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From Philadelphia comes news of the death of John Blake, Jr., a violinist who combined his classical training, love for the African-American musical tradition and sense of adventure to become prominent on the forward edge of jazz in the 1970s. Blake was 67. He made his mark recording with tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp and soon won the Violinist Deserving Wider Recognition category in the Down Beat Critics Poll. His fame widened when he toured with Grover Washington, Jr’s band and then with pianist McCoy Tyner in several of Tyner’s groups. He worked with a variety of artists including Duke Ellington, Steve Turre, Cecil McBee, James Newton and Billy Taylor. In recent years, Blake devoted much of his time and energy to the development of musical interest in young people in his native Philadelphia.

Here is Blake in 2001 with Taylor, bassist Chip Jackson and drummer Winard Harper in a program at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

For an obituary of Blake, see this article in The Philadelphia Inquirer. It includes video that shows Blake’s affinity for young people.

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Following the Bill Evans birthday piece three days ago, a note from Alan Broadbent about Evans reminded me of a Rifftides post from five years ago. The piece placed Evans in the context of his work in the 1950s with George Russell. It appeared on the occasion of Russell’s death, and it included video of some of Evans’ most stimulating playing. This appeared on July 29, 2009.

George Russell died Monday night. Here are some of the facts of his life, outlined by the Associated Press.

BOSTON (AP) — Jazz composer George Russell, a MacArthur fellow whose theories influenced the modal music of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, has died. His publicist says Russell, who taught at the New England Conservatory, died Monday in Boston at age 86 of complications from Alzheimer’s.

Russell was born in Cincinnati in 1923 and attended Wilberforce University. He played drums in Benny Carter’s band and later wrote ”Cubano Be/Cubano Bop” for Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra. It premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1947 and was the first fusion of Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz. Russell developed the Lydian concept in 1953. It’s credited as the first theoretical contribution from jazz.
Russell is survived by his wife, his son and three grandchildren. A release says a memorial service will be planned.

The first sentence of that AP story barely suggests Russell’s importance. There will be much more written and spoken about him in the next few days by scholars and historians, as there should be. The work he did, particularly in the 1950s and ’60s, had major influence on the thinking and performance of musicians who were shaping new ways of approaching the music. On a radio program I did in the sixties, I devoted five weeks of broadcasts to Russell’s music. This was the introduction to that series on Jazz Review on WDSU-FM in New Orleans in September and October of 1966.

Over the next few programs we’re going to consider the recorded work of George Russell – not only because Russell’s music is interesting, absorbing listening, but also because of his influence of the development of jazz in the sixties, an influence, I believe, more profound and widespread than is generally recognized even by many musicians. It may well develop that Russell is having an impact on the course of jazz as great as, or greater than, that of such imitated innovators as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.

Russell believes that jazz must develop on its own terms, from within. He believes that to borrow the concepts of classical music and force jazz into the mold of the classical tradition results in something perhaps interesting, perhaps Third Stream music, but not jazz. Faced with this conviction that jazz musicians must look to jazz for their means of growth, Russell set about creating a framework within which to work.

In 1953 he completed his Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization. The system is built on what he calls pan-tonality, bypassing the atonal ground covered by modern classical composers and making great use of chromaticism. Russell explains that pan-tonality allows the write and the improviser to retain the scale-based nature of the folk music in which jazz has its roots, yet have the freedom of being in a number of tonalities at once. Hence, pan-tonality.

That’s a brief and far from complete reduction of George Russell’s theory, on which he worked for ten years. It’s all in Russell’s book, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Jazz Improvisation.

Freedom within restrictions, however broad.
Discipline.

Improvising Russell’s way demands great technical skill. Listening to his recordings, one is struck by the virtuoso nature of the players. Some of their names: Bill Evans, Paul Bley, Don Ellis, Dave Baker, John Coltrane, Art Farmer, Steve Swallow, Eric Dolphy. Evans is featured soloist in Russell’s 1960 Decca recording, Jazz In The Space Age, the most thorough application of Russell’s theories to a large band. If you’re not familiar with Russell, all that talk about concepts and theories and pan-tonality and chromaticism may have led you to expect something dry and formidable. On the contrary, there’s a sense of fun and airiness in the music. The humor is subtle, but it’s there. And, I should add, it’s more evident after several hearings.

