4 Tuesday is live jazz night at Bella Luna, an exceptional Italian restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. For the past couple of years, guitarist Jack Wilkins has held court at this intimate hang, swinging nonchalantly in one corner of the room as unsuspecting patrons chow down on their rigatoni. On most Tuesday nights a coterie of hardcore Wilkins fans—most amateur and professional six-stringers themselves—gathers at the bar just a few feet away from the Brooklyn native to take in every nuance of his remarkable playing. They sip their wine and whiskey with eyes glued to Wilkins’ busy right hand; they soak in his lush chordal voicings, shimmering arpeggios and ringing harmonics. Though Wilkins’ fretboard prowess is on par with such celebrated contemporaries as Pat Martino and Larry Coryell, the 65-year-old guitarist has been flying under the radar since the release of his debut record, 1973’s <I>Windows</I> on the Mainstream label. A one-time member of Buddy Rich’s working septet of the early ’70s and accompanist to a bevy of great jazz singers over the years, from Sarah Vaughan, Chris Connor and Jay Clayton to Morgana King, Nancy Harrow and Amy London, Wilkins remains highly regarded in guitar circles. And when it comes to assessing his standing in the guitar firmament, the guitar aficionados at Bella Luna are quick to give their man kudos. “Jack is definitely one of the best guitarists out there today, without a doubt,” says one ardent fan at the bar. “His problem is he’s just not so good at promoting himself. But the players know the deal.” The particular Tuesday night I attended the weekly guitar ritual at Bella Luna, Wilkins was joined by special guest Howard Alden, whose impeccable playing on a rich-sounding seven-string guitar blended beautifully with Wilkins’ rhythmically charged comping and fluid single-note lines. The two created magic on a set of Great American Songbook favorites, interweaving tight counterpoint lines on “Give Me the Simple Life,” nimbly shifting roles back and forth on “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” and blowing through the changes on uptempo renditions of “Fascinating Rhythm” and “Everything I’ve Got.” At one point, a woman approached Wilkins with a request on the night of her engagement dinner—“When I Fall in Love.” Wilkins turned in a stirring solo rendition that was brimming with beautiful chordal melodies and deft re-harmonization, in the tradition of guitar role models like Joe Pass, Tal Farlow and Johnny Smith. On his most recent release, the superb <I>Until It’s Time</I> (MaxJazz), Wilkins covers Smith’s “Walk Don’t Run” (a tune popularized in the early ’60s by the Ventures). The piece begins with a fugue-like quote of the familiar melody before it opens up and starts swinging. “Johnny Smith is the musician that made me wanna play music in the first place,” says Wilkins. “The first time I heard his records I went crazy. I said, ‘This is ridiculous. I wanna do that!’” Wilkins is joined on his 14th recording as a leader by bassist and longtime collaborator Steve LaSpina, along with pianist Jon Cowherd and drummer Mark Ferber. “I played with Steve a million times,” says the guitarist. “Jon I’ve played with a whole lot. Mark I haven’t played with as much as the others but we had an immediate hookup. And so I knew it was going to be a righteous group.” Following a day of rehearsal, they knocked out all 12 tracks in a single day in the studio. The title track is a cover of the romantic Buffy Sainte-Marie tune from the ’60s, “Until It’s Time for You to Go.” Says Wilkins, “I was doing some solo guitar gigs, subbing for Gene Bertoncini at this place called La Madeleine, and one night somebody requested that tune. And as I played it I realized how gorgeous the changes were, with the beautiful harmonies and the bassline that moves around. I’ve always loved the song and I loved the way she sang it, just a very emotional reading of the tune.” A gifted player with a great ear and an impeccable sense of time, Wilkins got his big break with bandleader and drummer Buddy Rich. “I only played with Buddy’s big band once and, frankly, I didn’t care for it,” he says. “It was no fun for me. As a guitar player, you get lost in the big band. So for three years I always played in a small-group setting with Buddy. We went out on the road as a septet—sometimes we’d even play quartet. I learned a million tunes, and every night I came home from that gig I realized what I had to work on.” Rich’s working septet during this period (1971-74) included such heavy hitters as alto saxophonist Sonny Fortune, tenor saxophonist Sal Nistico, pianist Kenny Barron and electric bassist Anthony Jackson. They made one live recording as a unit, 1971’s <I>Very Live at Buddy’s Place</I> (Groove Merchant). “Buddy loved these guys,” says Wilkins. “And when he sat behind those drums he was just as happy as he could be. I sat two feet away from him the whole time I was in the band … and I still can’t believe what I saw. It was uncanny.” During their sets, Rich would invariably dismiss the rest of the band to feature Wilkins in a solo setting. “It started one night when Buddy looked at me and said, ‘Play something!’ and then left the stage. Maybe he was tired and hot and wanted to get a drink. Whatever the case, I was left up there all alone and had to come up with something quick to draw the crowd into my playing the best I could. It was a great learning experience for me to actually sit there and play something that people enjoyed. It taught me a lot about creating colors and moods and dynamics within a tune. I couldn’t just get up there and wail a lot of notes, I had to really communicate and make it happen in an organic way. And I could always tell if I was good. If Buddy liked it, I knew it was OK.” During his tenure with Rich, Wilkins wrote one tune for him called “Fum,” which they recorded together on 1974’s Transition. As Wilkins recalls, “Buddy loved that piece. We played it every night. When I first brought it to him he said, ‘What the hell kind of name is that? Like “Fee Fi Fo Fum”?’ And I told him, ‘No, it stands for “Fuck You, Man.”’ He just couldn’t stop laughing for a week after that.” As for the fabled Rich temper, Wilkins says he never saw it. “Buddy was so nice to me you can’t believe it. Buddy and I became really good friends. We’re both from Brooklyn, we both loved baseball, we both played music and I didn’t give him any shit about anything. Why would I? I mean, we all knew who the boss was. He was the boss, and we were cool with that.” Recommended Listening: Until It’s Time (MaxJazz, 2009) Reunion (Chiaroscuro, 2001) Merge (Chiaroscuro, 1977) true 21 2009-10-03T13:04:26-04:00 false 25112 175 true 80 2009-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

Tuesday is live jazz night at Bella Luna, an exceptional Italian restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. For the past couple of years, guitarist Jack Wilkins has held court at this intimate hang, swinging nonchalantly in one corner of the room as unsuspecting patrons chow down on their rigatoni. On most Tuesday nights a coterie of hardcore Wilkins fans—most amateur and professional six-stringers themselves—gathers at the bar just a few feet away from the Brooklyn native to take in every nuance of his remarkable playing. They sip their wine and whiskey with eyes glued to Wilkins’ busy right hand; they soak in his lush chordal voicings, shimmering arpeggios and ringing harmonics. Though Wilkins’ fretboard prowess is on par with such celebrated contemporaries as Pat Martino and Larry Coryell, the 65-year-old guitarist has been flying under the radar since the release of his debut record, 1973’s Windows on the Mainstream label. A one-time member of Buddy Rich’s working septet of the early ’70s and accompanist to a bevy of great jazz singers over the years, from Sarah Vaughan, Chris Connor and Jay Clayton to Morgana King, Nancy Harrow and Amy London, Wilkins remains highly regarded in guitar circles. And when it comes to assessing his standing in the guitar firmament, the guitar aficionados at Bella Luna are quick to give their man kudos. “Jack is definitely one of the best guitarists out there today, without a doubt,” says one ardent fan at the bar. “His problem is he’s just not so good at promoting himself. But the...

2009-10-12T11:21:58-04:00

4 Like many musicians who came up during the swing era and have since spent much of their life traveling the world, saxophonist Red Holloway has a trove of road stories to share. Yet none is more vivid or revealing than his childhood recollection of leaving the segregated South for the promised land of Chicago during the depths of the Depression. A midwife brought James Holloway into the world on May 31, 1927, in Helena, Ark. His mother was 13 when he was born; his father, whom he wouldn’t meet until 21 years later, was 17. Though Holloway spent only the first five years of his life in Helena, he has no difficulty recalling the suffocating air of racial tension, the indignity of having “to step off the sidewalk and onto the hot asphalt when white folks passed by,” and the not unfounded fears that almost consumed his teenage mother. “The racial thing in Arkansas was so bad that my mother, me being a male, didn’t want me to stay there, so we moved to Chicago,” says the veteran reedman and occasional vocalist, speaking from his home in California. “That was quite a trip, riding in the bus with a shoebox full of chicken. In Arkansas, on the black side of town, there were no electric street lights, so every place we’d get to, I’d see bright lights and say, ‘Mama, is this Chicago?’ ‘No, not yet.’ “They didn’t have toilets on the buses, of course,” Holloway continues. “And blacks couldn’t stop at every place on the normal route so we had to have a pickle jar to pee in and throw it out the window. We were in the back of the bus, of course, but we were lucky enough to get that long seat back there.” Even as a child in Arkansas, Holloway was drawn to music. His mother played piano and pump organ. “They used to have a crank on some of those, and I’d pump it while she played in church,” he recalls. Piano lessons came early, but it wasn’t until years later, in Chicago, when Holloway heard the Count Basie Orchestra on the radio, that he caught a glimpse of his future. “When I heard Lester Young, that’s when I knew I wanted to play saxophone. I guess most of us wanted to be Lester.” Enter Captain Walter Dyett, revered educator and bandleader at DuSable High School. An incubator for talented youth, the school was home to the likes of Johnny Griffin, Gene Ammons, Dinah Washington, Von Freeman and Redd Foxx, among many other budding musicians and entertainers. Dyett was a notoriously strict taskmaster. “If you didn’t practice, he’d throw you off the band,” Holloway recalls. “He threw out Johnny Griffin all the time. Johnny was playing alto, and when I wasn’t practicing he’d throw me out, too. But he had his own band and he’d take the best players and give them work. It was real nice.” By the time Holloway was 16 he had turned professional. Gone were the days of delivering 25-cent quarts of beer by bicycle. After joining Gene Wright’s big band, Holloway was making good money for a few years, until he joined the Army. After returning home, the saxophonist received a comprehensive education in the blues, courtesy of the great pianist Roosevelt Sykes. “My mother went to school with him,” Holloway recalls. “He was visiting her one day and he saw my saxophone. ‘Boy, do you play that thing?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ So he sat down at the piano and started playing some blues and I played with him. ‘You want to go out on the road with me?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’” And off they went. “Georgia, Arkansas, out west to Kansas City, everywhere,” Holloway recalls. “He taught me everything about the blues. And all those blues players knew each other. In fact, I got more gigs from blues players than jazz players back then.” Of course, it didn’t hurt that Holloway was at the right place at the right time. He played with just about everyone who was anyone on the flourishing Chicago blues scene in the late ’40s and ’50s, in the studio or onstage, from Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and Memphis Slim to his favorite vocalists: Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Witherspoon and Joe Turner. “Wolf and Witherspoon I liked because they had a raspy, big voice, a real blues voice,” Holloway says with a laugh. “They had that ‘I’m hungry and it’s time for us to get some money so I can eat every day’ sound.” At one point, Holloway was busy working in one capacity or another at the Chance, Chess, Checkers and Vee Jay labels. His professional association with Leonard and Phil Chess began shortly after the siblings purchased the Aristocrat label in 1949. “I used to write lead sheets for Leonard,” Holloway says. “I was getting three dollars a lead sheet. I’d write up 10 of them and they’d send them down to get copyrighted. So when I asked for my 30 dollars, he’d say, ‘Every time I turn around, you’re asking for money. Why don’t you take one percent of this company?’ This was back when they were operating Aristocrat. I said, ‘No, I just want my 30 dollars,’ never knowing how big the company would get when they changed the name to Chess.” Jazz, though, was always Holloway’s passion, and the advent of bop didn’t diminish his enthusiasm. While playing with Wright’s big band at the Persian Lounge, he got his first chance to hear Charlie Parker up close. “He was playing so much that I thought maybe I’d better go into the real estate business. I was still honking like Arnett Cobb!” Holloway credits his memorable alliance with his late friend Sonny Stitt for heightening his appreciation of bop. The two met in 1944, but it wasn’t until the late ’70s that Stitt convinced Holloway to play alto as well tenor on tour, a dicey proposition as it turned out. During one of their first road gigs, the two exchanged a few alto choruses on “Now’s the Time” before Stitt lowered the hammer: “He played 10 choruses and drove me right into the floor,” recalls Holloway. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, you MF. I didn’t want to bring this alto in the first place. You act like I’m the enemy.’ He said, ‘There ain’t no friendship on the bandstand.’” As much as Holloway admired other reedmen, no one has inspired his robust tone and melodic conception more than Ben Webster. Holloway got a chance to play with the tenor titan for six months during the mid-’50s. He wasn’t prepared, however, to spend much time going toe-to-toe with the grandmaster: “I’d play maybe two tunes and get right off the stage. But I’d furnish the Teacher’s Scotch every night so I could get a lesson.” You can still detect Webster’s influence on Holloway’s playing today. His recent release, Go Red Go! (Delmark), makes room for romantic ballads that showcase his big-toned lyricism, including “Stardust” and “Deep Purple,” as well as the kind of Hammond B3 organ grooves that recall Holloway’s influential recordings with Jack McDuff and George Benson.“I’ve always liked pretty music,” Holloway volunteers. “I remember what Ben Webster used to tell me: It’s like when you meet a pretty woman and you want to sing to her—make your horn sing.” Mention of McDuff and Benson quickly triggers a laugh: “George was—and is—a helluva player,” Holloway says. “But I remember he’d say, ‘McDuff, please let me sing one.’ McDuff used to say, ‘If I wanted a singer, I’d hire one!’” Years later Holloway wouldn’t miss an opportunity to needle McDuff. “I’d say, ‘Don’t you wish you let that boy sing?’ And he’d say, ‘F you!’ We always laughed about it.” Since the late ’60s, Holloway has been based on the West Coast. For 15 years he served as the talent coordinator for the luxe Parisian Room in Los Angeles, a job that he was well suited for given the similar positions he held at various clubs in Chicago. When he’s not touring, the reedman enjoys the good life, surrounded by friends and musicians in Cambria, Calif., a sunny enclave with an ocean view. He shares his home now with a 120-pound malamute—“half wolf and half Alaskan husky.” “Yes,” he adds, “it’s a beautiful place to live: no police, no jails and no fast food joints.” Recommended Listening: <I>Go Red Go!</I> (Delmark, 2009) <I>Coast to Coast</I> (Milestone, 2003) <I>Live With Harry “Sweets” Edison</I> (Chiaroscuro, 1995) true 110 2009-10-08T16:07:00-04:00 false 25159 176 true 80 2009-08-01T00:00:00-04:00

Like many musicians who came up during the swing era and have since spent much of their life traveling the world, saxophonist Red Holloway has a trove of road stories to share. Yet none is more vivid or revealing than his childhood recollection of leaving the segregated South for the promised land of Chicago during the depths of the Depression. A midwife brought James Holloway into the world on May 31, 1927, in Helena, Ark. His mother was 13 when he was born; his father, whom he wouldn’t meet until 21 years later, was 17. Though Holloway spent only the first five years of his life in Helena, he has no difficulty recalling the suffocating air of racial tension, the indignity of having “to step off the sidewalk and onto the hot asphalt when white folks passed by,” and the not unfounded fears that almost consumed his teenage mother. “The racial thing in Arkansas was so bad that my mother, me being a male, didn’t want me to stay there, so we moved to Chicago,” says the veteran reedman and occasional vocalist, speaking from his home in California. “That was quite a trip, riding in the bus with a shoebox full of chicken. In Arkansas, on the black side of town, there were no electric street lights, so every place we’d get to, I’d see bright lights and say, ‘Mama, is this Chicago?’ ‘No, not yet.’ “They didn’t have toilets on the buses, of course,” Holloway continues. “And blacks couldn’t stop at every place on the...

