Search Results for: Dave Brubeck

A few years ago, Gene Lees and I fell into serious agreement. It happened in one of our long talks over a glass of wine, or two, at the big table just off the kitchen in his and Janet’s house in Ojai. We were kicking around the peculiar effect that popular acceptance of an artist often has on the perception of critics and fellow musicians. We discussed the Modern Jazz Quartet, Cannonball Adderley, the Dave Brubeck Quartet and Diana Krall, all of whom during their struggle upward were lauded by writers and colleagues.

In each instance, when the musician began selling significant numbers of records and moved from subsistence work in clubs into the remunerative realm of the concert circuit, reviewers who wrote praise the year before suddenly detected compromised artistic standards. Among envious musicians, the logic seemed to go like this: if I haven’t made it big and those people have, they must have sold out.
Diana Krall was the most recent example. She had rather quickly gone from moderate recognition to stardom. The predictable post-success sniping was underway, but Lees and I thought that her playing put her high in the second tier of current jazz pianists and that she might someday edge into the first rank. We agreed that her singing, always good, had improved in intonation, time feeling and maturity of expression. Attractiveness and the naturalness of her stage presence were adjuncts to her popularity, we said, not the cause of it. Salud! Then we probably went on to argue about something.

Not long after that, Gene met Ms. Krall and wrote about her in 1999 for Jazz Times. The piece was a character study. It was built on their conversations, the quotes arranged and set in the text in that incomparable Lees way. He makes the reader an eavesdropper, a technique light years beyond substituting transcribed verbatim interviews for writing. The narrative sections were straightforward, like this one:

She has a strong face, and when the stage lights hit it, it radiated, looking like a flower above her black pantsuit. She is an outstanding pianist. (Even if she grouses about what she considers a limited technique; but compared to what, Art Tatum?) She sits slightly sideways at the keyboard, to face the audience, as Nat Cole used to do; maybe she picked it up from his movies and TV shows. Again she got a standing ovation. Whether she likes it or not, she is the glamour girl of jazz. I just hope her singing success doesn’t take her away from the piano, as it did Nat Cole.

It hasn’t. To read the entire article, go here.

I thought about that conversation and that article the other day when one of those Jazz On The Tube e-mail links showed up. It turned out to be to a section of Ms. Krall’s 2001 Live in Paris DVD, which I had never seen. She is with a large orchestra conducted by Alan Broadbent. John Clayton is the bassist, Jeff Hamilton the drummer, Anthony Wilson her regular guitarist, and we get a couple of glimpses of the marvelous John Pisano on acoustic guitar. If this is selling out, I’ll take it.

After three years of keeping his alto saxophone in the closet, in 1974 Paul Desmond finally succumbed to the exhortations of the Canterino family and agreed for the first time in a quarter of a century to play a club date as leader. The Canterino’s club, the Half Note, had moved from lower Manhattan to Midtown. The new proximity was an important factor. “After all,” he told me, “It’s only a couple of blocks away. I can fall out of bed and onto the bandstand.” He hired Jim Hall on guitar, Ron Carter on bass and drummer Ben Riley. For two weeks, they played opposite the Bill Evans Trio.
Desmond enjoyed it so much that he wanted to do more quartet playing. He had been thinking about going to Canada. Hall told him about a Toronto guitarist named Ed Bickert and a club called Bourbon Street. Following negotiations, he went into the club with Bickert, bassist Don Thompson and drummer Terry Clarke, later replaced by Jerry Fuller. It was the group that became his beloved Canadian Quartet, and he played with them the rest of his life.
The young woman speaking with Desmond in the January, 1976, video below is the skilled interviewer Mary Lou Finlay, then the host of the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s Take 30. In the full program, the actor and jazz enthusiast Paul Soles fills Finlay in on Desmond’s career and on jazz, about which she confesses to know nothing. Then, in a pre-recorded studio video, the Canadian quartet plays “Wendy,” followed by Finlay chatting with Paul live. It is a pity that YouTube doesn’t offer the full segment, but at least we have a rare instance of Desmond speaking on television. The clip picks up after Finlay has asked him why the Dave Brubeck Quartet disbanded in 1967.

Desmond recorded this album with the Canadian Quartet at Bourbon Street. Chapters 32-34 of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond cover the Canadian period and the final 16 months of Desmond’s life. He died on Memorial Day,1977.

The pianist and singer Joyce Collins died recently in Los Angeles following a long illness. She was 79. Highly respected in jazz circles, Collins played with a sensitive touch and subtle use of chords. Her singing was an outgrowth of those values, with attention to interpretation of the meaning of songs and, as Marian McPartland put it, “…deep feeling, a way of lingering over certain phrases, telling her story in a very poignant way.” Collins’s recorded debut as a leader had Ray Brown on bass and Frank Butler on drums. Earlier, she worked with Bob Cooper and Oscar Pettiford, among others, later toured and recorded as a pianist and vocalist with singer Bill Henderson and played with Benny Carter. Collins’s following included many musicians who sought out her gigs, which became increasingly rare in recent years as she depended increasingly on teaching for a living. Most of the recordings under her own name and with Henderson have become collectors items going for elevated prices on Amazon or as bargain LPs on eBay, but one of her best, Sweet Madness, with bassist Andy Simpkins and drummer Ralph Penland, is still in print.
Collins was born in Nevada and went to college in northern California, but not for long, for a reason I explain in Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.

