Hello There, Universe

Letter to a Clubowner

2012-01-18T23:35:00.003-05:00

My quartet played a gig at an Atlanta club back in October. The clubowner told me that they were looking for bands could bring in 30-50 listeners. We had what I thought was a successful gig - pretty good musically, and the 45 or so folks in the audience were enthusiastic about the music.

I waited a reasonable amount of time before approaching them about playing there again. I was told that our last gig had been "a little sleepy, turnout-wise." I pointed out that we met their audience expectations; the owner replied that bar sales had been disappointing, but offered us an earlier weeknight or Sunday slot instead of the more desirable Friday or Saturday. I probably overreacted in sending her this long reply. I've changed her name and redacted the name of the club. Creative Loafing is Atlanta's weekly entertainment paper.

Hi Katie,

I know that what I should say is: sure, we’d love to play on a weeknight or Sunday. But this exchange, as well as some other recent adventures trying to book bands, has brought a lot of things to the surface for me, and here’s what I’m feeling:

I’ve played music for 30 years – commercial music with other folks’ bands, but my own music has always been off-center, jazz-based music. It’s the type of music that will never have a large audience, but it’s the kind I’m driven to create. For the Jeff Crompton Quartet, our October gig at ------- was a good one.

Thinking back on that gig, I remember how nervous I was that we’d attract the required 30-50 listeners. It’s actually embarrassing and kind of humiliating to me when I remember how relieved I was that we’d “passed the test” by drawing the required crowd – at a venue that wasn’t paying us anything.

And now I find out that we didn’t pass after all. So after all these years of struggling, I put a new, excellent band together, and played a show which the clubowner liked, but don’t rate a weekend night. I'm depressed beyond words.

The current system of live music in clubs reminds me of our political system – it’s broken. You and I are part of the problem, and I’m kind of ashamed of myself for contributing to the problem by being willing to play at ------- under the current system. But not only am I willing, I want to. I love -------. I love the feel of the room; I love the acoustics; I love playing there; I love listening to music there; I love the Fin du Monde beer. I love the place.

But what have musicians come to? It has come to the point where there are hardly any clubs that will actually pay musicians for playing. Well, okay. Times are hard. Many clubs are scraping by. So we musicians have come to accept the fact that we have to play for the door, tips, or nothing. And if we play for the door, we have to hire our own doorman – and if we do that, we probably will have little left after paying him.

But okay – we’ve become resigned to that.

But when did the major responsibility for promoting the gig (and thus the venue), providing an audience, and racking up bar sales become the band’s? They should certainly be part of those things (mostly by playing good music), but it’s just bizarre that it should all fall to the band.

At our October gig, there were indeed some light drinkers and even some teetotalers. But some of those folks wanted to order food, only to find that there was little or none available. And one beer aficionado in the audience complained to me that he had difficulty getting served. I don’t know what the specifics of his problem were, but he wasn’t happy. It was his first time hearing me play, and he genuinely seemed to love the music. But I don’t know if I can get him to come back to -------. So maybe we’re not the right band for a weekend night at -------; maybe our audience is not right for the place – that’s for you to decide. But maybe the disappointing sales weren’t the band’s fault.

And promotion – I did a lot, but I have since thought of some other things I could do. And I’ll do them next time, if there is a next time. But I just looked through Creative Loafing, and none of -------’s upcoming shows are included in the music listings. I can understand if you don’t want to buy ads – I’ve bought Creative Loafing ads, and they’re expensive – but getting your venue included in the listings is free; there’s even a paragraph of instructions on how to get your shows listed.

I’m more discouraged than ever to be a creative jazz musician in Atlanta. I’ve probably pissed you off and burned this bridge, but that wasn’t my intention. To give you the simple answer I should have, instead of this depressing diatribe: Yes, we’d love to play at ------- – on a weekend, weekday or Sunday. Whenever you’ll have us, if you’ll still have us.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. Like I said, I love -------, and hope to play there soon, in spite of what I’ve said about the broken system we both contribute to. If that’s not to be, so be it.

Jeff

Deep Rivers

2012-01-14T22:42:00.001-05:00

Sam Rivers was born in 1923; he died on the day after Christmas, 2011. The death of an 88-year old can't really be said to be shocking or unexpected, but Rivers' passing caught me be surprise; it sometimes seemed as if he would live forever, creating incredible music for all time.

Sam Rivers was a saxophonist (tenor and soprano), flutist, pianist and composer; he also recorded on bass clarinet and synthesizer (and as a vocalist) on occasion. Jazz is often considered a young man's game, but Rivers was a late bloomer, at least in terms of making a mark in the larger jazz world. Although he had put in stints with Herb Pomeroy's Boston big band and T-Bone Walker and had recorded a Tadd Dameron session for Blue Note (not released until many years later), he was over 40 years old and practically unknown when he joined Miles Davis's quintet for a tour of Japan in 1964.

Recordings from that tour reveal a mature, imaginative, and very individualistic musician. He knows the tunes, knows the changes, and knows how to improvise over them. But he already seems to be somewhere else; his phrasing and note choices push against the confines of the songs. Musically speaking, Rivers wanted to be elsewhere, and his association with the Davis group ended when the Japanese tour was over.

But the floodgates had been opened; by the end of the year, Rivers had recorded Blue Note sessions with Tony Williams and Larry Young, following by Fuchsia Swing Song, his own first album. This seeming explosion of creativity marked the level of accomplishment that would last the rest of Rivers' life.

In 1970 he and his wife Beatrice opened Studio Rivbea in their Manhattan loft home. For most of the decade, audiences had the opportunity to walk through Rivers' living room to the performance space and hear some of the finest avant-garde jazz musicians in the world. Highlights from one week at Studio Rivbea were issued on five LPs - the Wildflower series on Douglas, reissued on CD as The New York Jazz Loft Sessions.

In 1991, he took a step in common with many Northern residents nearing 70 years of age - he moved to Florida. In Orlando, he found a large number of highly skilled musicians who were employed by Disney World, but were hungry to play some challenging, creative music. Rivers' name for his large ensembles was the RivBea Orchestra, and the Florida version of the big band was tight and impressive, even if some of the soloists could not match Rivers' own level of inspiration.

But for many listeners, Rivers was at his best in a trio setting, joining a bassist and drummer to play seamless sets of mostly-improvised music that flowed in and out of different keys and rhythms. His mid-70's trio, with Dave Holland and Barry Altschul, was almost telepathic in the musicians' responses to each other. His Florida trio, with Doug Mathews on bass and Anthony Cole on drums, was also excellent. Mathews doubled on bass clarinet and Cole on tenor sax, so they sometimes produced surprising all-woodwind textures. Personally, I feel cheated that the only recorded evidence of a really magnificent trio, Rivers, bassist Richard Davis, and percussionist Warren Smith, is six minutes from a 1972 concert released on Rivers' Hues album.

I was lucky enough to hear Rivers perform three times. The first was at Tyrone's in Athens, Georgia, where he played a stunning duet performance with Dave Holland in 1979. He was back a week later with a quartet, but the Art Ensemble of Chicago had a concert a few blocks away the same night - what a choice to have to make! - and I went with the Art Ensemble. (As I write this, I'm listening to the two wonderful Rivers/Holland duo albums on the Improvising Artists label.)

I didn't hear Rivers in person again until 2002, when his trio with Mathews and Cole played in an old stone church with wonderful acoustics, just a few blocks from my house in Atlanta. About a year and a half later he drove up from Orlando (no limo or private jet - the jazz business ain't exactly big-time show biz) to play a concert with the Jason Moran Bandwagon trio at a concert hall south of Atlanta. One of the selections they played was Rivers' tune "Beatrice," from the Fuchsia Swing Song album; this is the only one of Rivers' compositions that has become something of a jazz standard.

And now I am left with not only the memories of some wonderful concerts, but with regret. I always meant to make the eight-hour drive to Orlando to hear the RivBea Orchestra perform, but somehow never got around to it. I was excited to have a chance to redeem myself this Spring - I was planning to meet a friend in Sarasota for some shows Rivers had scheduled in March. Now, of course, that won't happen.

Reading what I've written, I'm struck with what a shallow tribute this is. I've only scratched the surface; Sam Rivers deserves a book, not a little blog post. So long, Sam Rivers, and thanks for the endlessly creative music.

George Hornsby

2011-11-08T22:31:00.002-05:00

This post is a rebuttal of sorts. As I write, I've got my copy of Bill Russell's American Music by Mark Hazeldine open to page 100. This page represents the major source of information in print anywhere about Pittsburgh pianist George Hornsby. And I don't like what it says.

William Russell's American Music label has long fascinated me. Russell started the label in 1944 to issue the recordings of New Orleans musicians he was making at the time. Some of the best recorded work by Bunk Johnson, George Lewis, Kid Shots Madison, and Wooden Joe Nicholas was issued on American Music. Russell issued 40 78 RPM records and 13 10" LPs before letting the label go dormant in the early 1950s. Some 20 years or so later, Russell began licensing American Music material to the Storyville label in Denmark and the Japanese Dan label, but in the intervening years, American Music recordings became legendary - not only for their musical quality, but because they were so scarce. Many collectors in those years first heard acetate dubs of the American Music 78s and albums before they ever saw the the actual records. The label is now owned by George Buck's Jazzology group, and most of the issuable music Russell recorded is available on CD.

As I said, most of the music Russell recorded and issued was by traditional New Orleans musicians, but he did venture into related areas. He recorded the St. Louis ragtime pianist Charlie Thompson and the Mobile Strugglers, a black string band from Alabama that played blues and country ragtime. And in February or March, 1947, he took a gospel pianist he found in Pittsburgh, George Hornsby, into Phifer Recording Productions in that city and recorded ten selections, eventually releasing four of them on 78s.

The two George Hornsby 78s represent some of the very few American Music recordings that have not been reissued - not on American Music, not on Storyville or Dan, not even by any enterprising bootleggers anywhere in the world. So of course, I kept my eyes open for them. I found a copy of American Music 521, "Bye and Bye" backed with "Jesus Gave Me a Little Light," about a year and a half ago. And a month ago I finally tracked down American Music 522, "I Know It Was the Blood" and "My Soul Loves Jesus."

George Hornsby is an elusive figure. According to Russell's biographical notes, he was born in Alabama in 1912, and in the 1930's had his own jazz band in Pittsburgh, the Fess Hornsby Orchestra. His name sometimes comes up in biographical discussions of Kenny Clarke - Clarke, a Pittsburgh native, played drums in Horsby's band. Russell indicates that Hornsby turned exclusively to religious music in 1939, and had a weekly radio show, "Modern Hymnology," in Pittsburgh.

Why haven't Hornsby's recordings been reissued? Well, according to Hazeldine's book on the American Music label, Russell wasn't happy with the results of the recording session, although I guess he was initially satisfied enough to issue four of the sides. On page 100, we find this passage:

This was the least successful of all the American Music sessions and Bill Russell was always reluctant to discuss it. Having listened to all of the [Hornsby] masters I can confirm that the playing is of a poor standard and there are no plans to issue any of the above tracks in the AMCD series.

Well, pardon my language, but this is bullshit. I haven't heard all ten recordings (plus alternate takes), as Hazeldine has, but the issued 78s are the work of an accomplished and excellent musician. There is nothing "of a poor standard" about these records.

I feel that Hazeldine has adopted Russell's values in decrying these recordings. William Russell was conservative in his musical tastes - he didn't care for later jazz developments, or even for the saxophone, which he felt had no place in jazz. I suppose that at some point he realized that George Hornsby wasn't a "primitive" gospel pianist, but a knowledgeable, modern (for the time) musician. Hornsby had formidable technical abilites, and his approach to the piano had more in common with Earl Hines than with Cow Cow Davenport or Jimmy Yancey. This was not to Russell's liking, apparently.

It's a shame that these excellent records have never been reissued, and probably won't be. So that interested listeners can hear them and make up their own minds, I've posted mp3's of the two issued George Hornsby 78s here. I invoked the name of Earl Hines in the last paragraph, and these recordings may remind some listeners of what Hines might have sounded like if he had turned to gospel music.

I don't know what happened to George Hornsby after his American Music session, or when he died, as he presumably has. But I'm unwilling to let the negative opinion expressed in the one readily available reference book mentioning him go unchallenged. I dig your music, Fess Hornsby!

New Orleans Report 2011

2011-09-28T21:43:00.011-04:00

For the past 21 years, I have visited New Orleans annually; it feels somewhat like a second home to me. For my friends, here's a brief report on my recent trip.

This year I made the trip during the second full week of September; the 17 months since my last visit represents my longest spell away from the city since 1990. It was the kind of New Orleans visit I have every once in awhile - things didn't quite "click," at least until my last night.

On my way across Mississippi, I turned south off of I-10 at Biloxi and drove the rest of the way to New Orleans on U.S. 90, along the coast. I was a little shocked at how much destruction Katrina had caused in this area, and how little has been rebuilt. I made a few stops to do some geocaching, notably in the Bayou Saugave Wildlife Preserve, where I had a nice, very hot, hike.

I hit the city on Wednesday afternoon and went to Preservation Hall that night. I was disappointed to see trumpeter William Smith walk in instead of Mark Braud, who was scheduled to be there; Smith has disappointed me at times in the past. But he played well on this occasion, and the music was very enjoyable. There was one of those nice moments when the audience sang responses to Smith’s vocal phrases on “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.” That tune was the band’s response to a toddler putting some money in the kitty. The band was led by Charlie Gabriel, who played clarinet on the first two tunes and tenor on the others. Freddie Lonzo was on trombone, Rickie Monie on piano, Jeffery Hills on tuba, and Joe Lastie on drums. “Dinah” was short, with no solos, to fill out the set. It was all the stronger for that, and had some nice collective improvising. The set I heard was:

China Boy
Caravan (drum feature)
St. Louis Blues (Lonzo vocal)
Yes Sir, That’s My Baby (Smith vocal)
Dinah

From there I walked to Mimi’s, at the edge of the Bywater neighborhood (the other side of the street would be Marigny) to hear a set by Aurora Nealand’s Royal Roses. They were an impressive young group. Nealand played soprano sax most of the night, but did a tune or two on clarinet. They played:

Shake It and Break It
Tishimingo Blues
Douce Ambience
Everybody Loves My Baby
The Old Rugged Cross
China Boy

and one other tune which I don’t remember. “Old Rugged Cross” went pretty far afield, starting with the guitar solo – trad free jazz, or something like that. Aurora is a really fabulous saxophonist - and pretty good on clarinet, too.

Nealand was scheduled to appear at Buffa’s with Tom McDermott, my favorite New Orleans pianist, on Thursday, but she posted on Facebook that McDermott wouldn’t be there that night, so I stayed in. But I did take a walk through Marigny and Bywater and found a couple of of interesting sites – the spot where Homer Plessy boarded a segregated train car, leading to the Plessy v. Ferguson case, and Jack “Papa” Laine’s house on St. Ferdinand Street. Laine was the patriarch of the white jazz scene around the turn of the 20th century.

On Friday I went back to Preservation Hall to hear Leroy Jones, whom I’ve always liked. It was kind of a mixed bag. I’m pretty sure that the Finnish trombonist Katja Toivola was Jones’ wife or girlfriend; I found her playing to be of borderline competency. It was nice to hear Daniel Farrow on tenor sax again, though. And I've always like Mari Watanabe's piano playing. Mitchell Player was on bass, and the drummer was introduced as “Jerry Barbarin Anderson” – I didn’t know he was part of that famous family. The set I heard consisted of:

Margie
Muskrat Ramble (Jones vocal)
Baby, Won't You Please Come Home
Come Down to New Orleans

I was in a somewhat unsettled frame of mind, though, until Saturday night, when I went to the Spotted Cat to hear (and sit in with) the Panorama Jazz Band. That event brought the whole trip into focus and made it all worthwhile. At the beginning of their second set, I played “Dolgo Hora” and “When My Dreamboat Comes Home" - I had always wanted to play the latter tune with a New Orleans band. Aurora Nealand sat out the two tunes I played, but when she came back to replace me, she really bore down and played hard. I took that as a compliment. Ben Schenck and the rest of the band sounded better than ever.

Sunday morning I took one last walk around the French Quarter. Although it was not the best visit I’ve ever had, in the end I really didn’t want it to end. Even when a New Orleans trip is slightly disappointing, it still hurts to leave.

On September 11th, a Poem by Ai

2011-09-11T00:01:00.002-04:00

Dread

My name is Shirley Herlihy,
but to the lowlifes on my beat,
I am Officer Girlie.
They do not mean to diss me.
It is a sign of respect
that I let them think is ok with me, and it is,
when I am trying to do my community policing.
After my brother disappeared
at the World Trade Center,
the word went out.
The lowlifes even gave me a bouquet of flowers
I could not accept.
They came from the Korean store
before somebody tossed a Molotov cocktail
through the front door
in retaliation for a “situation”
that involved the girlfriend of a drug dealer
shoplifting disposable diapers and Tampax.
The fact is I appreciated the thought
if not the deed.
I mean the flowers were at least a sign
I had not become a cop
turning a blind eye on the misery of the street.
I was known as someone who was tough,
but fair in meting out justice.
God knows it’s hard to toe the line
every single time a perp messes up, but I tried.
If somebody’s mother needed a ride
to a bail hearing,
my transportation specialist,
Bobby J, the gypsy cab guy would oblige.
I’d say thanks by slipping him
tickets to a ball game, a movie
or some lame excuse for entertainment.
I kept the wheels turning,
so I didn’t fall under them.
I only had to use my gun once in two years
against a sonofabitch
who murdered his uncle
and hid his body in a dumpster.
Original, huh?
Stanko, the wino, found him on his garbage rounds.
We cornered the asshole in an alley
behind that shooting gallery
in the building that’s now been gentrified
and is home to a decorater, six cats
and stacks of old cool jazz albums.
Anyway, the asshole said he had nothing to lose
fired and missed, fired again
and clipped me in the shins,
but I got him as I went down.
He died, but the paramedics revived him
and now he’s in prison.
He’s born again and keeps claiming Christ has risen,
as if nobody heard the news.
Once in a while, he calls me to apologize
and proselytize. I let him last time,
even as I sat, holding the telephone,
wishing my brother would come back.
I keep telling myself he’s gone forever,
but it’s so hard to accept.
He was always rescuing things
when we were kids – injured cats, birds,
even a German shepherd
who had been known to bite without provocation.
I used to tease him by singing,
“Patrick Kevin’s going to Heaven.”
I wonder if he made it, or if he’s suspended between the life
that didn’t mean much to him
and the death that means everything to me?
He was such a good boy.
He would have been a better man, if only…
After our parents died
when I was fifteen going on twenty-five
and he was twelve, we raised ourselves.
No one else had the time.
It’s a busy world out there
the addicts tell me and I believe them
because I know.
I bet they’re lining up at Smitty’s
crack house right now to score.
I should be there to arrest someone,
but I’ve turned in my badge and gun
and come downtown to search this crater
for some sign of Pat,
even if it’s only a feeling
that he’s still around in spirit at least,
if not in body.
There’re just a few of us
who won’t give up.
With our shovels, picks and garden tools
we dig among the hunks of steel,
the concrete and remnants of people
who went to work one day
and vanished into our memories.
I dread finding him and dread I won’t
as I choke from the fumes less poisonous
than the hope that keeps me awake at night,
but I can’t give up.
He’d do the same for me.
Patrick Kevin Herlihy, I repeat under my breath
as I uncover another credit card
and a wallet with something that looks
suspiciously like blackened flesh fused to it.
I turn them in and return to digging
until faint from the effort and fumes, I collapse.
Two other searchers take me by each arm
and help me to a chair,
but I don’t stay there long.
After a candy bar and a glass of water,
I’m back at my task.
On the job, I never questioned what I was.
I had my role to play
in the day to day give
and mostly take of the criminals
who inhabited my world,
but this sixty acres is a city of ghosts
and I don’t know where I stand with them.
When I arrived this morning,
nothing greeted me but the wind
and a grackle making a din
as it pecked and scratched
at flat, charred patches of ground.
Maybe it’s a good sign
that the birds have returned,
a sign of rebirth. But whose? I wonder,
as I stare at my bruised hands.
Last year, I solved the robbery
of a palm reader.
As a lark, I let her read my lines.
She said, “In the future,
you’ll find the one you lost,
but it will cost you.”
Now as I stand above a hole seventy feet deep,
looking down, I don’t see Pat.
When I call his name,
my voice is swallowed up by the roar of machines.
At first, that sound signified the possibility
of finding him
and made my heard beat faster,
but now it’s just the white noise
I hear in my nightmares
that always begins at the scene of a shooting
that occurred during a domestic disturbance
between a man and a woman in Queens
that left two teens bereft of a mother and father
and made them cling to one another much too tightly,
so that now the one left behind is frightened
by her utter loneliness
and drinks Irish whiskey at the pub
where her brother, Pat, used to hold up the bar,
promising the patrons he was going to quit drinking
one of these days
and to assorted laughter
call for another round of drinks,
knowing his sister would never let him
sink as low as he wanted to go.
He’d seen the fight. I hadn’t
but I was haunted too
although I tried not to show it,
especially to him.
That day when I got home
from basketball practice,
I found Pat cowering under the stairway
as I had so many times before
when our parents fought,
but this time, I knew something was different.
He wasn’t crying for a change.
“Are Mom and Dad fighting again?” I asked.
“They were,” he said, without a trace of emotion,
then he told me Dad had come into his room,
hugged him and said goodbye.
That’s when I knew something terrible had happened.
All the years since, I’d nursed him
through the rough times, the blue funks
and the highs that were too much
and always ended in a rush
of promises to stop drinking.
He worked construction, he’d say,
I wouldn’t catch him falling off some scaffolding
high above Manhattan,
even drunk he could maintain his balance.
The truth was he was often unemployed,
but I supported him.
I’d long since moved into our parents’ room,
but he stayed in his
across the hall from where they’d died,
surrounded by all his trophies from high school, comics
and posters taped and retaped to the walls.
The week before the attack,
he’d told me he was going back to work.
He’d stopped drinking for good
and I believed him, as I looked deeply into his eyes,
and saw a boy who having barely escaped
the inferno of family violence
would still finally perish in fire’s cold embrace.

Ai (October 21, 1947 – March 20, 2010)

Chris, Tabby, and the Blues

2011-07-03T23:53:00.004-04:00

Tonight I listened to a blues CD that I have always enjoyed - Red Mud by Chris Thomas King. King, the son of Baton Rouge bluesman Tabby Thomas, is an eclectic musician whose output includes electric blues, old-style country blues, hip-hop, soul blues, and more. Red Mud, from 1998, is an interesting mix of originals (blues and otherwise) and blues classics. Like I said, I've always enjoyed this album, and I was enjoying it tonight. But two tracks unexpectedly grabbed me and brought me to the edge of my seat.

Those two tracks were "Hoodoo Party" and "Bus Station Blues," both written by Tabby Thomas, and both featuring his vocals. These two songs got to me on a level that that King's own songs and covers (though excellent) didn't. I'm not sure what the significance of this is, if any. Tabby is a more limited musician than his son, although his voice is perhaps more compelling. Is the "lesson" here that the further one gets from the source of the blues, the more diluted the message gets? Maybe the most powerful blues performances are by those musicians whose level of sophistication doesn't permit them to play anything else but the blues.

I'm not sure what all this means, but I made sure to play a couple of Tabby Thomas 45s before I went to bed. They sure sounded good.

Steve and Watazumi

2011-06-06T15:33:00.002-04:00

Time for another post at least partially about Steve Lacy, one of my musical heroes.

Steve Lacy had a special relationship with Japan. He made twelve concert tours of the country, from 1975 to 2000, and a thirteenth tour was planned for June, 2004. That tour never happened; Lacy died on June 4th. Lacy's playing, spare and deliberate, seemed tailored for Japanese culture and attitudes, and he had a strong affinity with Japanese musicians, especially the great percussionist Masahiko Togashi, with whom he recorded many times.

Lacy's Japanese tours gave him the opportunity to directly experience the culture that had fascinated him for so long. He was deeply interested in Zen and Taoism (his Tao Suite was a cornerstone of his concerts from 1970). And on a couple of his trips, he took advantage of the opportunity to study with Watazumi Doso.

Watazumi Doso (海童道祖老師) (1910-1992) was a flutist and teacher of his own sect of Buddhism, Watazumido, or "The Way of Watazumi." Watazumi was a somewhat mysterious figure, down to the elusive matter of his name. He seemed to be known as Itcho Human and/or Tanaka Masaru in his younger days; later, Roshi, or "Master" was appended to his name. He was also sometimes known as Watazumido Shuso, which means something like "Head Student of the Way of Watazumi."

Watazumi did not consider himself a musician as much as a Buddhist teacher and practitioner. He exercised daily with the Jo stick, a long hardwood pole, and stressed the importance of breathing to his students. Here is an excerpt from a lecture he gave at the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, New York, in 1981 (translation by Chris Jay):

It's fine that you are all deep into music. But there's something deeper and if you would go deeper, if you go to the source of where the music is being made, you'll find something even more interesting. At the source, everyone's individual music is made. If you ask what the deep place is, it's your own life and it's knowing your own life, that own way that you live.

Watazumi played a variety of bamboo flutes known as hocchiku or hotchiku. They differ from the more familiar shakuhachi flute in that the bore is unlacquered and left in as natural state as possible. Hocchiku flutes are usually longer and heavier than shakuhachi, and the sound they produce is rawer and less tempered.

Steve Lacy called Watazumi "one of the greatest improvisers I've ever heard in my life, maybe the greatest." Watazumi's music is certainly more startling, even avant-garde, than a passing familiarity with Japanese shakuhacki music would lead one to expect. It's full of sudden changes of timbre and volume, as well as notes which don't fit into any scale, Western or Eastern.

Lacy visited Watazumi during that first tour of Japan in 1975 for a lesson. He returned for another lesson ten years later, and, as he said, "I had made a lot of progress!"

What did he learn from Watazumi? In a 1997 Fresh Air interview with Terri Gross, Lacy explained the lesson that he describes as a revelation: "That my own voice was my own ear was my own breath was my own sound; that it was all one - the conception that it's just one thing." Lacy's later music, from the last two decades of his life, provides plenty of evidence of lessons learned. His purity of tone is perfectly matched to the composed material and to the melodic conception of his improvisations.

Recordings of Watazumi Doso are difficult to find. The most accessible, at least in the United States, seems to be an LP with the somewhat unfortunate title The Mysterious Sounds of the Japanese Bamboo Flute, which was issued by Everest in the late 1960's. Here is as example of his playing from that album. (I didn't post the video.)

I'll leave the last word on Watazumi to Steve Lacy. "He was the most modern improviser I've ever heard in my life. He surpassed anybody I could think of, including Braxton, or Derek Bailey. Doso, to me, was just... whew, outside all of that, really."

Steve Lacy quotes are from Fresh Air, November 20, 1997 and The Wire, November, 2002.

The Last Watusi of The Radiators

2011-04-19T00:31:00.002-04:00

Big ones eat the little ones;
The little ones got to be fast.
That's the law of the fish now, mother -
You got to move your ass.

-"Law of the Fish" by The Radiators

Well, I'm late to the party, as usual. Last week I finally attended a show by The Radiators, the band that has forgotten more songs than most bands ever knew - exactly two months before their final performance at Tipitina's.

I listen to jazz, blues, classical music, klezmer, African music - but not much rock. The last few years, the only rock CDs I pull off the shelves with any regularity are by The Allman Brothers, Darryl Rhoades, and especially The Radiators. I became aware of the great New Orleans rock band about 15 years ago when I bought an intriguing cassette compilation at the Louisiana Music Factory in New Orleans. The tape contained, among other great Louisiana music, a reissue of the Rad's first single, their 1978 anthem to crawfish, fellatio, or both, "Suck the Head (and Squeeze the Tip)." I loved the New Orleans groove and the sound of the band, but for some reason I didn't follow up and explore The Radiators' other recordings.

But about five years ago, I came across a cheap copy of Law of the Fish, the Rads' first major-label release. I loved about half of it right away, and the other half grew on me. I started checking out their albums, and was drawn further into the Radiators' world, until I became a full-fledged Fishhead, as Radiators fans are called.

I visit New Orleans once a year, so I assumed that I would be able to hear them at Tip's or The Maple Leaf one of these days. But it never happened, and late last year Ed Volker, aka Zeke Fishhead, announced that he would be leaving the band this summer. Volker is the main songwriter for the band, one of its two lead singers, and the group's guiding light. It's a truism among Fishheads that you have to hear the band live to really appreciate them, so I looked at their schedule and found that their closest remaining show was in Orlando. I didn't mind the 400 mile drive at all.

It was an exciting show. The Rads played for two hours and 15 minutes, performing a mixture of originals and a bewildering variety of cover tunes, including "I Walk on Gilded Splinters," "Paint It Black," "The Pusher," "St. James Infirmary," the old ballad "Little Sadie," several old blues and spirituals, and more. Their recordings feature songs by Bob Dylan, Clarence Carter, Muddy Waters, The Meters, etc. All these cover tunes support the Radiators reputation as the world's best bar band - a reputation that's kind of accurate, as far as it goes.

But their originals, particularly Volker's, are the songs that get to me. Volker's songs are pretty conventional in terms of harmony and structure - they use the same three or four chords that have been used since the beginnings of rock and roll. But Volker writes catchy melodies and interesting lyrics. The latter are sometimes predictable, but more often enigmatic, and at times probably half-baked. In any case, I love "Doctor, Doctor" (yes, I know that Volker was not the first to use that title), "Hard Time Train," "Let's Radiate," "Crazy Mona," "Hard Rock Kid," "I Want to Go Where the Green Arrow Goes," etc.

And then there's the band itself. If you imagine a triangle whose points are The Allman Brothers, The Grateful Dead, and The Meters, The Radiators are situated approximately in the middle. Most of what they play is infused with a dark, swampy flavor that sets them apart from any other rock band. They boast two virtuoso guitarists, Dave Malone and Camille Baudoin, and they can turn any song into a long, improvisatory journey. Volker's keyboard style is more restrained - he's kind of a stripped-down Professor Longhair at times - but what he plays is just perfect for every song. The rhythm section of Reggie Scanlan and Frank Bua on drums can play solid straight rock, but more often adds at least a touch of New Orleans second line rhythm to the music.

For a few years in the 80's, the Radiators were signed to Epic Records, who didn't quite know what to make of them. Their three Epic albums are pretty good, if somewhat slicker than the Rads' usual sound. Except for those few years, the band has recorded for small labels or put out their own albums, and sustained itself by constant touring. During this period the band included percussionist Glenn Sears; except for his tenure, the band's personnel has remained unchanged for its entire life. More recently, The Radiators older audience has expanded - the younger "jam band" crowd has discovered them.

A lot of people think of The Radiators strictly as a party band. I think there's more going on than that; much of their music has darker overtones. If I was going to try to sum up what The Radiators are about, it would go something like this: We're living in a dying world. The Law of the Fish applies, so you'd better keep your eyes open. But while we're here, we might as well have a good time.

If you've never heard The Radiators, where should you start? The first Epic album, Law of the Fish, is pretty good; it has some of the band's best songs, like "Doctor, Doctor" and "This Wagon's Gonna Roll." There are several good live albums; Bucket of Fish is excellent. The Rads' 25th anniversary album, Earth Vs. The Radiators, is a double CD (and DVD) recorded at Tipitina's - guests include the Bonerama trombone section. But maybe the best representation of the band is their 30th anniversary double CD, Wild and Free. As long as you don't require audiophile quality on every track, you'll find it to be an amazing collection of live and studio recordings from the very beginning in 1978 through 2008.

I love the story of the band's origin. In 1978, Volker invited the members of a couple of different bands to jam in his garage one afternoon. They ended up playing for five hours, and the next day they all quit their old bands. They've been at it for the 33 years since then, but the end of the line is near. So if you have a chance during the next two months, set 'em up for the Hard Rock Kid, let the red wine flow, and catch The Radiators.

Brown and Yellow (Tom Brown and Alcide Nuñez)

2011-04-09T17:00:00.005-04:00

Warning: more ramblings about Ancient Musick ahead. Lately I've been fascinated by Alcide "Yellow" Nuñez, the early New Orleans clarinetist best known for his recordings with the Louisiana Five. As I explored Nuñez's music, I realized how much his career was entwined with that of trombonist Tom Brown, a fellow New Orleanian.

History is usually more complicated than it first appears, and the history of jazz seems more and more like an onion the more you examine it; peel off one layer, and there is another just underneath, waiting to be explored. Years ago I "learned" that the Original Dixieland Jazz Band was the first New Orleans jazz band to travel north and expose the world outside of Louisiana to the complex, intriguing sounds of New Orleans jazz. (It was only later that I learned of Bill Johnson's Creole Band, which included Freddie Keppard and George Baquet, and their success on the national vaudeville circuit as early as 1914.) But Tom Brown actually beat the ODJB to Chicago, and he and Alcide Nuñez, with a little more luck, could have enjoyed the success and fame that came to the ODJB.

Brown and Nuñez were part of the circle of white musicians centered around Jack "Papa" Laine, whose Reliance Brass Band was very popular in the early years of the 20th century in New Orleans. "Brown's Band From Dixieland," which included cornetist Ray Lopez and clarinetist Gus Mueller, came to Chicago in May, 1915 to open at Lamb's Cafe. Their reception was lukewarm at first; the music seemed loud, shocking, and impossible to dance to. But people were curious, and soon Brown's band was an attraction; the line to get in Lamb's was often two blocks long. Around this time, the word "jazz" (or "jass") began to be applied to this unusual music from New Orleans.

Clubowners and promoters suddenly wanted jazz bands, preferably from New Orleans. Drummer Johnny Stein brought his band up from the Crescent City and opened at the New Schiller Cafe. In addition to Stein, the group consisted of "Yellow" Nuñez and three future members of the ODJB: Eddie "Daddy Edwards on trombone, pianist Henry Ragas, and Nick LaRocca on cornet. By this time, Harry Shields had replaced Gus Mueller as the clarinetist in Tom Brown's band. Nuñez soon had a falling-out with LaRocca (not an unusual occurrence, apparently), and the two bands swapped clarinetists.

When Lamb's Cafe closed, Brown's band hit the vaudeville trail, and were offered a job at Reisenweber's Restaurant in New York City. But Brown didn't think the money was good enough, and he declined. The job eventually went to LaRocca, who took over Stein's band, replacing him with Tony Sbarbaro. The ODJB became the talk of New York, and made records for Columbia and Victor; those 1917 records are now considered to be the first real jazz recordings.

