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There was a sneak peak of the–for lack of a more accomodating word–classical aspects of The Seasons Fall Festival when tenor Robert Frankenberry and soprano Gilda Lyons previewed a bit of Daron Hagen’s opera Amelia. The Seattle Opera will premiere the work next spring. At an intimate session in The Seasons back room, the New York composer talked about the opera, which is in gestation, then took to the piano to accompany Frankenberry and Lyons in an aria. The Amelia of the title is not the lost pilot Amelia Earhart but the daughter of a Navy flyer who died in the Viet Nam war. The libretto by the poet Gardner McFall is based on the wartime loss of her own father. The work, as described by Hagen, has a complexity of themes involving flight, including references to Earhart and the myth of Icarus and Daedalus. If the entire opera is as beautiful as the sample, it will be worth the trip to Seattle in May.
Hagen, the festival’s artistic director, put together a sampler concert in the main hall that previewed many elements of the festival’s nine days. It encompassed performances by the Finisterra Piano Trio, the Kairos String Quartet, Chris Brubeck, the African percussion expert Michael Wimberly, more singing by Lyons and Frankenberry and a performance by Frankenberry of Aaron Copland’s 1931 Piano Variations. The Copland piece begins as a puzzling series of abstractions from his most experimental period. It works through 20 nervous, kinetic variations to a coda that ends the work in a grand statement packed with harmonic riches. It is notoriously demanding to play and, for many, difficult to listen to. Leonard Bernstein used to say that he could wind up a party with it because it would empty the room in two minutes. This recording is probably the best one available, but Rob Frankenberry should put it on a CD because–there’s no better way to describe it–he plays the hell out of it.
The “Bravi Tutti” sampler evening ended with a new Hagen arrangement of “Amazing Grace” played by all of the evening’s 20 or so musicians. Brooke Creswell, the retiring music director of the Yakima Symphony Orchestra, played double bass, Chris Brubeck worked up a long, blowsy, trombone solo and the Finisterra’s Tanya Stambuck brought down the house with her vigorous interpretation of the solo piano section.
The next evening’s chamber music concert by Kairos and Finisterra had riches of several eras. It included works by composers Michael Torke, Felix Mendelssohn, André Previn, BedÅ™ich Smetana and a deeply felt short string quartet piece by Hagen, Snapshot no. 1: Wedding Day. It ended with the Finisterra Trio’s world premiere performance of Gilda Lyons’ Folklorico, commissioned by The Seasons for this festival. The four-part piece is based on music and folklore of Nicaragua. It abounds with passions and rhythms of Latin America and a slow section called “Tortuga’s Lament” so intriguing that I am ready to immediately hear it again.
More later on an evening of cabaret, an African drum spectacular, the dynamo known as Matt Wilson and the Dena DeRose trio, which, as this is written, I am off to hear. Stay
tuned.

The next night (see the following exhibit) in their own concert, the Imani Winds drew upon music from their CD The Classical Underground. They began with the late Astor Piazzolla’s Libertango, a brief example of the heterodoxy with which Piazzolla shocked and outraged the Argentine tango establishment and ultimately endeared himself to music lovers everywhere. The Imani French horn player, Jeff Scott, arranged the piece to feature his instrument’s dramatic, even explosive, qualities. From a different branch of Latin music, the woodwind quintet continued with composer Paquito D’Rivera’s Aires Tropicales, a seven-part suite illuminated by the insinuating movement called “Dizzyness” (after D’Rivera’s former boss Dizzy Gillespie) and the magnetic harmonies of a joropo, “Vals Venezolano.”
To these ears, predisposed by years of living in New Orleans, the evening’s highlight was a short piece by another composer seasoned under the tutelage and leadership of Gillespie. It was Lalo Schifrin’s La Nouvelle Orleans, a seven-minute sketch that combines Schifrin’s classical and jazz sensibilities to encapsulate the sadness and liberating joy of a traditional New Orleans funeral procession. The Imanis, virtuosos all, captured both aspects as if they had often experienced the emotions of that march to and from the cemetery. Torin Spellman-Diaz, the oboist in the group photo above, was unable to be in Yakima. Her substitute, able and fully engaged, was James Roe (pictured), a stalwart of the New York chamber music milieu. To see bios and more photos of the regular members of the group, go here.
More about the festival is on the way, maybe later today.

The Portland Jazz Festival today announced its 2010 headliners and beefed up its front office strength by adding a veteran jazz publicist as managing director.
The headliners for the February 22-28 festival will be Pharoah Sanders (pictured), Luciana Souza, Dave Douglas, Dave Holland and the Mingus Big Band. There will also be concerts by three Norwegian groups. They are the saxophone-accordian duo of Trygvie Seim and Frode Haltli, the Christian Wallumrod Ensemble and In The Country, a trio of acoustic bass, piano and drums that, according to the festival’s publicity, combines rock influences with jazz. That’s not a revolutionary idea, but maybe they have a new slant.
Don Lucoff, who has for more than two decades run the extensive publicity agency DL Media, will take over as the festival’s managing director, working with its founder and artistic director, Bill Royston. For details about the artists and Lucoff, see the PDX web site.
Speaking of festivals, I’m moving at a fast pace battling car trouble and trying to keep up with The Seasons Fall Festival, now in its sixth day. I promised reports, and they will come, possibly beginning as soon as late tonight. The variety and quality have been impressive.

