Archives for November 2006

In the 1950s, the New Orleans saxophonist Al Belletto had a surge of international success with his sextet. A contemporary of Al Hirt and Pete Fountain, Belletto grew up steeped in traditional jazz as a clarinetist. But like Ellis Marsalis, Alvin Batiste, Ed Blackwell and other young New Orleans musicians, he was entranced by the music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell. He became an alto saxophonist and formed a small band whose members sang every bit as well as they played. For a time, they were a part of Woody Herman’s touring big band. They recorded for Capitol, Bethlehem and King and performed throughout North and South America. But Belletto couldn’t get New Orleans out of his system. The town effects people that way. In the 1960s, he left the road and returned home.
Belletto swam against New Orleans’ conservative musical preferences and turned the tide. Playing modern jazz, he developed an audience and established himself as a local favorite. He became a guru to generations of young musicians. They learned as they passed through his bands, and they invariably address him as “Coach.” Now and then he made CDs, including this splendid big band album. He was content to spend the rest of his life in the city whose call he couldn’t resist. The Louisiana Jazz Federation named Belletto its artist of the year.
Then Katrina devastated New Orleans. Belletto retreated to his weekend place in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, but it took a heavy hit and could not be a refuge for long. His house in New Orleans was filled with eight-and-a-half feet of water and mud. Everything in it was ruined. After being submerged for weeks, two of his alto saxes have been repaired, but he says they’ll never be the same. Recordings, sheet music, memorabilia of his long career–all are gone. Belletto and his longtime companion Linda moved in with his son and his family in Dallas. After several months came a painful decision; they would not move back to New Orleans. They were unable to handle what it would take physically and emotionally to get started again amid the wreckage. Now, they have their own house in Dallas. Settling in, adjusting to the idea of being exiles, they are filled with longing for their city, its history, its incomparable culture and atmosphere, longing for what New Orleans was before the storm.
I thought of Al Belletto and Linda as I read Howard Reich’s Chicago Tribune report about Katrina obliterating substantial portions of the documentation of New Orleans music. To read Reich’s piece, go here. Be sure to visit the photo gallery and interactive features of the article. As clarinetist Michael White takes Reich on a video tour through the debris-filled hulk of his house, you’ll get an impression of what White, Belletto and thousands of other New Orleanians went through after Katrina came to call.
As we reported soon after Katrina, in the wake of the hurricane con artists circled like a school of sharks, claiming that they would help musicians recover and re-establish. Most of the scammers have moved on to prey on victims of other disasters, but be cautious. Check out relief organizations before you give. Be sure that your money goes where you want it to go. Musicians displaced, disrupted or impoverished by the storm still need help, and will for a long time. The New Orleans Musicians Hurricane Relief Fund is an authenticated 501(c)(3) organization that directs to musicians all of the funds it receives. Click on the link above to go to the NOMHRF web site and make a donation. Belletto is getting by in Dallas. White is living in a FEMA trailer. Others aren’t as fortunate.

Excuse interruption of music festival, please, but would mind repeating excrutiating sound made with assistance of cat intestine?
–Charlie Chan to son Tommy, who has been playing “jazz” violin. From the motion picture Docks of New Orleans, 1948

Saxophonist, arranger and leader Bill Kirchner writes:

Anita O’Day’s passing reminded me of a week I spent working with her
in the summer of 1982 at the Blue Note in NYC. I was part of her backup quartet: Mike Abene, piano; Rick Laird, bass; her longtime partner John Poole, drums; and myself on saxes and flute.
As one might expect of someone with Anita’s frequently harsh life experiences, she was pretty brittle, though I got along with her well enough. She didn’t sing very many ballads, for whatever reason. On medium-to-up tempos, Poole would play nice brushes and Anita would float over them with one of the hippest, most laidback time feels I’ve ever experienced from anyone, singer or instrumentalist. Alas, when it was time for me to solo, Poole would exchange brushes for sticks, to less-than-exquisite effect. It was tough.
One night, though, Anita called “My Funny Valentine” at a slow tempo. She sang the melody and then, as we had predetermined, I soloed for a half-chorus and then paused for her to come back in. Apparently I was doing something right, because she motioned for me to finish the chorus. At that moment, I happened to look into her eyes; to my surprise, her protective shell seemed to disintegrate, revealing one very vulnerable soul.
Anita never said a word about this, but it was one of the most unforgettable moments I’ve had in music, and one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received.

