Archives for 2005

Years before his death at the end of July, disillusionment, indigence, homelessness and mental illness stilled Lucky Thompson’s tenor saxophone. His life began to unravel in the sixties. In the early seventies, he played little, then stopped. Kind strangers who admired his music saw after him in his last years.
I never knew Mr. Thompson, never saw him in live performance, but his work reached me from the first time I heard it on Charlie Parker’s 1946 Dial recordings. On “Moose The Mooche,” “Yardbird Suite,” “Ornithology” and “A Night in Tunisia,” Thompson’s solos suggested elements of Coleman Hawkins and Don Byas, but the surge and thrust of his invented lines and the swagger in his delivery—particularly on the master take of “Tunisia”—set him apart from other tenor players. He was not, srictly speaking, one of the early bebop artists, but his playing fit perfectly with theirs. Later, I went back a step to 1944 to listen to Thompson on Count Basie’s “Taps Miller” and “Avenue C” and found that he was a fully formed soloist at twenty, mixing smoothness and roughness in perfect balance.
If I were to recommend essential Thompson recordings to people unfamiliar with him, I would start with the Parker Dials, then refer them to the 1954 Miles Davis Walkin’ session on Prestige, which has some of Thompson’s greatest solos. Of his own albums, I suggest Tricotimsm (1956) on Impulse! and Lucky Strikes (1964) on Prestige. Tricotism includes bassist Oscar Pettiford and pianist Hank Jones, with both of whom Thompson had special rapport. The album is hard to find. Here is one possible source. Jones, with bassist Richard Davis and drummer Connie Kay, is also on Lucky Strikes. In it, Thompson plays soprano saxophone in addition to tenor, and the album may well be his masterpiece.

Jim Brown writes from Chicago:
I concur that Lucky Strikes and Tricotism are primo Lucky Thompson, and probably his best, but don’t forget his very important contributions to Cuban Fire, Johnny Richards fine mid-50’s work for the Kenton band. Richards had been around for quite a while by then, but this was his first major work. It may be the one for which he is best remembered, and with good reason. I also like his writing for Adventures in Time.

Thanks for reminding me about the Phil Woods DVD, and Phil’s Quincy Jones CD. I’ve just ordered both… I noticed them first a few weeks back when I ordered the Bill Holman Live release. BTW, ‘Rifftides’ has become a daily reference for me. Thanks!
Ted O’Reilly
Ted O’Reilly is a distinguished Toronto broadcaster and producer.

Just read your review of Blanchard’s set at Yoshi’s. I saw the band’s last set at Jazz Alley on the 7th. I’m still sorting out my own reaction to the music that evening. Certainly an entertaining show, and really a treat to see Aaron Parks continued growth.
Cheers,
Bruce Moore
Bruce Moore is a photographer in Seattle. You can see some of his images of the Blanchard Band here.

My recommendation of Bud Guthrie’s Field Guide to Writing Fiction (right column, under Books) did not arise out of whim. Unless you use your computer strictly for, say, logartihmic calculations, you are writing. Now that anyone on the web can decide to be a journalist, editor and publisher, writing with clarity and simplicity is more important than ever. (Don’t do as I do, do as I say.) That responsbility came to mind again today as I was reading Jay Rosen, a professor, gadfly and multiblogger from New York University who has been a conscience of journalism for twenty years. Rosen captured me with the introduction to his blog:

We need to keep the press from being absorbed into The Media. This means keeping the word press, which is antiquated. But included under its modern umbrella should be all who do the serious work in journalism, regardless of the technology used. The people who will invent the next press in America–and who are doing it now online–continue an experiment at least 250 years old.

Here is some of what Rosen wrote a year and a half ago in a blog piece called Journalism Itself Is A Religion.

We’re headed, I think, for schism, tumult and divide as the religion of the American press meets the upheavals in global politics and public media that are well underway. Changing around us are the terms on which authority can be established by journalists. The Net is opening things up, shifting the power to publish around. Consumers are becoming producers, readers can be writers.

To read all of Rosen’s long essay, go here, and then go here.
I am adding Rosen’s PressThink to the Other Places list in the right-hand column.

Kindly notice that the right-hand column is populated with new entries in the Doug’s Picks category. Enjoy.
Postings today will be light, possibly nonexistent. Travel and too much time away have overtaken me. Other duties call. I could use a nap. Or two.

