Archives for August 2005

This afternoon during my Annapolis sojourn, I recorded an hour with John Tegler for his Capitol Conversations show. If you stay up late Friday night, you can hear it on Baltimore’s WCBM, 680 AM. The air time is Saturday morning, August 13, at 12:05 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time…five minutes after midnight (9:05 PDT). John is a former Air Force jet pilot, Elliott Lawrence and Woody Herman drummer, band leader, concert producer and veteran radio interviewer. He has an inquiring mind and a finely honed interview style. We had a good time talking about Paul Desmond and associated subjects. I hope that you can join us on WCBM’s streaming internet audio or one of the show’s 99 affiliates connected by satellite. Please check your local listings.

This afternoon I will be signing copies of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond at Hard Bean Coffee and Book Sellers in Annapolis. The signing will follow the taping of a 2 PM interview with John Tegler for his Capitol Conversations radio program. Both things will happen at Hard Bean, 36 Market Space, on the downtown Annapolis waterfront. If you’re in the area, please come by and say hello.

Most people alive are too young to have heard Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker when they were establishing bebop. Most, indeed, were not born. Observers have attempted to describe the excitement of hearing Gillespie and Parker together for the first time, but words cannot convey the abstract wonders of great music. Now, thanks to an astounding new CD, it is possible to hear the fountainheads of bop as World War Two was ending – when they were virtually unknown, when to all but a tiny minority of musicians and listeners, jazz meant the music of the big bands, when “A Night in Tunisia” and “Salt Peanuts” had not been drilled into the collective consciousness. Those pieces and others that became part of the bebop canon had been played for audiences only a few dozen times, if that many.
Until Uptown Records released Dizzy Gillespie-Charlie Parker Town Hall, New York City, June 22, 1945 a few weeks ago, Parker’s and Gillespie’s partnership that year was known on records only within the three-minute limitation of 78 rpm technology. Someone—it is unclear who—recorded the concert in superb sound on twin acetate disc recorders, capturing complete performances in the seven-minutes range, with chorus after chorus of brilliant playing. Anyone who hears these recordings and doubts that Gillespie was at least Bird’s equal as a creative artist will have to maintain an unreasonable degree of stubborness.
Throughout, Gillespie’s control, range, harmonic ingenuity, melodic inventiveness and time—above all, his time—are breathtaking. In these performances, he and Parker give profound meaning to Dizzy’s frequently-quoted description of Bird as, “the other half of my heartbeat.” The two were the most uncanny unison players ever, their intellectual and psychic connection absolute. Their togetherness, at a furious tempo, on the out-chorus of “Bebop” must be heard to be believed. The transition from Bird’s solo to Dizzy’s on “Groovin’ High” is priceless, not because one repeats the other’s phrase—that trick is as old as jazz improvisation, probably as old as music—but because of the exquisite timing, the humor, what it says about their mutual respect and friendship. Gillespie’s solo on the piece is a statement of pure joy. And, everywhere, Parker’s virtuosity and heart match his boss’s. This was Dizzy’s band. Its concepts, and particularly its codification of the harmonic and much of the rhythmic language of the new music, came from Dizzy’s leadership and teaching.
In his liner notes, Ira Gitler describes pianist Al Haig’s playing on the concert as stiff, but that might be true only in comparison with Bud Powell’s most inspired work. Haig has long deserved a great deal more credit than he has received as a trailblazing pianist who inspired many of his successors. Those in debt to Haig include, as the researcher Allan Lowe has recently pointed out, Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris. I would add Bill Evans to that list. Haig and drummer Max Roach had a relationship, also built on rhythm, that complemented and illuminated the one between Diz and Bird. Entertaining and swinging as Sid Catlett is in his guest appearance on one piece, Roach was clearly the perfect drummer for this band. As for Curley Russell, he kept great time and was one of the best bop bassists after Oscar Pettiford, but suffice it to say that bass playing was a few years away from catching up with Parker, Gillespie, Haig and Powell.
Symphony Sid Torin, the unctuous radio host who MCed the concert, was unquestionably an important part of the New York jazz scene, but including only his opening announcement might have been enough. Symphony Sid’s cutesy, self-referential, tune introductions do not detract from the music. Nothing could. But they are irritating on repeated hearings. And he mispronounces Dizzy’s last name as “Jillespie.”
I could go on about this remarkable recording, but I’ll abide by the first paragraph’s admonition concerning the inadequacy of words. I cannot imagine anyone serious about serious music not cherishing it. Robert Sunenblick of Uptown Records deserves adulation for recognizing the value of what he discovered on those acetates and for seeing that it became available to the world.

