Armwood Jazz Blog

The Hard Core Jazz Cafe Saturdays 9pm-1am

2007-05-07T20:36:00.000-04:00

The Hard Core Jazz Cafe Playlist

John Armwood
May 05, 2007 9:00PM - 1:00AM
My opening theme is Jackie McLean's Little Melonae taken from his Hat Trick CD. My background theme is Duke Ellington's African Flower taken from his Money Jungle album.

Search Playlists

Name	Song Title	Name of CD
Jackie McLean	Little Melonae	Hat Trick
Charles Earland	Europa (Earth's Cry, Heaven's Smile)	Unforgettable
Les McCann & Eddie Harris	Cold Duck Time
Jimmy Smith	My Romance	The Master
Dexter Gordon	Society Red	Doin' Alright
Oscar Peterson	Moten Swing	Night Train
Horace Silver	Serenade To A Soul Sister	Retrospective
Miles Davis	Swing Spring	Miles Davis And The Jazz Giants
Jackie McLean & Ornette Coleman	New & Old Gospel	Old & Gospel
Brad Mehldau	River Man	Progression
Duke Pearson	Is That So	Honey Buns
Eddie Lockjaw Davis	Intermission Riff	Jaws In Orbit
Dinah Washington	Backwater Blues/ All of Me	The Jazz Sides
Grachan Moncur III	The Coaster	Evolution
Monty Alexander	Impressions	In Tokyo
Duke Ellington	Three Cent Stomp/ On A Turquoise Cloud/ New York City Blues/ Hy A' Sue/ Golden Cress/ Lady Of The Lavender Mist/ The Clothed Woman/Monologue (Pretty And The Wolf)	Monologue
Duke Ellington	Three Cent Stomp/ On A Turquoise Cloud/ New York City Blues/ Hy A' Sue/ Golden Cress/ Lady Of The Lavender Mist/ The Clothed Woman/Monologue (Pretty And The Wolf)	Monologue
Mingus Big Band	Moanin' Mambo	Live In Time
Anthony Davis & James Newton	Forever Charles	Hidden Voices
Roy Haynes	Bya	When It's Haynes It Roars
Stan Getz	Lucifer's Fall	Live At The Left Bank
John Coltrane	Out Of This World	Out Of This World
Eric Reed	Stablemates	Here

The Hard Core Jazz Cafe Saturdays 9pm-1am

2007-04-29T01:39:00.000-04:00

The Hard Core Jazz Cafe Playlist

John Armwood
Apr 28, 2007 9:00PM - 1:00AM
My opening theme is Jackie McLean's Little Melonae. My background theme is Duke Ellington's African Flower This shoe airs from 9:oopm until 1:00am

Search Playlists

Name	Song Title	Name of CD
Jack McDuff	A Real Good'un	A Real Good'un
Ray Brown	Freddie Freeloader	Live At Scullers
Charles Earland	Sheila	Unforgettable
Tommy Flannagan & Hank Jones	Our Delight	Our Delights
John Coltrane	By The Numbers	The Last Trane
Max Roach	Bird Says	Easy Winners
Jimmy McGriff & Hank Crawford	But On The Other Hand	Right Turn On Blue
Horace Silver	Sister Sadie	Horace Silver Retrospective
Art Blakey	Tell It Like It Is	The Freedom Rider
Bill Hollman	Friday The 13th	Brilliant Corners
Thelonius Monk	Bemsha Swing	The Complete Prestige Recordings
Carmen McRrae	The Ballad o f Thelonius Monk
Art Tatum	A Foggy Day	Group Masterpieces
Andrew Hill	Invitation	Spiral
Lester Bowie	Sardegna Amore New York Is Full Of Lonely People	The 5th Power
Buck Hill	Relax	Relax
Duke Ellington & Count Basie	First Time, The Count Meets The Duke	First Time, The Count Meets The Duke (Complete Album)
Sphere	Isfahan	Sphere
Clifford Brown & Max Roach	Take The A Train	A Study In Brown
Joey DeFrancesco with special guest George Coleman	Ceora	Live The Authorized Bootleg
Lee Morgan	The Procrastinator
Philly Joe Jones	On A Misty Night	Dameronia
Dan Nimmer	Quick Jump

Variety - Cheadle jazzed for Davis biopic

2007-03-17T16:56:00.000-04:00

Cheadle jazzed for Davis biopic

Actor will produce, direct, star in film

By MICHAEL FLEMING

Cheadle

Don Cheadle has solidified five feature film projects that he'll produce and star in. Among them is a biopic of jazz legend Miles Davis, on which he plans to make his feature directing debut.

Cheadle, who is being honored today as ShoWest male star of the year, has set up the projects through Crescendo Prods., the shingle in which he partners with longtime managers Kay Liberman and Lenore Zerman.

"Nixon" scribes Stephen J. Rivele and Chris Wilkinson are penning the Davis film, and Liberman and Zerman said they have secured music and life rights to the jazz legend, with whom Cheadle has long been intrigued.

"Miles pushed the envelope and was never satisfied and kept evolving," Liberman said.

Crescendo's producing with Cary Brokaw and Vince Wilburn Jr. and Darryl Porter of Miles Davis Properties. They have waited to complete the package before bringing it to financiers, with Cheadle aboard to direct.

Other projects on Crescendo's slate:

"Traitor" is a politically charged drama that was written and will be directed by Jeff Nachmanoff ("The Day After Tomorrow"). Overture's Chris McGurk and Danny Rosett are negotiating to finance a film that Crescendo will produce with Mandeville's David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman.

Cheadle will star as an operative embedded in a terrorist organization who becomes the target of federal agents; they fear he's crossed the line and actually become a terrorist himself.

"Quest to Ref" is a comic vehicle for Cheadle, scripted by Ben Watkins and Guy Guillet. Story concerns a disenchanted lawyer who follows his life dream to become a pro basketball ref.
Peter Biegen-scripted drama "Broken Adonis" has Michael Apted attached to direct. Crescendo will produce with Apted, Jeanney Kim and Sandy Kroopf. Story concerns an ex-con (Cheadle) who forms an unlikely relationship with a border patrol officer and her young informant.
Cheadle continues to work with "Ocean's" co-star Brad Pitt's Plan B and Reason Pictures on "Marching Powder," a fact-based story of a drug dealer who spent five years as a tour guide in the notorious San Pedro Prison in Bolivia. Cheadle will play the tour guide.

In addition Cheadle is producing, with "Crash" cohort Cathy Schulman and Jonathan Mark Harris, the Participant/Warner Independent docu "An Indifferent World," which is already in production. Cheadle is one of five subjects of the film who are trying to address genocide in Darfur. Ted Braun is directing and is in the Sudan shooting the film.

Cheadle, who made his producing debut on "Crash," is also co-writing the upcoming Hyperion book "Not on Our Watch," a handbook for activism that describes his own awakening to strife in Africa after he starred in "Hotel Rwanda."

His Crescendo partners said that while Cheadle continues to work steadily -- he's about to open opposite Adam Sandler in "Reign Over Me," then reprises in "Ocean's Thirteen" in June and stars in "Talk to Me" in July -- he is determined to be the architect of his future acting opportunities. They recently brought in Arlene Gibbs to be senior veep of production.

"Don has always made strong choices and been very smart about identifying and developing strong material, and that is what drives this company," Zerman said. "In the current climate, coming in with strong projects makes you feel like you're more a master of your own destiny."

Shock of the new

2007-03-05T14:38:00.000-05:00

An Article written By A British Writer Who Has Not Taken The Time To Lear About Jazz Before He Writes

I have not heard the new Wynton Marsalis album but it is clear this writer is part of the "hate Wynton contingent" in jazz. I am responding to his article which is below so you probably should read it first. He attacks Wynton and what he represents, not the specific album.

1) I personally have spoken with Lester Bowie about Wynton. Wynton was a member for a brief time in Bowie's New York Hot Trumpet Repertory Company. Lester's criticisms of Marsalis were both more nuanced and complex than those presented by this writer. Who takes Jarrett's rantings on jazz seriously. He is a wonderful player but his judgments of musicians leave a lot to be desired. He is notorious has a effete and difficult artist to work with.

2) There is nothing traditional about either "Blood On The Fields" or "All Rise". I wonder if the author has taken time to listen to these works. A casual listening to Wynton's playing will demonstrate that he has his own, original sound. He sounds nothing like Clark Terry, Roy Eldridge or Freddie Hubbard. It is unfortunate that writers who know little or nothing about jazz have the arrogance to write about a subject that they have taken little time to study.

3)Marsalis is part of an ever growing chorus in the African American community who decry the vulgarity and crudeness of hip hop. He is right in arguing that some people like to see vulgarity emanating from African American culture. I am thankful for Wynton's voice. In addition what is wrong with making money. Are all African Americans supposed to be poor and downtrodden?

John H. Armwood

Shock of the new

Wynton Marsalis almost explodes with rage when he talks about hip-hop. So why has the jazz stalwart recorded a track on which he breaks into a rap? He talks to John Lewis

Friday March 2, 2007
The Guardian

Wynton Marsalis is 10 minutes into an angry denunciation of hip-hop and he's just hitting his stride. "I call it 'ghetto minstrelsy'," he says. "Old school minstrels used to say they were 'real darkies from the real plantation'. Hip-hop substitutes the plantation for the streets. Now you have to say that you're from the streets, you shot some brothers, you went to jail. Rappers have to display the correct pathology. Rap has become a safari for people who get their thrills from watching African-American people debase themselves, men dressing in gold, calling themselves stupid names like Ludacris or 50 Cent, spending money on expensive fluff, using language like 'bitch' and 'ho' and 'nigger'."

Article continues
We shouldn't be surprised that one of the world's most famous jazz musicians is not a big hip-hop fan. The 46-year-old trumpeter and composer is regarded as a rather fogeyish, Brian Sewell figure in the jazz world, one who loudly registers his disgust at most music made since the early 60s. What is however surprising is that Marsalis's latest album sees him trying to rap. The album's final track, Where Y'All At?, is a state-of-the-union address, a declamatory, baritone-voiced sermon about a country in chaos, set against a jittery New Orleans funk beat. The lyrics make you cringe occasionally ("the rap game started out critiquing/ Now it's all about killin' and freakin'"), but it's clearly a rap. Isn't it?

"It's rapping, but it ain't hip-hop," he says. "It's the kind of rap we did in New Orleans back in the day. We called it juba juba, you know, 'My grandma said to your grandma/ Iko iko uh nay.' But it dates back long before the Dr John or Dixie Cups version of that song. Kids would sit on the street corner, improvising stupid rhymes with pornographic lyrics. You know the kind of thing: 'Your old woman got an ass like a truck/ Your old woman she likes to fuck.'" He declaims the words while beating out a rhythm on the table. "Today's hip-hop is just those pornographic rhymes on a grand scale."

Aren't you just using one strain of hip-hop to attack an entire genre? "Listen, I don't have to attack hip-hop. Hip-hop attacks itself. It has no merit, rhythmically, musically, lyrically. What is there to discuss?"

Flow? Rhymes? Assonance? Scansion? Lyrical dexterity? Rhythmic complexity? The use of samples that explore African-American musical history?

"Yeah yeah," he snorts. "It's mostly sung in triplets. So what? And as for sampling, it just shows you that the drummer has been replaced by a loop. The drum - the central instrument in African-American music, the sound of freedom - has been replaced by a repetitive loop. What does that tell you about hip-hop's respect for African-American tradition?"

Aren't these the same objections that cultural conservatives made about jazz 70 or 80 years ago?

"How does objecting to hip-hop make me a conservative?" he yells, his gruff holler getting louder and angrier. "Is it OK to call me a nigger and your wife a bitch? If I object to that then I'm a conservative? That is ridiculous!"

One could drive a bus through some of the holes in Marsalis's arguments. The man who rails against conspicuous consumption is the same Marsalis who advertises ultra-bling Movado wristwatches in the US; the man who denounces rappers for using made-up names seems to have forgotten those performers who called themselves Count, Duke, King and Jelly Roll. And since when have his assertions about drumming represented "the African-American tradition"? But it's equally true that even fans of hip-hop will find a kernel of truth in what he says. "I've been arguing with [Public Enemy frontman] Chuck D about this, on and off, for more than 20 years," he says. "Even he's come round to a lot of what I've been saying."

Marsalis' fury is not confined to hip-hop. His new album, From the Plantation to the Penitentiary, is an angry, fascinating, exhausting and often infuriating polemic that addresses the legacy of slavery. It's something that's never been far from his work, but too often his grand compositions on the subject - such as 1994's Pulitzer prize-winning opera Blood on the Fields, or 2001's symphony for the New York Philharmonic, All Rise - have fallen short of his ambition. (The late New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett described Blood on the Fields as "suggesting a play about slavery written by a precocious eighth-grade class".) Here, Marsalis takes the simpler form of a straight vocal jazz album, his quintet fronted by a 21-year-old from Florida called Jennifer Sanon, who was spotted singing Duke Ellington at a talent contest four years ago. Sanon delivers a set of didactic lyrics that examine the cracks in the American dream - rampant consumerism, the failure of public education, homelessness, government ineptitude, along with tirades against the misogyny of gangster rap - with a controlled anger that recalls the militant, civil rights-era jazz of Archie Shepp and Max Roach.

Marsalis is, of course, no stranger to outspokenness and controversy. For the past decade he has used his pulpit as the artistic director of jazz at the Lincoln Center - part of New York's large and well-funded arts complex - to denounce his fellow musicians who have moved into funk, fusion and the avant garde. While he paints himself as a lone voice of dissent that needs to be heard ("There is a need for strong visions to be asserted so people can choose; mine is just a single vision"), he has a salary (revealed last year to be about $850,000), a budget and curatorial powers at the Lincoln Center that no other figure in jazz history has ever had. By concentrating on consolidation rather than experimentation (his jazz canon, broadly speaking, encompasses Louis Armstrong to early Miles Davis), he has been accused of encasing the music in aspic, and it has made him something of a hate figure in the faction-filled world of jazz.

There is no doubting his technique - Marsalis was a child prodigy who played Haydn's trumpet concerto with the New Orleans Civic Orchestra at 14, and became the first person to win a Grammy in both the jazz and classical categories, aged only 22. But there are doubts about his legacy as a musician. He tends to use his technical virtuosity to stitch together pastiches of other trumpeters, such as Clark Terry, Roy Eldridge and Freddie Hubbard, while his compositions borrow heavily from Duke Ellington, Count Basie and George Gershwin. Many other jazz musicians have been highly critical. "I've never heard anything Wynton played sound like it meant anything at all," said pianist Keith Jarrett. "He has no voice and no presence. His music sounds like a talented high-school trumpet player." Trumpeter Lester Bowie agreed: "If you retread what's gone before, even if it sounds like jazz, it could be anathema to the spirit of jazz."

However, From the Plantation to the Penitentiary moves beyond Marsalis's self-consciously traditionalist musical strictures into more contemporary territory. As well as the rap track that closes the album, there are songs that nod towards the spacey 70s funk recorded on the Strata East label and even the cryptic, angular, hip-hop-influenced rhythms of Brooklyn's late 80s M-BASE collective - music that was always seen as the opposite of Marsalis's defiantly retro brand of jazz.

"Every decade I try to do a record that has a kind of relationship to contemporary culture," he says. "In the 80s I did Black Codes (From the Underground); in the 90s I did Blood on the Fields; now, in this decade, From the Plantation to the Penitentiary. As I say on the rap track, Where Y'All At, 'You got to speak the language the people are speakin'/ 'Specially when you see the havoc it's wreakin'.' Sometimes it's important to speak in the vernacular, both lyrically and musically."

The debris of Hurricane Katrina looms large over the album. Marsalis, a native of New Orleans, was one of the most prominent voices in the American media to denounce the government's response to the disaster, and he held a large benefit at Lincoln Center to raise money for those affected by the floods. He sees Katrina as an event that reawakened a long-dormant political awareness in American culture.

"People looked at the TV set and saw central government - and, let's not forget, local government, which was black - behaving with incompetence and inhumanity. We saw human beings suffering through bureaucratic fumbling, ignorance and stupidity. And we saw the descendants of slaves weeping in front of the cameras, saying, 'Have you seen my family? Have you seen my friend?' And that was eerie. That could have been happening in 1840, do you know what I mean? It made you realise that the legacy of slavery is very much with us. And I think that radicalised a lot of people. It's become something that's forced Americans to ask serious questions about what we are doing. I would hope that people are more receptive to these ideas than they've ever been."

· From the Plantation to the Penitentiary is released on Monday on Parlophone

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

New CDs Critics’ Choice By THE NEW YORK TIMES

2007-03-05T10:45:00.000-05:00

WYNTON MARSALIS
“From the Plantation
to the Penitentiary”

(Blue Note)

From his landmark album “Black Codes (From the Underground)” through his Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio “Blood on the Fields,” the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis has always found avenues for social critique. But his new quintet album delivers a fresh jolt to the system, by blowing apart the refuge of allegory. Oh, and he raps. But we’ll get to that.

Mr. Marsalis delegates most of the album’s vocal duties to a remarkable newcomer, Jennifer Sanon. Singing in a clarion tone with minimal vibrato, she projects a timbre not unlike Mr. Marsalis’s trumpet, carrying the album the way that Abbey Lincoln carried Max Roach and Oscar Brown Jr.’s “Freedom Now Suite.”

But that was a cry for civil rights; what troubles Mr. Marsalis is the state of civility itself. His lyrics disparage a culture of heartless poverty, chic misogyny and rapacious greed. He delivers the sharpest jabs himself, quasi-rapping on a track called “Where Y’All At?”:

All you ’60s radicals and world-beaters
Righteous revolutionaries, Camus-readers
Liberal students, equal-rights pleaders
What’s goin’ on now that y’all are the leaders?

