Archives for March 2006

When a voice behind me whispered low,
‘That fellow’s got to swing.’
—Oscar Wilde, Hélas (1903)

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.
—Duke Ellington (1932)

John Birchard of the Voice of America writes:

I read your new material on Willis Conover and VOA. When I joined the staff in ’93, Willis was in decline with cancer. As I worked ights, I didn’t see him often and, in fact, never had a conversation with him. It was my impression that a fair number of staff people kinda resented his status – his renown, his separateness from the “regular” employees.
Following his death, I was appalled that VOA continued to run his tapes for months and months. After some time had passed, I spoke with the then-Deputy Director of VOA, Alan Heil, asking what was going to happen to the program. He said they would hold auditions for a successor. I applied, knowing that whoever followed Willis would suffer by comparison, but feeling that they should have a “live” replacement and continue the great tradition.
Months went by and I was never given the courtesy of a response to my audition, and I learned a couple of other aspirants were treated the same. Management finally signed Russ Davis and put him on the air with a taped show with no publicity or promotion…a shabby epilogue to one of the great careers in broadcasting.
One final Willis anecdote: For most of the 1970s, I was emcee for the annual Quinnipiac College Jazz Festival, which featured the top college jazz bands along the eastern seaboard. Each year, festival organizers invited a distinguished panel of judges to critique the bands – people like Ernie Wilkins, Clark Terry, Chico O’Farrill, Rev Norman O’Connor, Jimmy Lyons, etc. At the time, I worked as a talk show host in New Haven. The festival ran Friday thru Sunday evenings and I couldn’t make the first hour of the Friday show because I was on the air. The organizers would run in a substitute for me for that hour. One Friday night, I believe it was in 1972, I arrived at
the festival site, walked in the hall and heard a very distinctive voice over the PA…yes, it was Willis. I made my way backstage, anxious that I might have lost my gig. When he was given the high sign from the wings, he introduced me. I walked onstage, took the mic and said to the audience, “Do you know how intimidating it is to try to follow the most famous jazz disc jockey in the world?”.
I don’t know if the audience realized who he was – but I sure did. It’s a memory I shall treasure lways.

“Bix Lives,” read the graffiti after cornetist Bix Beiderbecke died in 1931. “Bird Lives,” began appearing on walls in New York within days of Charlie Parker’s death in 1955. Neither Beiderbecke nor Parker, however, inspired an establishment of religion. So far, the only jazz musician to be declared a saint is John Coltrane. In Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers, the chapter on Coltrane included this:

For a complex variety of reasons, few of them musical, a legendary John Coltrane was created in the years immediately after his death in 1967. The legend persists, and it exists alongside the music as if on a separate plane. Coltrane the legend is a divinely inspired mystic who ultimately transcended music to deliver to the world a spiritual message of love and salvation. The legend comes complete with an appropriately mystical name for Coltrane, Ohnedaruth, evoking the mists, incense and chants of some great Zen beyond, from which Trane is sending back vibrations.
I have been in the pads of youngsters who have constructed little shrines not unlike those of Japanese or Italian working class homes. But the centerpiece is not a lithograph of Buddha or Jesus. It is a print of the cover photograph from Coltrane’s album A Love Supreme. In the late sixties and early seventies, the time of flower children, Haight-Ashbury, Vietnam, and burgeoning drug use, Coltrane became a convenient object of the search for heroes. And his early death seemed to qualify him, among those in need of martyrs, for the company of Dr. King, Malcolm X and Robert Kennedy.

One of the manifestations of the zeal surrounding Coltrane’s memory was the creation in San Francisco, four years after his death, of the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church. It exists thirty-five years later. Evelyn Nieves of The Washington Post visited the church and reports that its founder and members are serious and dedicated in their adoration of Coltrane.

Last Sunday’s service was typical: lots of music and listening. “The first part of our service is quiet meditation,” said Johnson, as a boombox on the floor played John Coltrane Live at the Village Vanguard.
The house-band members took their places in front of a seven-foot-tall Byzantine-style painting of Coltrane holding a saxophone with flames coming from it. Bishop Franzo King, in white robes with a fuchsia skullcap and cummerbund, took a seat in front of a conga drum, his soprano sax in hand.

To read the whole report, go here.

