Archives for December 2009

On the Jazzhouse web site, W. Royal Stokes posts a valuable column recommending recent jazz, blues and pop photography and art books. It is an extensive list, just in time for Christmas. Stokes gives each book a thorough paragraph of review and a link to an online source for purchase. Here is some of what he writes about Hank O’Neal’s Ghosts of Harlem, a recent Doug’s Pick:

That he shot them with an ancient wooden view camera, setting up lights, inserting a plate, and throwing a cloth over his head and the instrument (shades of Matthew Brady!) says much about his determination to capture that “moment of truth” in the best possible light. Which he did in image after image.

I was surprised and pleased to find that Mr. Stokes included Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond despite its being a biography, not a picture book. Now I am even happier that the publisher insisted on lots of photographs.

Thanks to Bill Royston for calling our attention to a strange turn of events at a jazz festival in Spain. Here is beginning of The Guardian‘s story about the incident:

Jazzman Larry Ochs has seen many things during 40 years playing his saxophone around the world but, until this week, nobody had ever called the police on him.
That changed on Monday night however, when’s Spain’s pistol-carrying Civil Guard police force descended on the Sigüenza Jazz festival to investigate allegations that Ochs’s music was not, well, jazz.
Police decided to investigate after an angry jazz buff complained that the Larry Ochs Sax and Drumming Core group was on the wrong side of a line dividing jazz from contemporary music.
The jazz purist claimed his doctor had warned it was “psychologically inadvisable” for him to listen to anything that could be mistaken for mere contemporary music.

To read the whole thing, go here.
This raises the perpetual question, “What is jazz?” and gives a perfect excuse to once again provide Sid Caesar’s attempt to answer it.

That nearly subliminal face at the end was Carl Reiner’s. He doesn’t know, either.

The Kennedy Center Honors ceremony held last Sunday will be televised on CBS December 29. In the meantime, the White House has released a clip of President Obama’s informal talk at the reception before the event. It runs about 18 minutes, with the camera on the President the whole time. The following video, nicely edited and produced, incorporates a shortened version of his remarks and interaction with the honorees, Dave Brubeck, Mel Brooks, Grace Bumbry, Robert De Niro and Bruce Springsteen. I thought you would find it interesting.

(When the video ends, it goes to black and hangs there, evidently forever. That’s how the White House provided it. If you click on your “reload” symbol in the address bar at the top of your screen, it goes back to normal.)

It was six degrees above zero here last night, but the calendar says we have eleven more days until winter. Before autumn leaves, let’s enjoy Bill Evans playing his signature arrangement of one of his favorite pieces. This was Copenhagen in 1965, with Eddie Gomez on bass and Alex Riel playing drums. There are several videos of Evans playing the song, but this one comes closest to the spirit of the version he first recorded in Portrait In Jazz, the 1959 album that brought him to wider attention and critical acclaim.

Indiana Public Media’s Night Lights has posted on the internet a one-hour program about Vince Guaraldi. The host, David Brent Johnson, traces the pianist’s career, plays a broad selection of his recordings and talks with guitarist Eddie Duran, Charlie Brown specials producer Lee Mendelson, Guaraldi’s son David, pianist Luke Gillespie providing analysis, and others who were close to Guaraldi. I am pleased to be included in the broadcast. To hear It’s Jazz, Charlie Brown: The Vince Guaraldi Story, click here.
Want even more about Vince? My Guaraldi spot with Scott Simon is still up on the NPR web site.
ABC-TV will air its traditional rerun of A Charlie Brown Christmas with Guaraldi’s music tomorrow, December 8, at 8 pm EST.

The Kennedy Center Honors for 2009 went last night to Dave Brubeck on his 89th birthday, and to Mel Brooks, Grace Bumbry, Robert De Niro and Bruce Springsteen. CBS-TV will broadcast two hours of highlights from the ceremony at 9 pm EST on December 29. This morning’s papers and tonight’s newscasts will be full of the story. Googling the name of the event will turn up dozens of items on the web.

For the jazz community, of course, the big news is the inclusion of Brubeck. By dint of talent, conviction and fortitude he has persevered through a 63-year career of struggle, fame, misfortune, rewards, unjustified calumny and ultimate acceptance by nearly everyone, including many who once found it convenient to use him as a symbol of whatever they found unworthy, inartistic or unfair in the jazz business. When he had survived a long time, they started listening.
Nothing I have read in the past few days has seemed to capture Brubeck more accurately or movingly than Ann Gerhart’s feature piece in yesterday’s Washington Post. Here is a bit of her article about an interview with Brubeck and his wife Iola.

They are in a hotel suite in Minneapolis, he in stocking feet, white shirt, khaki dress pants and suspenders, doing this interview, she in black sweater and slacks, silk scarf about her neck, peering at a laptop at their autobiography, now in progress for at least a decade. An easy, slow afternoon late in the autumn of a remarkable life and partnership. If you were scoring at home, perhaps you’d open with a reverie in waltz time, each note a lingering, almost melancholy kiss.
Brubeck would be good with your intro for maybe 16 bars.
Then he and his sidemen would crack that ballad wide open in a hard-charging, swinging version in a time signature you couldn’t hope to count out, you’d just have to close your eyes and hold on. That is how Brubeck is. That is how he plays. That is how he lives, in stubborn and sunny defiance of all conventional rhythms of jazz and age itself.

