4 The middle 1960s were strong years for jazz. The writing was not yet engraved on the wall: rock ’n’ roll had morphed into rock and soul, redefining the entire popular music landscape, but jazz musicians continued to operate with the confidence of artisans who have a fixed and essential place. They were more intrigued with the unholy terrors of the avant-garde than the comings and goings of Brit bands with funny haircuts, and more concerned with lining up gigs than accommodating themselves to the latest fashions. That attitude began to change by 1968, and underwent shock therapy during the next two years as the fusion hydra reared its head: jazz clubs closed; jazz labels declined, folded or modified their bill of fare; jazz musicians decamped for the academy, the studios and Europe, or invested in electronic accessories. Funny haircuts became de rigueur: Is there a musician who doesn’t cringe at photographs taken of him or her in, say, 1974? Yet in that brief window—the LBJ years—looking out on jazz as we knew it and not as it would soon be, a kind of workaholic innocence prevailed and the sheer number of prized recordings was huge. Blue Note was at an absolute peak, adding Cecil, Ornette, Eric Dolphy and Andrew Hill to the mix before falling into the maw of Liberty Records. Prestige was reclaiming the postbop mantle for a last hurrah with Jaki Byard, Booker Ervin, Sonny Criss and Teddy Edwards. Impulse!, Verve and Limelight looked as slick as they sounded, running the gamut from Ben Webster, Benny Carter and Dizzy Gillespie to Wes Montgomery, Bill Evans and Archie Shepp. Meanwhile, at the so-called majors, RCA dawdled in perennial confusion, while Decca turned to reissues, Capitol remade itself as “the home of the Beatles,” and Columbia, with John Hammond back in harness after more than a decade at Mercury and Vanguard, attempted, with mixed results, to expand on the steady output of Miles and Monk. Hammond facilitated pleasing instrumental sessions by George Benson, Illinois Jacquet, Herb Ellis, Stuff Smith, Clare Fischer, Don Ellis and two major signings that are too often overlooked. Mosaic Select has now rescued them with indispensible collections of the albums Hammond produced by pianist Denny Zeitlin (1964-67) and saxophonist John Handy (1965-68), both longtime residents of San Francisco with full-time alternate careers, Handy as an educator, Zeitlin as a psychotherapist. The best of the original albums—Handy’s Live at the Monterey Jazz Festival and Zeitlin’s Carnival—are at once timeless and time-defining, capturing a pivot-point when the most advanced thinking at the jazz center involved an understanding of free jazz and an almost subliminal recognition that rock wasn’t just for kids anymore. This music is radiant with ambition: the exhilaration of owning your music and your instrument with if-you’ve-got-it-flaunt-it virtuosity, not for its own sake but to express the immortal joy of homo ludens. A younger colleague recently named Handy’s Monterey as one of the first fusion albums, which seemed preposterous to me, perhaps because I had grown up with it before anyone spoke of jazz-rock. But you can’t miss the westward winds blowing here, in the extended length of the selections, the quintet instrumentation with violin and guitar, the flamenco and backbeat rhythms, and the fastidiousness of Handy’s lucid improvisations: “If Only We Knew” is almost half an hour, but the solos are concise, the changeups frequent, and the dynamics measured. This album introduced the Canadian rhythm team of Don Thompson and Terry Clarke, later known for their association with Jim Hall, guitarist Jerry Hahn and violinist Michael White. All returned for Handy’s follow-up album, after which Hahn and White went into fusion with Hahn’s Brotherhood (a Hammond project) and the Fourth Way. Mosaic includes singles versions of the Monterey tracks, unissued pieces and a concert performance with guitarist Sonny Greenwich plus violin and cello, but not Handy’s third album, New View, with Bobby Hutcherson and Pat Martino. Much of the Handy material was released by Koch in the 1990s, but the Zeitlin albums have languished, absurdly, for four decades. Hammond initially recorded him with flutist Jeremy Steig, and then released three studio albums (collected here with an hour of previously unreleased pieces, all worthy, some exceptional, including an uncharacteristically straight-ahead “I Got Rhythm”), and a concert album, not included. In a felicitous coincidence, the Mosaic set was issued at the same time as Zeitlin’s In Concert (Sunnyside), an ideal complement because it shows he never stopped growing while underscoring the fact that he had his stylistic ducks in a row as early as 1964. Hammond did him no favor by adorning the cover of Carnival with magazine hype: “The most inventive jazz pianist in at least two decades.” I love “at least”; so much for Bud and Monk. Also working against him was his second career, which limited his touring time and encouraged those who weren’t listening to dismiss him as a dilettante with chops. Big mistake: Zeitlin, born in 1938, sounds like no one else in his generation. He seems constitutionally incapable of playing an expected harmony; the pleasure in listening to him, especially when he dissects (le mot juste) standards, is bound up with his lightning aversions of the commonplace. The Columbias combine alluring borderline funk ditties—“Repeat,” “Cathexis,” “Carole’s Garden,” “Skippy-ing”—that go down like aged bourbon but with just enough harmonic surprises to keep you from taking them for granted, with expansive meditations on classic jazz (he digs Gigi Gryce), pop tunes and originals that manage the hat trick of not sounding as intricate as they obviously are. Confident enough to re-harmonize “Maiden Voyage” when its slash chords were still new, he is more impressive turning the extremely familiar changes of “All the Things You Are” into an adventurous fantasia. Then as now, he circumvents the sentimental. His two-part “Mirage” is a waltz that isn’t a waltz—it never stays still long enough to fall into line, but the tune and his extrapolations are so strong that your best option, as with Ornette, is to follow the melody. Zeitlin’s signature technique is a two-handed, chromatically omnivorous attack that washes across the keyboard, alternated with dancing single-note figures that have, no matter the speed, the articulation of discrete bells. He works with the best bassists and drummers, including Cecil McBee and Freddie Waits, Charlie Haden and Jerry Granelli, and on the new album, Buster Williams and Matt Wilson—they shoot the moon on a supersonic “Mr. P.C.” true 224 2009-04-20T16:01:41-04:00 false 24686 174 true 81 2009-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

The middle 1960s were strong years for jazz. The writing was not yet engraved on the wall: rock ’n’ roll had morphed into rock and soul, redefining the entire popular music landscape, but jazz musicians continued to operate with the confidence of artisans who have a fixed and essential place. They were more intrigued with the unholy terrors of the avant-garde than the comings and goings of Brit bands with funny haircuts, and more concerned with lining up gigs than accommodating themselves to the latest fashions. That attitude began to change by 1968, and underwent shock therapy during the next two years as the fusion hydra reared its head: jazz clubs closed; jazz labels declined, folded or modified their bill of fare; jazz musicians decamped for the academy, the studios and Europe, or invested in electronic accessories. Funny haircuts became de rigueur: Is there a musician who doesn’t cringe at photographs taken of him or her in, say, 1974? Yet in that brief window—the LBJ years—looking out on jazz as we knew it and not as it would soon be, a kind of workaholic innocence prevailed and the sheer number of prized recordings was huge. Blue Note was at an absolute peak, adding Cecil, Ornette, Eric Dolphy and Andrew Hill to the mix before falling into the maw of Liberty Records. Prestige was reclaiming the postbop mantle for a last hurrah with Jaki Byard, Booker Ervin, Sonny Criss and Teddy Edwards. Impulse!, Verve and Limelight looked as slick as they sounded, running the gamut from Ben...

2009-04-29T16:49:55-04:00

4 President Kennedy coined the phrase “a nation of immigrants” in tribute to the various diasporas that came here voluntarily or in chains. But President-elect Obama was simply going for a joke when, in discussing his family’s search for a dog, he referred to “mutts like me.” Maybe he was onto something, though: a nation of mutts. (He was, of course, using the vernacular and not the literal meaning, as derived from “muttonhead”—a distinction that needs to be spelled out for some in the right-wing blogosphere.) If the melting pot, characterized by a rabbi in 1906, never came to a boil, the mongrel culture that brimmed over the sides has been this country’s pride, joy and most effective ambas-sador for the better part of a century. Indeed, we helped mongrelize the world, as foretold by Duke Ellington in his posthumously released The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse: “It’s most improbable,” he noted, “that anyone will ever know exactly who is enjoying the shadow of whom.” Purity, like virginity, is greatly overrated except when refining olive oil. The more we study jazz in the context of its times, the more we are obliged to recognize that jazz is almost always locked in a willing embrace with other musical cultures, above and below, behind and ahead, or straggling alongside. Jazz gives mongrelism its good name, taking what it will from where it will. Consequently, the definition of jazz—or rather, the scope of its extended family—is constantly expanding. As recently as the 1970s, as I began writing to make friends and influence people, Ethel Waters and Bing Crosby had been excised from jazz history; the Mills Brothers and Frank Sinatra were mocked as compromised performers; Louis Jordan and Julia Lee were ignored or forgotten (she still is!), and Al Jolson and Paul Whiteman were not only disregarded but vilified. Stanley Dance once reviewed a book about Jolson in these pages with the backhand recommendation that it might interest those who read, uh, me. I did my part with a fatuous dismissal of Whiteman. Yet today the name Bill Challis brings a twinkle to my eye, and if his name means nothing to you, you can download Whiteman’s recordings of Challis’ “Lonely Melody” and “Changes,” for starters. It was in that same period that Gil Evans was critically assaulted for his adaptations of Jimi Hendrix, which grow in stature daily, and Miles Davis generated more fury than Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor at their most intransigent. The incomparable Waters, Cab Calloway and Helen Forrest were very much alive and still performing, but jazz was too hip to pay them much mind. Hip, like hep, is also overrated except when shopping for a zoot suit. We tend to be more open now: Herbie hits a homer with Joni Mitchell and Cassandra expands the jazz fake book in many directions. So how come the imperious Brazilian singer-guitarist-songwriter-cellist-bandleader Adriana Calcanhotto is practically unknown here? True, Brazilian Pop Music (or MPB for Música Popular Brasileira) is a rapidly expanding universe and only so many inroads can be made in the North American market. Yet this artist, for whom jazz is merely an ingredient (but an important one, especially in the way she organizes her rhythm section), is one of the most enchanting vocalists I’ve heard in years. Calcanhotto’s precision performance, as part of the 40th International Jazz Festival in Barcelona, and my appreciation were hardly diminished by the splendid setting: one of the world’s most magnificently ornate theaters, the Palau de la Música Catalana, a restored monument to Catalonian architectural modernism, built in the early 1900s. The Palau provided the colonnades, sculptures, mosaics, pipe organ and stained-glass skylight. Calcanhotto brought the giant shell that occupied stage right. I don’t know what the shell symbolism means, but she held a smaller one when she made her entrance, posing statuesquely at the stage apron, before seating herself amid a fastidiously responsive quartet and several guitars, each of which she used to distinct effect, including one with reversed strings (high E on the top, low E on bottom). The audience’s evident familiarity with most of her songs reminded me that it was in Copenhagen that I had previously discovered Rosa Passos. Musically, the distance between Brazil and Europe is shorter than between the Americas. Joan Anton Cararach, the indefatigable director of Barcelona Jazz, concedes that he books pop acts he doesn’t like to guarantee sellout concerts, but Calcanhotto doesn’t fall into that category. Her angelic voice and instrumental acumen is inextricable from her ability to craft a set, so that practically each number alters the combination of musi-cians (from solo vocal numbers to extended percussion duets), as well as tempo, mood and attitude. At one point, she put down a guitar and a musician handed her a cello and bow and she rocked the thing. Then she swanned over to the apron to receive her due, a lovely apparition in colored robes—most people I spoke to assumed she was in her early 30s, but she had just turned 43. She has recorded many albums for Sony Brazil: Import them! Import her! Another Barcelona highlight was an evening of duets by Joshua Redman and Brad Mehldau, reflecting Cararach’s decision to do something more unusual than a saxophone-plus-trio concert. The event, which nearly filled the larger L’Auditori, was received with a rapt attention and raucous enthusiasm that clearly inspired the musicians. The two-hour set began as an introverted dialogue, delicate pronouncements and rapid responses, a mutuality of courteous lyricism that grew increasingly assertive and even blissful, ultimately exploding in a dazzling “Donna Lee” and an amorous “Sophisticated Lady.” If this was a conventional jazz-qua-jazz evening, the racial muttdom spoke for itself, as it does so often in jazz. Yet the punch line of this peroration awaited me when I got home, and went to the Jazz Standard for the first night of a four-night/four-bands 50th birthday salute to Don Byron. This was the night devoted to the music of Mickey Katz with Jack Falk singing the parody lyrics mostly in Yiddish so that few could understand them. You didn’t need to: It was a mongrel evening. I didn’t understand Calcanhotto’s Portuguese either. true 224 2009-02-12T12:41:12-05:00 false 21144 136 true 81 2009-01-01T00:00:00-05:00

A Brazilian gem, Adriana Calcanhotto, is a highlight of the Barcelona Jazz Festival

