Archives for July 2005

I should have posted this earlier, before the concert it anticipates took place. It’s a message from Scott Faulkner, who directs a classical ensemble in Reno, Nevada. Yes, there is a non-gambling culture in Reno. He read yesterday’s Harmony and History posting.

I couldn’t agree more with you about music being heard instead of listened to. The Reno Chamber Orchestra is playing an outdoor concert tonight and one of the battles that I will no doubt have with the sound man is over whether or not he can play recorded music before our performance. I cannot stand this. People are coming to hear our orchestra, which is a good regional orchestra, but if a polished studio recording of the Berlin Philharmonic is our opening act, we’re cooked. Out of the same speakers will come our music and there is no convenient way to explain that wind and mosquitos and heat and better musicians and a million other factors cause their music to sound better than ours. However I am very confident that the experience we will provide will be far more enjoyable and satisfying than if the evening were spent listening to Berlin Phil CDs through the PA at the Hawkins Amphitheater.
When I taught Music Appreciation I used to tell students that silence is the canvas on which musicians paint, so making inappropriate sounds during a performance is like flicking black ink on the page while someone is trying to draw a picture. Many audience members don’t realize just how much musicians on stage hear the sounds made out in the hall. Don’t even get me started on cell phones, velcro purses, candy wrappers, and watches that tell you for no apparent reason that it is the top of the hour. These comments are more about unamplified music, and probably the more amplified the music the less these things are noticeable…but also the more bland the music must be. The louder the music is, the less people listen. A whisper can convey a whole lot more than a scream, but perhaps people are afraid to trust a subtle statement. In our world, we seem to favor bashing people over the head to get our messages across.
This is day seven of triple digit heat in Reno. The temperature should drop down to about 90 by the time our concert starts at 7:30. But, as they say, “it’s a dry heat.”

Scott Faulkner confesses that, given his name, he nearly succumbed to the temptation to become a novelist. Instead, he went into music—for the money, no doubt.

I mentioned in Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond (page 207) that I have heard Desmond, “in the Safeway while reaching for a box of Cheerios,” among many other places. The truth is, I don’t want to hear Desmond, or any other music, in the Safeway, at the gas station, in Starbucks, the Mexico City subway, The Gap or the dentist’s office, certainly not on the street, and not often in my car. I don’t have an Ipod and don’t want one. I want a little peace and quiet now and then.
Most musicians, apparently unlike the public at large, do not want music every moment. Long ago, I struck up a friendship with Jacques Singer, the conductor of the Portland, Oregon, Symphony. One day at lunch in an expensive restaurant, we were planning a television presentation of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” Singer asked the waiter to turn off the Muzak pouring down on us from a speaker in the ceiling. It stayed on. Singer asked again. Nothing. He called the manager over and said that if the music did not cease, he would remove the speaker. The manager chuckled and said, “Oh, Maestro, how amusing.” Jacques climbed up on the back of the booth and began reaching for the speaker. The manager said, “Oh, you were serious,” and silenced the Muzak.
In Los Angeles, Bill Holman, Jimmy Rowles, Lou Levy, Bill Perkins and I had an informal luncheon group that got together every month or so. Sometimes it included other musicians, Tom Talbert, Neal Hefti, Jack Brownlow and Lee Katzman among them. We searched a wide swath of L.A. before we found a restaurant, Barone’s in Toluca Lake, that had no background music. We talked about many things, including music, but we did not want music imposed on us. That would have been true whether the music was Oscar Peterson or Nine Inch Nails. Barone’s isn’t there anymore. But, then, neither are Rowles, Levy, Talbert and Perkins.
If I found myself in conversation with Roger Scruton, the British conservative philosopher, journalist, composer, farmer, fox hunter and author of thirty books, we would have a great deal about which to disagree. What a hoot it would be to have that talk. There is one area in which we would not disagree, his views on the omnipresence of music. A few years ago, my wife was so taken with something Scruton wrote, that she copied it by hand. She recently presented it to me. Here, with Mr. Scruton’s permission, is the excerpt.

Harmony and History
By Roger Scruton
The Wall Street Journal, December 28, 1999
The classical language of music arose from practices, such as singing, dancing and playing, which have begun to atrophy. Instead of singing, people merely “sing along” with pop songs; instead of dancing, they throw themselves about in a sexual display; instead of playing an instrument, they turn on the stereo.
The old culture of listening depended on something else that is no longer easily obtainable: silence…they try to fill it with noise. A new kind of music has emerged, designed not for listening but for hearing—music whose principal device is repetition, which employs only pre-digested harmonies and fragmented tunes, and which relies on a monotonous “back beat” to propel it into the ear and the soul of those who overhear it. People brought up on such music lose the feel for polyphony; their musical attention spans shorten to atrophy; and they grasp musical organization only by moving to a beat.