Ken Dryden writes:

I enjoyed reading Paul Blair’s comments about the late Willis Conover. What ever happened to his jazz collection–is it still in the VOA archives or was it disposed of with his estate, donated to an archives, etc.? Maybe Paul should get busy on a Conover bio.
I just picked up a DVD of the 1969 New Orleans Jazz Festival, whose lineup he was instrumental in putting together (before politics turned it into a commercial multi-cultural event with significantly less jazz content). He’s shown emceeing a group (Clark Terry, Zoot Sims, Jaki Byard, Milt Hinton and Alan Dawson, plus a deservedly obscure singer on one song) in the Court of Two Sisters courtyard, a place legendary for its awful food, even though it is a picturesque setting.

As Mr. Dryden knows, but perhaps others do not, Conover was central to the success of the 1969 New Orleans jazz festival, a milestone event of its kind. He produced it. Here is a little of what I wrote about it in the Rifftides piece that initiated this periodic Conover retrospective and the subsequent discussion of the peril facing the Voice of America’s English language broadcasts.

The ’69 festival turned out to be one of the great events in the history of the music. It reflected Willis’s knowledge, taste, judgment, and the enormous regard the best jazz musicians in the world had for him.
I won’t give you the complete list of talent. Suffice it to report that the house band for the week was Zoot Sims, Clark Terry, Jaki Byard, Milt Hinton and Alan Dawson, and that some of the hundred or so musicians who performed were Sarah Vaughan, the Count Basie band, Gerry Mulligan, Paul Desmond, Albert Mangelsdorff, Roland Kirk, Jimmy Giuffre, the Onward Brass Band, Rita Reyes, Al Belletto, Eddie Miller, Graham Collier, Earle Warren, Buddy Tate, Dickie Wells, Pete Fountain, Freddie Hubbard and Dizzy Gillespie. The festival had style, dignity and panache. It was a festival of music, not a carnival. An enormous amount of the credit for that goes to Willis.

For more on the ’69 JazzFest and Conover, go here. Also, read Charles Suhor’s accounts in Jazz In New Orleans: The Postwar Years Through 1970.

I’ll be unbloggable, and possibly sleepless, in Seattle for a couple of days of meetings at the University of Washington, and some book business. There are worse places to be in springtime, when the cherry trees bloom in the UW quad, the showers lighten, and people smile more.
In the meantime, visit the Rifftides archive and investigate what the other artsjournal.com bloggers have to offer you (links in the right-hand column).

Another location recording by Dave Frishberg?

What do you mean, another? There hasn’t been one since Do You Miss New York? That was four years ago.

Ah, the one with “Jaws” and “The Hopi Way.” How can he top that?

Top it? Why does he have to top it? Music isn’t a contest, a quest to set records (heh heh). Can’t he just make a CD with a few new songs and a few old ones and tie ’em together with a theme?

What’s the theme?

Nostalgia. You know, “The Dear Departed Past.”

Oh. Of course. Any new baseball songs?

Several, and he spins them together in a story about the White Sox scandal in 1919 and Christy Mathewson (“Matty”). One of them, “Play Ball,” is a nifty waltz. “Van Lingle Mungo” and “Dodger Blue” are there, too.

Hmm.

I forget to mention the boxing song, “Who Do You Think You Are, Jack Dempsey?”

How’s his piano playing?

Terrific. Nice little solos. Sympathetic accompanist. Listens to the singer. He does his best “Listen Here” on record.

Okay. What’s the album called?

Retromania: Dave Frishberg At The Jazz Bakery. Good cover shot; Frishberg and a bunch of old sports magazines. He wrote the liner notes. Sample: “I’m nostalgic about stuff that hasn’t even happened yet.”

The Rifftides discussion of the perilous situation of the Voice of America’s English language broadcasting has a running sidebar about Willis Conover. Conover was the VOA’s free lance jazz voice, one of the United States’ most effective instruments of public diplomacy during the Cold War. Ironically, although he was a hero to millions behind the Iron Curtain—teaching them about jazz and, as an unintended bonus, to speak English—he was unknown to most Americans and unrecognized by the government of the nation to which he attrracted incalculable good will. Since Willis died in 1996, a number of people who understand the importance of his contribution have tried to see that he is awarded a posthumous presidential medal of freedom. The Clinton administration ignored the entreaties. The Bush White House has shunned them with equal ignorance and indifference. Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq war, gets a medal of freedom. Willis Conover, who provided masses of people under Soviet bondage with hope and artistic object lesson in the meaning of freedom, does not.
Until the pianist, singer and songwriter Dave Frishberg sent the following story, I was unaware of the extent to which the VOA itself failed to recognize the importance of the man who brought so much credit to the agency and its country.

