Search Results for: target

Rifftides Readers sometimes send useful tips. Here are three:
Pianist Emil Viklický called our attention to this YouTube clip of him and two other Czech musicians sitting in with Dizzy Gillespie’s band in a 1990 concert. In a moment of geographic confusion, Diz introduces them as our “Yugoslav brothers.” The other Czechs are saxophonist Jiri Stivin, who plays a startling solo on pennywhistle, and trumpeter Juraj Bartos. Paquito D’Rivera is also aboard, on clarinet and alto. The bassist is John Lee, the drummer Ignacio Berroa. Does anyone recognize the tenor saxophonist? There is a guitarist whom we hear but never clearly see. Dizzy introduces the piece as “Straight, No Chaser.” That melody line never materializes, and they end with “Billie’s Bounce,” but we get ten entertaining minutes of the blues in F and a reminder that no one was better than Gillespie at setting riffs behind a soloist.
Saxophonist David Liebman
sent the following radio information:

I am being interviewed on the Musician’s Show tomorrow (Wednesday-Jan 16 at 6PM-Eastern time in the U.S.) on the illustrious jazz station WKCR-FM broadcast from Columbia University in New York. I will be playing the music that shaped my aesthetic over the years. As I write now, I am putting together the music, which will include my first influences and teachers (Elvis, Tristano, Charles Lloyd) to the main saxophonists (Wayne Shorter, Trane, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Lee Konitz, Joe Henderson); Miles and Bill Evans of course; world and classical music (Chopin, Beethoven and Bartok) as well as a few of my things and one track from a live gig that Quest just did a few months ago (Richie Beirach, Ron McClure, Billy Hart). Quest is playing Birdland in New York Feb 6-9. The show is three hours and hopefully the interviewer will be cool. You can google it and tune in anywhere in the world I believe. (I assume it will be archived).

To hear the program, tune in 89.9 FM in New York or listen on the web by going here.
Saxophonist, composer, arranger, bandleader and broadcaster
Bill Kirchner’s next Jazz From The Archives on WBGO radio will feature the singer and bassist Jim Ferguson, a world-class musician who might be better known if he lived in New York or Los Angeles. Ferguson is based in Nashville, Tennessee. Kirchner writes:

We’ll hear recordings of Ferguson performing solo, with two quartets (accompanied by tenor saxophonist Chris Potter, pianists Pat Coil or Stefan Karlsson, and drummer Jim White), and in duo with the veteran guitarist Mundell Lowe. The show will air this Sunday, January 20, from 11 p.m. to midnight, Eastern Standard Time.

In the New York area, WBGO is at 88.3 FM. On the internet, go here. Before the week is out, I expect to have a Rifftides item about the Mundell Lowe/Jim Ferguson CD.

It was a piano weekend in apple, wine and snow country in the shadow of the Cascade mountains. Two of the premier jazz pianists of the twenty-first century played here. Fresh from Los Angeles, Jan Lundgren had just recorded for Fresh Sound Records a trio CD of the music of Ralph Rainger. Bassist Chuck Berghofer and drummer Joe LaBarbera, who were on the record session, did not make the trip north.
The Swedish pianist had one rehearsal Saturday afternoon with Seattle bassist Jon Hamar and Don Kinney, principal percussionist of the Yakima Symphony Orchestra and a seasoned jazz drummer. In an interview at the rehearsal, Kinney told a television reporter, “Sixteen bars into the first tune, I felt as if I’d been playing with this guy all my life.” That’s how the three sounded Saturday night at The Seasons performance hall. It was a demonstration that under the right circumstances, the universal language common to experienced jazz musicians can bind the best of them together even on short notice.
Lundgren chose one of Rainger’s best-known songs, “Easy Living,” a cross-section of great American songbook pieces by Rodgers, Gershwin, Porter, Kaper, Ellington, Monk and Don Redman, and a pair of traditional Swedish songs including “Ach Warmeland du Skona” (aka “Dear Old Stockholm”). He dazzled the audience with his technique and his warmth. All hands got plenty of solo time, and the ad hoc Lundgren trio got a standing ovation.
Sunday afternoon,Jessica Williams
played a private concert at the home of a fan who is also a pianist. On a small grand piano in a big living room packed with guests, she marked a return to her fascination with Thelonious Monk. One of the most engaging and skilled of Monk interpreters, Williams told her listeners that she had made an effort to move away from his music because for a time she wondered “where Jessica had gone.” Not far, evidently; she and Monk were in perfect synch, the qualities of each on full display, nowhere more powerfully than in her composition “Monk’s Hat.” She premiered a new section of her recent “Freedom Suite,” dedicated to the young Americans who serve in the Iraq war. “This is not a political statement,” she said. “It’s a tribute to those boys and girls.” The melody, in long tones over an ostinato figure, was a meditation, a reflection, quite unlike anything else she played in the recital. Williams found a spellbinding medium-tempo groove for “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.” The two-hour recital ended with “I Love You, Sweetheart Of All My Dreams,” a 1926 pop chestnut that Monk once recorded unaccompanied. It was laced with his humor, her humor and stride passages that might have come from James P. Johnson. Williams’s altered changes would certainly have made James P. sit up and take notice–and smile.