Don’t be fooled: Mr. Marsalis still has no amicable feelings for hip-hop, the genre his lyrics elsewhere deride as “ghetto minstrelsy.” But while this album builds on blues and jazz traditions — by way of a band that has studiously conquered them — it also hungers for relevance.

“You got to speak the language the people are speakin’,” barks Mr. Marsalis, “ ’Specially when you see the havoc it’s wreakin’.” But he seems aware that fighting fire with fire, in some cases, might only fuel the flames. NATE CHINEN

Lorraine Gordon, Keeper of a Shrine to Jazz

2007-02-27T18:54:00.000-05:00

Lorraine Gordon, Keeper of a Shrine to Jazz

by Felix Contreras

View Gallery

Lorraine Gordon with Louis Armstrong. View more images from Alive at the Village Vanguard and hear additional interview clips.

Read an excerpt from 'Alive at the Vanguard Village'

Songs from This Story

All Things Considered, February 27, 2007 · Lorraine Gordon is the keeper of a shrine to jazz — New York's historic Village Vanguard. Recently, Gordon published a set of memoirs, the recollections of a woman who was married to two famous men of jazz. The book recalls a life lived beyond society's expectations — a colorful swirl of music, politics and family.

Now, at age 84, Gordon is the driving force behind a still-vital Vanguard, and the formidable guardian of its fabled legacy. The Vanguard is the most revered venue in jazz. John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk are among the many legends who have played the small, wedge-shaped room.

"The room really responds to some artists more than others," Gordon says. "The walls start to shake a little when there's no business and the room says forget it, the vibes aren't right. I listen to the room. The room tells me a lot."

Gordon's personal history with jazz goes back to 1930's Newark, N.J., when she was Lorraine Stein.

"That's the oddest part," she said, "because I grew up in a very middle-class family who never played a record. I don't remember any music in my house except for the records I played."

Some of those discs were on the emerging Blue Note label, a small outfit run by German emigre Alfred Lion. Lorraine eventually met Lion and the two were married in 1942, with Gordon soon making her own contributions to Blue Note's early successes. She'd listen to session playbacks, deciding which of the tunes would make it to vinyl, and the resulting albums helped establish Blue Note as a premiere label for the best in jazz.

The Lions occupied a small flat in Greenwich Village, the hub of bohemian life in New York. Back then, Gordon says, the Vanguard was a haven for poets. They read their works aloud and audiences tossed money onstage in appreciation. When Sunday afternoon jazz was added to the Vanguard's entertainments, Lorraine and Alfred became regulars.

Still, it was after her time with Lion that the Vanguard became a permanent part of Lorraine's life. After eight years, she and Alfred met with both marital and business problems. There was a painful transition.

Then, in 1950, Lorraine married Max Gordon, owner of the Village Vanguard. They had two daughters, and Lorraine became a mother with a taste for politics. She joined Women Strike for Peace, a group of anti-nuclear moms, and she opposed the Vietnam War, traveling to Moscow and to North Vietnam.

Jazz returned to center stage in Lorraine's life in 1989, when Max Gordon died. At age 70 Lorraine found herself the owner of the Vanguard, by then a jazz institution.

"The night he died, I closed the club," she remembers. "Max never asked me to run the club, he asked nobody to run it ... I closed it for one night, and the next night I opened it."

Gordon's memoir is called Alive at the Village Vanguard. Barry Singer, its co-author said of Gordon, "If you look at her life, the arch of it, it's almost like destiny that this is what she would wind up doing, because she was perfect at it."

Relying on her instincts and her love for jazz, Gordon taught herself the nightclub business, saying, "I have good ears. That's my gift — that I know when something is good, and I want it to play here."

So Gordon books artists that appeal to her personal tastes — including saxophonist Joe Lovano, who says Gordon takes a decisive role in running the club.

"I've seen her throw people out, and not care if people come in or not. She's got a strong energy, and when she's there, her presence is felt by everyone."

The people who know Gordon describe her as plainspoken, opinionated, and "one of a kind."

"Even the musicians say she kind of scares them with her intensity and her frank way of speaking," says Barry Singer. "I've always suspected there was a warm person underneath. The more I've gotten to know her the more I understand how sensitive she is."

The Village Vanguard is booked nearly to the end of the year. So, Lorraine Gordon will stay at her desk, backstage, paying bills, answering the phone, and doing whatever it takes to keep the place going. Still, when the lights go down, she's once again that teenage fan from Newark, lost in jazz, her first love.

Excerpt: 'Alive at the Village Vanguard'

by Lorraine Gordon

NPR.org, February 26, 2007 · It was Ike Quebec who first took us to see Thelonious Monk. Ike didn't say about Monk: "Record him." He just said, "Come on, I want you to hear someone." Ike didn't take us to a club either, he took us to Monk's West 65th Street apartment. And Alfred and I... well, we heard him.

Monk's room was right off the kitchen. It was a room out of Vincent Van Gogh somehow - you know, ascetic - a bed, a cot, really, against the wall, a window and an upright piano. That was it.

We all sat down on Monk's narrow bed — our legs straight out in front of us, like children. I looked up for a moment and saw a picture of Billie Holiday taped to the ceiling. The door closed. And Monk, his back to us, began to play.

He had enormous hands. Those hands almost stammered, it seemed to me, right above the keys. 'Where are they going to come down?' I kept wondering. It was just riveting to watch.

There were a lot of modern musicians I didn't understand — they were fast and terrific but not comprehensible to me, necessarily. Thelonious Monk I understood. Always. Monk was a revelation. From our very first encounter he was right in my groove.

He was always working on something new. That day we heard him composing what would turn out to be "Ruby, My Dear," one of Monk's most admired signature compositions. He didn't even have a title for it yet. I just loved the melody, so much so that I can remember thinking: 'Boy, I wish he'd name it after me - call it "Sweet Lorraine" or something.' Eventually, in the course of a later visit, Thelonious did tell me that he had titled this piece "Ruby, My Dear," and I said to him, "Oh, who's Ruby?" "No-one," Thelonious answered. "I just like the name."

That day Alfred, Frank and I practically said in unison, 'Let's record this guy!'

Did Monk's records sell at first? No, they didn't sell. I went to Harlem and those record stores didn't want Monk or me. I'll never forget one particular owner, I can still see him and his store on Seventh Avenue and 125th Street. "He can't play lady, what are you doing up here? The guy has two left hands."

"You just wait," I'd say. "This man's a genius, you don't know anything."

Thelonious Monk became my personal mission. I was really fighting everyone. I mean, I went huffing and puffing around with those records and my mind was undivided. When I have something to do and want to do it, nothing fazes me. And Monk didn't faze me. I just knew the man was great.

We began to hang out with Thelonious — Alfred, Frank and I — at Monk's family home. We met his mother, his sister, his brother-in-law. Thelonious was not married yet when we first met him. We sort of became part of the Monk family.

Thelonious was so eccentric and non-verbal, I really became his mouthpiece to the public. At one point, out of sheer enthusiasm, I wrote a letter to a newspaper I admired very much at the time called PM. PM was very hip and I enjoyed reading it. I addressed this letter to the editor, Ralph Ingersoll, and described Monk to him as "a genius living here in the heart of New York, whom nobody knows."

Well, Ingersol caught my pitch. He called me and said that he was going to send Seymour Peck, one of this best writers, to do a feature on Monk. I said fine.

I remember picking up Seymour Peck somewhere in my car and driving him that day to Monk's apartment. When I started to get out of the car with him, though, Peck balked. "Where do you think you're going?" he said. "I do this alone."

"I don't think so," I said. "Thelonious is not that talkative. Without me I don't think this will work."

"Don't worry about it," said Peck." And he went on in alone.

I sat outside in my car waiting. Within five minutes, here comes Peck storming out. "There is no story there!" he shouted. "The man doesn't speak!"

"I tried to tell you," I said.

Back at work I called Ralph Ingersoll. "Look," I said. "There certainly is a story in Thelonious Monk. A big story. But either I have to be there with him or you have to send another reporter."

"Fine," Ingersoll said. And back comes Peck. This time we go in together. The result: a huge, 2-page centerfold story on Monk in PM.

What happened? With me there, Monk talked. I mean Monk talked to other musicians, to Alfred, to me. He just didn't talk to strangers. PM took pictures of the apartment, of Monk's room right off the kitchen, and a picture too of the refrigerator in the kitchen, for some reason. This fridge picture actually showed up in the article, with a caption that described the fridge as dominating the apartment. Well, Thelonious' mother got very angry with me. She said that I had embarrassed them and why did PM have to talk about the apartment? I said to her, "Look, Mrs. Monk. Your son is going to be very famous. This is just the beginning. You will have to get used to this."

An Interview with Stanley Crouch

2007-02-27T17:08:00.000-05:00

Interview with Stanley Crouch

The Bad Plus and Stanley Crouch have been getting to know each other for the last couple of years, mostly at the Village Vanguard. Reid was the first one to meet Stanley there when he was playing with Bill McHenry and Paul Motian. Stanley dug Reid, began talking to him, and was surprised to discover that Reid's own band was the infamous The Bad Plus. I met Stanley at the Vanguard when playing with Billy Hart, and I surprised him by owning all his books and quoting Albert Murray. At the January TBP Vanguard run, Dave finally got to meet Stanley too, where they spent two nights in the kitchen talking drums and Ornette Coleman 'till 4 A.M. (If you need to find Stanley at 3 A.M. sometime, try the Vanguard kitchen first, where he will be most likely talking to the drummer.)

One of those late nights Stanley suggested that I interview him for Do the Math about his most recent book, Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz. Of course, I jumped at the chance. This interview was recorded on February 8th and transcribed over the following two weeks. I suggested that we freely speak our minds while the tape was rolling knowing we both could edit the transcript for content and clarity. Stanley readily agreed; what follows has a few minor additions and subtractions not found on the tape.

If you don't know who Stanley is, read Richard Boynton's wonderful 1995 New Yorker profile. David Adler's review of Considering Genius is here.

----

INTERVIEW WITH STANLEY CROUCH

EI: I'm going to begin by giving you a copy of this Barry Harris record you said you didn't have, Magnificent! It's from 1969 with Ron Carter and Leroy Williams...let's listen to a song together.

SC: Ok; great. Perfect.

EI: Try track two, Barry's own tune "You Sweet and Fancy Lady."

[Music plays. Here's an excerpt that runs from the bridge of the melody through the bridge of the first chorus of soloing.]

Download Sweet_Fancy_excerpt.mp3

[After we're done listening to the whole track, the interview commences.]

SC: Wow!

EI: Not bad, huh?

SC: Not at all! What fascinates me there is how Leroy Williams' tuning (and the sound he gets from his brushes and sticks and from each of his drums) is perfect for bebop…he really understands how the drums are supposed to sound in that kind of music.

EI: I think it was Williams' first record date.

SC: The other thing I'm thinking about is Ron Carter. Whenever I hear him in this kind of situation, he reminds me of Ray Brown.

EI: Mm-hmm…?

SC: The attack, the way he uses triplets…now, Ron is supposed to be coming from Paul Chambers, which he is, but there is something about Ray Brown that gets left out of the discussion in terms of the linage of the bass.

EI: You know, I wouldn't have thought of that myself, but I hear what you mean, especially in terms of trio playing--like Ron here is closer to Ray's records with Oscar Peterson than P.C.'s with Wynton Kelly.

SC: I was talking with Ralph Lalama one night about how Ray Brown plays a phrase on Sonny Rollins' record Way Out West that people think is a Ron Carter phrase, but is actually a Ray Brown phrase. Of course, if we could put it on Ray now, he would probably tell us he got it from some other earlier guy!

I didn't understand why the bass evolved into the jazz band to replace the tuba until I heard a concert at Carnegie Hall many years ago where they were playing the music of James Reese Europe. I had read in Eileen Southern's The Music of Black Americans about how Europe would have these "banjo choirs" with many banjos etc…I always thought "for WHAT? Why all those banjos?" But when I heard it in person, I could see that he had all of those banjos because he wanted the chords to move…he wanted a string instrument to deliver the chords in a percussive way. He had violins too, playing pizzicato rhythm. The tuba can do a lot of things, but it can't do that-- but the string bass can. When the bass comes into the band is when jazz musicians realized there was a way to have a real relationship between harmonic motion and percussion beyond the piano. It appears first in the banjo, and moves downward into the bass. The bass always delivers the harmony with that percussive sound. One of the great things about Ron Carter was that he sustained that relationship with all the fresh things he brought to bass. He was never tempted to give up the low end of the bass and the power it could bring to a band…always giving us that percussive feeling.

EI: This makes me think of Jimmy with Elvin, of course.

SC: No doubt. I think that John Coltrane heard that sound that he wanted with Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones for the first time on that Sonny Rollins record with Wilbur Ware and Elvin Jones. Coltrane wasn't able to get there for a number of years, but Coltrane always got there in the end.

EI: Of course, Coltrane played with Wilbur with Monk. He even talks about that in an interview. The way that Wilbur related to the ensemble, and then the way Jimmy related to the ensemble--there is an important thread there, for sure. [My small article on Wilbur Ware makes this same point.]

SC: As we know, Monk would leave Coltrane out there with Shadow Wilson and Wilbur Ware for a long time so that Coltrane could find that out. That may have been the first time that Coltrane learned how much could be achieved with no more than bass and drum accompaniment, though I don’t know if he always filled up that area of sound as well as Sonny Rollins did…

I know Ron Carter admires Paul Chambers above all other players. What Chambers does with Miles Davis at the Blackhawk is one of the supreme examples of melodic counterpoint while delivering the chords and swinging the time. Chambers is also extraordinary on the Stockholm concert with Davis and Coltrane--like on "So What." Amazing.

EI: There is no doubt that Ron comes from P.C., and on that Blackhawk record there are moments, like on that uptempo version of "Walkin'," where P.C. and Jimmy Cobb sound quite a bit like how Ron and Tony Williams would sound a year or two later.

Well, Stanley, this is great. I thought I would play you a song that I thought was good jazz and start talking with you to learn a few things, and that is exactly what has happened. It's very telling that I played a piano trio record and that all we have done is spent ten minutes on the drums and bass. Most people would have spent that time on Barry Harris, and would get to Leroy Williams some rainy day…maybe! Instead, your first reaction was about Leroy, and then to talk about the lineage of Ron Carter.

That is something I have always responded to in your writing, from your first pieces (I'm thinking of your liner notes to Old and New Dreams from 1976) to now: you always give each member of the ensemble a hearing. That is true throughout this collection of essays, Considering Genius. I like it that you not only praise the famous sidemen, but get critical if there is something not happening, like when you admire Ben Webster for swinging so hard late in life with lame-duck European rhythm sections or call out that mediocre studio drummer on the soundtrack to the movie Bird. If there is one thing I could say to the history of jazz criticism, it would be this: there is always some inherent democracy on the bandstand, and that all the energies are important. Pay attention to everybody, please!

SC: Yeah! Well, the thing is, everybody is up there to play, and everybody has to make the right decisions. What I consider "the groove" is when everybody makes the right decision.

I first came into this music with Duke Ellington of the era that they now call "The Blanton-Webster band." There has been an awful lot of writing about this period of Duke (the early nineteen-forties), usually with the claim that it is his greatest band. That's garbage to me. That was one of the greatest bands of all time, but I daresay the band of Such Sweet Thunder was superior to that one. The band of "The Queens Suite" is also superior. And the band of Anatomy of a Murder--forget it!

EI: Right, the later bands were even more swinging, no doubt.

SC: One of the things I am proudest of in Considering Genius is the long essay on Duke, which tries to straighten out a lot of misconceptions about the range and complexity of Duke Ellington’s work. I point out is that someone who plays the same thing in 1960 that he played in 1940 is going to know how to play it that much better--if he has maintained his health and has no physcial problems that limit his facility. This is true of almost every player in jazz. That's what bothers me about jazz criticism, that it doesn't acknowledge that type of maturation, which is a given in all of the other arts (except something like ballet where youth is so important to the quality of execution). Jazz often suffers from the car-dealership mentality, which is: "Well, we've got the new model this year! We've got to sell this one." That works ok for cars but it doesn't work as well for the arts. It may even pressure the artist to try to keep coming up with new models. If you are an artist with the kind of imagination that requires you to constantly transform yourself, that's one thing. That's fine. But if the artist feels pressure from the critical community or a record label to change, than that is an unnecessary intrusion.

Mingus was one of the guys who needed to constantly reinvent himself--or at least develop an approach that allowed him to play all of jazz as he had come to know it from the range of bandstands on which he worked, which included Armstrong, Hampton, Ellington, Parker, Powell, and Monk. I am still fascinated by all the different ways he and Dannie Richmond came up with to play time. I had never heard before--and have rarely heard since--a bassist and a drummer who could so dramatically affect the direction and intensity of the music.

Intensity isn't always volume, either. Billy Higgins showed me that. He would almost always play at the same volume, but when the band would get louder, he would just start swinging harder. I realized this at the Vanguard one night. I called him in L.A. the next week to tell him I had figured this out, and he said, "You're exactly right! Swing IS energy. If you can swing harder, that's all you have to do to raise the intensity. You don't have to hit anything harder, just dig into that groove deeper."

EI: One of the great things about your writing on jazz is exactly what you are doing now: quoting the musicians extensively. I don't think there is an essay in this book about a major figure that isn't peppered with quotes by their peers. It's very much to your credit that even if you are building a detailed edifice of critical thought on say, Dizzy Gillespie, you stop to quote Jimmy Heath or whoever.

SC: As you very well know, Ethan, the community of the practitioners should have a big part in defining the importance of a given player.

I've learned a tremendous amount about the music by listening to musicians talk about it. I also think that it is important to bring into the arena the interplay between musicians off the bandstand…their philosophical attitudes…and to make it clear to the reader how seriously musicians take interest in what other musicians are doing. They may not want to play like that, but they listen to it in a serious way.

