It’s not too late to put a reminder on your listening calendar. Bob Brookmeyer is the subject on Bill Kirchner’s Jazz From The Archives tonight at 11:00 p.m. EST on WBGO radio, which you will find at 88.3 on your FM dial if you’re in the Newark-New York area and at this address on the internet. Kirchner will survey the music of the valve trombonist and standard-setting composer and arranger. In addition, he promises “a surprise.” A vist from the great man himself, perhaps?
Archives for 2006
Phil Woods In Concert
Rifftides reader John Birchard, a Voice of America newscaster, has been attending the Jazz Heritage series of concerts in Washington, DC, and sharing his impressions with us. Here is his latest report. The Rifftides staff has added links to Woods’ recorded performances of some of the pieces John mentions.
Once upon a time, Phil Woods was the hottest alto player on the planet.
Bird was dead. Benny Carter had disappeared into the Hollywood studios. Cannonball Adderley was biding his time with Miles. Johnny Hodges was pretty much coasting in the safety of the Duke Ellington sax section and Paul Desmond was relaxing elegantly in the crook of Brubeck’s piano.
Phil, meantime, was rocketing into orbit from his spot in the Dizzy Gillespie band. It was Phil and Quill. It was Phil featured with Quincy’s band in Europe… Phil scorching on Oliver Nelson’s “More Blues and the Abstract Truth”… Phil the bomb throwing malcontent on Benny Goodman’s Soviet tour… Phil on fire with the European Rhythm Machine… Phil dignifying Billy Joel’s “The Way You Are” (and winning a Grammy) with one of his epigrammatic solos… Phil still smokin’ with his Delaware Water Gap bands.
Philip Wells Woods turned 75 this past week (Nov 2). The ol’ be-bopper has put in a lot of hard miles. He has, as they say in the NFL, lost a step. Emphysema will do that. Rather than routinely exceeding expectations, he now merely meets them…which, when you get to his level, ain’t bad.
The U-S Air Force jazz band, the Airmen of Note, closed out their Jazz Heritage series for 2006 the day after Phil Woods’ birthday by featuring him in concert at Lisner Auditorium on the campus of George Washington University in Washington, DC.
The band set the tone for the evening with a roaring tribute to the late Maynard Ferguson – Don Sebesky’s arrangement of “Take the A Train”, featuring some blistering work from the trumpet section. Vocalist Paige Wroble was up second and swung hard with an oldie, “You Can Have It”, which included a strong tenor sax solo from Tedd Baker.
Then it was time for Woods to hit – and his portion of the evening began with his original “target=”_blank”All Bird’s Children…” showcasing his alto, some nice piano from Steven Erickson and tasty 8’s and 4’s from drummer David McDonald.
Another Woods’ original, dedicated to the memory of Bill Evans, dropped the tempo to ballad pace. “Good-bye, Mister Evans” is a lovely tribute and, mixed blessing that it was, showed both Phil’s wonderful way with a melody and his reduced lung capacity. His phrases are shorter now, less often tossed out with the matchless confidence of his younger days. Not bad, mind you, but for the long-time listener, a melancholy reminder that even the greatest can’t beat the ravages of age. As Phil put it, “Growing old is not for sissies.”
And yet… Woods and the rhythm section trotted through the be-bop national anthem, “How High the Moon” with Phil slipping in some fire, some humor and a cliche or two from his own repertoire. Geoff Reecer was heard to advantage in a guitar solo.
A change of pace found the altoist joined by the sax section only for the Quincy Jones ballad, “The Quintessence“, which Woods claimed he played “four times a night back in the 50s and 60s” as a member of the Jones band. In this case, familiarity bred not contempt, but a lyrical solo and some choice ensemble passages.
A bright Woods original showed off Phil’s composer/arranger skills along with his still-virile alto, plus the Airmen’s ability to zip through a complex chart with equanimity. The largest crowd of the season gave the Grammy winner and the band a standing O and were rewarded with a stunning performance of “High Alto-tude”, featuring Phil and two altos from the band, lead man Lucas Munce and Andy Axelrod. The chart calls for the ability to negotiate breakneck-speed twists and turns in a three-man ensemble and to solo in what amounts to an old-fashioned cutting contest. Woods brought his “A” game to this one, and Munce and Axelrod were up to the challenge, with no one backing away. When it was over, the crowd was yelling, whistling and stomping, and the other band members were grinning and applauding.
