Archives for August 2005

I wrote this piece before Katrina sent New Orleans into agony. I almost held it back until the city revives. But that is likely to be years. Because I believe in the indomitable spirit of a place that is a part of my heartbeat and because WDSU’s news department is doing the kind of great work it always did in times of crisis, I offer this little recollection of the Crescent City in better times.
For a few years in the 1960s, when broadcasting companies still operated both radio and television stations, I had the good fortune to work for WDSU in New Orleans. The station was founded on the notion that public service was at least as important as profit. Edgar Stern, who owned the company, and A. Louis Read, who ran the TV, AM and FM stations, were committed to having the best broadcast news operation in the south, which they did. We covered the civil rights struggle, including school desegregation, not only for local viewers and listeners, but also for the network. NBC News had no bureau in the south then, and we frequently fed the Huntley-Brinkley show major stories on civl rights, Louisiana politics, Jim Garrison’s Kennedy assassination investigation, oil rig fires and hurricanes, among other things that happened in the best news town I ever worked in. I anchored the 6 pm and 10 pm television newscasts and did a fair amount of reporting.
Five nights a week, between the TV newscasts, I conducted a radio discussion program, Closeup, that had guests and invited telephone calls from listeners. This was years before Rush Limbaugh and his ilk laid waste to the idea of civil conversation on the radio. When I suggested that we try the same show on television, the station carved out a slot following the Tonight Show. We found, to our surprise, that a small late-night audience would watch a program whose only visual interest was two or three people discussing ideas and events, with calls from disembodied voices on a speaker phone.
Among the guests were politicians, sports stars, musicians and French Quarter characters. One memorable night during the New Orleans Jazz Festival, Jaki Byard, Danny Barker and Paul Desmond came on. I persuaded Byard and Barker to play a couple of piano-guitar duets. How I wish that I had a tape of that program. Desmond, sans horn, sat and grinned in that Cheshire-cat way. Another time, the guests were Woody Herman, George Wein and Sweet Emma Barrett the Bell Gal. Advertising revenues did not exceed the overtime costs of keeping the studio live and the technical staff on duty after midnight, and after a few weeks, Closeup bit the dust. Still, it was the sort of thing with which WDSU was willing to experiment.
Stern, Read and their radio manager Hal Wheelahan indulged my wish to do a jazz program on the radio. For several years, I taped a weekly hour that ran Saturday nights on WDSU-FM and AM. Jazz Review had reviews, plenty of music and visits from New Orleans musicians—Paul Barbarin, Alvin Alcorn, Monk Hazel, Al Belletto, Willie and Earl Turbinton, Eddie Miller, Pete Fountain frequently and, once, the magisterial trumpeter Red Allen. When they were in town, Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Rich, Cannonball and Nat Adderley, Joe Zawinul, Gary Burton, Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson and other itinerant players dropped by. Jazz Review was well sponsored and more than paid for itself. The FM station had a signal that powered across the Gulf Coast flatlands as far as Alabama and up into parts of Georgia. I was astounded to learn years later that the governor of Georgia was a regular listener, long before he became president.
(I’m getting to the Charlie Parker part.)
The theme music for Jazz Review was Charlie Parker’s two perfect choruses on “Funky Blues” from the Jam Session #1 album on Verve. Googling recently, I came across a 2001 interview by the Boston broadcaster Christopher Leydon with the great writer Whitney Balliett. In the program, Balliett is reluctant to be analytical in answering Leydon’s questions. He maintains that music of the quality of Parker’s, Pee Wee Russell’s and Ben Webster’s is laden with secrets. He implies that it cannot be dissected. Leydon plays Parker’s solo for Whitney, who calls it one of his favorite pieces of music.
“He preaches the first couple of measures,” Ballilett says. “Now, that’s full of secrets.”
You can go here to listen to WBUR’s audio stream of the broadcast. Exactly six minutes into it, you’ll get that incredible solo. Whenever I hear Bird play those magical twenty-four bars, they conjure up for me a time in New Orleans when a commercial broadcasting operation had a community-spirited mission and a sense of adventure. If there is one like it anywhere today under the deregulated earnings-driven corporate pressures of 21st Century broadcasting, I’d be happy to know about it.

The new Sonny Rollins CD is out, the one I raved about after I heard the advance a couple of months ago.