For five Saturdays, engineer Charlie Flatt played and I talked about Russell’s music, reaching back to 1947 and his “Cubano Be-Cubano Bop” for Gillespie and up to his 1963 quintet album The Outer View. The survey included the classic “All About Rosie,” commissioned by Brandeis University in 1957, the smalltet recordings for RCA, Russell’s series of Riverside albums and the remarkable suite New York, New York, a work recorded in 1958 and 1959 that brought together, among other players, Evans, Coltrane, Bob Brookmeyer, Art Farmer, and Phil Woods, all interesting young musicians who went on to be among the most influential in jazz.

For a sense of Russell and New York milieu in which he operated in the late 1950s, video of a 1958 edition of The Subject Is Jazz brings together several of the musicians who played his music. It includes a version of Rusell’s “Concerto For Billy The Kid,” with a Bill Evans solo not as electrifying as the one on this recording. Nonetheless, it presents Evans in the context of Russell’s work, and it is followed by critic Gilbert Seldes interviewing Russell about his concept. The program also has two pieces featuring Billy Taylor. If you stay with it for all 24 minutes, you’ll see credits for the musicians. And, yes the trumpeter identified as Carl Severinsen is Doc Severinsen. You may never have thought of him as a bebopper, but listen to those solos.

Was George Russell a force in opening jazz to greater freedom In the late fifties and early sixties, as I suggested 43 years ago, or did his Lydian Chromatic Concept synthesize ideas that were already in the air? Some of each, perhaps. Either way, he created some of the most stimulating music of his day, up to, including and beyond his collaboration with avant garde trumpeter Don Cherry. I am less enchanted with his later electronic works, but I’m going to dig them out and give myself another chance with them. After all, it’s George Russell; there may be more than met the ear the first time around.

Following that 1966 series of radio programs about Russell, I sent him a transcript, not knowing whether he would ever see it. I heard reports from New York that he was discouraged and had left the US to live in Europe. A few months later he sent me a letter from Stockholm.

It is like I have waited a lifetime to hear someone say the things which you did concerning my music (and if I never hear them again I will not feel that my efforts in jazz have gone unrewarded). I received the transcript at the right moment, too, for I was in one of those states of flux that I’ve come to accept as a necessary but painful part of artistic growth. It is very trying during these times to keep one’s self-confidence and I must admit that my morale was sagging more than a little bit. But your sensitive views of my music worked wonders.

Closing a long letter, Russell wrote that he hoped we would meet one day. We never did.
(For an obituary containing insights into Russell’s methods see the article by Brian Marquard and Michael Bailey in today’s Boston Globe)

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Mike Harris is one of several Rifftides readers who sent reminders that this is Bill Evans’ 85th birthday. Over a decade in the 1960s and ‘70s, Mr. Harris surreptitiously recorded the pianist at the Village Vanguard in New York. His recordings make up the eight-volume box set Bill Evans: The Secret Sessions. In a note, he suggested, “—perhaps worth a mention?”

This anniversary of the most influential jazz pianist of the second half of the twentieth century is worth more than a mention. From my notes for The Secret Sessions:

After young Bill Evans (1929-1980) got out of the Army in 1954, he became an indispensible sideman on the New York jazz scene. He recorded his first trio album late in 1956 and little more than a year later had begun to enhance his reputation through brilliant work with Miles Davis. Acting on insights gained from the music of Debussy and other impressionist composers, he enriched his chords beyond those of any other jazz pianist. Comparisons that come to mind are harmonies that Bil Evans and Robert Farnon wrote for large orchestras and with some of the mysterious voicings of Duke Ellington. Even in his earliest work he stretched and displaced rhythm and melody and hinted at modes and scales as the basis for improvisation.

With the 1958 sextet that also included saxophonists John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, bassist Paul Chambers, and initially, drummer Philly Joe Jones (replaced before very long by Jimmy Cobb), Evans had enormous influence in determining the course that mainstream jazz follows to this day. Although in his own groups he was to remain within the song form all of his life, at this time Evans clearly accelerated Davis’s change from a repertoire of popular songs and jazz standards to pieces with fewer chord changes and greater demands on the taste, judgment and imagination of the soloist.

That was “Flamenco Sketches.” For an appearance at Umbria Jazz in Italy in 1978, Evans reunited with Philly Joe Jones, the drummer with whom he had formed a strong partnership in the Davis sextet 20 years earlier. The bassist was Marc Johnson, a regular member of Evans’ last trio. The piece is Jimmy Rowles’ “The Peacocks,” a staple of Evans’ latterday repertoire.

