Archives for May 2006

Coincidentally, on the heels of yesterday’s Rifftides piece about the Legends Of Jazz television series, an e-mail message alerted me to a video performance that demonstrates the visual restraint, taste and directorial discretion that is missing in the Legends series. It is a solo piano performance by Denny Zeitlin of “What Is This Thing Called Love,” preceded by a few minutes of free playing as an introduction. It was videotaped at the 1983 Berlin Jazz Festival, with Zeitlin at a C. Bechstein concert grand.
Just as good writing should make the reader forget that he’s holding a book, good television presentation of music should make the viewer forget that he’s watching television. In the Zeitlin video, the setting, lighting, camera work and director’s shot changes are in partnership with the music, never calling attention to themselves or to production values. Even a cutaway shot of the Bechstein’s inner working makes sense with the improvisation. Pianists interested in Zeitlin’s technique are rewarded with sequences of his long fingers at work, the keyboard shot at a perfect angle for study. Since the subject here is not Zeitlin’s playing, suffice it to say that his improvisation is brilliant. Listen for the recurring Coltrane reference.
The only distracting notes come not from Zeitlin’s piano but from visual plugs for his latest solo album and his website.They momentarily fill the screen while he’s playing and break the spell. It is a minor flaw, but a crucially placed minor flaw. Commerce would have been served less jarringly when the music ends. But it is Zeitlin’s website and his call. To view the video, go here and look for the download instructions for Windows, Mac or iPod. With a broadband connection, the download takes more than a minute.
The full-screen option results in a slight loss of visual quality, but I found that expanding the picture, moving back a few feet from the monitor and cranking up the sound gives a sense almost of being there. To make the picture bigger, click on the box to the left of the X in the upper right corner of the realPlayer window.

Doug:
I watched the Legends of Jazz episode that featured Jim Hall and Pat Metheny and found it disappointing. Jim and Pat and associates played fine–as expected, of course. But the overall “happy talk” tone was rather shallow and not very enlightening; for that, the producers and writers are responsible. Jim’s good-natured grouchiness was a relief.
And for a show that’s supposed to be educating a mostly novice audience about jazz, there were some obvious balls dropped. Like identifying the titles of songs, for example. Only Jim & Pat’s duet on “All the Things You Are” was identified. When Jim played “My Funny Valentine,” couldn’t they have at least printed the title on the screen? These days, you can’t expect an audience under age 60 to know even so-called standards, especially if they’re played rather abstractly.
And wouldn’t it have been nice for someone to introduce bassist Christian McBride and drummer Antonio Sanchez? The only identification they received was in the closing credits, which went zipping by in small print. Again, I fault the producers.
I know that we’re all supposed to be grateful nowadays for getting any jazz on television. But classic jazz TV half-hours like the 1959 Miles Davis & Gil Evans show (produced by Robert Herridge without a superfluous word) have me spoiled. Or the Ralph Gleason Jazz Casual shows. Music shows that don’t seem like game shows.
—Bill Kirchner

Last July, Rifftides examined the pilot program for the Public Broadcasting System series Legends of Jazz. Here is part of that posting.

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.

