Archives for October 2006

As far as I knew until today, Bill Evans and guitarist Kenny Burrell recorded together only once, on Evans’ 1976 Quintessence session, which also included tenor saxophonist Harold Land, bassist Ray Brown and drummer Philly Joe Jones. The resourceful Jan Stevens of The Bill Evans Web Pages has pointed the way to another collaboration between Evans and Burrell, at the 1978 Montreux Jazz Festival. They played Thad Jones’ “A Child is Born,” one of the tunes from Quintessence. Evans was rarely caught smiling on camera, but he smiled radiantly–and for good reason–as he and Burrell finished a notably sensitive performance. To see and hear them, click here.

The conventional web widsom is that the possibilities of the internet are infinite. Fellow blogger DevraDoWrite, aka Devra Hall, seems determined to prove the theory. She has launched a new multifaceted venture in addition to her blog. It’s called SnapSizzleBop! The exclamation point is part of the title, and no wonder. She says the site is destined for expansion, but the beta version is already a house of many mansions. You can check it out by going first to DevraDoWrite or see it directly by going here. The Rifftides staff wishes Devra well and expects to see an item explaining how she sustains all that creative energy.

ASCAP (American Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers) has formally announced the winners of its 39th annual Deems Taylor Awards. As promised earlier, when I learned that Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond is a winner, here is the alphabetical list of authors and publishers to be honored at the December 7 ceremony at Lincoln Center in New York City.

· Julia Blackburn for With Billie, published by Pantheon Books

· Anna Marie Busse Berger for Medieval Music and the Art of Memory, published by University of California Press

· Jeff Chang for Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hip Generation, published by St. Martin’s Press/Picador

· Boris Gasparov for Five Operas and a Symphony, published by Yale University Press

· Kenneth Morgan for Fritz Reiner: Maestro and Martinet, published by University of Illinois Press

· Tom Piazza for Understanding Jazz: Ways to Listen, published by Random House

· Michael V. Pisani for Imagining Native America in Music, published by Yale University Press
· Doug Ramsey for Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, published by Parkside Publications

· George Rochberg for The Aesthetics of Survival, A Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music, published by University of Michigan Press

Deems Taylor (1885-1966) was a composer and music critic. He wrote suites, notably Through The Looking Glass and The Chambered Nautilus, and a number of other orchestral works. Two of his operas, The King’s Henchman and Peter Ibbetson, were commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera Company. An influential figure in American culture for more than three decades, he was ASCAP’s president for six years. Taylor was an intimate of the group of writers, actors and critics known as the Algonquin Round Table. The Algonquin group of literary tastemakers of the 1920s included Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Alexander Wolcott and Dorothy Parker.
For a complete list of the 2006 Deems Taylor Award winners in all fields, click here to go to the ASCAP announcement.

Johnnie Taylor, the blues singer, called me up one day and said I ought to play some rock and roll. No. No way. The blues, yes, that’s my heart. And let me play some Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, good standards, improvise on those. But play rock and roll? No, sir, that just isn’t music to me. I’d wash dishes first.

–Red Garland, pianist, quoted in Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers.

It was not for nothing that Dinah Washington was called, or called herself, The Queen of The Blues. Whatever she sang was infected with the blues. While YouTube still exists, or before it is transformed by new ownership or copyright suits, do not miss the opportunity to see and hear a pertinent example of her alchemy, at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. Among the accompanists are Terry Gibbs, who shares his vibes solo with Dinah; trombonist Urbie Green; and drummer Max Roach. The audience shots are priceless, the cameraman is fascinated with Ms. Washington’s strategically placed large pink bow, and the whole venture captures the old days of the Newport festival at its feel-good best. Click here.