Speaking of Dena DeRose (see the October 9 item below), she just showed up in YouTube clips accompanying and soloing with Bill Henderson at this summer’s Litchfield Jazz Festival. Listen to the head of steam the quartet generates on “You Are My Sunshine.” Avery Sharpe is the bassist, Winard Harper the drummer.

To hear three more songs from that occasion, go here and scroll down to the middle of the screen.

Sorry for the short notice, but this just came in from Jovino Santos Neto. The program he tells us about will go on the air ten minutes from now as I write this at 12:50 pm PDT.

Jim Wilke, who has become a Northwest musical icon for his relentless support of our music scene for decades. His show Jazz Northwest is a sampling of the music that happens around here, and “Jazz After Hours” keeps good company to all those who love music throughout the weekend nights. Jim is having a fund drive for his show today, Sunday from 1 to 2 PM at KPLU, 88.5 FM. I encourage you to call 1-800-677-5787 during that time or go online anytime at www.kplu.org and donate what you can to keep his show going. Make sure you specify Jim Wilke’s show as a recipient of your generosity. His show is the only one on the station that fully supports the world-class music that flows from this region to the world. Now it’s the time to us to give back.

To hear JIm’s program, go here. Please consider supporting this important music broadcaster. Here’s a link to his invaluable Jazz After Hours. But the important thing right now is to help assure the future of Jazz Northwest.

For the next several days, blogging will be irregular. (“So, what’s new?” a cynic might say.) The Rifftides staff is knee deep in the fourth year of The Seasons Fall Festival. The nine days of music include The Brubeck Brothers Quartet (pictured, left), Matt Wilson, Dena DeRose, The Imani Winds (pictured below), an African drum ensemble and an assortment of piano trios, string quartets and a chamber orchestra. The festival will present the world premiere of a new work by composer Daron Hagen, the festival’s artistic director. To see a schedule of the main events, go here.
Parallel to the festival’s main concerts is a series of workshops conducted by Hagen for a dozen outstanding young composers from around the United States. The Yakima Symphony Chamber Orchestra under Brooke Creswell will perform two new compositions chosen from among those by the young composers. All of that in a town of 85,000 in the heart of apple country at the foot of the Cascade mountains. That’s lot of music, a lot of listening. I will post reviews and impressions along the way. The satellite events will include a Monday pre-concert music-and-gab session conducted by your faithful correspondent. For a detailed schedule of all the events, go here. If you are coming to Yakima for the festival, please make yourself known. I’d enjoy meeting you.

A friend asked me to bicycle through the Yakima River canyon with him this morning. I said I had too much work to do, so he rode the 40 miles north to Ellensburg alone. When he got back, he sent a message, “The canyon is nice today,” with evidence.

Trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, admired within jazz circles but little known outside them, has received tangible recognition for his work as a player and a teacher. Belgrave left Ray Charles in the early 1960s ago to settle in Detroit. In today’s Detroit Free Press, Mark Stryker reports on the award and on Belgrave’s contribution to the city’s cultural life. Stryker writes:

For 46 years, Belgrave’s world-class musicianship, charisma, swing and commitment to mentoring young musicians — many of whom have become stars — have made Detroit a hipper city than it would have been without him.

To read the whole thing and hear a Belgrave performance with Tommy Flanagan’s trio, go here.
This video profile by Bret Primack supplements Stryker’s column.

For more of Primack’s profiles, go here.

Marc Myers, the resourceful and indefatigable king of the verbatim interview, posts a JazzWax conversation with Sonny Rollins about one of Rollins’s most unusual and successful albums. An excerpt:

JW: How did you pick the songs?

SR: All the songs I knew. By going to the movies so much as a child in the 30s, I was tuned in to Western popular music themes. Even today, people credit me for having an encyclopedic knowledge of what’s called the American Songbook. Included in there are Western songs, and Country music, too. When I was offered the date by Les (Koenig), I said, “Let’s make a concept album about the West,” which would evoke my feelings and the whole Western thing.

Rollins talks about how the famous William Claxton cover photo in the desert came about, and whose idea it was. To get the whole story, go here.