(Sorry, no link. The full article is available for a fee to subscribers to The Wall Street Journal’s online edition.)
The trend gathers momentum with the introduction of so-called Jack Radio stations devoted to flinging into the ether endless successions of records of the kind of unmusic Scruton described. The stations have no live people on the air. Once in a while a robot voice (Jack, Bill, Fred) offers a brief announcement, usually patting the station on the back for being mindless. Go here for a sample.
This is the brave new world of radio music. If you think jazz radio is unaffected, you may not have heard the syndicated satellite shows some public stations now plug into their late-night programming. There are still minimal announcements, but there is no identification of sidemen, no information about the label and no insight into the history of the music or the musicians. It is one step short of continuous music on cable system channels without production or continuity. It is one step short of Muzak, one step short of Jack Radio.
Getting back to Roger Scruton, Sholto Byrnes has a fascinating piece in The Independent about his visit with Scruton at the philosopher’s farm. The introduction reads, “Sholto Byrnes hears the confessions of an intellectual pariah.” Here is a sample.

“One of the great distinctions between the left and the right in the intellectual world,” says Scruton, who has held chairs in aesthetics at Birkbeck and philosophy at Boston as well as a fellowship at Peterhouse, “is that left-wing people find it very hard to get on with right-wing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with left-wing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken. After a while, if I can persuade them that I’m not evil, I find it a very useful thing. I know that my views on many things are open to correction. But if you can’t discuss with your opponents, how can you correct your views?”

You can read the whole thing here.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Greenwich Village jazz club scene and mentioned some of the great clubs that are long gone. DevraDoWrite is visiting the Village, her home town, and posts a lovely piece about her girlhood memories of the place.

Ansonia drugstore on Tenth Street and Sixth Avenue has probably been there for more than fifty years (I can personally attest to at least forty-five), and Bigelows a block and a half south is ancient too. Both used to have a soda fountain, and I loved Ansonia’s root beer floats and Bigelow’s butterscotch sundays. But what I miss most is the diversity of all the little shops and unique stores.

You can read the whole thing here.
Greenwich Village has no monopoly on vanished shopping diversity. It’s the same almost everywhere. Where I live, the downtown is virtually bereft of retail stores. An asphalt wasteland south of town contains the retail stores, and they are clones of stores in the other asphalt wastelands and malls across the nation. It’s the same in most medium and small towns. Seattle and Portland still have actual downtowns, although there, too, Devra’s “little shops and unique stores” are being chained out of existence. Go into one of those chain stores…The Gap, Banana Republic, Linens ‘n Things, Radio Shack, Starbucks, Eddie Bauer, McDonalds…and you could be anywhere. But you’re nowhere. Eddie Bauer started in downtown Seattle in the fifties as a Mom and Pop outdoor outfitter. The Banana Republic started in Mill Valley, California, as a kooky, endearing catch-all kind of clothing place. Each has been acquired by a chain, homogenized to serve corporate quarterly earnings, and bears no resemblance to what made it succeed in the first place. Their gain. Our loss.

This was too long to fit in Doug’s Picks. If you don’t like salmon, feel free to skip it, with my sympathy.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, wild salmon are threatened for many reasons, including dams that impede their migration, chemicals that poison streams, overfishing, drought, and water allocation policies. Declining salmon runs engender battles among environmentalists, recreational fisherman, commercial fishing interests, Indian tribes and, of course, politicians.
This Seattle Times story touches on just one aspect of the complex controversy surrounding survival of a species that humans love to eat. Chinook, Coho, Sockeye, Pink and Chum varieties are still available, if in limited amounts. None is more desirable than Copper River King, the Chinook caught off Alaska where the Copper River flows into Prince William Sound near Cordova. Fighting torrential, chilly currents, the Copper River King develops rich flesh loaded with Omega 3 oils—good, and good for you.
The farm salmon lobby may try to persuade you that there’s no difference between their fish and wild salmon. I suggest that you buy a filet from a farmed Atlantic salmon and one from a Copper River King, prepare them the same way and judge for yourself. Here’s a splendid recipe to use for your test, borrowed from our friend Nancy, who treated my wife and me to it the other night.
Tray Baked Salmon.
Use a broiler pan or any other oven-proof baking dish that’s about 9” by 11”. Do not oil the pan.
Four 8-ounce thick salmon fillet steaks with or without skin.
7 ounces of fresh green beans, stems trimmed away.
20 small cherry tomatoes
1 to 2 handsful of black olives (Nancy used Calamata pitted olives)
2 Tablespoons of olive oil.
Salt and freshly ground pepper.
2 lemons.
One handful of fresh basil
12 anchovies.
Blanch the trimmed green beans. Put the beans, tomatoes and olives in a bowl. Toss them with olive oil and a pinch of salt and pepper. Wash the salmon fillets and pat them dry. Squeeze the juice of ½ lemon over the fillets on both sides, then season with salt and pepper and drizzle the olive oil over both sides. Preheat your oven and the empty roasting tray at the highest oven temperature (Nancy uses 500 degrees). Put the salmon fillets on one side of the tray. Toss the basil leaves into the green bean mixture and place the mixture on the other side of the tray. Lay the anchovies over the green beans. Roast for about ten minutes or until done. Test the doneness of the salmon by assessing the color and opacity. Overcooking robs moisture, flavor and texture. Serve with the remaining lemon quarters. Bon appetit.
To go with your salmon, try this enigmatic wine, one of those daring Washington State blended whites that are getting a lot attention.