Through our Washington, DC, correspondent John Birchard, Rifftides has updated you from time to time on the fight against the Bush administration’s attempt to dismantle or downgrade the English language broadcasts of the Voice Of America. Birchard reports that there has been, if not an all-out victory, significant progress.

Concerning the battle to keep the English language news division at VOA alive: we won!
A two-year battle with our own management ended when Bush signed a budget bill that included specific language restoring the funds for English news as well as some language services that had been targeted for extinction (Russian, etc.). Not only that, the Congress included language (and funds) to restore some short- and medium-wave transmissions which will begin to expand our terribly shrunken reach.
Heroes in this tedious fight are the Chair of the Foreign Ops Subcommittee on Appropriations, Rep Nita Lowey of NY, and the ranking Republican on the subcommittee Frank Wolf of Virginia. But beyond their work, we found another member of Congress to whom we now refer as Our Lady on the Hill, Rep Betty McCollum, D of MN. She’s a former Peace Corps volunteer who was (and remains) a fan of VOA. She’s been a key defender for us and we can’t thank her enough for her efforts.
When I came to VOA fifteen years ago, I never expected to be involved in politics, nor did I want to. But this fight for survival has forced me (and a number of others) to learn the ropes of Washington behind-the-scenes legislative work. Like the making of sausage, it’s a process better left to the imagination.
And it’s not over. In February, when the fiscal ’09 budget is unveiled, we fully expect that management will again try to shut us down. But this time we don’t have to re-invent the wheel. We’ve done the research, cultivated the contacts, gotten on a first-name basis with the committee staffers who make things happen in the halls of Congress and know the battle goes not to the swift but to the plodding, every-day scut work where you win some, lose some and come back to fight another day. And never give up.
That’s your Washington report for today.
John Birchard

For John’s previous report, go here. This discussion started following a Rifftides piece about the VOA’s honored jazz broadcaster Willis Conover. If you search the archive (right-hand column) for Conover’s name, you will find other posts on the matter.

In the 1950s and early sixties, there was a vogue for combining jazz and poetry. It wasn’t new. Poets as far back as Langston Hughes in the 1920s read their work in collaboration with jazz musicians, usually in the privacy of homes, rarely in public. Thirty years later the idea sprang up again in beatnik pads in San Francisco and New York’s East Village, then spread to coffee houses, night clubs, recordings and on at least one occasion, a Los Angeles concert hall. For David Amram’s recollection of the role that he, Jack Kerouac and Philip Lamantia played in the New York phenomenon, go here. In the west, Alan Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, Kenneth Patchen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Rexroth were at the heart of the movement, along with musicians including Charles Mingus, Allyn Ferguson and Fred Katz. Here is a little of what Rexroth wrote at the time about jazz poetry.

I hope the faddist elements of this new medium will die away. The ignorant and the pretentious, the sockless hipsters out for a fast buck or a few drinks from a Village bistro, will soon exhaust their welcome with the public, and the field will be left clear for serious musicians and poets who mean business. I think that it is a development of considerable potential significance for both jazz and poetry. It reaches an audience many times as large as that commonly reached by poetry, and an audience free of some of the serious vices of the typical poetry lover. It returns poetry to music and to public entertainment as it was in the days of Homer or the troubadours.
Things are beginning to get out of hand. The other day Ralph Gleason, the jazz critic, said to me that he expected any day to see ads in the trade papers: “JAZZ POET: blues, ballad, upbeat, free verse or rhyme. Have tux. Will travel.” And T.S. Eliot touring the kerosene circuit with Little Richard and the Harlem Globetrotters. Crazes are usually pretty empty, sterile things. It would be a pity if incompetents looking for a fast buck turned this into a temporary social disease like pee-wee golf or swallowing goldfish.