Brand New: In Brief
Joe Martin, Not By Chance (Anzic). Martin is a versatile and rounded bassist who has collaborated with a wide range of musicians at the heart of the 30-something generation of jazz players in New York. Here, he enlists two fellow members of that generation’s elite, pianist Brad Mehldau and saxophonist and clarinetist Chris Potter. The drummer, several years younger, is Marcus Gilmore, an accompanist who listens, reacts and adjusts. All of the tunes but Jaco Pastorius’s “The Balloon Song” are Martin’s. The compositions and the performers radiate assurance and peacefulness regardless of tempo or harmonic challenge, yet there’s not a hint of complacency. For all its loveliness, this is music that energizes the listener’s imagination.
E.J.Strickland, In This Day (Strick Musik). Like Marcus Gilmore, drummer Strickland is elastic in his approach to rhythm. In this album of his compositions, he drives the music while accommodating the idiosyncrasies and divergent approaches of his horn players, pianist and bassist. The sidemen are his twin brother Marcus, a resourceful tenor and soprano saxophonist; the increasingly impressive alto saxophonist Jaleel Shaw; pianist Luis Perdomo; and bassist Hans Glawischnig. The latter two are regular members of alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon’s band. An assortment of guests is employed on various tracks for atmosphere and a couple of spoken-word episodes that are weak poetry. The quintet provides the primary interest, and it was all Strickland needed except for Pedro Martinez’s congas on the Latin pieces, Tia Fuller’s winsome flute on “Illusions” and a reflective guitar interlude by David Gilmore on “Robin.” The saxophones achieve a lovely blend on “Enternal,” managing to convey with their different pitches alone a sense of harmonization. “New Beginnings” is a particularly effective Strickland composition, with Strickland and Martinez laying down a shifting percussion foundation for eloquent solos by Perdomo and the saxophonists. It is a balanced and thoughtful album.
Oldish: Less Brief
Eric Felten, T-Bop (Soul Note). Conducting research, I came across this first album by the trombonist. Somehow, it got by me when it was released in 1993. Not long out of graduate school when he recorded it, Felten made his debut in the heavy, even intimidating, trombone company of Jimmy Knepper (1927-2003), one of the great unconventional thinkers and players among improvising musicians. On some tracks, the third horn is a tenor saxophone played by Joshua Redman barely known when the album was made in 1992. He was a Harvard friend of Felten. Redman’s own first album come out the following year. The rhythm section was pianist Jonny King, bassists Paul Henry or Paul LaDuca and drummer Jorge Rossy, emerging Boston-area musicians roughly Felten’s age. King’s boppish work here made me decide to go back and pay closer attention to some of his own recordings. Rossy is noted for his association with pianist Brad Mehldau and as the unofficial house drummer for Fresh Sound Records.
More or less in the J.J. Johnson camp, Felten contrasts with Knepper’s languid trickiness, although at moments he seems inclined to emulate it. With one of the most tromboney of trombonists standing by as he solos, if Felten is a tad nervous, well, who wouldn’t be? In any case, they sound as if they’re having the time of their lives. The joy of their counterpoint in the last chorus of “T-Bop” is infectious. Over the intervening 17 years, Redman’s work has taken on sophistication and complexity. Here, he wears simplicity and directness on his sleeve. His earnestness is refreshing. All of the pieces but “Stella By Starlight” and “I Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry” are by Felten the developing composer. “On Second Thought” is an amusingly fractured line on “I Got Rhythm” changes, “Hold Back the Dawn” a brooding ballad worthy of a good lyric. “Deconstruction” is a minor exercise with Latin tendencies that encourages the musicians, particularly Redman, to take their solos to the border of free playing. “Ontology” is a questioning blues line appropriate to its title. There is no question about “Blues for Lester Dubree;” it’s down-home and funky and kicks off with a Louis Armstrong quote. “Delphi” would have been at home in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers book.
Felten has gone on to refine his trombone playing, lead a big band in Washington, DC, develop as a singer, publish a book and write a general-interest column in The Wall Street Journal. His second CD included Joe Lovano, Randy Brecker and Bob Mintzer. His tribute to Mel Tormé and Marty Paich featured a who’s-who of west coast jazz stars, among them Herb Geller and Jack Sheldon. T-Bop is evidently rare as a physical object but available as an MP3 download. If you missed it the first time around, as I did, you may want to investigate it.