So – the Lion in Winter may have to take a couple of hits on his inhaler to get through a performance these days, but he can still jerk an audience to its feet from time to time. And it ain’t nostalgia that does that, pal. That’s the native talent that prompted Dizzy Gillespie to hire the boyish phenom fifty years ago. Long may he wave.
Your Washington correspondent,
John Birchard
Mulligan, Fabulous
Gerry Mulligan became famous well beyond jazz circles for his 1950s quartet that included Chet Baker on trumpet, succeeded by Bob Brookmeyer on valve trombone. Mulligan achieved universal admiration among musicians and a large following of listeners with his Concert Jazz Band, which flourished in the early 1960s. He frequently said, though, that his greatest musical satisfaction came from the sextet he headed from 1955 through 1958.
The sextet made a brief preview appearance in December of 1954 when Mulligan played a concert at a high school in San Diego, California. On that occasion, Red Mitchell was on bass and Larry Bunker on drums. Then, the quartet with Brookmeyer was still Mulligan’s working band, but nine months later he constituted the sextet as a permanent entity. The front line had Mulligan’s baritone saxophone, Brookmeyer’s trombone, Zoot Sims’ tenor saxophone and Jon Eardley’s trumpet. The bassist was Peck Morrison, the drummer Dave Bailey. Eardley was replaced for a short time near the end of the band’s life by Don Ferrara, Morrison by Bill Crow. The sextet recorded three twelve-inch LPs on the Emarcy label, none of which the company ever reissued on CD. Verve, which bought the Emarcy masters, now offers one of the albums as a web site digital download.
All of the Mulligan Sextet recordings, including the San Diego concert first issued by Pacific Jazz, are in a new three-CD box on Spain’s Fresh Sound Label. To find it, go here. The set is also available here. It is called The Fabulous Gerry Mulligan Sextet. The hyperbole of the title is justified. Mulligan’s leadership molded the six men into a unit capable of bringing to life the ambitious vision he laid out in his compositions and arranging. They combined the spontaneity of a freewheeling jam session with the disciplined performance of a chamber group. Because of Mulligan’s voicings, the horn lines that he layered and intertwined, and the intensely close relationships among the players, the group often sounds twice its size. The critic Ralph J. Gleason once characterized the effect of the sextet’s horns at their most rambunctious as “a boiling and bubbling stew which can raise me right off the floor.”
The pieces include Mulligan’s “Apple Core,” “Nights at the Turntable” and “Elevation,” Jerry Lloyd’s “Mud Bug,” Eardley’s “Demanton” (read it backward), and Mulligan’s ingenious treatments of standards. Two Duke Ellington medleys, the impressionistic “La plus que lente” and a glorious “Sweet and Lovely” are highlights of an album of highlights. There is not a dull moment in thirty-seven tracks. Among other attributes, these sextet recordings have some of the most inspired and ebullient Zoot Sims on record, compelling statements by Brookmeyer in the gruff-old-man style of his youth, and Mulligan’s baritone in full, majestic bloom. Eardley, with his fleet lines and slightly acerbic tone, fit perfectly with his more famous colleagues.
Later, Mulligan formed other sextets of various instrumentations. The enchanting Night Lights has the one with Brookmeyer, trumpeter Art Farmer and guitaritst Jim Hall. But there was never another Mulligan sextet that had quite the vivacity and sense of discovery of the band with Sims, Brookmeyer and Eardley. The digital remastering and reissue production by Dick Bank give the recordings greater depth and brilliance than they had in their original format. This welcome CD reissue of an important chapter in modern American music has been needed for a long time.
Coming soon: a few thoughts about Brookmeyer’s latest, Spirit Music.
The Radio Morass
Referring to the WKCR Lennie Tristano Festival and, on the other hand, the general white bread-with-mayonnaise quality of most radio today, particularly in regard to jazz, DevraDoWrite, observes:
I know a lot of dee-jays who are nearly in tears because their bosses, not wanting them to break the musical spell with any talk, won’t even allow them to tell us listeners who’s playing on a particular track let alone mention that the artist might be appearing in town.
