Archives for June 2005

For the next few days, I’ll continue playing catch-up with CDs that accumulated, and may have reproduced, while I was working on Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond (See Doug’s Books on the right). John Bishop’s Origin and OA2 labels concentrate on jazz in the Pacific Northwest. That gives Origin a large pool of talented musicians from which to draw. The label issues so many CDs that it’s hard to keep up with them. The music ranges from mainstream to the near edge of the avant garde. The sampler Modern Jazz: A Collection of Seattle’s Finest Jazz offers an overview, but merely hints at the riches of the Origin catalog. Like many albums by Origin artists, the sampler consists exclusively of original compositions. However satisfying that approach may be to the artists’ egos and sense of integrity, and regardless of how many mechanical royalties they avoid paying to the Gershwin and Porter estates, it presents a challenge to listeners who subscribe to the Broadbent principle. As you may recall from yesterday, that principle involves pianist Alan Broadbent’s conviction that listeners need and appreciate familiar melodies and forms with which to orient themselves. Trombonist Michael Vlatkovich’s trio CD Queen Dynamo offers a double whammy—nine originals as points of departure for free playing. I wonder how many record store or internet browsers unfamiliar with Vlatkovich’s blowsy, often optimistic, music are likely to add it to their shopping carts based on track titles like “The Length of the Tail Doesn’t Really Matter But it Does Have to be Bushy.” The music is funny and cheerful, and Jonas Tauber is one hell of a bass player.
Notes on a few other Origin and OA2 CDs:
Marc Seales Band, A Time, A Place, A Journey. A professor of music at the University of Washington, Seales is one of the Northwest’s most popular jazz pianists. This set by his sextet, recorded at Tula’s night club, shows why. It tends toward Seales’s reflective aspect and includes a slow “Deep River” ending on a powerful tremolo that releases the tension of exhiliration beneath the spiritual’s surface.
Steve Korn, Points In Time. Korn is the drummer on Seales’s album. Seales is the pianist on Korn’s. Two saxophones with a rhythm section play originals that are gentle, modal, peaceful, suitable for meditation. The CD is interesting until, about half way through, a sameness sets in.
Randy Halberstadt’s Parallel Tracks has only pieces by others, among them Artie Shaw, Bronislaw Kaper, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Cole Porter and Frederic Chopin. Halberstadt wrote one of the best books on jazz improvisation, Metaphors For The Musician: Perspectives from a Jazz Pianist. Accompanied by bassist Jeff Johnson and drummer Gary Hobbs, he demonstrates with his refined touch, harmonic adventurism and humor that he knew what he was writing about.
Like Halberstadt, Johnson and Hobbs would be better known if they were based in New York. Johnson’s Near Earth is a successor to his Free CD of a few years ago and again presents the bassist in empathetic conjunction with the luminous saxophonist Hans Teuber and a drummer, in this case Tad Britton. The only standard tune is Johnny Mercer’s “Dream.” As in their originals, they take “Dream” out, but not so far out that they’re not near Earth.
Hobbs, who played in one of Stan Kenton’s last bands, is a thinking drummer whose arranging imagination is an important factor in his Of My Times. He blends horns and cello with each other and with conventional and unconventional rhythm section instruments for surprising effects, among them a sly funk version of “Oh, Suzanna,” langorous backdrops for Gretta Matassa’s vocal on “Besame Mucho” and the techno thrust of “Robot Love.” I would like to have heard fewer synthesizer features and rock derivatives and more of the lyricism of the title track, but Hobbs’s drumming is fascinating no matter what the context.
More tomorrow on items from the Origin storehouse

I think it’s about time to put to rest the matter of New York Times critic Ben Ratliff’s predicting the quality of a concert that hadn’t happened (Rifftides, June 15.) But not quite. The Portland, Oregon, writer Jack Berry offered us this thought:

The Ratliff flap is sad. But it’s not so much the need to be “edgy,” which some observers suggest is the Times‘ new obsession. Pop culture is all about the next thing. If it’s been done, it’s done. Jazz is classical music (for better and worse). Writers about classical music are supposed to check in and see what the primary performers are doing. And, in doing that, you can be “edgy.” It’s appropriate to drop music that has no shelf life and that’s where Ratliff should be working. Ah, when Mozart was pop, when jazz was pop….

Berry is writing a biography of the tenor saxophonist Jim Pepper.