In her autobiography, High Times, Hard Times, Ms. O’Day explored those “harsh life experiences,” sparing no one, least of all herself. Her caption on a mug shot police took following a drug bust:

Arrested for the fourth time in Kansas City, I was as angry as I look. On a previous occasion I was framed and served time. This time I was guilty and managed to get off without a trial.

If you’d prefer to remember her in more innocent days, try this clip from the early 1940s, when she became famous as Gene Krupa’s vocalist.

Anita O’Day was my hero because she used four-letter words. That was really neat. I didn’t myself say them for a long time, but I loved hearing her say them.–Carla Bley
All I know is that there are four beats to a bar and there are a million ways to phrase a tune.–Anita O’Day ( Down Beat, circa 1938-39)

Over the long weekend, we lost Anita O’Day, who died in Los Angeles on Thanksgiving day. She was eighty-seven. The stalwart bassist Walter Booker is also gone, dead in New York on Friday at the age of seventy-three.
O’Day was the last of the great female jazz vocalists who emerged in the swing era. She survived Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee and Carmen McRae. She had perfect time and pitch, a voice without vibrato and the ability to swing as hard as the top horn players of her era. Her feistiness matched her musicianship and she had the respect of her instrumental colleagues, an honor not always accorded singers. One of the O’Day anecdotes being circulated concerns the time she was overheard correcting her drummer. He told her not to tell him how to play. “I’m not telling you how to play,” she said, “I’m telling you when to play.”
O’Day might have been ill advised to continue singing into her eighties, when after a monumentally rough life about all that remained of her talent was her spirit, but she soldiered on. It is unlikely that anyone could have persuaded her to retire.
For as long as she is remembered, her most indelible image is of the glamorous woman in the black dress with white flounce and spectacular hat singing at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. To see and hear her at Newport, click here for “Sweet Georgia Brown” and here for “Tea for Two.” But do not miss a sample clip from her less publicized 1963 Tokyo television special, a superb recital by one of the most important singers of her time.
Walter Booker played with scores of top jazz artists, but he will be best remembered as Cannonball Adderley’s bass player in the late 1960s and early ’70s when Adderley’s quintet was one of the most popular bands in the world. Never a virtuosic acrobat of his instrument, Booker’s specialties were good notes and dependable time, qualities that served Adderley well on more than a dozen Capitol and Fantasy albums including Pyramid. For a reprise of Booker’s life as a musician and as the operator of an important recording studio, go here.

November 25 would have been Paul Desmond’s 81st birthday. Less than two years before he died, he made a featured appearance at the 1975 Monterey Jazz Festival. He played Johnny Mandel’s “Emily” with an all-star rhythm section that included pianist John Lewis, bassist Richard Davis and guitarist Mundell Lowe. Exquisitely lyrical, even for Desmond, the performance might have justified his celebrated claim that he had won several awards for playing slowly. To see and hear it, click here.

In our review of the Tony Bennett TV special, a question arose about the absence of arranger credits. The New York Sun‘s Will Friedwald, reviewing Bennett’s Duets CD, provides a substantial clue that the charts were a team effort:

Mr. Bennett’s musical director and pianist Lee Musiker, string orchestrator Jorge Calandrelli, and horn arranger Torrie Zito (who has worked with Mr. Bennett for 40 years) have collaborated to rewrite or amend classic Bennett charts by Ralph Sharon, Johnny Mandel, and others in a way that preserves the best of the past.