Graham Collier, directing 14 Jackson Pollocks (GCM). Long before he wrote his recent book, Graham Collier’s music made it plain that Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Gil Evans were profound influences on his work. Collier followed Ellington’s and Mingus’s lead in fashioning pieces with his soloists in mind rather than the common concept of arrangements into which a leader could plug whatever soloist was at hand. As for Evans, I must say that I heard in Collier’s earlier recordings more of the Evans of “La Nevada” or “El Matador” – roiling, abstract patterns under soloists — than of the tonal tapestries in, say, Sketches of Spain. I still do. Collier amalgamated his inspirations into an orchestral style that coalesced at a moment in the late 1960s when musicians and listeners in Great Britain were ready to expand their ideas about what constituted jazz.
Collier was his own bassist for years before he concentrated entirely on composing, arranging and leading. Among the members of his bands were adventurous players including saxophonists John Surman and Art Themen, trumpeters Kenny Wheeler and Harry Beckett and drummer John Marshall. In directing 14 Jackson Pollocks, Collier reaches distillation of the notion that the orchestra, the written music and the improvising soloist comprise a trinity, each element inseparable from the other. The music makes obvious what the CD title means, unless you don’t know who Jackson Pollock was. The two-CD set consists of music recorded at concerts in London in 1997 and 2004. The astonishing Beckett, Themen and Marshall are among the players, along with pianist Roger Dean, bassist Jeff Clyne and others who long since absorbed Collier’s ethos of individual independence amidst collective dependence.
The music has something in common with the free jazz that emerged in the United States in the sixties, but where free jazz often fell by the weight of its pretensions of liberation from guidelines, Collier’s coalesces around his frameworks. His composing and arranging dictates, or suggests, shape, harmonic character and rhythmic direction of the solos. He infuses much of his music with wry humor at which titles like “Between a Donkey and a Rolls Royce” and “An Alternate Low Circus Ballad” can only hint. In any case, humor is only an element In Collier’s work, important but minor. He produces serious music that makes demands on its listeners and gives generous compensation to those who welcome it on its terms.
Efrat Alony, Alony (Enja). Bob Brookmeyer called my attention to this Israeli singer who has had success in Germany’s avant circles. In Brookmeyer’s words, “She is very gifted and very motivated–into electronics, arranging, always composing her own stuff. Been in Berlin for 15 years.” He thinks she deserves wider exposure. After spending a couple of hours of a long motor trip with her CD, I agree.
Alony’s voice, round and spacious, sounds classically trained. It is in the mezzo range, although she sometimes takes it higher, maintaining fullness and pitch unless she is purposely bending notes, which she occasionally does to great effect. The songs on Alony are not standards; she wrote most of the lyrics and music, with contributions from pianist Mark Reinke and one piece from the Israeli songwriter-singer Etti Ankri. In addition, Alony set to music William Butler Yeats’ bittersweet poem, “To a Child Dancing in the Wind.” Reinke and drummer Christian Thomé are the primary accompanists. They also provide electronic effects. A string quartet contributes backing and atmospherics. Alony now and then overdubs voices in unison or counterpoint. There’s a lot going on, but it’s all integrated, allowing concentration on the music as a whole. At their best, Alony’s lyrics achieve a haiku-like sensibility that distinguishes superior art songs:
Recollecting
fading shadows of joy
I slowly unlock the shackles of thought
my safeguard
freeing feelings I lost
bewitchment
delight
sweet longing
You are unlikely to find Alony at your corner record store. It is available as a download from Amazon and, evidently, as a CD only from the Enja web site. YouTube has a clever promotional video of “Lights On/Off,” the song that opens the album.
I’m not sure that there is a category for what Alony does. I’m not sure that there should be. Call it music.
We’ll have more Recent Listening soon. Well, reasonably soon.

Yakima, Washington
The recent CD by pianist Bill Anschell and soprano saxophonist Brent Jensen is called We Couldn’t Agree More. The title is inaccurate. In an intimate concert last weekend at The Seasons, they were in even greater agreement, with more daring and more complexity.
The duo’s approach is to play well-known tunes without well-known routines; no arrangements, no obvious statement of melody, no predetermined tempos or key signatures. They call on their experience, ears and reflexes. That may read like a description of free jazz at its freest, but Jensen and Anschell operate in standard song forms. “We never play a tune the same way twice,” Anschell told the audience, “and we never know which way it’s going to go.” At The Seasons, Jensen made the first move after Anschell said he had no idea what tune his partner had chosen. Jensen began improvising on his curved soprano. Anschell listened intently as Jensen played nowhere near the melody on the chords of “It Could Happen To You.” After a chorus, Anschell slid in under him with counterpoint. They were off and running through a program that also included “Autumn Leaves,” “I’m Old Fashioned,” “Squeeze Me,” “All Of You,” “Willow Weep For Me,” “Beautiful Love” and an Anschell composition, “Dreamscape.”
“Squeeze Me” developed into an exercise in rubato–squared. With no bassist or drummer to dictate time, the tempo sped, slowed and undulated. At moments it seemed in suspension, and yet the two were swinging. “All Of You” was laced with similar interior time play, further convoluted by stop-time anticipation of one another’s phrases and Anschell’s broken metre in the left hand. Quotes abounded through the set, none more amusing than Jensen’s paraphrase of “Straight No Chaser” as he and Anschell simultaneously diverted “I’m Old Fashioned” through the West Indies for a calypso interlude.
Jensen set up a tune with phrases that seemed headed toward “Have You Met Miss Jones?” but it turned out to be “Willow Weep For Me” and included a startling series of interval leaps by Jensen from tenor sax territory up to clarinet range. Anschell followed with passages of stride piano. In line with the Anschell-Jensen operating principle of surprise, the stride receded and advanced in a pattern no listener could have anticipated, swinging all the while. The finale began with a Rachmaninoffian piano introduction that mystified the audience but delivered a clue to Jensen, who grinned and melded into “Beautiful Love.” The duo worked the piece into a brief passage that sounded like gospel music and ended the evening proving that minor keys do not necessarily mean gloom, sadness or remorse.
The Seasons is a former church with perfect acoustics. Its perfection has been distorted time and again by jazz groups insisting on amplification where none is needed. Jensen and Anschell played music there the way God intended, acoustically.
It was glorious.

Hearty congratulations to Doug McLennan, pioneer web chronicler of the arts. He is artsjournal.com‘s founder, commander-in-chief and unfailingly patient rescuer of digitally challenged bloggers like me. Terry Teachout, who has been aboard nearly the whole time, reminds me by way of his blog that artsjournal.com is ten years old this week. Five years ago, Terry suggested that I do a blog and introduced me to McLennan. Doug let me under his umbrella into the company of a remarkable stable of arts experts. I am deeply grateful to him and Terry. For Doug’s thoughts on the occasion, go here. Best wishes to him for many more years of shedding light on the arts.