I actually tried to get a sound as big as Adrian Rollini, who was playing bass sax at that time . . . so I suppose whatever sound I get goes back to that.
–Harry Carney
No baritone player should be afraid of the noise it makes. Harry Carney isn’t.
–Pepper Adams

Dan Nimmer’s tale of talent and a lucky break resembles the story line of a feel-good movie. An accomplished twenty-one-year-old pianist, he moved from his native Milwaukee to New York City in early 2004. Wynton Marsalis heard him and was so impressed that when the piano chair in the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra became vacant, Marsalis put Nimmer in it. The pianist also tours as a member of Marsalis’s quartet, catapulted virtually overnight into the upper echelons of the world’s jazz capital. Marsalis may have been influenced in his hiring decision by the fact that Nimmer can play uncannily like Wynton Kelly. Marsalis was named for Kelly, one of his pianist father Ellis’s musical heroes and role models, and his admiration for Kelly is well known.
In any case, Nimmer’s talents are on impressive display in a new CD called Kelly Blue (Venus) after the title tune composed by Wynton Kelly. In addition to the aural evidence, drummer Jimmy Cobb’s presence on the album bespeaks endorsement of Nimmer’s authenticity in the Kelly style. Cobb was Kelly’s rhythm section mate in the Miles Davis quintet and sextet of the late 1950s and early sixties and is the drummer on Kelly’s own 1959 album called–guess what–Kelly Blue. Kelly was noted for a combination of driving swing, delicacy of touch and harmonic depth. Nimmer achieves all of that–relaxation on top of the beat, filagreed runs, blues inflections, left-hand punctuations on the off-beats, lightning parallel octives, deep swing. John Webber is the bassist, performing his Paul Chambers role so convincingly that someone hearing the CD in a blindfold test might confidently guess that it was a previously unreleased album by Kelly’s trio. Kelly died in 1971 at the age of thirty-nine.
Where Nimmer goes from here, whether he has aspirations and inclinations outside of his Kelly bag, remains to be disclosed. For now, it’s great fun to hear him emulating one of the most affecting of all jazz pianists. For background on Nimmer, plus photographs and an interview, go here.
Venus, imported from Japan, specializes, although not exclusively, in piano trios. Among the pianists recorded by Tetsuo Hara, the label’s impresario, are Eddie Higgins, Bill Charlap, Kenny Barron, Denny Zeitlin, Steve Kuhn, Barry Harris, Harold Mabern and Jacky Terrasson. On Hara’s trips to New York to capture leading jazz artists, he has also recorded guitarist Russell Malone, saxophonists Archie Shepp, Bob Kindred and Eric Alexander, and the One For All group with Alexander, Jim Rotondi, Steve Davis, David Hazeltine, David Williams and Joe Farnsworth. Venus CDs are beautifully recorded and packaged, often with cover photographs of beautiful women, some less than fully clothed. The albums harken back to the 1950s and sixties when American labels like Riverside, Blue Note, Prestige, Fantasy and Contemporary filled the mainstream niche that Venus, Criss Cross, Marshmallow and other overseas companies now aim to occupy.
I asked Charlap and Higgins how it is to work with Hara.
Charlap:

He makes some suggestion of tunes. Mostly, he just allows the dates to happen, lets the guys play. It’s almost like the old companies used to be. Nobody was worried about being on magazine covers. They just played. He has created a market in Japan.

Higgins:

His taste in jazz runs pretty much along the lines of the Great American Song Book. When he gets ready to do a CD, he sends Todd Barkan, his U.S. producer, a list of tunes for me to choose from. Todd reads me the list over the phone and we decide on 14 or so that I like. Then we pick sidemen, set a date and a studio, and I fly to NYC and record it–two or sometimes three CDs in a two-to-four day period. Venus is geared to the Japanese market, where it flourishes. Rarely a month goes by without a Venus CD in the #1 spot on the Swing Journal jazz charts. As far as the U.S. market is concerned, I don’t think that Venus has a distribution setup, although Amazon lists some at high prices.

