Archives for January 2007

The lead story on the ArtsJournal.com main page concerns jazz education’s role in music and culture at large. Here’s the AJ tease, quoted from NewMusicBox.com:
“How is it that jazz has become the vehicle for the resurgence of robust music programs in the schools while classical music, and its offspring (arguably US) still find it a challenge to be seen as relevant to arts education in the United States? Perhaps it is because jazz is an honest child of the arts in American culture and is taking back its true inheritance.”
Good question, and it leads to a string of reaction. You can follow the argument by clicking here.

Jazz gets relatively little attention on commercial television, but one of the newscasts on WBBM-TV, the CBS-TV affiliate in Chicago, made an exception recently. It profiled Bob Koester and his Delmark Records label. The story focuses more on Chicago blues than on Delmark’s jazz artists, but reporter Vince Gerasole produced a fine little piece incorporating atmospheric historical footage of the city. Go here to see video of the report and read a transcript.

On Saturday, Michael Brecker succumbed to leukemia brought on by MDS (myelodysplastic syndrome), the bone marrow disorder that put him on the sidelines of music until recently. He was fifty-seven years old. The most admired of the legion of saxophonists that arose in the wake of John Coltrane, Brecker influenced a generation of tenor saxophonists who emulated him to the point of outright imitation. Few, if any, achieved his level of invention and individuality.

Jazz educators teach his harmonic approaches and stylistic innovations the way classical composition teachers use Hindemith or Bartok. For a time, doctors hoped that a bone marrow transplant would save Brecker, but they could not find a suitable donor of his blood type despite a widespread publicity campaign seeking one. An experimental blood stem cell transplant was not effective. Brecker’s record company, Telarc, announced today that he completed a final album two weeks ago. It is to be released on the Heads Up label in the spring.
On Friday, Alice Coltrane died at the age of sixty-nine. The former Alice McLeod left her career as a bebop pianist in vibraharpist Terry Gibbs’ band to marry Coltrane in 1963. She entered the tenor saxophonist’s musical orbit and during the final phase of his life joined his band as he became increasingly experimental and adventuresome. After Coltrane died in 1967 at the age of forty, she raised their children while also pursuing a performing and recording career as a pianist, organist and occasional harpist.

She was noted for music with a spiritual component influenced by her Hindu religion. During 2004 she toured with her son Ravi, like his father a tenor saxophonist. Those were her final performances. A family spokesman said that Mrs. Coltrane died of respiratory failure.

Rifftides reader Russell Chase writes:

Last night, my wife and I watched the 1933 movie 42nd Street on TV. I promised myself that I would listen to Rod Levitt’s LP with the same title today. I wound up playing all of the four Levitt LPs that I have. They have always rated very highly among my favorite things. Such consistently interesting writing and fine playing over a span of four LPs is hard to match.
When your name popped out of the notes of the Insight album, you were immediately nominated as the person with whom I would share my elation at having a non-CD day, and the reason why.

Well, Mr. Chase, now you have shared your elation with all of us, and that’s good; Levitt’s music deserves recognition. Rod Levitt played trombone in the Dizzy Gillespie big band that that toured Latin America and the Middle East in 1956, and in Gil Evans’ orchestra. For a time, he made a dependable living in the orchestra of the Radio City Music Hall. But he had a compulsion to write music, and in the early 1960s, he began turning out ingenious arrangements for an eight-piece rehearsal band. Levitt made use of audacious harmonies and spacious voicings, and many of his horn players doubled instruments, so that the octet often sounded twice its size. He adored Duke Ellington, and reflected Ellington’s influence. Yet, without embracing free jazz, he also managed to impart a rambunctious feeling of abandon, and Down Beat included him in a survey article about nonconformist composers. All of the other subjects of the piece were card-carrying members of the avant garde. I remember Levitt’s being amused, if surprised, by the company in which the magazine put him.

