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Every November 25th since Rifftides debuted in 2005, we observe Paul Desmond’s birthday. He was born in San Francisco on this date in 1924, which, that year, was Thanksgiving. To the left, we see Desmond six months before he died in May of 1977. He’s watching Jim Hall carve the turkey that Jim’s daughter Devra prepared when she hosted her parents and Paul for a 1976 Thanksgiving dinner at her New York apartment. Longtime recording partners, Desmond and Hall were close friends. One of their rare experiences playing together outside a studio came in 1969 when President Richard Nixon celebrated Duke Ellington’s 70th birthday with a lavish tribute at the White House.

The Voice Of America’s Willis Conover put together the band for the tribute. Below you see its members rehearsing in the East Room the afternoon of the party, April 29, 1969. From left to right: Hank Jones, Jim Hall, Milt Hinton, Gerry Mulligan, Paul Desmond, Louie Bellson, Clark Terry, J.J. Johnson, Bill Berry, Urbie Green. Guest artists included Dave Brubeck, Billy Taylor, Earl Hines and the singers Joe Williams and Mary Mayo.

Mulligan and Desmond rehearsed Mulligan’s intricate arrangement of “Prelude to a Kiss.” The performance is included in a recording of that night’s music, finally released in 2002. From the Desmond biography, here is some of the description of that evening’s concert and aftermath:

It lasted an hour and a half and consisted of twenty-seven Ellington or Strayhorn pieces, several of them worked into medleys. Solos were distributed so that all of the musicians were featured. I was in the audience directly behind Cab Calloway, who was sitting next to Ellington. Duke had been lounging comfortably as he listened. He sat bolt upright when, on “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” with Brubeck at the piano, Desmond played a stunningly accurate impression of Johnny Hodges, Ellington’s star alto player of forty-one years. “Hey,” Duke said, and turned to Calloway with a grin, a reaction that pleased Desmond enormously when I described it.

Desmond was not happy about a medley that featured him on Strayhorn’s “Chelsea Bridge.” When they came to the song’s middle section, the bassist, Milt Hinton, forgot the complicated harmonic changes and went into an unrelated pattern. Desmond managed to keep his composure and preserve the melody line. It is unlikely that non-musicians in the audience knew anything had gone wrong, but Paul was convinced that it had been a disaster. After the concert, he headed for the open bar and stayed near it the rest of the night, which turned out to be long. The Nixons headed for bed, but the President urged everyone to stay and have a good time. White House staffers sprang into action and cleared the East Room for dancing, and a jam session ensued. Desmond’s mood lightened eventually, though he rejected all entreaties to play. I hung out at the bar with him and Urbie Green, but went on to other conversations after the Dewars competition moved out of my league. When the party broke up between 2:30 and 3:00 a.m., I wished Paul and Urbie a good night as they helped one another, unsteadily, through the entrance hall, down the White House steps and into a taxi. Later, Desmond was able to see humor in the “Chelsea Bridge” incident, but that night he worked at forgetting it.

In conclusion, I quote, not for the first time, what Brubeck told me years after Desmond’s death: “Boy, I sure miss Paul Desmond.”

Nearly all Americans who were alive when President Kennedy was murdered remember how and where they got the news. In announcing her revitalized blog, Carol Sloane asked her contacts to recall what they were doing on November 22, 1963. This is what I sent her:

My camera crew and I were in the ballroom of the Benson Hotel in Portland, Oregon, interviewing Denise Tourover, the national head of Hadassah. Mrs. Tourover was from Washington DC. She was a friend of the Kennedys. I had just asked her about the importance of Mr. Kennedy’s trip to Dallas when Richard Ross, the anchor at a competing station, burst into the room and announced that the President had been shot. It was soon confirmed that he was dead. KATU-TV had just been named the ABC affiliate in Portland, but the contract allowing us to carry the network’s coverage had not gone into effect. For the first several hours, until ABC made arrangements to hook us into the network, our news department carried the load of reporting about the assassination, depending on wire services and whatever guest experts we could round up. I persuaded Mrs. Tourover to come to the studio and go live with us. She became an invaluable source and a connection to other Kennedy contacts across the country. I did not leave the studio, or the air, for nearly 24 of the most demanding and emotional hours of my life.

In a pair of duo albums the protean Robinson confines himself to 10 instruments from his arsenal. Alphabetically, they range from alto sax to zither, sonically from the rumbling contrabass saxophone to the altissimo twittering of the sopranino sax. His accompanists are pianists, although in Záhadná Emil Viklický also plays organ and solovox and in Afar Frank Kimbrough doubles on electronic harpsichord, clavioline and two kinds of organ. As for the music, you were expecting maybe the Great American Songbook? Well——no.