When Venus CDs show up in US stores and on web sites, they go for import prices as high as thirty-five dollars. eJazzLines‘ $23.73 price for Nimmer’s Kelly Blue indicates that if you shop around, you may find them for less than $30.00 US. If you read Japanese, you may want to explore Venus’s web site.

News has arrived of the death of Claude Luter, the French trumpeter turned clarinetist who formed a close friendship with Louis Armstrong. Luter died last Friday at eighty-three. Already a success at the age of twenty-five when he met Armstrong at the Nice Jazz Festival in 1948, his popularity expanded during the late 1940s and remained high for the rest of the century. His band was in demand among the intelligentsia and glitterati who helped make jazz a French passion during the postwar years. Luter patterned his soprano saxophone playing after that of Sidney Bechet, Armstrong’s counterpart as a genius of New Orleans music. He became Bechet’s friend and disciple.
Agence France-Presse quotes French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres describing Luter as “a very great name in French jazz”:

For me as for so many, the name of Claude Luter will be forever associated with Saint Germain des Pres in the post-war years, with its innumerable jazz clubs where one ran across Camus, Sartre, Giacometti, Boris Vian, Raymond Queneau and so many others. Now and for ever he will be remembered as one of the remarkable men who symbolised this highly talented epoch.

This clip from a 1958 Edward R. Murrow documentary on CBS-TV, Satchmo The Great, shows Armstrong sitting in with Luter’s band in a Parisian club. The event may have been staged for the filming, but the affection between Armstrong and Luter was not.

The Rifftides staff loves to get your comments. We do not love to get messages in the comments file that are solicitations for Viagra, deviant sex, investment opportunities and cheap electronic equipment. Bogus comments come in by the dozens, doing the sender no good; they are dispatched to never-never land. Today, as I was executing several of these unwelcome intruders, I inadvertenty checked a legitimate comment about the Buck O’Neil quote two items down the page. All I saw of it before I answered yes to the “Do You Want To Delete These Comments” query was the name Ted Williams, and–poof–it was gone.
If the sender will launch it again, I will control my itchy trigger finger and share the comment with all of you.
(LATER) The sender, John Salmon, did. The comment is now posted with the Buck O’Neil item.
Reader comments are always welcome. Let ’em fly.

Musicians concerned about the health of their fragile instruments do whatever they can to keep them from the tender mercies of airlines baggage handlers. Perhaps it is possible for them to protest too much. Trumpeter Valery Ponomarev is suffering the pain of a broken arm and the inconvienience of an interrupted career following an encounter with zealous French police at Charles DeGaulle airport in Paris. His confrontation with the gendarmes was on September 9. I heard of the incident shortly after, but held it because initial reports by way of a blog were third-hand, so emotional and accusatory that I could not be sure they were accurate. It turns out that they were, according to a story by Doreen Carvajal in today’s New York Times.
The incident grew out of strict application of Air India’s restrictive rules for carry-on luggage in the wake of fears about airborne terrorism. Short version: Ponomarev refused to let Air India put the case containing his trumpet and flugelhorn in the cargo hold for a flight from Paris to New York, where he has lived since 1973. He defected from the Soviet Union in the 1960s. The veteran of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers insisted, vigorously, that he be allowed to take the horns on board. Air India demanded that they be checked. Ponomarev objected, loudly. An Air Indian supervisor called the police.
Four policeman arrived. Ponomarev refused to give up the horn case. There was a struggle. He claims that he was taken to a back room where, he says, his left arm was bent behind his back and broken. The gendarmerie told the Times that the injury was Ponomarev’s fault.

“The officers tried to subdue him, and you can say that he hurt himself by rebelling,” said a spokesman for the airport police.

The Times reports that Ponomarev was out of commission–and out of work–for nearly a month but recently played a concert in his native Russia, a metal plate holding together the bones of his arm.
To read the Times story, go here.