Amen. Maybe it’s time to again lower on the pabulum purveyors and their consultants who run most radio operations, public and private. Not that it ever does much good. Apparently, listeners are getting what they want, or they would rise up against mediocrity. To read all of Devra’s posting, go here.
Days Of Tristano
As I write this, I’m hearing Lennie Tristano talk about his admiration for Charlie Parker. The archived 1973 interview with Tristano, who died in 1978, is a part of a four-day celebration of his music by WKCR, the radio station of Columbia University. WKCR is billing it as a Tristano festival. It will run through noon EST on Saturday, November 11.
Tristano just said:
I had the best possible opportunity of anybody in the forties and fifties, because I was the only one who wasn’t doing what Bird was doing.
Tristano admirers undoubtedly know about the marathon broadcast and are listening. Those unfamiliar with his importance will be enlightened. In the New York area, tune your radio to 89.9 FM. In the rest of the world, the streaming audio is available on the web. Go here and click on “Live Broadcast” at the bottom of the page.
The following paragraphs are from the station’s news release.
A pivotal and often overlooked figure in jazz, Lennie Tristano was a virtuosic pianist whose singular achievements in performance, composition and teaching continue to resonate in today’s world. Born in 1919 in Chicago, he immersed himself in the New York scene at a time when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were in the midst of their revolutionary collaborations. Tristano quickly integrated into the bebop community and went on to build a musical world based on a distinct concept of improvisation.
Our festival seeks to present the many sides of Tristano’s genius. In addition to an airing of his entire recorded output, there will be in depth features on his compositional techniques and teaching methodology, as well as interviews with the former colleagues and students of Tristano who represent his living legacy.
The festival will include a chronological presentation of Tristano’s complete discography, presented uninterrupted throughout the day of Friday, November 10th.
The Rifftides staff encourages comments about the broadcast and about Tristano. Please use the comment link at the bottom of this posting or send an e-mail message to the address in the right column.
Jay Thomas Live At City Hall
A recurring theme of this blog is the universality and remarkably consistent quality of jazz in nearly every precinct of the globe. Jay Thomas has done his part to not only stimulate the growth of that quality abroad, but also to see that those of us in the music’s homeland get to hear the new generation of players from abroad. The trumpeter-saxophonist-flutist-leader and international sojourner spends a good deal of time in Japan and frequently imports his Japanese colleagues to work with him in the US.
A few days ago, Thomas’s East/West Jazz Alliance kicked off Seattle’s Earshot Jazz Festival with a concert at City Hall. In addition to Thomas, the band has pianist John Hansen, bassist Phil Sparks, alto saxophonist Atsushi Ikeda, tenor saxophonist Yasahiro Kohama and drummer Daisuke Kurata. Seattle’s remarkably hip municipal website has streaming video of the concert–nearly an hour long. To see it, go here. The Thomas concert is the first item.
Scrolling down the page, you will find video performances by The Tiptons, the energetic all-female saxophone quartet and drummer; and a stimulating set by the veteran trombonist Julian Priester’s quartet, which includes the rising young pianist Dawn Clement. Immediately below the Thomas video is the link to a November 12 recital by pianist Byron Schenkman with Mozart’s delicate Sonata in D-minor K31, and a set of Schubert’s compelling late piano pieces performed with notable vigor.
Seattlites can conduct their municipal business at city hall, then stop by the atrium for live music. There are compensations for living with all that rain.
Jay Thomas will be taking an edition of the East/West Jazz Alliance into The Seasons Saturday, November 11. I will have the pleasure of introducing the band. If you find yourself in Yakima, Washington, that night and attend the concert, please make yourself known.
Places To Visit
Thanks to Bob Young of Jazz Boston for adding Rifftides to the links from the site, which chronicles jazz people and events in the Boston area and includes Carol Sloane, Joe Lovano, Danilo Perez, Terri Lynn Carrington and Charlie Kohlhase on its board of artistic advisers. They must be giving good advice; it is a web site with good design, sensible organization, extensive information and hip background music .