Over three or four years in the mid-sixties, he turned out the four albums Russ Chase mentions. They comprise a body of recordings that are fresh, evocative and enormously entertaining forty years later. The writing was daring, finely crafted and marinated in wit. Most of his players were top studio professionals who were superb improvisers. Among them were the trumpeters Rolf Ericson and Bill Berry, the pianist Sy Johnson and the saxophonists Buzz Renn and Gene Allen. Levitt’s gutsy, often raucous trombone was at the center of many arrangements, but he also fashioned delicate woodwind ensembles. None of Levitt’s three RCA Victor albums has been reissued on CD. Five tracks made it onto a 1988 RCA compilation CD with other works by Hal McKusick and John Carisi. The disc is difficult to track down. Amazon continues to list it, but as “currently unavailable.” Trolling the web may now and then turn up vinyl copies of Insight and Solid Ground, but 42nd Street seems to have evaporated.

For the most part, the demand by a modest-sized core of listeners for reissue of Levitt’s albums has fallen on deaf ears (also known as recording company accounting departments), but there is a happy exception. Before his company sold itself to Concord Records, Ralph Kaffel, the president of Fantasy, Inc., succumbed to years of entreaties from pesky critics and reissued Levitt’s first album on Riverside as a CD in the OJC series. That was 1963’s Dynamic Sound Patterns. In his 2003 National Public Radio review of the CD, Kevin Whitehead said, “He liked blaring harmonies and primary colors,” and that’s true, but Levitt also fashioned delicate woodwind ensembles. He knew how to use space. He was a master of balance among the sections and a creator of droll surprises. The enthusiastic cadre of admirers he accumulated with those LPs wasn’t big enough to earn him a renewal with RCA. Now that the Victor catalogue has been absorbed into the massive Sony empire, chances of the Levitts being reissued seem small. By the early seventies, possibly discouraged but a cheerful realist, Levitt began making a living writing music for advertising and turned out some of the hippest background music ever to grace TV commercials in New York. He kept the octet going as a rehearsal group, playing occasional concerts and, sometimes, simply hiring musicians to play his charts for fun. He also played for a time in the 1970s in Chuck Israels’ National Jazz Ensemble, a pioneer jazz repertory orchestra. For the NJE, he expanded the arrangement of “His Masters Voice,” Levitt’s evocative tribute to Duke Ellington. Happily, it is available in a splendid reissue CD on the Chiaroscuro label. For the past several years, Rod Levitt has been living in Vermont, largely inactive in music.

A sidebar to the story: When I was anchoring and reporting television news in Portland, Oregon, in the mid-sixties, I was addicted to Dynamic Sound Patterns. Levitt came to his hometown to visit his parents, I invited him to be a guest on a series I put together, a hybrid documentary and discussion program. It was called Insight. I told Levitt the broadcast needed theme music and asked, with trepidation, what it would cost to commission him to write it. He named what I thought was a reasonable figure. The program manager approved the deal. When Levitt got back to New York, he wrote the music, recorded it with his octet, notified me that it was ready and sent an invoice. The management reneged. They wouldn’t pay the bill. I was angry and embarrassed. When I told Levitt, he said not to worry, he would make use of the music. It became the title tune of his next album. In the liner notes, he mentioned me and the station, kindly. That’s class.

The piece stands alone, but it was also perfect for its intended use. In the unlikely event that I ever go back into television, I’ll do a documentary series, call it Insight, use that music and see that Rod gets paid for it.

That is the headline on a newspaper article about arts web logs. Rifftides is the focus of the piece by Kim Nowacki, arts editor of the Yakima Herald-Republic. She also interviews Brooke Cresswell, conductor of the Yakima Symphony Orchestra; Dan Peters, proprietor of the Blue Begonia poetry blog; and Doug McLennan, commander-in-chief of artsjournal.com.