Nearly a year later, has it happened? No. Since the 1950s, television has accumulated so many layers of technical advances, production oversight, marketing skills, promotion know-how and showbiz values that even if a producer wished in his deepest being to create a program with the straightforward simplicity of The Sound of Jazz, it is doubtful that he could prevail over what television has become: slick.
Thus, Legends of Jazz is slick. And entertaining. I mean that in the kindest way. In format, it resembles Ralph Gleason’s Jazz Casual. Each program in the series is a half hour. In TV time, a half hour is 24 minutes and 27 seconds. The host is pianist Ramsey Lewis, who does a relaxed job of briefly interviewing the principal performers. The rest of the time, minus opening and closing credits, is devoted to music.
Some of the highlights of the shows I have seen on the air or on DVD:
Alone at the piano, Chick Corea generating as much swing in “Armando’s Rhumba” as if he were driven by a rhythm section.
Benny Golson on tenor saxophone, pouring himself into a performance of his “Killer Joe.”
Clark Terry in his incarnation as “Mumbles,” playing and mumbling beautifully, ending with “If I keep talking like this, I might get elected.”
Singers Kurt Elling and Al Jarreau, inventive on “Take Five,” surpassing what either might have done alone.
In another duet, Dave Brubeck and Billy Taylor collaborating at two grand pianos on “Take The ‘A’ Train” with humor, grace and the wisdom of 85-year-olds.
Dave Valentin in a flute performance full of Latin rhythm and pzazz, marred only by a few seconds of showboating at the end.
John Pizzarelli in an astonishing moment of vocal accuracy and control as he executes doubletime in guitar-voice unison during his solo on “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.”
Roy Hargrove expresssing astonishment in conversation when Chris Botti describes his record company’s elaborate promotion scheme: “What record company is that?”
To be inclusive and reach the wide audience marketing studies encourage, the program presents a range of music including genres that have accreted around jazz without quite being jazz. It gives us the master alto saxophonist Phil Woods not with one of his peers—say, Bud Shank, Charles McPherson or Jackie McLean (who was alive when the show was taped last year)—but with the smooth-jazz player David Sanborn. The producers team Clark Terry and Roy Hargrove with the pop-jazz trumpeter and singer Chris Botti, rather than with Ryan Kisor, Jeremy Pelt, Terell Stafford or one of a dozen other top-flight young jazz trumpet artists. Jane Monheit, a creation of publicity, is the one female vocalist in the series; not, for example, Karrin Allyson, Diane Reeves, Nancy King, Tierney Sutton or Meredith d’Ambrosio—singers steeped in jazz. Under the “contemporary jazz” label, Legends of Jazz brings together the rock-jazz-soul-funk fusion experts Marcus Miller, George Duke and Lee Ritenour. They are good at what they do. They are entertaining, and so are the urban blues singers and guitarists Robert Cray and Keb’ Mo’.
Maybe those are the kinds of compromises producers must make in the 21st century to get a “jazz” television program on the air. Or, it could be that they believe Sanborn, Monheit and Ritenour are jazz artists.
A word or two about production: The sound is excellent. The lighting on the performers is superb. The shifting, often pulsating, colored light effects in the background are a distraction from the music. The quick shot changes, swooping pans and frequent zooms are irritating. Television producers and directors brought up on action films and cartoons believe that pictorial stillness and calm are to be avoided at all costs. The seasick viewer pays the costs. Constant motion is de rigueur, and if there’s no motion in the subject, directors produce it by moving the camera. The car-chase mentality of shooting and cutting now extends to all television, even news programs. One of the wonderful things about The Sound of Jazz and Jazz Casual was that the camera and the director served the music, drew the viewer into it, allowed us to observe people simply doing what they do best. There should be no distractions.
The house band of pianist Willie Pickens, bassist Larry Gray and drummer Leon Joyce, Jr., deserves more credit than a lightning roll-by in the end titles. How about spoken credit by Ramsey Lewis or the old-fashioned, and effective, technique of superimposing their names in the lower third when they appear on screen? That may not be acceptably hip in the post-MTV school of television production, but it sure lets you know who you’re seeing and hearing.

Django Reinhardt died on this date in 1953. He was forty-three years old. Reinhardt melded jazz and the wild élan of the gypsy music he grew up with in Belgium and France. He began to be noticed in 1930 when he was twenty. By the mid-1930s he, violinist Stephane Grappellii and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France were sensations of Europe. By the end of the decade Reinhardt was also working and recording with Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins, Dickie Wells, Rex Stewart and other leading American jazzmen.
A few of his compositions—“Nuages,” “Djangology,” “Manoir de Mes Reves”— are in the basic repertoire. He was memorialized by John Lewis with one of the greatest jazz compositions, “Django.” The spirit and style of Reinhardt’s playing influenced innumerable guitarists, and several groups have patterned themselves on the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, but there has never been anyone like Django. If you need a reminder of or an introduction to his artistry, go to redhotjazz.com, scroll down to “Oh, Lady Be Good” and hear the joy Reinhardt and Grappelli generated shortly after they found each other in 1934. The site offers thirty-eight other QHCF tracks as RealPlayer downloads (complete recordings, not mere samples). This four-CD set at a bargain price is a fine survey of Reinhardt with and apart from the QHCF.

