Archives for February 2009

Concerning the “Driving Be Bop” item below, Ted O’Reilly writes from Toronto: 

Over the years, Honda has called several vehicles, including a motorcycle, Jazz. Now Renault, the French auto maker, has unveiled a new model in its Kangoo line and named it the Be Bop.

Could Renault’s move kick-start a trend? How about:

The Renault web site indicates that the Be Bop is available in much of the world, but not in the United States, the land where its namesake originated.

In the past few days, three videos have materialized of a 1956 television performance by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. They show the group after Brubeck was elevated to general fame by way of a TIME magazine cover story but before Joe Morello and Eugene Wright replaced Joe Dodge and Norman Bates on drums and bass. As I wrote in Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond,

It may be difficult for anyone who grew up after the pervasive hype of television and the omnipresence of the internet diluted the impact of print, to understand the power of a cover story in TIME. It brought massive attention to the subject and made him, or her, an instant celebrity. Brubeck’s career had begun to show that it had the potential for steady, respectable growth. Now it took off. Sales of his records leaped, not only of the new Columbias with Desmond, Bates and Dodge, but the Fantasys as well. The Quartet’s bookings increased and its fees grew exponentially.

Dodge resigned and Morello came aboard in the fall of ’56, so the TV program was most likely in the spring or summer of that year. As too frustratingly often with You Tube, the person who posted the videos gives no information about the program – not the date, the name of the show, the name of the host, the call letters of the station or the name of the city. I am attempting to dig up those facts. Stay tuned.
Of course, the music is what matters. The importance of Bates and Dodge to the early quartet has been obscured by the attention given Wright and Morello in the “classic” Brubeck Quartet following the massive success of “Take Five” in the early sixties. This is a rare chance to see Bates and Dodge and hear what a well-integrated band this was. To eliminate the bother of following links to YouTube, the Rifftides public service department brings you all three segments, totaling nearly 25 minutes. Enjoy.

If anyone out there in the blogosphere knows the missing who, when and where of these clips, please use the Comments link below.

Tonight and tomorrow night, Town Hall in New York City is observing the fiftieth anniversary of Thelonious Monk’s celebrated performance there with a ten-piece band. This evening’s concert will present trumpeter Charles Tolliver’s big band playing Monk’s music. WNYC will broadcast it live at eight o’clock EST. To hear it in the New York area, tune in to 93.9 FM. To hear it on the internet, go here.
Tomorrow night, pianist Jason Moran will lead an eight-piece ensemble in what is being described as a concert and media-collage. Both concerts will use W. Eugene Smith’s photographs of Monk and orchestrator Hall Overton as they created medium-size-band arrangements of Monk’s compositions. WNYC will record Moran’s concert and may broadcast it later.
Yesterday, Moran was in WNYC’s studios for the Leonard Lopate Show, discussing and demonstrating the challenges of interpreting Monk. Lopate brought in cameras, resulting in radio with pictures. Moran’s sidemen are alto saxophonist Logan Richardson, tenor saxophonist Aaron Stewart, bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits.

The recording of Monk’s Town Hall concert of February 28, 1959, is a basic repertoire item for any serious listener.

What you’ve all been waiting for —
— new Doug’s Picks. Please see the center column.

Howard Mandel suffered a transportation glitch, but gamely picked up the reporting on the Portland Jazz Festival that I left dangling. The proprietor of Jazz Beyond Jazz, Howard does a fine job of pulling together the loose Portland ends. He manages to incorporate three video clips, including one of Laurel and Hardy that I could watch all night. To see his omnibus piece, click here.

Every few years, there is a Freddie Webster revival, of sorts. In recent weeks, through internet contact jazz musicians, researchers and writers have again been discussing Webster, the trumpeter generally thought to have been an influence on Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. Webster died in 1947 at the age of 30. If you have been told or read about Webster but never heard him, David Brent Johnson offers the opportunity to listen to just about everything the trumpeter recorded. In 2005, Johnson devoted an hour to Webster on his Night Lights program. Between recordings, he provides considerable biographical information. To hear the archived program on Johnson’s web site, click here. See if you detect the pre-bebop ideas that may have inspired Davis and Gillespie.