2009-10-08T16:07:47-04:00

4 The story of rock ’n’ roll is usually told as a triumphant march, a populist victory for exuberant kids over the forces of repression and cultural conformity. But the rock revolution, particularly the second wave spearheaded by the British Invasion, also inflicted extensive casualties, in many cases sweeping away the livelihoods of the artists who paved the way for the insurrection in the first place. As a singer who came of age performing with jazz orchestras in the 1940s, Ernestine Anderson was on the frontline when the seismic forces unleashed by rock swept away most of the American music market. A commanding jazz vocalist with a powerful feeling for the blues, Anderson was born in Houston, raised in Seattle and weaned on gospel. In the late 1950s she’d gained an international following with a series of polished recordings for Mercury. But as the music business changed, Anderson found herself unable to work consistently in the United States. In a poetic twist, the tsunami triggered by the Beatles forced many American jazz and blues singers to seek work in the United Kingdom, which is where Anderson found a receptive audience in 1965. (Rare footage can be found on YouTube of Anderson in her prime on German television, singing “Moanin’” in 1967 with the formidable South African organist Cherry Wainer.) “When rock ’n’ roll became the music of America, I moved to London for two years,” says Anderson, 80, from her home in Seattle. “In order to keep working I had to leave the country. And when I came back, I stopped singing for a while. I just didn’t want to go through the hassle of starting all over again. I decided maybe it was time for me to give it up, and that’s what I did.” Fortunately, Anderson has enjoyed a career with a long, productive second act. After a decade of obscurity, she surfaced with a splash when bassist Ray Brown heard her sing at a jazz party on Vancouver Island in 1976. “At the end of it Ray asked me if I was ready to come back and start singing again,” Anderson says. “I told him I needed a record, I couldn’t just start cold. I needed something out there for people to hear. He called me a week later and said I’ve booked you at the Concord Jazz Festival and they’re going to record you there. That was my first recording after getting back in the business.” With Brown serving as her manager and the careful attention of Concord’s Carl Jefferson, Anderson spent 15 years with the label, recording more than a dozen consistently rewarding albums in a variety of settings. “Carl really had his hand on the pulse of the music, and knew how to record different artists,” Anderson says. “Once a record was made, he knew how to get behind it and promote it. He was a giant that way.” Showcasing her gift for delivering standards with rhythmic ease and emotional honesty and her bone-deep feeling for the blues, the Concord albums paired her with powerhouse big bands and a succession of superlative accompanists, including Hank Jones, Monty Alexander and Gene Harris. She felt particularly comfortable with George Shearing, recording a sensational set of lustrous ballads and midtempo, finger-snapping standards on 1988’s A Perfect Match. In a sure sign of flattery, Anderson has seen her signature tunes, particularly “I Love Being Here With You” and “Never Make Your Move Too Soon,” widely borrowed by other singers. Raised in a musical household, she absorbed blues and jazz listening to the radio at home with her parents, and gospel and hymns at church with her father. “My mother was a housewife and my father worked on the Great Northern Railroad,” Anderson recalls. “When I was growing up he sang bass in a quartet in Houston. They used to sing in different churches and I used to follow my dad around because I loved hearing them sing.” Anderson learned how to win over an audience at a very young age. She first gained attention as a 12-year-old who was chaperoned for Sunday performances with trumpeter Russell Jacquet at Houston’s El Dorado Ballroom. By 18 she was touring with a jump-blues band led by R&B pioneer Johnny Otis. Early on she worshipped Sarah Vaughan, but when Otis’ tenor saxophonist Paul Quinichette told her she needed to find her own sound if she wanted a career if jazz, Anderson stopped listening to vocalists for several years and concentrated on deciphering the new bebop recordings by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. After a few years, she made jazz’s major leagues, joining Lionel Hampton’s hugely popular orchestra in 1952. “Hamp was in town and my husband heard that Betty Carter was leaving the orchestra and that he was looking for a singer,” Anderson says. “He pushed me to go and audition for the band and I got the job. I traveled with that band for a year, and it was one of the hottest bands that Lionel ever had. Quincy Jones was there too and he was writing for the band and Jimmy Scott was the other singer.” With Hampton she was immediately thrust into the big time, performing at high-profile gigs like Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first inauguration. At the time, the orchestra bristled with brilliant musicians, including saxophonists Gigi Gryce and Jerome Richardson, trombonist Jimmy Cleveland and a trumpet section featuring Art Farmer, Quincy Jones and Clifford Brown. But like all of Hamp’s vocalists, Anderson didn’t last long. She left the band after a year rather than embark on what turned out to be an ill-fated European tour (she was replaced by Annie Ross). She did make an important connection with Gryce, recording a definitive version of his tune “Social Call” on his 1955 Savoy album Nica’s Tempo. A partnership with Swedish trumpeter Rolf Ericson led to a three-month Scandinavian tour, which launched Anderson as a major attraction in Europe. She recorded the album Hot Cargo in 1956 with a Swedish orchestra led by Harry Arnold, an album that became a hit when it was released in the U.S. by Mercury. “It was a wonderful experience,” Anderson says. “I found out that the Swedish people love jazz. After that I found that to be true all over Europe and Asia, every place except our own country.” She settled in San Francisco when she returned to the States, and quickly won a devoted fan in Ralph J. Gleason, the incisive San Francisco Chronicle columnist who was a founding editor at Rolling Stone and helped launch the Monterey Jazz Festival. In a striking case of the power of the jazz press, he made it his mission to spread the word about Anderson’s talent. Landing a coveted spot at the first Monterey Jazz Festival in 1958 performing with piano ace Gerald Wiggins, Anderson cemented her status as rising star. The following year DownBeat presented her with the “New Star” award. “Ralph Gleason did so much for me,” Anderson says. “He was responsible for getting Hot Cargo off the ground when I came back from Sweden. He made Monterey happen and was responsible for getting an article in Time magazine, which was unheard of in those days for a jazz musician. He really got behind me and made it happen.” Anderson hasn’t won another jazz poll for half a century, an oversight that might partly be explained by her decision to spend most of her career based on the West Coast. Like the beloved but perennially underappreciated Etta Jones, who went about her business recording one captivating album after another until she passed in 2001, Anderson brings a quiet professionalism to every project. She puts her stamp on a song with her relaxed phrasing and supple sense of time, swinging fiercely and slyly generating tension by breaking up lines in unexpected places. Her mellow contralto has proven remarkably resilient, sounding warm and pleasingly weathered on her recent albums. It seems particularly fitting that Anderson has found a late-career home at HighNote, the label responsible for documenting Jones’ final years. Released in January, Anderson’s latest album, A Song for You, feels like a gift and a valediction. The session features Jones’ longtime musical partner, tenor saxophonist Houston Person, who offers purring commentary to Anderson’s playful reading of “This Can’t Be Love” and a ravishing rendition of “Skylark.” But it’s the closing track, a devastating version of “For All We Know,” that captures the essence of Anderson’s music. Tough but tender, vulnerable but self-assured and utterly without self-pity, Anderson offers a fearless glimpse at mortality. “Singing is what keeps me going,” Anderson says. “It’s my life’s work. I don’t know anything else to do and retirement is out of the question.” Recommended Listening: A Song for You (HighNote, 2009) I Love Being Here With You (Concord Jazz, 2002) A Perfect Match (with George Shearing; Concord Jazz, 1988) true 290 2009-04-20T10:10:10-04:00 false 24596 174 true 80 2009-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

The story of rock ’n’ roll is usually told as a triumphant march, a populist victory for exuberant kids over the forces of repression and cultural conformity. But the rock revolution, particularly the second wave spearheaded by the British Invasion, also inflicted extensive casualties, in many cases sweeping away the livelihoods of the artists who paved the way for the insurrection in the first place. As a singer who came of age performing with jazz orchestras in the 1940s, Ernestine Anderson was on the frontline when the seismic forces unleashed by rock swept away most of the American music market. A commanding jazz vocalist with a powerful feeling for the blues, Anderson was born in Houston, raised in Seattle and weaned on gospel. In the late 1950s she’d gained an international following with a series of polished recordings for Mercury. But as the music business changed, Anderson found herself unable to work consistently in the United States. In a poetic twist, the tsunami triggered by the Beatles forced many American jazz and blues singers to seek work in the United Kingdom, which is where Anderson found a receptive audience in 1965. (Rare footage can be found on YouTube of Anderson in her prime on German television, singing “Moanin’” in 1967 with the formidable South African organist Cherry Wainer.) “When rock ’n’ roll became the music of America, I moved to London for two years,” says Anderson, 80, from her home in Seattle. “In order to keep working I had to leave the country. And when I...

2009-11-03T14:37:01-05:00

4 On Arild Andersen’s new ECM album, Live at Belleville, Tommy Smith’s tenor saxophone rasps and brays and lunges over intervals and keens toward madness. Andersen’s bass enters and hammers nails into the music. Drummer Paolo Vinaccia randomly erupts, scattering curses. Then the three settle into time and fly, Smith’s blistering runs converging to long hoarse cries. The sound, like the music, is raw. Aren’t ECM recordings supposed to be moody and ethereal, with crystalline, transparent sonic quality? Whatever happened to the cool, austere “Nordic jazz sensibility”? Is there really such a thing as an “ECM sound”? “I think I’ve always been in between some kind of energy type playing, and more spacey stuff,” says Andersen, speaking by phone from his home in Oslo, Norway. It is morning on the West Coast of the United States, but late afternoon in Oslo, “completely dark and snowing.” Andersen has just returned from Paris, where he received the Prix du Musicien Européen 2008, from the Académie du Jazz. He continues: “I like to burn. But sometimes it’s difficult to catch that feeling in the studio. On my live albums, like Molde Concert and Belleville, you can hear what I sound like live: high energy. But my studio albums have been more held back, in a sense. It’s like the difference between what you want to hear at a Friday night hang in a club, and what you like to listen to at home—maybe on a Monday morning.” Those “held back” ECM studio albums include Hyperborean, from 1997, which just whispers, Andersen’s bass meditating over the somber, subtle backgrounds of a classical string quartet. There is also Electra, from 2005, the kind of project few jazz labels would undertake: 18 composed scenes of theater music for Sophocles’ tragedy, employing six instruments and a four-voice choir. Even Live at Belleville often subsides into quietude. The album is mostly taken up with “Independency,” a sweeping, diverse suite in four parts, commissioned by an agency of the Norwegian government to mark the centenary of Norway’s liberation from the union with Sweden. Hardly the subject matter for a blowing session. Andersen is not as famous as some ECM artists like Keith Jarrett and Jan Garbarek, but there is no musician more closely identified with the label. He played on the very first ECM recording session in 1970 (for Garbarek’s Afric Pepperbird). Since 1975, he has released 18 ECM albums as leader or co-leader, and has been a sideman on many others. You can dip into this voluminous discography almost anywhere and become convinced that Andersen is among the great living bassists. He is deeply, poetically expressive as a soloist. His warm, looming sound, combined with his sense of dramatic timing, communicates nuances of emotion beyond the reach of mere horns. And he is a demon in a rhythm section. But “bassist” is a very incomplete job description. He is also a bandleader, a composer/arranger, a conceptualist behind ambitious projects, and a pioneer in the use of electronics in acoustic jazz. He sustained (for a decade) one of the seminal Norwegian small jazz ensembles (Masqualero), was among the first to bring Norwegian folk forms into jazz, collaborated with major guitarists like Bill Frisell and Ralph Towner and Terje Rypdal, and co-led a groundbreaking piano trio with Greek classical pianist Vassilis Tsabropoulos. Not surprisingly, the project that Andersen is most excited about is his current one, the trio with Scotsman Tommy Smith and Italian Paolo Vinaccia. He says, “This trio is my ideal band, a band that doesn’t need a bass player. Sometimes I can comp the saxophone. On some songs I can just lay out. I can come in wherever I want. The energy is moving around. We can build a saxophone solo to go up, up, up, and all of a sudden we take a left turn and it’s very quiet. The feeling of three equally balanced musicians is very important for me, and with this trio I think I’ve finally found it. Also, without keyboards or guitar, I can use my electronics more freely.” Those electronics include a Boss octave pedal, a Gibson Echoplex Pro, and a TC Electronics M2000 reverb unit. On Live at Belleville, Andersen uses them to multiply three instruments into occasional orchestras. Three tracks come from the first gig that Smith and Vinaccia ever played together, and were recorded (on a soundboard tape) without Andersen’s prior knowledge. In Europe, the album appeared on many “Best of 2008” lists. Like virtually every European jazz artist of his generation, Andersen says that his course was set by his early exposure to American musicians. “When I came up in the ’60s, there were no jazz schools in Norway. In Scandinavia, I had a chance to play with people like George Russell and Don Cherry. Dexter Gordon and Art Farmer also spent time here. Then I visited New York in the early ’70s and played with Sam Rivers and Paul Bley. To play with these masters, learning how they phrased, feeling their time, that was my school. It shaped the music I’ve been doing all my life.” But while Americans got him started, Andersen’s career has been as Euro-centric as that of any jazz musician of his stature. He has recorded almost exclusively with Europeans. It has been largely a practical matter: “Living in Norway, I have needed to pick people to play on my records who could go on tour.” Some he “picked,” like Jon Christensen and Nils Petter Molvær, have gone on to international reputations. More, like Tore Brunborg and Eivind Aarset and Bendik Hofseth, remain almost entirely unknown in the United States. To discover the creative strength of these players through Andersen’s recordings is to realize that there is now a fully independent jazz scene in Europe. Andersen himself has rarely played in the United States, and never since the early 1990s. To immerse oneself in Andersen’s ECM discography, with its variations of mood and its huge swings in dynamic range, is to once again encounter the question: Is it meaningful to speak of an “ECM sound”? Andersen thinks so. He believes that what gives the ECM catalog its unity is the fact that “Manfred Eicher is not a producer, he is an artist, and when he is in the studio, you listen to him. Manfred’s approach to music is that feeling you get on ECM records.” Andersen also has some ideas about what critics like to call “the Nordic sensibility” in jazz. He says, “When I was in New York, playing with Sam Rivers and Barry Altschul, I was really into that free, fast-moving, ‘streets of New York’ type of sound. Coming back to Norway, the music reflects a bit of the life here, the nature.” He also speculates, “Another difference with northern, or Scandinavian, jazz, may be the idea of sharing. I find American jazz more of a hierarchy, in the sense of a bandleader with sidemen, or a soloist with a rhythm section. Here we share everything: the money, the solos, the good food, the bad wine, whatever: We share it.” Andersen will turn 64 this year, and is busier than ever. From the beginning of October until mid-December 2008, he played 40 concerts, half in Norway, half in other European destinations. “It’s challenging,” he says, “when you are not on tour but have to fly to almost every concert.” He is able, “90 percent of the time,” to bring his “real bass,” a German instrument from the late 1800s. An Accord carbon-fiber bass case (“only 14 kilo”) has been a valuable recent acquisition. When the plane is too small, he brings a Yamaha SLB200 electric bass, on which he has changed out the pickup for his preferred Danish Wilson. He says, “I have to check out what kind of aircraft is flying. It’s not so much the flying time or the price but can I get the bass on?” His projects may be erudite, like his rarefied ruminations on Sophocles. He may pursue the most sophisticated organic relationships between composition and go-for-broke improvisation, as on Live at Belleville. He may use electronics to introduce cold north winds into the open vistas of his music, like on Electra. But Andersen is refreshingly down to earth. When asked which takes more of his time, composing or practicing the bass, he does not hesitate: “Sending e-mails and booking flight tickets.” Recommended Listening: Live At Belleville (ECM, 2008) Electra (ECM, 2005) Selected Recordings (ECM :rarum Series, 2004) Hyperborean (ECM, 1997) Molde Concert (ECM, 1982) true 209 2009-03-25T11:08:04-04:00 false 24394 138 true 80 2009-04-01T00:00:00-04:00

"I think I've finally found it," says this ECM artist

2009-04-23T11:23:50-04:00

4 To celebrate her 80th birthday last November, Sheila Jordan hired a string quartet to accompany her regular trio of longtime collaborator and pianist Steve Kuhn, bassist David Finck and drummer Billy Drummond in a weeklong engagement at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in New York. “I wanted to sing with a string quartet ever since I heard Bird With Strings,” confides the lifelong Charlie Parker fanatic. “I had worked with strings before at a festival in Vancouver, also a few times in Italy, but I had never done it in the States. And to work with strings in New York, a city I love so much, was a special treat for me. I told myself, ‘I don’t care what it costs me; I’m gonna make it happen.’ So it was my 80th birthday gift to myself.” Her Dizzy’s gig turned out to be a major triumph. Canadian cellist Harold Birston, who had worked with Jordan before in Vancouver, wrote some special arrangements for the occasion, including a rendition of Parker’s “Confirmation” that incorporated a note-for-note transcription of Bird’s two-chorus solo. With violinist Mark Feldman also contributing virtuosic solos on pieces like Tom Harrell’s “Out to Sea,” Dave Frishberg’s “Heart’s Desire,” the Dietz-Schwartz standard “Haunted Heart” and a clever medley of Frank Loesser’s “Inch Worm” and Larry Gelb’s “The Caterpillar Song,” Jordan sang impressionistic curlicues around the notes, never quite landing directly on them but rather fluttering around them as if in zero gravity. And she delivered each tune with such personal flair and old-school charisma that she quickly won over the adoring Dizzy’s audience. “Thank you, my dears, my darlings,” she would say to them after each round of applause. And her casual between-song banter, in which she shared anecdotes about her amazing journey from small-town poverty to the heights of bebop to her current status as a grand dame of jazz, was both entertaining and revealing. You can hear that kind of openness and instant rapport with her audience on Jordan’s latest recording, the live Winter Sunshine (Justin Time). Recorded at the Upstairs club in Montreal during the frigid month of February, Jordan warms up the audience with her inventive takes on George and Ira Gershwin’s “Lady Be Good,” Bobby Timmons’ “Dat Dere” with Oscar Brown Jr.’s playful lyrics, and Bronislaw Kaper’s “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm,” which segues neatly into Miles Davis’ “Little Willie Leaps.” But she makes her biggest impact with her autobiographical tunes “The Crossing,” written after her recovery from alcoholism, and “Sheila’s Blues,” a starkly dramatic tune that she recorded on four previous occasions and which has been her crowd-pleasing set closer for years. “Sheila’s Blues” tells the tale of little Sheila Jeanette Dawson. Born on Nov. 18, 1928, in Detroit, she was raised by her grandparents in the coal-mining town of Ehrenfield, Pa. (aka “Scoopy Town”). “Mother had me when she was 17,” she explains. “And since she and my father were not together, I was sent to live in Pennsylvania with my grandparents while my mother stayed in Detroit to work in the factory.” She grew up there in a house with six relatives. “My aunts and uncles were more like my brothers and sisters,” she recalls. “In fact, one uncle was six years younger than me. We had no heat or plumbing in our house and food was scarce. And there was a lot of alcoholism in my family. My grandmother and grandfather did the best they could but we were very poor and there was a lot of suffering. It was not a happy childhood.” Singing became Sheila’s salvation during those lean years. “I sang when I was sad, I sang when I was happy, I sang when I was scared. All my emotions revolved around singing. Singing was necessary for my existence. I sang because I needed to sing.” She also remembers as a child serenading the out-of-work coal miners at a local beer garden that her grandmother would frequent. “She used to take me up to these different beer gardens and there would be live music and then they’d get me up there to sing. And my grandma used to say, ‘When they throw money at you, don’t stop singing. Don’t pick it up until after you’re through singing.’” By the time Jordan returned to Detroit as a teenager, she met hipsters Skeeter Spight and Leroy Mitchell and formed a kind of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross-styled singing group with them. Along with fellow Bird fanatics like Barry Harris, Kenny Burrell and Tommy Flanagan, they would follow Charlie Parker from places like the Club Sudan to El Sino to hear him play. Since they were all too young to get into the clubs, they would invariably hang out in the alley and peek into the back window to catch a glimpse of Bird in flight. “One time he came out between sets and played his sax to us kids standing out there in the alley,” she recalls. “I’ll never forget that night.” In Detroit, Jordan dated saxophonist Frank Wess, though the sight of an interracial couple in late ’40s Detroit was a cause for agitation among the locals. “There was so much racial prejudice, it was terrible,” she says. “I was always being hassled, constantly down at the police station being questioned as to why I hung around with black people. Of course, those were not the words they used. I hated that other word they used. ... I can’t even say it. The police would constantly stop me and my black friends for no reason, coming to and from the clubs, and they’d ask where I lived, how old I was, where I was going. It got to be a real drag, so I finally decided to split. The racial prejudice drove me out of Detroit. But I was ready to leave anyway to go follow Bird’s music to New York.” Shortly after arriving in town in 1951, Jordan began studying with Lennie Tristano and hanging at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem after hours. Around this time she also took up with Bird’s piano player, Duke Jordan. “I had met Duke in Detroit and got reacquainted with him in New York,” she says. “Somehow we started going out and we ended up together and got married in 1952. It wasn’t a happy marriage but the nice thing about that was, he was with Bird at the time. So anytime Bird had a gig, I could go and hear him. And Bird would always ask me to sit in.” In 1955, Sheila gave birth to her daughter Traci. That same year, her hero Charlie Parker died. “Of course, I was devastated,” she says, “but I wasn’t surprised, in a way. He had fallen prey to this baffling, powerful disease of heroin addiction. He was in bad shape mentally and physically. He was really such a sweet and caring man but the drugs and alcohol made him a different person.” A few years later, Jordan began singing at the Page Three, which is where composer George Russell first heard her. He recruited Jordan to contribute haunting, ethereal vocals on a unique arrangement he had written on “You Are My Sunshine,” a tune that she used to sing to the out-of-work coal miners in Scoopy Town. That session for Russell’s 1962 Riverside recording The Outer View was her first-ever recording, and led to her own date for Blue Note, Portrait of Sheila, which was recorded later that year and released in 1963. “And then I didn’t record again for about a dozen years,” she says. “I’m not a pusher. I don’t go out there and push. I don’t know how to do that.” Although Jordan has only 21 albums as a leader to her credit in her 60 years as a vocalist, she has made countless appearances in nightclubs and at festivals all over the world. And every time she hits the stage, she continues to pay tribute to her idol and main inspiration, Charlie Parker. “I cannot let this man’s name die,” she says. “I constantly talk about Bird because some people forget about him or they put him on a back burner. But he’s too important to me. I wouldn’t be sitting here today if it weren’t for Bird. “It’s amazing because every time I need an uplift, his music picks me up,” she says. “The first time I heard Bird was on a jukebox. It was a version of ‘Now’s the Time’ by Charlie Parker and his Reboppers, and as I listened to it the hair stood up on my arms. I heard three notes coming out of that jukebox and I said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s the music I’ll dedicate my life to!’ “Then, just yesterday, I was feeling kind of down,” she continues. “I went into a Japanese restaurant and ordered some miso soup, and just as soon as I put the spoon to my mouth ... what comes on? Charlie Parker playing ‘Now’s The Time.’ And as I sat there listening to Bird, I said to myself, ‘Yeah, everything’s all right with the world.’ Jordan still lives in the same Chelsea apartment where she has resided for the past 44 years, within walking distance of some of the Greenwich Village clubs where she used to play during the early ’60s, like the Page Three. “You know, I never thought I’d live to be this old,” she laughs as we finish our tea. “But you can’t fight it. There’s nothing you can do about it, except grow old gracefully. That’s what I want to do.” Recommended Listening: Guitar Moods by Mundell Lowe (Riverside) A Grand Night for Swinging (Riverside) Old Friends (with Ray Brown and André Previn) (Telarc) Haunted Heart (with Jim Ferguson) (Lily’s Dad’s Music) true 21 2009-02-24T16:47:02-05:00 false 21266 137 true 80 2009-03-01T00:00:00-05:00