2009-03-25T13:45:42-04:00

4 For sheer emotional resonance, the highlight of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Jazz Masters ceremony-concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall, in October, was probably the opening procession, as past and present recipients of the $25,000 prize marched down the aisles to their seats. Accompanied by a sustained, standing, often roaring ovation, the mostly aged, occasionally halting parade of nearly two dozen musicians was, in the best sense of the term, Fellini-esque: a dreamlike amble of men (the four living women recipients were not present) whom we have enjoyed, admired, respected and venerated all our lives. Their number and the history they represent demanded the salute we too infrequently get to render. After a radiant blast of Bud Powell’s “Un Poco Loco” by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (arranger uncredited), Wynton Marsalis and Dana Gioia made a couple of speeches, setting up the evening’s plan. This consisted of introducing new recipients for 2009—George Benson, Jimmy Cobb, Lee Konitz, Toots Thielemans, Rudy Van Gelder, Snooky Young—with a filmed salute, an introduction by a past recipient, followed by the current Jazz Master saying a few words and, in most cases, performing a number with the JLCO. All seven of the musical numbers were savory, particularly the concerto arrangement of “Body and Soul,” featuring Konitz, though the audience preferred Thielemans' “What a Wonderful World.” For comic élan, no one could ace Phil Woods, who introduced Konitz with written comments, because, he explained, “My memory is very good but extremely short.” Marsalis closed the program with “Li’l Darlin’” in graceful tribute to Neal Hefti, who died the previous week, at 85, never having been designated a Jazz Master. (On the subject of missed opportunities, may I simply express the hope that the NEA program does not run out the clock before Muhal Richard Abrams, Bill Holman, Sam Rivers, Helen Merrill, Roscoe Mitchell, Carla Bley, Andrew Cyrille, Archie Shepp, Sheila Jordan, Charlie Haden, Jack DeJohnette, Arthur Blythe, Paul Bley, Kenny Barron, Yusef Lateef and Johnny Mandel also get to join the procession?) For Gioia, who recently announced his departure from the NEA to return to his writing (he is a prizewinning poet), the evening must have been bittersweet; indeed, he seemed reluctant to let it go. As chairman for the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia revived a moribund institution not least by revving up its involvement in jazz. When the Jazz Masters program began in 1982, it honored three artists per year. After taking over in 2003, Gioia doubled that number (sometimes bringing it to seven), increased the prize money to make it a meaningful honor, added a category for jazz-enabling non-musicians (hence Van Gelder), and instigated touring, educational and archival programs—you can find NEA-funded interviews with jazz legends as online PDF files. If he has garnered any bad publicity—rock-ribbed crazies who think government has no place in the arts except to give corporations perpetual copyrights don’t count—it has passed me by. The fact is that jazz, despite its ludicrously low domestic profile, never fails to mask hard times. I think it was Murray Kempton who observed that the only totally unsullied evening in the Nixon White House was occasioned by its celebration of Duke Ellington’s 70th birthday. George Wein has noted that almost every major municipality in the world welcomes a jazz festival—it raises commerce and good vibes. The Depression was the only time in Hollywood history when movies bannered swing bands on marquees to represent cheerful American optimism; before and after the Depression, jazz appeared in films to indicate loose morals and lost souls. Of course, Hollywood’s all-time favorite orchestra was Xavier Cugat, but still. If the economy continues to pan out as the pundits threaten, jazz may actually regain commercial significance. Even given his many successes, the Rose Hall event must have been a particular plum for Gioia. The mechanics were fairly complicated, what with the balance of films, talk and music, but, notwithstanding a few brief pauses that Marsalis effortlessly riffed through, they came off without a hitch—close enough for opera, you could say. The orchestra is now pretty much beyond cavil, the guests were delighted, and the audience was willing to rise with greater frequency than any religious service could require. It ought to be an annual New York event. As for Gioia, who has been literary, corporate and political, and decided literary is better, may he awake with the muse shouting in his ears. And may his successor be worthy. With the Democrats in charge, the NEA ought to have an easier time, and the new administration must keep jazz as a priority in appointing a new chairperson. Yet much as I applaud the NEA, there is a part of me that left the evening with a hollow heart. Is the future of jazz to be nothing but government backpatting and educational initiatives? Will there never be the jazz equivalent of Seattle’s EMP, Cleveland’s rock museum or Nashville’s Opry? Jazz at Lincoln Center is itself an historic (if still not as inclusive at it might be) step in the right direction, but can we have no better jazz hall of fame than its closet-with-plaques? How long till the National Museum in Harlem has a home worthy of its mandate? Can we have no commercial jazz radio and television network? To how many hundreds of cable stations must we subscribe before we can have one dedicated to jazz? What does Warren Buffett listen to anyway? true 224 2008-12-10T12:21:06-05:00 false 20900 129 200812 true 81 2008-12-01T00:00:00-05:00

For sheer emotional resonance, the highlight of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Jazz Masters ceremony-concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall, in October, was probably the opening procession, as past and present recipients of the $25,000 prize marched down the aisles to their seats. Accompanied by a sustained, standing, often roaring ovation, the mostly aged, occasionally halting parade of nearly two dozen musicians was, in the best sense of the term, Fellini-esque: a dreamlike amble of men (the four living women recipients were not present) whom we have enjoyed, admired, respected and venerated all our lives. Their number and the history they represent demanded the salute we too infrequently get to render. After a radiant blast of Bud Powell’s “Un Poco Loco” by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (arranger uncredited), Wynton Marsalis and Dana Gioia made a couple of speeches, setting up the evening’s plan. This consisted of introducing new recipients for 2009—George Benson, Jimmy Cobb, Lee Konitz, Toots Thielemans, Rudy Van Gelder, Snooky Young—with a filmed salute, an introduction by a past recipient, followed by the current Jazz Master saying a few words and, in most cases, performing a number with the JLCO. All seven of the musical numbers were savory, particularly the concerto arrangement of “Body and Soul,” featuring Konitz, though the audience preferred Thielemans' “What a Wonderful World.” For comic élan, no one could ace Phil Woods, who introduced Konitz with written comments, because, he explained, “My memory is very good but extremely short.” Marsalis closed the program with “Li’l...

35682 2009-03-09T17:01:47-04:00

4 Serious blues writing got a powerful if naively researched jumpstart with the still indispensible, late-’50s and early-’60s books of Sam Charters and Paul Oliver, the latter in England, where by the early 1970s it was also possible to find Robert Johnson transcriptions and John Fahey’s revised master thesis on Charley Patton. Young American blues lovers of the ’60s went south in search of records, information and musicians, walking in the shoes of John and Alan Lomax, hunting for their own Lead Belly, “collectors” in every sense. They did good work: Some, like Giles Oakley, Peter Guralnick and William Ferris, published serious studies, and others, like Nick Perls, opened his collection to everyone with his label, Yazoo, though he was not overly concerned with rights and royalties. Yet as Robert Johnson became a superstar, the emphasis changed from research to custody, peaking perhaps with the title of the PBS series Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey—his musical journey. A creepily familiar mixture of narcissism and nostalgia set in as white writers reduced black artists to supporting players in their own stories, occasionally striking out at former colleagues. Recently, we have had three notable additions to blues literature that restore the virtues of hot invention and cool objectivity: In ascending order of importance, a labor of obsession, a work of art, and a triumph of scholarship. The first (published by Steidl in 2007) is Lead Belly: A Life in Pictures, edited, as best I can tell (the credits are beyond confusing), by Tiny Robinson, Lead Belly’s “favorite niece,” from the collection of John Reynolds, Lead Belly’s “prodigious researcher.” The comprehensive selection of portraits and curios is splendidly reproduced on thick paper stock, capturing Lead Belly and his era, as fans, producers and managers attempted to remake his image from happy sharecropper, Southern primitive and victorious ex-con to folk singer, spokesman for progressive causes and (even) jazz musician. In one picture, he looks like a vaudevillian, complete with derby and cane, though there is no caption to explain their provenance. But if the pages are fun to turn, the text is almost a parody of fan reflections, reading like a succession of self-absorbed snapshots. While some mourners can justify a personal perspective, like Pete Seeger and perhaps Tom Waits (who was born the day after Lead died and “passed him in the hall”), others, unknown to me, are no less vainglorious. One writer wants us to know that he was 3 when he first heard him, another worries he would not have liked Mozart or Lead Belly had he met them, and so forth. Many contributors aren’t identified beyond their names; several retyped newspaper clips are neither dated nor sourced. Longhand letters from Lead Belly, not retyped, are hard to read. Some commentaries are illuminating, and the poetry of Tyehimba Jess, scattered throughout, is evocative, but a scholarly apparatus and flow-through narrative are sorely missed. Getting a firm grasp on Akira Hiramoto’s endless manga-in-progress, Me and the Devil Blues 1 (Del Ray), is nearly impossible from the first volume (published in July). But we can say of this feat of narrative energy that it is strangely powerful, often shocking, occasionally inexplicable and almost always mesmerizing. Subtitled “The Unreal Life of Robert Johnson,” Me and the Devil Blues 1 combines two installments that appeared in Japan in 2005; the second American volume is scheduled for December 2008 and a third for late 2009. If the subsequent volumes are as long as the first, the three will amount to a 1,600-page comic-book phantasmagoria, in which Johnson is apotheosized in a largely mythological realm—a new Faust, but one peculiarly lacking in aplomb, let alone arrogance. Hiramoto’s style expands and retards time with rhythms unique to manga (the Japanese word for “comics”). A character’s momentary response may take pages of drawings: a montage of angles, backgrounds, fleeting reflections. No filmmaker could use half as many cameras as would be necessary to replicate Hiramoto’s perspectives—the only cinematic equivalent that seems remotely relevant would be Orson Welles at his most edit-crazy, for example, in Lady From Shanghai. Especially impressive is Hiramoto’s grand disregard for the phony controversy about Johnson meeting the devil at the crossroads. Recognizing a genuinely mythic situation, Hiramoto uses Christian iconography to set up “RJ” with Dracula-like literalness, in which fantasy and reality intersect freely—RJ hallucinates encounters with Son House and Willie Brown before they occur, his hand really does sprout 10 fingers, he is as much possessed and confused by his gift as everyone else. The first half of Me and the Devil Blues 1 mixes documented fact and pure fancy, successfully recreating the farm community of RJ’s teenage marriage and the irresistible allure of local juke joints. The second half spins into a willful fabrication, beginning with an abrupt flash-forward depicting the violent killing of Bonnie and Clyde; at the last moment, Clyde sees that his pistol is jammed with a thumb pick. A flashback to 1930 details Clyde’s travels with RJ, who is reduced to fearful sidekick (Bonnie isn’t present), though his music inadvertently triggers much of the action. Together and apart, Robert and Clyde descend into the darkest racist hellhole of the South, ruled by an apparently blind madman. This section ends with Clyde trying to save RJ from a lynching. I’ve no idea where Hiramoto is taking this story, but am waiting eagerly for the December installments. Meanwhile, we have the best volume of all: Ted Gioia’s exemplary Delta Blues (Norton), an expertly researched, elegantly written, dispassionate yet thoughtful history that brings a fresh perspective to much-trammeled ground. Having absorbed the literature and music of Delta blues, Gioia companionably and persuasively adjudicates various controversies by presenting all sides with journalistic rigor and common sense. Of Johnson’s encounter at the crossroads, he explores the origin of the myth, but is no more inclined to dismiss it than embrace it; he understands that genuine mythology is as meaningful as it is rare. Gioia is insightful at comparing early records with those of late-blooming rediscoveries, and at showing how the story of Delta blues is a black history inextricably entwined with white explorers, a position that holds him in particularly good stead when approaching the 1960s revival. If Delta Blues is not the last word on the subject (in discussing the music’s ongoing influence, he fails to mention Cassandra Wilson, who has done more than anyone to reenergize Delta songs), it is likely to remain the best word on the subject for years to come. true 224 2008-12-03T14:26:49-05:00 false 20778 128 200811 true 81 2008-11-01T00:00:00-04:00

Serious blues writing got a powerful if naively researched jumpstart with the still indispensible, late-’50s and early-’60s books of Sam Charters and Paul Oliver, the latter in England, where by the early 1970s it was also possible to find Robert Johnson transcriptions and John Fahey’s revised master thesis on Charley Patton. Young American blues lovers of the ’60s went south in search of records, information and musicians, walking in the shoes of John and Alan Lomax, hunting for their own Lead Belly, “collectors” in every sense. They did good work: Some, like Giles Oakley, Peter Guralnick and William Ferris, published serious studies, and others, like Nick Perls, opened his collection to everyone with his label, Yazoo, though he was not overly concerned with rights and royalties. Yet as Robert Johnson became a superstar, the emphasis changed from research to custody, peaking perhaps with the title of the PBS series Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey—his musical journey. A creepily familiar mixture of narcissism and nostalgia set in as white writers reduced black artists to supporting players in their own stories, occasionally striking out at former colleagues. Recently, we have had three notable additions to blues literature that restore the virtues of hot invention and cool objectivity: In ascending order of importance, a labor of obsession, a work of art, and a triumph of scholarship. The first (published by Steidl in 2007) is Lead Belly: A Life in Pictures, edited, as best I can tell (the credits are beyond confusing), by Tiny Robinson, Lead Belly’s...