…Joyce Collins, like Desmond, was a musician not majoring in music. Dave Brubeck heard her in 1947 playing in a bar in Stockton, where she was a student at Stockton Junior College. He thought she was too good a musician for Stockton J.C. and recommended that she move to San Francisco and study with his piano teacher, Fred Saatman.
“I don’t know why,” she said, “since I didn’t know who he was, but I took his advice. I went to San Francisco State, enrolled as a liberal arts major, called up Fred Saatman and started with him.”
She found herself in two classes with Paul Desmond, one on Shakespeare, another on the American novel.
“I’d go plugging along, never missed a class, studied hard. Lucky to get a C. He rarely came to class. He’d breeze in, always looking sleepy. Literarily brilliant, but sleepy. And of course he got A’s. I was so shy and so in awe of him, I was tongue-tied. It was hard for me to make conversation, but I always used to say to him, ‘We’re the hare and the tortoise.’ He was so witty. He was talking to a girl and I kind of overheard him, and he said, ‘There’s a vas deferens between us.’ I thought it was the wittiest thing I’d ever heard. It went around. People quoted that.”

For more about Joyce Collins, including a rare piece of video, see Bill Reed’s blog, The People vs. Dr. Chilledair.

Rifftides reader Ty Newcomb sent a link to video of the Dutch singer Fay Claassen doing Gerry Mulligan’s “Line for Lyons.” After enjoying it, I noticed that YouTube has another version of the piece by The Dave Brubeck Quintet. What to do? Why, show you both, of course.
First, we see and hear the composer with Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Jack Six and Alan Dawson at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1972. The director goes berserk with reverse zooms out of the stage lights, but a little dizziness is a small price to pay for a fine performance. Brubeck enjoys the work of his compadres and joins them in a round (so to speak) of counterpoint. Mulligan, sporting his old-man-of-the-mountains look that year, wrote and recorded the tune in the key of G 20 years before, but Desmond preferred it in B-flat and that’s where they play it here.

If you’re keeping track, Fay Claassen also chooses B-flat. She plays Chet Baker to Jan Menu’s Mulligan in an arrangement that thrives on tempo changes. Hein van de Geyn is the bassist. John Engels is on drums.

Among her other accomplishments, Ms. Claasen is a Chet Baker specialist. This double CD is devoted to her interpretations of his trumpet solos and his vocals.

The Kennedy Center Honors for 2009 went last night to Dave Brubeck on his 89th birthday, and to Mel Brooks, Grace Bumbry, Robert De Niro and Bruce Springsteen. CBS-TV will broadcast two hours of highlights from the ceremony at 9 pm EST on December 29. This morning’s papers and tonight’s newscasts will be full of the story. Googling the name of the event will turn up dozens of items on the web.

For the jazz community, of course, the big news is the inclusion of Brubeck. By dint of talent, conviction and fortitude he has persevered through a 63-year career of struggle, fame, misfortune, rewards, unjustified calumny and ultimate acceptance by nearly everyone, including many who once found it convenient to use him as a symbol of whatever they found unworthy, inartistic or unfair in the jazz business. When he had survived a long time, they started listening.
Nothing I have read in the past few days has seemed to capture Brubeck more accurately or movingly than Ann Gerhart’s feature piece in yesterday’s Washington Post. Here is a bit of her article about an interview with Brubeck and his wife Iola.

They are in a hotel suite in Minneapolis, he in stocking feet, white shirt, khaki dress pants and suspenders, doing this interview, she in black sweater and slacks, silk scarf about her neck, peering at a laptop at their autobiography, now in progress for at least a decade. An easy, slow afternoon late in the autumn of a remarkable life and partnership. If you were scoring at home, perhaps you’d open with a reverie in waltz time, each note a lingering, almost melancholy kiss.
Brubeck would be good with your intro for maybe 16 bars.
Then he and his sidemen would crack that ballad wide open in a hard-charging, swinging version in a time signature you couldn’t hope to count out, you’d just have to close your eyes and hold on. That is how Brubeck is. That is how he plays. That is how he lives, in stubborn and sunny defiance of all conventional rhythms of jazz and age itself.

To read all of Ms. Gerhart’s story, go here.
Congratulations to Dave and Iola Brubeck.

Today is Billy Taylor’s 88th brthday. It has not gone unnoticed by his publicists that, coincidentally, the piano has 88 keys. Appropriately, they have posted on his web site 88 videos of Taylor playing in a variety of contexts; speaking informatively on CBS Sunday Morning, where for years he did commentary; and being interviewed by Charles Kuralt, Charlie Rose, Charles Osgood and William F. Buckley, Jr., among others.
It is worth noting that Taylor and Dave Brubeck have long maintained a mutual admiration society. Brubeck is also 88, and one of those web site videos brings us the two of them playing 176 keys. Michael Moore is the bassist, Randy Jones the drummer.