Robinson, Viklický and Kimbrough are masters of chord-based invention, but these albums from Robinson’s ScienSonic label are mostly free improvisation. In Záhadná there are also musings on a few folk melodies from Viklický’s native Moravia. The haunting “Ej, Lásko, Lásko,” with Robinson playing C melody sax, is a highlight. Little pieces played with abandon in eight pastiches called “Honička” (Czech for “chase”), live up to their title. Altogether, the music is packed with insights into the workings of three unconventional minds. In Czech, “Záhadná” means “mystery” or “eeriness.” These CDs have not only mystery, but also wit, profundity and remarkable musical sensibilities interacting with the speed of thought.

It dawned on me this evening that the post below was not the first time that Rifftides has addressed the question of Diana Krall’s popularity in the context of arguments about the quality of her artistry. An item from three-and-a-half years ago makes some of the same points. More important, it contains a video clip from a Paris concert that is worth seeing and hearing. It also has a quote from and a link to an astute article about Ms. Krall by the late Gene Lees. To find the May, 2010 post, click here.

Pianist, composer and Bill Evans expert Jack Reilly alerts us to a five-part program about Evans. Donald Macleod hosts the Composer Of The Week series about Evans’s life, with three of the episodes devoted to his work with Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis and the producer Helen Keane. The BBC is making the series available on the internet for a short time. The opening segment will be heard for only two more days. The remaining four expire on successive days. To listen to them, Go here.

Visiting Santa Barbara, California, I was offered a ticket to last night’s performance of the traveling theatrical production Million Dollar Quartet. It is unlikely that I would have sought out a rock and roll musical, but my hosts took me along. The magnificent Granada Theater on State Street was nearly overflowing. The crowd’s appearance indicated that most people in the audience were of high school age when Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis were in the first wave of rock shock troops. They and Bill Haley stormed popular music as elements of rhythm and blues, country and pop music coalesced into early rock and roll. America’s culture—and eventually that of the world—was destined to change forever. The musical emphasizes again and again in taunts by Presley, Perkins and Phillips that predictions of the early death of rock and roll were flat-out wrong.

Million Dollar Quartet’s story revolves around a day in 1956 when Lewis, Perkins, Presley and Cash (pictured left to right) met in Sam Phillips’ Sun Records studio in Memphis. Presley had left Sun for RCA. Cash and Perkins were about to defect to Columbia Records. That sets up tension as Phillips, realizing that all three of his big stars are gone, determines to groom Lewis, a zany ball of fire, to be his next big recording success. In the course of 90 minutes or so, we heard two dozen songs including “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Hound Dog,” “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Long Tall Sally.” The actor-musicians who played the rock performers were uniformly effective in their roles. The opening announcement emphasized that there was no lip-synching or air guitar; the playing and singing on stage were the real thing. Cody Slaughter had Presley’s moves down cold and frequently caught his inflections. John Countryman captured Lewis’s borderline manic personality. James Barry had Perkins’ mixture of belligerence and sweetness just right. Scott Moreau was touching in his representation of Cash’s rumble of a voice and his peacemaker personality. Vince Nappo played Sam Phillips, the self-made blusterer whose cajoling, pleading and threatening were necessary to rein in the egos of his star performers.

The production was perfect in every respect— sound, lighting, pacing, script and performance. So why did I leave the building disturbed? It was because a brilliantly realized theater microcosm had encapsulated a phenomenon that 57 years ago established a lowest common denominator. The rock mentality spread so fast and so wide that every aspect of popular culture was diluted or distorted. The power of music to direct lives and attitudes has never been more starkly demonstrated than in rock’s influence not only on music but also on literature, theater and film, on sexual mores, on the general capacity or willingness of people to make subtle distinctions in civil discourse, on the flavor and fabric of modern life.

The program notes for Million Dollar Quartet conclude with a double-edged fact:

In his rudimentary, one-room studio, Phillips looked for innovation, not imitation. The music he recorded transformed the cultural landscape of the twentieth century, and its reverberations are still felt today.

Are they ever.

Every time I return to Los Angeles, I am reminded why my years living there were often surprisingly interesting in small ways. Somewhere in the accompanying postcard photograph is Moorpark Street in the Studio City section. Among Studio City’s 35,000 residents are show business figures, and among its businesses are the kinds that help give L.A. its cultural flavor.