2009-03-20T17:16:08-04:00

4 Between the JVC Jazz Festival in New York and Umbria Jazz in Perugia, Italy, there was much to treasure and contemplate, including a few surprises mixed in with the anticipated highs. Having set out not to take notes at events I initially had no intention of reviewing, I rely here on the failings and advantages of memory. The failings are obvious: holes like Swiss cheese into which events and nights disappear. Yet the advantages are not to be denied—chiefly an automatic filter that cuts to the chase and eradicates the merely ordinary. The first surprise loomed on the first night of JVC, in a tribute to Alice Coltrane, organized by Ravi Coltrane, with a harpist named Brandee Younger, and a rhythm team that ought to be revived for its own night: Geri Allen, Charlie Haden, Jack DeJohnette. It was a surprise because, while I don’t much love the multicultural spiritualism and unilateral modes of Alice Coltrane’s recordings, I was enchanted by this evening, disappointed only by Allen’s strangely unassertive performance. Ravi played with focus, building to a breakout finish; the swirling harp and harplike piano arpeggios added agreeable colors; and DeJohnette was as attentive as a surgeon. Especially affecting was a reel of home movies that transferred John Coltrane from the realm of mythology to the hearth of family life. I hope Ravi incorporates them into a CD/DVD. A João Gilberto recital is never to be missed, and this one was characteristically mesmerizing; the only surprise was that instead of his one English song, “’S Wonderful,” he offered a Portuguese version of “God Bless America.” There aren’t many chances to hear an artist who invented an idiom; in this, the 50th anniversary of bossa nova, Gilberto remains the foremost interpreter of Jobim and a sui generis singer-guitarist who keeps the candle barely flickering while unfolding reels of meditative melody. In contrast, Dianne Reeves prepared one of the most exuberant and meticulously judged sets I’ve heard from her. Opening for Al Green, who likes to play the fool and conduct sing-alongs as much as sing, she outmaneuvered him by doing things—Motown’s “Just My Imagination” and an a cappella spiritual (“If I Can Help Somebody”: Carnegie Hall was so rapt that a sneeze would have sounded like an explosion)—Green patented. She also revived Gigi Gryce’s “Social Call,” and encouraged guitarist Russell Malone to investigate his deep blues instincts. Most memorable was the piano bill shared by George Cables and Cecil Taylor, the former interpreting originals and standards with a filigree delicacy at the bounding line between Tatum and Powell. In 1984, George Wein presented a double bill of Taylor and Oscar Peterson, and many of Peterson’s fans noisily exited as Taylor played. There were no walkouts this time, but there were plenty of remarks from those who had not followed Taylor for a while suggesting that he had mellowed, grown lyrical, accessible. No: Taylor is Taylor and Taylor. He doesn’t stoop to conquer, but he raises the recalcitrant to share his vision. His performance, cued by the arcane graphs that he uses as scores, unfolded as a sonata—rigorous, compelling, gorgeous, thrilling. Perugia is an incomparable setting for a jazz festival, with its acoustically marvelous 18th-century theaters (the Morlacchi is a giant jewel box); the grand Corso Vannucci with its brightly lit piazzas, where free concerts helped to attract a reported 400,000 visitors; and alleyways and hilly staircases that can lead you as far back in history as an Etruscan arch; not to mention stadium concerts with giant screens projecting the views from multiple cameras and a sound system that confidently balances and projects every note. There were daily pleasures, including sets by Allan Harris, in a charmingly mimetic salute to Nat Cole as pop singer, and the preternaturally cool Pat Martino, who, with little physical exertion beyond his hands and nary a word, stands at center stage, backed by a rhythm section alert to his every gesture, and drives deeply into each piece, his superb technique animated by a narrative logic that is intolerant of fakery or excessive ornamentation. Cassandra Wilson, with her exceptional band directed by Marvin Sewell, another miraculous guitarist, who travels the byways from the deep, dark Delta to Mars, and featuring the remarkable young pianist Jonathan Batiste, a month after his graduation from Juilliard, performed a rhythmically vivacious and broad repertoire from Loverly and earlier recordings. The glory days of Ella and Sarah are gone. The glory days of Dianne and Cassandra are now. Miles Evans rocked the Morlacchi with a much too infrequent reunion of the Gil Evans band—Lew Soloff, Chris Hunter, Conrad Herwig, Kenwood Denard, Delmar Brown—that turned out to be a farewell performance by Hiram Bullock, playing with bemused aggression, peaking with the band on “Little Wing.” Are there no Monday nights left in New York for this intoxicating ensemble? For me, the most rewarding discovery of Umbria was the Italian pianist Stefano Bollani, whose octet performed his Brazilian tribute album, Carioca, including his stunning keyboard arrangement of “Tico Tico.” He revealed something rarer than a conservatory technique (I mean, who doesn’t have that these days?): a distinctive touch, supple and pointed, that, especially after hearing his other recordings (seek out Jazz Italiano Live 2006), I suspect I would recognize amid a mob of pianists. Still, the highlight of Umbria was no surprise at all. Sonny Rollins, closing a long international tour, attracted some 4,000 people to the Arena Santa Giuliana, and extended a two-hour (no break) invitation to exultation. A couple of critics, as ever, declined, but the crowd roared, especially after a few encores, including “Don’t Stop the Carnival” and the sublime “Serenade,” at which point the barriers were taken down and the audience was allowed to rush the stage, where it remained long after the stage was bare, unwilling to let go of the moment. The set was given over to originals, not least the lyrical calypso “Nice Lady,” and standards—“In a Sentimental Mood,” “Someday I’ll Find You,” and in a pièce de résistance, “They Say It’s Wonderful.” You can surmise when Rollins is happy with what he plays and hears by his dancing, which doesn’t come as easy these days. This night he wriggled a lot, shifting weight from one leg to the other, caught in a rhythm that he, like the audience, was reluctant to let go of. The great days of Sonny are now. true 224 2008-09-24T19:14:07-04:00 false 20379 127 200810 true 81 2008-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

Between the JVC Jazz Festival in New York and Umbria Jazz in Perugia, Italy, there was much to treasure and contemplate, including a few surprises mixed in with the anticipated highs. Having set out not to take notes at events I initially had no intention of reviewing, I rely here on the failings and advantages of memory. The failings are obvious: holes like Swiss cheese into which events and nights disappear. Yet the advantages are not to be denied—chiefly an automatic filter that cuts to the chase and eradicates the merely ordinary. The first surprise loomed on the first night of JVC, in a tribute to Alice Coltrane, organized by Ravi Coltrane, with a harpist named Brandee Younger, and a rhythm team that ought to be revived for its own night: Geri Allen, Charlie Haden, Jack DeJohnette. It was a surprise because, while I don’t much love the multicultural spiritualism and unilateral modes of Alice Coltrane’s recordings, I was enchanted by this evening, disappointed only by Allen’s strangely unassertive performance. Ravi played with focus, building to a breakout finish; the swirling harp and harplike piano arpeggios added agreeable colors; and DeJohnette was as attentive as a surgeon. Especially affecting was a reel of home movies that transferred John Coltrane from the realm of mythology to the hearth of family life. I hope Ravi incorporates them into a CD/DVD. A João Gilberto recital is never to be missed, and this one was characteristically mesmerizing; the only surprise was that instead of his one English song, “’S Wonderful,”...

2009-03-02T00:27:48-05:00

4 Last year, I commented here about the hit-and-mostly-miss tradition of movies with jazz or jazz-related stories. I neglected to discuss another, more successful tradition: movies with scores by jazz or jazz-influenced composers that may have little or nothing to do with jazz as plot material. That tradition is now the subject of a remarkable exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Prepared with unprecedented comprehensiveness by Joshua Siegel, the assistant curator of MoMA’s film department, this series includes dozens of films, some rarely if ever seen, as well as wall hangings involving posters, LP album covers and video displays. It opened in April, with director Arthur Penn introducing his surreal 1965 thriller Mickey One, music by Eddie Sauter and Stan Getz, and continues into September, closing with Spike Lee’s gripping documentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, scored by Terence Blanchard. Jazz has always been a part of the mix in Hollywood movies, even in the silent era, when ragtime was a major component in scores created by theater pianists and organists. From the beginning, jazz justifiably represented the sound of urban life, though with less justification, it also came to signal immorality. A silent film accompanist might use Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” to connote the innocence of country life, but the sound of jazz almost always indicated the presence of wayward flappers, dissolute roués and other lost souls. With the advent of sound, jazz often signified violence or madness—Duke Ellington’s “Rape of the Rhapsody” triggers homicide in Murder at the Vanities (1934). During the Swing Era, the association between jazz and moral laxity briefly disappeared, as big bands were celebrated for their all-American vitality, wartime sentimentality and patriotism, though white Mickey Mouse or show bands were favored—Xavier Cugat appeared in more movies than any other dance band ever. Black bandleaders and musicians were usually hired for isolated episodes that could be excised for Southern distribution. In the postwar era, many of the shadowy crime pictures that are now fashionably characterized as noir included scenes set in seedy nightclubs where second-rate jazz musicians provided low-rent ambience. But in 1951, Alex North—a newcomer to the world of Hollywood scoring long dominated by such venerable men as Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Franz Waxman—used jazz elements in the score to A Streetcar Named Desire. A generation of film composers weaned on jazz and swing followed suit, including Elmer Bernstein (The Man With the Golden Arm, in 1955, Sweet Smell of Success, 1957, and Walk on the Wild Side, 1962) and Henry Mancini (Touch of Evil, 1958, High Time, 1960, and the television series Peter Gunn, 1958-60). Some of these films featured onscreen appearances by jazz musicians like Shorty Rogers and Chico Hamilton, but the important thing was the non-diegetic music; these scores may have been “jazzy” rather than jazz per se, but they used jazz techniques to convey emotions previously reserved for string orchestras sawing variations on 19th-century romantics. An unsung pioneer was Benny Carter, who worked on several 1950s scores without credit; in some of them, he got onscreen appearances in nightclub scenes. Aside from a few Faith and John Hubley animated shorts and some TV work, Carter did not get to put his name on a feature film score until Leo Penn’s A Man Called Adam, in 1966. Robert Wise, who is now more widely associated with the music of West Side Story and The Sound of Music, went a step further than other directors by hiring genuine jazz composers to score films: John Mandel (with an assist from an onscreen Gerry Mulligan ensemble) for I Want to Live! (1958) and John Lewis (leading an all-star offscreen orchestra) for Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). Both pictures explored societal sleaze—junkies, thieves, killers, racists—yet, in both instances, the scores draw lines between a jazz that defines the lower depths and a jazz that comments on and supersedes plot and characters. Otto Preminger made a still bolder decision with his counterintuitive signing of Duke Ellington to score Anatomy of a Murder (1959), which showed that jazz was suitable for a story involving a homespun Midwestern attorney, even if his big case does involve rape and murder. At the same time, jazz was finding a regular base in Europe and in America’s independent cinema. Louis Malle invited Miles Davis to improvise the score for Elevator to the Gallows (1957) and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers enlivened Roger Vadim’s 1959 Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1959). Martial Solal added terse grace notes to Breathless (1960) by Jean-Luc Godard, who used jazzier scores by Michel Legrand for A Woman Is a Woman (1961) and Band of Outsiders (1964), as did Agnès Varda, who put Legrand onscreen in Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962). In the burgeoning New York film movement of the late 1950s, Charles Mingus and Shafi Hadi provided intermittent music for John Cassavetes’ Shadows, David Amram scored Robert Frank’s Pull My Daisy, and Freddie Redd (with Jackie McLean) created the classic onstage score for the off-Broadway production of Jack Gelber’s The Connection, which Shirley Clarke filmed in 1961. Other films were scored by Mal Waldron, Lalo Schifrin and, most prolifically, Quincy Jones. Jazz scores lost favor after The Graduate and Easy Rider, as filmmakers switched to rock or licensed records with which the audience was already familiar—yet exceptions abided, often in films by Clint Eastwood, not least his misperceived comic jaunt, The Gauntlet (1977), for which composer Jerry Fielding programmed expansive solos by Jon Faddis and Art Pepper. Almost all these films are part of the MoMA series, and if you’re in New York in August and September, some highlights still to come include Jack Johnson (Miles Davis), A Man Called Adam (with a serious performance by Louis Armstrong), Tune in Tomorrow (Wynton Marsalis), New York Eye and Ear Control (Albert Ayler) and Naked Lunch (a Howard Shore score with Ornette Coleman improvisations). Most revelatory is Larry Clark’s long-overlooked 1977 UCLA master thesis film, Passing Through (on August 7 and 9), a genuinely innovative drama of Los Angeles musicians, in which Horace Tapscott’s score and recorded excerpts by Charlie Parker, Eric Dolphy and others telegraph the emotions of the characters with a specificity rare in any film. Passing Through shows how the belief in music’s healing power could be throttled into vigilante justice, and it’s like nothing else you’ve seen. true 224 2008-08-12T19:17:42-04:00 false 19898 126 200809 true 81 2008-09-01T00:00:00-04:00

Last year, I commented here about the hit-and-mostly-miss tradition of movies with jazz or jazz-related stories. I neglected to discuss another, more successful tradition: movies with scores by jazz or jazz-influenced composers that may have little or nothing to do with jazz as plot material. That tradition is now the subject of a remarkable exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Prepared with unprecedented comprehensiveness by Joshua Siegel, the assistant curator of MoMA’s film department, this series includes dozens of films, some rarely if ever seen, as well as wall hangings involving posters, LP album covers and video displays. It opened in April, with director Arthur Penn introducing his surreal 1965 thriller Mickey One, music by Eddie Sauter and Stan Getz, and continues into September, closing with Spike Lee’s gripping documentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, scored by Terence Blanchard. Jazz has always been a part of the mix in Hollywood movies, even in the silent era, when ragtime was a major component in scores created by theater pianists and organists. From the beginning, jazz justifiably represented the sound of urban life, though with less justification, it also came to signal immorality. A silent film accompanist might use Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” to connote the innocence of country life, but the sound of jazz almost always indicated the presence of wayward flappers, dissolute roués and other lost souls. With the advent of sound, jazz often signified violence or madness—Duke Ellington’s “Rape of the Rhapsody” triggers homicide in Murder at the Vanities (1934)....