Thanks to Mr. Young, also, for including among Jazz Boston’s links one to a collection of pieces Tony Gieske has written and illustrated with his photographs over the years. Gieske, once with The Washington Post, now writes for the Hollywood Reporter. His site is called Remembrance of Swings Past. It has columns, essays, and anecdotes about Woody Herman, Miles Davis, Tiny Grimes, Jimmy Rowles, Ravi Coltrane, Bob Brookmeyer, Sam Rivers, Peggy Lee, Charles Lloyd Conte Candoli, Chet Baker, the young trumpeter Maurice Brown and a couple of dozen others. Gieske is good at description:
Brookmeyer poked the mike deep into the bell of his instrument and began producing that drawly, equable sound of his, buzzy and furry and intimate. The brilliant guitarist Larry Koonse, immaculate and cool, gave the sound a silvery core as the two exposed the text of whatever familiar theme they had chosen.
Gieske has an ear for quotes, like this one from a profile of Annie Ross, the heroine of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross:
The other day I was walking along Madison Avenue and I passed a police station and a black policeman came out off duty and he’s walking up the street singing ‘Moody’s Mood for Love.’ He did the female chorus, the whole thing, walking along Madison Avenue. Out of sight! I was thrilled.
And this one from Tiny Grimes recalling New York in 1944:
I had a little job with my quartet down on 52nd Street, and Charlie Parker used to come in, and I used to let him play, you know? He couldn’t get a job nowhere because nobody at that time understood the music. But I could dig it. I just couldn’t play it that well.
But Bird was there every night. He was there so often, they thought he was workin’ there. And then when I got this record date for my group, the producer at Savoy over in New Jersey – he really didn’t want him. I talked him into it. It was Parker’s first real record date, where somebody let him play.
I am adding Jazz Boston and Remembrance of Swings Past to the links in the right-hand column. Pay them a visit. Don’t forget to come back.
Skvorecky And Viklický
In the recent Rifftides piece about Freedom and Josef Skvorecky, I named several jazz musicians from former Communist countries who have risen to the top of their profession. One of them was the Czech pianist Emil Viklický.
The world is small and tightly interconnected. A day or two after the piece appeared, I got a message from Viklický informing me that he knows Skvorecky “quite well” and that he contributed an important element to a masterly–and very funny–Skvorecky novel. Emil wrote:
There is my long letter to him, written in 1974 to Canada, published as a
resolution of novel The Engineer of Human Souls.
The Engineer of Human Souls rambles through life under the Nazis, the Communists, academia and the human condition. In this brilliant roman á clef, the narrator, a Czech professor of literature teaching in Toronto, is Skvorecky once removed. One of the characters from his Czech past is his friend Benno Manes, described by Viklický in his message as “dirty speaking fabulous trumpetist.” Viklický discloses that Manes’ had a counterpart in real life.
Skvorecky of course changed all real names to fictive names. It was necessary back in 1974. The letter describes the death of Pavel Bayerle, bandleader, trumpeter, a close friend of Skvorecky. I was in army big band in October 1971 when Bayerle died of heart attack on the stage while conducting the band in Russian-occupied army barracks in Olomouc. Bayerle was 47 then. My letter to Josef remained in the novel practically intact. Skvorecky received my letter just when he was finishing Engineer.
Skvorecky changed Olomouc army barracks to Bratislava Russian barracks. In Russian barracks, we often played longer improvisations mostly ending in aggresive free music. It was our kind of protest. We knew that Russian listeners didn’t like it that way.
As it appears in the book, the letter mentions a singer, Miluska Paterjzlova; a guitarist named Karel Kozel, “a big handsome fellow with a green Gibson;” the MC, Private Hemele; and a trumpeter called Pavel Zemecnik who helps the letter writer, “Desmosthenes,” pull the stage curtain closed when Benno Manes dies as he is conducting. They were fictional names of Viklicky’s real bandmates.
Real singer name was Helena Foltynova, lately married as Helena Viktorinova, still singing some backgrounds for pop stars now. She was Marilin Monroe type of beauty, at the time simply stunning. Guitarist real name was Zdenek Fanta, his Gibson was dark red colour. Private Hemele is well-known actor Jan Kanyza; Trumpeter, who closed yellow curtain from the other side, was Petr Fink. Bayerle died in the 5th bar of letter D of his own song.