Please notice that there is a brand new batch of Doug’s Picks in the right-hand column. The only holdover is in the food category. I’m deciding whether to lay a new salmon dish on you, and how to make it fit in a small space. I’m also deciding whether to keep the food category. What do you think?

As the new century loomed, it was an honor when Bill Kirchner asked me to contibute to a book he was editing. It turned out to be one of the most significant anthologies ever published about jazz. Now Kirchner announces that the book is entering its next stage of life. Here’s his message.

In the fall of 2000, The Oxford Companion to Jazz was published—864 pages long, with 60 essays by 59 distinguished musicians, scholars, and critics. In 2001, the Jazz Journalists Association voted it “Best Jazz Book” of the year. And it received over 50 reviews worldwide, about 90 percent of them positive. My favorite “review,” though, came from composer-arranger Johnny Mandel, who remarked: “Putting this book together must have been like being contractor for the Ellington band.”
I’m pleased to announce that this month, the Companion has just become available in a new paperback edition, complete with a number of small additions and corrections. It can be purchased in bookstores internationally as well as from a variety of Internet outlets. At, I might add, an even more reasonable price than previously: $29.95 U.S. (retail).
If you haven’t yet checked out this book (which a number of schools have used as a textbook), I hope that the following list of essays and contributors will serve as encouragement.
1) African Roots of Jazz—Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.
2) European Roots of Jazz—William H. Youngren
3) Ragtime Then and Now—Max Morath
4) The Early Origins of Jazz—Jeff Taylor
5) New York Roots: Black Broadway, James Reese Europe, Early Pianists—Thomas L. Riis
6) The Blues in Jazz—Bob Porter
7) Bessie Smith—Chris Albertson
8) King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, and Sidney Bechet: Ménage à Trois, New Orleans Style—Bruce Boyd Raeburn
9) Louis Armstrong—Dan Morgenstern
10) Bix Beiderbecke—Digby Fairweather
11) Duke Ellington—Mark Tucker
12) Hot Music in the 1920s: The “Jazz Age,” Appearances and Realities—Richard M. Sudhalter
13) Pianists of the 1920s and 1930s—Henry Martin
14) Coleman Hawkins—Kenny Berger
15) Lester Young—Loren Schoenberg
16) Major Soloists of the 1930s and 1940s—John McDonough
17) Jazz Singing: Between Blues and Bebop—Joel E. Siegel
18) Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Billie Holiday—Patricia Willard
19) Jazz and the American Song—Gene Lees
20) Pre-Swing Era Big Bands and Jazz Composing and Arranging—James T.Maher & Jeffrey Sultanof
21) Swing Era Big Bands and Jazz Composing and Arranging—Max Harrison
22) The Advent of Bebop—Scott DeVeaux
23) The New Orleans Revival—Richard Hadlock
24) Charlie Parker—James Patrick
25) Cool Jazz and West Coast Jazz—Ted Gioia
26) Jazz and Classical Music: To the Third Stream and Beyond—Terry Teachout
27) Pianists of the 1940s and 1950s—Dick Katz
28) Hard Bop—Gene Seymour
29) Miles Davis—Bob Belden
30) Big Bands and Jazz Composing and Arranging After World War II—Doug Ramsey
31) Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus—Brian Priestley
32) John Coltrane—Lewis Porter
33) The Avant-Garde, 1949-1967—Lawrence Kart
34) Pianists of the 1960s and 1970s—Bob Blumenthal
35) Jazz Singing Since the 1940s—Will Friedwald
36) Jazz Since 1968—Peter Keepnews
37) Fusion—Bill Milkowski
38) Jazz Repertory—Jeffrey Sultanof
39) Latin Jazz—Gene Santoro
40) Jazz in Europe: The Real World Music…or The Full Circle—Mike Zwerin
41) Jazz and Brazilian Music—Stephanie L. Stein Crease
42) Jazz in Africa: The Ins and Outs—Howard Mandel
43) Jazz in Japan—Kiyoshi Koyama
44) Jazz in Canada and Australia—Terry Martin
45) The Clarinet in Jazz—Michael Ullman
46) The Saxophone in Jazz—Don Heckman
47) The Trumpet in Jazz—Randy Sandke
48) The Trombone in Jazz—Gunther Schuller
49) The Electric Guitar and Vibraphone in Jazz: Batteries Not Included—Neil Tesser
50) Miscellaneous Instruments in Jazz—Christopher Washburne
51) The Bass in Jazz—Bill Crow
52) Jazz Drumming—Burt Korall
53) Jazz and Dance—Robert P. Crease
54) Jazz and Film and Television—Chuck Berg
55) Jazz Clubs—Vincent Pelote
56) Jazz and American Literature—Gerald Early
57) Jazz Criticism—Ron Welburn
58) Jazz Education—Charles Beale
59) Recorded Jazz—Dan Morgenstern
60) Jazz Improvisation and Concepts of Virtuosity—David Demsey