For Bill Evans in a variety of settings, go to this YouTube page and begin browsing through dozens of audio tracks and videos.

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Jim Wilke’s Jazz Northwest broadcast on Sunday afternoon will feature the Jensen sisters, trumpeter Ingrid and saxophonist Christine. Their prestigious rhythm section has pianist Geoffrey Keezer, bassist Martin Wind and drummer Jon Wikan. Wilke recorded the quintet at the Centrum Jazz Port Townsend festival in July.

From Jim’s announcement:

The sisters grew up in Nanaimo, BC and have gone on to successful musical careers. Christine Jensen now lives in Montreal where she composes for and leads her own jazz orchestra. Ingrid is based in New York, leads her own groups and plays with the Maria Schneider Orchestra and other ensembles. Both have recorded numerous CDs and tour internationally.

The program airs at 2 PM PDT Sunday on KPLU-FM, 88.5, Seattle-Tacoma, Washington. It will stream on the web at kplu.org. (Photo by Jim Levitt)

From the other coast, saxophonist, bandleader and broadcaster Bill Kirchner (pictured) sends word that the Newark/New York station WBGO will drop the venerable Jazz From The Archives at the end of December. Kirchner has two shows in the works before the series ends. Here is part of his announcement.

For my final two shows (August 17 and September 14), I’ve decided to focus on my proudest achievement in 45 years as a professional jazz musician: the music of my own Nonet, which was a working, touring,
NYC-based band between 1980 and 2001. The Nonet recorded five albums–one of them a 2-CD set. (go here for a listing of them).

The band included some of NYC’s finest jazz musicians and, I daresay, developed a unique identity. All of the three reed players “doubled” extensively on woodwinds, the two trumpeters on fluegelhorns, and the bass trombone provided a rich “bottom”; all this combined with a versatile rhythm section. As critic Larry Kart put it: “A musical coat of many colors, Kirchner’s Nonet sounds at times as though it were twice its actual size.”

Bill’s show will air this Sunday, August 17, from 11 p.m. to midnight, Eastern Daylight Time.

NOTE: If you live outside the New York City metropolitan area, WBGO also broadcasts on the Internet at http://www.wbgo.org/.

Have a good weekend.

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I’m back from Europe, too jet lagged for any good use but reluctant to go long without posting. In such situations, trolling the Rifftides archive usually hooks something worthy of another look.

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August 24, 2005

A couple of weeks ago, the Italian plum tree in our little orchard broke off at the base of its trunk and fell over, loaded with hundreds of perfect purple plums. Before the hired man chopped it up and hauled it away to a useful end in someone’s fireplace, I harvested the tree’s final crop and stashed it in bushel baskets.

This evening, I pulled a chair up to the dissecting table in the garden shed, switched on the radio and set to work cutting the plums, removing the pits and putting the halves into dehydrators. My timing was lucky. Terry Gross replayed her interesting 2000 interview with Robert Moog, the synthesizer inventor who died on Sunday, and Northwest Public Radio followed Fresh Air with Franz Schubert’s Quintet in C.

(Added for this 2014 revival of the post, here is the first movement, played at the 2008 Zagreb International Chamber Music Festival by Susanna Yoko Henkel and Stefan Milenkovich, violins; Guy Ben-Ziony, viola; Giovanni Sollima and Monika Leskovar, cellos.)

If one of the primary aims of jazz improvisation is the creation of melody, could there be a more inspirational concentration of examples than in this astonishing work? Each of the four movements is awash in melodies that implant themselves in the listener’s mind. The melodies are sustained by Schubert’s harmonic genius, as bold as Beethoven’s; visionary in the early nineteenth century. Any developing jazz player would benefit by paying close attention to the little melodies, as fleeting as thought, in the brooding Adagio, and to the ripping chromatic dance tune of the Scherzo that Shubert contrasts with the movement’s funereal slow section. They are examples to aspire to as surely as those of Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Lester Young, Art Farmer, Paul Desmond, Bobby Hackett, Miles Davis and the other great melodists in jazz.

