Archives for 2005

Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them, well, I have others—Groucho Marx

As usual, there are piles of incoming compact discs in my office and the music room. Among those that I will want to hear more than once are several by the piano-bass-drums combination that for at least sixty-five years has been at the core of jazz. The piano trio, of course, functions as the rhythm section for big bands and combos. On its own, depending on the players and how they relate to one another, it is capable of nearly limitless flexibility, breadth, depth and variety. In this posting last month, I reflected on the importance of a piano trio that changed the state of the art. Here’s a short list of recommended trio CDs from among the stacks of fairly recent arrivals.
Kenny Barron Trio, The Perfect Set, Live At Bradley’s II (Sunnyside). Barron, piano; Ray Drummond, bass; Ben Riley, drums.
Three years ago in my Jazz Times review of this album’s predecessor, I wrote,

Barron takes “Solar” at a fast clip that does nothing to suppress his development of original melodic ideas or inventiveness in voicings. There’s not a cliché to be heard.

Nor is there in volume two, unless sprinkles of Thelonious Monk seconds and whole-tone runs are to be considered clichés. Barron’s one solo track is a joyous ride on Monk’s “Shuffle Boil.” For the rest of the hour, the trio shines. Barron’s ballad tribute to Monk, “The Only One,” is a highlight, but not the highlight. The entire CD is a highlight by one of the best trios of this or any other period of jazz.
Don Friedman VIP Trio, Timeless (441). Friedman, piano; John Patitucci, bass; Omar Hakim, drums.
Since the very early 1960s, Friedman has been demonstrating that his thorough understanding of Bill Evans liberates him to be himself within the song form. For a pianist to be himself playing so indelibly personal an Evans piece as “Turn Out the Stars” is a monumental expression of individuality. At seventy,Friedman continues his growth, sounding more youthful and inventive than ever. Patitucci may be Friedman’s ideal bassist.
Jason Moran, Same Mother (Blue Note). Moran, piano; Tarus Mateen, bass; Nasheet Waits, drums; Marvin Sewell, guitar.
Okay, so it’s a quartet. But it’s a trio with a guitar grafted on, except for the integrated, and quite lovely, “Aubade.” After being puzzled by all the hype when Moran emerged a few years ago, I am beginning to fathom his iconoclastic approach, although I find it less profound and revolutionary than some do. He may have studied with Jaki Byard, a genius, but the publicity suggesting that he is Byard’s successor or reincarnation is massively unfair to Moran. Let’s wait a minute and see what he becomes. His trio treatment of Mal Waldron’s “Fire Waltz,” sans guitar, may hold a hopeful hint.
Mary Lou Williams 1944-1945 (Classics). Williams, piano; Al Lucas, bass; Jack Parker, drums.
This survey of a couple of important years in Williams’s career includes her suite “Signs of the Zodiac,” seven of whose twelve segments are with the trio. If you want to hear, in her prime, an influence on Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, this is a good place to start.
Bill Mays, Neil Swainson, Terry Clarke, Bick’s Bag (Triplet). Mays, piano; Swainson, bass; Clarke, drums.
Mays has two trios, the one with Martin Wind and Matt Wilson and this one, with two of Canada’s finest sidemen. Recorded at The Montreal Bistro and Jazz Club, having a fine night, they close with Bud Powell’s “Hallucinations,” a good idea because the performance would have been hard to top.
Jon Mayer Trio, Strictly Confidential (Fresh Sound). Mayer, piano; Chuck Israels, bass; Arnie Wise, drums.
Without Mays’ sprung energy, Mayer is a relaxed and relaxing player with origins in the Bud Powell school. Here, he reunites with Israels and Wise. He played with them in Europe more than four decades ago. Their take on Powell’s and Kenny Dorham’s title tune is saturated with Bud’s spirit, and Israels is in his most compelling walking mode.
The Christian Jacob Trio, Styne & Mine (WilderJazz). Jacob, piano; Trey Henry, bass; Ray Brinker, drums.
The brilliant pianist in a program of songs by Jule Styne (“It’s You or No One,” I Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry, and others) and originals by Jacob. The trio’s sometime boss, Tierney Sutton, sings a couple of tunes with the band. In the notes, Jacob’s other sometime boss, Bill Holman, says, “Christian, Trey and Ray are masters; chops are in abundance, but only in the service of the music.” Yup.
Steve Kuhn Trio, Quiéreme Mucho (Sunnyside). Kuhn, piano; David Finck, bass; Al Foster, drums.
Like the slightly older Friedman and the slightly younger Mays, Kuhn is a yeoman of modern jazz who earns more recognition than he gets. In this program of classic Latin American songs (“Bésame Mucho,” “Tres Palabras” and “Andalucía” among them), he is full of swing, refractive ideas and, at times, almost giddy good humor. Finck and Foster are superb behind, around, and weaving in and out of Kuhn’s inventions. A splendid album.
Hey, this is fun. Let’s do more tomorrow.
(To be continued)

Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt. —Sir Francis Bacon

In the right-hand column, you will find a new batch of Doug’s Picks. Yes, I know; it’s high time.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, ‘Is there a meaning to music?’ My answer would be, ‘Yes.’ And ‘Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?’ My answer to that would be, ‘No.’ —Aaron Copland

Acquaintance: Where are you living these days?
Al Cohn: Oh, I’m living in the past.

I tend to live in the past because most of my life is there. —Herb Caen

The sad news from Devra Hall and John Levy is that Shirley Horn died last night. She had been unwell for several years. As DevraDoWrite, Devra just posted an excerpt about Shirley from her and John’s Men, Women and Girl Singers. To read it, go here.
For the excellent NPR Jazz Profiles on this remarkable musician and enchanting singer, go here.

Yakima, Washington, where I live most of the time, has more attractions than trolleys and the legacy of William O. Douglas. Among them is a new place in which to hear music. Well, it’s not a new place. It was built in 1917 and until recently was the Church of Christ, Scientist. Over the past few decades, the congregation, like many of its counterparts across the country, shrank. The church is moving to smaller quarters. After the possibility that the building might become an athletic facility or, worse, be torn down to make way for a parking lot, a family successful in the building trade and devoted to music, acquired it and determined to make it a concert hall.
As the Strosahl brothers, Pat and Steve, were reaching their final decision, they invited a few people to sit and listen to music in the main hall of this gorgeous building, which might have been beamed over to Eastern Washington from the Italian Renaissance.
The test performances included a piano trio playing Beethoven, a group of singers from the Seattle Opera, a brass quintet and a jazz ensemble. The listeners included Brooke Cresswell, the conductor of the Yakima Symphony Orchestra; Jay Thomas, the eminent Seattle trumpeter; Thomas’s wife, the singer Becca Duran; several other professional musicians; and me. After the second sound check, we arose from the pews and gathered under the magnificent dome to evaluate the sound. Our consensus and advice: don’t change a thing. The room has the best natural acoustics I have heard since I listened to a string quartet from the back of St. Nicholas Church in Prague and the music was so clear that I might have been sitting in the midst of the group.
After negotiating an obstacle course of applications, permits, approvals and, in general, dancing a bureacratic
tango daunting even to seasoned builders, the Strosahls emerged with approval in the nick of time for their first concert. That was good, because they had hired the Bill Mays Trio to be the premier performers in what was now called The Seasons Performance Hall. Their plan is to concentrate on jazz and classical chamber music, incorporate tastings of the Yakima Valley’s celebrated wines and make The Seasons an attraction not only for residents but also for visitors who flood into the valley to tour the vineyards and wineries.
The launch was a success. An audience of 350 heard Mays, bassist Martin Wind and drummer Matt Wilson—fresh from an engagement at Jazz Alley in Seattle—in an inspired two-hour concert. In the spirit of the name of the hall, Mays created a program of pieces that alluded to all of the seasons. They included an adaptation of a movement of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” “Autumn Leaves,” “Spring is Here” and “Snow Job,” Mays’ transformation of “Winter Wonderland.” True to the sound check, the hall was a listener’s dream. Amplification of the nine-foot Steinway was not only unnecessary but would have been a prosecutable crime. The dynamics of Wilson’s drumming were crystalline, down to the tiniest whispers of his brushes and the subtlest pings and dopler effects of the little bell he sometimes flourishes. Wind cracked his bass amplifier almost impercebtibly, only enough to enhance the balance. It was a rarity in jazz today, an acoustic performance, warm and intimate, without electronic shaping or manipulation.
When the big department stores abandoned downtown Yakima, either to disappear entirely or move to an asphalt wasteland on the edge of town, it wasn’t long before most of the small stores, without retail anchors to bring shoppers, drifted away. It is a problem common to many medium-sized American cities that have been, to use a generic term, Walmartized. There are dozens of plans and suggestions, many of them harebrained, to breathe life back into downtown. The Strosahls, bypassing commissions, committees and councils, have taken initiative with a cultural approach. With luck, community support, the right kind of publicity and advertising campaign, and bookings that maintain the quality of the opening event, The Seasons could be a catalyst for a downtown Yakima revival.