Bill Milkowski gives an Overdue Ovation to singer Sheila Jordan.

28830 2009-04-03T10:52:13-04:00

4 Pianist Larry Willis’ early life in Harlem, with its frequent sightings of American legends, from Duke Ellington to Willie Mays to Leonard Bernstein, sounds like something novelist E.L. Doctorow might have cooked up. Yet even that story is no match for Willis’ remarkable if largely unheralded career: Four decades distinguished by an unusually colorful range of recordings, more than 300 in all, and an extraordinary array of collaborations with the likes of Jackie McLean, Cannonball Adderley, Hugh Masekela, Stan Getz, Woody Shaw, Herb Alpert, Blood Sweat and Tears, Carmen McRae and the Fort Apache Band. Both Ellington and Joe Louis lived up the block from the Willis home in the early ’50s, so each plays a role in the pianist-composer’s earliest recollections, along with Sugar Ray Robinson, often spotted cruising down the 155th Street viaduct. The youngest of three gifted boys, Willis remembers standing on the corner, watching wide-eyed as the champ drove by. “My father used to park cars for two New York Giants,” says Willis, picking up the narrative thread over lunch on a recent afternoon in suburban Maryland. “One was a guy named Hank Thompson, the other guy was named Willie Mays.” (To this day one of Willis’ most prized possessions, given to him by the Hall of Famer, is a baseball signed by the ’54 Giants.) A devoted Brooklyn Dodgers fan who followed the team even after it abandoned Ebbets Field for warmer climes and bigger financial returns, Willis puts down his sandwich and cracks a big grin before volunteering another baseball anecdote. “There was a guy who married a lady who lived on my block and we would see him whenever the Dodgers played the Giants at the Polo Grounds,” he says with a laugh. “He would always come into the block to see his in-laws. We’d see his white Eldorado fishtail Cadillac parked up the street—the license plate was ‘ROY-39.’” Tales of encounters with Roy Campanella soon give way to another concerning Leonard Bernstein. Turns out, the renowned composer and conductor introduced Willis, then a voice major participating in Bernstein’s Young People Concerts, to both Carnegie Hall and the storied CBS 30th Street recording studio. No, it’s not a much of a surprise to discover that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, one of Willis’ neighborhood pals and dearest friends, is encouraging the pianist to write his memoirs—or, for that matter, to find that Willis has already chosen a title: Beyond My Wildest Dreams. If you can develop a knack for being in the right place at the right time, Willis had mastered it by the time he began to think seriously about pursuing music as a profession: first, at the High School of Music and Art, where Jimmy Owens, Billy Cobham and Richard Tee were among his classmates; later, at the Manhattan School of Music, where Willis befriended Masekela, Eddie Gomez, Ron Carter, Richard Davis and Donald Byrd. “Oddly enough, the school was very anti-jazz,” Willis recalls. “We used to get kicked out of the practice room for jamming. And now, of course, they have a big jazz program.” Masekela suggested that Willis take piano lessons from John Mehegan, who always warned students of the challenges they faced. “He said the piano is the most complicated piece of machinery man ever invented. Just look at it: Every time you sit down, the odds against you are 88 to 10—and they don’t get any better.” Encouraged by his brother Victor, an accomplished classical pianist, Willis quickly developed his piano technique, though he spent a lot of time shooting hoops with a few future NBA players: Abdul-Jabbar (known as Lew Alcindor at the time), Freddie Crawford and Tom Stith. With the help of Mehegan and some Harlem buddies, most notably Herbie Hancock, Willis also developed an interest in melody, harmony and structure that continues to inform his approach to composition. “My brother exposed me to the classical literature, particularly the impressionistic period, which became a strong influence,” says Willis. “I’ve always liked pretty chords and sounds. Then I heard Red Garland, Ahmad Jamal, Bill Evans and, needless to say, Wynton Kelly, who influenced the way I voice chords. At the same time, I was studying the music of Ravel, Debussy, Poulenc and Messiaen, great composers of that nature.” Even now, Willis says, nothing is more artistically rewarding than writing for a large ensemble. He has had considerable success in the field—a suite for piano and strings, commissioned for the Florida Southern College Symphony Orchestra, has taken on a life of its own. But Willis is always looking for more opportunities to express the full range of his interests and talents: “To have that kind of command, the command of a Ravel or a Brahms, to take that immense palette and bring it into focus, that’s where the challenge is.” A genial spirit with a contagious laugh, Willis often counts his blessings when reflecting on the past. He entered the big leagues when he was just 19, recruited by Jackie McLean, one of his boyhood heroes. The saxophonist was looking not only for a pianist but a composer, and Willis delivered on both counts. Indeed, he contributed two tunes to his first recording with the McLean group, the 1965 Blue Note session Right Now. (In 2007, the pianist acknowledged the debt by dedicating “Blue Fable,” a trio session on the HighNote label, to the late alto giant.) Eventually Willis’ career led to myriad collaborations and friendships that still trigger vivid memories: Stan Getz (“a nice bunch of guys; a great musician and a complicated man”), Dizzy Gillespie (“my second father, and the world’s greatest comedian”), Blood Sweat and Tears (“I cherish those years. We played in places where jazz bands didn’t go back then; it gave me a chance to see the world from a different perspective”), Art Blakey (“When I joined Blood Sweat and Tears, he told me that I’d better enjoy myself while it lasted, because ‘you’ll never find a Brinks truck following a hearse’”). In recent years, Willis has been busier than ever, both here and abroad. As musical director at Mapleshade Records, he contributed to several widely acclaimed CDs for the label, in addition to recording his own albums, including the stirring Solo Spirit, a series of interpretations of traditional spirituals. The morning of Jan. 7, 2007, however, abruptly changed his life. Willis lost many of his possessions when a fire broke out at a manse in Upper Marlboro, Md., home of the Mapleshade Studio. He recalls standing out on the lawn, “wrapped in nothing but a towel, watching all my personal effects go up in smoke. It was an old house and it was like someone put a torch to a dry Christmas tree. I had to pick up the pieces and move on with my life.” He did just that, with help from Catholic Charities and the Jazz Foundation of America, relocating to Baltimore six months later. As for his years at Mapleshade, Willis has mixed feelings. Though he takes pride in his collaborations with John Hicks, Tony Pancella and other artists, he often found himself at odds with the label’s meticulous audiophile approach to recording. “I make music for the two-inch speakers you have in your car, and if it sounds good there, it’ll sound great anywhere else,” he says. Looking back on his work for the label now, nothing pleases him more than the mostly improvised music he created with drummer Paul Murphy on the duo‘s The Powers of Two recordings. “When we get together, it reminds me of something Cannonball Adderley used to call ‘spontaneous composition.’ Paul has the experience and chops to sit down and pursue something like that, which is very rare,” says Willis. Last summer, the pair released Exposé, another daring yet accessible session, on Murphy Records. As a solo recording artist, Willis now calls HighNote home. The Manhattan-based label has released his last three albums, including The Offering, his latest session, featuring bassist Eddie Gomez, drummer Billy Drummond and saxophonist Eric Alexander. (Perhaps not surprisingly, former New York Met and Baltimore native Ron Swoboda wrote the album’s affectionate liner notes.) “I don’t expect to get rich,” Willis says of his “ideal” relationship with HighNote. “I just want the music inside of me to be documented and marketed the right way, and they do that.” Polishing off his lunch, Willis says he’s eager to record an upcoming HighNote session with bassist Buster Williams, drummer Billy Hart and a special guest, perhaps reedman Alexander or trumpeter Wallace Roney. “I’m going to take an entire month off to prepare for this record. I’m a firm believer that the lack of preparation is preparation for failure.” Recommended Listening: Solo Spirit (Mapleshade, 1992) The Offering (HighNote, 2008) Exposé with Paul Murphy (Murphy, 2008) true 110 2009-02-12T15:50:22-05:00 false 21151 136 true 80 2009-01-01T00:00:00-05:00

Pianist Larry Willis’ early life in Harlem, with its frequent sightings of American legends, from Duke Ellington to Willie Mays to Leonard Bernstein, sounds like something novelist E.L. Doctorow might have cooked up. Yet even that story is no match for Willis’ remarkable if largely unheralded career: Four decades distinguished by an unusually colorful range of recordings, more than 300 in all, and an extraordinary array of collaborations with the likes of Jackie McLean, Cannonball Adderley, Hugh Masekela, Stan Getz, Woody Shaw, Herb Alpert, Blood Sweat and Tears, Carmen McRae and the Fort Apache Band. Both Ellington and Joe Louis lived up the block from the Willis home in the early ’50s, so each plays a role in the pianist-composer’s earliest recollections, along with Sugar Ray Robinson, often spotted cruising down the 155th Street viaduct. The youngest of three gifted boys, Willis remembers standing on the corner, watching wide-eyed as the champ drove by. “My father used to park cars for two New York Giants,” says Willis, picking up the narrative thread over lunch on a recent afternoon in suburban Maryland. “One was a guy named Hank Thompson, the other guy was named Willie Mays.” (To this day one of Willis’ most prized possessions, given to him by the Hall of Famer, is a baseball signed by the ’54 Giants.) A devoted Brooklyn Dodgers fan who followed the team even after it abandoned Ebbets Field for warmer climes and bigger financial returns, Willis puts down his sandwich and cracks a big grin before volunteering another baseball...

42529 2009-03-17T10:21:26-04:00

4 It was a great life,” says Mundell Lowe. “It still is.” It certainly is for this esteemed guitarist, composer and arranger, whose résumé includes stellar collaborations with enough legends to fill at least one jazz museum. His discography includes albums with such iconic instrumentalists as Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Mary Lou Williams, Benny Carter, Johnny Hodges, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Lee Konitz, Shirley Scott, Red Norvo, Charles Mingus and Benny Goodman. Vocal greats he has recorded with range from Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald to Dinah Washington and Peggy Lee, along with R&B, rock and pop dates with everyone from Jackie Wilson and Big Joe Turner to the Everly Brothers and Barry Manilow. “I can’t say this person was more important than that person; I felt close to all of them, a warm kinship to all of them,” says Lowe, who has resided in San Diego since 1989 with his wife, veteran jazz singer Betty Bennett. “We all liked each other and we all hung out and learned a lot from talking to each other. In my relationship with Bird, we never discussed music. He was quite a knowledgeable guy about chemistry and mathematics, but we never discussed music until we got on the bandstand. “Bird was fairly easy to get along with, as long as you didn’t start a [cutting] contest with him. Most of those people were like that; Buddy Rich was like that and so was Sinatra. The people I was blessed to work with didn’t want a competition. It was such a wonderful time to live; all the people you admired, we were all growing up together.” The silver-haired guitarist chuckles when asked whether the jazz pioneers he worked with were aware that they were making music that would have an enduring impact in decades to come. “A couple of weeks ago Billy Taylor called me,” Lowe says. “We’ve been friends for many years and I played in his trio. We talked about that very subject and agreed that we were growing up and learning, and just trying to pay the rent. Looking back on it, it only became something extremely important, and perhaps worth keeping, when writers started to write about it and spread the word and created some interest with the outside world.” Over the course of a career now in its seventh decade, Lowe has kept pace with some of the most formidable guitarists in jazz: onstage, on record and at private jam sessions. But the qualities that have always distinguished his playing have little to do with hot licks or florid runs. Rather, it’s his impeccable musicality and the unerring taste, cohesion and structural balance he brings to virtually any setting. Graceful and urbane, Lowe doesn’t play a burst of notes when just a few will do, an approach he adheres to whether essaying a silken ballad or gliding through an accelerated bop workout. But his choice of what to play, and how to phrase it just so, reflects the finely honed aesthetics of a master craftsman who is always devoted to serving the music, and fellow musicians, at hand. “I’m a huge fan of Mundell’s,” says ace bassist Bob Magnusson. “I got to work with a lot of that generation of guitarists—Joe Pass, Laurindo Almeida, Charlie Byrd—and Mundell is my favorite. He plays the fewest notes of all of them. But he has the best feel, rhythmically, and the best sound, musically, and he always chooses the most melodic lines. He’s also an amazing composer and a wonderful arranger.” Lowe credits his economical yet eloquent approach to his early love for the tenor saxophone in general and to the sax’s single-line delivery in particular. “I always wanted to emulate that approach to jazz, as opposed to lots of fingers and not many ideas,” he notes. “The people having a drink in a club, or even those in a concert hall, want to hear a kind of melodic approach, and the tunes they know played well, so that’s always been my thinking.” Lowe, who was an early mentor to pianist Bill Evans and has worked extensively with André Previn, no longer maintains the almost nonstop pace he once did. (“When you’re 86, you start to slow down,” he says.) But he completed a concert tour of Germany and Austria last month, and is scheduled to teach a master class and perform a Christmas concert at Maryland’s Salisbury University on Dec. 12 and 13. In October, he and top English guitarist Martin Taylor played a duo gig at the San Diego jazz club Dizzy’s. Due next year is a new album by Lowe and longtime friend and fellow guitarist Jaime Valle, who in July helped organize and stage an all-star San Diego tribute concert to Lowe. Held at the multimillion dollar Anthology and broadcast live on KSDS-FM Jazz 88, the tribute featured Kenny Burrell, Russell Malone, Ron Eschete, Valle and Lowe, along with pianist Mike Wofford, flutist Holly Hofmann and other musical admirers. “I met Mundell back in 1986, when I was living in Atlanta,” Malone told the sold-out Anthology audience. “At the end of the evening we were talking, and I said, ‘Man, how do you get that sound and those note choices?’ He said, ‘Living. After you’ve lived a while, you get all the crap out of your playing and you make music.’” Valle, who toured Europe with Lowe last fall, is equally effusive. “Mundell is a national treasure and a real gentleman of the old school, like Cary Grant,” Valle says. “When he writes music he knows exactly what it will sound like, and he writes by hand. I’ve learned more from him in one year about how to play the guitar, harmonic ideas and tone, than I have in my life. He is a walking encyclopedia and such a great human being. Playing with Mundy is a very humbling experience.” A Mississippi native, Lowe was barely a teenager when he started playing in various jazz bands on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. He was just 17 when he began a six-month stint working with Pee Wee King on the Grand Ole Opry radio show in Nashville. After serving in the military during World War II, the budding guitarist moved to New York and began to make a name for himself through his work with Holiday, Parker and other jazz giants. He soon found himself performing with Cy Coleman on the early morning NBC-TV show A Date in Manhattan. A subsequent TV gig, The Kate Smith Hour, teamed him with Stan Getz and Kai Winding, while his tenure on The Today Show came as part of a 17-year stint as a guitarist and arranger for the network. Lowe put his jazz career largely on hold after a 1965 move to Los Angeles, where he contributed music to TV (Wild, Wild West; Hawaii Five-O; Starsky and Hutch) and film (Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask; Billy Jack) alike. It was a lucrative time for the guitarist, who also found time to make albums with both Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae. He also hung out at L.A. jazz clubs whenever his schedule allowed. But after 15 years Lowe found himself ready to return to the guitar, and jazz, full-time. He has rarely looked back since. “Every morning after I finish my coffee and take my old age pill, I come upstairs and play for at least an hour,” says Lowe, who in the 1980s spent four years as the music director for the Monterey Jazz Festival. “That way I keep the fingers trained and the brain working to some extent. Herb Ellis told me he never practiced at home because he wanted to get as far away from it as possible, until he got on the bandstand. And Paul Desmond told me he didn’t practice because he didn’t want to get too fast. “I start very slowly, with some interesting scales and maybe some harmonic devices I’d like to be thinking of. What I try to do every morning is read and play a new or strange piece I haven’t played before. But you know what they say about us old beboppers: We don’t pass away, we just write another tune.” Recommended Listening: Guitar Moods by Mundell Lowe (Riverside) A Grand Night for Swinging (Riverside) Old Friends (with Ray Brown and André Previn) (Telarc) Haunted Heart (with Jim Ferguson) (Lily’s Dad’s Music) true 179 2008-12-10T14:30:08-05:00 false 20908 129 200812 true 80 2008-12-01T00:00:00-05:00