You learn about someone like Max Roach not just from the listening to the records but from the many, many stories musicians tell about him. The stories about the major figures of the music indicate three things: their personality, their imagination, and their physical ability (just their body, not as a player). Like Charlie Parker: he came from a mysterious part of the gene pool that meant he could do almost anything that called for physical precision--he could pitch, he could throw, his first wife says he was a great dancer, and even late in his life when he was overweight he could assume very difficult yoga positions! Symphony Sid told me that he talked to guys who said that Bird could have been a world-class golfer. When Sid saw Bird with golf clubs, he assumed that Bird had stolen them to sell for dope. But then he saw three guys at the club that night who said they had played golf that day with Bird in New Jersey, and that Bird was an absolute natural.

EI: Bird played golf?

SC: Yeah.

EI: Well, that must be in the second volume of your Charlie Parker biography, because you let me preview the first volume and there wasn't anything about golf.

SC: That's right, it will be in the second volume.

EI: Well, the first volume--which comes out in the fall, right?--is remarkable. The amount of oral history you preserve in there is wonderful. All that information from people like Rebecca Parker, Gene Ramey, and Jay McShann--no one but you could have gotten these people to open up like that, Stanley, I am sure of it. It reminds me of Notes and Tones by Art Taylor, which is one of the few other examples of a brother interviewing black jazz musicians. I think that the fact that you are a black writer really means something in the jazz environment--or at least for an older generation, it was really important.

SC: Yeah, it was. But that is primarily because, black academics, including so many of the neon ethnics of black studies, have never shown any serious interest in jazz. In Considering Genius I go on to say that if they had been serious about it, we would have an extensive circuit through American colleges that would be an alternative to the European circuit that so many musicians depend on to make a living.

EI: A large group of talented black academics taking on jazz! Good lord--the history of this music would be written differently, for sure. But at least we have you and a couple of others. Taylor gets incredible stuff out of Art Blakey, Betty Carter, or Dizzy in Notes and Tones--stuff that some white critic would never have gotten, period. The same applies to you, especially in the Charlie Parker book with people like Gene Ramey, but also in Considering Genius.

One thing that your more vociferous critics don't realize is how much respect you get from the older players, both black and white. Paul Motian digs you, for example, and I've seen Al Foster treat you like royalty. I was really blown away the night we saw Bobby Hutcherson leading a quartet. The band was sounding only ok, but then you went up and said hi to Hutcherson during a piano solo. I must admit, that is not my style: when you went up to the stand I was thinking, "What the fuck is Stanley doing going up to bandstand while they are playing? That is rude!" But I bit my tongue when Bobby was clearly so pleased to see you, and then started playing like he really meant it: his next solo was easily the most inspired of the set. Obviously, since he knew Stanley Crouch was in the house, he realized he had better start playing!

There's no doubt that you have hung with the real cats for a long time, and that they respect you for trying to parse the music. They know how dedicated you are, that you would lay down your life for jazz.

SC: [laughs] Well, that's true, I would.

You remind me of a story Reggie Workman told at the Jazz Museum in Harlem about playing with Art Blakey. This was after he left John Coltrane. Blakey had more of a show than Coltrane, and it was largely the same every night, with Blakey playing the same breaks and so on. So Reggie got to point where he thought he knew was it was, that he could sleepwalk through the gig. But one night, Billy Eckstine and Dizzy Gillespie came in, and Art Blakey saw them. Blakey then commenced playing on a level Reggie had no idea Blakey was capable of. Actually, when Reggie was telling this story, he started crying, since the memory of this thrilling experience--of Blakey's relationship to the music and to those two other men--was so moving.

(McCoy Tyner also told me of a night playing with Blakey where Blakey did something behind the drums that shook the whole stage. And McCoy had already played with Coltrane and Elvin, but only Blakey--somehow--shook the whole stage.)

I like that bit in that interview with Billy Hart you did where Hart keeps asking Higgins how he got it together and Higgins keeps insisting he got it all from Blackwell. You should have heard the night Ed Blackwell came into Bradley's and sat behind Billy Higgins while he was playing with Hank Jones and Ray Drummond. We all know that Higgins could play more stuff than he usually did, but that night--wow!

I've seen so many musicians play so great on so many nights. I know the difference between the sound of someone in person and the recorded sound of an engineer. Coltrane's tone was much darker and thicker than the sound on those Impulse! records engineered by Rudy Van Gelder. But maybe Van Gelder chose that sound because he could hear that Coltrane was an alto player first before switching to tenor. I think the sound Coltrane was looking for came from the one you hear Charlie Parker using on "What's New" which was recorded in performance at a dance and released on Bird at Saint Nick's.

In Considering Genius, it's always an attempt to deliver the player to the reader, so that the reader realizes that this is a special person. One way I learned to do it was from studying Whitney Balliet and Leroi Jones, each of whom invented a style that was celebratory in its very eloquence.

EI: Let me quote from the prologue:

Part of my belief in the power of words came through having read about Holiday and the various moods she created when singing. Those desciptions allowed me to know, without a doubt, when I first heard her on the radio, "that must be Billie Holiday." As the disc jockey announced her name I think I realized then that if a writer was good enough, he could prepare a listener to recognize the sound of an artist on first hearing. That might apply to certain singers but I don't really believe that is true of instrumentalists. Even so, it always remains a goal.

That's a classic Crouch paragraph.

You take this mission seriously, and there are many passages in your articles on Duke, Monk, Ahmad Jamal, Miles Davis, and others--like that extremely influential Village Voice article on Louis Armstrong--where you give a novice reader a sense of what the musicians are like to listen to, and the experienced listener a sense of what the musicians themselves were thinking about.

Most of Considering Genius I have read before, in your other collections or scattered about in magazines, but there's some new stuff, too. I got very excited about the long prologue, "Jazz Me Blues." It is your "autobiography with jazz," which is began when you were born in Los Angeles in 1945.

SC: Right. I wanted to lay out my intellectual development and tell how I came to love jazz. There was so much excitement and so much disappointment, but there was always the possibility of discovery. What makes me different from a lot of the guys who write about jazz or who teach in the academy is that I have known many different kinds of people, from semi-literate poor people all the way over to supremely sophisticated men like Ralph Ellison, Charles Johnson, and Saul Bellow. I have been around the block, I have been down in the basement, I have looked out on the world from the parapets of penthouses, and every place that I have been and have come to know is far more often dominated by the moods and wishes of people than by stereotypes. My experience has led me to distrust academics and to feel equal contempt for lames who try to present themselves as hip because they believe that they are up to date with the latest European take on the arts. They need to get out there into life and see what it will do to their ideas. They need to discover what Ornette Coleman calls “the human reason.” But at the same time, as I point out in "Jazz Me Blues," the survival of jazz has resulted because so many white people, hip or lame, have supported the music, which points up, once again--as I go on to say--the ongoing failure of black studies when it comes to the arts, which is a conclusion no else has ever made about black studies and jazz. Being out here for a while will teach you all you need to know.

EI: You've changed you mind on things over the years, and sometimes it has been confusing. There were things I didn't understand about your development until reading "Jazz Me Blues." For example, I knew of your dislike for Leroi Jones/ Amiri Baraka. However, your aggressive dismissal of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka always struck me as a something like as if I were to aggressively dismiss Paul Bley--my true forebear! Jones was a big influence on you.

SC: Yes, he was, and I go into that in the book.

EI: Exactly, and then you explain step by step how that relationship soured. It was quite revelatory.

SC: Well, I think he lost his mind when he became super-black nationalist, anti-white, and so forth. He has really been a detrimental influence, so much so that if you make any criticism of something done by white people for what are apparently white reasons, most white people seem to they think you must be taking the Leroi Jones line. There's a lot of resentment--or hand-me-down resentment--in both races about that period of black nationalism.

EI: Well, as a flabby white intellectual liberal, I will always be willing to give an angry black man a hearing. And while I really learned some things reading your personal history with Baraka, nothing you or anybody could say would change my mind that Black Music is one of the most significant books on jazz ever written.

SC: Well, it is.

EI: Those interviews with Wayne Shorter and Roy Haynes are great. And when he talks about Albert Ayler--I know you aren't that interested in Albert now, but you were at one point--when he talks about Albert Ayler he really hits high gear. I like what Gerald Early (who I wouldn't know about unless you hadn't written about him) said in Tuxedo Junction:

Baraka…has done more than any other writer to popularize black avant-garde music…he certainly adored it. And adoration is a very useful kind of currency in a society of cash and carry emotions.

There may have been negative consequences from some of the later essays in Black Music, but that feeling I got as a teenager reading Jones about a trio concert of Don Cherry, Wilbur Ware, and Billy Higgins---

SC: Whew!

EI: --That feeling is immortal.

SC: This was a very talented man. And when he went first into Black nationalism, then Super-Black racism, then Marxism--he shredded his talent in front of all of us.

The overall problem with his writing in the last third of Black Music is that he never arrives at anything of substance to say about anyone he likes. You get no idea of HOW Albert Ayler or Sonny Murray played, just a lot of celebratory adjectives or phrases intended as barbs to exclude white readers.

EI: And recently, his poem about Israel being behind 9/11--

SC: He's lost his mind. He's a nut now. He was a superb and original writer up until about 1965 or '66, maybe '67.

When I was a younger guy, I would read his essays in Black Music over and over, and became intrigued with many of people he talked about.

In fact, the essay in Considering Genius about Thelonious Monk, "At the Five Spot," is in direct response to the essay "Recent Monk" in Black Music. I was determined to outdo him, since he has HIS foot so firmly on the gas in that one. Wow! I thought the highest performance level (that I had seen) of "writing an essay about Thelonious Monk" had been achieved by Leroi Jones. He made you feel like you were at the club.

As far as explicating the technical side of Monk, I thought that Martin Williams and Gunther Schuller had closed the door. It's important to remember that back then, Gunther was the only guy with concert credentials who could defend the aesthetics of jazz to other classical musicians, since Gunther could actually write down what the men actually played.

EI: It's not that accurate, unfortunately.

SC: Well, one time Wynton Marsalis told me that he was playing a thorny Ralph Shapey orchestral score with Gunther conducting. There was a big dissonant cluster: blat! You couldn't hear anything in there, and Wynton played a note a half-step off on purpose, just to see if Gunther could hear it. Gunther stopped the orchestra and said, "Wynton? Do you have an A or Ab in your part?" "Oh--uh--it's an A." "Then why are you playing Ab?"

EI: Oh, Gunther's ears are legendary: the pitches are always right. But I don't think any of the musicians Gunther talks about in Early Jazz or The Swing Era would recognize their music-making in Gunther's technical descriptions. And his early 60's transcriptions of Ornette Coleman are an abomination, with "Un Muy Bonita" being notated in 15/8 for chrissake--do you think Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins have ever played in 15/8 in their whole lives?

SC: Well, I don't put anything beyond's Gunther's talent except, of course, swing.

[extensive laughter]

EI: Ok, I'm going in.

SC: Ask anything you want.

EI: Well, I can't really understand why you take it to certain place you take it. Ok: your first book is called Notes from a Hanging Judge. So from book one, we know that Stanley Crouch is going to give us unapologetic fire-and-brimstone judgments on his fellow humans.

SC: Right.

EI: But, man! You really go for it. This is a passage from a speech from your spectacular takedown of Baraka from 1985 called "Jazz Criticism and Its Effect on the Art Form," reprinted in Considering Genius:

…a rail-tailed Negro named Michael Jackson sold more copies of a single album than any singer or instrumentalist in recorded history…a blind Negro named Stevie Wonder has earned more dollars than the most popular composers and instrumentalists in both jazz and European concert music…a horse-faced Negro from the South named Lionel Ritchie pulls down millions for songs that contain so little melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic character that even the most imaginative jazz musicians haven't tried to use them as bridges to a larger audience in the way they could when the best of Tin Pan Alley was in flower.

I suspect I'm not the first person to bring up this sentence to you. What does "rail-tailed" mean? Does that mean he has a small ass?

SC: No, just a skinny guy. It's slang we used growing up.

EI: Ok. Here's the thing: I can understand you saying this in front of an audience in 1985--this was a speech, and I'm sure you got a big laugh.

SC: Yeah, I did.

EI: I'm a performer; I certainly can understand that. But why reprint it twenty years later? Why not soften it, or just edit it out?

SC: Whenever you collect some pieces, you have to decide: am I going to revise them for the way I think now, or am I going to lay out what it was?

EI: Clearly, this is the "what it was" collection.

SC: This is "what it was!" AND, what I'm talking about there is a point that still gets left out of the discussion of music when you talk about race like Leroi Jones does: all three of those men made far more money than Debussy, Ravel, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, or anyone else in classical music--even more than Leonard Bernstein who had "West Side Story." You can't always be arguing that the white man takes all the money and the black man doesn't get all the money, etc.

The next point is that Betty Carter always complained to me that she always was searching for a pop tune to put in her band. (She believed in the classical jazz tradition of using pop tunes to connect with the audience.) But there wasn't anything in the music of those three guys--or anyone else in big money pop music--that she could use on a gig. There wasn't enough harmony or melody.

EI: Um, there's a certain irony that you are talking to a member of The Bad Plus right now.

SC: Of course. But it's not really that ironic, because you and Reid and Dave go so far from the original tune that you aren't playing on the form of the song.

EI: Well, you're right: we don't play jazz harmony or jazz solos on the tunes the way Betty Carter would have needed.

SC: But you also don't play anything after the head that that anybody would call pop music. Your first phrase, after the melody, is always totally "out." I find it really interesting how your audience is shocked and exhilarated by the conclusions you come to with a melody they already know.

To me, the conception of The Bad Plus is actually derived from the way Coltrane and his band played "My Favorite Things," which is really far from hearing Julie Andrews sing it. What Coltrane--what everybody in his band--was playing on it is like…[shrugs] "What are they playing?" --"'My Favorite Things.'" --"Where is 'My Favorite Things' here? I don't get it." That's The Bad Plus, too.

EI: You are on the money with this comparison, Stanley. I have actually brought up Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" to interviewers myself.

SC: Well, there you go. Right.

EI: And even The Bad Plus isn't going to do a Lionel Ritchie song…but back to this quote about Ritchie, Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson. Because this is something that gets you a lot of heat: the aggressive put-downs you write are a real barrier for people.

SC: I know it.

EI: I imagine you do--so, is there something you want to say, to explain why you use these insults?

SC: I don't write things to shock people, necessarily, but sometimes, when making an argument…

Let me put it this way: Some people go out into a field of wheat and they'll pick something--just one thing that they like. However, other people will drive a thresher through there.

Sometimes, if I have a choice, I'll just drive the thresher through.

[extensive laughter]

SC: Sometimes I think that's what's called for. Style and form are what I'm thinking about, you know. Sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph there is an attempt to personalize everything I learned from Ralph Ellison, LeRoi Jones, Martin Williams, and Whitney Balliett. Then, in something like “Body and Soul,” I get to a symphonic version of essay form that I am very proud of. Form is always my concern and is what I am always experimenting with, even when I am driving the wheat thresher.

EI: Well…there are friends of mine that you have driven the thresher through, and I know that it doesn't feel good.

But I understand that there is an argument for being over the top, just putting it out there, and seeing the dust settle. I'm sure we will be still looking at this book long after history has forgotten those who never came down on one side or another.

SC: I believe in taking off the gloves and getting to it. Sometimes you just have to say, "this is how is goes, fellas, like it or not." It might be a personality flaw, true. I'm glad you're asking about this.

Being acceptable is not a primary concern. If I wanted to be acceptable, I would join those dolts who think they will get young people to listen to them if they praise rap.

EI: Certainly, back in the day, a lot more threshers were in use than now. Cats like George Bernard Shaw, Virgil Thomson, and Harold Schoenberg delighted in dropping the heavy, often worse than you!

Should we talk in more detail about the most controversial piece in Considering Genius, which is "Putting the White Man in Charge?"

SC: Ok.

EI: I don't know too much about Tom Piazza or Francis Davis, which are your topics in the first two pages, but I do know something about Dave Douglas, who you get to at the end. Here's the paragraph:

There is nothing wrong with Douglas, who can play what he can play and should continue to do whatever he wants to do, but there is something pernicious about [Francis} Davis and all of those other white guys who want so badly to put white men--American and European--in charge and put Negroes in the background. Douglas…is far from being a bad musician, but he also knows that he should keep as much distance as possible between himself and trumpet players like Wallace Roney, Terence Blanchard, and Nicholas Payton, to name but three, any one of whom on any kind of material--chordal, nonchordal, modal, free, whatever--would turn him into a puddle on the bandstand. Unlike the great white players of the past, such as Jack Teagarden, Bobby Hackett, Benny Goodman, Stan Getz, Lee Konitz--or now, Joe Lovano--Douglas will never be seen standing up next to the black masters of the idiom. The white critical establishment couldn't help him then.

Well, all I can say is, if Roney, Payton, or Blanchard tried to play Dave's harder music, they would not find it easy--and they could never play it as well as he can. They would have trouble playing even a few bars of it unless they studied it in detail. There are authentic systems in Douglas' music that contribute to his unique voice.

SC: Whether or not there are authentic systems in Douglas’s music is not even close to the point. To me, the question is: What is jazz music? What I really don't like is how the avant-garde, which is more like contemporary European music, is treated as the solution to jazz to the exclusion of real jazz. I realized the problem years ago when Roland Kirk complained to Cecil Taylor in Downbeat that Cecil wouldn't let him sit in with his band. Cecil said they had arrangements, and that's why he didn't let Kirk sit it, but that's not a good reason. That's what holds the music back. It is a real problem that there is no agreed-upon place for avant-garde musicians and the musicians who play real jazz to play together. Because if the avant-garde musicians stay away from the jazz musicians, their music gets to the point where it has less and less to do with jazz. I don't like that. Some people do; I really don't!

I do know this: if Douglas got up on to the bandstand with Wallace, Payton, or Blanchard to play some blues, he would be in trouble.

