4 The restorative powers of music are being increasingly documented—as, for instance, in the Louis Armstrong Music Therapy program at New York’s Beth Israel Medical Center. But music can be used to torture, as I’ve discovered in my day job, reporting on the CIA’s “enhanced interrogations” in its allegedly closed secret prisons and during its “renditions.” The latter violations of international laws and our own involve kidnapping terrorism suspects and storing them in foreign prisons specializing in torture. There, music played incessantly at unremittingly high volume can “break” any prisoner. I’ve written a number of syndicated columns about British citizen Binyam Mohamed who, finally released after years without charges, recalls his CIA experiences in our own overseas prison in Kabul, Afghanistan, and during “renditions”: “It was pitch black. … They hung me up for two days. My legs had swollen. My wrists and hands had gone numb. … There was loud music [by] Slim Shady and Dr. Dre for 29 days. … It got really spooky in this black hole.” Since the CIA’s playlists are classified as “state secrets” (as are many other details of President Obama’s continuation of the Bush-Cheney “renditions”), I don’t know if any jazz combos, classic or cutting-edge, have been torture apprentices. But I expect that any of us for whom music of any category is a vital life force, would agree with Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine (reported by Andy Worthington on commondreams.org on Oct. 23): “The fact that music I helped create was used as a tactic against humanity sickens me. We need to end torture.” And Rosanne Cash, phoning the <I>Washington Post</I>, adds: “I think every musician should be involved. … Music should never be used as torture. … It’s beyond the pale. It’s hard to even think about.” Cash’s call to the </I>Washington Post</I> resulted in this report by Eva Rodriguez there on Oct. 29: “Rosanne and crew filed Freedom of Information requests with some 10 U.S. agencies demanding all records pertaining to ‘the use of loud music during detention and/or as technique to interrogate detainees at U.S.-operated prison facilities in its War on Terror at Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan during 2002 to the present.” (They omitted the CIA secret prisons.) Note that her FOIA request was made toward the end of 2009! Soon after taking office, President Obama pledged to end the Bush-Cheney no-longer-secret practice of torture. So why are he and his CIA director, Leon Panetta, continuing CIA “renditions”? They won’t tell us, despite Obama also promising to stop the Bush administration’s use of “state secrets” to end court trials involving torture before any evidence is even heard. But Obama is vigorously wielding the “state secrets” privilege in several so far aborted court cases in which his administration demands secrecy even beyond the Bush-Cheney Justice Department. So we may never know who else is on those CIA playlists—and which CIA music critics put them there. We do know this from Andy Worthington on commondreams.org about further musicians’ protests: “As was reported widely yesterday, also launching a formal protest against the use of music as torture were REM, Pearl Jam, Trent Reznor … Jackson Browne, Billy Bragg, Michelle Branch, T-Bone Burnett, David Byrne, Rosanne Cash, Marc Cohn, Steve Earle, the Entrance Band, Joe Henry, Bonnie Raitt, Rage Against the Machine, and The Roots.” I don’t know if any of them are on President Obama’s iPod, but I’ve heard that John Coltrane is, among other jazz musicians. This prez obviously cares about music. Since he has continued the “legal black holes” of “renditions,” is he at all troubled by the possibility that other terrorism suspects are being relentlessly assaulted by music in what the CIA used to call “black sites”? This formal request by these musicians—also demanding song titles [for royalties?]—was filed by the valuable non-government National Security Archive in Washington. It has a good track record on penetrating government secrets, and I am impressed that this large part of the music community has done more than express “disgust” (Rosanne Cash’s term) at the defilement of their music by their own government. They’re actually trying to do something about it. Jazz musicians should not sit on the sidelines, but should get involved too. Jazz is an expression of freedom and the way music has been used in these facilities is an affront to that freedom and our rule of law. If you want to know more about the extent and depth of torture in our name, the most definitive book so far is <I>Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond</I> by Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh of the American Civil Liberties Union (Columbia University Press). Included are official autopsy reports (detailing the tortures), e-mails from FBI agents in the field aghast at these practices and interrogation directives, among many other government documents. Says one dedicated interrogator, describing preferred techniques: “sleep deprivation, white noise … fear of dogs and snakes appear to work nicely. I firmly agree that the gloves need to come off.” That last phrase is exactly what Dick Cheney said soon after 9/11. There are musicians, including many jazz musicians, who have the ear of Barack Obama. I wish they’d tell him—as Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane would have—“Dammit, put those gloves back on!” <I>Nat Hentoff can be contacted at 212-366-9181</I> true 95 2009-12-13T23:55:15-05:00 false 25454 179 true 94 2010-01-01T00:00:00-05:00

Nat Hentoff looks at how music has been used for torture and what musicians are doing about it.

2009-12-31T11:15:13-05:00

4 When I was a kid, doctors made house calls and learned more about a patient’s living and emotional conditions than they did taking a medical history in an office. These days, many increasingly overburdened doctors can usually give a patient little more than a short listening period. Recently I got all of 12 minutes from a physician I went to. As a result, and as I previously wrote in the April issue, there’s growing concern among medical educators to teach doctors how to let the patient set the tempo for revealing his or her symptoms and worries. In showing how Dr. Paul Haidet has become an expert in using jazz to instruct doctors in the advanced art of creative listening, I promised a second column on how he presents—in lectures and at medical conferences around the country—illustrations of “guided jazz listening” through specific recordings. Although most <I>JazzTimes</I> readers are not doctors, I thought you might be interested in expanding and deepening what you hear in the music through his commentary. And maybe some of the teachers of jazz courses in schools around the country can choose other recordings to show how much there actually is to hear. For instance, last December at New York’s Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, Dr. Haidet—during a seminar entitled “Where Medicine Meets Jazz: The Improvisational Aspects of Talking With Patients”—played the Bill Evans Trio’s “Waltz for Debby” (Take 2), from the Riverside CD of the same name. In introducing the audience to the concept of ensemble playing, he said, “The early ’60s Bill Evans Trio was one of the most empathic units in the history of jazz. Bill Evans and bassist Scott LaFaro, in particular, had a kind of mental telepathy going on. It was said that Bill could start a phrase and Scott would finish it, and vice versa. When you listen to ‘Waltz for Debby,’ listen to how the piano and bass weave in and around each other. Both players are improvising simultaneously in a way that they are making up a collective new melody to the song. This takes advanced listening to each other.” How does this happen in a doctor’s office? In an article, “Building a History Rather Than Taking One” (Archives of Internal Medicine, May 24, 2003), Haidet tells doctors how to improvise collectively, to develop “the ability of the physician not only to observe the patient during the medical interview, but himself/herself as well. This ability to observe one’s words and actions applies directly to questions asked during the development of the patient’s narrative,” a contrast to doctors’ “narrowly constructed yes/no questions.” I’d call that spontaneous empathy a way of describing the advanced listening of musicians in a jazz ensemble. Referring to “Waltz for Debby,” Dr. Haidet told the doctors and medical students at Mt. Sinai, “Listen to the first 30 seconds of this track. … [E]ven on something as straightforward as the statement of the melody, Evans and LaFaro compress and stretch time—in perfect unison! How did they do that?” By being able to hear inside one another. “Also,” Haidet continued during his seminar, “listen to what Paul Motian is doing on drums. LaFaro is not playing the usual thunk, thunk, thunk that you might expect from the bass player. Instead, he is running up into the high registers of the bass to ‘play’ with Evans. Then, when Motian goes off to rejoice with Evans, the drummer ever so subtly picks up the timekeeping function and accents his playing with the brushes in such a way that the song never loses its pulse, its ‘spark.’” Dr. Haidet concluded: “These three define what it means to listen and play, simultaneously, harmoniously.” And, as I can testify, being very much a lay listener, you don’t have to be able to identify the passing chords and what Basie guitarist Freddie Green called “the rhythm waves” in order to appreciate and learn from the music. At the core of the spontaneous interaction among jazz players, and listeners, is feeling. Art Blakey said it for all times: “You don’t have to be a musician to understand jazz. All you have to do is be able to feel.” So, too, in the doctor-patient relationship, the doctor has to give the patient the space and impetus to express not only his symptoms but also his range of feelings. And the doctor’s openness to his own feelings, as he takes real time to listen, will add to the spontaneity of his questions as he gets to know more of the whole patient. If you feel regularly rushed by your doctor, and he or she doesn’t intimidate you, you might want to show them these two columns on how medical educator Paul Haidet is trying to enable doctors and patients to improvise. This skill is all the more vital in our world of instantaneous communication and new media, where there is less and less true understanding of one another. (Take, for example, the Internet, where most people go only to sites they already agree with.) Another dividend of Dr. Haidet’s pioneering, I expect, will be more doctors starting collections of jazz recordings and being drawn into jazz clubs. true 95 2009-10-08T16:20:38-04:00 false 25161 176 true 94 2009-08-01T00:00:00-04:00

When I was a kid, doctors made house calls and learned more about a patient’s living and emotional conditions than they did taking a medical history in an office. These days, many increasingly overburdened doctors can usually give a patient little more than a short listening period. Recently I got all of 12 minutes from a physician I went to. As a result, and as I previously wrote in the April issue, there’s growing concern among medical educators to teach doctors how to let the patient set the tempo for revealing his or her symptoms and worries. In showing how Dr. Paul Haidet has become an expert in using jazz to instruct doctors in the advanced art of creative listening, I promised a second column on how he presents—in lectures and at medical conferences around the country—illustrations of “guided jazz listening” through specific recordings. Although most JazzTimes readers are not doctors, I thought you might be interested in expanding and deepening what you hear in the music through his commentary. And maybe some of the teachers of jazz courses in schools around the country can choose other recordings to show how much there actually is to hear. For instance, last December at New York’s Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, Dr. Haidet—during a seminar entitled “Where Medicine Meets Jazz: The Improvisational Aspects of Talking With Patients”—played the Bill Evans Trio’s “Waltz for Debby” (Take 2), from the Riverside CD of the same name. In introducing the audience to the concept of ensemble playing, he said, “The early...