“Take The ‘A’ Train,” which you just heard, was Duke Ellington’s theme song. Taylor and Brubeck were guest pianists at the 70th birthday party President Richard Nixon threw for Ellington at the White House in 1969. I happened to be standing nearby at the afternoon rehearsal in the East Room when a photographer asked the two of them to pose together. Taylor said, “Sure, something might rub off,” eliciting a wide grin from Brubeck.
Happy Birthday, Billy.

Thirty-two years ago today, Paul Desmond bid his girlfriend goodbye as she set off for London, urging her to have a good holiday. That was on Friday. He would be fine, he told her; he had friends coming the next day. But his only companion that weekend was the lung cancer that had ravaged him during the past year. His housekeeper found him dead on Monday, Memorial Day.
Marian McPartland said, “It’s just like Paul to slip quietly away when everyone’s out of town, not to bother anybody.” Dave Brubeck still says, “Boy, do I miss Paul Desmond.” Details of Paul’s passing–and his life–are in Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.
Here he is at the 1975 Monterey Jazz Festival two years before his death.

The vacation trip is over. I’m easing out of the driver’s seat and back into the saddle. Blogging will resume at a leisurely pace necessitated by rescuing the lawn and garden from two weeks of neglect, paying overdue bills, dealing with an accumulation of telephone messages, and facing the intimidating pile of mail that I hauled out of the post office in a plastic tub the size of the freight containers we saw on trucks on Interstate 5. Well, enough of that; you know what it’s like to return from a vacation.

One of the pleasures of the 3000-mile motor excursion down and up the west coast of the US was silence. Except for conversation between two people who don’t seem to get enough of it at home, and a modicum of music, we cruised along luxuriating in the glorious spring scenery. We saw shades of green I’d forgotten existed. This was along the old Columbia Gorge highway in Oregon.

George Avakian has produced recordings by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Erroll Garner, Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, among others. With the 78 rpm albums of Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens that he oversaw for Columbia Records in the 1940s, he invented the jazz reissue.
George turned 90 this week, and there was a huge party for him at Birdland in New York City. A wide cross-section of the jazz community turned out for the celebration. A splendid ad hoc mainstream band signed on to honor Mr. Avakian. They were David Ostwald, tuba; Randy Sandke, trumpet; Wycliffe Gordon, trombone and vocals; Anat Cohen, clarinet; Mark Shane, piano and vocals; Kevin Dorn, drums. Michael Steinman, proprietor of the excellent Jazz Lives web site, was there to report on the party.
Steinman’s report includes four videos of the band playing and one of George, with his customary charm, addressing the celebrants. To see it, click here.
Happy Birthday, George.

When I was looking for something on You Tube the other night, what to my wondering eyes should appear but the Kessler Sisters. I hadn’t seen them in forty years, and they still looked terrific. Paul Desmond introduced me to them in 1965 at the Hilton Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Desmond had just played a concert with the Dave Brubeck Quartet at Willamette University down the road in Salem. I couldn’t go because I was working. When I got off the air, I met him for a drink. Here’s the story from Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.

In the Hilton bar, he was high on the success of the concert he had just played and delighted to see the Kessler sisters again. The Scopitone was a film jukebox. The first ones were made in France, in part from used World War Two airplane reconnaissance camera equipment. The more finished version that made its way from Europe to the United States in 1963 looked rather like a big old soda fountain Wurlitzer with a screen at the top. Scopitone films on sixteen milimeter stock with magnetic sound tracks ran on endless loops through a projector inside the jukebox. They were descendants of the Nickelodeons of the first decade of the twentieth century and the soundies of the thirties and forties, and ancestors of the music videos seen on MTV and VH-1. French businessmen persuaded U.S. investors, who in turn persuaded bar and lounge operators, that Scopitone was going to get Americans away from their television sets and back out to night life. The films ran two or three minutes, with production values on a scale from almost absent to spectacular, and featured artists with talent to match. At the low end of the scale were groups like The Casualeers singing on a fire escape while two mostly nude girls gyrated. At the upper end were Scopitones starring the Kessler sisters, a pair of blonde, leggy young women who sang and danced with exhilarating zeal through pieces like “Cuando, Cuando” and “Pollo e Champagne.”

Desmond pumped quarters into the Hilton Scopitone, sending the Kessler Sisters cavorting again and again through an amusement park, singing as they leapt on and off a train, with a corps of dancers in the background executing routines that would have done Busby Berkeley proud. He was convinced that the Scopitone was going to be bigger than television and almost had me persuaded that we should invest large sums in the phenomenon. The more Dewars we had, the more sensible the investment plan became. Fortunately, the Oregon closing law kicked in before I committed to anything irrevocable. I don’t know whether Paul signed up for a share of the company, but I am glad that I didn’t. By the end of the decade, Scopitones were gathering dust in warehouses all over the world.