During the more than two years I was mostly closeted writing Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, CDs kept materializing in my mailbox. There wasn’t much I could do about them but write an occasional review. When I emerged from isolation, I sampled many and paid close attention to a few. In the next few days, I’ll share with you my imprssions of some of them.
Now that any eighteen-year-old tenor player is likely to be a record company, the CDs come pouring in. Some weeks, self-produced albums by fledgling musicians outnumber those by players with track records (so to speak). More often than not, these maiden voyages are launched on waves of compositions by the leader, but I have encountered no new jazz composer with Herbie Hancock’s ability to sustain an album of original material. When I see on the back of an album a list of tunes written by someone six months out of Berklee, my inclination is to consign the CD to the box reserved for things I may get around to some day. I’m with Alan Broadbent, who spoke years ago about the importance to performer and listener alike of improvisation based on recognizable music.

“There’s a joy, an intellectual bliss that derives from being able to discern the form of something and to hear how somebody is playing on it,” Alan told me years ago when I was preparing the notes for his Pacific Standard Time. “A lot of listeners who know a tune sense its form and feel that they’re a part of it. They can feel the tension. They can hear how the tune is being reharmonized. That’s part of the joy of the art of it, for listeners to be able to use their minds, so it’s not just mood music.”

Still, once in a while something intrigues me into hearing a collection of originals by a young musician. In the case of Alex Heitlinger’s Green Light, the hook was the presence in Heitlinger’s sextet of the remarkable trumpeter Greg Gisbert. Heitlinger is a 24-year-old Colorado trombonist who played in symphony orchestras in the Rocky Mountain region and around the Southwest. He recently moved to Jersey City to be close to the New York scene. His jazz playing has elements of whimsy that remind me of Bill Harris and Roswell Rudd. His flights of fancy extend into his writing on “Crazy Jake,” which sounds like George Russell visiting a 1920s Berlin cabaret, and “Pondering,” with a melody perfectly suited to the title. “Missing You” is a waltz with a bittersweet cast and nicely harmonized horn parts behind Art Lande’s piano solo. “The Foot,” whose line is more a series of impressions than a melody, opens up space around a vamp for the horns to sputter and splatter at will, which they do entertainingly and not to excess. Lande, Heitlinger, saxophonist Peter Sommer and Gisbert solo lustily, with bassist Dwight Kilian and drummer Jill Fredericksen strong in support. This one was a pleasant surprise.
More tomorrow on recent (well, relatively recent) CDs.

Don’t miss DevraDoWrite’s update on Bill Crow, bassist, anecdotist, musicians’ champion and good guy. Excerpt:

Bill Crow was a musical chameleon in his youth, playing trumpet, baritone horn, alto sax drums, and valve trombone. He didn’t take up the bass until he was in his early 20s. Within a few years he was playing bass with Stan Getz, Marian McPartland, and Gerry Mulligan, to name just three, and he never looked back.

Read the whole thing, and see a great recent picture of Bill, here.

The Czech Frantisek UhliÅ™ is one of the greatest bassists in the world. He works frequently in the trio of his countryman pianist Emil Viklicky, another great European player about whom most Americans know little. I just ran across a brief note I made when I was in Prague twelve years ago, helping American economists teach market economics to Czech journalists newly released from communism.

June 10, 1993: Went to Agartha last night to hear Frantisek Uhlir, the wonderful bassist. Earlier in the day one of his fans told me he is better than George Mraz. Maybe, maybe not, but he is superb, world class. Uhlir is a short, powerful, chubby man with a pleasant round face. His tone is round, too, and centered, and he is fast, agile and swinging.

Vicklicky’s trio with Uhlir and the Slovakian drummer Laco Tropp backs the multi-instrumentalist Scott Robinson on Robinson’s lovely Summertime CD released last year on the Czech label Cube Metier. In my Jazz Times review of the album and one by Robinson of Louis Armstrong compositions, I wrote:

One of the best contemporary pianists, Viklicky’s soloing and comping, his touch, voicings and intervals have a good deal in common with fleet, tasteful pianists like Tommy Flanagan, Jimmy Rowles and Bill Charlap. His individuality is deeply informed by the music of his native land, and particularly by that of Moravia.

To read the review of both albums, go here.