2009-10-08T16:21:46-04:00

4 There is a growing momentum in medical education to make doctors aware that they not only take the patient’s history, but, much more meaningfully, must listen to his or her stories about why they came to a doctor. Too often a physician makes a diagnosis quickly, based on past experiences with that condition and certain stereotypes of the illness. A leading medical educator and practicing physician, Dr. Paul Haidet, is pioneering the use of jazz to teach medical students and doctors how jazz musicians, as they improvise, listen deeply to one another’s stories. Haidet, a longtime jazz listener—he was a jazz disc jockey in college—quotes in his essay “Jazz and the ‘Art’ of Medicine: Improvisation in the Medical Encounter,” what McCoy Tyner said of Roy Haynes: “The thing that sets Roy apart from other musicians is that he listens so well. He teaches you to listen carefully and to respond accordingly—to put things in perspective, not simply go out for yourself.” Haidet tells me that Miles Davis is another of his teachers in how to use space in communicating with a patient. As he has written in the Annals of Family Medicine (March 2007), “Rather than take up all the space in the conversation with strings of ‘yes/no’ questions or long psychological explanations, I find that I am at my best when I can give patients space to say what they want to say, gently leading patients through the telling of their illness narrative from their perspective, rather than forcing their narrative to follow my biomedical perspective.” As of this writing, Dr. Haidet is a staff physician at the DeBakey VA Medical Center as well as an associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine, both in Houston. I was introduced to him and his work by my son-in-law, Dr. David Nierman, who directs a hospital in Queens, N.Y., and who is a swinging jazz saxophonist when he can find time for jazz gigs. Dr. Nierman is also involved with using music to teach medical students how to listen. I wish Duke Ellington were here so that I could tell him about this advance in medical education. The Ellington Orchestra was like the Supreme Court in that vacancies were few. I once asked Duke what his criteria were in deciding to bring a new player into the band. “He has to show me,” Duke said, “that he knows how to listen.” Dr. Haidet, who is designing a course for medical students and young doctors to teach them, through jazz, improvisation in medical settings, educated me with a quote from Dr. Stephen Nachmanovitch, a violinist and educator, on the vital importance of improvisation in doctor-patient settings. What he says is something that jazz educators should also tell their students about how to listen creatively during a gig: “In real medicine, you view the person [the patient] as unique. You use your training, but you don’t allow your training to blind you to the actual person sitting in front of you [or alongside you in a band]. In this way, you pass beyond competence to presence. To do anything artistically, you have to acquire technique, but you create through your technique, not with it.” As Ralph Ellison puts it in Living With Music (Modern Library), “After the jazzman has learned the fundamentals of his instrument and the traditional techniques of jazz … he must then ‘find himself,’ must be reborn, must find, as it were, his soul. He must achieve his self-determined identity.” And simultaneously, must be able to listen to the “actual persons” playing with him. How does this apply to the doctor-patient relationship? Says Dr. Haidet, “It takes recognition that all voices in the medical encounter have things to say that are as important as one’s own statements. … And it takes raising one’s awareness to clues: nonverbal signals, fleeting glimpses of emotion, and key words [such as ‘worried,’ ‘concerned’ and ‘afraid’] and following up on these clues when they present themselves. “The essence of ensemble, whether in jazz or in medicine, lies in looking beyond one’s own perspective to see, understand and respond to the perspective of others.” In July, Haidet will become Director of Medical Education Research at the Penn State University College of Medicine in Hershey, Pa. He will carry with him a lesson from a teacher he much admires, Bill Evans, on the challenge of group improvisation: “Aside from the weighty technical problem of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social, need for sympathy from all members to bend for the common result.” And, in medicine, Haidet adds, “Physicians and patients can achieve ensemble in their improvisation by accommodating, where possible, to each other’s statements and styles of communication.” As a patient, there are varied and uneven skills of communication, when you’re conscious of your mortality. Dr. Haidet has already conducted several sessions with medical students and physicians in which they learn through “guided jazz listening” (specific jazz recordings) about how hearing this music can enhance their interrelationships with patients telling them their stories. In my next column, I will give you a list of those recordings he chooses, through which you can test yourself—even if you’re not a doctor or medical student—in what jazz teaches you about the nature of improvisation; the creation of a singular personal sound; the importance of space in the act of communication; and the art of listening to one another in ensembles. Haidet told me that one of his references in teaching is a story in my book, Listen to the Stories, about how Charlie Parker shocked fellow musicians at a bar by choosing country music records on a jukebox. Bird explained his pleasure in that music: “Listen to the stories!” true 95 2009-04-01T14:36:01-04:00 false 24523 138 true 94 2009-04-01T00:00:00-04:00

There is a growing momentum in medical education to make doctors aware that they not only take the patient’s history, but, much more meaningfully, must listen to his or her stories about why they came to a doctor. Too often a physician makes a diagnosis quickly, based on past experiences with that condition and certain stereotypes of the illness. A leading medical educator and practicing physician, Dr. Paul Haidet, is pioneering the use of jazz to teach medical students and doctors how jazz musicians, as they improvise, listen deeply to one another’s stories. Haidet, a longtime jazz listener—he was a jazz disc jockey in college—quotes in his essay “Jazz and the ‘Art’ of Medicine: Improvisation in the Medical Encounter,” what McCoy Tyner said of Roy Haynes: “The thing that sets Roy apart from other musicians is that he listens so well. He teaches you to listen carefully and to respond accordingly—to put things in perspective, not simply go out for yourself.” Haidet tells me that Miles Davis is another of his teachers in how to use space in communicating with a patient. As he has written in the Annals of Family Medicine (March 2007), “Rather than take up all the space in the conversation with strings of ‘yes/no’ questions or long psychological explanations, I find that I am at my best when I can give patients space to say what they want to say, gently leading patients through the telling of their illness narrative from their perspective, rather than forcing their narrative to follow my biomedical...

2009-04-16T16:09:13-04:00

4 Preparing for an interview at New York’s Blue Note jazz club with Ron Carter—master bassist, cellist, challenging leader and composer—I read something he said in Jazz Improv-New York that is seldom said in public: “The black press, the black media has a great deal of responsibility for the lack of—and the possibility of—increasing the visibility and viability of jazz.” In our conversation, Ron elaborated: “Papers like the Amsterdam News, the Chicago Defender, the L.A. Sentinel, the Pittsburgh Courier, assuming all of them still exist, they have a responsibility not just to advertise Kangol hats and the latest wedding and church services, but also to say, ‘This music is your contribution to more than your neighborhood!’” I told him that when I was in my teens, I’d regularly read some of those newspapers for civil rights news, but hardly ever found any jazz. But speaking of spreading the word, I said to Ron, “Currently the major figure in media, all across the country, is Oprah Winfrey. Has she heard much jazz?” “No,” he said. “The story is she’s not a fan of the music. A person like her has so much power. She’ll say, ‘This is my favorite book of the month,’ and it’ll sell a million copies in two weeks. She makes stuff move!” “Maybe,” I asked, “since she’s a strong supporter of Barack Obama, if he knows anything about jazz, he can get her involved.” “Well, the story is that he’s got John Coltrane on his iPod, so we’ll see if Obama has interest in anything other than Coltrane.” Since Ron mentioned the venerable and still forceful Amsterdam News in Harlem, I told him of the time when Adam Clayton Powell, the formidable congressman from Harlem, started a newspaper there in competition with “The Amsterdam,” as it was called. I knew the editor, and often saw him at jazz clubs, but the music was scarcely covered in the new paper. I asked him why. Usually forthright, the editor vamped for a while, and finally indicated that jazz didn’t have the “image” the paper wanted to be too closely associated with. That reminded me of conversations I had long ago with Sterling Brown, an extraordinary poet, folklorist, expert on the blues, and author of such seminal books as Southern Road, for which James Weldon Johnson wrote the introduction, saying that Brown “had deepened the meaning and multiplied the implications of black folk poetry.” Starting in 1929, Sterling Brown taught English for some 40 years at Howard University, where his papers are archived. When we spoke long ago, he startled me by saying that during all the time he was at Howard University, he was not allowed to include jazz in his courses. It was a question of the music’s origins in such bawdy places as Storyville in New Orleans, and its early denunciations in some pulpits as “the devil’s music.” A matter of “image.” “So what I did,” Brown told me, “was bring in recordings such as Stravinsky’s ‘Ragtime’ and certain works by Darius Milhaud, who had been influenced by jazz. “Then I’d say to the students, ‘Now I’ll show you where this music came from,’ and I’d put on some stride piano recordings by Luckey Roberts, and the music of Duke Ellington.” Other jazz musicians who’d attended black colleges also told me that jazz was, to say the least, frowned on by those in charge. In his introduction to Ralph Ellison’s masterly collection of writings on jazz, Living With Music (Modern Library), Professor Robert O’Meally, who founded the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, where he taught comparative literature, writes of when Ellison appeared at Harvard University in 1973. O’Meally, a student listening to the panel discussion, indicated to Ellison his concern that the contributions of black culture, including music, remained greatly unrecognized. He asked Ellison, “Don’t you think the Harlem Renaissance failed because we failed to create institutions to preserve our gains?” Recalled O’Meally in the book’s introduction, “Given that I was a black student in a dashiki, he probably took this to be blankly black-nationalistic. Ralph Ellison drew on his cigar and calmly told me, ‘No.’ “Just before being led toward the stage, he paused to look at me with steely eyes. ‘We do have institutions,’ he said. ‘We have the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And we have jazz.’ Sterling Brown, during all his years at Howard University, could only teach that truth indirectly. But these days, I’m told that at a number of predominantly black colleges and universities, jazz’s “image”—internationally and here—is one of respect and achievement. I’d be grateful to learn about the current state of jazz at largely black colleges from students, faculty members and graduates. Please write me c/o JazzTimes. Toward the end of my interview with Ron Carter, I asked how optimistic he is about the future of his calling. “One sign of jazz’s survival, in this country,” he said, “is that schools of high educational level, colleges and universities, are teaching it. And there are still jazz camps. There are some wonderful young players out there who are determined to make the music theirs. As long as they can maintain that focus, we’re going to hear the music and be with it for a very long time.” In Paris in 1969, when Carter was being interviewed by Art Taylor for his indispensable book, Notes and Tones: Musician to Musician Interviews (Perigee Books), Ron spoke of “the awareness that black colleges must have of our music. I’ve played at some black colleges and we only get booked because the students raised such a clamor to get some jazz. The dean of the school, the dean of music, were making a point of not encouraging jazz.” Wouldn’t it be splendid if Oprah Winfrey did a show with Ron, musicians from some of the black colleges and universities, and youngsters from all backgrounds from summer jazz camps? Maybe President Obama could do a walk-on. true 95 2009-02-26T15:55:13-05:00 false 21387 137 true 94 2009-03-01T00:00:00-05:00

A little exposure could go a long way, if only...