As I write this, I’m having difficulty keeping my eyes off the scene out the window to the left of my friend’s computer. I am spending a few days with a cherished colleague from my TV news days. He and his wife live on Weems Creek, a tributary of the Severn River in Annapolis, Maryland. Every house along this broad creek has a dock, and every dock has at least one boat. I see a place with a sailboat, a speed boat and two kayaks. The houses, the boats behind and the vehicles in front bespeak affluence. (My friend, reading this, said, “They bespeak debt.”)
When my pal moved here more than thirty years ago, downtown Annapolis was run down and a little dangerous. Store fronts were empty. There were three or four bars and a couple of restaurants. Tourists interested in American history wandered through now and then. Annapolis is marinated in history. I wonder how many of you knew—I did not—that for a short time in the late seventeen-hundreds, it was the capital of the United States.
Thanks to political, community and business leadership, and thanks to good economic times, things have changed here. Yesterday afternoon we meandered from the area of the state capitol and St. John’s College along the brick streets down to the waterfront. The marina was lined with vessels ranging from sleek speed boats to yachts in the mine-is-bigger-than-yours trophy class, hundred-footers. The sidewalks were packed with tourists. The tourists were packed with ice cream from four thriving stores. The handful of original bars has been joined by many more, and there are a dozen or so first-class restaurants. Some of the locals are not happy with the proliferation of T-shirt and curio shops or the influx of tourists. But most accept them as inevitable side effects of prosperity and growth. Annapolis is impressive on both counts

Our reuniting Marines spent yesterday cruising the Potomac, visiting the Korean War, Viet Nam, World War Two and Franklin Delano Roosevelt monuments, then the Washington Navy Yard for a long lunch. One of our 150 guys failed to make it back to the bus following the monuments tour, causing a good deal of concern. “You know, Barry didn’t look so good,” somebody said. “We’d better check the hospitals.” We did. No Barry. A few hours later, Barry showed up at the Marine Barracks at 8th and I, where we assembled as darkness fell to see the evening parade on the grassy field. He had walked across DC to reunite with the reunion.
There was a breathtaking display of precision execution of the manual of arms by the Marine Corps silent drill team, using M-1 rifles with bayonets. Don’t try it at home. The music was by the Marine Corps Band and the Marine drum and bugle corps. The band’s numbers included “Stars and Stripes Forever,” not just a great march but a great piece of American music, categories aside. They preceded it with a so-so march, perhaps by design, so that when the John Phillips Sousa piece got underway, the contrast was startling. Sousa may have had nothing to do with pre-jazz forms and may later in life have disdained jazz, but jazz isn’t the only kind of music that swings, and Sousa built a kind of swing into that march. The Marine Band gave it a superb performance last night. A diminutive woman stepped out front, played the bejabbers out of the famous piccolo obbligato and got an ovation. It was a terrific evening of music, martial pomp and patriotism, and I was glad to be a part of it. I strongly recommend that if you visit Washington, you arrange to see the evening parade at 8th and I. There is nothing like it.

More than a hundred men who were commissioned Marine Corps second lieutenants together a long time ago are gathered at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia. We visited the Officer Candidate School on the banks of the Potomac where we spent twelve weeks convincing the Corps that we were good enough to be officers, wondering how we had conquered the fearsome obstacle course, survived the twenty-two-mile hikes with eighty-five-pound field packs, studied late, slept little, and came out of it in the best condition of our lives. We watched some of the current crop of officer candidates meeting the same challenges—but wearing more accomodating fatigue uniforms and boots. We marveled at the young women undergoing the same rigors as the men.

It was 100 degrees with 90 percent humidity today when we went into the boondocks to see the quonset huts where we lived for nine months as we trained to be worthy of the gold bars on our collars. The huts have windows now. In that distant August, they were airless metal half-tubes filled with double rows of bunk beds, perfect for roasting half-baked second lieutenants. We joked about the rough times. We became solemn when we talked about the guys who didn’t come back from Viet Nam.

At dinner tonight, the MC read the posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor citation for one of our number, Colonel Donald Cook. Don assumed senior status after he was captured in Viet Nam, stood up to the captors, gave his own food and medicine to those who were in many cases no hungrier or sicker than he and was punished for his leadership and defiance. He died at Phoc Tuy in 1967 following nearly four years of North Vietnamese captivity.

