If only my computer had a sound card and a 3d graphics accelerator and a jet engine and a Roman Abrohamovitch budget. Ahh, the fun we could have, the diseases we could catch….

I am a sucker for Christmas music of all kinds. I like traditional carols sung by choirs, ’60s holiday rock ‘n roll like Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree, oratorical masterpieces like the Messiah, and jazz and Big Band treatments of the Christmas standards. I’m always on the lookout for some new holiday music to add to the Ipod “holiday mix” playlist. The challenge is to find another “Christmas album” that compares to the all-time classics, like Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas or, more recently, Linda Ronstadt’s a Merry Little Christmas.

And so, I must give kudos to the Purple Raider, who long ago recommended An Oscar Peterson Christmas. I finally picked it up recently, and it has met my high expectations. It is an excellent, note-perfect jazz tribute to the holidays that has to rank up there with some of the best Christmas albums ever. Its combination of slow and fast treatments, piano and vibes, will allow for an even better mix of tunes for the days of holiday baking.

More on Christmas music later. In the meantime, as we ramp up to the holidays, An Oscar Peterson Christmas gets the Webnerhouse seal of approval.

Jazz is my idea of how a tune should go. – Louis Armstrong.

Happiness blues – Charlie Parker

One thing I like about jazz is that it emphasized doing things differently from what other people were doing.  It pulled me like a magnet, jazz did, because it was a way that I could express myself. – Herbie Hancock

The people in Japan know more about the history of jazz and the musicians than the people in the United States do. – Billy Higgins

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other’s ideas.  As far as playing jazz, no other art form, other than conversation, can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction. -  Stan Getz

The biggest problem with American music right now, is that kids don’t listen. They come by it honestly, Americans don’t listen anyway. When people go to concerts, they say I’m going to see… not, I’m going to hear.  – Branford Marsalis

I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I’m doing . . . the emotional reaction is all that matters as long as there’s some feeling of communication, it isn’t necessary that it be understood.  – John Coltrane

A session in jazz is comparable to an open forum where theories and opinions are discussed openly and freely. Without inhibition or the fear of being reprimanded, a soloist rises and speaks without the aid of notes or previous preparation. Speeches with words of various inflections and insinuations are replaced with a flow of melodic, rhythmic music. One soloist will speak for himself on a chosen topic and then retire to hear the feelings of another on the same subject.  -  Stan Kenton

I’d rather play jazz, I hate rock and roll. – Ginger Baker

You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That’s jazz.  -  Oscar Peterson

To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that’s not what I play. I play black classical music. – Nina Simone

Life is a lot like jazz… it’s best when you improvise. – George Gershwin

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can’t explain it. They really can’t translate feeling because they’re not part of it. That’s why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling. – Bill Evans

By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with. – Duke Ellington

…art courtesy of www.debrahurd.com

My dream jazz quintet: Oscar Peterson/Piano,  Freddie Hubbard/Trumpet,  John Coltrane/Saxophone,  Ray Brown/Bass,  Jeff Hamilton/Drums.  Jeff is the only one of my dream jazz quintet still living and he is also a contemporary of mine at Indiana University.

Ceora – Lee Morgan …click this one for a taste of beautiful music that defies categorization.

My FM station?  88.1 KKJZ is often available to me at my home, 166 miles south of their antenna in Long Beach, CA.

Here they are, two giants together making great music. It doesn’t get any better than this.

Shortly after Nat King Cole’s death Oscar Peterson recorded the tribute album With Respect To Nat with his trio and Manny Albam’s big band as backup. Oscar’s vocals in these selections sound suprising like Nat himself, very well done!

Bassist Linda Oh

Two strangers will meet on stage at Wangaratta, writes Roger Mitchell

THEY seem so different. She plays bass — electric and upright. He plays trumpet. She is 25, was born in Malaysia and grew up in Perth listening to Red Hot Chili Peppers. He is 67, was born in Jacksonville, Florida and grew up listening to his parents’ 78rpm Jazz at the Philharmonic records.

Both live in New York, but they have never met. In a few days they will share a stage at the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz, in a quartet with pianist Mike Nock and drummer Tommy Crane.

One of the joys of this festival, which this year celebrates its 20th anniversary, is that Linda Oh and Charles Tolliver, who are from such different generations and genres in jazz, can link up.

Yet they have much in common. Each was inspired to play when given an instrument — Tolliver’s grandmother, Lela, gave him a cornet; Oh’s uncle gave her an electric bass. Both were initially self-taught and both considered other careers— Tolliver as a pharmacist, after working for a local apothecary, and Oh as a lawyer.

Both musicians like challenges and both are perceptive, intelligent and thoughtful.

Asked about the importance of music in people’s lives, Oh says, “It’s a shame these days that everything is so overrun by TV and advertisements and reality TV that a lot of people don’t have the energy to go out to live music or put an album on and listen to it from start to finish.

“If Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie said to everyone ‘You should go and see a jazz show’ everyone would go. We need more spokespeople.”

Tolliver’s view, fittingly, is borrowed from Art Blakey: “He would come up to the microphone and, in that inimitable voice of his, say ‘Good evening ladies and gentlemen, we are here to wash away the dust from your everyday lives’. I think that’s it.”

Linda Oh says her entry to jazz was “a little backwards”, beginning with the fusion of Jaco Pastorius, Stanley Clarke and Chick Corea and then being turned completely around by Ray Brown and Oscar Peterson on the album Night Train.

Driven by the desire to “do something that I didn’t know much about and to learn as much as I could”, she studied bass at the WA Academy of Performing Arts, graduating with honours. Oh says Perth had many talented musicians who were “very honest about what you need to do to get better”.

