Archives for March 2008

From the second section of Strunk and White’s English usage bible The Elements Of Style:

 

Omit needless words.

Harold Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker, wrote in a memo to his staff, “The next writer around here who uses ‘upcoming’ will be outgoing.”

That’s a good word to put at the top of a list of needless, overused and annoying words and phrases. Here is the first dozen.

upcoming

 

absent  (as a preposition)

 

area (as an adjective)

 

as it were

 

at this point in time

 

case in point

 

if you will

 

like (as an interjection)

 

ongoing

 

the likes of

 

that said

 

y’know

 

Edwin Newman of NBC News recalled the time a man he was interviewing told him, “Well, y’know, y’never know, y’know.”

 

The Rifftides staff solicits your suggestions for additions to the list.

And then when I went to Chicago, that’s when I had these outer space experiences and went to the other planets. — Sonny Blount (Sun Ra)

…even if this story is revisionist autobiography … Sonny was pulling together several strains of his life. He was both prophesying his future and explaining his past with a single act of personal mythology.– John F. Szwed, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (Pantheon, 1997)

Sun Ra: Space Is The Place (1974)

Sun Ra Arkestra: Face The Music (1990)

Here’s a calendar item for those in, or planning to be in Boston on April 1.
Joe Lovano (pictured), Hal Galper and Jack Walrath will headline a concert at the Berklee College of Music. Proceeds will benefit the Herb Pomeroy Scholarship Fund. Pomeroy, trumpeter, arranger, and Berklee teacher for four decades, died last August. Among the school’s alumni whose compositions and arrangements will be played by the Berklee Concert Jazz Orchestra are Alan Broadbent, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Michael Gibbs and the longtime Berklee teacher John LaPorta. For more information, go here and scroll down.

Following Teo Macero’s death on February 19, most news stories and obituaries concentrated on his role as the producer of Miles Davis’s Columbia recordings. Beginning in 1959 with Kind of Blue,  Macero edited or oversaw Davis’s sessions, which included those for Sketches Of Spain, In A Silent Way, and Bitches Brew, some of the most influential albums of the past fifty years. With exceptions, notably in the editing of In A Silent Way, Macero got along well with Davis. “We had our battles,” Macero said after Davis’s death in 1991:

There were times when he wouldn’t speak to me and I wouldn’t speak to him. It’s like a husband and wife. There are times when you just like to be left alone.

Kind Of Blue and Sketches Of Spain became two of the best-selling jazz albums in history.
It was barely noted in most of the articles, and not at all in some, that Macero was himself a gifted musician who won a scholarship to the Juilliard School and emerged as a daring composer of atonal acoustic and electronic music. He was also a talented and highly individual tenor saxophonist prized by Charles Mingus, among other important jazz artists of the 1950s. After he joined Columbia as an editor then moved up to producer, his playing took a back seat and he became one of the label’s busiest recording executives. Nonetheless, Macero did not give up his saxophone. The drummer Kenny Harris, who moved from England to New York then settled in Bermuda, had a playing encounter with Macero. He writes Rifftides from Hamilton, Bermuda.

When I was playing at Elbow Beach in the 60’s I also had a jazz show on ZBM radio on Saturday afternoons. Teo was vacationing here and had read in the newspaper that Jim Hall was to be a guest on my show. He called me as he wanted to speak to Jim – Jim was not in the studio as the interview had been recorded earlier in the week and he had gone back to New York. Teo came into Elbow Beach one evening and asked if he could sit in with the band. He borrowed a tenor saxophone and played in his usual style. Everyone in the nightclub left. Everytime I saw him in New York after that he would always say to me “If you want to clear a nightclub, give me a call.”

It’s an amusing story, but if Macero was playing “in his usual style,” the Elbow Beach patrons walked out on some fine music. He is prominent on Jazzical Moods, a 1954 album co-led by bassist Mingus and alto saxophonist John LaPorta, and also featuring the young trumpeter Thad Jones. It was a remarkable gathering of far-sighted adventurers whose music foreshadowed jazz departures made later in the decade.

Teo Macero, 1925-2008.