The speaker after dinner was retired Navy Admiral William J. Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and father of a Marine Corps officer in Iraq. Admiral Crowe praised the Marines for their performance in Iraq. Then he talked about larger questions. He agreed with the Bush administration’s refusal to peremptorily pull out of Iraq. But he said that the US is reaping the consequences of not pre-planning. Far up the list of consequences, he said, is the cost of US operations in Iraq, five billion dollars a month. He concluded that before going into Iraq, or any such challenging situation, the United States should have a balance of three essential elements:

·Sufficient military capability
·Carefully conceived diplomacy
·Well planned, adequate budgeting

Crowe called for a coordinated plan among all agencies of government, looking ahead to the nation-building he sees as an inevitable responsibility of a superpower in a changing world.
I thought that Rifftides readers would be interested.

When the Four Freshmen were winning 1950s Down Beat polls as the top vocal group and their recordings were ubiquitous on radios and juke boxes, I was more impressed by their contemporaries, the Hi-Los. The Hi-Los’ mix of voices was richer and more varied, their arrangements more harmonically daring, and the group always sounded as if they were enjoying themselves. I found much of the original Four Freshmens’ work lugubrious.
Well, the Hi-Los are no more, but thank heaven for recordings. I have been listening to the brilliant The Hi-Los And All That Jazz since it came out in 1959. I keep hearing new things in their performance of its brilliant Clare Fischer arrangements. Jack Sheldon’s eight-bar trumpet solo on the bridge of “Then I’ll Be Tired of You” is embedded in my psyche. Inexcusably, Columbia has allowed The Hi-Los And All That Jazz to go out of print, but “Then I’ll Be Tired of You” is included in this compilation.
The Four Freshmen roll on. The original members were Hal Kratzsch, Bob Flanigan and the brothers Ross and Bob Barbour. Kratzsch was succeeded by Ken Errair in 1953 and then Ken Albers in 1956. Flanigan, the last of them, retired in 1992, but the group has continued through a variety of incarnations. It seems to me that the current edition is the best of all, including the original. The new Freshman are Brian Eichenberger, Curtis Calderon, Vince Johnson and Bob Ferreira. Over the past two or three years, they have evolved, retaining the vocal matrix of the Barbour-Flanigan-Kratsch group, adding impressive instrumental musicianship and degrees of subtlety in their new album, The Four Freshmen In Session. Eichenberger, the lead singer, is a more than capable guitarist. Johnson chooses good notes in his bass lines and adds trombone to the textures of the instrumental ensemble. Calderon comes as the real surprise. He is a superb soloist, lyrical on flugelhorn in an intriguing arrangment of “My One and Only Love,” articulating crisply in the high register on trumpet in a seven-bar solo on “It’s All Right With Me,” then ending the piece softly muted over voices in a coda.
I might quarrel with a diction decision or two in the ensemble singing—occasional over-emphasis on consonants (“meaDow,” “ShaDows”)—and with the laconic whistling on a couple of tracks. But, all in all, I find myself enjoying this CD more than I ever thought I would enjoy a Four Freshmen album. They deserve accolades for helping to keep alive the wonderful Bill Carey-Carl Fischer song, “You’ve Changed.” Whoever has the vocal solo on “If I Only Had A Brain” captures the spirit of the song better than anyone since Ray Bolger in The Wizard of Oz.
If you’d like to compare the original Four Freshmen with the new group, Mosaic has issued a box set of their fifties Capitol recordings.

Rifftides reader Martin Fritter writes,

I’ve just discovered Benny Carter’s alto playing, which seems of absolutely the highest caliber. Could you recommend some basic discs?

