Archives for 2005

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.

In Rifftides a month or so ago, you may have read,

Jazz albums should have program notes. Listeners want and deserve information about the music.

You can read the rest of that post by clicking here. I admit self-interest; I sometimes write album essays. Nonetheless, as a listener, I count on program notes to fill me in on the backgrounds of players, composers and arrangers and, often, on the music itself. Writers of liner notes, definitely including this one, depend on discographers. Discographers are unsung heroes.

Discography. The systematic cataloguing of sound recordings. Data for listings, in which aspects of the physical characteristics, provenance, and contents of sound recordings themselves (with their containers and any accompnaying written and iconographic materials) as well as from logbooks, lists, and catalogues compiled by the record producer or manufacturer, journals and other printed materials, and oral sources.—New Grove Dictionary of Jazz

Simply put, the discographer finds out who recorded, when, where and with whom. If that seems trivial, it is not. Much of jazz history has taken place in recording studios and much of it would be lost if discographers did not painstakingly dig it out, verify it and make it available. For purposes of study, jazz recordings are the equivalent of classical scores or popular sheet music. Accurate information about them is not only desirable, it is essential. Perhaps the best analogy is the field of baseball statistics. Two of the pioneers among discographers, in the 1930s, were the Frenchman Charles Delaunay and the Briton Hilton Schleman. They were followed by Charles Edward Smith, Frederic Ramsey, Brian Rust, Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen, Walter Bruyninckx and Tom Lord, all authors of general discographies. There are also many discographers specializing in specific styles, periods and individual musicians.
I’m singling out a pair of contemporary general discographers who, it seems to me, are making a valuable contribution. They are Michael Fitzgerald and Steve Albin. The difference between Fitzgerald-Albin and nearly everyone else in the field is that they offer their work on the internet. On their website, they make a persuasive case that the web is the best tool for discography, better than print, better than the CD-ROM. They write in “A Philosophy of Jazz Discography”:

Online discographies are ever malleable, readily accepting additions and corrections and immediately substituting the new version for the old.

You can read all of the explanation, find out how to use their system, which Albin developed and calls Brian (after Brian Rust), and roam through the listings by going to his site, which is cleverly named www.jazzdiscography.com. Fitzgerald and Albin have more than fifty musicians in their discography and are planning on adding many more. They include the famous (Frank Sinatra, compiled by Albin) and the semi-obscure (John Neves. Before you go, for those new to discograpy entries, here’s a sample from the www.jazzdiscography.com listing for Sir Charles Thompson, compiled by Bill Gallagher.

Date: March 2, 1945
Location: Los Angeles
ldr- Coleman Hawkins; t- Howard McGhee; tb- Vic Dickenson; ts- Coleman Hawkins; p- Sir Charles Thompson; g- Allan Reuss; b- Oscar Pettiford; d- Denzil Best
Rifftide (Coleman Randolph Hawkins)
Hollywood Stampede – 03:07 (Coleman Randolph Hawkins)
I’m Through With Love – 03:11 (Gus Kahn, Joe Livingston, Matty Malneck)
What Is There To Say – 03:17 (Vernon Duke, E. Y. “Yip” Harburg)
Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams – 03:04 (Harry Barris, Ted Koehler, Billy Moll)
“Hollywood Stampede” is mistitled on the Extreme Rarities issue (#1008) as “Sweet Georgia Brown.” “Hollywood Stampede” also appears in the film “Crimson Canary.” “Rifftide” was unissued but a tape exists.

I wonder how many of you knew that Coleman Hawkins’s middle name was Randolph. I didn’t. Nor did I know, until I read this entry, that “Rifftide” was recorded again after the famous Hawkins Capitol date of February 23, 1945, with Vic Dickenson added. That sort of thing is trivia to some, valuable information to others. Enjoy your visit to Michael Fitzgerald’s site. Hurry back, if you can tear yourself away.