The May issue of Allegro, the monthly publication of the New York local of the American Federation of Musicians, has reviews by Bill Crow of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, the reissue of Gene Lees’ superb biography The Worlds of Lerner and Loewe, and the first volume of Don Rayno’s Paul Whiteman, Pioneer in American Music.
From the review of the Whiteman book, a dart in the side of conventional wisdom:

This account refutes the accusations that accumulated in the jazz press in later years that Whiteman was an exploitative entrepreneur who squelched jazz luminaries in his band like Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer. Joe Venuti is quoted as saying, “Don’t ever make fun of Paul Whiteman. He did great things for American music. He took pride in having the finest musicians in the world as sidemen, and he paid the highest salaries ever paid.”

To read the reviews, go here, then scroll down and click on Book Notes.

The You Tube website has put up a seven-minute video of the Dave Brubeck Quartet playing Brubeck’s “London Flat London Sharp” at the North Sea Jazz Festival. Sound, production qualiy, camera work and direction—except for one brief asleep-at-the-switch moment—are excellent. Bobby Militello’s alto solo is one of the most cogent I’ve heard from him. It’s interesting to watch Brubeck digging Michael Moore as he comps for Moore’s bass solo. The first half of Brubeck’s own solo is about as close to daintiness as you’re likely to hear from him, but before it’s over, he unleashes both hands on the piece’s substantial harmonies. To see and hear it, go here. The same page of the site has two video performances of “Take Five” by the classic Brubeck quartet with Paul Desmond, Gene Wright and Joe Morello and one by the current group.

While you’re there, don’t miss Elis Regina singing Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Aguas de Marco.” This is the irreplaceable Elis in solo, apparently a predecessor to the video of her doing the song with Jobim.

Bob Brookmeyer is as forthright, and often unorthodox, in his conversation as he is in his music. Here’s some of what Brookmeyer told The New York Times‘s Ben Ratliff about how jazz soloists often relate to the music he writes:

If you give a soloist an open solo for 30 seconds, he plays like he’s coming from the piece that you wrote. Then he says, ‘What the hell was that piece that I was playing from?’ And the next 30 seconds is, ‘Oh, I guess I’ll play what I learned last night.’ And bang! Minute 2 is whoever he likes, which is probably Coltrane.

Ratliff’s article, “Bob Brookmeyer: Raging and Composing Against the Jazz Machine,” is in today’s Times. The Rifftides staff recommends it. If it doesn’t give you enough of Brookmeyer’s undiluted opinions about music and life, go to his website, scroll down and click on “Currents.”

Love your blog…
Got it from Kenny Harris* here in Bermuda. I am a tenor and soprano sax player living in Bermuda as Kenny is. Trying to keep flame alive. Damn, there are so many steel pan players here, but I guess that’s what the tourists want.
The real reason I emailed you is response to the baritone sax players. ~~~ great. Just a plug for my old friend, Nick Brignola. Never seemed to get his due, but could also play great tenor and soprano. May he RIP.
Keep up the good work.
George Kezas

*The British drummer Kenny Harris played in New York in the 1950s with Sonny Stitt, Paul Bley and others and appeared at clubs including the Hickory House, Basin Street East and The Embers. He had a memorable encounter in Bermuda with Paul Desmond, recalled in Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, pages 248-9. Harris wrote a biography of his teacher and hero Don Lamond, First Call Drummer, out of print but worth seeking. —DR

John Birchard, a firmly committed Washington, DC, jazz listener who moonlights as a Voice of America correspondent, sent this report. The Rifftides staff added links.