And what of Brown and Nuñez? After a few trips back and forth to New Orleans, they both ended up in New York for a few years before returning home for good. Brown apparently found that the life of a well-paid sideman made for a more secure existence than that of a bandleader, and made himself an indispensable part of the Yerkes dance band empire. Harry Yerkes was one of the most active bandleaders in New York from 1917 to 1924; he led (and recorded with) a bewildering variety of aggregations: Yerkes' Jazzarimba Orchestra (featuring xylophone and marimba as part of the instrumentation), Yerkes' Novelty Five, Yerkes' Saxophone Sextet, Yerkes' S.S. Flotilla Orchestra, The Happy Six, etc. Tom Brown was part of most of these groups from 1919 to at least 1923; he made scores of records with various Yerkes groups, as well as with the dance bands of Ray Miller, Russ Gorman, and the xylophone-playing Green Brothers.

After Brown's band broke up, Yellow Nuñez formed a five-piece band, the Louisiana Five, with drummer Anton Lada. Nuñez's clarinet was the lead instrument; the only other horn was the trombone of Charlie Panelli, who later played with the Original Memphis Five. The Lousiana Five was at least a distant rival to the ODJB; they recorded over 40 sides, one of which, "Yelping Hound Blues," was pretty popular. (It's actually much better than the grim title would suggest.) The Louisiana Five recordings have been both praised and panned by jazz critics, but the best of them sound pretty good 90-something years later. Nuñez was a strong clarinetist; he played (on records, anyway) exclusively in the high register, allowing his lead to cut through the sound of the other instruments. He seldom strayed far from the melody, but often indulged in some mild improvisation as the tune progressed.

When the Louisiana Five broke up, Nuñez also found a home with Yerkes; it is reasonable to assume that Tom Brown helped him secure a position with the bandleader. For whatever reason, the clarinetist didn't stay with Yerkes long; he only made a handful of records with Yerkes' groups, all from the years 1919 and 1920. Nuñez led a quartet for awhile, and returned to New Orleans in 1927. Until his death in 1934 he played with various groups, including a police band, but never recorded again. He passed down musical genes, apparently; his grandson, Robert Nunez, is now principal tubist with the New Orleans Philharmonic.

Tom Brown also moved back home, and in 1924 and 1925 he appeared on a couple of fine Okeh records by trumpeter Johnny Bayersdorffer and pianist Norman Brownlee. The Bayersdorffer record ("Waffle Man's Call"/"I Wonder Where My Easy Rider's Riding Now") in particular is a great example of a New Orleans jazz band recorded in the city, and probably represents Brown's best recorded work. He recorded several times with trumpeter Johnny Wiggs in the 1950's (including an album under his own name), showing his brass-band derived style to be basically unchanged. Brown died in 1958.

Unfortunately, one of the things musicians and observers remember about Brown is his virulent racism. Many of the early white New Orleans jazz musicians seemed to have had blinders on when it came to giving credit to African-Americans for creating jazz, but Brown's attitudes went beyond that. I decline to quote some of the statements attributed to him.

Recordings by Nuñez are somewhat hard to find now, but most of the Louisiana Five sides have been reissued at various times, although often on small labels, and most of those collections are now out of print. There are several tracks by the Five in the Ragtime to Jazz CD series on the Timeless label, and one track on Retrieval's Pioneer Recording Bands. The Happy Six have their own collection, Dance-O-Mania, on the Rivermont label; Nuñez plays on a couple of the tracks, and there's plenty of Tom Brown there, of course.

Because these recordings are so hard to come by, I've posted several items from my 78 collection here in mp3 form. As far as I can tell, the Louisiana Five's Columbia record of "Yelping Hound Blues" and "Just Another Good Man Gone Wrong" has never been reissued, although I may have overlooked some obscure release. I also included a side by the Happy Six which doesn't appear on the Rivermont CD, "Who'll Be the Next One (To Cry Over You)." It's early-20's dance music, not jazz, but it's pretty good for what it is; you'll hear a "straight" trombone solo on the melody by Tom Brown. The virtuoso soprano sax work toward the end is probably by the great (non-jazz) saxophonist Rudy Wiedoeft, although it could be F. Wheeler Wadsworth. And finally, there's a track by Yerkes Southern Five which features both Nuñez and Brown, Lucky Roberts' "Railroad Blues." It has been reissued, on one of the Timeless Ragtime to Jazz CDs, but it's so good that I couldn't resist posting it here; it may be the best recorded performance by Nuñez. In addition, you can download the Louisiana Five's Edison recording of "Clarinet Squawk" here; it's not their best work, though, in my opinion.

I'll let the last word on Alcide Nuñez belong to Charles Ellsworth Russell, Jr. In 1918, long before Pee Wee Russell was the great jazz clarinetist he became, his father took him to an Elks Club event in St. Louis. The band was the Louisiana Five, and the twelve-year-old Pee Wee was surprised and amazed at what he heard from Nuñez's clarinet: "Nuñez played the melody and then he got hot and played jazz. That was something. How did he know where he was and where he was going?" If for no other reason, we should honor Alcide Nuñez for introducing Pee Wee Russell to the world of jazz.

Acknowledgments: I referred to the following books in preparing this post:

Robert Hilbert - Pee Wee Russell: the Life of a Jazzman
Al Rose and Edmond Souchon - New Orleans Jazz: A Family Album
Brian Rust - The American Dance Band Discography 1917-1942
Gunther Schuller - Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development
Richard Sudhalter - Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contributions to Jazz, 1915-1945
Brian Wood - The Song for Me: A Glossary of New Orleans Musicians.

The Sudhalter book in particular was very helpful in sorting out the comings and goings of the early white New Orleans musicians in Chicago and New York.

The first photograph is of Alcide Nuñez, from the Nuñez family archives. The second photograph is a rare shot of The Happy Six, with Tom Brown, from a 1922 Columbia Records Catalog in my collection.

Big Jack, The Oil Man

2011-03-18T19:30:00.002-04:00

Well, damn. I certainly didn't want to add another memorial post to this blog. But I've learned that Big Jack Johnson died of kidney failure a few days ago, on Monday, March 14. Big Jack, the Oil Man, the Last of the Jelly Roll Kings, the Fishin' Musician, is gone. He was 70.

For years, I've been telling people that Big Jack was alive only due to my quick reflexes. I heard him play at the Sunflower River Blues Festival in Clarksdale in the mid 1990's - an afternoon show. Late that night I passed Red's Lounge, the famous Clarksdale juke joint, as I was driving back to my hotel. Johnson was hanging out in front, talking with a friend. As I approached, Big Jack was apparently overcome with mirth at his buddy's story, and staggered out into the middle of Sunflower Avenue, bent over with laughter. I hit my brakes and swerved, and Johnson was with us for 15 more years.

Big Jack, who was simultaneously, and paradoxically, the most traditional and the most original of bluesmen, was born in Lambert, Mississippi, about ten miles from Clarksdale. His father played guitar, banjo, and fiddle, and passed on the basics to Jack. In the early 1960's, Johnson became a member of one of the greatest juke joint blues trios of all time. Frank Frost, Johnson, and Sam Carr played throughout Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee as Frank Frost and The Nighthawks. The band hung together for 25 years or so, although they changed their name to The Jelly Roll Kings when they released their Earwig album Rockin' the Juke Joint Down in 1979, since there was already a long-established blues/rock band called The Nighthawks. The Kings rocked hard, and consistently sounded like a larger group. In the early days Frank Frost took all the vocals, as well as playing guitar and harmonica. There was no bass, but Big Jack's guitar provided the bottom. In later years, Frost played keyboards (usually a cheap organ) rather than guitar, and the vocal duties were split between Johnson and Frost.

Making a living at music was has always been difficult, and it's almost impossible in the Mississippi Delta. For years, Big Jack put food on the table by driving a heating oil truck, making deliveries all over the Delta. His day job led to his nickname, The Oil Man, and he called his band The Oilers. As he became a popular figure on the blues festival circuit, he left the Delta for periods in Chicago and Pennsylvania, but he finally moved back to Clarksdale, playing at Red's Lounge when he wasn't on the road. In recent years, Johnson was plagued by health problems; in fact, erroneous reports of his death circulated before the end came this week.

One of the things I loved about Big Jack was that he had no taste. That may seem like a strange thing to say, but it speaks to the absolute honesty of Johnson's music; he played whatever he felt like playing, whether it was musically or politically correct or not. When I heard him in Clarksdale, he followed a tough blues shuffle with a bizarre rendition of "Tequila," during which he moved from the "A" section to the bridge more or less at random. The huge grin on his face throughout showed how much he enjoyed playing the tune, as strange as it seemed to the hard-core blues fans in the audience. He had a song called "Chinese Blues," in which he sang in "Chinese." And check out his melodramatic, overwrought original called "Daddy, When Is Momma Coming Home?," which he recorded several times. All of this is in bad taste, and also a lot of fun.

But that same directness and honesty resulted in some incredible blues performances. On the last Jelly Roll Kings album, Look On Yonder Wall, Big Jack sings a warning to Frank Frost, who was right there in the studio, behind the organ: "Frank Frost, you better lay that bottle down!" Johnson, in true Delta blues fashion, wasn't particularly concerned with counting measures to the next chord change - he moved to the next chord when it felt right, and the band had better be listening. The title song of his We Got to Stop This Killin' album has choruses that are 13, 15, and 19 bars long, in addition to those that fit the standard 12-bar blues form.

Big Jack's style was intense, with a sometimes extreme vibrato applied to both his guitar and voice. Perhaps his greatest recorded performances are those made for the film Deep Blues in 1990. Johnson plays what is maybe the hottest version of the traditional "Catfish Blues" ever, weeps his way through "Daddy, When Is Momma Coming Home?," and winds up with the wonderful and bizarre "Big Boy Now," inspired by hearing country music on the radio as a child. Jack tells the tale of wanting to yodel "like those white folks on that radio," and follows the vocal with a twisted, shredded slide guitar solo that works its way higher and higher, until he is practically playing on the pickups. It's one of those performances that must be heard to be believed.

Big Jack's gone now, but he left some excellent recordings behind. I would go so far as to say that anyone with the slightest interest in electric Delta blues needs to have The Jelly Roll Kings' Rockin' the Juke Juke Down in their collection. I'm partial to Johnson's albums Roots Stew and The Memphis Barbecue Sessions, the latter a collaboration with harpist Kim Wilson of The Fabulous Thunderbirds. And of course, there's the amazing Deep Blues soundtrack. Right now, sales of his albums at CD Baby will directly benefit his family. Do yourself a favor and treat yourself to some Big Jack Johnson. So long to the Last of The Jelly Roll Kings.

Two New CDs

2011-02-21T20:17:00.008-05:00

There are two new CDs out that relate to previous posts of this blog, and which many folks may not hear about; these releases are unlikely to be featured in a "new releases" email from Amazon or iTunes. Neither will be found at your local Wal-mart, but they can both be had from CDBaby.com. Each of these CDs is a personal, contemporary look at a very old American musical tradition.

When I was in Mississippi last month, I spent about an hour looking through the CDs and records at Cat Head Blues and Folk Art, a wonderful little store in Clarksdale. One of the finds I was most excited about was What Do I Do?, a 2010 release by Sharde Thomas, whom I mentioned in my 2009 post on Mississippi fife and drum music. Miss Thomas, who is billed simply as "Sharde" on the CD cover, is the granddaughter of Othar Turner, the late master of the Mississippi Hill Country fife and drum tradition. That tradition reaches back to antebellum times, although the music has undoubtedly changed greatly over the years.

This CD was quite a surprise to me. I didn't know that Sharde had released a CD, and seeing the cover, with Miss Thomas and her fife, was a thrill. The second surprise was when I stuck the CD into my car's stereo: most of the album is R & B, not fife and drum music. The third surprise was that I liked all of it, even though much of it was not what I expected. Much of the success of the album is due to the production of Ricky Davis, who also plays guitar and drums on many of the tracks. He gives the proceedings a polished, professional sheen.

It shouldn't have been a surprise that Sharde, who must be about 21 years old now, is not content to confine herself to the fife and drum tradition; hers is a very different world from the rural Mississippi, isolated and racist, in which her grandfather grew up. Sharde's R & B is sweet and engaging - there is nothing aggressive about it. She sings about her family, about having a good time, about being young and in love. Her voice is nothing like the American Idol divas that seem to dominate pop and R & B these days, and I'm glad about that. It's pleasant, sure, and (sorry to use this word again so soon) sweet. One of the most touching of the R & B songs is "O. T.," which, of course, is dedicated to her grandfather. The introduction uses a recording of Mr. Turner's voice; he says, "If anything happen to me, I get so I can't play, Sharde gonna be the one." And she pretty much is, now.

There are also two blues on the album, one written by Sharde and one by her cousin, Aurbrey Turner, a musician who played drums behind Othar Turner. The blues songs manage to be as sunny and enjoyable as the R & B. Sharde plays piano on them, as she does on many of the R & B tracks.

But for many listeners, the meat of the album will be the four fife and drum tracks. They are as tough and exciting as anyone who has heard Othar Turner's recordings would expect, but they don't "feel" like Turner's music - they have an urgent, contemporary feeling, even when Sharde is playing music as traditional as the Hill Country standard "Bounce Ball" or the old African-American game song "Sally Walker." Part of this feel is due to the addition of Aurbrey Turner's drum set to the stand-alone snare and bass drums. On the live version of "Shimmie She Wobble," Turner's set is also credited, but it doesn't seem to be actually present there. These four tracks are the most assured and mature recordings of Miss Thomas's fife playing yet.

In many ways, the most innovative track is the last one, "We Made It." It ties together all the threads of Sharde's music: she plays fife and piano, and the song has elements of blues, R & B, and the fife and drum tradition running through it. That night in Clarksdale, this is the track I cranked up, and I couldn't keep still.

The other new CD was only released a week or two ago; it's 17 Days by the Panorama Brass Band, and it's one of the most original New Orleans brass band albums I've heard. Ben Schenck's Panorama Brass Band is the marching offshoot of his Panorama Jazz Band, one of my favorite New Orleans bands. Like the Panorama Jazz Band, the PBB plays traditional New Orleans tunes, klezmer, Caribbean tunes, Eastern European music, and more. The last two Panorama Jazz Band albums have each featured a few tracks by the brass band, but this is their first full album.

The new CD, which was recorded last Mardi Gras season, opens with two pieces which are strictly in the NOLA brass band tradition, "Nearer My God to Thee" and "Lily of the Valley." These should convince any skeptic that the Panorama is the real deal. "Lily" swings hard, and this might be my new favorite version of "Nearer My God to Thee," although there are recordings by the Olympia and the Onward that I love. Alto saxophonist Aurora Nealand's high harmony in the last four bars of the Panorama's "Nearer" is perfect and heartbreaking.

From the third track on, though, it's obvious that this is a different kind of New Orleans brass band. That third track is Nealand's arrangement of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" (!), which in the hands of the Panorama BB becomes both ominous and funky. From there the band goes on to touch on reggae, Balkan brass band tunes, Jewish freylkhs and horas, calypso, and even Haydn, in Schenk's arrangement of "St. Anthony Chorale," a piece which Brahms also used as source material.

Besides their atypical repertoire, the Panorama is unusual in terms of instrumentation. They use the old-style middle-register brass horns, alto and tenor horns, that all but died out in New Orleans around 75 years ago, when alto and tenor saxophones took over their function in the ensemble. The slightly nasal sonorities of the alto and tenor horns (two of the latter) give the band an unusual sound: full and slightly exotic. There are saxophones in the PBB, of course; besides the wonderful Aurora Nealand, Dan Oestricher's baritone sax helps hold down the bottom. There is only one trumpet; Jack Pritchett's performance is all the more heroic for that, since he usually carries the lead. Schenck hardly features himself at all; there are not more than one or two clarinet solos on the album, but his high countermelodies are excellent.

The CD ends with a "Lagniappe track," a lo-fi version of "Grazin' in the Grass" (which has become a New Orleans brass band standard), recorded live on the street during Mardi Gras 2010. It captures the chaotic excitement of a New Orleans street parade perfectly, down to the passing of a police car. The title of the Panorama Brass Band's new album refers to the fact that the band only exists for 17 days each carnival season. I'm glad they gave us an hour of music that we can enjoy the other 348 days.

Delta Report

2011-01-31T23:03:00.009-05:00

For the first time in many years, I visited the blues country of the Mississippi Delta last week. I mean, I've driven through a couple of times in the past few years, but this was the first time I had spent more than a day there since about 1997. Even for a Southerner, the Delta is strange place, full of contradictions and mysteries.

The area that Mississippians call the Delta is the northwestern slice of the state, between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers, extending northwards to Memphis. It's flat - almost totally devoid of hills, with some of the deepest and richest topsoil in the country. There are places where it seems like you can see forever. The area was practically wilderness until the late 19th century, when planters bought large tracts and cleared them for cotton plantations. Cotton was a labor-intensive crop until mechanization changed the cotton industry in the 1940's, so large numbers of workers, mostly African-American, were recruited for cheap labor. The Delta's population was soon majority black, as it still is. The white minority resorted to increasingly oppressive tactics in order to maintain social and political control. It's no wonder that the Delta is often considered the birthplace of the blues.

On my trip, I stayed for two nights in Cleveland, in the very center of the Delta. I had wondered how this extremely poor region was faring during these economic hard times, and I must admit that Cleveland gave me a false impression. It appears to be a prosperous, bustling town; the downtown area is attractive and healthy. It only took a little driving around to other towns to discover that most of the area is not faring as well. Tutwiler, Glendora, Friars Point, Merigold - these towns are as shockingly poor as any places I have ever seen in the United States. Hirsberg's Drug Store in Friars Point has been around long enough for Robert Johnson to have played on the bench in front of the store, but it couldn't survive the current economic climate; they were having a going-out-of-business sale when I was there.

My wife made a little bit of fun of me because I visited so many dead blues guys' graves. But often those graves are the only remaining physical locations that represent those pioneers' careers - their homes are long gone, for the most part, as are the places they played. If you want to pay homage in the form of a blues pilgrimage, you're left with visiting graves. In some cases, you are left with visiting someone's guess about where a grave is. There are three Robert Johnson graves around Greenwood. And while I visited Charley Patton's grave in Holly Ridge, there are some who believe that he's buried in the nearby Longswitch cemetery. And one of Patton's relatives says that he's buried underneath the burner of the cotton gin next to the cemetery.

But the Holly Ridge cemetery is a place I always visit when I'm in the Delta. Although there are houses across the road and a working cotton gin next door, this spot somehow always gives me an intensely desolate, isolated feeling. I don't think I've ever seen another human being while visiting the cemetery, and it feels like the middle of nowhere as much as anyplace I've visited.

Digging a grave in the Holly Ridge cemetery must be a nightmare. I've never visited when the ground wasn't wet and spongy, with standing water scattered around. In addition to Patton, harmonica player Willie Foster (whom I heard in 1995) and Asie Payton, who had two stunning posthumous albums released, are buried there.

I also visited the grave of Sonny Boy Williamson (the second one) outside of Tutwiler, and Dockery Farms. Dockery, as much as any place on Earth, can reasonably lay claim to being the birthplace of the blues. Charley Patton lived there for some 30 years, and learned to play guitar there, inspired by an older musician, Henry Sloan.

But I wanted to hear some music, so after a couple of days I moved my base of operations to Clarksdale, where I rented a wonderful, large apartment downtown for a couple of days. I was staying two doors down from where W. C. Handy lived for awhile, and just steps from the depot where Muddy Waters caught the Illinois Central train to Chicago. Weekends are about the only time to hear music in the Delta, so on Friday night I went to hear Terry "Big T" Williams at Ground Zero, Morgan Freeman's blues club in Clarksdale. I had been impressed with Big T on recordings, but his live show was kind of disappointing - a pretty slick presentation of predictable blues covers by Albert King, B. B. King, etc.

But the next night was something else. Clarksdale once had numerous juke joints - informal bars with a jukebox and live music on the weekends. They're pretty much all gone now except for Red's. Red's frankly looks like an abandoned, boarded-up building. But on Friday and Saturday nights, it's anything but. The crowd was fairly small on the Saturday night I was there, but the music was just what I was looking for. Big A (I only learned his real name, Anthony Sherrod, later) and his three-piece blues band played with soul, humor, and intensity. They played some of the same cover tunes I had heard the night before, but Big A and his cheap-ass guitar (I never did figure out what brand it was) turned every song into a raw, strong, immediate experience. His rhythm section played with that perfect blend of drive and relaxation that's found in the best blues. I couldn't keep still.

There was more to my trip which would probably only interest someone as geeky as me. I loved the little moments when I encountered a trace or remnant of blues history, like the tile floor that's only thing left of Sonny Boy Williamson's house in Helena, Arkansas, or the trestle of the Yazoo Delta (Yellow Dog) rail line I unexpectedly came across in Boyle. A lot has changed in the Delta, but many things remain the same. I can't decide if that's good or bad.

Germany Report

2011-01-01T20:23:00.000-05:00

Nothing about music here this time - just a short report on our trip to Germany for my friends, with some pictures that I haven't posted elsewhere on the interwebs. Karen's nephew is studying computer engineering at the University of Saarland, so the idea was that we would visit during the Christmas season, and meet up with Karen's sister, brother-in-law, and niece, who would stay in Germany for Christmas, while we returned home Christmas Eve.

Flying across the Atlantic is always brutal, even if it is kind of miraculous. We took one of those awful overnight flights and arrived in Frankfurt at 7:00 AM on December 17. I knew that it would be cold in Europe at that time of year, but for some reason snow didn't occur to me; I guess I just don't think about it much here in Atlanta. We arrived just as Europe was experiencing unusual amounts of snow, which played havoc with plane and train schedules. Anyway, we found our nice little hotel, walked around Frankfurt a little, and had a nice dinner at a good restaurant.

The next morning we took the train to Saarbrücken, where our nephew and niece, along with their two kids (2 1/2 and six months) met us at the station. Saarbrücken is a nice little city, about the size of Savannah, Georgia, I guess. It's on the Saar river, near the French border, and has bounced back and forth between Germany and France a few times. Although the guidebooks say there's not a whole lot to do or see there, it was interesting enough to this American; there are several centuries-old churches and a 17th-century palace. We did some sightseeing, but since this was a family trip, we spent a lot of time just hanging out in our nephew's tiny student apartment, drying out and warming up from walking through the snow.

Speaking of the snow, it delayed Karen's sister's arrival for days. Their flight was cancelled, and they couldn't get another for four days. So the several days we were planning on spending together turned into about 45 minutes - they arrived at the Saarbrücken train station as we were leaving on the 23rd.

The plan for the 22nd was to catch an early morning train to Paris, spend the day there, and return on the 7:00 PM train. Well, our train was canceled due to the weather; the next one was scheduled for 11:00 AM. After some debate about whether it would be worth it, we bought tickets for the 11:00 o'clock train, which actually left about 12:30. So we only had a few hours to walk around Paris, but I'm glad we did. We had a simple, but excellent meal, with the best pommes frites (French fries) I have ever had - I guess that's not surprising. In our few hours in Paris, we visited Notre Dame Cathedral, and I got to kiss my wife in the rain on a bridge over the Seine. Notre was awesome, with incredible artwork. There was a mass service going on when we visited, and the polyphonic choral music seemed suspended in the air. A handful of hours is not enough time in Paris, but I'm glad we had that.

Other impressions: All of the airports and train stations had policemen carrying assault rifles. I never quite got used to that.

Europe is more advanced than the U.S. in some ways, but not in bedding. Sheets and blankets are much superior to duvets, which make temperature regulation almost impossible.

I never had a bad beer in Germany. Even the cheap stuff was good.

Speaking of alcohol, gluhwein is good stuff. It's hot spiced wine, popular around Christmas. The first sip was a little bit of a shock, but I took to it pretty quickly.

The weather played one last trick on us as we tried to get home. Our flight out of Frankfurt was cancelled. We scheduled a flight the next day, and the airline put us up in a hotel near the airport. It was a brand new hotel - functional rather than elegant - and the airline had apparently booked the entire place. So all of the "guests" were stranded passengers like us; we all shared a strange, Purgatory-like existence. We had shelter and meals - always pasta and sauce, served buffet-style. And no refills on the Coke, please.

So we didn't make it home for Christmas with my family; we spent twelve hours on a plane, instead. But we made it home that night. It was a low-key trip to Europe, but we got to do lots of baby-holding.

Council Spur Blues - Robert Curtis Smith, RIP

2010-12-08T11:36:00.006-05:00

I've been wanting to write something about the great, if obscure, bluesman Robert Curtis Smith. Now it seems as though this post must serve as a memorial. Smith was not famous enough for his passing to be noted in the press, but word has reached the blues community through his family that he died in Chicago in November. Smith deserves to be remembered by the world at large, if for no other reason than because he recorded one of the best blues albums of the LP era.

R.C. Smith was an elusive figure. He was born in or around Cruger, Mississippi, at the edge of the Delta region, around 1930. For the first 38 years or so of his life he seemed to alternate between attempting to survive the poverty and oppression of life in Mississippi and attempting to escape it. He left the Delta for Chicago and Texas at various times, but apparently found little relief, since he always returned to Mississippi. In an early-1960's interview with Paul Oliver, he described the conditions in which black sharecroppers found themselves in Mississippi:

You work from the time right sun-up until sundown. Other words in choppin' (cotton)
it's three dollars a day, and it's hard to make enough money to practically do anything, because, during the week you got to live and you go to the store and take up a little groceries to carry you that week but when you paid off you owe almost half of that. So there ain't anything you can do with the little change you has got, but stay here, because you can't leave here unless you do leave walkin'.

It would be nice to report that Smith's fortunes changed when he walked into Wade Walton's barbershop in Clarksdale on the day in 1960 when Paul Oliver and Chris Strachwitz were there, searching for unknown and long-lost blues musicians. Oliver and Strachwitz recognized his talent right away, and Smith made several recordings in 1960 and 1961, including one of the most remarkable blues albums ever. Clarksdale Blues: The Blues of Robert Curtis Smith was released on the Bluesville subsidiary of Prestige records; it made absolutely no impact and sunk without a trace, never to be reissued. But for those of us lucky enough to have a copy, it's a treasure.

Smith's music shows an awareness of the blues tradition; he "covers" songs by Memphis Minnie and Big Bill Broonzy, as well as the traditional "Catfish Blues." But the really striking songs are his originals. Their power comes largely from his melodic gift (not every bluesman can create memorable, beautiful melodies) and the structures of his songs - most are based on the standard 12-bar blues pattern, but are altered or extended in very interesting and original ways. One song, "Council Spur Blues," describes conditions on Roy Flowers' plantation in great detail, mentioning Flowers and his overseer, Mr. Walker, by name. This was a brave gesture for a black man in Mississippi in 1961.

Smith finally escaped Mississippi around 1968, spending the rest of his life in Chicago. He played the blues up north for awhile, and even auditioned for a spot in Willie Dixon's band. At some point, he had the religious conversion experience he later recounted in "Lye Water Conversion" on the album From Mississippi to Chicago, and only performed gospel music after that. Most people in the blues community knew nothing of all this for years; it seemed as if this talented musician had just disappeared from the face of the earth. For a long time Jim O'Neal, owner of the Rooster Blues record label, had a picture of Smith posted in his Stackhouse record store in Clarksdale; the caption read, "Do you know this man?"

Eventually Wade Walton became aware of Smith's whereabouts; this led to his appearance at the 1997 Sunflower River Blues Festival in Clarksdale, where I was lucky enough to hear him. It was clear that this was Smith's first performance ever in a concert setting; he was uncomfortable and unsure of what to do or say on stage. But the music (all gospel songs, of course) was passionate and powerful, and over all too soon.

And now there won't be any more music by this remarkable musician. But you can still hear his recordings, if you can find them. A comprehensive discography of Smith's records has been put together by Stefan Wirz, and can be found here. It looks like a lot of records, but most of the issues are drawn from the same few recording sessions. The most easily available CD featuring Smith is I Have to Paint My Face: Mississippi Blues 1960, an anthology on the Arhoolie label; Smith's four solo selections are excellent, and there's a fun example of Wade Walton's infectious, rhythmic playing of his razor and strop to Smith's guitar accompaniment. From Mississippi to Chicago, mentioned above, features several of Smith's later gospel songs and is still in print. Clarksdale Blues, his masterpiece, is long out of print and very difficult to find, but for those who know their way around the internet, can be found for download.

I'm glad I got to hear R.C. Smith perform that afternoon in Clarksdale. So long to a talented man who overcame a lot.

Revisiting Ma and Fletcher

2010-12-04T21:40:00.010-05:00

(I apologize in advance for the appearance/layout of this post. I tried to insert the photos in such a way that would look good on the screen, but found that I have very little control over how it may end up looking on any individual computer screen. On the plus side, you can click on any photo for a larger view.)

Yesterday I headed south again, armed with a camera this time, to revisit the Ma Rainey house and grave that I stumbled on by chance last month. (See my November 10 post.) The door of the Rainey house was locked when I tried it, but the woman working there had seen me walk up, so she let me in after determining that I was there to visit the museum, not for any nefarious purpose. She obviously had been trained in Rainey lore, but in some way she didn't seem to "get" it - a lot of the things she said were close to being right, not not quite. I would have preferred to be left alone to wander around by myself, but that didn't seem to be an option.

The house, as pictures attest, was in pretty bad shape a few years back, but it's been restored nicely. Much of Ma's original furniture is intact, including the piano, which has been stripped of the green paint that someone applied at some point. There are some Paramount records on display that made me drool. Otherwise, the displays were pretty generic, providing information about Rainey and the blues. But for me, the whole point was just being in Ma Rainey's house.

One of my assumption in my previous Rainey post was wrong, I think. Ma had such a large house built not so that she could take in boarders, but so that her parents (and sister, I think) could live with her. I was fascinated to see that she had her father's name inscribed in the concrete before the door.

I was also wrong in assuming that the Pridgetts buried on either side of Ma Rainey in Porterdale Cemetery were sisters. Edna, her mother, is on one side, and I think that (based on the dates) that Edna's sister is buried on the other side.

While in the cemetery I took also took pictures of an interesting-shaped tombstone, and the stone marking the grave of Jenny, Kizzie's baby, that I wrote about in that earlier post. Notice that Jenny's stone is marble, and professionally carved. Many, if not most, of the monuments in Porterdale cemetery are concrete, and are much rougher (and cheaper) in appearance. Who paid for the the stone over Jenny's grave? Was Kizzie the maid of a privileged daughter? Could Jenny's father have been the slavemaster?

After paying my respects at Porterdale, I headed 60 miles further south, to the little town of Cuthbert, Georgia. Cuthbert was the birthplace of the great Fletcher Henderson, who practically invented the big band swing style. Henderson spent most of his life in New York or on the road, but he's buried in his hometown. While Ma Rainey was buried in a segregated cemetery, Henderson's grave is in the town's main, mostly white, graveyard. I don't think this had anything to do with his fame as a musician; it was probably due to the respect in which his father was held. Fletcher Henderson, Sr. was principal of the African-American school in Cuthbert for decades.

I last visited Cuthbert and Fletcher's grave about 15 years ago. At that time, there was nothing at the gravesite to indicate that a brilliant and widely influential musician was buried there. Since that time, Chet Kruly, who played with Henderson's band in the late 1940's, sponsored a marker which at least mentions that Henderson had a band.

I'm glad I got to pay my respects to these two great Georgia musicians.

Audio Glimpses of the Past

2010-11-26T10:45:00.004-05:00

I spend a good bit of time in antique stores these days, searching for 78s. A couple of months ago, I visited an Atlanta antique store which had an interesting-looking box. It looked like it might have records in it, and it did - not 78s, but 40 or 50 home-recorded discs. They were 12" discs; some were marked as 33 1/3, and some were labeled with song titles or rudimentary information about the radio programs they were recorded from. I bought three of the most promising-looking of the records, took them home, and found them to be easily playable on my turntable. Moreover, they were quite well-recorded, for the most part. A couple of the sides were pretty disappointing - they proved to be nothing more than recordings of disc jockeys playing records, but several of the sides were intriguing and musically rewarding enough to get me pretty excited.

Radio was once a more interesting and creative medium than it is these days. Bands of all types commonly broadcast live from clubs and ballrooms, their sounds carried over the various radio networks to listeners across the country. These broadcasts were sometimes recorded by hobbyists with home recording equipment, which until the late 1940's meant a disc recorder of some kind. The person who recorded the stash of discs I found labeled some with his name, and even with information about the equipment he used.

Our recordist was named J.M. Keith, apparently from Atlanta, since most of the radio stations he recorded from were Atlanta stations like WSB and WAGA. On a couple of discs he engraved the make, model, and serial number of the recorders he used. The earlier records were made with a Presto Model Y, serial #4111. The Model Y paired one of Presto's cheaper recorders with an amplifier and speaker. Later, Mr. Keith upgraded to a Presto 6N, serial #1891. The 6N was a high-quality machine, used by many radio stations. And it wasn't cheap. The price for 6N was $735 in 1950; it probably wasn't much less in 1948, when Keith seemed to have acquired his.

Our friend J.M. Keith had somewhat eclectic tastes; he recorded all kinds of music. There's a really horrible "lounge" quartet from a club in New York, several disc jockey shows, and lots of recordings from the semi-classical Bell Telephone Hour. Listening to those first three discs and examining the labels and sleeves gave me some insight into Mr. Keith's labeling system, though, so I went back to the antique store and bought all of the records that I though might contain worthwhile music. I ended up with a dozen discs. They all seem to be have been recorded in 1947 or 1948. I played them all one evening, one after another, and it was like a trip back in time - like listening to a couple of hours of late-forties radio, dialing to different stations every twelve minutes or so. Most of the discs are quite well-recorded, although in a few cases, the surfaces have deteriorated a little bit. And Mr. Keith would occasionally record with the gain set too high, resulting in some distortion.

There ended up being six sides of music that were interesting enough to digitize and preserve:

Three tunes by the Ray McKinley big band from the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, August, 1947. One of these is Eddie Sauter's amazingly forward-looking "Sand Storm," which the band had recorded in the studio a year and a half earlier.

Three selections by a very different big band, that of Noro Morales. "Caramba Bebop" from this broadcast is a very hot piece of Latin jazz, with an oddly wonderful piano solo by Morales.

A broadcast by the Adrian Rollini Trio. Rollini was the first great bass saxophonist in jazz, but by 1947 he was playing vibes and doubling on chimes. These are the only hot jazz chimes solos I've ever heard.

A side split between Rollini's trio and the Mary Osborne Trio. Osborne was an excellent Charlie Christian-inspired guitarist, but she's featured mostly as a vocalist here.

