Archives for July 2005

It is always humbling and, of course, deeply appreciated, when a fellow writer points out an error, a goof, a screwup. DevraDoWrite did me that favor when she came across an, er, ambiguity in the Food entry in the right-hand column. I have repaired the damage. If you insist on seeing the misbegotten original, click on the link in the previous sentence.
And let that be a lesson to me.

“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”—H.G. Wells

It is startling how many knowledgeable jazz listeners do not know about Tom Talbert. Let’s do something about that.

Tom died on Saturday, a month short of his eighty-first birthday. An elegant, soft-spoken man, he was an early and drastically overlooked composer, arranger and band leader on the west coast before West Coast Jazz was a category. His mid-to-late-1940s Los Angeles bands included Lucky Thompson, Dodo Marmarosa, Hal McKusick, Al Killian, Art Pepper, Claude Williamson and other musicians who were or went on to become leading soloists. Talbert’s writing for large ensembles was ingenious and subtle. The best of it, “Is Is Not Is,” as an example, rivaled George Handy’s iconoclastic work for the Boyd Raeburn band. The recordings Talbert made shortly after World War Two sound fresh today. Art Pepper fell in love with Tom’s treatment of “Over the Rainbow” and adopted the song as his signature tune.

During his New York period, the first half of the fifties, he made combo arrangements for Marian McPartland, Kai Winding, Don Elliott, Johnny Smith and Oscar Pettiford. They were on a smaller scale only in terms of ensemble size. His capacious imagination ranged through classical music as well as jazz. He was a gifted composer whose formal chamber pieces received acclaimed New York performances. His setting for Pettiford of Billy Taylor’s “Titoro,” as an example, is quiet and layered with complexity, like Talbert himself.

The masterpieces of his New York years are Wednesday’s Child, an album of settings for the singing of the underappreciated Patty McGovern, and Bix Duke Fats. Despite critical acclaim, Atlantic Records let the brilliant Wednesday’s Child LP die on the vine and has never reissued it on CD. Bix Duke Fats is another matter. It got five stars in Down Beat, but Atlantic also ignored this jewel in its discography. The Discover Jazz label has rescued it and kept it available on CD. Bix Duke Fats has some of Talbert’s most imaginative writing and features great musicians, among them Pettiford, Herb Geller, Joe Wilder, Eddie Bert, Barry Galbraith and Aaron Sachs. As Bruce Talbot points out in his biography of Talbert, Tom’s arrangements of pieces by Beiderbecke, Ellington and Waller preceded by more than a year Gil Evans’ celebrated New Bottles, Old Wine. Both evoke past days by setting familiar works in contemporary harmonic language. Stylistically, Talbert and Evans had much in common. Maria Schneider commented on that in an interview with Talbot after she had listened to Talbert’s arrangement of Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss.”

To me what’s amazing about that, what Tom has in common with Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, and Gil Evans, is that the harmony is driven by the line. Hearing this reminds me of the Ellngton recording of “Variations on Mood Indigo.” That interweaving of lines that brings you to harmonic places that you would never come up with if you were thinking of reharmonitzation in a passing-from-chord-to-chord kind of way; thinking of vertical chords. It’s truly a weaving of the horizontal that creates very interesting vertical structures…Tom is clearly a master of that, and “Prelude to a Kiss” is an incredible example of that.

When rock and roll drove out the good, Talbert was one of the victims. He left New York in 1960, returned to his parents’ home in Minnesota and went into his father’s business, barges on the Mississippi. He had success with a band in Minneapolis, tried cattle ranching in Wisconsin for a while, but ultimately listened to friends who said things were getting better for music in Los Angeles. In 1975, he moved back to California.

By 1977, he was recording again, an album called Louisiana Suite, inspired in New Orleans when he was in the barge business. Then, he started writing for television shows, the Serpico series and the Carol Burnett Show among them. In the early eighties, producers’ eagerness to cut costs made it easy for electronics to chase live musicians out of the studios. It was the period when Conte Candoli told a friend, “I played a fantastic studio gig today. We had ten brass, six saxophones, five percussion, thirty strings, a harp, an organ and a piano. It put two synthesizer players out of work.”

Talbert took some time off, and accepted a job as a cocktail pianist for a time, but it wasn’t long before his arranger-composer genes reactivated. He found a marvelous women named Betty who helped him organize sextet concerts in his house on a hill

above Laguna Beach. She eventually became his wife. Before long, Talbert was writing big band charts. Through the eighties and nineties, he recorded several CDs, including Duke’s Domain, a rare instance of an arranger doing a collection of pieces by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn without copying them. In the notes for the album, I wrote:

Talbert applies to the maestro’s compositions voicings unlikely to have occurred to him if Ellington’s example hadn’t long since permeated modern music. But his work owes at least as much to his career as a classical composer who admires Ravel, to his tolerant, sophisticated, amused and slightly exasperated world view and to his own long experience in jazz.