It was a great life,” says Mundell Lowe. “It still is.” It certainly is for this esteemed guitarist, composer and arranger, whose résumé includes stellar collaborations with enough legends to fill at least one jazz museum. His discography includes albums with such iconic instrumentalists as Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Mary Lou Williams, Benny Carter, Johnny Hodges, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Lee Konitz, Shirley Scott, Red Norvo, Charles Mingus and Benny Goodman. Vocal greats he has recorded with range from Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald to Dinah Washington and Peggy Lee, along with R&B, rock and pop dates with everyone from Jackie Wilson and Big Joe Turner to the Everly Brothers and Barry Manilow. “I can’t say this person was more important than that person; I felt close to all of them, a warm kinship to all of them,” says Lowe, who has resided in San Diego since 1989 with his wife, veteran jazz singer Betty Bennett. “We all liked each other and we all hung out and learned a lot from talking to each other. In my relationship with Bird, we never discussed music. He was quite a knowledgeable guy about chemistry and mathematics, but we never discussed music until we got on the bandstand. “Bird was fairly easy to get along with, as long as you didn’t start a [cutting] contest with him. Most of those people were like that; Buddy Rich was like that and so was Sinatra. The people I was blessed to work with didn’t want a...

35742 2009-03-02T00:28:05-05:00

4 Small wonder Alvin Queen sounds so happy, speaking from his home in Geneva. The New York-born drummer has just spent his 58th birthday doing something he cherishes: photographing the magnificent Swiss Alps. A resident of Switzerland for nearly 30 years now, the accomplished drummer, bandleader and Nilva label founder reports that life is good abroad—very good, indeed. True, he’s never enjoyed the sort of recognition many less gifted jazz artists have received, despite a remarkably prolific career on both sides of the Atlantic. His résumé is chockablock with impressive credits, including collaborations with Oscar Peterson, Horace Silver, George Benson, Ruth Brown, Don Pullen, Stanley Cowell, Pharoah Sanders, Randy Weston and Charles Tolliver, among many others. But Queen is keenly aware that in many ways he’s led a charmed life, and he’s delighted by a welcome turn of events. Just a Memory, a subsidiary of Justin Time Records, has reissued two enjoyable albums he recorded in the ’80s for his enterprising Nilva label: Jammin’ Uptown, a Queen-led session featuring Manny Boyd, John Hicks, Terence Blanchard, Robin Eubanks and Ray Drummond; and Soul Connection, an aptly titled smoker sparked by the late Hammond B3 organist John Patton, backed by Queen, Grachan Moncur III, Grant Reed and Melvin Sparks. Couple these albums, previously unavailable on CD, with Queen’s recent Enja release, I Ain’t Looking at You, a soulful, contemporary session that generously showcases Terell Stafford, Jesse Davis, Mike LeDonne and Peter Bernstein, and it’s easy to appreciate the drummer’s sunny outlook. For a while there, it seemed as if the Nilva catalog—roughly a dozen-and-a-half albums in all—would never see the light of the digital age. Queen put the label on hold in the early ’90s, after more than a decade of operation, when distribution problems appeared insurmountable. The Nilva story continues to unfold, however, and Queen has plans for additional reissues. “What I was doing was trying to put something back that was not being recorded then,” says Queen, reflecting on the birth of his indie label. “At the time, Blue Note was not functioning that heavy, so all the musicians I recorded were great friends of mine. We were coming from the Slugs’ days, the old Five Spot days. I was going to record all the musicians who needed to be recorded, because I was so thrilled with the Blue Note sound.” First out of the box was Alvin Queen, In Europe, released in 1981. It didn’t sell well, but on the advice of a friend who thought running a successful record label was akin to running a successful ice cream parlor, Queen began creating “different flavors.” The next release, Ashanti, became so popular it helped boost sales of its predecessor. Says Queen, “That’s when I decided to go on and record different albums with Junior Mance, Charles Davis, Ray Drummond and Bill Saxton. By the early ’80s, Queen was already living in Europe, but the Nilva sessions were recorded at Minot Studios in White Plains, N.Y. On one level, Queen explains, he saw Nilva as a way to rekindle the passions of his youth. “When you heard Gene Ammons, Dexter Gordon, Art Blakey with “Moanin’,” Cedar Walton—these guys were firing up so much that you’d have to pull over the car. You’d say, ‘Now, wait a minute, let me see who this is,’” says Queen with a contagious laugh. “That was something that wasn’t there anymore.” Though upbeat by nature, Queen is still coming to grips with the recent deaths of two close friends and collaborators: Oscar Peterson and Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen. Indeed, bassist Pedersen was responsible for helping Queen land gigs with two renowned trios, one led by Peterson, the other by Kenny Drew Sr. “Oscar put the icing on the cake for me, being at that level,” says Queen. “Underneath he was a real warm person—that’s the person I got to know. I went into the band thinking, Oh, man, this is a genius. But Oscar used to sit down and talk to me like a son—all my priorities seemed to fall in place.” Even though Peterson wasn’t in prime form when Queen joined the trio—the pianist suffered a stroke in 1993, affecting his left hand—accompanying the jazz legend was always a daunting experience. “He used to kill me with that right hand—unbelievable sense of time,” Queen says. “When I first got in there he was making some pretty fast tempos, but the biggest thing with Oscar was watching where he was going. You always stayed on guard because you never knew what to expect the next moment. He helped me develop that. That’s where the approval came from.” Of course, approval came from others, and it came very early on. A musical prodigy, Queen grew up in Mount Vernon, N.Y., supported by a family that shared his interests. Andy Lalino, who owned a local drum studio, took Queen under his wing, serving as educator, urban guide and manager. Lalino often brought his young charge to Roseland, where the pre-teen soon distinguished himself as a wunderkind during a Gretsch Drum Night showcase, playing alongside Mel Lewis, Art Blakey, Max Roach, Charlie Persip and Elvin Jones. Thanks to Lalino, Queen also became a regular at the Apollo Theater, where he first heard the John Coltrane Quartet. The precocious drummer was warmly embraced by the jazz community in Manhattan after being anointed “boy wonder” at Roseland. “I really got in the door. It was my turn to show them what I could do because I saw the shows at the Apollo.” Soon Queen was roaming 52nd Street and heading down to the Village, “sneaking in all the places I could sneak in. At the Five Spot I couldn’t get in, but I used to sit by the door. I used to watch Monk run around the streets. I’d go back and say, ‘Dad, I saw this crazy guy running all around the streets.’ He said, ‘That could only be one guy, Alvin: Monk.’” Later, Queen asked saxophonist Johnny Griffin what Monk was all about. “Everybody thought Monk was out there, but Monk was in,” Griffin told Queen. “He would get off the bandstand and go dance in the street—dance! He was looking for the rhythm. Once he found a danceable rhythm, he would go sit back down and hit the piano—Bam!” Says Queen, “That was where the rhythm was. Incredible!” And then there was the night that Queen, again chaperoned by Lalino, unexpectedly found himself onstage at Birdland, briefly anchoring the Coltrane Quartet, no less, during what would later became known as the landmark “Live at Birdland” recording engagement. “Coltrane was like Charlie Parker then, someone new,” says Queen. “Buck Clayton, ‘Sweets’ Edison, Joe Williams—everyone was going by Birdland to see who was this man. What is he doing? The tunes are so long! He’d play two songs in a set. And Elvin! The glasses on the bar would rattle in there.” Jones had “adopted” Queen following their appearance together at Roseland, and shortly after arriving at Birdland that night, the phenom from Mount Vernon suddenly found himself onstage. “The kid has got to learn, the kid has got to learn!” says Queen, mimicking Jones’ raspy shout. “Coltrane and McCoy kept playing, and I had the sticks, trying to touch the pedals and trying to act like Elvin.” No, Queen doesn’t recall the tune, he says, “but I’ll never forget that evening.” As a young professional, Queen loved playing in and around New York City, partly because he was respected in a highly competitive market. (“If you couldn’t play, you’d have another tryout every three or four years. Everybody knew it—the word went out.”) The experience primed him for playing on tour with major artists, including memorable stints with Silver and Benson. In time, though, Queen became frustrated with the lack of recording offers, among other things, so following his visits to Europe with Charles Tolliver in the early ’70s he began weighing his options. “I had tried so hard and I thought I can’t do no worse, so I took off for Europe,” recalls Queen. “Things began to change and I worked all the time. Paris, Nice, Geneva—wherever there was a demand for me.” He was welcomed, and sometimes put up, by a large family of jazz and blues expatriates that included Kenny Clarke, Art Taylor, Memphis Slim and Champion Jack Dupree. Eventually settling in Switzerland, the drummer has never regretted the career move. “I’m thinking about playing a little golf and coming out to perform more and do some workshops,” says Queen, sketching out plans for the future. “Everything is going well for me; it’s amazing after 40 years.” In fact, he adds, “It’s better for me now because I have more to offer.” Recommended Listening: I Ain’t Looking at You (Enja/Justin Time, 2007) true 110 2008-12-03T15:02:22-05:00 false 20785 128 200811 true 80 2008-11-01T00:00:00-04:00

Small wonder Alvin Queen sounds so happy, speaking from his home in Geneva. The New York-born drummer has just spent his 58th birthday doing something he cherishes: photographing the magnificent Swiss Alps. A resident of Switzerland for nearly 30 years now, the accomplished drummer, bandleader and Nilva label founder reports that life is good abroad—very good, indeed. True, he’s never enjoyed the sort of recognition many less gifted jazz artists have received, despite a remarkably prolific career on both sides of the Atlantic. His résumé is chockablock with impressive credits, including collaborations with Oscar Peterson, Horace Silver, George Benson, Ruth Brown, Don Pullen, Stanley Cowell, Pharoah Sanders, Randy Weston and Charles Tolliver, among many others. But Queen is keenly aware that in many ways he’s led a charmed life, and he’s delighted by a welcome turn of events. Just a Memory, a subsidiary of Justin Time Records, has reissued two enjoyable albums he recorded in the ’80s for his enterprising Nilva label: Jammin’ Uptown, a Queen-led session featuring Manny Boyd, John Hicks, Terence Blanchard, Robin Eubanks and Ray Drummond; and Soul Connection, an aptly titled smoker sparked by the late Hammond B3 organist John Patton, backed by Queen, Grachan Moncur III, Grant Reed and Melvin Sparks. Couple these albums, previously unavailable on CD, with Queen’s recent Enja release, I Ain’t Looking at You, a soulful, contemporary session that generously showcases Terell Stafford, Jesse Davis, Mike LeDonne and Peter Bernstein, and it’s easy to appreciate the drummer’s sunny outlook. For a while there, it seemed as if...

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

4 He wrote countless songs between 1928 and 1981, often with indelible melodies, mostly for films, including the Busby Berkeley spectacular 42nd Street, and had more pop hits than any of his peers—Berlin, the Gershwins, Porter, Carmichael, et al. But as far as the vast majority of listeners are concerned, Harry Warren has always been The Man Who Wasn’t There. Invisible. Anonymous. Unheralded. “I’ve played his music my whole life and never really put together how many of the tunes were his,” says composer, arranger, conductor and bandleader David Berger, speaking from his home in Manhattan. Recently Berger has spent a lot of time connecting the dots, however. Inspired in part by Wilfrid Sheed’s latest book, The House That George Built (Random House), which is dedicated to the memory of Warren and includes a fascinating portrait of the composer’s remarkably prolific and puzzling career, Berger has just fashioned a new octet recording, I Had the Craziest Dream: The Music of Harry Warren (Such Sweet Thunder). The idea wasn’t entirely his. Not long ago Berger received a phone call from an old high school jazz chum, Washington, D.C.-based lawyer Bob Schwartz, who wanted to bankroll a recording with two reedmen he’s always admired, Harry Allen and Joe Temperley, one of Berger’s closest friends. A 12-year-old flutist when he first met Berger, Schwartz was familiar with Sheed’s book, and one thing quickly led to another. Featured on the album are Berger’s engaging, swinging and often bop-tinted arrangements of “Jeepers Creepers,” “You’ll Never Know,” “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” “I Only Have Eyes for You” “Serenade in Blue” and other Warren-penned tunes. Of course, as Berger is quick to point out, one CD can scarcely do justice to the late composer’s prodigious gifts and output. “Lullaby of Broadway,” “There Will Never Be Another You,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “The More I See You,” “At Last”—there’s no end to the hit parade. “You have a great idea of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin—this huge body of standard tunes. But this guy, it was like, Gee, I never really thought about him,” says Berger, best known his long association with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and for helming the acclaimed 15-piece ensemble the Sultans of Swing. “When I had a look at it, he’s got more hits than anybody. Why don’t we know who he is? It’s a very interesting thing. Part of it was his personality. He was a very down-to-earth, unassuming guy. All his composer-lyricist buddies used to rip him about it—‘Irving [Berlin] is famous and nobody knows who you are.’” Not that Warren hasn’t had his advocates. Composer and critic Alec Wilder marveled at Warren’s ability to turn out melody after melody that could sing itself, and pianist-pop scholar Michael Feinstein, a close friend of Warren’s, has done a lot to pique interest in the Brooklyn native, born Salvatore Guaragna in 1893. (Feinstein and Sheed, not coincidentally, contribute liner notes to I Had the Craziest Dream.) By all accounts, though, Warren wasn’t much concerned with recognition. In fact, after researching Warren’s songbook and visiting with the composer’s family on the West Coast, Berger has more than a few telling anecdotes to share. One concerns lyricist Al Dubin, a frequent Warren collaborator, who hired a publicist in the late ’30s. “After a little while the publicist placed three stories,” says Berger. “And the first one comes out in the paper, and Harry Warren gets up in the morning, he’s eating breakfast, reading the newspaper, sees the first story, gets furious and immediately fires the publicist. He was embarrassed to be in the newspapers.” Then again, sometimes anonymity isn’t all it’s chalked up to be. “The story is,” says Berger, “he went to the Academy Awards to get his first award, he rented a tuxedo and they wouldn’t let him in.” The response was blunt: “‘We don’t know who you are.’” If Berger is puzzled by Warren’s signature low profile, cultivated or not, he doesn’t miss a beat when asked to explain the nature of the composer’s genius or the breadth of his work. “He might be the greatest of all the songwriters for the very same reason that we don’t know who he is. His music is an amalgam of everybody’s music. When you hear a Gershwin tune or hear a Harold Arlen tune or Cole Porter, they are very identifiable. They have their quirks to them. But Harry Warren’s music is the American song of that period—all of it. It’s not personal, it’s just what’s in the air. And the quality is amazingly high.” Many contemporary composers and arrangers can relate to the anonymity issue, says Berger. “Everybody knows the Joe Lovanos and Wynton Marsalises, but nobody really checks out who writes the music. That was one thing I always loved about Frank Sinatra. He always said, ‘Oh, this was arranged by Nelson Riddle,’ or whomever. … I worked with Sinatra and he was so thankful to musicians, and especially arrangers, because he knew that’s what made him sound good.” Berger also has no problem relating to Warren’s deep appreciation for melody, a trait evident throughout his long career. “I really got a feel for what his style was. … His hero was Puccini, and you can hear that in a lot of the melodies. He just had a great ear for melody, just spun them out, one tune after another. They’re kind of simple but they always go to the right place. They’re never dull. They have just enough interest to be somewhat surprising but you knew they had to go there.” As planned from the outset, the Berger Octet recording provides a generous showcase for reedmen Temperley and Allen. But more important, it’s stamped by their distinctive personalities. “Joe—we’ve been best buddies since the early ’70s and for most of that time we’ve worked together,” Berger says. “I know his playing intimately, better than anybody. And Harry, in recent years, I’ve become his biggest fan. I had the sound of their playing in my ear and I wanted to craft some arrangements that would be their way of doing it. They’re kind of like swing players with a hint of bebop, and very melodic players—gentle and romantic. There’s lot of romance. Whatever my picture of them is, the sound of the album is really those two guys.” Still, the octet, which feature musicians drawn from the Sultans of Swing, takes full advantage of its size and resources. “When I’m writing I’m thinking about the players and their personalities and I want to get as much of that as possible,” says Berger. “I learned that from watching Duke Ellington in rehearsals. His attitude was, I write the stuff but it’s your music. I want to hear what you guys do with it. Duke would be like a referee and that’s what I like to do. I’m the final arbiter but I don’t want to be a dictator. If everybody is having a good time, that gets across to the listeners.” Though Berger has transcribed over 500 Ellington-Billy Strayhorn arrangements and written extensively for big bands, he’s been leading an octet, on and off, for the better part of a decade now, inspired by its unique challenges and rewards. “You can do a lot that you can do with a big band. Of course, you don’t have the power and diversity, as many notes in all the chords, but it’s pretty good. You can get a little bit of each color and there’s just enough people that there’s a richness of harmony. There’s more room for everybody to have a little expression. When you listen to this record, you know every single player on it. Their sounds are very prominent, everyone gets a chance to solo, much more than they would on a big-band record.” Turns out, thanks to a bit of serendipity, a Sultans of Swing album devoted to Warren’s trove of unheard songs is in the offing. While trying to secure publishing rights to a photograph of the composer, Schwartz and Berger were invited by his family to sort through Warren’s vast collection of trunk songs. They couldn’t believe their good luck. Among the finds were several songs composed by Warren and Ira Gershwin for the 1949 film musical The Barkleys of Broadway, originally written for Judy Garland. “She got sick and couldn’t do the movie,” says Berger. “They got Ginger Rogers and she couldn’t sing these songs. So there are these great songs, I mean masterpieces. They would have been standards, as good as any songs I know, and nobody knows them. “It’s kind of funny,” says Berger, as the conversation winds down. “[Harry Warren’s] claim to fame is not being famous. We might ruin that.” Recommended Listening: David Berger Octet I Had the Craziest Dream: The Music of Harry Warren (Such Sweet Thunder, 2008) David Berger and the Sultans of Swing Hindustan (Such Sweet Thunder, 2006) true 110 2008-09-25T13:31:55-04:00 false 20385 127 200810 true 80 2008-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