Solos by Armstrong reflect his love of the Italian operas that were a living part of New Orleans when he was learning. Charlie Parker quoted melodies from classical composers, including Wagner, that he absorbed from radio, records and live performances. Desmond had a fund of Stravinsky phrases on which he worked variations and permutations. How many teachers in the high school and college programs turning out the majority of today’s prospective jazz players immerse their students in melodic geniuses of classical music as well as those of jazz and the Great American Songbook?
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To browse nearly nine years of Rifftides posts, go to “Archives” in the right column. You may also enter a name or topic in the “Search The Site” box at the top of the page. There’s a lot of stuff there.

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The American bassist and singer Kristin Korb has lived in Denmark the past two years. In her Per Helsas GÃ¥rd concert, she included songs from her next album, Finding Home, about the effects of the move and the peace she has found in her marriage and her adopted country.

A protégé of the late Ray Brown, Ms. Korb’s bass playing is the foundation of her musicianship. She is an increasingly clever lyricist in the songs she writes, arranges and sings. “58 Boxes” was about “missing my stuff” during the weeks it was in transit from the US. She worked melodies from Miles Davis’s “All Blues” and references to James Brown’s “I Feel Good” into her introduction to Bob Dorough’s “Better Than Anything.” The lyric she set to “Groove Merchant” and her bass lines were perfect matches for the spirit and churchy harmonies of Jerome Richardson’s classic piece. Pianist Magnus Hjorth, played several impressive solos in the set. The other member of Korb’s trio, drummer Snorre Kirk, was buoyantly propulsive throughout.

In the first of his two appearances, the Ystad Festival’s artistic director Jan Lundgren and his trio hosted Grégoire Maret. The Swiss harmonica player is often mentioned as the new Toots Thielemans, the instrument’s modern jazz pioneer. Lundgren alternated solo and trio pieces with those that featured Maret. Veterans Jesper Lundgaard, on bass, and drummer Alex Riel played together in the pianist’s first trio. The rapport they established with him in the 1990s has, if anything, deepened. Their backing of Maret in “Velas,” Brazilian composer Ivan Lins’ tribute to Thielemans, had a blend of rhythmic muscle and lyrical sensibility that matched Maret’s interpretation. In “The Man I Love,” one of the pieces on Lundgren’s forthcoming solo album, Maret played in response to Riel’s drum figures. The two took the music beyond the edge of Gershwin’s harmonies, which inspired further adventuring by the quartet as they went out in a long, leisurely tag ending based on one chord.

In a Wall Street Journal article today about the festival and the state of jazz in Sweden, I cover Lundgren’s other performance in Ystad. The Journal is available at newsstands and, to WSJ subscribers, online.

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The Rifftides staff leaves tomorrow morning for Ystad on the southern Baltic coast of Sweden. The ancient seaside town will host the Ystad Jazz Festival in its fifth year. The festival will present such well known musicians as Joshua Redman, Charles Lloyd, Roy Hargrove, Jan Lundgren, Diane Schur, Jon Scofield and Abdullah Ibrahim, plus an extensive sampling of veteran and youthful European artists. In addition to posting from Ystad for Rifftides, I will write a piece for The Wall Street Journal about the state of jazz in Sweden as reflected at the festival.

Our son Paul is flying from Santa Barbara to meet me at the Copenhagen airport for the hour trip south to Ystad. I know from having covered the festival in 2012 that Ystad in summer is a popular tourist destination usually drenched in sunshine, a happy contrast to the gloomy place portrayed in the Wallender novels and television series. It is unlikely that he’ll be around, but we will keep an eye out for the inspector (pictured right). We may have to check out a dark tavern or two.

Blogging for the next several days will be as often as the festival schedule allows. To see the schedule, go here.

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Today’s cycling expedition through eastern Washington’s Naches Valley took me where orchard country and cattle country merge for a few miles. Waving above a prosperous looking ranch house was this enormous American flag.

A mile or so up the road, another rancher was not to be outdone.

The flags reminded me of two versions of “America The Beautiful” that I did not include in the 4th of July Rifftides post. There are several videos of the song by Ray Charles. This one with the Raelettes is seen less often than most. He perfected a routine for this piece, but within the pattern every performance was an original, because it was by Ray Charles.

The other “America The Beautiful” is by a trombonist we lost in 2003. Carl Fontana was held in awe by colleagues and aficionados. He deserved wider fame for his musicality, swing, astonishing control of his instrument and the humor in his work.

