Archives for 2005

Jerry Jazz Musician has a long interview with the author about Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He incorporates photographs and sound clips. While you’re there, roam around the JJM site and see all the good things he’s up to, but don’t forget to return to Rifftides. Please bring friends back with you.

Now that you ask, the name Rifftides was inspired by a 1945 Coleman Hawkins piece, “Rifftide.” The tune was part of the celebrated 1945 Hollywood Stampede session that included trumpeter Howard McGhee, one of the bebop kiddies Hawk nurtured. Thelonious Monk had played with Hawkins the year before. Monk later recorded the tune and called it “Hackensack.” Either way, it’s based on the harmonic structure of “Oh, Lady Be Good,” but copyright law doesn’t cover chord changes, and George Gershwin’s estate earned no royalties. Nor can titles be copyrighted, so I stole Hawkins’s and pluralized it.

The public television station where I live finally got around to airing the first installment of the new PBS series Legends of Jazz, three weeks after most of the rest of the country saw it. Given the near-absence of jazz on TV, it was welcome. The program presented tenor saxophonist James Moody, clarinetist Paquito d’Rivera, festival impressario George Wein and singers Jon Hendricks and Nancy Wilson, all named jazz masters by the National Endowment for the Arts.
The hour was as much a panel discussion with the host, pianist Ramsey Lewis, as it was a musical event. It served as a preview of and promotion for a thirteen-week series of half-hour shows that will air in the fall. Lewis moderated with relaxation, thoughtful questions and camaraderie that arose from mutual respect between him and his guests. “Wait a minute,” he said to Hendricks, “back up a couple of sentences and tell us about Art Tatum.” That prompted the story of the great pianist grooming the thirteen-year-old Hendricks’ talent in their mutual hometown of Toledo in the early 1930s.
Wein told about cajoling Duke Ellington into reaching for something special at the Newport festival in 1956. The result was “Diminuendo in Blue” and “Crescendo in Blue” with Paul Gonsalvez’s celebrated 27-chorus tenor saxophone solo in the “wailing interval.” Moody talked about the thrill of coming out of the service in 1946 and into Dizzy Gillespie’s big band on 42nd Street.

Knocked me out, ’cause I’d be sitting in the band with Diz and I’d look up and there sitting at the bar were Benny Goodman, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins—and in the band, Thelonious Monk, Ray Brown, Milt Jackson.

Then, Moody played a piece indelibly associated with the bebop era, Gillespie’s “Woody’n You.” He was accompanied by the superb rhythm section of pianist Billy Childs, bassist Dave Carpenter and drummer Roy McCurdy. They also backed Hendricks in his over-the-hills-and-dales vocalise on Monk’s “Rhythm-a-ning.” In an inexcusable slight, Childs, Carpenter and McCurdy were never introduced until the last seconds of the show, in a fly-by roll of the credits.
D’Rivera told of growing up in a household in Cuba in which all kinds of music were played and studied, so that by the time he was a professional clarinetist and saxophonist he made no distinction among categories. He was equally at home with classical concertos, Afro-Cuban claves and Charlie Parker bop tunes. He demonstrated his range in a virtuoso performance of an unaccompanied, and unidentified, classical piece that melded into a jazz duet with bass guitarist Oscar Stagnaro. Stagnaro got the same anonymous treatment as Childs, Carpenter, McCurdy and the classical piece. Surely, when the fall series airs, the producers will have corrected those little injustices.
Asked about her influences, Nancy Wilson emphasized—above all others—Little Jimmy Scott. Her performance of “God Bless The Child,” with Lewis at the piano, confirmed that there is much more of Scott in her lineage than of the song’s composer, Billie Holiday.
As the program was winding down, Wein introduced Renee Olstead, a fifteen-year-old sitcom star and singer whom he identified as emblematic of his belief that young people will embrace jazz and guarantee its future. Ms. Olstead sang “Taking A Chance On Love,” credibly, then told Lewis that she is making a project of converting her contemporaries to jazz. That brought a round of “Yeah” and applause from the veterans.
It was a charming and engaging program. It lacked the intensity, focus and video artistry of the immortal 1957 The Sound of Jazz on CBS-TV, Ralph Gleason’s Jazz Casual series of the sixties and the Jazz At The Maintenance Shop programs directed by John Beyer for PBS in the late seventies and early eighties. But, after all, it was a pilot and a promo. We may hope that when the series hits in the fall, it will reflect the values of those earlier programs—creative camera work for directors who know how to use it, good sound, lighting without gimmicks, and a minimum of explanation (The Sound of Jazz, the best program of its kind, ever, had almost no talk). In his notes for the long-playing record of the music from that show, Eric Larabee wrote that because of the artistic, if not commercial, success of the television program, there was talk of a series. He said that Whitney Balliett and Nat Hentoff, the critics whose taste and instincts guided the show, should remain in charge.

