Archives for 2005

If you would like to get in touch—I hope—use the e-mail address under Contact in the right-hand column. I try to answer communiques with all possible dispatch. In other words, if it take a few days, please be patient. The Rifftides staff would appreciate your recommending us to your friends and neighbors. The audience seems to be growing, but there is room for expansion. More is more.

The CBS Radio Weekend News Roundup is running Correspondent Bill Vitka’s report on Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. Based on Vitka’s interview with the author, it is a brilliantly produced min-documentary about four minutes long. Wait ’til you hear what he did with “Petrouchka.” Click on this link. When the CBS window comes up, scroll down to item 4 and click on “Author Interviews.” The segment is at 3:55, after one with Howard Bryant on his book about steroids in baseball; Take Five following strike three.

DevraDoWrite went to guitarist Jim Hall’s concert last night at the 92nd Street Y in New York. She liked it.

My reaction is favorably biased, of course, as Jim is my dad, but it was a great concert, really. I’m not going to review it — hopefully someone else will, but I will tell you that my favorite part of the program was the second half. That’s when an unusual string section consisting of six cellos and six violas played on three compositions: a Jim Hall original titled October Song, an arrangement of John Lewis’ “Django” featuring Jim along with guitarist Peter Bernstein, and “Goodbye” by Gordon Jenkins featuring Joe Lovano on clarinet and soprano saxophone.

Go here for all of Devra’s comments. Someone else did review the concert…Zan Stewart in The Star Ledger (Newark). His first line: “Jim Hall is a giant of jazz guitar.” He liked the concert, too.

Flugelhornist Tom Harrell offered breathy, singing lines on “With a Song in My Heart,” as Hall backed him with almost scratchy-sounding chords, then soloed with the warm, full sound that recalled his early career work. And there was tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, who teamed with the honoree for the saxman’s “Blackwell’s Message.” Hall soloed with ideas that ranged between abstract and grounded.

All of Stewart’s review is here.

Paul Conley of KXJZ in Sacramento turned an interview about Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond into a masterly short program. Conley, who has produced several excellent shows in the NPR Jazz Profiles series, added an announcer introduction, worked in music clips and seasoned the segment with sound bites from Dick Johnson. Johnson was the leader who enticed Desmond away from the Band Box in 1949, leaving Dave Brubeck scuffling…and furious with Paul. (They reconciled. Sorry to spoil the suspense.) To hear the piece, click on this link, then click on “Listen.”

Following the most recent rounds of atrocities—Iraq, London—a friend wanted to talk. He did not have comforting insights into mankind’s oldest philosophical question, nor did I. I don’t know whether Miller Williams has the answer, but this distinguished American poet ponders it beautifully. With his permission, here is one of his finest poems.

Why God Permits Evil:
For Answers to This Question
Of Interest to Many
Write Bible Answers, Dept. E-7

—ad on a matchbook cover

Of interest to John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas
for instance and Job for instance who never got

one straight answer but only his cattle back,
With interest, which is something, but certainly not

any kind of answer unless you ask
God if God can demonstrate God’s power

and God’s glory, which is not a question.
You should all be living at this hour.

You had Servetus to burn, the elect to count,
bad eyes and the Institutes to write;

you had the exercises and had Latin.
the hard bunk and the solitary night;

You had the neighbors to listen to and your woman
yelling at you to curse God and die.

Some of this to be on the right side;
some of it to ask in passing, Why?

Why badness makes its way in a world He made?
How come he looked for twelve and got eleven?

You had the faith and looked for love, stood pain,
learned patience and little else. We have E-7.

Churches may be shut down everywhere,
half-written philosophy books be tossed away.

Some place on the South Side of Chicago
a lady with wrinkled hose and a small gray

bun of hair sits straight with her knees together
behind a teacher’s desk on the third floor

of an old shirt factory, bankrupt and abandoned
except for this just cause and on the door:

Dept. E-7. She opens the letters
asking why God permits it and sends a brown

plain envelope to each return address.
But she is not alone. All up and down

the thin and creaking corridors are doors
And desks behind them: E-6, E-5, 4, 3.

A desk for every question, for how we rise
blown up and burned, for how the will is free,

for when is Armageddon, for whether dogs
have souls or not and on and on. On

beyond the alphabet and possible numbers
where cross-legged, naked, and alone,

there sits a pale, tall, and long-haired woman
upon a cushion of fleece and eiderdown

holding in one hand a handwritten answer,
holding in the other hand a brown

plain envelope. On either side, cobwebbed
and empty baskets sitting on the floor

say In and Out. There is no sound in the room.
There is no knob on the door. Or there is no door.

©1999 by Miller Williams

Williams wrote and read the inaugural poem at the beginning of President Bill Clinton’s second term in 1997, four years after Maya Angelou was the inaugural poet as President Clinton began his first term. In a PBS program, The Inaugural Classroom, a 12th grader asked Williams how it felt to be compared to Angelou.