When Willis Conover was living in in New York around 1970 he assembled a big band under the direction of Bill Berry, and presented the band in a series of Sunday afternoon concerts at the Roosevelt Hotel. I was playing piano in the band, and that’s when Willis and I met.
In April, 1984 when I was playing in Washington DC, he invited me to lunch and told me to meet him at the Voice Of America studios. When I checked in at the security desk in the lobby, none of the security personnel had heard of Willis Conover, and I was denied access to an elevator. They looked in every possible phone directory and his name was nowhere to be found. I explained loudly that Willis Conover was THE VOICE in the Voice Of America, but they stared at me with mounting mistrust. A man walked by and heard me arguing with the security people and told me he was going up to VOA and would tell Willis that I was in the lobby. When Willis came down to get me, I told him “These security guards don’t even recognize your name!” He smiled and said , “I know. Ridiculous, isn’t it?”
Dave Frishberg

To read the full Willis Conover story, go to this Rifftides posting from the archive. For more on Conover’s relationship with the Voice, go to the next exhibit.

Paul Blair, now an editor, free lance writer and licensed New York City tour guide, was a colleague of Willis Conover at the Voice Of America in the 1980s. He hosted a daily VOA broadcast. Blair sent Dave Frishberg the following recollection after reading Dave’s story in the previous Rifftides posting. We’re bringing it to you with their permission.

I believe Willis had, by the spring of 1984, left (or been left by) the New York wife and more or less settled in Washington for good. Apparently this was his final spouse, some sort of exotic and difficult European princess. I think he had a little apartment somewhere up on Capitol Hill but he’d never reveal his home address or number. He was quite Ellingtonian in many ways, always eager to keep the various aspects of his life separate from one another.
VOA still broadcasts from those aging facilities at 330 Independence Ave. SW, across from the Mall from where the Museum of the American Indian has lately been built. He’d have been working daily from a cramped little studio on the second floor. What you have to understand is that Willis was never a fulltime government employee. Instead, he had some kind of lucrative long-term contract as an outside vendor, selling his services to VOA but not actually a civil servant like the rest of us. No one else ever used his personal studio, or could have. Perhaps you’ll recall how crowded it was with LPs and tapes, literally spilling out of huge metal cabinets, arrayed in such a way that only he could ever locate anything. Anyway, this explains why no rent-a-guard at the VOA entrance would have been ableto locate Willis in a staff directory – but why anyone who’d been working awhile in the building knew exactly where to find him.
The rest of us all used studio engineers from a rotating pool of old timers. But Willis had his own personal engineer, someone who’d be available whenever he felt like recording shows at any time of the day or night. These tended to be youngish guys from the Polish, Bulgarian and Latvian Services who’d grown up hearing Willis and were worshipful of him – but who’d always quit after six or eight months because they couldn’t get used to either his hours or his temperament. At that point, they’d be returned to the pool of regular engineers, where they sit around and retell Conover anecdotes to one another and anyone else who’d listen.
Willis’ personal assistant/secretary for many years was a lovely older woman named Nita Brasch. The only photo on the desk in her basement office was (at his instruction, I’m sure) a framed shot of Meredith d’Ambroiso, for whom he obviously had the hots. I do want to emphasize how kindly and generously this guy treated me over the seven years I worked at VOA. Once, at a Duke Ellington Society conference, he actually stood up and introduced me at some length to fellow attendees. He’d brought along a tall, impossibly slender but not terribly young Russian-language broadcaster to that gathering as his own guest. He gestured toward her at one point and whispered to me, “That’s not chopped liver!” I also remember him telling me one day – though can’t recall the context – that his forties had been an especilly active decade for him sexually. My own heartthrob at this point was a broadcaster in the Indonesian Service. (It was because of this woman that I resigned from VOA in 1988; I pursued her all the way to Jakarta, where I ended up living for ten years – and subsequently married someone else.) Not knowing of this relationship, he invited this young woman into his private studio one day and detained her with compliments and questions for nearly an hour. As she left, he autographed a photo to her personally, one showing him interviewing Ellington. I still have it.
Willis stayed on top at VOA through some very effective politicking with top brass who’d been around for many years. I always fancied that Willis regarded me as the person most likely to succeed him, and I believe others in the building had similar thoughts. But in fact the whole idea of VOA broadcasting jazz really died when Willis did. There’s no real jazz on government air any more. After all, the commies have been soundly beaten and European musicians are now the world’s most adventuresome. In retrospect, maybe he knew that he’d never be succeeded. He did take care to polish his own legend, though. Whenever Nita received an interview request, she’d send out a press packet thick with previous pieces written about Willis. Surely this explains why the same anecdotes (triumphal airport welcomes in Eastern Erope, etc.) are repeated in one profile after another.
A few years ago, Terry Ripmaster, a guy in New Jersey, was working on a Conover bio. We spoke on the phone once or twice around 1999. I don’t know if he ever finished the manuscript or found a publisher. But I can relate one story unlikely to appear in such a book. Once when my four-year old son was visiting me at VOA, I took him into the men’s room, a huge marble-encrusted affair. My son was chatting with great animation. Although we thought we were alone in there, Willis was seated in one of the stalls – and he obviously thought that someone was addressing him. His response was to ask, loudly, “What?” Given the resonance of his voice plus the impressive echo within those confines, it sounded like God himself was addressing us. My son, scared into silence, proceeded to pee on the floor.
Paul Blair