Viewing Tip
The current offering on Bret Primack’s web site is a video in which the Blue Note 7 all-stars play a complete performance of Thelonious Monk’s “Criss Cross.” It is worth your time. To see it, click here.
For the Rifftides review of a Blue Note 7 concert as they got underway with their national tour, go here.

When I was looking for something on You Tube the other night, what to my wondering eyes should appear but the Kessler Sisters. I hadn’t seen them in forty years, and they still looked terrific. Paul Desmond introduced me to them in 1965 at the Hilton Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Desmond had just played a concert with the Dave Brubeck Quartet at Willamette University down the road in Salem. I couldn’t go because I was working. When I got off the air, I met him for a drink. Here’s the story from Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.

In the Hilton bar, he was high on the success of the concert he had just played and delighted to see the Kessler sisters again. The Scopitone was a film jukebox. The first ones were made in France, in part from used World War Two airplane reconnaissance camera equipment. The more finished version that made its way from Europe to the United States in 1963 looked rather like a big old soda fountain Wurlitzer with a screen at the top. Scopitone films on sixteen milimeter stock with magnetic sound tracks ran on endless loops through a projector inside the jukebox. They were descendants of the Nickelodeons of the first decade of the twentieth century and the soundies of the thirties and forties, and ancestors of the music videos seen on MTV and VH-1. French businessmen persuaded U.S. investors, who in turn persuaded bar and lounge operators, that Scopitone was going to get Americans away from their television sets and back out to night life. The films ran two or three minutes, with production values on a scale from almost absent to spectacular, and featured artists with talent to match. At the low end of the scale were groups like The Casualeers singing on a fire escape while two mostly nude girls gyrated. At the upper end were Scopitones starring the Kessler sisters, a pair of blonde, leggy young women who sang and danced with exhilarating zeal through pieces like “Cuando, Cuando” and “Pollo e Champagne.”

Desmond pumped quarters into the Hilton Scopitone, sending the Kessler Sisters cavorting again and again through an amusement park, singing as they leapt on and off a train, with a corps of dancers in the background executing routines that would have done Busby Berkeley proud. He was convinced that the Scopitone was going to be bigger than television and almost had me persuaded that we should invest large sums in the phenomenon. The more Dewars we had, the more sensible the investment plan became. Fortunately, the Oregon closing law kicked in before I committed to anything irrevocable. I don’t know whether Paul signed up for a share of the company, but I am glad that I didn’t. By the end of the decade, Scopitones were gathering dust in warehouses all over the world.

In today’s Los Angeles Times, David Ritz writes from a personal standpoint about the nearly simultaneous loss of three important musicians. Ritz is the author or co-author of several books about blues and soul artists including Ray Charles. The headline on his op-ed piece is “Ray Charles’ Heavenly Trio.” Here’s the first paragraph:

In summer 1957, I was a teenager who had just moved to Texas from the East Coast. One Sunday afternoon, I happened to walk into a large social hall in South Dallas where a jam session was underway. On the bandstand were three saxophonists: Leroy “Hog” Cooper on baritone, David “Fathead” Newman on tenor and Hank Crawford on alto.

To read the whole thing, go here. For the Rifftides remembrance of Newman, and a performance video, go here.

Earlier this week, Dick Hyman played a noontime recital at a church in Manhattan. Fellow artsjournal blogger Jan Herman was there with his camera and posted videos of Hyman playing Fats Waller’s “My Fate Is In Your Hands” and “Bach Up To Me.” To see Jan’s piece and hear Hyman, go here.
When you come back, if you want more Waller — and, of course, you will — click on these links to hear Fats play:
“My Fate Is In Your Hands,
” Valentine Stomp” (take one)
and
“Valentine Stomp” (take two), all from 1929.
There. Now, don’t you feel better?

