Archives for March 2007

St. Patrick’s Day never arrives without reminding me of a record that did not get made. In the 1960s Paul Desmond and guitarist Jim Hall, frequent collaborators in those days, came up with an idea for an album of Irish music. In their planning session, they decided on some of the tunes they would record, “The Tralee Song,” “Lovely Hoolihan” and “Fitzhugh or No One” among them. That, unfortunately, is as far as the project went.
Happy St. Patrick’s day.

I have been roundly corrected by alert Rifftides readers who point out that the German broadcasting entity NDR has always been in Hamburg. For their interesting comments, additional information and a bit of speculation about the Phil Woods video discussed in the previous posting, go here. Thanks to all for their help.

Thanks to Rifftides reader Tyler Newcomb for sending a link to this Phil Woods video from 1968. YouTube gives almost no information about it. I gather from the ID bug in the upper right-hand corner of the screen that this was made in the studios of Norddeutscher Rundfunk in what was then East Germany. If so, given the cold war chill at the time, there must be a story about what the American musicians were doing there. The rotary valve flugelhorn player is Jimmy Owens. The trombonist appears to be Slide Hampton. The non-playing alto saxophonist sitting next to Woods is Lee Konitz, who now and then gives a knowing half smile. I have no idea who the other musicians are. And how about that song title, “And When Were Young?” That can’t be right.
YouTube‘s fact-checking process is nonexistent. It’s wonderful to have the music YouTube brings us, but If the video donor, in this case Selmer 54, doesn’t provide the information or gets it wrong, tough nuggets. If you can identify the mystery players or disclose the actual title, please send a comment (see the end of the posting) or an e-mail message (see the right-hand column).

Your more or less faithful correspondent is working pretty much full tilt on an essay to accompany the reissue of an important Red Garland album. In the course of researching the piece, I ran across an article I wrote about the pianist for Texas Monthly in 1977. It included Garland’s story about his first job with a name band. Not long out of the Army, in 1946 he was back in his hometown, Dallas, and sat in with the great trumpeter and singer Hot Lips Page. Page’s band was short a pianist, but Garland didn’t realize that he had just played an audition. He went home and went to bed.

About five the morning here comes a knock at the door–boom, boom, boom, boom–and my mother says, “What have you done, Little William, must be the police, you must have done something wrong.” We opened the door and there were Hot Lips Page and Buster Smith. Lips said, “You the guy who sat in with me tonight? Well, I need you, man. Come on, throw somethin’ in a bag and let’s go.” That was it. That was the beginning of life on the road.

The best-known episode of that life was Garland’s central role in the career of Miles Davis. The Texas Monthly piece about Garland is in Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers.

Pianist Emil Viklický and his trio recently did a tour of the Czech Republic with the American trumpeter Marcus Printup. It began at the Prague Castle and took in other cities including Olomouc. Viklický reports that a CD will be released of music from the castle concert. In Olomouc, a fan captured video of Viklický, Printup, bassist Petr Dvorsky and drummer Laco Tropp in a modern old-timey b-flat blues. The Rifftides staff thought that you would enjoy it. The camera work is amateurish. The music is decidedly not. To see and hear the clip, click here.

We’re in the most stupid business in the world.
-Artie Shaw, BBC interview
Are big bands coming back? Sure, every football
season.
-Woody Herman

Clifford Jordan, one of the great (term used advisedly) tenor saxophonists of the second half of the twentieth century, in 1974 made a magnificent album called Glass Bead Games. Billy Higgins was the drummer on all twelve tracks. Cedar Walton and Stanley Cowell shared piano duties. Sam Jones and Bill Lee were the bassists in the two editions of Jordan’s quartet represented on the album. Sonny Rollins, who rarely provides blurbs, called Glass Bead Games “Clifford Jordan at his best…with a great band!”
The album consisted entirely of Jordan compositions, a practice often adopted for the wrong reasons. Jordan followed it for the right ones; he was an accomplished and original composer, and he was inspired by Herman Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game. His music captures something of the mystery and strange energy of that story. The playing by all hands–but particularly by Jordan–is exceptional. Issued as a double LP on the Strata East label, the album finds Jordan maintaining his commitment to mainstream values while edging into the freedom of new music pioneered by colleagues like Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. He achieved a balance that might have served as an example for some of the space cadets who took the new music so far out that it became inaccessible to most listeners.
Glass Bead Games has not been generally available in its entirety for years. I have heard of copies of the LP set going at auction for as much as $100.00. From time to time, CDs of the album have been available from Japan at high prices. Now that she has acquired the rights to it, Jordan’s widow Sandra (he died in 1993) has made Glass Bead Games available at a reasonable price, apparently only from this source. Its reappearance is an important reissue event. I did an A/B comparison of the original LPs to the CD and was relieved to find that the sound quality has not been digitally distorted.

The Rifftides discussion about the size of the jazz audience moves along as comments continue to come in. Most them are posted following the original item, which you will find here. We’re adding the following communique from the pianist and composer Vijay Iyer, who goes beyond the effect of formal music education to questions of commerce and cultural health. Pandora’s box is now officially open.