In the fall of 2006, we posted a piece connecting two important Czech artists, one a novelist, the other a pianist. This week, the story they gave us drew a comment from yet another Czech artist who was there when it happened during the Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia. Here is the original item from November, 2006. I encourage you to follow the first link below, then come back to this page.

In the recent Rifftides piece about Freedom and Josef Škvorecký, I named several jazz musicians from former Communist countries who have risen to the top of their profession. One of them was the Czech pianist Emil Viklický.
The world is small and tightly interconnected. A day or two after the piece appeared, I got a message from Viklický informing me that he knows Å kvorecký “quite well” and that he contributed an important element to a masterly–and very funny–Å kvorecký novel. Emil wrote:

“There is my long letter to him, written in 1974 to Canada, published as a resolution of novel The Engineer of Human Souls.”
The Engineer of Human Souls rambles through life under the Nazis, the Communists, academia and the human condition. In this brilliant roman á clef, the narrator, a Czech professor of literature teaching in Toronto, is Å kvorecký once removed. One of the characters from his Czech past is his friend Benno Manes, described by Viklický in his message as “dirty speaking fabulous trumpetist.” Viklický discloses that Manes’ had a counterpart in real life.
“Å kvorecký of course changed all real names to fictive names. It was necessary back in 1974. The letter describes the death of Pavel Bayerle, bandleader, trumpeter, a close friend of Å kvorecký. I was in army big band in October 1971 when Bayerle died of heart attack on the stage while conducting the band in Russian-occupied army barracks in Olomouc. Bayerle was 47 then. My letter to Josef remained in the novel practically intact. Å kvorecký received my letter just when he was finishing Engineer.
Å kvorecký changed Olomouc army barracks to Bratislava Russian barracks. In Russian barracks, we often played longer improvisations mostly ending in aggresive free music. It was our kind of protest. We knew that Russian listeners didn’t like it that way.”

As it appears in the book, the letter mentions a singer, Miluska Paterjzlova; a guitarist named Karel Kozel, “a big handsome fellow with a green Gibson;” the MC, Private Hemele; and a trumpeter called Pavel Zemecnik who helps the letter writer, “Desmosthenes,” pull the stage curtain closed when Benno Manes dies as he is conducting. They were fictional names of Viklicky’s real bandmates.

“Real singer name was Helena Foltynova, lately married as Helena Viktorinova, still singing some backgrounds for pop stars now. She was Marilin Monroe type of beauty, at the time simply stunning. Guitarist real name was Zdenek Fanta, his Gibson was dark red colour. Private Hemele is well-known actor Jan Kanyza; Trumpeter, who closed yellow curtain from the other side, was Petr Fink. Bayerle died in the 5th bar of letter D of his own song.”
From Viklicky’s letter to the author about Benno Manes’ death in Å kvorecký’s novel:

“The last thing I remember, and I’ll never forget it, was how he was lying there in that empty hall on an empty stage, with his huge belly completely purple, and dark grey trousers, and you couldn’t see his head for the stomach, and all around there was yellow bunting, that awful yellow bunting. Yellow and purple, maybe the bust of some statesman behind it but all I could see when I looked into the hall for the last time was that ghastly purple stomach and the yellow bunting. Then we left for Prague. I thought you might be interested in how your friend died.”

They went on to become friends, the novelist emerging as a major literary figure; the pianist about to leave the army, devote himself to jazz and become one of Europe’s most famous jazz musicians. Viklický adds:

“When my quartet played in Chicago in 1991, Å kvorecký came down from Toronto and stayed with the band for a few days. I think he was fascinated by musicians’ talk, because he stayed through rehearsals as well. Backstage slang in ’91 was probably different than back in the ’40s when Å kvorecký was young. But he seemed to love to listen to it. And maybe put it into his next novel.”

Yes, the world is small and tightly interconnected.

Now, three years after that Rifftides piece, from the Czech Republic comes a comment from Petr Fink, the trumpet player who helped Viklický pull the curtain when Pavel Bayerle died. Mr. Fink’s comment is in Czech. I showed it to Emil, who kindly volunteered to translate it. He included a footnote, marked by an asterisk. The Czech version follows Emil’s translation.

I was there on that evening when trumpeter-bandleader Pavel Bayerle died on stage while conducting his own song “Pohádka a sen,” (“Fairytale and Dream.”). I was the last and the only one, to whom Pavel turned his eyes. I saw his eyes, totally desperate, full of pain. After that there was the fall. He went down. Next, some army doctor jumped on stage with a large syringe* for the heart. But it was the end. Pavel was lying on the ground with large belly. Soldiers didn’t want to cover him, perhaps afraid of dirtying something, but after 15 long minutes, finally they had covered him with some kind of red rug.

Next day the band drove by bus to Prague and I was sitting in his front seat, with his civilian clothes on the hanger in front of me. There was a tie, which I took as a memory. Then I was asked to arrange for big band a medley of Bayerle´s most known songs: (“O nas dvou, Pribeh nasi lasky, Pohadka a sen” ( “About Two of Us”, “Story of our Love” and “Fairytale and Dream”). When we played that medley at the funeral ceremonies, people started crying.
Greetings, Petr Fink

Here is Viklický’s observation.