Twelve or so minutes from an August, 1948 broadcast of the Grand Ole Opry. This is an interesting broadcast, but I was surprised at how lame most of the music was. The other side of this disc is much better:

Part of the WSB Barn Dance program that followed the Grand Ole Opry. Barn Dance was similar to the Opry, but the music (and comedy) is more "down home."

I have uploaded selections from all of these broadcasts (except the Grand Ole Opry) here. Once on the page with the links, you can click to listen or right-click to download. I hope you enjoy these audio glimpses of the past. And thank you, J.M. Keith.

Blues Poetry II

2010-11-17T23:22:00.005-05:00

As I was cleaning out my file cabinet a few days ago, I came upon a folder of transcriptions of blues lyrics that I did about 15 years ago. Once again, I was stuck with what beautiful poetry blues lyrics can be. Here are four of my favorites from that old stash of transcriptions, plus one more (the Percy Mayfield song) that I transcribed tonight.

Transcribing blues lyrics can be a challenge. Thick Mississippi accents, idiosyncratic pronunciation, archaic turns of phrase, poor recordings with worn surfaces - all of these conspire against an accurate hearing of the lyrics. Comparing different published transcriptions of the same song might reveal very different hearings. But I reviewed all of these tonight, and I'm satisfied with their accuracy. Being Southern helps, as does experience with listening to the blues.

And as wonderful as some of these lyrics are, they are greatly enhanced by hearing them in context, sung by these brilliant musicians. The interaction of the lyrics, the singing, and the instruments is what creates the complete picture. I've listed the original issue, place and date of recording after each song. Punctuation and line breaks are, of course, my own.

Mama, “Tain’t Long for Day
Blind Willie McTell

Wake up, mama, don’t you sleep so hard.
Wake up, mama, don’t you sleep so hard.
Boy, it’s these old blues walkin’ all over your yard.

I’ve got these blues, reason I’m not satisfied.
I’ve got these blues; I’m not satisfied.
That’s the reason why I stole away and cried.

Blues grabbed me at midnight, didn’t turn me loose ‘til day.
Blues grabbed me at midnight, didn’t turn me loose ‘til day.
I didn’t have no mama to drive these blues away.

The big star fallin’, mama, it ain’t long for day.
The big star fallin’, mama, ‘tain’t long for day.
Maybe the sunshine will drive these blues away.

(Oh, come here quick.
Come on mama,
You know I gotcha.)

Mm – mm.
Mm – mm.
Mm – mm.

Victor 21474
Atlanta, Georgia; October 18, 1927

Son House is one of my favorite bluesmen, and one who really paid attention to the quality of his lyrics. "Pony Blues" is traditionally about sexual prowess; House's version seems to be about more than that. Everyone will have his or her own interpretation, but to me, House's pony is himself - his soul.

The Pony Blues
Son House

Why don’t you catch my pony; now saddle up my black mare.
Oh, my pony; saddle up, up my black mare.
You know I’m gonna find my baby, well, in the world somewhere.

You know, he’s a travelin’ horse, and he’s too black bad.
He’s a travelin’ pony; I declare, he’s too black bad.
You know he got a gait, now, no Shetland ain’t, ain’t never had.

You know, I take him by the reins and I led him around and round.
I said I take him by the reins and I, I led him around and round.
You know, he ain’t the best in the world, but he’s the best ever been in this town.

You know, he’s a travelin’ horse and he don’t deny his name.
He’s a travelin’ pony and he don’t deny his name.
You know, the way he can travel is a lowdown, oh, dirty shame.

Why don’t you come up here, pony; now come on, please, let’s us go.
I said, come up, get up now; please, pony, now let’s us go.
Let’s we saddle on down on the Gulf of, of Mexico.

You know, the horse that I’m riding, he can foxtrot, he can lope and pace.
I said the pony I’m ridin’, he can foxtrot, he can lope and pace.
You know, a horse with that many gaits, you know, I’m bound to win that race.

Mm, he’s a travelin’ horse and he don’t deny his name.
He’s a travelin’ pony; he don’t deny his name.
You know, the way he can travel is a lowdown, oh, dirty shame.

Library of Congress 92401
Robinsonville, Mississippi; July 17, 1942

Sad Days, Lonely Nights
Junior Kimbrough

My mama told me –
I was a child.
She said, “Son,
Gonna have hard days.”

My daddy told me, too.
He said, “Son,
Gonna have sad days,
Lonely nights;

Sittin’ alone;
Head hung down,
Tears runnin’ down.”

Done got old –
Sad days,
Lonely nights
Done overtaken me.

Sometimes I sit alone;
I wonder ‘bout the things
My mama and daddy told me.

Sad days,
Lonely nights
Done overtaken me.

Fat Possum 1006
Holly Springs, Mississippi; April, 1994

Memory Pain
Percy Mayfield

Every time I see a woman, it makes me think about mine.
Every time I see a woman, it make me think of mine.
And the way she used to treat me, boys, I just can’t keep from cryin’.

I used to come home in the evenin’; that woman would be gone.
When I would come home in the evenin’, my woman would be gone.
And when I would get up in the mornin’, boys, she’d just be coming home.

I don’t see well, and I’m absent-minded,
And I hardly sleep at all.
My past has put me on a habit
Of nicotine and alcohol.
It serve me right to suffer; serve me right to be alone.
Seems I’m still livin’ with the memory of the days that’s past and gone.

Specialty 2126
Hollywood, California; April 23, 1952

This Joe Callicott song was later recorded by Ry Cooder as "France Chance." Callicott's reference to "great news" means "big news," not "good news."

Love Me Baby Blues
Joe Callicott

Drop down, baby, just like showers of rain;
Hate to hear my fair brown call my name.
Yeah, I hate to hear my fair brown call my name;
Well, she calls so loud and the poor girl calls so plain.

Walked to the station, tears runnin’ down;
I got news my baby done left town.
Yeah, I got news my baby, well, she done blowed this town.
Well, I got great news – my baby done blowed this town.

Rooster crowed in England; heard ‘im in France.
Look like the other guy won’t ‘low me no chance.
Yeah, look like the mmm…, ah, they won’t ‘low me no chance.
Ah, look like to me I can’t get a possible chance.

I knows my doggie when I hear him bark;
I know my baby if I feel her in the dark.
Yeah, I know my baby… I feel her in the….

Ah, tell me woman, how can you be so mean?
Give all of my money out on the brand new stream.
Baby, oh tell me, woman, how can you be so…?

Arhoolie 1042
Nesbit, Mississippi; August, 1967

A Chance Encounter With Ma Rainey

2010-11-10T17:20:00.000-05:00

I'll begin this post as so many bloggers have over the years: It's been a long time since my last post. I'll try not to let that happen again. Now, on to business:

Yesterday I drove the 90 miles or so from Atlanta to Columbus, Georgia to hunt for 78s and do some geocaching. Columbus in a nice little city; the downtown area is pretty healthy, mostly due to the large number of Columbus State University students spending their money, I imagine. After looking around downtown for awhile, I drove down 5th Avenue and was surprised to see a historical marker proclaiming "Ma Rainey Home."

Ma Rainey was one of the seminal blues performers and recording artists, although "seminal" seems like an odd adjective to apply to a woman. She was born Gertrude Pridgett in Columbus in 1886 - earlier, notice, than either Charley Patton or Blind Lemon Jefferson. She was singing the blues on tours throughout the South by the time she was 20, and was one of the first Southern blues singers to record - although Bessie Smith beat her to the studios by ten months. Rainey recorded 111 released sides (including alternate takes); unfortunately, her entire recording career was for Paramount Records, famous for the poor quality of their recordings and pressings. But enough of her voice comes through the lousy sound to make it clear that she was the real deal - a strong, earthy singer who sounds like she grew up with the blues.

I had forgotten that this great woman was from Columbus. By the time my brain had processed what I had just seen, I had passed the house. I quickly backed up, pulled over and got out of the car. I read the marker several times, and stared at the house for awhile. It's a large house - I suspect Rainey rented out rooms - and it's painted yellow, as it apparently was when Rainey lived there between her retirement in 1935 and death in 1939. The house is now a museum, but I didn't know that - there was nothing to indicate that it was open to the public. So I just stared.

The marker indicated that Porterdale Cemetery, where Rainey is buried, was nearby. I found the cemetery about a half mile away. Three guys were digging a grave near the entrance, so I pulled over and asked where Ma Rainey's grave was, and one of them showed me. Rainey is buried between two of her Pridgett sisters; each has a concrete slab over her grave. Ma's just reads "Gertrude Rainey" and the date of her death, but she also has a nice new headstone proclaiming her status as "Mother of the Blues."

After visiting the grave, I had the urge to drive back by the house while playing some Ma Rainey music. This was all unplanned, so I didn't have any Rainey CDs with me, but I had brought Allen Lowe's idiosyncratic blues history box set Really the Blues? as road music, so I found "Don't Fish in My Sea" and cranked it up.

It was very cool to run across Rainey's house more or less by chance, and to be led to her gravesite by the plaque. I'm planning to go back before too long, actually visit the museum and take some pictures.

At the cemetery, I had a gut-wrenching moment not directly related to Ma Rainey. Porterdale Cemetery was a burying ground for the black residents of Columbus - for most of the South's history, segregation didn't end with death. Near Rainey's grave was the grave of an infant. The headstone was inscribed with the child's given name (which I don't remember), the date of her death (1858) and "Kizzie's Baby." No last names. I thought it was odd, until it hit me - Kizzie and her child didn't have last names. They were slaves. You can't live down here without frequently thinking about the terrible history of the region, but it was a powerful experience to unexpectedly come across the raw evidence of human slavery - not in a museum, not in a book, but while just wandering around.

So Long, Donna's

2010-09-04T11:30:00.003-04:00

Music has been a part of life on New Orleans' Rampart Street at least since the beginnings of jazz. On South Rampart one could hear Bunk Johnson and Sidney Bechet playing at the Eagle Saloon or young Louis Armstrong holding forth at the Red Onion. (Both of these buildings are still standing.) The ballroom of the Astoria Hotel was a popular spot in the 1920s and 30s; you could catch Lee Collins and David Jones with their Astoria Hot Eight. Heading downtown to North Rampart, Luis Russell led the band at the Cadillac before moving north to Chicago. The Boswell Sisters were "discovered" while singing at the New Orleans Athletic Club. Cosimo Matassa opened his first recording studio at the corner of North Rampart and Dumaine, the corner immortalized in Professor Longhair's "Go To the Mardi Gras." In the 1970s, Lu & Charlie's featured Ellis Marsalis, Alvin Batiste, and James Booker. More recently, Big Sam Williams' Funky Butt was one of the best places in the city to hear music, but the club never reopened after Katrina hit. And now an era has ended: a couple of weeks ago Donna's, the last music club on North Rampart, closed its doors for the last time.

Music clubs come and go all the time; none of them last forever - although it looks like the Village Vanguard has a shot at immortality. So why does the closing of Donna's affect me so much?

From the time that it opened in the early 1990s (I don't remember the exact year), Donna's was something special. Even to an introvert like me, who mostly just wants to be left alone, Donna's was warm and welcoming. It's kind of a cliche, but you felt like family as soon as you walked in the door.

And, of course, the music was often amazing. In the early days, Donna featured brass bands; there weren't really any other clubs featuring this amazing New Orleans hybrid music at the time. The bands would stand at one end of the room, and if you wanted to use the restroom, you had to walk through the band. The first time I heard a New Orleans brass band in the flesh was in Jackson Square, where the young Rebirth Brass Band was playing for tips, but my second exposure to this incredible sound was at Donna's, where I heard the Algiers Brass Band. It was such a stunning experience that I went back a couple of nights later to hear the Pin Stripe BB. I was also fortunate enough to catch Tuba Fats' Chosen Few, the Mahogany, Treme, Hurricane (from Holland), and Hot 8 Brass Bands there.

Later, of course, they built a bandstand against the windows facing Rampart. And expanding from brass bands, Donna booked a variety of New Orleans music (mostly jazz) into the club.

Memories from Donna's:

The Tom McDermott Quartet had just played a version of "Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gave to Me" which took all sorts of unexpected and unusual turns. I remember one passage in which drummer Shannon Powell was playing in a different, but related, tempo than the rest of the group. As they played the last note, a police car zoomed down North Rampart, sirens blaring. Bassist Matt Perrine laughed and said, "Oh, no - the trad police!"

Uncle Lionel Batiste coming into the club, dressed as sharp as a tack, and dancing with all the young ladies to whatever band was playing.

Speaking of Mr. Batiste - standing near him as the Treme Brass Band was playing and realizing just how interesting and creative his bass drumming is.

Hearing Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers' dark, spooky version of "Light Up." One young man took the message of the song to heart and lit up a joint in the middle of the floor. Donna, who was sensitive to illegal shenanigans in her club, came over the bar like some sort of action hero and had the guy out the door in seconds.

The sitters-in: you never knew who was going to show up to play - Leroy Jones, Nicholas Payton, David Torkanowsky, Kermit, visiting musicians from Europe or Japan. One night Tom McDermott was playing with the young band Loose Marbles when veteran trumpeter Jack Fine came in and sat at the bar. He stayed there all night with his horn on the bar, and whenever he felt like it, he'd pick up the trumpet and join in from his barstool.

And on a couple of occasions, Donna's was where I experienced some of the best music I have ever heard in my life. I can think of at least two evenings when Evan Christopher and Tom McDermott, playing either with a quartet or as a duo, "lifted the bandstand," as Thelonious Monk put it - they played music that transcended "good music" and touched another level.

Donna's husband Charlie manned the kitchen. I still think his barbecue ribs were the best I ever had.

Donna and Charlie decided to close the club for a variety of reasons. Charlie has had health problems, and Donna has been commuting to and from Florida, where she has a teaching job. But the primary reason seems to be the condition of the building; the landlord has been unwilling to make repairs, and the building has been slowly falling apart. Incidentally, this was one of the reasons for the demise of the Funky Butt - and that building was owned by the same landlord.

I don't live in New Orleans; I was a couple-of-times-a-year visitor to Donna's. I doubt anyone associated with the club would remember me. But I owe some of my most cherished memories to that little club on the corner of North Rampart and St. Ann. So long, Donna's - I'll miss you.

Barbecue in the South

2010-07-21T18:15:00.003-04:00

Life is too short to let it pass without eating barbecue. Of course, if you eat too much barbecue, you won't live as long - but that's another story.

First of all, some definition of terms. Be forewarned that I'm going to do something that I usually avoid: embrace my regional prejudices. This post is concerned with barbecue as it's found in the southeastern United States: that group of states starting in eastern Louisiana (western Louisiana might as well be Texas) and forming a crescent around to Virginia. Down here we believe that:

"Barbecue" is a noun, not a verb. The practice of cooking meat outdoors on a grill is "grilling," not "barbecuing."

With all due respect to my friends in Texas and Kansas City, beef is not barbecue.

Barbecue is pork slow-cooked over hickory wood and served with sauce on it. It's that simple. But something about the interaction of pork, hickory smoke, and sauce results in a dish that's more than the sum of its parts.

The sauce is sometimes applied during the cooking process, but most often added just before eating. It can be tomato-, vinegar-, or mustard-based. I've always been partial to barbecue sauce that uses tomato as its base, but as I get older, I find that I'm enjoying vinegar-based sauces quite a bit.

To me, an indispensable accompaniment to barbecue is brunswick stew - a sometimes mysterious concoction which usually contains pork, chicken, tomatoes, corn, and occasionally other vegetables. Brunswick stew is not universal throughout the South, though; in South Carolina and eastern Georgia they put together something they call barbecue hash instead of brunswick stew. I've been told not to ask what's in it. And one night, in a barbecue joint in Clarksdale, Mississippi, I had to explain brunswick stew to the waitress; she had never heard of it. I told her that we always ate it with our barbecue in Georgia and described the ingredients. She thought it sounded pretty good. At that point I broke off our conversation, grabbed my newspaper, and smashed a cockroach that was crawling across my table. I still enjoyed the barbecue.

There are stylistic differences in barbecue in different parts of the South. Some places favor using the leaner cuts of pork; some use fattier parts of the pig, for more flavor. In North Carolina, the sauce tends to be vinegar-based; in South Carolina they favor mustard-based sauce. Alabama and Mississippi seem pretty firmly in the tomato-based sauce camp. In Memphis there are places where you have to specify that you don't want slaw on your sandwich; it's considered a given. In north Georgia, the brunswick stew tends to be composed mostly of finely-chopped meat. As you travel further south, the stew contains more vegetables. There are differences between eastern and western North Carolina barbecue that seem to be mostly technical in nature; they will concern the cook, but not the person sitting at the table. It's been said that Georgia can't make up its mind what it wants its barbecue to be. That's pretty much true - you'll find all sorts of sauces and stews in the state.

The best barbecue is found in the shabby little restaurants throughout the South, often out in the middle of nowhere or in run-down neighborhoods in the cities and towns. An ugly cinder block building is a good sign, as are uncertain business hours and a very limited menu. I will drive (and I'm not alone in this) miles out of my way to eat at a good barbecue joint, and I always try to make barbecue part of my agenda when I'm traveling through the South.

Yesterday I ate at my favorite Georgia barbecue joint - Old Clinton Barbecue, about fifteen miles northeast of Macon. Naming Old Clinton as my favorite is somewhat arbitrary, given the competition. Fresh Air Barbecue in Jackson is usually considered to serve up the best 'cue in Georgia. Sprayberry's in Newnan is excellent, and Dean's in Jonesboro has a lot to recommend it. Harold's, on the south side of Atlanta, is usually very good - about once every 15 visits you may get an unpleasantly fatty serving of pork. My favorite brunswick stew can be had at the Georgia Pig, which is in Brunswick, fittingly enough. Fincher's in Macon, Sconyer's in Augusta, and Vandy's in Statesboro are are all worth a drive to visit. One of my favorite meals was about 15 years ago, at Richardson's Barbecue in tiny Iron City, in the southwestern corner of the state. They had a jukebox which reflected the rural population of the area perfectly - it was half-filled with country records and half-filled with blues. I kept ordering more food and feeding quarters into the jukebox - blues records for me, thank you. I revisited Richardson's about two years ago; the barbecue was still excellent, but the jukebox was gone.

But Old Clinton Barbecue.... It's odd - the sauce is not very good when sampled by itself; it's salty, thin, vinegary. But by some alchemy, it enhances the excellent smoked pork perfectly. The ladies behind the counter also know just how much sauce to ladle onto the sandwiches; I tried putting a little extra sauce on the last quarter of mine, and it destroyed the perfection. I only visit Old Clinton once a year. Between visits, I sometimes wonder if the barbecue is really as good as I remember. And it always is.

Wonder and Madness at 78 Revolutions per Minute

2010-07-09T22:12:00.000-04:00

My record collecting has been out of hand for years. My wife just shakes her head when I come home with more recorded music. But until fairly recently, I could tell her, "Well, at least I don't collect 78s." Those who have read this blog regularly know that I can no longer make that claim.

Record collectors are a little nuts anyway, but collecting 78 RPM records is just over the top. In an age when an iPod can hold 1000 hours of music, filling your home with highly breakable pieces of shellac which hold six minutes of music is just ridiculous. And they will fill your home - 78s take up a lot of room. I'm up to seven boxes.

So why bother? Well, the reason I got into 78s is that there is still some music which can't be heard any other way. Not much, these days, with some exhaustive CD reissue programs around the world, but there are still 78s that have not been reissued in any other form. The Boyce Brown record on the Collector's Item label (discussed in an earlier post) is a prime example. I've got more than a few very cool records which are unavailable in any other form.

And even though most of the stuff is available in other formats, there is still something kind of magical about hearing the music as the musicians expected it to be heard at the time. I'm not saying that they wouldn't have preferred more advanced technology if it had been available, but most of the music issued on 78s was conceived to be issued in that form.

And a well-made 78 in good condition can sound wonderful. There is always some surface noise present, but the ears quickly adjust to that. Many LP and CD reissues of material from 78s filter out the surface noise, which also takes out frequencies of the music, removing some of the "life" from the sound. I never had any complaint about the sound quality of my CD reissue of the 1923 recordings by A. J. Piron's New Orleans Orchestra - until I found one of the original records in excellent condition. The 78 sounds much better than the CD. There are certain records in my collection that I cherish for their sound - I can hear Louis Armstrong's breath through his horn and hear Eddie South's bow on the strings of his violin.

There's more to my love of these old records - something less tangible. They are artifacts from the past - windows to a forgotten world. As I hold or play a 78, I often speculate on who originally owned the record - why did they buy this particular record - did they enjoy it? I recently bought a box of records from an antique dealer in Chattanooga. There were a few records in the box which "didn't belong" - they obviously came from another source. But most of the box seemed to be from a single collection. Whose records were they?

Well, the original owner was probably from the country, presumably somewhere in East Tennessee or North Georgia. The vast majority of the records are what we would now call country music, but the style was usually called "hillbilly" at the time. Most of the records come from a ten-year period starting in 1924; the earliest record is a real gem from that year - an Okeh record by Henry Whitter, the first "hillbilly" artist to record. The record buyer's tastes leaned, for the most part, toward the more commercial side of country music - Carson Robison is the most-represented artist, and his music was slicker and more "citified" than the more down-home hillbilly musicians. But there were plenty of amazing "real-deal" records in the box, too, by groups like the West Virginia Night Owls, the North Carolina Ramblers, and the Carter Family.

The person (or family) who accumulated this collection was probably fairly religious - there are quite a few "white gospel" discs in the stack. He (or they) was probably Irish, and not too many generations removed from the Emerald Isle. There are Irish songs performed in country style (like a Conqueror record by Mac and Bob), but there is one straight-up record of Irish dance tunes by the Four Provinces Orchestra, an Irish band out of Philadelphia.

My precursor's record buying tailed off around 1934, but there were a few later records in the stack, like the bizarre gospel song "Television in the Sky," recorded in 1939 by the West Virginia trio of Cap, Andy and Flip. The most recent record is a 1942 Roy Acuff.

I owe this mysterious person a debt for bringing together this fascinating collection of early country music. And I'll keep buying those ten- and twelve-inch shellac discs until I totally run out of room.

Goodbye to Two Giants

2010-06-25T20:49:00.005-04:00

I haven't posted here in awhile, and it gives me no pleasure that this post is a memorial. Two giants of avant-garde jazz (for lack of a better term) have died in the past few days. Trumpeter/composer Bill Dixon passed last week at the age of 84. And tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, 81, left us yesterday.

For much of their careers, these two men were, to an extent, outsiders - even by the already marginalized standards of avant-garde improvised music. Both were founding members of organizations whose purpose was to encourage and promote the somewhat challenging music created by their members; Dixon was the primary mover behind the Jazz Composers Guild, which grew out of the October Revolution in Jazz, a week-long series of concerts he set up in 1964. Anderson was a founding member of the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), the Chicago organization that gave a forum to Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, Joseph Jarman, George Lewis, and many others. The Jazz Composers Guild soon fell apart, split by the differing aims of its members, but the AACM is still going strong.

On his first recording, a 1962 album by the Bill Dixon/Archie Shepp Quartet, Dixon sounds like a fairly conventional free-jazz trumpet player, if that's not too much of a contradiction in terms. It was soon apparent that his music went beyond Jazz with a capital J, however. His magnificent 1966 record Intents and Purposes sounds like it has at least one foot in the realm of contemporary classical music. And his trumpet style developed into one of the most distinctive and unusual in jazz - he used smears, spaces, squeezed notes, blats, sounds that were more air that pitch, and multiphonics. And it all worked; when a Dixon solo was over, it felt like a unified statement, not like a series of effects.

Bill Dixon was, by many accounts, a difficult figure to deal with. I suspect that he would have responded to such a statement by saying that he was uncompromising. He became a professor at Bennington College at Vermont in the late 1960s, and remained there for many years. Dixon recorded infrequently in the seventies and eighties, but recordings became more frequent during the last two decades of his life. His solo on "With (Exit)," from Cecil Taylor's 1966 Conquistador! album, is still one of the most striking passages in recorded music. Just as the piano, basses, and drums begin to get more agitated, Dixon enters with long, ethereal notes separated by spaces, the intervals carefully chosen. It's a beautiful moment.

For many years, Fred Anderson was even more obscure than Bill Dixon, at least to the world outside of Chicago. He made strong contributions to Joseph Jarman's first two albums in 1966 and 1968, then didn't record again for a decade. When I was a young man learning about jazz, I knew Anderson as a somewhat legendary figure who had contributed to the Chicago avant-garde scene of the the sixties, but I had no idea if he had ever recorded again. Somewhere along the way, he became something of a father figure to younger Chicago musicians such as Hamid Drake and Ken Vandermark. Recordings became more frequent, and he developed a strong reputation in the avant-garde jazz world.

His tenor sound was filled with history; you could hear Coleman Hawkins and Gene Ammons in his playing, although his influences were so well internalized that he never sounded like anyone except himself. While Dixon went into academia, Anderson became a saloon owner - his Velvet Lounge on the Near South Side of Chicago became a mecca for musicians and fans. For those of us who never had the chance to hear him there, there are several live albums from the Velvet Lounge, including an 80th birthday tribute CD and DVD.

Recordings by Dixon and Anderson are easier to find now than in the past, although there are still plenty of gaps in what is available. Hear them on record, since we can't hear them in person anymore. Every year, every month, fewer giants walk the earth. We've just lost two.

Brother Matthew

2010-05-06T08:50:00.005-04:00

When I was a high school kid trying to learn all I could about jazz, I found a book in my school's library that fascinated me; I checked it out over and over again. It was the first (1955) edition of Orrin Keepnews and Bill Grauer's A Pictorial History of Jazz. Even though that book was pretty outdated (it was nearly 20 years old by the time I discovered it), it was the first book that helped me get a handle on the complex, sometimes baffling history of the music. I spent hours poring over the rather poorly-reproduced photographs and captions, trying to understand how all of these musicians fit together, and wondering what they sounded like, since I had only heard recordings by a few of them. In retrospect, the Pictorial History presents a pretty flawed and incomplete view of jazz history, but it was very helpful to me at the time, and I was glad to find a battered copy in a used book store as an adult.

One picture particularly intrigued me, for some reason, and I'm still not entirely sure why. It's a picture of group that only existed for one day, and only for the purpose of making a 78 RPM record for the Collector's Item label. The only one of the five musicians who could be considered to be a fairly big name in the jazz world was cornetist Wild Bill Davidson, although pianist Mel Henke did a good bit of recording later, both in the jazz and pop worlds. But the most interesting figure in the photograph was the small-boned, wispy man with the thinning hair who was playing the alto saxophone. Boyce Brown was described in the text as "obscure," but I somehow knew right away that he was someone I wanted to hear.

Boyce Matthew Brown (1910-1959) was not your typical rough-and-tumble Chicago jazzman; he was introspective, temperate, and lived with his mother. He wrote poetry, read philosophy, and listened to the music of impressionist composers like Debussy and Delius. He was musically literate, but his extremely poor eyesight made sight-reading difficult for him, so he did most of his playing in small Chicago jazz bands. Brown's playing is striking and unusual, even after the passage of many years. He improvised with great drive, but at the same time, his phrasing was often asymmetrical and off-center, and his note choices were unusual.

Boyce Brown recorded fewer than a dozen times in his career. His recording debut was with Paul Mares and His Friars Society Orchestra in 1935; this session is currently available on a Retrieval CD called New Orleans Rhythm Kings: The Complete Set. He is a racehorse out of the gate on the first tune, "Nagasaki;" it's clear that a special talent has been turned loose.

Perhaps his most well-known recordings are the four 1939 sides which Jimmy McPartland's band made for the Decca Chicago Jazz album. This album (a set of six 78 RPM records) attracted a good bit of attention at the time. George Avakian's orginal liner notes are worth quoting:

To most, this record ("China Boy") will serve as an introduction to Boyce Brown's alto sax. He shares a chorus with Bud Jacobson and gives us a typical solo: perfectly executed, fast, full of notes, but completely logical and amazingly conceived. Boyce's personality is expressed in his music - a statement which has worn thin, but here it is the cold truth. Boyce is unlike any musician you have ever met, and his is a completely individual and unorthodox style. Take warning that Boyce will need a lot of listening. His complexity makes a casual hearing worthless. Careful attention will be rewarded by an understanding of the subtleties of Boyce's ideas, which are distinctively his own.

Somewhat amazingly, the publicity the Decca album generated led to Brown winning the "Best Alto Sax" category in the 1940 Down Beat magazine readers' poll - above Johnny Hodges and Benny Carter! Unfortunately, this was "little more than a prelude to obscurity," as writer Richard Sudhalter has said. Boyce had one more record date on which he was prominently featured: the aforementioned Collector's Item session. It's not entirely clear who the leader of the session was; there is no band name on the labels, although they do have all the musicians' names. The sides are often listed in discographies under Wild Bill Davidson's name, and the band is sometimes called the Collector's Item Cats. The matrix numbers in the run-off groove area of the record start with the letters "BB," however, which leads me to believe that it was Boyce's date.

The two issued sides, "On a Blues Kick" and "I Surrender Dear," have never been reissued, as far as I can tell - although "On a Blues Kick" is scheduled for issue on a future volume of Allen Lowe's mammoth blues history set, Really the Blues? (dubbed from my copy of the original record, by the way). These two sides perhaps represent Brown's greatest recorded solos - thoughtful, interesting, and somehow logical and odd at the same time. And for me, they are the reason that I started collecting 78s - I wanted to hear these legendary recordings, and there was no way to do so except to find the original issue.

Because of the rarity of these recordings, I have posted them in mp3 form for listeners to hear or download. Click here to hear this rare record. It's unclear who the copyright holder is; if contacted by such a party, I will remove these recordings upon request.

Boyce Brown's story took an unusual turn, at least for a jazz musician. This quiet, thoughtful man converted to Catholicism in 1952, and became a monk in the Servite order the next year. He played the saxophone only occasionally after that, once for a 1956 ABC-Paramount album called Brother Matthew With Eddie Condon's Jazz Band. He agreed to make the album, in part, to raise money for the monastery. These days the record is almost universally panned, but it's not so bad, in my opinion. Brother Matthew is rusty, but his ideas are interesting, and Condon's guys sound like they're having a alcohol-fueled good time. Brown died in the Servite monastery three years later.

The best source for information about Boyce Brown is probably Richard Sudhalter's book Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contributions to Jazz. It contains a quote from George Avakian, made over 50 years after his notes for the Chicago Jazz album:

People hearing him for the first time were just flabbergasted. I know I was. Where did this guy get this odd way of playing? Where did it come from? I guess there was a rather mysterious quality in all that.

Love Letter

2010-04-23T11:05:00.004-04:00

It's been a few weeks since I've posted here. I've written parts of several posts, and ended up rejecting them all - none of them were turning out right. Part of my problem is that it's been a strange, stressful month or so, personally and professionally speaking - more about that later, perhaps.

So I'm going to write something short and simple: a love letter.

A couple of weeks ago I visited New Orleans for the 27th time. (Yes, I have kept track.) I've never lived there, but it feels almost like home to me. I've considered moving to the City That Care Forgot at several points in my life, but there was always something that prevented me from taking that step: family, friends, a job, a band. Perhaps that's a good thing. I sometimes think that if I had moved to New Orleans 15 years ago, there's a good chance I would be dead by now - my early demise brought on by excessive intake of food and alcohol, coupled with lack of sleep brought on by fear of missing some music.

I won't give a detailed report on my latest visit, except to say the Tim Laughlin has the most beautiful clarinet sound I've ever heard, Matt Perrine is still the most amazing tuba player on the planet, and Ben Schenck and the Panorama Jazz Band just get better and better. This visit, like most of them, was a mixture of the familiar and the unexpected. I always learn something new in New Orleans - something about the city, something about music, something about myself. And damn - the music! People ask me if I visit during Jazz Fest. Due to my work schedule, I've never made it to the Jazz and Heritage Festival, but incredible music can be heard in New Orleans every night of the year. A night spent exploring the clubs on Frenchmen Street will provide enough musical inspiration to sustain body and soul for months.

But one can't eat, drink, and listen to music 24 hours a day (although some New Orleanians seem to be trying). What else do I do in the city? Well, I wander, I walk, I explore. The architecture, the history, and just the feel of the city are extraordinary - like nowhere else. You never now when you'll come across something amazing - and in New Orleans the ordinary is amazing enough. I love wandering through the Lower Quarter (the quiet, mostly residential side of the French Quarter, near Esplanade). Such a walk is usually the first thing I do when I hit the city and the last thing I do before I have to leave.

And leaving New Orleans is always hard. Even if I miss my wife; even if my body is rebelling from the quantity and richness of the food; even if I have worn myself out and crave the routine and peace of home, it's hard to leave. I feel a pang in my heart as soon as I hit the entrance ramp for I-10 East. I know it will be months before I see my favorite city again, and it always hurts.

New Orleans is definitely a city that doesn't live in the past; it lives for today. But the past is never forgotten; as William Faulkner might say, it's not even past. Tradition, memory, possibilities, and the present moment all exist at the same time. The city keeps its traditions, even as it changes them to fit the moment. No matter how many times I vist, I never quite know what to expect. I love New Orleans.

The Way of the World

2010-03-30T07:27:00.004-04:00

It only seems right, since this blog is named after a Mose Allison song, that I take note of the fact that Mr. Allison's first new album since 2002 (and first studio album since 1998!) was released last week. I've spun The Way of the World several times in the past seven days, and, for what it's worth, Jeffery approves.

The Way of the World was produced by Joe Henry, and it has a somewhat different sound from anything Mose has issued before, with plenty of slide guitars, loose snares, and an overall vibe that is less "jazzy" that usual for Mose. The album is short - just over 35 minutes - but it seems "complete." There is one instrumental, "Crush," and if you have heard any live Mose you'll have an idea of what that track sounds like. In addition to new material, there are two standards, one sung as a duet with daughter Amy, and a couple of older Mose songs. Luckily these are not songs that he has performed to death, and they're two I've always liked: "Let It Come Down" and "Ask Me Nice." There's one song written by Amy (sung by Mose) - "Everybody Thinks You're an Angel," which I didn't much like at first, but which has grown on me. Mose also sings a couple of blues written by others - I really like this version of Roosevelt Sykes' "Some Right, Some Wrong" - its minimalist lyrics could have been written by Allison himself. The best of the new songs, in my opinion, is "Modest Proposal." Maybe I like it so much because it seems to indicate that Mr. Allison and I have similar ideas about how the universe works; those who are more traditionally devout might not like it very much.