2009-04-03T10:56:23-04:00

4 Of the many books on jazz I’ve read, much of the permanent illumination has come from those written by the musicians themselves. I can now add to the list Wynton Marsalis’ Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life (Random House). I don’t look for analysis of techniques. That’s obviously not my bag. I want to know more of the musicians, and how they hear one another. Wynton gets into the jazz experience from the inside. (Geoffrey C. Ward helped in the structure of the book; Wynton wrote it.) A perpetual student, “I’m always reading,” Wynton has said. “And listening.” Soon after he came to New York from New Orleans, he found how much he had to learn. One night, Harry “Sweets” Edison “called a slow blues. ‘Man,’ Sweets said when it was done, ‘you just played more notes than I played in my entire career.’ Implied in that was ‘And you didn’t say anything.’” Young Wynton asked John Lewis how he defined jazz, and was told, “It has to swing or seem to swing. It has to contain the element of surprise, and it has to embody the eternal search for the blues.” Adds Wynton about Lewis, “The way he presented himself didn’t make you think about the blues.” In my own first meeting with the creator of the Modern Jazz Quartet, John had a copy of England’s sophisticated political publication, the New Statesman, jutting out of his suit pocket. But, Wynton writes, Lewis “understood the blues above all else. At every moment, wherever he was, he was going to find the blues.” I rarely saw John Lewis overtly angry, but one day he was smarting. He’d heard of an imminent Atlantic Records session with Joe Turner, and Lewis hadn’t been asked to be part of it. “I’m a blues player!” he said to me in sharp frustration. I knew Billie Holiday, heard her often in clubs, and read a lot about her. But Wynton shows us how to penetrate more deeply into her continuing presence among us. When he was growing up, his father often played at home the last recording she made, Lady in Satin. Says Wynton, “Some people hated it because so little of her voice was left. But for me, it teaches that the message you are delivering can be more important than limitations in the method of delivery. “Billie could evoke dark, dark feelings by applying swinging sweetness. If you put a little salt in something sweet, it gets sweeter; if you put some sugar in something bitter, it gets more bitter. She was like that.” I knew Duke Ellington in a number of contexts and have written a lot about him, but again, Wynton adds more to my appreciation and understanding of his music: “He was fascinated by intense interactions and unusual human foibles. Two guys in the band didn’t like each other? Make them sit right next to each other. Give them back-to-back solos. See what happened. … He loves musicians. Not just their playing. Them. … [A]nd more than any other jazz musician, he addressed the rich internal lives of men and women in love. “One touch of his hand on the piano and the moon enters the room. He loved ladies and they loved him.” A recent Winston Churchill quote I found brought Duke instantly to mind: “I am a man of simple tastes, easily satisfied with the best.” With Duke, that also included women. Charlie Parker has, of course, a wide international audience. I don’t use the past sense referring to his immortality, but in Moving to Higher Ground, Wynton reveals the often stunning breadth of Bird’s impact. I had a friend, a New York City homicide detective, Don Baezler, who was a Bird enthusiast. A police precinct would be a rather unusual place to discuss Charlie Parker recordings. Or so I thought at the time. But Wynton shows how parochial I was: “John Lewis told me all kinds of people would be at Charlie Parker’s gigs. It always shocked him: sailors, firemen, policemen, city officials, prostitutes, dope fiends, just regular working people. Whoever it was, when Bird started playing, his sound would arrest the room.” I once ran into Bird briefly on a railway station platform. At that time he was only interested in talking about country music. As Wynton writes, Bird’s music “had so much in it because it had come such a long distance. It had all of American music in it: fiddlers’ reels and Negro spirituals; levee tunes and camp-meeting songs; minstrel songs; vaudeville tunes, and American popular songs; the blues and ragtime … European classical music”—Bird once told me a Bartók concerto had long resonated in his head—“and the irresistible stomping, riffing style of blues playing that tells you Parker came from Kansas City.” I recently interviewed the internationally celebrated Jerry Douglas, the master Dobro player, winner of a number of Country Music Association Awards. Bird came into the conversation, and Douglas spoke excitedly of what a kick it was for him to record with Ray Charles. Songcatcher Alan Lomax used to call what we have here, and sent around the world, “the rainbow of American music.” In his book, Wynton says, “No one knows how another person experiences living. It’s too deeply rooted, based on too many unique circumstances. Language cannot express these private, ever-changing states of being. Music is much clearer about subconscious and super-conscious matters. Music makes the internal external. What’s in you comes out.” Wynton notes that he wrote the book to “explore the creative tension between self-expression and self-sacrifice in [the ultimate wholeness] of jazz, a tension that is at the heart of swinging, in music and in life.” And because jazz is so deeply rooted in the evolution of American music, it changes your life all the more by surprising you in the range and continuous surprises of your feelings. true 95 2009-02-17T10:11:42-05:00 false 21243 136 true 94 2009-01-01T00:00:00-05:00

Nat Hentoff gives a thumbs up to Wynton Marsalis' new book

4946 2009-03-23T09:31:26-04:00

4 In our conversations, Duke Ellington never called his music jazz. He opposed putting any music in categories. So too did Charles Mingus, who said of his compositions and performances that they were—and still are—“Mingus music. I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.” For most of us for whom jazz is a common part of our language, no other originals in the history of the music so far have equaled Ellington and Mingus in the multi-dimensional power and range of their creations. When Mingus, as a youngster in Los Angeles, first heard Duke’s band, “I almost jumped out of the balcony. One piece excited me so much that I screamed.” Recently I heard, on NPR’s News and Notes, Robert O’Meally, founder of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, discussing the impact of first hearing Mingus on his students: “They almost jump out of their chairs. And then they want to play like that. They want to play for real!” 2009 will be a singular year for the always contemporary Mingus music. Sue Mingus—who has a pool of hundreds of musicians for the Charles Mingus Orchestra, the Mingus Big Band and the Mingus Dynasty—tells me that these embodiments of his indomitable presence will be touring here and in Europe, focusing on selections from three of his seminal albums—Mingus Ah Um, Mingus Dynasty and Blues and Roots—during the 50th anniversary of their release. It’s worth noting that the musicians in these Mingus ensembles, some of whom weren’t even born when he died in January 1979, adhere to Mingus’ command to his sidemen: They bring to the charts who they are. Or, as Sue puts it, “Each one brings his or her own chemistry.” In this country, students in several thousand high school jazz bands find themselves—as well as Charles—in the Simply Mingus series and the Mingus Big Band charts, published by the Hal Leonard corporation in Milwaukee. From Feb. 22-24, the first Mingus High School Competition takes place during a three-day Mingus festival at the Manhattan School of Music. In charge will be Sue Mingus and Justin DiCioccio, head of the school’s jazz department, who designed and organized the first of the widely successful Essentially Ellington high school competitions at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Toward the end of last September, in the Watts section of Los Angeles, there was the grand opening of the already operating Charles Mingus Youth Arts Center by the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. And the next month, the city, having won an American Masterpieces grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, presented a series, “The Charles Mingus-Son of Watts Musical Caravan.” All of this brought me back a half-century to when the phone would ring in my office, and there’d be instantly recognizable Mingus music. After a while, the composer would come on: “What do you think of that? I just wrote it.” It was like Beethoven calling. Mingus is not universally acclaimed, however. Ken Burns’ series on jazz on the Public Broadcasting System—which, I understand, is circulating in schools around the country—gave Mingus about two minutes. I couldn’t believe it! I thought I’d somehow missed part of it. But I hadn’t. Yet Wynton Marsalis had a considerable advisory role in that television breakthrough (where has PBS been since?). Why hadn’t he educated Ken Burns on Mingus? My next Final Chorus will be devoted to an essential new “inside jazz” book, Wynton’s Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life, with Geoffrey C. Ward (Random House). There are remarkably perceptive insights, new to me, on musicians I knew well but not that well. However, there are only fleeting Marsalis mentions of Mingus, and nothing to even indicate his towering presence in this music. There is deep appreciation of Duke Ellington (“his music is full of lessons”) but nothing of the so-many life lessons in the universe of Mingus music. It’s not surprising, then, that while the Mingus Big Band and Mingus Dynasty will be touring next year in a celebration of the 50th anniversary of several spirit-lifting Mingus albums, Wynton’s Jazz at Lincoln Center will present in February three-day tributes on the 50th anniversaries of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and John Coltrane’s Giant Steps. Mingus didn’t rate. And in the otherwise valuable “Jazz in the Schools” toolkit and Web site that has reached many schools and was developed by the National Endowment for the Arts in cooperation with Jazz at Lincoln Center, Mingus appears mainly as a civil-rights voice with only one of his compositions, “Fables of Faubus.” That’s all Wynton could think of? The music students throughout the country being exposed to much more Mingus that “they want to play for real” are getting a much deeper knowledge of Mingus than Wynton apparently has. For another example, at a January 2009 Jazz at Lincoln Center tribute to civil-rights jazz, only that segment of the Mingus experience will be heard. Sure, Charles was a protester, as when he told me, “It’s not only a question of color anymore. It’s getting deeper than that. People are getting so fragmented, and part of that is fewer and fewer people are making a real effort anymore to find exactly who they are and to build on that knowledge. “Most people,” Charles continued, “are forced to do things they don’t want to for most of the time, and so they get to the point where they feel they no longer have any choices about anything important, including who they are. We create our own slavery. But I’m going to keep on getting through, and finding out the kind of man I am, through my music. That’s the one place I can be free.” That’s also in Mingus' music, Wynton. true 95 2009-03-16T09:32:30-04:00 false 24334 129 true 94 2008-12-01T00:00:00-05:00

Is this innovative figure being forgotten?

2009-03-30T13:32:23-04:00

4 Just as certain musicians—Armstrong, Parker, Coltrane—have influenced so many others, so the Jazz Foundation of America has helped spur a vital regional organization, the Philadelphia-based Jazz Bridge Project (215-517-8337; jazzbridge.org), to be of multi-dimensional help to jazz and blues musicians. Founded almost four years ago, and reaching from Trenton (N.J.) to Wilmington (Del.) and from Reading (Pa.) to Atlantic City (N.J.), the Jazz Bridge began thanks to Wendy Simon Sinkler and Suzanne Cloud, both jazz singers. The impetus, they told me, was because “both of us had lost dear friends in the jazz community to illness, desperation and/or a lack of hope when times got difficult, as times always do in a jazz musician’s life. We just got fed up with the lack of resources for the jazz community there. “We’ve helped musicians get medical and dental care, eye exams and legal help. We replaced drummer Billy James’ drum set when he lost everything in a fire, and bought him a new suit so he could continue playing gigs. And we’ve paid funeral costs for local, yet famous, musicians whose families could not afford to bury them.” Crediting Wendy Oxenhorn (the ceaselessly swinging rhythm section for the Jazz Foundation of America) for having been “a great inspiration and help to us,” Sinkler and Cloud say, “Our dream is that other regions will take up the challenge to support their local musicians.” And that’s also the purpose of this column—along with hoping to encourage support for the Jazz Bridge itself. It took them almost a year, but the Jazz Bridge is now officially nonprofit and therefore tax-deductible. Along with volunteers, who are eagerly sought by the Jazz Bridge, co-founders Cloud and Sinkler are learning, step by step, how to regenerate the lives and music of many jazz and blues improvisers left without a rhythm section: “We network and collaborate with individuals, corporations and nonprofits who provide pro bono or low-fee services,” say Cloud and Sinkler. For example: “Philadelphia Eyeglass Labs formed a partnership with the Jazz Bridge to generously provide jazz musicians with free eye exams and low cost glasses.” Moreover, “Mercy Hospital helped a local artist who needed emergency treatment and testing, care that would not have been available without the unique Bridge/Mercy coalition.” That coalition has broken down, however, and the Bridge hopes one of Philadelphia’s renowned hospitals will join the band. Among future Jazz Bridge plans is setting up a “low-cost dental program, so hopefully by the next newsletter we’ll have good news, especially if we get some generous help from donations or a tender-hearted dental group.” The July 2008 “Notes From the President,” by Sinkler, indicates the determined commitment of the evolving Bridge. The organization vitally needs more funding “as the national healthcare crisis worsens along with the economy, and many more musicians and singers seek assistance.” What follows is small in actual numbers of musicians, but consider the impact on each of them—and their music. Writes Sinkler: “In 2006, we assisted three clients who needed emergency medical care … In 2007, we assisted 24 clients regarding medical care; emergency dental care; eye exams and free glasses; legal help concerning royalties and copyright; homelessness; emergency home repair; and property tax needs to save a family home.” Halfway through this year, the Bridge responded to the “24 clients regarding funeral service support, medical care and surgery, dentures and bridgework, and emergency legal support.” It’s also worth noting that after Mercy Hospital was no longer available to the Jazz Bridge, a musician requiring hospital treatment was sent—through the Jazz Foundation’s Oxenhorn—to Englewood Hospital and Medical Center in New Jersey, which for years has provided free care, including surgery, to the Foundation’s musicians. Learning more about the Jazz Bridge, I discovered that Philadelphia might be the only city in the country with a record company, Dreambox Media/Encounter Records, that has been archiving the city’s jazz scene for more than 20 years through releases by the city’s musicians. Every city should have one, and if there are others that do, please let me know. Cloud (a writer and editor as well as a jazz singer) and drummer Jim Miller run Dreambox, which is a co-operative. As the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Feb. 28, 2007, Miller, the label’s president, “funnels almost all of the profits back to the artists, who retain ownership of their own masters and publishing rights.” (Some of them have contributed part of their proceeds to the Jazz Bridge.) Dreambox covers the jazz spectrum, including avant-garde. The label’s name came from Cloud’s research for her doctoral dissertation on jazz history at the University of Pennsylvania. In the hours of oral histories she taped, one of the musicians referred to his brain as his “dreambox.” The Bridge’s annual calendar—with photographs of, and epigrammatic quotes from, jazzmen and -women with Philadelphia roots—is becoming a collector’s item. For May, for example, there is bassist Jymie Merritt: “Playing with someone you enjoy playing with is like an endless conversation … always something new to discuss.” For September, drummer Mickey Roker on playing with bassist Bob Cranshaw: “There were times when the groove was just so hard that before the first tune was played, I’d be smiling. Once we locked in, it was a love affair.” Much attention and speculation is necessarily focusing on where new audiences are coming from. But it’s also deeply important to be aware of, and support, jazz creators in your city and region. And Philadelphia’s Jazz Bridge should be a model, and an inspiration, to jazz societies throughout the country. true 95 2008-12-09T12:21:43-05:00 false 20897 128 200811 true 94 2008-11-01T00:00:00-04:00