It’s nice to be in such good company…again. If you are an online shopper, you can find The Oxford Companion to Jazz by following this link.

Before we retire the current article recommendation in Doug’s Picks (right-hand column on this page), I have a few reflections on Shelby Foote’s close friend Walker Percy. One of the great American novelists of the twentieth century, Percy learned from Faulkner (a little higher up in the right-hand column), but emulated him more in story-telling ability than in style. Percy’s writing is leaner and more precisely layered than Faulkner’s. Nonetheless, it is rich in moral and philosophical allusions and metaphors if you care to acknowledge them. If you don’t, you can just follow the story. Perhaps that is true of all great novelists but James Joyce. You could even read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow as a wacky tale about madcap characters caught in World War Two, but it would require a serious effort of idea aversion.
At any rate, after I first posted the little piece about Slate’s obituary of Foote, I received this message from Marc Edelman, the culturally aware proprietor of Sharp Nine Records:

If you’re on to Shelby Foote, I’m sure you’re on to Walker Percy.
1. The Moviegoer
2. Love in the Ruins
3. The Last Gentleman
4. Lancelot

I’m a long-time Percy addict. I’ve read everything of his; The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman many times. (See page 151 of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond.)I wasn’t surprised that Paul liked The Moviegoer. He and its main character had a good deal in common, not least the acceptance, even a certain satisfaction in accepting, that loneliness on one level or another comes as part of the package when you want to live a truly individual life.
I keep Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book close at hand, on the shelf with The Messsage in the Bottle; two fine books about Percy by Robert Coles and Panthea Reid Broughton; and Lanterns on the Levee, by William Alexander Percy, the uncle who raised Walker Percy and guided his intellectual and moral development.
Walker Percy was a medical doctor, a philosopher, a Christian existentialist, a Catholic and a Southerner. All of those elements churned within him, sometimes intermixing, sometimes separating like oil and water, always spurring his search for authenticity, a search like that of Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer. Binx thought,

…the search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life….to become of aware of the possibiity of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Percy was onto something.
When I was doing radio and television news at WDSU in New Orleans in the last half of the sixties, I spoke now and then with Dr. Percy, who lived across Lake Pontchartrain in Covington. Between the 6 and 10 pm television newscasts, I did a radio talk show (before the genre was trashed by Rush Limbaugh and his ilk). Often, authors were guests. Percy listened to it regularly and told me that he liked it. After several conversations and considerable cajoling, I talked him into coming on. The day before he was scheduled, he called and said he couldn’t do it. That is, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He was too shy.
Percy’s, and Foote’s, friend Hodding Carter II did come on, by telephone, and talked about what it was like to run the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times with Mississippi in the throes of the civil rights struggle and three-quarters of white Mississippians hoping he’d be lynched or shot, many of them eager to do it themselves. It was typical of Carter’s graceful heroism that he talked frankly about his battle against racism while the battle was raging and he knew that his enemies were listening. That was one of the best hours of radio in which I was ever involved. When it ended, Walker Percy called and said maybe he’d made a mistake not appearing. But he didn’t offer to change his mind. I left New Orleans as the sixties ended and never spoke with Percy again, to my regret. He died in 1990.