Fellow artsjournal.com blogger, indefatigable all-purpose arts critic and small-town New Yorker Terry Teachout is visiting home, down where Missouri meets Tennessee, Arkansas and Kentucky. He customarily refers to it as Small Town USA, but by giving us a link to the hometown paper, he’s blown the town’s cover. Tourists will be piling in there by the busload, hoping for a glimpse of his birthplace. Terry is giving a speech there, and the local paper interviewed him in advance.

Teachout noted he wrote his first story for publication for the Sikeston High School newspaper, Bulldog Barker, and plans to talk Tuesday about how the world of journalism has changed, especially by the Internet and new media, since he began writing,
“When I started doing this, I wrote on a manual typewriter. Nobody had a computer,” Teachout said.

You can read the whole story here.
TT’s mention of typewriters recalled my typewriter story from the same period. In 1975, I had just taken over the news department of KSAT-TV in San Antonio. We were drastically underequipped and misequipped. When I wrote my first budget, I put in for ten IBM electric typewriters to replace the broken-down manuals the reporters battled every day. The general manager supported me, but the president of the broadcasting company went through the roof. “A bunch of journalists don’t need that fancy equipment,” he said. “They’d just break it.”
Such was the speed of the electronic revolution in TV that within a couple of years, film was out, tape was in, the reporters went from manual typewriters to computers and were doing live reports from the field by microwave.

It is unlikely that there will be a new posting today. The Rifftides staff is on deadline. But, you never know, we could finish early and file something. Watch this space.
As always, we appreciate it when you tell people interested in jazz and other matters about our venture and direct them to Rifftides. Thanks.

I am adding the writer and musician John Robert Brown’s website to the Other Places list in the right-hand column, and not just because he wrote this:

Occasionally a publication changes one’s thinking. Take Five is such a book. I am old enough to have attended several of Desmond’s concerts back in the 1950s. Doug Ramsey’s account rekindled my respect, taught me more than I had ever imagined about its subject, propelling me into a Desmondmania that set me on a revisionist crusade of buying old Brubeck CDs and raving to my friends about my re-discoveries.

Mr. Brown is, among other things, chairman of the Clarinet and Saxophone Society of Great Britain. Some of the articles on his site are devoted to reed players and instruments, and some are simply fascinating reading for people with a general interest in jazz and other matters. Here he is on interviewing Maria Schneider at a big convention of jazz people:

Her Thursday evening concert in the massive Imperial Ballroom of the Manhattan Sheraton, though pitted against three other simultaneous events, was signed ‘house full’. Currently, Maria Schneider is big news. I had arranged to meet her during the afternoon, after a radio interview, in a public area.
Though she had seen me waiting, and acknowledged me, I couldn’t get near for the many enthusiasts wanting to speak to her. When eventually we did meet (it took fifteen minutes), the interrupting fans made it difficult to greet her, and impossible to escort her to the interview lounge. Eventually Schneider coached me in the correct body language. “Look at me and keep talking,” she advised. “Then we won’t be interrupted.”

Click here to read the interview. Then, roam around Mr. Brown’s site. Don’t miss his disquisition on how to pronounce the name of the letter H. It’s under the “General” heading. And I couldn’t resist showing you this lead from an article in his classical section.

A Ford Transit van parked in a leafy side street in north Leeds catches my attention. Finished professionally in silver and black, it bears the words: The Keyboard Academy. The piano keys painted on the side of the vehicle leave no doubt that music teaching is involved. Plainly, this is no van ordinaire.

There’s no pun like a bilingual pun. It’s in a piece about a mobile piano school.

Rifftides is not a way station for announcements, but if something comes up that I think you’d want to know about, well, of course. This is from trumpeter Marvin Stamm.