*I certainly doubt that. Russian doctor didn’t have any syringe ready in his pocket. I saw the scene myself. I was closing that yellow curtain and came to Pavel from the other side of the stage, where the grand piano was. The doctor only tried to massage Pavel´s heart. He tried hard. Perhaps later somebody brought him a syringe, but I dont think so.

For those who read Czech, here is Ptr Fink’s message in the original

Jsem účastník (trumpetista) onoho večera, kdy kapelník Pavel Bayerle zemÅ™el na jeviÅ¡ti pÅ™i dirigování své písnÄ› “Pohádka a sen”. Byl jsem poslední a jediný, na koho se v té chvíli obrátil pohledem a já spatÅ™il jeho zoufalé, bolestí zkroucené oči a pak už jen pád na zem. A dále jen jak pÅ™iskočil jakýsi vojenský doktor s velkou injekcí přímo do srdce. Ale byl konec. Vojáci ho nechtÄ›li pÅ™ikrýt, aby se nÄ›co neumazalo, až asi po dlouhé čtvrthodinÄ›, kdy Pavel ležel na zemi s obrovským nafouklým bÅ™ichem, ho pÅ™ikryli nÄ›jakým rudým hadrem! Druhý den se jelo do Prahy a já sedÄ›l v autobuse na jeho pÅ™edním sedadle, pÅ™ed sebou na ramínku jeho civilní Å¡aty s kravatou, kterou jsem si nechal na památku. Byl jsem pověřen upravit pro Bayerleho pohÅ™eb smÄ›s jeho písní (O nás dvou, PříbÄ›h naší lásky a Pohádka a sen). PÅ™i této smÄ›si, kterou jsme s orchestrem hráli, lidé začali plakat.
Zdraví Petr Fink

On the heels of the announcement that he is a 2009 Kennedy Center honoree, Dave Brubeck wrapped up a rare extended club engagement, part of his latest western tour. Sunday, at the helm of the “new” edition of the quartet he has headed since 1951, the 88-year-old pianist and composer played to a packed house for the final set of a four-night engagement at Seattle’s Jazz Alley.

Brubeck has come a long way in his recovery from a viral infection that put him out of action last spring. In conversation earlier in the day, he mentioned lingering tiredness and discomfort in his hands. Neither was apparent that night. Weariness dropped away after he made his greeting announcement and settled onto the bench for “C-Jam Blues,” initiating a Duke Ellington medley. To some listeners who live in the past, the Brubeck Quartet will always be the one with alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, bassist Eugene Wright and drummer Joe Morello. That group disbanded in 1967. Desmond has been dead since 1977. The new quartet is not new. Drummer Randy Jones has been with Brubeck for 30 years, saxophonist Bobby Militello 28, bassist Michael Moore a mere nine.

Renowned for pieces he has written, Brubeck didn’t get around to playing any of them until he and the band entertained one another and the audience with the Ellington medley and a couple of great American song book items. He slid from his spare solo on the blues into “Mood Indigo” and segued from there to “Take the ‘A’ Train,” a central part of the quartet’s repertoire since his Jazz Goes To College days of the 1950s. At Jazz Alley, the vigor of Militello’s attack and uses of key modulations distinguished a solo that set Moore up for the first of three solos in which he used the bow to virtuosic effect that seemed to rivet Brubeck, Militello and Jones. Throughout the evening, the band listened intently to one another, exchanging smiles and glances at meaningful moments. It is an endearing characteristic of this group; without wearing their regard on their sleeves, they don’t mind letting it be obvious that they dig each other. The attentiveness and fellow feeling rub off on the audience.

“‘A’ Train” cooked along on Militello’s energetic solo, gained steam with the riff figures Brubeck set up and came to an abrupt conclusion with a Jones drum tag that could not have been more definite. Then came a staple from Brubeck’s fund of cherished standards, “These Foolish Things. ” He opened it with an unaccompanied chorus into which he managed to fit the “She may get weary, women do get weary” phrase from “Try a Little Tenderness.” That unlikely interpolation clearly surprised and amused Moore. Brubeck began “Stormy Weather” alone, melding into a steady 4/4 left-hand swing that set up Militello for a couple of choruses that disclosed the blues core Harold Arlen put into the song.

The only Brubeck composition of the evening came halfway through the set. It was “Dziekuje (Thank You),” which he wrote in gratitude to Poland for giving the world Chopin. His playing was soft almost to the edge of silence, and he built intensity in his solo not through volume but through development of the piece’s exquisite chords. Militello elevated the concentration of feeling, then the quartet brought the piece back to earth. Next, were they really going to play “Melancholy Baby?” No. That was just Brubeck’s eccentric choice of a few bars to introduce another song that’s almost as old. “Margie” (1920), as modern jazz players as various as Jimmy Rowles and Miles Davis knew, has great chords to blow on, and that’s what the quartet did, with Moore delivering a stunning pizzicato solo.