Mose's voice is that of an 82-year-old, but it was always an unusual, personal singing voice anyway. I'll have to live with this album a while before I have a feel for where it stands in the Mose Allison canon, but it's certainly a worthy addition. I hope there are more to come.

Carl LeBlanc

2010-03-18T10:50:00.003-04:00

I thought this might a good time to write about New Orleans guitarist/banjoist/singer Carl LeBlanc, since I've been listening to lots of Sun Ra and New Orleans music lately. LeBlanc is neither a genius nor an innovator - just a journeyman musician with a variety of performing experiences. But he intrigues me: what other musician has toured and recorded with both the Sun Ra Arkestra and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band?

LeBlanc grew up in New Orleans' Seventh Ward and heard the city's brass bands on parade when he was a kid. But it was the Beatles' famous Ed Sullivan appearance which inspired him to take up the guitar; a few years later his inspirations were James Brown and Jimi Hendrix. During his apprenticeship years of playing with R & B and jazz bands in New Orleans, he got a call to sub on banjo at Preservation Hall. His dreadlocks, attitude, and lack of knowledge of the traditional jazz repertoire did not endear him to his fellow musicians; he was not called back for 20 years.

LeBlanc came to the attention of the larger jazz world when he joined Sun Ra's Arkestra in the mid 1980s. He has called Ra one of the two great teachers he has had; the other was Narvin Kimball - more about that later. Ra apparently took a liking to the young man and taught him many of the standards LeBlanc didn't know. He appears on several Arkestra recordings from this period; he is most prominently featured on Blue Delight, on which he contributes several excellent solos.

At some point LeBlanc moved back to the Crescent City with, among other things, a stack of Sun Ra compositions Sunny had let him copy. He became something of a protege of Narvin Kimball, an outstanding banjoist who had recorded with Oscar Celestin's band back in the 1920s. In more recent years, Kimball had gained widespread recognition as the banjo player with the main Preservation Hall touring band. Kimball eventually gave LeBanc his beautiful gold-trimmed banjo, and Carl took over as the banjoist with the number one Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

As it did with many New Orleans residents, Katrina dealt a serious blow to LeBlanc. He lost his home, instruments, and Sun Ra manuscripts in the flood; he did manage to save one instrument, though - Kimball's banjo. He has spoken of the connections between his very different mentors - in concert he often sings one of Narvin Kimball's signature songs, "You Can Depend on Me," while playing the older man's banjo. Ironically, though, LeBlanc says that it was Sun Ra who taught him the song.

In addition to his fine playing on several Preservation Hall Jazz Band albums, LeBlanc has issued a solo album on Preservation Hall Records, New Orleans' Seventh Ward Griot. It must confuse a lot of people who buy it at the Hall or at concerts, because traditional jazz makes up only a small part of the record. Most of it is genial R & B - either classic or original - with LeBlanc playing all the instruments. Speaking for myself, I don't find most of these songs very memorable, but there is also LeBlanc's version of "You Can Depend on Me," a striking vocalese rendition of Louis Armstong's opening trumpet solo from "West End Blues," and a strange solo guitar/voice performance of "Madman Across the Water." That last one just confused me at first, then I realized it was more of a tribute to Jimi Hendrix than to Elton John.

But the track that, in my opinion, makes the whole album worthwhile is "On Super Sunday," LeBlanc's version of a New Oleans Mardi Gras Indian chant. I won't go into too much detail about the city's Mardi Gras Indian culture or the practice of parading Uptown in full Indian costume on Super Sunday (St. Joseph's Day). But most of the New Orleans Indian songs ("Indian Red," "Corrine Died on the Battlefield," "Iko Iko," etc.) are about how brave and pretty the Indians are, or about having a good time. LeBlanc's "Super Sunday" starts out typically:

On Super Sunday
On Super Sunday
Hunter's Field
Keepin' it real
Just one deal
Do what you feel

But about 45 seconds in, he sounds a more menacing note:

You get what you give
And you die like you live

From there the song turns into an account of the quick, casual violence that can change things so quickly in New Orleans.

Just havin' fun
Then pop when the gun

Tambourine ringin'
But ain't nobody singin'
Pick up the baby
Look for your lady
You gotta move fast
Cause it might be your last

Layin' in the grass
Like year before last
One more dead
Indian Red.

LeBlanc's anger and helplessness in the face of this violence is palatable on this track. Carl LeBlanc has accomplished a lot in his musical career; "On Super Sunday," perhaps the only Mardi Gras Indian song that will bring a lump to your throat, is not the least of those accomplishments.

What Jazz Is... Sometimes

2010-03-03T10:05:00.000-05:00

A couple of times every year Standard Deviation, a band I play with, plays a house party in a large, 100-year-old house in the Inman Park neighborhood of Atlanta. The house is owned by a popular older couple with ties to city's the old-school liberal activist community. The parties are always a blast - lots of food, lots of alcohol, and lots of interesting people: writers, folksingers, liberal talk-show hosts, drag queens, and folks from the neighborhood.

We play a pretty wide variety of jazz at these parties, including tunes by Jelly Roll Morton, Ellington, Monk, Gershwin, and Cole Porter. And the people love it - all night long party-goers hang out to listen, drink, smooch, and especially to dance. We played one of these parties last Saturday, and at its height, that rare, magical alchemy happened - the band, the dancers, and the listeners became one intense, sweaty, happy entity.

For a jazz musician these days, especially one whose music usually leans toward the avent-garde, this can be a rare phenomenon. Jazz is often relegated to the role of background music for eating, drinking, or conversation. Or it's presented in a concert setting, with the band on a lighted stage and the audience in the dark, invisible to the musicians. And there's nothing wrong with that. But it sure is nice to experience that immediate, symbiotic connection with the audience.

Different people have different views of what jazz is, probably because jazz is so many things. It's often called America's classical music or our country's contribution to the arts. I know that comments like that are meant to be positive, but I hope jazz never becomes what classical music has become in some circles - atrophied music to be listened to in the dark, quietly.

Admittedly, the party-goers reacted so well to the music partly because most of the tunes included vocals, and because most of the music featured a strong, danceable beat. But once that connection was made, they were willing to follow us into slightly more challenging areas. Of course, we didn't go into any 30-minute versions of Albert Ayler tunes, but that's not what we were there for. I'm not about to abandon more challenging areas of music, but it's great to swing hard on "I Can't Believe That You're in Love With Me" and have the audience swinging along with you. That's not all jazz can be, but I hope it never loses that populist connection.

A Member of the Angel Race

2010-02-25T21:45:00.006-05:00

Well, I seem to have started one of my periodic Sun Ra jags - digging out album after album and reminding myself of how incredible this music is. The first Sun Ra album I bought was the Impulse reissue of The Magic City, from 1965. I don't know exactly how old I was, but I think that I was still a teenager. It got to me right away. I knew I was listening to another way of making music than I had experienced before - the music was based on a different aesthetic.

There are plenty of reason why a discerning listener might not like the music of Sun Ra. His music often has a campy, showbiz flavor - albeit from a pretty bizarre angle. His rhythm (and that of his ensembles) is sometimes lumpy/clunky. At times the sections of his large bands played with poor intonation and blend, making the listener wonder what went on at those legendary hours-long rehearsals. And his keyboard style, although it revealed formidable technique, was often offbeat and skittery.

But the impact of Sun Ra's music defies rational criticism. It's more than the sum of it's parts, and that's due to Ra's vision. The music is unusual, deep, accomplished, amateurish, serious, and campy - sometimes all at the same time.

The scope of Ra's recorded output is vast and somewhat baffling. Although he made albums for others, most of his records came out on his own label, Saturn (with its Thoth Intergalactic and Repeto subsidiaries). The release strategy and documentation Ra employed were unusual, to say the least. As I write this, Sound Sun Pleasure!! is playing in the CD player. This album of mostly standards was recorded in 1958, but not released until 1970, when the Sun Ra Arkestra (as he called his band) was playing a completely different style. It must have thoroughly confused those who bought the album at his concerts - the main distribution method for Saturn releases. Furthermore, the personnel list on the back of the album is bogus - Ra just listed a bunch of musicians that were in his band at the time the record was released, most of whom weren't playing with him in 1958. And the version of "Enlightenment" on this album had already been released (in a slightly different mix) on Jazz in Silhouette. This kind of discographical chaos is par for the course for Ra and Saturn - some pressings even paired side one of an album with side two of another.

The almost 850 pages of Robert Campbell and Christopher Trent's The Earthly Recordings of Sun Ra (2nd edition) make sense of this mess. It's a remarkable book, given the daunting task of sorting out Ra's recordings. I wish it had been around during that brief period in the early 1980s when Rounder Records distributed the Saturn label. One evening I walked into a suburban Atlanta record store and found that the jazz section had a dozen or so Saturn releases with hand-decorated covers. I didn't know much about the Saturn catalog at the time and was confused and uncertain about which records to get, so I walked out without buying anything. I wish I had just grabbed a few at random - they are all rare collector's items today.

What accounts for the impact of Sun Ra's music? Well, for one thing, it is often probing and forward-looking - music "on the edge," as Steve Lacy put it. Ra was a musical explorer who continually tried to push his musicians and himself into unknown territories. As early as 1955, an obscure piece called "Piano Interlude" (eventually released on Deep Purple and on the Evidence reissue of Sound Sun Pleasure!!) reveals a searching, advanced musical imagination, unlike any other in jazz. The piece is built on quartal harmony (chords built on fourths rather than thirds) at first, but flirts more and more with pantonality and atonality as it progresses. Not many jazz musicians were exploring this territory in 1955 - Lennie Tristano and Cecil Taylor come to mind, but Ra has his own voice and doesn't sound like either of them.

Sun Ra frequently wrote modal pieces in the 1950s - several years before Kind of Blue brought modalism to the forefront of jazz development. By the middle of the 1960s, Ra was creating music completely devoid of tonal center and metered rhythm. Others were doing the same (Cecil Taylor again comes to mind, as does Albert Ayler), but Ra's music is once again very different. Most so-called "free jazz" is still recognizable as jazz because it retains the intensity and forward motion of jazz. But The Magic City and Heliocentric Worlds are different - sounds drift in and out of focus; instruments combine and diverge; the speed and intensity of the music changes frequently. Much of the music from this period can be seen more as the presentation of a kaleidoscopic series of events than of a linear narrative. In that sense it has more in common with Stockhausen or Varese than with conventional jazz.

Ra was also "on the edge" with his use of electronics. He experimented with the Solovox, an early, monophonic electric keyboard, before 1950. He was an early adopter of the Wurlitzer electric piano - hear his 1956 solo piece "Advice to Medics," about which his longtime tenor saxophonist John Gilmore said, "There was a period when, if I was not practicing, I would be listening to that song. There's so much beauty and thought in there." In the mid 1960s he was using instruments like the Rocksicord and Clavioline, and by the end of the decade he had somehow gotten hold of one of the first Moog synthesizers. He seems to have instantly grasped the latter instrument's strengths and limitations; the five solo Moog pieces on My Brother the Wind, Volume II are a beautiful summary of the Moog's possiblities.

But at the same time, Ra kept one foot firmly planted in the music's heritage. Even during his most extreme period, much of his music was intended to swing in a conventional jazz sense, and he never totally abandoned standards as source material. Beginning in the 1970s, he revisited the repertoire of Fletcher Henderson, for whom he did some arranging in Chicago 30 years earlier. For the rest of his career, "Big John's Special," "Queer Notions," and "Can You Take It" frequently showed up in his concerts.

I haven't heard all of Sun Ra's recorded output, and I doubt that few, if any folks have heard it all. But I've heard a lot of it, including most of what are considered his "major" works. One of the striking things about this body of work is that no two albums, even no two pieces, sound alike. Music of great complexity, music of utter simplicity, carefully composed pieces, totally improvised pieces, large bands, small ensembles - they all exist side by side in Ra's world. Of the vast omniverse of Sun Ra's recordings, here are half a dozen of my favorites:

Interstellar Low Ways (also known as Rocket Number Nine Take Off For the Planet Venus (1959/1960) - My favorite early Sun Ra, with gorgeous pieces like "Interstellar Low Ways" and "Space Loneliness" alongside the cool/campy "Interplanetary Music" and "Rocket Number Nine Take Off For the Planet Venus." The latter tune has a tenor solo by John Gilmore that was ahead of its time and which justifies Coltrane's interest in Gilmore during this period.

The Magic City (1965) - The title cut takes up all of side one of the vinyl album - it's monumental and mysterious. The other side contains an early version of the intense "The Shadow World," a piece Ra recorded several times and played from the early sixties to the end of his career. Atlantis and Heliocentric Worlds (Volumes 1 & 2) cover similar ground and are equally fine.

My Brother the Wind, Volume II (1969/1970) - Half prescient synthesizer etudes; half swinging organ-based jazz.

Disco 3000 (1978) - From an Italian tour with a quartet - John Gilmore, Michael Ray on trumpet, and Luqman Ali on drums. Ra was using a Crumar keyboard with a built-in drum machine and programmable bass lines; he used it to create incredible swirls of sound over intense rhythms.

A Fireside Chat With Lucifer (1982) - This album contains the first appearance of the swing/funk anthem "Nuclear War," as well as some free improvisations that can only be described as eloquent. Good luck finding this one - it's never been reissued, although "Nuclear War" has appeared on other albums.

Mayan Temples (1990) - An excellent latter-day recital from Ra, with atonal improvisations, pop standards, modal exotica, and Ra classics like "El is a Sound of Joy."

There's so much more to write/talk about with Sun Ra - the incredible musicians like John Gilmore and Marshall Allen who played with him for years, his poetry, his apprenticeship years, his adoption of Disney songs into his repertoire late in life. But what about the whole outer space thing - did he really believe that he was sent to earth from outer space to save the planet through music, or was it just a showbiz act? He sang, "I know that I'm a member of the angel race; my home is somewhere there out in outer space." My feeling is that it was an act that became more and more real to him as the years passed.

In any case, exploring Ra's music is like traveling through a spiral galaxy. The deeper you get into it, the more you learn. You "see" the music from different angles and grasp more and more of it, although you realize that you'll never totally have a handle on it. But it's a great journey.

A Virtual Jazz Tour of New Orleans

2010-02-17T21:15:00.004-05:00

It's that time of year again. About halfway through February every year I start pining for New Orleans, that city where I've never lived, but which somehow feels like home to me. So I decided to give myself a virtual tour of my favorite city.

Lately I've been fooling around with Google Maps, particularly the Street View function. If you're not familiar with Street View, here's how it works. Go to Google Maps, zoom in on a location (close enough to distinguish individual streets), then click and drag the yellow humanoid figure at the top left, above the scroll bar. If any streets on your map are available in Street View, they will be highlighted in blue. Drop the little yellow guy onto a street, and the view will change to a panoramic, scrollable, street-level scene. It's an amazing technological achievement, as well as being somewhat creepy, in a Big Brother kind of way.

But it enabled me to "visit" some of my favorite jazz-related spots from 500 miles away. You can reproduce my tour here. I advise that you right-click on each link and open it in a new tab or window, so that you can easily find your way back here. At each location, you can pan, scroll down the street, zoom in, or zoom out. I encourage you to move your view around to get a sense of the neighborhood for each location. You'll figure it out.

We'll start where, in a sense, American music itself started: Congo Square. Before the Civil War, African musical traditions were kept alive during weekly Sunday gatherings of slaves ("generously" allowed by their owners). These meetings were centered around drumming, singing, and dancing. This shaded area is now part of Armstrong Park; you'll see the old Municipal Auditorium in the background. It's just past the edge of the French Quarter, toward the lake. (Directions in New Orleans are commonly given as "Lakeside, Riverside, Downtown, Uptown" instead of "North, South, East, West.") History hangs heavily in the air here, as it does in many spots in New Orleans. Here is the view from North Rampart Street.

If we go to the Downtown edge of Congo Square, by the main entrance to Armstrong Park, then cross Rampart at St. Ann, we'll be at Donna's. Donna's is a little bar with incredible music - brass bands, traditional jazz, modern jazz, and all combinations of the above. It's one of my favorite places to hear music in the city. That's the entrance to the park across the street.

From Donna's we'll head Uptown on Rampart Street. South Rampart Street marks the slightly seedy edge of the Central Business District, and passes through Louis Armstrong's old stomping grounds - a pretty rough neighborhood a century ago, but one with plenty of great music. On the right, at the corner of Rampart and Perdido, is the building which once housed the Eagle Saloon; it still looks solid and formidable. Buddy Bolden, Bunk Johnson, and Sidney Bechet all played here.

Continuing down South Rampart, there's a lonely-looking building on the left. Now a law firm, this was once the Red Onion, a tavern immortalized by the Red Onion Jazz Babies, a recording band featuring Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet. They both played here during their New Orleans days.

Further uptown we enter one of the poorest neighborhoods in New Orleans. At the turn of the 20th century, though, it was a middle-class, mixed-race neighborhood, and was home to Charles "Buddy" Bolden, reputedly the first musician to put together the strands of ragtime, blues, and spirituals in such a way that a new music was formed. Here's the view from the corner of Libery and 1st; the Bolden home is behind the big tree. A few feet further down 1st, we can turn around for a good view of Buddy Bolden's house. The house has deteriorated noticeably in the 20 years I have been visiting New Orleans.

St. Charles Avenue follows the curve of the river uptown. One of its major cross streets is Napoleon Avenue, and almost at the end of Napoleon, where it runs into Tchoupitoulas , you'll find Tipitina's, the famous club that was started for a simple reason: to give the late Professor Longhair a place to play. They feature all kinds of music, and most of it is worth hearing.

If you continue down St. Charles, you'll reach its end - you can't go any further without swimming in the Mississippi. Take a right on Carrollton, and you'll end up the the neighborhood of the same name, formerly a separate town. It seems sleepy and slow, even for New Orleans, but the Maple Leaf in the heart of Carrollton is anything but sleepy, especially on Tuesday nights, when the Rebirth Brass Band is in residence. The brilliant, troubled pianist James Booker was a frequent performer here.

After visiting Carrollton, we'll head way back Downtown, to Frenchmen Street in Marigny, past the French Quarter. Frenchmen Street has become the musical center of New Orleans, with a bunch of great clubs - d.b.a., The Blue Nile, etc. But the Cadillac of New Orleans Jazz Clubs is Snug Harbor, where you might hear Ellis Marsalis, Astral Project, Charmaine Neville, or a big name from out of town. If you leave this elegant club, you can cross the street to my favorite New Orleans dive, the Spotted Cat, an amiable dump where you can hear the fabulous Panorama Jazz Band, as well as other talented local musicians.

Further up Frenchmen, at the corner of North Robertson, you'll find the home of Jelly Roll Morton. Like some of the other historic structures in the city, this house has seen better days. This neighborhood was hit pretty hard by Katrina, and many of the houses are in rough shape.

Time to hit the French Quarter - an amazing place, full of incredible architecture, great food, tacky tourist stuff, and bars that never close. These days it's not really the most interesting part of the city for music, though. But I love walking around the quiet part of the Quarter, where Danny Barker was born in a substantial brick house on Chartres Street. There is a nice plaque on the house commemorating its heritage, unlike at the other homes of famous jazzmen in the city.

Around the corner and up a couple of block, you'll find George Lewis's house - it's the orange house with green shutters. I'm sure that Lewis paid next to nothing to rent this place in the 1940s, but it's probably worth a small fortune now. Many of Bunk Johnson's best American Music recordings were made here, and the first New Orleans brass band recording session was held in the back yard in 1945.

We'll make the last stop Preservation Hall on St. Peter Street - it has been my last stop many evenings. Depending on your outlook, the Hall is a tourist spot to be avoided, or it's holy ground. I lean toward the latter viewpoint. Even though my first visit was in 1990, when many jazzheads already considered Preservation Hall to be past its prime, I have heard Percy and Willie Humphrey, Kid Shiek, Narvin Kimball, Jeannette Kimball, Chester Zardis, Tuba Fats, Frog Joseph, and Harold DeJean, among others, in the cramped, uncomfortable confines of the Hall.

I hope you enjoyed the tour, which really only scratched the surface. If you've never been to New Orleans, go! There is much more to the city than Bourbon Street - you can hear incredible music every night of the year.

The Magic of Mediocre Monk

2010-02-13T21:34:00.000-05:00

Which album is Thelonious Monk's best? Brilliant Corners, Monk's Music, or a collection of his best Blue Note sides would all be reasonable nominees for that honor. Maybe the fairly recent issue of the Carnegie Hall concert with Coltrane is a contender. I know of a few knowledgeable listeners who rate 5 By Monk By 5 above all other Monk albums. But I don't think anyone would place the Columbia album simply called Monk. at the top of the Monkian heap.

And I agree - Monk. (the period is part of the title) is not only not Monk's best album, it's not really even near the top of Monk's Columbia output, which most listeners don't consider on the same level as the Blue Note or Riverside recordings. Without thinking about it very hard, I would put Monk's Dream, Big Band and Quartet in Concert, and Underground from the Columbia catalog above Monk., and on reflection would probably consider other Columbia albums superior to Monk.

But I've listened to Monk. several times in the last few days, and am struck with the realization that even this lesser Monk effort is a magical thing, full of striking moments. The record was made in 1964 by Monk's working quartet of the time, including longtime musical companion Charlie Rouse on tenor sax, Ben Riley on drums, and Larry Gales on bass, except on "Teo." That track was recorded seven months earlier than the rest of the album; Butch Warren was the bassist - a fact which wasn't noted on the original album, and is still not mentioned on my 2002 reissue.

Monk. is unusual in that it contains more pop standards than Monk originals - there are only two of the latter. Monk opens the album with his imaginative reharmonization of Gershwin's "Liza;" Rouse's brilliant solo here justifies Monk's loyalty to a saxophonist some critics never thought was musician enough to hang with Monk. "April in Paris," a tune Monk recorded at least seven times, follows. My favorite moment is Monk's last chord, a thick cluster sustained until it fades away. Another standard, "I Love You," is played solo in Monk's best stride-piano-on-acid style. There are two originals, an old one ("Pannonica," written in 1956) and a brand-new one ("Teo"). I don't think anyone would claim that "Teo" is classic Monk, but this deceptively simple tune has some nice, unusual touches.

I'm glad we have the Blue Notes, the Prestige recordings, and the Riversides, but I'm also glad we have albums like Monk. The title of this post is only to be taken seriously in context; if Monk. is mediocre, it's only in comparison to his masterpieces. If this was somehow the only recording we had by an obscure pianist/composer named Thelonious Monk, we'd still know that he was something special.

Wlder Concert Report

2010-02-11T21:42:00.003-05:00

Last Saturday's Evening With Alec Wilder was more to less successful in these aspects:

Audience response: The smallish hall was packed - we had to put out more chairs. The audience was attentive and appreciative - they even laughed or exclaimed at my Alec Wilder stories. The most gratifying aspect of the event was the number of people who came up with some variation of "Thank you for introducing me to Alec Wilder." They even called for an encore. We didn't have anything prepared, but if I had had the presence of mind, we could have played the last two minutes of "All the Cats Join In" again.

Musical quality: Kind of a mixed bag. There were some really good moments, but nerves took their toll to an extent. If we had a couple of more performances, we could really have things smoking. C'est la vie.

Finances: Well, I didn't lose too much money. I wish I could have paid the musicians more, but at least everybody got something. How does anybody make any money promoting good music?

Anyway, the final tally is on the positive side of the ledger, as far as I'm concerned. Maybe we'll make the Atlanta Alec Wilder concert an annual event. In the meantime, there are some pictures - and more importantly, a few mp3 clips from the concert - here. Enjoy.

Alec Wilder in Atlanta

2010-02-04T21:33:00.004-05:00

I'm taking a break from folding programs for the Alec Wilder concert I'm presenting this Saturday night. It's a strange thing - like a campaign staff on election night, I suppose. Ben, my bassist and close friend, reminded me the other night that I've been talking about putting on a concert of Wilder's music for 15 years. About three years ago I started to really pin down repertoire and got that great Atlanta clarinetist, Sandy Wade, to agree to perform the Clarinet Sonata. Various obstacles slowed things down for a year or two, but the pace of the planning picked up about a year ago. We started rehearsing about six months ago, with intensive rehearsals for the past three months. Our final rehearsal made me think we timed the pace just right - the music flowed easily, but still seemed fresh. With a little luck, it could be a really good concert.

But two days out, who really knows? And I have no clear picture of how many people might show up to hear us. And in terms of preparation or publicity, there's not a whole lot more that can be done now. It's going to be what it's going to be. But those of you who are close to Atlanta on Saturday, Feb. 6 are urged to drop by the First Existentialist Congregation (The Old Stone Church - 470 Candler Park Drive) at 8:00 for what should be an interesting and unusual concert. You'll hear some of the best musicians in Atlanta (Scott Hooker, Janna Nelson, Sandy Wade, Ben Gettys, Keith Leslie, Dan Clemenz) and me present some of Alec Wilder's greatest pop, jazz, and classical pieces. Bring ten bucks.

A Legend in Concert

2010-01-30T23:18:00.004-05:00

The second performance by a major jazz artist that I remember attending was by McCoy Tyner. (Not to keep you in suspense, the first was by the Gary Burton Quartet.) I don't remember any of the tunes Tyner's group played, but I remember the intensity of the music - I was sitting just a few feet away from Eric Gravatt's ride cymbal. And I remember all the members of the band - Joe Ford and Ron Bridgewater on saxophones, Charles Fambrough on bass, Tyner and Gravatt, of course, and percussionist Guilherme Franco. This must have been 1976 or '77, at the long-defunct Midtown Pub in Atlanta.

Tyner would have been in his late thirties at that time. He was in his twenties during his tenure as one-fourth of one of the greatest jazz ensembles of all time, the John Coltrane Quartet. And he was 71 when I heard him play a concert with his trio at Atlanta's Variety Playhouse tonight.

Age has taken a step or two off of Tyner's technique, but has not effected his musical instincts. His rhythm section was accomplished, but not particularly distinctive. (I never caught the drummer's name, but Gerald Cannon was the bassist.) The first set was fairly mellow; he opened with "Sama Luyaca," which he first recorded in 1978, and segued into a version of Ellington's "In a Mellotone" which was a swinging delight. The trio's seemingly spontaneous arrangement of Coltrane's "Moment's Notice" included uptempo burning and bluesy medium tempo passages.

The second set had more of the modal intensity I associate with Tyner, with plenty of the "left hand like a drum" that is one of the pianist's trademarks. The highlight of the evening was this set's reading of "Blues on the Corner," from the 1967 Real McCoy album. Tyner overlaid the basic twelve-bar form with complex subsitute harmonies, but never lost the blues feeling. And it swung like hell.

I was pleased to see that the hall was packed; Mr. Tyner seemed touched by the warm reception he received. As he was making his final speech of the evening, a couple of ladies in the audience yelled, "We love you!" They spoke for all of us.

King Bolden

2010-01-28T22:15:00.004-05:00

Sooner or later, everyone who is at all interested in the history of jazz has got to deal with Buddy Bolden. By the time researchers began looking into the origins of the music in the 1930s, Charles Bolden (1877-1931) was already more legend than man. The Bolden story usually included these elements:

Buddy Bolden was the first jazz musician. (Well, maybe.)

He could blow his cornet so powerfully that when he was playing in Lincoln Park off Carrollton Avenue, he could be heard downtown in the French Quarter. (Um... no. Please!)

He could blow his cornet so powerfully that when he was playing across the river in Algiers, he could be heard downtown in the French Quarter. (Theoretically possible, considering the lack of automobile traffic noise and the way sound carries in New Orleans.)

Bolden was a barber, a scandal sheet editor, a police informant. (No, no, and no.)

He blew out his brains, figuratively speaking, going beserk during while playing a parade. (Sorta.)

Okay, let's deal with the first thing everyone "knows" about Buddy Bolden - he was the first jazz musician. It seems kind of ridiculous that the beginnings of this wonderful music called jazz could be pinned down to one person. Except.... Musician after musician who lived through the Bolden era and survived long enough to be interviewed has stated that he was the first to put together the strands of ragtime, blues, spirituals, and Creole songs in such a way that something new was created. Typical is an account by the great Creole trumpeter Peter Bocage, who was born in 1887 (and so was a young man of 19 when Bolden's career ended). Bocage was interviewed by Dick Allen and William Russell in 1959 [clarifications in brackets are mine]:

Q: Who do you think was the first band to play jazz or ragtime?
A: Well, I attribute it to Bolden. Bolden was a fellow, he didn't know a note as big as this house [he couldn't read music], whatever they played, they caught [by ear], or made up. They made up their own music and played it their own way. So that's the way jazz started. Just his improvisation.

This passage is transcribed in the book which contains pretty much all of what we know (and probably will ever know) about Bolden: In Search of Buddy Bolden by Donald Marquis. Marquis' book, first published in 1978, is meticulously researched, and so might come off as disappointing in a roundabout way: Marquis resists the temptation to embellish the Bolden story. He dispels many of the myths, and simply presents everything he has been able to find out about Bolden. The problem is that even Marquis was not able to find out that much - there are plenty of gaps in the story, and we are left without a real feel for what kind of person he was. But the book is extremely valuable for showing us as true a picture of Bolden as we are likely to get.

But what did he sound like? If Bolden recorded (and accounts of a cylinder recording persist), nothing has survived. But Freddie Keppard (1890-1933) did record, and many early New Orleans musicians said that he sounded something like Bolden. Peter Bocage again:

Q: Did anyone or does anyone play like Bolden?
A: Keppard, they were most on the same style. The improvisations is always gonna be a little different, no two men alike.

Keppard recorded several times during the 1920s, but only the 1926 date by Freddie Keppard and His Jazz Cardinals presents him on his own terms. His playing on "Stockyard Strut" and "Salty Dog" is clipped and raggy, built around short phrases. It is powerful, but doesn't swing in the way jazz had already started to swing by that time. It's easy to imagine that Keppard's cornet style may contain an echo of Buddy Bolden.

A group of traditional jazz musicians built around cornetist Marc Caparone issued a CD in 1999 which, although little known, is an impressive piece of jazz scholarship, as well as a fun listen: Music of the Bolden Era on the Stomp Off label, by the Imperial Serenaders. The selections, instrumentation, and performance styles are based on the best available research about what and how Bolden played. It's archaic, lively, and pretty convincing.

When I first visited New Orleans in 1990, I made my own Bolden pilgrimages. My first evening there, I drove several miles out St. Charles and Carrollton Avenues to the sites of Lincoln and Johnson Parks, two recreation areas for the "colored" citizens of the city where Bolden played. There's not much to see there; my first wife wryly commented that "that sure is a historic gas station." But Bolden's house on First Street is still standing, and will most likely remain intact until New Orleans is finally washed away, since the house has been placed on the National Register of Historical Places. It looks as it probably did 110 years ago, although during Bolden's lifetime this was a middle-class, racially mixed neighborhood. Now it is one of the poorest parts of the city, full of vacant and decaying buildings - depressing and a little frightening to drive through, let along walk in.

But my real Bolden moment came when I was walking through Armstrong Park, which was carved out of the Treme neighborhood. The Masonic hall known locally as Perseverance Hall was formerly on St. Claude St., but it now stands on the park grounds. One morning I walked up at a time when the building was being renovated. The workers had left the doors unlocked, so I walked in and stood on the wooden floor where Buddy Bolden had played for dancers a century earlier. Standing on the boards Bolden had stood on, looking up at the high ceiling, and imagining the sound of the Bolden band in 1900 was a moving experience.

Buddy Bolden had mental/emotional issues which were exacerbated by alcohol abuse. In 1907 he was arrested and sent to the Lousiana Insane Asylum in Jackson. He stayed there for 25 years before dying a forgotten man. The exact location of his grave is unkown, but it's somewhere in Section C of New Orleans' Holt Cemetery. All of us jazz people owe him a debt. Thank you, Buddy Bolden, and rest in peace.

Ai

2010-01-14T22:34:00.002-05:00

I love poetry, but reading it presents the same problem as listening to the music of Cecil Taylor: it takes time, energy, and solitude, and I have too little of each these days. But yesterday I put on a record by a Kinda Famous African-American Female Poet, who read her work accompanied by a group of jazz/funk musicians. It was terrible - musically and poetically. I only listened to the first side, and I don't think I'm going to keep the record even for the one track that the Famous Jazz Saxophonist (who was once married to the poet) plays on.

But that record made me hungry for some poetry by an accomplished and talented female poet, so I pulled all my books by Ai off the shelf and started reading. I don't know what name she was given when she was born, but Ai describes herself as "1/2 Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche." Her poetry is dark, chilling, and very moving. I discovered her work by chance about 16 years ago when I picked the reprint of her first two collections, Cruelty and Killing Floor, off the shelf at an Atlanta bookstore. I think I wanted to see what kind of poetry someone named Ai wrote; when I opened the book at random, I was floored.

Ai writes character poems. By that I mean that her poetry is not written in her voice or the voice of an omniscient narrator, but in the voice of, well, a child molester, a teenaged boy who kills his family, a young African boy whose hand is cut off by a rebel fighter (at least I think that's what happens), or Jack Ruby. She manages to fully inhabit these characters, most of whom she could have nothing in common with except for the humanity we all share.

The poems are often grim and violent. The violence sometimes seems random and sometimes seems inevitable - you get the impression that the life of the narrator of "Sleep Like a Hammer" has all led up to the moment when he kills his father. The violence often seems analogous to the sex in the poems - the characters use it in order to convince themselves that they are alive - in order to feel something. But beyond the poetry's bleakness is a touching sense of the fragility of life - of the sense that life is precious.

The title poem of her 2003 collection Dread is "narrated" by an Irish-American female New York City cop - Shirley Herlihy, or Officer Girlie, as the lowlifes on her beat call her. As I read the poem, my first impression was that it was too prose-like. But that impression quickly disappeared. The details which Ai adds, line by line, create a strong and very real image. As the poem progresses, we learn that Officer Herlihy's troubled brother died in the World Trade Center attack, that her parents died in a domestic murder-suicide, and that she compulsively sifts through the rubble at Ground Zero, looking for any trace of her lost brother.

I don't know if reading this will make anyone want to read Ai's work; it will probably make many folks run the other way. Her poetry is not for the faint of heart, but it is extremely moving. I'm probably breaking 15 copyright laws by doing this (and I'll remove this if requested), but I wanted to end with an entire poem, from Killing Floor. The narrator is a soldier who is not long for this world.

THE GERMAN ARMY, RUSSIA, 1943

For twelve days,
I drilled through Moscow ice
to reach paradise,
that white tablecloth, set with a plate
that's cracking bit by bit
like the glassy air, like me.
I know I'll fly apart soon,
the pieces of me so light they float.
The Russians burned their crops,
rather than feed our army.
Now they strike us against each other like dry rocks
and set us on fire with a hunger
nothing can feed.
Someone calls me and I look up.
It's Hitler.
I imagine eating his terrible, luminous eyes.
Brother, he says.
I stand up, tie the rags tighter around my feet.
I hear my footsteps running behind me,
but I am already going.