I’ve seen men lose 50 years in just a few hours. Baseball is better than sex. It is better than music, although I do believe jazz comes in a close second. It does fill you up.
–John Jordan “Buck” O’Neil, Jr. (1911-2006)

Mr. O’Neil died last Friday at 94. He was a star of the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues, the first black coach in the majors and a central figure in Ken Burns’ 1994 PBS film Baseball. Thanks to Russ Neff for calling the O’Neil quote to our attention.

Next weekend, Jim Wilke will broadcast the first half of the Bill Mays concert melding jazz and classical music. Jim recorded the concert at The Seasons for his Jazz Northwest. Part 1 will air exclusively on Tacoma/Seattle’s KPLU 88.5 on Sunday, October 15 at 1 pm Pacific Daylight Time. Cellist Kevin Krentz and violinist Kwan Bin Park of the Finisterra Trio joined Mays, Martin Wind and Matt Wilson for a stirring program that included Ravel, Debussy, Bach, Mendelssohn, Carl Sandburg and Charlie Parker, among others.
To hear the program on KPLU’s streaming audio, go to its web site on Sunday and click on “Listen Now” on the upper left of the home page. This is one I don’t think you want to miss. For the Rifftides review of the concert, click here. Wilke will schedule the second half of the concert for a date to be announced.

It is hardly a secret that some of the best large jazz aggregations in the world operate under the auspices of the United States military. One index to the excellence of the Air Force’s Airmen Of Note and the U.S. Army Blues Jazz Ensemble is the number of major civilian jazz soloists who have appeared with them and rave about their quality. I wrote in January about Buddy DeFranco’s encounter with the Army Blues. Our occasional correspondent John Birchard checks in with a report about another such high level collaboration.

Junior Mance will be 78 next week (Oct 10). Hard to believe it’s been over forty years since I last saw him in person.
Last night, Mance was the guest artist with the U-S Air Force jazz band, the Airmen of Note, as part of their Jazz Heritage Series at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium. The 17-piece Airmen kicked off the evening with a beautifully-written up-tempo original (most of the charts are by band members) featuring the trumpet of Master Sergeant Rich Sigler. The band vocalist, Tech Sergeant Paige Wroble, followed with a pair, “Let the Good Times Roll”, recalling the Ray Charles version, and “Corcovado”.
Junior joined the band and sounded somewhat tentative in the first piece, his own early composition “Jubilation”. But, as the concert progressed, so did his piano work. With “On Green Dolphin Street”, he began to sound like his old bluesy self. And by the time he called for Johnny Mandel’s “Emily”, which he described as his favorite tune these days, he showed why so many major artists have employed him over the years – Cannonball Adderley, Dinah Washington, Dizzy Gillespie, to name three. Accompanied only by the Airmen’s excellent bassist, Senior Master Sergeant Paul Henry, Junior’s “Emily” was by turns thoughtful and lovely.
Highlights of the evening for this listener followed: two charts by the late tenorman Eric Dixon, a slow blues and an up-tempo blues were separated by a stunning solo reading of Ellington’s “The Single Petal of a Rose”. When Junior finished “Rose”, there was silence followed by sustained applause.
The slow Dixon arrangement featured mostly Junior’s soulful piano, some nicely placed moans by a trio of trombones and a blistering guitar solo by Tech Sergeant Geoff Reecer, who – to that point in the evening – had played only a Freddie Greene rhythm role. When he turns up the amp, the mild-looking Reecer has a sound with a nice bite to it and he produced several choruses of heartfelt blues that had the audience yelling for more.
The evening ended with an up-tempo Dixon piece that brought to mind his longtime employer Count Basie, and Mance’s solo was a tribute to the Count’s style: spare, tasty and with a little bit of stride piano to finish the job. After long, warm applause for Junior and the band, Mance seemed almost overwhelmed by emotion. He told the audience, “This week has been one of the highlights of my career,” and went on to say, “These guys are not only great musicians, they’re great guys. I could use two or three more weeks like this.”
This year’s Jazz Heritage series ends November 3rd with the Airmen joined by guest artist Phil Woods – and these concerts are all free and open to the public. Not a bad way to start the holiday season.
Your Washington correspondent,
John Birchard

John is a veteran broadcast journalist employed by the Voice of America.