He wrote countless songs between 1928 and 1981, often with indelible melodies, mostly for films, including the Busby Berkeley spectacular 42nd Street, and had more pop hits than any of his peers—Berlin, the Gershwins, Porter, Carmichael, et al. But as far as the vast majority of listeners are concerned, Harry Warren has always been The Man Who Wasn’t There. Invisible. Anonymous. Unheralded. “I’ve played his music my whole life and never really put together how many of the tunes were his,” says composer, arranger, conductor and bandleader David Berger, speaking from his home in Manhattan. Recently Berger has spent a lot of time connecting the dots, however. Inspired in part by Wilfrid Sheed’s latest book, The House That George Built (Random House), which is dedicated to the memory of Warren and includes a fascinating portrait of the composer’s remarkably prolific and puzzling career, Berger has just fashioned a new octet recording, I Had the Craziest Dream: The Music of Harry Warren (Such Sweet Thunder). The idea wasn’t entirely his. Not long ago Berger received a phone call from an old high school jazz chum, Washington, D.C.-based lawyer Bob Schwartz, who wanted to bankroll a recording with two reedmen he’s always admired, Harry Allen and Joe Temperley, one of Berger’s closest friends. A 12-year-old flutist when he first met Berger, Schwartz was familiar with Sheed’s book, and one thing quickly led to another. Featured on the album are Berger’s engaging, swinging and often bop-tinted arrangements of “Jeepers Creepers,” “You’ll Never Know,” “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” “I Only...

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

4 I’m still here, and I’m not a miserable S.O.B.!” says 58-year-old Jerry Bergonzi with a laugh when asked what he considers his greatest accomplishment. Certainly, the Boston-born-and-bred tenor saxophonist has reason to be content. Not only has he earned a reputation as one the finest tenor saxophonists of his generation, he’s also a renowned jazz educator. He’s taught at the New England Conservatory since the mid 1990s, and authored an influential series of books on improvisation. He performs at the most prestigious clubs and festivals, and teaches master classes to aspiring jazz musicians all over the world. Life is good for “The Gonz.” Bergonzi’s quintessentially modern tenor sax style melds the linear, chromatic approach of such greats as Joe Henderson and Wayne Shorter with the horizontal, chordal techniques of John Coltrane. His tone is full-bodied with an occasional hard edge, enhanced by a savvy use of dynamics and creatively varied articulation. He’s an expressive and versatile player, as comfortable playing the hoariest of jazz standards as he is playing an Ornette-ish free tune. Above all, his manner of playing is utterly spontaneous and distinctive. With such contemporaries as Joe Lovano, Michael Brecker, George Garzone, and Dave Liebman, Bergonzi has helped define the modern approach to his instrument. Bergonzi started on clarinet at age 8. He remembers hearing jazz when he was very young, thanks to a very hip uncle, a guitarist, bassist and trombonist who lived upstairs from the Bergonzi family. “I listened to Basie, Lester, Ellington,” says Bergonzi in a friendly, unassuming voice that’s as much New York as Boston. His uncle took an active role in his early jazz education. “He wrote out jazz solos for me to play. The first was on ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ I worked on that for three months!” he remembers. Bergonzi got his first saxophone—“an old Conn alto”—around the age of 11. By 14 he’d switched to tenor full-time. He played in a youth band led by the jazz educator and saxophonist John LaPorta. LaPorta had played alto and clarinet with Mingus; apparently, the irascible bassist’s demanding leadership style had rubbed off. “LaPorta would stop the band and tell you why you sucked, in front of everybody,” Bergonzi, laughing, “but it was so great. He was such a great inspiration and leader.” Before long, Bergonzi was also studying with another Boston musical legend, saxophone teacher Joe Viola. “Joe and John were the best. I’d go to a lesson with Joe and we’d play these sax duets. Joe would sight-read the tenor parts on alto, transposing as he played, and never make a mistake.” Along the way, Bergonzi also developed some electric bass chops, which would come in handy when it came time to support himself as a musician. After high school, Bergonzi attended the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. It was an unsatisfying experience, to say the least. “It was just terrible, just pathetic,” says Bergonzi. “A bunch of stuffed shirts—music school with no music. Other than that it was great.” He managed to escape Lowell’s clutches and attend Berklee for a year, but financial difficulties forced his return. After graduating in 1971, Bergonzi gigged around Boston, mostly playing bass, backing singers, strippers and comics. By 1972 he’d saved enough money to move to New York. Initially he roomed with a friend, the bassist Harvie Swartz. Bassists are always in demand, so living with one was a boon. “Harvie referred me for gigs, took me around. He’d get a call to play a session, and he’d say, ‘Hey, my roommate is a tenor player, do you mind if I bring him along?’” Bergonzi landed a regular weekend gig at Mercer Arts Center in Manhattan. “It was great,” says Bergonzi, “until the roof caved in, and that was the end of that.” The six-plus years Bergonzi lived in New York were critical to his development. His third-floor loft became the scene of many a jam session, featuring the cream of New York’s young jazz crop: Joe Lovano, Steve Slagle, Dave Liebman, Michael Brecker, Bob Berg, John Scofield, Tom Harrell and Pat LaBarbera were among those who came to play. It was in the aftermath of one of those sessions that Bergonzi almost got to play with the musician he considers his greatest influence, Elvin Jones. “Elvin’s my all-time hero. Anything he’s on, I’d buy. Everything about him—the rhythm, the intensity,” says Bergonzi. “After one of those sessions, Dave Liebman says he’s going to go hear Elvin’s band, and would I like to come along? So we go to the place, and Dave, he used to play in Elvin’s band, so he sits in. Then [pianist] Richie Beirach goes up and sits in. I’m just getting my courage to go up, and one of the guys says, ‘Elvin doesn’t want anyone else sitting in,’ so I missed out.” Another jazz legend gave Bergonzi his biggest break. In 1973, Dave Brubeck hired Bergonzi to play with Two Generations of Brubeck, a band that included the pianist’s sons, Chris, Darius and Danny. It was a turning point. “For the first time, I was able to live the life of a musician. Playing jazz paid the rent,” he days. With Brubeck from 1973-75 (and later, from 1979-81), Bergonzi performed at the biggest festivals and the most prestigious venues. By the early 1980s, Bergonzi was back in Boston, working on the city’s then-fertile jazz club scene. Around that time he also became involved in jazz education, teaching improvisation privately, developing a system he later spelled out in a series of books titled Inside Improvisation. Bergonzi found teaching liberating. “It was pure. I was able to make a living doing jazz all the time,” he says. As the 1980s and ’90s progressed, work in Boston became scarce. “When they raised the legal drinking age from 18 to 21, work in the clubs dried up,” he says. Fortunately, he was afforded more and more opportunities to work outside the U.S. His recording career also took off. In 1989, he realized every jazz musician’s dream by recording for Blue Note (Standard Gonz). He also recorded several albums for Italy’s Red Records, one of his greatest supporters over the years. Over the past two decades Bergonzi’s star has steadily risen. He’s played most if not all of the world’s great jazz events, including the Red Sea, San Remo and North Sea festivals. He’s recorded prolifically, as well. By his own count, he’s played on upwards of 150 records as leader and sideman, with more on the way. His latest is Tenor Talk (Savant), a quartet album featuring pianist Renato Chicco, bassist Dave Santoro and drummer Andrea Michelutti. Today, in addition to a busy performing schedule, the Gonz is a full professor at NEC. He finds fulfillment in teaching. “I’m the eternal student, myself; I think that’s what makes me a good teacher,” he says. As someone who’s constantly striving to improve, he’s still inspired by the great tenor players of the past. Still, these days he’s just as likely to find stimulation elsewhere: “My inspiration is likely to be the last person I heard—a student, a CD, the radio. When I was young, I had an agenda when it came to learning, but now I don’t. I’m open to anything.” The key, he thinks, is living in the moment. “I try to always be in the present. Yesterday is forgotten, tomorrow is yet to come,” he says. It must work. “I’m happier today than I’ve ever been. I play my own music with great musicians. I’m working all the time. I have a full life.” Recommended Listening: Tilt (Red, 1991) Lost in the Shuffle (Double-Time, 1998) A Different Look (with Andy LaVerne) (SteepleChase, 2001) Tenor of the Times (Savant, 2006) Tenorist (Savant, 2007) true 214 2008-08-12T19:25:27-04:00 false 19905 126 200809 true 80 2008-09-01T00:00:00-04:00

I’m still here, and I’m not a miserable S.O.B.!” says 58-year-old Jerry Bergonzi with a laugh when asked what he considers his greatest accomplishment. Certainly, the Boston-born-and-bred tenor saxophonist has reason to be content. Not only has he earned a reputation as one the finest tenor saxophonists of his generation, he’s also a renowned jazz educator. He’s taught at the New England Conservatory since the mid 1990s, and authored an influential series of books on improvisation. He performs at the most prestigious clubs and festivals, and teaches master classes to aspiring jazz musicians all over the world. Life is good for “The Gonz.” Bergonzi’s quintessentially modern tenor sax style melds the linear, chromatic approach of such greats as Joe Henderson and Wayne Shorter with the horizontal, chordal techniques of John Coltrane. His tone is full-bodied with an occasional hard edge, enhanced by a savvy use of dynamics and creatively varied articulation. He’s an expressive and versatile player, as comfortable playing the hoariest of jazz standards as he is playing an Ornette-ish free tune. Above all, his manner of playing is utterly spontaneous and distinctive. With such contemporaries as Joe Lovano, Michael Brecker, George Garzone, and Dave Liebman, Bergonzi has helped define the modern approach to his instrument. Bergonzi started on clarinet at age 8. He remembers hearing jazz when he was very young, thanks to a very hip uncle, a guitarist, bassist and trombonist who lived upstairs from the Bergonzi family. “I listened to Basie, Lester, Ellington,” says Bergonzi in a friendly, unassuming voice that’s as...

2009-03-02T00:27:25-05:00

4 One of the great jazz guitarists since the 1960s, Joe Diorio has flown under the radar of the vast majority of jazz fans. But to the hordes of working guitarists today who studied with him at Hollywood’s Guitar Institute of Technology (GIT) from 1977-97 and later at the University of Southern California, Diorio is revered as a kind of six-string guru; his unconventional methods helped liberate them to cross over the line from the intellectual and the intuitive. As he put it in his 1989 REH instructional video, Creative Jazz Guitar: “The idea in improvising is to free yourself from left-brain thinking. The left side of the brain wants to know exactly what it’s doing through every step of the process, whereas the right brain is purely intuitive. It loves to take chances and be creative. And when that right brain starts to kick in, then you’ll start to come up with things you never thought of before.” Admired throughout his career by fellow plectrists like Joe Pass, Howard Roberts, Jack Wilkins, Robben Ford, Pat Metheny and Mick Goodrick, the native of Waterbury, Conn., is a part of jazz history for his work on the first-ever gold-selling jazz record, saxophonist Eddie Harris’ Exodus to Jazz (Vee-Jay), which sold in unprecedented numbers in 1961 on the strength of the Top 40 hit single, a jazzy adaptation of the Exodus movie theme by Ernest Gold. Diorio is also highly regarded among guitar aficionados for his creative collaboration during the early ’70s with saxophonist-trumpeter Ira Sullivan and his string of eight brilliant recordings during the mid-’90s for the Italian RAM Records label. But all of those examples of Diorio’s astounding six-string prowess seem like a distant memory now as he sits in his Waterbury home, struggling to regain the full use of his left hand following a stroke he suffered in April 2005 at his West Coast residence in San Clemente, Calif. “It took out my left side, all the way from the top of my head down to my toes,” says Diorio, who is thankful that his speech and memory were not diminished at all by the stroke. “I had to learn how to walk again, how to use my arm, my hand. And I’m still in the process of doing that. I just finished a three-year run of rehab so I’m on my own at this point. I have exercises to do that improve my arm and my fingers. But the most important thing I can do is to play every day. My power’s not there yet, so it’s a slow process. But I still try every day.” Diorio had just returned from the gym when he felt the first symptoms of what turned out to be a stroke. “Believe it or not, I was trying to get in shape,” he says. “I’m always fighting this weight problem. That particular day I worked out and when I came home I noticed that I couldn’t walk so good. I thought maybe I had overdone it at the gym and just went on with my business. The next day I woke up and it was worse, so I told my wife, Christina, ‘I don’t know what the hell’s happening here.’ And as I was speaking to her, I went to sit down on the couch and my whole left arm went out on me. I was rushed to the hospital and it just continued to get worse overnight.” The stroke that sidelined Diorio came just five months after he had completed a superbly swinging duet recording with former GIT guitar student David Becker. The Color of Sound (on the German Acoustic Music label) captures Diorio’s remarkable facility in full flight on wide-open renditions of jazz standards like “Beautiful Love,” “All the Things You Are” and “Stella by Starlight,” as well as some daring right-brained extrapolations like “Dance of the Inner Valley” and “Reflections of India.” As Becker wrote in the liner notes to that adventurous duet project: “I first met Joe in 1980 at GIT. I was about 18 and at the time was searching for some inspiration. After I heard Joe play for the first time, something touched me very deeply and I thought to myself, ‘I’ve got to get to know this guy.’ Joe strongly encouraged me to always follow the music I heard inside and never said to do this or that. He once told me, ‘I am sure you had your influences, but yet you were always David Becker, and that’s good.’” Diorio may have provided similar encouragement for another young disciple, guitarist Robben Ford, on their joint project, 1989’s Minor Elegance (Inakustik), which featured Peter Erskine on drums and Gary Willis on bass. That rare encounter included a smoking rendition of Miles Davis’ “So What” along with a chops-busting intervallic workout titled “Blues for All Space Cadets.” On 1993’s Rare Birds (RAM), a freewheeling duet session with fellow guitarist and educator Mick Goodrick, the two forward-thinking players took great liberties with standards like “On Green Dolphin Street,” “My Funny Valentine” and “Out of Nowhere,” while also engaging in such spontaneous creations as “Sus(4)penders Blues,” “Space Walk” and the provocative title track. Diorio says this kind of open-minded attitude toward playing had its roots in his early ’60s Chicago experience. “Those years were the catalyst for sure. Chicago was a happening scene then, like the jazz equivalent of going to Yale. All the great sax players were there at the time—Sonny Stitt, Ira Sullivan, Von Freeman, Eddie Harris, Johnny Griffin. And then you had tons of amazing piano players like Willie Pickens and Jodie Christian that nobody outside of Chicago knew about. We’d play all night and get to a place where we went beyond the intellect and were just playing from that total zone, man. I was very young at the time and that whole experience in Chicago just opened my head and ears to so many new things.” Diorio had come up in Connecticut idolizing guitarists like Django Reinhardt, Jimmy Raney and Tal Farlow, but during his tenure in Chicago he gravitated toward more modern players. “After Wes Montgomery came along, everybody started imitating him, me included,” he says. “Then I found Jim Hall, which really changed me a lot. He played this laidback kind of way that I really loved. He took his time and his comping was just incredible. I had my own way of comping at the time but I realized, after checking out Jim, that I might’ve been too busy. So I started to lay back a little bit. Then I went to see him play with Art Farmer in Chicago one night and I was looking at the voicings he was using and I thought, ‘I gotta start updating my whole harmonic sense.’ So I think he had a lot to do with the way I play.” Following the success of Exodus to Jazz, Diorio played on several of Harris’ Vee-Jay label follow-up recordings, and later appeared on two sessions with Chicago-based sax burner Stitt (1963’s Move on Over and 1964’s My Main Man, both on Argo). Joe remained on the Chicago scene through the ’60s and eventually moved to Miami in 1972, which marked the beginning of an experimental phase with Sullivan. “That was the best period of my life,” he says. “We were doing everything from straightahead jazz to space-cadet stuff … total avant-garde. And we were so in tune with each other it was like telepathy, man.” With drummer Steve Bagby and pianist Tony Castellano, Ira and Joe played a regular Friday-night workshop gig at a Unitarian Church in Miami that produced scintillating results. “There were nights over there that were some of the musical highlights of my life,” says Diorio. “It made me realize that there’s a place in music that you can rise to where there’s no concern about your technique, your hearing, the harmony or anything. Because it’s all there. It’s just like you’ve fallen into the magic pool of music. I mean, there’s no struggling for anything, it’s just spontaneous creation. And we did that collectively many times at that church. We just rose up to another level and when that happens, man … Oh, my God! It’s like being in heaven. I’m lucky that something like that happened in my life. Boy, oh boy, was it ever a special time.” During his tenure with Sullivan, Diorio also encountered and began collaborating with a young, pre-Weather Report Jaco Pastorius. “We did some gigs together and we rehearsed a lot with Ira,” he says. (Diorio and Pastorius appear together on one track, “Portrait of Sal La Rosa,” from Sullivan’s self-titled 1975 A&M album, and they also recorded with Sullivan, drummer Bagby and Fender Rhodes player Alex Darqui on “Ballye de Niña,” a previously unreleased Pastorius original that appears on the 2006 Holiday Park compilation, Jaco Pastorius: The Early Years Recordings.) While he presently faces a daunting challenge in terms of reclaiming his legendary command of his chosen instrument, Diorio maintains a daily writing regimen. “I don’t need my guitar to write,” he says. “I prefer to write with just pencil and paper. It’s actually faster for me to do that than to deal with computers and software and all that. I like having the pencil in my hand because I like to draw and paint too, so it’s kind of an extension of the whole deal.” Diorio adds that his present physical limitations won’t stop him from making slow but sure progress on the guitar. “Just think of what Django was able to do after that fire. It was nothing less than a miracle. And I think about what Pat Martino overcame to be able to play again. Pat’s a big inspiration, man. Now I realize how hard he had to work to get it back. And it’s a slow road back. But I realize that I’m here to play music on this planet; that’s obvious to me. And to give it up for some bullshit thing like a stroke, man, it’s just crazy. So I’m just gonna play my music the best I can and write as much as I can until I check out. And that’s it.” Now that he’s come full circle back to his hometown of Waterbury, it’s time to reinvent himself. And with Zen-like patience, Diorio is bound to make a comeback. “I know what I have to do,” he says. “You gotta bravely face whatever the gods send you and don’t loathe or get angry. You gotta try to find the peace within yourself. Hopefully, the music will help you to get to that peaceful place.” true 21 2008-07-09T18:27:53-04:00 false 19427 125 200808 true 80 2008-08-01T00:00:00-04:00