2009-03-02T00:27:24-05:00

4 The magnificent Art Tatum album, Piano Starts Here, which combines his first four solo recordings from 1933 with a slightly abridged version of his 1949 Shrine Auditorium concert, has been chosen as the second “re-performance” release in a series created by Zenph Studios for Sony Classical. The most prosaic question it raises is this: In what end-of-year awards category can you vote for it? It is obviously not a new performance, because every note (save two minutes that Columbia cut from “Gershwin Medley,” rendering it as “The Man I Love”) has been available for decades—on 78s, 45s, 10- and 12-inch LPs and CD. But neither is it a reissue, because it is entirely unconcerned with transferring or improving old records. Zenph goes beyond the recording process in an effort to recreate the performance itself. If this sounds like science fiction, join the club. I’ve interviewed two Zenphians and spent many hours with the Sony disc, now called, inaccurately, Piano Starts Here: Live at the Shrine (the 1933 solos are still included), along with computer-generated transcriptions of four performances, and I am still in the technological dark. But let me, as a semi-reformed Luddite, try to explain. Zenph digitizes recordings to learn precisely how every note is played—in the words of project manager John Q. Walker, “how the note was touched and released, the dynamic range, how and when the pedals were used, and so forth.” Tatum’s playing was turned into high-resolution computer files, which, through solenoid-driven electronics built into the hardware of the piano by Yamaha, manipulate the piano’s hammers. On the most basic level, they have created a reproducing player-piano of unparalleled sophistication and nuance. But that’s just the beginning. While Walker and his team will admit to no guess-work in reclaiming the actual notes, which are timed to within 200th of a millisecond to the original, they concede to speculation in re-creating the performance. No one, for example, knows what kind of piano Tatum played at the Shrine—though the timbre, as conveyed by the recordings, suggests a six- or seven-foot Baldwin. So Zenph took a state-of-the-art concert grand, the Yamaha Disklavier Pro, voiced it to replicate the Baldwin, and placed it onstage at the Los Angeles Shrine for a September 2007 concert before an audience. The new CD is a recording of that 2007 concert, not a restoration of the 1949 recording. They used two discrete microphone designs, both included on the disc: The 13 selections are offered first as a concert performance, with the microphones placed in accordance with modern recording techniques rather than in an attempt to replicate the microphone placement in 1949, and then in a “Binaural” version. At the concert, Zenph put a Tatum-size dummy at the keyboard, with microphones in each of its ears. The “Binaural” recording, which is meant to be listened to with headphones, is an attempt to recreate what Tatum heard while he was playing. Is the “re-perfomance” any good? Is it necessary? Well, it has proven necessary, even if you hate the result, because in the course of analyzing the performance, the Zenph team—which had no prior familiarity with Tatum as an artist—discovered that Columbia had been issuing this music at incorrect pitch: everything is slightly flat. As a Zenph analyst, Anatoly Larkin, points out, it is not impossible that Tatum used a slightly off-pitch piano (only someone who attended the concert and has perfect pitch can testify to that). Yet that seems unlikely, knowing what we do know of Tatum’s phenomenal sense of pitch and of the professionalism of Gene Norman, who produced the Shrine concert. Zenph has restored the correct sequence of Tatum’s program, which was accurate on the 10-inch LP, but not on the 12-inch or the CD. With the help of Tatum discographer Arnold Laubich, it also restored the missing two minutes from “Gershwin Medley.” All of these corrections ought now to be high on Sony’s to-do list for a reissue of the Tatum album: The Zenph recording is by no means a replacement for it. But it does offer a new way of enjoying Tatum’s music. My own response wavered for a few weeks, beginning with instant elation, modified by increasing trepidation as I compared the Tatum record (which, notwithstanding the issue of pitch, is acoustically sound, eminently listenable and ultimately irreproducible) to Zenph, before settling into a mildly qualified enthusiasm. Serendipity played a part in my conversion. For some reason, the NAD player in my office cannot read the Sony disc, so I listened to it on a computer and iPod. Eventually, I took it home and played it on a much better rig, usually reserved for vinyl, and it blew my socks off. At first, I considered the Zenph a Tatum aide—the clarity of recording and the differences in microphone set-ups, pianos and vintage recording equipment repeatedly focused my attention on details that seemed new to me, sending me back to Tatum for a comparison. Using Zenph as a way of getting closer to Tatum, I sometimes found it lacking: Is the second note Tatum plays in “The Kerry Dance”—a D natural—really the same as the note sounded in Zenph? Is the bluesy momentum of his intro to “St. Louis Blues” accurately captured by Zenph? Zenph insists that they are (“we slaved over every note,” Larkin says), though they acknowledge that other audio distinctions are inevitable. Yet it’s a mug’s game to compare the two—that’s Zenph’s problem and not ours. What excited me about hearing Zenph on a good system was not the clarity it brought to Tatum, but the restoration it brought to the piano—the actual pressing and releasing of the keys, the extraordinary dynamic range, the ambient echoes, the overtones, the beauty of the instrument itself, all of which combined to put Tatum in the room. I wouldn’t recommend a recreation, re-performance or reproduction of anything over the original, but I do find this technological rapprochement with the past to be irresistible. I wish, though, that Zenph and Sony would avoid hyperbole on the order of “Tatum Lives, Seriously.” That goes without saying, with and without Zenph. Piano Starts Here is the second of 18 projects Zenph has contracted to do with Sony; the first was Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. I hope they continue to keep jazz in the mix—Teddy Wilson’s 1930s solos, for instance. John Walker says that in years to come they might be able to digitize all instruments; they have already begun on bass, working with an Oscar Peterson-Ray Brown performance, at Peterson’s request. They concede that the system they have is imperfect and there are things they’d redo; their software will evolve, as all recording techniques have. To underscore the point, they have scheduled a Tatum concert to be played on a seven-foot Steinway at the Apollo. I’ll be there. true 224 2008-07-09T18:19:14-04:00 false 19418 125 200808 true 81 2008-08-01T00:00:00-04:00

The magnificent Art Tatum album, Piano Starts Here, which combines his first four solo recordings from 1933 with a slightly abridged version of his 1949 Shrine Auditorium concert, has been chosen as the second “re-performance” release in a series created by Zenph Studios for Sony Classical. The most prosaic question it raises is this: In what end-of-year awards category can you vote for it? It is obviously not a new performance, because every note (save two minutes that Columbia cut from “Gershwin Medley,” rendering it as “The Man I Love”) has been available for decades—on 78s, 45s, 10- and 12-inch LPs and CD. But neither is it a reissue, because it is entirely unconcerned with transferring or improving old records. Zenph goes beyond the recording process in an effort to recreate the performance itself. If this sounds like science fiction, join the club. I’ve interviewed two Zenphians and spent many hours with the Sony disc, now called, inaccurately, Piano Starts Here: Live at the Shrine (the 1933 solos are still included), along with computer-generated transcriptions of four performances, and I am still in the technological dark. But let me, as a semi-reformed Luddite, try to explain. Zenph digitizes recordings to learn precisely how every note is played—in the words of project manager John Q. Walker, “how the note was touched and released, the dynamic range, how and when the pedals were used, and so forth.” Tatum’s playing was turned into high-resolution computer files, which, through solenoid-driven electronics built into the hardware of the piano by Yamaha,...

2009-03-02T00:27:03-05:00

4 A few months ago, I interviewed Sonny Rollins on stage at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center (you can hear it at www1.cuny.edu/forums/podcasts/). Surveying his early years, Rollins said, “My first idol was a chap named Louis Jordan. Now Louis Jordan was an entertainer as well as a great instrumentalist and if you see anything by him today you might see him dancing or clowning around or having a funny costume on. But he was really a great musician and he really had the heart and soul of rhythm and blues.” He added that Jordan was “the guy who turned a lot of us on,” emphasizing, “He was a fantastic musician.” In this, Jordan’s centennial year, that fact ought to be commemorated. In the ’40s and ’50s, his influence was everywhere. He all but single-handedly created rhythm and blues, though his songs were covered by pop and jazz stars as well as the musicians who emerged directly from the idiom he established. Ray Charles not only recorded Jordan’s staples—“Let the Good Times Roll,” “Don’t the Sun Catch You Crying,” “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town”—but also leaned on Jordan’s arrangements and vocal attack. Dizzy Gillespie considered him the father of rock and roll, a claim borne out by Chuck Berry, who said, “I identify myself with Louis Jordan more than any other artist.” Yet Rollins was pointing beyond Jordan’s R&B styling to his way of playing alto and tenor saxophone; his time, tone and wit; his smooth and precisely rehearsed small band, the Tympany Five—a name that reflected drummer Walter Martin’s penchant for the symphonic tubs. Many of Jordan’s nearly 60 charted hits, recorded between 1942 and 1951, reached No. 1 and No. 2 on the R&B chart and crossed over to the largely white pop chart. But as often happens with pop artists, the selling points that dazzled one generation repelled the next. Jordan’s role as the jump-band heir to Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller established him as a nonpareil attraction for black audiences, for whom his jokes signified an intimate bond. With changing times and attitudes, however, his clowning, costumes and speechifying would be smugly dismissed as Tomming; the comical exaggeration that made “Caldonia” or “Beware” sensations in the 1940s were disdained as a kind of minstrel badinage. It didn’t help that white singers found Jordan’s attack so contagious that they couldn’t refrain from trying to sing “black.” Jordan had created a unique musical sphere in which black culture—good, bad and ridiculous—was often skewed and always celebrated. If he generally ignored modes of contemplation, he also rejected mean-spiritedness, dejection and self-pity. His music derives much of its appeal and humor from its immersion in Southern black communities, everyday life and current trends. His songs are about sexual and marital mores, Saturday night parties, the draft and the church—in emphasizing good times, they explore personal peccadilloes rather than injustice. The white world hardly exists in his music, which advanced archetypes of blackness that reflect a pride of being. Jordan reminded people that African-Americans had a life, not just a grievance. Jordan was born on July 8, 1908, in Brinkley, Ark., studied clarinet and saxophone with his father (a music teacher) and began gigging at 15, touring with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. He headed north in 1930, and began to make his name in 1936, when Chick Webb recruited him as alto and soprano saxophonist and vocalist. Although he is said to have delighted audiences in concert, Jordan was given little to do by Webb on recordings—possibly to avoid competition with his other singer, Ella Fitzgerald. On a few featured numbers (“Gee But You’re Swell,” “Rusty Hinge”), Jordan sings rigidly and high and is defeated by poor material. After several clashes, Webb fired him, and Jordan set out to create a small band using Waller and John Kirby as his models. Jordan’s Elks Rendezvous Band debuted in 1938, when orchestras ruled the music business, and from the first, he demonstrated clarity and purpose in his alto solos, on “So Good” and “Honey in the Bee Ball,” singing with loose-limbed panache on the latter, and playing a surprisingly smooth baritone sax on “Barnacle Bill the Sailor,” which also spurred his comic instincts. Early the next year, he introduced the Tympany Five (Martin gives the tympani a workout on “Flat Face”), an ensemble that, despite its evident polish, gave the illusion of merry spontaneity. The arrangements focused on Jordan’s ingratiating vocals and alto, which combined the centered sound and cohesive logic of Hilton Jefferson with the melodic ideas of Benny Carter. Jordan didn’t recruit many famous names, but in the early years he had two fine trumpet players—briefly Freddie Webster (whom Miles Davis claimed as an influence) and reliable, neglected Eddie Roane; both men died in their thirties. By 1944, the Tympany Five had several huge hits under its belt, including “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town,” “Five Guys Named Moe” and “Ration Blues,” when it struck gold with a double-sided classic: Johnny Mercer’s “G. I. Jive” (Jordan wailing on soprano) and an original collaboration with Billy Austin, “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby,” a superbly honed piece with its powerful bass vamp, engaging verse and knockout chorus. Several films followed, along with duets involving Armstrong, Fitzgerald and, in a savvy move that hastened his crossover stature, Bing Crosby, who left a party he and his wife were hosting to record “My Baby Said Yes” and “Your Socks Don’t Match”—the fun they had is especially evident on the breakdown take of the latter. By this time, Jordan was playing tenor (“I Like ’Em Fat Like That”), though often on tracks that weren’t released until CDs, including the calypso “De Laff’s On You.” But in 1946, he and Ella placed a calypso, “Stone Cold Dead in the Market,” at the top of the charts. Sonny surely recalled it when he introduced “St. Thomas” a decade later. Jordan pioneered the electric guitar in pop music, with Carl Hogan on “Reet Petite and Gone” and other sides in the mid-’40s. More influential was his use of the Hammond organ, as he encouraged pianists Wild Bill Davis and Bill Doggett to master it, combining piano and organ on “Tamburitza Boogie” and “Lemonade,” and spurring interest in portables before there was a B3. Illness derailed him in the ’50s, but he showed diversity and prescience at a 1952 session, mining a second-line beat on “Junco Partner,” and rendering a definitive reading of Wild Bill’s ballad “Azure-te.” Although he remained active until shortly before his death in 1975, Jordan’s great period was a 15-year stretch from 1939 to 1954, an era he helped define and continues to define. true 224 2008-06-12T21:10:30-04:00 false 17981 116 200806 true 81 2008-06-01T00:00:00-04:00

A few months ago, I interviewed Sonny Rollins on stage at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center (you can hear it at www1.cuny.edu/forums/podcasts/). Surveying his early years, Rollins said, “My first idol was a chap named Louis Jordan. Now Louis Jordan was an entertainer as well as a great instrumentalist and if you see anything by him today you might see him dancing or clowning around or having a funny costume on. But he was really a great musician and he really had the heart and soul of rhythm and blues.” He added that Jordan was “the guy who turned a lot of us on,” emphasizing, “He was a fantastic musician.” In this, Jordan’s centennial year, that fact ought to be commemorated. In the ’40s and ’50s, his influence was everywhere. He all but single-handedly created rhythm and blues, though his songs were covered by pop and jazz stars as well as the musicians who emerged directly from the idiom he established. Ray Charles not only recorded Jordan’s staples—“Let the Good Times Roll,” “Don’t the Sun Catch You Crying,” “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town”—but also leaned on Jordan’s arrangements and vocal attack. Dizzy Gillespie considered him the father of rock and roll, a claim borne out by Chuck Berry, who said, “I identify myself with Louis Jordan more than any other artist.” Yet Rollins was pointing beyond Jordan’s R&B styling to his way of playing alto and tenor saxophone; his time, tone and wit; his smooth and precisely rehearsed small band,...