Since the publication of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, I have done twenty-two radio interviews. Many more are scheduled. Most have been for NPR or PRI stations with jazz policies, but a third of them were aired on general FM (and two AM) stations or networks, including Westwood One and CBS. If the interest of these stations reflects the taste of the audiences, it indicates that there is more acceptance of jazz on the air than we tend to think; jazz, that is, without a modifier, not Soft or Smooth or Easy or Crossover or Slick or whatever may be the latest marketing terms for unjazz and near jazz.
Sunday at 10:30 a.m. EDT, 7:30 a.m PDT, I’ll be with Al Vuona on WICN, the Boston-area jazz and folk station in Worcester, Massachusetts. WICN streams its programs on the internet here. We recorded the thirty-minute interview this week for Al’s program The Public Eye. It was a lively one. I hope that you can join us.

The intellectually tireless arranger, composer, saxophonist, leader and writer Bill Kirchner called to my attention an important essay by Martha Bayles. Under the same artsjournal.com umbrella as Rifftides, Ms. Bayles is the proprietor of Serious Popcorn, a web log devoted to film. Her March 31, 2005 piece titled “The Perverse in the Popular” touches on matters of interest to anyone concerned about the size of the audience for serious art and about the quality of music, movies, television, and the internet as a source of entertainment. Here are two excerpts:

The entertainment industries are full of cultivated, intelligent people who think about their work in a much more traditional way than academics do. Recording artists ponder melody and rhythm; film and television scriptwriters wrestle with plot and dialogue; production designers worry about color, texture, and line; actors and directors compare themselves with admired predecessors in film and theater. The language these people speak is a craft language, directly descended from that of the older performing arts. In other words, each craft has its own center of excellence.
These people understand the depredations of commerce. But they also strive for that rare prize, the chart or ratings or box office success that is also a work of art. Such miracles don’t happen every day, or even every year. But they do happen. And what’s more, they last. In this time of dispute over the elite cultural canon, there is surprising agreement about what belongs in the canon of popular culture. The songs of Cole Porter, the compositions of Duke Ellington, the films of John Ford, the comic strips of Walt Kelly, the novels of Dashiell Hammett, and the 39 episodes of The Honeymooners that ran on CBS between 1955 and 1956 are just some of the works now described, without irony, as classic.

Perverse modernism would be a nonstarter today without obscenity. Gone are the days when audiences could be provoked by free verse, loose brush strokes, pounding rhythms, or vivid descriptions of lovemaking. In America, most people accept the right of the artist to do whatever he or she wants, because they know all too well that even if some fussbudget tries to drag an artist into court, the law contains a loophole big enough to drive a Hummer through. If 2 Live Crew’s “As Nasty As They Wanna Be,” Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio, and other controversial landmarks of the past 20 years can all be said to have “serious artistic value” in the eyes of the law, then blood-soaked video games and pornographic Web sites are home free.

You can read Ms. Bayles’s entire piece here. It ran originally in The Wilson Quarterly, a fact that makes me think it is time to resubscribe to that valuable little journal.

Speaking of the cinema, Charlie Shoemake, lightning vibraharpist and late-night TV movie browser, sent a message after he read yesterday’s posting about the name of our adventure in blogging.

Concerning the “Hollywood Stampede’ session, tell your readers if (truly out of left field) they should stumble sometime in the wee hours of the morning across a 1945 “B” movie entitled The Crimson Canary (Noah Beery Jr.) to grab onto it because they’ll see Coleman Hawkins, Howard McGhee, Oscar Pettiford, Sir Charles Thompson, and Denzil Best playing “Sweet Georgia Brown” (“Hollywood Stampede”). I had it on Beta tape years ago but now can’t find it, though I continue to search. The band sounds absolutely great and Pettiford, in particular, takes a classic solo. The plot of the movie has Noah Beery Jr. as a dixieland trumpet player on the lam for a murder he didn’t commit. While ducking the law, he pops into this club and who should be appearing….you guessed it.

Charlie isn’t the only one who can’t find The Crimson Canary. I did a deep-dive Google search through a dozen or more web retailers who brag about their stocks of hard-to-get films. No one offered it for sale on DVD, VHS, Beta or cellophane strips. (Does anyone but Charlie still have a Beta deck?) If you know where to find The Crimson Canary, tell us all, please.