One of the great jazz guitarists since the 1960s, Joe Diorio has flown under the radar of the vast majority of jazz fans. But to the hordes of working guitarists today who studied with him at Hollywood’s Guitar Institute of Technology (GIT) from 1977-97 and later at the University of Southern California, Diorio is revered as a kind of six-string guru; his unconventional methods helped liberate them to cross over the line from the intellectual and the intuitive. As he put it in his 1989 REH instructional video, Creative Jazz Guitar: “The idea in improvising is to free yourself from left-brain thinking. The left side of the brain wants to know exactly what it’s doing through every step of the process, whereas the right brain is purely intuitive. It loves to take chances and be creative. And when that right brain starts to kick in, then you’ll start to come up with things you never thought of before.” Admired throughout his career by fellow plectrists like Joe Pass, Howard Roberts, Jack Wilkins, Robben Ford, Pat Metheny and Mick Goodrick, the native of Waterbury, Conn., is a part of jazz history for his work on the first-ever gold-selling jazz record, saxophonist Eddie Harris’ Exodus to Jazz (Vee-Jay), which sold in unprecedented numbers in 1961 on the strength of the Top 40 hit single, a jazzy adaptation of the Exodus movie theme by Ernest Gold. Diorio is also highly regarded among guitar aficionados for his creative collaboration during the early ’70s with saxophonist-trumpeter Ira Sullivan and his string...

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

4 Alto saxophonist Vernice “Bunky” Green already had degrees from Northwestern University and Chicago State University in 1989, yet that’s when he chose to go back to school while in his mid-50s. To teach, that is. That school was the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, which hired Green as a professor on the strength of his instructional prowess at Chicago State. He’d started his teaching career there in 1972, in the midst of what’s now a 48-year, 14-album solo recording catalog. Professor Green, now 73, quickly ascended to his current position as director of jazz studies within UNF’s nationally heralded program. That, combined with his most recent stellar release, the Label Bleu recording Another Place (Green’s first in 17 years), disproves the notion of “those who can do; those who can’t teach.” “I actually play more now than before I started teaching,” he says. “In a school environment like this, I’m constantly playing, and these kids move fast. I’ve made sure that I had enough piano chops to play tunes with my students, too. That’s important. I always have my students learning some basic piano. So they keep me on my toes, and I keep them on theirs.” His learn-by-doing studiousness fits right into the music program at UNF. The school’s faculty includes touring artists like pianist Lynne Arriale and drummer Danny Gottlieb. “As director of jazz studies, I only teach students one at a time,” Green says. “I have my office here, sure, but don’t do a lot of administrative work, except for e-mails, which never let me rest. I do one-on-one teaching sessions with each student, so we get a chance to really get into it. In a class, you have to move at the speed of the entire class. If I have a student who’s bright and can surge ahead, there’s no speed limit.” Born and raised in Milwaukee, Green was such a formidable autodidact that he could replicate Charlie Parker’s challenging solos while still in his teens. The underage saxophonist then bravely got his first onstage experience by sneaking into Milwaukee clubs to sit in. “I tell the kids that I’m a product of the street,” Green says, “and that I’m proud of that. I learned by trial and error. At 15, I could play everything that Bird ever recorded, verbatim. At 16, I had to paint on a fake mustache to get into clubs and play.” The stage, he says, is where his real higher learning occurred. “My students know that playing here at school is not the real world,” Green says. “This is make-believe. They still have to learn to work and play together with other people in the moment, something that requires constant adjustment.” Green moved to New York City in his late teens, and received a lesson both valuable and volatile when he replaced Jackie McLean for a stint in bassist Charles Mingus’ band in 1960. “Lou Donaldson told Mingus about me,” Green says, “Mingus was a disciplinarian, and very concerned about how you played his music. If you didn’t play it the way he wanted, he’d let you have it no matter where, even on the bandstand. At my audition, he told me, ‘This is your part, man,’ and played it on the piano. It was difficult, because the intervals were abstract, almost atonal. I said, ‘Do you have the music for this?’ He said, ‘Look, man, if I wrote it down, you’d never play it right!’ I understood what he meant; played it back to him, and he smiled.” “I learned part of what my style is based on from Mingus,” Green continues. “Part of what I’m known for stylistically is based on his approach. He told me that there was no such thing as a wrong note. I realized that he was talking about tension and release, where there has to be some sort of clash before a release. My style is based around that. You can play almost any note along with chords, as long as there’s resolution.” The Mingus lessons helped to prepare Green for an active playing/teaching career in Chicago, where he moved in 1960 and lived for nearly 30 years. “One of the first people who gave me an opportunity to play in Chicago was Joe Segal, who owned the Jazz Showcase,” he says. “I got to play there with people like Johnny Griffin and Eric Dolphy. The city was on fire, so I decided to move there. When it comes to music, it certainly isn’t the second city to New York.” Green’s reputation led to a session career that includes recordings with Elvin Jones, Clark Terry, Eddie Harris, Sonny Stitt and James Moody. The teaching saxophonist and his wife of 40 years, Edith, still live in the same house they first moved into in Jacksonville. He says there was a culture shock upon arriving there. “You have the ocean, which is a nice diversion,” Green says. “But it certainly isn’t Chicago. Everything was at my fingertips there. My intention was to come down here for a year and check out the UNF jazz program. I figured I could never leave Chicago. But in between, something happened. I got some great students.” Another Place, released in 2006, was Green’s first recording since his poignant 1989 album Healing the Pain, which commemorated the death of his parents. Saxophonist and disciple Steve Coleman lured Green back into the studio and produced the latest disc. Pianist Jason Moran, bassist Lonnie Plaxico and drummer Nasheet Waits aid Green’s close-to-the-edge urgency and soulful downshifts throughout. “Steve has taken stylistic saxophone things that I’ve helped create to his own logical conclusion,” Green says. “I wasn’t really hot on recording another album, ’cause I’ve been ripped off by so many record companies. But Steve said it wouldn’t be like that, and talked me into it. I’m glad, because it gave my career a jump-start.” A new Green recording led to new international tour dates. Playing the JazzBaltica festival in Germany in the summer of 2007 inadvertently led to his next CD. “When I came over, I figured I’d be playing with people I knew,” he says. “But they paired me with some younger German players who are well known in that area, and they play with a free approach! They learned the music really well, but played free. I had to be flexible to function in that environment. But that performance was judged one of the best in Germany in 2007 by Jazzthetik magazine, and the organizers called me about releasing the concert on CD. I’ll be playing JazzBaltica again this July, then the North Sea Jazz festival, and by then the CD will be available on the German label Traumton Records.” Still, Green is arguably better known as an educator than musician. He was president of the International Association for Jazz Education from 1990-1992, and was inducted into the IAJE Hall of Fame in 1999. During his 18 years at UNF, the school has risen in stature among national jazz institutions. “We have parents calling from Wisconsin and Michigan, and bringing their kids down here to audition,” Green says. “It’s a wonderful faculty; great people. We’re like a family. If we have a conflict, we talk about it, work it out and make things better.” Green is even considering working on a follow-up instructional book to his Inside Outside, published by Jamey Aebersold Jazz in 1988. “That’s still selling after all these years,” he says. “About five years ago, Jamey said, ‘Why don’t you do another book?’ I have another one in me. Like Mozart, it’s already written—in my head! I won’t give the exact angle yet. I’ll just say that saxophone players play a certain way, generally. There’s another way to approach voicings on the instrument. I’ll come from that angle.” The underrated, understated and rejuvenated Green laughs when the subject turns to an online community dedicated to him, the Society for the Promulgation of the Music of Bunky Green (SPMBG) on MySpace (http://groups.myspace.com/bunkygreen). Founded in Jersey City, N.J., in 2006, the site has more than 150 members and the subtitle “Bunky Green Kicks Ass!” “Someone told me about that, but I haven’t seen it yet,” he says. “I bet that’s David Carey, a former student of mine who’s very dear to me and lives in that area. And he probably recruited some of my other students who’ve graduated through the years.” Recommended Listening: Testifyin’ Time (Cadet, 1964) Places We’ve Never Been (Vanguard, 1979) Healing the Pain (Delos, 1989) Another Place (Label Bleu, 2006) true 10419 2008-06-12T21:28:09-04:00 false 17990 116 200806 true 80 2008-06-01T00:00:00-04:00

Alto saxophonist Vernice “Bunky” Green already had degrees from Northwestern University and Chicago State University in 1989, yet that’s when he chose to go back to school while in his mid-50s. To teach, that is. That school was the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, which hired Green as a professor on the strength of his instructional prowess at Chicago State. He’d started his teaching career there in 1972, in the midst of what’s now a 48-year, 14-album solo recording catalog. Professor Green, now 73, quickly ascended to his current position as director of jazz studies within UNF’s nationally heralded program. That, combined with his most recent stellar release, the Label Bleu recording Another Place (Green’s first in 17 years), disproves the notion of “those who can do; those who can’t teach.” “I actually play more now than before I started teaching,” he says. “In a school environment like this, I’m constantly playing, and these kids move fast. I’ve made sure that I had enough piano chops to play tunes with my students, too. That’s important. I always have my students learning some basic piano. So they keep me on my toes, and I keep them on theirs.” His learn-by-doing studiousness fits right into the music program at UNF. The school’s faculty includes touring artists like pianist Lynne Arriale and drummer Danny Gottlieb. “As director of jazz studies, I only teach students one at a time,” Green says. “I have my office here, sure, but don’t do a lot of administrative work, except for e-mails, which...

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

4 She can be counted, alongside bandleader/trumpeter Louis Prima, among the earliest architects of Las Vegas showmanship. When the very first Grammy awards were handed out in 1959, she was up for two, losing Best Female Vocal Performance to Ella Fitzgerald but scoring, with Prima, for Best Performance by a Vocal Group for their frenetic rendition of “That Old Black Magic.” (She wasn’t in attendance to accept, but made up for it earlier this year, recreating that same “Magic” alongside a clearly out-of-his-league Kid Rock on the Grammys’ 50th-anniversary telecast). Sinatra wooed and nearly married her. Sammy and Dino numbered among her closest friends. So did Bobby Darin. JFK tapped her to perform at his inauguration. She’s walked with kings, but has never lost the common touch. Such is the magic of Keely Smith. She could (and, a more than a half-century on, still can) sing circles around the preeminent girl singers of her era: Doris Day, Jo Stafford, Patti Page, even Rosemary Clooney. Her power, her range, her interpretive skill and her emotive dexterity rival Ella and Sarah. Her stagecraft outshines them all. But Smith never craved stardom (still doesn’t). At the height of her 1950s popularity, when she and Prima were proving a bigger draw than many of the Strip’s headliners, she’d do her five shows a night (starting at midnight, ending at 6 a.m.), retire to the ladies’ room to read between sets, then head home to care for their two young daughters. Even her trademark demeanor—the deadpan ennui fans assumed was purposefully created as a counterpoint to Prima’s limb-flinging explosiveness—was accidental: While waiting for her turn to sing she’d stand stock-still in front of the piano and simply stare off into space, letting her mind wander. So, does it concern her to have, much like her pal Sammy Davis Jr., spent a lifetime in the shadow of lesser talents? On the phone from her home in Palm Springs, Calif., Smith, now 76, doesn’t hesitate for a moment. “Sammy was the best,” she says matter-of-factly. “He loved what he did and lived what he did, and it bothered him sometimes that he should have gotten more recognition. But it never bothered me at all. I was in love, I was happy, I had my kids, I did something I enjoyed doing. I was like a pig in shit. … My daddy was a carpenter, so was my stepfather. My mother worked in a dime store. I come from those kinds of roots. I always feel that, God forbid, if something happened, I could work in a dime store. I don’t have the ego that a lot of show-business people have. I don’t sweat the small stuff.” Those roots lead back to Norfolk, Va., where she was born Dorothy Jacqueline Keely, of Irish and Native American heritage, on March 9, 1932. As young as age 11 she was singing up a storm, but received no formal music education. Instead, she says, her teachers were “Ella Fitzgerald and June Christy. Those were the two I listened to from my school days on. Also Nat Cole. He is still my favorite singer. I loved Nat, and he was probably the nicest man I ever met in show business.” It was at age 15, during a family vacation to Atlantic City, that Smith first caught sight of Louis Prima. Her first impression? “I didn’t like him,” she candidly admits, “but I loved him as a performer [and] I admired his honesty. He loved what he did and could do things with his legs that were unbelievable. I’ve always said Elvis copied him, and Elvis actually told me he did take some of his moves from Louis.” The pair’s professional partnership began a year later when, after persuading a Virginia Beach club owner to book Prima, she discovered he was looking for a girl singer. Six years of touring and recording followed. Marriage was in the cards, but Prima had to first settle his third divorce. He and Smith finally exchanged vows in 1953. The following year, Smith found herself, at age 22, a naïf in Sin City—intensely shy, pregnant and all but penniless. Prima, long used to playing the plushest rooms in the biggest towns, had hit the professional skids. So he called in a favor. His buddy Bill Miller used to manage New Jersey’s massively popular Rivera nightclub, but was now in Vegas running a brand-spanking-new casino called the Sahara. Prima asked for a gig. Miller apologetically offered what he perceived a massive comedown for the mighty Prima: four weeks, not in the main room, but in the comparatively tiny, noisy Casbah Lounge. Desperate for any work they could get, Prima and Smith signed on. That four-week engagement would ultimately extend to seven years as they quickly emerged as the hottest ticket in town. Though Prima easily adjusted to the lounge’s boisterousness, it was tougher for Smith. “The service area was right in front of the stage, and when Louis was up there playing, with his trumpet blaring and the band swinging, it would be OK,” she recalls. “But when I was singing a ballad like ‘The Man I Love,’ the waitress would come up and yell, ‘Six beers and four martinis,’ or whatever. One night, Louis stopped the show, leaned over to the waitress and said, ‘That’s OK, honey, we’ll wait ’til you’re finished.’ The next day, that service station was moved to the far end of the room.” Though Smith is no fan of the garish homage to excess that Vegas has become, throughout the 1950s she found it “absolutely wonderful. I loved the freedom, and the town was very clean. It was a wonderful community. Our kids lived our schedule. We’d get off at six in the morning and often we’d go water-skiing at dawn. Then we’d head home, I’d sleep ’til noon, be with the kids all day, and head back to work after they were in bed. In those days, there were no hookers. Well, I’m sure there were, but we didn’t see them because we had, excuse the expression, whorehouses. And [Vegas] didn’t have any of the other problems that came along later.” Naturally, with thousands flocking to what was being accurately dubbed “the wildest show in Vegas,” record labels’ interest in Prima was re-ignited. When Capitol came calling, Prima wisely and generously insisted that the deal include a separate contract for Smith. Teamed with producer Voyle Gilmore for her debut album, Smith remembers how “he and Louis and I sat down and played a bunch of songs, all standards, and then he played what he said was a French song, ‘I Wish You Love.’ I never used to talk to anybody in those days, but I turned to Louis and said, ‘Babe, I’ll sing any other 10 songs you want me to, but I want to do the French song.’ And Voyle said, ‘Oh, God, Keely, that song will never mean anything.’ Then Louis turned to him and said, ‘Voyle, if she wants to sing the French song, she’ll sing the French song.’ And that’s how I got it.” Fortune further smiled on Smith when Nelson Riddle was assigned to craft the arrangements for the album that would become I Wish You Love. Says Smith, “Louis was used to controlling everything—every move we made onstage, all the arrangements, came out of Louis’ head. When we got Nelson, who I got because of Sinatra, all we gave him were the keys to the songs. Louis never opened his mouth to him. He let Nelson write whatever he wanted to write.” Riddle was also on hand for Smith’s third and final Capitol release, Swingin’ Pretty. In between, Smith was paired for the brassy Politely! with the label’s other virtuoso arranger and orchestra leader, Billy May, whom she fondly remembers as “a character. He’d walk up to the podium, tap his little baton and say, ‘OK, gentlemen, I don’t want any shit out of this, play the notes on the music.’ And that’s how the sessions would start. I remember one time we’d given him an ending to write, but I didn’t sing it his way. He stopped the entire session and said, ‘Keely, you gave me a goddamn ending to write, I wrote it, and you’re going to sing it!’ But Billy was a nice, nice man.” Amid her three Capitol albums, Smith was also invited by Sinatra to join him on a pair of lightweight duets, “How Are You Fixed for Love?” and “Nothing in Common.” By this point, Sinatra had earned a reputation as “one-take Frank” on both film sets and in the recording studio, but Smith gleefully recalls, “Not with me he wasn’t! You know, as a singer you’re supposed to sing the best you can and, to be honest, you don’t put out crap just because you’re Frank Sinatra. He had the power to say, ‘OK, that’s it, no more.’ When he said it, I was too dumb and too naïve to not know better and say in front of all the musicians, ‘No, that’s not right.’ Frank looked at me perplexed because he knew how shy I was. But when it came to what was right or wrong, you’ve got ears and you can tell if it’s not a good take, so I said, ‘Frank, it’s not good enough. We can do better.’ And he just smiled and said, ‘OK, baby.’” When the Capitol deal ended, Prima made the ill-advised decision to shift to Dot Records, a move Smith says was “strictly because of money. It was never the caliber of music we did at Capitol. I had no business recording with [people like] Billy Vaughn, but I did because Louis told me to.” In 1961, with their Vegas glory days behind them, their record sales in decline and their marriage in tatters, Prima and Smith divorced, leaving her terrified at the prospect of continuing her career as a solo act. “Louis told me I’d be nothing without him, and I believed him,” she says. “I was petrified and didn’t go onstage for a couple of years. It was Dinah Shore who finally got me working again. Dinah called up and said, ‘I want you on my [TV] show.’ I said, ‘Dinah, I can’t do it.’ She was in Hollywood and I was in Vegas, and she said, ‘Get off your ass and fly in here.’ I thought, OK, let me try this, and it worked!” Signing with Sinatra’s Reprise label, Smith’s relationship with him turned personal. “At the time,” she says, “whenever I was with Frank we were almost always with Peter Lawford and his wife Pat, who were my best friends in those days. It never dawned on me that anybody thought Frank and I were having a romance, and the funny part is that we weren’t really. I know, given Frank’s reputation, that nobody will believe this, but he treated me like a little princess, a doll. He was very respectful, very sweet, very charming, very tender, and every night I went home by myself, which frustrated the hell out of him!” He proposed marriage, but she declined. “I’m basically a country girl,” she explains, “and always have been. And I’m extremely honest. As I’ve grown older I’ve become quite outspoken. Frank would have loved the honesty, but he couldn’t handle the honesty. I don’t think he would have liked how outspoken I’ve become. He liked to control everything. He really needed a girl who needed him.” In the mid-’60s, after the release of her finest Reprise album, Sings the John Lennon/Paul McCartney Songbook (a major success in the U.K., but all but unknown in the U.S.), Smith chose to retire and focus on her children. In 1985, she returned to the studio for a superb one-off, I’m in Love Again for Fantasy. Fifteen years later, at age 68, Smith found herself under contract to Concord, though it happened quite by happenstance. “You’re not going to believe this,” she laughs. “Jimmy Darren was recording at Capitol and I was at a studio next door. Jimmy asked me to come over and listen to a couple of things he’d recorded and while we were listening this guy walked in. I took one look at him and said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s one of the most beautiful men I’ve ever seen.’ It turned out to be [producer] John Burke from Concord. We started talking. He asked if I was with a label, and I said no. He asked if I was interested. I’d never heard of Concord Records, but said, ‘Yes, as long as they don’t try to control me.’ And that’s how I ended up on Concord. It was just a fluke he walked in that day.” Over the past eight years, Smith has delivered four superb albums, including the Grammy-nominated Keely Sings Sinatra, her voice sounding as fit and strong as it did a half-century ago. “That’s because I’m still young,” she maintains. “Once in a while I’ll have a drink, but I’m not a drinker. I’ve never smoked and I’m very healthy. I’m a positive thinker and I’m a happy person. God’s been really good to me. I guess my voice is in shape because I don’t abuse it, even though I work quite a bit. And, thank God, I don’t sing incorrectly.” Though Vegas will never again be in the cards for Smith (“I don’t like it. When Howard Hughes came in, which was toward the end of Louis and I, he changed everything. Overnight, everything was corporate; and you can’t run entertainment based on corporate”), she continues to tour extensively and is toying with the idea of publishing her memoirs. There’s also talk of her life story being made into a film, perhaps by Ray director Taylor Hackford, but only, she insists, if the soundtrack includes “either the original recordings or new ones I do myself. There’ll never be anybody doing me!” And, there’s even the possibility of a high-profile collaboration. As Smith reveals, “A young man approached me recently about working with Paul McCartney. I said, ‘I’d love to sing with Paul McCartney, but what makes you think he’d record with me?’ He said, ‘They’re talking about rereleasing your Beatles album and adding a couple of duets with Paul.’ I’ve only met Paul once, but I liked him. He was a wonderful young man and a perfect gentleman.” Her Concord contract calls for at least one more album, which she’s recently begun contemplating. “People think I’m a jazz singer,” Smith says. “Now, I’ve never considered myself a jazz singer, but I figure maybe I should do a jazz album because I’m going to be working some jazz clubs. Recently, I started listening to June Christy again. I’ve never sung ‘Midnight Sun’ or several of the other wonderful songs she did.” Echoing the modesty that has defined her entire career, she quietly adds, “I think maybe I’ll start incorporating those tunes into my act and see how it works, see if people accept those from me.” Recommended Listening I Wish You Love (Capitol, 1958) Reprise Musical Repertory Theatre (Reprise, 1963) Keely Sings Sinatra (Concord, 2001) Keely Swings Basie-Style (Concord, 2002) true 204 2008-06-16T19:29:02-04:00 false 18111 117 200805 true 80 2008-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