Bill Evans would be seventy-six years old today. He died on September 15, 1980 at the age of 51. To borrow what Jim Hall said about Paul Desmond, Bill would have been a great old man. That is an easy conclusion; he was a great young man. Here is a little of what I wrote about him in the notes for the 1997 boxed CD set, The Secret Sessions.

The evolution of jazz music as a distinct form of creative expression is contained in only eight decades of the 20th century. The maturing of the art of jazz piano improvisation is an index to the astonishing speed of that development. It took less than 40 years, and its main current ran from James P. Johnson through Fats Waller, Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson, Nat Cole, Bud Powell, and Bill Evans, with Art Tatum standing apart as an unclassifiable phenomenon. (If I were writing that last sentence today, I would add Jelly Roll Morton and Al Haig.)

Evans, the last great jazz piano innovator, inherited and expanded the art transmitted through the fountainheads of piano style…

He recorded his first trio album late in 1956 and little more than a year later had begun to enhance his reputation through brilliant work with Miles Davis. Acting on insights gained from the music of Debussy and other impressionist composers, he enriched his chords beyond those of any other jazz pianist. Comparisons that come to mind are with harmonies that Gil Evans and Robert Farnon wrote for large orchestras and with some of the mysterious voicings of Duke Ellington. Even in his earliest trio work he stretched and displaced rhythm and melody and hinted at modes and scales as the basis for improvisation.

No week passes without my listening to Bill Evans. Although I find it difficult to write with music playing because I cannot ignore it, I am now listening to the brilliant solo pieces he recorded on January 10, 1963. He was about to move on from his relationship with producer Orrin Keepnews at Riverside Records and join Verve. For reasons Keepnews explains in his notes for Bill Evans: The Complete Riverside Recordings, the seventeen performances did not leave the Riverside vaults until the boxed set was issued on LP in 1984. It is now on CD. Evans reached deep into his soul for these performances. I find them indescribably moving on several levels, and I am celebrating his birthday by listening to them, having an excellent Oregon pinot noir and suggesting that it would be a better world if we all heard more Bill Evans. If you need further impetus, ask Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Bill Charlap, Kenny Barron and a legion of other jazz pianists where they would be without Bill Evans.
If you don’t know about it, I suggest that you investigate Jan Stevens’s web site, The Bill Evans Pages. It is a compendium of information about Evans and an accurate guide to his recordings.

By way of his invaluable blog, Terry Teachout has news of the indispensable Shirley Horn. It is not good. Shirley needs cheering up. Please go here for details.

The Encyclopedia of Jazz, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz and Ira Gitler’s books on bebop spell the name of a famous Charlie Parker-Dizzy Gillespie bassist as Curly Russell. But Jack Tracy informs me that when he was editor of Down Beat, Russell told him that he preferred Curley (his given name was Dillon). Accordingly, I am adding the “e” in the Rifftides posting about the CD called Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Town Hall, New York City, June 22, 1945.
This is really just an excuse to again call your attention to that remarkable recording.