Rifftides reader Gary Alexander has some thoughts about what he sees as a watershed year for jazz back when popular culture had not yet been reshaped by rock and roll. Mr. Alexander broadcasts a jazz program Mondays and Fridays 3:00 to 5:30 p.m. PST, from KLOI on Lopez Island, Washington. If you are among the 2,200 (+ -) people who live on that enchanting island in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, you may know that KLOI is at 102.9 FM. If you are one of the 6-billion-800-million others (+ -), your best bet is to listen to Mr. Alexander on the web. Go here and scroll down to where it says, “Click Here To Listen To The Stream.” The opinions Mr. Alexander offers in the following piece are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Rifftides staff. On the other hand–to take a firm stand on the matter–maybe they do.

1959: The Year Jazz Was Reborn 

By Gary L. Alexander

Early in the morning of February 3, 1959, the chartered Beechcraft Bonanza carrying Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and J.R. “Big Bopper” Richardson crashed just after take-off near Clear Lake, Iowa. It was shocking news, similar to what jazz fans felt when Charlie Parker died (“Bird Lives”) four years before, in March 1955. Later singers like Don McLean called this crash “the day the music died.” 

I beg to differ. Later that same day, the Miles Davis sextet (absent Miles) recorded

The Cannonball Adderley Quintet in Chicago, the first of three phenomenal new albums – all included John Coltrane – in the first half of 1959 alone. As the 50th anniversary of the Buddy Holly crash arrives this year, rock musicians and cultural pundits will mourn the death of these three vital voices at their peak of popularity in their golden age of rock’n’roll, but jazz musicians can celebrate the rebirth of their own music. 

In the six months of 1959 – particularly the four months between the famous crash on February 3 and the end of May – jazz was almost literally reborn, with ground-breaking albums like Miles Davis and his all-star sextet in the celebrated perennial best-seller, Kind Of Blue which was mostly recorded on March 2 of 1959. That album, a best-seller 

each year since, introduced modal music to many listeners, while albums recorded in the same season contained the most forward-looking avant-garde music. Giant Steps, John Coltrane’s post-“sheets of sound” excursion, was mostly recorded on May 5, the same day that Ella Fitzgerald captured many of the first Grammy awards in ceremonies dominated by jazz and swing-related music. 

Ella was busy recording her largest “Songbook” offering, the 53-song George And Ira Gershwin Songbook recorded from January to July of 1959. In the

 same period, Thelonious Monk recorded his famous Town Hall Concert (on February 28) and Charles Mingus perhaps his best album, Mingus Ah-Um (in May). Looking forward, Ornette Coleman offered us The Shape of Jazz to Come. At mid-year, Dave Brubeck recorded odd-time compositions in Time Out on June 25 and July 1. 

The rest of America was fairly hip in those months. The #1 jazz hit in 1959 was the “Theme from Peter Gunn,” written by Henry Mancini and played by Ray Anthony’s big band. It was in the Billboard Top 40 from January 19 to April 13, 1959, peaking at #8. The #1 hit for 1959 was a song written by Kurt Weill for a German opera in the 1920s, “Mack the Knife” (recorded in late 1958 and reaching #1 for 9 of 10 weeks in late 1959, a huge hit for Bobby Darin). As you can see, the #1 hits for the first half of 1959 were better-than-average pop songs.
   

#1 Billboard Hits its in Early 1959 

“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” by the Platters (#1 for 3 weeks, January 19 to February 8)
“Stagger Lee,” by Lloyd Price (4 weeks): February 9 to March 8 
“Venus,” by Frankie Avalon (5 weeks): March 9 to April 12 
“Come Softly to Me,” by the Fleetwoods (4 weeks): April 13 to May 10 
“Kansas City,” by Wilbert Harrison (3 weeks): May 11 to May 31 
“The Battle of New Orleans,” by Johnny Horton (6 weeks): June 1 to July 12 

Jazz singers fared reasonably well on the Hit Parade, too. “Broken-Hearted Melody,” by Sarah Vaughn, charted for 11 weeks (August 17 to October 16), peaking at #7, while “What a Difference a Day Makes,” by Dinah Washington, reached #8. When the first Grammy Awards were announced in May 1959, jazz was a big winner, especially in the “Pop” category – although later on the Grammy judges mostly ignored jazz. 

For records released in 1959, the 1960 Grammy awards were also jazz-centered: 

Speaking of movie soundtracks, 1959 was the year that jazz scores expanded from jazz-influenced composers like Alex North, Elmer Bernstein and Henry Mancini to pure jazz artists like Duke Ellington, Gerry Mulligan and John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. 

In late 1958Johnny Mandel scored and a band led by Mulligan played in I Want to Live, followed by Duke Ellington’s award-winning Anatomy of a Murder score in the Otto Preminger classic, released July 1, 1959. In the fall of 1959, three more movies featuring jazz artists were released: Les Liaisons Dangereuses, featuring Art  Blakey; Odds Against Tomorrow, with a score by John Lewis, and Shadows, featuring the music of Charles Mingus. 

