Archives for January 2008

If you go to the right-hand column and scroll down to Doug’s Picks, you will find five new recommendations. To browse back through more than a year-and-a-half of recommendations, click on “More Picks” at the end of the current batch.

Rifftides reader Jim Denham sent a message reminding us that today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Henry Red Allen. Allen was the New Orleans veteran whom in the 1960s the iconoclastic young trumpeter Don Ellis famously called “the most avant garde trumpet player in New York.”
Ellis is quoted further in a tribute Mr. Denham posted on a web site with the intriguing name of Shiraz Socialist. Mr. Denham’s piece is well written, historically accurate and worth reading. It incorporates guitarist Jim Douglas’s touching memoir of Allen’s final tour in the UK in 1967. It also links to a video clip of Allen with the Alex Welsh band, playing and singing “St. James Infirmary,” one of his specialties. And it includes a description of Allen’s playing by the poet Philip Larkin. Larkin was a troglodyte in many of his jazz assessments, but not in this one:

There was always something unusual about Allen’s playing: even at the start he tended to sound like Armstrong in a distorting mirror, and by the end of his life an Allen solo was a brooding, gobbling, stretched, telegraphic thing of half notes and quarter-tones, while an Allen vocal sounded like a man with a bad conscience talking in his sleep. (All What Jazz, Faber and Faber) .

To read the Denham article and see the video, click here.
For more of Allen, watch his performance of “Rosetta” from the 1958 CBS program The Sound Of Jazz. His colleagues are Coleman Hawkins, tenor saxophone; Vic Dickenson, trombone; Rex Stewart, cornet; Pee Wee Russell, clarinet; Nat Pierce, piano; Danny Barker, guitar; Milt Hinton, bass; and Jo Jones, drums. Whew.
In 1957, having wrestled my commission from the United States Marine Corps and been given three days’ leave, I traveled from Quantico, Virginia, to New York. I got off the train at Penn Station, grabbed something to eat at a delicatessen, checked into a cheap hotel and walked up Broadway to the Metropole Restaurant. Just as I arrived, a very long Cadillac pulled up to the curb. From the driver’s seat emerged the majestic figure of Red Allen, trumpet case in hand. Inside, his band was waiting. It was the one on this CD, a required item in every basic collection. At the Metropole, the back bar was the bandstand, so narrow that it could accommodate the musicians only if they arrayed themselves shoulder to shoulder along its length. That was true of small groups like Allen’s and of big ones like Woody Herman’s. I stood–at the Metropole, nearly eveyone stood–listening enthralled until the place closed. I walked out just behind Red Allen, who got into his Cadillac parked under a “No Parking” sign and drove off into the night. I’ve always wondered what kind of arrangment he had with the Midtown North Precinct of the NYPD.

Roger Kellaway, still high on the news of his award by the French, sent a succinct message with a link. The link takes you to a performance by Zoot Sims. The transcription blowup on the wall behind the bandstand identifies the club as the lamented Donte’s in Los Angeles. Here is Roger’s message in its entirety:

A fun trip down memory lane

The rhythm section is Kellaway, bassist Chuck Berghofer and drummer Larry Bunker. Like his playing, Zoot’s style of hair and dress remained pretty much unchanged for the last two decades of his life, thank goodness, but the costumery and hairdos on Kellaway and Bunker seem to place this in the late 1970s. Play this only if you want to feel good.

Big cities do not have exclusive rights to major jazz artists. First-rank musicians play performance halls in small and medium-sized towns that New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Tokyo may think of as the hinterlands. Here are five US examples, among dozens.
Saturday, January 12, pianist Stanley Cowell will play a concert at Cityfolk in Dayton, Ohio. Go here to read about it. Check out the left-hand column of the Cityfolk page for the future lineup of pianists–Steve Kuhn, Bruce Barth with Terell Stafford, Bill Charlap with Houston Person. There’s serious listening in Dayton.

The same evening, the brilliant Swedish pianist Jan Lundgren plays a trio concert at The Seasons in Yakima, Washington, his only US engagement following a recording session in Los Angeles and an evening at the Jazz Bakery. Nancy King will play The Seasons on January 26, the Bill Charlap Trio on February 16.

In February, The Shedd Institute will present The Bad Plus, a highlight of the winter season in Eugene, Oregon. The town will never be the same.

Wynton Marsalis brings the Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra to The Outpost in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They’ll be followed by Pat Metheny with Christian McBride and Antonio Sanchez.