2009-03-02T00:26:10-05:00

4 Most musicians don’t look much different on the bandstand than at ease. In the throes of creation, their cheeks may be distended or flushed and their eyes squeezed or closed, but they don’t undergo a complete transformation. Horace Silver is not most musicians. Look at the photos: When he isn’t playing, he smiles a dimpled smile or gazes with boyish serenity—Dr. Jekyll at your service. But in action, the bottled imp is uncorked as his spine snaps taut as a bow; his shoulders rise, the better to leverage his arms; his neatly combed hair flies forward with Cab Calloway defiance; and his eyes intensify into obsidian points of concentration. This is no Hyde, however: His ecstasy is as tempered as it is catching. He plays few notes, but makes you feel them all. Come September, Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silver—pianist, composer, lyricist, godfather of hard-bop, spiritualist, memoirist and phrasemaker who originated the name Jazz Messengers and established funk as a musical term—will celebrate his 80th birthday. No need to wait until then to celebrate. Silver hasn’t recorded in a decade, yet he has a new album. Blue Note, the label that documented his greatest years and now has as much luck trolling the Library of Congress as jazz clubs, has come up with another forgotten blast: Silver’s Live at Newport ’58. Having found a tape in the LOC and remembering that George Avakian recorded that year’s NJF for Columbia Records, Blue Note producer Michael Cuscuna went to Columbia’s vaults and found a three-track master. Had they released it half a century ago, it would already be in your collection. Silver’s music never goes out of date or catalog. But his low profile in recent years and the mixed response to the didactic projects he recorded in the 1970s and ’80s (The United States of Mind, Guides to Growing Up) have reduced his recognition among younger fans. They may even be surprised to hear the Voice of America’s voice of God, Willis Conover, introduce him to the Newport audience as a peer of Ellington and Monk. Well, why not? Like them, Silver wrote tunes that were instantly adapted by singers and school ensembles—tunes that were nonetheless constructed so ingeniously that they kept his soloists on red alert, as inspired by the melodies, harmonies, meters and forms as by Silver’s adrenalin-pumping accompaniment. Silver co-founded the Jazz Messengers with Art Blakey in 1953. They made a few live recordings (including A Night in Birdland, with Clifford Brown) that codified a new urban jazz that modified bebop complexity with the blunt directness of blues and gospel-inspired melodies and backbeats or—as Silver called them—“finger-popping” rhythms. During their three-year partnership, Silver composed several of the tunes that incarnated the hard-bop aesthetic. Born and raised in Connecticut, he had soaked up a far-ranging assortment of musical influences: Cape Verdean folk music learned from his immigrant father, tenor saxophone studied with a church organist, blues, boogie-woogie, big bands (he idolized Jimmie Lunceford) and especially bop. At 21, he was discovered in Hartford by Stan Getz, who took him on tour and into recording studios. He was soon in demand, working with Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and Charlie Parker, and appearing with Miles Davis on the benchmark 1954 Walkin’ sessions that helped turn the tide from cool to hard. Beyond his ability to filter bop through gospel, R&B and folksong structures, Silver demonstrated an uncanny ability to compose catchy melodies that sounded familiar and new at the same time. One of his early pieces, “Opus de Funk” (1953), a play on Getz’s “Opus de Bop” (1946), popularized a word on which he practically had a patent before James Brown and George Clinton came along. The word funk is derived from 19th-century slang for spoiled tobacco, and before Silver it had mostly unpleasant associations—as Jelly Roll Morton sang, “It’s nasty, it’s horrible, take it awaaaay.” Several Silver tunes of varying degrees of funkiness were adapted by pop and soul performers: “The Preacher,” “Doodlin’,” “Senor Blues,” “Peace,” “Song for My Father” and others. Live at Newport is notable on a few counts. Incredibly, it seems to be the only live Silver performance released (at least legally), other than 1961’s Doin’ the Thing, recorded at the Village Gate. The opening track, “Tippin’,” has been out for years on a Swedish label, but the three other tracks, which are better, have been buried. It offers a rare chance to hear trumpet player Louis Smith, who had a brief Blue Note association before he left the travails of the road for a career in education. His bravura chops (phrasing against the beat, double-tonguing) and appealing sound might have established him as an heir to Clifford Brown. The other players are tenor saxophonist Junior Cook, who, after warming up his pitch, is in outstanding form, bassist Gene Taylor, and the ever-alert drummer Louis Hayes, whose slashing cymbals detonate rests and turnbacks. The four pieces are a lesson in Silverismo. “Tippin’” is a headlong theme: rolling eighth notes that pause at the release for parallel riffs of descending thirds. After Cook and Smith play four choruses each, Silver burrows in for eight, dropping hints along the way of “High Society,” “Shortnin’ Bread” and a bugle call. Then things get more serious. Silver had recorded “The Outlaw” early in 1958, but in that performance you can practically hear the players sweating out the format, one of Silver’s most treacherous. It has an ABABCD form in which the A and C sections are in straight-four while the B and D sections have a Latin beat. That’s the easy part. The hard part is that A is seven bars, B six, C 10, and D is a 16-bar adlib followed by a two-bar written break. What a difference a few months make, especially for Hayes, who shapes the grid so decisively that the musicians glide through their solos. “Senor Blues” was a hit in its day, released as a single and covered by several singers (with lyrics by Silver); the first version I ever heard was by the rock and roll singer Dee Clark. Which doesn’t mean it’s remotely conventional. Written in six flats, it opens with a mild dissonance and encompasses two Latin rhythms in the course of its 24-bar blues-driven main theme and the 16-bar rave-up interlude; for good measure, it ends with an additional 16-bar coda—Silver isn’t the sort of guy who just fades out. His extended solo on this track, beginning with a spiky tremolo, is the high point of the set, and one of his best on records. “Cool Eyes” is 32 bars and each eight-bar segment is different, producing a surprisingly evenhanded gambol complete with diminished chords, significant rests, suspended time and a two-note breath-catching riff. When it was over, the audience didn’t want the band to stop. Unlike the Newport crowd, we can hit replay. true 224 2008-06-17T18:48:25-04:00 false 18227 118 200804 true 81 2008-04-01T00:00:00-04:00

Most musicians don’t look much different on the bandstand than at ease. In the throes of creation, their cheeks may be distended or flushed and their eyes squeezed or closed, but they don’t undergo a complete transformation. Horace Silver is not most musicians. Look at the photos: When he isn’t playing, he smiles a dimpled smile or gazes with boyish serenity—Dr. Jekyll at your service. But in action, the bottled imp is uncorked as his spine snaps taut as a bow; his shoulders rise, the better to leverage his arms; his neatly combed hair flies forward with Cab Calloway defiance; and his eyes intensify into obsidian points of concentration. This is no Hyde, however: His ecstasy is as tempered as it is catching. He plays few notes, but makes you feel them all. Come September, Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silver—pianist, composer, lyricist, godfather of hard-bop, spiritualist, memoirist and phrasemaker who originated the name Jazz Messengers and established funk as a musical term—will celebrate his 80th birthday. No need to wait until then to celebrate. Silver hasn’t recorded in a decade, yet he has a new album. Blue Note, the label that documented his greatest years and now has as much luck trolling the Library of Congress as jazz clubs, has come up with another forgotten blast: Silver’s Live at Newport ’58. Having found a tape in the LOC and remembering that George Avakian recorded that year’s NJF for Columbia Records, Blue Note producer Michael Cuscuna went to Columbia’s vaults and found a three-track master. Had they...

2009-03-02T00:26:18-05:00

4 Bet on it: Just about every Matthew Shipp album will spur someone to write that it is more accessible than its predecessors, an observation that says more about the observer than Shipp, who has never been all that inaccessible. His reputation for obscurity, as opposed to, say, obliquity, of which he is indeed a master, is somewhat patronizing, with its insinuated subtext: “We can appreciate his music, but it may be beyond your less-evolved sensibility.” Shipp’s music is too diverse and expansive to fit anyone’s pigeonhole, but for the most part it is decidedly listener-friendly. Piano Vortex (Thirsty Ear), one of the outstanding discs of 2007, has proved particularly conducive to claims of mainstreaming, and I’m not sure why. For one thing, it’s less traditional than such previous group works as Pastoral Composure (2000) and Expansion, Power, Release (2001), or the gripping solo recitals, Songs (2002) and One (2006). Like most of Shipp’s music, it is entertaining and demanding in equal parts. If it gets a broader hearing than usual because it is reputed to be more conventional than usual, fine. But I fail to see the virtue in suggesting to those who fear or applaud Shipp’s avant-garde status that Piano Vortex is regressive or uncharacteristic, especially in light of his decision to open it with the longest and most challenging track. Piano Vortex is significant on a few counts. It reunites Shipp with two longstanding collaborators: drummer Whit Dickey, who worked with him for much of the 1990s, in and out of the David S. Ware Quartet; and guitarist Joe Morris, who has partnered with Shipp on and off for a quarter-century—only this time, he plays bass, not guitar, and with unexpectedly impressive authority. It is Shipp’s first recording since Ware’s Renunciation (Aum Fidelity), a candidate for the best CD of 2007, which signaled the quartet’s dispersal, at least as far as American concerts go. The rave-up enthusiasm this superb group invariably triggered in live performances never transferred into record sales, which may be why the label included several minutes of applause, a sentimental but understandable gesture. Renunciation, recorded in New York at the 2006 Vision Festival, captures the quartet (tenor saxophonist Ware, Shipp, bassist William Parker, drummer Guillermo E. Brown) with flags flying: the “godspellized” sublimity of “Ganesh Sound,” the strenuous exchanges between Ware and band on the title suite (including one cadenza that whirls briefly into “Bags’ Groove” before rising into a series of the purest spectral saxophone hollers on record), and an emphatic reprise of “Mikuro’s Blues.” This is rousing stuff, and in the wake of its receding overtones, Shipp’s Piano Vortex may sound relatively quiet, settled and understated, but its power is deep and circuitous, the eight tracks held together almost suite-like by apparent pairings, conceptual echoes and pounding rhythmic figures that take off like Möbius strips. The title track begins almost gingerly, a meditative checking out of the terrain in which each dissonance is nicely italicized. There is a feeling of intuition reminiscent of Paul Bley—spare, lyrical and observant, as melodic fragments and harmonies unfold in a stream of remembered bits, shadowed by Morris’ alert bass, all of it coming together and coagulating midway. “Piano Vortex” is a piece that needs to be returned to after the rest of the album has been absorbed, as if it were a round. In sharp contrast, “Key Swing” is short, repetitive and rhythmic, with little in the way of improvisational variation; its recurring eight-bar piano figures recall pieces by Herbie Nichols in their tricky hops and minor mood. “The New Circumstance” sets out in another direction, introduced by bowed bass and drums, and emerging as a rubato cluster of chords that in turns leads to a simple melody with an Eastern accent, which builds in rhythmic intensity until it emerges in a brief headlong groove (plucked bass, pattering snare drums) that opens up to bass and drums solos, until Shipp wraps it up so that the other guys can take it out. In other words, you cannot predict where the hell this thing is going, though it never slumps in getting there. Again, in sharp contrast, the shorter “Nooks and Corners” is all forward momentum. The theme is a witty and engaging riff, naggingly repeated, complete with some Morse code plinking and riotous swing: great fun—the kind of thing Jaki Byard would have dug. And then the disc attains a deeper level with two masterly performances that show how really resourceful this trio can be. “Sliding Through Space” opens with a disarmingly lyrical melody, but the axis of interest ricochets from one corner of the triangle to another while stacking cumulative timbres. Morris’ bowing makes pitches sound as if they were played backwards, and slips through piano chords as Alan Silva once did with Cecil Taylor. Shipp pummels a characteristic rhythm, pedal pressed to the floor for maximum thunder. Yet overall, the drama is held in reserve, waxing and waning and waxing and finally waning into lyricism. “Quivering With Speed” is possibly the most Taylor-inspired piece; firmly grounded by Dickey’s drums, it is rigorously controlled, as Shipp reasserts pedaled dynamics (he really likes these chords), rolls vivaciously through the treble keys, and cuts out on a surefire vamp. The final two pieces indicate yet another pairing. “Slips Through the Fingers” is an unaccompanied piano solo that uses a technique associated with Thelonious Monk: playing plush chords and then raising all the fingers but one. This is Shipp in a romantic, classical mode, though just when you think he is meditating on the 19th century, he mixes up the rhythm and fills out the body of sound with left-hand forays. The piece is short (little more than three minutes) and the abrupt ending is the album’s one disappointment; every time I play it, I play it twice. “To Vitalize,” the closer, does what it promises, demonstrating especially impressive digital command as Shipp sustains the rhythm established by a strict bass walk, improvising eight-bar phrases that are as conspicuously lacking in reiteration as some of the previous pieces partake of it. After “To Vitalize,” go back to “Piano Vortex” and notice how relaxing it is, how sensible, even logical, it now seems. Vortex-like, this album sucks you in and keeps you spinning. true 224 2008-06-18T19:10:01-04:00 false 18371 120 200803 true 81 2008-03-01T00:00:00-05:00

Bet on it: Just about every Matthew Shipp album will spur someone to write that it is more accessible than its predecessors, an observation that says more about the observer than Shipp, who has never been all that inaccessible. His reputation for obscurity, as opposed to, say, obliquity, of which he is indeed a master, is somewhat patronizing, with its insinuated subtext: “We can appreciate his music, but it may be beyond your less-evolved sensibility.” Shipp’s music is too diverse and expansive to fit anyone’s pigeonhole, but for the most part it is decidedly listener-friendly. Piano Vortex (Thirsty Ear), one of the outstanding discs of 2007, has proved particularly conducive to claims of mainstreaming, and I’m not sure why. For one thing, it’s less traditional than such previous group works as Pastoral Composure (2000) and Expansion, Power, Release (2001), or the gripping solo recitals, Songs (2002) and One (2006). Like most of Shipp’s music, it is entertaining and demanding in equal parts. If it gets a broader hearing than usual because it is reputed to be more conventional than usual, fine. But I fail to see the virtue in suggesting to those who fear or applaud Shipp’s avant-garde status that Piano Vortex is regressive or uncharacteristic, especially in light of his decision to open it with the longest and most challenging track. Piano Vortex is significant on a few counts. It reunites Shipp with two longstanding collaborators: drummer Whit Dickey, who worked with him for much of the 1990s, in and out of the David S....