With pleasure. This is the best assignment I’ve had in weeks. I envy anyone’s hearing Carter for the first time. He’s one of the great joys of jazz listening—and there is so much of him in so many of his aspects; saxophonist, clarinetist, trumpeter, arranger, composer, leader. There are hundreds of Carter recordings. Even the Carter website offers only a selected discography. All I can give you are a few highlights. Let’s include Sax ala Carter, which I discussed last month in this posting. He recorded that in 1960.
Then, let’s go back thirty-one years before that, to 1929, when Carter was twenty-two years old and playing in a great band with a silly name, McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. He has a solo on “I’d Love It” that shows not only his early mastery of the alto saxophone, but also the close attention he had paid to Louis Armstrong’s phrasing. It comes a minute into the real audio clip of the entire recording. You will find it on this page of the Red Hot Jazz website. Scroll down and click on “I’d Love It.” You will also hear solos by Fats Waller, Coleman Hawkins and the wonderful trombonist Claude Jones.
Another Bluebird collection, All Of Me, has thirteen tracks of Carter’s early 1940s big band. The title number has his magnificent scoring for saxophones and a prime example of his clarinet, which he later dropped from his arsenal. The album also has Carter as a sidemen in five groups from 1934 to 1947, playing a beautifully formed trumpet solo with Willie Bryant’s band on “The Sheik of Araby”, alto sax with an Artie Shaw all-star combo plus strings, and guesting with a band of young boppers led by tenor saxophonist Lucky Thompson. This bountiful collection also presents four of the pieces he co-composed and orchestrated for the late-fifties television series M Squad, with a rare serving of Carter on soprano sax.
The Radio Years 1939-1946 has twenty well-recorded air checks of three editions of Carter’s big band. The 1943 band included several important figures in the swing-to-bop transition, among them J.J. Johnson, Freddy Webster and Curly Russell. In 1946, Miles Davis was in the Carter trumpet section, but he has no identifiable solos here. Carter’s alto solo on “I Can’t Get Started” is one of the loveliest melody statements he, or anyone, ever played.
One of the most astonishing sessions Carter was involved in was someone else’s. In 1939, Vibraharpist Lionel Hampton put together an ad hoc recording band with three of the four reigning tenor sax giants, Chu Berry, Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins (only Lester Young was absent); Carter on alto; young Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet; and a rhythm section of Hampton, pianist Clyde Hart, guitarist Charlie Christian, bassist Milt Hinton and drummer Cozy Cole. They recorded a song Carter had written in England three years earlier, “When Lights Are Low.” It became his most famous composition. The alternate take is the only track with Carter in the rare Hampton CD, The Jumpin’ Jive, which the Rifftides staff managed to track down (so to speak) in a sub-basement of the Amazon website.
In the 1950s, Carter was heavily committed to arranging and scoring work in the Hollywood studios, but he found time to record for Norman Granz’s labels. His sessions with Oscar Peterson’s Trio were notably successful. One of his enduring masterpieces came in 1958 in the Jazz Giant album for the Contemporary label. It reunited him with Ben Webster and brought in west coast luminaries Jimmy Rowles, Andre Previn, Frank Rosolino, Barney Kessel, Leroy Vinnegar and Shelly Manne. It is one of the few jazz albums by anyone that is an unqualified success from its first note to the last. I’ve always thought of the 1962 Swingville CD Benny, Ben & Barney, which I have always thought of as a sort of sequel to Jazz Giant. Webster is on board again, with the Ellington clarinetist Barney Bigard, trumpeter Shorty Sherock, Rowles, Vinnegar, guitarist Dave Barbour and drummer Mel Lewis. It has a splendid version of “When Lights Are Low” and a delicious long performance called “You Can’t Tell The Difference When The Sun Goes Down Blues.”
Finally: One of the great jazz albums of any era, Further Definitions, for which Carter assembled three other great saxophonists—Coleman Hawkins, Phil Woods and Charlie Rouse—and a perfect rhythm section of pianist Dick Katz, bassist Jimmy Garrison, guitarist John Collins and drummer Jo Jones. The latest CD reissue pairs Further Definitions with Carter’s 1966 followup, Additions to Further Definitions, which is almost, but not quite, as good. Hardly anything is.
From there, you’re on your own. Carter continued to record through the sixties, seventies, eighties and much of the nineties. He made a quintet album with Phil Woods, the other member of a mutual admiration society, in 1996, when Carter was eighty-nine years old. He died in 2003, just short of his ninety-sixth birthday, one of the most revered figures in American music.

Jim Brown writes about a couple of points with which he takes issue in a recent Rifftides piece, Harmony And History.

First, I take great pleasure in sitting in a Starbucks or other
small restaurant and hearing QUALITY music in the background (or
even the foreground). It appears that Starbucks did a lot to make
this practice widespread, and I applaud it. In fact, many of the
restaurants that my wife and I patronize for the food have adopted
quality jazz as their background.

A few years ago, I walked into a Panera Bread restaurant to hear a
track from Clifford, Sonny, and Max’s Joy Spring session, and
wondering if they had ever guessed that day what masterpieces they
were creating, and that the music might not only outlive them, but
also become music for the masses.