Rifftides reader Mark Stryker, the music writer for The Detroit Free Press, sent the following message with information about Calandrelli and about the eighty-year-old Bennett’s vocal regimen.

I happened to meet Calandrelli in August at the Vibrato Grill, the swanky restaurant-jazz club in Bel Air owned by Herb Albert. I was in Los Angeles working on a couple of stories and went to the place to hear a friend of mine, pianist John Campbell; Calandrelli was there to eat and check out the music after some function at the Mancini Institute, and we were introduced. He seemed to be a very, very nice man. What was weird was that two days earlier I had spoken to Bennett for 20 minutes for a quick-hit story for the Free Press. I mentioned this to Calandrelli, who told me about the CD, though I cannot recall if he said anything about the film.
In my short interview with Bennett, which we ran as a Q-and-A, I asked him specifically about craft and how he’s kept his voice in such good shape. I’ve copied the exchange below. It relates nicely to your observations and those of your D.C. correspondent.
Question: At 80, your voice is still in remarkably supple shape. You’ve taken good care of your instrument, haven’t you?
Bennett: Yes. I had good training and very good teachers. After the Second World War, when I came home, I studied at the American Theatre Wing under the GI Bill and they taught me how to keep my voice in good shape.
Q: What did they teach?
A: Stay very musical and the system of and doing that warm-up, which is very easy, unlike what everybody thinks. I’m not trying to sing like Pavarotti. Just the vowel sounds of A, E, Ah, Oh, OO, and warm up that way because each day it’s a little different. It keeps you in shape, so you don’t have to push.
Q: Do you have a vocal routine?
A: It takes about 15 minutes. Sometimes it’s very intimate and no one can even hear you do it. It’s a matter of breathing properly and when you feel the center — it’s almost like tai chi — you get relaxed and you can see where you are that day.
I do it in bits and pieces. Like in the morning, if I’m shaving, I’ll very quietly hum a kind of flat sound without any vibrato, and then about 2 o’clock in the afternoon I go to it for about 15 minutes. Once I feel that center, I’m ready to perform.
Q: I spoke recently with the great jazz pianist Hank Jones, who just turned 88 and still practices two hours a day. As his fellow pianist Cedar Walton told me, “Preparation is his secret weapon.”
A: Boy, that’s good advice. You know, the late Joe Williams saw me on a airplane once, and we had a chat. He sang with the Basie band in the ’50s. He said, “You know what it is about you? It’s not that you want to sing. It’s that you have to sing.” I said, “You just saved me a lot of money from going to a psychiatrist.”
Q: You’re not a jazz musician, but jazz has clearly had a huge impact on your phrasing, your sense of time, the way you interact with a band.
A: I know how to improvise, and for me jazz is the greatest contribution culturally that the United States has given to the world.
Q: You’re always concerned with getting the message of the song across, but there’s a looseness to the phrasing that makes it come alive in the moment.
A: That’s the whole thing. It’s the interpretation of going behind the beat or in front of the beat, and it changes every night. You might be singing the same song but there’s a vitalness that the musicians feed me and I feed them. I’ll make a turn of phrase and all of sudden they’ll change the chords, embellish it and make it better.
Q: There’s such optimism in your singing and the way you interpret a lyric. Are you you really that happy?
A: No, it’s a gift. My life is absolutely gorgeous. Imagine the things that are happening to me. I’m 80 years old and it’s really the greatest year that I’ve ever had — becoming an NEA Jazz Master and the Smithsonian Institute has accepted one of my paintings and it’s in there permanently, along with John Singer Sargent and Hopper and Winslow Homer. I’ll never get over that.
–Mark Stryker

This is an important American national holiday. To those of the U.S. persuasion, the Rifftides staff sends wishes for a happy Thanksgiving. To readers around the world: we are thankful for your interest, attendance and comments.