“When I started ArtsJournal, the word blog had just been invented,” says Douglas McLennan, the Seattle-based founder and editor of ArtsJournal.com, a daily digest of arts, culture and ideas that launched in September 1999. The site, which receives about 600,000 visits per month, now also hosts blogs from some of the top arts and culture critics, including Ramsey.

I confess to a bit of a wince when I saw the adjective “venerable” attached to my name in the first sentence of the piece. Then I reflected on possible alternatives and felt better.
To read all of Kim’s story, go here. She provides links to the other blogs and sites mentioned in the article. Don’t miss the panoramic photograph at the top of the Herald-Republic page, a shot of the valley with the peaks of Mount Rainier and Mount Adams standing guard.

More than a year ago, we reported on the alliance between Václav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic and the pianist Emil Viklický. Klaus established a series of jazz concerts at Prague Castle, the Czech equivalent of the White House, and chose Viklický to launch it. To read about that event, click here. Viklický is one of several veteran European jazz pianists, including the Italian Enrico Pieranunzi, the Austrian Fritz Pauer and the Frenchman Martial Solal, who are barely known in the United States despite their celebrity on the continent and in the British Isles. Viklický toured the US and Mexico in 1996 with the Ad Lib Moravia ensemble, but his appearances outside of Europe are rare. There has been talk of his touring North America with his Czech compatriot, the bassist George Mraz, on whose 2001 CD Moravá Viklický was featured.
In the meantime, Viklický continues to add to his considerable discography. His latest CD , Cookin’ in Bonn, was recorded at a festival in Germany with his longtime trio mates, the jaw-dropping bassist FrantiÅ¡ek Uhlíř and drummer Laco Tropp, a specialist in quiet power. The All About Jazz web site has a new page featuring the album and providing a download of “Aspen Leaf,” one of Viklický’s compositions based on the music of his beloved Moravia. It is a way to sample a complete performance, not just one of the snippets usually available to web surfers. Full disclosure: I wrote liner notes for the CD, but stand to gain nothing from its sale. My fee was paid long ago, and liner note writers don’t get royalties. Come to think of it, musicians rarely do. But that’s a complicated subject for another time.
Try Viklický. He’s worth hearing.

The interaction between or among jazz soloists has often been described as like a conversation. A brilliant young man about whom I am trying to learn more — his name, for instance — has taken that simile literally, given it substance and put it on YouTube. Watch this, and smile your way into the weekend.

You may remember the tenor saxophonist Jim Pepper for “Witchi-Tai-To,” an American Indian peyote chant he learned from his Kaw grandfather. Pepper set it to music and it became a crossover hit. The song persists as a staple in the repertoires of pop and so-called world music groups on several continents. It has a place in efforts to raise Native American pride and awareness, for which Pepper, with his Kaw and Creek heritage, has become a symbol.

When I knew Pepper in Portland, Oregon, in the early 1960s, he had a big sound with rough edges and was primed to jam at a moment’s notice. He could be combative on the stand and off. The muscle and heft of rhythm and blues ran through his playing. He took chances with harmony, which is to say that he often refused to let conventional chord guidelines interfere with his conception. Looking back a few years later, it was easy to see that Pepper was primed for the rock-jazz fusion milieu he jumped into in New York in the middle of the sixties. Free Spirits, the band with Pepper, guitarist Larry Coryell, drummer Bob Moses, singer Columbus Baker and electric bassist Chris Hills, had an impact on rockers including Jimi Hendrix and The Velvet Underground. The 1967 Free Spirits album Out of Sight and Sound disappeared for years but recently resurfaced as a CD. Pepper worked later with such adventurers on the jazz frontier as Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, Dewey Redman and Bill Frisell. Here’s part of a 1968 Don Heckman interview with Pepper:

Don: Let me ask you the standard question. Where do you think jazz is going to go?
Jim: It seems like it’s just about ready to just roll over for the third time and die. But that’s hard to say. The rock music may help it out some, but the musicians themselves in their performance will really have to help. Maybe the younger musicians; if the older musicians move over, then something else will happen. I don’t think that people like to go to clubs and see Brooks Brothers suits anymore. Those days are gone, I think.