Jazz musicians have lots of stories from their gigs. Not to impinge on Bill Crow’s territory, but here are three that the peripatetic Bill Mays sent me from the road following his Yakima gig.

I was playing the Knickerbocker in New York City several years ago. A man came up after the set and said “I loved every minute of it. I have all your records, and I love your work.” Always a little suspicious of people who say they have “ALL my records.”I innocently inquired “Really?—I’m curious—which one is your favorite?” He replied with a title that I didn’t recognize. I said “I’m a bit confused—I never made a record by that name.”
He said, “But aren’t you Cedar Walton?” I guess he’d never LOOKED at the backs (or fronts) of his LP collection and thought that as he was enjoying his cavier pie and braised liver, he was also enjoying the music of Cedar Walton.

Mr. Mays (photo by Judy Kirtley) is on the left, Mr. Walton on the right.

Same club, the Knickerbocker; a man and his wife at a nearby table. It’s a talky club and I never, of course, expect a rapt, silent audience. Anyway, this guy requested some tune. I played it, during which he talked continuously to his wife. Near the end of the set he got up, walked past the piano and indignantly said “I never heard my tune”. I replied “That’s because you talked through it the entire time.” He did a hrrummph and strode angrily away. As he was almost out the door I said to the bass player “Keep playing”. I jumped from the piano, ran up to him and said “I played your f—ing tune. You talked all the way though it. Now, I’m going to play it again, and you’re going to stand right here and not move until I’m finished.” Looking shocked and sheepish, to say the least, he dutifully obeyed and stood there for the next eight minutes and 14 choruses while I replayed his request. Upon hearing the last chord he saluted me, took his wife on his arm and vacated the premises. I was lucky. One of these days I’ll get shot.

Third story just came to mind. Shortly after I moved to New York, Ron Carter had been hearing of me and called me for a week at the Knick (they were doing five nights then, as opposed to two now). During a set, a man came up, handed Ron a $5 bill and requested a tune. Ron looked at it, handed it back and said “Sorry, that’s a twenty dollar tune.”

I am in Seattle to help fire the opening shot of the Earshot Jazz Festival, a discussion about the jazz audience and what might be done to expand it. I have reservations about the premise of the second part of that proposition, but I look forward to learning from my fellow panelists. Admittance is free. A cynic might say that you get what you pay for.
This massive city-wide festival includes Bill Charlap, Jason Moran, Robert Glasper, Patricia Barber, Ravi Coltrane and Luciana Souza, among dozens, maybe hundreds, of other musicians. For a schedule, go here. I wish that I could stay around for all eighteen days of it, but obligations elsewhere are calling.