JATP

2010-01-11T21:00:00.006-05:00

Okay, this is something of a confession for an erudite, sophisticated jazz listener such as myself. I have a weakness for Jazz At the Philharmonic. Norman Granz's jazz roadshow of that name was sometimes characterized by playing that could be described as "lowest common denominator" jazz. The saxophones often squealed and honked, the trumpet battled to see who could play who could play higher, and the drummers bashed and banged. The audiences responded with cheers worthy of a Mussolini rally. But a quick count shows that I have 11 LPs of JATP material, along with several concerts on CD and even some 78s, including Jazz At the Philharmonic, Volume One. Why?

Norman Granz began presenting jazz concerts in Philharmonic Hall in Los Angeles in 1944. He started recording the shows almost from the beginning, and was so taken with the spirit of the music from a February 12, 1945 concert that he started shopping it around to record companies. All the major labels were horrified - the tunes were too long and sloppy, and the audience was too loud. But the small folk label Asch was interested, and released "How High the Moon" and "Lady Be Good" on three twelve-inch 78s. The music set the pattern for the dozens of JATP recordings that followed. The concert series soon hit the road, playing all over the United States and Europe, producing album after album, and keeping the Jazz At the Philharmonic name no matter where the performance was. By the turn of the 1950s, JATP shows generally consisted of two or three short sets featuring individual performers or established groups, and always ended with a long "jam session" set.

The saxophonists at that 1945 concert (Illinois Jacquet, Charlie Ventura, and Willie Smith) played in typical JATP fashion - each started his solos tastefully, but got more and more obvious, repetitive, and even hysterical. Jacquet and Flip Phillips, who played in many JATP shows, were famous for this kind of over-the-top improvising. Other saxophonists, though, played with Granz's troupe without pandering or compromising. Charlie Parker shows up on recordings from 1946 and 1949, and plays superbly, although it is disconcerting to hear lesser saxophonists get more applause for honking low C's. Coleman Hawkins made frequent appearances from 1946 on, and was never anything but his sophisticated, harmonically acute self. Lester Young was able to find a middle ground in his JATP showings. Honks and repeated notes were part of style anyway, although handled with more subtlety than by Jacquet and Phillips, and he was able to be himself while still appealing strongly to the audiences. Benny Carter usually exhibited his unruffled, urbane style, but during the Carnegie Hall concert of September 13, 1952, goes nuts a little bit, seemingly mocking the "JATP style" of saxophonics.

Charlie Parker's first recorded JATP appearance is somewhat legendary. He arrived late to the January 28, 1946 show at the Philharmonic in L.A. His playing was wild, sloppy, and brilliant; the three choruses he played on "Lady Be Good" were bluesy, inspired, and widely influential. When Bird stepped back from the microphone after this solo, none of the other horn players wanted to follow him, so the next solo was one of the rare bass solos in JATP history. While bassist Billy Hadnott played, the horns huddled and decided that Lester Young was best equipped to play something that wouldn't be totally eclipsed by Bird's solo; Prez reluctantly walked to the mic and played a solo which was indeed quite beautiful.

That's one reason I enjoy JATP recordings so much. As with any improvised music, moments of surprising beauty can occur at any time. A few days ago, I was listening to the JATP performance of "Mordido" from 1947. (The big blockbuster tune from that concert was "Perdido," so Granz named a couple of the other jam session tunes "Mordido" and "Endido.") I have the original issue of "Mordido," spread across six 78 sides. And, until the fifth side, it was all so hokey that I had just about decided to ditch these records. But then came the piano solo by Hank Jones, and it was just gorgeous - totally unlike any of the histrionics that had gone before. Needless to say, I kept the records.

But that doesn't tell the whole story. I don't just love JATP for the sublime moments. At times (like "Mordido"), the louder-and-higher atmosphere gets to be too much. But, warts and all, Jazz At the Philharmonic is a lot of fun. A JATP concert is usually more like comfort food than fine cuisine, but hey, sometimes I want a hot dog and fries.

My favorite JATP recordings (and I certainly haven't heard them all) include the 1946 concert with Charlie Parker and Lester Young described above, as well as the September 18, 1949 Carnegie Hall Concert that also features Bird and Prez. There's a great LP, issued in 1983, called The Coleman Hawkins Set; it collects three of Hawkins' feature sets, from 1949, 1950, and 1957. I'm partial to the November 21, 1960 Stockholm concert which resulted in four LPs; it has the only recorded instance of Benny Carter and Cannonball Adderley sharing a stage, as well as excellent playing by Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Don Byas, and others. But the best extant JATP recording, in my opinion, is from Carnegie Hall, November 2, 1949, although it was not released until 2002. Both Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins are on hand, as is Hank Jones and the great Fats Navarro on trumpet. The drummer is Shelly Manne, whose playing is tasteful and swinging - a nice change from the volume and showmanship of frequent JATP participant Buddy Rich. There are a few lesser lights on this recording, but no matter - there is plenty of inspired playing here. Parker, Hawkins, and Navarro are at their best.

One or two Jazz At the Philharmonic concerts would be plenty for most jazz fans. But you might end up, like me, needing a regular dose of the jazz comfort food that is JATP.

Thanks to blogger King Ubu for clearing up some of the discographical mysteries concerning JATP, Volume One.

Happy New Year and Updates

2010-01-08T20:00:00.003-05:00

Happy New Year to all. I've been busy with various endeavors, but wanted to get back to posting here, so here's a little bit of this and that, with some updates.

When you live in Georgia, where it seldom snows, you appreciate how beautiful snow is. I imagine that it gets old quickly in colder places, but snow is a welcome rarity here. Except that we freak out a little - everything closes down when there is one inch of snow. I'm enjoying an unexpected day off of work right now. To be fair, part of the problem here is that driving gets pretty tricky. First of all, we don't know how to drive on snow. Secondly, we have very few snowplows and salt trucks here, so many roads never get cleared. But the main reason driving gets so treacherous is, ironically, because it doesn't get that cold here. Instead of nice crunchy snow, we tend to get a mushy mix of rain, sleet, and snow that freezes, melts, and refreezes multiple times, forming a slick (and almost invisible) coat of ice on the roads. Looking out my window this morning, it seemed kind of ridiculous that all the schools were closed, but on the other hand, there was a 29-car pileup due to ice on one of the Interstate ramps in Atlanta.

Ben Schenck of the Panorama Jazz Band informs me that my favorite dive bar, The Spotted Cat on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans, has reopened. It looks like the Panorama plays at the Cat on Saturdays when they are not otherwise engaged. I hope that's still the case when I vist NOLA in April.

I have partially corrected my ignorance of John Hollenbeck's Large Ensemble music by picking up the newest CD by the group, Eternal Interlude. It's gorgeous - engaging from moment to moment while having the kind of impact that larger compositional form can give. I'm glad I discovered Hollenbeck's music.

Some bootleg CD Horo Records issues have been come out recently, but it looks like the official CD reissues will finally be coming out early this year. I don't know know where Steve Lacy's Eronel is in the release schedule, but I'm looking forward to finally hearing this album.

Finally, a petty little personal story of the kind I usually try to avoid here. Between Christmas and New Year's Day, Karen and I visited her relatives in Washington state. We stayed with her brother, who lives between Bellingham and Lynden; his house is only about 15 minutes from the Canadian border. Well, being so close, I couldn't resist crossing the border to hunt some Canadian geocaches. Crossing into Canada was a breeze, so I visited Aldergrove Lake and found a couple of caches. The border crossing back to the U.S. was a different story. The cars were bumper to bumper for at least a mile. That was okay - I knew it might be a long border crossing, so I had my iPod and a book. I was patient and didn't get upset - until the border was in sight and a jerk in an SUV cut in front of me from the emergency lane. I cursed, but there didn't really seem to be anything I could do about it. Then, when we got even closer to the checkpoint, a young Canadian officer walked over to my passenger door. I rolled down the window; he asked, "Excuse me, sir, did that car pull in front of you from the emergency lane?" I'm guessing they had a video camera watching the line of cars. I answered, "Why, yes sir, he did!" He walked up to the car and yelled, "Pull over!" I cheered.

George Baquet

2009-12-16T22:25:00.001-05:00

In the last 24 hours, I've listened to complete recorded works of George Baquet, the New Orleans Creole clarinetist who lived from 1883 to 1949. Not that it was time-consuming - Baquet only made four or five issued sessions. His playing fascinates me, although I suspect that many listeners will probably find it less than enthralling.

Baquet was the clarinetist with the legendary Creole Band, which was led by bassist Bill Johnson and which was extremely successful in vaudeville well before the Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first jazz records in 1917. (Larry Gushee's Pioneers of Jazz tells their story in detail.) He settled in Philadelphia in 1923 and spent the rest of his life there.

Baquet was the son of the well-respected New Orleans clarinetist Theogene Baquet, who taught George and his brother Achille, also a professional clarinetist. The Baquets were Creoles, with French and African ancestry; I've always thought that it was an interesting statement on the meaning of racial identity that, when they came of age, George decided to be black and Achille decided to be white. Achille played and recorded with Jimmy Durante's New Orleans Jazz Band in 1918-1919; Durante felt obliged on at least one occasion to deny the rumors that his clarinetist was, in fact, black.

Brian Rust's jazz discography credits Baquet with the clarinet work on Bessie Smith's October 15, 1923 session. The booklet of the Columbia Complete Sessions Vol. 1 booklet is more cautious: George Baquet or Ernest Elliott. The clarinet is prominent on "Whoa, Tillie, Take Your Time," and it certainly sounds like it could be Baquet, based on his later recordings.

Baquet shows up again on Jelly Roll Morton's three July, 1929 big band sessions. This is Jelly's touring band with Baquet added, probably because Morton and Baquet were old friends and because the recordings were made in Camden, New Jersey, just across the river from Philly. Baquet sounds kind of odd in this context. Morton's arrangements were not state-of-the-art, like Ellington's or Don Redman's, but they were fairly modern for the time. Baquet sounds like he stepped out of another era. He's got the odd, old-fashioned tone that many older New Orleans clarinetists exhibit, derived at least partly from the double-lip embouchure (no teeth on the mouthpiece) they used. His articulation is also very 19th-century, and he doesn't really swing at all, at least in the way jazz musicians were expected to by 1929.

All that being said, I love these recordings. The contrast between the up-to-date band and the antique clarinet style just kills me, although it doesn't make any sense objectively. "New Orleans Bump" in particular is a delight - Baquet has a very cool flutter-tongued solo.

John Reid made some informal recordings of Baquet in 1940 that were released on an American Music CD, The John Reid Collection, in 1992. There are two selections by the jivey swing band Baquet was leading at the time; he plays clarinet and tenor sax in the ensembles, but lets the younger guys take the solos. But Reid also recorded two amazing documents - a slow blues on clarinet with just the rhythm section accompanying, and another version of the same blues with Baquet's former student Sidney Bechet added on soprano sax. Like some other early Creole musicians (Peter Bocage comes to mind) Baquet treats the blues as a chord progression rather than as a style; his playing is somewhat formal and detached. This must be how some of the earliest New Orleans blues sounded. When Bechet is added, Baquet ups his ante somewhat; without really changing his style, his playing becomes hotter and more involved. He and Bechet trade choruses; each plays beautiful, spare accompaniments to the other's melodies.

I love George Baquet's playing - not just for what it is, but for what it represents. Hearing his clarinet is like catching a glimpse of the light from a distant star - one we know has burned out, but whose light still reaches us. In his music we hear those first, halting steps of the musicians who first put together the music we call jazz.

Shameless Plug

2009-12-04T21:41:00.004-05:00

I've been busy, but I've got a couple of longer posts waiting in the wings, not quite ready to be revealed. But in the meantime....

The new CD by the 4th Ward Afro-Klezmer Orchestra, East Atlanta Passover Stomp, has been reviewed at the All About Jazz website - check it out. Immodesty compels me to point out that the "Dolgo Horo" saxophone solo the reviewer attributes to tenorist Ben Davis is actually me on alto (Ben has several great solos on the CD, though), and that two of the compositions on the album are mine. You can buy multiple copies of the CD at the band's website, my website, or at CDBaby.

Vonski

2009-11-13T09:45:00.005-05:00

There's a new Von Freeman album out. In a just world, this would mean that the legendary 87-year-old Chicago tenor saxophonist would be making the rounds of the talk shows - playing on Good Morning America and trading quips with Letterman and Leno; the news would be splashed on the arts sections of every paper in the country. As it is, Von Freeman's audience is a minority within a minority; a small subsection of the already small jazz audience. How many people are going to notice a new Freeman album?

Twenty years or so ago, my band of the time, the Bazooka Ants, opened Chicago Day at the Atlanta Jazz Festival, for some reason - we certainly had no link to Chicago. I guess we were picked because we were kind of avant-garde, but also accessible - a good lead-in to the first two of the Chicago acts that filled the rest of the day: Douglas Ewart's clarinet ensemble (with Anthony Braxton) and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. It was an amazing day, and seeing/hearing the Art Ensemble's set from the side of the stage was like going to church. But the highlight was the appearance of Von Freeman. I was standing near Ewart and Roscoe Mitchell while Von was deep into a medium-up tune on Rhythm changes. Mitchell turned to Ewart, laughed and shook his head, and said, "Now that's a real saxophone player!"

Freeman's playing is unusual and highly individual; he has a very personal tone, sense of rhythm, and style of phrasing, as well a flexibility with pitch which allows him to bend notes "into the cracks" between the tempered pitches of Western music. His music is so interesting and moving in part because he's always improvising. That may seem like a simplistic thing to say about a jazz musician - isn't that what they all do? But so many "improvising" musicians are just recycling their licks; it's easy to predict what they're going to play next. Not so with Von - he continually takes the music in surprising and unexpected directions. His version of "Footprints," from Live at the Dakota, is as strange and beautiful as any music I've ever heard. His tortured phrases slide around and between the pitches of the chromatic scale, and he plays with amazing drive and intensity - he was a mere 73 years old at the time. And his spoken introduction to the tune is both funny and sobering - I'll let you track down the album and check it out yourself.

Von didn't record an album of his own until he almost 50. What is often considered his best record was made a couple of years after that - Have No Fear came out on Nessa, Chuck Nessa's label. (Disclaimer - While we've never met, Mr. Nessa and I are slightly acquainted through the tubes of the internet.) Nessa's output has been small, but uncompromisingly excellent - 25 or so albums over the past 30 years. Nessa's latest release is Vonski Speaks, by Freeman and the quartet that accompanies him on his regular Tuesday night gig at the New Apartment Lounge in Chicago. The CD is both joyous and achingly beautiful. On the uptempo title cut, Von's phrases often begin like conventional bebop phrases before they are twisted into unexpected directions, ending on unusual notes. I was less than excited to see yet another recorded version of "Summertime," but this is the most challenging reading of the Gershwin song I've ever heard, with the possible exception of Albert Ayler's. The young band which accompanies him is worthy of Freeman's great performance; I imagine playing with Von stretches them to play above themselves. This is great jazz.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this album, but to me Freeman's work on Vonski Speaks perfectly captures both the wonder and brevity of our moment on this planet - it reminds us that life is complex, beautiful, and short. While we and Von are still on this side of the grass, hear his music. Von Freeman is a national treasure.

Wilder

2009-11-02T21:45:00.000-05:00

After numerous delays, we finally had the first rehearsal for the Alec Wilder concert yesterday....

For several years, I have wanted to present a concert of the music of Alec Wilder, that most unusual American composer. His amazing music is not as well known as it should be, perhaps because he is so unclassifiable. Wilder wrote some of the best songs in the "Great American Songbook," even if "While We're Young," "I'll Be Around," "Blackberry Winter," and "Moon and Sand" are not as widely known as the songs of Gershwin or Cole Porter.

But after years in the pop music business, Wilder began composing "classical" music, often for wind instruments. Again, this music is not widely known among classical listeners, but instrumentalists love it - Wilder's classical music is melodic, challenging, and fun to play. He wrote for musicians he liked - Julius Baker, Harvey Phillips, Donald Sinta - and just gave his scores away, not charging the recipients, and often not keeping a copy of the music for himself.

Although Wilder was by no means a jazz musician, much of his work was touched by jazz. He first gained fame by composing and recording a series of octets with titles like "Sea Fugue Mama," "It's Silk, Feel It!," and "Jack, This is My Husband." These pieces were written for woodwinds and a rhythm section which included harpsichord. They're not really jazz, not quite pop, and not exactly classical. They're totally Wilder, though.

And he wrote pieces like "Jazz Waltz for a Friend" for the great Marian McPartland. "Jazz Waltz" is strange, twisted, but ultimately logical. I wanted to play it for the concert, but was unable to find the sheet music. So I transcribed it from McPartland's first recording of the tune. It took me three days and gave me nightmares, literally - I would wake up in the middle of the night thinking about those chords. But the odd harmonies and 38-bar structure make sense in the end.

At our rehearsal, we stumbled and felt our way through the tunes, but music started to emerge. When the other members of Standard Deviation, Scott, Janna, and Ben, began to rehearse what is perhaps my favorite Wilder song, "Blackberry Winter," I was somewhat overcome. I had only heard this song on recordings, never in person. That halting first attempt was so beautiful that it literally brought a tear to my eye. At the same time, I was chagrined and disappointed - the three of them sounded so perfect together on the song that I realized I shouldn't play on it. So I won't be playing my favorite Alec Wilder tune at the concert.

That concert, by the way, will be February 6 at the First Existentialist Congregation (The Old Stone Church) in Atlanta. It will feature Wilder's songs performed by Standard Deviation as well as some of his classical pieces - in particular the Clarinet Sonata performed by Sandy Wade. I'll keep everyone informed.

Copenhagen Report

2009-10-25T00:45:00.003-04:00

My wonderful wife Karen had a meeting in Copenhagen, and I kind of invited myself along. I mean, how often am I going to get a chance to go to Copenhagen? Here’s my brief report on the trip. It will be totally uninteresting to people who don’t know my or to those who are well-travelled. You can skip this post. But for my friends who want to know what I’ve been up to for a week:

It’s amazing that we can fly across the ocean in a day, but there’s no denying that jamming a bunch of people into a tube for nine hours is a pretty brutal way to travel. But a grueling flight to Paris left us with enough time between planes to find a geocache near Charles De Gaulle Airport. What better way to stretch our legs and set foot on French soil?

A few hours later, we were working our way through the Copenhagen airport, trying to figure out how to get to our hotel. There were plenty of the usual missteps one makes when in a new city for the first time, but soon we were settled in. The next day (Monday) would be the only full day we had together, so decided to put another country under our belts and took the train to Malmö, the third largest city in Sweden. Considering that the third-largest city in the U.S. is the huge Chicago, Malmö seemed pretty small and sleepy, but it was a nice little town. We walked around for awhile to get our bearings, and ate a nice Indian meal on Lilla Torg, a beautiful old square. I (of course) added Sweden to the list of countries I’ve geocached in. Perhaps the highlight of our short trip to Malmö was a visit to St. Peter’s Church, where construction began in the 14th century. The roof was originally painted with Biblical and allegorical scenes, but was whitewashed over in the 16th century. The Merchant’s Chapel, however, was added in the 15th century and shortly thereafter sealed off as redundant, so the roof paintings survived. They’re pretty amazing – somewhat faded, but the haunted faces of Christ and the medieval knights still communicate across the centuries.

Back in Copenhagen, we walked the length of the Strøget, a series of streets given over to pedestrians. It ranges from fascinating to tacky. At the end of the Strøget, we walked past the Royal Theatre to Nyhavn, the beautiful “new harbor” neighborhood where the canal is lined with restaurants. Karen picked out a tiny place called Havfruen (Mermaid), where we had a great meal. After one more drink on the way back, we called it a day.

Some general impressions: To an American, this is just a beautiful old city – interesting buildings, squares, and canals all over the place. Bicycles everywhere. There are probably as many bicycles as cars on the streets, and they are left parked all over the place, often without being locked. Everyone seems to smoke, although it’s not allowed inside most places any more. Danish women all seem beautiful and about seven feet tall. And the language makes absolutely no sense to an outsider. Spanish or French is easy to pronounce, at least, when you know the rules. Karen had a short Danish lesson as part of her meeting and tried to explain some things to me, but it seemed pretty random. Just about everyone speaks English, though, and will quickly switch to it when they realize that you don’t speak Danish.

On Tuesday, Karen and I left the hotel early so that she could check in for her meeting. I spent a few hours walking, record shopping, and geocaching. I bought lunch from one of the pølser (hot dog) stands, where I got a Danish hot dog that rivaled one of Chicago’s for unusual toppings – along with spicy mustard, it had bacon bits and pickles. It was great. I found a cache at the Rundetårn, the “Round Tower” built in the 17th century. I was amused by the description on the cache page, on which one of the cache hiders related how, when she was a child, she was convinced that the Rundetårn was the tallest building in the world – she had read about skyscrapers in America, and thought that they must be almost as tall.

That night I heard Jesper Thilo’s very creative quartet at Jazz Paradise in the Huset arts complex. It’s the same for jazz musicians everywhere – they played the first set for an audience of three. However, from the first note, they played as if their lives depended on it – with mastery, concentration, and interaction. Thilo’s tenor sax sound was rich and beautiful, and he swung hard. Even if his playing was not particularly original, it reminded me of how rewarding unadorned straight-ahead jazz can still be. Olivier Antunes took things in odd directions during his piano solos, and bassist Bo Stief deserved a medal for following him at least 90% of the time. The drummer, Frands Rifbjerg, was solid as a rock. Thilo’s selection of tunes was a little old-fashioned by American standards, for the most part, but he did play Ornette Coleman’s “Turnaround” along with “Thou Swell” and “Strike Up the Band.” A rewarding evening – and the audience swelled to eight during the second set!

On Wednesday, Karen was able to get away from her meeting to sightsee with me in the morning. She showed me around Slotsholmen, the small island which was the original center of Copenhagen. (She had been given a tour the day before.) Then we took the harbor bus (a ferry, basically) across to the Christianshavn section of the city. After walking along one of the canals, she had to return to her meeting, so I explored Christianshavn for the rest of the morning. It seems a little more “real” and working-class than the other parts of Copenhagen I visited. There were very few signs or menus in English in this section of town. I paid 25 kroner for the privilege of climbing to the top of the spire of Vor Frelsers Kirke (Our Savior’s Church). In the States, this would be a risk management officer’s nightmare. There are 400 steps to the top. The first 350 are inside and wooden; they get steeper, narrower, darker, and more rickety as you ascend. The final 150 steps wind around the outside of the tower and continue to get narrower to the top. It was fairly terrifying, but the view was great.

I then visited the “free city” of Christiana, a section of Christianshavn centered around some abandoned military barracks and which was taken over in 1971 by a group of (for lack of a better word) hippies. The settlers declared the area independent of Copenhagen, and the settlement has existed in an uneasy truce with the city government since. Maybe I’m showing my age or conventionality, but this was an extremely depressing area. It just seemed dirty and unkempt; it was the only part of Copenhagen I visited which was littered with trash. I was glad to leave it behind and take a nice walk along the moat on the eastern side of the island.

More strolling, more sightseeing. The highlight of Thursday was a visit to the National Museum, which had so many amazing displays that I soon began to suffer from “museum fatigue” – one bronze age tool started to look like another. I’d love to go back and spend about a week in this museum. Then it was time to move to a hotel close to the airport, since I had a 6:00 AM flight the next morning. The TV didn’t work in my downtown hotel, so the main revelation from my last evening in Denmark was that Danish TV is as bad as American TV, except that you can see breasts in commercials.

Copenhagen is a beautiful place. I already want to go back, and take my horn. I hope I have the chance.

Everybody's Talking About Sammy

2009-10-13T07:36:00.012-04:00

In reading interviews with old New Orleans musicians, names of great, unrecorded trumpet players like Buddy Bolden, Buddy Petit, and Chris Kelly keep coming up. But the band that inspires awe, admiration, and even fear in those interviews is Sam Morgan's Jazz Band, which recorded eight titles for Columbia Records in 1927. Those 24 minutes of music represent some of the most exciting New Orleans jazz ever put down.

Sam Morgan's was a musical family; he and his brother Isiah played cornet in the band, another brother, Andrew, played clarinet and tenor sax, and brother Al was an accomplished bassist. (Al Morgan went north and made a name for himself before the band recorded.) Alto saxophonist Earl Fouche and Big Jim Robinson on trombone were the other horns on the Columbia records, and a strong four-piece rhythm section provided the foundation. That rhythm section drives the band like a diesel engine, playing a strong four beats to the bar, as opposed to the two-beat rhythm of many "dixieland" bands.

The whole band swings very hard, and surprisingly makes no concessions to the fashions of popular music at large, unless you consider the presence of saxophones in the ensemble a trendy 1920s element. (I don't.) Compare the Morgans' approach to other New Orleans bands who recorded around the same time: Oscar Celestin's band or the Halfway House Orchestra, for instance. Those band were adopting the scored ensemble passages and "modern" harmonies of the northern bands of the time, but not the Morgan band. They continued to play old-style New Orleans improvised polyphony.

The tunes are mostly originals; the most impressive as a composition is "Bogalousa Stomp," a multi-strain piece which is still played fairly frequently by New Orleans bands. (Kermit Ruffins has recorded a nice version.) Sam Morgan sings "Everybody's Talking About Sammy" and the racy "Short Dress Gal" in a rough, cawing voice; I can only understand some of the words. In addition to the jazz stomps, the band also recorded three spirituals; they were the first jazz band to do so. "Sing On" and "Over in the Gloryland" are still played by New Orleans jazz and brass bands; I don't know whether this is because the Morgan recordings were influential or because the tunes have always been popular in the city. There is a touching passage in "Down by the Riverside when all the instruments except the piano drop out and some of the band sing the spiritual in harmony. It's a beautiful down-home moment from this swinging group.

The Morgan recordings, particularly the spirituals, also demonstrate the cross-pollination that was going on between the jazz bands (which played mostly for dancing) and the brass bands which played on the street. On "Sing On" and "Gloryland," the band is basically playing brass band style with a rhythm section. Take away the trap set, string bass, piano, and banjo and replace them with tuba, snare drum, and bass drum, and this band could have played the same notes at a funeral parade.

Perhaps the most impressive musician in the band was alto saxophonist Earl Fouche. He never recorded again, and that's something of a tragedy, because he really shines on the Morgan sides. He's all over the place - doubling the first cornet, harmonizing with the cornets, playing countermelodies, and contributing killer solos to "Mobile Stomp" and "Bogalousa Strut." Fouche obviously had a real command of the saxophone and of harmony, something that can't be said of everyone in the band. (You'll hear some poor note choices by Andrew Morgan in "Over in the Gloryland" and a spectacularly wrong note by Jim Robinson in the introduction to "Steppin' on the Gas," where he plays a D against an A flat major chord.) Based on these eight recordings, Fouche was probably the best saxophonist in New Orleans during that period.

Ill health dogged Sam Morgan, and the band fell apart when he died in the mid 1930s. Only Robinson, Andrew Morgan, and bassist Sidney Brown recorded commercially after this, and only Jim Robinson really gained any fame. Brother Isiah continued to play, and a field recording made at a dance in Mississippi in the 1950s showed him to be an able, swinging, but unspectacular trumpeter. There have been several recorded tributes to the Morgan band, but by far the best is the Sam Morgan Revisited session made under Kid Howard's name for the Icon label. The record was reissued on the Jazzology family of labels, and features five absolutely smoking versions of Morgan's tunes. The band includes Jim Robinson and Andrew Morgan, as well as other musicians who played with Sam Morgan at various times, but who weren't on the Columbia sessions. They play with an abandon which makes this session one of the most exciting of the so-called "New Orleans Revival" of the sixties.

The eight Morgan sides have been reissued on Azure and Jazz Oracle CDs, and probably elsewhere. I'll always be grateful that they jammed into the upstairs room of Werlein's Music Store on Canal Street to play into the inadequate recording equipment of the time. The myth that all the good musicians left New Orleans by 1920 is blown out of the water by these stirring, amazing 24 minutes of music.

New Website

2009-10-10T22:04:00.004-04:00

I've finished the new website, at least in its preliminary form - I plan to keep adding to it and improving it. But if you visit www.jeffcrompton.com you'll be able to keep up with where I'm playing, download strange music (including a couple of tracks by the semi-legendary Bazooka Ants), and buy lots of CDs. Check it out.

Debut

2009-10-10T01:33:00.004-04:00

It's been a strange and intense week. I've dealt with angry and irrational people on my day job, worked obsessively to get my new website up, practiced the saxophone and clarinet with satisfaction and frustration, and presented a new band.

The debut of the new Jeff Crompton Quartet at Atlanta's Eyedrum Gallery tonight was sloppy and intense, and the audience seemed to enjoy it. The band was exhausted afterwards, which I take as a good sign. I think we certainly have potential. We play the kind of free jazz that relies on listening, interaction, and instinct, and we're just going to have to play together for awhile before things really start to jell. The musicians in the audience tonight didn't hear all the mistakes that we felt and heard, so I think the spirit of the music prevailed over the sloppiness. Thank you Keith, Bill and Ben.

Now I'm trying to come down with Steve Lacy. The last tune on the Live in Budapest duet album with Steve Potts is "Morning Joy," based on the Bob Kaufman poem of the same name. It's a strange and wonderful poem, which I memorized about 15
years ago. Here it is from memory - the line breaks and punctuation might not be quite right, but I've got the words:

Piano buttons stitched on morning lights;
Jazz wakes with the day.
As I awaken with jazz,
Love lit the night.

Eyes appear and disappear
To lead me once more
To a green moon.

Streets paved with opal sadness
Lead me counterclockwise
To pockets of joy
And jazz.

Please Stand By....

2009-10-05T21:05:00.002-04:00

As has been pointed out, I don't post to this blog that often - about four times a month seems to be the rate I've settled into. I've been thinking about music (and other things) just as much as ever, but I've been putting lots of time into my new quartet (which makes its debut at Eyedrum Gallery in Atlanta in four days) and into my new website. I hope to have the website up and running by the time the quartet hits the stage on Friday. It will have info on my musical activities, free downloadable tracks, and (of course) CDs for sale. Stay tuned.

And thanks to everyone who has found their way to this blog. I hope you've found something you enjoy, and I hope you'll come back.

All Around Man

2009-09-26T23:40:00.003-04:00

Lexington, Mississippi bluesman Lonnie Pitchford died of AIDS in 1998, a month beyond his 43rd birthday. If you've read the chapter on Pitchford in Robert Nicholson's book Mississippi Blues Today!, you might find it amazing that he lived as long as he did. Nicholson recounts, in jaw-dropping fashion, his unsuccesful attempt to keep up with the hard-living, pleasure-seeking Pitchford for 24 hours. Nicholson's night with Pitchford involved copious amounts of lying and alcohol, refueled by a visit to the bootlegger in the middle of the night. Although Pitchford stayed up until dawn drinking, Nicholson was amazed that he was up at 9:00 AM with a bottle of Colt 45 and Oprah on the TV.

At the Sunflower River Blues Festival in Clarksdale one year (I don't quite remember which) in the early nineties, Pitchford was all over the place - performing, listening, helping out, wandering around. And every time I saw him, he always seemed pretty drunk. But he was incredibly patient with one of his mentors, Eugene Powell, who recorded before World War II as Sonny Boy Nelson. The very elderly Powell was still able to play sing his blues and play guitar, but was no longer able to tune his instrument. When Pitchford realized that Powell was having trouble, he mounted the stage, tuned his teacher's guitar, and handed it back. Powell, probably acting on instinct, immediately reached out and turned one of the tuning pegs, destroying the younger man's work. Pitchford sighed, took the guitar back, and retuned it.

Pitchford's other mentor was the great Robert Lockwood, Jr., often called "Robert Junior" Lockwood, since his mother was the girlfriend of Robert Johnson. Many bluesmen hung around Robert Johnson and picked up licks and techniques. Lockwood was, however, apparently the only musician whom Johnson taught directly. He learned well, amplified Johnson's lessons (listen to "Talk a Little Walk With Me" from Lockwood's first recording session in 1941), and, years later, passed the lessons on to Lonnie. The beautiful "See See Rider" from Pitchford's only full-length album, All Around Man, illustrates the Lockwood influence on Lonnie's playing.

The name of that Rooster Blues album is appropriate - not only because Pitchford performs Bo Carter's wonderfully dirty song of the same name, but because he covers so many musical bases. When he first came to the attention of the larger blues community, Pitchford was known for two things: his moving, virtuoso performances on the "diddley bow," the one-string guitar, and for his precise and passionate renditions of Robert Johnson's songs. All Around Man presents Pitchford in those two settings, as well as the Robert Lockwood-influenced style mentioned above, the haunting hill country style he apparently learned from his father, as a modern blues electric guitarist in front of a band, and even as a jazz/funk soloist (on Donnie Hathaway's "The Ghetto"). And he's the best of the three bassists that appear on the album. He sounds totally natural and convincing on all of this. The only setting in which he disappoints is as a jazzy piano soloist; he doesn't have either the chops or musical knowledge to make much of "My Sunny," his simplification of the Bobby Hebb tune.

Although All Around Man is his only album, Pitchford contributed tracks to the German "Living Country Blues" series (partially reissued on Evidence), the concert that produced the Columbia album Roots of Rhythm & Blues: A Tribute to the Robert Johnson Era, the Deep Blues soundtrack, and volume one of the National Downhome Blues Festival albums on Southland. But one of my most highly prized records is an LP of gorgeous Mississippi gospel by The Star Lite Singers. One of the Star Lites was the Rev. Charles Pitchford; he recruited his brother to play guitar and bass on their Footprint of Jesus album. I bought this record in Clarksdale around 1992; I suspect that not many people outside of Mississippi have heard it. Lonnie doesn't solo, but every shuffle rhythm and fill he plays is just perfect.

Charles officiated at his brother's funeral when the end came. Years ago, I read an online account of the service, but it has since been lost somewhere in the tubes of the interweb. But from what I remember, Rev. Pitchford's funeral sermon was unapologetic, even defiant, about his brother's lifestyle, taking the position that Lonnie was given the talent to play and sing the blues by God, and that he followed his path as well he was able. With any great artist, it's hard to know how much we can separate the man and music. If Lonnie Pitchford hadn't lived so fast and so hard, maybe his music wouldn't be so moving. But, hearing "See See Rider," "Lonesome Blues," or "Don't You Do That No More," it's hard not to regret the mode of living that brought early death to such a talent.