I attended a jazz concert at the Kennedy Center’s “K-C Jazz Club” venue – the Baritone Saxophone Band in a Gerry Mulligan tribute. I had been looking forward to the evening for some time and was not disappointed. On the remote possibility you’re not familiar with the group, Ronnie Cuber has rounded up Scott Robinson and Gary Smulyan for a three-bari front line that displays a remarkable variety of sound combinations due to Cuber’s skills as an arranger – gruff and punching here, smooth and crooning there. He also avoids the mistake of routining each tune the same with head followed by horn solo, horn solo, horn solo, bass solo and drum fours, then out. If only more jazz band leaders would give that rote approach some thought, their music would be more stimulating.
Cuber is faithful to the Mulligan concept of a no-piano rhythm section that included Andy McKee on bass and Shingo Okudaira on drums. The set we attended included such Mulligan staples as “Five Brothers”, “Walkin’ Shoes”, “Line for Lyons” and “Theme for Jobim”, all of which had their attractions. The band really took off on an up reading of “Bernie’s Tune”, with Cuber digging in hard in his solo. After the applause died down, he referred to it as “ass-kickin'” music. Later in the set, he departed from the Mulligan book to take one from Art Blakey’s library – Curtis Fuller’s “A La Mode”, which was ‘way up and smokin’.
Robinson and Smulyan are excellent players and accomplished soloists, but clearly the boss is Cuber. Over the years since I first heard him with Maynard Ferguson’s band in the early 60s, he has developed into a mature, gifted musician whose solos display swing, wit, soul, experience and whose ideas are given space to breathe. He’s grayer and larger in the mid-section now than I remembered him, but he still has the stuff that has kept him employed with everyone from Mongo Santamaria to Woody Herman to Steely Dan and the Mingus Big Band. If there’s a better owner/operator of the baritone sax around today, I haven’t heard him/her. Ronnie Cuber is a rightful heir to the Gerry Mulligan/Harry Carney/Pepper Adams legacy.
John Birchard

Cuber, Smulyan and the late Nick Brignola recorded in an earlier three-baritones coalition paying homage to Mulligan.

It seems to me that most people are impressed with just three things: how fast you can play, how high you can play, and how loud you can play. I find this a little exasperating, but I’m a lot more experienced now, and understand that probably less than two percent of the public can really hear. I mean follow a horn player through his ideas, and be able to understand those ideas in relation to the changes.
—Chet Baker

Whether I get adequate attention or not, people here do know the work I have been doing systematically and without compromise for over 40 years. I get tired of people making excuses for guys who don’t continue the art because they can’t make a living.
—Bill Dixon

Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond has been awarded second place in the performing arts category for an IPPY, a 2006 Independent Book Publishers Award.
Here are the finishers:
Winner:
Vivian Perlis and Libby Van Cleve, Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington (Yale University Press)
Finalists:
Doug Ramsey, Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond (Parkside Publications)
Weathervane Theatre, Nights of Northern Lights:40 Seasons of the Weathervane Theatre
I don’t think that Desmond would have been discouraged about losing to Charles Ives and Duke Ellington. Nor am I. Hearty congratulations to Ms. Perlis, Ms. Van Cleve and Yale. I can’t wait to read their book.

Rifftides reader Bob Walsh writes:

What ever happened to guitarist Mundell Lowe? I saw him often in the studio band of Merv Griffin in New York. I met him at Monterey when he was a fixture in backup groups. He later took over after Monterey impresario Jimmy Lyons’ s forced retirement. I recall that he was married to vocalist Betty Bradley, who vastly improved as a singer after she wed Mundell. As a very young man, he was a guitarist with the Sons of the Pioneers, along with Ohio-born Leonard Sly (later known as Roy Rogers). He fit into any setting but never seemed to have an identifiable style or “voice.” Reminds me that Marian McPartland was passed over many times for Monterey until John Lewis finally concluded she was no longer playing back others’ voices and had found what was distinctively her own.