Just as certain musicians—Armstrong, Parker, Coltrane—have influenced so many others, so the Jazz Foundation of America has helped spur a vital regional organization, the Philadelphia-based Jazz Bridge Project (215-517-8337; jazzbridge.org), to be of multi-dimensional help to jazz and blues musicians. Founded almost four years ago, and reaching from Trenton (N.J.) to Wilmington (Del.) and from Reading (Pa.) to Atlantic City (N.J.), the Jazz Bridge began thanks to Wendy Simon Sinkler and Suzanne Cloud, both jazz singers. The impetus, they told me, was because “both of us had lost dear friends in the jazz community to illness, desperation and/or a lack of hope when times got difficult, as times always do in a jazz musician’s life. We just got fed up with the lack of resources for the jazz community there. “We’ve helped musicians get medical and dental care, eye exams and legal help. We replaced drummer Billy James’ drum set when he lost everything in a fire, and bought him a new suit so he could continue playing gigs. And we’ve paid funeral costs for local, yet famous, musicians whose families could not afford to bury them.” Crediting Wendy Oxenhorn (the ceaselessly swinging rhythm section for the Jazz Foundation of America) for having been “a great inspiration and help to us,” Sinkler and Cloud say, “Our dream is that other regions will take up the challenge to support their local musicians.” And that’s also the purpose of this column—along with hoping to encourage support for the Jazz Bridge itself. It took them almost a year, but...

2009-03-02T00:28:05-05:00

4 When Phoebe Jacobs, longtime friend and associate of Louis Armstrong, says, “Don’t let anyone tell you Louis is dead because he’s not,” she’s not talking only about the continuing presence of his music all around the world. As the central force of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, Phoebe keeps providing grants to a range of projects fulfilling Louis’ wish “to give back to people some of the goodness I’ve had from them.” Particularly notable in its worldwide influence is the Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine, based throughout New York’s Beth Israel Medical Center, from the intensive care unit to the treatment of children and adults with asthma and pulmonary disease. And in June this year, the Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine presented at Beth Israel the First International Musical Therapy and Trauma symposium, attended by therapists from across this country, South Africa, Ireland, et al. Dr. Joanne Loewy, director of this Armstrong Center, has also lectured on the findings of the music therapy part of Louis’ living legacy in European hospitals. Recently I learned that another jazz legend with a big heart and “big ears”—as she challengingly demonstrated by improvising with musicians of all styles—also lives on, through the many lives regenerated by the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation in Pacific Palisades, Calif. Like Louis, Ella wanted to enrich people’s lives with more than her music. The Foundation’s executive director, Fran Morris Rosman, tells me that the implementations of Ella’s wish began with the fact that her personal attorney, beginning in the 1980s, was Richard Rosman, Fran’s husband. “When Ella passed,” Fran says, “Richard needed an archivist and I’m the only archivist he knows.” It would take far more space than this column to list all the organizations that keep swinging because of Ella. On the list is one of her favorites, the American Heart Association. And one of my favorites is the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation’s A Book Just for Me, which puts books into the homes and hands of disadvantaged children. Among its eight divisions is Getting Ready for School, through which “children participating in free school-clothing programs, and in tutoring programs for the homeless, receive a book in addition to their clothes and school supplies.” Ella wanted to foster a love of reading, Fran adds, citing another part in which children and their families in family service center programs get books to read together because, she notes, “Studies have shown that reading together helps build stronger families.” And kids’ confidence in school. Also, Ella’s foundation, funded by her royalties and investments, provides grants to “numerous organizations that provide free or low-cost healthcare to those who have no healthcare coverage, as well as providing funding for organizations that provide shelter and food for those in need.” On Los Angeles’ Central Avenue, where many world-class jazz musicians got their seasoning, there is A Place Called Home, emphasizing after-school academic enrichment. That’s on Ella’s list, as is—in the same city—People Assisting the Homeless (PATH). The Simon Wiesenthal Center/Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, an organization I rely on to trace that inextinguishable prejudice, antiw- Semitism, in all corners of the world, also benefits from Ella’s long reach. Having interviewed Ella at a Boston club very long ago, I was struck by both her spontaneous gentleness and firm independence. At the time, she was jousting with her then-record label, Decca, for not allowing her to record the kinds of songs she wanted to sing. (Norman Granz was not yet her career enabler, driven by his enormous respect for and appreciation of her stature.) The Ella I remember from that and other contacts is now a natural, empathic supporter of the Center for the Partially Sighted in Los Angeles and the residential Children of the Night in Van Nuys that provides services for disadvantaged youth. In the vision context, on Ella’s list is Guide Dogs of America in the San Fernando Valley. Ella’s Foundation makes a point of remembering the birthdays of the children with which it is involved. As Fran Morris Rosman explains, one of its projects is Birthday Books, and this is how it works: “The Centers, clinics and non-profit organizations advise us as to the number of children and, about once or twice a year, we send a large shipment of books to the centers, complete with colorful book labels to be pasted inside each book. The labels say, ‘Happy Birthday to you from the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation.’ On each child’s birthday, the Center staff presents a book to the birthday child.” The younger kids, and not only them, might someday also find somewhere a recording of Ella’s first big hit, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” I played it often long after I was a kid to relive the sheer cheerfulness of first hearing it with Chick Webb’s band joining the joy. Because of the economics of the jazz life, not even internationally known performers ever amassed enough bread to start and sustain a foundation. But if there are others in addition to those through which Louis and Ella keep enhancing all kinds of people’s lives, please let me know c/o JazzTimes. The Ella Fitzgerald Foundation can be reached at: P.O. Box 1587, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272 www.ellafitzgeraldfoundation.org true 95 2008-09-25T18:08:47-04:00 false 20446 127 200810 true 94 2008-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

When Phoebe Jacobs, longtime friend and associate of Louis Armstrong, says, “Don’t let anyone tell you Louis is dead because he’s not,” she’s not talking only about the continuing presence of his music all around the world. As the central force of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, Phoebe keeps providing grants to a range of projects fulfilling Louis’ wish “to give back to people some of the goodness I’ve had from them.” Particularly notable in its worldwide influence is the Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine, based throughout New York’s Beth Israel Medical Center, from the intensive care unit to the treatment of children and adults with asthma and pulmonary disease. And in June this year, the Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine presented at Beth Israel the First International Musical Therapy and Trauma symposium, attended by therapists from across this country, South Africa, Ireland, et al. Dr. Joanne Loewy, director of this Armstrong Center, has also lectured on the findings of the music therapy part of Louis’ living legacy in European hospitals. Recently I learned that another jazz legend with a big heart and “big ears”—as she challengingly demonstrated by improvising with musicians of all styles—also lives on, through the many lives regenerated by the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation in Pacific Palisades, Calif. Like Louis, Ella wanted to enrich people’s lives with more than her music. The Foundation’s executive director, Fran Morris Rosman, tells me that the implementations of Ella’s wish began with the fact that her personal attorney, beginning in the 1980s,...

2009-03-02T00:27:53-05:00

4 There’s a country music song, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?,” of which I never tire, and it jumped to mind as I was reading an advance copy of Ben Ratliff’s characteristically illuminating new book, The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music (Times Books). The publication date is November 11. You may have seen some of them in Ratliff’s “Listening With” series in The New York Times. He not only has a deep, far-ranging knowledge of jazz, but like Count Basie comping his band, Ratliff leaves breathing and feeling space for the musician with whom he’s talking. He asked 15 musicians for a list of five or six pieces of music he or she would like to listen to with him, among them Wayne Shorter, Sonny Rollins, Paul Motian and Maria Schneider. Ornette Coleman’s first request startled me into freshly realizing—like that country music song—how central jazz has been to the unbroken circle of my life for more than 70 years. Ornette’s choice was a recording by Josef Rosenblatt, a Jewish cantor (chazan) in a 1916 (that’s not a typo) recording from the Sabbath services in an Orthodox Jewish synagogue (a shul). Ornette’s selection jolted me back to when I was a boy, sitting next to my father, in a shul in Boston’s Jewish ghetto. The first music that went all the way through me was the soul music of the chazan, both in that shul and others I kept going to just to hear what I described in this column’s “Jazz and Deep Jewish Blues” (JazzTimes, February 2002): “The cry, the kretchts (a catch in the voice), a cry summoning centuries of hosts of Jews … a thunderstorm of fierce yearnings that reverberated throughout the shul and then, as if the universe had lost a beat, there is sudden silence, and from deep inside the chazan, a soaring falsetto.” This was during the so-called Great Depression, and by the time I was 11, working as a delivery boy on a horse-drawn wagon, I had enough money to buy three-for-a-dollar records by Louis Armstrong, Peetie Wheatstraw (“the devil’s son-in-law”) and Josef Rosenblatt. Ornette told Ratliff he first heard a Rosenblatt recording some 22 years ago when, in Chicago, a young man asked him to come by and listen to what he thought would interest Ornette. The reaction by Ornette: “I started crying like a baby. The record he had was crying, singing, and praying, all in the same breath. And none of it was crossing each other. I said, ‘Wait a minute. You can’t find those “notes.” They don’t exist.’” That’s what early listeners of Ornette’s used to say. I first heard him at one of his first recording sessions in Los Angeles for Lester Koenig’s Contemporary label. The penetrating human sound as he sang through his horn made me feel I’d found a soul brother. I didn’t know then that Josef Rosenblatt was part of our troika. Also in Ratliff’s new book is a listening session with Roy Haynes. I first heard Roy live during a Sunday afternoon jam session at Boston’s Savoy Café, which was my second home. My parents thought it was where I really lived. A kid in his teens walked into the club and asked if he could sit in. He was a student, I later found out, at Roxbury Memorial High School, near where I lived. That kid lit up the room with a propulsive beat that lifted everybody up, including the bartender. His name was Roy Haynes. Many years later, Roy and I were in the same class of National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters (all I could play was the electric type-writer), and I told him of that session at the Savoy. He laughed and said, “You know, when I was in school in Boston, I used to listen to you on the radio.” On the air, while a staff announcer at WMEX, I got a jazz show in a time slot management couldn’t sell. And during a series on jazz history, I played Louis Armstrong recordings with Baby Dodds on drums, including a 10-inch “instructional” recording Dodds made (I think for Moe Asch’s Folkways label) on topics including “Playing for the Benefit of the Band.” There was Baby Dodds, brought back to life during Ben Ratliff’s interview with Roy, who said, “I used to travel with that [Baby Dodds] record.” And Ratliff included in the excerpt from the record: “You must study ... a guy’s human nature. Study what he will take or what he will go for ... that’s why all guys is not drummers that’s drumming ... You can’t holler at a man, you can’t dog him. Not in music. It’s up to me to keep all that lively. That’s my job.” Livelier than ever—that’s still Roy’s job. Roy spoke of his idol, “Papa” Jo Jones, who, as Ratliff notes, “was proud of his ‘kiddies,’ the musicians whom he influenced.” When I was still on Boston radio, doing remotes from the Savoy, Jo Jones stunned me when he decided I was to be one of his “kiddies.” I couldn’t play anything, but I had a radio show and was writing about the music, so I had to be instructed in the calling I’d become marginally involved in. One night, Papa Jo sat me down at the Savoy, and until the club closed, told me where the music had come from, where he had come from, and how to listen to this music by paying attention to what’s really inside the players, because that’s what the music was all about. In his introduction to The Jazz Ear, Ratliff explains what he learned by listening to musicians as they were listening to other players: “What are the things they notice? What are their criteria for excellence? What makes them react involuntarily? The answers indicate what a musician values in music, which comes to connect what a musician believes music is for in the first place. And that is the big thing, the big question, from which all small questions descend.” That’s why The Jazz Ear will be a permanent part of learning how to listen inside the musicians playing. Jo Jones never stopped keeping an eye on his “kiddies.” From time to time, he’d let me know if he felt I needed more instruction. Papa Jo would be proud of “kiddie” Ben Ratliff. Clearly, jazz has also been at the center of the unbroken circle of Ben Ratliff’s life all these years—and we’re all fortunate that The New York Times recognizes his value. true 95 2008-08-13T15:16:01-04:00 false 19983 126 200809 true 94 2008-09-01T00:00:00-04:00