On one side of one block of Moorpark between Tujunga and Kraft avenues, these are these businesses nestled cheek by jowl:

Data + Imagination
Pretty Tanning & Bodywork (Massages $40/Hr)
Hair Razing (Cuts For Men And Women)
Bodies In Balance
Starlite Cantina And Sports Bar
The Best Cactus Tacos

I passed the opportunity to have my first cactus taco. I wonder if the advantage over ordinary tacos is that the cactus variety comes with built-in toothpicks.

New York’s Jazz And Colors mass musicale took place yesterday in Central Park. If you’ve been wondering how it went, go to The New York Times for a report by Ben Ratliff. “The point of Jazz and Colors seems basically sensory: Hear jazz, feel autumn,” he writes. Mr. Ratliff works his way into the coverage by comparing the event with a longstanding Dutch festival and tour. His piece includes a slide show.

The producer of the Bill Holman documentary was concerned that the Holman band’s live performance of his Thelonious Monk arrangements would be lightly attended. Kathryn King and her crew were to film the concert, and she was hoping for enthusiastic response by a big crowd. As it turned out, she needn’t have worried. Vitello’s, a little club in the Studio City area of Los Angeles, was packed on Friday evening. The response was indeed enthusiastic, ending with a standing ovation answered by an encore. The latest edition of the band was in great form. Ms. King says that the documentary will include at least one complete performance from the evening.

The band included Holman veterans and an impressive batch of young newcomers, among them the rhythm section of pianist Max Haymer, bassist Alex Frank and Drummer Jake Reed. These were the horn sections:

There were superb improvised choruses throughout the evening, including those by Babad playing alto sax on “Thelonious,” Whitfield on “Bye Ya,” Summers with a gorgeous reading of the melody of “Ruby My Dear, Stout and Webb in a number of solos. Winner of several awards for minimalist conducting, Holman often stood in front of the band with a half smile, head cocked as if he were hearing the music for the first time. He introduced his take on “Brilliant Corners” as “the thorniest piece of the collection.” An ensemble section that might have been written by Igor Stravinsky, had he been a jazz arranger, supported the claim.

I spent a good chunk of Saturday interviewing Holman. Ms. King and director Gil Gilbert are planning interviews with a number of Holman associates and admirers. Already filmed are band members Babad, Stout and Whitfield, as well as Holman’s fellow leader Gerald Wilson and the legendary producer/engineer Bones Howe. Watch Rifftides for reports on the progress of the documentary.

Across the country from warm and sunny Los Angeles tomorrow, New York’s Central Park will be full of leaves turning color and 30 bands serenading the season. It is the park’s annual Jazz And Colors celebration.

The photograph is from last year’s event. For information, including a list of the bands and a map, go here.

Watching and listening to Bill Holman put his big band through its paces was a rare treat. The 86-year-old leader was preparing his troops for a rare public performance of his arrangements of the ten Thelonious Monk compositions in his celebrated Brilliant Corners album. Allowed to drop out of sight, never reissued, Holman’s Monk CD recorded in 1997 is one of the large-ensemble masterpieces of the second half of the twentieth century. Nor has there been anything that I know of to match it in the new millennium.

The concert tonight at Vitello’s in Los Angeles will be filmed for the documentary about Holman that I wrote about a couple of days ago. It has the makings of one of the city’s cultural events of the year, but it has received a puzzling lack of attention in the press and virtually no promotion by the club—barely a mention on their website. Holman’s band has some of L.A.’s youngest top-flight musicians, some of its oldest and some in between. As its 16 pros navigated the demands of his arrangements this afternoon, their enthusiasm, precision and joy were as if they were all about 25. If you are in L.A., or within striking distance, you might give attendance serious consideration. I rarely find myself in a promotional mood. For this, I make an exception.

Here is one of the pieces from that 1997 album, Monk’s “Friday The 13th.” The quirky soprano saxophone work is by the late Bill Perkins.

If I weren’t flying south today, I might very well be looking for a plane headed east. If you live in the northeastern US, you may want to know about these events:

Steve Kuhn has lined up a rarity in these days of one-shot engagements; four nights in the same club, Thursday through Sunday at the Jazz Standard in New York City. For decades a pianist of uncommon depth and inventiveness, Kuhn has in his trio Buster Williams on bass and Billy Drummond on drums. That’s all the information it would take to get me there. If you want more, go here, click on “Show Schedule” and scroll down.

Another event worth leaving home for is the 2013 manifestation of East Stroudsburg University’s Zoot Fest in the mountains of Pennsylvania’s Delaware Water Gap region. It’s a Sunday event named in memory of Zoot Sims. Just one day, but what a day. The spirits of Zoot and Al Cohn will be there in spirit, summoned by an all-star cast that includes Phil Woods, Joe Lovano, Bucky Pizzarelli, Bill Crow, Bob Dorough, Lew Tabackin, Bill Goodwin, featured guest Joe Locke (pictured) and—if the pattern of previous years holds—a few surprises. It’s a fundraiser for the university’s Al Cohn Memorial CollectionTo learn more, go here.

