Archives for August 2007

Mr. JazzWax, aka Marc Myers, tracked down the venerable baritone saxophonist Danny Bank, one of the few Charlie Parker sidemen still with us, to talk about Bird. Among Bank’s anecdotes:

“One morning, sometime in 1951, I think, I took out one of the Sonatas for Woodwind by Hindemith and used it to practice. That night, after I played on two or three recording dates that day, I went to Birdland to hear Charlie play.
“As soon as he saw me come into the club, he started to pay the Hindemith Sonata I had played earlier while laughing through his mouthpiece. Bird had been listening to me through the walls! His ear was so amazing that he played what I practiced from memory when he saw me that night.

I just discovered that I had a defective link to Ethan Iverson’s Do The Math, the blog of The Bad Plus. I fixed the link. Use it to see Iverson’s tribute to the late British critic Richard Cook and read Cook’s evaluation of one of Horace Silver’s milestone recordings. I was startled to see how young Cook was. Dead at fifty. Enjoy life, folks.
The veteran Pennsylvania jazz broadcaster Russ Neff has launched a blog. Like his program, it’s called My Favorite Things. Neff’s first postings are based on archive interviews with George Shearing and Ray Brown.
Other Matters
If you’ve had nothing better to do, you may have been following every detail of the mens-room adventures of Idaho Senator Larry Craig and the apparent suicide attempt of film personality Owen Wilson. Society of Professional Journalists President Christine Tatum doesn’t mention Craig in her most recent Freedom Of The Prez posting, but this paragraph applies to his ordeal.

I completely get the public personality-or-official lecture delivered in Media Law 101. Heck, I even get the far more advanced versions gleaned over the course of my career. You cast yourself into the limelight or get yourself elected to public office, and you ask for the scrutiny. You ask for the criticism, the leering, the praise, the fawning, the constant flashbulbs, the boatloads of letters and e-mail and the stupid guy begging for an autograph while you’re in a public restroom. Once you enter that white-hot public spotlight, you can’t leave it whenever you choose.

She deals directly with the unfortunate Mr. Wilson’s being circled not only by the tabloid sharks but also by an appalling number of supposedly responsible journalists.

But journalists. What’s their responsibility when an Owen Wilson has a breakdown and asks the media (and, by extension, the general public) to allow him to heal in private? He’s no Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan or Nicole Ritchie driving under the influence on public streets. He’s not even a Britney Spears, who has an incredible knack for taking her wackiness public.
Might this be a time when we let a prominent person who apparently struggles with depression have the solace and privacy he needs? I certainly hope so.

So do I. To read all of Tatum’s posting, go here.

For a long time, the Doug’s Books section on the right side of your screen ended with:

His next book is a novel that has nothing to do with music.

The section now begins (bells, whistles, horns, raucous whoops and shouts, please):

Doug’s most recent book is Poodie James, a novel published in 2007.

The official publication was a few days ago. The book is now available. Preview readers have been extraordinarily kind. You can see some of their comments if you go to this page at the publisher’s web site. In a convenient coincidence, that is also the place where you can place an order for Poodie. Please do. If you order directly from Libros Libertad, a pioneering new house in Vancouver, British Columbia, you will support their efforts to make a difference in the way writers of serious fiction and poetry reach their readers. In other words, if you buy from Libros Libertad, the publisher makes a little more money.
At the Libros Libertad site, you’ll find an excerpt from Poodie James and a link to a longer biography of the author than you’ll see on Rifftides. I wrote earlier that the book has nothing to do with music. That is true in the sense that music is not a central theme and no central character is a musician. It is unlikely that any book of mine could avoid music altogether. Here is a short excerpt from a scene in which Poodie, who is deaf, attends a dance.

The rhythm surging through his body made him happy. Poodie wondered if the dancers got the sensation from hearing the music that he did from feeling it, radiance in the belly, warmth around the heart. The first piece ended. Poodie applauded with the others.
Now the leader was singing into a microphone. The first words went by too fast for Poodie to see them, but then the man sang, “Caldonia, Caldonia, what makes your big head so hard?” On each syllable the drummer hit the bass drum with the pedal and a smaller drum with his sticks. When the words came around again, Poodie laughed. Seeing him, the drummer laughed too. During slow pieces, Poodie could feel just a thump now and then, but on the fast ones the thunder of the drums rolled against him. Sometimes, when all of the men played at once, a wave came through the air and along the floor. It pushed into his chest and up through his feet and made his heart beat faster.