From the letter about Benno Manes’ death in Skvorecky’s novel:
The last thing I remember, and I’ll never forget it, was how he was lying there in that empty hall on an empty stage, with his huge belly completely purple, and dark grey trousers, and you couldn’t see his head for the stomach, and all around there was yellow bunting, that awful yellow bunting. Yellow and purple, maybe the bust of some statesman behind it but all I could see when I looked into the hall for the last time was that ghastly purple stomach and the yellow bunting. Then we left for Prague.
I thought you might be interested in how your friend died.
They went on to become friends, the novelist emerging as a major literary figure; the pianist about to leave the army, devote himself to jazz and become one of Europe’s most famous jazz musicians. Viklicky adds:
When my quartet played in Chicago in 1991, Skvorecky came down from Toronto and stayed with the band for a few days. I think he was fascinated by musicians’ talk, because he stayed through rehearsals as well. Backstage slang in ’91 was probably different than back in the ’40s when Skvorecky was young. But he seemed to love to listen to it. And maybe put it into his next novel.
Yes, the world is small and tightly interconnected.
Zenón At The Seasons
When they played The Seasons the other night, it had been nine months since I heard alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón’s quartet. I was impressed with the band at the Portland Jazz Festival and with Zenón’s JÃbaro CD. In Feburary, the leader’s fellow Puerto Rican Henry Cole had recently replaced the formidable Antonio Sánchez on drums and was working into the group. Cole’s working-in is long past. The band has the cohesion, mutuality of direction and sense of purpose that come when performance together night after night settles individual players into a unit.
Zenón, Cole, bassist Hans Glawischnig and pianist Luis Perdomo are without question a unit. Playing to a hinterlands audience unsure of what to expect from a band most of them had neither heard nor heard of, Zenón took the bold step of performing the tunes in each of two sets without interruption. Before intermission, all of the pieces but two new compositions, “Camarón” and “Penta” were from the JÃbaro album. In the second set, the music consisted only of fresh music by Zenón, unified in the form of a suite.
I could sense surprise and mild discomfort in the hall when the playing in the first set had continued without a break for fifteen or twenty minutes. Gradually, the content of Zenón’s music, the band’s intensity and the passion of the soloing created the awareness that this was chamber music of a high order; captivating chamber music flowing with Latin pulses, lyricism and yearning, fed by jazz sensibility and swing. Zenón’s playing is unlike that of any other young alto saxophonist of whom I am aware. He has the potential to become one of those soloists–not uncommon a couple of generations ago–whom the average listener can recognize after a few notes. Cole is an equally distinctive player. The four members of the band interact with almost eery interconnectedness inside complex music made to sound natural and easy.
I have frequently commented here on the regrettable trend of knee-jerk standing ovations. If everything deserves a standing ovation, nothing deserves one. When the concert ended, there was a long standing ovation full of shouts and whistles. The Zenóns deserved it.
The new pieces that made up that entrancing second half were “Ulysses in Slow Motion,” “Santo,” “Lamamilla” and “3rd Dimension.” None has been recorded. Zenón told me that he hopes to take the band into the studio early next year and incorporate the new music into a CD. Good.
Correspondence: Cannonball 1
From time to time, John Birchard of the Voice of America news staff shares with Rifftides his impressions of musical events in the District of Columbia and environs.
Can a ghost band make art? For example, does one consider a Glenn Miller Orchestra led by Sam Donahue capable of creating music that stands the test of time? How about the group led by Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter that featured Wallace Roney in the role of Miles Davis? Is their collaboration to be considered on the same plane as the Miles Davis Quintet? If not, why not?
The crowd that gathered for the second set by Louis Hayes and the Cannonball Adderley Legacy Band Featuring Jeremy Pelt (try fitting THAT on the marquee) at the KC Jazz Club at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (one long name deserves another) in Washington, DC last night didn’t seem to be mulling over such questions.
Whether they washed up on a wave of nostalgia–a number of gray heads in the audience could have been around back in the day for the Adderleys’ own group–or were there out of curiosity, they were treated to an hour and a half of tunes associated with Julian and Nat, served hot and tasty.
The set started with the Quincy Jones composition “Jessica’s Day”. The ensemble was tight and snappy, the solos bore promise of a good night. Though forty years have passed since Louis Hayes was a young up-and-comer, he still can drive a band, no matter the tempo. Next on the menu was “Lisa” by the late Victor Feldman. Hayes gives Pelt considerable solo space and the trumpeter uses it well. He reminds me of Freddie Hubbard in his attack and the confidence he exudes. Pelt was featured again, this time in a Harmon mute, on “Naturally” (spelling?). The rhythm section stayed with a feeling of 2/4 throughout, Hayes on brushes.