At Cambria on the California coast halfway between L.A. and San Francisco, The Hamlet At Moonstone Gardens becomes a concert hall on Sundays. Vibraphonist Charlie Shoemake and his vocalist wife Sandi bring in other name musicians. Tomorrow, January 6, the guest will be big band trumpet mainstay Don Rader. January 20 alto saxophonist Lanny Morgan (pictured above) joins the Shoemakes with pianist Tom Ranier, bassist Tom Warrington and drummer Joe LaBarbera.

Think Topeka, Kansas, isn’t hip? The Topeka Jazz Workshop recently had concerts by Gary Foster and by B.E.D. with Rebecca Kilgore, Eddie Erickson and Dan Barrett. This winter, the hall has booked dates by the rising young pianist John Proulx and by Tiger Okoshi, a trumpeter who has melded into academia but lost none of his power to astonish listeners.

Look around your area. There may be more music than you think.

Home computers and cell phones became realities after Paul Desmond died in 1977. Given his fascination with electronic devices, I am certain that if he were alive, he would be addicted to all things digital. Paul would love the idea of a program shooting through the ether into a computer and onto a compact disc.
Producer Paul Conley alerts Rifftides readers that his National Public Radio Jazz Profiles program on Desmond is now available as a free MP3 download at the NPR Music site. Nancy Wilson is the host. Her guests include Dave Brubeck, Eugene Wright, Jim Hall, John Snyder, Gene Lees, yours truly and, on tape, Desmond himself.
Desmond on Brubeck’s polytonality in their early days:

He would be in fifteen different keys on an out-of-tune piano and there were occasions when I was totally desperate about the situation.

Jim Hall:

Some people moved into the apartment across the hallway from him who were playing sort of garbage du jour, loud, all the time. So one time Paul just lost it and he put on a Bartok record, very loud, went across the hall, banged on the door, somebody opened the door and he said, “You hear that? It’s called music. How do you like it?”

The program was created before research for Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond unearthed new information about Desmond. It perpetuates the story Desmond concocted that he chose his last name from a telephone book. From Take Five, here’s fellow saxophonist Hal Strack’s recollection of the inspiration for the change from Breitenfeld to Desmond. It came at Sweets Ballroom in Oakland, California.

We were listening to Gene Krupa’s band, sometime in 1942. Howard Dulany had just left as the singer. The guy who replaced him had some kind of a convoluted Italian name and they decided that just wasn’t going to work for a vocalist. I mean, it was more difficult than Sinatra. So, he changed his name to Johnny Desmond.* We were standing there listening to the band and discussing the fact that this had happened, and Paul said, “Jeesh, you know that’s such a great name. It’s so smooth and yet it’s uncommon. If I decide I need another name, it’s going to be Desmond.”

Besides, he told someone later, Breitenfeld was too long to fit on a 78-rpm record label. In 1946, he went to the courthouse and made the change legal.
The program has plenty of music, including a fascinating section that illustrates Desmond’s ability to play counterpoint not only with Brubeck but also with himself. To download or listen to the hour-long Desmond Jazz Profiles program, follow this link.

*Johnny Desmond (1920-1985), the son of Italian immigrants, was born Giovanni Alfredo de Simone in Detroit in 1919. As a boy soprano, he won a radio talent contest. The name change quickly followed.

Rifftides reader Rich Juliano comments on the Jaki Byard item in the previous exhibit :

Back in 1985 Jaki was a clinician at the Tri-C Jazz Festival in Cleveland where I grew up. As an aspiring jazz pianist I was excited to attend his piano clinic but terrified when he asked for duet partners and one of my teachers volunteered me. I was so nervous I called “Stella by Starlight” in the wrong key! Nonetheless Jaki got the tune started (in the key I meant to call) and was very complimentary and gracious, commenting on my relative youth when he asked my age (18 at the time). He’s been a favorite of mine ever since. Unfortunately that was the only chance I ever had to see/hear Jaki live. My encounters with him that week remain among the highlights of my jazz listening and studies. Thanks for featuring him today!

I’m happy to tell Mr. Juliano that today I came across two YouTube clips of Byard at a jazz workshop in Berlin in 1965. In the beginning of the first one (that’s a link), he plays free with Reggie Workman on bass and Alan Dawson on drums, then works his way into what sounds to me like “I Love Being Here With You.” In the second clip, towering eminences of the piano meet when Byard and Earl Hines face one another and play “Cherry.” To borrow a phrase from Louis Armstrong, “Chops is flyin’ everywhere.”