If you are of a mind – and awake – please tune tonight – July 26 – to JaiJai Jackson’s new jazz radio show at www.xradio.biz/lasvegas from 8-10pm West Coast Time…. just scroll down to “Woman of Jazz” and listen in!
JaiJai (Chubby Jackson’s daughter) will be interviewing me and playing tunes from The Stamm/Soph Project Live at Birdland and from By Ourselves, my duo CD with pianist Bill Mays.

The Stamm/Soph Project includes Mays, drummer Ed Soph and bassist Rufus Reid, with guitarist John Abercrombie on several tracks. Mays’ “In Her Arms” and Reid’s “When She Smiles Upon Your Face” are highlights. Consider both CDs recommended with enthusiasm.

In his newsletter, Blowing My Own Horn, the pianist Hal Galper (Cannonball Adderley, Phil Woods, his own trio) writes,”In truth, I’m a free player in bebopper’s clothing.”

You might find my history of free playing illuminating. In my early Boston days (the 1960’s) I had the good fortune to apprentice with Sam Rivers for 6 years. At the time with Phil Morrison on bass and Tony Williams on drums, followed by my old partner in crime Steve Ellington. We were playing free inside the tunes trying to make them accessible to our audiences by hiding how free we were playing by keeping a groove while still trying to be melodic. (It was many years later that Tony brought the concept, and Sam, into Miles’s band [Davis – ed.]). Eventually we recorded a quartet album for Blue Note, A New Conception.

To read the whole thing in printable PDF format, go here. The Rifftides staff also recommends Galper’s website for its news and his forthright views.

To your right, you will find a brand new batch of Doug’s Picks.

Regarding the Rifftides posting about the late Tom Talbert, and comments in later editions, Larry Kart writes from Chicago:

I bought Bix Duke Fats when it came out (in the days when you could listen in your local record shop to things by people you’d never heard of before) and since have acquired everything (I think) of Talbert’s that has been issued. He was special. Among other things, I love the way he could set up particular soloists in order to draw out their gifts—e.g. George Wallington and Aaron Sachs on Bix Duke Fats. Joe Wilder, too, of course, but there I think Talbert was working with what was evident to all, while with Wallington and Sachs, Talbert perhaps zeroed in on parts of their musical souls that lay a bit below the surface or had not been showcased as effectively before—e.g. what Talbert referred to, wonderfully, as Wallington’s “slow-smiling wit.”

While I never had the pleasure of meeting Talbert, his notes to Bix Duke Fats suggest that he must have been a very witty, sophisticated man. I remember in particular his remark about Bix being a “moderne” experimentalist as a composer, in contrast to a full-fledged modern artist like Picasso, who was not experimenting but realizing exactly what he was going for. That distinction made a big impression on my unformed adolescent mind. (BTW, I notice that the CD booklet for Bix Duke Fats removes both the reference to Bix being “moderne” and the contrast to Picasso.)

Larry Kart’s new book is Jazz In Search of Itself (Yale). I’ve mentioned it before. It deserves at least two plugs.

A reader sent a message taking me to task for shameless hucksterism.

Can a week go by without you plugging your book? I count 21 mentions since mid June.

So many? I’ll try to watch it. I won’t tell you the subject of my interview with Megan Marlena of KKJZ, Los Angeles. I guess you’ll just have to tune in or go to the station’s web audio stream and find out. It will run at 6:35 a.m. and 8:35 a.m. PDT (9:35 and 11:35 EDT) tomorrow, Wednesday.

It is a challenge to create eleven songs on demand, which is why so many albums consisting entirely of originals are less than compelling. The success rate is high in A Sense Of Wonder, a compact disc of songs written by the veteran Australian tenor saxophonist Laurie Lewis and his lyricist wife Alwyn. Young Heather Stewart sings the songs with a sweet innocence. She handles lyrics well and has good intonation, not an epidemic among vocalists. The jewel of the collection is “Don’t Ask.” I am also taken with the regretful “Rather Than Love” and the title song. Lewis, pianist Mark Fitzgibbon and guitarist Doug de Vries have relaxed solos throughout.