Archives for August 2008

It is now called the JVC Jazz Festival, but it still takes place in Newport, Rhode Island. If the festival no longer has the jazz purity of its beginnings in the 1950s, at least it has survived. It continues to include major jazz artists among the tangential pop figures who attract the big crowds that pay the bills. In today’s Boston Globe, Steve Greenlee summarizes the two days of Newport and evaluates the highlights as if he were scoring Olympic events.

Gold medal: Sonny Rollins. The titan of the tenor sax hadn’t played Newport in more than 40 years, but last night he owned it, with a hard-blowing set that closed the festival. He improvised endlessly on the repeating two-bar figure that serves as the framework of “Sonny Please.” He played ahead of time and against time, punctuating phrases with quick jabs, shrieks, and honks. Be it burner or ballad, he blew and blew, and he never ran out of ideas.

Greenlee even awards gold, silver and bronze medals to elements of the audience.To read his entire report, click here.

In an interview a few days before the Newport performance, Rollins told Rick Massimo of the Providence Journal why he has kept bassist Bob Cranshaw in his band for more than four decades…

…because he maintained the fixed portion of it, and that would allow me to extemporize freely and the song would still be maintained. It was a contrast; if he had the fixed part, then I could go into all of my wild dreams.

…and why he rarely works with pianists.

At the risk of alienating my piano-playing friends — and I’ve played with some great piano
players — the piano is a very dominating instrument. I guess this goes back to when I was 7 years old and I was able to play and get into myself without any other instrument. The jazz bands in New Orleans — you see these guys marching down the street, there’s no piano…

The kind of music without a piano is more gritty, more real, hard jazz. It allows me to feel more free in my improvisations. The piano is very leading. You can lead a band here, you can lead to this chord, this mood. Everything is fed by a piano. I find that very restricting.

For more of the Massimo interview, go here.

For classic examples of Rollins not being led or fed by a piano, listen to A Night At The Village Vanguard and Way Out West, both from 1957 and as fresh as this morning.

The Frishberg, Sullivan, Wellstood item in the next exhibit brought quick responses from two men who knew Wellstood well. The first was Ted O’Reilly, the Toronto broadcaster who produced a few Wellstood recordings.

Wellstood was one of the brightest men I ever met, never mind how great a pianist he was. And great he was, and not afraid to play the way he did: as a stride/swing player in the bop era, and do it so well! (I’ve thought of him as the Ruby Braff of the piano…) I think I made more records with Wellstood at the piano than anyone else — two with reedman Jim Galloway, two solo releases, and Stridemonster, piano duets with Dick Hyman. I’m glad I knew him, and wish he were still around.

Dave Frishberg wrote:

Did you know Wellstood? I did, although our paths crossed only infrequently. In the early ’60s, my wife Stella (whom you met in New Orleans) and I stayed with Kenny Davern for a couple of days in Brielle NJ, where he and Wellstood played on a boat. One morning, Dick and Kenny and I played with gloves, bat and ball on a big athletic field. All three of us threw our arm(s) out. That was the day I got to know Wellstood, watched him play the piano at his cottage.

Wellstood was always one of my idols, although I never tried to play like him. He was a schooled pianist who could play Chopin, Bach, etc. One night I took Ben Webster (who was a piano freak) to hear Wellstood play solo at a jazz club around the corner from the Metropole. Ben was knocked out, gave Wellstood an enthusiastic hug and many shouts of approval. Also in the audience was Louis Armstrong (!) and party, and I was introduced to him twice at his table by both Wellstood and Webster. A memorable evening for me. I think the club was in the 40s between Fifth and Seventh Aves, a jazz club that popped up and soon disappeared.

Dick was a brilliant guy, brilliant like Dick Sudhalter, and undoubtedly among the best writers of all jazz musicians, a humorist on a very high level. You must have that Jazzology 2CD set of The Classic Jazz Quartet, and you probably remember the liner notes that each of those guys wrote: Joe Muranyi, Marty Grosz, Sudhalter, and Wellstood — they all write beautifully. Wellstood’s writing reminds me of Woody Allen and SJ Perelman. By the way, that’s a recording I go back to listen to pretty often. There’s another CD on Arbors of Dick playing solo in Dublin that I think is Wellstood at the top of his game.

Now that Dave asks, yes, I knew Wellstood. We became acquainted through the mail. In the 1960s, he sent me an indignant and very funny post card about my review of one of his records, quoting the offending line. By return mail, I pointed out that he had misread and misquoted the line. He then sent a letter of apology, also funny.

We got together occasionally during my New York years in the first half of the seventies. After the late newscast, I frequently went to Hanratty’s on Second Avenue to hear him. Once, I took Paul Desmond. Desmond was delighted by his playing. Wellstood was surprised and flattered that Desmond came to hear him. Dick came to our table during his breaks. I anticipated scintillating exchanges between two world-class wits, but they just sat there complimenting one another.