Saturday night, following my lecture as jazz scholar-in-residence, I attended the final concert by the students of the Brubeck Institute’s 2005 Summer Colony. The Institute staff invited prominent jazz musicians to select the seventeen colonists by compact disc audition from among the best teenaged jazz musicians in the United States and some from outside this country.
Sixteen-year-old alto saxophonist Ben van Gelder came from the Amsterdam Conservatory in the Netherlands. Playing with haunting tonal quality, he invented melodies that incorporated a judicious use of space, and made harmonic choices outside the chords without sounding contrived. He is one of those rare young musicians who establishes his individuality in three or four notes. His work in the student all-star combo nurtured by trumpeter Ingrid Jensen included not only captivating solos but also unison playing of absolute precision. Listen for Ben van Gelder.
Kyle Athayde, the son of a high school band instructor, is seventeen and came to the Summer Colony from Acalanes High School in Lafayette, California, across the bay from San Francisco. He is a trumpeter, vibraharpist and composer, impressive in all of those areas. The ensemble played a piece, the sort of thing that used to be called a rhythm ballad, that had such an aura of professionalism about it that until Athayde announced it as “a composition of my own,” I assumed that it had been composed and arranged by someone like Jimmy Heath, Frank Foster or Slide Hampton. His trumpet playing, like that of 17-year-old Gregory Diaz of Los Angeles, covered all of the harmonic, rhythmic and technical aspects required of a first-rate jazz soloist. If they have yet to achieve the level of individualism of Ben van Gelder, so do many players who have been making a living in jazz for decades.
In a few days, seventeen-year-old Katie Thiroux will begin her senior year at the Hamilton High Music Academy in Los Angeles. A bassist, she swings hard, solos well and develops supporting lines that inspire soloists. In the all-star combo, her rapport with pianist Julian Bransby and drummer Steve Renko was remarkable. She and her fellow bassists Nick Jozwiak and Charlie Zuckerman joined in a double bass trio workout on Oscar Pettiford’s “Blues in the Closet.” (Introducing them, institute executive director J.B. Dyas, a bassist, explained to the audience that all you need for a jazz combo is a bassist plus one other instrument.)
Not content to be merely a superb player, Ms. Thiroux sings beautifully, accompanying herself on bass in the manner of Kristin Korb, with whom she has studied. In a duet with Ingrid Jensen, she sang “Close Your Eyes” simply and brilliantly, with a canny understanding of the meaning of the lyrics and their relationship to the melody. She and Ingrid ended the piece with a complex unison line that culminated in a high G perfectly intoned by Jensen’s muted horn and Ms. Thiroux’s angelic voice. Generous and giving, Katie Thiroux is a thoroughgoing musician, the anthithesis of the image of the egocentric chick singer. I hope to hear more of her, for the sheer pleasure of it.
Steve Renko is fifteen. He is from St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland, Ohio. His drumming is controlled but swings loosely, and he has perfect time. Julian Bransby, the seventeen-year-old pianist in Jensen’s combo, is from Bloomington, Indiana. Both of his parents are professional musicians. Given the quality of his playing, they must be proud parents, indeed.
In Saturday’s post, I mentioned Isaiah Morfin, the shy fifteen-year-old alto saxophonist who played at my book signing. That night, in the big band directed by colony instructor Joe Gilman, Isaiah, who is approximately the height and weight of his baritone saxophone, played a stomping solo awash in rhythmic intensity and tonal variety. On alto, his soloing is incandescent and derivative. On baritone, the real Isaiah seemed to emerge, brimming with confidence. This time, he did not smile furtively when he got a huge round of applause; he grinned, as pleased with his solo as was the audience.
Drummer Harvel Nakundi, a seventeen-year-old from Miami’s New World School of the Arts, is one-quarter Art Blakey, one-quarter Philly Joe Jones, one quarter Buddy Rich and one-quarter sheer exhuberance in search of consistency. He is a riveting drummer now. When he gets his loose ends tucked in, he will be formidable.
Brian Crutchfield, 17, is a towering Texan from Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. His tenor saxophone conception and tone complement his large frame. His solos showed not only an allegience to John Coltrane and Michael Brecker, but also self-editing that allowed his substantial ideas room to blossom. Such discipline is not often a hallmark of post-Coltrane saxophonists.
One of the faculty said of seventeen-year-old trombonist Ismael Cuevas of Eagle Rock High School in Los Angeles, “Ismael is basically an ear player—but what an ear.” He demonstrated his harmonic acuity, rich sound and range in several contexts.
I was also impressed with guitarist Graham Keir of Wyndmoore, Pennsylvania, and drummer Max Wrightson of Los Angeles, both seventeen. Sixteen-year-old Woody Goss of Skokie, Illinois, is a pianist of depth that reflects his classical training. Pianist Noah Kellman is fourteen. He just finished the eighth grade. His parents, visiting the colony from the family’s home in DeWitt, New York, told me that when he was five, Noah stood watching as his dad played a simple Mozart piece. He asked if he could do it, too. Indulging the boy, his father helped him onto the bench, whereupon Noah played what he had just heard, flawlessly. Lessons ensued. He became a jazz player at the age of ten. Four years later, he is an accomplished jazz accompanist and soloist.
Nadia Washington is a sixteen-year-old senior at the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas, the school at which Bart Marantz’s jazz program produced Roy Hargrove and Norah Jones, among others. She sings in a clear voice and loves Ella Fitzgerald. One of her pieces Saturday night was a virtual reproduction of Fitzgerald’s famous “How High The Moon” from a Jazz At The Philharmonic recording, right down to Ella’s ad lib about forgetting the words—a neat trick of imitation, but a trick nonetheless. Ms. Washington’s real singing came with the colony big band on Dave and Iola Brubeck’s “Since Love Had Its Way” from The Real Ambassadors. It was a sensitive and poised performance.
As I listened to the encore piece that closed the concert and this year’s colony, I thought of this passage from the chapter, called A Common Language, in Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers:

Like every art form, jazz has a fund of devices unique to it and universally employed by those who play it. Among the resources of the jazz tradition available to the player creating an improvised performance are rhythmic patterns, harmonic structures, material quoted from a variety of sources, and “head arrangements” evolved over time without being written. Mutual access to this community body of knowledge makes possible successful and enjoyable collaboration among jazzmen of different generations and stylistic persuasions who have never before played together. It is not unusual at jazz festivals and jam sessions for musicians in their sixties and seventies to be teamed with others in their teens or twenties. In the best of such circumstances, the age barrier immediately falls.