Fair warning: Poodie James has no car chases. It has a terrific train wreck, though.

Rifftides reader Wade Nelson of River Forest, Illinois, writes:

After reading a piece about George Russell, I hauled out a 1957 LP by Hal McKusick called Jazz Workshop that I hadn’t listened to in many years. Arrangements by Russell, Giuffre, Evans, Mandel, Albam and Cohn. Very fine music.

I couldn’t agree more. McKusick was in an elite cadre of musicians during a golden age of jazz in New York in the late 1950s and early ’60s. He had a distinctive tone on alto saxophone and a personalized adaptation of Charlie Parker’s style. He worked often with George Russell, recording with Russell and in various combinations with Art Farmer, Bill Evans, Eddie Costa, Paul Chambers, Milt Hinton, Barry Galbraith and others. He is the alto soloist on George Russell’s seminal recording of “All About Rosie.” There is a good cross-section of McKusick’s small groups from 1957 and ’58 on the compilation CD Now’s The Time.
Through the late fifties until 1978, McKusick was a CBS staff musician. I encountered him as a member of the band on the Arthur Godfrey radio program when I was doing a television news story about Godfrey. Godfrey’s band also incuded pianist Hank Jones, guitarist Remo Palmieri and trombonist Lou McGarity. I don’t know how they felt about Godfrey’s singing or his ukelele playing, but they all seemed glad to have the work. That kind of employment for New York musicians no longer exists. Since studio work ended, McKusick, now eighty-three, has made his living as a private teacher.

The Rifftides staff directs your attention to the right-hand column and the exhibit entitled Doug’s Picks. All the picks are new. We invite your comments, as always.

Labor Day Weekend’s Detroit International Jazz Festival is looming, and Mark Stryker of the Detroit Free Press is profiling some of its headliners. In today’s column, pianist Herbie Hancock tells Stryker about his early experience with Miles Davis.

“After a couple of months of trying to play what I thought would please Miles, I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to let this out.’
“So the next gig, which I think was in Chicago, I just played what I really wanted, and if it clashed with something Miles did, I threw it in there anyway.
“After the set I thought I was going to get fired. Miles walked up and said” — and here Hancock imitates Davis’ famous raspy whisper — ” ‘Why didn’t you play like that before?’
“Miles wanted to hear me. That set me free.”

Here’s a little of what Stryker writes about Hancock:

Hancock’s go-for-broke attitude electrifies the bandstand. Very little in jazz matches the anticipation that rises when Hancock starts a solo, because to a degree unusual even in an art based on improvisation, you never know what’s going to happen — and there’s a chance you’re about to hear the greatest piano solo you’ve ever heard.

To read the whole thing, go here, Perhaps you’ll be as astonished as I was by the size Hancock’s performance fees.

The Rifftides piece about Charles Mingus brought a response from pianist and composer Jill McManus in New York.

Jill McManus

I knew Mingus! I was introduced to him one night when I took my mother, in from England, to the old Half Note in the ’70s. I seem to remember it was pouring. We were waiting in line, chilled and dripping, chatting with Rev John Gensel when Mingus plunged in, and John introduced us. Mingus was charming, looked at them, one on either side of me, smiled and said, “Hmm, good Christian girl.” (!!) ( think I lowered my eyebrows.) He and John then proceded to a contest of crushing beer tops with the thumb of one hand, and Mingus won.
Mingus heard me play the early set at the Village Gate one night and was complimentary, and always greeted me warmly except once: The Jazz Sisters band was to open for him downstairs at the Gate. We were a sextet, and his group was a quintet. We got a great response, the only female jazz group of its kind in that day. Word was sent that Mingus resented being upstaged by a band bigger than his, but after his pout we were invited to his dressing room for cake. He was actually very nice.
I sat in with Mingus once at the Vanguard ( I was a beginner player, had been studying with Roland Hanna) one night when he was having a spat with Jaki Byard. Jaki was simmering at the bar, and Mingus called me up. Wow. I struggled to stay in place with Danny Richmond’s crazy style and dropping of bombs. Think I came out a couple of beats late on “Star Eyes.” But Mingus said “Come back and play anytime.”
The last vision – Mingus was in a wheelchair at Bradley’s with a group of friends. I went up to him and reached out to shake his hand, not realizing he was paralyzed. I was so chagrined I almost cried. But he nodded and I saw he forgave me. One night not long after that I dreamed that he was on a big boat leaving shore — it was foggy — I was trying to reach out to him to say goodbye — it was too far — too late to jump across. The boat disappeared into the fog. I think he died that night, and I learned of it a day or so later.
Some years later I met his oldest son, Charles III, at an art opening on the East Side. He told me about the time his father put him on the roof of a shed, and said “Jump, I’ll catch you. Trust me.” The little kid jumped and Mingus stepped back and let him crash to the ground, saying, “Never trust anybody.” The saddest story…