Our occasional Washington, DC, correspondent John Birchard sent a message that included the following observations about Tony Bennett, An American Classic, the special that ran on NBC Television last night.

I thought The Old Man outclassed all the other performers. Bennett is in astonishingly good shape, vocally. The last few years, he seems to take more liberties with the melodies, adding nice little alternatives that freshen the songs he’s sung so many times. (example: “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” which also featured lovely accompaniment from Bill Charlap)
My major complaint about the show is that it seemed like the camera never stopped moving. I suppose the director and/or producer deem that necessary for today’s media-saturated generation, but I find it tiresome. Also, it seemed like the camera seldom settled on Bennett in close-up… there were mostly medium- and long-range shots, or hazy, atmospheric closer pictures of him. Are they afraid we’ll see how old he is?
But, all in all, it was good to see and hear an hour with Bennett. The word “icon” is
used altogether too often on so many of today’s suddenly-arrived stars, but it seems
appropriate for somebody who’s stood for so long as a model of taste and integrity
in the notoriously changeable pop music world.
Hope you had a chance to catch the show. –JB

Yes, I watched it, amazed that a network would do something like that these days. The Las Vegas segment was godawful, but we speculated that, as a spoof, Rob Marshall, the director, made it as faitfhul as possible to one of those dreadful Vegas hotel productions. I had never before heard Elton John sing an actual song. He was in tune, and his phrasing wasn’t bad. K.D. Lang sang well.
Bennett looked and sounded fine, with only a couple of intonation slips. His phrasing and interpretation of lyrics have improved over the years, and they were good to start with, even on that terrible song that made him famous, “Rags to Riches.”
The rapport I’ve seen in the past between Diana Krall and Tony didn’t quite materialize. Stevie Wonder’s harmonica solo was the instrumental highlight of the hour. His singing drove me nuts. It always has, but he’s written two or three good songs. Christina Aguilar? That was a joke, right? Bublé? Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Charlap got a solo chorus on “San Francisco,” but they covered him with meaningless b-roll shots, about twenty of them in half a minute. Television, like the movies, is infected with the quick-cut disease. God forbid that a director should let the audience get used to a shot for longer than three seconds.
Let’s see, who else was there? Oh, Streisand, at the beginning. She sang beautifully. I wish that the show had maintained the taste and simplicity of that opening song, but any network getting away with presenting palatable music in 2006 must satisfy the MTV generation and those with MTV tastes. When Bennett is gone, what popular singer of classic songs who has taste, ability and a repertoire of standards will have the clout to get a network television program like this?

Do you know who wrote the arrangements? I tried to catch that info during the
closing credits, but missed it – if it was there. — JB

I went here to get arranger credits. The arranger(s) got no credit. Hooray for Hollywood.
For a review that ran in advance of the broacast, go here.

Nat Hentoff is a champion of the Jazz Foundation of America in its efforts to help aging musicians who lack the resources to provide for themselves. In his latest column in the Village Voice, Hentoff makes it clear that jazzmen and women who find themselves in want are not always those who failed to make it to the top of their profession.

Jazz musicians do not have pensions, and very few have medical plans or other resources. Pianist Wynton Kelly, for example–a vital sideman for Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie–died penniless. I was at the first recording session of pianist Phineas Newborn, whose mastery of the instrument was astonishing. As jazz musicians say, he told a story. His ended in a pauper’s grave in Memphis.
At last, 17 years ago, in New York, a group of musicians and jazz enthusiasts for whom the music had become essential to their lives formed the Jazz Foundation of America. Its mission is to regenerate the lives of abandoned players–paying the rents before they’re evicted, taking care of their medical needs, and providing emergency living expenses.

To read all of Nat’s column, learn of Dizzy Gillespie’s crucial role in the foundation and find out how to help, click here.