Brubeck must have heard thousands of drum solos on Desmond’s “Take Five” since the first one by Morello in 1959. But after he and Militello worked out on the tune and Jones began developing chorus after chorus in his solo, Brubeck leaned forward on the piano and paid attention to Jones’s permutations, now smiling, now nodding agreement at some variation. It was a fine solo. Brubeck absorbed it. His concentration on the music, his enjoyment of that moment, spoke volumes about what keeps him going in the fullness of his ninth decade.

Following a huge response to “Take Five,” Brubeck told the crowd, “I’m tired and I want to go to bed,” and so the quartet’s encore was “Show Me The Way To Go Home.” They made the most of the song’s earthy chord structure and got another standing ovation. Brubeck waved good night, stepped out the 6th Avenue door of Jazz Alley into a waiting car and went off to bed. In the morning, he and the band were driving across the state, headed toward the next one-nighter

Jessica Williams, The Art Of The Piano (Origin). Williams’ 2800-word liner essay declares renewed and deepened love for the piano and rededicated independence from the strictures and orthodoxies of the music establishment. She cites an internet video clip of Glenn Gould playing Bach as “…a life-altering event” that took her back to “…a music founded on the purity and clarity and infinite tonal colorations of the piano itself.” Those are qualities I have never found missing from her work, but for strength, serenity and pianism in all of its aspects, this concert at The Triple Door in Seattle reaches the heights of any solo performance I have heard from her.
Williams pays exquisite attention to harmonic color, touch, and the uses of time in a program of Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1” (here called “First Gymnopédie”), John Coltrane’s “Lonnie’s Lament,” and five original compositions. When it was in the development stage in a previous recording, she referred to “Love and Hate” as “my step into the next zone.” This version is more settled at the same time that it is more adventurous in thematic development, with contrasting moods and massive, almost symphonic, harmonic structures. Music being multi-dimensional, she still also occupies a more earth-bound zone. She opens the CD rocking, perhaps nostalgically, in a good old blues in G. “Triple Door Blues” incorporates passages in which Williams uses strings and hammers but not keys, and others that refer to the spirit and four-square swing of Erroll Garner.
“Esperanza” sounds as Spanish as its name. It has deep voicings that might have been written by Granados or Rodrigo, and dance rhythms redolent of Central and South America. A recurring phrase in “Elaine” hints at love songs of more than half a century ago, but the piece opens into a thoroughly modern ballad. “Diane” is another original ballad in which Williams’ delicacy of touch is a central element even as she builds intensity. In the Satie “Gymnopédie No. 1,” a Bill Evans influence on Williams’ interpretation is one color among many. Others are the blues and a brief Satie-like use of the pentatonic scale as in Japanese music. I know of no performance in which a jazz musician has explored the piece more thoroughly.
“Prophets” has the feeling of Coltrane in his late mystical period, with hypnotic modal figures in the left hand and flawlessly executed flourishes on top. Williams does not paint Coltrane’s “Lonnie’s Lament” with the melancholy he gave it as the final movement of his 1964 album Crescent. Still, she subtracts nothing of the piece’s air of profound reflection and brings to it buoyancy that may be an indication of her new state of mind. She seems to have stepped fully into that next zone.

Stefon Harris And Blackout, Urbanus (Concord). Harris is one of the brightest legatees of the vibraphone tradition glorified by Milt Jackson and such of his successors as Walt Dickerson, Cal Tjader and Bobby Hutcherson. The Jackson school played an important part in Harris’s development as a soloist. But, born in 1973, he came to maturity in the 1990s and is under the spell of not only bebop but also the pop culture of his time. The music he grew up with included gospel and R&B, standard inspirations for jazz musicians for decades. Harris was affected, too, by go-go, a funk offshoot that influenced early hip-hop; hip-hop itself; soul music; rap; and influences as diverse as Radiohead, Stravinksy and Stevie Wonder. The musicians in Harris’s band, Blackout, are roughly his age. They think no more in categories than he does and wish to use their music to reach a generation of young people who are likely to find jazz too complex, too intellectual, too fuddy-duddy–the music of their parents and grandparents.
Grabbing the youngsters is an admirable goal, one that relates to web log discussions flaring up in the wake of a National Endowment for the Arts finding that the future of jazz is in danger because its presumed primary audience is aging. (For an interesting development in that contretemps, see fellow artsjournal.com blogger Howard Mandel, who is conducting a public experiment.) No matter how effectively Harris captures his target audience–and I hope he does–for serious listeners of any age the music is what matters. In Urbanus, there is much to like, not least Harris’s rich arrangements for ensembles that expand his quintet to a medium-sized band. Harris’s basic crew is alto saxophonist and vocorderist Casey Benjamin, bassist Ben Williams, drummer Terreon Gully, and Marc Cary, who plays piano, electric piano and assorted other keyboards.
As we have come to expect of him, Harris’s playing is brilliant on both vibes and marimba. I keep going back to his quintet exposition of “Minor March,” Jackie McLean’s great contrafact on “Love Me or Leave Me.” High points: Harris’s quicksilver soloing, his compelling stop-time arrangement, Gully’s not-quite-military drumming during what in another era might have been called a shout chorus, and an ending that brings the tune and the listener up short. There are riveting tempo, time and chord changes in Harris’s “Blues For Denial,” with heated improvisation by Harris and Cary. Working from and beyond the Gil Evans arrangement for Miles Davis, Harris takes Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess anthem “Gone Gone Gone” into funk territory with splashes of electronic keyboards ameliorated by skillful voicings for flutes and reeds.
The vocorder is described in the Urban Dictionary as “An electronic device used to alter the voice. Typically used by talentless ‘musicians’ to try and sound like they can sing.” That is unfair, since its most celebrated user is Stevie Wonder, who is generally credited with being able to sing. Herbie Hancock and Joe Zawinul have also put the vocorder to good, if excessive, use. Benjamin uses it on Buster Williams’s “Christina,” a ballad so gorgeous that it would survive nearly any treatment. He also plays it on Wonder’s “They Won’t Go (When I Go)” and “For You,” a ballad Benjamin co-composed with Sameet Gupta. I would just as soon have heard him play alto sax on those pieces; with continued exposure the vocorder’s campy charm recedes. The soulfulness of Benjamin’s saxophone commenatary over the ensemble on the concluding “Langston’s Lullaby” is a bright facet of the album.
Harris melds his influences tastefully, employing pop elements to attract but not pander to his generation and maintaining substance for experienced jazz listeners. It could be a step toward getting both audiences to ditch labels and think of music as–music.