Giuffre

2009-09-22T16:54:00.004-04:00

Jimmy Giuffre (1921-2008) was on a different level than the general run of jazz musicians; he was one of those rare individuals who could create a musical universe or change the direction of a piece with one note. Giuffre ranks so highly in my esteem that his death, like Steve Lacy's passing, is still a little difficult for me to process; I have to force myself to realize that we no longer share the same planet.

My first encounter with Jimmy Giuffre's music came when I was in the eighth or ninth grade and was invited to attend the first rehearsal of my high school's newly formed "stage band." The school’s band director, Leon Cole, was remarkably visionary and open-eared, and was anxious to expose us to as many different types of music as possible. He really didn't know how to teach us improvisation, but it was at that rehearsal that I became aware of the concept. And Mr. Cole brought in a couple of books to teach us jazz style and phrasing. One was by Lennie Niehaus, if I remember correctly, but the other was Jazz Phrasing and Interpretation by Jimmy Giuffre, published in 1969.

The exercises in the Giuffre book were odd, conceptual, and difficult. We quickly gave up on it and concentrated on the Niehaus method. But I took my copy of the Giuffre home, and pored over it. It was way beyond me at the time, but I was fascinated, particularly by the final exercise, which was atonal and written without barlines. Several years ago I found another copy, and I still find it very challenging.

Jimmy Giuffre first came to the attention of the larger jazz world when Woody Herman recorded his "Four Brothers" back in 1947. The piece featured a saxophone section of unusual instrumentation: three tenors and a baritone. The first recording, featuring Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Herbie Steward, and Serge Chaloff, was enough of a musical and commercial success that Herman played the piece for the rest of his life, and used the three-tenors-and-a-bari sax section from then on.

Although Giuffre was active in a variety of settings in the late forties and early fifties, he only found his true musical personality with a series recordings for Atlantic Records and with the formation of The Jimmy Giuffre 3 in the middle of that decade. The first Atlantic recording, The Jimmy Giuffre Clarinet, exhibited the unusual, breathy sound that Giuffre had developed on that instrument. During this period he played the clarinet almost exclusively in the lower register, which led to one of the great sarcastic putdowns of jazz history; when it was announced that Giuffre would be teaching at the Lenox School of Jazz, critic Andre Hodier asked, "Who will be teaching the upper register?"

But a more important aspect of the Clarinet album was the variety and imagination of the settings which Giuffre composed or arranged for himself. It was obvious that Giuffre considered himself a composer as much as an instrumentalist. And although he contributed works to various large ensemble projects during this period, his most important compositional canvas was The 3, with Jim Hall on guitar and Ralph Pena on bass. This group was highly controversial at the time, in part because it didn't include a drummer. Giuffe had become increasingly dissatisfied with the role of drums in jazz, and had experimented (unsuccessfully, in my opinion) with an approach wherein the drummer played fills, but dispensed with conventional timekeeping. But those with ears to hear found the Jimmy Giuffre 3 a particularly intelligent and heartening example of that blending of composition and improvisation which was one of the overlooked subtexts of jazz in the 1950s. Pieces like "The Train and the River" and "Two Kinds of Blues" are good examples of the best work of this group.

When Pena left, Giuffre couldn't find another bassist that suited him, so he added valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer as the third member of the group. On the surface, this seemed like an even more radical instrumentation, but in reality this version of The 3 swung harder, while taking even more chances compositionally. Their definitive album paired Giuffre's four-part "Western Suite" with wonderful, loose versions of "Topsy" and "Blue Monk."

Toward the end of the fifties, and possibly influenced by some of the criticism he was receiving, Giuffre became unhappy with the direction of his music. The playing of Monk and Sonny Rollins seemed more direct and emotional to him, and he drifted for awhile before getting his bearings again. During this period he recorded a live album with Hall on guitar and a hard-swinging rhythm section. It didn't quite work, and critic Max Harrison has blamed the rhythm section, saying that they didn't understand what Giuffre needed. Harrison is the critic I most admire, and I hate to disagree with him, but it's obvious to me that Giuffre is forcing; he's trying to play hard and emotionally, but it's equally obvious to me that he's not being himself.

The answer came with the formation of a new Jimmy Giuffre 3 in 1961. Pianist Paul Bley and bassist Steve Swallow were Giuffre's new partners; during the short life of the group they recorded three studio albums and impacted jazz in ways which only became apparent in retrospect. The new trio played music in which tonality, conventional jazz rhythms, and closed structures were only options, not givens. The result was a sometimes atonal jazz chamber music which, to many listeners, seemed to have more in common with contemporary classical music than jazz. Although influential and widely praised (musicians as diverse as Evan Parker and Joe McPhee have talked about this group’s impact on them), they never attracted much of an audience; Steve Swallow has written that they disbanded after a gig on which they each made 35 cents.

Giuffre continued playing uncompromising, individual free jazz with various partners. One of the few recorded examples of The 3 from later in the decade is a 1965 Paris set; it can be found on a French CD. With Don Friedman and Barre Phillips, Giuffre plays fearless, abstract music. The audience quickly loses patience and makes its displeasure known, but the hisses and catcalls seem to spur Giuffre on to new heights; he improvises with great intensity on both saxophone and clarinet.

In the seventies he continued to play with Paul Bley at times (Quiet Song is particularly beautiful) and lead his own groups, usually with bass and drums. He formed a new 4 (he didn't seem to care for the terms "trio" and "quartet") after hearing Weather Report and being impressed with its palette of electronic sounds. The new group included Pete Levin on synthesizers and keyboards and made three albums for Soul Note. Although my friend Robo finds the keyboard sounds too dated to enjoy this group, I like their music, which combines the lyrical feel of Giuffre's early 3 with a new strength and excitement.

Jimmy Giuffre continued to perform and record until the early nineties. Some of the most intriguing later work is by the reunited trio of Giuffre, Bley and Swallow. They made four albums between 1989 and 1993, and it's interesting to hear what elements of their earlier music they retained and which they discarded or reconsidered. Much of their later work was completely improvised, and they often broke into duets or solos.

Parkinson's Disease finally made it impossible for Giuffre to perform, and like all Parkinson's sufferers, he continued to decline until his death a couple of years ago. He left an amazing body of work, though. And he still kicks my ass every couple of days when I attempt to practice out of Jazz Phrasing and Interpretation.

Wisdom From Jeffery...

2009-09-14T21:53:00.001-04:00

...for all the world to read and marvel at....

Music is the healing force of the universe.
Albert Ayler

Music is just a bunch of noise that doesn't mean anything.
Thanks to one of Atlanta's great drummers, John Lewis, for this one.

All the rest are mine.

Ancient bullshit is still bullshit.

Popular bullshit is still bullshit.

Science is a flawed and incomplete means of understanding the world, but at least it knows that.

No musician is self-taught, and all musicians are self-taught.

People are basically good.
People are basically evil.
People are basically indifferent.
All of the above are true.

People instinctively feel that they need enemies. Too bad.

American culture owes so much to the enslavement of West Africans early in our history. This is a hard fact to take on many levels, but it's true.

A generalization: The more sure someone is that he knows what God wants, the nastier, more unpleasant, and downright scary he tends to be.

You work with what you've got - in music and in anything else.

Panorama

2009-09-07T21:00:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm kind of depressed. One of New Orleans' (and the world's) greatest dive-bars-with-music has closed. Sometime in August, the New Orleans music magazine Offbeat posted a note on their website:

Jimbeaux’s on Frenchmen Street formerly known as the Spotted Cat will be closed until further notice.

The Spotted Cat couldn't really be called a music club; it was a seedy bar with a bandstand. Every time I visited the Cat, it was jam-packed with music lovers, tourists, barflies, alcoholics, and folks from the neighborhood. And there was always great music coming from the tiny bandstand: The New Orleans Jazz Vipers, Washboard Chaz and his trio, The Psister Sisters, Loose Marbles. But trouble was in the air this past Spring. The stories are confusing and conflicting, but apparently one of the owners of the place was difficult to get along with, and the landlord was reluctant to renew the lease. For a month or two the bar continued to operate under the name Jimbeaux's, but amid rumors that one of the owners hit the other in the head with a hammer, the place closed its doors this summer.

The Spotted Cat was always a lively place, but every Friday evening between 6:30 and 9:30, it became the center of the universe. That's when the Panorama Jazz Band made their weekly appearance on the bandstand. My friend Robo introduced me to the Panorama, and I'll always be grateful - they are one of my favorite New Orleans bands. The six-or-seven member group, led by clarinetist Ben Schenck, plays traditional jazz, klezmer tunes, Caribbean songs, Bulgarian dances - music from the Creole and Jewish diaspora. The Friday night listeners, partiers, and drinkers at the Spotted Cat didn't seem to care where the music came from from, or whether the tune was a New Orleans rhumba, a meringue from Martinique, or a seven-eight hora from eastern Europe. They danced and cheered to it all.

But while the Spotted Cat is gone, the Panorama Jazz Band lives on. They now have 14 years of experience and three CDs under their belt, and the latest album, Come Out Swingin', shows them sounding better than ever. The "rhythm section," which is perhaps an arbitrary distinction in a New Orleans band, consists of banjo, accordion, tuba, and drums, and they make the jazz tunes and odd klezmer rhythms sound equally natural. Schenck is partnered in the "front line" (again, a somewhat meaningless division), by trombone and, for the last couple of years, by the fiery alto sax of Aurora Nealand.

The Panorama's tunes are carefully worked out and rehearsed; I don't know if they are ever arranged on paper, but the band doesn't use charts on the bandstand. There are no real virtuosos in the band, except for "accordionist emeritus" Patrick Farrell, who played on the first two albums and makes a guest appearance on the new one. And the improvised solos are functional, rather than inspiring, for the most part. But none of that matters - the Panorama Jazz Band is more than the sum of its parts. It all works wonderfully - wherever the song is from, the Panorama somehow makes it sound like swinging New Orleans jazz while retaining the original flavor of the tune.

There is also a street version of the band, the Panorama Brass Band, which plays the Krewe de Vieux Mardi Gras parade every year, among other events. Each of the last two Panorama albums has included a few cuts by the brass band. Yeah, they play the traditional New Orleans brass band tunes like "Down in Honky Tonk Town," but they also play Balkan Gypsy tunes and Ravel's "Bolero." They don't sound quite like any other brass band in New Orleans.

I'm not trying to make a case that the Panorama Jazz Band is the best band in New Orleans, or that they'll go down in jazz history, or anything like that. But they're accomplished, unique, and a lot of fun. Catch them if you can.

Louis

2009-08-31T21:21:00.003-04:00

This post represents my attempt to sum up Louis Armstrong in a few paragraphs. That can't be done, of course, and the result is so simplistic that any readers who are at all familiar with Armstrong and his genius can safely ignore what follows. I've found, though, that many jazz listeners, and even musicians, don't understand what all the fuss is about - they consider Louis old-fashioned at best.

At some point in my high school band career, I was given the Louis Armstrong Jazz Award for being the best jazz musician in the school. However, that wasn't saying much in the semi-rural school I attended - it's not like there was a lot of competition. But it got me thinking, perhaps for the first time, about the paradox of Louis Armstrong.

When I was a kid (and still today), the most powerful AM radio station in Atlanta was WSB. But while WSB is now a talk radio station featuring unreflective right-wing mouths, it used to be the adult "easy listening" station. And I'll admit that I kind of liked it as a kid, and that I learned a lot from listening to it. They played crap like Lennie Dee and Danny Davis and the Nashville Brass, but they also played Benny Goodman and Dave Brubeck. And they played Louis Armstrong records: "Mack the Knife," "Cabaret," and "Blueberry Hill."

By the time I was playing in my high school's "stage band," as school big bands were usually called in those days, I vaguely knew that Armstrong was supposed to be one of the jazz greats - possibly the jazz great. But I couldn't reconcile that image with the pleasant, genial music I heard by Louis on the radio - that music didn't seem like the work of a genius. Understanding and appreciating Armstrong was a slow process, and was part of the journey of appreciating and enjoying early jazz styles in general.

A little investigation, a little exploration of the records in the local library, and I started to get it. As I explored Louis' early output, I found some stunning music: "West End Blues," with its amazingly complex opening cadenza, "Potato Head Blues," with a solo that dances over a stop-time rhythm, and "Beau Koo Jack," with trumpeting as virtuosic as any ever recorded in jazz.

The late-twenties Okeh records like these, collectively known as the Hot Fives, since most of them featured that band name, are usually considered to be Armstrong's pinnacle. But the best of his slightly later recordings for the Victor label are no less amazing. These records were made with pretty mediocre big bands, and the material is mostly pop songs of the time - good ones like "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues" and lousy ones like "That's My Home." But the material is immaterial - on both of these sides Louis acheives a soaring eloquence unlike anything else in jazz; his playing on these tunes reminds me more of Beethoven than King Oliver.

The conventional wisdom is the rest of Armstrong's career represented decline and compromise. Certainly his later trumpet playing never again reached the heights of the Hot Fives and best Victors. But later recordings such as "I Double Dare You" feature brilliantly constructed improvisation with a somewhat more subdued, pared-down trumpet style. And even near the end of his career, when his ability to play the trumpet was limited, he could create solos that show his genius. I've always been struck by his playing on the 1968 "Dream a Little Dream of Me" - it's spare, using short phrases and few notes, but each note is carefully chosen and placed for maximum expressive effect. It's one the most moving of Armstrong solos.

By the time he recorded "Dream a Little Dream of Me," Louis had been fronting his constantly touring band, known as the All Stars, for 20 years or so. During this time, he became one of America's foremost entertainers; it was in this role that I first became aware of Armstrong. If it is difficult to understand how the first and greatest genius of jazz could settle for being a mere entertainer, well, that's a distinction which Louis never made for himself. In all stages of his career, he played music which he hoped people would like. Yes, his days of jazz innovation were long behind him by the time he knocked the Beatles out of the number one spot on the pop charts with "Hello Dolly," but he was still trying to create good music, and usually succeeding.

Gary Giddins' book on Armstrong, Satchmo, has chapters titled "The Artist as Entertainer" and "The Entertainer as Artist." This summarizes Louis - he was both, and didn't see a division. If you don't know Armstrong's music, check out the early masterpieces, but don't stop there. Listeners who can open themselves to Louis' music at all stages of his career will find lots of rewards waiting for them.

Real Improvising

2009-08-24T21:41:00.007-04:00

I have a longer post waiting in the wings, but I just came across a beautiful Lee Konitz quote:

As soon as I hear myself play a melodic segment that I already know, I take the mouthpiece out. The art of improvising implies, from the first note onward, that the slate is clean. What interests me is the procedure that falls into place without premeditation. The important thing is to flee the task that's assigned to you.

I love that, particularly the paradoxical last sentence. When I read something like this, or when I hear Konitz play, I am filled with admiration. And I'm a little chagrined about my own playing. Konitz and Steve Lacy are two of my heroes, and they both exhibit the same pure esthetic in their playing. They are (or were, in Lacy's case) interested in improvising melody, not in creating excitement, not in working up the audience, and certainly not in running through predictable patterns. Lacy, unlike Konitz, sometimes ventured from melodic improvising into sound exploration, but he even did that his own way - no screaming, no "finger-wiggling," but an exploration of the saxophone's sound capabilities that was just as thoughtful as his melodic playing.

Not many players in jazz have maintained such a pure approach to improvising. There have been numerous published studies of Charlie Parker's music showing how he combined his favorite licks and devices in different ways time and time again. Parker, of course, was a genius, and his solos were so brilliantly constructed that his use of set material didn't weaken his incredible music. But we've all heard lesser players who keep coming back to the same licks. And Johnny Hodges was one of the most amazing saxophonists in the history of jazz, but he often used the same set solos every night for many tunes.

I certainly don't come close to the melodic purity of Konitz or Lacy. With the 4th Ward Afro-Klezmer Orchestra, I only get a few solos per night, and I often plan the opening phrase of a solo before I start to play. And I do resort to devices that I know will "work" - building my solo gradually to a high point, then tapering off fairly quickly, for example.

There are lots of ways to improvise, and few of us have the musical and personal strength to improvise the way Konitz does. But I've found that the closer I keep his example (as well as Lacy's), the stronger my own music is. I'll make sure to keep them close.

Happening Now

2009-08-11T20:13:00.009-04:00

I write so much about Ancient Musik that I wanted to post something about somebody/something Happening Now in jazz that excites me. Composer/drummer John Hollenbeck's first CD as leader was issued less than ten years ago, in 2001, and his music is some of the most amazing and touching to be found in jazz today.

I was totally unfamiliar with Hollenbeck until early 2005, when RoboCromp, my duo ensemble with Rob Rushin, opened for Hollenbeck's Claudia Quintet at Eyedrum in Atlanta. As Rob and I arrived to set up, tune up, and warm up, it became obvious that Hollenbeck had not known that there was going to be an opening act and was pretty annoyed by that development. This, in turn, annoyed me, and I think that my playing that evening was informed by a certain amount of anger. But my negative feelings disappeared as soon as the Claudias started playing.

The Claudia Quintet has an unusual instrumentation: Chris Speed on clarinet and tenor sax, vibist Matt Moran, Ted Reichman on accordion, and bassist Drew Gress, in addition to Hollenbeck. Hollenbeck's music for the Claudia Quintet is highly structured; there's plenty of improvisation, but the "solos" are part of the composed web - they add to the impact of the compositions rather than stand out as virtuoso statements for their own sake. The pieces build over time and are often built from unusual musical materials and from even more unusual external inspirations. "...can you get through this life with a good heart?," from I, Claudia, was inspired (as Hollenbeck explained at the Eyedrum show) by composer Morton Feldman and songwriter Joni Mitchell. The slow-moving pointillism of the opening few minutes gives way to warm, but unusual harmonies and heart-breaking melodic fragments over a pop-ish groove. "Drewslate," from Semi-Formal, was written so that four members of the ensemble would have some difficult music to rehearse when the bassist was late to rehearsal; the bass part is simpler than the tricky parts for the other instruments.

I love an improvised piece by Hollenbeck that I thought I would hate. "No Images," the title track from his debut album, is played on his late grandmother's autoharp with a portable electric fan. Sounds like a really bad idea, but the small fan blades against the strings produce a complex soundscape, full of unexpected subharmonics.

I'm not in a position to write definitively about Hollenbeck's work because, until 24 hours ago, I somehow had not been aware that he has issued several CDs of material by his Large Ensemble big band. I'm not sure how I came to be so far behind the curve on that group, but you can be sure that I'll be checking them out. In the meantime, I think I'll put on the Claudia Quintet again.

More About Flannery O'Connor

2009-08-02T10:43:00.008-04:00

During my recent visit to Andalusia, I learned that Flannery O'Connor's bedroom, where she did her writing, has been left pretty much untouched after her death. Her desk and typewriter were moved to the Flannery O'Connor Room of Georgia College and replicas brought to her room at Andalusia, but everything else is as she left it. So on my visit, I was fascinated to see a record player and a stack of records in one corner of the room. What kind of music did Flannery O'Connor like? I was not allowed behind the velvet rope into the room, but when I got home, I pulled out my copy of The Habit of Being, a collection of O'Connor's letters, to see what I could find out.

During the last year of her life, Fannery was given a record player by a group of Atlanta nuns. Shortly after this, Thomas Stritch, a fellow Catholic writer, sent O'Connor a stack of records. I was amused to read her thoughts on music:

I have the original Tin Ear, that is to say, the First and Prime Tin Ear. So I like music that is guaranteed good because I have no way of finding out for myself. Old stuff like Haydn that there is positively no doubt about. On my own I wouldn't know it from Music to Clean Up By.

And later:

...I don't have any preference yet though I think I like the kind that is straight up and down better than what slides around, if you know what I mean.

And:

We are broke out with records now as Thomas sent me a box full out of his basement. All I can say about it is that all classical music sounds alike to me and all the rest of it sounds like the Beatles.

And if you've never read anything by Flannery O'Connor and don't know where to start, the best of her short stories are funny, shocking, and revelatory. Among the best are "A Good Man is Hard to Find," "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," and "Good Country People." Perhaps my very favorite is "Revelation," in which Mrs. Ruby Turpin, a shallow and self-satisfied Southern Christian, receives a message from God, delivered in an unusual way. At the end of the story she has a revelation about her place in the universe. It's deep and very funny.

Faith, Meaning, and Evidence

2009-07-27T23:32:00.009-04:00

It's probably a mistake to post this one. Although it's a long post, it's too short for me to fully explain what I'm trying to say. It used to be even longer, but I cut a bunch of it out. What I've left will probably offend some people or have people telling me I'm going to hell. (Like I don't already know that!) But here it is, anyway:

Every summer I take a couple of days and head east of my home in Atlanta, out Interstate 20. I stop in Columbia, South Carolina, and spend a couple of hours in Papa Jazz, one of my favorite record stores - I always find some great stuff there. From there I head 70 miles northwest to Ora, the little town where my grandfather was born. Ora is hardly a town out all; there is a church, with its old cemetery, an abandoned school, and a few houses - that's about it. Visiting Ora gives me a strange sense of belonging, even though I have never lived there. My grandparents, their parents, and their parents are buried there, and my sister and I scattered some of my mom's ashes there when she died. Visiting this homeplace where I never lived is oddly comforting.

This year I took a detour on the way to Columbia, and visited two spots which seem related to each other somehow. I drove south of Madison, Georgia and visited Rock Eagle, a large, bird-shaped rock mound built somewhere between 1000 and 3000 years ago. There is now an observation tower at the foot of the mound; as you climb, you see the eagle slowly emerge from what just looks like a pile of rocks at ground level. Since history belongs to the winners, the purpose and meaning of the monument haven't survived. But it's likely that it had some religious meaning. It's moving to see this artifact built by unknown people so long ago.

From Rock Eagle I continued south on US 441 until I reached Andalusia, the farm home of Flannery O'Connor, the brilliant Georgia writer who died of lupus in 1964. I have read O'Connor's short stories and novels since I was about 15. Her work is strange and familiar at the same time; I "recognized" many of the characters right away, but her stories are filled with violence and bizarre twists. It took me several years to realize that her work was inspired by her Catholic faith.

Visiting Andalusia was, again, very moving. Since I have read and reread all of O'Connor's fiction, the place seemed somehow familiar and brought certain scenes from her work more into focus. Andalusia was a dairy farm, and peering in the locked, disused milk processing shed, I could almost see Asbury smoking over the objections of the hired hands: "She don't 'low no smoking in here." The tenant farmers' house, which had been the original plantation house in the 19th century, was obviously the home of the Shortleys and all the other hired hands in O'Connor's stories. It was an amazing visit.

Rock Eagle and Andalusia, only about 30 miles apart, seemed connected by mankind's longing to make sense of the universe - a quest that has so often come to rest in religion. Religion has resulted in so many wonderful creations, such as the Rock Eagle mound and the fiction of Flannery O'Connor, but it seems clear to me that religion is a result of man's attempts to impose order on the universe, not any god's revelation to man.

I'm a proponent of David Hume's dictum, "A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence." If you want me to believe that I have an eternal soul which will live forever, you'd better have some pretty strong evidence, since that's contrary to what is suggested by even a casual examination of the world. And you can tell me that God will either reward me or torture me forever after I die, but it's going to take more than the fact that you were taught that from childhood to convince me.

I don't think that it's an accident that every religion I've examined puts a lot of emphasis on faith. From what I gather, most people consider faith a good thing; I guess my attitude is not as positive - to me, a concise definition of faith is "believing in that for which there is no evidence." The problem with that is that if you choose to believe something with no evidence, you might as well believe anything. You could choose to believe that a god wants you to sell all of your possessions and give the money to the poor or that a god wants you to kill those who follow another religion.

So what do I believe? All the evidence seems to lead to the conclusion that we a short life on earth - and then it's over. I half-jokingly tell people that my basic philosophy comes from the prophet Louis Jordan: "Hey everybody, let's have some fun; 'cause you only live once, and when you're dead, you're done. So let the good times roll!" (Seriously, I don't live [or recommend] the kind of hedonist life that line seems to recommend if you take it at face value. Without moderation, life gets out of balance pretty quickly, and just gets even shorter. But it's a great line!)

I'm not a particularly profound thinker, but here's what I think about the meaning of life: life has no intrinsic meaning. We just are. That doesn't mean that my life or your life can't have meaning. It's just not automatically there, and it's not imposed from outside. The meaning of your life is whatever you decide it is. And for a lot of people, that's religion. And that's okay with me - just don't expect me to take your religion seriously as "truth" or as what my life should mean.

As to what my life means, well, that's where my own irrational faith comes in. I have far too much faith in the strange power of the organized vibration of air molecules. Like Charlie Parker, I'm a devout musician. Those vibrating air molecules have anchored my life for years. There are other anchors, but I won't get into that here.

Okay, that's enough of my half-baked philosophy. Back to regularly scheduled programming.

The Original Memphis Five

2009-07-07T22:21:00.010-04:00

Since I've gotten back into 78s, I have "adopted" the Original Memphis Five. Trumpeter Phil Napoleon's early-1920's jazz band was not particularly original, and none of them were Southerners, but there were five of them. One out of three ain't bad.

Okay, I couldn't resist parsing their name, but I don't mean to be derogatory - I like the OM5 a lot. No, they weren't ground-breaking or original, but they were consistently good - more consistent, in my opinion, than some more talented bands of the time, like the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. No, they never reached the heights of the NORK's best work, but they deserve to be remembered more than they have been.

From a 78 RPM record collector's standpoint, being an Original Memphis Five fan works out pretty well. They recorded a lot - way more the the Rhythm Kings or King Oliver's band. And their records are not in high demand by collectors, which means that I can get an excellent 78 by the OM5 for two or three bucks rather than the 50, 100, or more dollars a pristine original issue by Oliver's Creole Jazz Band or the NORK would set me back.

That wouldn't make any difference if the music wasn't worth tracking down, but the Original Memphis Five was a really good band. They started recording in 1922, a year before Oliver, and continued in more or less their original formation until 1925. Besides Napoleon, the band included Frank Signorelli on piano, drummer Jack Roth, Jimmy Lytell on clarinet, and alternating trombonists Miff Mole and Charlie Panelli. The band carefully worked out their tunes and came to the studio prepared, but they swung harder than their obvious model, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and seem to have used more real improvisation than the ODJB. The OM5 concentrated on the pop tunes of the day, rather than jazz specialties, although they did record some originals. The emphasis on pop tunes was deliberate, according to Napoleon, and allowed them to reach a wide audience without sacrificing the quality of the music; they "jazzed" the pop tunes pretty hard. The Memphis Five's music was only weakened when vaudeville vocalists like Billy Jones were added to the band.

At least four members of the band were outstanding talents. Napoleon's trumpet lead was a little stiff on the 1922 recordings I've heard, but it had loosened up nicely by the middle of 1923. His first-choice trombonist, Miff Mole, was simply the first great trombone soloist of jazz. His real maturity came later in the decade, but he is excellent on the OM5 records, playing interesting, wide-ranging lines. Since he got busier and busier doing studio work as the decade wore on, he was often replaced by Panelli, who was not in the same league. Frank Signorelli's piano pretty much was the rhythm section, since most of whatever Jack Roth was doing didn't make onto the records. Signorelli's accompaniments are solid and full-sounding, and his solos are impressive. But the real surprise of the band, to me, anyway, was Jimmy Lytell. As I explored the band's work, I had the growing realization that Lytell is one of the unsung heroes of the early jazz clarinet. As early as 1922 or 1923 he had developed an original sound and style. I assume that he was somewhat influenced by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's Larry Shields, but he doesn't sound like anyone but himself. Well, he sounds a little like Larry's brother Harry Shields, who is one of my favorite New Orleans clarinetists. But the chances that Lytell was influenced by Harry Shields are pretty slim, since Harry hardly ever left New Orleans and didn't record until 1925. But sometimes, like during the 1924 "My Papa Doesn't Two Time No Time,"* Lytell starts a phrase with a hair-raising scoop up to a long high-register note in a way that Harry Shields favored. Anyway, Jimmy Lytell may not have been a near-genius clarinetist like Leon Rappolo, but he sure was good.

I've got over an hour's worth of OM5 78 RPM records on the Broadway, Banner, Pathe Actuelle, Vocalion, Perfect, Cameo, Regal, and Grey Gull labels. And luckily, they also recorded for Victor, who in my opinion, put out the best-sounding 78s. (I've got three of their Victors.) Since they tried to reach a "general" audience, as opposed to just jazz fans, some of their records are paired with more pedestrian dance bands on the flip side. (If any of you have been dying to hear "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" by the Majestic Dance Orchestra, come by my house - I have it on the back of a Memphis Five record.) But they were hip enough to back up the African-American blues/vaudeville singer Lena Wilson - the label reads "Lena Wilson and Her Nubian Five"(!)

If you are intelligent and mentally stable enough not to collect 78s, there are a few CD reissues of the OM5 out there. The most readily available seem to be a collection on the Timeless label (which I haven't heard) and a set of all their Columbia recordings on Retrieval (which I have heard). There are too many vocals for comfort on the Columbia sides, but otherwise, the Retrieval CD is an excellent reissue.

These days many jazz fans are exploring the work of excellent, long-forgotten, second-tier talents of the fifties and sixties. I hope those with a taste for early jazz will similarly give an ear to the Original Memphis Five - one of those solid, professional, journeyman bands that jazz would be poorer without.

*This was recorded for the Emerson label, but also issued on a bewildering variety of labels. I have it on Grey Gull.

Fifes and Drums From the Hill Country

2009-07-04T23:30:00.008-04:00

I like all kinds of music, although anyone who has read many entries of this blog knows that I'm most partial to jazz of various stripes. But there is one family of music that has always touched me deeply in a strong, primal way. I'm talking about early black American music - music that echoes, at least to some extent, the music of nineteenth-century African-Americans. Amazingly, some of this pre-blues, pre-jazz, pre-ragtime music survived well into the twentieth century, at least in scattered corners of the South. This web of music includes field hollers, work songs, ring shouts, and banjo music. Maybe I'll write about some of these branches of the early African-American music tree later, but right now I want to talk about fifes and drums.

The Africans who were enslaved in The Land of the Free were not allowed, for the most part, to practice the musical, religious, and cultural traditions of their homelands, but they were allowed, even encouraged, to adopt the musical culture of their "owners." This they did, but with their own twists. A simple way to look at early black American music is to say that African music didn't survive in the new world, but African ways of making music did. The reluctant new Americans played music from the European-American tradition, but played it their own way.

Fife and drum bands have a history in America which predates the formation of the United States, so it's no surprise that black Americans took up this instrumentation. We can only guess what early black fife and drum bands sounded like and how the African-American fife and drum tradition developed over the years before they were first recorded. And it seems that this kind of band mostly died out sometime in the nineteenth century - but it didn't die completely.

Folklorists have pointed out that the oldest traditions survive the longest in the most isolated areas. There are a few spots in the American south that, well into the twentieth century, were populated by a fairly isolated black population. These include the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina, where a rich heritage of spirituals and ring shouts survived, and the Mississippi hill country east of the Delta. The farmland in the hill country is not as rich as that of the Delta, so the white cotton planters of the Delta had no interest in snatching up the hill country land; this area was settled by small farmers, black and white. The hill country gave rise to such amazing African-American musicians as Fred McDowell, R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough. And it is the last place in America where black fife and drum music survives - not as a museum piece, but as a living, breathing music.*

Music from this tradition was first recorded in 1942 by Alan Lomax, who preserved quite a few selections by the great hill country musician Sid Hemphill. Hemphill** had a fife and drum band as well as string band, and was apparently the most popular musician (with both black and white audiences) around Tate and Panola Counties. The Lomax/Hemphill recordings sound like a strange hybrid music drawn partly from a world I recognize and partly from some alien world. The two snare drums, bass drum, and cane fife play nineteenth-century folk ballads and pop songs like "Jesse James" and "The Sidewalks of New York" as well as an unearthly "Death March," which reminds us that this type of ensemble sometimes provided funeral music in the rural South. Hemphill (or his bandmate Alec Askew) was also recorded playing a haunting, very African-sounding "Emmaline, Take Your Time" on the the four-note "quills," or pan-pipe; the notes of the melody (which doesn't match up with any tempered scale) are interspersed with falsetto whoops - an apparently African musical practice which also shows up in the music of blues harpist Sonny Terry.***

Lomax returned to the hill country in 1959 and recorded more tracks by the now-elderly Hemphill, but more importantly, recorded the next generation of fife and drum music. Ed and Lonnie Young's music was harder, funkier, bluesier than Hemphill's. Several of their recordings showed up in Lomax's Sounds of the South series, issued on Atlantic. Tunes like "Jim and John," "Chevrolet," and "Oree," with the fife and drums accompanied by several local women clapping complex cross-rhythms, are extremely powerful, and still seem somewhat other-worldly, even to a Southerner like me.

The distillation and toughening up of the black fife and drum tradition continued in Mississippi through the work of Napoleon Strickland, who retired from playing in the 1980's. But the figure most associated with Mississippi fife and drum music is the legendary Othar Turner, who died in 2003 at the age of 94. Turner farmed the challenging soil of the hill country from his teenage years, and his farm was the site of many legendary fife and drum picnics. On holidays such as Independence Day and Labor Day, Turner would get up early, kill and barbecue a goat, and host an outdoor party featuring non-stop dancing to the fife and drums.

I never attended one of his picnics, but it wasn't for lack of trying. R.L. Boyce, one of the drummers in Turner's Rising Star Fife and Drum Band, gave me detailed, semi-intelligible directions to Turner's farm, and I tried to find the place one July 4th about 15 years ago, but I got hopelessly lost driving around the hill country outside of Senatobia. I did hear the Rising Star band a couple of times at the Sunflower River Blues Festival in Clarksdale, and both times the impact of the music was strong, visceral, and almost overwhelming. After one of the performances, I bought a tape from Othar's daughter Bernice, who played drums in the band. (Strangely, Bernice died from cancer on the same day her father died; she was only 48.) I found Mr. Turner and asked him to autograph the tape, and he got a strange look on his face. But he took my pen and laboriously wrote a "T" on the card. I thanked him and hoped I had not embarrassed him.

Othar Turner was a somewhat more limited fife player than any of the others I've mentioned. He only had a handful of tunes, and about half of what he played turned into the repeated two-bar riff known as "Shimmy She Wobble." But his limitations were also his strengths; his music was like sunlight through a lens - focused onto such a small area, it emerged as a extremely powerful and haunting expression of a man and a tradition.