1) Why does something have to be commercially successful to be judged as meritorious? Jazz was rarely ever commercially successful except on a very small scale. Soundscan changed everything, because then music was assessed not by its merits but by its absolute sales figures. The slippage between monetary and cultural value is typically American and it lies at the heart of this issue.
2) The entire market for music (not just jazz) is crumbling because of new technologies and unprecedented levels of access to the entire recorded archive. Meanwhile, however, more and more musicians of all levels of accomplishment are able to create, record, and distribute their own music. There are difficult repercussions here, but let’s not blind ourselves to what’s undeniably positive about both of these new realities.
3) There is essentially no jazz radio of any kind here. Gone are the days when Miles, Stevie Wonder, Weather Report, and Sam Rivers were played on the same station. This is Clear Channel country; we have been divided and conquered.
Anyway, why should artists or audiences take any blame for any of this?
This is a music that requires nurturing and noncommercial support at all levels. There should be no stigma here; the same is true of classical music, even more so, and nobody doubts its merit or cultural value. In fact, individual patrons shell out big bucks to preserve classical and “new” music.
It takes vision to make this happen for jazz. Having toured all over the world, I must say that there’s very little of it in this country. One of the few glowing examples in the US is Outpost Performance Space in Albuquerque. Look at their web site, especially this page, and ask yourself: how many other jazz presenters in the US are willing to pursue such a combination of fundraising, partnerships with community organizations, local businesses, and academic institutions, strong curatorial vision, and audience development over such a long term? You can count them on one hand.
What if we had one or two such upstart venues in every state? The entire scene would be different.

My Jazz Times review of the Lionel Hampton International Jazz Festival is published in full on the magazine’s web site. It includes most of what I reported in Rifftides and some festival background added for JT.

When I listen to the two-track analog stereo tape recordings Roy DuNann (pictured) made for the Contemporary label shortly after the perfection of stereo in the 1950s, I curse the boneheads who, because they could, introduced multi-track, multi-microphone recording. Digital capability then came along with 587-channel mixing boards and made post production a sci-fi adventure that compounded all of the engineering wizards’ sins. Red Mitchell was right; simple isn’t easy. That applies to everything in life, especially audio engineering. Rudy Van Gelder, nominated by acclamation as the god of jazz recording, was better in early stereo than after he got all the toys. For one thing, in the fifties his pianos sounded more like pianos.

Roy DuNann is most likely a genius. Listen to his recording of Double Play! with Andre Previn and Russ Freeman at two pianos and Shelly Manne playing drums. DuNann recorded it in Contemporary’s studio in Los Angeles in 1957. The little company’s studio was the shipping room.

If you want another example of what DuNann could do with minimal high-quality equipment in a tiny space, try Sonny Rollins’ Way Out West. Rollins, Ray Brown and Manne played side by side, not in isolation booths, captured cleanly with just enough separation, plenty of depth and no cute tricks. There are dozens of other DuNann recordings in the OJC catalogue, still available. If it was recorded for Contemporary in the 1950s or ’60s, chances are DuNann was the engineer.

It is worth the frustration of navigating the confusing Concord Records web site in search of DuNann gems by Previn, Manne, Art Pepper, Art Farmer, Hampton Hawes, Lennie Niehaus, Shorty Rogers, Benny Carter, Benny Golson, Duane Tatro and Red Mitchell, among others. Click on the pull-down menu titled Original Jazz Classics Artists. Be aware that Concord has the strange practice of listing artists alphabetically by first name.

Last I heard, Roy DuNann was still with us, living in Seattle.

It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.
-Dizzy Gillespie-
It’s not the mistakes that count, it’s what you do after them that counts.
-Thelonious Monk-

I know, I know. I promised a survey of recent CDs. But a couple of writing assignments materialized, the kind that bring more than the psychic rewards associated with blogging, and I must meet the deadlines. In the meantime, here’s a link to an informal performance of “Sweet Lorraine” by Zoot Sims, Red Mitchell and Rune Gustafsson. It’s a good way to start your week: relaxed, swinging and happy. It will help you understand what Paul Desmond meant when he said that going to the Half Note and listening to Zoot was like getting your back scratched. Mitchell’s eight-bar introduction is a gem.

There has been interesting response to the Rifftides musing a few postings ago about jazz audiences decreasing at the same time that jazz education programs are burgeoning. Here is an excerpt from one comment:

A lot of talented high school and college band directors never program anything more adventurous than Thad Jones — or worse, third-rate Thad Jones knock-offs. [This is not to knock Thad, of course — I love Thad.] Many of them are completely unaware of any developments in jazz since, say, 1967, and aren’t even aware of what’s going on locally. They never take their students to jazz clubs or bring in local musicians to do workshops and sit in with the students.

For the original item and all of the readers’ comments, go here.

Reports from New York are that the benefit for pianist Larry Willis last week at St. Peter’s Church raised more than $5,000. That won’t build Willis a new house, but it will help him replace some of what he lost in a January fire. More than two dozen pianists, including some of the most prominent in jazz, played for Willis. One of them, Deanna Witkowski, sent her impression of the event:

I thought that the evening was beautiful, and there really was a lot of love in the room! The concert lasted for about three and a half hours.

Another of the pianists, Lenore Raphael, wrote:

It was warm and thrilling to be part of such a benefit and tribute. We played on a 9 foot Fazioli dream of a piano and everyone got as much out of it as one could get from such a great instrument. I wish you could have been there.

Willis himself played at the benefit, a duet with trumpeter Jimmy Owens. Total attendance through the evening was about 250. For a recommended CD by Larry Willis, see Doug’s Picks in the right-hand column.