To visit Mr. Blair’s SwingStreets website featuring news about and ways to take his walking tours of New York, go here. If you roam around the site long enough, you’ll find a way to play full-length examples of New York jazz from various eras. To go directly to that feature, click here and scroll to the bottom of the page. It is easy to let the music seduce you into entrapment there. Don’t forget to come back to Rifftides.

Last night’s concert by the Jim Knapp Orchestra at The Seasons Performance Hall drew on much of the repertoire from Knapp’s most recent CD, Secular Breathing. There were a few changes in personnel, most notably the addition of Tom Varner, the brilliant French hornist who has moved from New York to Seattle. Varner fits perfectly into Knapp’s philosophy, which involves the creation of orchestral structures layered in rich textures that he parts to provide soloists opportunities for as much freedom as they care to exercise.

Varner cares to exercise plenty of freedom, as he made plain in his roaming, exploratory solo on “Wild West,” a piece not on the CD. Varner wasn’t the only one who rode the open country of Knapp’s orchestration. Each of the reed men played at length, baritone saxophonist Jim DeJoie ending his long, gutsy, solo by improvising simultaneously with alto saxophonist Mark Taylor; Taylor soloing at length and melding with tenor saxophonist Steve Treseler, who merged with fellow tenor man Adam Harris, who gave way to bassist Phil Sparks for a bowed solo that segued into pizzicato playing and led the orchestra out of the exhilirating untethered region of free time into strict tempo and resolution. The performance kept the audience in its grip. It had focus and energy so profound that later when one of the musicians remarked that the piece had lasted twenty-six minutes, I was startled. I thought it had been ten or twelve minutes.

There were impressive solos through the evening by trombonist Jeff Hay, trumpeters Jay Thomas and Vern Sielert and pianist John Hansen. Andy Omdahl, playing publicly with the band after only one rehearsal, was thrilling in his lead trumpet work on Knapp’s demanding arrangements. But the star of the thirteen-piece orchestra is Knapp, who manages to evoke his influences—including Debussy, Ellington, Gil Evans, Ives and (I think) Dvorak—while creating music that has his own mark of individuality. If this band were based in New York rather than Seattle, my guess is that it would be creating a significant buzz. My further guess is that it will do so in any case. A live recording is reportedly in the works. Keep an ear out for it.

The Portland Jazz Festival ended early this month, a week after I had to leave it. One of the events I hated to miss was a concert by the Jim Hall-Geoffrey Keezer duo. The Oregonian’s Marty Hughley was there. I just came across his review, which contains this apt characterization of Hall.

At 75, Hall is one of the genre’s revered elder statesmen, long lauded for his mellow, saxophone-like tone and gentle lyricism. It would be a mistake, though, to think of Hall as an old-fashioned musician. Through just more than an hour of music, Hall and pianist Geoff Keezer played music that was refined and pleasing to the ear, yet frequently challenged convention in subtle, refreshing ways.