Final report on the opening days of the Portland Jazz Festival:
In elegant Schnitzer Hall, clarinetist and tenor saxophonist Don Byron had Edward Simon on piano and Eric Harland on drums in his Ivey-Divey Trio. It was the same instrumentation as the Gross-Frishberg-Doggett trio that played the night before in quite different circumstances (see Part 2). In makeup, feeling and interaction, both groups reflect the Lester Young-Nat Cole-Buddy Rich trio of the mid-1940s. Their lead voices, respectively Byron and John Gross, revel in taking harmony and phrasing over the edge of convention. Gross does it with no physical motion beyond what is necessary to operate his saxophone. Byron moves constantly, bobbing, weaving, dancing, conducting with body language. It would be interesting to hear and see these two adventurers together.
Byron opened with “Lefty Teachers at Home” from his 2004 Ivey-Divey CD. The piece has evolved harmonically, with even greater chance-taking than in the recording. Then came “Fosberry Flop.” Introducing it, Byron suggested that just as Dick Fosberry’s unorthodox style revolutionized high-jumping, the piece involved turning around aspects of Arnold Schoenberg. That qualifies as counter-revolutionary. The trio’s use of dynamics was most dramatic in “Fosberry,” Harland ending a solo with a crescendo that
Byron and Simon followed so softly that their re-entry would have to be notated pppp. Then came a three-way conversation in which, as he made his points, Simon dominated and receded, swelled and diminished. The pianist was impressive throughout the set and evidently having a splendid time. He rarely stopped smiling.
“Somebody Loves Me” was laced with boom-chicky rhythms that Byron, Simon and Harland managed to make both evocative of earlier jazz and as hip as tomorrow. They generated powerful swing, with solos from Byron on clarinet and tenor, Harland commenting and interjecting, and Simon’s full-bodied playing a revelation. Has Simon slipped under the radar or have I been missing his growth from a good into a master jazz player? Byron’s tenor work was fine. His clarinet playing was brilliant. He wound up his set with what he described as a “chain gang” piece in which he recruited the audience of more than 2,000 as a percussion section, clapping time.
When he was through, Byron referred to the next artist as “the greatest pianist in the world.” That was McCoy Tyner, presented as co-leader of a quartet with Joe Lovano. It was the last of Lovano’s four major appearances at the Portland Festival. Bassist Gerald Cannon and drummer Eric Gravatt, stalwarts of post-Coltrane jazz, rounded out the rhythm section. Much of the music was from Tyner’s 2007 CD with Lovano, and some of the pieces they played go back as far as his 1967 album The Real McCoy.
No saxophonist can work with Tyner and avoid comparison with John Coltrane, but as Joe Henderson and Michael Brecker had before him in their collaborations with Tyner, Lovano has long since worked through his Coltrane apprenticeship. Even on “Moment’s Notice,” the one Coltrane composition in the concert, there was no sense of Coltrane’s spirit riding on Lovano’s shoulder. He and Tyner have developed their own relationship. It involves more by-play and humor than existed in the classic Coltrane quartet.
As in most of his work for the past couple of decades,Tyner’s hallmarks were strength and volume, but in “Moment’s Notice” he shifted down for a solo of clarity with single note lines rather than unremitting successions of power chords. He reached the concert’s apogee of muscular playing in “Angelica,” which also had a commanding Cannon bass solo. Then came Tyner’s only unaccompanied piece and only standard song of the evening. In “For All We Know,” he disclosed more about his early piano influences than we usually hear. Intensity drained away for a few minutes and his playing was utterly relaxed. It encompassed moments when Teddy Wilson might have been at the keyboard and others when Tyner took his listeners even further back in the history of jazz piano, to the stride era. It was a change of pace, good programming and a glimpse of a facet of Tyner’s musical makeup that is usually under cover.
For “Blues on the Corner,” it was back to post-bop business, with chops flying everywhere, to borrow Louis Armstrong’s immortal phrase; plenty of exchanges between Tyner and Lovano with each smiling at the other’s phrases, another sturdy bass solo by Cannon, and drum explosions from Gravatt. The encore, following insistent applause, was one of Tyner’s signature compositions, “Fly With the Wind”
The publicity surrounding and following Lionel Loueke’s signing with Blue Note Records made it seem that the guitarist from Benin in West Africa had materialized unexpectedly. However, he is an overnight sensation with a deep background in music. It includes higher education in Europe, studies at Berklee College of Music and the Thelonious Monk Institute, and experience with Terence Blanchard’s sextet. He and his trio mates met in Paris and have been playing together for more than a decade.
All of that time in yoke accounts for the polish in their performance, and for their empathy. In the three pieces I heard them play in Portland, it was clear that, with bassist Massimo Biolcati and drummer Ferenc Nemeth, Loueke has merged his African heritage and his jazz knowledge in a synthesis that gives his trio a sound and identitiy that qualifiy them for that abused adjective, unique.

