Archives for 2014

There has been disagreement for more than forty years about whether the saxophonist, composer and sometime pianist Anthony Braxton is a jazz musician. With many others, he long insisted that the music he wrote and played was not jazz, but in 1993 he told author Cole Gagne…

…even though I have been saying I’m not a jazz musician for the last 25 years; in the final analysis, an African-American with a saxophone? Ahh, he’s jazz!

Maybe that concession is part of what led the National Endowment for the Arts to name Braxton one of the four NEA Jazz Masters for 2014. He, pianist Keith Jarrett, bassist Richard Davis and musician-entrepreneur Jamey Aebersold will receive their medals and their $25,000 awards on Monday evening. In a moment, we’ll hear one of Braxton’s controversial early recordings. But it may be helpful to first see and hear him discuss his approach to music.

In 1969, when he was 24, Braxton recorded, on one of his arsenal of saxophones, For Alto, a two-LP album of unaccompanied performances. Braxton dedicated three of the album’s pieces to John Cage, Cecil Taylor and Leroy Jenkins, indications of his leanings away from the mainstream of jazz and toward the unfettered expression musicians were pursuing in the wake of Ornette Coleman’s, and Taylor’s, emergence. Here is “To Pianist Cecil Taylor.” You will see schematic drawings of roughly the kind Braxton has included in most of his album packages through the years. It may take this video a few seconds to come up on your screen.

The NEA Jazz Masters ceremony, attended by the glitterati of the arts world, or at least of New York’s jazz community, will be streamed live from Lincoln Center. It will be on the web at 7:30 p.m. Monday on the arts.gov and Jazz at Lincoln Center websites.

The 20014 NEA Jazz Masters will receive their awards in a ceremony at New York’s Lincoln Center Monday evening, January 13. The four recipients are pianist Keith Jarrett, saxophonist Anthony Braxton, bassist Richard Davis and— in the jazz advocacy category—publisher, recording executive and musician Jamey Aebersold. They will be the 32nd group in the jazz community to be so honored since the National Endowment for the Arts established the recognition program in 1982. The affair will include performances by young musicians cited by the NEA as rising stars, among them vibraharpist Warren Wolf and bassist Yasushi Nakamura, There will be appearances by several former medal winners including Jimmy Heath, David Liebman, Roy Haynes and Annie Ross. The ceremony will be streamed live on the internet at 7:30 p.m. on the arts.gov and Jazz at Lincoln Center websites.

Over the next three days, Rifftides will post sketches about and performances by the new Jazz Masters, beginning with Davis. The bassist was a powerful presence on the New York jazz scene in the 1960s and ‘70s and remained in demand in clubs and studios there even after 1977, when he moved to the Midwest and a professorship at the University of Wisconsin. To give you an idea of the scope of Davis’s abilities, here are two brief segments from my notes for his 1972 album The Philosophy of the Spiritual:

If you were watching a few seasons ago when the National Educational Television network broadcast a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert of Igor Stravinsky conducting some of his works, you saw the maestro emerge from the wings and bow toward a bassist added for the special occasion. At the conclusion of the concert, Stravinsky paused as he left the stage to put his hand on the bassist’s shoulder, a tribute to the slender, elegant black man many musicians consider the world’s greatest bass player. He is Richard Davis.

The following Monday night, Davis was jammed between the saxophone section and a wall of the Village Vanguard, Max Gordon’s funky little wedge-shaped basement in New York. The Vanguard is a far cry from Symphony Hall, but it’s Valhalla to aficionados of the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra…

Davis was the bassist for the Jones-Lewis band from 1966 to 1972, which many musicians, listeners and critics believe to have been the orchestra’s peak years. During that time, as a freelancer he was in constant demand for concerts and recording sessions with artists as varied as Earl Hines, Eric Dolphy, Frank Sinatra and John Lennon. I’ve always been partial to the photograph above of Davis playing his lion-headed bass at the recording session for Phil Woods’ Musique Du Bois (1974). The dream rhythm section was Davis, pianist Jaki Byard and drummer Alan Dawson.

From The Philoslophy of the Spiritual, here he is (left channel) with fellow bassist Bill Lee (right channel), pianist Chick Corea, guitarist Sam Brown, drummer Sonny Brown and Frankie Dunlop adding subtle percussion touches.

Next time, we’ll consider NEA Jazz Master Anthony Braxton.

New York’s Winter Jazzfest opens a five-day run tomorrow, celebrating its tenth year featuring musicians who operate on the leading edge of the music. The atmosphere of adventurism does not necessarily indicate that the artists are all young revolutionaries. Among the dozens of seasoned players appearing in clubs and concert halls throughout Manhattan will be Gary Bartz, Craig Handy, Miguel Zenon Don Byron, Matt Wilson and Jason Moran. For their Wednesday Town Hall concert, Moran and fellow pianist Robert Glasper plan a four-hand tribute to the 75th anniversary of the Blue Note label’s first recording session, which featured Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis.

Relatively new jazz scene arrivals playing the festival include Darcy James Argue’s big band, guitarist Mary Halvorson, singer Gretchen Parlato, saxophonist Sharel Cassity, pianist Aruan Ortiz and a vocal ensemble called Roomful Of Teeth, which ties with the band Mostly Other People Do The Killing in the festival’s intriguing-name sweepstakes. At post time, the festival’s website listed one hundred groups. To see a schedule and lists of performers and locations, go here.