Julius Tolentino is a suitable stand-in for Cannonball. I had not heard the altoist before and on his feature “Bohemia After Dark”, he called up images of the Far East and snake charmers. Nicely done. Apparently, Tolentino is new to the band. When Hayes introduced him to the audience, he called him “Julian Tarantino”, which caused the rest of band to burst into laughter. Seems it’s happened before.
The set continued with Bobby Timmons’ “Dat Dere”, a showcase for bassist Gerald Cannon, whose funky walking solo brought yells from the audience, and for pianist Rick Germanson, whose offering was appropriately soulful. Nat Adderley’s “Work Song” closed the evening with Tolentino evoking Julian’s spirit And, again, Jeremy Pelt showed why he’s a star on the rise, with a swaggering, blues-inflected solo.
Does Louis Hayes front this band because he loves the music and wants to share it, or is it because he recognizes that he can earn a living from being the only surviving alumnus of a famous jazz group? Maybe it’s both. The fact is this is a very good band, playing strong material well. If last night’s audience is any indication, the public approves.
Having raised the question whether this is art or commerce, my vote is for commerce–but it surely is enjoyable commerce.
Your Washington correspondent,
John Birchard
For a Rifftides review of a CD by Hayes and the Cannonball Adderley Legacy Band, click here.
Correspondence: Cannonball 2
Continuing the Adderley theme, a Rifftides reader who identifies himself as El Destiny, sent the following message, which includes a link.
This article includes a rare mp3 of Cannonball Adderley jamming with a novelty act of singing squirrels.
The article tells the story of jazzman Don Elliott and partner Sascha Burland recording the track in an attempt to compete with Alvin & the Chipmunks. (Who had their own troubles with record labels…!)
Within the article are several links, including one to an MP3 of Cannonball playing “Yardbird Suite” with Elliott’s and Burland’s Nutty Squirrels.
Comment: Life Imitates Art
After reading the Rifftides item about Josef Skvorecky’s novel The Bass Saxophone, the British bassist, composer and leader Graham Collier wrote:
Some years ago I suggested to BBC radio that they adapt The Bass Saxophone, which they duly did with my music. Art Themen, best known as a tenor sax player, played the bass sax for the occasion. He owned a bass saxphone, which helped, but I asked him for this gig because–as I had seen in other collaborations with him–he had the rare ability to “act with his instrument.” This he did and the adaptation won a Sony Radio award.
The first time I heard Art play the instrument it shook the floor–and the people standing outside a nearby pub. I suggested that what I’d heard would do for the part where the boy in The Bass Saxophone was playing the instrument for the first time, but that for the final sequence–where he rides over the oom-pah band “like a dancing male gorilla”–he would need to practice. Which he did, and the end result was amazing. Art can be heard on bass saxophone in similar vein in my 1994 CD Charles River Fragments (Jazzprint).
Charles River Fragments is also available as a digital download.
Other Matters: October
Any day now could be the last good one of the year for cycling, so I said goodbye to work and took advantage of a late October afternoon so perfect that to have left it out there by itself would have been a shame. Deciding not to pit the road bike against heavy, skitterish Friday traffic, I left it in the shed and headed the mountain bike toward the system of canals that criss-crosses this agricultural valley. I dropped onto the path along a canal a block from my house and entered instant peace and quiet, except for the dogs that charge with intent to kill the moment they sense a cyclist.
Is there an animal psychologist out there who can tell us what it is about bicycles that drives dogs temporarily insane? Fortunately, there’s a leash law that keeps dogs mostly behind fences in town. In the country, you can usually get up a head of steam and outrun a farm dog, but a couple of weeks ago, a big black brute roared out of a yard and was gaining on me. When he came alongside and started nipping, I yelled as loud as I could (that’s loud), “Go home.” To my relief–and from the expression on his face, to his astonishment–he went home.