Jill McManus’s previous Rifftides contribution was in a team report on last fall’s benefit concert for Richard Sudhalter. In addition to composing and playing music, she writes about it for the Newark Star-Ledger.
McManus’s Symbols of Hopi (Concord, 1984) featuring her compositions and piano, David Liebman, Tom Harrell, Marc Johnson, Billy Hart and American Indian percussionists, is one of the important recordings of the 1980s still not reissued on CD.

Here’s a video clip of an unlikely collaboration, complete with a little refresher course in jazz history.

The Chicago pianist and self-described bon vivant Jeremy Kahn writes:

I was lucky enough to have crossed paths with Max Roach on a couple of different occasions: Once was for a workshop of an Amiri Baraka play about Bumpy Johnson, the black gangster in the twenties. It was performed by NYU students, one of whom was Muhal Richard Abrams’s daughter Richarda. The first time, though, was for 3 plays by Sam Shepard at LaMama for which Max was supplying the music. Permit me a middle-aged memory:
When the phone rang, I was engaged in the kind of personal business that under-employed guys in their twenties tend to engage in quite a bit. Picking up the phone with my good hand, the voice said “Jeremy Kahn? This is Max Roach.” I played along with this weak ruse while I tried to figure out which of my friends was doing this fairly convincing impersonation.
Much to my amazement, it turned out to actually be Max. He wanted me to be involved with the Shepard plays, along with Bobby Watson, Curtis Lundy and a drummer whose name I don’t recall. He was Max’s gofer, and Max seemed to delight in tormenting him.
During rehearsals, we smoked large amounts of reefer and hash totally out in the open. I mean, after all, we were jazz musicians, right? When called upon to play, Max would just count off a tempo and told us to jam. Sometimes he would sing a rhythmic figure and say “Do it in F minor”. At one point we said. “How about back and forth between F minor and G-flat major? Like this?” And he said, “Yeah, yeah; that’s good.” Max ended up winning an Obie award for his “Original score”, but was very gracious about acknowledging our contributions.
He was a great guy and a great hang 99% of the time, but, when he got pissed, he had a terrifying temper.
It was my privilege to have met him.

For a Rifftides remembrance of Max Roach, click here.

2007 is turning out to be a bonanza year for a Charles Mingus sextet that existed for a few months forty-three years ago. All of the band’s members are dead. Its music is gloriously alive. The high point so far is a remarkable two-CD set capturing a performance that might have been forgotten except for a lucky discovery. On a neglected shelf, Sue Mingus, indefatigable preserver of her husband’s legacy, found tapes of a concert the sextet played at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in March of 1964. Blue Note has released the music as Charles Mingus Sextet with Eric Dolphy: Cornell 1964.
With the promethean bassist were pianist Jaki Byard, saxophonists Eric Dolphy and Clifford Jordan, trumpeter Johnny Coles and drummer Dannie Richmond. They were red-hot and full of joy at the Cornell engagement, which took place nearly a month earlier than the Town Hall concert that launched the band’s celebrated European tour. Fresh from eight weeks at the Five Spot Café in Mahattan, Mingus had whipped the sextet and its repertoire into shape, achieving a combination of togetherness and abandon that can result only from long, steady work on the bandstand. This is a further reminder that the restrictive 21st century economy of the music business robs jazz of opportunities for creative development. When is the last time a major jazz group had a two-months’ run in a club?

Charles Mingus, 1964
Mingus’s emotional downs were often horrendous, hard on his sidemen, his listeners and himself. I once wrote:

If Mingus rose to towering rages, he also reached the sustained joy achievable only by musicians of the highest rank. It is a fact that all the musicians he abused, all those he screamed at and humiliated in public — even those he assaulted — forgave him, worked with again, and in most cases gave him credit for their development.