New York is the still the jazz capital of the world. For residents of the Apple or visitors, this looks like a splendid—if exhausting—way to survey the state of the music. The event is packed with young and youngish artists making waves that excite fans their ages and younger and frustrate many older listeners who have rigid convictions about what constitutes jazz. There is a wide range of musicians and styles, but the prevailing direction is forward, not back.

In what may or may not serve as a preview of Mary Halvorson’s appearance at the Winter Jazzfest, here she is with her quintet in one of National Public Radio’s Tiny Desk concerts. Halvorson, guitar; Jonathan Finlayson, trumpet; Jon Irabagon, alto saxophone; John Hebert, bass; Ches Smith, drums.

The passing of Saul Zaentz yesterday at 92 brings to mind the crucial part he played in expanding Fantasy Records from a vital, colorful, but minor independent label into a pop hit-maker and a major repository of jazz recordings from the late 1940s on. He is being remembered in obituaries around the world as the producer of Amadeus, The English Patient, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and other major motion pictures. For a thorough review of his life and career, see this piece in The New York Times.

Zaentz’s importance to jazz was as the head of Fantasy. When the label’s founders, the brothers Max and Sol Weiss, decided to sell the company in 1967, it went to Zaentz, their longtime right-hand man. Under Zaentz and Fantasy president Ralph Kaffel, the label’s star hit-maker was Creedence Clearwater Revival, a rock band that became a massive success and sold millions of albums. The profits the band’s recordings earned for Fantasy set up Zaentz not only to form the Saul Zaentz Company and get into film production, but also to buy the catalogs of the Prestige, Riverside, Contemporary and Pablo labels.

For several years, Fantasy owned one of the world’s richest concentrations of mainstream jazz recordings. Until Zaentz and Kaffel sold Fantasy to Concord Music in 2004, they maintained the integrity of that catalog. In the past ten years, Concord has branched into pop, rock, soul, hip-hop and other areas of popular music. Uncompromising jazz has assumed a smaller role. Much of the jazz catalog that Concord acquired from Fantasy is now available only as digital downloads.

That catalog contained essential recordings by a roster that included Thelonious Monk, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Woody Herman, Art Blakey, Cal Tjader, Vince Guaraldi, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Count Basie, Art Pepper and Duke Ellington, among dozens of key jazz artists. Merely sampling the highlights of the former Fantasy catalog could take hundreds of hours of listening. In remembrance of Saul Zaentz, from that precious lode we have chosen one track from an album by a Fantasy artist whom he championed long before the multimillion-seller pop hits and the Oscar-winning movies.

Thanks, Saul.

Al Porcino, a powerful lead trumpeter for several big bands, died on New Years Eve. He was 88. His wife said that he succumbed to complications following a fall in his house in Munich. Porcino had lived in Germany since the late 1970s, frequently augmenting American bands touring in Europe, as well as leading his own large ensemble.

After debuting in 1943 with Louis Prima when he was 18, Porcino played with swing bands led by Tommy Dorsey, Georgie Auld and Gene Krupa. He made the transition into the bebop era with Woody Herman’s First Herd and went on to work with Stan Kenton and Chubby Jackson. Porcino rejoined Herman and Kenton in the 1950s. Following his move to Los Angeles in 1957, he co-led a band with Med Flory and played lead with Terry Gibbs. He was frequently employed for the sound tracks of motion pictures and toured with singers including Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Mel Tormé and Judy Garland. He also recorded with the Bill Holman band and with Count Basie.

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Porcino had extensive stints with Thad Jones and Mel Lewis. From Danish television, we see and hear him playing lead in Jones’s “Central Park North.” Solos are by Jones, flugelhorn; Snooky Young, trumpet; Jerome Richardson, soprano sax; Lewis, drums.

Porcino’s fame was primarily as a commanding lead player who teamed with the drummer to drive a band. He occasionally improvised on recordings, including with Charlie Parker, but according to The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz, his own favorite recorded solo was from early in his career, 16 bars in this 1946 Gene Krupa recording of Sibelius’s “Valse Triste”.

Finally, here’s Al Porcino reuniting with Med Flory and leading their reconstituted big band at a Los Angeles Jazz Institute concert in 2008. Flory has the alto saxophone solo. The sound is of less than prime digital quality, but Porcino’s piquant personality comes through loud and clear

Well, maybe piquant wasn’t the right adjective. Al was rather mild in that clip. If you want the full-bore Porcino, listen to this interview with Don Manning of KBOO-FM in Portland, Oregon. It was probably in the early 1990s. Warning: Before you play the interview, be sure that children and other impressionable people are out of the room. “Strong language” doesn’t begin to cover it.

There seems to be a Ray Charles aura abroad in 2014; several Rifftides readers have called my attention to a remarkable 1974 performance by Charles, his band and the Raelets. The headline on the clip reads, Ray Charles Plays the Slow Blues in Madrid.

“Slow” doesn’t begin to describe the tempo. At roughly 30 beats to the minute, a 12-bar chorus takes about a minute and a half. But that’s not the point. The point is the depth of Charles’s distillation of blues feeling. Be sure to stay for the other-worldly coda that he coaxes out of his Fender-Rhodes.

The acoustic pianist behind Charles was Ernie Vantrease. The guitarist is not identified.