2009-03-02T00:26:23-05:00

4 In 1978, a large Third Avenue storefront that couldn’t keep tenants for more than a year or two reopened as a restaurant called Blue Hawaii. The place was so spacious that a good night in a normal restaurant meant half capacity at Blue Hawaii—and it was rarely that full. The owner was a nice man who loved jazz and installed a fine grand piano in a corner niche, perfect for listeners while suitably removed from uninterested diners. This short-lived island paradise (the décor included sea-blue paint and fish nets, and the menu offered forgettable dishes that may or may not have involved pineapple) was situated directly across the street from my apartment, and the owner refused money from jazz critics. Better yet, the incomparable Jaki Byard was often in residence, solo. The audience was usually so, let us say, intimate that the sets were like séances, with much give-and-take between the artist and the house, which on certain nights consisted of, say, two freeloading critics with dates and Jaki’s witty wife, Louise. During one set, Jaki noodled for a moment and then came up with an idea: He would play a medley of Dizzy Gillespie tunes. Well, you can imagine how utterly enthralling that performance was, especially when, toward the end, he moved into a rhapsodic “Con Alma.” Suddenly, he ceased his romantic wizardry, looked at the keyboard, and with one hand or one finger picked out the bare melody of “Con Alma,” just the first few measures. Then he stopped, turned toward us, and asked, “How the hell does he think of things like that?” I recall that my colleagues and I grumbled about the indignity of great musicians playing in restaurants and bars: We were young! We were idealistic! We were out of our minds! Of course, now I would happily pay for all the meals I ever cadged for one more evening of Jaki at Blue Hawaii or anywhere else. But wait (and cancel the check). What is this I hear before me? A previously unreleased 1978 solo recital by Jaki Byard, recorded at San Francisco’s Keystone Korner by its proprietor, Todd Barkan, and available to one and all from High Note Records as Sunshine of My Soul—and a triumph, no less, without an idling measure anywhere—one of the best Byard recitals on record. Don’t even think about not getting hold of it. The title, of course, is an incredibly dumb and pointless provocation—the same title as Byard’s classic 1967 Prestige trio album with David Izenson and Elvin Jones. Better to have borrowed the title of the opening track, “Tribute to the Ticklers,” a deliriously energetic cousin-once-removed from “ATFW You,” the Byard solo that opens last year’s other—and, yes, even more surprising, rewarding, revealing—recovery from the mists of time, Charles Mingus Sextet with Eric Dolphy, Cornell 1964, on Blue Note. (A remedial class in album-titling might not be unwarranted; and while we’re being parenthetical, full disclosure mandates pointing out that I wrote liner notes for the latter.) The fervent reviews that greeted the Mingus concert paid homage to Byard, but for some reason those plaudits seem to stop short of his own catalog. As I write, Amazon ranks the Mingus at 1,217 and the Byard at 83,221. Yet we are in a Byard revival of sorts. During his lifetime, he was frequently dismissed as an all-purpose, tongue-in-cheek eclectic. Now pianists who came of age back then offer a corrective. Jason Moran, one of his students, has been most diligent in reviving Byard’s compositions and flair. Other Byard students who carry a torch include Fred Hersch and D.D. Jackson. Mingus himself is unusually forthcoming in expressing his pleasure in Jaki’s work at the Cornell concert—during the numbers, not in-between. If Cornell 1964 whets the appetite for the Jaki Byard experience (the name of another Prestige classic, with Roland Kirk), the Sunshine recital is an ideal repast. Byard opens with ringing, descending tremolos that clear the air for the stride tribute to come—it’s like beginning the meal with palate-clearer and dessert. A Mingus medley begins with a masterly reconsideration of “Fables of Faubus,” played at first with melancholy compassion and then with angry resolve—a spellbinding interpretation that finds a new way of looking at an exceedingly familiar melody. The following transition runs through almost as many 19th-century piano signatures as he usually does ranging over jazz, which would be hilarious if it weren’t so startling, especially as the payoff is a boogie-woogie rendition of “Peggy’s Blue Skylight.” “Spinning Wheel” is one of the savviest jazz adaptations of a rock hit ever. Byard plays it respectfully but also turns it inside out. He begins it with an oom-pah-pah vamp, flies lyrically through the chord changes, plays the melody as a semi-stride blues (in the manner of other Byard adaptations like “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”), and then, as if losing interest in the melody, shrouds it in ever-richer chords that set up a superbly imaginative improvisation, the heart of the performance, before retracing his steps back to the melody and the triple-rhythm vamp. It’s a small Byard masterpiece. And so is “Besame Mucho,” a standard he played frequently, though not always with the operatic grandeur he bestows on this splendid version. When he goes into time, it’s the time of a Tatum or Garner, as reliable as a metronome, despite astonishing close-harmony chords thrown in along with artful rests and sweeping arpeggios. This is a fantasia, at once spontaneous and carefully worked out. Byard’s originals are no less illustrative of the pure pleasure he took in his virtuoso chops, most of which he kept in reserve, sampling them in the appropriate context and then, at times, unleashing them with effects that surprised even him. “Hazy Eve” is one of his prettiest tunes, and “European Echoes” one of his most buoyant—a fearless, glittery, striding tour de force that shows how much he owed to the masters of the form as well as how little. He develops “Song of Proverbs” into a stream-of-consciousness romance with the proper touch of Lisztian bombast; you can imagine him in tails with a candelabrum on the piano. “Sunshine,” an ingenious, spiraling workout, gets an exemplary reading, the kind that makes you wonder, “How the hell does he think of things like that?” true 224 2008-06-19T18:46:52-04:00 false 18481 121 200802 true 81 2008-01-01T00:00:00-05:00

In 1978, a large Third Avenue storefront that couldn’t keep tenants for more than a year or two reopened as a restaurant called Blue Hawaii. The place was so spacious that a good night in a normal restaurant meant half capacity at Blue Hawaii—and it was rarely that full. The owner was a nice man who loved jazz and installed a fine grand piano in a corner niche, perfect for listeners while suitably removed from uninterested diners. This short-lived island paradise (the décor included sea-blue paint and fish nets, and the menu offered forgettable dishes that may or may not have involved pineapple) was situated directly across the street from my apartment, and the owner refused money from jazz critics. Better yet, the incomparable Jaki Byard was often in residence, solo. The audience was usually so, let us say, intimate that the sets were like séances, with much give-and-take between the artist and the house, which on certain nights consisted of, say, two freeloading critics with dates and Jaki’s witty wife, Louise. During one set, Jaki noodled for a moment and then came up with an idea: He would play a medley of Dizzy Gillespie tunes. Well, you can imagine how utterly enthralling that performance was, especially when, toward the end, he moved into a rhapsodic “Con Alma.” Suddenly, he ceased his romantic wizardry, looked at the keyboard, and with one hand or one finger picked out the bare melody of “Con Alma,” just the first few measures. Then he stopped, turned toward us, and asked,...

2009-03-02T00:26:26-05:00

4 Sometimes you have to leave home to find yourself most at home. My recent trip to Brazil, culminating with the sixth annual Festival Tudo é Jazz in Ouro Preto (Sept. 13-16), provided a too brief but intense immersion in the marvels of Brazilian jazz, yet, in truth, the most unforgettable set was provided by homeboy Joshua Redman, leading a trio through selections from his Back East repertory. That album, released in April, is one of Redman’s best, and last summer he gave a bold account of it at Town Hall as part of the JVC Jazz Festival. Yet his performance at Ouro Preto was on another level—the kind you live for because it not only exceeds but upends expectations. My experience with Redman, in the 16 years since he won the Thelonious Monk competition, has been somewhat binary: occasions when he gives himself up to electrifying improvisations and interchanges with the members of his band; and occasions when he is so absorbed in his fastidious arrangements that he seems boxed by them. With the first notes of “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top,” the air in the main auditorium, Salão Diamantina, crackled: This would be an instance of the former, an inspired blowout, and two contributing factors were instantly evident. First: The hall’s sound is exceptionally vivid and was even more so with Redman’s sound man designing the amplification. In New York concert halls, we are almost inured to muddy sonics that give up the main facts of pitch and timbre with little of the nuance. Redman has worked too hard to master details of sound in every register on both tenor and soprano saxophone to lose them in echoes and overtones. On “Indian Song,” he produced an ethereal yet firmly edged tone on tenor, simultaneously of the air and earth; on “Angel Eyes,” he focused on the high and high-middle registers, etching two-note chords and above-the-scale squalls with offhanded accuracy; on “Zarafah,” his soprano swirled into near-Hebraic davening; on “Back East,” he unleashed a raucous knees-up tirade, neither Rollins nor Coltrane, but firmly in the mighty tradition that seems to exist chiefly to prove that jazz is brimming with a dynamism it hasn’t begun to exhaust. Second: Gregory Hutchinson. Which is not to say that bassist Matt Penman wasn’t an equilateral member of the triangle—he was precise, attentive, forceful. But Hutchinson, perhaps the great drummer of his generation, entered the fray with a muscularity that accommodated the arrangements while suggesting his impatience to move beyond them. Hutchinson’s counterintuitive provocations, turning rhythms around and clamping down on ballads, set up a chemistry that Redman basked in—this was only their third performance together on a tour that the trio’s usual drummer, Eric Harland, could not make. Yet the passion never undermined the lucidity, the always-involving clarity. Redman, shaking his head at one point, told the audience it might be the altitude, then said he wished that he could spend the rest of his life in Ouro Preto, “or at least a couple more hours.” There was much more from the North American contingent, which doubled as representatives of Israeli and Canadian jazz, including superb sets by Aaron Goldberg’s trio and the Omer Avital Quintet and a more languid but pleasing one by the Ingrid Jensen Quartet. Madeleine Peyroux and Wallace Roney fared less well, the former channeling Norah Jones (not as good a fit for her as Billie and Peggy), the latter paying a raucous homage to Joe Zawinul. One of the qualities that makes the Ouro Preto festival so absorbing, besides the magically preserved 18th-century environment (a pastel community built on steep hills that make San Francisco feel like the plains, it is located in Minas Gerais, between Sáo Paulo and Bello Horizonte) is the determination of founder-director Maria Alice Martins and co-curator Ivan Monteiro to combine music from the United States, Europe and Brazil. The Brazilian groups were fascinating, especially Casa Forte, a quartet led by the flutist and saxophonist (alto and soprano) Mauro Senise, playing music by the singer and composer Edu Lobo. His album of Lobo’s songs, one of the year’s outstanding releases, is difficult to find here, but worth the effort. Senise is a gifted improviser—his well-tuned soprano and beaming flute and piccolo combine, in the Brazilian manner, glittery virtuosity, rhythmic intensity and easy lyricism. No less impressive were solo turns by bassist Ivan Conti and pianist Itamar Assiere, and the arrangements (by Gilson Peranzzetta) of such memorable pieces as the ballad “Canção do Amanhecer” and the quasi-blues “A História de Lily Braun.” One of the more anticipated events was the reunion by pianist João Donato and altoist Bud Shank, which had moments of beauty but felt inhibited as Shank, at 81, began to show signs of fatigue and Donato restrained his own stirring beat. But it was also a chance to hear two fabled Brazilian rhythm players, bassist Luiz Alves and the remarkable drummer Robertinho Silva, a master of the brushes who is even more understated with sticks. My visit coincided with the publication of Música Nas Veias, the much-awaited memoir by the music historian, producer and radio personality Zuza Homem de Mello, who with his wife Ercìlia Lobo, were my hosts in and around São Paulo. While he signed hundreds of books one evening, I visited the magnificent Mozarteum Brasileiro, a train terminal converted into a state-of-the-art concert hall through a complex system of buffers. Gilbert Varga conducted the Basque Symphony Orchestra in a program that included the highly rhythmic Orreaga - Suite Basca by the neglected Aita Madina; Brahms’ Double Concerto, featuring violinist Lorenz Nasturica and cellist Asier Polo; and a brazenly immoderate embrace of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique. In Campinas, a couple of hours from São Paulo, Zuza took me to hear a similarly eclectic program by the 20-piece orchestra Zérró, led by the indefatigable bassist Zérró Santos (check him out on YouTube). The band combines original music, Brazilian classics and jazz classics (“Naima,” “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Mercy Mercy Mercy”) in a stream-of-consciousness collage: That is, the band doesn’t only go from one tune to another—it also interpolates one tune within another, depending on the whim of the leader, who, constantly on the move, changes the material as willfully as he does soloists, many of whom are young local players of much promise. Yet another eclectic big band closed the festivities at Ouro Preto: Maria Schneider, working with a Brazilian rhythm section and clearly psyched by the rehearsals. But I had to miss her performance in order to return to New York for Sonny Rollins’ 50th-anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall. I’ll have more to say about that glorious evening when the record comes out. true 224 2008-06-26T16:32:36-04:00 false 19193 124 200712 true 81 2007-12-01T00:00:00-05:00

Sometimes you have to leave home to find yourself most at home. My recent trip to Brazil, culminating with the sixth annual Festival Tudo é Jazz in Ouro Preto (Sept. 13-16), provided a too brief but intense immersion in the marvels of Brazilian jazz, yet, in truth, the most unforgettable set was provided by homeboy Joshua Redman, leading a trio through selections from his Back East repertory. That album, released in April, is one of Redman’s best, and last summer he gave a bold account of it at Town Hall as part of the JVC Jazz Festival. Yet his performance at Ouro Preto was on another level—the kind you live for because it not only exceeds but upends expectations. My experience with Redman, in the 16 years since he won the Thelonious Monk competition, has been somewhat binary: occasions when he gives himself up to electrifying improvisations and interchanges with the members of his band; and occasions when he is so absorbed in his fastidious arrangements that he seems boxed by them. With the first notes of “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top,” the air in the main auditorium, Salão Diamantina, crackled: This would be an instance of the former, an inspired blowout, and two contributing factors were instantly evident. First: The hall’s sound is exceptionally vivid and was even more so with Redman’s sound man designing the amplification. In New York concert halls, we are almost inured to muddy sonics that give up the main facts of pitch and timbre with little of the...