Jerry Jazz Musician has a long interview with the author about Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He incorporates photographs and sound clips. While you’re there, roam around the JJM site and see all the good things he’s up to, but don’t forget to return to Rifftides. Please bring friends back with you.

Now that you ask, the name Rifftides was inspired by a 1945 Coleman Hawkins piece, “Rifftide.” The tune was part of the celebrated 1945 Hollywood Stampede session that included trumpeter Howard McGhee, one of the bebop kiddies Hawk nurtured. Thelonious Monk had played with Hawkins the year before. Monk later recorded the tune and called it “Hackensack.” Either way, it’s based on the harmonic structure of “Oh, Lady Be Good,” but copyright law doesn’t cover chord changes, and George Gershwin’s estate earned no royalties. Nor can titles be copyrighted, so I stole Hawkins’s and pluralized it.

The public television station where I live finally got around to airing the first installment of the new PBS series Legends of Jazz, three weeks after most of the rest of the country saw it. Given the near-absence of jazz on TV, it was welcome. The program presented tenor saxophonist James Moody, clarinetist Paquito d’Rivera, festival impressario George Wein and singers Jon Hendricks and Nancy Wilson, all named jazz masters by the National Endowment for the Arts.
The hour was as much a panel discussion with the host, pianist Ramsey Lewis, as it was a musical event. It served as a preview of and promotion for a thirteen-week series of half-hour shows that will air in the fall. Lewis moderated with relaxation, thoughtful questions and camaraderie that arose from mutual respect between him and his guests. “Wait a minute,” he said to Hendricks, “back up a couple of sentences and tell us about Art Tatum.” That prompted the story of the great pianist grooming the thirteen-year-old Hendricks’ talent in their mutual hometown of Toledo in the early 1930s.
Wein told about cajoling Duke Ellington into reaching for something special at the Newport festival in 1956. The result was “Diminuendo in Blue” and “Crescendo in Blue” with Paul Gonsalvez’s celebrated 27-chorus tenor saxophone solo in the “wailing interval.” Moody talked about the thrill of coming out of the service in 1946 and into Dizzy Gillespie’s big band on 42nd Street.

Knocked me out, ’cause I’d be sitting in the band with Diz and I’d look up and there sitting at the bar were Benny Goodman, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins—and in the band, Thelonious Monk, Ray Brown, Milt Jackson.

Then, Moody played a piece indelibly associated with the bebop era, Gillespie’s “Woody’n You.” He was accompanied by the superb rhythm section of pianist Billy Childs, bassist Dave Carpenter and drummer Roy McCurdy. They also backed Hendricks in his over-the-hills-and-dales vocalise on Monk’s “Rhythm-a-ning.” In an inexcusable slight, Childs, Carpenter and McCurdy were never introduced until the last seconds of the show, in a fly-by roll of the credits.
D’Rivera told of growing up in a household in Cuba in which all kinds of music were played and studied, so that by the time he was a professional clarinetist and saxophonist he made no distinction among categories. He was equally at home with classical concertos, Afro-Cuban claves and Charlie Parker bop tunes. He demonstrated his range in a virtuoso performance of an unaccompanied, and unidentified, classical piece that melded into a jazz duet with bass guitarist Oscar Stagnaro. Stagnaro got the same anonymous treatment as Childs, Carpenter, McCurdy and the classical piece. Surely, when the fall series airs, the producers will have corrected those little injustices.
Asked about her influences, Nancy Wilson emphasized—above all others—Little Jimmy Scott. Her performance of “God Bless The Child,” with Lewis at the piano, confirmed that there is much more of Scott in her lineage than of the song’s composer, Billie Holiday.
As the program was winding down, Wein introduced Renee Olstead, a fifteen-year-old sitcom star and singer whom he identified as emblematic of his belief that young people will embrace jazz and guarantee its future. Ms. Olstead sang “Taking A Chance On Love,” credibly, then told Lewis that she is making a project of converting her contemporaries to jazz. That brought a round of “Yeah” and applause from the veterans.
It was a charming and engaging program. It lacked the intensity, focus and video artistry of the immortal 1957 The Sound of Jazz on CBS-TV, Ralph Gleason’s Jazz Casual series of the sixties and the Jazz At The Maintenance Shop programs directed by John Beyer for PBS in the late seventies and early eighties. But, after all, it was a pilot and a promo. We may hope that when the series hits in the fall, it will reflect the values of those earlier programs—creative camera work for directors who know how to use it, good sound, lighting without gimmicks, and a minimum of explanation (The Sound of Jazz, the best program of its kind, ever, had almost no talk). In his notes for the long-playing record of the music from that show, Eric Larabee wrote that because of the artistic, if not commercial, success of the television program, there was talk of a series. He said that Whitney Balliett and Nat Hentoff, the critics whose taste and instincts guided the show, should remain in charge.