That didn’t happen. Rather, the movement had a brief period of attention, then faded into a subterranean region of the culture. Could it resurface into the mainstream? Maybe so, if Robert Pinsky, the former poet laureate of the United States, continues his interest in jazz and poetry. Pinsky combined forces the other night with the veteran drummer Andrew Cyrille. Paul Lieberman reported on their performance in The Los Angeles Times.

Pinsky, who proved to be a populist poet laureate by inviting Americans to send him their favorite verses, indeed teaches at Boston University. But the plan did call for him to try one exercise out of the jazz world, not academia: a round of “trade fours” with the drummer, Cyrille. Normally, musicians throw a few bars back and forth, “just have a conversation,” the drummer noted, the wrinkle here being that Pinsky would throw him couplets instead, two-line rhyming poems, such as one by J.V. Cunningham that went, “This Humanist, whom no belief constrained, / Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.”

To read all of Lieberman’s story, go here.
In 1957, Kenneth Rexroth recorded an album of his jazz poetry in San Francisco at The Cellar, a Chinese restaurant converted into a nightclub. The performance by Rexroth with a group that included tenor saxophonist Brew Moore and bassist Ron Crotty is reissued on this CD. It discloses that Pinsky was not the first poet to trade fours with jazz players. This essay from the Rexroth Archives contains the poet’s observations on the form.

As far as I know, Pete Winslow never recorded his poetry, with or without a jazz group, but I played once while he read. Pete and I were in journalism school together at the University of Washington. He edited the campus humor magazine and sometimes wrote poetry for it under the pseudonym Eleanor H. Browning. He was a tall, skinny guy with short hair and horn-rimmed glasses. He often seemed to be smiling, even when he wasn’t. This badly reproduced picture from the yearbook will give you an idea of the seriousness with which he took his job as editor of Columns, the humor magazine. After graduation, Pete worked for the Seattle Post Intelligencer, I for The Seattle Times. Before long, I left for the Marine Corps. Four years later, I was a civilian again and in my first television job in Yakima, Washington, where, strangely enough, I have settled after four decades as a journalism gypsy. But I digress.
Bob Mitchell and, I both trumpet players, used to sit in at the Enchanted Gardens of the Chieftan Hotel in the heart of downtown Yakima with an all-girl trio from Los Angeles, The Three Vees. One night in 1960 or ’61 I looked into the audience from the bandstand of the Enchanted Gardens and, to my considerable surprise, saw Pete Winslow, smiling. Really smiling. When the tune ended, we had a reunion. He presented me with a copy of his first book of poetry, Whatever Happened To Pete Winslow? (Tolle House, 1960) and signed it. I asked him if he’d like to read some of his work to the Enchanted Gardens audience of cowboys, used car salesmen, secretaries and orchardists. He said he would. I cleared it with Mitch and the Three Vees–Verna, Paula and Mary Ann. They were game for anything. It was that kind of band.
We played behind him, listened closely, filled when he paused, reacted when he emphasized passages and, in general, sounded as if we had rehearsed. Pete became the sixth member of the band. It could have been a disaster, but it worked. We enjoyed it and so did the crowd. No one threw anything. Pete went on to establish something of a reputation in San Francisco’s North Beach. Although he read in coffee houses toward the end of the brief heyday of the beatniks, he never really qualified as a beat poet. Perhaps his work was too cheerful, too surrealistic I don’t remember which of his poems Pete read that night at the Chieftan. He may have included this one, which has gained a small amount of fame:

FORM
Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater
Is trochaic tetrameter.

Or this one:

UNDERGROUND RUBIYAT
A book of verses, underneath the Bau-
delaire, some bread, a real Guernsey cow,
mooing beside me, darling Filthy Bess – –
Ah, Filthy Bess were Mary Pickford now!
That great inverted bowl there, on the floor;
Why did I walk so quickly through the door?
Now stains and bits of cabbage spot the wall
Where moving Fingers writ the football score.
Come, spill the soup! And in the mire I sing,
You bitter varmint, waiting sentencing.
The bird of time has taught a turtle how
To stutter, and–the turtle’s stuttering!