2009-03-09T17:07:56-04:00

4 Max Roach, the most ingenious drummer to rise with and define the nature of modern jazz, died on August 16. The news was hardly unexpected: He was 83 and had long battled that dreadful disease, Alzheimer’s. He rarely recorded or appeared in public during the past decade; his final bow, a 2002 collaboration with Clark Terry (Friendship), came as an isolated bolt from the blue, a shaking of the branches in the autumn of a career that endured more than its share of winter. So why does his passing darken the sky? Well, for one thing, a curtain has descended—when the last of the Mohicans goes, the world grieves a bit more than for most mortals. With the passing of Max, bop belongs to the ages. A few members of its second wave remain with us, most prominently James Moody, Lee Konitz, Hank Jones and those graduates of Bud Powell’s Modernists, Roy Haynes and Sonny Rollins. But Roach was the last survivor of Charlie Parker’s “Koko” session, the last constituent (as Parker might have said) in the first wave of benign revolutionaries who brought the new music to fruition at the Onyx Club, the Three Deuces and, as we learned only a couple of years ago, Town Hall, on June 22, 1945. Of course, Roach was not one to look back or stand on his laurels. You can count on your fingers the number of times he reconvened with his contemporaries to play in the bop style during the past half century. He first recorded, at 19, with Coleman Hawkins, in 1943, and within a year began working with Gillespie and Parker, while also touring as a member of Benny Carter’s orchestra. The breakthrough year for bop and Max was 1945. Before that, the modernists made do with swing drummers or trained younger adepts like Stan Levey in the exigencies of music that might be played very fast or very slow but was almost always volatile in a way that demanded the drummer’s complete involvement and hair-trigger reflexes. Kenny Clarke had paved the way, changing the primary time-keeping component from the skins to the cymbals and using the drums to prod and engage soloists. But Max was simply born to the manner, the drummer Bird and company had been waiting for. He was lean and cunning, tuning his drums high, driving the rhythm with focused efficiency, developing polyrhythms with crystal clarity—playing the music rather than letting it play him, a distinction that took new meaning in the middle 1950s, when his solos shunned the trap drums tradition of virtuoso buildup in favor of melodic incisiveness. After 1945, when he recorded with Sarah Vaughan as well as Parker, Roach became the key percussionist of modern jazz; for the next dozen years, he was everywhere. The bookends of his early career were a couple of two-year associations—working with Parker’s band in 1947-49 and, in what may have represented the peak of his professional life, co-leading the magisterial, doomed quintet with Clifford Brown, in 1954-56. In those same years, he helped to shape the budding luster of Bud Powell, Miles Davis, J.J. Johnson, Lee Konitz, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, Charles Mingus, Herbie Nichols, Abbey Lincoln and others. Like Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, he was always “there” when needed—at Rockland Palace, the birth of the cool, Massey Hall, Brilliant Corners. In 1952, Max and Mingus created Debut Records, a pioneering attempt to put musicians in charge of their own recordings. Most of his pioneering was in the realm of pure music: When Parker and Powell separately investigated Latin rhythms, Roach gave them foundations of blistering individuality; when Monk and Rollins separately investigated waltz rhythms, Roach gave them a modish confidence. He perfected the soon ubiquitous practice of trading fours on Parker’s “Bird Gets the Worm,” and took that gambit to another level a decade later, trading ones with Rollins on the latter’s “Someday I’ll Find You.” That track came from two sessions, in early 1958, that made up Rollins’ Freedom Suite, which in retrospect has come to suggest a demarcation in Roach’s career. Before it, almost everything he did was in the idiom of bop and its direct tangents. Reeling from the death of Clifford Brown, he rebuilt his quintet with Kenny Dorham, a trumpet player in the bop tradition. After Freedom Suite, we have a new Max Roach. In June, he debuted the band that introduced a remarkable 20-year-old trumpet player, Booker Little, whose impulsive phrasing—asymmetrical and dissonant yet tenderly intoned—seemed to revive Roach’s appetite for endless modernism. He replaced piano with tuba in that band, and made himself available for adventurous orchestral works by George Russell, Randy Weston, Mingus and the Boston Percussion Ensemble. In 1960 and 1961, Max and Abbey Lincoln, with whom he had twice recorded in a straight jazz context, made three stirring albums that melded jazz with black history and contemporary social conscience: We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, Lincoln’s Straight Ahead and Roach’s Percussion, Bitter Sweet. At the same time, he grew more deeply involved with the avant-garde as represented by Little and Eric Dolphy, and with vocal choirs. Constantly in transition, he and Mingus turned even a trio date with Duke Ellington (Money Jungle) into a prickly battle of wits. He led bands that included Freddie Hubbard, in 1965, and Charles Tolliver and Gary Bartz, in 1968, but found little traction, and ceased to record for three years. Roach returned in the 1970s with a choir, on Lift Every Voice and Sing, and the percussion ensemble M’Boom. The loft era in New York inspired him again, and he appeared in duets with musicians far removed from the music he had helped design, including Archie Shepp, Anthony Braxton, Connie Crothers and, in two infamous tussles separated by 20 years, Cecil Taylor. For two decades, he led a steely quartet with no chordal instrument and no soft edges, encouraging his longtime partners, trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater and saxophonist Odean Pope, to go for broke. For a while he added a string quartet, including his daughter Maxine on viola, touring as the Max Roach Double Quartet. Occasionally he organized other bands, leading the (apparently unrecorded) So What Brass, or teaming with percussionists like Olatunji and Tito Puente. In the 43 years between Freedom Suite and the valedictory with Clark Terry, he reunited with the 1940s insurgents only six times—most memorably on The Bop Session, in 1975, and in combustible duets with Gillespie, recorded in Paris in 1989. Yet during those decades, the peripatetic drummer reinvented himself and the image of the solo percussionist. Max had become a recitalist. This was perhaps his most improbable and radical innovation. He showed up in a concert hall with nothing more than sticks and a hi-hat cymbal, as casually as if he were carrying a bow and violin. He would play spellbinding mosaics, usually in deference to his predecessors, Jo Jones and Sid Catlett, demanding the highest respect for himself and the drums and getting it. Quite an accomplishment. true 224 2008-06-25T14:28:04-04:00 false 19021 115 200711 true 81 2007-11-01T00:00:00-04:00

Max Roach, the most ingenious drummer to rise with and define the nature of modern jazz, died on August 16. The news was hardly unexpected: He was 83 and had long battled that dreadful disease, Alzheimer’s. He rarely recorded or appeared in public during the past decade; his final bow, a 2002 collaboration with Clark Terry (Friendship), came as an isolated bolt from the blue, a shaking of the branches in the autumn of a career that endured more than its share of winter. So why does his passing darken the sky? Well, for one thing, a curtain has descended—when the last of the Mohicans goes, the world grieves a bit more than for most mortals. With the passing of Max, bop belongs to the ages. A few members of its second wave remain with us, most prominently James Moody, Lee Konitz, Hank Jones and those graduates of Bud Powell’s Modernists, Roy Haynes and Sonny Rollins. But Roach was the last survivor of Charlie Parker’s “Koko” session, the last constituent (as Parker might have said) in the first wave of benign revolutionaries who brought the new music to fruition at the Onyx Club, the Three Deuces and, as we learned only a couple of years ago, Town Hall, on June 22, 1945. Of course, Roach was not one to look back or stand on his laurels. You can count on your fingers the number of times he reconvened with his contemporaries to play in the bop style during the past half century. He first recorded, at...

2009-03-02T00:26:48-05:00

4 It would be easier to grouse about the paucity of great—or good or tolerable or watchable—jazz-themed feature films if Hollywood had done any better by classical music or rock. It hasn’t. Most American musicals, from The Jazz Singer and The Broadway Melody to Moulin Rouge and Dreamgirls, are concerned with the backstage tribulations of show folk, and employ stock storylines on which to hang the songs. Of all the movie genres, the glossy musical has died the stoniest of deaths. People too young to be courted by AARP may find Busby Berkeley’s calculus of female body parts or Fred and Ginger’s between-dancing spats or the Technicolor trippiness of Fox and MGM burlesques to be a realm as foreign as Oz. Camp will take you only so far down the yellow brick road. Even I, a diehard fan of musicals, am dumbfounded by Esther Williams. Yet jazz has long been an important part of the mix, and we must be grateful for what we have in the way of jazz footage on film and videotape. The twisted relationship between movies and jazz predated the sound era, when the latter was often invoked as an ominous indication of wayward flappers, dissolute roués and other lost souls. As decades went by, jazz continued to represent the underbelly of the human experience. For me, three items sum up that attitude. First, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), in which Jimmy Stewart is obliged to imagine idyllic Bedford Falls as if he had never been born. The place has gone to hell, particularly the friendly neighborhood bar, which in his absence has been invaded by bullies, rummies, hookers and … Negro jazz! Second, the humid saxophone glissando that became ubiquitous in melodramas of the 1950s. Whenever a doll gets flirtatious or has too much to drink or wanders into a bad part of town, cue the alto—a sultry, ascending little lick, jazz’s putative contribution to moral unrest. Third, a quite good Peruvian movie by Armando Robles Godoy, called The Green Wall (1970), about an office drone who leaves the noisy congestion of Lima for the verdant purity of the forest. When he is exulting in nature, the music is imitation Bach; when he’s in the nerve-shattering city, the music is imitation MJQ. On the other hand, there is also a long tradition of Hollywood using jazz to represent vitality and good times. As jazz musicians achieved national recognition, it was good business to banner them on movie marquees, and not just for intermission floor shows; a filmed cameo was the only way most people got to see them. When Duke Ellington appeared in the leaden blackface Amos ’n’ Andy vehicle, Check and Double Check (1930), for less than three minutes, black audiences lined up to see Duke. Significantly, Ellington wanted Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys to handle the vocal part, but as the producers would not allow white singers to share the stage with a black band, a mike was set up so that the trio could sing behind a curtain while three band members lip-synched their chorus. Crosby himself debuted as a leading man in Frank Tuttle’s ingeniously surreal The Big Broadcast (1932), which allowed the country its first peek at many radio stars, including Cab Calloway, the Mills Brothers and the Boswell Sisters. Still, the racial issue remained toxic throughout the 1930s and ’40s, as jazz became a familiar element in big-budget musicals. Black specialty numbers were routinely isolated from the storyline so that they could be excised when the film was distributed in the South. In 1936, Crosby invited Louis Armstrong to appear in Pennies From Heaven, which established him as a “specialty” performer in movies, and in 1937, Berkeley ignored the color line to feature the Benny Goodman Quartet in Hollywood Hotel. As the swing era waxed, however, almost all the good gigs went to white bands—though who could have added more snap to a film than Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb or the 1930s Basie band? Basie wasn’t invited west until 1943 (Reveille with Beverly), and the others were relegated to shorts. Thank goodness for Vitaphone and other makers of musical one-reelers, even if there is only one “Jammin’ the Blues” as opposed to dozens of Mickey Mouse novelty acts. The 1950s produced the biopics of dance-band leaders, and what a crew: Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Eddy Duchin, Red Nichols, each the subject of the same storyline: Arrogant rube arrives in city, is tamed by a woman, overcomes indifference or ridicule, triumphs, grows too big for his britches, dies or makes big comeback. The Glenn Miller Story (1953) has my all-time favorite line: Asked to describe his revolutionary approach to music, Jimmy Stewart’s Glenn explains, as if contemplating nuclear fission, “To me, music is more than just one instrument. It’s a whole orchestra playing together!” Sweet Love, Bitter (1967) originated the theme of the troubled black jazz genius, in this instance a saxophonist known as Eagle, whose travail is told from the vantage point of his enlightened white friend. No room here to debate the pros and cons of ’Round Midnight, Bird and Kansas City, but let me tell you about three good films that audiences ignored in droves. Jazzman (1983), by Russian director Karen Shakhnazarov, who also made a remarkable film about terrorists, The Rider Named Death (2004), depicts musicians risking their freedom to play jazz in the Soviet Union of the 1920s. Frank D. Gilroy’s The Gig (1985), a melancholy comedy, captures the enthusiasm of amateur jazz players. Gary Winick and Polly Draper’s The Tic Code (1999), though concerned with Tourette syndrome, accurately conveys the love of jazz among grade schoolers. Interestingly, all three share the same two themes—male bonding and jazz as a reason for living—and go far beyond the dictates of biopics. As I write, films about Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and other jazz musicians are in various stages of development. I haven’t even mentioned documentaries, which have proliferated over the past 40 years, or the countless hours of jazz preserved on international television, little of it seen here (consider the splendid Jazz Icons DVD series); there is enough archival material to fuel a 24-hour jazz TV station, if only someone had the interest and moxie to bring it off. The DVD offers many other possibilities, as witness the CD/DVD double-sets of the past few years. Jon Faddis and I were interviewed on camera for a featurette about Miles Davis’ score for Louis Malle’s 1958 film, Elevator to the Gallows, released as a Criterion DVD. Why don’t music producers get into that kind of thing? Using DVD technology to offer the kinds of supplements that helped to drive movie sales is one way to stay ahead of iTunes. true 224 2008-06-24T15:01:33-04:00 false 18844 123 200709 true 81 2007-09-01T00:00:00-04:00

It would be easier to grouse about the paucity of great—or good or tolerable or watchable—jazz-themed feature films if Hollywood had done any better by classical music or rock. It hasn’t. Most American musicals, from The Jazz Singer and The Broadway Melody to Moulin Rouge and Dreamgirls, are concerned with the backstage tribulations of show folk, and employ stock storylines on which to hang the songs. Of all the movie genres, the glossy musical has died the stoniest of deaths. People too young to be courted by AARP may find Busby Berkeley’s calculus of female body parts or Fred and Ginger’s between-dancing spats or the Technicolor trippiness of Fox and MGM burlesques to be a realm as foreign as Oz. Camp will take you only so far down the yellow brick road. Even I, a diehard fan of musicals, am dumbfounded by Esther Williams. Yet jazz has long been an important part of the mix, and we must be grateful for what we have in the way of jazz footage on film and videotape. The twisted relationship between movies and jazz predated the sound era, when the latter was often invoked as an ominous indication of wayward flappers, dissolute roués and other lost souls. As decades went by, jazz continued to represent the underbelly of the human experience. For me, three items sum up that attitude. First, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), in which Jimmy Stewart is obliged to imagine idyllic Bedford Falls as if he had never been born. The place has gone...