To read all of Hughley’s review, go here.

Thanks to Bill Reed and David Ehrenstein for calling this to our attention.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was going to my hometown—Wenatchee, Washington, The Apple Capital of the World and the Buckle of the Powerbelt of the Northwest—to give a talk preceding a concert by the Jeff Hamilton Trio. I had not heard Hamilton’s group in person since early in the century, shortly after he brought aboard pianist Tamir Hendelman and bassist Christoph Luty. His drumming has been an addiction since I first heard him with Woody Herman in the late 1970s. My fascination with his work grew when he was with the L.A. Four and, later, when he sparked the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra and recorded with Ray Brown, Milt Jackson, Bill Holman, Diana Krall and Benny Carter, to name a few of the major musicians he has supported and inspired.
I’m not sure how the talk went that night; I was preoccupied with giving it. But I know that the concert was a success. The first half was by the Wenatchee Big Band, a semi-pro outfit with polish and sophistication suprising in a town with fewer than 30,000 people far from the big population centers. Hamilton sat in with the band, swinging it harder—I think it’s safe to say—than it may have thought it could swing. Among big band drummers, he most effectively embodies the unique combination of power and refinement the late Mel Lewis brought to that demanding craft. In a combo setting, he is every bit as effective, as he demonstrated with his trio in the second half.
I was unprepared for the degree to which Hamilton, Hendelman and Luty have coalesced into a group that, in unity of thought, purpose and execution, is in a league with the greatest piano trios. It has a personality different from the trios of Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Tommy Flanagan or, more recently, of Bill Charlap and Kenny Barron, but comparison with them defines its standing. The trio’s character grows out of Hamilton’s astonishing command of time. He maintains irresistible swing while executing rhythmic permutations of enormous complexity, more often with brushes than with sticks. That night in Wenatchee, Hendelman and Luty were not only with him every step of the way, but melded into his rhythm and he into theirs. They achieved a chamber music ideal, performance as one mind, one spirit. How wonderful it would be, I thought, if they could capture this level of perfection and swing in a recording. It would have to be a live recording, of course, because such things virtually never happen in the cold, demanding precincts of a studio.
This is a case in which it is good to be wrong. The trio’s new CD arrived a few days ago. The Jeff Hamilton Trio: From Studio 4, Cologne, Germany, has the warmth, enthusiasm and flawless musicianship we heard in the Wenatchee concert. The arrangements by the members of the trio are smart, functional, never too clever for their own good. The pieces include a Milt Jackson blues, a samba by Hamilton, Hendelman’s clever treatment of Thelonious Monk’s “Epistrophy,” and several standards given new life. Among the more or less familiar songs are Luty’s arrangement of “Moonglow” incorporating Hamilton’s subtle virtuosity with wire brushes, “I’ve Never Been in Love Before” and the gorgeous “Too Many Stars.” With Hamilton’s group, Hendelman, an engaging team player, has grown into a major piano soloist, and Luty has developed further as a bassist strong in support and in solo.

The V.O.A. on short-wave radio and, in particular, the jazz presented by Willis Conover was top of our listening list as U.K. students in the late 1950’s. Starved of American artists in the U.K because of the Musician’s Union Ban, this was one way of our hearing the best U.S. jazz of the day.The programmes did a great deal to influence my musical taste and sow the seeds of a lifetime commitment to ‘America’s Music’.
When the band exchanges started during that period John Dankworth took his band to a festival in New Jersey and reported back with one revelation: “Willis Conover talks in the same careful, almost pedantic, way in real life”. Later Dankworth had to pay out of his own pocket for records by his band and Cleo Laine, sent to V.O.A. and played by Willis Conover. The U.K. record company (EMI) regarded V.O.A. as irrelevant to their marketing!
Gordon Sapsed in the U.K.

Thanks to ArtsJournal commander-in-chief Doug McLennan for calling our attention, by way of his daily digest, to this story from the San Jose Mercury-News :

San Jose’s summer jazz festival calls itself the “largest free jazz festival in the United States.” But that designation may be about to change. The festival may have to start charging: $5 a person for an all-day pass. “The reason for the charge: rising operational fees coupled with a loss of corporate sponsors Ford, Chevron and Applied Materials. The festival costs almost $1 million and, much to their disappointment, organizers said, only $60,000 comes from a city that has just designated $4 million for a car race.