Last month’s Paul Gonsalves posting continues to stimulate recollections by Rifftides readers who admired the Duke Ellington tenor saxophonist. Here is another reminiscence, from a man who heard the band when neither Ellington nor Gonsalves had long to live.

I appreciate your piece on Paul Gonsalves. I recall seeing him a year and a half before he passed away at a miserably publicized and scantly attended concert at “Rhodes on the Pawtuxet” in Cranston, R.I. The Ellington band was deep into the post Hodges and Strayhorn era, but it was still great, and I recall being appalled, even embarrassed, at the size of the house. Still, some of Paul’s relatives had come across town from Pawtucket and several of the people among the two dozen or so in attendence claimed to have grown up or served in the army with him. They all talked of Paul with complete affection and were obviously proud of his accomplishments. I hope this was the reason Duke called for the “strolling saxophone” solo on “In a Sentimental Mood”, rather than for medicinal purposes you alluded to.
Gonsalves, at least while he was alive, never had the titanic reputation of his section mate Johnny Hodges or his predecessor in the tenor chair, Ben Webster– and they both, of course, were thrilling musicians. But, Gonsalves has always been my favorite of the Ellington sidemen because his ballad playing projected a special warmth and vulnerability, and his great solos –pieces like “Chelsea Bridge” and “Happy Reunion” — have a wonderful poignant edge. His playing also had a unique rhythm that was, perhaps, a product of his Cape Verdean ancestry.
The Cranston concert was only sixteen years after the great driving solo at Newport that made him famous, but his physical deterioration was evident at close range, and it was clear that he could no longer handle that sort of demand. But, “Happy Reunion” still worked, especially for those of his family and friends for whom I’m sure it was a happy reunion.
The concert was completed professionally. There was no encore and the band and customers repaired to the bar on the other side of the wall, where a friend of Paul’s had already made sure he would not have to buy drinks. Scott Hamilton, who at the time made his professional living in a rhythm and blues band which performed at various colleges in the area, took pains to secure the autograph of the entire reed section before they retreated from the bar into the November rain. Sixteen months later Paul and Duke were gone, with too many of those playing that night to follow soon after.
Arthur Luby

Gonsalves and Ellington both died in May, 1974. For other memories of Gonsalves, go here and here.

What is music to you? What would you be without music? Music is everything. Nature is music (cicadas in the tropical night). The sea is music, the wind is music. The rain drumming on the roof and the storm raging in the sky are music. Music is the oldest entity. The scope of music is immense and infinite. It is the ‘esperanto’ of the world.
–Duke Ellington

I try to listen attentively to musical sounds around me. You can think of the sounds of daily life as being musical. So I try to absorb the intricacies of the sounds as I would if I were listening to a piece of music. I try to see the beauty in everything.–Tom Harrell