EI: I'm not so sure, Stanley..but here, let me put this on me, not Dave. We are going downstairs to hear Eric Reed play in a little bit, and I wouldn't dare get up and play a straight-ahead blues solo after he did. He (or Cyrus Chestnut or Marcus Roberts) could cut me into little pieces. But I don't think any of them could play in The Bad Plus. You have got to make music based out of your life experience.

SC: Yeah, well, I think if you are playing jazz, you really need to be able to play some blues. Ornette is the perfect example: he always sounds like a blues musician, no matter how far out he gets. And this is why Duke Ellington could make a record--a supremely great record--with John Coltrane, with both men just playing their individual personalities but making music together. In fact, Elvin Jones told me how nervous he, Jimmy Garrison, and Coltrane were until Ellington got to the studio and cooled everyone out. Listen to the solo Ellington plays on Coltrane’s tune called "Big Nick." It's two perfect uncliched choruses that could be transcribed and made into a song.

You see when we hear Duke Ellington playing with Coltrane, we realize that the music is a certain tradition, based in blues and swing. Those elements provide bridges between schools and styles. George Wein told me that Charlie Parker played two choruses on "Royal Garden Blues" with so much authority one afternoon in Boston that he startled Vic Dickenson and some other swing era musicians up on that bandstand who only knew him at a distance. But of course Bird could play swing and earlier jazz, and his own advanced style was a re-imagining of those basic elements.

EI: In the post-modern era I think there are more options. I have always believed that you had to play your own way, no matter what---even at the expense of jazz. My own voice is not pure jazz, for precisely this reason, since I have always been determined to be distinctive.

I appreciate your point, though, and do worry about it sometimes, since the best jazz has always been connected to a certain kind of community that I could never have access to. I consider myself lucky to have Reid and Dave--at least we are a little white Midwestern community.

SC: Community is important because music is made by bands, but as I say in Considering Genius and go into great detail to make clear: Sensibility is the imperishable element. Background can never be an excuse for not sounding good. That only comes into the conversation when a white musicians try to duck the difficulty of learning to play by saying that their backgrounds did not provide them with fundamental exposure to blues, swing, or the black church. But that doesn’t work for Leontyne Price or Kathy Battle: neither of them could say that because she was from Mississippi or Ohio that you couldn't expect a good performance of Puccini. The music is there for whomever can play it and it is hard to do no matter what background a player has. How many blues clubs and black churches were in Czechoslovakia when George Mraz was growing up?

EI: Right, and he was the favorite bass player of both Tommy Flanagan and Hank Jones.

SC: Then there is the impossibly great Francesco Cafiso, the young Italian alto player I discuss in Considering Genius. Nothing will stop a pure musician, not color, not culture, not geography. All they need is what Billy Higgins always told young musicians when they asked him for advice: "Get to a bandstand as soon as you can."

There comes a time, in the personality of a guy who's a jazz musician, that no matter how experimental he was as a young guy, he becomes a jazz musician. From that point on he doesn't need to leave out what he knows about experimentation. I predict that one of these nights in The Bad Plus, one of you is actually going to set up a true jazz groove, and the other two are going to jump on it, and from then on the future will be different. You will still play what you play, but you will be expressing your love of jazz!

EI: H'mm…!

SC: You could actually teach your audience about swing, which is the great American innovation.

EI: You are always convincing, Stanley! I dare anyone to have this conversation with you and not leave determined to start swinging.

Obviously, though, since the 60's, a lot of musicians, both black and white, have wanted to do something more than swing. Let's talk about the avant-garde. I know something about Ornette Coleman, and so do you. Most people don't realize how much you do know about him. In fact, I have a confession to make: I have never really enjoyed the Coleman trio with David Izenzon and Charles Moffett, since my allegiance has always been to the Coleman music with Charlie Haden. But then I read your 2002 essay "Ornette Coleman: Blues for the Space Age" where you say:

The astonishing sweep of liberated form and emotion in his music is made obvious in his remarkably symphonic improvisation on "The Ark," from his 1962 Town Hall concert with bassist Izenzon and drummer Moffett, both of whom brilliantly respond to and inspire Coleman's creation of movements based on the theme rather than choruses. In the process, they make his trio perhaps the most spontaneously flexible we have ever heard.

I had almost all of Ornette records but that one, and after reading that, I had to go out and get that one too. Of course you were right: "The Ark" is amazing and has become my favorite performance by that trio. Stanley Crouch, of all people, teaching ME something about Ornette Coleman--Jesus--can I even print this?

SC: People think I am against contemporary European concert music. I'm not--why would I be against it? But I do think they don't need jazz musicians to do it. And jazz doesn't need European music--or Balkan music, or Indian, or whatever non-American music--to improve itself. Ornette didn't. This is from Considering Genius:

Technically, the most important thing about Coleman is that he proved how much jazz could do with its own tradition in order to "advance." It did not have to use academic methods borrowed from the European avant-garde as the basic foundation with which to marginalize the jazz idiom and the distinctive emotion of the music. It also did not need the exotica of India or African music or the pretensions that too often attend the rhetoric of those devoted to something "Non-Western." Jazz could build on its Negro-American roots while maintaining its universality…As Coleman said once in the early 1960's, "Many people don't realize it, but there is a real American folklore in jazz. It's neither black nor white. It's the mixture of the races, and the folklore has come from it." That realization is what anchors his achievement.

Bobby Bradford told me about how messed up Gunther Schuller and those cats were by how Ornette got to someplace next door to them--without going through what they knew! He got there through Bird and jazz tunes. I said to Coleman one time, "I have figured out one thing about your development." He said, "What's that?" I said, "You were fascinated with the bridges of tunes, weren't you? A melody would go on for sixteen bars, and then change. That really got to you, didn't it?" And he said, "Yeah, that's right."

EI: I had almost exactly the same conversation with him. [See this post.] Ornette's bridges were the beginning of free jazz.

SC: Right!

EI: We have all heard bad interpretations and imitations of modern classical music by mediocre jazz players. But! If I hear a group of musicians who do know something about jazz playing together with talent and commitment, and their playing is informed by European avant-garde, minimalism, rock, world-music--whatever non-jazz source--I, as a dedicated jazz lover, will be nurtured by their performance--perhaps more than I would be by the original. There would still be a spark that I think of as jazz.

Let me give you a specific example: we heard Masabumi Kikuchi and Paul Motian play free the other night. Now, very little of their musical content stemmed from the blues or jazz folklore. But since they were improvising, and do have some relationship to jazz (especially Paul, of course), I enjoyed it far more than if a composer had written it out--a composer who could have made the music superficially much better by taking the time to make it impeccable structurally, time that an improviser doesn't have.

SC: I know that Anthony Braxton agrees with you about this, although, again, that approach is not for me.

I was talking to Braxton one night, and I said to him: "You are really what Gunther and John Lewis meant when they were talking about 'Third Stream,' and you have never been recognized for being that in the right way." He said, "Look, all of us were listening to European music, but when Black Power came in, a lot of us pretended to have gotten the ideas from Africa or someplace non-white. I became the odd man out, because I refused to deny what my real interests were. If it was Stockhausen, it was Stockhausen! I wouldn't pretend that it came out of the south side of Chicago or whatever."

In that respect, I thought the worst offender was Cecil Taylor, whose whole style comes from European music--especially Messiaen--with a few drips and drabs of Ellington, Monk, and Bud. I played Catalogue d'oiseaux for both Jimmy Lyons and Andrew Cyrille, and they were astonished. "What record is that? I've heard that many times!" Jimmy almost fainted. They didn't know modern classical music, and had just taken Cecil's word on his own originality.

The reason I really respect Braxton now (although I went through many years of being hostile to him) is that he has always been an honest guy! He stood by what he was doing without ever renouncing his deep commitment to European music.

I wish you had been there the night Cecil and I had it out at Bradley's. We really went at it. I thought I won, but maybe he thinks he did. Anyway, I said it came down to one thing: "All that stuff about Africa that you say--Africa this, Africa that--well, if you went and played in Africa, a new record would be set for someone emptying a hall! However big the concert hall was, you would clear it in five minutes!"

[laughter]

EI: Look, I just have to say, in Cecil's defense, that regardless of whatever Andrew Cyrille said, Cecil's harmonic language is not that of any major European composer, including Oliver Messiaen. I know Messiaen's language, and those of Bartok, Schoenberg, Webern, Stockhausen and others; I've looked at all those scores, played the notes, etc., and Cecil is different--I mean, apart from the obvious fact that he improvising, and that his piano sonority is massive and distinctive, his actual pitches are different.

SC: Braxton told me that, too. Look, Cecil Taylor is far too intelligent a guy to totally copy anybody. He's not just an intelligent guy, he's some kind of genius, who has many original thoughts about many, many things. BUT the sound of his music is not jazz--it is something else, based in European music. I don't think he has influenced any real jazz today, either. That’s why he and all of those other guys used to call what they do “black music.” They KNEW it wasn’t jazz, although that rhetoric has changed over the years.

EI: Yeah, they gave up that phase "black music" awhile back, but it is interesting to remember that there was that rhetoric for at least a decade. I don’t think Cecil says "Africa" too much any more, either, which is just as well, since any record of the whitest British rock has more to do with Africa than any Cecil Taylor record of the last 40 years.

Stanley, you raise very interesting points about jazz and a definition of jazz in your book, and if the reader is willing to go in and wrestle with you on your terms they will come out learning something.

The older I have gotten, I have noticed myself doing two things: on the one hand, I have gotten more and more willing to stick up for anybody who has a valid song to sing, regardless of style. On the other hand, I have felt increasing tension and resentment when reading (or just being around) people who act like they know something about jazz when they really don't.

I don't think you can have the word "jazz," Stanley--you would make too many people upset if you took it away from them. And if you asked me point blank whether Cecil was jazz, I would say, "yes." However, if you come up with another term that meant the kind of music which you describe on every page of Considering Genius, it's very probable that I (and the rest of The Bad Plus) would give you our support for this new word, because we do believe in some sort of absolute value of that tradition of real jazz, although we haven't made the choice to inhabit it ourselves.

At any rate, I firmly believe that it is high time to put this issue--which has fragmented the jazz world terribly--onto the table and look at it in a serious way.

SC: Ethan, I am always impressed by your enthusiasm.

----------

CODA

The interview proper about Considering Genius ends there…however we kept talking with the tape rolling, and here are a few more excerpts from our discussion. It's interesting to get Stanley's insights on some of the music that he has been around but many people don't realize he knows (once, when I told Stanley that my favorite Cecil Taylor song was "Bulbs," he instantly and accurately sang it back to me).

SC: Free Jazz is to me Ornette's supreme achievement with his ensemble concept. You know, the great Whitney Balliett just died…I remember being amazed at how well Balliett heard that record when it was released.

EI: I don’t care for that record--I much prefer the ensemble stuff from the sessions for Science Fiction. I don't appreciate Free Jazz.

SC: Yeah, well you will someday. Ornette responds to each musician on that one…totally unlike the way Albert Ayler tries to out-loud every other player on New York Eye and Ear Control.

EI: Well, I love Ayler. But he probably shouldn't have made those early standards records--he doesn't sound good there.

SC: No…but Jimmy Lyons told me that one time he heard Albert sit in at a straight-ahead jam session in Europe. Before playing, Albert told him, "I guess I need to do my Charlie Rouse bag." And Jimmy said he sounded like that--really good--and Jimmy himself could play the fuck out of bop.

EI: As much as I am a defender of Ayler, I also feel like I don't need every record--it gets monochromatic after awhile.

SC: No, you only need two or three. My favorite is Witches and Devils with Norman Howard. That's sensational--the sound that Ayler and Howard get together is a sound we have never heard before or since. Towards the end of one of Ayler's solos on that record, Sunny Murray play an interpretation of the ride cymbal that sounds like time, but spread out. I like that record a lot.

EI: I remember reading a poem of yours somewhere in praise of Albert.

SC: I liked him…but see (and Earle Henderson was the first one to show me this), John Coltrane was really the cat. In his last records like Expression, Coltrane shows that he peeped Ayler, thought it was interesting, and took it much further musically. I can't stand Coltrane's last band, but when everybody's out of the way but him and Rashied Ali, like on Interstellar Space, that's some rough stuff!

EI: Yeah, really rough--just amazing. But even with the band, the level of horn Coltrane is playing is just astronomical.

SC: No doubt there. Some people like the last band. My problem is simply this: having heard Elvin, McCoy, and Jimmy so many times playing so well, I just couldn't swallow that last band.

EI: Even if they didn't agree with you, anyone could understand your perspective…unless that person was extremely obtuse.

---

EI: You mention Henry Threadgill's Sextett in the book, and how good they sounded when you booked them into the Tin Palace. That band was an underrated, too-little known moment in the history of the music. [See also this post.]

SC: Definitely!

I'm one of those sentimental people who likes to think that there is some unlettered black person who should be the final arbiter of value, because they have absorbed the truth through their nostrils or something when eating collard greens and cornbread when growing up poor in the South. Blah, blah, blah---it's bullshit, of course.

EI: You mean the kind of character Morgan Freeman gets hired to play sometimes in the movies.

SC: Right! BUT…I will say, not in Henry Threadgill's defense, but in his celebration, that one night at the Tin Palace, this black guy--an uptown [Harlem] guy--happened to be on the Bowery and came in the club as Threadgill started to play. He stayed for all three sets and I talked to him a bit. He didn't know this band, but he was really moved and loved the music--thought they were really playing. There was something that Threadgill had with that band that could make this "unlettered soulful black arbiter of value" say it was the real deal. It was communicating to both people looking for the avant-garde and people who didn't even know there was an avant-garde.

If Threadgill had kept that band together--two drummers, trumpet, trombone, cello, Fred Hopkins and himself--then that band could have been right next to the Art Ensemble of Chicago. But I think there is something in Threadgill's personality that prevented him from keeping that band together--something like "when people start liking what he's doing, he's got to figure out something they don't like."

EI: Ornette can be a little like that, too.

SC: Kind of, yeah.

Threadgill did keep Air with Fred Hopkins and Steve McCall together for a while, and really turned out New York with that trio. The records don't do them justice.

EI: I dig Hopkins. I admit I don't really like it when Air played the Jelly Roll Morton or ragtimes, but I really dig a record of all abstract music on Nessa called "Air Time."

SC: Man, they killed when they played the Jelly Roll live. Fred Hopkins was deep--I loved him, man. Do you have the Sextett albums What Was That? and Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket? Olu Dara sounds smoking on that one.

But for saxophone playing, when Arthur Blythe showed up, Threadgill felt the pressure. I remember that well, because Blythe had such a rich sound, and Threadgill didn't really have that.

---

EI: Julius Hemphill is someone I would have loved to gotten to know.

SC: Did he ever die too young! He's another cat who really had the blues in his playing, no matter how far out he got.

EI: You must have known Phillip Wilson.

SC: He was rough, man, a great drummer. But of those cats, it was Don Moye who impressed me the most. I heard the Art Ensemble almost every night at the Five Spot in 1976. They were playing! Wow!

EI: Back then you were playing the drums yourself.

SC: Not well, but not that bad, either, in that free-form style. Check it out:

[Stanley plays a tune recorded live in Amsterdam with David Murray, Butch Morris, Don Pullen, and Fred Hopkins. It's a long waltz with extended solos by each member--Pullen sounds the best on it. The drumming for the swinging waltz is a sloppy slow groove, quite behind the beat, and broken up by free fusillades.]

EI: I dig it! Why did you quit?

SC: Well, when I was in California, I thought I was really good. But then I moved to New York and kept hearing Elvin Jones, Roy Haynes, Billy Higgins, and all the other truly great drummers. That was a level I had no hope of achieving. In my own style, Don Moye was the guy who closed the door.

EI: I guess you had a different destiny anyway.

SC: Yeah…that's certainly true.

Stanley Crouch

HTC Unveils Tiny 'Laptop' 3G Phone

2007-02-14T09:22:00.000-05:00

HTC Unveils Tiny 'Laptop' 3G Phone

HTC's new trio of smartphones include a device resembling a tiny laptop and a Window Mobile 6-based handset with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.
Matthew Broersma, Techworld

Tuesday, February 13, 2007 04:00 PM PST

HTC has launched a trio of smartphones at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, including a device resembling a tiny laptop and a Window Mobile 6-based handset with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

Separately, BT announced a range of HTC handsets would be added to its converged Fusion offering. HP is also joining Fusion with a dual-mode Windows Mobile 6 device.

The devices are among the dozens of handsets introduced at the trade show, with some manufacturers focusing on the convergence of fixed and mobile telephony, and others, like Research In Motion, on the convergence of business and consumer features.

Still other handsets, such as Samsung's Ultra Smart F700 or the earlier Apple iPhone, are oriented around new interface technologies such as touchscreens.

The HTC Advantage, aka the X7500, to be launched by T-Mobile across Europe in March under the Ameo brand, is a 3G handset built to resemble a tiny laptop. It has a 5-inch VGA screen, magnetic QWERTY keyboard, eight-hour battery life and a sensor technology that allows users to navigate the screen by tilting the device.

Other features include 8GB hard drive, miniSD slot, video output for making presentations, GPS and 3-megapixel camera, as well as standard office software and other features. It handles tri-band UMTS.

The HTC S710, to be launched across Europe by Orange under the SPV E650 brand, is destined to be one of the first Windows Mobile 6 devices on the market. Its principal attraction is a QWERTY keypad that slides out from behind a standard-looking "brick" form-factor; it also sports push email, GPRS/EDGE, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

The HTC P3350 is a media-oriented handset resembling a PDA, and, like the Advantage, runs on Windows Mobile 5.

FusionBT said it would add an unspecified range of HTC handsets to Fusion, which combines mobile and home wireless telephony using GSM and voice-over-IP.