The public was mostly buying good music, too. The best-selling album of 1959 was the soundtrack from Peter Gunn, which featured top Los Angeles-based jazz musicians. For the eight years surrounding 1959, the best-selling albums in America were all Broadway soundtrack albums: My Fair Lady (#1 in 1957-58), The Sound of Music (1960), Camelot (1961), West Side Story (1962-63), Hello Dolly (1964) and Mary Poppins (1965). The record-buying public was pouring more cash into music by Lerner & Loewe, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein & Steve Sondheim, Jerry Herman and other great composers than into any single item by any rock artist – and that trend continued for nearly a decade, until 1966. 

Turning back to pure jazz, here are just a few of the albums recorded in those four magic months.

Day by Day, Classic Jazz Albums Recorded from February 2 to May 31, 1959

You can make a case that all forms of jazz existed side by
side, in relative peace, in that one year – everything from Dixieland to
avant-garde was on the record shelves under one category, Jazz.  The miracle year 1959 was not only the
year the music was reborn, but the year that jazz creativity reached its
zenith.

                                                                                  ©Gary Alexander, 2009.

From San Francisco comes news of the death of Frances Lynne, the singer who worked with Paul Desmond and Dave Brubeck before there was a Brubeck Quartet. Ms. Lynne went on to sing with Charlie Barnet and Gene Krupa as the big band era wound down. Her first recording, however, was not until 1991 with her husband, John Coppola’s band. She and the trumpeter were married for fifty-six years. She was eighty-two years old. Reviewing her CD, Remember, I wrote, “Often discussed but seldom heard, Ms. Lynne is a charming singer.”

She worked in the late 1940s at San Francisco’s Geary Cellar in a group called the Three Ds in which Brubeck was the pianist. In 1949, Desmond stole her, Brubeck and bassist Norman Bates from the Three Ds leader for a job at the Band Box near Palo Alto. In Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, Ms. Lynne recalled that experience.

Oh, it was a funny little gig, just an ordinary little gig, and the people from Stanford used to come in and sit there and inspire us, especially Dave and Paul. They’d get on a kick where they’d play all these fugal things. It was just a great happy thing. When I was singing, Paul played behind me. He never got in my way. He was the kind of player who was intuitive and inspirational. He’d never do anything unmusical. He was just a sweet, sweet person. He was interested in what you said and what you thought. Everybody likes that. He was attentive and he was very, very talented. Nobody got a sound like that out of the alto saxophone.

And, you know, those little jobs at the Geary Cellar and the Band Box never seem to die. I still hear people talking about them. And I’m glad, very happy, because that’s my only claim to immortality. I got a lot of offers in those days, but I wanted to stay with the group. I was like a little puppy, I was having so much fun. 

After the Band Box job ended and following her time with Krupa, Ms. Lynne worked in New York, including a spot on television, then returned to San Francisco. She and her husband kept their home there while Coppola went on the road as a member of Woody Herman’s Third Herd in the fifties and later led his band in the Bay Area. She sang occasionally, always winning praise for her intonation, phrasing and sensitivity to the meaning of lyrics.

For more on Frances Lynne, see Jesse Hamlin’s article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.

We may as well keep the Desmond string running through the weekend. After the Dave Brubeck Quartet disbanded at the end of 1967, Desmond did not play for more than a year. It wasn’t a matter of simply not performing in public or not recording. He did not take his saxophone out of the case, allegedly concentrating on writing How Many Of You Are There In The Quartet? the book that never happened. He also lolled around in the Caribbean. Toward the end of 1968, he relented to the extent of recording for the A&M label’s Horizon subsidiary. He was existing comfortably on his invested quartet earnings and the royalties from “Take Five,” but in the early seventies something within told him that he needed the gratification of regular playing. He began appearing as a guest with Brubeck’s reconstituted quartet or with Dave and his sons in the Two Generations Of Brubeck group. The Desmond interregnum period is covered in (here comes the shameless book plug) Chapter 29 of Take Five: The Public And Private Lives Of Paul Desmond.

Brubeck had taken less time to succumb again to the compulsion to play jazz. He continued to write his long-form concert works, but he assembled a band with Jack Six on bass and Alan Dawson playing drums. Gerry Mulligan, whom his friend Desmond once described as “the consummate prima donna bandleader,” put aside his own leadership and a fraction of his ego to tour with Brubeck. When Desmond joined them, they often played one of his favorite Mulligan pieces, “Line For Lyons,” as they did in a performance at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1972. This clip, new to me, materialized on You Tube in the past few days.

 Desmond was costumed in the glen plaid garment known as The Suit, nearly inseparable from him in his later years. We get closeups of both in another performance from the Berlin Festival. Paul is featured on a ballad he cherished, “For All We Know.” 

Have a good weekend.

Ted O’Reilly, the Toronto broadcaster, sent a recording of an interview he did with Paul Desmond in 1975. O’Reilly asked if there was a moment when Desmond realized the astounding degree of popularity the Dave Brubeck Quartet had achieved. Not really, Paul said, but that reminded him of a favorite question.

We were on a State Department tour in ’59, and we landed in Ismir, Turkey, and there was this huge hoop-de-do at the airport. They had a band playing one of our tunes, and a whole bunch of people; jazz fans and critics and whatnot. We were schlepping all of the equipment and baggage and everything to the hotel. Press conferences and interviews and pictures and all of that went on for an hour or so. Then, ultimately, it all subsided and I was sitting in the bar. There was nobody much left except this one guy who came up and said, “How long have you been famous?”