The last I heard, Mundell Lowe, at eighty-four, was working as much as he cared to. I think the Betty you have in mind is Bennett, who was a terrific singer long before she met Lowe. They live in southern California. Earlier, she was married to Andre Previn and in the early fifties dated Paul Desmond (Take Five, pages 205 and 206). I didn’t know about Lowe’s being with the Sons of the Pioneers, but that doesn’t surprise me. Many fine jazz guitarists are from the Southwest or deep South—Lowe is from Mississippi—and many played country music, among them Jimmy Raney, Herb Ellis, Charlie Christian and Hank Garland, not to overlook the amazing Thumbs Carllile. As for the question of Lowe’s style and voice, he gets by on thorough musicianship, taste, intense swing and the undiluted admiration of his fellow musicians. All of his attributes, plus the lift of his rhythm guitar, are on this CD, a trio with Ray Brown on bass and Previn playing piano.
In case you are skeptical that there is a Thumbs Carllile, go here, scroll down and sample “Me and Memphis.”
Roy Rogers was a good singer, better than Gene Autry. I wish that I still had a 78 rpm record of him singing a song called, I think, “Moaning Low.” It seems to be missing from all of the Rogers CD reissues. Rogers recorded near misses like “Cleanin’ My Rifle (and Thinkin’ of You)” and lightweight novelties (“Gay Ranchero,” “Pistol Packin’ Mama). ” But “Everything Changes,” “Green Green Grass of Home,” “Blue Shadows on the Trail” and his skilled yodeling on “My Little Lady” compensate for a lot of dross. Country music today could use a stiff shot of Rogers’ unpretentious, straightforward approach. This album has generous samples of Rogers from all phases of his career.

You’ve had nearly a month to memorize those old picks, so they’re gone. You’ll find the new Doug’s Picks in the right-hand column.

In jazz histories, as in all histories of human activity, small errors are repeated and become the standard version of events. Don Payne, the bassist on Ornette Coleman’s first album, sent the following addendum to the Rifftides piece on Johnny Mandel’s contribution to a Coleman compositon and the record deal that led to Coleman’s emergence.

We soon did a one a.m. audition at the club. It was attended by John Lewis, Percy Heath, Milt Jackson and Connie Kay–the Modern Jazz Quartet. They brought Les Koenig, the owner of Contemporary Records. On the spot, he signed us, on a handshake, to a two-record deal. I remember Koenig taking Ornette by the arm and saying, “If I don’t get you, Atlantic will.” That first LP, now a classic, was Something Else: The Music of Ornette Coleman. That is history.

Payne’s account differs significantly from the liner-note version, which says that bassist Red Mitchell suggested to Coleman that he take one of his compositions to Koenig, Coleman demonstrated the tune by playing it on his alto sax and Koenig signed him then. In light of the outcome–Coleman’s fame–does it matter which version is true? Only if you think that accuracy in history is important.
After Coleman’s two Contemporary albums, Atlantic did get him. He made eight albums for Atlantic before moving on to Columbia, then a variety of labels.

Bill Crow did not stop collecting jazz anecdotes when he published Jazz Anecdotes and From Birdland to Broadway. He has a column of anecdotes every month in Allegro, the newspaper of New York’s Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. With Bill’s permission, here is one that deserves circulation beyond the 802 membership. The Rifftides staff has added links to music by the principals.

Bassist Don Payne, who now lives in Florida, was three years out of the Army in 1958. He moved into a cottage in the Hollywood hills where he and a group of local musicians that called themselves “The Jazz Messiahs” often rehearsed, trying to develop their own sound. Don Cherry, the trumpet player with the group, introduced them to Ornette Coleman, who had written some interesting originals. One day they were working on “The Blessing,” one of Ornette’s tunes. Walter Norris had worked out the harmonies, and they were playing it over and over to memorize it. Suddenly the door opened and Payne’s next door neighbor walked in. After nodding hello, he took a sheet of music paper and quickly wrote down the tune they had been playing, and added an improvement to the chords at the end of the bridge. He reached over Walter’s shoulder and put the music in front of him on the piano, bowed and smiled to the other musicians and went back out the door. Walter played what he had written and said, “This works!” He turned around to say thank you, but the man was already gone. He asked, “Who was that?” Don said, “That’s my neighbor, Johnny Mandel.”

Jazz is a small community, but I would never have imagined a connection between Ornette Coleman and Johnny Mandel.
I called Don Payne this afternoon to fill in a couple of blanks. He said that The Jazz Messiahs was Don Cherry’s group. Don Friedman was the original pianist, replaced by Walter Norris when Friedman moved to New York. James Clay was the tenor saxophonist, Billy Higgins the drummer. After Clay left to join Red Mitchell, Ornette came in on alto saxophone. The quintet’s showcase performance at a Hollywood club led to Coleman’s being offered a record deal. The band eventually went pianoless and became the Ornette Coleman Quartet. Payne left Los Angeles to join guitarist Mundell Lowe, then Ralph Sharon’s trio backing Tony Bennett.
Payne’s memories of the circumstances leading to the emergence of Ornette Coleman are at odds with conventional accounts, which he says perpetuate initial reporting errors that distort history. Eventually, we’ll have more of Payne’s recollections of that yeasty period.