Fusion will also see the addition of HP's iPaq 514 Voice Messenger, a Windows Mobile 6-based candybar handset with quad-band GSM and 802.11b/g, using UMA to roam between the two.

The device is HP's first candybar-style iPaq and is HP's first Wi-Fi device allowing power management, HP said. Users can turn the Wi-Fi radio off if desired, or it can be left in sleep mode, waking up when it detects Wi-Fi infrastructure.

MTV URGE SONNY ROLLINS Q&A

2007-02-10T15:42:00.000-05:00

SONNY ROLLINS Q&A

URGE: As an artist, have you always felt that revealing emotions we all share was one of the thrills of music-making?

SR: I never was presumptuous enough to assume that what I was doing would ever reach the heights of bringing good emotions to people. I was just sort of involved in learning how to play musical things. I'm still pretty amazed when people tell me how this music has hit them, or describe something they've gotten from my playing.

URGE: But you do know what they're talking about, right? If I came up to you and effused about how the tail end of "Someday I'll Find You" on the new disc really catches the spirit, you'd know what I mean.

SR: Well, I wouldn't know what “you” are talking about. I would know what “/” was trying to convey. But I wouldn't know it affects other people.

URGE: Your new label Doxy is named after one of your classic tunes. Do you remember where you were when you wrote "Doxy."

SR: Actually I think I was institutionalized when I wrote "Doxy." The gory details.well it was back at a time when I was hooked on drugs, and while I was institutionalized my mind turned to music, and I had an opportunity to play with a band, a sort of Protestant Chapel Band - we played hymns and such. It's not a pleasant memory. But it's fruitful in that I was able to overcome those problems.

URGE: Tell me what came into your mind when you watched the classic clips that were recently placed on your Web site. What kind of memories did it conjure?

SR: Hold on to your hat. I've never seen them. I don't have a computer. But I understand we got a lot of hits on the site. A lot people like 'em and wanted more.

URGE: Jazz fans love that kind of footage. I just got a Monk DVD where Ben Riley looks 22 years old.

SR: When I look back at old pictures of me, I know it's me, but it feels like another guy. Like, "who's that guy?"

URGE: Do you look back at pictures of you with your famed Mohawk haircut and say "what the hell was I doing," or are you proud of it?

SR: Ha, ha, ha. I loved it. At the time I did it, it was sort of a statement - outside of the box behavior. I got different reactions from different people. But I thought it was a very individualistic thing and I'm happy I did it.

URGE: When writing, do you know when you have a strong new piece, something a cut above the rest?

SR: When I'm playing at my best I usually know that I have something good, when it's better than usual. But in composing you never really know how it's going to strike people. I had some tunes that I thought were good, but didn't make a lot of noise with the public. Some of my songs did resonate with some people, so I shouldn't really imply that they weren't accepted. "Doxy," that's a song that needed exposition. It needed Miles and the people that were playing on it to truly make it happen. I was fortunate in that I had the right group of musicians around to bring it to life.

URGE: I was listening to “The Bridge” the other night and hearing you trade lines with Jim Hall. From Clifford Brown to Clifton Anderson, you've often had simpatico mates in the front line. What does the job of sharing the front line with Sonny Rollins entail? Is it jousting, is it kissing each other on the cheek, what.

SR: It's all of those things. It's kicking each other in the behind, too. When you're playing with someone on the front line, it's a lot of “give”. I might have to substitute what I might do “alone” for the sake of the other person and what we're trying to make “together”. So we can reach another level. It's a little different than when you're soloing. Some different elements come out when playing in the front line.

URGE: Describe some of your key partners from throughout the years. Jim Hall?

SR: Jim was great, a wonderful accompanist. He had a great sense of space and time and - for sure - harmonic structure. It gave me what I needed at the time. He's an exceptional musician. I learned from him.

URGE: Don Cherry?

SR: Don and I would practice together, just he and I. Great fun. He had a fantastic musical imagination, musical mind. He always kept things on a creative, unplanned level. Spontaneous.

URGE: Fans and critics love to play a parlor game with you. They want to be the producer. "Gee, he needs different band, a trio maybe." Or "He should make a duets disc, just Sonny and a bassist." Do people bring that up to you? Are they steadily pitching you contextual ideas?

SR: My wife used to say that to me all the time. "You know Sonny, all these critics want to tell you who you should play with, or what tunes you should play." There's something about me where people have their own ideas about how I should be presented. I don't know if I should be flattered or concerned or what. It's a form of flattery, though. I'm happy they even consider me.

URGE: Back in the day, when you guys were hanging out, would that kind of conversation come up? "Oh, Miles needs drummer X, not drummer Y." Did you guys speculate how a band could be improved?

SR: Sure, sure. And there would be some musicians. I don't want to mention names - I'm thinking of a specific case - but I remember a piano player who burst on the scene at a certain time and everybody was saying, "well, no, we still like Bud Powell. Bud's the best guy to be involved with Charlie Parker's group, not this other guy. So, yeah, we had our preferences. With Miles, for instance. I always liked Miles with Charlie Parker - outside of the original Dizzy and Parker collaboration, I mean. I always thought that nobody else connected with Bird like Miles did. They really had a perfect symbiosis, if that's the word.

URGE: That a good example of what we're talking about. Because in the large, everyone might not agree with that. Miles is known as many things, but not the ultimate trumpet player.

SR: Right. But Dizzy and Bird were closer in style - they sounded alike. Miles brought a different approach to what Bird was doing, and I thought that was great. I think Miles is a top-notch player. Now Fats Navarro was a guy who everyone agreed was a whiz, technically. But I heard Miles and Fats Navarro play with each other at Birdland one night, and they were right on the same technical level. I can understand why people might say that about Miles, because he doesn't always play with that kind of skill. But he definitely had it, and if the occasion presented itself, he'd let it loose.

URGE: They're finally a movie of Miles' life. Was he as hot-blooded as history has it?

SR: In what sense? How do you mean that?

URGE: As quick to rile or as ornery as we hear.

SR: You know that got overblown, and he played on it. In part, Miles used to turn his back on stage from shyness. People looked at that and said, "Look, this guy's really arrogant -- he's turning away from us." I don't want to blow his image, but from our association in the late '40s and early '50s, I always though he was shy.

URGE: I was chatting with a horn player who's been trying to physically change his personal sound. Did you ever go through a period where you overtly tried to not only improve, but indeed create a different sound?

SR: Oh yeah. I've done it a great deal in my career, so I understand what this guy's doing. That's why we used to change mouthpieces, horns, reeds. We're always looking for something that's not there, a sound we're not getting. I'm still searching. I'm glad I hit it every now and then, but it's a constant. That's why I practice every day - I'm still trying to get my stuff together. That “sound”. You're looking for a place that will allow you to play easily, freely. Coltrane, and me and all the older cats used to call each other. "Oh yeah, try this mouthpiece, try this approach." See if they could make you the best you can be.

URGE: Do you feel more in touch with sentiment or wistfulness now, as an older man. Do you think you bring different emotions to a song now than you did when you were, say, 30?

SR: An insightful question. I've never said this before, but I think I have gained a certain amount of experience, so I can get some thoughts over better than I once did. Not in a technical sense, but in an emotional sense, just knowing certain things from life - experiences, you know? It's very gratifying when those things happen through music. I've never been put in the position of saying that. I hope it doesn't sound to self-aggrandizing. You asked the question, so you made me answer. But yes, I feel I can sometimes get deeper inside an emotion of late. I never thought about it quite that way. But I'm a person who's always searching and trying to improve myself.

Sam Danner
Press Here Publicity
138 West 25th Street 7th Floor
NYC NY 10014
T: 212 246 2640
**********************

'Lush Life,' a Self-Portrait in Song

2007-02-06T16:37:00.000-05:00

azz

'Lush Life,' a Self-Portrait in Song

by Ashley Kahn

Billy Strayhorn.

Morning Edition, February 6, 2007 · Best known as the songwriting genius who created many of Duke Ellington's masterpieces, Billy Strayhorn is the subject of a new documentary premiering Tuesday night on public television, as well as a fine companion CD. Both are titled Lush Life, after Strayhorn's most enduring composition, which commentator Ashley Kahn sees as the composer's autobiography in music form.

Though it was written in the '30s, "Lush Life" was not recorded for public release until Nat "King" Cole sang it in 1949 with a free and easy feel. Since then, it's become one of the most standard of pop standards, with no signs of fading away. It was even a highlight of a recent Grammy Awards gala, performed by Queen Latifah.

"Lush Life" conveys such a vast range of emotions that more than 500 musicians have explored it. Some, like Joe Henderson playing solo saxophone, have chosen a hushed approach, while singers like Nancy Wilson have given it a shot of drama.

"Lush Life" seems simple, but it's quite complex — emotionally and musically, with a very unusual structure. It even gave Frank Sinatra a hard time when he tried to record in 1958. He gave up on the song, laughing that he would "put it aside for about a year." But he never did return to it.

"Not everybody could sing it," says Andy Bey, a celebrated jazz singer and pianist with a strong personal connection to "Lush Life," a song he has returned to repeatedly throughout a 55-year career. "A lot of songs had verses and refrains, you know, but it's like a mind boggling thing. It's not about 'ring-a-ding ding' when you do "Lush Life."

"It's about somebody's life. There's a worldliness, about a person who has lived. You really have to kind of understand the story and try to keep the mood, keep the focus."

The pun in the song's title suggests that "Lush Life" might be speaking of a life of elegance, or of boozy despair. In both senses, the song reflects the life of the man who wrote it. Billy Strayhorn was the piano prodigy Duke Ellington recruited in 1938 to compose material for his band. Through a 30-year, on-and-off relationship, Strayhorn wrote many of Ellington's most memorable and sophisticated tunes.

"He was like Duke Ellington's right-hand man," says Bey.

Strayhorn was born in 1915, and fell in love with classical music before developing a fascination with jazz. Growing up in a working-class neighborhood in Pittsburgh, he dreamed of a more cultured and cosmopolitan way of life. He was only 16 when he began to write "Lush Life," which he first called "Life Is Lonely" — and which we now know as "Lush Life."

In fact, the words Strayhorn wrote as a teenager predicted the life he did eventually lead. He did become a socialite, he did make it to France. And he did become an alcoholic.

The song's lyric reveals both poetry and a maturity that's surprising coming from a teenager. It also seems to suggest another significant side to Strayhorn's identity: his sexual orientation.

Bey quotes the first line of the song — "I used to visit all the very gay places..." — and adds, "Who knows? He might have been thinking about the gay bars, but I think it was something broader than that, because he was too broad of a person. I see it as places that are happy and carefree and gay."

As his biographer David Hajdu wrote, Strayhorn was a minority three times over — African-American, gay and open about his homosexuality. His offstage role in Ellington's band made it possible to avoid the public spotlight.

"I think he loved taking a back seat," Bey says. "Because that way, it gave him the freedom to be himself, even though it might have hurt him, because he wasn't given the credit that he deserved as an artist. Billy had the strength and the balls to come out and be who he was."

Strayhorn died in 1967, his death hastened by years of alcohol and cigarettes. He never said if "Lush Life" was intended to be a pronouncement of his lifestyle, yet the song survives as a poignant self-portrait: complex, mature and open to interpretation.

Jazz

Recommended Strayhorn: Career Highlights

by Ashley Kahn

NPR.org, February 5, 2007 · Few American composers — in any category of music — were on a par with William Thomas Strayhorn. His ability to weave the intricate and sophisticated harmonies of classical music into the richness and swing of big-band jazz was unparalleled. (Just check out the nimble chordal movement in a tune like "Chelsea Bridge.") He excelled at composing melodies and writing lyrics with wit and poetry, as in his signature tune "Lush Life."

"With all respect to Cole Porter and Rogers and Hart and Jerome Kern, I love them all, they're great geniuses," singer/pianist Andy Bey said. "But Billy Strayhorn was a different kind of a genius because he was in the background."

When the 51-year-old Strayhorn died in 1967 after battling cancer, he was well on his way to the recognition he deserved. Certainly, Duke Ellington — with whom he had remained, off and on, for most of Strayhorn's 30-year career — emphasized his contributions to the Ellington orchestra in stage announcements, on LP covers, and on a posthumous tribute album to his friend and songwriting partner: And His Mother Called Him Bill.

To know Strayhorn's full story, check out the new television documentary Lush Life, airing as part of PBS's Independent Lens series, or read David Hajdu's biography of the same name. For those looking to hear his music, the titles listed below represent a good start.

Billy Strayhorn, Passion Flower

Easily the best CD overview of the diminutive maestro's oeuvre, this collection features 21 tracks — mostly performances by the Ellington band of such classics as "Lotus Blossom," "Rain Check," "Take the A Train" and "Satin Doll." Also included: Nat "King" Cole's version of "Lush Life" — the public debut of the song from 1949, with Pete Rugolo's impressionistic arrangement — and drummer Louie Bellson's take on "Johnny Come Lately," with Strayhorn himself on piano.

Duke Ellington, Three Suites

By the early '50s, miffed at the lack of credit he had received under Ellington's wing, Strayhorn departed for a few years to freelance his talents and try his hand at writing a Broadway show. Upon his return in 1957, Ellington spent the next 10 years making up for past slights: granting Strayhorn co-credit on their collaborations and lending him headline status on various projects, including the suites collected on this CD. Of special note: their oh-so-hip reworkings of tunes from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, like "Sugar Rum Cherry" (from "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy") and "Danse of the Floreadores" ("Waltz of the Flowers").

Various Artists, Lush Life

Not surprisingly, the Strayhorn tributes that are currently available outnumber the composer's recordings of his own music. He created music intended for wide interpretation, and it shows; a tune like "Lush Life" has been convincingly performed as a swinging celebration or as moody self-reflection. The takes on this collection feature stellar soloists from the current Blue Note jazz roster, including saxophonist Joe Lovano, vocalist Dianne Reeves, and pianists Bill Charlap and Hank Jones. The four-handed workout "Tonk," performed by Charlap and Jones, is a revelation, while Lovano's "Chelsea Bridge" and "Johnny Come Lately" are flavorful and fun.

MICHAEL BRECKER MEMORIAL

2007-02-03T12:45:00.000-05:00

MICHAEL BRECKER MEMORIAL

MICHAEL BRECKER MEMORIAL
Tuesday, February 20th
Town Hall
123 West 43rd Street
6:00-7:30pm
General Admission
Public Invited
Doors open at 5.15pm

Whitney Balliett, 80, Dean of Jazz Writers

2007-02-02T11:31:00.000-05:00

Whitney Balliett, 80, Dean of Jazz Writers

BY WILL FRIEDWALD - Special to the Sun
February 2, 2007

Whitney Balliett, who died yesterday at 80, was the longtime jazz reviewer for the New Yorker.

A reporter, historian, and expert interviewer, Balliett's greatest gift was as an astute listener with the rare ability to capture the sound of the music in words. He wrote with a cadence and rhythm that mirrored the music itself, and was as witty and fun to read as he was serious and scholarly.

He wrote that Blossom Dearie had a voice so small that "without a microphone it would not reach the second floor of a doll's house"; he described another singer, Betty Carter, as being so far out that she "makes Sarah Vaughan sound like Kate Smith." He once compared the midperformance moaning of pianist Keith Jarrett to that of a woman giving birth. Balliett also likened jazz drumming to tap dancing: "a great drummer dances sitting down, a great tap dancer drums standing up."

Balliett's favorite kind of jazz was intensely melodic, the style he had grown up with in the '30s and '40s; he tended to favor the great swing players and their latter-day descendants. He also had a fascination for the Great American Songbook, and the more traditional singers of both the jazz and related pop variety who sang it.

Yet he also had a special proclivity for drummers and did not neglect the many equally essential modern and postmodern players who flourished in the decades of his tenure at the magazine. Some of his earliest columns focused on Jimmy Giuffre, Sonny Rollins, and even the extremely avant-garde Cecil Taylor.

Balliett was raised in New York. Soon after graduating from Cornell University in 1951, he began submitting poetry and Talk of the Town entries to the New Yorker. After a four-year stint at the Saturday Review, he began writing a regular column on jazz for the New Yorker in January 1957. His last article in that magazine was published in 2001; he spanned an even half century at the magazine.

"I think the role of any critic is, first, to explain or describe what it is that he is criticizing, and then make his evaluation," Balliett said in one of his last interviews. He preferred to let the music come alive in the reader's head rather than dwelling on what he thought of it.

He continued, "I think you waste time by battling and sending out sharp opinions and dumping on people. It's a waste of effort and it's also destructive."

Although Balliett had been writing his column for a scant two years, his first book was published in 1959. Like most of the dozenplus books he produced, "The Sound of Surprise" collected his New Yorker columns.

Balliett's wrote in two modes, reviews and profiles, some of which were not, strictly speaking, on musicians, such as "Alec Wilder and His Friends" (1974) and "Barney, Bradley, and Max: Fifteen Portraits in Jazz" (1989).

In his profiles, Balliett let's subjects speak for themselves, at length. In his reviews, he offered witty, vivid verbal-paintings such as this typical description of Ray Charles in action: "One waits for the shout that falls in a beat to a whisper, the flashing falsetto, the pine-sap diction, the pained hoarseness, the guttural asides, the spidery staccato sprays of notes, the polysyllabic explosions, the faster-than-the-ear dynamics."

On the pianist Dave McKenna: "His eyes are deep-set and close together, and his wide face has eagle lines. His long arms end in banana fingers."

More than any other critic in the genre's history, Balliett captured the *feel* of jazz. He wrote of the clarinetist Pee Wee Russell: "Russell's blues were an examination of the proposition that there must be a way to make sadness bearable and beautiful."

He was a profound influence on the next generation of jazz critics, including Gary Giddins, Francis Davis, and Stanley Crouch.