But one wonders if the miracle can happen twice. Part of the reason that Balliett and Hentoff were let alone was that no one in high authority really understood what they were up to. Now the secret is out and there will be many hazards.

Larabee was right. No successor to The Sound of Jazz, let alone a series, emerged. That does not mean that it couldn’t happen. Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Ben Webster, Vic Dickenson, Gerry Mulligan and all of the other musicians but two who populated The Sound of Jazz are gone. Only the master guitarist Jim Hall is thriving. Clarinetist Jimmy Guiffre survives in ill health. Still, we have important players of several generations with us today. Let us wish the people in charge of Legends of Jazz the understanding, integrity and lack of interference required to gather the cream of today’s jazz artists and present this music on television in the best possible way, simply and naturally. Ms. Olstead’s teenaged peers—and the rest of us—might just dig it.

The Coleman Hawkins DVD recommendation in Doug’ Picks (right-hand column) mentions an unidentified vibes player. Rifftides reader Russ Chase says the vibist is Harry Sheppard. Barry Feldman, the producer of the CD, confirms it. Sheppard worked in the 1950s with Billie Holiday, Cozy Cole and Sol Yaged and in the ‘60s with Benny Goodman, Doc Severinsen and Georgie Auld. In recent decades, he has been in Houston, where, according to his website, he remains gainfully employed in music at the age of seventy-seven. After listening to one of Sheppard’s CDs, Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times, “Mr. Sheppard wrings unexpected tones out of his instrument. He juxtaposes a floating vibrato, quick skittering notes and a marimba like percussive tremolo.” Sheppard is reported to be a four-mallet man these days, but at the Hawkins session he used two mallets and still managed to skitter impressively.
Unlike Pee Wee Russell, Charlie Shavers, J.C. Higginbotham and others whom viewers might recognize on the DVD, Sheppard and guitarist Dickie Thompson never became household names, let alone household faces. Thompson is easy to identify once you know to look for that rarity, a left-handed guitarist. He had a distinctive style founded on crisp swing and worked for years in the trio of organist Wild Bill Davis. I came across photographs of him on bassist Ed Friedland’s web site. They show Thompson playing last year in Tucson, where he settled but apparently did not retire. At eighty-seven, Thompson was sporting a nifty red guitar and had less hair than in the late fifties—in fact, no hair—but otherwise looked remarkably unchanged. It used to be said that jazz was a young man’s art. Not if you’re Dickie Thompson or those amazing upper octagenarian pianists Hank Jones and Marian McPartland.

A reader of Rifftides or Take Five (both, I hope) has been listening to Jim Hall’s 1974 Concierto CD in which Hall’s sidemen are Paul Desmond, Chet Baker, Roland Hanna, Ron Carter and Steve Gadd. She sent a message asking a question at which musicians tend to guffaw when civilians ask it, one that arises out of genuine interest and does not deserve scorn. Here’s the exchange:
Q: The track “Concierto de Aranjuez” is hauntingly beautiful. Do the musicians totally improvise, or do they each have a kind of musical outline around which they create? You can guess from the question I’m not a musician, but it’s something I’ve wondered about.
A. Except in the most unfettered avant garde improvisation, there must be a plan or the result will be random noise, which, come to think of it, describes the most unfettered avant garde improvisation. Virtually every piece of music has some sort of tonal organization, whether or not there is a formal chord structure. In the case of “Concierto” on the Jim Hall album, the musicians improvise around the simple and quite lovely harmonies that Joaquin Rodrigo wrote into the adagio section of his famous “Concierto de Aranjuez.”
Jazz musicians frequently get questions about whether they know what they’re doing. In Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, I included an old Down Beat piece of mine that tells how Paul dealt with the question on one occasion. it’s on page 214. Here is the pertinent passage.

Desmond and an old friend were about to reminisce, but one of the Musicarnival actresses had a question.
“I don’t want to show my ignorance,” she chirped, “but do you know what you’re going to play before you sit down, or do you just sort of make it up as you go along?”
Desmond gave her a long look to be sure he wasn’t the victim of a put-on, decided he wasn’t, and explained.
“First of all, I never sit down. But I do try to follow a general plan, which we’ve all discussed on the plane. Chords and things.”
“Oh, you mean sort of like harmony.”
“Yeah, something like that.”