His ups could generate glory, and that’s what we get in the Cornell concert. Mingus and the band are happy, even giddy. Their virtuosity is wrapped in good feelings. Exuding raw energy in his bass work, Mingus is the coach and cheerleader urging everyone on.
“Stride it now, baby, take it back a few years, uh huh,” Mingus mutters to Byard during the pianist’s second solo chorus on “Take the ‘A’ Train.” His urging is additional fuel for the stride and boogie woogie fire that Byard builds before he slides into bebop time. Clifford Jordan follows with five hallelujah choruses levitated by Ellingtonian unison puncuations from Dolphy and Coles. Dolphy delivers one of his patented bass clarinet solos, full of wild interval leaps, inflected with speech patterns and intimations of birdsong . Coles, a great trumpeter who never got his due, begins the round of “‘A’ Train” solos reflective and thoughtful, with a touch of irony in his quotes. The performance includes a bass-drums conversation between Mingus and Richmond, as remarkable for its hilarity as for its intensity. In the midst of it, one of them exclaims, “Ya-hoo,” an emblem of the elation this track–indeed, the entire concert–generates. Byard’s swirl of solo piano on “ATFW You,” a tribute to Art Tatum and Fats Waller, opens the concert and sets the tone of exuberance.
The state of grace remains throughout the CDs, even in half-hour versions of “Fables of Faubus” and “Meditations,” Mingus compositions that arose out of his frustration and anger over political and social conditions in America. He performed “Meditations” with the sextet at Town Hall, then almost nightly during the month-long tour of Europe in April of ’64, and later that year with different personnel at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco and at the Monterey Jazz Festival. It was recorded on several of those occasions, but I have never been more moved by its solemnity and power than in this concert debut. The other premiere at Cornell was “Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk,” a piano piece that Mingus refined for the sextet during the Five Spot gig. As for “Faubus,” the racist Arkansas governor inspires ridicule and good-natured derision rather than anger in this performance loaded with punning quotes that include Mingus’s allusion to “Pick Yourself Up” and Byard’s whimsy in a series of variations on “Yankee Doodle.”
Mingus wrote the blues “So Long Eric” to wish Dolphy godspeed. Dolphy was to leave the group following the European tour. He and the others could not have known that in three months their astonishingly gifted colleague would be dead at thirty-six of a heart attack brought on by diabetes. Dolphy’s mercurial flute work is the centerpiece of “Jitterbug Waltz.” Mingus features Coles as “Johnny O’Coles, the only Irishman in the band” in a fast ¾ version of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” The news that he is going to play that unlikely tune and be the only soloist seems to come as a surprise to Coles. He scuffles a bit at the beginning, but by the end solves the piece’s Gaelic mysteries in a powerful chorus. It’s all great fun. And great music.
Rifftides reader Don Frese writes that he had the good fortune to hear the band live:

God, I was so lucky to see this group once at the 5 Spot just before the tour. It was a wonder the joint was still standing after, the performances were so intense. The second set was Parkeriana, the pastiche of Dizzy’s “Ow” and other tunes associated with Charlie Parker, and the last set was “Meditations.” I was in tears at the end.

Mingus Observed
Mr. Frese also provided a link to a video clip of the sextet rehearsing a portion of “Meditations” in Stockholm during the tour. To see and hear it, click here.
Mingus The Icon
Ten days from now, the Jazz Icons series of DVDs will release a new set of seven discs including the Mingus sextet videotaped during the ’64 tour of Scandinavia. Other DVDs in the release feature John Coltrane, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Dexter Gordon and Wes Montgomery.
Mingus’s Basses
Shortly after The New York Times article in late July about the widows of Charles Mingus and Art Pepper, Nigel Faigan, a Rifftides reader in New Zealand, wrote on the Jazz West Coast listserve:

I was interested to read about Susan Mingus and unreleased tapes. BUT I was dismayed to read that Mingus’s Bass is leaning in a corner of the apartment. CM owned a beautiful French bass – if that is sitting unplayed for all those years, it may be suffering. Could someone find out whether the bass is being played. Like any instrument, it will suffer from disuse.

The Rifftides staff asked Sue Graham Mingus. This is her reply:

Charles’s lion’s head bass is being played by Boris Kozlov, and has been for the past six or seven years. One bass was given to Red Callender and another to Aladar Pege, the Hungarian bassist. The only other bass here is the one whose right shoulder was cut off and reversed by a master Italian bass repairman who lived down the block from Charles’ studio on East 5th Street in the late Sixties and who accomplished this feat over a period of six months. Charles came up with this astonishing idea in order to facilitate bowing — this was his “bowing bass.”