Rollins is amazing on the title track and “Where or When.” Stephen Scott’s piano solos, dazzling and capricious, run Sonny a close second. Trombonist Clifton Anderson has a good night, and Bob Cranshaw demonstrates that a great player can give electric bass lines the definition, clarity, and swing of the acoustic instrument.

The album is Without A Song: The 9/11 Concert. Rollins plays with the force of the emotions he took into his concert four days after he witnessed the attacks on the twin towers, a story told by Bob Blumenthal in his notes for the CD. Sonny is elemental in this performance.

The man who created these all-too-human ballets led a life outwardly uneventful, at least by the standards of the best-seller list. He fled the Soviet Union in 1924, settling first in Europe and then in New York City, where he started a dance school and a series of ballet companies. For the rest of his days, he made and rehearsed dances. That was all there was to it, he claimed. Asked on one occasion by a journalist to sum up his life, he replied, “It’s all in the programs.”
—All In The Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, by Terry Teachout

My only conversation with Coltrane took place in 1963 when he was appearing with his quartet at a Cleveland jazz club called Leo’s Casino. I was the Cleveland correspondent for Down Beat and I was assigned to interview him.
“Why?” asked Coltrane on the telephone.
I allowed that he must be tired of interviews.
“Shouldn’t I be?” he asked. “I can’t explain anything. It’s all in the music. Come to the club and hear the music.”
—Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers, by Doug Ramsey

As noted here earlier, to his credit Teachout temporarily refitted his Arts Journal About Last Night into a blog clearinghouse on Hurricane Katrina. In the process, he discovered something about this capacious and puzzling new medium.

As Hurricane Katrina finally slowed down and Monday lurched to a close, I stopped updating “Live from Katrina” and started thinking about the implications of what I’d been doing for the past two days. On the one hand, nothing could have been less typical of “About Last Night” than for me to have thrown myself head first into so unlikely an undertaking. Yet at the same time, nothing could be more characteristic of the new world of new media. One of the most distinctive properies of blogs, after all, is that they are instantly and infinitely malleable at the whim of the blogger. “About Last Night” is about art because Our Girl in Chicago and I want it to be about art. If we decided at noon tomorrow that it would henceforth be about hockey, or smoked salmon, there’d be nothing to stop us from changing course at 12:01. Instead, we decided to make a one-day detour into citizen journalism—and the blogosphere promptly sat up and took notice.

Read all of TT’s Katrinablog reflections here.

From a Rifftides reader:

Thanks for the postings and links on New Orleans. Teachout’s site led me to great info. I’m from New Orleans and most of my family still lives there. Naturally I lost contact during the storm and the WDSU site had the early video and allowed me to see the area where they live. Fortunately most of my relatives evacuated. What a disaster! Thanks again for your concern.

The worst of Katrina has passed New Orleans. Now, flooding is the big concern. With dozens of news organizations and hundreds of bloggers covering the storm and the city’s agony, there is little point in my attempting to add much from this distance. Monitoring tells me that my alma mater, WDSU-TV, is doing a good job of continuing updates, as is The Times-Picayune.
Here’s a recent entry from WDSU’s web log:

11:52 a.m.: Evacuees Huddle In Hallways At Chalmette H.S.
People who took shelter in Chalmette High School are now huddled in the hallways because the windows have blown out. The building has sustained significant damage. There are reports that the water is 10-feet deep near the high school and is rapidly rising. — WDSU.com Web Staff

And here’s one from the Picayune‘s Jon Donley in a NOLA weblog :

NEW ORLEANS IS SINKING…I DON’T WANT TO SWIM
9:34 – Reports of widespread flooding now, although not at the doomsday scenario levels. But we’ve got several hours to go before we’ve seen the worst past. Scanner traffic is busy with calls of rising water, including 18 inches and rising against the levee in the French Quarter. Dispatchers questioning officers on the scene, trying to determine if there is a break in the river levee, or if water is pouring over the top. Independently, NOLA has received a flooding alert for the French Market area.
Fairly heavy street flooding in front and behind the Times-Picayune . . . water appears about knee deep, whipped by the steady wind into whitecaps and breakers. Water is hubcap deep on the furthest vehicles in the employee parking lot, and rising quickly.

For a guide to other blogs on the Katrina situation, check the list at About Last Night.