Yesterday, I renamed Arnold Schoenberg, called him Aaron. I must have confused him with a character in one of his stage pieces. It’s fixed now. An attentive reader, Chris Schneider, caught the mistake and sent this charming reprimand.

Geez, and I thought his name was *Moses* Schoenberg …
Anyone who makes a mistake like that deserves to be subjected to the Schoenberg joke in my additional lyrics for “The Wonder of You” (that’s the Ellington/George song of that title, *not* the Elvis one).
Quote:
I’ve whistled ‘Pierrot Lunaire,”
I’ve jockeyed in the June air;
I’ve moped about in moon air, all blue.
The worlds may fall asunder,
But nothing’s like The Wonder of You.
(©2002 Chris Schneider)
– – – – – –
Having made more than my own share of misnaming typos, I’m full of sympathy.

Thanks. I feel so much better

Reacting to Tuesday’s posting about the Wingspread conference on ways to grow the market share of jazz, Rifftides Reader Jan Brukman thinks it unlikely that jazz will exceed its three percent share of the market (an optimistic estimate) for music recordings, but he doesn’t think it will disappear.

As string quartets will never die, neither will jazz, and for the same reasons. They are classical forms; if you stray too much from the classical forms, however, you get experiments, which real people cannot hear. No amount of education can transcend that, as arrogant idiots like Charles Wuorinen never found out.

That is how many jazz people feel about Ornette Coleman, but Coleman has as enthusiastic a following as does Wuorinen among afficionados of music on the edges of modern classicism. Wuorinen is an American composer who uses the twelve-note system developed by Arnold Schoenberg and expanded by Milton Babbitt. He often writes electronic music. His best known pieces are Time’s Encomium, which brought him a Pulitzer prize, and Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky. “Best known” does not mean familiar. I wonder how many people have heard a Wuorinen work. He also won a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur “genius” grant. The New York Times once wrote, “Charles Wuorinen has taken the decrees of 12-tone music and made them sing.” Dissenting somewhat, The New Yorker critic Alex Ross wrote of Wuronen’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a collaboration with Salman Rushdie:

Although Wuorinen has not renounced the twelve-tone writing with which he made his name, he, too, now deposits triads in his scores as if they were pillow mints, and even indulges in pastiches of jazz and blues. Schoenberg once believed that atonal music could have the same emotional range as tonal music; Wuorinen, surrendering to psycho-acoustic reality, uses dissonant complexity to express the terror of war and quasi-tonal passages to express love and reconciliation. Passages of the latter type are, admittedly, tentative and fleeting. This comedy growls and thrashes more than it sings and dances.

That paragraph, which has dissonant complexity of its own, is from a piece about the conductor James Levine. You can read the whole thing in Ross’s The Rest is Noise, a blog I cannot recommend highly enough. I am adding it to the Other Places list in the right-hand column.

Gordon Sapsed reports on British radio and clubs not quite keeping jazz at arms’ length and not quite embracing it.

Here in the UK the London radio station Jazz FM recently changed its name to Smooth FM. Explaining the change the owners said, “it’s a sad fact of life that Jazz FM has never made a profit in 15 years of existence …..the station will continue its commitment to broadcast 45 hours of specialist jazz programming each week ….. but there is an enormous appetite for artists such as Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Alicia Keys, George Benson, Michael Buble and Diana Krall who will fill the daytime schedule…… In-depth research shows that 40% of our listeners prefer the name ‘Smooth FM” and two thirds of non-listening Londoners are put off tuning in because of the name Jazz FM. 42% say they do not tune in because ‘they were not into jazz music.”
Meanwhile, here in the Southampton area, the Concorde Club (usually thought of locally as the Concorde Jazz Club) has undergone a multi-million pound refit but maintained a jazz policy by keeping jazz away from the money-earning Thursday Friday and Saturday nights. ‘Clubbing’, with dancing to D.J.s and tribute bands (clones of Elvis, The Stones,The Beatles and such) provides the funding to make jazz affordable on other nights. Jazz is just one part of the club’s overall image

Back in the USA, as one of those clone bands is probably singing, a veteran New York jazz pianist who has had trouble finding work told me about a gig she was offered. The conditions were that she play nothing but Sinatra hits and Italian songs…for no pay. She declined. At least, the club owner didn’t ask her to pay him. That has been happening in several cities, a rather radical redefinition of market share.

Have I mentioned lately that I wrote a book called Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond? You can buy it from the publisher and get free shipping. Please do.

Doug Ramsey explores every facet of Desmond’s public and private lives in this intimate, often hilarious and very thorough biography, a book that is very hard to put down. —Ken Dryden, allaboutJazz.com

See the entire review here.