This may be a subject better suited to Nancy Levinson’s Pixel Points than to Rifftides, but here goes: what has happened to house design? I don’t mean high-end design by top-rung architects working with wealthy clients, but design of houses for ordinary folks. Not far from where I live, a small orchard has disappeared—almost overnight, it seems—and been replaced by a half-dozen houses that will probably sell for a couple of hundred thousand dollars each. They are builder houses, not so much designed as extruded; featureless, bland, sited cheek-by-jowl on their lots with their backs to views, their fronts looking at each other across a cul de sac, two of the four walls devoid of windows except for tiny ones looking out of bathrooms. The forbidding doors of two-car garages dominate the house fronts. Variations on this depressing theme characterize a high percentage of new housing built in the United States.
In contrast, a mile or so away, is a three-acre former farm also now populated with houses. Those houses were bought by an entrepeneur and moved there when a hospital expanded and forced them out. They appear to have been built in the late 1930s and forties, with light, openess and welcoming characteristics in mind. None of them is grand, but each is an individual. Some are on a new curving short street, others face a busy thoroughfare. Together, they have the friendly aspect of a village. The houses on the old orchard land have all the charm of a clump of prefab classrooms on the back lot of an overcrowded high school.
In their book A Pattern Language (Oxford), Christopher Alexander and his fellow architects of the Center for Environmental Structure long ago set out principles not only for design of houses but also of neighborhoods, towns and regions. A few headings from the book hint at what they suggest for dwellings:
Light on Two Sides of Every Room
Opening to the Street
Connection to the Earth
Garden Seat
Sitting Circle
Alcoves
Natural Doors and Windows
Low Sill
Pools of Light
Front Door Bench
Windows Which Open Wide
Small Panes
Flow Through Rooms
Little in A Pattern Language is technical. Most of it is based in taste and common sense. Driving around new subdivisions, I can’t help wondering about the supply of both among many of today’s home homebuilders—and why buyers settle for lousy design.

It is clear from responses I am getting that some of you are working journalists and that others have an interest in the news process. So, I am adding Tim Porter’s First Draft blog to the list of Other Places in the right-hand column. Porter has a solid background as an editor and, later, as an independent thinker about journalism problems. He has valuable insights into the big issues. He is unforgiving of bad writing and clichés. And he must be a good guy; he lives in Mill Valley, California, perhaps the favorite of my many former home towns. First Draft is worth a look.

The Jazz Institute of Chicago website has the transcription of a valuable 1981 interview with Bill Perkins by the indefatigable British print and broadcast journalist Steve Voce. Perkins was one of the great tenor saxophonists who grew out of Lester Young. In the fifties, Stan Getz said of him, “Perk is playing more than any of us.” I have always assumed that by “any of us,” Getz meant not just himself, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Paul Quinichette, Brew Moore and dozens of others who worshipped Lester, but tenor saxophonists in general. Perkins adored Young, but he was on a constant search beyond Young, beyond himself, so that he could get deeper inside himself and his music. He worked incessantly and intensely to become a more expressive player. And he seemed never to be satisfied with his own playing. More than once I have seen his fellow musicians’ mouths fall open in astonishment at some daring passage he played, only to have him come off the stand shaking his head in disgust at what he considered a failed attempt. His self-deprecation was no act. Here’s some of what he told Voce.

As you know the attraction to Los Angeles for the musicians was the chance to make money in the studios. It was a very enticing thing. But in recent years because of the sheer number of musicians there they’ve made their own thing musically. And still you can’t possibly make a living as a jazz musician in Los Angeles. I think I took the studio work too seriously. I’d go to each job with the attitude that it was supposed to be a work of art and I’d wind up going home almost on the point of tears because I thought I’d played badly. But, as my dear friend Ernie Watts pointed out, it’s not art it’s craft at best, and if you look at it that way it won’t be so painful to you. Here’s a man half my age educating me!

The important thing about Perk—all musicians who played with him in later years remarked on it—was his unceasing self-renewal as an artist. A coterie of fans constantly barraged him with requests that he play as he did in 1956; specifically, as he did on the marvelous Grand Encounter with John Lewis, Jim Hall, Percy Heath and Chico Hamilton. But, like Hall, he kept growing, exploring, taking harmonic and rhythmic chances, never entertaining the thought of remaining static. That made it difficult for admirers whose antennae were pointed backward, but he treated more open-minded listeners to some of the most adventurous playing in all of jazz. His exploratory, occasionally boggling, conception comes through in his last recordings with the Bill Holman Band, and there is a lot of it in CDs with the Danny Pucillo Quartet on Pucillo’s Dann label and in Silver Storm with Bud Shank’s sextet on Raw Records. Still, Perkins never lost his love for Lester Young and was persuaded late in his life to recreate some of Young’s most famous solos on Perk Plays Prez on the Fresh Sound label.
In part because he was on the west coast, in part because it is demanding to follow a moving target, Perk’s daring late work eluded taste-making critics. Anyone who examines his ouvre of the late nineties and early 21st century will witness astonishing music-making. I rarely tell musicians what I think they should do. Generally, they don’t need or want to hear it. But in 2002, when we are all in the same place, I suggested to Perkins and the guitarist Jim Hall, another giant incapable of not looking ahead, that they collaborate on new music. They liked the idea. That would have been something to hear. If only it had happened before Perk died in August of 2003.