I said, “Well! That’s sort of hard to pin down. I suppose it would depend on whether you
start with the Columbia records or the concerts and Fantasy. Oh, I don’t know, I guess maybe 1954 or somewhere around there.”

And then he said, “What’s your name?”

In his eighty-eighth year, Dave Brubeck is going to have to add another shelf to his trophy room–or another trophy room. His most recent honor came yesterday from the US State Department. Here’s a paragraph from the Reuters report in The New York Times.

“As a little girl I grew up on the sounds of Dave Brubeck because my dad was your biggest fan,” U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said at the ceremony where Brubeck received the department’s Ben Franklin Award for public diplomacy.

To read the whole story, click here.

It is admirable that the State Department is honoring Brubeck for the valuable cultural diplomacy he and his quartet practiced with government sponsorship as recently as the 1980s. But what is the policy of The United States today in using culture to reach out to the world? Sad to report, official cultural diplomacy is largely dormant at a time when the country’s international image is at its lowest point in decades. I recently delivered a speech entitled “Jazz Roots In The Bill Of Rights.” Cultural diplomacy was not the main theme of the talk, but this paragraph touched on it.

Not long after the Berlin Wall came down, the United States Information Agency asked me to go to Eastern Europe as part of its US Speakers program. That program no longer exists because the USIA no longer exists. The Clinton administration killed the agency in a budget move. The function shifted to the State Department and under the Bush administration, nothing has been done with it. Cultural diplomacy exists on paper, but it is not being practiced. That’s a shame because there is intense interest in the world in how democracy and the concept of individual freedom work. We have laid aside a tremendously effective tool for making friends in the world by the simple, inexpensive means of sending Americans abroad to talk about America.

Let us hope that the next administration will understand the importance and impact of what the USIA did–when there was a USIA–and revive the agency or create one like it.

The charms and opportunities in bands of six to eleven pieces attracted jazz composers and arrangers eight decades ago, as they do to this day. For an overview and links to recordings of early mid-sized groups, go to the first installment of Medium But Well Done.

Separated by the width of the United States, in the second half of the 1940s two medium-sized bands working with different inspirations and source materials arrived at strikingly similar results. In New York, Miles Davis became the leader of a nine-piece band with arrangements by Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan and John Lewis. In 1948, it wasn’t called anything. Now, it’s known as the Birth Of The Cool.

Davis and his confreres were interested in encapsulating the harmonic palette of the Claude Thornhill Orchestra for which Evans had created memorable arrangements. They wanted the freshness and improvisatory feel of Evans masterpieces for Thornhill like “Anthropology” and “Donna Lee.” They were after more tonal subtlety and a less intense rhythmic approach than that of bebop, then in its heyday. In a typical bop performance, there was a group melodic statement, a succession of solos, and a repeat of the melody. In pieces by the Davis nonet, written and improvised sections of the music flowed together more or less seamlessly, without strain, in the vibratoless image of the Thornhill band. How well it succeeded in pieces like “Move,” “Moon Dreams” and “Budo” is reflected in the enormous influence of the Birth Of The Cool band in the ensuing six decades.

In northern California, Dave Brubeck and a few other chosen young men were studying at Mills College with the French modernist composer Darius Milhaud. As early as 1946, Brubeck, Dave Van Kriedt and Jack Weeks began working out solutions to problems raised in their studies in an ensemble they called, simply, The Eight. Later, it became the Dave Brubeck Octet.

Milhaud approved their efforts.

“He liked our music,” Brubeck told me. “He loved Kriedt’s “Fugue on Bop Themes. ” He said it was a wonderful example of a real fugue, written in a jazz style. He was as strict as could be about counterpoint. You had to follow his rules, which were Bach’s rules. Kriedt just had a natural gift for writing fugues. How else could this young jazz player absorb that so fast and translate it into the jazz idiom? It’s a classic piece.” Here is more from the essay I wrote in 1992 for the retrospective Brubeck CD box Time Signatures.

There are interesting parallels between the Brubeck and Davis bands. Both were experimental, although in pieces like “Schizophrenic Scherzo” and “Rondo” the Brubeck Octet demonstrated more audacity with its polytonality and polyrhythms. Both bands were ahead of their time. Both had three paying jobs. On records made in the same year, 1949, both sound fresh and undated more than forty years later, still models for inventive uses of textures, counterpoint, moving harmonies and time signatures. (This remains true fifty-nine years later.) “Curtain Music” is in 6. Schizophrenic Scherzo and the bridge of “What Is This Thing Called Love” were in 7. Brubeck’s adventures in time began long before “Blue Rondo a la Turk” and “Take Five.”

There are similarities in phrasings of melody lines and in voicings, right down to the ways in which the alto leads of Paul Desmond and Lee Konitz were employed in the two bands. Classical influences and currents of musical thought in post-war jazz were informing composers and arrangers working 3000 miles apart. Gerry Mulligan, with Evans and John Lewis a key arranger for the Davis band, went on to form his own quartet, which became, like Brubeck’s, one of the most successful of the 1950s.