The National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters for 2006 are Ray Barretto, Tony Bennett, Bob Brookmeyer, Chick Corea, Buddy DeFranco, Freddie Hubbard and John Levy. They were announced a few weeks ago and will be honored at the annual meeting of the International Association of Jazz Education in New York in January. That is not news.
This, however, may be new to you. It was to me. At the NEA web site ,you will find photographs of the new honorees. If you go there and click on each winner’s photograph, you will get a comprehensive biography. It is good interactive internet entertainment and information. Then, go to this page for photos and bios of the previous NEA jazz masters. In the group shot, click on each person to link to his or her bio and another photograph. Good interactive information.
Thanks to Bruce Tater, Mark Chapman’s sidekick at KETR-FM in the Dallas area, and to DevraDoWrite for calling these links to our attention.

An early September posting on Rifftides discussed Czech President Václav Klaus’s involvement with and support of jazz. In it, I quoted a communique from the fine Czech pianist Emil Viklický:

There is a new CD coming out from Prague Castle – George Mraz’s 60th birthday. Multisonic asked me to help with mixing and arranging things since George himself is not here in Prague. I will push Multisonic owner, Mr. Karel Vagner, to have better distribution for abroad.

That CD of a concert honoring and featuring Mraz has just been issued. The great bassist performs with four colleagues with whom he grew up in music in Czechoslovakia, decades before that nation split, peacefully, into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Viklický and Karel Ružička share piano duties. Rudolf Dašek plays guitar. Ivan Smažík, Mraz’s grade school companion from Tábor in southern Bohemia, is the drummer. These men are in the top tier of Czech jazz players who weathered communist domination of their country and culture and lived to see their nation independent after the wall came down. By then, Jiří Mraz had become George, moved to the United States and established himself as one of the best bassists in the world. Whenever he goes home, it is an occasion. He has had no grander homecoming than this concert at the Czech equivalent of the White House. Mraz is introduced and praised by the president of his native land and given a birthday party. As Jan Beránek points out in his literate, informed liner notes, it happened once before, when Richard Nixon threw a birthday celebration for Duke Ellington.
So much for the honor. How is the music? It is full of spirit, warmth and virtuosity. Except for one number, Mraz is omnipresent, playing with impeccable technique, perfect time, and feeling that radiates from his Moravian heart and blues soul. He was born in southern Bohemia, but as a boy spent his summers in Moravia and soaked up its music. Moravian music, with its predominance of minor keys, has stylistic similarites to blues. Major and minor thirds often coexist in the same Moravian songs. It is no surprise that musicians like Mraz and Viklický gravitated toward jazz. Their work together in Mraz’s CD Moravá concentrates on Moravian material melded with jazz
Mraz’s playing on the unaccompanied first number of this new album, the traditional “White Falcon, Fly,” is enough to make grown men weep, if they happen to be bassists. The rest of the program consists of standards (“For All We Know,” “My Foolish Heart,” “Rhythm-a-ning”) and compositions by Mraz, Ružička and guitarist Dašek, who was once Mraz’s bandleader. Mraz’s “Picturesque” has bass-guitar unison passages intimating that he may have had his bass predecessor Oscar Pettiford in mind when he wrote it. Mraz sits out for Thelonious Monk’s “Rhythm-a-ning,” a two-piano performance by Viklický and Ružička so marinated in jazz piano vocabulary and grammar and—well—rhythm, not to mention humor, that it suggests an album of their collaborations is not just a good idea but mandatory. Mraz mastered arco playing in his studies at the Prague Conservatory, then refined his mastery, as his bowing on his “Blues for Sarka” testifies. Ružička’s “Streamin’” melds jazz sensibility with that Moravian minor-thirds feeling, and Mraz has a stunning solo.
If you know people who feel that Europeans don’t quite have the hang of jazz, this CD would be a splendid means of convincing them otherwise. About the matter of the Multisonic label distributing abroad; I hope that it comes about. In the meantime, it is possible to order from this Czech website, which also offers MP3 samples of the music. My experience is that the Jazzport site is reliable.