Like many blogs, Rifftides is under seige by lurkers filling the Comments bin with messages having nothing to do with Rifftides. Some days there are hundreds. The strictest filters do little to stem the tide of these unsolicited links to hard porn sites. In an attempt to delete en masse a batch of this filth, we may have inadvertently deep-sixed a few legitimate comments.
We want to hear from you. The Rifftides staff will don gas masks, hip boots and rubber gloves to wade through the sludge and find legitimate communiques. Please keep your comments coming.

I never thought that the music called “jazz” was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all other dead things that were once considered artistic.
Miles Davis

For years, there have been reports that there would be a feature film about Miles Davis. No film has appeared. Pat Broeske writes in Sunday’s New York Times that two such motion pictures may actually be on the drawing board. One would have a screenplay by Quincy Troupe, who co-authored Davis’s autobiography and later wrote a memoir about his friendship with the trumpeter. Another, according to Broeske, would be a picture “authorized” (the quotation marks are Broeske’s) by the Davis estate. That leaves the impression that the Troupe version would be unauthorized. Given the dark, scatological nature of the autobiography, it’s not hard to see why. To read the Times piece, go here.
The challenge of containing in even a long picture the contradictions in Davis’s character, the variety of his music and the complex web of his relationships could make film biographies like Ray (Charles) and Walk The Line (Johnny Cash) seem simple assignments. The shortcomings of Bird (Charlie Parker) and earlier movies about Gene Krupa, Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman suggest that Hollywood has room for improvement in jazz musician bio flicks. It will take a director of extraordinary skill and insight, and an exceptional actor, to fairly portray the creative son of a middle-class family who at twenty reached the apex of jazz with Parker and later decided to cloak himself in the image of a dirty-talking gut-punching street fighter.
People who were close to Davis tell of not only his toughness but also his warmth, humor and sensitivity. I was not close to him, but I have a small story.
In January, 1961, I was in New York for a week interviewing for a correspondent job with CBS News. It was a near thing, but ultimately the news division president, Richard Salant, wisely decided that I needed seasoning. “Come back in a year or so,” he said. I didn’t, but that’s another story. That night, moping around Manhattan, I ended up at The Jazz Gallery in Greenwich Village, where Miles Davis was operating a sextet. Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane had moved on, but Wynton Kelly and Paul Chambers were still aboard. Philly Joe Jones was temporarily back with Miles. The horns were Davis, Hank Mobley and J.J. Johnson. Teddy Wilson’s trio alternated sets with Miles’s band. The story of my encounter with Davis first appeared in notes for the LP reissue of some of his early Prestige recordings and later in Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers.

Aside from the distinct recollection that Miles, Philly Joe and J.J. played superbly that night, two memories of the evening survive. Between sets, Miles sat at a table in front of and slightly to the right of the piano and listened to Wilson intently and with great enjoyment. During a later break he came to the bar and took a stool next to mine. I had heard all those stories about Davis’s surliness and wasn’t about to get him riled up by coming on like the hick fan I was. But he initiated a conversation and for maybe twenty minutes we made small talk, little of it about music. The freezing weather came up, as I recall, the New York newspaper strike, foreign cars, and Teddy Wilson. There was no handshake, no exchange of names. Then, as Miles got up to return to the stand, he asked where I was from. No place he’d ever heard of, I said, Wenatchee, Washington. He paused a moment, then said:
“Say hello to Don Lanphere.”
Don was pleased.

If there is a movie, I hope it includes that thoughtful facet of a complicated man.

The Rifftides staff has added Marshall Bowden’s Jazzitude web site to Other Places in the right-hand column. Befitting its Louisiana origin, Jazzitude is a gumbo of a site. On the menu: news, reviews, features and history sections. If the free enterprise road to the internet future is advertising, Bowden is paving it with a profusion of links to books, DVDs, CDs, posters, instruments, equipment and sheet music. His menu doesn’t trap you in the ads, though. It allows navigation to what interests you.