Rifftides is going into partial suspension for a few days. I’m involved in a documentary about Bill Holman (pictured), the composer, bandleader and NEA Jazz Master universally regarded as one of the greatest of all jazz arrangers. I will be in Los Angeles for a few days to interview Mr. Holman. Kathryn King Media, a veteran producer of projects related to music, is making the film. Ms. King reports that the production will be supported in part by a fundraising campaign and that information about it will appear by the end of the week in the “Search Projects” section of the Kickstarter website under the title Charting Jazz: The Mastery of Bill Holman.

This video clip summarizes a few of King Media’s projects.

Here’s Holman in 2000 conducting Germany’s WDR Big Band. The piece is his arrangement of “Just Friends,” a breathtaking example of Holman’s celebrated linear writing style, with unison sections that he crafts as if they were improvised solos. Frank Chastener is the pianist, John Goldsby the bassist, Jeff Hamilton the drummer and James Moody the guest tenor saxophone soloist. About halfway through, you’ll see a list of all of the musicians in this remarkable band.

In due time, I’ll post more about the Holman project. As the week of production moves along, I’ll try to work in a Rifftides item or two. Stay tuned.

During the week when we lost Frank Wess, it has been impossible not to keep thinking about him—and listening to him. Today’s listening was to Uptown Records’ marvelous two-CD set of Wess in his partnership with trumpeter Johnny Coles (1926-1997). Their quintet was a 1980s band that reflected trends of the previous three decades. It was a platform not only for two nonpareil horn soloists but also for rhythm sections made up of some of the music’s brightest younger players. The first disc, recorded in 1983 in Rudy Van Gelder’s famous studio, has pianist Kenny Barron, bassist Reggie Johnson and drummer Kenny Washington. It is packed with pieces by the elite among modern jazz composers; Kenny Dorham, Tadd Dameron, Gigi Gryce, Bud Powell and Benny Golson among them. In some cases, two takes of a tune give additional insights into Wess’s warmth as an improviser on tenor and alto saxophones, and into his fluency of thought and execution, which seemed to come without effort. The same may be said of Coles, who plays flugelhorn throughout. He may well have been the most under-appreciated major brass soloist of the second half of the twentieth century. This collection is an opportunity to catch up with him.

As noted occasionally on Rifftides, the creative power of medium-sized jazz ensembles often exceeds their size. Go here to read several posts on that topic. The guitarist Anthony Wilson added to the mid-sized genre’s discography with his Power of Nine in 2006. Over the summer, he revived the group and peopled it with an impressive array of name musicians. Jim Wilke, winner of the Jazz Journalist Association’s broadcaster award, recorded the group and will put them on the air and stream them on the web this weekend. Here’s Mr. Wilke’s announcement with a photograph of the nonet by Jim Levitt.

“Thank you,” I said to the clerk at the hardware store.

Lester Perkins, the proprietor of Jazz On The Tube, sent an alert to a rare opportunity to watch and listen to Duke Ellington rehearsing a new piece. This was on the French Cote d’Azur in 1966. We see glimpses of Paul Gonsalves, Russell Procope, Cat Anderson, Buster Cooper, Jimmy Hamilton and the other members of the ’66 band, even one of Tom Whaley, Ellington’s indispensable arranger and copyist (at :37). The video clip melds smoothly from rehearsal into performance and features chorus after chorus of Johnny Hodges deep into the “The Old Circus Turn-around Blues.”

I must confess that among the dozens (and dozens) of unsolicited email messages that pour into the Rifftides computer each day, I have paid little attention to those from the Litchfield Jazz Camp. That changed when one arrived with news that next year the camp moves from Kent to another Connecticut town. From the news release:

It was a fine day for the ritual of draining, coiling, labeling and storing the hoses. The canal has been dry and the irrigation water off since Tuesday. That news is of no importance whatever and has nothing to do with the usual topics of this blog. Hoping to find a connection (hah), I searched for music inspired by hoses and found nothing but a semi-bawdy saloon song that ended up being about a garden hose only after implying that it was about something else. Therefore, we offer a song the first syllable of whose title is the word in question. The song, from Harry Belafonte’s best selling 1956 Calypso album, expresses the elation we felt around here after all those hoses had been stored for the winter.

First, from an upstairs window looking across the valley. This is a fine time of year to live in the high desert at the foot of the Cascades.