The encore was Thelonious Monk’s “Bright Mississippi.” With the colonists and teachers Greg Tardy, Ingrid Jensen and Hal Crook wailing away on the “Sweet Georgia Brown” changes, the barrier was definitely down. All of this may be more than you wanted to know about seventeen astonishingly talented youngsters. I imagine that it is considerably less than you will want to know as the years go by, assuming that the narrow confines of the jazz economy allow them to work as performing artists.

Well, the book signing at Barnes and Noble in Stockton went fine. We moved a few copies of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond and I signed a batch of shelf copies on which Kathleen Anderson, the store’s lively, intelligent events manager, slapped “Autographed Copy” stickers. “These will go fast,” she promised.
Before the signing and as it happened, a combo of talented summer colonists from the Brubeck Institute played. A fifteen-year-old alto saxophonist from Bakersfield, Isaiah Morfin, began his blues solo on Coltrane’s “Cousin Mary” with a couple of bars of “Take Five.” “That was for you,” he later said, shyly. His parents and little sister were in the audience, beaming.
More later on these remarkable youngsters.

Here in hot Stockton, California (more than a month of daytime temperatures in the nineties or higher, with no relief), the young musicians of the Brubeck Institute’s Summer Colony are learning to be better improvisers. I’ll hear some of them for the first time this afternoon when one of their combos plays at my book signing. The faculty members, who include Ingrid Jensen, Hal Crook and Bart Marantz, tell me that this is a notably gifted bunch of teenagers.
This year’s Yoshi’s distinguished artist-in-residence is Terence Blanchard. Last night, the seventeen colonists, Institute director J.B. Dyas, some of the faculty and I piled into vans and cars and drove eighty miles to Oakland to hear Blanchard’s band at Yoshi’s. Oakland was overcast and cool. Mark Twain famously said that the worst winter he ever spent was one August in San Francisco.
Blanchard’s band, with sidemen averaging not much older than the age of the colonists, concentrated on music from his new CD, Flow. In a long set, they played four pieces, none of them quite free, at least not in the Ornette Coleman sense; none of them straight ahead. They incorporated African elements centered in the astonishing vocal and rhythmic utterances of the guitarist Lionel Louweke, and a variety of world music influences. They played to each other with virtuosity and great enthusiasm. Blanchard demonstrated his mastery of the trumpet. Tenor saxophonist Bryce Swanson, particularly on the piece called (I think) “Wandering Wander,” played with impressive tone and use of space. The drummer, Kendrick Scott, filled and accented beautifully, with internal rhythms and colors that shifted and shimmered.
Pianist Aaron Parks consistently invented chord changes where there were no changes, underscoring by contrast what, for me, was the problem with this band. They were having a splendid time playing for one another, and their enthusiasm transmitted to the audience. Still, except for Parks’s enchanting harmonies on the hymn-like “Over There,” the music lacked harmonic elements on which I could get a handle. And it was missing the consistent time that makes the best jazz performances compelling. At the end, I was full of admiration for the Blanchard band’s skill and elan, but went away unsatisfied and rather empty.

Devra Hall, aka DevraDoWrite, was Joe Williams’s publicist and close friend. She responded to yesterday’s post.

The Joe and Ben story is a great one, and Joel Dorn’s account is quite accurate, but I would quibble with one phrase. Joel writes, “But blizzard or not, enough people showed up so that Joe had to perform.” For Joe it was never a matter of having to perform; the imperative came from his own desire. If there had been but one person in the house, Joe would have wanted to do his show. If I had a nickel for every time Joe told me, “Every night is Carnegie Hall,” I’d be a very wealthy blogess. And of course you are spot on about Joe’s blues and balladry. I had the privilege of composing the notes for Joe’s funeral program, in which I wrote:

“He rode to fame on the back of the blues, but he bared his soul with romantic ballads. The real heartbreak in the 1957 release of A Man Ain’t Supposed to Cry was not about lost love but about a world that was not yet ready to embrace a black balladeer.”