Leo Boucher in Houston sent a message about my comments Wednesday on Ben Ratliff’s New York Times piece predicting a boring concert at the JVC Festival.

I read it differently. I don’t think he meant that those players are boring or that the concert would be boring. I think he meant that it is an example of boring, uninspired programming. My guess is that that’s why he didn’t name the pianists; he wasn’t dissing them, but the festival programmers. I look forward to reading your blog.

Nate Dorward, a Canadian reviewer and blogger, wrote much the same, and added:

I think a better word would have been “unimaginative” or “safe”: heartfelt tributes originated by the musicians themselves are one thing, but the way festival programmers (and record labels) constantly turn jazz into unimaginatively packaged tributes to a pantheon of past greats is frustrating for many jazz fans. It would be far more respectful of the individual geniuses of Weston, Allen, Barron and Caine to give them each a concert to themselves and let them play whatever music struck their fancy.

I don’t know how far I’m going to go with the Food section under Doug’s Picks, but Jack Wright of Boston responded to the first entry.

For your asparagus recipe, allow me to recommend a favorite pinot gris of mine. The label is Big Fire, the winemaker is R. Stuart & Co of McMinnville, OR. That’s what I’ll be drinking when I make your recipe. I look forward to reading Rifftides fervently.

Ah, those Oregon pinots—gris and noir. Salud.
Another Bostonian, the respected critic Bob Blumenthal, had a thought about Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.

Am I the only one who has said that your Desmond book reminds me of nothing so much as the recent Albert Ayler “spirit box”? And I mean that in a good way, but these are two saxophonists who don’t normally share the same thought.

I can hear Desmond giving his conspiratorial chuckle at the thought. He rather liked Ornette Coleman, even if he did say that listening to Ornette was like living in a house where everything was painted red.
The master trumpeter Marvin Stamm writes concerning my evening at the Garage Restaurant in Greenwich Village:

I am glad you had the opportunity of hearing Virginia Mayhew play while on your recent NYC sojourn. I have been doing several gigs with her these past few months and am enjoying her playing immensely. She’s a beautiful player and a lovely person to work with. She’s an excellent musician who knows what she wants, yet allows each player plenty of latitude for their own musical input. She’s certainly showing me a thing or two about playing in odd meters!

I have had unbelievable luck lately. Just this morning, I got an e-mail message notifying me that I have won a million Euros in the Royal Spanish Sweepstakes Lottery, another from the son of a murdered bank official in Kenya who will make me rich for helping him invest his inheritance, and one from a merchant in Dubai who led a selfish life, but now that he is dying of a particularly hideous form of cancer, wants to give his fortune to charity and would like me to help him dispose of it. As if that weren’t enough, I’ve been offered a huge stockpile of Viagra at bargain prices. What opportunities the internet brings.
Have a nice weekend.

Shortly after Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond came out, we threw a book party at Elaine’s Restaurant. In his last decade, Paul spent a good deal of his time at that way station of culture and good times on Second Avenue in Manhattan, hanging out with writers and thinking about finishing the book he barely started. Malcolm Harris of Parkside Publications, Dave and Iola Brubeck and I co-hosted the party. Elaine Kaufman, her chief of staff Diane Becker and their crew are known as book party experts, and they made this one special, complete with Desmond solos floating through the room. There were sixty-odd—and some merely interesting—guests. Most of them knew Paul. Some of them played with him. His two favorite guitarists were there. Jim Hall came up from Greenwich Village. Ed Bickert, to everyone’s amazement, left his seclusion in Toronto and came all the way to New York just for the occasion, his gorgeous daughter in tow. Don Thompson, who played with Bickert in Desmond’s last quartet, showed up with the great alto saxophonist John Handy. They were playing at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in Handy’s reunited quintet, the one that stunned the jazz world in the sixties. Thompson said he’s been trying to persuade Ed to start playing again. Bickert says it’s too much work.