Pete died at the age of thirty-seven of complications following surgery. He wrote a novel, Mount Gogo, which seems to have disappeared, and five volumes of poetry, none in general circulation today but all available if you look hard enough. They are Whatever Happened to Pete Winslow? The Rapist and Other Poems, Monster Cookies, Mummy Tapes and Daisy in the Memory of a Shark.
Pete was a good guy. I miss him. For more about Winslow, see this article at Poetry Bay.
During those Enchanted Gardens days, Bobby Mitchell had a part-time job as a garbage man; there wasn’t much steady work for jazz trumpet players in Yakima. Nor is there now. A fine player, he eventually solved the problem by getting out of town and working with Count Basie and Earl Hines. He is on several Basie CDs from the late 1970s, including this one. He is the featured soloist on this video clip of the Basie band at Montreux in 1977. Mitch died a few years ago. I miss him, too.

Here is part of a Rifftides piece from last March:

When I listen to the two-track analog stereo recordings Roy DuNann made for the Contemporary label shortly after the perfection of stereo in the 1950s, I curse the boneheads who, because they could, introduced multi-track, multi-microphone recording. Digital capability then came along with 587-channel mixing boards and made post production a sci-fi adventure that compounded all of the engineering wizards’ sins. Red Mitchell was right; simple isn’t easy. That applies to everything in life, especially audio engineering. Rudy Van Gelder, nominated by acclamation as the god of jazz recording, was better in early stereo than after he got all the toys. For one thing, in the fifties his pianos sounded more like pianos.

I concluded that piece,

Last I heard, Roy DuNann was still with us, living in Seattle. Won’t someone bring him out of retirement?

DuNann has not come out of retirement, but It developed that the jazz journalist Thomas Conrad found him five years earlier and wrote a long piece about him for Stereophile magazine. Whether reading about audio gear and techniques makes you quiver or you’re a listener who simply relishes quality sound, this warm-hearted article will make you feel good. It includes a sidebar list of some of the best albums DuNann recorded at Contemporary. To read Tom’s piece, click here.
Last fall, Rick Chin and other members of the Pacific Northwest chapter of the Audio Engineering Society invited DuNann, now well into his eighties, to come to a meeting and talk about his achievements. Clarinetist William O. Smith, who was on several Contemporary albums that DuNann recorded, also spoke. To visit the AES website and listen to an MP3 of that meeting (in excellent sound, of course), go here. You’ll find the MP3 links at the bottom of the page about the meeting, which also has photos of DuNann, Smith and Conrad. When Rick Chin sent me a message about this, he wrote, “The files are rather large in the interest of fidelity.” I hope that your computer can accommodate them. Long live two-track stereo.

Rifftides reader Jim Denham sent a message reminding us that today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Henry Red Allen. Allen was the New Orleans veteran whom in the 1960s the iconoclastic young trumpeter Don Ellis famously called “the most avant garde trumpet player in New York.”
Ellis is quoted further in a tribute Mr. Denham posted on a web site with the intriguing name of Shiraz Socialist. Mr. Denham’s piece is well written, historically accurate and worth reading. It incorporates guitarist Jim Douglas’s touching memoir of Allen’s final tour in the UK in 1967. It also links to a video clip of Allen with the Alex Welsh band, playing and singing “St. James Infirmary,” one of his specialties. And it includes a description of Allen’s playing by the poet Philip Larkin. Larkin was a troglodyte in many of his jazz assessments, but not in this one:

There was always something unusual about Allen’s playing: even at the start he tended to sound like Armstrong in a distorting mirror, and by the end of his life an Allen solo was a brooding, gobbling, stretched, telegraphic thing of half notes and quarter-tones, while an Allen vocal sounded like a man with a bad conscience talking in his sleep. (All What Jazz, Faber and Faber) .