Apart from his writing, Balliett's other best-known achievement was serving as a musical consultant, alongside fellow reviewer Nat Hentoff, on the 1957 CBS-TV show "The Sound of Jazz." This program is among the finest hours of the music ever televised (and possibly ever recorded), but is also the most celebrated all-star gathering in the history of jazz. Indeed, Balliett would go on to write at length about such iconic figures as Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Count Basie, Gerry Mulligan, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, and many others who appeared on "The Sound of Jazz."

I once asked Balliett how he got so many jazz greats in a single production, and he answered, "Easy — they needed the gig!"

Whitney Balliett

Born April 17, 1926, in Manhattan; died February 1 at his home in Manhattan; survived by his wife, Nancy Balliett, his children Whitney Balliett, James Balliett, Julie Rose, Blue Balliott, and Will Balliett, his seven grandchildren, and a brother, Fargo Balliett.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Not my favorite jazz writer. He was of the "old school" when it came to race relations. This old school perspective was obvious in his writing.

John H. Armwood

Alice Coltrane, Jazz Artist and Spiritual Leader, Dies at 69 - New York Times

2007-01-17T15:34:00.000-05:00

Alice Coltrane, Jazz Artist and Spiritual Leader, Dies at 69 - New York Times:

January 15, 2007

Alice Coltrane, Jazz Artist and Spiritual Leader, Dies at 69

By BEN RATLIFF

Alice Coltrane, widow of the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane and the pianist in his later bands, who extended her musical searches into a vocation as a spiritual leader, died on Friday in Los Angeles. She was 69.

The cause was respiratory failure, said Marilyn McLeod, her sister and assistant.

Ms. Coltrane lived in the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles near the Sai Anantam ashram in Agoura Hills, which she had founded in 1983. Known as Swami Turiyasangitananda, Sanskrit for “the highest song of God,” she was the guiding presence of the 48-acre ashram, set among the Santa Monica mountains, where 25 to 30 full-time residents study the Vedic scriptures of ancient India, as well as Buddhist and Islamic texts.

She was also the manager of Coltrane’s estate, as well as of his music-publishing company, Jowcol Music, and the John Coltrane Foundation, which has given out scholarships to music students since 2001.

As a pianist, her playing was dense with arpeggios that suggested the harp; the instrument had an important place in her life. One of her childhood heroes was the Detroit-based jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby, and she was later motivated to study that instrument by Coltrane, who loved its sound.

Raised in a musical family in Detroit, Ms. Coltrane played piano and organ for church choirs and Sunday school from age 7. As a young musician in Detroit, she was studying classical music and playing piano in jazz clubs, in a group including her half-brother, the bassist Ernie Farrow, and the trombonist George Bohannon.

In her early 20s she lived briefly in Paris, where she studied informally with the pianist Bud Powell, and was briefly married to the singer Kenny (Pancho) Hagood, with whom she had a daughter, Michelle. She returned to Detroit, playing in a band with her brother, and then moved to New York in 1962. A year later she met John Coltrane.

She was playing vibraphone and Powell-inspired bebop piano in a group led by the drummer Terry Gibbs at Birdland, on a double-bill with Coltrane’s quartet. Coltrane was well established by the beginning of the 1960s, though she hadn’t known about him for long before moving to New York; the first time she ever heard him, she said, was on the 1961 album “Africa/Brass.”

They connected instantly; she moved in with him and traveled with the Coltrane band. By the summer of 1964 they had relocated from New York City to a house in Dix Hills, on Long Island. They married in 1965 in Juárez, Mexico, coinciding with Coltrane’s divorce from his first wife, Naima Grubbs. By that time she and Coltrane had already had two of their three children together — John Jr., who died in 1982, and Ravi, who by his 30s had become an acclaimed jazz saxophonist.

Ms. Coltrane is survived by her sisters, Marilyn McLeod of Winnetka, Calif., and Margaret Roberts of Detroit; her daughter, Michelle Carbonell-Coltrane of Los Angeles; her sons Oran Coltrane of Los Angeles and Ravi, of Brooklyn; and five grandchildren.

In 1966, as the Coltrane band’s music became wilder and more prolix, she became its pianist. She replaced McCoy Tyner, who quit without rancor, largely because he could no longer hear himself on the bandstand. Though she wasn’t Mr. Tyner’s technical equal and lacked his percussive power, she fit with the group’s new purpose; by the time of the recordings that would become the album “Stellar Regions,” in February 1967, she was fluid and energetic within the group’s freer new language.

She told an interviewer that Coltrane helped her to play “thoroughly and completely.” This meant stretching the definitions of rhythm and harmony, but she also meant something broader; Coltrane was talking about “universalizing” his music, creating a nondenominational religious art that took cues from ancient history and foreign scales. He helped her to sign a contract as a solo artist with his label, Impulse. And he introduced her to Eastern philosophy and religion, which became the main focus of her life.

After Coltrane’s death from liver cancer in 1967, Ms. Coltrane took a vow of celibacy. And at first she made music closely related to his, often reflective, minor and modal; on piano or harp she played flowing, harplike phrases over a deep midtempo swing, and she worked with the bassist Jimmy Garrison and the drummer Rashied Ali from John Coltrane’s band. On records like “A Monastic Trio,” “Ptah, the El Daoud” and “Journey in Satchidananda,” she was able to reconcile blues phrases and jazz rhythm with a kind of ancient, flowing sound.

Ms. Coltrane met her guru, Swami Satchidananda, in 1970, and in more recent years became a devotee of Sathya Sai Baba. By the early 1970s she developed a renewed interest in the organ, because it produced a continuous sound; she wanted to make a meditative music that wouldn’t be interrupted by pauses for breath. Her 1972 record, “Universal Consciousness,” with Ms. Coltrane on Wurlitzer organ and string arrangements by Ornette Coleman, became a far-out classic. In the mid-70s she switched to the Warner Brothers label and made four more records, including orchestras and Hindu chants. Thereafter, until 2004, she made records purely for religious purposes, distributing them privately.

After first establishing the Vedanta Center in San Francisco, she moved her ashram to Agoura Hills, just northwest of Los Angeles, and expanded it. In the past 10 years, she performed the occasional concert with Ravi, and in 2004 she finally returned to recording jazz, making “Translinear Light,” produced by Ravi, who reunited her with some old colleagues like Charlie Haden and Jack DeJohnette, as well as a chorus of singers from her ashram.

ALICE COLTRANE, MUSICIAN 1937-2007

2007-01-17T15:27:00.000-05:00

ALICE COLTRANE, MUSICIAN 1937-2007

She became a devotee of Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba after the 1967 death of her husband, legendary saxophonist John Coltrane

BY BEN RATLIFF, NEW YORK

Pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane was the widow of legendary jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, whose death led her to explore a vocation as a spiritual leader.

Ms. Coltrane lived in the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles near the Sai Anantam Ashram in Agoura Hills, which she had founded in 1983. Known as Swami Turiyasangitananda, Sanskrit for “the highest song of God,” she was the guiding presence of the 20-hectare ashram, set among the Santa Monica mountains, where 25 to 30 fulltime residents study the Vedic scriptures of ancient India, as well as Buddhist and Islamic texts. She was also the manager of John Coltrane’s estate, as well as of his publishing company, Jowcol Music.

Michael Brecker | Obituaries | Guardian Unlimited

2007-01-16T13:39:00.001-05:00

Michael Brecker | Obituaries | Guardian Unlimited:

Michael Brecker

Master saxophonist who straddled the worlds of jazz, blues rock and funk

John Fordham
Tuesday January 16, 2007
The Guardian

Brecker was held in such awe by students, commentators and players alike that the thought of his exit will be hard for many to comprehend. A reserved, private and undemonstrative man, who made light of his talent - he was so indifferent to onstage histrionics that he would play the most high-energy solos with almost nothing visibly moving but his fingers - Brecker inspired enduring loyalties for his modesty as much as his influence. He also inspired confidence in the most demanding of artists that his presence would make even their best work sound better. Those who hired him in his pre-leadership days included Frank Sinatra, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Steely Dan, Frank Zappa, Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, Charles Mingus and Jaco Pastorius.

Brecker combined the striving energy, technical ambition and sophisticated harmonic sense of Coltrane - his first and biggest inspiration - with a soulful bluesiness that allowed him to drop easily into the earthiest of blues, rock or funk bands. In his prime, he could sustain an unaccompanied one-man show by sounding like several sax players, and even parts of a rhythm section, all at the same time. But if he could tingle the spine with Coltranesque split-note wails that took the tenor sax way above its regular range as well as transforming it into a chordal instrument, he could be tender with slow music, as his performance of Every Day I Thank You on guitarist Pat Metheny's 80/81 album confirms.

Self-revelatory emotions were not perhaps his style, in the way they were Coltrane's. But, playing in New York in the week following 9/11, Brecker told me: "I maybe felt in touch with the true purposes of music in a way I never had been before - as a hearing, transporting, unifying force." He seemed to tune into both his inner voices and the wider possibilities of his art increasingly in later years; that journey ends with an as yet unnamed new album completed just two weeks ago.

Brecker's lawyer father was a part-time jazz pianist, his sister Emmy a classical pianist, and his brother Randy became a celebrated jazz trumpeter. Michael would joke that the only way the children could have had a subversive teenage rebellion would have been to become doctors or attorneys. "[Our father] took us to jazz concerts the way other kids went to ball games," he recalled of those childhood trips to hear Miles Davis, Duke Ellington or Thelonious Monk.

Michael played drums at first (percussive accents remained a strong feature of his saxophone style), then clarinet from the age of seven, alto sax in high school, and finally the tenor and soprano instruments. While at Indiana University he mostly played rock, turning to R&B and funk at the end of the 60s when he moved to New York to play professionally. In 1969 Michael and Randy Brecker, guitarist John Abercrombie and drummer Billy Cobham co-founded Dreams, one of the earliest and most creative of the first wave of jazz-rock bands. Work with Cobham and with Horace Silver followed, before Randy and Michael formed the Brecker Brothers.

One of the group's album titles, Heavy Metal Bebop, aptly described the style. Michael's spiky, chromatically dense improvising style developed in this period - but, unlike a good many jazz players turning to funk in the 70s, he never sounded cramped by the rhythm patterns of the idiom. He burst with ideas whether the underpinning was the loose, cruising feel of swing, or the slamming backbeats of rock.

The Brecker Brothers continued with various line-ups until 1982, and between 1977 and 1985 they also ran a New York club called Seventh Avenue South. Between 1970 and the mid-80s, Michael also contributed to more than 400 pop albums as a session saxist. Then, in 1986, with pianist Joey Calderazzo, drummer Adam Nussbaum and bassist Jeff Andrews, he formed a much more jazz-oriented post-bop group, and in 1987 recorded his debut album as a leader (it was jazz album of the year in both Downbeat and Jazziz magazines), and toured with Herbie Hancock's quartet. He also briefly explored the possibilities of an electronic sax, the EWI.

That first album was well received, partly for the revelation that Brecker had an eloquent compositional talent with which to trigger his torrential saxophone variations (though he never composed extensively, and depended on a close relationship with pianist Gil Goldstein as a composer-arranger). Sideman roles still occasionally tempted him (he toured with Paul Simon in 1991-92 and with Hancock in 1997), and the Brecker Brothers were occasionally coaxed out of retirement, but it was the powerful quartet (often featuring the drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts) that was his most regular vehicle through the 1990s. Albums like Tales From the Hudson, Time Is Of the Essence, The Ballad Book and Wide Angles (2004) displayed the same improvisational verve as ever, but were also showcases for Brecker's high-class admirers - like McCoy Tyner, Metheny, Hancock and Elvin Jones.

In his 50s, Brecker's improvising gradually shed the grandstanding pyrotechnics, gaining subtler colours, greater contrast and a compelling narrative strength. In 2001, at the invitation of the English Contemporary Music Network, he also successfully explored leadership of a larger band, working with Gil Goldstein and an Anglo-American group on expanded arrangements of his own compositions. A bigger group also participated on Wide Angles, which won two Grammy awards.

The following year, the news emerged that Brecker was suffering from the blood disease myelodysplastic syndrome, a condition that frequently precedes leukaemia. Last summer, an experimental blood stem cell transplant was attempted, but was unsuccessful. Realising the importance of the marrow donor programme, Brecker and his family began campaigning for raised awareness about it generally. "This whole experience has allowed me to be a conduit to attract attention for a cause that's much larger than me," Brecker said. He is survived by his wife Susan, children Jessica and Sam, brother Randy and sister Emily Brecker Greenberg.

· Michael Brecker, saxophonist, born March 29 1949; died January 13 2007

Michael Brecker, the Philadelphia-born saxophonist star who has died of leukaemia aged 57, could hurl out more notes faster than almost all of his fellow-practitioners, but his 11 Grammy awards, devoted worldwide audience and status among musicians everywhere testified to artistic strengths that went far beyond technique. He was a composer, bandleader and improviser whose solo career started late, after years as a sideman and session-player; but in the two decades after he made his leadership debut, he became the most emulated jazz saxophonist on the planet after John Coltrane.

Article continues
Brecker was held in such awe by students, commentators and players alike that the thought of his exit will be hard for many to comprehend. A reserved, private and undemonstrative man, who made light of his talent - he was so indifferent to onstage histrionics that he would play the most high-energy solos with almost nothing visibly moving but his fingers - Brecker inspired enduring loyalties for his modesty as much as his influence. He also inspired confidence in the most demanding of artists that his presence would make even their best work sound better. Those who hired him in"

village voice > music > by Greg Tate

2007-01-04T04:34:00.001-05:00

village voice > music > by Greg Tate:

Eulogy for Black Caesar
James Brown, 1933–2006

by Greg Tate
January 2nd, 2007 4:00 PM

James Brown funeral procession
photo: Cary Conover

See also:
Photo gallery from the Apollo wake

Tune in
High Bias: The James Brown special
Skinny white bands who owe the Godfather

Eeeeeeyow. Gud gaad. Aintit fonkeenah? James Brown knew how to freak the tribal speak and the tribal feet alike—the tribal neckbone and irrepressible tribal hambone too. Being a poet, a boxer, and a onetime Pentecostal supplicant, the Godfather knew a thing or two about being hit with the spirit and hit with the quickness; he also knew how to hit back, how to respond in kind in a New York minute. Bold, Black, and Beautiful things just happened faster in the world according to Brown. Tempos, terpsichore, tantrums, tangents, even jail time. They didn't call him Mr. Dynamite for nothing. Word is that when the Hardest Working Man in Showbiz did his three-year bid, he stayed industrious, organized a choir, ran the kitchen and laundry detail. Sit-down time for Black Caesar? Fuhgeddaboudit. And unlike so many of our fallen fighters whom dust and base cocaine dropped to the mat in the '80s and '90s, JB came back up as superbaaad as ever. Lest we forget, he transitioned to another world tour by straight stealing Jesus' thunder on Xmas Day. He wasn't ever a puny human to begin with anyway, so don't act surprised.

The line for his people's wake at the Apollo Thursday—as great a day in Black ancestor worship as the world done seen since James Baldwin's 1987 going-away soiree at St. John the Divine—began at 1 p.m. and didn't end till nine that night, teeming multitudes still being turned away to the chilly neon darkness uptown. All kinds of reporters, I'm talking cats from here to Melbourne, spent all day asking about the significance of JB. Your reporter hit it and quit with one inquisitor, obliquely declaring Brown "the Alpha and the Omega of the African in African American." Say wha? Because JB is the embodiment of all the working-class African blood that got us through, all that African left in us beyond the Middle Passage. Because JB embodied all our collective love, joy, ingenuity, and indefatigability, all our spirited and spiritual survivalist complexity, all our freedom jazz dance. The power of King James rang true for continental Africans too—in Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, and Congo especially. He became the bridge, and the measure of how much New World African modernity they needed to keep their postcolonial cultures moving, grooving, and counting off like a sex machine too. In a nutshell, JB was our grand Black unifier. The universal Negro solvent with the feral eyes, flashwhite teeth, torrential sweaty brow, swinging crown of piled-up processed hair, and skintight pants, who made us understand nothing less than absolute soulfulness as our cultural prime directive.

Truth be told, JB remains the one Black truth we can all agree to agree on as a life-giving essential. Just ask Sly, Jimi, Miles, Fela, and Marley, because by the time the '70s rolled around they were all convinced James was the Answer. You can hear that for yourself in Fresh, Band of Gypsys, Jack Johnson, Africa 70, Exodus, and everything that flowed from those funk-saturated templates. All the way to heaven, all the way to Parliament-Funkadelic, all the way to hiphop. No surprise that everybody attributes the way hiphop music sounds to JB—the Godfather, Jimmy Nolen, Clyde Stubblefield, and Maceo Parker knew they had built a rhythmcentric beast, a perpetual-motion-making machine whose gifts couldn't help but keep on giving. But dig, if you will, this picture: The streetwise poesy of hiphop lyrics is all his inspiration too. JB's every economical, anthropological utterance legitimized and laid bare the thought process of the 'hood's hardknockschooled philosophers, those organic Black intellectual Bamm-Bamms whose only book might be the Bible, but whose chiseled, charismatic bullet-point language was their bloodsoaked own. Point-blank, the vernacular priesthood of the MC begins with Mr. Brown, a man whose savior-like social vision, bottomless erotic optimism, and boundless capitalist ambition all found expression in his dolla-bill raps, his gangsta raps, his love raps, his protest raps, and his party raps for damn sure.

This man could sum up the modern Black condition and modern Black gender relations in two or three declarative sentences: "I don't care about your past/I just want our love to last. . . . I don't care about your wants/I just want to tell you about the dos and don'ts. . . . When you kiss me and ya miss me/You hold me tight/Make everything alright/I break out—in a cold sweat." You could fish a whole August Wilson play out of those lines, with their naked, scary promise of unconditional love and inflexible control, their spooked response to a sexual charge, their punch-drunk fervor thrown down before his intended like damnation and salvation will be delivered by the same hand. Girl, you heard the man: Get up off that thang, dance to the music, and put your foot on the rock.