But one wonders if the miracle can happen twice. Part of the reason that Balliett and Hentoff were let alone was that no one in high authority really understood what they were up to. Now the secret is out and there will be many hazards.

Larabee was right. No successor to The Sound of Jazz, let alone a series, emerged. That does not mean that it couldn’t happen. Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Ben Webster, Vic Dickenson, Gerry Mulligan and all of the other musicians but two who populated The Sound of Jazz are gone. Only the master guitarist Jim Hall is thriving. Clarinetist Jimmy Guiffre survives in ill health. Still, we have important players of several generations with us today. Let us wish the people in charge of Legends of Jazz the understanding, integrity and lack of interference required to gather the cream of today’s jazz artists and present this music on television in the best possible way, simply and naturally. Ms. Olstead’s teenaged peers—and the rest of us—might just dig it.

The Coleman Hawkins DVD recommendation in Doug’ Picks (right-hand column) mentions an unidentified vibes player. Rifftides reader Russ Chase says the vibist is Harry Sheppard. Barry Feldman, the producer of the CD, confirms it. Sheppard worked in the 1950s with Billie Holiday, Cozy Cole and Sol Yaged and in the ‘60s with Benny Goodman, Doc Severinsen and Georgie Auld. In recent decades, he has been in Houston, where, according to his website, he remains gainfully employed in music at the age of seventy-seven. After listening to one of Sheppard’s CDs, Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times, “Mr. Sheppard wrings unexpected tones out of his instrument. He juxtaposes a floating vibrato, quick skittering notes and a marimba like percussive tremolo.” Sheppard is reported to be a four-mallet man these days, but at the Hawkins session he used two mallets and still managed to skitter impressively.
Unlike Pee Wee Russell, Charlie Shavers, J.C. Higginbotham and others whom viewers might recognize on the DVD, Sheppard and guitarist Dickie Thompson never became household names, let alone household faces. Thompson is easy to identify once you know to look for that rarity, a left-handed guitarist. He had a distinctive style founded on crisp swing and worked for years in the trio of organist Wild Bill Davis. I came across photographs of him on bassist Ed Friedland’s web site. They show Thompson playing last year in Tucson, where he settled but apparently did not retire. At eighty-seven, Thompson was sporting a nifty red guitar and had less hair than in the late fifties—in fact, no hair—but otherwise looked remarkably unchanged. It used to be said that jazz was a young man’s art. Not if you’re Dickie Thompson or those amazing upper octagenarian pianists Hank Jones and Marian McPartland.

A reader of Rifftides or Take Five (both, I hope) has been listening to Jim Hall’s 1974 Concierto CD in which Hall’s sidemen are Paul Desmond, Chet Baker, Roland Hanna, Ron Carter and Steve Gadd. She sent a message asking a question at which musicians tend to guffaw when civilians ask it, one that arises out of genuine interest and does not deserve scorn. Here’s the exchange:
Q: The track “Concierto de Aranjuez” is hauntingly beautiful. Do the musicians totally improvise, or do they each have a kind of musical outline around which they create? You can guess from the question I’m not a musician, but it’s something I’ve wondered about.
A. Except in the most unfettered avant garde improvisation, there must be a plan or the result will be random noise, which, come to think of it, describes the most unfettered avant garde improvisation. Virtually every piece of music has some sort of tonal organization, whether or not there is a formal chord structure. In the case of “Concierto” on the Jim Hall album, the musicians improvise around the simple and quite lovely harmonies that Joaquin Rodrigo wrote into the adagio section of his famous “Concierto de Aranjuez.”
Jazz musicians frequently get questions about whether they know what they’re doing. In Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, I included an old Down Beat piece of mine that tells how Paul dealt with the question on one occasion. it’s on page 214. Here is the pertinent passage.

Desmond and an old friend were about to reminisce, but one of the Musicarnival actresses had a question.
“I don’t want to show my ignorance,” she chirped, “but do you know what you’re going to play before you sit down, or do you just sort of make it up as you go along?”
Desmond gave her a long look to be sure he wasn’t the victim of a put-on, decided he wasn’t, and explained.
“First of all, I never sit down. But I do try to follow a general plan, which we’ve all discussed on the plane. Chords and things.”
“Oh, you mean sort of like harmony.”
“Yeah, something like that.”