There’s a country music song, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?,” of which I never tire, and it jumped to mind as I was reading an advance copy of Ben Ratliff’s characteristically illuminating new book, The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music (Times Books). The publication date is November 11. You may have seen some of them in Ratliff’s “Listening With” series in The New York Times. He not only has a deep, far-ranging knowledge of jazz, but like Count Basie comping his band, Ratliff leaves breathing and feeling space for the musician with whom he’s talking. He asked 15 musicians for a list of five or six pieces of music he or she would like to listen to with him, among them Wayne Shorter, Sonny Rollins, Paul Motian and Maria Schneider. Ornette Coleman’s first request startled me into freshly realizing—like that country music song—how central jazz has been to the unbroken circle of my life for more than 70 years. Ornette’s choice was a recording by Josef Rosenblatt, a Jewish cantor (chazan) in a 1916 (that’s not a typo) recording from the Sabbath services in an Orthodox Jewish synagogue (a shul). Ornette’s selection jolted me back to when I was a boy, sitting next to my father, in a shul in Boston’s Jewish ghetto. The first music that went all the way through me was the soul music of the chazan, both in that shul and others I kept going to just to hear what I described in this column’s “Jazz and Deep Jewish Blues” (JazzTimes, February...

2009-03-02T00:27:28-05:00

4 A lawyer I know began his jazz listening with the bebop of Bird and Dizzy, although he knew they had forebears whom he intended to sample eventually. Upon hearing Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” on Newark jazz station WBGO, he excitedly called me: “Where can I get more records by Armstrong?” (The sobriquet “Satchmo” was unfamiliar to him.) I obliged, having had similar calls from listeners decades younger than I am. To all of them, I recommend they get the catalog of Mosaic Records, which has set international standards for rediscovering and regenerating much of the timeless history of this music (www.mosaicrecords.com). In 1983, I bought its first release, a boxed set of The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk. Ever since, Michael Cuscuna, Scott Wenzel and the late Charlie Lourie have been formidable jazz detectives. Leasing jazz product from major labels, they burrow into those companies’ vaults, discover unissued sessions and alternate takes, and call surviving musicians to get accurate personnel for these Mosaic releases. There is also an online music store, True Blue Music (www.truebluemusic.com), that I recommend to baby boomers curious to learn how much pleasure they’ve been missing. A convenient place to start the surprises is the True Blue 2007/2008 catalog that has a set I urge everyone to buy, regardless of age: Lester Young: The “Kansas City” Sessions. When I was 19, I bought the original Commodore release—with Pres on clarinet and tenor, Buck Clayton, Dicky Wells, Eddie Durham and, on many of the tracks, the core Basie rhythm section (Jo Jones, Freddie Green and Walter Page) that quintessentially defined what it is to swing. It is the first record I’d pick to take to the proverbial desert island because, as Loren Schoenberg says, it is “among the most prophetic and profound meditations on jazz ever recorded.” Also in that True Blue treasure trove is a set my lawyer friend may well put in his will—Louis Armstrong’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1923-34). On another True Blue page, I was brought back to a revelation I experienced at 16 when, in a secondhand record and book store in Boston, I found a 1929 Mound City Blue Blowers session with Pee Wee Russell and Coleman Hawkins. I played it so often I almost drove my mother crazy. In 1961, during my brief time as an A&R man, I brought Coleman and Pee Wee into a studio together for the first time since 1929, for Jazz Reunion: Pee Wee Russell/Coleman Hawkins, originally issued on Candid. When the session ended that afternoon, pianist Nat Pierce, who had arranged all the tracks, said to Hawkins, who was enjoying his well-deserved cognac, “Did you notice Pee Wee’s ‘28th and 8th’ tune sounded like something Monk might have written?” Hawkins, the patriarch, nodded affirmatively, adding: “And for 30 years, I’ve been listening to him play those funny notes he used to think were wrong. They weren’t. They didn’t have a name for them then.” It’s one thing to have had the privilege of writing about jazz for some 60 years, but it was an extraordinary experience to have been a part of putting some of this music into the grooves. As a record “producer,” all I actually did—after finding out if the leader was available—was to keep track of how long each take was, send out for sandwiches, and make sure the leader was in the studio for the final editing. It was his or her byline, not mine. I was very pleased to see in that True Blue catalog another of my Candid sessions. It was by a Texas tenor, Booker Ervin, who is hardly mentioned anywhere anymore. He died in 1970, just short of his 40th birthday, of kidney disease, but his signature room-filling sound and daring unpredictability made Charles Mingus, for whom Booker had worked, say, “Nearly everybody I’ve worked with whom I’ve liked seems to get into a trance when they’re at their best. When Booker was really going, I’d say something to him and he just didn’t hear me. He was somewhere else—inside the music.” And if I’ve contributed nothing else lasting to jazz, I was able to send out into the world “Booker’s Blues” in this set. The album title, That’s It, came to me when, in the studio, listening to a playback, Booker said, “Yes, that’s it!” That deep sense of fulfillment—answering Duke Ellington’s song, “What Am I Here For?” (from the Hawkins-Russell reunion session)—resounds through so many sessions that Michael Cuscuna and his colleagues have brought back to life, and with much more than was in the original grooves. In Dan Morgenstern’s essential book, Living With Jazz, he writes of Mosaic’s beginning and its release of the Thelonious Monk set: “Not only are there 11 previously unissued alternate takes, including one each of the masterpieces, ‘Criss-Cross’ and ‘Horning In,’ but there are also two entirely new pieces. One is a delightful trio version of the pop tune, ‘I’ll Follow You,’ which Monk never recorded before or again. The other (in two takes) is a Monk original, ‘Sixteen,’ from the memorable sextet date of 1952. These discoveries alone make this Mosaic issue a major event.” In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters designations were expanded to include non-musician “Jazz Advocates,” of which I was the first. In that spirit, there ought to be room in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Jazz Hall of Fame for Michael Cuscuna, Charlie Lourie and Scott Wenzel. true 95 2008-07-11T14:40:15-04:00 false 19546 125 200808 true 94 2008-08-01T00:00:00-04:00

A lawyer I know began his jazz listening with the bebop of Bird and Dizzy, although he knew they had forebears whom he intended to sample eventually. Upon hearing Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” on Newark jazz station WBGO, he excitedly called me: “Where can I get more records by Armstrong?” (The sobriquet “Satchmo” was unfamiliar to him.) I obliged, having had similar calls from listeners decades younger than I am. To all of them, I recommend they get the catalog of Mosaic Records, which has set international standards for rediscovering and regenerating much of the timeless history of this music (www.mosaicrecords.com). In 1983, I bought its first release, a boxed set of The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk. Ever since, Michael Cuscuna, Scott Wenzel and the late Charlie Lourie have been formidable jazz detectives. Leasing jazz product from major labels, they burrow into those companies’ vaults, discover unissued sessions and alternate takes, and call surviving musicians to get accurate personnel for these Mosaic releases. There is also an online music store, True Blue Music (www.truebluemusic.com), that I recommend to baby boomers curious to learn how much pleasure they’ve been missing. A convenient place to start the surprises is the True Blue 2007/2008 catalog that has a set I urge everyone to buy, regardless of age: Lester Young: The “Kansas City” Sessions. When I was 19, I bought the original Commodore release—with Pres on clarinet and tenor, Buck Clayton, Dicky Wells, Eddie Durham and, on many of the tracks, the core Basie rhythm section...