While we're on that subject, we'll also remind y'all that JB's footwork, legwork, and neckwork were damn near bionic in their velocity, violence, viscosity. Talking about that way he had of moving everything below his waist at fuming warp speed while his triangular pugilist's torso became hummingbird-still, more implacable than any mannequin. Talking about the way that famously unhinged slide so aptly contrasted with that almost "zombie" freeze. Talking about that voodoo thing he did with his visage midstroke, that look from somewhere between trance and terror, jokes and hallelujah, grimace and beatitude.

Something like that look was seen on his face at the Apollo last week, Mr. Brown's body driven there by two white horses and two dark horsemen in tails and top hats. Lying in state in a solid-gold casket on the very stage he'd rocked so often in days of yore, Mr. Dynamite, a/k/a the Godfather, a/k/a He's Soul Brother Number One in Tokyo was decked out in a dark-powder-blue silk suit, delicate white gloves, and sparkling silver ankle boots as his music burst like bombs around the solemn processional line and the Apollo's famous ushers did everything they could not to break in to the Funky Chicken. His face, his death mask, postmortem and post- mortician—yes, that carved granite face, first on Black Rushmore after King and X (and before Clinton and Pryor)—epitomized what the old folks mean when they say they made him look "natural." And maybe even too natural at that, as there was something etched in that famous ebony-grain skin whose cheeks now sagged under the weight of a suddenly tight mouth poised somewhere between smirk, surrender, and dissatisfaction. Something that said he wasn't too happy the way this final act had been sprung on him, and on us too, quiet as it's kept. Because truth be known, Mr. Brown was one of those iconic figures we all thought of as family first, and as with family, we took his every success and setback as our reflection, illumination, and humiliation too. If loud James said we were Black and proud, we instantly became all that in spades: louder, Blacker, prouder. If James liked the hot pants, we blindly followed suit. And if Brown went to the slammer, we did too: "Free James Brown!" Tell me you don't remember that! And we always knew, as he'd already so famously reminded us, that while money won't change you, time will take you out. Troubles, flaws, and all, Mr. Brown was one of our best, perhaps precisely because he was an object lesson in self-mastery and self-martyrdom, and took every licking as a spur to resurrection. Lawd, tell me: Now that James Brown is truly free, what's to become of the rest of us?

James Brown, 73, Dies; ‘Godfather of Soul’ - New York Times

2006-12-25T09:15:00.000-05:00

James Brown, 73, Dies; ‘Godfather of Soul’ - New York Times:

December 25, 2006

James Brown, 73, Dies; ‘Godfather of Soul’

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 8:44 a.m. ET

ATLANTA (AP) -- James Brown, the dynamic, pompadoured ''Godfather of Soul,'' whose rasping vocals and revolutionary rhythms made him a founder of rap, funk and disco as well, died early Monday, his agent said. He was 73.

Brown was hospitalized with pneumonia at Emory Crawford Long Hospital on Sunday and died around 1:45 a.m. Monday, said his agent, Frank Copsidas of Intrigue Music. Longtime friend Charles Bobbit was by his side, he said.

Copsidas said the cause of death was uncertain. ''We really don't know at this point what he died of,'' he said.

Along with Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and a handful of others, Brown was one of the major musical influences of the past 50 years. At least one generation idolized him, and sometimes openly copied him. His rapid-footed dancing inspired Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson among others. Songs such as David Bowie's ''Fame,'' Prince's ''Kiss,'' George Clinton's ''Atomic Dog'' and Sly and the Family Stone's ''Sing a Simple Song'' were clearly based on Brown's rhythms and vocal style.

If Brown's claim to the invention of soul can be challenged by fans of Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, then his rights to the genres of rap, disco and funk are beyond question. He was to rhythm and dance music what Dylan was to lyrics: the unchallenged popular innovator.

''James presented obviously the best grooves,'' rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy once told The Associated Press. ''To this day, there has been no one near as funky. No one's coming even close.''

His hit singles include such classics as ''Out of Sight,'' ''(Get Up I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine,'' ''I Got You (I Feel Good)'' and ''Say It Loud -- I'm Black and I'm Proud,'' a landmark 1968 statement of racial pride.

''I clearly remember we were calling ourselves colored, and after the song, we were calling ourselves black,'' Brown said in a 2003 Associated Press interview. ''The song showed even people to that day that lyrics and music and a song can change society.''

He won a Grammy award for lifetime achievement in 1992, as well as Grammys in 1965 for ''Papa's Got a Brand New Bag'' (best R&B recording) and for ''Living In America'' in 1987 (best R&B vocal performance, male.) He was one of the initial artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, along with Presley, Chuck Berry and other founding fathers.

He triumphed despite an often unhappy personal life. Brown, who lived in Beech Island near the Georgia line, spent more than two years in a South Carolina prison for aggravated assault and failing to stop for a police officer. After his release on in 1991, Brown said he wanted to ''try to straighten out'' rock music.

From the 1950s, when Brown had his first R&B hit, ''Please, Please, Please'' in 1956, through the mid-1970s, Brown went on a frenzy of cross-country tours, concerts and new songs. He earned the nickname ''The Hardest Working Man in Show Business'' and often tried to prove it to his fans, said Jay Ross, his lawyer of 15 years.

Brown would routinely lose two or three pounds each time he performed and kept his furious concert schedule in his later years even as he fought prostate cancer, Ross said.

''He'd always give it his all to give his fans the type of show they expected,'' he said.

With his tight pants, shimmering feet, eye makeup and outrageous hair, Brown set the stage for younger stars such as Michael Jackson and Prince.

In 1986, he was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And rap stars of recent years overwhelmingly have borrowed his lyrics with a digital technique called sampling.

Brown's work has been replayed by the Fat Boys, Ice-T, Public Enemy and a host of other rappers. ''The music out there is only as good as my last record,'' Brown joked in a 1989 interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

''Disco is James Brown, hip-hop is James Brown, rap is James Brown; you know what I'm saying? You hear all the rappers, 90 percent of their music is me,'' he told the AP in 2003.

Born in poverty in Barnwell, S.C., in 1933, he was abandoned as a 4-year-old to the care of relatives and friends and grew up on the streets of Augusta, Ga., in an ''ill-repute area,'' as he once called it. There he learned to wheel and deal.

''I wanted to be somebody,'' Brown said.

By the eighth grade in 1949, Brown had served 3 1/2 years in Alto Reform School near Toccoa, Ga., for breaking into cars.

While there, he met Bobby Byrd, whose family took Brown into their home. Byrd also took Brown into his group, the Gospel Starlighters. Soon they changed their name to the Famous Flames and their style to hard R&B.

In January 1956, King Records of Cincinnati signed the group, and four months later ''Please, Please, Please'' was in the R&B Top Ten.

Pete Allman, a radio personality in Las Vegas who had been friends with Brown for 15 years, credited Brown with jump-starting his career and motivating him personally and professionally.

''He was a very positive person. There was no question he was the hardest working man in show business,'' Allman said. ''I remember Mr. Brown as someone who always motivated me, got me reading the Bible.''

While most of Brown's life was glitz and glitter -- he was the singing preacher in 1980's ''The Blues Brothers'' -- he was plagued with charges of abusing drugs and alcohol and of hitting his third wife, Adrienne.

In September 1988, Brown, high on PCP and carrying a shotgun, entered an insurance seminar next to his Augusta office. Police said he asked seminar participants if they were using his private restroom.

Police chased Brown for a half-hour from Augusta into South Carolina and back to Georgia. The chase ended when police shot out the tires of his truck.

Brown received a six-year prison sentence. He spent 15 months in a South Carolina prison and 10 months in a work release program before being paroled in February 1991. In 2003, the South Carolina parole board granted him a pardon for his crimes in that state.

Soon after his release, Brown was on stage again with an audience that included millions of cable television viewers nationwide who watched the three-hour, pay-per-view concert at Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles.

Adrienne Brown died in 1996 in Los Angeles at age 47. She took PCP and several prescription drugs while she had a bad heart and was weak from cosmetic surgery two days earlier, the coroner said.

More recently, he married his fourth wife, Tomi Raye Hynie, one of his backup singers. The couple had a son, James Jr.

Two years later, Brown spent a week in a private Columbia hospital, recovering from what his agent said was dependency on painkillers. Brown's attorney, Albert ''Buddy'' Dallas, said the singer was exhausted from six years of road shows.

Brown was performing to the end, and giving back to his community.

Three days before his death, he joined volunteers at his annual toy giveaway in Augusta, and he planned to perform on New Year's Eve at B.B. King Blues Club in New York.

''He was dramatic to the end -- dying on Christmas Day,'' said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a friend of Brown's since 1955. ''Almost a dramatic, poetic moment. He'll be all over the news all over the world today. He would have it no other way.''

Michael Woods

2006-12-19T09:10:00.001-05:00

Michael Woods: Tuesday, December 12, 2006 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Humanity and the Importance of Jazz

"God has brought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create - and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations.

Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life's difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music.

Modern Jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument.

It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by Jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of "racial identity" as a problem for a multi-racial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls.

Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down. And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these." posted by Michael Woods

Walter Booker Obit :: eJazzNews.com : The Number One Jazz News Resource On The Net :: Jazz News Daily

2006-12-19T07:07:00.000-05:00

Walter Booker Obit :: eJazzNews.com : The Number One Jazz News Resource On The Net :: Jazz News Daily: Obituaries: Walter Booker Obit

Posted by: editoron Thursday, December 14, 2006 - 09:57 AM

Walter Monroe Booker, Jr., lovingly dubbed “Bookie,” was born on December 17, 1933 in Prairie View, Texas to the late Walter Monroe Booker, Sr. and the late Thomye Collins Booker. The family moved to Washington, D.C. when his father accepted a position with the Howard University Medical School and later became Head of the Department of Pharmacology. Booker was the oldest of two children, his sister, Marjorie, fifteen years his junior resides in Washington, D.C. He attended the District of Columbia Public Schools for his early education and graduated from high school at the Palmer Institute of North Carolina. Booker then matriculated and graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Booker was drafted into the United States Army during which period he became fascinated with and began to play the acoustic bass. He married Yvonne Blakeney with whom he had two sons, Randall and Russell. In 1959, he returned to Washington where he quickly became a member of Andrew White’s band, the JFK Quintet, who performed regularly at the Bohemian Caverns. Cannonball Adderley discovered them at the Caverns and brought them to public attention by way of their first recording, “New Jazz Frontiers From Washington.” He attended Howard University Medical School while performing with the quintet, but withdrew from school after two years to pursue his musical career full time.

He moved to New York City in 1964 and studied privately with Homer R. Mensch, Juilliard faculty member and one of the 20th Century’s greatest bass players and teachers of that instrument. Booker later married Maria Smith and had one son, Krishna. His remarkable talent gained recognition fast from notable and professional jazz musicians. He was first hired by trumpeter Donald Byrd, and later performed with both Stan Getz’ and Sonny Rollins’ bands. From 1967 to 1969, Booker recorded and toured with many jazz greats — Ray Bryant, Art Farmer, Harold Vick, Betty Carter, and, most notably, with Thelonius Monk’s last touring ensemble.

In 1969, Booker was invited to join the Cannonball Adderley Quintet, a recording, and touring relationship and friendship that lasted until Cannonball’s untimely death in 1975. That year, Booker became Sarah Vaughan’s bassist. He recorded and toured with her for the next six years.

While playing with Cannonball and Sarah Vaughan, Bookie began to explore his interest in music production and recording. He designed, constructed, and operated Boogie Woogie Studios in his Upper West Side Manhattan apartment. Booker used geodesic principles to sculpt two rehearsal and recording spaces, an ingenious concept that produced clean, pure, high-tech quality sound. For over ten years Boogie Woogie became a launching pad for musicians from all over the world, helping to shape their growth by providing a safe haven for them to develop their craft and learn at the feet of the many masters who passed through the studio doors. Artists who credit Walter Booker and Boogie Woogie Studios for their start include Nat Adderley, Jr., Rasheed Ali, Angela Bofill, Earl McIntyre, T.S. Monk, Airto Moreira, Noel Pointer, and Moroslav Vigous Ira “Buddy” Williams.

Three unions born of Boogie Woogie Studio include the young group “Natural Essence,” led by artist Rasheed Ali; “Love Carnival and Dreams,” a wonderful Brazilian jazz collaboration formed by Booker and Guilherme Vergueiro; and “Weather Report” the jazz crossover group formed by Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter.

In 1983, Bertha Hope was sent by a friend to meet Booker to investigate recording in the Boogie Woogie studio. This was the beginning of a friendship that blossomed over the next three years into a life-long relationship. They enjoyed many hours of playing and recording together.

Booker traveled and performed with the John Hicks Trio. The trio also accompanied saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders on a West Coast tour. Nat Adderley, Cannonball’s brother, asked Bookie to join his new quintet. Booker continued to play, record, and tour with other jazz artists, but he primarily recorded and toured internationally with Nat for 17 years until Nat’s demise in early 2000. Every year since its 1987 inception, Booker performed at the annual Child of the Sun Festival in Lakeland, Florida with the Nat Adderley Quintet, continuing after Adderley’s death with the remaining members.

In the early ‘90s Booker served as tutor, teacher and mentor to many, inspiring young musicians through lectures, demonstrations and performances at the Sewell Music Conservatory in Washington, D.C. This exemplified his love and dedication to music. His generosity in sharing his knowledge with others expanded his influence by reaching across generations in this “hometown” setting.

In 2000, after recording on well over 250 albums, Walter Booker produced and released his first album as bandleader forming the Walter Booker Quintet to record “Bookie’s Cookbook” on Mapleshade Records. He was anchored by Cecil Payne on baritone sax, Marcus Belgrave on trumpet, Roni Ben-Hur on guitar, and Leroy Williams on drums. He toured as part of the Bertha Hope Trio, together with drummer Jimmy Cobb. Bookie also formed ElMollennium with his wife jazz pianist Bertha Hope and guitarist Roni Ben-Hur, an ensemble dedicated to performing the music of the late be-bop pianist Elmo Hope.

“Book’s Bossa” and “Saudade,” tunes Walter Booker composed, were recorded by Pat Metheny, Donald Byrd and over a dozen others. Portions of another composition from the “Zodiac Suite” were sampled by Hip Hop artist “A Tribe Called Qwest” and Grammy recipient “Monica.” In 2004, in recognition of his music integrated into the most played song for the prior year, Booker received a Citation of Achievement from BMI for the “Monica” recording, “So Gone” which attained the No. 1 slot on Billboard’s R&B chart.

In September 2004, as a birthday tribute to Cannonball Adderley, Booker performed at the Iridium in New York City with the last rhythm section to perform with Cannonball’s band. Joining him were Michael Woolf on piano, Roy McCurdy on drums, Vincent Herring on alto sax, James Moody on tenor sax and James Carter on baritone sax. In December of that same year, La Belle Epoch restaurant hosted a special birthday bash for Booker. It was heavily attended by many world-renowned musicians and friends who came to jam and celebrate with him. It would be his last public performance.

On Friday, November 24, 2006, Walter M. Booker, Jr. left this world to journey to the next. He is survived by Bertha, his loving wife of twenty years, three children Randall, Russell, and Krishna, his sister Marjorie, niece Cecily and her husband Keith, nephew Thomas, grandnephew Victor; his stepchildren Monica, Daryl and Kevin -- whom he called his ‘brother-in-the-craft,’ a host of cousins and many loving friends and acquaintances.

“Celebration of Life”
Memorial Service
for
Walter M. Booker, Jr.

to be held on

Sunday
January 14, 2007
7:30 P.M.

Saint Peters Lutheran Church

Bebop Lives! Jazz at Lincoln Center :: eJazzNews.com : The Number One Jazz News Resource On The Net :: Jazz News Daily

2006-12-19T07:03:00.000-05:00

Bebop Lives! Jazz at Lincoln Center :: eJazzNews.com : The Number One Jazz News Resource On The Net :: Jazz News Daily: Bebop Lives! Jazz at Lincoln Center

Posted by: eJazzNews Readeron Friday, December 15, 2006 - 09:45 AM

Bebop Lives!

Featuring James Moody &
Charles McPherson with Roy Hargrove & Roberta Gambarini

January 26 & 27, 8pm, Rose Theater in Frederick P. Rose Hall
January 26-Friday Free Pre-Concert Lecture w/ Phil Schaap

New York, NY (December 12, 2006) Bebop saxophonists James Moody (tenor) and Charles McPherson (alto) are two of the greatest living players of this exciting style of jazz and they bring the swing to Frederick P. Rose Hall on January 26 and 27 in Rose Theater. These two will be joined by two incredible performers, Roy Hargrove (trumpet) and Roberta Gambarini (vocals). Ms. Gambarini is nominated for a Grammy ® this year for Best Jazz Vocal Album. With a rich history in the continuation of bebop, these artists bring to life the jazz style founded by giants like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk.

Tickets for Bebop Lives! are $30, $50, $75, $100, $120 and can be purchased at the Jazz at Lincoln Center box office on Broadway at 60th Street, by calling CenterCharge at (212) 721-6500 or via www.jalc.org.

Bebop Lives! Is a celebration of one of the greatest and most difficult innovations to duplicate in jazz. There will also be a Friday pre-concert lecture with Jazz at Lincoln Center curator Phil Schaap introducing all ticket holders to the breadth of bebop and the impact this innovation had on the history of jazz.

Charles McPherson says, "I'm looking forward to doing the gig with James Moody because of his association with Dizzy's big band. Just playing with somebody who was around at that time is an extra special treat for someone like me...I'm a little younger."

"Bebop is incredibly important music because it has all of the real elements of what music is," Mr. McPherson adds. "The innovators of this music were melodic, they were harmonically saavy and rhythmically very advanced. The bebop idiom exemplifies all three of those nuances."