She can be counted, alongside bandleader/trumpeter Louis Prima, among the earliest architects of Las Vegas showmanship. When the very first Grammy awards were handed out in 1959, she was up for two, losing Best Female Vocal Performance to Ella Fitzgerald but scoring, with Prima, for Best Performance by a Vocal Group for their frenetic rendition of “That Old Black Magic.” (She wasn’t in attendance to accept, but made up for it earlier this year, recreating that same “Magic” alongside a clearly out-of-his-league Kid Rock on the Grammys’ 50th-anniversary telecast). Sinatra wooed and nearly married her. Sammy and Dino numbered among her closest friends. So did Bobby Darin. JFK tapped her to perform at his inauguration. She’s walked with kings, but has never lost the common touch. Such is the magic of Keely Smith. She could (and, a more than a half-century on, still can) sing circles around the preeminent girl singers of her era: Doris Day, Jo Stafford, Patti Page, even Rosemary Clooney. Her power, her range, her interpretive skill and her emotive dexterity rival Ella and Sarah. Her stagecraft outshines them all. But Smith never craved stardom (still doesn’t). At the height of her 1950s popularity, when she and Prima were proving a bigger draw than many of the Strip’s headliners, she’d do her five shows a night (starting at midnight, ending at 6 a.m.), retire to the ladies’ room to read between sets, then head home to care for their two young daughters. Even her trademark demeanor—the deadpan ennui fans assumed was purposefully created...

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

4 The scene was much more nurturing 20 years ago,” says bassist Reggie Washington, a former stalwart of the M-Base Collective and a ubiquitous figure on New York’s jazz, funk and creative music scene through the ’80s, ’90s and into the first half of the ’00s. “Older cats took you under their wing and made you learn on the bandstand. Nowadays, there’s no sharing, there’s so much competition and hatin’ ... it’s a totally different scene. Cats want to get paid for rehearsals ... gigs are for less money, and there are fewer gigs. Times have changed.” A resident of Belgium for the past three years, the Staten Island native has racked up extensive sideman credits over the years, including a dozen recordings with Steve Coleman and Five Elements and a slew of sessions and tours with the likes of legendary drummer-bandleader Chico Hamilton, vocalist Cassandra Wilson, alto saxophonist Greg Osby, guitarist Jean-Paul Bourelly, clarinetist Don Byron and pianist Uri Caine, as well as Roy Hargrove’s RH Factor, Branford Marsalis’ Buckshot LeFonque and Oliver Lake’s Steel Band. He has also traveled the world music circuit with African drum master Babatunde Olatunji and calypso star Mighty Sparrow and crossed over into the pop world with D’Angelo, Meshell Ndegeocello and Ute Lemper. But the talented bassist had not, until recently, stepped out as a leader in his own right. Washington’s long-overdue debut, Lot of Love, Live! (Jammin’ Colors), highlights his distinctly different approaches to upright and electric basses while also demonstrating his melodic penchant as a soloist on both instruments in two separate and highly interactive trio settings: his Belgian band with Erwin Vann on tenor sax and Stephane Galland on drums, and his American band with tenor saxophonist Ravi Coltrane and drummer Gene Lake. Recorded during two separate European tours in October 2005 and March 2006, Lot of Love, Live! includes stirring interpretations of Marcus Miller’s “Mr. Pastorius” (underscored by a simmering African-flavored 6/8 groove), Wayne Shorter’s “Fall” and Bill Frisell’s mysterioso anthem “Strange Meeting” (recast as a soulful D’Angelo-esque groover). Washington also showcases potent originals like “Reuben’s 2 Train” (a kind of mash-up of Sonny Rollins’ “Freedom Suite” and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “The King and I” that was named for his son), “Ledge” (based on both Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You” and Notorious B.I.G.’s “Kickin’ the Door”), the funk-laden electric bass throwdown “Jade 4 Giada” and “Half Position Woody” (not a reference to erectile dysfunction but rather to the fact that the entire tune is played in the half position on his wooden upright bass). The last track on the album, an overdubbed bass extravaganza titled “Fanny’s Toy” that has Washington laying down three bass tracks on top of a slamming drum sample from ?uestlove (Ahmir Khalib Thompson) of the Roots, is a glimpse of things to come from Washington. “I’d like to eventually do a full-scale bass choir,” he says, “but I want to come at it in a different way than just a wild jamboree with all this booming bass. I want everybody on the stage to have a function and assume a different spot in the music, just like an African drum choir.” The younger brother of jazz drummer Kenny Washington, Reggie started off playing cello in the junior high stage band and switched to double bass in the ninth grade All-City High School Orchestra. Around this time, Kenny started hanging out with his LaGuardia High School of Music & Arts classmate, Marcus Miller. “Marcus used to come over to the house all the time,” recalls Washington. “Kenny had this huge jazz record collection and he used to say to Marcus, ‘Why don’t you come over to the house and check out some jazz records instead of learning all that damn funk?’ So Marcus and Kenny would sit up and listen to records all night long, then get up in the morning and go to school. And being four years younger, I wasn’t exactly invited to hang with them. But I’d sit in the corner and just watch them. “Marcus had his bass there and I started to take an interest in it,” he continues. “I didn’t have my own electric bass at the time so I used to mess around with his. He would show me a few things and I just took to it really quickly and easily.” Concurrent with exploring funk licks on Miller’s electric bass, Washington also studied privately with some highly regarded upright players, including classical bassist William Blossom from the New York Philharmonic, salsa bassist Victor Venegas from the Fania All-Stars and jazz bassist Paul West, who had studied with Washington’s all-time favorite bass player, Sam Jones. “That’s the end-all cat for me,” he says. “I love Paul Chambers, Ray Brown, Oscar Pettiford, Scott LaFaro and all those cats. But Sam Jones just had a certain thing in terms of note choices that was different from everybody’s and that really grabbed me.” While focusing more on electric bass in the mid-’80s, he got some invaluable pointers from fellow electric bassists like Kim Clarke, Melvin Gibbs and Rev. Bruce Johnson. By 1989, Washington began playing with Steve Coleman’s Five Elements, though he had met the Chicago-born alto saxophonist 10 years earlier. “I met Steve in ’79 when he was playing with my brother Kenny and [bassist] Curtis Lundy. Steve had a huge Afro and a dashiki in those days. But I later got hooked up with him through Greg Osby. Steve was looking for a replacement for Kevin Bruce Harris and Greg recommended me. So I showed up for a rehearsal and Steve pulled out some very challenging music, and I played it. Then we went on to next one and the next one, and I ran it all down.” Washington got the gig and ended up playing on Coleman’s Rhythm People (RCA Novus, 1990). During his lengthy tenure with Five Elements (steadily through 1996 and then on and off through 2005), the bassist was immersed in the M-Base concept of playing intricate overlapping meters and shifting time signatures. “People would flip out over Steve’s music,” says Washington. “They’d say, ‘Oh, man, you play in odd meter! How do you do that?’ But it’s not odd at all. What makes it odd? A number? I think not. It’s all even, it’s metric, it’s perfect. And it’s a groove. Your body can feel it. So it’s not odd if your body can feel something like that.” He adds, “Music is a language and I had to learn his language before I could get comfortable in it. With Steve’s music, you’re assuming two large things: the rhythmic and the melodic. He wants you to understand the melodies and the interrelationship of the melodies to the basslines along with the rhythmic things. He has specific ‘drum chants’ that work in a certain way, and if you’re not playing your particular chant, it affects everything because it’s just a subset of the whole. But when they all work together, everything opens up and you can see the lines between everything. And with Steve’s music, one melodic line starts at the end of the previous one. So if you don’t know and fully internalize that first melodic line, it’s going to be a long, long night for you on the bandstand, because you can’t guess with this music.” Washington further points out that Coleman’s concept, though seemingly complex, is actually based in the ancient art of call-and-response. “We might be grooving on something but then Steve plays some new motif and the whole band goes to this other place. That’s African stuff. You play a certain drum chant in an African drum choir and everybody knows instinctively to go to something else. Or, in more recent terms, you could look at James Brown. When he said, ‘Take it to the bridge,’ Maceo [Parker] and them instinctively knew where to go. And when Steve would play a certain line, we would instinctively shift. So you had to be listening all the time in that band.” Regarding his experience on the bandstand with jazz elder Chico Hamilton, Washington says, “Chico was like a second father to me. He took the time with a lot of young players and he definitely influenced me from a lot more than just the music standpoint. He taught me more about cultural exchange, how to conduct myself as a black man in Europe, how to conduct myself with dignity and class. And he taught me to respect the bandstand, to respect the music, to respect who we are and what we’re contributing and putting out into the world. His attitude was ‘Always come to the bandstand ready to hit.’ You can be tired, drunk, jetlagged or sick, but when you come up there on the bandstand, you have to be professional. I learned that lesson the hard way in Chico’s band.” The bassist is currently involved in two projects: his ultra-funky TRio TRee with Jozef Dumoulin on Fender Rhodes electric piano and Skoota Warner on drums, and an ambitious duet project with Belgian reed virtuoso Fabrice Alleman that pays tribute to jazz icons Wayne Shorter and John Coltrane. This summer Washington plans to tour Europe in a trio with the brothers Strickland, Marcus on tenor sax and E.J. on drums. His other goals for the future? “I want a chance to make an impact and also steer some of the next generation in a better direction than they’re going,” says Washington, who is proud to have recently gotten clean and sober. “In my career I got help from some old-school cats like Jimmy Ponder, Bob Cranshaw, Reggie Workman, Jimmy Owens, Chris White and Buddy Williams. They all told me, ‘Be proud of what you do. If you believe it, others will.’ Now I want to pass that sentiment along to the young cats and also help keep the integrity of the music alive.” true 21 2008-06-17T19:07:44-04:00 false 18234 118 200804 true 80 2008-04-01T00:00:00-04:00

The scene was much more nurturing 20 years ago,” says bassist Reggie Washington, a former stalwart of the M-Base Collective and a ubiquitous figure on New York’s jazz, funk and creative music scene through the ’80s, ’90s and into the first half of the ’00s. “Older cats took you under their wing and made you learn on the bandstand. Nowadays, there’s no sharing, there’s so much competition and hatin’ ... it’s a totally different scene. Cats want to get paid for rehearsals ... gigs are for less money, and there are fewer gigs. Times have changed.” A resident of Belgium for the past three years, the Staten Island native has racked up extensive sideman credits over the years, including a dozen recordings with Steve Coleman and Five Elements and a slew of sessions and tours with the likes of legendary drummer-bandleader Chico Hamilton, vocalist Cassandra Wilson, alto saxophonist Greg Osby, guitarist Jean-Paul Bourelly, clarinetist Don Byron and pianist Uri Caine, as well as Roy Hargrove’s RH Factor, Branford Marsalis’ Buckshot LeFonque and Oliver Lake’s Steel Band. He has also traveled the world music circuit with African drum master Babatunde Olatunji and calypso star Mighty Sparrow and crossed over into the pop world with D’Angelo, Meshell Ndegeocello and Ute Lemper. But the talented bassist had not, until recently, stepped out as a leader in his own right. Washington’s long-overdue debut, Lot of Love, Live! (Jammin’ Colors), highlights his distinctly different approaches to upright and electric basses while also demonstrating his melodic penchant as a soloist on both...