2009-03-02T00:27:08-05:00

4 In January, I was on a panel at Jazz at Lincoln Center. The subject, “Is Jazz Black Music?” is still a lively and even combative one in some quarters. When I was invited, what first came to mind was Duke Ellington telling me long ago that in the 1920s, he went to Fletcher Henderson and said, “Why don’t we drop the word ‘jazz’ and call what we’re doing ‘Negro music’? Then there won’t be any confusion.” Henderson took a pass. But years later, when Louie Bellson was in Ellington’s band, Duke said he was the most extraordinary drummer he’d ever heard. We wouldn’t have been at Lincoln Center for that discussion had it not been for black field hollers, ring games, call-and-response church music and the blues. So it’s indisputable that jazz began as black music. On the panel, I proposed a line—obviously debatable—between the continuing originators of this music and those who were original musicians but hadn’t very deeply shaped the directions of jazz. Duke used to tell me it’s always been the individuals whom others followed, and he named Sidney Bechet as an example. My partial list of originators—and I’m sure you have yours—includes Louis Armstrong, Mr. Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Christian, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Lester Young. All were black, and some were influenced by non-blacks. Lester Young told me that Frank Trumbauer, mainly known for his association with Bix Beiderbecke, “was my idol. When I started to play, I bought all his records and I imagine I can still play those solos. I tried to get the sound of the C-melody saxophone on the tenor. That’s why I don’t sound like other people. Trumbauer always told a little story.” But Trumbauer, though an original, didn’t affect, as Prez did, the stories of countless jazz musicians around the world. The moderator that night at Lincoln Center was historian and jazz professor Lewis Porter. He made the salient point that although the roots of the originators were black, they had big ears and were open to an infinite diversity of influences. As Charles Hersch notes in his important new book, Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans (University of Chicago Press), the jazz culture there “included [transmutations of] quadrilles, mazurkas and schottisches.” On the panel, I mentioned that world-traveler Duke Ellington absorbed into his music the colors, dynamics and stories of the regional and national sounds he heard. Porter emphasized, “It’s typical of African-American music that jazz players are open to influences.” Eric Dolphy told me how hearing birds singing became part of his music. But again, the roots are black. Or, as Porter put it, being that open “doesn’t make it non-black.” That’s true of both originators and originals. A necessarily partial list of the originals who are influential but didn’t profoundly change the course of jazz would encompass such non-black players as Bix Beiderbecke (at whom Louis Armstrong marveled during Chicago after-hours sessions), Pee Wee Russell, Jack Teagarden, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Bill Evans, Jim Hall, Phil Woods and bandleader Woody Herman. The black roots of jazz of course quintessentially nourished all of these non-blacks, and many others. And the next unexpected originator, like Ornette Coleman swooping into New York, could come from any place in the world. Between sets one night, John Lewis and I were talking about who might become the new compelling shepherd—the individual others would follow, in Duke Ellington’s phrase. “Right now,” John said, “in a club in Romania, it could be a bassist or a trumpet player in a combo there.” He or she hasn’t broken through the jazz firmament yet. And it certainly could be a she. As of now, that female person isn’t in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra because Wynton Marsalis hasn’t yet found a woman musician, of whatever nationality, color or age, who meets his standards for being a regular member. Since Wynton does have big ears, I remain puzzled at this omission. As a challenge (one I’ve issued the trumpeter before), why doesn’t he try a blind audition for once? What I forgot to add about jazz and blackness at that Jazz at Lincoln Center panel was a scene I once witnessed at a club in New York where Charles Mingus was working. When a set was over, Mingus came off the stand and we started talking. A man strode over—a very black man—and pointing at Mingus, said accusingly, “You’re not black enough to play the blues!” Neither Mingus nor I had ever seen this guy before. Mingus drew back his arm, clenched a fist, thought better of it, rushed back on the stand, got his bass, brought it down to where the accuser still stood, and played a blues that, as I felt it, shook the room. The very black man, without a word, slunk away. Mingus was one of the closest friends I’ve ever had, and he believed, as Bird said, “Anyone can play this music if they can feel it.” Or listen to it. I suppose these probes of how black this music is now or in the future—or any of the people who play it—will continue. But I prefer Thelonious Monk’s approach to defining the essence of jazz. As the late Leslie Gourse reported in Straight No Chaser: The Life and Genius of Thelonious Monk (Schirmer Books), Monk told a New York Post columnist in 1960, “I never tried to think of a definition [of jazz]. You’re supposed to know jazz when you hear it. What do you do when someone gives you something? You feel glad about it.” true 95 2008-06-16T18:47:51-04:00 false 18103 116 200806 true 94 2008-06-01T00:00:00-04:00

In January, I was on a panel at Jazz at Lincoln Center. The subject, “Is Jazz Black Music?” is still a lively and even combative one in some quarters. When I was invited, what first came to mind was Duke Ellington telling me long ago that in the 1920s, he went to Fletcher Henderson and said, “Why don’t we drop the word ‘jazz’ and call what we’re doing ‘Negro music’? Then there won’t be any confusion.” Henderson took a pass. But years later, when Louie Bellson was in Ellington’s band, Duke said he was the most extraordinary drummer he’d ever heard. We wouldn’t have been at Lincoln Center for that discussion had it not been for black field hollers, ring games, call-and-response church music and the blues. So it’s indisputable that jazz began as black music. On the panel, I proposed a line—obviously debatable—between the continuing originators of this music and those who were original musicians but hadn’t very deeply shaped the directions of jazz. Duke used to tell me it’s always been the individuals whom others followed, and he named Sidney Bechet as an example. My partial list of originators—and I’m sure you have yours—includes Louis Armstrong, Mr. Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Christian, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Lester Young. All were black, and some were influenced by non-blacks. Lester Young told me that Frank Trumbauer, mainly known for his association with Bix Beiderbecke, “was my idol. When I started to play, I bought all his records and I...

2009-03-02T00:26:14-05:00

4 More than the rest of us who write about jazz, Whitney Balliett’s words describing music often turned into music. Yet the last book he wrote before his death last year was turned down by such mainstream publishers as Oxford University Press (which had published a number of his best-known volumes) and Random House. As a result, in 2006, Whitney’s New York Voices was published by the University of Mississippi Press. Although some valuable books on jazz survive the deciding committees at American firms, I can attest that it’s getting harder to break through. For a couple of years, I’ve unsuccessfully sent proposals to some of the publishers from whom I still get royalties (though modest) for previous jazz books. Occasionally the publishers don’t even answer back. So, like Whitney, I’m going to approach the University of Michigan Press because—under the guidance of jazz author, critic and Rutgers University professor Lewis Porter—that firm has published, among other works, significant biographies of Ben Webster and Lee Morgan, a definitive history of the Detroit jazz scene, and the collected, unusually challenging insights of André Hodeir. (Imagine a mainstream American publisher even knowing who Hodeir was.) Recently, I came across a publisher in Toronto—the 30-year-old Mercury Press—that proves how a nonacademic, for-profit firm still has the knowledge and determination to add notably to the history of this music with surprising, adventurous projects I doubt any mainstream American publisher would consider. Many years ago, a few jazz elders told me about a female trumpet player who could more than hold her own at cutting sessions. And last year, Mercury Press published the thoroughly engaging High Hat, Trumpet and Rhythm: The Life and Music of Valaida Snow by Mark Miller, the dean of Canadian writers on jazz. He makes clear why, in 1928, when Snow played in Louis Armstrong’s band at the Sunset in Chicago, he made her proud by encouraging her to take solo choruses. A 2008 surprise by the Mercury Press is David Lee’s The Battle of the Five Spot: Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Field. I was part of that 1959 civil war in the fractious jazz community when Ornette made his explosive New York debut. One of those bristling nights hearing Ornette at the Five Spot, I was sitting next to Roy Eldridge when he said, “I think he’s jiving. He’s putting everybody on.” And Coleman Hawkins, who immediately understood Dizzy and Bird when other established jazz dons were scowling, said in 1959 of Ornette that, while he never liked to criticize a musician publicly, “I think this one needs seasoning. A lot of seasoning.” This daring, category-defying newcomer volubly turned many of the jazz critics off, but Martin Williams and Gunther Schuller championed Ornette as did, among some musicians, including John Lewis. Having been present and viscerally energized in Los Angeles at Ornette’s first Contemporary recording session, I was very welcoming at the Five Spot for much of his engagement. Among other depth charges in this book, Lee goes into the very nature of jazz criticism and the inadvertent self-revelations of its practitioners. As for the musicians—not all of them elders, who were so hostile toward Ornette then—Lee quotes bassist Buell Neidlinger: “They’re scared to death Ornette was going to be the thing and that they couldn’t make it.” That, of course, also happened when Bird and Dizzy came to town. An extraordinary Mercury Press addition to the early history of jazz is Mark Miller’s Some Hustling This! Taking Jazz to the World, 1914-1929. Miller is a champion researcher, as evidenced by the many pages of annotated sources. Here we have 22-year-old Sidney Bechet touring Europe in Will Marion Cook’s Southern Syncopated Orchestra, and heard playing the blues by the celebrated Ernest Ansermet, founder and conductor of the Orchestra Suisse Romande, who had already championed Stravinsky, Ravel and Debussy. Writing of the young New Orleans jazzman’s “richness of invention, force of accent, and daring in novelty and the unexpected,” Ansermet trumpeted, “I wish to set down the name of this artist of genius; as for myself, I shall never forget it: it is Sidney Bechet,” whose blues had a “brusque and pitiless ending, like that of Bach’s second Brandenberg Concerto (sic).” That reminded me that it wasn’t until my early 20s when I realized how strongly Bach could swing! Years later, I heard a classical trumpet player swing Bach’s Brandenburg with a symphony orchestra. His name was Wynton Marsalis. (To find out more about the Mercury Press, visit its Web site at www.themercurypress.ca. Its books can be ordered online through amazon.com or amazon.ca.) If only among America’s leading book publishers there was one editor equivalent to what the record industry has in Arbors’ Mat Domber, whose enthusiasm for jazz’s singular creators—regardless of their previous record sales—is typified by his new release, Scott Robinson Plays the Compositions of Thad Jones: Forever Lasting. As for what may be my last music book, At the Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene, none of which has previously been in book form, I’m off, I hope, to a university press here. The advance isn’t much, but a university press book stays in print. true 95 2008-06-17T18:39:12-04:00 false 18225 117 200805 true 94 2008-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

More than the rest of us who write about jazz, Whitney Balliett’s words describing music often turned into music. Yet the last book he wrote before his death last year was turned down by such mainstream publishers as Oxford University Press (which had published a number of his best-known volumes) and Random House. As a result, in 2006, Whitney’s New York Voices was published by the University of Mississippi Press. Although some valuable books on jazz survive the deciding committees at American firms, I can attest that it’s getting harder to break through. For a couple of years, I’ve unsuccessfully sent proposals to some of the publishers from whom I still get royalties (though modest) for previous jazz books. Occasionally the publishers don’t even answer back. So, like Whitney, I’m going to approach the University of Michigan Press because—under the guidance of jazz author, critic and Rutgers University professor Lewis Porter—that firm has published, among other works, significant biographies of Ben Webster and Lee Morgan, a definitive history of the Detroit jazz scene, and the collected, unusually challenging insights of André Hodeir. (Imagine a mainstream American publisher even knowing who Hodeir was.) Recently, I came across a publisher in Toronto—the 30-year-old Mercury Press—that proves how a nonacademic, for-profit firm still has the knowledge and determination to add notably to the history of this music with surprising, adventurous projects I doubt any mainstream American publisher would consider. Many years ago, a few jazz elders told me about a female trumpet player who could more than hold her...