2009-03-02T00:26:42-05:00

4 When he had the wind in his sails, which was pretty often during a tragically curtailed career (he died at age 33 from complications incurred in a car accident), Chu Berry was a terror. Few musicians combine, as effortlessly and consistently as he, fearless aggression with sensible demeanor. Jazz in the prewar era was often a high-wire act. If all you got to show for yourself in a three-minute record was eight or 16 bars, you wanted to make the most of it, a situation that called for creativity, coordination and concentration. Berry took every cue as a challenge, restively running up against the waves, not unlike his most constant and inspired partner, the firebrand Roy Eldridge. We follow each of them with the slightly inflamed pleasure we get watching a great athlete, certain that he is having the time of his life and vicariously sharing in his daring. Mosaic has released Classic Chu Berry Columbia and Victor Sessions, an anthology of the tenor saxophonist’s best work, excepting a 1935 Red Norvo session for Columbia, which is in Mosaic’s Bunny Berigan box; Count Basie’s “Lady Be Good” (on Decca); and the indispensable Commodores (decisive alliances with Eldridge and Hot Lips Page), which Mosaic released long ago as part of its in toto presentation of that label’s catalog, now way overdue for a reissue series. Don’t miss this one. If you have been collecting jazz records for any length of time, you almost certainly have some of its contents—sessions by Fletcher Henderson, Cab Calloway, Gene Krupa, Wingy Manone, Lionel Hampton, Henry Allen, Teddy Wilson, Mildred Bailey and others. Get it anyway. Chu (pardon the informality, but who can resist that name?) recorded for only eight years, and this set is both a panorama of the 1930s and a Pilgrim’s Progress with a hero who brakes for nobody. Context counts for a lot in these comprehensive box sets; most of them are de facto storage bins to be rooted around in. But sometimes, as happens here, they unveil a compelling narrative. This one would be a lot more compelling if most of the alternative takes had been shunted to a separate disc. For the very patient listener, even they may add to the suspense generated by the nominal star, prone to tweaking his ideas on each outing. I’m not that patient; the value of three takes of “Papa’s in Bed with His Britches On” escapes me. Papa would do better to have a remote control in hand. Still, the upshot of 178 tracks, 34 of them alternates and breakdowns, is a vivid, twisty, usually beguiling portrait of a contradictory era when swing was a way of life, masking Depression, discontent and the only fear we had to fear. As linchpin, Berry valiantly stalks the perfect solo while documenting the jazzman’s travail, lending himself to settings that range from sublime (Krupa’s 1936 Victors, for example) to “A Chicken Ain’t Nothin’ But a Bird,” involving not only swing, but also New Orleans polyphony, ballads, rhythm and blues, and novelties—all in a day’s work. Occasionally, he was given free rein, as in his rendering, with Cab Calloway‘s band, of “Ghost of a Chance.” This performance is purposefully in the tradition of Coleman Hawkins’ “Body and Soul,” though it isn’t in that class—what is? As a rule Chu is more affecting at brighter tempos, like Henderson’s “Blue Lou” and “Stealin’ Apples,” Bailey’s “Lover Man” and “Thanks for the Memories,” Manone’s “Annie Laurie” and “Limehouse Blues,” and Calloway’s sleek “Bye Bye Blues.” The great thing about “Ghost of a Chance” and other ballads (Calloway’s rapturous “Lonesome Nights” is exceptional), beyond the penetrating beauty and insights of his ideas, is that we get to hear Berry think in slow motion, choosing his moves with canny deliberation, weighing one gambit against another. When he throws in a glissando or riffs that come straight from Hawkins, they underscore the unmistakable originality of his timbre and the governing framework of his solos. Berry is always conscious of the specific environment in which he solos. Henderson’s “Blue Lou” is in the major key, but it opens with a two-note riff in the minor mode. Berry begins his solo by echoing that riff, increasing the drama of the performance; at the bridge, his rhythmic attack seems to trigger the bassist into a sturdy walking figure. On Teddy Wilson’s magnificent “Blues in C Sharp Minor,” the great Israel Crosby (all of 17 years old) requires no such trigger; his bass ostinato is the heartbeat of the piece, and Chu draws from it a tapestry of dark emotions. Both these sides pair Chu with Eldridge, and they have their first face-off on Putney Dandridge’s “When I Grow Too Old to Dream.” Berry rides the whirlwind on that, a preview of Krupa’s euphoric session, where everyone generates serious adrenalin, despite that dreadful tune “Mutiny in the Parlor.” If Chu, Roy, Gene and Benny Goodman in full throttle don’t raise your temperature, you’re reading the wrong magazine. As guest of honor, Chu is invariably the one we keep waiting on, no matter how great the other players. He rarely disappoints. If the kettle is hot, he brings it to a boil; if it’s boiling, he makes it brim over. Charlie Parker apparently felt that way the first time he saw him in Kansas City. His young wife Rebecca remembered his excitement and her surprise, a few days later, when she found him in the living room, “blowing his brains out,” inspired by Chu’s solo on Henderson’s “Stealin’ Apples,” which he played repeatedly. Two years later, Parker named his firstborn Leon after Leon “Chu” Berry. Berry got his much-misspelled moniker (Choo, Chew) from musicians, because he chewed on his mouthpiece or had Fu Manchu facial hair or both. He earned the name all over again chewing up the changes on Lionel Hampton’s “Sweethearts on Parade,” a 1939 Chu extravaganza that is a candidate for his finest ever recording—a good place to start. Mosaic’s package is characteristically attractive, with fine full-bleed black-and-white photographs, excellent biographical and critical liner notes by Loren Schoenberg, and superb transfers. The sound is bright and real—don’t hesitate to give it juice. People often treat this music as nostalgia, as if they pined for the world that produced it. Screw that. That world was roiled by a Depression; lynching was virtually legal; the airwaves were flooded with racist and anti-Semitic ranting that makes Don Imus sound like Gandhi; the world was readying itself for war, the Holocaust and nuclear annihilation. Only the music was supreme and the music is still here—there is nothing nostalgic about it. JT true 224 2008-06-24T15:17:45-04:00 false 18854 111 200708 true 81 2007-07-01T00:00:00-04:00

When he had the wind in his sails, which was pretty often during a tragically curtailed career (he died at age 33 from complications incurred in a car accident), Chu Berry was a terror. Few musicians combine, as effortlessly and consistently as he, fearless aggression with sensible demeanor. Jazz in the prewar era was often a high-wire act. If all you got to show for yourself in a three-minute record was eight or 16 bars, you wanted to make the most of it, a situation that called for creativity, coordination and concentration. Berry took every cue as a challenge, restively running up against the waves, not unlike his most constant and inspired partner, the firebrand Roy Eldridge. We follow each of them with the slightly inflamed pleasure we get watching a great athlete, certain that he is having the time of his life and vicariously sharing in his daring. Mosaic has released Classic Chu Berry Columbia and Victor Sessions, an anthology of the tenor saxophonist’s best work, excepting a 1935 Red Norvo session for Columbia, which is in Mosaic’s Bunny Berigan box; Count Basie’s “Lady Be Good” (on Decca); and the indispensable Commodores (decisive alliances with Eldridge and Hot Lips Page), which Mosaic released long ago as part of its in toto presentation of that label’s catalog, now way overdue for a reissue series. Don’t miss this one. If you have been collecting jazz records for any length of time, you almost certainly have some of its contents—sessions by Fletcher Henderson, Cab Calloway, Gene Krupa, Wingy...

2009-03-02T00:26:43-05:00

4 The conductor Otto Klemperer once said, “Listening to a recording is like going to bed with a photograph of Marilyn Monroe.” Recordings have long been demonized—accused of destroying amateurism and live music, promoting soul-killing perfectionism, cheapening appreciation. The jeremiads have a grain of truth, but only a grain. We would no more give up on recordings than we would electric light. For one thing, they define the difference between Buddy Bolden, a subject of eternal speculation, and King Oliver, the object of eternally strained ears. The strain has just gotten easier. Archeophone, the indispensable company that resurrected the complete Bert Williams a few years back, is distributing one of the most vital jazz reissues in many years: King Oliver Off the Record: The Complete 1923 Jazz Band Recordings. The careful title reminds us that only the Gennett sides were credited to King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band; “Creole” was dropped for the selections he made for OKeh, Columbia and Paramount. Here they are: all 37 tracks in presumed chronological order and in startlingly resonant audio transfers. Given the tradition of Oliver mastering breakthroughs, I wouldn’t bet a nickel that these CDs will remain the last word in audio redemption forever and ever—just for the next few decades. All earlier editions are now obsolete. According to engineer Doug Benson, who co-produced with annotator David Sager, he elaborated on a method pioneered by the lamented John R. T. Davies. When I visited Davies 15 years ago, he explained that the grooves of 78-rpm discs contain more information than is usually retrieved, especially in the groove walls, which an ill-fitting stylus will not fully engage. His solution was to make a stylus that snugly fit the grooves of a particular disc. He excoriated the kind of digitalization used by major labels, which sacrifices musical information, especially in high and low frequencies, to blot out surface noise and create a “modern” sanitized sound. Of course, to mine the details, you need good copies of the originals. Benson provides documentation of his success in finding the best 78s (more than half are graded excellent or better), crafting more than a dozen styli (he gives the size of each and whether it is elliptically or conically truncated), and correcting pitch with playback speeds ranging fractionally from 78 to 81 rpm. The result is a kind of time machine, only better: What was it like to buy, in 1923, a brand new platter of, say, “Weather Bird Rag” and “Dipper Mouth Blues,” and play it at home for the first time? Chances are your gramophone and stylus would not have been as good as Benson’s. The main thing this set restores is presence, ambience—the very thing that early digitalization removed. I recall the horrified response of Erroll Garner’s manager, Martha Glazer, when she heard the first Garner CD on Columbia. “They made him sound as if he didn’t swing,” she said; an exaggeration, I thought, until I heard it. The brittle, processed, midrange sound emanated from a vacuum that shortchanged his momentum along with overtones and spatial resonance. Swing thrives on resonance, and that’s what this Oliver set recovers after nearly 85 years. One aspect of Oliver’s music that distinguishes it from other New Orleans ensembles is its massed charge, its rhythmic unity. His best performances sustain a proud vertiginous energy, whether the tempo is slow (“Riverside Blues”), medium (“Working Man Blues”), or up (“Snake Rag”). With these transfers, the massed force gives way to something more human: The band sounds like real musicians in a real place—breathing, thinking, interacting. At the same time, greater resonance increases the group’s rocking and rolling certainty. For one example, consider the prosaic chimes strain in “Chimes Blues,” two blues choruses where Lillian Hardin plays piano triads against the ensemble’s first-beat-of-the-measure chords. I usually roll my eyes with impatience, waiting for it to end and Louis Armstrong’s magnificent trio recitation to begin. Never again: The augmented ringing of the piano and its palpable relation to the ensemble underscores the swinging forthrightness of the passage, now revealed as an agreeably coherent setup for Armstrong. In the same passage, I am now struck by the dense written flurry of brasses at the turnback between Lil’s choruses. Returning to previous transfers of this music, I could hear that the turnback was always there, always audible, but I had never much noticed it: a lovely two-bar detail. I found myself going back often to LPs and older CDs to check details that had previously escaped my attention. I could always find them. But then the music was hardly impenetrable: Four decades ago, Gunther Schuller transcribed Oliver’s three-chorus trio solo on the Paramount “Mabel’s Dream” and (even more impressively) Oliver’s lead and Armstrong’s obbligato in the first trio chorus of the Gennett “Mabel’s Dream.” I wonder if even, or especially, Schuller might not uncover overlooked facets in the Archeophone discs. The biggest surprise concerns the Paramount session, once dim, now bolstered with electrifying sharpness—possibly, the producers speculate, because they were recorded electrically in the first place. I marvel anew at the work of each participant. Never did Johnny Dodds sound more warmly personal and evocative than on “Canal Street Blues,” “Dipper Mouth Blues,” “Sweet Lovin’ Man” and “Buddy’s Habit.” How unfairly neglected was Honore Dutrey, whose phrases once struck me as sentimental but now seem witty, knowing, at times almost sardonic. He is variously a rhythmic enabler (“Canal Street Blues”), rock of support (“Froggy Moore”) and formidable lead—his twisty glissandi and boozily whimsical playing on “Tears” is a perfect foil for Armstrong’s nine mind-bending breaks. Another point clarified here is Oliver’s desire to shift to a weightier big-band style three years before he launched his Dixie Syncopators. Whatever other reasons Oliver had for enlisting Armstong, he clearly relished the opulence Louis brought to the band, his presence indicating a transition from standard New Orleans polyphony to a more cosmopolitan orchestration. That shift is underscored at the last Gennett session with the addition of Stump Evans on C-melody saxophone (possibly doubling on bass saxophone, too), and at the OKeh session with the recruitment of the mysterious trigger-happy bass saxophonist Charlie Jackson. On “I Ain’t Gonna Tell Nobody,” Oliver’s team jets into the zone between embellished and written music, on a flight no one else quite matched. true 224 2008-06-24T20:36:50-04:00 false 18984 122 200706 true 81 2007-06-01T00:00:00-04:00

The conductor Otto Klemperer once said, “Listening to a recording is like going to bed with a photograph of Marilyn Monroe.” Recordings have long been demonized—accused of destroying amateurism and live music, promoting soul-killing perfectionism, cheapening appreciation. The jeremiads have a grain of truth, but only a grain. We would no more give up on recordings than we would electric light. For one thing, they define the difference between Buddy Bolden, a subject of eternal speculation, and King Oliver, the object of eternally strained ears. The strain has just gotten easier. Archeophone, the indispensable company that resurrected the complete Bert Williams a few years back, is distributing one of the most vital jazz reissues in many years: King Oliver Off the Record: The Complete 1923 Jazz Band Recordings. The careful title reminds us that only the Gennett sides were credited to King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band; “Creole” was dropped for the selections he made for OKeh, Columbia and Paramount. Here they are: all 37 tracks in presumed chronological order and in startlingly resonant audio transfers. Given the tradition of Oliver mastering breakthroughs, I wouldn’t bet a nickel that these CDs will remain the last word in audio redemption forever and ever—just for the next few decades. All earlier editions are now obsolete. According to engineer Doug Benson, who co-produced with annotator David Sager, he elaborated on a method pioneered by the lamented John R. T. Davies. When I visited Davies 15 years ago, he explained that the grooves of 78-rpm discs contain more information than is...

2009-03-02T00:26:47-05:00