To read the whole story, go here.
Allow me to remind you that ArtsJournal bloggers write regularly on music, the visual arts, architecture, media, publishing, theater, dance and the business side of culture. It is a smorgasboard of expertise under one web umbrella. To sample it, go to AJ BLOGS CENTRAL.

The Bush administration’s efforts to reduce or eliminate the amount of English language broadcasting overseas by the Voice Of America are receiving close attention from all sectors of the body politic. Not all of the warnings about the shortsighted foolishness of the administration strategy are coming from the left and middle of the spectrum. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation, no hotbed of anti-Bush activism, raises the alarm. In a national security research memo issued by Heritage, Stephen Johnson writes:

Because public diplomacy efforts such as international broadcasting take years and decades to do their work, shifting massive resources to current hotspots may net little in the end. America needs a more balanced long-term strategy for its foreign broadcasting, and its overseers need to use greater creativity to spread American culture and ideas successfully.

And:

More recently, poor vision has caused policymakers to regard the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington as proof that most threats now come from the Middle East. In a rush to influence Middle Eastern public opinion in a hurry, they gutted the global Voice of America (VOA) radio and TV networks to create new regional broadcasting services.
However, research shows that changing deep-seated perceptions takes time and targeting through multiple channels such as supplying textbooks, supporting libraries, and sponsoring academic exchanges. Sadly, face-to-face public diplomacy efforts remain disorganized at the U.S. Department of State.

To read the entire Heritage Foundation memo, go here.
Average Americans can do something about this dangerous plan, which works against the longrange interests of The United States. We can apply pressure. For the original Rifftides posting on this attempt to gut the VOA’s invaluable public diplomacy, click here. Then use the suggested message to e-mail your senators and representative in congress.
As for Rifftides readers around the world, please let us know what the Voice of America has meant to you. Use the “Comment” link at the end of this posting or the e-mail address in the right column.

I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play, bring a friend… if you have one.
– George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second… if there is one.
– Winston Churchill, in reply

Bill Crow read the Rifftides post about The Seasons, then wrote:

Could this be the realization of the dream Red Kelly had when he started the OWL party in Olympia. He wanted to build a giant Sin Drome near Chehalis, where everyone could come and party.
His slogan: “Unemployment isn’t working!”

Uh. No, but any opportunity to remember Red Kelly is welcome. His campaign to be elected governor of Washington was, like much in his life, for laughs. He was serious about music. For those who may not have had the pleasure, Red was a shipyard welder in Seattle in 1943 when he taught himself to play the bass. He had heard there was a shortage of musicians because of the war. After a period with the pianist Johnny Wittwer in 1944, he went on to play with—more or less—everybody. Here’s a quote in which he described his career path.

I picked the brains of the best: Ted Fio Rito, Randy Brooks, Sam Donahue, Chubby Jackson, Herbie Fields, Charlie Barnet, Red Norvo, Claude Thornhill, Woody Herman, Maynard Ferguson, Stan Kenton, some studio work, back to Herman (the third Herd), Les Brown — we hated each other — finally Harry James off and on for 14 years. And I’ll never forget the night I played with Charlie Parker at Birdland. He even hugged me, so it must have been okay.

That is from a column Harvey Siders wrote for Seattle’s Earshot Jazz Monthly not long after Red died in 2004. Much of the good and funny stuff of Red’s life is in Siders’ piece; his dream rhythm section partnership with Buddy Rich and Jack Perciful in the James band; the time Red Norvo hired him thinking he was Red Mitchell; his tongue-in-cheek run for governor in 1976 as the candidate of the OWL Party (“Out With Logic, On With Lunacy”), winning nine percent of the vote; how his bar in Tacoma because a must-hang spot for the jazz elite. To read the whole thing, go here. To read even more, see the Tacoma Public Library’s Red Kelly Collection website, officially named Remembering Red. Very few jazz bass players become the best known characters in their states. Red managed it.
CDs:
Kelly was in the 1955 Woody Herman Road Band that also included Dick Collins, Richie Kamuca, Chuck Flores and Cy Touff.
Blues On The Rocks incorporates Kelly’s Classic 1960 Pacific Jazz Good Friday Blues with guitarist Jim Hall and fellow bassist Red Mitchell playing piano.
One of Stan Kenton’s best albums of the 1950s, Kenton At The Tropicana, has Kelly on bass and singing his touching ballad, “You and I and George.”
Red had a knack for showing up on bands when they were at their height in terms of musical quality, or maybe he had something to do with their achieving it. On Verve Jazz Masters 55, he is with Harry James at one of the trumpeter-leader’s peaks.