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

4 When I came upon video interviews with 280 jazz musicians (available on CD, DVD, audiocassette and in print), it was for me like hearing the voices of participants in the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, where our swinging liberties were being improvised by James Madison and other sidemen and set down for posterity. I had known about this Jazz Archive at Hamilton College in upstate New York, but only recently discovered its history and extent under the supervision of Monk Rowe, whose formal title is the Joe Williams Director of the Jazz Archive. In his dressing room once, Joe talked to me about chronicling the survivors of this music. Along with his own continuing presence on recordings Joe, in his connection with Hamilton, has been instrumental in giving permanence to more jazz history. While Rowe has conducted most of the interviews, those with Milt Hinton, Clark Terry, Oscar Peterson and George Shearing were done by Williams. To give you a small indication of the range of the other voices, with future interviews to come, they include: Jay McShann, Jimmy Witherspoon and Sherrie Maricle, creator of the all-women Diva, currently the most swinging big band in jazz. Also: James Moody, Frank Wess, Phil Woods, Roswell Rudd, John Levy, Joe Wilder, Al Grey, Jane Ira Bloom, Ron Carter, Maria Schneider, et al. I can attest to the knowledgeable skills of interviewer Monk Rowe because I’m among the “Arrangers, Composers, Authors, Etc.,” as are Albert Murray, George Avakian, and the walking equivalent of Google as a jazz search engine, Phil Schaap. The vital enabler of the Jazz Archive was a Hamilton College alumnus and trustee, the late Milt Fillius, drawn to the music as a drummer in high school bands, and later a friend of Williams. A successful businessman, Fillius, intent on documenting the lives of these musicians who had enlarged his life, started the videotaping, in 1995 that became the Hamilton College Jazz Archive. Joe Williams’ participation gave credibility among his peers to this preservation of jazz history in the actual voices of its makers. Upon his death, Williams’ estate donated to the Archive his private collection of live open-reel recordings and other material from his own archives. In this column, from time to time—depending on the theme I’m exploring—there’ll be excerpts from these interviews. To start, I was intrigued by a statement in an Archive brochure that read, “The holdings are particularly viable for material pertaining to the learning process employed by young musicians prior to the establishment of jazz education programs, and the realities of making a career in jazz.” So here is Harry “Sweets” Edison in an illuminating personal addition to the January/February 2008 JazzTimes excerpt from Dave Gelly’s invaluable book, Being Prez (Oxford University Press) that focuses on Basie and Lester Young, among others, during the genesis of the band that was flowingly synonymous with the word “swing.” Sweets joined Basie when he was 19, and Rowe asked him, “How much of the music was written out?” “We didn’t have any music,” said Edison. So how did he learn what to play? “When I first joined the band, everybody had played with Bennie Moten’s band. They all had notes to play on, like, ‘One O’clock Jump,’ ‘Swinging the Blues’ and ‘Out the Window.’” For these head arrangements, “The brass section would get together and set a riff, and we’d all come back to the rehearsal hall.” But Sweets became very frustrated because not having been in the band at the creation of the heads, when his colleagues played those numbers fast, “You’re trying to find a note [for you to play] and it’s past. They’re finished before you can find a note.” What he meant, Rowe interprets, was that as the music whizzed by, Edison couldn’t find a note to fit the fleeing chord—and a note that Ed Lewis, sitting next to him in the trumpet section, didn’t have. “I really was disgusted,” Edison recalled, and gave Basie his notice. “Why?” asked the Count. “You sound good.” “Well, all these arrangements you play every night, I can’t find a note.” “If you find a note tonight,” says Basie, “that sounds good, play the same damn note every night.” Encouraged by the boss to stay, Edison was in the band for 20 years, in and out. Having found his notes, Sweets adds, “I should have paid him to be in the band because I was having so much fun. You couldn’t pay for that kind of education.” Years later, there was to be a tribute to Count Basie at Carnegie Hall, and that morning, in a rehearsal room nearby, an arrangement was distributed to the Basie alumni, most of whom were in their 60s and 70s. They started on the arrangement, and Sweets stopped the music. He told the arranger that he was going to take some of the notes out of his parts, and slow down the tempo. The arranger, who hadn’t been on one road trip with Basie, was smart enough not to argue. Sweets had not only found his notes long before that rehearsal, but he’d also learned what notes not to play so that the music could breathe. To learn more about the Hamilton College Jazz Archive—and the availability of these interviews—the contacts are: www.hamilton.edu/jazzarchive, www.monkrowe.com and (315) 859-4071. In time, there should be a book on all these themes and variations of the jazz life. Maybe a publisher will come forward. true 95 2008-06-18T18:48:40-04:00 false 18364 118 200804 true 94 2008-04-01T00:00:00-04:00

When I came upon video interviews with 280 jazz musicians (available on CD, DVD, audiocassette and in print), it was for me like hearing the voices of participants in the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, where our swinging liberties were being improvised by James Madison and other sidemen and set down for posterity. I had known about this Jazz Archive at Hamilton College in upstate New York, but only recently discovered its history and extent under the supervision of Monk Rowe, whose formal title is the Joe Williams Director of the Jazz Archive. In his dressing room once, Joe talked to me about chronicling the survivors of this music. Along with his own continuing presence on recordings Joe, in his connection with Hamilton, has been instrumental in giving permanence to more jazz history. While Rowe has conducted most of the interviews, those with Milt Hinton, Clark Terry, Oscar Peterson and George Shearing were done by Williams. To give you a small indication of the range of the other voices, with future interviews to come, they include: Jay McShann, Jimmy Witherspoon and Sherrie Maricle, creator of the all-women Diva, currently the most swinging big band in jazz. Also: James Moody, Frank Wess, Phil Woods, Roswell Rudd, John Levy, Joe Wilder, Al Grey, Jane Ira Bloom, Ron Carter, Maria Schneider, et al. I can attest to the knowledgeable skills of interviewer Monk Rowe because I’m among the “Arrangers, Composers, Authors, Etc.,” as are Albert Murray, George Avakian, and the walking equivalent of Google as a jazz search engine,...

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

4 From when I was too young to be allowed into Boston jazz clubs, there’s an enduring memory of sneaking into Downtown at the Ken and marveling at Sidney Bechet joyously overpowering even Wild Bill Davison. Ever since, Bechet, whom I got to know when he played in Boston, has been the embodiment for me of the indomitable spirit of New Orleans jazz. I often turn again to his masterful autobiography, Treat it Gentle (Da Capo Press), for such passages as, “That music was like waking up in the morning and eating; it was that regular in your life. It was natural to the way you lived and the way you died.” Even now, as hard as it is for many in New Orleans to live as they used to, the spirit ain’t dead yet. Writing of Tuesday nights now at the Maple Leaf Bar in the Uptown neighborhood, Pableaux Johnson (New York Times, Nov. 26) describes the regular gig there featuring the ReBirth Brass Band: “With roots in the city’s vibrant street-parade tradition and centuries of Afro-Caribbean polyrhythms, Rebirth [sic] pumps the city’s musical lifeblood in a revival that’s equal parts bebop cutting session and hard-grooving dance party. Searing trumpet runs boomerang off the room’s pressed-tin ceiling; bass notes from drum and tuba rumble the length of the hundred-foot room and beyond.” Yes, bebop coming out of the roots. Sidney Bechet used to emphasize that you can’t keep this music from going wherever it wants to, so long as it remembers where it came from. Also, as jazz studies move into more classrooms, I hope that the stories about the magic in the air told by the musicianers (as Sidney Bechet called them) in the springtime of New Orleans jazz will not be lost. When the late Nat Shapiro and I put together Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Musicians Who Made It, we started the first section with Danny Barker. Jazz musicians are riveting storytellers, not only on their horns, and Barker always made me want more. In the book, he had me wish I’d been born there: “One of my [most pleasant] memories as a kid growing up in New Orleans was how a bunch of us kids, playing, would suddenly hear sounds. The sounds of men playing would be so clear, but we wouldn’t be sure where they were coming from. … The music could come on you anytime. That city was full of the sounds of music.” In my last Final Chorus, I wrote about 38-year-old clarinetist Evan Christopher, who emigrated to New Orleans from his native California to become a continuer of the city’s soaring legacy on that instrument, both there and in his growing number of international gigs (his most recent recording, on Arbors, is Delta Bound). Interviewing him for the column, I was very pleased, as Nat Shapiro would have been, to hear that when he was still in school in Long Beach, Christopher began to find what turned out to be his lifetime vocation by reading what Danny Barker said about Evan’s future home in Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya. It’s good, and extremely rare, to know that a book you’ve been involved in has had a life-changing effect on someone. In an article on the “New Orleans Clarinet Style” that Christopher wrote for The Jazz Archivist, a newsletter for the William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University, he discussed the special “social and commercial function” of the energy of early New Orleans music that “primarily was to make people want to celebrate, want to dance, want to drink, want to love.” Bechet called it “that pleasure music. … You’d leave some place like the fairground, start to walk home, and you’d still have a feeling in you want to bust out dancing again.” In October of last year, Christopher played at a Sidney Bechet Society concert in New York where—as reported in the valuable The Bechet Quarterly—his “torrid clarinet solos illustrated why he’s held in such high regard by fans and fellow musicians alike. … On ‘Panama,’ he soared … literally dancing in place.” Among the current rebuilding projects in New Orleans is “Make It Right,” which is building (New York Times, Dec. 3) “150 affordable, environmentally sound houses over the next two years” in the Lower Ninth Ward that was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Brad Pitt commissioned designs by 13 architects for the project, part of the $5 million he pledged in contributions to “Make It Right.” One of the architects, Thom Mayne, designed “a lightweight concrete foundation, anchored by two pylons, like a pier, which would buoy the house if floodwaters rose.” Said Mayne, “It is a boat.” And that boat is right in tune with the buoyant spirit of New Orleans. Around the world, untold millions have been lifted by the music of which New Orleans was so life-affirming an element. In Treat it Gentle, Bechet distilled why the music that gave a ceaselessly satisfying meaning to his life has also energized so many of us: “You come into life alone and you go out alone, and you’re going to be alone a lot of time when you’re on this earth—and what tells it all, it’s the music. You tell it to the music and the music tells it to you … and then you know about it … All the beauty that’s ever been, it’s moving inside that music.” true 95 2008-06-19T18:31:17-04:00 false 18480 120 200803 true 94 2008-03-01T00:00:00-05:00

From when I was too young to be allowed into Boston jazz clubs, there’s an enduring memory of sneaking into Downtown at the Ken and marveling at Sidney Bechet joyously overpowering even Wild Bill Davison. Ever since, Bechet, whom I got to know when he played in Boston, has been the embodiment for me of the indomitable spirit of New Orleans jazz. I often turn again to his masterful autobiography, Treat it Gentle (Da Capo Press), for such passages as, “That music was like waking up in the morning and eating; it was that regular in your life. It was natural to the way you lived and the way you died.” Even now, as hard as it is for many in New Orleans to live as they used to, the spirit ain’t dead yet. Writing of Tuesday nights now at the Maple Leaf Bar in the Uptown neighborhood, Pableaux Johnson (New York Times, Nov. 26) describes the regular gig there featuring the ReBirth Brass Band: “With roots in the city’s vibrant street-parade tradition and centuries of Afro-Caribbean polyrhythms, Rebirth [sic] pumps the city’s musical lifeblood in a revival that’s equal parts bebop cutting session and hard-grooving dance party. Searing trumpet runs boomerang off the room’s pressed-tin ceiling; bass notes from drum and tuba rumble the length of the hundred-foot room and beyond.” Yes, bebop coming out of the roots. Sidney Bechet used to emphasize that you can’t keep this music from going wherever it wants to, so long as it remembers where it came from. Also,...