To read the Denham article and see the video, click here.
For more of Allen, watch his performance of “Rosetta” from the 1958 CBS program The Sound Of Jazz. His colleagues are Coleman Hawkins, tenor saxophone; Vic Dickenson, trombone; Rex Stewart, cornet; Pee Wee Russell, clarinet; Nat Pierce, piano; Danny Barker, guitar; Milt Hinton, bass; and Jo Jones, drums. Whew.
In 1957, having wrestled my commission from the United States Marine Corps and been given three days’ leave, I traveled from Quantico, Virginia, to New York. I got off the train at Penn Station, grabbed something to eat at a delicatessen, checked into a cheap hotel and walked up Broadway to the Metropole Restaurant. Just as I arrived, a very long Cadillac pulled up to the curb. From the driver’s seat emerged the majestic figure of Red Allen, trumpet case in hand. Inside, his band was waiting. It was the one on this CD, a required item in every basic collection. At the Metropole, the back bar was the bandstand, so narrow that it could accommodate the musicians only if they arrayed themselves shoulder to shoulder along its length. That was true of small groups like Allen’s and of big ones like Woody Herman’s. I stood–at the Metropole, nearly eveyone stood–listening enthralled until the place closed. I walked out just behind Red Allen, who got into his Cadillac parked under a “No Parking” sign and drove off into the night. I’ve always wondered what kind of arrangment he had with the Midtown North Precinct of the NYPD.

Roger Kellaway, still high on the news of his award by the French, sent a succinct message with a link. The link takes you to a performance by Zoot Sims. The transcription blowup on the wall behind the bandstand identifies the club as the lamented Donte’s in Los Angeles. Here is Roger’s message in its entirety:

A fun trip down memory lane

The rhythm section is Kellaway, bassist Chuck Berghofer and drummer Larry Bunker. Like his playing, Zoot’s style of hair and dress remained pretty much unchanged for the last two decades of his life, thank goodness, but the costumery and hairdos on Kellaway and Bunker seem to place this in the late 1970s. Play this only if you want to feel good.

Big cities do not have exclusive rights to major jazz artists. First-rank musicians play performance halls in small and medium-sized towns that New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Tokyo may think of as the hinterlands. Here are five US examples, among dozens.
Saturday, January 12, pianist Stanley Cowell will play a concert at Cityfolk in Dayton, Ohio. Go here to read about it. Check out the left-hand column of the Cityfolk page for the future lineup of pianists–Steve Kuhn, Bruce Barth with Terell Stafford, Bill Charlap with Houston Person. There’s serious listening in Dayton.

The same evening, the brilliant Swedish pianist Jan Lundgren plays a trio concert at The Seasons in Yakima, Washington, his only US engagement following a recording session in Los Angeles and an evening at the Jazz Bakery. Nancy King will play The Seasons on January 26, the Bill Charlap Trio on February 16.

In February, The Shedd Institute will present The Bad Plus, a highlight of the winter season in Eugene, Oregon. The town will never be the same.

Wynton Marsalis brings the Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra to The Outpost in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They’ll be followed by Pat Metheny with Christian McBride and Antonio Sanchez.

At Cambria on the California coast halfway between L.A. and San Francisco, The Hamlet At Moonstone Gardens becomes a concert hall on Sundays. Vibraphonist Charlie Shoemake and his vocalist wife Sandi bring in other name musicians. Tomorrow, January 6, the guest will be big band trumpet mainstay Don Rader. January 20 alto saxophonist Lanny Morgan (pictured above) joins the Shoemakes with pianist Tom Ranier, bassist Tom Warrington and drummer Joe LaBarbera.

Think Topeka, Kansas, isn’t hip? The Topeka Jazz Workshop recently had concerts by Gary Foster and by B.E.D. with Rebecca Kilgore, Eddie Erickson and Dan Barrett. This winter, the hall has booked dates by the rising young pianist John Proulx and by Tiger Okoshi, a trumpeter who has melded into academia but lost none of his power to astonish listeners.

Look around your area. There may be more music than you think.

Home computers and cell phones became realities after Paul Desmond died in 1977. Given his fascination with electronic devices, I am certain that if he were alive, he would be addicted to all things digital. Paul would love the idea of a program shooting through the ether into a computer and onto a compact disc.
Producer Paul Conley alerts Rifftides readers that his National Public Radio Jazz Profiles program on Desmond is now available as a free MP3 download at the NPR Music site. Nancy Wilson is the host. Her guests include Dave Brubeck, Eugene Wright, Jim Hall, John Snyder, Gene Lees, yours truly and, on tape, Desmond himself.
Desmond on Brubeck’s polytonality in their early days:

He would be in fifteen different keys on an out-of-tune piano and there were occasions when I was totally desperate about the situation.