Nothing like that happened today. The only annoyances were piles of mud dredged out of the canals by ditch riders cleaning up after a summer of irrigation, and the extra shirt I threw on under my jersey. The air seemed cool when I started, but the temperature quickly rose on the steep hills. Russet and red leaves along parts of the path crackled under my tires. A crow circled along in the clear sky above me for a few hundred yards, reprimanding me for some offense. Two horses looked up as I passed their pasture. Apple harvest was over in most of the orchards. One pear farmer apparently decided that his crop wouldn’t bring him enough to make picking worthwhile. The pears lay beneath his trees where he let them fall, in the first stages of returning into the earth.
On a stretch up near the valley rim, a squirrel darted across the path fifty feet ahead. To my right, I saw a bigger creature move along the edge of an expansive lawn. The man paused to pump his air gun, then stalked the squirrel. He stopped, took aim, got off a shot, shook his head, and resumed gliding slowly along the edge of his property. Not wanting to distract him, I stopped and watched for ten minutes as he pursued his quarry with no less concentration than a sahib on safari. He took two more shots, but it was clear that the varmint had escaped. As he turned around, I said, “Hold your fire.”
“Oh,” he said, “I didn’t see you.”
“I know. I didn’t want to startle you and be your next victim.”
He felt like talking. He said he couldn’t keep flowers and couldn’t grow vegetables. The squirrels dig them up and eat them. They undermined a stone walkway he built. It was sinking, he said. He pointed to two pieces of equipment, a loader and a hay rake. One of his sons was storing them there, but he told him he’d have to move them, so the son found a buyer who gave him fifty dollars for the loader and a hundred for the rake, but the buyer hasn’t come for them.
“You see that shed,” he said. “I put that there years ago to store my tools while I built the house. I intended to tear it down when the house was done, but now it’s full of my grandson’s stuff. I told him he’d have to get it out of there next year. I want this area clear so I can plant it in lawn. That camper my son put there has got to go.” His gaze swept over his property. “I’ve got a lot of lawn, two acres of it. That area there, I cleared,” he said, pointing to a space ten by twenty feet bordered with creosoted timbers. “My other son had this old Mustang. It sat there for a long time, then some fella from Australia came along and paid him ten thousand dollars for it. Shipped it back to Australia with three or four other Mustangs. I guess they like old Mustangs down there.
“I’ve had this place since 1941. Retired from the mill fifteen years ago. Raised three kids here. After we had the first one, a daughter, the doctor told my wife she couldn’t have any more children. Seven years later, we had a son. He was fine. She was fine. Shows you what doctors know. Fourteen years after that, we had another son. What happiness. She was fifteen when we met, I was seventeen. Got married when she was twenty and I was twenty-two. I love it out here. It’s quiet. Away from the road. I’ve got a long driveway. Got that ditch running by. Nearest neighbor is clear over there, but his property runs right up against mine. We get along.”
He gestured at the orchard across the canal. “The old man who owned that had property ran clear into town, down by the freeway where the mall is. He used to stop by here when he was in his eighties, and I’d say, ‘I’m going in and get you a coke,’ and we’d just sit here by the canal and talk, for hours sometimes. He’s gone now.”
I extended my hand. We exchanged names. “I ride by here now and then,” I said. “We’ll talk again.”
“We sure will,” he said. “You take care.”
I rode home feeling good. The dogs seemed friendlier.
Freedom
Jazz expresses a yearning for freedom that survives the worst oppression. In his essay “Red Music,” the Czech novelist Josef Skvorecky wrote about an urge that even the most brutal tyranny cannot fully extinguish. Skvorecky grew up under Nazi occupation in World War Two. He was a budding tenor saxophonist in a dance band with other youngsters. They were infected by the “forceful vitality,” the “explosive creative energy” of jazz. He and his young friends did not regard themselves as protesters,
…but of course, when the lives of individuals and communities are controlled by powers that themselves remain uncontrolled–slavers, czars, fuhrers, first secretaries, marshals, generals and generalissimons, ideologists of dictatorships at either end of the spectrum–then creative energy becomes a protest.
Jazz was a sharp thorn in the sides of the power-hungry men, from Hitler to Brezhnev, who successively ruled in my native land.