Yesterday, I renamed Arnold Schoenberg, called him Aaron. I must have confused him with a character in one of his stage pieces. It’s fixed now. An attentive reader, Chris Schneider, caught the mistake and sent this charming reprimand.

Geez, and I thought his name was *Moses* Schoenberg …
Anyone who makes a mistake like that deserves to be subjected to the Schoenberg joke in my additional lyrics for “The Wonder of You” (that’s the Ellington/George song of that title, *not* the Elvis one).
Quote:
I’ve whistled ‘Pierrot Lunaire,”
I’ve jockeyed in the June air;
I’ve moped about in moon air, all blue.
The worlds may fall asunder,
But nothing’s like The Wonder of You.
(©2002 Chris Schneider)
– – – – – –
Having made more than my own share of misnaming typos, I’m full of sympathy.

Thanks. I feel so much better

Reacting to Tuesday’s posting about the Wingspread conference on ways to grow the market share of jazz, Rifftides Reader Jan Brukman thinks it unlikely that jazz will exceed its three percent share of the market (an optimistic estimate) for music recordings, but he doesn’t think it will disappear.

As string quartets will never die, neither will jazz, and for the same reasons. They are classical forms; if you stray too much from the classical forms, however, you get experiments, which real people cannot hear. No amount of education can transcend that, as arrogant idiots like Charles Wuorinen never found out.

That is how many jazz people feel about Ornette Coleman, but Coleman has as enthusiastic a following as does Wuorinen among afficionados of music on the edges of modern classicism. Wuorinen is an American composer who uses the twelve-note system developed by Arnold Schoenberg and expanded by Milton Babbitt. He often writes electronic music. His best known pieces are Time’s Encomium, which brought him a Pulitzer prize, and Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky. “Best known” does not mean familiar. I wonder how many people have heard a Wuorinen work. He also won a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur “genius” grant. The New York Times once wrote, “Charles Wuorinen has taken the decrees of 12-tone music and made them sing.” Dissenting somewhat, The New Yorker critic Alex Ross wrote of Wuronen’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a collaboration with Salman Rushdie:

Although Wuorinen has not renounced the twelve-tone writing with which he made his name, he, too, now deposits triads in his scores as if they were pillow mints, and even indulges in pastiches of jazz and blues. Schoenberg once believed that atonal music could have the same emotional range as tonal music; Wuorinen, surrendering to psycho-acoustic reality, uses dissonant complexity to express the terror of war and quasi-tonal passages to express love and reconciliation. Passages of the latter type are, admittedly, tentative and fleeting. This comedy growls and thrashes more than it sings and dances.

That paragraph, which has dissonant complexity of its own, is from a piece about the conductor James Levine. You can read the whole thing in Ross’s The Rest is Noise, a blog I cannot recommend highly enough. I am adding it to the Other Places list in the right-hand column.

Gordon Sapsed reports on British radio and clubs not quite keeping jazz at arms’ length and not quite embracing it.

Here in the UK the London radio station Jazz FM recently changed its name to Smooth FM. Explaining the change the owners said, “it’s a sad fact of life that Jazz FM has never made a profit in 15 years of existence …..the station will continue its commitment to broadcast 45 hours of specialist jazz programming each week ….. but there is an enormous appetite for artists such as Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Alicia Keys, George Benson, Michael Buble and Diana Krall who will fill the daytime schedule…… In-depth research shows that 40% of our listeners prefer the name ‘Smooth FM” and two thirds of non-listening Londoners are put off tuning in because of the name Jazz FM. 42% say they do not tune in because ‘they were not into jazz music.”
Meanwhile, here in the Southampton area, the Concorde Club (usually thought of locally as the Concorde Jazz Club) has undergone a multi-million pound refit but maintained a jazz policy by keeping jazz away from the money-earning Thursday Friday and Saturday nights. ‘Clubbing’, with dancing to D.J.s and tribute bands (clones of Elvis, The Stones,The Beatles and such) provides the funding to make jazz affordable on other nights. Jazz is just one part of the club’s overall image

Back in the USA, as one of those clone bands is probably singing, a veteran New York jazz pianist who has had trouble finding work told me about a gig she was offered. The conditions were that she play nothing but Sinatra hits and Italian songs…for no pay. She declined. At least, the club owner didn’t ask her to pay him. That has been happening in several cities, a rather radical redefinition of market share.

Have I mentioned lately that I wrote a book called Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond? You can buy it from the publisher and get free shipping. Please do.

Doug Ramsey explores every facet of Desmond’s public and private lives in this intimate, often hilarious and very thorough biography, a book that is very hard to put down. —Ken Dryden, allaboutJazz.com

See the entire review here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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