When Othar died, it was feared that the Mississippi fife and drum tradition would die with him - there were lots of drummers, but few fife players. But he had been teaching his granddaughter, Sharde Thomas. She was only 13 years old at the time of her grandfather's death, and has only recorded a few scattered tracks that have been issued so far. But she loves the music, and is now carrying a tradition on her back by herself. A heavy burden for someone not yet 20.****

*African-American fife and drum music could still be heard into the mid-twentieth century in western Tennessee and 90 miles southwest of my house, in the countryside outside of Columbus, Georgia. It has since died out in both places.

**Sid Hemphill's granddaughter was the She-Wolf, the great Jessie Mae Hemphill. Jessie Mae was a powerful blues and gospel musician who, luckily, was recorded quite a few times.

***These recordings can be found on Traveling Through the Jungle: Fife and Drum Band Music From the Deep South (Testament), an album which also includes recordings by Napoleon Strickland, Othar Turner, and a Georgia fife and drum band.

****Othar Turner can be heard on two CDs on the Birdman label: Everybody Hollerin' Goat and Othar Turner and Afrossippi All Stars, on which the Rising Star band collaborates with West African musicians. His music in perhaps its purest form can be heard on the Rising Star's cassette For the Times Beyond and a 7" EP on the Sugar Ditch label. Sarde Thomas's most prominent recorded appearance so far comes on two tracks of Corey Harris's truly remarkable 2003 album Mississippi to Mali. The album also contains Harris's moving dedication to Othar, "Mr. Turner."

Recent Listening

2009-06-25T23:03:00.007-04:00

A couple of more well-developed posts are waiting in the wings, but in the meantime, here are some ramblings about some of the music that has particularly gotten under my skin in the past few days. Some of this stuff is new to me; some I’m known for awhile.

Tony Parenti – Tony Parenti’s New Orleans Shufflers (Jazzology). Parenti was one of the good, not great, New Orleans clarinetists, but this 1954 album is more than the sum of its parts. I love the band he put together; it’s half young musicians, half older veterans; half black, half white; half New Orleanians, half Northerners. Well, it’s a seven-piece band, so each split is not exactly half and half, but it’s a four/three (or vice versa) on each. The music is relaxed, sounding more like New Orleans than New York dixieland. My man Danny Barker is on hand – he sure had a springy beat on rhythm banjo. The young cornetist Jack Fine made his recording debut here; 54 years later I was in Donna’s on Rampart Street in New Orleans when he came in, set his horn on the bar, and ordered a drink. For the rest of the evening, whenever he felt like playing along with the band (Tom McDermott and Loose Marbles), he’d pick up his horn and start blowing from his barstool, much to the delight of the musicians on the bandstand.

Cecil Taylor – Algonquin (Bridge). This music, a duet between Taylor and violinist Mat Maneri, was recorded in concert at the Library of Congress about 10 years ago and issued on a classical label a few years later. It’s a lovely concert; the music belies the perception of Taylor’s music as unremittingly thunderous and intense. (Of course, that perception doesn’t hold up to much actual contact with Taylor’s music.) Maneri seems to totally inhabit Taylor’s world, while, at the same time, Taylor bends his music to Maneri’s sound and style. This beautiful performance further deepens the mystery of how Taylor’s music is put together: what’s composed, what’s improvised, and what’s the difference in Taylor’s world, anyway?

John Patton – That Certain Feeling (Blue Note). I’m using this wonderful record to represent Patton’s Blue Note recordings in general. I’ve had a couple of them for years, but my recent exploration of the Blue Note organ scene of the 1960’s has led me to realize what an interesting musician Patton is. I’ve been tracking down more of his Blue Notes, and find myself going back to them often. Big John could play standard organ funk with the best of them, but was not content to stay in that bag for very long. While perhaps not a great improviser, Patton composed or chose settings that would allow him and the other soloists to stretch quite a bit further than was typical on an "organ grinder" date. “I Want to Go Home," from That Certain Feeling, is an interesting tune in 5/4. It doesn’t have an obvious groove like “Take Five” – it took a little while to reveal itself to me.

Roscoe Mitchell – Nonaah (Nessa). Specifically, the 1977 solo alto saxophone set from Willisau, which is the only part of the double CD I’ve had the stones to listen to so far. This music knocked me on my ass. The first several minutes consist of the same short, jagged phrase played over and over, while the audience gets increasingly (and vocally) more restless. To quote Mitchell from the liner notes: “It was a battle. I had to make the noise and whatever was going on with the audience part of the piece. The music couldn’t move till they respected me, until they realized that I wasn’t going anywhere, and if someone was going it would have to be them.” When the tension is almost unbearable, Mitchell finally begins to develop the piece, and does so in amazing ways. Several more minutes in, and he has the audience with him; the catcalls have subsided, and there is total, mesmerized silence behind Mitchell’s softest passages. At the end of the 30-plus minute set, the crowd erupts. This is some of the most intense, stunning music I’ve heard for quite a while, and I regret waiting 32 years after it was first issued to experience it.

I should be ready to tackle the rest of Nonaah tomorrow….

Magic Slim

2009-06-20T23:20:00.004-04:00

I don't often read music magazines anymore. At one time I had subscriptions to several, including Downbeat, Cadence, and Living Blues. I'm not sure why they don't interest me anymore; I know that I no longer try to keep up with up with the latest news and latest new names in the kinds of music I like. (Sometimes this is to my detriment - I'm a year or two behind the curve concerning saxophonist Steve Lehman, whom I heard about just a few days ago. I've got some catching up to do there.) But I was in a bookstore yesterday and took a look at the music magazines; there, smiling up at me from the new Living Blues, was my favorite living bluesman, Magic Slim.

Well, you know how it is. In a couple of days, I might name someone else as my favorite living blues musician - Honeyboy Edwards, B.B. King, or even Corey Harris. But Morris Holt, aka Magic Slim, is certainly up at the top of the list. Magic Slim and the Teardrops play straight, unadorned Chicago blues - the kind of Mississippi blues overlaid with big city energy that you might have heard in the Windy City back in the fifties or sixties. But I hope that doesn't give the wrong impression - there is nothing "retro" or nostalgic about the Slim and the Teardrops. Even if they are playing a 50-year-old variant of a 110-year-old style, they play it with a strictly contemporary energy. This is music for tonight!

Slim is 72 now, but is still hitting it as hard as ever. He was born in Grenada, Mississippi, at the edge of the Delta, and took up guitar when he lost a finger on his right hand in a cotton gin accident, putting an end to his budding piano career. After playing local juke joints and house parties, he moved to Chicago when he was in his early twenties and apprenticed with Magic Sam Maghett, who gave him his nickname. About 15 years ago, tired of the crime in his Chicago neighborhood, Slim settled his family into the least bluesy spot on earth - Lincoln, Nebraska. Except that in Lincoln you can find more than just rabid Nebraska Cornhusker fans and the Penis on the Prairie (as the irreverent call the Nebraska Capitol building); you can find the Zoo Bar, one of the country's great blues bars.

I've been lucky enough to hear Magic Slim and the Teardrops at the Zoo Bar and another one of America's great blues bars, Blind Willie's in Atlanta. Slim (who hasn't lived up to the second half of his nickname in years) is pretty unprepossessing until he climbs onto the bandstand and plugs his Fender Jazzmaster directly into the amp - no pedals or effects for him, thank you. His guitar sound is as raw as you might expect, his vocals are strong and basic, and the Teardrops rock the Chicago shuffle like no other band around. The resulting sound isn't fancy, but it sure is strong. Slim's music has a directness and purity that make "revivalist" blues bands sound phony.

There are quite a few recordings by Slim and the Teardrops out there. I can't claim to have heard them all, but my favorite out of the ones I am familiar with is Black Tornado, on Blind Pig. Two tracks, "Wake Me Up Early" and "She's Got Bad Intentions," could serve as a two-part primer in Chicago blues grooves. "Early" is a perfect Chicago shuffle - intense, yet relaxed, while "Intentions" has a groove that the blues guys call a "flat tire shuffle" - the last triplet of every beat is accented. The result is a loping groove that is incredibly laid-back, yet at the same times moves forward like a freight train.

Magic Slim is a treasure. I hope he stays around for a long time.

Holy Ghost

2009-06-10T22:34:00.007-04:00

"Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I was the Holy Ghost."
-saxophonist Albert Ayler

The first time I heard Albert Ayler I was horrified. I was 17; my mom used to frequent junk stores, looking for bargains, and she would bring home any records that looked like they might be jazz. I've mentioned the Arista/Freedom Sampler album that she picked up for me in a previous post. As I said before, the Anthony Braxton and Oliver Lake tracks got to me right away, but the Ayler track, "Saints," was just repellent. I couldn't believe anyone would want to play like that. But, being a curious guy, I also wondered why anyone would play like that - what was Ayler getting at? So I listened again, and then again. On the third listen, a light bulb went off - the piece was a rondo. Ayler kept coming back to the same melodic material. And there was a melody - I could hear it. I was fascinated. Once I knew that the piece made "sense" - it had form and logic - I wanted to hear more Albert Ayler and understand his message.

Thirty-something years later, I sometimes feel that I'm not much closer to "understanding" Ayler, but I love his music - the best of it, anyway. Albert Ayler represents the furthest extreme of jazz; the most "advanced" music (in terms of language) created in the name of jazz. It's difficult to imagine how anyone could take the musical language of jazz further than Ayler did, and almost 40 years after his death, no one has. At its most extreme, Ayler's music was harsh, atonal, and devoid of regular pulse. It makes for very intense and demanding listening.

If you have access to the Revenant Holy Ghost box set of Ayler's work, listen to his first small-group recordings, with Herbert Katz's Finnish group. He plays the written melodies of these conventional tunes with assurance, but once his solos start, he is in another place than the rest of the group. It's easy to understand why some of the group thought he didn't know what he was doing, since his improvisations have little relationship to the harmonies of the pieces. But it's also apparent, at least in hindsight, that they were wrong. As odd and unexpected as some of Ayler's note choices were, it's obvious that he knew exactly where he was in the structure of the tunes all the time. And it's equally obvious that Ayler needed a less conventional setting in order to get his message across.

In practice, Ayler's mature music was not unrelentingly harsh or demanding. Many of his improvisations, no matter how intense and abstract they were, were launched by simple, singable "heads," often marchlike. And as his career went on, the tonal, folkish melodies became longer, while the atonal solos got shorter. And pieces like the beautiful "For John Coltrane" had an identifiable key center throughout.

But in my opinion, the music he recorded in 1964 represents Ayler at his purest. The heads are short and the improvisations are frightening, accomplished, and utterly unlike anything heard up that time in jazz or any other music. His colleagues (usually Gary Peacock on bass, Sunny Murray on drums, and sometimes Don Cherry on trumpet) are totally in tune with Ayler's aims. He created some wonderful music after that, but for a taste of the "real" Ayler, hear Spiritual Unity, Prophecy, Vibrations (also known as Ghosts), or The Hilversum Session.

Although Cherry came from a somewhat different place than Ayler, musically speaking, his work with Ayler showed how adaptable he was - he adjusted his playing so that it fit perfectly with Ayler's. Later, Albert tried to create a trumpet player in his own image by bringing his brother Donald into his band. This was valuable as a negative example; Donald's one-dimensional playing showed that Albert, in contrast, was really onto something. On any record on which they play together, compare Donald's blaring, monochromatic playing to the range, variety of phrase shapes, and dynamics of Albert's improvisations.

Ayler's intense music came from a pretty intense individual. As might be deduced from the titles of his pieces ("Holy Holy," "Spirits Rejoice," "Zion Hill"), Ayler's music was largely inspired by his strong religious feelings. The Holy Ghost box set contains a 1966 interview in which Ayler frankly sounds a little crazy; he is so full of pseudo-biblical sayings that's it's a little scary. He sounds somewhat more in control in the 1970 interviews; he is still pretty intense, but also amiable. But in November of that year, his body was found in the East River; the circumstances of his death have never been completely explained.

This post has been difficult to write, and I'm still not satisfied with it. Ayler's music is so complex and demanding that's it's difficult to talk about. So I'm going to end with a copout. Here is perhaps the best paragraph ever written about Albert Ayler, by Max Harrison. Reading the first sentence here always gives me a chill.

Even decades later, on listening to Ayler's courageous, bewitched, desperate music, we are haunted by the strange and disquieting impression that we are out on the very limits of the expressible, out on the last dangerous fringes where the ice of what we normally call art is so thin that we can almost see through into the depths below, into the mysterious thing-in-itself from which we abstract the all-too-human conventions of music. What he did in his best moments seemed like a further attempt at exploding the language of music so that it might eventually approximate to the mind's complexity. To those who say that language, even musical language, is a social contract which cannot be broken without loss of communication, Ayler would maybe have replied that his aim was less communication that communion in the appreciation of mystery.

from The Essential Jazz Records, Volume 2; p. 502.

More This and That

2009-06-01T21:54:00.011-04:00

Another post about this and that....

My last post, about a single recording by a strong-voiced African-American woman, put me in mind of a (somewhat) more recent recording by another such woman, along with her sisters and father. I don't care about most music that makes the top 10, but in the summer of 1972, "I'll Take You There" by the Staple Singers made it to the number one spot on both the Billboard R & B and pop charts. And it's still an amazing song, although it's pretty simple: two chords, a cool bass line, the great Muscle Shoals rhythm section, some touching lyrics, the amazing Mavis Staples on lead vocals, and a hypnotic drive. A few years ago, I was driving around Atlanta with John Lewis - no, not that one; this JL is one of Atlanta's best drummers. I had The Best of The Staple Singers in the CD player, and when this song came on, I started talking about how hip the bass line was. John listened for a minute, and pointed out something I hadn't noticed - there is only one syncopated note in the bass line: the second one. It's so full of life that I would have thought it was heavily syncopated, but it's pretty simple. Again, what a great song.

I was feeling a little under the weather today, but I had to get out and run some errands anyway. In between stops, I decided to stop by a nature preserve here in Atlanta and hunt a geocache that was recently hidden by my friend Lee. It was amazing how better I felt as soon as I was in the woods and on the trail. I don't understand how searching for a box hidden in the woods and signing the logbook inside can be so therapeutic, but it is.

About half of our daylilies are in bloom right now. The daylilies in our yard are all from my mom's garden - she raised them and hybridized several new varieties, as did her father. My grandfather, Charles Blakely, was well-known in daylily circles back in the sixties and seventies; several of his hybrids won awards. We have his Green Wonder in our yard - it was all the rage about 30 years ago. My mom's garden was really amazing for about two months every year; it's gone now, as is the house I grew up in. We don't have nearly as many daylilies in our little yard as she did, but I'm glad we have the ones we do - it's a connection to her that I'm grateful for. I think about my mom every day; she is even more on my mind when the daylilies are in bloom.

Daylilies don't last long. Each flower lasts only a day. All the blossoms on a plant obviously don't come out at the same time, but each plant is in bloom only for a short period. Different varieties bloom at different times; the earliest blooms come out in May, the late bloomers don't show up until July. By late July, all the flowers are gone. They're only here for a short time, and they remind me that we only have a little time here as well. Thanks for the daylilies, Mom.

Art In Spite of Itself

2009-05-23T18:18:00.006-04:00

"Morning Dove Blues" by Sippie Wallace is a perfect work of art. Every detail is just right, and each works to heighten the emotional affect of the song: Wallace's strong voice, with its pleasing Texas accent, the rich piano accompaniment by her nephew, Hersal Thomas, and the simple, well-chosen fills provided by King Oliver on cornet. It's all just perfect.

And the amazing thing is that nobody involved, from the musicians to the Okeh record company officials who set up the date in 1925, had any thoughts of creating a work of art. Yes, they wanted to make a quality product, but product it was - designed to fill the demand for "race" records. It took record companies until 1920 to realize that African-Americans would buy records, wanted to buy records, if the recording industry would give them something they liked. For the next nine years, until the depression all but wiped out the record business, the companies threw an astonishing variety of black music into the marketplace, with no idea what would sell. Much forgettable music resulted, but they also recorded, almost in spite of themselves, some masterpieces like this one.

Some of Sippie's records sold pretty well, but "Morning Dove Blues" apparently didn't - not many copies have survived, and all the LP and CD issues I've heard have lots of surface noise competing with the music. For those with ears to hear, though, it doesn't matter. 84 years after this performance was recorded, I'm able to hear Sippie sing "Early in the morning, I rise like a mourning dove...." King Oliver answers her with his muted cornet, and my heart constricts. Art in spite of itself.

Gil Evans and the Magic Moment

2009-05-18T21:04:00.004-04:00

I discovered two of my heroes, Steve Lacy and Gil Evans, at one fell swoop at age 18 when I bought a reissue of Gil's first album as leader, Gil Evans & Ten. I've loved Gil's music ever since, from the highly detailed charts he created for Miles Davis in the late fifties and early sixties, to the loose, improvising big band he had late in his career. Evans had many strengths, but one of them was the knack for creating the magic moment that would lift the music to another plane.

Gil spoke on several occasions about his debt to Louis Armstrong. In a 1986 interview with Ben Sidran, he said, "I bought every one of his records from 1927 till around 1936.... In every one of those three-minute records, there's a magic moment somewhere. Every one of them." And he's right. No matter how lame the song, how clunky the rhythm section, how corny the arrangement, Louis was always able to lift it to another level, even if only for a moment.

Gil apparently learned this lesson well. Of course, many of his great recordings don't need the magic moment, because they are incredible from beginning to end. But when they weren't, Gil could make something magical happen. An unlikely example is the main title theme from the movie The Color of Money. I don't know how much Evans contributed to this film's music (his name is barely to be found on the soundtrack album), but the exact moment he took over the arranging of the main title is apparent. 45 seconds in, the trendy (mid-1980's style), ordinary music we have heard so far takes a darker turn. The real magic moment comes about 10 seconds later, when an ominous bass clarinet riff, a trombone lip trill, and a tightly muted trumpet solo occur simultaneously. It's an unexpected combination of sounds that only someone of Evans' genius could have conceived.

Often, especially in later years, the magic moment manifested itself by Evans simply knowing which soloist to point to. Listen to "Half Man, Half Cookie," from Bud & Bird from 1986. This comes from the period in which Evans' band played at Sweet Basil every Monday night. He encouraged his band members to contribute to the book, so that they would have plenty of different material to play. Saxophonist Bill Evans wrote "Half Man, Half Cookie," a big-band funk piece that is competent rather than outstanding. That is, until guest star Johnny Coles, an Evans associate for years, steps up to solo about two-thirds of the way through the piece. The atmosphere instantly changes, becomes more mysterious and unpredictable. Coles, of course, deserves much of the credit for raising the musical level, but Evans chose to have him on hand and knew just when to add him to the mix.

Like I said, most of Gil Evans' music was all magic. But when it wasn't, he could make that magic moment happen.

Organ Grinders

2009-05-07T21:45:00.004-04:00

It's been a tough few weeks at work. Music is, as always, my refuge. But somewhat to my surprise, I have found that organ grinders have provided me with more serenity and enjoyment that any other musicians lately. I'm talking, of course, about practitioners of soulful, intellectually undemanding jazz featuring the Hammond B3 organ. I've been listening to Big John Patton, Lonnie Smith, Freddie Roach, Baby Face Willette, Jack McDuff, and the daddy of them all, Jimmy Smith.

Like I said, I'm kind of surprised at myself. In the past I have only liked to occasionally sample this kind of organ jazz, as a respite from more challenging music. I've always loved organist Larry Young, but he was a different animal from the guys listed above; he was more influenced by Coltrane, Miles, and McCoy Tyner than Jimmy Smith. But something about the organ grinders is speaking to me right now.

The basic unit these guys favor is the organ trio: Hammond, guitar, and drums. A bassist is not needed; the organist plays bass lines with his left hand, or on the foot pedals on ballads. The guitar fills out the chords during the organ solos, and provides a contrasting solo voice. Often a tenor sax is added to the basic trio; occasionally, even more horns are added.

These guys all tend to play simple, blues-based material, but I'm enjoying the subtle differences between them. Baby Face Willette (much beloved by organ fans, and pretty much unknown to everyone else) is the bluesiest, with a wonderfully grungy sound. Freddie Roach is more concerned with color and texture - his use of the drawbars on ballads is masterful. Lonnie Smith is not content to stick to the organ grinder formula - he wants the audience to meet him at least halfway. I particularly like his Turning Point album, where the horn soloists are Lee Morgan, Julian Priester, and Bennie Maupin - all players who could play the blues, but who had at least one foot in the avant-garde of the time. And I'm developing a new appreciation for Jimmy Smith - I had always thought of him as just scattering bluesy licks across any chord progression, but I have to admire him for his sound and drive.

An added bonus with this stuff is the guitar - it's often played on these albums by Grant Green or Kenny Burrell. Both of these guys are just as bluesy as their organ-grinding employers, but often more sophisticated. Their solos provide nice contrast.

Organ grinding may go back to being an occasional thing for me. But right now, I'm really enjoying it.

Jeffery's Kids' Korner

2009-05-02T20:14:00.002-04:00

Hey kids! Here are some fun facts to learn and share!

Did you know...

Most adults are as scared and confused as you are!

There is no such place as Hell! People made it up to control the behavior of others!*

You're going to do lots of stupid things that make your life more difficult!

Most people choose what to believe for bizarre reasons! You might do better forming your beliefs based on reason and evidence! Try it! It's fun!

Most of mankind's creations are pretty crappy! Some are cool, though, like jazz and barbecue!

Lots of people will tell you how to change to become better! They're full of crap! You're better off trying to figure things out for yourself!

If you give money to street people, they might spend it on booze or drugs! That's okay - you should give them money anyway!

You can try being nice to jerks, but they will probably still be jerks!

Okay, kids, that's enough for now! Look for more fun facts later! Now go away and leave me alone!

*This doesn't mean that it's okay to be an asshole, though!

CT

2009-04-25T09:26:00.006-04:00

Cecil Taylor, I have read, is ill and has canceled a concert tour. Here's hoping he has a speedy recovery. And without wishing to be morbid, I decided that now would be a good time to write something about this great musician, who is 80 years old; I don't particularly want to write a memorial piece about him, and I hope this doesn't turn out to be one.

I'm not sure if I remember the first what the first Cecil Taylor music I heard was. It may have been Indent, a protean solo piano piece from the early seventies. I picked up that album in a junk store, and I remember being awestruck with Taylor's ability to improvise atonally at such length, with such intensity, and with such logic. The music made sense to me right away, even if I didn't (and still don't) always understand the principles that guide the construction of CT's music.

And it's obvious that the music is carefully constructed, even when it's mostly improvised. Taylor has made it clear over the years that he considers the idea of "composing" music in the western sense to be a highly dubious concept. But at the same time, his music hangs together in a compositional way - he seems to control the predetermined and spontaneous elements of his music in such a way that they form a unified whole. I feel this, even if I am not always able to look back at a Taylor piece when it is over and describe how that compositional unity was achieved. And others who have attempted to analyze CT's music have made similar observations. There's a wholeness to his music, and a mystery as to how that wholeness is achieved.

I have been lucky enough to hear Cecil Taylor perform only once, when he presented a solo concert in Atlanta in 1986. Taylor is also a trained dancer, and he began the concert, as he often does, with a series of ritualistic movements that slowly brought him from the wings to the piano bench. (He has said that "you don't just walk up to a piano.") At the same time, he intoned words and phrases, sounds and poetry; some of these vocalizations were intelligible and some were not. When he reached the keyboard, he began playing fairly sparely, but the music quickly increased in intensity and complexity. After about five minutes of atonal piano fireworks, large parts of the audience gave up and started leaving in droves. The rest of us were enthralled.

Listening to the recorded music of Cecil Taylor presents certain challenges. It's intense, the pieces are usually quite long, and the recordings are often hard to find. His two mid-sixties Blue Note albums (Unit Structures and Conquistador) are usually easy to find and are excellent representations of Taylor's music. They both feature his longtime musical partner, alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, and no piece on them is over 20 minutes long. Other Cecil Taylor recordings may feature one piece which lasts for an hour or two, spread over a couple of CDs or several LPs. Listening to these obviously requires an investment of time and concentration, which, however, is always rewarded.

It has struck me that the titles of Taylor's pieces can be seen as little poems, as mysterious as the music itself: "Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within)," "With (Exit)," "It is in the Brewing Luminous." The title which keeps coming to my mind, given the state of Taylor's health, is "One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye."

Matt Perrine

2009-04-22T07:55:00.004-04:00

New Orleans is full of incredible musicians who are hardly known outside the Crescent City. One of these remarkable musicians is bassist/sousaphone player Matt Perrine. With all due respect to Kirk Joseph, etc., Perrine is my favorite New Orleans tuba player, and with all due respect to James Singleton, etc., he is my favorite NOLA acoustic bassist – I try to hear him play every time I visit the city. On my recent trip (only four days long) to New Orleans, I heard Perrine play three times. That seems about right. Perrine plays regularly with several different bands and always seems to be playing somewhere with somebody. He is a member of the Tom McDermott/Evan Christopher Danza Quartet, the New Orleans Nightcrawlers brass band, Bonerama, and the Tin Men, which of course is “New Orleans' premiere guitar/tuba/washboard trio.” As busy as he is, Perrine doesn’t seem inclined to coast - whoever he’s playing with, and whatever kind of music they’re playing, Perrine's playing is imaginative and fully involved.

About a year ago I picked up the first CD under his name, Sunflower City. The cover actually put me off for a minute – it’s features a close-up photo of a large sunflower. I thought, “Great – this is just good-time happy music.” But then I looked at the picture again, and saw that in the background, to the right of the flower, you can see an “X” and some numbers painted on the front of a house. This, of course, is the code sign used by the search and rescue teams after Katrina; the “X” shows that the house was searched, and the numbers indicate how many living people, bodies, and pets were found in the house. Perrine has explained in interviews that sunflowers were the first wild plants to grow in post-Katrina New Orleans. It’s a great cover, symbolizing rebirth and renewal after disaster.

The music is, for the most part, joyous rather than happy, if that distinction makes any sense.* There is traditional jazz, straight-ahead jazz, Caribbean music, and even a touch of avant-garde. The opening track is the most elaborate arrangement of the hoary old New Orleans warhorse “Muskrat Ramble” that I’ve ever heard. The instrumentation and color of the track is constantly changing. But it works – it's one of the most enjoyable “Muskrat Rambles” I’ve heard. Perrine plays a stunning solo on this track; the range, technique, and conception of this tuba solo must be heard to be believed. I played it for a friend who is a low brass specialist, and he was convinced that it must have been played on a higher, four-valve tuba in E flat or F. He actually wrote Perrine to ask; MP confirmed that it was played, as were all of his tuba parts, on a standard double B flat sousaphone.

I definitely recommend hearing on of Matt Perrine’s bands when visiting New Orleans. He shouldn’t be hard to find.

*To me, “happy music” is mindless music. Much New Orleans music, however, is full of the joy of life, but seems to have an underlying awareness of how short that life is.

New Orleans Report

2009-04-11T17:30:00.007-04:00

I promised a report from New Orleans, but somehow I've managed to find better things to do than blog. But now I'm in my last 15 hours or so in the city, and I think I'm done. It's like when you eat a big meal and know when to stop, even if there's more food on the table. So here's my report:

Arrived in New Orleans around lunch time on Wednesday and checked in, for the first time, at the Le Richelieu in the French Quarter – nice place. After some red beans and rice, I headed to the Louisiana Music Factory and got some cool CDs and 78s, including some unreissued 78s on the American Music label. That night I caught a set by The Tin Men (Alec McMurray, Matt Perrine, and Washboard Chaz) at d.b.a. The band is “New Orleans’ premiere guitar/tuba/washboard trio,” and is very entertaining, though kind of lightweight. They played, among other things, “Palm Court Strut,” “You’re Feet’s Too Big,” and (my favorite of the evening), Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song.”

Then I headed to Preservation Hall to hear a band that, while not great, produced the best music I’ve heard at the Hall for at least four or five years. Carl LeBlanc* (playing Narvin Kimball’s banjo) led the a five-piece band: clarinet and trombone in the front line, but no trumpet until the German trumpeter Norbert Susemihl sat in for the last set. There was some ensemble confusion (who has the melody?) until Susemihl sat in, after which everyone seemed more comfortable. I like his playing a lot. Like I say, not great music, but for the first time in years, I left the Hall feeling better than when I walked in.

I should say something about Preservation Hall. There are those who view it as a tourist spot, with some justification. It's a place that visitors who don't know anything about jazz go. But I have memories (going back 20 years) of hearing some of the great second-generation jazz pioneers play here: Percy and Willie Humphrey, Narvin Kimball, Chester Zardis, Kid Shiek Colar. And when they were gone, the outstanding younger musicians they taught (Michael White, Wendell Brunious, Leroy Jones, etc.) still played here, and sometimes still do. But the quality of the music has greatly deteriorated greatly over the last ten years, and it sometimes seems pointless to walk in the door. But going to the Hall is part of my New Orleans ritual, even if the music is seldom very good any more. I could no more visit New Orleans without going to Preservation Hall than I could visit without eating gumbo.

Thursday night was devoted to the Evan Christopher/Tom McDermott Quartet at Donna’s, with Matt Perrine on bass and tuba and the King of Treme, Shannon Powell, on drums. Jesus god, what great music! Christopher and McDermott opened with a duet version of “Temptation Rag,” which was composed in 1909. It was as exciting and alive as any music I’ve ever heard. The full quartet apparently always opens with a tune they have never played together as a group; tonight’s choice was “When Dreams Come True.” (Have I even ever heard a live version of this tune?) It was a controlled brushfire. Perrine switched to tuba for “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor” and played an incredible solo. The whole first set was amazing. A couple of European guys, including Norbert Susemihl again, sat in for the second set, and the music was much more ordinary and less compelling.

The next evening found me at what has to be the center of the universe on Fridays between 6:30 and 9:30: that’s when the Panorama Jazz Band has their weekly gig at the Spotted Cat on Frenchmen Street. I just love this band, as do all the locals, tourists, and barflies that hang out in the Spotted Cat. The PJB plays traditional jazz, klezmer, and Caribbean music, all with fire, imagination, and conviction. I spoke briefly to Ben Schenk, the clarinetist/leader, and admired saxophonist Aurora Nealand from afar.

After a couple of sets I returned to Preservation Hall – I wanted to see and hear what David Torkanowsky and Johnnie Vidacovich would sound like in this setting. Much to my surprise, I saw Evan Christopher and New Orleans’ foremost modern jazz trumpeter, Irvin Mayfield, along with trombonist Freddie Lonzo, taking the stand. I didn’t get the bass player’s name, but he didn’t know a lot of the changes. I heard the entire second set, which consisted of:

When My Dreamboat Comes Home
I Found a New Baby
Margie
Darktown Strutters’ Ball
Summertime
Down By the Riverside
South Rampart Street Parade.

I stayed for part of the last set:

I’m Confessin’
a song about coffee sung (!) by Vidacovich
When I Grow Too Old to Dream

This was, potentially, the best gathering of musicians I’ve seen in the Hall for years. In practice, it didn’t work too well. Torkanowsky’s playing and bandleading seemed kind of “show-offy,” and he worked out arrangements on the fly (and gave the bass player the chords) kind of loudly. I may be reading things into the situation that really weren’t there, but some of the band members seemed kind of annoyed by him. At one point during “Confessin’,” Evan Christopher just stopped playing, turned to Torkanowsky and said, “That’s not how the song goes." At the beginning of the next chorus, he kind of took over the song, slowing it down and playing it in such a way that the melody and chords would be kind of obvious. For the next chorus he just smoked - took everyone to school. Christopher was phenomenal whenever he was given a chance to play; if I had any doubt that he is the best clarinetist in New Orleans, this evening removed it.

Saturday afternoon I went to a concert by the Society Brass Band, led by Barry Martyn on snare drum. The Society is the most traditional brass band in the city, and the only one that still plays dirges and 6/8 marches from music. The concert was very exciting – almost overwhelming; it was the closest I’ll ever get to hearing the long-gone Eureka or Young Tuxedo Brass Bands. The lineup was:

Trumpets: Clive Wilson, Burnell Brunious, Chris Clifton
Trombone: Paul Robertson; Tuba: Bill Yeager; E flat Clarinet: Chris Burke
Alto Sax: Tom Fischer; Tenor Sax; Joeseph Torregano
Snare: Barry Martyn; Bass Drum: Wayne Brunious
Grand Marshall: Andrew LeDeuf

“Sweet Fields,” “Westlawn Dirge,” “Salutation March,” and “Abide With Me” were all played from music. They also played (among other things) "Lord, Lord, Lord," "Panama," "Lady Be Good," and "It Feels So Good," that 1950's R & B song that the Young Tuxedo Brass Band used to play. I never thought I would hear a live performance of “Westlawn,” my favorite brass band dirge – it was played a little fast for my taste, but was still beautiful. Seeing this performance gave me a better idea of how the three trumpets in a traditional brass band were used; they all three played only on the first and last choruses; otherwise either the second and third trumpet or only the first was playing. I’ve always loved Tom Fischer’s beautiful sound on alto, so we talked vintage saxophones afterwards – he plays an early-20’s Beuscher. Again, a phenomenal experience.

So I don't think I'm going out to hear more music tonight. I'm going to get some dinner and take a walk through the Lower Quarter and Marigny. After Evan Christopher, Tom McDermott, the Panorama Jazz Band, and the Society Jazz Band, I'm full.

*Yes, the same Carl LeBlanc who played guitar in Sun Ra's band for years. A few years back he came back to his hometown and started playing music from his roots.

Jeffery's Three-Dot Column...

2009-04-07T23:04:00.009-04:00

I'm in a hotel room in Mobile, Alabama, with my iPod going, and I haven't posted for awhile, so this seems like the perfect opportunity to write the blogging equivalent of a three-dot column. For those who don't know what that is, well, see, there used to be these things called newspapers...

Last Saturday, the 4th Ward Afro-Klezmer Ensemble played at a club in East Atlanta. Even with one of the horns missing, the gig showed how far we've come. Most of the tunes which we have played a bunch were precise, but loose. And the rhythm section* both responded to the horns and led them in unexpected directions. We played one tune for the first time ("Silver Wedding"), and it came out like I imagine all of our tunes did the first time we played them - sloppy and awkward. But the rest of the pieces showed where we might be headed...