“She writes opera and classical music,” Williams said, “and I write jazz and blues.”

The late poet John Ciardi summed up Williams this way:

Miller Williams writes about ordinary people in the extraordinary moments of their lives. Even more remarkable is how, doing this, he plays perilously close to plain talk without ever falling into it; how close he comes to naked sentiment without yielding to it; how close he moves to being very sure without ever losing the grace of uncertainty. Add to this something altogether apart, that what a good reader can expect to sense, coming to these poems, is a terrible honesty, and we have among us a voice that makes a difference.

“Why God Permits Evil” appears most recently in Williams’s collected poems, Some Jazz a While. To learn more about Miller Williams, go here.

The New York pianist George Ziskind observed the changing of the guard at a venerable New York jazz institution and sent us this report.

Monday night I attended the opening shot of this year’s “Jazz in July” event at the 92nd Street Y. Dick Hyman, who had long been artistic director of this annual jazz concert series, recently passed that baton to Bill Charlap – and Bill has already made some significant innovations in programming. (Like, how about “The Front Line: Small Group Jazz of Horace Silver and Kenny Dorham”)
I attended a master class co-helmed by Charlap and Ted Rosenthal. That alone is reason enough to have been there – two wizard players, both of whom know how to defeat the dreaded “muddy gene” that so often destroys the music when two pianists, no matter how good, play simultaneously.
But this was way more than two good players on two Steinway B’s: four students from Manhattan School of Music played two tunes each (a ballad, and something other than a ballad). Following each tune, Charlap and Rosenthal offered cogent commentary. There were a few instances when the playing was on such a super-high level that Bill and Ted were hard pressed to offer any comment.
If the talent shown by Michael Cabe, Gordon Webster, Miro Sprague and Fabian Almazon is an indicator of who’s going to handle jazz piano playing after you and I depart this orb, things will be in good hands. Cabe looked to be thirty-something; he could have been a bit younger. The youngest was Miro Sprague, 16. As I wrote Bill and Ted this morning, these two gave me the biggest thrills (not that the others were chopped liver by any means!) Cabe opened with a version of “Be My Love” that simply dripped with inner voices and passing tones. It would have been hard to improve this performance – but possibly taking it into tempo after a chorus or two of rubato might have done the trick, and both Bill and Ted pointed this out in their comments.
Miro Sprague – remember that name! – opened his pair with “All Blues.” The best way to describe what he did on the tune would be to paraphrase Charlap’s comments: “You took a tune that had been owned by Miles Davis ever since the Kind of Blue LP, and made it your own – and that is a very hard things to do.”
I was seated 4-5 feet from the top end of Miro’s keyboard and I kept staring at his hands. I had never seen such long, slender, elegant fingers. They just seemed to go on and on . . .
I hope the master class format continues to be a part of the annual Jazz in July event. Oh – one final note about the material played: a significant item on the c.v. of both Charlap and Rosenthal is the fact that they each were a part of Gerry Mulligan’s band. Fittingly, they bookended last evening’s proceedings with two Mulligan compositions: they opened with “Curtains” and closed with “Rocker.” “Rocker” is the better known of the two. I won’t even try to describe “Curtains”; it is so loaded with deep and melodic subtlety, I don’t think I could do it justice.

“Rocker” was at first called “Rock Salt” when Mulligan wrote it for a Charlie Parker date with strings in the early 1950s. There are two classic recordings of it, in Mulligan’s arrangement for the last Miles Davis Birth of the Cool session and with Mulligan’s own Tentet. “Curtains” is on the Midas Touch CD by Mulligan’s quartet with Rosenthal on piano. It is from a concert in Berlin in 1995, eight months before Mulligan died.
The only information I could find on the web about Michael Cabe, aside from scattered references, was this paragraph from a 2002 Betty Carter Jazz Ahead program at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Obviously, he has moved on since then.

Michael Cabe is a 23-year-old jazz pianist/composer who has been active on the Seattle scene for several years. Cabe is a member of the Glynn Brothers Quartet, performs with the Seattle repertory Jazz Orchestra, appears as a solo pianist in many venues, and leads his own Michael Cabe Trio. He has worked with many of Seattle’s top jazz musicians including bebop saxophonist Don Lanphere, multi-instrumentalist Jay Thomas, and one of Seattle’s favorite vocalists Becca Duran. A winner of many musical awards and scholarships in the greater-Northwest region, including the 1997 Bellevue Jazz Festival Award for Outstanding Soloist, and runner-up at the 2002 Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival, Cabe continues to forge a successful musical career. Cabe grew up in Monroe, Washington, attended Mt. Hood Community College in Portland Oregon, and will complete his jazz studies degree in 2002 at the University of Washington, where he studies with Marc Seales.