–Sue Mingus

A Mingus Book

Further reading: Tonight at Noon, Sue Mingus’s absorbing account of her life with Charles.

Coming soon: meditations on Charles Mingus, who is proliferating posthumously this year. I had hoped to finish the piece tonight, but it is demanding more than I had intended to give it and night is rapidly heading toward morning. To borrow Dave Frishberg’s line, I gotta get me some Zzzzs.
Stay tuned.

Al Haig and Gene DiNovi came out of their teens into the excitement of bebop as the music was discovering itself in the early 1940s. They played piano with some of the most important musicians of the era, had periods of relative obscurity, then re-emerged — Haig briefly. DiNovi is still enjoying a long second run and showing no signs of slowing.

Al Haig
Haig’s first recording session, when he was twenty-one, was with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Curly Russell and Sid Catlett on the Guild session that produced “Salt Peanuts,” “Shaw ‘Nuff,” “Hot House” and the classic “Lover Man” with Sarah Vaughan’s vocal (all included in this collection). He went on to work extensively with Parker, Gillespie, Miles Davis and Stan Getz, recording with them and with Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Wardell Gray, Don Lanphere, Chet Baker and his own trio. He was one of the most inventive and influential bop pianists, generally considered second only to Bud Powell.
Blue Manhattan was Haig’s penultimate album. Issued as a vinyl disc by Interplay, the LP became a collector’s item and has finally appeared as a CD on the Japanese label M&I. The CD booklet incorrectly identifies the recording date as January 4, 1985. In fact, it was January, 1980, just short of two years before Haig’s death at fifty-eight. With basist Reggie Johnson and drummer Frank Gant, Haig retained the fluency, harmonic nuance, swing, humor and much of the fire of his youth. With an ear to new developments, he tackled John Coltrane’s “Impressions” and Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints,” as well as fresh material of his own.

Gene DiNovi
DiNovi, four years younger than Haig, began working with Henry Jerome when he was fourteen. He went on to play with swing era bands like Benny Goodman’s, then with bop pioneers Boyd Raeburn and Chubby Jackson. He recorded with Brew Moore and Lester Young and played with Chuck Wayne, Stan Hasselgard, Buddy DeFranco and other instrumentalists. He was a favorite accompanist of Peggy Lee, Anita O’Day, Lena Horne and Tony Bennett. Through the years, even while immersed in writing film scores, he kept playing.
All Through The Night is the most recent of a series of CDs DiNovi has recorded for Marshmallow records while making frequent tours of Japan and establishing himself as one of the favorite pianists of Japanese jazz fans. DiNovi’s fleetness, resolutely two-handed style and light, firm touch incorporate elements of Powell and another of his heroes, Hank Jones, for whom he names a piece called “The Dean.” The CD incudes bracing versions of Duke Jordan’s “Jordu” and the Cole Porter title tune. DiNovi has fine support from the Canadian bassist Neil Swainson and a drummer new to me, Kazuaki Yokoyama. DiNovi has made his home in Toronto for several years.

Record producer, writer and all-’round musician Bill Kirchner writes:

In 1995, I programmed and did the liner notes for Harry James: Verve Jazz Masters 55, a CD compilation of James’ MGM recordings from 1959 to ’64. These recordings are among James’ best from a jazz standpoint; the CD is still available.
My thanks to trumpeter/bandleader/historian Dean Pratt–much more of a James authority than I am–who hipped me to these recordings in 1993 when I was working on the Smithsonian Big Band Renaissance boxed set.

In case you’ve forgotten or never knew, Harry James was a terrific leader who had some great bands. If that seems obvious to you, then you are a better listener than many of the critics who knocked James for what they decided was showy trumpet playing without much musical merit. There are many recorded examples disproving that misperception and, it turns out, several pieces of video that also demonstrate the quality of his band. The Rifftides staff is grateful to the big band authority Bill Kirchner for calling some of those clips to our attention.
One of James’s excellent bands relatively late in his career had his faithful sidekick Jack Perciful on piano and riding herd on arrangements. Also in the rhythm section were drummer Buddy Rich and bassist Red Kelly, both of whom served James well in various editions of the band. The 1964 clips at the other end of the following links will attest to the band’s power and musicianship and to the authority and taste of James’s trumpet work. For evidence, go here
Here
Here
And, for a rare big band version of Ray Bryant’s “Cubano Chant” and some very hip, unshowy licks by James, go
Here
While you’re at You Tube, you may wish to look around a bit in the Harry James section for other clips from a wide range of his career.