Discouraged by what he felt as low esteem for jazz in the United States, Pepper moved to Europe in his last years. He became popular there, particularly in Austria. He died back home in Portland in February, 1992, at the age of fifty. I have not seen Sandra Osawa’s highly praised documentary, Pepper’s Pow Wow,which seems impossible to find on DVD. If you’re interested in the VHS edition, go to this web page and scroll down. Few music outlets stock the albums Pepper made under his own name. One is 1987’s Dakota Song, in which he included sensitive performances of standard songs that demonstrated he wasn’t all swagger and boistrousness. Another is Comin’ and Goin’, recorded with John Scofield, Don Cherry, Nana Vasconcelos and Colin Wolcott in 1984. It includes a version of “Witchi Tai To” and just reappeared on CD at a confiscatory import price.
There may not be much of Pepper’s music available, but the folks at Harvard University’s radio station evidently have a substantial collection of it. They are billing what they call a Jim Pepper Orgy this Friday, January 12, from 6:00 am to 8:00 pm EST. It will be hosted by a woman with the intriguing name of Jesse Morgan Righthand. If you are in the Boston area, you can hear WHRB at 95.3-FM. If you are elsewhere, go to the station’s web site and click on “Tune In.”
Jim Pepper is often strong medicine. Strong medicine can make you well. If you’re hearing Pepper for the first time, let us know your impressions.

In The New York Times, Ben Ratliff reports on Sunday night’s memorial service for tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, at which a number of Redman’s colleagues performed.

The pianist Ethan Iverson and the bassist Reid Anderson, both of the trio the Bad Plus, with (Matt) Wilson on drums, got off a version of (Ornette) Coleman’s “Broken Shadows” that demonstrated the slippery harmonic mobility Mr. Redman played so easily. And Joshua Redman, Dewey Redman’s son, played a startling piece on tenor saxophone, unaccompanied, and very unlike the rest of his music: it was slow and minor and wary, using the horn’s full range, putting space between short phrases.

To read all of Ratliff’s story, go here. For a rare recording of the Redmans together, seek out Dewey’s 1992 CD African Venus, and hear the contrast between the styles of father and son.

In her blog, DevraDoWrite picks up the Erroll Garner thread, posting reminiscences of her husband, the ageless 94-year-old John Levy, who played bass on a Garner recording date in 1945.

There were no parts to read on this session because Erroll, like many of the great musicians, didn’t read or write music. He picked standard tunes and we figured out little interludes, intros and endings, talked down the solo choruses and then recorded. We did all four sides in a single three-hour session in those days; none of this elaborate re-recording and punching in individual notes or mixing in a different solo.

To read the entire story of the session, including how John got his bass up thirty flights of stairs, go here. The Savoy tracks that Levy made with Garner are still around, on this CD set. They demonstrate that there was no essential difference between the way the pianist played at the start of his career and at the end. The whole amazing apparatus was in place and fully operational from the beginning.

The Erroll Garner item on Rifftides the other day touched something in the readership. Comments are still rolling in. You’ll find them by clicking on “Comments,” at the end of the original post. This one from Hans C. Doerrscheidt in Germany included links:

Thanks for the YouTube link of the great E.G! I remember finding the Concert By the Sea CD in the grab-box near the cashier in a supermarket (in a German small town!) in the early 90s. I’ve loved it ever since.
There’s a great DVD available of Erroll’s gig at the British Jazz 625 TV show from the mid-60s.
A lot of times I’ve read the anecdotes about Erroll using a phone book to add height to the stool, and only when watching the DVD I finally understood that it was actually to achieve his fairly unusual playing position – arms almost straight, hips on or above keyboard level – rather than because of his fairly small stature. (For a contrast on the other end of the “unusual playing position” scale, compare this Glenn Gould clip.