“Red Music” prefaces a volume with two short Skvorecky novels, Emoke and The Bass Saxophone. The latter is the story of a boy whose life is ruled equally by the Nazis and his fascination with jazz. He dreams of the music and of figures who to him and his friends are demigods, among them Louis Armstrong and the bass saxophonist Adrian Rollini. He discovers a bass saxophone, plays it, then hears it played in a solo so powerful that he arrives at an epiphany. It is a simple story told with complexity and beauty. The Bass Saxophone is about what Skvorecky calls “the desperate scream of youth” that, as I wrote years ago in a review of the book, “is always inside us when we have been touched with the indelible truth of art.” You will find an excerpt from The Bass Saxophone on Skvorecky’s web site, but I urge you to read the entire novel. My review of it is included in Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers.
Also in Jazz Matters is a story told by the Polish writer Leopold Tyrmand, who, like Skvorecky, was a captive of both Naziism and Communism. A forced laborer in Germany, Tyrmand chanced upon a Nazi soldier who was also a jazz fan. At the risk of dire consequences to both of them if they were caught, they rowed a boat to the middle of a river and spent an afternoon taking turns at the oars, listening to forbidden Benny Goodman records on a windup phonograph.
I thought of the Skvorecky and Tyrmand stories when I read Nate Chinen’s New York Times article about Tomasz Stanko, the Polish trumpeter who was captured–and freed–by jazz when he first heard it half a century ago.
“The message was freedom,” he said one afternoon last week in a Midtown Manhattan hotel room. “For me, as a Polish who was living in Communist country,” he continued in his slightly broken English, “jazz was synonym of Western culture, of freedom, of this different style of life.”
To read the entire interview, go here. Stanko’s new recording is Lontano (ECM). He is one of dozens of Eastern European musicians who, since the collapse of Communism, have joined the top ranks of jazz musicians in the world. He, George Mraz, Emil Viklický, Robert Balzar, FrantiÅ¡ek UhlÃÅ™, Adam Makowicz, the late Aladar Pege, Laco Tropp and many others kept the music alive underground during years of subjugation and proved that in art, talent and the human spirit trump race and nationality.
New Picks: Guitar DVD
The latest DVD recommendation has joined the other new Doug’s Picks in the right-hand column.
The Artist’s Dilemma
. . .this is my dilemma. I’m a guy who makes things up as I go along so nothing is ever finished–there are so many layers. So when you solo, yeah, you might get into one thing, but then, hey, everything has implications! You can hear the next level. And that’s how I feel about improvising–there’s always another level. –Sonny Rollins
New Picks: CDs And A Book
In the right column under Doug’s Picks, you will find three recommended new CDs and a book of photographs to keep you company. Soon to come: a new DVD pick.
CD
Sonny Rollins, Sonny, Please (Doxy). A canny balance between new compositions and show tunes he loved in his youth. The great tenor saxophonist proves that since 2001’s Without a Song, and following the loss of his wife two years ago, his strength, imagination and intensity are undiminished. Steady work together has finely attuned Rollins and his five bandmates. His solos, laced with allusions and quotes, are notably cheerful. Stephen Foster is on his mind. “Oh! Susannah” pops up on two tracks, and he summons “Old Folks at Home” on another. Of the new pieces, his tribute to Tommy Flanagan, “Remembering Tommy,” should have the staying power to become a jazz standard. With this release on his own label, Rollins joins the ranks of musicians taking their business affairs into their own hands. Universal will distribute Sonny, Please as a digital download in November and a CD in January, but now it is available in both forms only through Rollins’s web site.
CD
Brian Lynch/Eddie Palmieri, Simpático (ArtistShare). Lynch, trumpeter for Eddie Palmieri, is the leader in this immensely satisfying album. He also works for Phil Woods and brings in both of his bosses as sidemen. At the piano, Palmieri ignites the proceedings spectacularly on Lynch’s “The Palmieri Effect.” Woods contributes stunning alto sax solos. Lynch plays throughout with fire, technical perfection and bebop harmonic understanding. Lila Downs brings emotional depth to vocals on two pieces, including Palmieri’s classic “Páginas De Mujer.” The bands range from six to thirteen musicians. This is Palmieri’s most impressive jazz/Latin collaboration since his 1966 El Sonido Nuevo with Cal Tjader. It is a major achievement for Lynch, who composed four of the pieces and collaborated with Palmieri on the rest. Like Rollins, he is now in business for himself. The Simpático link above takes you to Lynch’s web site.