Trying to determine whether they play jazz is as pointless as trying to define jazz itself. They play improvised music that allows freedom within structures, and both aspects of their work are compelling. Loueke’s style encompasses rhythm guitar as well as a highly individual way of gliding through chord patterns. It is unlike the work of any other guitarist with whom I am familiar. His singing, sometimes integrated with simultaneous vocal clicks, is intriguing and, as far as I could tell on short exposure, not included as a novelty but as an integral part of his performance.
Biolcati and Nemeth are first-class players who listen closely to Loueke and each other. They all throw rhythmic suprises to and fro, to their apparent pleasure and satisfaction. It’s a serious and entertaining band. The songs they played, “Karibu,” “Benny’s Tune” and “Seven Teens,” are all from the Loueke trio’s most recent CD. I liked what I heard in Portland and I’m going to spend a little time with their album to get to know them better.
The PDX festival continues this weekend. My fellow artsjournal.com blogger Howard Mandel is there. Maybe he’ll pick up the cudgel and let us know what happens.

Further reflections on highlights of the festival’s first weekend:
Gonzalo Rubalcaba opened the first major concert of the festival with a band of young sidemen who are in the thick of the latterday New York Latin jazz explosion that is producing some of the most important music of the new century. The virtuoso pianist’s quintet is twice or three times removed from the Charlie Parker-Dizzy Gillespie generation but it has a distinct bebop lineage, particularly in the ensembles. The rhythms are manifestations of the various Cuban traditions of which Rubalcaba is a master. The Rubalcaba band’s melding of the two strains produces harmonic astringency and irresistible time feeling. Alto saxophonist Yosvany Terry, bassist Yunior Terry and drummer Ernesto Simpson are Rubalcaba’s fellow Cubans. Trumpeter Michael Rodriguez is a New Yorker fully immersed in the Latin mainstream and, like Terry, a soloist who seems bound to become a major figure.
A typical piece in a Rubalcaba concert begins with the pianist unaccompanied in a meditation at the keyboard. Gradually, his playing takes on rhythmic character that intensifies as bass and drums undergird the time. Trumpet and alto saxophone express the melodic line harmonized or in unison, then solo at length. In some pieces there are drum or bass solos. Rubalcaba often chooses to go last in the solo sequence.
The other night, Yosvany Terry blew billows and clusters of notes with a vigor that often bordered on ferocity. Rodriguez was more considered in his note choices but played with nearly equal force and with excursions into the stratospheric range that seems to be standard equipment for young trumpeters. Simpson’s roiling drum patterns urged them on. There may be no pianist at work today with more technique than Rubalcaba. He astonishes listeners with his command of the instrument. And yet, when he solos following the elation of a drum, bass, trumpet or saxophone solo by one of his sidemen, the level of passion drops. It may be that he means to create contrast. In any case, for all of the beauty of his playing, in his solos the emotional level of the music subsides. Judging by their reaction, the Portland audience didn’t notice that, or it didn’t matter to them. Rubalcaba and the band received thunderous applause and a standing ovation.
The second half of the opening night concert was trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard’s post-hurricane lament for his home town, New Orleans. As in the CD of the work, “A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina)” presented Blanchard’s quintet and a 40-piece orchestra. Written by Blanchard and members of his band, the music expresses the grief, anger and frustration that dominated the city in the wake of Katrina and the Bush administration’s botched response to the disaster. Painfully, New Orleans is recovering from both. A thirteen-movement suite, “A Tale of God’s Will” has uplifting moments as well as dirges, but Blanchard delivered the uplift on waves of anger expressed not only in his playing, but also in spoken sentiments onstage. Still, passages of quiet beauty remain in the mind, notably in Aaron Parks’ “Ashé” and in “Dear Mom,” Blanchard’s portrayal of his mother’s ordeal in the flooding of New Orleans.