In 1954, Mulligan formed a tentet modeled on the Birth Of The Cool Band and, later, put together his thirteen-piece Concert Jazz Band. The CJB, because of its size, was technically a big band, but in philosophy, spirit and execution it hewed to the principles he, Evans and Lewis developed with Davis in the late forties.

The gloriously testicular Chicago tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons led a succession of sextets more concerned with the basic emotions than with the refinements that occupied Davis and Brubeck. The arrangements were designed not to explore the possibilities of harmony or texture but to set off Ammons’s heartfelt solos. They do that most effectively in “Pennies From Heaven,” a witty pastiche of Christmas songs, the chugging “Jug Head Ramble” and a reduction of Ammons’s “More Moon” feature from his days with Woody Herman. Those pieces and more from 1948 and ’49 are in the fine reissue CD called Young Jug.

One arranger and leader whose work shows profound effects of the Birth Of The Cool recordings was an Ammons colleague from the Herman band, Shorty Rogers. At twenty-six, the trumpeter and arranger was also a veteran of the Red Norvo, and Stan Kenton bands. He took a nine-piece group into Capitol’s Hollywood studio in 1951. The six pieces they recorded featured Art Pepper, Jimmy Giuffre, Shelly Manne, Milt Bernhart Hampton Hawes and

Rogers’s writing full of zest and just enough complexity to be intriguing. “Popo,” “Didi,” “Four Mothers” and perhaps especially “Over The Rainbow” with its moving alto sax solo by Pepper get a large part of the credit–or blame–for establishing west coast jazz as a category, not just a geographic descriptor. It quickly became West Coast Jazz, typecasting that was good for commerce but stereotyped its musicians and has dogged them ever since.

This CD includes those initial Rogers nonet tracks, along with the Mulligan Tentette pieces. This one, with the same musicians, has eight tracks recorded by Rogers and his Giants for Victor in 1953. Among them are the remarkable intertwining lines and swooping backgrounds of “Indian Club,” “Diablo’s Dance” with its great piano work by Hawes, and the amusing “Mambo del Crow,” an early example of Rogers’s effective use of Latin elements.

We haven’t reached the mid-fifties, and there’s much more to report in this survey of medium-sized bands. Next time–maybe even tomorrow–more from California with Don Faguerquist, Lennie Niehaus, Clifford Brown and Chet Baker. In the offing: Tadd Dameron, Al Cohn, Bob Brookmeyer, Bill Kirchner, Anthony Wilson, Bill Holman and Charles Mingus, among others.

Patti Bown died last Friday in a Pennsylvania nursing home, little known not only to the general public but also to many jazz listeners. Despite her talent as a pianist, Miss Bown never became celebrated to the degree that she might have. That was for reasons at least partly to do with her uncompromising individualism.
Good breaks, good management and good advice–if she had been willing to take it–could have made a difference. There is strong evidence of her talent on recordings she made as a member of the remarkable Quincy Jones big band and with Gene Ammons, Jimmy Rushing, Illinois Jacquet, Dinah Washington and Oliver Nelson, among others.

In Patti’s obituary in Monday’s Seattle Times, Paul de Barros described her as “idiosyncratic, outspoken, versatile.” He might have added brilliant, well-read and argumentative. I knew her for a time in Seattle before she moved to New York. One night we were at a small party in honor of Dave Brubeck following a concert by his quartet. It was shortly after Brubeck was the subject of a TIME magazine cover story and was becoming famous. Brubeck, Patti and I sat talking at length about the part of the article that dealt with his forthright attitude on racial matters as expressed in a verse sung years later by Louis Armstrong in Brubeck’s musical The Real Ambassadors.

‘They say I look like God,

Could God be black my God!

If both are made in the image of thee,

Could thou perchance a zebra be?’

How I wish that I had a recording of that conversation, which I remember only as alternating between intensity and laughter.

Patti was a vital and unfailingly interesting part of a Seattle jazz community that also included trumpeter Floyd Standifer and bassist Buddy Catlett. They were all childhood friends of Jones. When he formed the big band he took to Europe in 1959, they were in it, along with others including Phil Woods, Quentin Jackson, Budd Johnson, Melba Liston, Clark Terry and Joe Harris–a cross-section of veterans and emerging stars. Patti is in the rhythm section of that remarkable band on the Quincy Jones DVD in the Jazz Icons series.

Recently, from Holland emerged video clips of a small unit from the Jones band in which Patti was the pianist. The others are Woods, Jackson, Harris (misidentified on the videos as Joe Morris), Catlett and Sahib Shihab. Each of the musicians solos on all three tunes. Patti’s chorus on “Straight No Chaser” comes closest to what I remember of the daring, even quirky, aspects of her improvisational style, but she is also eloquent on “Undecided” and “Ornithology.” No one takes more than one solo chorus in these clips that run in the neighborhood of three minutes apiece. It is striking how expressive the players are in the forced economy of the time limit. In the post-Coltrane era, that kind of self-editing is all but a lost art.