The Trumpet As Metaphor

You must stir it and stump it,
And blow your own trumpet,
Or trust me, you haven’t a chance.—W.S. Gilbert

With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance. —Norman Mailer

The very essence of leadership is that you have to have vision. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.—Theodore Hesburgh

Reading, hearing and seeing stories this week about the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival triggers memories of the festival’s beginnings and of the years I lived in the Crescent City (please, not The Big Easy). JazzFest, as it was christened at its birth in the late 1960s, began as the purest of jazz festivals, integrated with a judicious smattering of associated events involving Louisiana food and culture. The 1968 and ’69 festivals, along with certain years at Newport and Monterey, were among the music’s milestone large events. They were not big money makers and they did not fit some New Orleans movers’ and shakers’ vision of what a festival should be in a city whose motto is “Let The Good Times Roll.”
From an earlier Rifftides piece about Willis Conover, who produced the 1969 JazzFest:

The ’69 festival turned out to be one of the great events in the history of the music. It reflected Willis’s knowledge, taste, judgment, and the enormous regard the best jazz musicians in the world had for him.
I won’t give you the complete list of talent. Suffice it to report that the house band for the week was Zoot Sims, Clark Terry, Jaki Byard, Milt Hinton and Alan Dawson, and that some of the hundred or so musicians who performed were Sarah Vaughan, the Count Basie band, Gerry Mulligan, Paul Desmond, Albert Mangelsdorff, Roland Kirk, Jimmy Giuffre, the Onward Brass Band, Rita Reyes, Al Belletto, Eddie Miller, Graham Collier, Earle Warren, Buddy Tate, Dickie Wells, Pete Fountain, Freddie Hubbard and Dizzy Gillespie. The festival had style, dignity and panache. It was a festival of music, not a carnival. An enormous amount of the credit for that goes to Willis. His achievement came only after months of infighting with the chairman and other retrograde members of the jazz establishment who did not understand or accept mainstream, much less modern, jazz and who wanted the festival to be the mini-Mardi Gras that it became the next year and has remained since.

To read more about Conover’s role in the festival, go here.
In 1970, George Wein’s Festival Productions company took over JazzFest from the locals who created it, renamed it the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and—with promotional skill and canny marketing—made it the world-famous party it is today. The fact that the bash is overwhelmingly pop, secondarily heritage and minimally jazz doesn’t bother the promoters and doesn’t bother New Orleans. It was probably inevitable in the city that care forgot, that JazzFest would become a big, fat, swirling celebration full of R&B, rock, gospel, Zydeco and soul. The headliners this year are Bob Dylan, Dr. John, Herbie Hancock, The Meters, Dave Matthews, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Keith Urban and Fats Domino. Perhaps you’ll have no trouble finding the one jazz name in that list.
In the aftermath of Katrina, with much of the city resembling a post-war nightmare, a party called a jazz festival symbolizes New Orleans’ determination to recover. That speaks of a spirit that rises from within New Orleanians and cuts through a malaise of failed leadership, politics and bureaucracy. For eight years, I was a New Orleanian. I understand that spirit. It grows out of the curious combination of laissez faire and obstinance that animates folks whose blood has a component of coffee with chicory.
Partying is wonderful. Food is wonderful. Boogying and getting down is wonderful. Few Orleanians would disagree with any of that. But this is the city that gave us Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, Henry “Red” Allen, Barney Bigard, Raymond Burke, Danny Barker, Paul Barbarin, James Black, Johnny Vidacovich, Al Belletto, Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison and the Marsalises.
Clearly, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is here to stay as a kaleidoscope of entertainment. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the city also had room for a festival that honored and nurtured the music that is the living symbol of the New Orleans spirit. Somehow, jazz ended up in a minor role at what the natives still call JazzFest.

Today, favorite blogette DevraDoWrite is celebrating the first anniversary of her web log. Many happy returns.
If you’d like to learn how Devra likes to horse around, go here.