Someone known to me only by the e-mail handle “Bloorondo” pointed out links to a pair of Dave Brubeck video performances new to me and, perhaps, to you. The first, “All The Things You Are,” was at a concert in Berlin in 1972 when Gerry Mulligan was the saxophonist in the Brubeck Quartet and Paul Desmond joined them on tour. Jack Six was the bassist, Alan Dawson the drummer. Brubeck, Mulligan and Six are turned out in seventies fashions, including lots of hair. Be sure to notice Brubeck’s trousers; not that you could help it. Dawson’s and Desmond’s wardrobes and hairdos are, as usual, restrained. Desmond is wearing his frequent attire of later years, The Suit (see Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, page 257). The playing by all hands is at a high level, with interesting Desmond/Mulligan counterpoint at the end. Camera work, direction and audio quality are good. To watch it, click here.

“In Your Own Sweet Way” is by the classic Brubeck Quartet with Desmond, Eugene Wright and Joe Morello. My guess is 1964, but it could be a year or two either way. This is a notably lyrical performance by Desmond, with the kind of assistance from Brubeck that led Desmond to frequently praise him as an ideal accompanist. The Wright-Morello mutual admiration society is in session. Click here.

Welcome to the new, improved, more functional Rifftides. Artsjournal.com commander-in-chief Doug McLennan and his team spiffed us up as the pioneer site (aka guinea pig) in reformatting all of the artsjournal.com blogs. The Rifftides staff thanks them for a dazzling makeover.

There is a change in the comments procedure. You will still click on the “Comments” link below each item. That takes you to a simple form. After you have filled in the form, you will be asked to enter a couple of words in a box before you submit the comment. If all works as planned, that will end the tsunami of spam that has plagued us for months. The Rifftides staff encourages you to try it out.

You may also correspond using the “Contact me” link in the first of the two right-hand columns. Either way, please let us know how you like the new Rifftides. For your celebratory opening-day bonus, click on this link for video of a Thelonious Monk piece by pianist Jessica Williams.

Rifftides reader George Finch sent this message in reaction to a ten-year-old article in The
Atlantic. There has been so little essential change in jazz since 1997 that The Atlantic piece might have been written last week. It consists mainly of a conversation among authors Tom Piazza, the late Eric Nissensen and the magazine’s Ryan Nally. To read the article, go here.

 Just read Eric Nissensen’s book while I was in Boston, and happened to come across this article. Haven’t read Tom Piazza’s book, but Nissensen makes a lot of good points, although he goes overboard on Wynton and his “neo-conservatism”. I didn’t know that Marsalis was powerful enough to shape jazz. Also, Nissensen’s existentialist definition of jazz as almost pure process is a tad extreme, although a good searchlight. It is a creative process that defines itself as people create the music, but the process does not take place in a void. There seems to be a tradition that they work with, and the good ones will not be content just rehashing it. There will always be ” there must be something else”.

Well, enough. I am not a musician, just trying to learn and think things out. Where do you stand visa vis their chit chat, and who are some of the musicians forging new directions in jazz?

Marsalis did not shape jazz. He shaped himself, shaped Jazz At Lincoln Center and served as a role model to young musicians. Nissensen confused that with shaping jazz. I am not aware of musicians who are forging new directions in jazz, despite blather and ceaseless promotional claims, more of them from managers, agents, publicists and record companies than from musicians.

Unless I’ve missed something (always a possibility), the last time new directions were forged was the late fifties, early sixties – Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Miles Davis. Every “departure” since then has been imitation or elaboration. Fusing jazz and Latin, jazz and klezmer, jazz and blue grass, hip-hop, classical, folk, ragas, gamelan, etc., etc., etc., does not consitute newness. It constitutes fusion. Some of it is wonderful, but none of it amounts to innovations like those of Armstrong, Young, Parker, Gillespie, Evans, Coltrane, even Coleman. Playing without guidelines, which in the final analysis is impossible and which Ornette neither did nor claimed to do, is not a new direction.

There is a powerful and apparently unquenchable notion that to be worthwhile, music must break new ground. It is difficult enough, and should be satisfying enough, to play and write music well. To say that, is not to downgrade or discourage searching and experimentation. Even searches that lead nowhere and experiments that fail can be valuable and interesting. If a new direction is being forged, we will recognize it when the forging produces something so artistically powerful that it doesn’t need public relations to announce it or critics to analyze it.