With Katrina veering only slightly east, moving fast and staring New Orleans in the face, I’m worried about my friends there. We spent eight years in that amazing city and went through many hurricanes. We were there in 1969 for Camille, the one that’s being compared with tonight’s monster storm. I covered Camille. WDSU-TV was the only station in town with auxiliary power through most of it. I was on the air for something like thirty-six straight hours broadcasting to those who had electricity, hadn’t fled and were watching television. There was a surpisingly large number of them.
On average, the city is three feet below sea level, a massive dish. Camille hit the Gulf Coast considerably east of the city. When a cameraman and I went there a couple of days after the storm, we were stunned by the extent of the devastation in that relatively unpopulated area. I just now looked at the film we made, shaking my head at what would have happened if Camille had made a direct hit on the city.
It doesn’t seem possible that New Orleans will be as lucky this time. Everyone from Mayor Ray Nagin to President Bush has urged people to get out to higher ground. Reports are that many Orleanians, unable to accept that this really is the big one, have decided to stick it out. Some of them, apparently, are observing the old tradition, defying nature by hunkering down in their homes and throwing hurricane parties. How I hope that none of them are the folks I know and love.
Terry Teachout and Laura Demanski have set up as part of their Arts Journal About Last Night a clearinghouse of bloggers sending reports from the city or from where they have sought safety. If you are concerned about or interested in what seems certain to happen to New Orleans, I suggest that you check in with Terry and Laura, along with your traditional news sources.

David Liebman, the perpetually searching saxophonist, has been playing festivals all over the world. He emphasizes that he is not complaining, but he is disturbed by the reaction of people attending those high-priced events.

If anything concerning the question of communication is at all relevant, it is for me about the degree of successful interaction between band members. Doing this to the best of our abilities is the mechanism for demonstrating our respect for the audience. Miles used to say when he turned his back, it was to play to the band so they could hear him better.

(Just to be sure we are on the same page, I am obviously talking about the kind of audience that is there to hear jazz by design, not by mistake. In other words, opening for the Rolling Stones for example is just not relevant to this discussion.)

…Therefore when I look out and “vibe” the audiences I have encountered this summer ranging from Los Angeles to Rome to down the road from where I live, it amazes me that so many people can just sit there and not react at all. It seems the bigger the gig and the higher the fee, the more tepid the reaction.

To read all of Liebman’s essay. go to his newsletter, Intervals.

Nearly three years ago, I reviewed in Jazz Times a CD that pianist Kenny Barron recorded with bassist Ray Drummond and drummer Ben Riley at Bradley’s, the lamented Greenwich Village club.

Barron takes “Solar” at a fast clip that does nothing to suppress his development of original melodic ideas or inventiveness in voicings. There’s not a cliche to be heard. Drummond aces another solo, Riley and Barron exchange eights and the three go into a long tag ending that culminates in a densely harmonic Latin vamp. It is an exciting performance.

To read the whole review, go here.
Sunnyside Records has issued a second volume of performances from Barron’s 1996 Bradley’s engagement and subtitled it, “The Perfect Set,” a claim with which I have no argument. On a solo version of Thelonious Monk’s seldom-heard “Shuffle Boil,” Barron’s harmonic and rhythmic wizardry includes what sound like references to the crippled cadences of stride masters like Donald Lambert and James P. Johnson. The trio follows with a fourteen-minute workout on Monk’s “Well You Needn’t” that took my breath away the first time I heard it…and the second. The title of Barron’s “The Only One” alludes to Monk. The melody line and the improvisation have Thelonious written all over them.
It was not an entirely Monk evening. Barron’s “Twilight Song,” a ballad tinted with Latin accents, and a quarter-hour exploration of “You Don’t Know What Love Is” complete the perfect set. There are few improvisers whom I care to hear play anything for fifteen minutes. Kenny Barron is one of them.
Not incidentally, the beautifully recorded piano on which Barron performs is the Baldwin grand that Paul Desmond willed to Bradley’s. Since the club’s demise, it has been on loan to The Jazz Gallery, a nonprofit club in Lower Manhattan. On page 310 of The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, you will find a picture of Renee Rosnes sitting at it. You didn’t think I’d pass up a chance to plug the book, did you?