Gould: another force of nature. And if you are a student of piano keyboard positions, you know about Bill Evans. Here’s a refresher course.

This is short notice, but Rifftides just received notification that there will be a memorial service this evening for the late tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman. Readers in or near New York City may wish to know. The service will be at 7:30 p.m. at Saint Peter’s Church, Lexington Avenue and 54th Street.

Among those expected to perform in Redman’s memory are his son Joshua, Cameron Brown, Charles Eubanks, Pat Metheny, Charlie Haden, Frank Kimbrough, Geri Allen, Jack DeJohnette, Joe Lovano, Reid Anderson, John Betsch, John Menegon, Judy Silvano, Leroy Jenkins, Mark Helias,Matt Wilson, Teri Roiger, Ethan Iverson, Pheeroan AkLaff and Sheila Jordan. That’s
quite a lineup in tribute to a soloist who carried the rugged Texas tenor sax tradition into the avant garde and never lost its traces.
Redman died on September 2 in Brooklyn.

Erroll Garner died thirty years ago, almost to the day. I don’t know whether the National Public Radio station I listen to was aware of that, but the past few days during morning news programming, the producers cued up a few seconds of Garner’s piano as transitions between local and national segments. The news was mostly grim, but Garner was full of cheer and optimism, as he was in life. Even in fifteen-second bursts, he got the day off to a good start. I cannot think of another jazz pianist after Fats Waller who made serious music with so much happiness.
Garner is not often mentioned these days in discussions of major pianists but, unquestionably, he was one. As when he was alive, the tendency among critics–but not among pianists–is to dismiss him as a naïf, an instinctual primitive who never learned to read music, as if reading music is more important than making it. He didn’t read because he didn’t have to. He didn’t learn the names of chords because the chords presented themselves to him before he knew they had names. In harmony, melody and rhythm, Garner was complete, and he was one of the few pianists who could improvise convincing variations based on melody lines alone. I don’t buy the argument that if he had learned to read it would have diluted his originality. Nothing could have done that. What would reading have done for him, brought him studio session work? He didn’t need it. He was a star before he was thirty, a huge popular success by the end of the 1950s, the only jazz musician the impresario Sol Hurok ever booked.
As a recording artist, Garner was remarkably consistent. I cannot recall one of his albums that was substandard, but it is easy to recommend one in which he has no moment that is less than inspired. It is his most famous, Concert by the Sea. The recorded sound is less than perfect, in fact notably less than perfect. The piano had not been visited by a tuner. It doesn’t matter. That night in 1955, Garner was a force of nature. Close second: Campus Concert, taped at Purdue University in 1964, also with his faithful sidekicks bassist Eddie Calhoun and drummer Kelly Martin. This one has a priceless back-to-back double-header “Lulu’s Back in Town” followed by “Almost Like Being in Love;” as much swing and joy as it is legal to pack into eight-and-a-half minutes.
To see Garner at work, visit this video clip from 1962, when he was at the height of his fame. Yes, that’s a telephone book he’s sitting on. He took the Manhattan directory on the road with him. It gave him just the right height. Watch Calhoun concentrating on Garner’s hands as he tries to anticipate what the boss is leading up to in his Rachmaninoffian introduction.
Have a good weekend.

Trumpeter Marvin Stamm has put up a video page on his web site. It has clips from a concert by his quartet with pianist Bill Mays, bassist Rufus Reid (see the current DVD in Doug’s Picks in the right column) and drummer Ed Soph. Guitarist John Abercrombie is guest soloist on one of the seven pieces and in the ensemble on others. Except for a couple of fades to black, the videos are complete performances by a solid group that deserves wider exposure.
The Stamm quartet rarely plays in New York. It has two appearances there this month, January 10 at the Kitano Hotel at Park Avenue and 38th Street and January 12 at the Sheraton Hotel during the annual conference of the International Association of Jazz Educators. If I could be at the IAJE this year, these would be musts.