Arnold Roth, whose incomparable drawings grace the end papers and several pages of Take Five, was there with his wife Caroline. They met Desmond in Philadelphia in the days when the Brubeck Quartet took turns sleeping in the back of Dave’s cavernous old Kaiser Vagabond. The alto saxophonist Jerry Dodgion, who played with Paul in Alvino Rey’s hotel band in 1951, was there, as were the writers Jack Richardson, Nat Hentoff, Whitney Balliett, Ira Gitler, Will Friedwald, Bruce Jay Friedman and James Lincoln Collier. The great singer Jackie Cain reminisced with bassist Bill Crow about Paul’s playing in a medley of Brubeck’s “Summer Song” and Gershwin’s “Summertime” on her and Roy Kral’s Time and Love. Here’s how she tells it in Take Five.

So, at the proper moment, Paul was there, ready. He was warmed up and played it once. He played it so beautifully. I think if he had done other takes, it would have been just as wonderful, but it was so great that there was no need to do another take. So, we stopped and listened to it, and he was happy. We were all happy, in fact delighted, with it. Then he said, “Well, what’s next?” But that was it. That was the only thing he’d been brought in for, to do that one song.

Brubeck entertained The New York Times’ Campbell Robertson with stories about his cowboy youth. Elaine told Robertson about the night Desmond went backward off a bar stool and hit the floor without spilling a drop. George Avakian, who produced many of Desmond’s and Brubeck’s albums, beamed at being with so many of his old friends. Rick Breitenfeld, the cousin who immeasurably enriched the book by unearthing information about Paul’s growing up, circulated chatting with other characters from Desmond’s life. Jean Bach, doyenne of the New York jazz scene, came with Charles Graham, the audio genius who kept Paul’s sound system in shape.
As the evening was winding down, I looked across the dinner table at Brubeck. From the speakers, through the restaurant babble, he and Desmond were at Storyville playing their incomparable, intuitive,1952 duet on “You Go To My Head.” Dave was leaning back with his eyes closed, smiling.

Devra Hall yesterday posted a charming memory of Alec Wilder on her blog, DevraDoWrite. I recommend that you take a look at it.
Alec and Paul Desmond were friends. Evenings with Alec holding court in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel, his home, were among the highlights of my years in New York. One occasion with Wilder, Desmond, Willis Conover of the Voice of America and the great French horn player Jimmy Buffington may have been the highlight. There was much hilarity and much wisdom.
Alec was not opposed to improvisation, as some have claimed. He was disturbed in his quietly outraged way when jazz players messed with his melodies on the first chorus. After faithful observation of the tune, improvisation was okay with him. In her memoir Marian McPartland’s Jazz World, Marian recalls that Alec was delighted when Desmond told him, “the perfect chorus is the song itself.”

Thanks to the veteran AJ bloggers Terry Teachout, Andrew Taylor, Jan Herman and Tobi Tobias for their warm welcomes into the ArtsJournal.com tent. Following the launch, I heard from writers, musicians, broadcasters, old and new acquaintances and a couple of long-lost friends. The prodigious pianist Jessica Williams checked in with this:

Congrats on stepping into a new area of literary critique; before you know it, you might be writing copy for AlterNet.org or DemocracyNow.org. The great thing about blogging is—you are your own news outlet, no walls. And subject matter is now entirely up to you. Have fun!

I’m not sure I’m ready to jump back into the daily news grind, but Jessica is right about the freedom of this digital medium. While I’m having fun, I’ll try to remember that with the freedom to spread information comes responsibility. (Whoa. Wait a minute. No sermons.)

Today is the first day of this new web log about jazz and, as its subtitle proclaims, other matters. At the top of the right-hand column you will find a sort of manifesto, below that information about the proprietor. Farther down the right-hand column under “Doug’s Picks” are things I like that I hope you will like. I want this to be not merely a blog, but a diablog, so please respond with reactions. Your participation will be at least half the fun. There is an e-mail address under “Contact” in the right-hand column. My intention is to post every weekday, and weekends when the spirit or events move me.
Launching this venture, I would like to thank Terry Teachout, who suggested blogging as an alternative or supplement to the print straitjacket, and ArtsJournal commander Doug McLennan, who agreed to give Rifftides a home and helped me build it. Doug’s a wizard.