That experience came to an end over the weekend, but much of the music Tom created in his long career is preserved for us. It is worth hearing repeatedly.

He left something more. I’m not sure of the source of Tom’s wealth. It might have been the family business or the studio work, or both. It certainly wasn’t his concerts and recordings, the chamber music or the cocktail piano gig. In any case, he did a lovely thing with some of it. He created a private foundation to help promising young composers and arrangers. One of his first grants, in 1996, went to young Maria Schneider. This year she won four Grammys.

A couple of weeks before Rifftides debuted in mid-June, The Johnson Foundation sponsored a conference of people from the power structures of the jazz business and jazz education. It was at the foundation’s Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin. The purpose of the three-day gathering was to discuss how to increase the market share of jazz. The foundation has a report on a website created for the conference.
Conventional wisdom is that jazz album sales—an important index of market share—account for between two and three percent of total recorded music sales. That may be an optimistic estimate. I don’t know if anyone has established how much of total attendance at clubs and concerts jazz audiences represent, but if it’s much more than two or three percent, I’d be surprised.
That indicates a tiny share for jazz in the universe of music and entertainment. Naturally, executives who run record companies, publish jazz magazines, produce festivals, and recruit students for music schools want to grow the market. It’s called capitalism, market economics. Succeeding in the richest and most dynamic economic system in the world means growth, no less in the business of music than in the businesses of automobiles and groceries. Movers and shakers in the music establishment are not alone in wanting to see the jazz audience and jazz opportunities grow. So, too, do jazz musicians, two of whom, Billy Taylor and John Clayton, were included in the conference. Taylor and Clayton are important players who are also organizers, producers, executives. The list of attendees includes the names of no journeyman jazz musicians who gig for a living. There are deep thinkers among them. Some should be invited to followup conferences.
Since the mid-1940s, jazz musicians and jazz establishmentarians have been haunted by the swing era. For a few years, by chance and no one’s market planning, jazz was the nation’s—and much of the world’s—music of choice. To say quality popular music was not an oxymoron. High school girls knew the names of Benny Goodman’s sidemen. Blue-collar workers and housewives went to dance pavilions not necessarily to dance, but to stand entranced listening to Jimmie Lunceford’s band. Jazz people want that back. But today’s high school girls know the names of the members of Coldplay. Blue-collar workers and housewives, depending on their generations, are entranced by the remnants of the Grateful Dead or by George Strait, Jennifer Lopez, Slim Thug, The Lost Boyz, Gorillaz, Missy Elliott. The likelihood of jazz supplanting a significant share of the market those performers hold is roughly the same as for string quartets.
Paul Desmond’s cousin Rick Breitenfeld thought about being a professional trumpet player. Desmond told him not to consider a life in jazz unless he could not imagine doing anything else. Most musicians who dedicate themselves to jazz or chamber music cannot deny the compulsion to do so. On some level, they understand that they are fortunate to make even a modest living playing music. I have found that the few who get beyond a modest living are surprised and grateful. The others bemoan the fact that they do not earn in proportion to the sacrifices they make or the satisfaction and inspiration they provide society. They are right to bemoan their condition.
If the Wingspread conference leads to improvement in market share so that those dedicated artists have a higher standard of living, bravo. If it leads to further efforts to grow the jazz audience by diluting the music into new brands of soft jazz, near-jazz, pseudo jazz and unjazz, the market may benefit, but it will do music, and musicians committed to their art, no good.
ADDITIONAL THOUGHT
“Ah, music! What a beautiful art! But what a wretched profession!”
Georges Bizet (1867)

I took a morning mountain bike ride along irrigation canals, past fields of alfalfa and through orchards. The usual dogs raced along their fences barking outraged warnings, but most of the ride was peaceful. All that I could hear were bird songs, and my puffing on the uphills. Then, making a pavement transition from one canal system to the next, I passed a large old farm house festooned with bunting. From its open windows, at considerable volume, came “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The thrill I felt in my cynical breast took me by surprise. If you go here, you’ll find a splendid rendition of that Sousa masterpiece by the Dallas Wind Symphony. The RealAudio player gives you the whole thing, not just a clip.
Happy Fourth of July.