The eminent neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote a letter to The New York Times that touches on the subject of a recent Rifftides posting. Here is the final paragraph:

The human brain is exquisitely sensitive to, susceptible to, the sound patterns of speech and music, but it is only with music, curiously, that we can be so readily overloaded – we see this, in a minor way, with catchy tunes. And I am inclined to agree with Dr. Victor Aziz that such hallucinations may well become more common as we are all constantly bombarded with music, whether we desire it, attend to it, are conscious of it or not.

Dr. Sacks’s entire letter is here. The article to which it refers, “Neuron Network Goes Awry, And Brain Becomes an IPod,” is here, but because it is older than a week, it will cost you $3.95. Sorry; it’s not MY policy.

I will be blogging lightly today. This may be all there is until tomorrow, unless inspiration or necessity convince me to break away from the deadline article that I’m writing for even more pay than I get from Rifftides.
The Rifftides staff has added a new blog to the Other Places list in the right-hand column. It is the site operated by Joe Moore of KFSR-FM in Fresno. He deals in news about jazz, which lately includes a discouraging number of obituaries. For the most part, his blog is a collection point for articles from all over, but now and then he doesn’t mind giving his opinion. This is the one that made me think his Jazzportraits is a blog worth keeping an eye on. It concerns a track on an album by the singer Mary Stallings with pianist Gerri Allen and drummer Billy Hart, among others.

Someone, (please raise your hand) decided it would be a good idea for Mary to record a cover of Nashville pop diva Shania Twain’s chart topping hit “Still the One” (not the song by the band Orleans of the same name, which would have been a better choice).
Like a car wreck that’s so horrible you can’t take your eyes off of it, after sitting slack jawed through the first listen through this track, I had to click repeat and hear it about 10 more times. The tune is performed slower than the original, in a quasi swing Billy Hart beat that he’s used quite often on Geri’s records before. Geri’s reharmonized the tune with her typical minimalist approach, and then had the (?)inspired(?) idea to overdub this dissonant synth organ part behind Mary’s vocals, almost an alien pedal point (the chord does change a few times, but you get the idea). The melody of the tune does NOT lend it to a swing beat, especially the B section (the hook). Mary, who is a true pro, tries to make the best of it, but it’s a flat out disaster, and I’m actually shocked it made the record. Simply horrible.

That seems to indicate that Moore listens closely, knows what he’s hearing, and is not reluctant to be blunt. Bluntness is not epidemic in jazz radio. To read the whole review, go here.

Annie Kuebler, the Mary Lou Williams archivist at the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies, gives us further insights into “Rifftide.” That is the 1945 Coleman Hawkins recording that inspired the name of this blog. She does not say that Hawkins stole the tune from Williams, only that it is likely to have been lodged in his mind when he played on a little-known record date with Mary Lou a couple of months before his own session. In the mid-forties, Hawkins and Williams were major swing era musicians encouraging and aiding the younger players who were developing bebop. Hawkins gave Thelonious Monk one of his most important early jobs as a pianist. Wiliams had a profound influence on the new music’s pianists. She told Ira Gitler in an interview for his book Swing To Bop, “We were inseparable, Monk, Bud Powell and I. We were always together every day, for a long time.”
Here is the note Ms. Kuebler sent us about “Rifftide.”

On December 15, 1944, Moe Asch recorded six cuts titled Mary Lou Williams and Her Orchestra in New York City. Williams’s arrangement of “[Oh] Lady Be Good” is nearly identical to Hawkins’s “Rifftide”—and one doesn’t need a musicologist to explain it. It just takes a listen. The only real difference is the breaks to accommodate the various musicians.
Originally recorded on 78 rpm Asch 552-3 as a three record set, the recording is now available on CD on the Chronological Classics Series # 1021, Mary Lou Williams 1944 -1945. The personnel for four of the cuts is Hawkins – tenor sax; Joe Evans – alto; Claude Green – clarinet; Bill Coleman – trumpet; Eddie Robinson – bass; Denzil Best – drums; and, of course, Williams on piano.
Obviously, this recording precedes “Rifftide,” attributed to Hawkins, from Hollywood Stampede on February 23, 1945. I don’t believe enough time had passed that Hawkins forgot the source, but that’s an opinion. Since my music manuscript archivist career began with Duke Ellington’s Collection, I am not judgmental about these things — just like to lay the facts out. In such matters, I am always reminded of Juan Tizol’s reply when asked if Ellington stole songs, “Oh, he stole. He’d steal it from his own self.”
Hope this helps. Thank for naming your website after a great underrated artist’s arrangement.

Before she joined the Institute for Jazz Studies five years ago, Annie Kuebler spent twelve years at the Smithsonian Institution. There, among many other achievements, she accomplished the massive task of organizing the manuscripts in the Smithsonian’s Duke Ellington collection. Her contributions to preserving large segments of American art and culture are invaluable. Thanks, Annie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can read the whole thing here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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