In yesterday’s New York Times, Ben Ratliff performed the amazing critical leap of predicting that a musical event will be uneventful. Ratliff wrote of a JVC Jazz Festival-New York tribute: “Tomorrow (that’s this evening, 6/15–DR) there is a concert blurrily called ‘Piano Masters Salute Piano Legends,’ with four different pianists playing Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock and Thelonious Monk. How boring.” The pianists, for those of you who missed them in Ratliff’s piece because he didn’t bother to name them, are Randy Weston, Uri Caine, Kenny Barron and Geri Allen. I can’t recall being bored by any of them, but Ratliff and I may have different thresholds of boredom.
This raises an interesting critical conundrum for Mr. Ratliff. Does he skip the concert, having decided that it’s not worth hearing? Does he cover it to give it a fair chance? If he covers it and likes it, does he say so in print, thereby letting the air out of his reputation as a seer? In any case, does he continue his new policy of deciding the merits of music yet unheard? Rifftides readers who attend, please let us know by the end of the week about the accuracy of Ratliff’s clairvoyance. Journalism ethicists, I wouldn’t mind hearing from you, too.

One of the pleasures of New York as recently as the 1980s was to schlep around Greenwich Village and drop into small clubs for casual listening. An evening of music, even in major clubs, did not require a reservation secured by a credit card, and a second mortgage to fund the occasion. Today, there is a minor renaissance of listening spots that at least hint at the fifties, sixties and seventies when there were places like the Five Spot, Slug’s,The Guitar, Bradley’s and–somewhat farther afield, down in the meat packing district–the blessed Half Note. My publisher, Malcolm Harris, his wife Karen and I took an evening out of our recent whirlwind book promotion visit to New York to dine in the midst of the youth explosion at Pastis (recommended for the food and the nonstop floor show provided by the crowd of early-twenties hangers-out at the bar) and then prowl in search of music.

The Village Vanguard was sold out, full of advance planners and second mortgagers eager to hear Lou Donaldson. We wandered three blocks down the street and found a 1920s garage converted into a jazz club. Even adjusting for inflation, the Garage Restaurant at 7th Avenue South near Grove is no throwback to the last golden age of jazz in New York–not in the fiscal sense. A couple of drinks can make twenty dollars disappear. But there is no cover and no minimum, and it is possible even on a populous Saturday night to commandeer a stool at the bar, focus your hearing through the hilarity and be treated to a superior jazz performance.
We listened to the Nick Moran trio with bassist Marco Panascia and pianist Eduardo Withrington. Moran is a good young guitarist with a lyrical bebop bent and an alert harmonic faculty. He would benefit from self-editing, but it’s a rare young improviser who would not. Unless you don’t want to hear the piano, try for a spot at the bar that is not under the enormous copper air vent, a relic of a cooking area long dismantled. The metal seems to block or absorb the piano’s sonority.

Next up was the bright young tenor saxophonist Virginia Mayhew, a Garage regular. She was at the helm of a pianoless quartet, a good idea under the acoustic circumstances. Mayhew’s playing was so far advanced from the last time I heard her that I was riveted by her expansive tenor sound, flow of ideas, humor, use of space, and swing that is by turns loping and hard-driving. This pleasant brunette, lean as a model, is one of the most interesting mainstream players of her generation. She has rhythm in her bones, and her exchanges with drummer Victor Jones are amiable conversations. When Jones solos, he makes melodies. Occasionally in her improvising, Mayhew reorients the listener by returning to or referring to the melody, an act of generosity she performed this night during an adventurous turn on Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation.” During a slow dalliance with “Deep in a Dream,” I wondered if she was thinking of Sinatra.

The Garage floor show is provided not by the customers but by a pair of young veteran bartenders, David Coss and Mary Ann Stevenson, who deftly dodge each other, occasionally dance together, hug now and then, josh with the counter dwellers and seem to have the time of their lives while slinging the sauce at top speed. Coss moved from Seattle to the Village thirteen years ago. In his spare time, he books the club. Sunday nights, he gets out from behind the bar and onto the bandstand. Next trip, I hope to find that he sings with the band as well as he performs with Ms. Stevenson under the copper overhang. Overhang is what I did at Garage. The loss of sleep was worth it.

Next time: The Take Five book party at Elaine’s.

If you live in Dallas, Fort Worth, northeast Texas or southern Oklahoma, you may want to tune into KETR-FM 88.9 tonight at 8:00. I’ll be on with Bruce Tater and Mark Chapman to discuss Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. Sorry, the station doesn’t stream its programs on the web. I’ll talk about Desmond with Claudia Russell on KSDS, San Diego, at 6:oo pm PDT on Sunday, June 26. KSDS does stream. You’ll find it here. Several radio appearances are coming up when I’m in New York at the end of next week. I’ll let you know details soon.