There were good days with Charles, but there were some stormy days. His temper is well known. I used to make him cry simply by telling him how nasty he was. It’s amazing how he could change, storming one minute like he was going to kill someone and blubbering with remorse the next. But he had beauty, a little child’s beauty, about him.

–John Handy in Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers

This is some of what I wrote in a lengthy Jazz Times review more than three years ago when The Marsalis Family: A Jazz Celebration was released as a CD.

Together, the elder brothers are astonishing in their trumpet-soprano counterpoint flurries on “Nostaligic Impressions.” Following Wynton’s wry spoken comment about brotherhood, they have a spirited instrumental conversation in Branford’s “Cain and Abel.” The conversation grows in intensity and becomes an argument before it is resolved more satisfactorily than Cain’s with Abel.
“Struttin’ With Some Barbecue” is no mere indulgent tip of the hat to the tradition, but a reminder that this stuff is in the Marsalises’ New Orleans bones. In his salad days, Ellis worked his share of traditional gigs. He shows that he retained the lessons and knows how to make them work in his modern style. Wynton’s two choruses are full of Louis Armstrong’s spirit, Delfeayo’s simply full of spirit, with one of those piquant runs out of key. I keep zapping the CD player back to Branford’s soprano choruses on “Barbecue.” With his logical construction, audacious ideas and broad, unrestricted tone so unlike the squeezed soprano sound of many post-Coltrane players, this classic solo transcends stylistic categories.
Reservations about aspects of Wynton’s and Branford’s recent work slip into the shadows when I listen to this family gathering.

To read all of the review, go here.
I finally got around to watching the DVD of the concert, which marked establishment in 2001 of a chair in father Ellis’s name at the University of New Orleans. The video version adds a two-Steinway romp through “Caravan” by Ellis and his former student Harry Connick, Jr., a home boy and honorary Marsalis. In an interview, Branford identifies Jason, the drummer, as the “accident baby” who came along twelve years after the third son, trombonist Delfeayo. Marsalis pal Roland Guerin is on bass throughout. Lucien Barbarin sits in on trombone for “Saint James Infirmary.”
With interviews interspersed, the DVD takes a semi-documentary approach. The talk is brief, often witty, and to the point of the music and the natures of the family members. The video I watched was the Public Television version running a bit less than an hour. The commercially released edition is sixteen minutes longer and has additional music including “Caravan,” “Limehouse Blues” and “The Party’s Over.” The production values are solid and unpretentious, the lighting, sound and camera work admirable, with fine directing by Phillip Byrd.
The Marsalis brothers were raised by Ellis and his wife Delores to be staunch individualists. Each is in his own musical world. Branford tells the interviewer that he and Wynton have different approaches to music, that he did not want to do this concert, because he thought it wouldn’t work.
It worked. No one set out to blaze trails in this get-together, just to play well and enjoy one another. Watching an admirable family make good music together was a fine way to start the new year.

At the end of her slightly dyspeptic little essay on the exhorbitant cost of eating out, DevraDoWrite adds this reminder, which I heartily endorse. I should have posted it myself.

…if you are a jazz lover in New York with $5 and a free lunch hour on Wednesday, January 3rd – 1-2 PM, make your way over to Saint Peter’s Church (E. 54th St. & Lexington Ave.) for the MIDTOWN JAZZ AT MIDDAY concert featuring soprano saxophonist BILL KIRCHNER and pianist JUNIOR MANCE. I can’t think of a better way — or more affordable — to spend a lunch hour at the start of the year!

Godoggone writes:

Not sure “Zog” was the best possible caveman name for this particular topic. Google that and see what you get…

That name I made up had a naggingly familiar ring to it. My apologies to King Zog’s descendants and to Albanians everywhere. Strictly unintentional.

From the Rifftides staff to all: Best wishes for a happy and prosperous new year (that is a link).