Blanchard’s orchestral writing, still evolving, sometimes bypasses the potential for harmonic depth and variety in the string section, but when he brings in the brass, he achieves moments of swelling grandeur. It is mystifying why Blanchard or the concert producer thought it was necessary to amplify the orchestra. In the good acoustics of Schnitzer Hall, the balance between soloists and orchestra would have been better au naturale. Blanchard’s excessive use of slurs and scoops in his playing has always disturbed me. In “Levees,” with its echoes of “St. James Infirmary,” the slurs were effective. Nonetheless, as they accumulated through the concert, they amounted to a distraction.
Bassist Derrick Hodge and drummer Kendrick Scott have been with Blanchard for some time. Pianist Fabian Almazan and young tenor saxophonist Walter Smith are new to the band. All played beautifully in a work whose substance should give it a life beyond its timeliness as commentary on a tragedy.
In her concert at the Schnitzer, Dianne Reeves did what she does best. She sang good songs simply. Accompanied by her trio and the Oregon Symphony orchestra conducted by Gregory Vajda, Reeves avoided the gospel and soul affectations that have sometimes marred her work and employed her glorious voice in the interpretation of standards appropriate to Valentine’s Day. She included “I Remember Sarah,” which she wrote with Billy Childs, and followed it with an engagingly self-deprecating anecdote about her first encounter with Sarah Vaughan, her idol, when Reeves was a teenager.
Thad Jones’ “A Child Is Born” and Gerhswin’s “Embraceable You” were high points. Both had affecting piano solos by Peter Martin. Martin, with her other longtime trio members bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Kendrick Scott, backed Reeves with what may have been extrasensory perception. It was, hands down, the best I have ever heard her sing. Reeves’ performance was an emotional experience for her and her audience.
At the Portland Art Museum, guitarist John Scofield had bassist Matt Penman and drummer Bill Stewart in his trio. With the tonal qualities of a hip hurdy-gurdy, his daring intervals and thrilling runs, Scofield delivered a concert packed with intensity and good-natured swing. Continuing his ubiquitousness, Joe Lovano sat in with his old friend and recording partner for a not-quite-impromptu meeting of their mutual admiration society. Lovano, who evidently either never forgets a tune or can absorb and perform one simultaneously, was in lockstep with Scofield on complex melody lines. They had a great time entertaining one another and the audience. Penman and Stewart were in equally fine fettle.
Meanwhile, at the Art Bar of the Portland Center for the Performing Arts, the cooperative trio of tenor saxophonist John Gross, pianist Dave Frishberg and drummer Charlie Doggett were playing to a modest crowd until the Scofield concert ended. Then, the bar in the PCPA atrium filled up with thirsty musicians and others, some of whom paid attention to the music, which was a good idea, because it was remarkable. Gross, who made his mark in the most avant garde band Shelly Manne ever had, is a tenor saxophonist who calmly and with a rich tone plays iconoclastic ideas. Frishberg is a celebrated performer of his own songs whose policy is never to sing in Portland, his home town. He does, however, accept gigs there as a pianist. He is one of the best pianists in the mainstream. Doggett is a young drummer who accommodates himself to the extremes of Gross’s and Frishberg’s styles and helps fuse the trio into a cohesive and coherent group. I had to come and go during their three hours on the stand, but heard their performances of Thelonious Monk’s “Ask Me Now;” Gary McFarland’s “Blue Hodge;” Bob Brookmeyer’s “Dirty Man;” and three Ellington pieces, “Dancers in Love,” “Strange Feeling” and “Scronch.” Some of those are on their only CD, which I have recommended before and recommend again. It was a pleasure to hear them in person.
That’s enough for now. In the third and final installment of this Portland report, I’ll give you a few words on McCoy Tyner, Don Byron and Lionel Loueke.

What to add to the hundreds of tributes to Louie Bellson in the wake of his death last weekend? The outpouring of accolades emphasizes what anyone who ever encountered him knows: he was full of warmth, generosity and the largest available portion of human spirit. Dozens of obituaries are quoting Duke Ellington’s assessment of Bellson as not only the world’s greatest drummer but the world’s greatest musician. There are excellent obits by Howard Reich in the Chicago Tribune, Nate Chinen in The New York Times and Don Heckman in The Los Angeles Times. 

The grins on the faces of Hinton and Bellson when Earl Hines was in full flight.