Rifftides readers interested in knowing more about the great drummer and arranger Tiny Kahn (discussed in this posting) will find it in Burt Korall’s Drummin’ Men—The Heartbeat of Jazz: The Bebop Years. From Korall’s chapter on Kahn:

His drumming made bands sound better than they ever had before, particularly during his last years when he had all the elements of his style in enviable balance. His time was perfect—right down the center. He wasn’t too tense or too laid-back. Kahn had his own sound and techniques on drums and could be quite expressive, using his hands and feet in a manner that was his alone.

Musicians remember how easy his charts were to perform; they felt right for all the instruments and never failed to communicate and make a comment. His unpretentious writing mirrored his concern for expressing ideas in an economical, telling swinging manner.

Kahn’s intellectual and cultural breadth matched his physical size. The pianist Lou Levy told Korall, “He alerted me to Al Cohn and Johnny Mandel. Kahn-Cohn-Mandel became the three wise men, as far as I was concerned. Tiny also introduced me to Alban Berg and Paul Hindemith.” Korall’s book covers bop drummers from the transitional figures (Jo Jones, Sid Catlett) through the innovators (Kenny Clarke, Max Roach, Stan Levey, Shelly Manne) to the important and obscure (Ike Day). Its predecessor volume treated drumming in the swing era with similar scope, detail and insight. Both of Korall’s books belong in anyone’s basic library of books about jazz.
Thanks to artsjournal.com blogmate Terry Teachout for jogging my memory about Drummin’ Men.

Stan Levey was two years younger than Kahn, but in 1944, at eighteen, was Dizzy Gillespie’s drummer and provided Kahn with lessons by example. Nearly a decade younger than Levey, Artt Frank was fifteen in 1948 when he frequented 52nd Street, convinced Levey that he was serious about learning to play and, for his sincerity, received instruction. Neither Levey, Kahn nor Frank had the almost supernatural technique of Max Roach, the reigning bop drum master. What they had in common was unerring time, intelligence, hearing keenly attuned to their bandmates and the flexibility to provide the contrasting rhythmic elements of steadiness and punctuation that bebop soloists needed for support and inspiration. Frank is not as well known as many modern drummers, but he is respected and admired by musicians as diverse as Dave Brubeck and Dave Liebman and has worked with a wide range of players. His longest association was with Chet Baker, who has often been quoted as saying that Frank was his favorite drummer.

Frank’s book, Essentials for the Bebop Drummer, is fundamentally an instruction book for drummers, but it has other values. Among them are his anecdotal story of evolving from a poor boy growing up in a little town in Maine into a drummer encouraged by Charlie Parker; explanations of bop rhythms that laymen can understand; and a CD in which he and fellow drummer Pete Swann illustrate the lessons. The CD also has tracks of Frank demonstrating the practical application of the patterns he teaches as he performs with colleagues in the Southwest. He makes his home in Tucson. On a couple of pieces, he also sings, an activity that he evidently intends to pursue further. I find the book entertaining and helpful. I think I’ll get out an old set of brushes that has been languishing in a drawer, sit down with a large piece of cardboard on my lap and see if I can master a couple of Frank’s basic left hand exercises.

Where will we find new jazz writers and critics? At least one will develop his or her chops under the sponsorship of Jerry Jazz Musician. Joe Maita, the proprietor of that estimable web site, is holding a competition to choose someone fourteen to seventeen years old to become a columnist for JJM. If you are in that age group or know someone who is and might qualify, you can find details here. Writer Gary Giddins and singer Dee Dee Bridgewater will choose the winner. And may the best youth win.