Mark Stryker’s column in today’s Detroit Free Press is about the alto saxophonist Charles McPherson. Here’s some of what McPherson told Stryker about his school days, when he studied with the pianist Barry Harris, another Detroiter:

One day I came home from school and I had my report card, and he asked to see it. I was a C student; I didn’t try for anything more than that. He saw the C’s and he said, ‘You’re quite average, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m passing.’

He said, ‘You can’t be average and play the kind of music you’re trying to learn. There’s too much going on. Charlie Parker is not average. Your heroes are above average.’

It was like a little epiphany. It totally changed my life. I put in more effort and instead of being a C student I got A’s. I started getting interested in literature. I read Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Capricorn,’ and I started reading philosophers, for instance, Francis Bacon, Kant, Schopenhauer.

McPherson is interesting on Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lonnie Hillyer and himself. You can read all of Stryker’s piece here.

Here is the critic A.B. Spellman on Ornette Coleman’s groundbreaking Change Of The Century album.

A large part of the credit I believe must be given to the rhythm section. Because in Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins you have two Hall of Fame musicians. And this rhythm section again was working with a different kind of sense of accents. You had a strong melodic lead in the bass of Charlie Haden, because without a piano, the bass then has more responsibility for sort of leading the group. The responsiveness of this particular rhythm section would not permit for (sic) a dead spot.

That is from the transcript of a broadcast conversation between Spellman and Murray Horwitz of the American Film Institute. Their dialogues are central to National Public Radio’s mini-programs centered around a basic library of 100 essential jazz recordings. Because of scarce air time, the radio installments are short, but many of the web site versions include at least one musical illustration; in the case of Change Of The Century the complete six-minutes of Coleman’s “Una Muy Bonita.”
Anyone could argue about what is on and not on the list, but the NPR choices constitute a fine basic library. If you have never heard Bix Beiderbecke’s golden “I’m Coming Virginia,” you can have it..all of it…here. Then, next time you hear one of a few thousand trumpet players steal Bix’s tag phrase, you’ll know where it came from, even if the soloist doesn’t. If you have somehow missed bassist Sam Jones’ and drummer Arthur Taylor’s hand-in-glove support of Thelonious Monk in Monk’s famous Town Hall big band concert, NPR gives you the complete “Thelonious.”
The explanations by Spellman and Horwitz (sometimes Horwitz alone) are as basic as the library itself; the segments run only about three minutes apiece. Still, if you know someone who is just entering jazz as a listener you could do much worse than recommend NPR’s introductory course.

Alec Wilder on Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ On The Ritz.”

Berlin keeps you totally off-balance until the fifth bar, where he sensibly lands on a whole note tied to a half note and then whips you with the title phrase in eighth notes. The release, again sensibly, he leaves for the most part unrhythmic. The structure is straight A-A-B-A. It’s a marvelous song.

Wilder: American Popular Song (Oxford)

DevraDoWrite is peeved about website inadequacies and excesses and doesn’t mind saying so. As an example:

Ineffective site search tool – If you do any kind of research, search tools are invaluable. I believe that sites with a lot of content, be they static or ever changing and growing blogs, should provide a search tool specific to that site. On this blog, for example, you can search for Luther Henderson and see a listing of only those posts in which his name appears.

Amen to that and all of her other gripes. I wish that I had Devra’s technical grasp of this medium. Please notice that THIS site has a search tool. It’s that little blank box in the right-hand column. Don’t bother looking for Kenny G.