Before I left Atlanta for my annual trip (or pilgrimage, as my wife accurately calls it) to New Orleans, Karen was in Denver for a few days. The first couple of day that I was a temporary bachelor, I was so busy/tired that I couldn't really take advantage of it. But yesterday, I was rested and she was at work, so I took advantage of the situation, in my own geeky way - I did some things that require attention, solitude, and repose. I have been reading lots of stuff by/about Samuel Johnson lately, but I finally read what is considered his greatest poem, "The Vanity of Human Wishes," which had always put me off by its length. I'm weird, I guess - I liked the bleak descriptions of the human condition, but was let down by Johnson's conclusion, which is basically "Trust in God." Soon I'll devote a post to Johnson, which might be more of a threat than a promise...

I love poetry, but it requires time, attention, and solitude, as does much of the music I like. My prime music-listening time is in the evenings, when my hard-working wife is watching what she herself calls "stupid TV." It relaxes her after a day of hard work, but it drives me crazy, so I listen to music with headphones. Well, some music just can't compete with the TV, even with headphones. But since I was on my own, I listened to Dave Holland's solo bass album Emerald Tears for the first time in years . What a record! Holland has incredible technique, taste, and sense of melody. I still think of Holland as a cutting-edge young bassist, but he's 12 or so years older than me. Time marches on...

I've got a piece of software called TransferMyDVD, which converts DVD content into iPod format. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with copy-protected CDs, which means it doesn't work with 99.9% of commercial CDs. Since I knew I was going to be on the road, I tried it with some DVDs which I thought were old or odd enough to work with it. Sure enough, I was able to load a Lennie Tristano concert DVD, a W.C. Fields collection, and Jivin' In Bebop by Dizzy Gillespie into my iPod. Tonight I watched/listened to the Tristano and the Gillespie. The Tristano was stunning, and makes me think that he's one of the geniuses of jazz. His opening version of the standard "Darn That Dream" is as avant-garde as almost anything I've heard...

The Gillespie movie is something else. We jazz folk think of bebop as art music - the jazz that, for the first time, was not dance or pop music. But this low-budget movie from 1946 or '47 has "Night in Tunisia," "Things to Come," and "Shaw 'Nuff" as background music to comedy and dance skits. Don't get me wrong - the scantily-clad, chunky dancer on "Night in Tunisia" does it for me - I never like the skinny super-model look - but it's funny to see/hear this great art music treated as an aspect of the entertainment business...

The next post will be from the City That Care Forgot, the Birthplace of Jazz..

*You guys are incredible, by the way...

Last Week

2009-03-24T21:18:00.001-04:00

A couple of items from last week:

On Wednesday Robo drove up from Florida to hear Bill Frisell at the 5 Spot, down the street from my house. Frisell is on tour playing duets with pedal steel player Greg Leisz. It was a nice evening - it's always great to reconnect with the other half of RoboCromp (someone at the 5 Spot took us for brothers), and I wanted to see Frisell - I've been impressed with him since the beginning of his recording career. However, I'm not crazy about the country/folk/Americana direction he has taken the last few years. And I felt kind of like an outsider at the 5 Spot - a saxophonist surrounded by 250 guitarists. And all of those guitarists loved the show. I enjoyed myself - it was a well-performed evening of music with several truly beautiful moments. But it was obvious to me that I wasn't getting what almost everyone else was getting out of the music. What to me was an evening of pleasant, relatively simple music was, to most of the audience, a transcendent experience.

I don't have any profound conclusions to draw from this. It was just interesting to me how this music affected people in the audience in different ways.

And on the same day, we lost another New Orleans R & B legend. Eddie Bo died, a few weeks after his often-partner, Snooks Eaglin. I was fortunate enough to see/hear Eddie quite a few times in his hometown. Depending on his mood and the requests of the tourists, he could be so-so or stunning. Just before he went on stage one evening, I introduced him to Scott Hooker, and let him know that this great Atlanta piano player had come to hear him do some old school Professor Longhair-type stuff. Eddie responded with smoking versions of "Big Chief" and "Tipitina." Check out "Every Dog Got His Day" from 1960 - one of the great NOLA singles. So long, Eddie.

Fleas Come With the Dog

2009-03-16T10:52:00.003-04:00

I have felt kind of out of touch with the rest of the jazz world lately. I’ve been listening to (and writing about) a lot of older jazz – 1940 and earlier. Comments from friends and on my favorite jazz forum have let me know that a lot of folks just don’t relate to the older stuff at all.

Enjoying early jazz has never been a problem for me. Yeah, my first jazz album was a Budd Johnson album which featured a really out-there, avant bass solo by Richard Davis, but after that, I learned about jazz more or less chronologically. My grandmother gave me a stack of 78s, mostly pre-WWII. And the first jazz album I ever bought was a collection of Bix Beiderbecke’s 1924 recordings. I liked some tracks better than others, but I responded to the music right away. I knew Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five before I knew the Miles Davis Quintet, Coleman Hawkins before I knew Ornette Coleman, and Sidney Bechet before I knew John Coltrane.

Anyone who loves early jazz knows that fleas come with the dog; you have to put up with a lot in order to enjoy the music. For some people, just the sound of the music prevents them from enjoying it – it just sounds like “old folks’ music” to them. To them I would say: keep listening; get past the surface into the substance of the music. It’s not exactly like learning a new language, but maybe it’s like becoming familiar with a different dialect – once it no longer sounds “funny” you can start to hear what the musicians are really saying.

And the quality of the recordings themselves can be pretty grim. Before 1925, everything was recorded acoustically – the music was played into horns, which had tubes leading to membranes which vibrated the recording needle. You can imagine how little of the music actually made it to the records. Even after microphones were common in recording studios, the music was still recorded onto wax or acetate discs instead of tape until after World War II, so there was plenty of surface noise, and frequency response was limited.

Then there are the strictly musical issues. If you want to listen to the great improvised solos of the 1920's, 1930's, and before, you're going to have to put up with lame sidemen, clunky rhythm sections, sappy arrangements, and (worst of all), incredibly bad vocals. The best (worst) example of this is "Sweet Sue," by Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. This 1928 recording contains one of Bix Beiderbecke's greatest recorded solos near the end, but before that... well, allow me to quote from myself, from my blog entry on Beiderbecke:

It is an act of faith to listen to this recording. The first three and a half minutes of this portentous and pretentious arrangement are so bad that it's hard to believe that anything could be worth enduring them. Jack Fulton's singing is like nothing you're ever heard, and like nothing you'll ever want to hear again. But if you make it through all that, there is a magnificent 32-bar Bix solo that floats and dances over the rhythm section. It's one of the most "modern" and imaginative things he ever played.

It could be argued that Bix, along with Louis Armstrong and some of the other giants, seldom or never recorded with adequate musicians. In Louis’ case, how could it be otherwise? He was head and shoulders above almost everyone else in jazz. Johnny Dodds and Kid Ory, from the early Hot Five sessions, are fine early jazzers. But they’re just not on the same page as Louis – he was a few chapters ahead.

I’ve also always sensed the connections between jazz from different eras. Baby Dodds, Big Sid Catlett, and Philly Joe Jones don’t sound very much alike, but they were all trying to do a lot of the same things: keep the music moving forward, inspire the soloists, change the color of the music. And I’ve said before that I never liked the old-time New Orleans trumpeter Kid Thomas Valentine until I heard Lester Bowie – they were doing a lot of the same things. To me early jazz and contemporary jazz are two points on a continuous line, and I like them equally well.

So, fleas come with the dog. Many early jazz classics are mixed bags – the sublime and the painful are side by side. If cut yourself off from those classics, though, you’ll miss out on some incredible music. And those who ignore the past will be unable to repeat the cool parts.

A Hipper-Than-Thou Geek and Willie Lewis

2009-03-12T08:29:00.005-04:00

Sometimes I worry a little about the tone of this blog, or the way people might take it: “Oh, great – another post about an obscure musician. What an annoying, hipper-than-thou geek!” Well, that’s not my intention – I write about what I’m interested in, but I am a geek. From the time I discovered jazz at the age of 15, I’ve wanted to know it all: all the history, all the musicians, and to understand how it all fits together. I remember (I was about 20) reading about pianist Elmo Hope, and thinking, “Great – I just got a grasp on Bud Powell, Al Haig, and Dodo Marmarosa, and now I’ve got to check out Elmo Hope. Does it ever end?”

No, it doesn’t, and that’s the cool thing about exploring jazz – new discoveries are always waiting just around the corner, even for an old dude like me who has been listening to and reading about jazz for 35 years. I recently picked up an LP of mid-thirties recordings by Willie Lewis and His Entertainers. I listened to it for the first time last night, and my reaction was, “Jesus, this is incredible!” How could I have never heard this music before now?

Well, at least I was aware of this stuff before, mostly from articles about Benny Carter, who plays and arranges on one of the sessions. But Lewis, although African-American, was based in Paris and recorded for French labels, so he has remained obscure. I remember seeing a reissue album of his stuff back in the 70’s, but didn’t pay attention at the time. The album I have is on the French Pathe label. I poked around Amazon and the Red Hot Jazz Archive a little, and Lewis’s mid-thirties material doesn’t seem to be available at all at the moment.

But this music knocked me out – not so much for originality or quality of the arrangements (they’re pretty pedestrian, except for those Carter did), but because of the spirit of the band and the incredible soloists. Carter’s alto playing is superb, as usual, but he also contributes several trumpet solos which are just stunning, considering that trumpet was probably his third instrument, after alto and clarinet. And his excellent arranging features those delicious saxophone soli passages that he was famous for.

Carter was only around for one session (six tunes), but the rest of the tracks feature Bill Coleman on trumpet and two excellent, although almost forgotten musicians: New Orleans reedman Frank “Big Boy” Goudie and pianist Herman Chittison. Just as these tracks convinced me that Carter was really a trumpet player (as opposed to a dabbler), they put me on notice that Bill Coleman was one of the greats. Why didn’t I realize that before? Goudie and Chittison deserve to be better remembered, but from what I could tell, they also spent most of their careers in Europe, so they were pretty much forgotten here.

I would say to check out Willie Lewis and His Entertainers, but I’m not sure how you’re going to be able to. Damn! There’s so much incredible music out there.

Don, John, and the Cotton Pickers

2009-03-10T21:00:00.010-04:00

In the last few days, I've listened to all the recordings I have by McKinney's Cotton Pickers, the great band with the unfortunate name. Anyone with a taste for early jazz should check out this band, if you don't already know them. The Cotton Pickers were one of the great early big bands, and in their brief heyday could almost rival Fletcher Henderson's band. But jeez, that name!

William McKinney, a drummer, had a little Midwestern jazz band in the early 1920's called the Synco Jazz Band. It grew into a full-size big band for the time (11 pieces), based out of Detroit. There they were heard by Jean Goldkette, a (white) big band impessario of the the time. He signed a management contract with the band, changed the name (Dan Morgenstern has written, with some understatement, that the new name was "not well received by the band members"), and got them a recording contract with Victor records.

The records, made between 1928 and 1931, sound great today. The band swung hard for the late twenties and featured a four-piece saxophone section, as opposed to the then-standard trio of reeds. Don Redman, who had been writing most of Henderson's charts, was music director of the band and did about half of the arrangements, while John Nesbitt, almost forgotten today, wrote most of the rest. The work of both men sounds very modern for the time, with lots of tricky rhythmic displacement and full, imaginative harmonies. Redman knew how to rehearse a band, and the ensemble work was tight and impressive.

What the Cotton Pickers didn't have was a set of great soloists, although it could be argued that trombonist Claude Jones achieved greatness during his tenure with the band.* Jones, Redman (on alto sax and clarinet), Nesbitt (on trumpet), and Prince Robinson on tenor and clarinet were the main soloists; they were usually adequate rather than inspired. To counter this weakness, Redman arranged three days of recording in November, 1929 with some of the band replaced by the cream of the New York City's jazz talent: Coleman Hawkins, Fats Waller, Benny Carter, Joe Smith, Kaiser Marshall. Hawkins and Carter came up with some of their best early solos on record - hear Hawkins' frighteningly virtuosic playing on "Plain Dirt." Claude Jones was retained on trombone for this session, and was seemingly inspired - his solos had always been good, but here his playing is truly distinguished; in solo after solo he creates unusual, original, and very satisfying melodies.

When Redman left to form his own band in 1931, the band was never again the force it had been. Like I said, you've got to have a feel for early big-band jazz to appreciate the music. But in their prime, occasional silly vocals and all, this was one of the great big bands.

*By the way, the underrated Jones is one of my very favorite jazz trombonists; in my opinion he is the equal of better known players of the time like J.C. Higginbotham and Benny Morton.

Report From the Deep End

2009-03-05T21:11:00.003-05:00

Like I said in my last post, I've gone off the deep end. The 78 RPM Boyce Brown record I bought hasn't come yet, but I've pulled out my old box of 78's, and I'm having a blast. My old 78 turntable proved to be noisy and unreliable, so I picked up a reasonably-priced vintage Miracord table and a cartridge designed for 78's.

I remember some of my 78's being this cool, but there are others I didn't remember at all, and which I don't think I ever listened to. So far the coolest discoveries I've listened to are:

A Paul Bley single on the Emarcy label. Even when playing a standard ("Autumn Breeze"), Bley is concerned more with melody than chords. Could this be Bley's only 78?

A Kenny Clarke side, with mostly French musicians, on Dizzy Gillespie's Dee Gee label. Early bebop just sounds cool at 78 RPM - very organic.

A two-sided tune ("That's My Baby") by saxophonist Marvin Johnson, who was the in Les Hite band that backed up Louis Armstrong in the early thirties. This blues features punning, double-entendre lyrics and some nice, Benny Carter-like alto sax solos.

West Coast blues singer Estelle Edson, on the Black & White label. Yeah, who's she? But she's backed by the Oscar Pettiford All Stars with Lucky Thompson on tenor sax.

Two red-label Okehs by Sara Martin, from 1922. She wasn't the greatest of the classic female blues singers, but on one of these the accompaniment is by young Thomas "Fats" Waller. Too cool.

Okay, I'm gone; I know it. I checked Ebay tonight, and I've got my eye on a 78 by the great jazz pianist Dodo Marmarosa (on the Atomic label) and one on the Trumpet label by Mississippi bluesman Willie Love. I'm gone.

Jeffery Finally Descends Into Madness

2009-03-03T10:42:00.002-05:00

I have officially gone off the deep end.

Everybody who knows me is aware that I am an obsessed record collector. I have more jazz records and CDs than anyone should be allowed to have. I’ve known for years that I’m slightly crazy in this regard. But I have always reassured myself with one fact: at least I don’t collect 78's.

I just shake my head at people who collect 78 RPM records. I mean, those folks are nuts. They’ll pay hundreds, even thousands, of dollars for a rare, but highly breakable, piece of shellac containing six minutes of music. That’s crazy. And do you know how much room a collection of 78’s takes up? Aside from that, most worthwhile 78’s have been reissued on LP or CD, anyway.

Yeah, I know I’ve had a box of 78’s for years; my grandmother gave it to me when I was a teenager. And I learned a lot about jazz and classic pop music from those records – I first heard Sidney Bechet, Benny Carter, and Coleman Hawkins, among others, on records from this stack. But I haven’t played any of those records for at least ten years. I don’t even know if the only turntable I own that will play 78’s even works any more. And it doesn’t matter anyway, because I don’t collect 78's.

But yesterday I bid on, and won, a 78 on Ebay. No, wait – let me explain! I have long been fascinated by an obscure jazz saxophonist who was active in Chicago in the 1930’s and 1940’s: Boyce Brown. And one of his sessions produced a 78 on the Collector’s Item label. I’ve been trying for years to find these two sides on an album, but according to Tom Lord’s jazz discography, they have never been reissued. So….

Well, you know the rest. And no, I didn’t pay three or four figures for this record – barely into two. So I’ll be digging out my old 78 RPM turntable to see if it works. When the record arrives, I’ll write something about the great Boyce Brown. In the meantime, think of me as I descend into madness.

The Lure of New Orleans

2009-02-28T13:48:00.007-05:00

Well, I'm feeling it, as I do every year about this time. About the middle of January, it's just an occasional twinge, but by the end of February, it's a strong, palpable urge - I've got to go to New Orleans.

I've been visiting New Orleans for 20 years, usually during the first week of April, when public school teachers and students are given a break from each other. And April is a great time to visit - the weather is warm without being oppressive, as it will be later, and the jasmine is in bloom, contributing its wonderful fragrance to the strange mixture of smells one encounters in that city by the river. But my trip last year was mixed. I played a gig with my friend Robo, we heard some stunning music, and ate some great meals. But my car was broken into, and my trip coincided with the French Quarter Festival, which made for some great listening, but also made for huge crowds.

So I had decided that I would go somewhere else and do something else this year. But as the time gets closer, I find that the lure of the Crescent City is too strong. I don't seem to have any choice.

I love other American cities. New York really is, to a large extent, what it thinks it is: the center of the universe. I love Chicago partly because it doesn't seem to realize how amazing it is - it just is. But there's nowhere else like New Orleans, and I can't seem to get it out of my blood. When I first visited, there were still a handful of second-generation jazz musicians still playing - guys born between 1900 and 1910. And they could still play, too. Now, of course, they are gone, but amazing music can be found everywhere: traditional jazz, contemporary jazz, funk, brass bands, zydeco.

And jeez, the food! I have done some major eating in New Orleans, but I've got to bow at the feet of my friend Scott, who gave a truly heroic gastronomical display one evening. I asked him where he wanted to eat, and he said, "Somewhere where I can get either oysters or soft-shell crab." So we found a table at Tujague's, on Decatur Street. Scott apparently still couldn't make up his mind, so he put away a dozen oysters and two crabs. My hat goes off.

People ask me what I do when I'm in New Orleans, besides eat and listen to music. A lot of the time I just walk. I can spend an entire morning walking in the Garden District or the Upper Quarter (the quiet side of the French Quarter near Esplanade). I'm not even entirely sure how to describe what I get out of this. I do know that the atmosphere and "feel" of the city is different from anywhere else, and surprises and discoveries can happen at any time. I was walking along Camp Street uptown one morning, and thought, "Oh, yeah, the Boswell Sisters lived on Camp Street. I wonder where?" Two houses later, I saw a plaque that announced that the Boswell Sisters had lived there. A stroll down another street might reveal amazing architecture, a hidden garden, or a cool cemetery.

The musically unexpected can happen any time, too. I've seen/heard the Nightcrawlers Brass Band grow to almost double its size by the end of the night as more and more musicians show up to sit in, Herlin Riley sit in with Eddie Bo (the regular drummer sat in the corner shaking his head), great musicians playing for tips in Jackson Square, and a wandering birthday party, complete with brass band, take over Lafitte's bar.

I'm fond of a drink when I'm in the city, but to me, Bourbon Street is something you walk across to get somewhere better - say, Donna's on Rampart Street. However, I do like to stop in at Fritzel's to see who is playing, and Lafitte's is my favorite bar in which to just hang out, have an Abita, and watch people go by.

New Orleans has taken a lot of beatings, but it's still standing. And, possibly against my better judgement, I'll be there in a few weeks, soaking it all up.

Lessons From Sidney

2009-02-24T17:32:00.003-05:00

A couple of years ago I was talking to one of Atlanta’s first-call saxophonists. We were talking about what music we like to listen to, and I said that I tended to play Sidney Bechet or so-called free jazz more often than mainstream hard bop. He replied that he had never heard Bechet.

In spite of being dumbfounded, I think that I was able to respond politely, suggesting that he might find Sidney’s music worth checking out. But trying to play jazz without knowing the work of the early giants seems like, I don’t know – studying physics without reading Newton. You’re just cutting yourself off from a lot of possibilities.

That got me thinking about what, if anything, I’ve learned from Sidney Bechet. I’ve been listening to his music for 35 years, and aside from the enjoyment I’ve gotten from it, I’ve picked up some musical lessons along the way – some obvious, some subtle; some general, some specific. What Sidney has taught me:

Know the melody, know the chords, and know how and why they fit together.

Don’t try to sound like anyone except yourself.

The descending tritone (six to flat three) is a powerful interval. (But don’t overdo it.)

Playing with conviction can paper over a lot of cracks.

Be your own rhythm section.

You can turn a note into a blue note by messing with the pitch, messing with the timbre, or both.

Whenever possible, play with musicians better than you. (Sidney was only able to do this when he played with Louis Armstrong, and maybe not even then. But his records with Louis certainly find him more involved than when he recorded with young revivalist bands.)

Whenever possible, sleep with Tallulah Bankhead. (Note to self: no longer practical. Ann Hathaway?)

Don’t run changes, improvise melodies. Although…

Sometimes running changes can be effective. (But don’t overdo it.)

Tuning is both absolute and relative.

Mix it up – long notes, fast notes, pretty notes, growled notes.

Always try to hold the last note of “Saints” longer than everyone else. (Okay, perhaps this is not Sidney’s best lesson.)

So Long, Snooks

2009-02-20T10:37:00.002-05:00

To those of us who don’t play it, the guitar can be an intimidating instrument in the hands of a master. The best guitarists always sound to me like they have at least three hands. I seldom listen to Robert Johnson or Joe Pass without thinking, “How do they do that?” New Orleans R & B guitarist Snooks Eaglin, who died Wednesday at the age of 72, was one of those frighteningly accomplished players. To a non-guitarist such as myself, Snooks’ solo versions of “High Society” (complete with the clarinet solo) and “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” are jaw-dropping.

It has always amused me that Eaglin was “discovered” playing on the streets of New Orleans by folklorists, who recorded him and issued several albums (including an amazing set on Folkways) by Blind Snooks Eaglin, the unspoiled folk/blues guitarist and singer. What his “discoverers” didn’t realize was that he was recording rhythm-and-blues singles for Imperial around the same time. If you can find his early Imperial recordings, listen to the first session, the one with “Nobody Knows” and “That Certain Door.” Snooks is accompanied only by bass and drums; the songs seem modeled on Ray Charles’ gospel-tinged R & B style, but Snooks’ raw vocals and impassioned guitar playing make Ray sound positively slick in comparison. This is great New Orleans music.

I was visiting New Orleans in 1995, when Snooks’ version of “Josephine” was a local hit; it seemed like it was on the radio every time I turned it on. Instead of the genial bounce Fats Domino gave it, Snooks set the song over one of the deepest, nastiest New Orleans second-line grooves I’ve ever heard. The bass line is extremely spare, and no less powerful for that. Halfway through the song, Snooks unleashes a choppy, intense, somewhat out-there guitar solo which raises the groove to a positively ecstatic level. Although nothing else on the Soul’s Edge album reaches the heights of that amazing opening track, the entire disc is worth hearing.

I was fortunate enough to hear Snooks several times at the Rock-N-Bowl in uptown New Orleans. He sounded great when paired with Eddie Bo, as he often was, but he was at his best stretching out with a trio, like on his early Imperial recordings. To fans of New Orleans music, it seemed like Eaglin had always been around and would always be around. That, of course, is not true of any of us. So long, Snooks.

The Prophetic Herbie Nichols, Volume II

2009-02-19T10:32:00.002-05:00

After 24 more hours of thinking about/listening to/reading about Herbie Nichols, here are a few more observations:

Introductions: Nichols often used short, composed introductions to his pieces, and a four- or eight-measure introduction by Herbie Nichols is often more interesting than an entire composition by someone else. Listen to the intro of “Cro-Magnon Nights,” with its hammering low-register tritones, which are answered by Art Blakey’s drums. The first four notes of “Blue Chopsticks” echo the children’s piano ditty, but the introduction quickly goes into distant harmonic territory. These intros are little gems.

Biography: The best source for information on Nichols’ life is still probably A. B. Spellman’s Four Lives in the Bebop Business. (What a great title!) This 1966 book profiles Nichols, along with Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, and Jackie McLean. The Nichols chapter is kind of depressing, though; it’s largely a litany of failure - a listing of all the unrewarding gigs Nichols took in order to stay alive.

Mary Lou: The list of other musicians who have recorded Nichols’ music in my last post was not meant to be complete, but I should make special mention of the outstanding, open-eared pianist Mary Lou Williams, who was an early champion of Herbie Nichols. She recorded several of his tunes in the early fifties, before he had the opportunity to record any of them himself. She was particularly fond of “The Bebop Waltz,” written when jazz in ¾ time was still kind of daring.

Recording debut: WARNING! If you have no interest in the historical/discographical minutiae of jazz, stop reading now – you will be bored.

Rereading Spellman’s chapter on Nichols last night reminded me that Herbie told Spellman that he first recorded in 1946 with Danny Barker on the Apollo label. But in my conversation with Barker in 1992, Danny was adamant that he had not recorded with Nichols. He did add that Herbie had recorded with his wife, Blue Lu Barker, when he (Danny) was not present. Well, Blue Lu recorded twice for Apollo, in August and October of 1946. All the reissues and discographies I have seen list Norman Lester on piano and Danny Barker on guitar for both sessions. But after listening to the Apollo recordings carefully, I suspect that it might not be the same piano player on both sessions. I could be wrong, of course, but the pianist on the earlier session sounds more adventurous harmonically.

More importantly, I’m convinced that Danny Barker is not the guitarist on either session. The guitar is not prominent, but when it can be heard clearly, it’s obvious that it’s an electric guitar. I’m not aware of Danny ever recording on anything but an acoustic instrument, and it just doesn’t sound like him.

So keeping in mind what Nichols told Spellman and what Danny told me, my best guess is that Herbie Nichols is the pianist on at least one of Blue Lu’s Apollo sessions, and that Danny is not present on either one. If Danny set up the date and contracted the personnel, Nichols might well have remembered it as a Danny Barker session, even if Danny was out on the road with some band at the time of the session. I know that this is just speculation, but at least it’s informed speculation. Discographers take note.

The Prophetic Herbie Nichols

2009-02-18T10:43:00.003-05:00

Who is the greatest jazz musician you’ve never heard of? The answer just might be Herbie Nichols, the incredibly talented pianist and composer who died in 1963 at the age of 44. Nichols always seemed on the verge of breakthrough, but it never happened – he was nearly unknown when he died. He made three albums for Blue Note (two had the same title as this post) and one for Bethlehem, but they made almost no impact at the time. Nichols made his living in settings not suited to his talents: playing in dixieland bands, backing up greasy R & B tenor players, playing cocktail piano gigs.

The lack of regard from his peers and the jazz public seemed to be due to the fact that his music just didn’t sound like what modern jazz was supposed to sound like. His compositions were unusual, oddly structured, and highly detailed. They had wonderful titles: “House Party Starting,” “Blue Chopsticks,” Cro-Magnon Nights,” “Amoeba’s Dance.” When he improvised on them, his playing was often based on the melody more than on the chords. His style fell somewhere between Teddy Wilson and Thelonious Monk, if you can imagine that. His touch and oblique approach remind me a little of Andrew Hill. But he really didn’t sound like anyone but himself.

Some of his pieces are descriptive – “House Party Starting” starts quietly, then becomes increasingly, drunkenly, more insistent, while Nichols keeps the melody in sight throughout. “The Gig” (maybe my favorite Nichols composition) is an affectionate portrait of a somewhat inept pickup band who doesn’t quite know the tune they’re attempting on the bandstand. The A section is based on a common chord progression, but the last chord is “wrong.” The melody starts, hesitates, starts, stops, and starts again; it ends up being nine bars long instead of the standard eight – the band has added a measure.

“Shuffle Montgomery” is an AABA tune that has one the coolest/funniest bridges ever: it’s the same two-bar blues-cliché lick played four times in a row, regardless of how the harmony changes underneath it. Then Nichols throws in the same lick as a tag at the end of the tune. Too cool.

Although Nichols was not really accepted by his peers during his lifetime, he attracted a small coterie of younger followers/students, including some who went on to greater fame, like Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd. Rudd has probably done more to keep Nichols’ legacy alive than anyone; he has recorded many of Herbie’s tunes, including two volumes of The Unheard Herbie Nichols, previously unrecorded pieces that he learned directly from Nichols. Dutch pianist Misha Mengelberg has recorded several albums of Nichols, both with his ICP orchestra and with smaller groups. And The Herbie Nichols Project, a collective band built around pianist Frank Kimbrough and bassist Ben Allison, has recorded three albums of Herbie’s tunes, including some that had not been recorded before.

But you should check out the original. As of right now the complete Blue Note recordings are still in print – all three original albums plus many tracks that were not released until years later. And Art Blakey and Max Roach are the drummers! Buy this stuff, borrow it, download it, steal it - just hear it while you can.

And all of you jazz history/discography geeks out there, check out the definitive answer, straight from the horse’s mouth, about Nichols and Danny Barker recording together, from a previous post.

Steve and Roz

2009-02-17T19:57:00.008-05:00

I haven't written, except in passing, about my biggest musical hero, Steve Lacy, in a while. So here are some thoughts on the Steve Lacy/Roswell Rudd Quartet in its various incarnations.

I don't know exactly when soprano saxist Lacy met trombonist Rudd, but it must have been in the late 1950's, when both men had one foot in traditional jazz and one foot in the avant-garde of the time, such as it was. Both of them recorded early on with Cecil Taylor - Lacy played on Taylor's first album, Jazz Advance. Somewhere along the line they started exchanging ideas and learning tunes together. They eventually decided to form a band - a pianoless quartet - that would concentrate on the great compositions of the jazz repertoire. They played Ellington/Strayhorn, Monk, Herbie Nichols,* Cecil Taylor, etc. Eventually all of that music proved to be unwieldy, and they pared it down to just Monk, learning everything he wrote.

They rehearsed incessantly and scared up a few gigs, but the band never made any money or achieved any level of recognition. It lasted about three years, from late 1961 to 1964. Besides Lacy and Rudd, the band consisted of drummer Dennis Charles and, as Lacy later said, 28 different bassists, including John Ore, Wilbur Ware, and Steve Swallow. Since the gigs were extremely low-paying, the bassists would desert them as soon as something better came along. They recorded for Verve and Columbia, but nothing was released at the time.

But one evening in 1963, the poet Paul Haines borrowed Jimmy Giuffre's tape recorder and took it the a coffee house where the band was playing. Twelve years later, the recordings were released as School Days on the Emanem label; years later they came out on CD on the Swiss HAT label, but the album now seems to be out of print. Low fidelity and all, this is one of the great live jazz albums. The amazing bassist Henry Grimes was on the gig, but was late, so the first two tunes don't have bass. The tunes are all by Monk, but include such rarely-heard pieces as "Skippy," "Brilliant Corners," and "Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are." Lacy and Rudd obviously know the music backwards and forwards, and feel free enough to take some liberties with it, including some oddly dixieland-sounding counterpoint. The rhythm section has an appealing tension between Grimes' rock-solid bass lines and Charles' drumming, which seems to always be leaning forward. It's an instructive and inspiring 50 minutes of music.

A couple of years ago, 23 minutes or so of studio recordings by this band were issued on Early and Late on the Cuneiform label. It's not clear whether this music is from the Verve or Columbia sessions or from a demo session. It's excellent music, although not quite at the high level as the School Days session. In addition to a couple of Monk tunes, the band (with Bob Cunningham on bass) plays Cecil Taylor's "Tune Two."**

Lacy finally got fed up with trying to make a living as a jazz musician in New York, and left for Europe - Rome, then Paris. There were a few encounters between Rudd and Lacy over the years, including an excellent one-off reunion album on Black Saint, Trickles. The two hornmen, with Kent Carter on bass and Beaver Harris on drums, play a program of Lacy's compositions - no Monk. That was pretty much it until 1999, when Rudd joined Lacy's trio (Jean-Jacques Avenel on bass and John Betsch on drums) for a studio album (Monk's Dream) and a tour. They sounded better than ever, playing a book of Lacy originals and Monk tunes, with a few Rudd originals and Nichols tunes thrown in. I heard this band at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta in 2000; the music was incredible, although the theatre was only about one-fourth full.

The contrast between Lacy and Rudd was more pronounced with this later quartet. Lacy's playing was passionate, but controlled, thoughtful, and deliberate. Rudd could be just as thoughtful, but his playing was more extroverted; he made use of devices from his dixieland past, like plunger mutes and tailgate glissandos. I remember Lacy shaking his head and laughing at some of Rudd's outrageous ideas.

It all worked, though, and it can be heard on the rest of Early and Late. The first disc of that album is from the 1999 tour, and most of disc two is from a 2002 show at Iridium in New York. Rudd and Lacy recorded together on a few other occasions over the years (Monk's "Pannonica," played as a duet on Lacy's Associates is a prime example), but the quartets they co-led, early and late, remain some of the highest points of both musician's careers.

*If you don't know who Herbie Nichols was, look him up - now! I'll devote a post to his incredible music soon.

**Lacy recorded "Tune Two" a couple of times over the years, as well as Taylor's early pieces "Louise" and "Air." Besides Ken Vandermark, who else has recorded any of Taylor's music? Oh, that's right - the on-again, off-again duo RoboCromp recorded "After All" on their CD But Does It Swing?

Horo Records, part 2

2009-02-11T10:28:00.002-05:00

I don’t know how many of my thousands of readers saw this comment on my post about Horo Records:

I was assistant producer at HORO Records for several years, when I was in my teens. Aldo Sinesio, the producer, is on the verge of reissuing most of the HORO catalogue on CD, and I will produce the reissues. Lonehill Records has just ripped off a Teddy Wilson record from HORO, so, in order to avoid other "fakes" (the guys at Lonehill have just copied an LP), the catalogue wll be reissued almost in its entirety. Within May/June a series of recordings live by Freddie Hubbard, and an unissued recording, by pianist Dave Burrell and legendary drummer Sam Woodyard, will be out. I think you're the first person to get the news...
Cordially yours, Gianni Morelenbaum Gualberto

This is very good news for the jazz world. A lot of people have been waiting for this catalogue to be reissued on CD.

I can’t let the subject of the Horo label go without talking a little more about the three Sun Ra double albums the label released. Unity is a live album by the full band, and is a typical Ra mixture of originals, swing-era standards, and free improvisations. But New Steps and Other Voices, Other Blues are two of the most unusual items in the Ra discography, although Media Dream and Disco 3000 on the Saturn label were recorded around the same time and are somewhat similar. All of these are quartet albums which feature the mighty John Gilmore on tenor, Michael Ray on trumpet, and Luqman Ali on drums. Ra plays piano (with a strong left hand to make up for the lack of bass) on some tracks, but the most interesting music on these albums finds Sonny behind a Crumar Mainman, one of those electronic keyboards that seemed like a good idea at the time. It had a built-in drum box, and apparently had some elementary sequencing capability – Ra uses programmed bass ostinatos on some tunes. The music that he wrests from this cheesy instrument is really remarkable – at times it is hard to believe that no overdubbing is involved, but it apparently wasn’t. The rest of the quartet rises to the occasion with some inspired playing. This is some truly weird and wonderful music.

And when the Horo catalogue is reissued, it will be a lot easier to get me Steve Lacy’s Eronel for Christmas.