News flash: Johann Sebastian Bach may have been ahead of his time.
Eric Altschuler, a Bach researcher for more than a decade, was a guest today on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition Sunday. He discussed with host Liane Hansen his proposition that Bach used a twelve-tone row a couple of centuries before Arnold Schoenberg revolutionized 20th century music with the device and, I might add, about 250 years before Ornette Coleman employed the atonal row in jazz. To hear the Altschuler interview, complete with musical examples, click on the single arrow in the player below.

There are countless recordings of The Well-Tempered Clavier. For years, I’ve been fascinated with the interpretations by the young Andras Schiff of Book 1 and Book 2.
If you’re interested in going into Bach beyond listening, a recent book by the Canadian musicologist Marjorie Wornell Engells examines the musical language and emotional dimension of The Well-Tempered Clavier.
I suppose you could go through life without learning to love Bach, but I wouldn’t advise it.

Listening to the Art Pepper CDs for the new batch of recommendations in Doug’s Picks (center column) stimulated memories of time spent with Pepper not long before he died. The occasion was the basis of an article in Texas Monthly. Later, in slightly different form, it ended up as part of a chapter in Jazz Matters. Here it is as a bonus post–or as a marketing ploy for a twenty-year-old book that manages to stay in print–or as an excuse to show you an unusual picture.

Art Pepper’s Last Chorus
1982
Art Pepper had been quiet and a little sad all evening. But he grinned at the irony of posing for the Polaroid photographer in the Bourbon Street Jail. San Quentin was on his mind. He and his wife, Laurie, were in New Orleans on a book-plugging tour, and everywhere they went he was asked about the years he had spent in prison on a narcotics conviction. What evolved into his autobiography, Straight Life, began as a series of cathartic tape recordings in which Pepper told Laurie everything he could recall about his unremittingly broken life. His memory was comprehensive, and he spared himself and his readers nothing.
Pepper’s merchant seaman father was twenty-nine and his mother was fifteen when they were married. He was rarely at home after Pepper was born, and she was often drunk. Pepper learned to play the clarinet at nine, the alto saxophone at twelve. At seventeen, he had played in the bands of Gus Arnheim and Benny Carter and was working with Stan Kenton. After two years in the Army, he freelanced around Los Angeles, then rejoined Kenton in 1947. His reputation as a brilliant and original saxophonist became established.
By 1950, when he was twenty-five, Pepper was a veteran of the military, big bands, alcohol, pills and pot. That was the year he became addicted to heroin. He was first sent to jail on a narcotics conviction in 1953. From then until 1966 he spent more time in prison than out. After a short period of rehabilitation, during which he played with Buddy Rich’s band, Pepper reached the depths. Sick almost literally unto death, in 1969 he checked himself into Synanon. There he met Laurie, who, along with methadone maintenance, proved to be therapy and salvation. He resumed playing and recording, and he regarded himself with wary realism. “I’m a junkie. And that’s what I will die as–a junkie.”
His account of the hell of his struggle with heroin puts into miraculous relief the beauty of his artistic achievement. From a childhood of rejection and neglect, Pepper had taken into manhood the only trustworthy and stable element he was to know in his first fifty years. Not until he met Laurie did he have another reliable anchor.
Pepper’s expressiveness on alto saxophone has deepened and broadened, and his recordings after 1976 have been acclaimed as his finest. Finally lauded worldwide as a master soloist, he was, in his cautious way, basking in the recognition and the star treatment. At dinner, between waves of his customary reticence, Pepper allowed that his playing was at a keen edge he had been seeking for years. He said that at last he was often able to accept his performances. It’s a nice memory of Art Pepper. At a sparkling table under the old ceiling fans at Arnaud’s with the woman who helped him gain control of his life, he was content and smiling.
In June, he died shortly after suffering a stroke as he sat at their breakfast table chatting with Laurie. He was fifty-six.

For excerpts from Laurie Pepper’s memoir-in-progress, go here.