The Fall Festival at The Seasons ended on Saturday night with a shout. In the second of two concerts by the Bill Mays Trio, the focus was primarily on themes from classical music. The string section of the Finisterra Trio integrated with the Mays group on several pieces. Following two days of rehearsals laced with hard work and laughter,
violinist Kwan Bin Park and cellist Kevin Krentz put aside the typical classical player’s apprehension about whether they could swing. They could. They did–mightily–with pianist Mays, bassist Martin Wind and drummer Matt Wilson.
The program included Rachmaninov, Debussy, Mendelssohn, Ravel, Borodin, Bach and Rodrigo, with additional compositions by Mays, Wind and Wilson. The pieces by the trio alone were at the Mays Trio’s customary high level of excellence. The performances with strings were extraordinary, particularly in the breathtaking closers of each half. Mays’ arrangement of the fourth movement of Felix Mendelssohn’s “Piano Trio in C Minor” opened up for the trio’s jazz improvisation and May’s skillfully written “blowing” lines for the strings. One section employed unalloyed E-flat blues changes, the other Mendelssohn’s own harmonies. Wilson’s solo on the blues was a living definition of melodic drumming, Wind’s on the more complex Mendelssohn changes a stunning demonstration of tonal depth and harmonic resourcefulness. In the movement’s famous hymn variations, the blend of cello, violin, piano and arco bass was almost unbearably moving. Mays’ variations on the variations summoned up still more hymns, including an allusion to “Bringing In The Sheaves.” If you think the famous “We Want Cantor” 1-6-2-5 harmonic sequence began with Eddie Cantor, listen to the conclusion of the Mendelssohn C Minor. And it was old when he used it. Properly played by a classical piano trio, that finale is a powerhouse. With the addition of Wind’s bass and Wilson’s drums, it is enough to lift an audience out of its seats. It did.
Mays’ “Peace Waltz” (aka “Kaleidoscope”) and Wilson’s setting of three poems by Carl Sandburg included narration, which I was flattered to be asked to provide. The poems from Sandburg’s The People, Yes, were “As Wave Follows Wave,” “To Know Silence Perfectly” and “Choose,” with beautifully written parts for the five instruments. Wilson’s instructions included improvisation by the classical players, which Krentz and Park performed as if they had been doing it all their lives. “Choose” has the passion of a 1930s labor protest song or something by Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra.

Choose (Sandburg)
The single clenched fist lifted and ready.
Or the open asking hand held out and waiting.
Choose:
For we meet by one or the other.

I was recruited to play melody on flugelhorn in “Choose” and to commit free improvisation along with the quintet. It ended up sounding like Don Cherry sitting in with your neighborhood Salvation Army band.
The final piece began with Mays playing J.S. Bach’s “Two-Part Invention No. 8 in F Major,” BWV 779,segueing into Charlie Parker’s “Scrapple From The Apple,” the cello and violin playing Parker’s “Ah-Leu-Cha” in counterpoint. Mays, Wind and Wilson each soloed at length, Mays quoting “Nola” and “Jitterbug Waltz,” among other several other unlikely things. But he wasn’t through quoting when his solo ended. The penultimate chorus that Mays wrote for the ensemble contained snatches of “Tenor Madness,” “Buzzy” and “Honeysuckle Rose.” The final shout chorus of counterpoint on the Parker themes concluded with the celebrated coda of Parker’s 1947 Dial recording of “Scrapple From The Apple,” the strings wrapping it up on a tremendous tremolo. The encore was a repeat of the shout chorus.
We have frequently discussed in Rifftides the undeservedness of ninety percent of standing ovations these days. This standing O at The Seasons was in the other ten percent.
Jim Wilke recorded the concert for his Jazz Northwest radio program. There is talk that it may also be released on compact disc. Stay tuned.

Many Rifftides readers check in regularly with Terry Teachout’s indispensable artsjournal.com blog About Last Night. You may also read him in The Wall Street Journal, where Terry’s Sightings column over the weekend concerned the economic, ethical, commercial and cultural facets of a phenomenon often discussed and linked here. It is YouTube, the web site devoted to video clips. A large percentage of what appears on YouTube and similar sites is ego-driven ephemera, but much of it is cultural treasure. To read Teachout’s thoughts on the long-term value of YouTube, go here. The Journal has granted a free link to the piece.
When you come back, click this link for a YouTube clip of the great saxophonists Benny Carter and Coleman Hawkins at a latterday Jazz At The Philharmonic concert. The introducer is JATP’s impresario, Norman Granz. The intergenerational rhythm section is pianist Teddy Wilson, bassist Bob Cranshaw and drummer Louie Bellson. The tune is “Blue Lou,” not, as YouTube bills it, “Blue Lue.” Spelling is not often the strong suit of the people who mount these videos.