Carl Fontana, trombone; Al Cohn, tenor Saxophone; Richard Wyands, piano; Ray Drummond, bass; Akira Tana, drums, from Uptown Records’ The Great Fontana. For an extended live version of “America The Beautiful” by Fontana, go here. The audio quality is a bit compressed, but you can hear everyone. Your close attention will be rewarded.

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Events in Ukraine, Israel, Palestine and Nigeria—to name the locations of a few of the world’s festering sores—make it appropriate to revisit a post from the Rifftides archive. It appeared during the first year of this blog.

(July 22, 2005)

Following the most recent rounds of atrocities—Iraq, London—a friend wanted to talk. He did not have comforting insights into mankind’s oldest philosophical question, nor did I. I don’t know whether Miller Williams has the answer, but in his collection Some Jazz A While this distinguished American poet ponders the question beautifully. With his permission, here is one of his finest poems. Like all poetry, it is best read aloud.

Why God Permits Evil:
For Answers to This Question
Of Interest to Many
Write Bible Answers, Dept. E-7
—ad on a matchbook cover

Of interest to John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas
for instance and Job for instance who never got

one straight answer but only his cattle back,
With interest, which is something, but certainly not

any kind of answer unless you ask
God if God can demonstrate God’s power

and God’s glory, which is not a question.
You should all be living at this hour.

You had Servetus to burn, the elect to count,
bad eyes and the Institutes to write;

you had the exercises and had Latin.
the hard bunk and the solitary night;

You had the neighbors to listen to and your woman
yelling at you to curse God and die.

Some of this to be on the right side;
some of it to ask in passing, Why?

Why badness makes its way in a world He made?
How come he looked for twelve and got eleven?

You had the faith and looked for love, stood pain,
learned patience and little else. We have E-7.

Churches may be shut down everywhere,
half-written philosophy books be tossed away.

Some place on the South Side of Chicago
a lady with wrinkled hose and a small gray

bun of hair sits straight with her knees together
behind a teacher’s desk on the third floor

of an old shirt factory, bankrupt and abandoned
except for this just cause and on the door:

Dept. E-7. She opens the letters
asking why God permits it and sends a brown

plain envelope to each return address.
But she is not alone. All up and down

the thin and creaking corridors are doors
And desks behind them: E-6, E-5, 4, 3.

A desk for every question, for how we rise
blown up and burned, for how the will is free,

for when is Armageddon, for whether dogs
have souls or not and on and on. On

beyond the alphabet and possible numbers
where cross-legged, naked, and alone,

there sits a pale, tall, and long-haired woman
upon a cushion of fleece and eiderdown

holding in one hand a handwritten answer,
holding in the other hand a brown

plain envelope. On either side, cobwebbed
and empty baskets sitting on the floor

say In and Out. There is no sound in the room.
There is no knob on the door. Or there is no door.

©1999 by Miller Williams

Williams wrote and read the inaugural poem at the beginning of President Bill Clinton’s second term in 1997, four years after Maya Angelou was the inaugural poet as President Clinton began his first term. In a PBS program, The Inaugural Classroom, a 12th grader asked Williams how it felt to be compared to Angelou. This was his answer:

She writes opera and classical music, and I write jazz and blues.

The late poet John Ciardi summed up Williams this way:

Miller Williams writes about ordinary people in the extraordinary moments of their lives. Even more remarkable is how, doing this, he plays perilously close to plain talk without ever falling into it; how close he comes to naked sentiment without yielding to it; how close he moves to being very sure without ever losing the grace of uncertainty. Add to this something altogether apart, that what a good reader can expect to sense, coming to these poems, is a terrible honesty, and we have among us a voice that makes a difference.

“Why God Permits Evil” appears in Williams’s collected poems, Some Jazz a While. To learn more about Miller Williams, go here.

Top photo of Williams: Dan Hale, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

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Until recently, admirers of the great trumpeter Clifford Brown heard him speak only a few words on the album The Beginning and the End. Recently, however, a YouTube contributor who identifies herself as Nespasisi posted a segment of Brown being interviewed by Willis Conover of The Voice of America. Nespasisi explains that she found the fragment “on one of my dusty old cassette tapes.” The discussion was shortly before Brown died in an automobile accident on June 27, 1956, four months short of his 26th birthday.