During a listening session one afternoon, I played Gerry Mulligan the Wellstood album called Alone. Mulligan was impressed by Dick’s composition “Dollar Dance” and his playing on it. I suggested that the two of them should record it together. Mulligan liked the idea. So did Dick, and for a while it seemed that they were going solve contract issues and find a way to make a duo album. That was my one venture into musical match-making. The date never happened. I can still hear in my mind how the two of them would have hit if off.

As Frishberg indicated, Wellstood was a gifted pianist who could handle the classics, and jazz up to, through and beyond bebop. He could play anything. He preferred traditional styles.  He was the first stride pianist, maybe the only one, to take on John Coltrane’s modern harmonic obstacle course “Giant Steps.” He recorded it in 1975, when it was still mystifying much of the jazz world. He tore it up. It’s on his CD This Is The One…Dig! 

I’m with Ted O’Reilly. I wish Wellstood were still around.

Dick Wellstood has been on my mind. Maybe it’s because I heard Dave Frishberg play the piano the other night at The Seasons. Frishberg was in concert singing his inimitable songs and accompanying himself, but he opened up plenty of space for piano solos. Before he became famous for performing his songs, Frishberg worked with Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Ben Webster, Jack Sheldon and Carmen McRae, among other demanding leaders. He was, and is, a versatile and idiosyncratic pianist who wraps several jazz eras into a style of his own. A couple of times on Saturday night, he pulled off stride passages that Wellstood would have appreciated.

In the mid-1940s when Wellstood was a young man working toward a career as a pianist, he was under the spell of Joe Sullivan (pictured). Sullivan (1906-1971) came from Chicago and
began recording in 1927. By 1933, he was Bing Crosby’s accompanist and established as one of the brightest of the young pianists influenced by Earl Hines, James P. Johnson and Fats Waller. He in turn influenced Wellstood, who had cards printed that read, “Perhaps you can help me to meet Joe Sullivan. My name is Dick Wellstood.” He distributed the cards in musicians’ hangouts. Finally, the cornetist Muggsy Spanier told Wellstood where Sullivan lived. According to clarinetist Kenny Davern’s account of the meeting, quoted in Edward N. Meyer’s Giant Strides: The Legacy of Dick Wellstood, the pianist knocked on Sullivan’s apartment door well after midnight.

Soon this disheveled figure in slippers and a bathrobe comes shuffling through. Joe opens the door and says, “Yeah?” Dick says, “Hi, my name is Dick Wellstood and Muggsy Spanier said to say hello.” And Joe Sullivan said, “Tell Muggsy Spanier to go f___ himself,” and slammed the door right in Dick’s face.

Nonetheless, Wellstood remained a steadfast admirer of Sullivan. Here is one reason, Sullivan’s 1933 recording of “Gin Mill Blues.”

There is little video of Wellstood performing, but this clip from a concert in Germany in 1982, five years before he died, catches him in full stride, concentration and swing.

New: Torben Waldorff, Afterburn (ArtistShare). The Danish guitarist accomodates his early rock leanings to absorption with expansive jazz of the kind that thrives in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn and is spreading around the world. Waldorff, tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin and pianist-organist Sam Yahel are leaders among the articulate standard bearers of the movement. They play off one another with fiery inventiveness and with grace that allows the music to breathe. Bassist Matt Clohesy and drummer Jon Wikan are fully immersed in the new sensibility. All of the compositions but one are by Waldorff. The one is Maria Schneider’s “Choro Dancado,” first recorded on her Concert in the Garden CD. The curve of its Brazilian melodic shape and the elegance of its harmonies inspire a superb performance. Waldorff’s chromaticized “Skyliner” (unrelated to the old Charlie Barnet piece) is another high point.

Old: Art Farmer, Modern Art, UA/Blue Note. This 1958 session paired the trumpeter with
tenor saxophonist Benny Golson in what amounted to a preview of their cooperative band The Jazztet. The pianist was Bill Evans in a brilliant sideman appearance before he left Miles Davis and formed his own trio. Art’s twin brother Addison was the bassist, Dave Bailey the drummer. Farmer and Golson had a nearly symbiotic relationship, but it was Evans who inspired Farmer to some of his best playing on record. The pianist’s own solos on “The Touch of Your Lips” and “Like Someone in Love” are masterpieces. The young, developing, McCoy Tyner was the pianist when Golson and Farmer launched The Jazztet in 1959. This CD tantalizes the listener with intimations of the glories that might have flowered in that group if Evans had been aboard. It is one of the most satisfying recordings of the l950s.