The comprehensive boxed set Count Basie and his Orchestra: America’s # 1 Band (Columbia/Legacy) has been out for a couple of years during which I have played it so often that if it was on vinyl LPs, I’d have worn them out. Its four CDs contain the most important Columbia recordings of the Basie band from late 1936 through the end of 1940. It was some of the most influential music of the period—indeed, of any period. Lester Young’s other-worldly tenor saxophone solos were one reason (in the notes, Sonny Rollins is quoted as wondering what planet Young appeared from).
There were plenty of other reasons: the ball-bearing propulsion of the celebrated all-American rhythm section, Harry Edison’s eliptical trumpet solos, Buck Clayton’s glittering ones, the speaking-laughing trombone solos of Dickie Wells, the spare perfection of Basie’s piano interjections, spare arrangements that swung off the paper or out of the collective heads of the band.
The set also has a selection of superior Basie tracks made after Young left the band in December of 1940, through the spring of 1951, when bebop had changed the landscape and the big band era had declined but not quite fallen. In the last of them, the band had important transitional swing-to-bop players, among them tenor saxophonists Wardell Gray and Lucky Thompson and trumpeter Clark Terry. The book of arrangements had works by Dizzy Gillespie, Tadd Dameron and Neal Hefti, hinting at Basie’s coming transition from the loose, swinging outfit he had led for twenty years to a machine-tooled juggernaut oriented more toward arrangers than soloists.
All of the music on the first three CDs in the set has been previously issued to a faretheewell, though never before in so comprehensive a fashion or with such clear sound. What makes the box indispensable is the inclusion of a fourth CD of previously unavailable air checks of the 1939-1941 band in broadcasts from the Famous Door, the Savoy Ballroom, the Meadowbrook Lounge and the Café Society Uptown. To hear the Basieites playing in their workaday world for audiences that came to dance and listen is a revelation. The radio microphones captured an element that virtually never exists in a studio, the human connection between performers and their audience. There is a sense that, sixty-five years apart, we and the musicians and those appreciative audiences are sharing the same space. The soloists are not necessarily playing better than they did in the studio, although the solos are full of surprises simply because they are different from the ones on the same tunes in the studio versions. But the sense of their engagement is palpable. There is lots of “new” Lester Young, and lots of young Harry Edison telling silver truths through his muted horn, and there are rides on carpets of rhythm launched by Basie, Freddie Green, Walter Page and Jo Jones.
There is someone else: Billie Holiday. She sang with Basie for a year, but had a contract with a different record company and was not allowed to record with him. Three 1937 pieces from the air checks let us, at last, understand why so many people who heard her with Basie have written and talked about it as the ultimate Holiday experience. Her use of rhythm, her time sense, allows her to float above the ensemble much as Young did, taking the same kinds of chances with phrasing, stretching without effort across the bar lines. She has transformed her Louis Armstrong inspiration into a marvel of individual artistry. Her way with lyrics is unlike that of any singer at the time other than Armstrong’s. My guess is that her example had a profound effect on Bing Crosby, who was the country’s star vocalist when she emerged.
If you want to know who was influencing the young Frank Sinatra, if you have any doubt where Peggy Lee came from, listen to Holiday on “I Can’t Get Started” and “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” Hear her turn the silly “Swing, Brother, Swing” into a triumph. The delightful Helen Humes does some of her best singing with Basie on these air checks, but Billie Holiday is transcendent.

Responding to the Rifftides posting about La Scena Musicale, Paul Conley of KXJZ in Sacramento, California, led us to his colleague Jeff Hudson’s interview with the mezzo soprano Cecilia Bartoli. This site has Hudson’s short and longer interviews with Bartoli and excerpts of her singing. Many jazz musicians and listeners are put off by opera, but the range, purity, power and sheer beauty of Bartoli’s voice may make a convert or two.

Speaking of being led, here’s a double lead. On the home page of the Bill Evans website, I found a link to a blog about classical music that has an erudite, informed posting about Evans. Among other interesting facts about the great pianist, the anonymous author of the blog called On An Overgrown Path discloses that Evans influenced the modernist composer Gyorgy Ligeti as Ligeti was creating his Etudes for solo piano. Further exploration of the site turned up valuable pieces on Messiaen, Beethoven and one of my favorite Swedish pianists, Jan Johansson, among many other musicians. I’m making On An Overgrown Path a habit and adding it to the Other Places list in the right-hand column.

Happy birthday to one of my favorite fellow bloggers, DevraDoWrite, who reports that it’s going to be more or less business as usual today. But there is nothing usual about her business, which, at the moment, includes writing a biography of Luther Henderson, an underheralded figure in twentieth century music.