Clifford Brown with Lou Donaldson, alto saxophone; Elmo Hope, piano; Percy Heath, bass; and Philly Joe Jones, drums, playing “Brownie Speaks,” included on this album. If you’re in the mood for more about Clifford, listen to Nat Hentoff talk about him with Clifford Brown, Jr., in a Philadelphia Institute of the Arts symposium.

For even more, go to this Rifftides archive piece.

Rudy Royston, 303, (Greenleaf Music)

Since his emergence from Denver (area code 303) nearly a decade ago, Royston’s drumming has graced bands led by Dave Douglas, Bill Frisell, JD Allen, Tom Harrell and other leaders in 21st century jazz. With 303, Royston becomes a leader himself. As he has since he first attracted attention playing for Denver trumpeter Ron Miles, Royston is notable not only for the dynamics of his technique but for empathy with his fellow musicians and the reactive support he gives them. His drums are prominent in the mix, but for all of his technical adroitness, he does not put himself on display, even in the rockish insistencies of “Goodnight Kinyah” or the vaguely Latin ones that develop into an intense drum solo with horn accompaniment in “Gangs of New York.”

Royston is equally at home coverng Radiohead’s “High and Dry” and adapting Mozart’s “Ave Venum Corpus” as an anthem in which his brush work floats under Jon Irabagon’s alto saxophone. Royston gives Irabagon, trumpeter Nadja Noordhuis, pianist Sam Harris and guitarist solo opportunities of which they take impressive advantage. He uses two basses, played by Mimi Jones and Yasushi Nakamura, not for novelty but to provide texture and harmonic coherence.

Hannah Svensson, Each Little Moment (Volenza)

In a 2012 collection of duets with her guitarist father Ewan, Ms. Svensson exhibited charm, clear intonation and a confident approach to lyrics. Her new album finds the young Swedish singer again with her dad, plus the masterly pianist Jan Lundgren, bassist Morten Ramsbøl and drummer Kristian Leth. She is affecting in four pieces associated with Billie Holiday, notably so in “It’s Easy to Remember,” whose rarely heard verse she includes. She gives a personal blues spin to a slow “Fine and Mellow,” which has effective solos from Svensson, Sr., and Lundgren. She and Lundgren give glowing performances in “My Foolish Heart.” Few singers her age would be attracted to Louis Jordan’s 1944 hit “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby.” Ms. Svensson takes it on with verve and makes amusing, bluesy, use of her tendency to slide up into notes. Other highlights of the track: Ramsbøl’s powerful bass work and the harmonic riches of Lundgren’s solo. For a Rifftides review of her previous CD, go here.

More Recent Listening coming soon

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The announcement none of us wanted to hear came early this afternoon from Tina Pelikan of ECM Records.

It is with deep sorrow that we announce that Charlie Haden, born August 6, 1937 in Shenandoah, Iowa, passed away today at 10:11 Pacific time in Los Angeles after a prolonged illness. Ruth Cameron, his wife of 30 years, and his children Josh Haden, Tanya Haden, Rachel Haden and Petra Haden were all by his side.

Every note Charlie Haden played came from conviction. His sincerity and commitment affected every musician with whom he worked. He used the insistency and quiet power of his music to express his beliefs. He did not compromise.

The first of two pieces in remembrance of Haden is by his beloved Quartet West. The second is from one of his albums with pianist Hank Jones.

For an obituary, go here. Charlie Haden, RIP

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Following the death of Horace Silver on June 18, Bill Kirchner called my attention to trumpeter John McNeil’s remembrance of his time in Silver’s quintet in the late 1970s. It appears on the New Music Box website. McNeil’s essay gives insights into traits and practices that formed Silver’s leadership qualities. For one thing, he insisted that his sidemen be on time. If they weren’t, he fined them twenty-five dollars.

The on-time rule also applied to getting back to the bandstand after a break. I ran afoul of this one time when I had been busy at the bar, chatting up a member of the opposite sex. All of a sudden I heard Horace play a little arpeggio and realized everyone was on the bandstand but me. I rushed up on stage and as I went by the piano, Horace, without looking up, said, “Twenty-five bucks. Good lookin’ though.”

The thing is, being on time wasn’t just some rigid rule of his. What really mattered to Horace was that being late and keeping other musicians waiting was disrespectful.

To read all of McNeil’s recollection of his formative time with Silver, go here. His concluding anecdote speaks volumes about Horace’s moral integrity.

For Rifftides thoughts about Silver’s importance, see this, posted the day after his passing