsalis Music)
5. Craig Taborn, Avenging Angel (ECM)
6. Matthew Shipp, Art of the Improviser (Thirsty Ear)
7. Lee Konitz-Brad Mehldau-Charlie Haden-Paul Motian, Live at Birdland (ECM)
8. Rudresh Mahanthappa, Samdhi (ACT)
9. JD Allen Trio, Victory! (Sunnyside)
10 (tie). Terri Lyne Carrington, The Mosaic Project (Concord Jazz)
10 (tie). Charles Lloyd & Maria Farantouri, Athens Concert (ECM)

That list is of new releases. The other categories are Reissues, Vocal, Debut and Latin. In his explanation of the poll methodology, Francis tells how he tabulated the points. I cannot imagine the hours of painstaking work he put in. To see complete results and the individual ballots of the 122 poll cats, go to the Rhapsody poll index page and begin your exploration by clicking on “The 2011 Jazz Critics’ Poll: The Results”. The index page has links to all elements of the poll and to essays and sidebar features. For what it’s worth, here is my ballot

NEW RELEASES
1.Jan Lundgren-Chuck Berghofer-Joe La Barbera,Together Again at the Jazz Bakery (Fresh Sound)
2.Ambrose Akinmusire, When the Heart Emerges Glistening (Blue Note)
3.Miguel Zenón, Alma Adentro: A Puerto Rican Songbook (Marsalis Music)
4.Jessica Williams, Freedom Trane (Origin)
5.Sonny Rollins, Road Shows, Vol. 2 (Doxy/Emarcy)
6.Rudresh Mahanthappa, Samdhi (ACT)
7.Tierney Sutton, American Road (BFM Jazz)
8.Kenny Wheeler, One of Many (CAM Jazz)
9.Matthew Shipp, Art of the Improviser (Thirsty Ear)
10.Wadada Leo Smith, Heart’s Reflections (Cuneiform)

REISSUES
1.Stan Getz, Quintets: The Clef & Norgran Studio Albums (Hip-O-Select)
2.Bill Dixon, Intents and Purposes (International Phonograph)
3.Duke Ellington, The Complete 1932-1940 Brunswick, Columbia and Master Recordings (Mosaic)

VOCAL
Tierney Sutton, American Road (BFM Jazz)

DEBUT
No choice.

LATIN
Jerry Gonzalez, Jerry Gonzalez Y El Commando de la Clavé (Sunnyside)

The wedding yesterday of our son and new daughter-in-law, under blue Florida skies, was beautiful and moving (see the January 3 post below). The bride and groom are up and away, and we are all happy beyond measure.

By necessity, blogging has been in suspension the past few days, but I have been saving a video to show you during a slow period such as this. From a 1965 CBS-TV documentary, the clip demonstrates the artistry that put so many who worked with Frank Sinatra in awe of his musicianship. It is likely that you will recognize the recording; it is one of his biggest successes. Gordon Jenkins is the conductor. The narration is by Walter Cronkite.

To once again quote Red Mitchell, “Simple isn’t easy.”

The influential Czech novelist Josef Skvorecky, an admirer and champion of jazz musicians and the freedom they represent, has died in Toronto. He was 87. Skvorecky and his wife moved to Canada after the reforms of the Prague Spring were trampled by the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. His novels portrayed the perverse absurdity of totalitarian regimes, the Nazis in The Bass Saxophone, Stalinist Soviets in The Engineer of Human Souls. In Toronto, Skvorecky established a firm that published books by dissenting writers including the playwright Vaclev Havel, who became president of the Czech Republic following the collapse of Communism. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1982. Havel later honored Skvorkecky with the nation’s highest honor, the Order of the White Lion. Havel died last month.

The Bass Saxophone, one of the most powerful short novels in all of literature, is an account of the impact of free expression on a boy whose country is under the heel of German domination in World War Two. Skvorecky’s introduction to the novella quotes the Nazi regulations controlling Czech dance orchestras during the occupation and helps set the atmosphere for the book’s absurd and moving events.

1. Pieces in foxtrot rhythm (so-called swing) are not to exceed 20% of the repertoires of light orchestras and dance bands;
2. in this so-called jazz type repertoire, preference is to be given to compositions in a major key and to lyrics expressing joy in life rather than Jewishly gloomy lyrics;
3. As to tempo, preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones so-called blues); however, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated;
4. so-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10% syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs);
5. strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit (so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc.) as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl (so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.);
6. also prohibited are so-called drum breaks longer than half a bar in four-quarter beat (except in stylized military marches);
7. the double bass must be played solely with the bow in so-called jazz compositions;
8. plucking of the strings is prohibited, since it is damaging to the instrument and detrimental to Aryan musicality; if a so-called pizzicato effect is absolutely desirable for the character of the composition, strict care must be taken lest the string be allowed to patter on the sordine, which is henceforth forbidden;
9. musicians are likewise forbidden to make vocal improvisations (so-called scat);
10. all light orchestras and dance bands are advised to restrict the use of saxophones of all keys and to substitute for them the violin-cello, the viola or possibly a suitable folk instrument.

Among the Czech musicians who knew Skvorecky well is the pianist Emil Viklický, who supplied material the novelist used in The Engineer of Human Souls. For an account of their connection, see this Rifftides archive post. The Wikipedia entry about Skvorecky contains a fairly comprehensive account of his career and literary output

For the next several days, blogging will be a sometime thing, if it happens at all. Mrs. R. and I are plunging into activities surrounding and including our son’s wedding in Miami. The ceremony will be by the pool of a lovely old art deco hotel on South Beach.

It is wrenching to forsake the January pleasures of the interior Pacific Northwest, but for those we love no inconvenience is too great, even sand in our shoes, stone crabs and mojitos in our diets—and that moon.

We’ll be back——eventually.

Steve Cerra, pictured on the left, is the proprietor of the endlessly informative and entertaining Jazz Profiles blog. His latest profile is of Paul Desmond, concentrating on Desmond’s RCA Victor recordings with Jim Hall. Desperate for material, Steve fills out the feature with liner notes I have written over the years to accompany Desmond albums. At the end is a montage of portraits of the artist with a soundtrack from the Desmond Blue album. Cerra excels at those video constructions. To see (and listen to) the Desmond profile, go here.

Following the Desmond opus, be sure to scroll down for Steve’s profiles of two great arrangers, Robert Farnon and Manny Albam. As always, he incorporates musical examples.