And on the topic of late night satellite radio, I have no quibble
at all with the high quality show that Bob Parlocha does on a
hundred or more stations every night. When this show was in the
planning stages, an engineer friend who works for WFMT, the
syndicator of the show, asked me for suggestions of who might host
it. One of those I mentioned was jazz trumpeter Art Hoyle, a
Chicagoan who both loves the music (when I’m out listening to
someone good, Art is nearly always there too) and whose great voice
has long made him a favorite for voiceover work. He didn’t get that
gig, but he is “voicing” one of the satellite jazz channels (XM or
Sirius). He could have a lot to say about all of the music, but I
doubt that he does (I don’t have a receiver for those sources).

Like many jazz fans of my generation, I was lucky enough to grow up
with GREAT jazz radio, and consider it critical to the good health
of the art form. Great jazz radio should be both entertainment and
education, and the great jazz jocks could do both very well. And I
agree that the currently widespread practice of not talking about
the music, failing to identify soloist, sidemen, and arrangers,
etc. is doing jazz a great disservice. The great jazz jocks I grew
up with were my early teachers — guys like Dick Martin, Sid McCoy,
Hugh McPherson, Daddyo Daylie, Harry Abraham, Bill Artis, and Dick
Buckley were some of them. Buckley is still on the air in Chicago.
The rest are gone. But I’ll put Parlocha in their class. I only
wish he was on the air in Chicago.

Jim Brown is a distinguished audio expert who, among his other accomplishments, recorded Carmen McRae at Ratso’s, that fine two-CD set released a few years after she died.

I am working tonight in an airport hotel. Tomorrow morning, I shall clamber aboard an airplane and head for Quantico, Virginia, and a reunion with a bunch of guys who took their commissions away from the Marine Corps a long time ago. Most of us haven’t seen each other since. Someone told me that our first reunion event is a twenty-mile forced march with eighty-five-pound field packs followed by hors d’oeuvres and white wine. I think it was a joke—the white wine part. While I’m in the Quantico-Washington-Baltimore-Annapolis area, I’ll do a few book interviews and a signing or two. If anything happens that I think you might find interesting, I’ll post at once. In the meantime, I have prepared a few tidbits that will appear over the next few days. Watch this space. Bring friends.

I made a one-day trip to the Centrum Port Townsend (Washington) jazz festival over the weekend for a book signing and to hear as much music as I could take in. Copies of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond moved quite nicely, thank you.
The music I heard was in the four-hour Saturday afternoon concert in Fort Warden State Park’s McCurdy Pavilion (no, it’s not named for Roy McCurdy). The opener was bassist Christian McBride’s quartet with saxophonist Ron Blake, drummer Terrion Gully, and pianist John Beasley subbing for Geoff Keezer. McBride stunned the packed house with his virtuosity and swing. Blake never fails to impress me, particularly on tenor sax, and he was in great form. Gully is a young powerhouse. With little notice, no rehearsal time with the band and barely a sound check, Beasley more than held his up his end. But it was a disappointment that, with a perfectly good Steinway concert grand sitting there, he spent most of his time on a Fender-Rhodes electric piano and a synthesizer.
In his introduction of pianist Kenny Barron, John Clayton emphasized Barron’s keyboard touch. Then, in four duets with violinist Regina Carter, Barron demonstrated his touch, time and exquisitely honed harmonic sense. The crowd responded with long, loud enthusiasm to the duo’s sensitive approach to “Don’t Explain,” and again to the set closer, “Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise,” also a highlight of their Free Fall CD.
Clayton wrapped up the afternoon conducting a spirited set of Count Basie pieces by the festival big band that included tenor saxophonist Ricky Woodard, trumpeter Byron Stripling and drummer Gary Hobbs. Bruce Forman supplied rhythm guitar and proved that he understands the mixture of strength and subtlety with which Freddie Green propelled the Basie band. Pianist Bill Mays proved that he understood Basie. Carmen Bradford sang three songs with the band and captivated the crowd. By the time the band signed off with “One O’clock Jump,” jumping had been persuasively defined and Clayton seemed to have firmly established himself as the festival’s new artistic director. Not all of the bitterness has dissipated after the clumsy dismissal of Bud Shank in that role a year ago, but attendance and enthusiasm seem to indicate that the Port Townsend festival is viable.