You may also hear Patti Bown on these CDs:

Quincy Jones: Pure Delight

Oliver Nelson: Afro/American Sketches

Oliver Nelson Verve Jazz Masters (on four tracks)

Gene Ammons: Late Hour Special

Patti Bown, whom I wish I had known longer and better; gone at seventy-six.

Today’s Seattle Times has a substantial obituary of Jack Brownlow. It begins:

Jack Brownlow learned to play the piano by ear at age 12. By his late teens, he was an accomplished professional. Although he never sought a national stage, he made a stir here as a musician’s musician, a quiet pianist known best for his harmonic sophistication and his encyclopedic knowledge of songs.
When he first heard Mr. Brownlow play, Paul Desmond, the alto saxophonist and lead soloist in the Dave Brubeck Quartet, reportedly remarked: “If I played piano, that’s how I’d want to play it.”

To read the whole thing, go here.
Rifftides will resume normal operation eventually. This executorship business is going to be full time for at least a few days. I hope to find time for a report on Luciana Souza’s perfomance at Jazz Alley. Please check in now and then.

We continue the Rifftides survey of the second release of Jazz Icons DVDs. For earlier reviews of the Mingus and Ellington discs, go here.
In addition to their first-rate musical material and high production values, the Jazz Icons discs–unlike far too many DVDS–provide background about the music and the artists. Each includes a booklet with discographical information, photographs, and program notes by knowledgable experts. Patricia Willard wrote essays for the Ellington disc and for the Sarah Vaughan.
Sarah Vaughan Live In ’58 & ’64 (Jazz Icons)
In her 1958 appearances in Sweden and Holland, the singer was in her mid-thirties, a seasoned performer but still shy before audiences and cameras. The girlish reticence that was part of her persona and her charm is on the film that went into this DVD, and so is bewitching singing from an extraordinary time in her career. Vaughan’s discography of the late fifties is rich with gems, including the first recording of “Misty,” her live date at Mr. Kelly’s in Chicago and her initial dates with Quincy Jones and members of the Count Basie band. Much of the cream of that repertoire is represented here, including “Lover Man,” “Sometimes I’m Happy,” “Mean To Me” a sublime “Over The Rainbow” and a supremely relaxed up-tempo “Cherokee.” She was in perfect voice–she was nearly always in perfect voice–with few of the mannerisms that crept in later. With perfect time, intonation and taste, she is hand-in-glove with her trio, pianist Ronell Bright, bassist Richard Davis and drummer Art Morgan.
By 1964 in Sweden, there were hints of grand operatic tendencies, but not to the extent that sometimes took the edge off Vaughan’s later work. She was more elaborately gowned and coifed and had developed a polished stage presence. Vaughan had updated her repertoire with Bernstein’s “I Feel Pretty” and “Maria” from West Side Story and with “Baubles, Bangles and Beads,” but the highlights of the set are a joyous “I Got Rhythm” with finger-snap accompaniment, and a definitive slow performance of “The More I See You.” Her trio is pianist Kirk Stuart, drummer George Hughes and the young Buster Williams on bass.
Dave Brubeck Live In ’64 & ’66 (Jazz Icons). Full disclosure: I wrote the foreword to Darius Brubeck’s notes for this DVD of a pair of European concerts by the classic Brubeck Quartet. Here is the first part:

Aside from its music, which is among the best I have heard in hundreds of hours of listening to the classic Dave Brubeck Quartet, this DVD explains an essential element of the band’s huge success. Concert audiences made the Brubeck group a phenomenon, at first on college campuses, then in the world at large. Listeners in concert halls and clubs could see the esteem and fondness Brubeck, Desmond, Wright and Morello had for one another.
Without a trace of artifice or overt showmanship, the four displayed the enjoyment they got from playing together. It was infectious. People who may not have known a quarter note from a mouthpiece were captivated as they shared in the quartet’s naturalness with the creative process.

The concerts in Belgium and Germany capture that naturalness, with the quartet at or near a peak of performance. In “St. Louis Blues,” which they must have played a thousand times, Joe Morello and Gene Wright lock up in a way justifying Wright’s claim that their togetherness was “like Jo Jones and Walter Page with Count Basie.” In a delicious video moment, the alert director switches to a shot that captures the camaraderie of the bassist and drummer who called one another, “Section.” There are two versions of “Koto Song.” Both have remarkable minor blues solos by Paul Desmond. Brubeck is at his most ethereal and impressionistic in the one before a German audience.
The two “Take Fives,” are relaxed and flowing. Morello, who introduced 5/4 time to the quartet in the late fifties, creates a structurally perfect piece of musical architecture in the ’64 performance in Belgium. The concerts also include “Three to Get Ready,” “I’m In A Dancing Mood,” “In Your Own Sweet Way,” “Forty Days” and “Take The ‘A’ Train.” In both cases, the simplicity of the stage settings and the direction imparts a timeless quality to the look of the video. Sound quality is more than acceptable. This is the best Brubeck on DVD.
Coming up: The Wes Montgomery, Dexter Gordon and John Coltrane Jazz Icons DVDs.