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

4 During the so-called Great Depression, aware of my immersion in music, my father bought a small soprano saxophone for me in a pawnshop when I was 10. When I heard Sidney Bechet, I put it away in despair. I turned to the clarinet, starting a lifelong love affair. My model wasn’t Benny Goodman; he had the chops but was deficient in soul. Artie Shaw had both, but for deep, warm waves of sound, there was Irving Fazola (of the Bob Crosby Bob Cats), whom hardly anyone mentions anymore. For astonishing inventiveness—a surprise in every note and many cliffhangers—there was Pee Wee Russell. Years later, when I recorded him for Candid with Coleman Hawkins, a rejuvenation of their 1929 session, Hawkins told me, “Back then, they said he played ‘funny notes.’ They were not then, and they aren’t now.” But the clarinetist I listened to for pure, lyrical intimacy was Lester Young—on the very few recordings he made on the instrument, notably the Kansas City Six date. Singularly, he used a metal clarinet, as I did, the only kind my father could afford. And after reading Charles Edward Smith on New Orleans legends, I reveled in the parade of New Orleans clarinetists, among them Barney Bigard, Jimmy Noone, Albert Nicholas, George Lewis, Omer Simeon and Edmond Hall. I long yearned to play the glorious clarinet solo on “High Society,” but by then, knowing I didn’t have the gift to be a musician, I had laid down my horn. Since the ascent of Bird and Dizzy, I rarely saw the clarinet in the frontline, but there were still players who made the instrument sing. Tony Scott had a passion for life and its surprises that continually fired his music. And Kenny Davern personified the joy of jazz. I heard him years ago at a New Year’s Eve party, and never again has the New Year seemed as inviting as it was that night. Kenny hated having microphones in front of him. He didn’t need them. His spirit filled the room. With Tony and Kenny gone, while there are quite a few accomplished jazz clarinetists, none quickened my own spirit the way my personal hall-of-famers had. That is until I opened a new package from Arbors Records, owned by Mat Domber, who, like Norman Granz, only records music that makes him feel good. The Arbors recording that lifted me from my day job chronicling genocides in Darfur and in the Constitution here at home was Delta Bound, by 38-year-old Evan Christopher. Christopher, both a master and scholar of New Orleans clarinet, exemplifies what Ben Ratliff writes in his valuable new book, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): “Structural newness, genre newness, is not necessarily what we are looking for. What we want is the musician’s individual expression: honor the past while being yourself. If a genuinely individual expression comes inside a familiar-sounding package, that shouldn’t reduce its value.” Before going into the odyssey of this clarinetist with such deep roots and so personal a sound and story, I cannot resist sharing a dimension of John Coltrane from Ratliff’s book that may intrigue you as much as it did me. I thought I knew John pretty well, but Ratliff tells of when composer and French horn player David Amram first met Coltrane, who suddenly asked him, “What do you think of Einstein’s theory of relativity?” Amram, as I would have, drew a blank. Coltrane, always generously willing to reveal what he knew, told, as Amram recalled, “about the symmetry of the solar system, talking about black holes in space, and constellations, and the whole structure of the solar system.” Adding that Einstein had explained all of this simply (at least to Coltrane), John said that “he was trying to do something like that in music—something that came from natural sources, the traditions of blues and jazz. But that there was a wholly different way of looking at what was natural in music.” There are many ways of looking at what’s natural in music, and in the notes for Delta Bound, Tulane University’s Dr. Bruce Boyd Raeburn, son of Boyd Raeburn, leader of an orchestra through which he showed highly adventurous new ways of jazz, wrote of Evan Christopher: “He understands that it’s not in the notes but the feeling behind them—and the human connections that result—that matter most in New Orleans jazz. … He places himself within this tradition, and it’s appropriate that he should do so, because he is advancing it at a time when some might assume that it is already extinct.” In the next Final Chorus, I’ll discuss how Christopher, a young clarinetist in Long Beach, Calif., won the Louis Armstrong National Award while still in high school; traveled to New Orleans; was one of New Orleans Magazine’s Jazz All-Stars in 2002; and has a schedule that includes jazz festivals and other gigs in Israel, Italy, Switzerland, France, California and with the Sidney Bechet Society in New York. I will also explore Christopher’s extraordinarily illuminating historical study, Licorice Stick Gumbo: The New Orleans Clarinet Style. He began his research by digging into the extensive oral history collections at Tulane University’s Hogan Jazz Archive, of which Dr. Bruce Boyd Raeburn is curator. “Seeking out the interviews with New Orleans clarinetists, I traveled back in time, ‘took lessons’ with musical ghosts.” Now, as the extent and diversity of Evan Christopher’s venues indicate, he is not channeling those “ghosts,” but rather, in his own deeply personal appreciation of these forebears, he is indeed demonstrating that this New Orleans tradition is still very much alive. true 95 2008-06-20T20:11:11-04:00 false 18678 121 200802 true 94 2008-01-01T00:00:00-05:00

During the so-called Great Depression, aware of my immersion in music, my father bought a small soprano saxophone for me in a pawnshop when I was 10. When I heard Sidney Bechet, I put it away in despair. I turned to the clarinet, starting a lifelong love affair. My model wasn’t Benny Goodman; he had the chops but was deficient in soul. Artie Shaw had both, but for deep, warm waves of sound, there was Irving Fazola (of the Bob Crosby Bob Cats), whom hardly anyone mentions anymore. For astonishing inventiveness—a surprise in every note and many cliffhangers—there was Pee Wee Russell. Years later, when I recorded him for Candid with Coleman Hawkins, a rejuvenation of their 1929 session, Hawkins told me, “Back then, they said he played ‘funny notes.’ They were not then, and they aren’t now.” But the clarinetist I listened to for pure, lyrical intimacy was Lester Young—on the very few recordings he made on the instrument, notably the Kansas City Six date. Singularly, he used a metal clarinet, as I did, the only kind my father could afford. And after reading Charles Edward Smith on New Orleans legends, I reveled in the parade of New Orleans clarinetists, among them Barney Bigard, Jimmy Noone, Albert Nicholas, George Lewis, Omer Simeon and Edmond Hall. I long yearned to play the glorious clarinet solo on “High Society,” but by then, knowing I didn’t have the gift to be a musician, I had laid down my horn. Since the ascent of Bird and Dizzy, I rarely...

2009-03-02T00:26:35-05:00

4 The FBI is proposing a new computer-profiling system, STAR (the System to Assess Risk), that, as National Public Radio reported on July 17, will be sifting through some six billion pieces of data by 2012, “about 20 records for every man, woman and child in America.” Many of those “persons of interest” suspected of terrorism links will be databased for additional scrutiny by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. They won’t know they have FBI files. Back in J. Edgar Hoover’s reign, even without databasing, the FBI amassed files on great numbers of Americans with purported ties to Communism and other subversive activities. Later, through the Freedom of Information Act, I was able to get my FBI reports—including an extensive file of articles I’d written, petitions I’d signed and people I’d known—with no mention anywhere that, as I’ve written, I’d been a fierce anti-Communist since reading Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (about Stalinism from the inside) when I was 15. Hoover had a special interest in black Americans, so I was not surprised to find recently—thanks to Louis Armstrong archivist Michael Cogswell and Louis’ longtime friend and associate, Phoebe Jacobs of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation—an FBI file stamped “This Summary Had Been Prepared for Use at the Seat of Government and is Not Suitable for Dissemination.” This secret Armstrong summary was dated Aug. 8, 1962. Then, as now, the FBI specialized in imaginary conspiracies based on its suspects’ associations. In Louis’ file: “A letter from Embassy Paris, dated 5/8/56 … revealed that a ‘Congress of Scholars of the Negro World,’ sponsored by the leftist ‘Presence Africaine’ … was scheduled to take place in Paris, September 19-22, 1956 … Louis Armstrong [was among] the American delegates who were invited.” Whether or not Louis ever came, the suspected association was duly noted. After all, as the FBI added the next year, this Armstrong person was extremely critical of President Eisenhower: “A newspaper clipping from the 9/19/57 issue of the ‘Southeast Missourian’ … reported that Armstrong, while in Grand Forks for a concert, declared that he was dropping plans for a government-backed trip to Russia [as a cultural ambassador] ‘because of the way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell [sic].’” This musician-agitator also, said the file, “called Eisenhower ‘two-faced’ and had ‘no guts’ and was letting [Arkansas] Governor Orville Faubus who forbade the entrance of black students in Little Rock schools [sic].” As an indication that FBI sources of information on subversives included patriotic citizens, directly under the entry of Armstrong’s denunciation of the war-hero president, was, “An anonymous letter, dated 9/21/57, with the envelope postmarked Boston, Mass., revealed that the writer was concerned about ‘various well known Negroes,’ who, according to the writer, were associated with CP members. “The writer stated: ‘Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong is a communist, why does the State Dept. give him a passport?’” (Maybe the passport had been issued by one of those communists whom Joe McCarthy told us had infested the State Department.) When the Supreme Court unanimously ordered Governor Faubus to let those Negro children into the Little Rock Schools and Eisenhower reluctantly agreed (saying, “there were extreme myths on both sides”), Louis’ FBI files ran clips from the New York Herald Tribune and the Washington Post reporting that Louis might change his mind about a government-sponsored tour of Russia. The FBI’s unblinking eye, however, stayed on Louis: “A letter from Embassy. Lome, Togoland, Africa to the State Department dated 12/9/60 [focused on the] distribution in Togo of Communist Propaganda … which presented a vicious attack on US racial policy [and] ‘made its appearance at approximately the dates on which Louis Armstrong performed in Lome.’” (The FBI must have surmised that wasn’t a coincidence.) At least Louis was in Africa on that date. My own FBI file reported that I had been at a meeting of “radicals” in North Africa around the same time. I have never been to Africa, North or South. Hardly any possible unlawful activity of Louis was ignored by the FBI. An 11/30/50 entry “indicated that Louis Armstrong and his orchestra were playing at the Flamingo Hotel and Armstrong was dissatisfied with the situation.” A person whose name was redacted said “he would take care of Armstrong by calling him on the telephone and by sending him a bottle of Scotch or a couple of reefers.” Possession of reefers could get you busted. Almost entirely blacked out was a 7/13/48 report that [name redacted]’s address book contained the name of Louis Armstrong, 9200 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, Calif.” If Congress funds the FBI’s new STAR profiling operation, capable of harvesting billions of names, some Americans may decide to look carefully in their address books, whether in print or electronic form. In my FBI file, a particularly damning report involving jazz was that I had given a course on jazz in the 1940s in Boston at the Samuel Adams School, which was on the list of Communist-front institutions. Actually, it was, and I knew about some pinkos on the faculty, but no other school had ever asked me to teach a course on jazz, and I couldn’t resist. Of course, I often mentioned Louis Armstrong during my lectures, and that might have heightened the FBI’s subsequent sustained interest in me. I prize any association with Louis, even thanks to the FBI files. true 95 2008-06-27T18:49:11-04:00 false 19382 124 200712 true 94 2007-12-01T00:00:00-05:00

The FBI is proposing a new computer-profiling system, STAR (the System to Assess Risk), that, as National Public Radio reported on July 17, will be sifting through some six billion pieces of data by 2012, “about 20 records for every man, woman and child in America.” Many of those “persons of interest” suspected of terrorism links will be databased for additional scrutiny by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. They won’t know they have FBI files. Back in J. Edgar Hoover’s reign, even without databasing, the FBI amassed files on great numbers of Americans with purported ties to Communism and other subversive activities. Later, through the Freedom of Information Act, I was able to get my FBI reports—including an extensive file of articles I’d written, petitions I’d signed and people I’d known—with no mention anywhere that, as I’ve written, I’d been a fierce anti-Communist since reading Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (about Stalinism from the inside) when I was 15. Hoover had a special interest in black Americans, so I was not surprised to find recently—thanks to Louis Armstrong archivist Michael Cogswell and Louis’ longtime friend and associate, Phoebe Jacobs of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation—an FBI file stamped “This Summary Had Been Prepared for Use at the Seat of Government and is Not Suitable for Dissemination.” This secret Armstrong summary was dated Aug. 8, 1962. Then, as now, the FBI specialized in imaginary conspiracies based on its suspects’ associations. In Louis’ file: “A letter from Embassy Paris, dated 5/8/56 … revealed that a ‘Congress of...

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