Dave Brubeck, touring at eight-four as if he were twenty-four, is in California—momentarily. Saturday night at eight, he will play in Sacramento at the Radisson Hotel Grove Amphitheater with his quartet (Bobby Militello, alto saxophone; Michael Moore, bass; Randy Jones, drums). A few weeks ago at Carnegie Hall, during the JVC Jazz Festival Newport, Brubeck began noodling one of his introductions designed to mystify his sidemen. It is one thing for a pianist to play an obscure introduction to a piece in the band’s repertoire. Erroll Garner made a specialty of it. It is quite another to offer an inscrutable introduction to a song the band has never played. Few leaders outside the bailiwick of free jazz would take that chance in a major concert, but I have often seen Brubeck do it. At World Series time a couple of years ago, he sprang “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” on the quartet. Once they figured out what the boss was pitching, they knocked it out of the park—er—theater.
At Carnegie, it began to dawn on Militello, Moore and Jones that Brubeck was slyly unveiling “Sleep,” a 1923 chestnut by Earl Lebieg that for years was the theme song of Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians. Although a few jazz musicians, including Benny Carter and Tommy Dorsey, recorded it, “Sleep” hardly became a staple of the repertoire. I’d bet that most jazz players don’t know it exists. The Brubeck group had certainly never played it together, but Militello, Moore and Jones were just old enough to have it lurking in their consciousnesses. Once the puzzlement subsided, grins appeared on the sidemens’ faces. They exchanged glances, took a simultaneous deep breath and dove in. “Sleep” is not “Giant Steps” in the chord changes department. To call the song simple may be upgrading it. The structure and melody are basic—two sixteen-bar sections that are nearly identical. But this was a demonstration of the truth of the Sy Oliver-Trummy Young maxim, ‘Tain’t What You Do (It’s The Way That’Cha Do It). The piece developed momentum, good cheer and, ultimately, an intensity that captivated the audience. It was the hit of the evening, and it was no mere novelty. It was thoroughly creative music making.
I was standing backstage next to the tenor saxophonist Harry Allen. As a member of John Pizzarrelli’s band, he was about to follow Brubeck. We listened and watched on monitors, and Allen said, “Can you believe the way these guys are swinging?”
In addition to springing surprises with simple tunes, Brubeck continues his complex older ways. He works in time signatures, polyrhythms and polytonalities that, after a half-century of his pioneering them in jazz, few other musicians have tackled, let alone mastered. One who has them comfortably in mind and under his fingers is Joe Gilman, a pianist who might be much better known as a player if he didn’t devote himself primarily to education. Gilman is one of the teachers at the Brubeck Institute Summer Colony for gifted young jazz players and a professor at American River College in California. He can not only play Brubeck’s demanding music, he can also explain it, as he does in a five-and-a-half-minute radio piece produced by Paul Conley of KXJZ in Sacramento. You can hear it by clicking here and then clicking on the “listen” icon on the Capitol Public Radio page.

…he has an undergraduate degree in piano and jazz studies from Indiana University, a masters from the Eastman school and a doctorate in education from Sarasota University. There is more on his background here. Gilman, with six CDs under his belt, is a teacher who can do. His albums date back to 1987. One from 1992 has drummer Bob Hurst and Jeff “Tain” Watts as sidemen and the brilliant tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson as guest soloist.
In the course of his teaching, Gilman has become an expert on Brubeck’s music. Not a mimic of Brubeck’s playing style, he has more in common with bop and post-bop players. His Time Again: Brubeck Revisited, volume 1 and volume 2 present twenty Brubeck compositions. “In Your Own Sweet Way” is included, as are “Blue Rondo a la Turk,” and Paul Desmond’s “Take Five” in a wildly cartoonish version on prepared piano. He also interprets such less-well-known pieces as “Recuerdo,” “There Will Be No Tomorrow” and the stirring “Love and Anger.” Gilman is accompanied by bassist Joe Sanders and drummer Justin Brown. They take unBrubeckian approaches to “Blue Rondo” and “Summer Song,” to single out just two examples. Gilman sees “The Duke,” as less Ellingtonian than like a Velvet Gentleman with a touch of decidedly unarthritic atonality in the left hand.
Brubeck appreciates adventurousness by others as much as he enjoys committing it. He is reported to be delighted with Gilman’s versions of his songs.

The Rifftides staff is always glad to hear from you. We direct your attention to the e-mail address in the right-hand column.
And we promise that there will soon appear new items in Doug’s Picks.

Today I made a round-trip drive of six hours for an hour-and-a-half meeting that could have been completed in thirty minutes or a twenty-minute conference call. While motoring, I auditioned several CDs that I promised to listen to, only one of which was rewarding. As a result, my blogspiration index is lower than my blood sugar and the level of fuel in my gas tank. That’s low. A good night’s sleep and relief of the temporary hypoglycemia should send me back into action. In other words, there will be no new posting for at least a few hours, maybe not until tomorrow.
In the meantime, remember to check in with the mother of all artsjournal.com bloggers, ArtsJournal, and the AJ webloggers to whom Rifftides links in the right-hand column. These people know their stuff.

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.
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?

One of my favorite quotations about writing could apply just as well to jazz soloing.

No writer ever truly succeeds. The disparity between the work conceived and the work completed is always too great and the writer merely achieves an acceptable level of failure.
–Phillip Caputo