Now that’s a record that can make you cry!

I have had one day at home and in the office following my adventures—Marine and otherwise—on the east coast. This morning, I am flying to Stockton, California. Stockton is the site of the University of the Pacific, home of the Brubeck Institute. I’ll speak at the institute’s Summer Colony for promising young jazz musicians and do two book signings, one at the institute. There will also be a 1 p.m. signing Saturday, August 15, at the Stockton Barnes and Noble store, 4950 Pacific Ave # 319. If you are in the neighborhood or nearby, please join us.
The Summer Colony is funded by Herb Alpert in honor of Paul Desmond. Trumpeter Ingrid Jensen is the colony’s artistic director. The faculty includes trombonist Hal Crook and Dave and Iola Brubeck’s bassist-trombonist-composer son Chris. You can read all about the colony here. I expect to report to you on what I see—and hear.

You may have heard about the new (yes, new) Joe Williams CD. There has been a lot of talk about it. No wonder.
In the winter of 1964, Williams had an engagement with a magnificent rhythm section at Pio’s a club in Providence, Rhode Island. The weather was so bad that Williams, pianist Junior Mance, bassist Bob Cranshaw and drummer Mickey Roker were afraid that no one would come. A few isteners did, despite the storm. So did someone else. In the liner notes for Havin’A Good Time, producer Joel Dorn tells the story. Here is a part of it.

…the city got hit with a blizzard. But blizzard or not, enough people showed up so that Joe had to perform. When Joe and the guys got there, to their surprise, they found Ben Webster, saxophone in hand, sitting in a corner. They didn’t know he was in town and, obviously, had no plans to play with him. Ben asked if he could sit in. Well, who wouldn’t want Ben Webster on the band stand with ’em? Ben, who by this time had stopped drinking was, according to Junior, “sweet and gentle.”

For me, this album is what jazz is really about. It’s what happens when world class players get together and do what cats have been doing for decades, make magic on the spot. Thank God somebody was runnin’ a tape.

There is little to add to Joel’s enthusiastic report, except to say that this is one of the best albums of Williams’s post-Count Basie career, the trio is superb, and Webster worked himself into the arrangements as if he had rehearsed with the band. The early sixties was not a particularly happy time for Webster, certainly not a high point in his career. You’d never know it from his playing that night in Providence.
If you think of Joe Williams as a great blues singer, you’re right, but he was also a master of the art of the ballad. He demonstrates both facets here. To mention only two examples, he gives a booting performance of one of his staples, Joe Turner’s “Kansas City Blues,” and a touching one of “That’s All,” a song he tells his audience he doesn’t know very well. He shouldn’t have spilled the beans. They never would have guessed.

A Rifftides reader responds to the posting about Annapolis.

Weems Creek: I lived in Annapolis from 1969-1986, with a brief 2-year return to NYC in the late 70s (Memo to self: Thomas Wolfe was right). Managed a record store some of those years on West Street, and still have many friends there, including my oldest continuous friend, who is a tutor at St. John’s College; it may have been a sleepy and somewhat shabby town in 1970 compared to today, but I prefer it to Bobo Heaven–when did over-priced coffee and a nice white wine reduction become synoymous with civilization? I’d rather eat home-made crab cakes on crackers and drink 25 cent National Bohs at Sam Lorea’s (ask your friend).

I asked my friend. He said:

National Bohemian was a cheap beer. It was okay. We also drank Munich beer. It was even cheaper, and awful. The 50-cent crab cakes were spectacular. Sam Lorea (pronounced Low-Ray) was a right-wing racist who refused to serve anyone with long hair, and adorned his bar with pictures of Spiro Agnew. Sam always closed his bar at 6 p.m. because he wanted to go home, leaving his customers thirsty and in search of a bar that was open. When he died in 1976, they found several hundred thousand dollars worth of liquor stashed upstairs. Sam feared a return of prohibition. The current Bobos in the restaurant business are more into in-time service.

Crab cakes in Annapolis now go for several multiples of 50 cents, but they are still spectacular. We had great ones last night down at O’Leary’s.

Regarding my rave review of the Marine Corps Band the other night, if you haven’t heard Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” for a while and don’t have it in your collection, here is a free refresher course. It’s a Real Player download of the entire three-and-a-half minute piece by an unidentified band. They take it a trifle fast, but it has a great piccolo solo and an exhuberant out-chorus…if that’s the term.
What does this have to do with jazz? Nothing. Please see the About Rifftides explanation at the top of the right-hand column.

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.