To read all of Ms. Gerhart’s story, go here.
Congratulations to Dave and Iola Brubeck.

It has been a long while since the Rifftides staff acknowledged the extent of our readership. These are just a few of the places where you have recently allowed us into your computers.
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The Rifftides staff thought you would be interested in this announcement from Jim Wilke of an imminent broadcast pairing. Besides, the photographs by Jim Levitt are too good not to use.

Tenor saxophonists Hadley Caliman and Pete Christlieb first played together in LA in the 60s and have remained friends ever since. They reunited in Seattle last month to record a CD together for Origin Records and to play at The Ballard Jazz Walk. Highlights from their reunion (with Bill Anschell, Chuck Deardorf and John Bishop) will air Sunday, December 6 at 1 PM Pacific Standard Time on Jazz Northwest from 88-5, KPLU. The program will also stream live to the internet at kplu.org.

Jazz Northwest is recorded and produced by Jim Wilke exclusively for KPLU and kplu.org. A podcast will be available at kplu.org after the airdate.

Here are video snapshots of both saxophonists from their slightly younger days. First, Caliman with Freddie Hubbard at the Jazz Jamboree in Warsaw in 1979. The vocalist is Leon Thomas, with Billy Childs on piano, Larry Klein on bass and drummer Carl Burnett. The song is Coltrane’s “Cousin Mary.”

Christlieb was a mainstay of the Tonight Show band for years. Here, we see and hear him on the Arsenio Hall Show after the band, its leader Doc Severinsen and host Johnny Carson left the Tonight Show. Severinsen also solos. Never underrate Severinsen.

Things change. The bass player for instance; John Leitham is now Jennifer, and still swinging. I don’t want to think about how many of those guys are dead. Christlieb is decidedly not.

Art Blakey, Live in ’65 (Jazz Icons). The Blakey entry in the new Jazz Icons DVD release will come as a surprise even to many of the drummer’s most persistent fans. The band it presents in France was not an edition of Blakey’s celebrated Jazz Messengers, but a short-lived quintet billed in the opening credits as “Les Art Blakey’s New Jazzmen.” Assembled for a European tour, it had played a few concerts by the time it appeared at the Palais de la Mutualite as part of the Paris Jazz Festival. The band was primed, collectively and individually.
Rather than a pianist he could count on to operate within his defined rhythmic guidelines, Blakey hired Jaki Byard. As Michael Cuscuna emphasizes in his comprehensive essay, Byard thrived on fluidity of time, a concept that would seem at odds with Blakey’s more regimented approach. The bassist is Reginald Workman who could operate with equal effectiveness in Blakey’s strict temporal realm and Byard’s free one, and it may have been Workman who provided the commonality that made this rhythm section function so well together. The film shows Blakey directing frequent glances and grins of approval at Byard and Workman.
The tenor saxophonist is Nathan Davis, who was living in France at the time and pleased Blakey so well on the tour that the drummer offered him a job when he reformed the Messengers. Davis opted to stay in Paris because of family obligations or he might have become as famous as a number of other Blakey sidemen. Freddie Hubbard came to prominence with Blakey in the early sixties and by 1965 was acknowledged as the hottest young trumpet player in jazz. Each of the band’s musicians is impressive, but Hubbard owns this concert. He was at the peak of his form in conception, execution and taste. He maintains a stunning level of excellence through each long solo on extended treatments of his compositions “The Hub” and “Crisis” and a brilliant version of “Blue Moon,” a signature ballad feature for him during this era. Midway through his virtuoso “Crisis” solo there is a moment emblematic of Hubbard’s energy and enthusiasm when he pauses for a breath, executes a deft dance move and, perfectly synchronized, between a grunt and a groan exclaims “Woo, ooh, ooh.” Throughout, this was Freddie Hubbard’s night.
Davis had a few worthy albums as a leader and a sideman, but relatively little exposure during his most active playing days. When he returned to the States he concentrated on music education. Since 1969, he has been director of jazz studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He had a generous tone and a fine sense of line in construction of his solos. His work here demonstrates that he was in a class with several tenor players who worked with Blakey over the years. Byard’s accompaniments are inspirational to the horn players. His solos are a bit more restrained than they might have been in company with Tony Williams, Alan Dawson or other drummers more inclined to go with his flow. Nonetheless, his mastery of the range of jazz piano styles and his irrepressible cheer and whimsy are in full operation. As for Blakey, he is sui generis, a force of nature, a marvel of swing, one of the great drummer leaders. To see him beaming through his extended solo on “Crisis” is to see a man immersed in his work and in love with it.
The digital remastering of the slightly grainy black and white source film results in acceptable picture and good audio quality. The fourth batch of Jazz Icons DVDs maintains the high standard set by the first three. The series is a boon to listeners and to the preservation of jazz history. Let us hope that its proprietors continue to mine European film and television for more treasures like this one.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.

Music washes away the dust of every day life.