Cadillac is the Lead New York Sponsor of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Jazz at Lincoln Center proudly acknowledges its 2006-07 sponsors: Altria Group, Inc., Bank of America, Bloomberg, The Coca-Cola Company, Time Warner Inc., XM Satellite Radio.

BET J is proud to partner with Jazz at Lincoln Center to present the television series
Journey with Jazz at Lincoln Center.

For more information please visit www.jalc.org

# # #

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LISTING INFORMATION:

Producer: Jazz at Lincoln Center
Event: Bebop Lives! Featuring James Moody, Charles McPherson, Roy Hargrove & Roberta Gambarini
Date/Time: Friday-Saturday, January 26 & 27, 2007/8pm
Location: Rose Theater in Frederick P. Rose Hall located on Broadway at 60th St.
Tickets: $30, $50, $75, $100, $120 and available at the Jazz at Lincoln Center box office on Broadway at 60th St., by calling CenterCharge at (212) 721-6500 or via www.jalc.org.

For Immediate Release

December 12, 2006

For More Information Contact:
Scott Thompson, Assistant Director, Public Relations (212) 258-9807 or sthompson@jalc.org

Rifftides: Doug Ramsey on jazz and other matters

2006-12-19T06:45:00.000-05:00

Rifftides: Doug Ramsey on jazz and other matters: "«

December 19, 2006

The Bebop Bentley

The Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter was known for her friendship with Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and other leading musicians of the bop and post-bop periods. She was born a Rothschild -- as Jean Bach puts it, a vraie Rotschild -- of the English branch of the lavishly moneyed international banking family. She married into minor royalty, was an ambulance driver in the Free French resistance during World War Two, lived in Mexico for a time and popped up in New York in 1951. Her interest in jazz led her to become a patron of a number of musicians. She is honored in the titles of several compositions including Monk's "Pannonica" and Horace Silver's "Nica's Dream," first recorded in an unforgettable version by the original edition of Art Blakey's jazz messengers.

Nica's favorite Bentley S1, one of several Bentleys and Rolls Royces she owned, was noted for its disposition around Manhattan, often in front of jazz clubs where parking was not necessarily sanctioned by the city. The Baroness died in 1988, but her fame and that of the Bentley continue. A Rifftides reader in New Zealand who is a Bentley collector asked a while back if I had stories about Nica and the Bentley. I hadn't, but I asked Jean Bach, the filmaker of A Great Day in Harlem, who knew Nica. She replied with a letter that I forwarded to New Zealand. Jean gave permission to use it here as well. It gives a sense of Nica's personality and of her dedication to Monk in his later days. For that matter, it gives a sense of the delightful Mrs. Bach.

In the early fifties, a fashion photographer friend of our asked my late husband to round up some musicians for a party on his roof. The worlds of jazz and fashion were just beginning to fuse, and Bob came up with an assortment of stars that soon became the Jazz Messengers.
Outside the building I spotted a Bentley and a Rolls. "Must be some heavy garmentos," I thought. And then I met the driver of the Bentley - the very British, very fragrant Baroness. "You like my scent? I think it's my daughter's - Jonka's."

I think the Bentley was the band bus for the musicians, and I guess the Rolls followed with the instruments. A vraie Rothschild, she was one of several fascinating siblings. Her sister was the author of a book titled, Dear Lord Rothschild, which was the opening line of a letter from someone named Balfour - probably a first draft of the Balfour declaration. Nica's brother, Lord Victor Rothschild, was studying piano with Teddy Wilson, which is how and when she got turned onto jazz. When she immigrated to the U.S., she settled in a house just across the Hudson River from Manhattan* with several of her children and more than five or six cats. Letters from her were always datelined, "The Cat House."

I spotted the Bentley outside a nearby piano bar one night, and since I had a leg of lamb roasting slowly in the oven, I popped in to see if she'd care to join me and a couple of friends for dinner. I gave her the whole menu, which appeared to meet her approval, and we started to walk back to my house, when she suddenly said, "Good heavens, what time is it?"

Turns out she was already late for Thelonious Monk's night-time tray. As Monk had become more and more eccentric, Nica and Monk's wife, Nellie, had agreed that it would be more convenient for him to move into chez Koenigswarter, where he could spend his days and nights in his own room, where each meal would be delivered on a tray, and he could dine alone.

I once asked the pianist Barry Harris, who also had a room in Nica's house, "Does someone (usually Nica) always deliver the tray" "Yes, and they'd better not ask me to bring one," he answered. Even though Charlie Parker died in her posh Manhattan apartment, she always maintained that her favorite musician of all time was Monk.

Another jazz musician with good taste was the late saxophone/trumpet player, bandleader, composer, arranger Benny Carter. He lived in the Hollywood Hills, and negotiated those twists and turns in a Rolls Royce. When he died, the Rolls passed along to James Moody of "Moody's Mood for Love" fame.

Fondly,
Jean

*The Baroness's first New York residence was in the Stanhope hotel, where Parker died in her apartment in 1955. Then she lived in the Bolivar hotel, made famous by Monk's "Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are," before buying the house overlooking Weehawken, New Jersey, on the Hudson River.

To see a picture of her Bentley S1 and read a bit about its history, go here.

Dave Black, Ellington drummer - The Boston Globe

2006-12-16T17:29:00.000-05:00

Dave Black, Ellington drummer - The Boston Globe:

Dave Black, Ellington drummer

By Adam Bernstein, Washington Post | December 8, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Dave Black, a jazz drummer who toured and recorded with Duke Ellington's big band in the mid-1950s and inspired composer Billy Strayhorn to write the drum showcase "Gonna Tan Your Hide," died Monday at his home in Alameda, Calif. He was 78 and had pancreatic cancer.

Mr. Black, an immensely versatile drummer, played swing, bebop, and early rock with equal skill in his native Philadelphia. After seeing him, Fred Astaire called Mr. Black "the only drummer I've seen with dancing fingers."

He joined Ellington in 1953, after beating out Ed Shaughnessy and Philly Joe Jones in a contest to replace Louis Bellson. He stayed with the band two years, until a diagnosis of polio forced his departure.

After recuperating, he became a staple of a Dixieland revival band led by trumpeter Bob Scobey and a much-admired freelance drummer in the San Francisco area, performing with singer Lena Horne, pianist Earl "Fatha" Hines, and others. He also co-led the Gene Krupa tribute band from 1966 to 1992.

Speaking of Ellington, Mr. Black told jazz writer Nat Hentoff: "Of all the band leaders I have worked for, he was very free -- letting you play your way, your style."

Bebop Lives! :: eJazzNews.com : The Number One Jazz News Resource On The Net :: Jazz News Daily

2006-12-11T21:27:00.000-05:00

Bebop Lives! :: eJazzNews.com : The Number One Jazz News Resource On The Net :: Jazz News Daily: " Bebop Lives!

Posted by: editoron Monday, December 11, 2006 - 05:45 PM

Featuring James Moody &
Charles McPherson with Roy Hargrove & Roberta Gambarini

January 26 & 27, 8pm, Rose Theater in Frederick P. Rose Hall
January 26-Friday Free Pre-Concert Lecture w/ Phil Schaap
New York, NY (December 12, 2006) Bebop saxophonists James Moody (tenor) and Charles McPherson (alto) are two of the greatest living players of this exciting style of jazz and they bring the swing to Frederick P. Rose Hall on January 26 and 27 in Rose Theater. These two will be joined by two incredible performers, Roy Hargrove (trumpet) and Roberta Gambarini (vocals). Ms. Gambarini is nominated for a Grammy ® this year for Best Jazz Vocal Album. With a rich history in the continuation of bebop, these artists bring to life the jazz style founded by giants like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk.

Tickets for Bebop Lives! are $30, $50, $75, $100, $120 and can be purchased at the Jazz at Lincoln Center box office on Broadway at 60th Street, by calling CenterCharge at (212) 721-6500 or via www.jalc.org.

Bebop Lives! Is a celebration of one of the greatest and most difficult innovations to duplicate in jazz. There will also be a Friday pre-concert lecture with Jazz at Lincoln Center curator Phil Schaap introducing all ticket holders to the breadth of bebop and the impact this innovation had on the history of jazz.

Charles McPherson says, "I'm looking forward to doing the gig with James Moody because of his association with Dizzy's big band. Just playing with somebody who was around at that time is an extra special treat for someone like me...I'm a little younger."

"Bebop is incredibly important music because it has all of the real elements of what music is," Mr. McPherson adds. "The innovators of this music were melodic, they were harmonically saavy and rhythmically very advanced. The bebop idiom exemplifies all three of those nuances."

Cadillac is the Lead New York Sponsor of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Jazz at Lincoln Center proudly acknowledges its 2006-07 sponsors: Altria Group, Inc., Bank of America, Bloomberg, The Coca-Cola Company, Time Warner Inc., XM Satellite Radio.

BET J is proud to partner with Jazz at Lincoln Center to present the television series
Journey with Jazz at Lincoln Center.

For more information please visit www.jalc.org

Defusing Davis's Strange ‘Brew'

2006-12-11T09:14:00.000-05:00

Defusing Davis's Strange ‘Brew':

Defusing Davis's Strange ‘Brew'
Jazz

BY WILL FRIEDWALD
December 11, 2006

Miles Davis's classic 1969 album "Bitches Brew" is perhaps the most outrageous hoax ever perpetrated on the world's jazz lovers: For the first time since the swing era, a great jazz instrumentalist was able to produce art and sell it in large quantities to record buyers by convincing them that it was pop music.

At the time, "Bitches Brew" was promoted by Columbia Records as the breakthrough album in the new genre of "fusion," which promised to deliver the best of both worlds — namely the rock that was so popular and the jazz that was finally reaching the mainstream. Yet in retrospect, the album has little to do with any kind of rock 'n' roll, except maybe for some variations played by such guitar gods as Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, and Eric Clapton, who were deeply influenced by jazz and blues.

Just how much "Bitches Brew" is actually art music, with precious little to tie it to the pop of its period, was reinforced in a concert Saturday night at Merkin Hall featuring the saxophonist Bob Belden and his band, Animation, as part of a series called "Reissue: Classic Recordings Live."

Mr. Belden has a long history with "Bitches Brew."Since first hearing it as a freshman music student at North Texas State in the early 1970s, he has not only become one of the more important instrumentalists, composers, arrangers, and bandleaders on the contemporary scene, but a Grammy-winning producer of both new and historical albums. His specialty is the music of Miles Davis; in 1998 he produced a four-CD box entitled "The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions," which included not only the six tracks on the original 1969 double-LP, but an additional 15 different songs by more or less the same edition of the Davis ensemble at the same time.

If "Bitches Brew" was a successful "fusion," it wasn't between jazz and rock, but between the regular members of Davis's working quintet (Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette) and special guests who were added for the recording dates (Bennie Maupin, Joe Zawinul, John McLaughlin, etc). Likewise, the original tunes were a combination of material that the Quintet had been playing on the road and music spontaneously created in the studio, assembled and reworked from roughly nine hours of sessions and boiled down by Davis into a remarkably coherent double-LP.

The expanded group that recorded most of the original "Bitches Brew" included three horns, electric guitar, two keyboards, two basses (in some combination of electric and acoustic), and as many as four drummers and percussionists. By contrast, Animation consists of Mr. Belden on soprano sax, Tim Hagans on trumpet, Scott Kinsey on keyboard and various electronics, Matt Garrison on a five-string, fender-style electric bass, Guy Lachada on drums, and DJ Logic on turntables and additional electronica.

In terms of playing "Bitches Brew," Animation was well served by advances in technology. Mr. Kinsey can create as many different effects with his computerized setup as two keyboardists could 35 years ago, and DJ Logic could use his "instrument"to reinforce either the percussion or the keyboard.

On the original album, Davis experimented with electronic enhancements to his trumpet. He didn't have the raw technique of a Dizzy Gillespie or Clifford Brown, but he had a preternatural knowledge of how to coax a universe of sound from his instrument. The result was a revolutionary combination of reverb, feedback, echo, and other special effects, all of which blended with Davis's extant vocabulary of valving colorations. The novelty of these effects soon wore off, and few trumpeters have tried them since, but on Saturday Mr. Hagans unabashedly and authentically deployed electro-manipulations designed to sound like state-of-the-art 1969.

Yet the canniest imitation of Davis's trumpet timbre was created by Mr. Belden on his soprano sax, when, during the opening track, "Pharoah's Dance," he played a largely unaccompanied pentatonic passage that sounded considerably more Spanish than anything in the fourth track, "Spanish Key."

Taken as whole, Animation did more to imitate Davis's spirit of experimentation than his music. As with much of the best jazz repertory performances — such as Wynton Marsalis's reassessment of Louis Armstrong's Hot Five masterpieces and Steve Bernstein's revisiting of Don Cherry's "Relativity Suite" (to name two recent, trumpet-specific concerts) — the idea Saturday at Merkin Hall was to capture the spirit rather than the exact letter of the original "Bitches Brew." For one thing, Mr. Hagans didn't repeat the same allusion to "Spinning Wheel" that Davis threw in six minutes into the title track.

But in a more general sense, a reimagining of "Bitches Brew" rather than a note-by-note rendition is the only suitable tribute, because it is difficult to hear the original six extra-long tracks specifically as compositions: They are less about the melody than the groove, finding a specific rhythmic feeling and holding to it, slowing down occasionally to an almost painfully ad-lib tempo only for dramatic purposes. One reason this extremely avant-garde music found a more receptive audience than most forms of experimental jazz in the first place was because Davis simply kept the pulse going and the bottom (many layers of bass line) solid.

In earlier years, Davis had improvised on virtually everything: melody, harmony, modes, and scales, whereas by 1969 he seemed to be using nothing but groove and mood as a starting point. Though the music often seemed formless and rambling, it could never be accused of sounding repetitive or boring. But it was complicated, and Animation's performance helped illuminate the places in the compositions where the melodies actually reside and how they differ from one another.

The only short piece on the album, the four-minute track called "John McLaughlin," is essentially an excerpt from one of the extended jams spotlighting the rhythm on the title that Davis liked; here, as played by Mr. Kinsey, it seemed more like a distinct tune."Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" was also one of the more clearly defined melodies, an elaboration on the blues that Cassandra Wilson distilled into song form on her 1998 album "Traveling Miles." Animation's interpretation began with a powerful bass vamp, played by Mr. Garrison on a latin-style electric upright instrument, which made the piece sound like the offspring of Davis's 1959 "So What."

Animation's concert ended at the 90-minute mark, almost the exact length of the original album. The only notable absentee was the bass clarinet, played by Bennie Maupin on the original, whose presence in 1969 reinforced the idea that "Bitches Brew" was a jazz album rather than a pop album. It still has considerably more in common with the free jazz of Ornette Coleman and the avantgarde classical music of Stockhausen and Milton Babbit than it does with the Rolling Stones.

"Bitches Brew" was the catalyst for a lot of jazz that followed, but in 37 years there's been nothing to match it. Indeed, the idea that a double-LP set of abstract improvisations (some as long as 27 minutes) could sell a million copies today seems as far removed from us as the big band era.

wfriedwald@nysun.com

Jay "Hootie" McShann - in memory

2006-12-08T08:50:00.000-05:00

Jay "Hootie" McShann - in memory:

In Loving Memory
James Columbus McShann: January 12, 1916 - December 7, 2006

Kansas City pianist, bandleader and songwriter Jay 'Hootie' McShann has died in hospital today (Dec. 7) after a brief illness. He was 90 years old. He was the last of the great Kansas City players, and the creator of a style that combined swing and blues and changed the course of popular music. A piano player with a unique and subtle touch, he was a bluesman at heart. His best known composition 'Confessin' The Blues' has been recorded by artists like The Rolling Stones, BB King, Little Walter, Esther Phillips, and Jimmy 'Spoon' Witherspoon among many many others. McShann was born in Muskogee, Oklahama in 1916

Settling in Kansas City in the mid-'30s, he soon formed a small group, but by 1940 had a large band which included a young alto sax player called Charlie Parker. His links to Parker are widely known, but McShann's later role in building the career of singers Walter Brown (who co-wrote Confessin' the Blues) and Jimmy Witherspoon has been largely overlooked. Typecast as a blues band, McShann's group recorded few of his more complex jazz arrangements, but they helped build his reputation and he was able to move to New York in 1942 - however, the second World War intervened, McShann was drafted, and moved to Los Angeles after his discharge two years later. For many years, he languished in relative obscurity, but emerged again in 1969, taking up a heavy touring schedule that brought him international fame. Along the way he recorded for numerous labels, including Decca, Mercury, Vee Jay, EmArcy and Atlantic.

Toronto was frequently on his tour schedules; jazz musician and Downtown Jazz Festival artistic director Jim Galloway brought him to the now-vanished Bourbon Street club in 1972 and he recorded close to a dozen albums in the city for the Sackville label. His last four albums, including the Grammy-nominated 2003 release "Going to Kansas City", were recorded for the Edmonton-based Stony Plain label; three of them were co-produced by guitarist Duke Robillard. Stony Plain's owner, Holger Petersen, acting as tour manager, frequently accompanied McShann to international jazz festivals in Montreal, Toronto, Monterey, and the North Sea Jazz Festival in Holland. Said Petersen: "Jay had a great uplifting smile and kind words for everyone. He was always a delight to travel with, and had a very laidback, inquisitive and cheerful attitude. I'll miss his smile, and hearing him and saying 'Everything's cool'."And Jim Galloway summed it up: "His passing marks the end of a line. He will be missed." Jay McShann leaves his companion of more than 30 years, Thelma Adams (known as Marianne McShann), and three daughters - Linda McShann Gerber, Jayme McShann Lewis, and Pam McShann.

Funeral services will be announced shortly; plans are pending for a musical celebration of his life to be held in Kansas City early next year. For further information please contact:
Richard Flohil at 416 351-1323 Holger Petersen at Stony Plain Records 780 468-6423

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