For weeks, the CD reissue of Phineas Newborn, Jr.’s 1961 album A World of Piano! has been propped up near my computer as a reminder to post something about him. It is neither his birthday (December 14, 1931) nor the anniversary of his death (May 26, 1989), and no recently discovered Newborn recording has been released, but we need no special occasion to remember his astonishing talent.

Because he was sporadically troubled by emotional instability, Newborn’s career was spotty. He never got the recognition his virtuosity might have brought him if his health had been on an even keel. Still, from the time the young man from Memphis debuted with Lionel Hampton in 1950, musicians and informed listeners were aware that he was a phenomenon. He made a splash in New York in the mid-fifties when Count Basie and the producer-promoter John Hammond gave him a boost. He worked in a duo with Charles Mingus and played with the bassist on the soundtrack of John Cassevetes’ celebrated art film Shadows. His recordings on RCA, Atlantic, Roulette, Steeplechase, Pablo and a smattering of other labels remain available and sell steadily if modestly. Few serious jazz pianists are without Newborn shelves in their collections.

Through the ’60s and ’70s he recorded a series of albums for Contemporary, at first as a sideman with Howard McGhee and Teddy Edwards, then four under his own name. Concord Records, the custodian of the Newborn Contemporary CDs, has allowed several of them to drop out of the Original Jazz Classics catalogue. Some of them have resurfaced as imports and may be found, along with other Newborns, at this web site. It would be difficult to go wrong with any of them. There are, as far as I can determine, no Phineas Newborn albums worthy of fewer than four-and-a-half stars out of five. You will find his complete discography here.

A few clips of Newborn playing with the monumental bassist Al McKibbon and drummer Kenny Dennis have shown up on You Tube. They all seem to come from the Jazz Scene USA televison program hosted by Oscar Brown, Jr., in the early 1960s. If you’re unfamiliar with Newborn, try “Oleo” for an introduction to the piston-perfect technique of his fast playing and “Lush Life” for proof that his harshest critics were wrong when they accused him of being without feeling.

As for the pronunciation of Newborn’s first name, it has been solidly established by family and close friends that he preferred “Fín-uhs” (as in “finest”).

A frisky spirit makes my trombone sing.–Chris Barber

 Never look at the trombones. You’ll only encourage them.–Richard Strauss

 

Julian Priester is a musician of uncommon breadth as a composer, leader
teacher and–most notably–a highly individual and subtle trombone soloist . Priester is quiet and self-effacing, but he could justifiably boast about having satisfied such contrasting leaders as Duke Ellington and Sun Ra, Cal Tjader and John Coltrane, Lionel Hampton and Dave Holland, Bo Diddley and Max Roach, among others. Since he immersed himself in academia thirty years ago, opportunities to hear Priester live have been rarer than when he was in the thick of the New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco jazz scenes.

 

Last night, I had had one of those rare opportunities. Priester and pianist Dawn
Clement, his teaching colleague and former student at Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts, brought their quartet to The Seasons. The concert was superb throughout, but in three extended pieces following the intermission, it went beyond that. Five years ago Priester’s CD In Deep End Dance, was striking for the rapport between the sixty-seven-year-old trombonist and the pianist then in her early twenties. Their empathy has deepened. Last night with the collaboration of bassist Geoff Harper and drummer Jose Martinez, the power of their performance built through the evening until, on the final number, the swing feeling reached a happy intensity that raised it above the “having a good night” category. The piece was Priester’s “First Nature.” For the musicians and the audience, it became a memorable experience in ¾ time, one nobody in the room is likely to forget.  

 

Last year, Priester, Clement, Harper and Martinez recorded much of the music they played last night. Harper told me that “First Nature” reached the same height at the record session in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio as it did at The Seasons. That CD will be out later this year. I look forward to it.

 

Coincidentally, two new CDs involving Clement arrived a few hours before last night’s concert. One is her own album, Break, with drummer Matt Wilson and bassist Dean Johnson. The other is soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom’s Mental Weather, also with Wilson, and bassist Mark Helias. I’ll be listening further to both, but a couple of hearings of each persuade me further that Dawn Clement is one of the most interesting pianists to emerge in years. In the precision and interaction of her work with Bloom, she fully employs both her classical technique and her jazz soul. It seems to me that in Bloom’s extensive discography, Mental Weather is one of the finest things she has done.