Jim Hall:

Some people moved into the apartment across the hallway from him who were playing sort of garbage du jour, loud, all the time. So one time Paul just lost it and he put on a Bartok record, very loud, went across the hall, banged on the door, somebody opened the door and he said, “You hear that? It’s called music. How do you like it?”

The program was created before research for Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond unearthed new information about Desmond. It perpetuates the story Desmond concocted that he chose his last name from a telephone book. From Take Five, here’s fellow saxophonist Hal Strack’s recollection of the inspiration for the change from Breitenfeld to Desmond. It came at Sweets Ballroom in Oakland, California.

We were listening to Gene Krupa’s band, sometime in 1942. Howard Dulany had just left as the singer. The guy who replaced him had some kind of a convoluted Italian name and they decided that just wasn’t going to work for a vocalist. I mean, it was more difficult than Sinatra. So, he changed his name to Johnny Desmond.* We were standing there listening to the band and discussing the fact that this had happened, and Paul said, “Jeesh, you know that’s such a great name. It’s so smooth and yet it’s uncommon. If I decide I need another name, it’s going to be Desmond.”

Besides, he told someone later, Breitenfeld was too long to fit on a 78-rpm record label. In 1946, he went to the courthouse and made the change legal.
The program has plenty of music, including a fascinating section that illustrates Desmond’s ability to play counterpoint not only with Brubeck but also with himself. To download or listen to the hour-long Desmond Jazz Profiles program, follow this link.

*Johnny Desmond (1920-1985), the son of Italian immigrants, was born Giovanni Alfredo de Simone in Detroit in 1919. As a boy soprano, he won a radio talent contest. The name change quickly followed.

Rifftides reader Rich Juliano comments on the Jaki Byard item in the previous exhibit :

Back in 1985 Jaki was a clinician at the Tri-C Jazz Festival in Cleveland where I grew up. As an aspiring jazz pianist I was excited to attend his piano clinic but terrified when he asked for duet partners and one of my teachers volunteered me. I was so nervous I called “Stella by Starlight” in the wrong key! Nonetheless Jaki got the tune started (in the key I meant to call) and was very complimentary and gracious, commenting on my relative youth when he asked my age (18 at the time). He’s been a favorite of mine ever since. Unfortunately that was the only chance I ever had to see/hear Jaki live. My encounters with him that week remain among the highlights of my jazz listening and studies. Thanks for featuring him today!

I’m happy to tell Mr. Juliano that today I came across two YouTube clips of Byard at a jazz workshop in Berlin in 1965. In the beginning of the first one (that’s a link), he plays free with Reggie Workman on bass and Alan Dawson on drums, then works his way into what sounds to me like “I Love Being Here With You.” In the second clip, towering eminences of the piano meet when Byard and Earl Hines face one another and play “Cherry.” To borrow a phrase from Louis Armstrong, “Chops is flyin’ everywhere.”

Reading Gary Giddins’s tribute to Jaki Byard in the February Jazz Times stimulated memories of that astounding pianist. Giddins builds his article around the CD called Sunshine Of My Soul, reviewed in Rifftides last March. The magazine is now on news stands. The piece is not available on line.

Memory 1
I was at the recording session for the Phil Woods album Musique Du Bois in RCA’s storied Studio B in New York in 1974. The rhythm section was Byard, bassist Richard Davis and drummer Alan Dawson. Phil later wrote that the album “never settled, never got off the paper,” but that he liked my liner notes. I am flattered by his second asssertion puzzled by the first; the album still sounds good to me. When 32 Jazz reissued Musique Du Bois as a CD, they eviscerated the notes, but in this book they are reproduced intact. Here’s a snippet:

Jaki Byard wanders in, looking, as always, slightly bemused and mystical. He greets the others and sets about testing the piano. Asked how he likes it, Byard says, “It’s a piano. I had a good one once, in France.” The universal suffering of jazz pianists; an endless chain of inadequate instruments binds them together as surely as their love for Art Tatum.