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

4 When Azar Lawrence grabs you for a handshake, your fingers quickly know they’ve met their match. He may be past the mid-century mark, but the veteran Los Angeles tenor saxophonist still has the sturdy look and powerful presence of a first-string linebacker. His playing is no less vigorous, but far more emotionally multifaceted, a gripping combination of fiery, fast-fingered technique and soaring, high-note lyricism. Although Lawrence is one of the most authentic of the Coltrane-influenced tenor players, he has, more than most, transformed the style into a uniquely personal expression. So unique, and so personal, in fact, that he has performed impressively with everyone from Ike and Tina Turner, Eric Burdon and War, Marvin Gaye, and the Watts 103rd St. Rhythm Band to Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner, Bobby Hutcherson, Clark Terry, Cedar Walton, Frank Zappa, Busta Rhymes and Maurice White. And many more. Why is it, then, that Lawrence’s name, despite decades of achievement, doesn’t ring a bell with many jazz fans? In part because the performances and recordings that might have generated high visibility—beyond his native L.A.—were largely packed into a decade and a half or so. And also because he spent another significant period of time working actively in the pop and R&B arena. And, perhaps most importantly, because of the nine years—which he describes as his 40 days and 40 nights in the desert—in which he dealt with serious addiction problems. Lawrence resurfaced in a significant way last year on The Legacy and Music of John Coltrane. Performing with the Edwin Bayard Quartet, he risked the most challenging of comparisons with such classics as “Mr. P. C.,” “Impressions” and “My Favorite Things,” and succeeded admirably, by channeling the Coltrane style without losing contact with his own creative vision. “If even half [of the John Coltrane tribute albums] were as vital and powerful as tenor saxophonist Azar Lawrence’s Legacy and Music of John Coltrane, there’d be no reason for jadedness” wrote Scott Verrastro in the August 2007 issue of JazzTimes. “I listened to Coltrane all the time when I was growing up,” says Lawrence. “But I never transcribed the solos and tried to play along with them, or anything like that. Maybe I should have. But so, even though we have similar approaches, what I play developed as a natural kind of thing. I listened a lot, but I never put my horn into my mouth and tried to play like him.” Sitting with him in a Los Angeles Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, watching the precipitation from the winter’s first rainstorm streaming down the windows, discussing everything from the chord changes of a McCoy Tyner piece to the Egyptian roots of his first name, the complex layers of Lawrence’s life and times gradually unfold. He is what often seems a rarity in Southern California: a native Angeleno, born Nov. 3, 1953, to an upper-middle-class black family living in the then largely white area of Baldwin Hills. (It has since become known as the African-American Beverly Hills.) “I was blessed enough to grow up in that area, and to have, among other things, the luxury of a pool,” he says. “My mother was a very fine pianist, and she started me on violin at an early age. I also played piano and the drums. But all that changed when a man named Lonnie, a friend of my father’s, started to come over. He liked to lie by the pool and play his flute. And one day he brought an alto saxophone. That’s when I discovered the saxophone sound, and I really liked it. So my father went out and bought me one.” His jazz education proceeded quickly from that point, as he mastered the horn and soaked up sounds like a musical sponge. “I met Reggie Golson, Benny Golson’s son,” he recalls, “and he had a great collection of records—Coltrane, Johnny Hodges, Charlie Parker—and he had personal experience with Coltrane, Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, guys like that.” By the late ’60s, Lawrence had become an active participant in the cutting-edge scene centered on the music of the adventurous pianist/composer Horace Tapscott. “When I first started working with Horace, I was playing alto,” he recalls. “But Arthur Blythe and Will Connell were holding down the alto chairs, so I played baritone.” Shortly after he graduated from high school, Lawrence changed to tenor. “I met Raymond Pound,” he explains, “the drummer on Marvin Gaye’s ‘Trouble Man,’ and he told me, ‘Hey, man. It’s time to start playing a man’s instrument.’” When he was just turning 19, Golson introduced him to Jones. “I went with Reggie to pick up Elvin at the airport,” says Lawrence. “He was playing at the Lighthouse, and when we got there I heard Reggie telling Elvin that I was a great sax player. I had my soprano with me, and at the club Elvin walked past me, pointed at it and said, ‘You know what? You might get a chance to use that thing.’ “I went to a rehearsal with him, and he said, ‘Hey, are you with me? I have a ticket for you.’ We went up to Canada and then to New York. And it was phenomenal, playing with him. At first I used to get lost, because of all those polyrhythms. What it was, to play with Elvin, was that you had to become anchored and secure with your own sense of time.” Lawrence had always wanted, however, to play with McCoy Tyner. One night, Alphonse Mouzon, who was playing drums with Tyner, came in to hear the Jones band at the Village Vanguard. “He went back to McCoy,” explains Lawrence, “and told him, ‘Hey, man, what we need is down at the Vanguard.’ McCoy told Alphonse to ask me to come over to their gig. When I got there, McCoy talked to me for a while. He said, ‘Hey, so I hear you like music.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I love music.’ So he said, ‘You like to play?’ And I said, ‘I love to play.’ And he said, ‘Well, come on and sit in.’ I did, and afterward, McCoy came up to me and said, ‘Give me your number, buddy.’” It was the casual introduction to a gig with Tyner that would last more than five years. And what was it like, I wondered, to have the rare experience of playing consecutively with two musicians so closely associated with Coltrane? “Well, to start with,” Lawrence responds with a smile, “I give thanks for that. Isn’t it something? Especially since we felt the same way about music. Both of them, maybe because of their association with Coltrane, didn’t have much to say about what they wanted you to do. If they hired you, you were what they wanted. Just play yourself. Do what you do. You’re the guy they hired.” Lawrence’s relatively brief encounter with Miles Davis in 1974, which consisted of a few rehearsals and the Carnegie Hall date that produced Dark Magus, called for a somewhat different kind of “guy,” but it too was a role that he was fully capable of handling. “I came from an R&B kind of background,” he says, “the Watts 103rd St. Band, etc. And I was a Jimi Hendrix fan, had the opportunity to hear him perform in Los Angeles. … So Miles’ band was just perfect for me. I was in hog heaven.” Lawrence’s own albums, Bridge Into the New Age, People Moving People and Summer Solstice, the only releases under his name prior to the Legacy and Music of John Coltrane, were also released in the mid-’70s. At the same time, his career was expanding in the pop direction as well. Performing with acts such as Phyllis Hyman, Deniece Williams, Skip Scarborough, Jennifer Holliday, Marvin Gaye and Gene Harris, among many others, triggered the discovery of his “knack for writing.” A partnership with Chuck Jackson and Patryce Banks produced songs for Irene Carr, Stanley Turrentine, Ren Woods and others. “Then I ran into Maurice White,” recalls Lawrence. “We found out we shared some spiritual ideas. He explained some of the stuff he’d seen in Egypt, and I said, ‘Well, listen, I have a couple of songs.’ But he was only mildly interested. They all thought of me in the John Coltrane context. But I played some things for him and he said, ‘Wait a minute. I’m hearing some stuff there.’ So I played the next one and he said the same thing. Well, we never did get to talk about Egypt, and some of the songs wound up on Earth, Wind and Fire’s Powerlight album.” Escalating success, however, was accompanied by personal tragedy. Lawrence was also visiting his seriously ill father every night in the hospital. “I would go see him every night, no matter what time of night it was,” he says. “And the one night I was so tired that I couldn’t make it, that was the night that he passed. The nurse told me, ‘Yeah, and he was calling your name.’ It took me nine years to forgive myself of the guilt I was carrying. And because of that, I abused myself in various manners.” Lawrence pauses for a moment, still carrying painful memories. But he has been clean now for over three years, he says, and is moving forward with plans for another Coltrane tribute album. On a longer-range timeframe he also hopes to establish a clinic dedicated to the use of music, in correlation with color charts, natal and numerology charts, etc., for the healing of what he calls “dis-ease.” “I am where I am now,” he says, “in part because Billy Higgins was very instrumental in assisting me. He came over, showed me his arms, and they were full of potholes. He said, ‘Man, if I can become clean, you can.’ And he was right. People can go out and fight battles and wars and shoot other people. But if you can win one battle over yourself, that’s how you can experience growth.” Recommended Listening Azar Lawrence w/ the Edwin Bayard Quartet Legacy and Music of John Coltrane (Clarion, 2007) Azar Lawrence Bridge into the New Age (Prestige, 1974) Miles Davis Dark Magus (Sony, 1974) McCoy Tyner Enlightenment (Milestone, 1973) Elvin Jones New Agenda (Vanguard, 1975) true 93 2008-06-18T19:22:31-04:00 false 18385 120 200803 true 80 2008-03-01T00:00:00-05:00

When Azar Lawrence grabs you for a handshake, your fingers quickly know they’ve met their match. He may be past the mid-century mark, but the veteran Los Angeles tenor saxophonist still has the sturdy look and powerful presence of a first-string linebacker. His playing is no less vigorous, but far more emotionally multifaceted, a gripping combination of fiery, fast-fingered technique and soaring, high-note lyricism. Although Lawrence is one of the most authentic of the Coltrane-influenced tenor players, he has, more than most, transformed the style into a uniquely personal expression. So unique, and so personal, in fact, that he has performed impressively with everyone from Ike and Tina Turner, Eric Burdon and War, Marvin Gaye, and the Watts 103rd St. Rhythm Band to Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner, Bobby Hutcherson, Clark Terry, Cedar Walton, Frank Zappa, Busta Rhymes and Maurice White. And many more. Why is it, then, that Lawrence’s name, despite decades of achievement, doesn’t ring a bell with many jazz fans? In part because the performances and recordings that might have generated high visibility—beyond his native L.A.—were largely packed into a decade and a half or so. And also because he spent another significant period of time working actively in the pop and R&B arena. And, perhaps most importantly, because of the nine years—which he describes as his 40 days and 40 nights in the desert—in which he dealt with serious addiction problems. Lawrence resurfaced in a significant way last year on The Legacy and Music of John Coltrane. Performing with the Edwin Bayard Quartet,...

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

4 When Steve Reid talks about his fascinating life as a drummer or waxes philosophical about the state of jazz, three words pop up routinely in the conversation: cycle, rhythm and dance. Those terms also provide apt modifiers for describing Reid’s circuitous career trajectory and his infectious drumming and compositions. At 64, Reid has survived many of jazz’s stylistic permutations and the industry’s ups and downs, and in spite of a four-decade-long career during which he played with a horde of heavyweights, including Sun Ra, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Miles Davis and Jackie McLean, he’s not a household name. “My thing has always been kind of weird. That’s probably why I’m not as established on the jazz map, because I was going to different places for years,” he explains over the phone from his home in Lugano, Switzerland. “Some people thought that I had disappeared or something.” He also attributes his obscurity to his discography as a leader, none of which is documented on high-profile labels such as Blue Note, Prestige or Impulse. “Most of my records were made outside the United States, and a lot of them are on vinyl and aren’t obtainable on CD,” he says. Some of those vinyl-only LPs he’s referring to are his mid-’70s forward-thinking gems, Nova, Rhythmatism and Raw, all released on his own record company, Mustevic Sound, co-spearheaded with his old school friend, Joe Rigby. The British imprint Soul Jazz, however, reissued Rhythmatism in 2003, which paved the way for Reid to release 2005’s Spirit Walk. His newest disc, Daxaar, is on yet another obscure label, Domino, and like he said, it too was recorded outside of the United States, in Senegal. Just as Reid constantly refers to cycles, Daxaar brings him back to one of the African countries he first visited when he left New York City in 1966. He stayed in Africa for three years, playing with the likes of Fela Kuti, Guy Warren, Randy Weston and the mighty Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars. On Daxaar, Reid teams up once again with electronica maverick Kieran Hebden (of the innovative electronica group Four Tet) and keyboardist Boris Netsvetaev to engage in sometimes futuristic Afro-jazz funk with young Senegalese musicians: bassist Dembel Diop, percussionist Khadim Badji, trumpeter Roger Ongolo and guitarist Jimi Mbaye. The long open-ended grooves on Daxaar have a modal, almost deep house vibe to them. The pulsating title track, distinguished by Reid’s insistent four-on-the-floor backbeat, Netsvetaev’s swirling organ fills and Badji’s driving conga rhythms, recalls the spiritual deep house magic Joe Claussell cooked up with Jephté Guillaume a decade ago. “Dabronxxar” percolates at a slightly furious but danceable pace thanks to Reid’s good-foot drumming as does the magnificent “Jiggy Jiggy,” a bluesy, dancefloor romp that suggests what Marvin Gaye’s 1977 hit “Got to Give It Up” would have sounded like had he recorded it in Senegal. That Motown bump he gives “Jiggy Jiggy” betrays Reid’s roots as a rhythm and blues drummer while growing up in the southeast Bronx. In fact, he got his first break at the age of 17 with Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, when she came to his school with the Motown Revue. He later put his rhythmic stank on her classics “Heat Wave” and “Dancing in the Street.” The gig also landed him the drummer’s chair in the Apollo Theater house band, led by Quincy Jones. Reid attributes his formative years playing at various dances to the feet-friendly vitality of his rhythmic concepts. “My drumming has always been about getting the people happy and moving. When I got into jazz, I just kept that same flavor to somehow keep a rhythm happening,” he explains. “Rhythm makes it easy for people to follow even if you go into strange places,” he argues. “Trane’s [mid-’60s] quartet was an example of that. When he took out Elvin Jones and put in a non-rhythm thing, [the music] was harder to follow, because it didn’t have a [rhythmic] base anymore.” As adventurous as Daxaar is at times, it’s undeniably accessible, largely because of the music’s infectious grooves. When asked why he chose to record in Senegal, Reid replies, “That’s where the new music is,” then goes on to explain that because the country has a port city, its music scene isn’t as insular as those of other African countries. “When I decided to go over there, a lot of people thought that the music was going to be with a whole lot of drums, cymbal crashes and screaming,” he says with a laugh. Reid says that he even kept Hebden and Netsvetaev in the dark in terms of what he had in mind. “I wanted to bring that southeast Bronx funk thing, the jazz flavor and their thing.” Reid describes his Bronx stomping grounds as “real hoodie.” Nevertheless, he shares fond memories of growing up right across the street from Thelonious Monk on Lyman Place. “Monk used to come out on Sundays and direct the street traffic with his little dancing. It was a great time,” he laughs. Before Reid settled on the drums, he’d played guitar and tuba. Citing Philly Joe Jones and Papa Jo Jones as two of his earliest idols, Reid began gaining a reputation as a commanding drummer from leading a little trio that played at some dive in Nassau County, Long Island. The first drummer he saw live that really blew him away was Art Blakey. “He was playing at a dance at the Audubon Ballroom, the same place Malcolm X was killed, opposite the Fats Green Calypso Orchestra. I think that was during Blakey’s ‘Three Blind Mice’ period.” Blakey’s explosive brand of hard bop, however, wouldn’t narrowly inform Reid’s musical path. After returning from Africa in 1969, he became increasingly interested in the more avant-garde jazz of Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Charles Tyler and Arthur Blythe. Oddly enough, Reid now blames the extremities of the avant-garde for reducing the jazz audience. “I’ve played avant-garde with guys who could play anything. Trane and Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders just decided to play avant-garde,” Reid explains. “But you had some guys who came into the avant-garde that could only squeak and shout.” Perhaps, another attraction for Reid into the “New Thing” of the late ’60s and early ’70s was the Black Panther Party, which he joined while attending Adelphi University. “It was an exciting period. We actually changed something. They have demonstrations and stuff now but nothing gets changed,” Reid claims. When the U.S. government was drafting troops for the Vietnam War, Reid held onto his leftist principles and refused to register for the draft. His decision landed him a four-year prison sentence, in late 1969, at Pennsylvania’s Louisburg Federal Penitentiary, where he served alongside Jimmy Hoffa. But instead of breaking his spirit, the prison experience strengthened his independent drive. After his release on parole in 1971, he worked profusely, doing numerous sessions with the likes of Dionne Warwick, Horace Silver and Freddie Hubbard, as well as on and off-Broadway stage productions. During this time, he also gained some significant experience working with Charles Tyler and Sun Ra. Then in 1974 he reconnected with Rigby to create the Legendary Master Brotherhood and the Mustevic Sound label. Like many musical kindred spirits such as the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Julius Hemphill and Frank Lowe, Reid began touring and recording extensively in Europe. He eventually settled in Switzerland, even though he still splits his time between there and his home borough of the Bronx. It was in Europe where Reid met Hebden, whom he refers to as his newfound “musical soul mate.” The two were paired together by a concert presenter for a new project at Paris’ Cartier Foundation in 2005. That same year, they released the critically acclaimed duo discs Exchange Sessions Vol 1. and Vol. 2 (Domino). Hebden contributed greatly to the Steve Reid Ensemble’s Spirits Walk, then the two collaborated in duo format again with 2007’s Tongues (Domino). Reid’s new alliance with Hebden has garnered him significant attention in the expansive electronica music scene, something that he says is opening doors for younger jazz fans. It’s something that keeps him both optimistic and realistic when it comes to the survival of jazz, especially in times when so many people are bemoaning its dwindling and/or graying audience. “There’s an audience for everything. Just look at some of this shit on television,” he says with his customary robust and gruff laugh. “[But] the jazz audience is getting younger, because these kids equate Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders with Monk and Miles; it’s all the same to them. The kids don’t compartmentalize jazz like the older audiences did. “Jazz is dying and being reborn just like the music industry,” he continues. “It’s very exciting for me, because I see a lot of changes coming. This electronica is opening things up. I’m just happy to get another record release because we all can’t work for Starbucks and sell our records to the newspapers,” he jokes with another vigorous chortle. Recommended Listening Daxaar (Domino, 2007) Tongues with Kieran Hebden (Domino, 2007) Spirit Walk (Soul Jazz, 2005) Nova (Mustevic Sound, 1976) Rhythmatism (Soul Jazz, 1975) true 22 2008-06-19T19:07:46-04:00 false 18489 121 200802 true 80 2008-01-01T00:00:00-05:00

When Steve Reid talks about his fascinating life as a drummer or waxes philosophical about the state of jazz, three words pop up routinely in the conversation: cycle, rhythm and dance. Those terms also provide apt modifiers for describing Reid’s circuitous career trajectory and his infectious drumming and compositions. At 64, Reid has survived many of jazz’s stylistic permutations and the industry’s ups and downs, and in spite of a four-decade-long career during which he played with a horde of heavyweights, including Sun Ra, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Miles Davis and Jackie McLean, he’s not a household name. “My thing has always been kind of weird. That’s probably why I’m not as established on the jazz map, because I was going to different places for years,” he explains over the phone from his home in Lugano, Switzerland. “Some people thought that I had disappeared or something.” He also attributes his obscurity to his discography as a leader, none of which is documented on high-profile labels such as Blue Note, Prestige or Impulse. “Most of my records were made outside the United States, and a lot of them are on vinyl and aren’t obtainable on CD,” he says. Some of those vinyl-only LPs he’s referring to are his mid-’70s forward-thinking gems, Nova, Rhythmatism and Raw, all released on his own record company, Mustevic Sound, co-spearheaded with his old school friend, Joe Rigby. The British imprint Soul Jazz, however, reissued Rhythmatism in 2003, which paved the way for Reid to release 2005’s Spirit Walk. His newest disc, Daxaar,...

2009-03-02T00:26:27-05:00