Please notice that all of the Doug’s Picks entries in the right-hand column are new. What did Shelby Foote have to do with jazz? Nothing that I know of. (If you’re new here, refer to “About” at the top of the right column. And…welcome aboard. Tell your friends to sign on, please.)

Attention midlife crisis fans: The venerable ArtsJournal blogger Terry Teachout (He’s been doing this for two whole years) reflects in depth on the phenomenon and its ramifications in his July 4th entry. He starts with this paragraph.

Like so many middle-aged men with a taste for poetry and a preoccupation with lost possibilities, I found myself thinking the other day of the first stanza of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which can be translated in countless ways but comes most fully to the point in the most literal of renderings: In the middle of the journey of our life/I found myself in a dark wood,/for the straight way was lost. One of my fellow bloggers has lately been reflecting on the meaning of the expression “midlife crisis,” but she and her readers are so preoccupied with the more florid symptoms of that often-absurd phenomenon that they seem to have lost sight of the thing itself, the terrible moment in the middle of the journey when you wander into a dark wood and suddenly notice that you can no longer see the signposts that led you there.

See the rest of TT’s rumination at About Last Night.

Improvisation in the performing arts does not belong to jazz alone. Think of Chopin, Jackson Pollack, Martha Graham, Richard Pryor. Think, also, of Edward Albee. The playwright who won a Lifetime Achievement Tony Award a few weeks ago uses his improvisational ability in his teaching when he invents characters suggested by his students.
“Everything I do is unrehearsed, spontaneous, and I have to invent it as I go along,” Albee says in an interview that you can see here. The interview clip precedes others of Albee demonstrating. You watch a great playwright write by acting. Some of his attempts work better than others (like jazz solos), but they’re all interesting glimpses inside a creative mind.

Rifftides and Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond are drawing responses from a cross section of jazz people in the United States and around the world, some from as far away as Australia and New Zealand. Norman Davis sent a message from the eastern Hungarian village of Sirok, famous for its ruined ancient castle. He retired there from England after a career in insurance. Mr. Davis’s story of hearing Paul Desmond for the first time, and the lasting impact that discovery made, is not unlike the experiences of countless others for whom music is an essential part of lives necessarily focused on other pursuits; making a living, for instance. Mr. Davis wrote:

I first encountered Paul Desmond’s playing in the Dave Brubeck Quartet back in 1954 when I was doing my National Service (draft) in the Royal Air Force. My musical interest up to then had been purely classical but I was bowled over by Paul’s inventiveness, his tone and his almost classical restraint. At that time, being new to jazz, I found the style of Charlie Parker and the others of the bop scene too raucous and seemingly undisciplined. I know better now, but it’s fair to say that Desmond’s style formed a bridge into a new world. But he was not just a bridge; he remains for me one of the truly great jazz saxophonists whose playing is as fresh now as it was 50 years ago. I saw him with the quartet in London in the late 50s – a remarkable experience.

My early encounter with Desmond encouraged me to buy and learn the alto saxophone and, with friends, form a small dance band until work in the insurance business demanded all my time. I later took up the clarinet, mainly to play classical music. Toward the end of our time in England I played in the local symphony orchestra, a clarinet quartet and other ensembles when opportunities arose. Over here, I managed to meet a flautist and pianist with whom I play classical trios mostly arranged by myself from other instruments. I am strictly an amateur player of a decent but not professional level. I also play (purely for my own amusement) the tárogató, a wooden Hungarian single-reed instrument inspired by the soprano saxophone. Regrettably, the alto does get much of an airing these days.

My publisher, Malcolm Harris, and I dropped by Jim Wilke’s Jazz After Hours studio in Seattle the other day for a long chat about Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. As always, Jim’s depth of knowledge and his focus led to a rewarding conversation. The hour interview, with Desmond’s music interspersed, will air tonight (Friday) at 1 am EDT, 10 pm PDT, midnight CDT. If one of the sixty-six stations carrying Jazz After Hours is not in your listening area, you can tune in on the streaming internet audio of WAMC (Albany-Schenectady) by clicking here.
Later, Wilke will include an interview extra, Desmond’s wry story about his encounter in the 1950s with a Hollywood starlet. That will air about 11:15 Pacific time, 2:15 am Saturday Eastern time, long after small children in the US are, or should be, in bed.
PLEASE NOTE THAT THE EARLIER VERSION OF THIS POST WAS WRONG. THE STARLET STORY IS TONIGHT, NOT TOMORROW NIGHT.

I may post something more today, or I may just flop into the long Fourth of July weekend and emerge on Monday or Tuesday. When you see, e-mail or telephone your friends, be sure to tell them about Rifftides. We need all the Rifftiders we can get.