Reading Gary Giddins’s tribute to Jaki Byard in the February Jazz Times stimulated memories of that astounding pianist. Giddins builds his article around the CD called Sunshine Of My Soul, reviewed in Rifftides last March. The magazine is now on news stands. The piece is not available on line.

Memory 1
I was at the recording session for the Phil Woods album Musique Du Bois in RCA’s storied Studio B in New York in 1974. The rhythm section was Byard, bassist Richard Davis and drummer Alan Dawson. Phil later wrote that the album “never settled, never got off the paper,” but that he liked my liner notes. I am flattered by his second asssertion puzzled by the first; the album still sounds good to me. When 32 Jazz reissued Musique Du Bois as a CD, they eviscerated the notes, but in this book they are reproduced intact. Here’s a snippet:

Jaki Byard wanders in, looking, as always, slightly bemused and mystical. He greets the others and sets about testing the piano. Asked how he likes it, Byard says, “It’s a piano. I had a good one once, in France.” The universal suffering of jazz pianists; an endless chain of inadequate instruments binds them together as surely as their love for Art Tatum.

Memory 2
Paul Desmond and I stood in the ballroom of the Royal Orleans hotel during the 1969 New Orleans Jazz Festival listening to a jam session that included Byard and Roland Kirk. Jaki finished a virtuosic piano solo, then jumped to his feet, grabbed an alto saxophone and played with an intensity to match Kirk’s wildness. Desmond said, “I wish he’d mind his own business.”
Memory 3
Later that week, among the guests on a television program I hosted were Byard, Desmond, Al Belletto and Danny Barker, who I have always considered the world’s second greatest rhythm guitarst after Freddie Green. In a discussion of Kansas City style, I asked Byard and Barker to demonstrate. They had never played together. Jaki demurred. He said that he couldn’t do justice to what Count Basie had perfected. I coaxed. Finally, he moved to the piano, Barker unsheathed his guitar and two great musicians of widespread generations worked their way into into a blues that captured the essence of Basie and Green. How I wish that I had a recording of that encounter.
Memory 4
The house band at the ’69 New Orleans JazzFest was Byard, trumpeter Clark Terry, tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims and bassist Milt Hinton, with Dawson on drums. Among their appearances were an evening on a Mississippi riverboat and support for assorted soloists at main festival events. This CD captures their concert with Sarah Vaughan, one of her most inspired and most likely the only recording she made between 1967 and 1971. On this CD the house band backs trumpeters Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Buck Clayton, with Terry and Bobby Hackett making a guest appearance on Eldridge’s set. Byard’s kaleidoscopic solo on “Rifftide” with Eldridge was a highlight of the festival.
Jaki has received a good deal of attention lately with the release of a previously unissued 1964 Cornell University concert by the Charles Mingus Sextet–covered in this Rifftides review–and a Jazz Icons DVD of several of the Mingus group’s European concerts the same year. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the musicianship and excitement he contributed to that remarkable band and, indeed, to music in the last half of the twentieth century. The mystery of his 1999 death at seventy-six by gunshot in his home remains unsolved.
For a substantial profile of Jaki Byard, including audio clips of him and musicians who admired him, go to this NPR profile.

New Year’s Day – Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.–Mark Twain
The only way to spend New Year’s Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.–W.H. Auden
Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.–Brooks Atkinson
May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions.–Joey Adams
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
–Alfred, Lord Tennyson
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.–T.S. Eliot

Hugh Massingberd, the longtime obituaries editor of The Telegraph of London, died on Christmas day at the age of sixty. From 1986 to 1994, Massingberd converted the dullest page in the paper into one so entertaining that his obits were collected in six anthologies. In her obituary of Massingberd in today’s New York Times, Margalit Fox wrote that he spoke “frankly, wittily and often gleefully ill of the dead.” She provided translations of some of his terms.

To dispatch his subjects, Mr. Massingberd used the thinnest of rapiers, but also the sharpest. Cataclysmic understatement and carefully coded euphemism were the stylistic hallmarks of his page. Here, for the benefit of American readers, is an abridged Massingberd-English dictionary:

“Convivial”: Habitually drunk.

“Did not suffer fools gladly”: Monstrously foul-tempered.

“Gave colorful accounts of his exploits”: A liar.

“A man of simple tastes”: A complete vulgarian.

“A powerful negotiator”: A bully.

“Relished the cadences of the English language”: An incorrigible windbag.

“Relished physical contact”: A sadist.

“An uncompromisingly direct ladies’ man”: A flasher.

To read all of the Massingberd obituary, go here.