Memory 2
Paul Desmond and I stood in the ballroom of the Royal Orleans hotel during the 1969 New Orleans Jazz Festival listening to a jam session that included Byard and Roland Kirk. Jaki finished a virtuosic piano solo, then jumped to his feet, grabbed an alto saxophone and played with an intensity to match Kirk’s wildness. Desmond said, “I wish he’d mind his own business.”
Memory 3
Later that week, among the guests on a television program I hosted were Byard, Desmond, Al Belletto and Danny Barker, who I have always considered the world’s second greatest rhythm guitarst after Freddie Green. In a discussion of Kansas City style, I asked Byard and Barker to demonstrate. They had never played together. Jaki demurred. He said that he couldn’t do justice to what Count Basie had perfected. I coaxed. Finally, he moved to the piano, Barker unsheathed his guitar and two great musicians of widespread generations worked their way into into a blues that captured the essence of Basie and Green. How I wish that I had a recording of that encounter.
Memory 4
The house band at the ’69 New Orleans JazzFest was Byard, trumpeter Clark Terry, tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims and bassist Milt Hinton, with Dawson on drums. Among their appearances were an evening on a Mississippi riverboat and support for assorted soloists at main festival events. This CD captures their concert with Sarah Vaughan, one of her most inspired and most likely the only recording she made between 1967 and 1971. On this CD the house band backs trumpeters Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Buck Clayton, with Terry and Bobby Hackett making a guest appearance on Eldridge’s set. Byard’s kaleidoscopic solo on “Rifftide” with Eldridge was a highlight of the festival.
Jaki has received a good deal of attention lately with the release of a previously unissued 1964 Cornell University concert by the Charles Mingus Sextet–covered in this Rifftides review–and a Jazz Icons DVD of several of the Mingus group’s European concerts the same year. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the musicianship and excitement he contributed to that remarkable band and, indeed, to music in the last half of the twentieth century. The mystery of his 1999 death at seventy-six by gunshot in his home remains unsolved.
For a substantial profile of Jaki Byard, including audio clips of him and musicians who admired him, go to this NPR profile.

Hugh Massingberd, the longtime obituaries editor of The Telegraph of London, died on Christmas day at the age of sixty. From 1986 to 1994, Massingberd converted the dullest page in the paper into one so entertaining that his obits were collected in six anthologies. In her obituary of Massingberd in today’s New York Times, Margalit Fox wrote that he spoke “frankly, wittily and often gleefully ill of the dead.” She provided translations of some of his terms.

To dispatch his subjects, Mr. Massingberd used the thinnest of rapiers, but also the sharpest. Cataclysmic understatement and carefully coded euphemism were the stylistic hallmarks of his page. Here, for the benefit of American readers, is an abridged Massingberd-English dictionary:

“Convivial”: Habitually drunk.

“Did not suffer fools gladly”: Monstrously foul-tempered.

“Gave colorful accounts of his exploits”: A liar.

“A man of simple tastes”: A complete vulgarian.

“A powerful negotiator”: A bully.

“Relished the cadences of the English language”: An incorrigible windbag.

“Relished physical contact”: A sadist.

“An uncompromisingly direct ladies’ man”: A flasher.

To read all of the Massingberd obituary, go here.

The French Jazz Academy has awarded pianist Roger Kellaway its Le Prix Du Jazz Classique for his 2007 CD Heroes.The album is by Kellaway’s trio with guitarist Bruce Forman and bassist Dan Lutz. Nat Cole had such a drummerless trio and inspired Art Tatum to use the same instrumentation. Oscar Peterson, who adored Cole and Tatum, had a similar group from 1950 to 1958, with Ray Brown on bass, and guitarist Irving Ashby followed by Barney Kessel and then Herb Ellis. Although he is one of the great individualists among modern jazz pianists, Kellaway keeps the Cole-Tatum-Peterson tradition alive through the repertoire on Heroes. Peterson was one of Kellaway’s major influences before Kellaway became a success on the New York scene at the age of twenty-two. They remained close musically and as friends. When I talked with Kellaway a couple of hours ago, he said, “Losing Oscar and getting this award in such close proximity makes me wonder if there’s something going on–something mysterious.”
He said that he will go to Paris to receive the award January 7 in a ceremony at the Châtelet Theater. The French Jazz Academy Awards is the oldest and most serious music awards ceremony in France. Created in 1955, it is like the Grammy Awards with class. The voters are 60 independent journalists, photographers, writers and radio and TV producers. Kellaway was not nominated for a 2008 Grammy. Roger told me that while he’s in Paris, he hopes to meet with Madame Eglal Farhi, the celebrated proprietor of the New Morning club in the Tenth Arrondissement. In France, New Morning is to modern mainstream jazz what the Blue Note was in the 1960s. It would seem a perfect fit for Kellaway.