A couple of Rifftides readers have asked if there is a website for The Seasons, the nifty 400-seat performance hall in Yakima, Washington, my current home town. The Pacific Northwest of the United States is a wonderful place to visit. It is unlikely that many of you have immediate plans to come here, especially those in, say, Beijing, Perth or Oslo. Nonetheless, click here to be transported to The Seasons site and see its intriguing artist lineup for the next few months. Perhaps you’ll decide to hop a plane and come. If you do, please let me know. We’ll tour a few of the Yakima Valley’s world-class wineries.
Recent performances I have attended included splendid concerts by Tierney Sutton and her band, the Brazilian pianist Jovino Santos Neto and his Quartet, and the Thomas Marriott Quartet. I am told that in addition to the musicians listed on the website, Kenny Barron, Meredith d’Ambrosio, Miguel Zenon, and Luciana Souza (with Romero Lubambo) will all be playing The Seasons before the year is out. The Bill Mays Trio, which inaugurated the hall, will be back, and Mays is likely to cross over and perform the stirring finale from Mendelssohn’s Trio in D Minor with The Seasons’ classical artists-in-residence, the Finesterra Trio.
Not bad for a city of 75,000 on the unpopulous side of the Cascade Mountains in the upper left corner of the country. The sky, by the way, is nearly always as blue as you see it in the photograph above; this is the non-rainy side of the Cascades. (Full disclosure: I am not in the employ of the Yakima Chamber of Commerce. I am a volunteer advisor on talent matters to The Seasons nonprofit management and sometimes give unpaid pre-concert talks. They get me in free.)
For previous Rifftides postings about music at The Seasons, go here and here.

For ten years or so, David Sills has been emerging as a tenor saxophonist with a knack for fashioning calm, cool improvised lines laced with melodic and harmonic interest. His tonal quality leads reviewers to make comparisons with Stan Getz and Lester Young. Based on his harmonic resourcefulness, unruffled execution and slightly dry sound, it would be just as easy to find similarities to Hank Mobley and Warne Marsh. But comparisons are weak vessels. Sills is no imitator.
In his new CD, Down The Line, he begins his solo on “It’s All You” by toying with a series of intervals, seeming as casual as a man whiling away the time bouncing a ball. As he enters the sixteenth bar of his first solo chorus (the piece is based on “It’s You or No One”), he brings out material from the deeper harmonic structure of the tune and builds toward the mid-point of his solo. In the second chorus, Sills continues to increase the complexity of his melodic line and the intensity of his rhythm, but not his volume. As he approaches the final sixteen bars of the solo, his line is at its most variegated. Then he eases off with a succession of phrases like scales, recalling his opening intervals. He plays a section of mostly sixteenth notes, and finishes with a short speech-like declaration. In sixty-two seconds, Sills has told a story that has a definable beginning, middle and end. Economy of expression is not something of which post-Coltrane soloists are often accused. Here’s one who knows how to conceive a short statement, make it count, and get out.
In the same piece, Sills and alto saxophonist Gary Foster have a chorus of unaccompanied counterpoint in the style of Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz. Foster’s own solo finds him at his most Konitz-like, but on the album’s title tune—an “I Got Rhythm” variant—Foster is his identifiable self, and he has a quietly glittering solo on “Eastern View.” He and Sills blend so effectively on the out-chorus of “Slow Joe” that it was difficult on the first hearing to know whether it was one horn or two.
Alan Broadbent is the pianist. One of the great accompanists in jazz today, he also one of its most breathtaking soloists, as his work here on “Slow Joe” and “Down the Line” demonstrates. Broadbent’s introduction to Sills’ achingly beautiful peformance of “Never Let Me Go” and his solo on the piece are highlights of the CD. In common with Sills, guitarist Larry Koonse does not wear his virtuosity on his sleeve, but he doesn’t need to; his musicianship and the richness of his ideas are obvious. Broadbent’s longtime sidekick Putter Smith is the bassist, Tim Pleasant the sensitive drummer.
Nice album.