In his JazzWax, Marc Myers has a fascinating four-part interview with Bill Holman. I’m no enthusiast of transcribed verbatim interviews, but Myers’s introductions, questions and production values make the format work, and in the great arranger he has a subject whose articulateness and wit carry the reader along. Two excerpts:

I used to think that writing a jazz arrangement was like stream of consciousness, the same as a jazz solo. You just started playing and built on what you just played. Then you go on to the next thing and never repeat yourself. After a few years it finally dawned on me that the ear wants to hear something it recognizes, so I started concentrating on the shape of an entire piece, the form, and how it builds to a climax. As a writer, you also want to avoid getting to the climax too soon. If you do, you’ll kill yourself trying to top it in the arrangement. And the result is monotony.

Writing music and arranging never gets easy. I’ve had students ask me, “How long does it take before it gets easy?” I tell them, “Never.” As soon as you get to one point in your development, you’re looking at the next level.

To read the four parts in order, go to JazzWax and scroll down to July 29. Start with part 1 and scroll back up through parts 2, 3, 4 and an addendum.

Long before he won the Thelonious Monk Institute Composers Competition in 2000, Michael Weiss established himself as a pianist. Fresh out of Dallas in his early twenties, he was soon working with Jon Hendricks, Junior Cook, Charles McPherson and Lou Donaldson, among others. He went on to play with Art Farmer, George Coleman, Frank Wess, Slide Hampton, and the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra. Following his Village Vanguard debut as a leader in 2006, The New York Times noted that Weiss was “a confident and sparkling presence on piano,” exhibiting “sensitivity and logic, along with crisp control.” 

In The Chicago Tribune, Howard Reich wrote of Weiss, “Even at full tilt, his sound is sleek, his lines lucid, his textures virtually transparent.” The New Yorker reported that his “shrewd writing and arranging skills [are] as clearly in view as his sleek piano work.” Weiss’s longest association was with Johnny Griffin. He played with the tenor saxophonist from 1987 until Griffin’s death last month at the age of eighty. Shortly after Griffin died, Weiss wrote an appreciation and offered it to Rifftides. We are pleased to have it.

 Reminiscing About Johnny Griffin

by Michael Weiss

Johnny Griffin was one of the great personalities and individuals of jazz, and if jazz is supposed to embody anything, it is individuality, together with improvisation and collaboration.  Griffin was one of the very best soloists who could fully express their personality through their instrument. You hear one note and you know that it’s Johnny. Everything that came out of his horn was a magnification of who he is. You don’t even notice his influences anymore. He really played like nobody else.  His phrases were so unpredictable.  He had this way of abruptly lunging at things at any moment, but could also finish the same line with a sweet lyrical melody. Griffin should be remembered not only for his technical virtuosity but for how he used that technique in his overall expression, woven into the fabric of his style.

Long before I played with Johnny I knew all his records with Monk and Jaws very well and had even transcribed a few of his solos. In 1985 I had been working with his drummer Kenny Washington so when Griff’s regular pianist was unable to make a gig, Kenny recommended me and I joined the band shortly after that. We toured every year up to 2001.

Working with Griffin was among the most – if not the most – exhilarating and electrifying experiences I’ve had on the bandstand with any leader. And not just because Johnny liked to play fast tempos. At any tempo there was a level of energy and excitement on the stage that never felt commonplace. Even after I worked hundreds of gigs with Johnny over several years, there was an intensity, focus and energy with each set that was unlike any other group I’ve played with. It was like mental weightlifting. Griffin, a real extrovert, had a lot to express through his horn and was such a commanding presence that he drew the same thing out of you. Having to solo after him night after night I was compelled to make sure my musical statement was meaningful and worthwhile. Accompanying him was also no easy task, but it didn’t take long to realize the best modus operandi was to just stay out of his way. Overall, it was a great training ground to experience that level of seriousness of purpose and integrity on the bandstand.

Griff was fun to be around. He knew how to enjoy life and seemed very comfortable in his own skin. This generally happy demeanor was quite contagious. On the gig, he listened closely to the rhythm section as we worked our stuff out in our solos. He especially delighted in listening to us wrestle through a particular musical idea. During such occasions, I might look up and see Johnny with his eyes aglow and a big smile. He enjoyed the creative struggle and he was along with you for the ride. Playing jazz for him was a positive, joyous experience and he spread that feeling to everyone in the audience. He had the people in the palm of his hand all the time. He was very comfortable on the mic and frequently said some very funny things. But he was deadly serious about musicmaking – on the bandstand there was no nonsense, no messing around.

The Johnny Griffin Quartet was one of the few working bands in jazz that was still touring regularly throughout the 1990s. As performing night after night is the only way a musician can really develop and improve on his craft, I’m grateful to have been able to do exactly that with Johnny Griffin.

To hear Michael Weiss in two of his many collaborations with Griffin, listen to the 1990 CD The Cat and to Griffin’s 2000 quintet album with Steve Grossman. Grossman, also an expatriate American tenor player in France, is an improviser whose zeal and vigor nearly match Griffin’s.