Winning a Sisters in Jazz competition in 2004 gave her a chance to visit New York. She was “pretty blown away, but not just in awe of it — I checked out local musicians and universities and saw there was so much stuff to be learned out here and I knew I had to do it”.

Oh won a scholarship to Manhattan School of Music, where she completed a Masters in Jazz-based Performance and met trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and drummer Obed Calvaire, with whom she recently released her acclaimed debut album, Entry. With Oh and Crane, Akinmusire will perform tunes from that album at Wangaratta.

Oh has never played with Tolliver, though she has heard a lot of his music. “Tommy went to New School University, where Charles has an Art Blakey Ensemble, so it will be a very interesting mix, especially with Mike Nock — I’m a huge fan.”

Tolliver recalls playing with Blakey’s Messengers “for a minute, replacing Lee Morgan, a long time ago”, but as other names of jazz identities from his past tumble out there is no self-promotion.

He says it was “an act of providence of miraculous proportions” that the young dropout from Howard University met bandleader Jackie McLean and within six months was making his first recording.

Labels such as hard bop, bebop and post bop meant little, Tolliver says. “We understood that was just print journalism. We were just trying to expand on what Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk had laid out there.”

Tolliver admits to many influences on his sound, including Gillespie (“He’s the go-to guy for inspiration”), Charlie Shavers, Freddie Hubbard, Kenny Durham, Donald Byrd, Lee Morgan, Clifford Brown, Booker Little, Fats Navarro and Roy Eldridge.

But Tolliver’s improvising involves taking risks. “You’re really trying to make a statement of your emotional self on that instrument and the only way I can see to do that is to get busy exploring something right away. I need to have that little bit of danger there that I might not be able to get out of what I’m trying to do.”

Tolliver will perform twice with Sydney’s Jazzgroove Mothership Orchestra, playing tunes from With Love and the recent Emperor March. With the quartet he’ll play a selection from the Mosaic Select box set.

Wangaratta Festival of Jazz starts on Friday, October 30

An edited version of this article appeared in the Herald Sun newspaper, Melbourne, on October 28

It’s ME!!!

Music is so fascinating and full of what life is about. It tells our stories in the most creative, innovative and diverse ways. I’ve found genius in these featured artists. Prepare to be dazzled, sucked in and amazed… Let the incredibleness begin!

Rho ( Miss R&B )

Oscar Peterson… astoundingly amazing, genius at his craft, compared to the greats of all time, yet is a great in his own right…

Bill Evans… wonderfully talented, beautiful touch to the piano and totally in the music

Art Tatum… a pioneer and inspiration to a lot of the greats, insanely good, with a flare all his own

Ahmad Jamal… so fabulous with his finesse, great ear and wonderful musician

Thelonious Monk… unique playing style, madly talented and eccentric

Umi Garrett… a phenom, beautiful spirit, and exceptional ability

Chick Corea… modern yet classic, skilled execution and inspiring player

Dave Brubeck’s 1959 album Time Out is one of the landmark recordings in jazz history. For that reason alone, the 50^th anniversary of its release merits celebration. But, on a larger scale, Time Out represents a major development within American culture, one that was crucial to inducing the seismic shifts to occur in our country during the tumultuous 1960s that followed. While it is likely that such shifts would have occurred anyway, with or without Brubeck’s contributions, a strong case can be made that his group, and its most important work, helped accelerate progress on several fronts, advancing the cause of racial harmony while opening the door for later musical innovations.

It is further worth noting that Brubeck’s achievements represent, to a surprising degree, a triumph of conservative values: faith, family, hard work and self-reliance. His ideological compass has always remained pointed toward the California ranchlands of his youth—the kind of environment that was later famously embraced by President Reagan, who fully understood the symbolic value of his years of public brush-clearing and horse-riding. Reagan’s retreats to the ranch implied a desire to escape the Beltway’s rarefied air and reorient himself to the pioneer spirit which drove America’s development in its first century of existence. The simple beauty of such areas communicates an austere dignity that would surely impart perspective on the serious issues all Presidents must grapple with, and so it is make perfect sense that men as different in personality as George W. Bush, Richard Nixon and Teddy Roosevelt would embrace them.

For most of his early life—from childhood, through his years in the US Army and as a music student at Oberlin College—Brubeck existed firmly within the Tradition. Had he not caught the jazz bug early on, he might have ended up as a concert pianist working with symphony orchestras, or a composer of string quartets. He did eventually do a lot of work in these areas, but it was the worldwide acclaim earned as a jazzman that gave him the freedom to expand his musical horizons. Indeed, if his legacy could be summed up in one word, despite all his formalistic trappings, it would be “freedom”.

This legacy of freedom is being celebrated by Columbia Records, which recently reissued Time Out in a special three-disc package, on occasion of the 50^th anniversary of the album’s original release. Suffice to say that, if you have never heard this music, then you owe yourself the pleasure of doing so; likewise, people for whom this music is old hat will still find value in its enhanced sound quality and the wealth of bonus material, including photos, performance footage and eight songs recorded live at the Newport Jazz Festival between 1961-64. The highlight is an interactive tutorial in which Brubeck, now 89 years old, talks viewers through the melodies as he plays them.

The point of Time Out was to break out of the creative restrictions imposed on the jazz musician by strict adherence to the steady 4/4 beat that had characterized jazz since it first emerged from turn-of-century New Orleans. For the first 30 years of recorded jazz, that beat was maintained by the bass drum, replicating its role in the standard marching band, whose cadences and instrumentation were the basis of jazz early bands. Drummers of the 1940s New York scene, led by Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, shifted the burden of time-keeping from bass drum to the ride cymbal, which opened up the sound and set the standard for what modern jazz would sound like. (The upright bass, adapted from symphonic orchestras, evolved to replace the tuba as a rhythm instrument early on, and typically reinforced the 4/4 beat; its time-keeping role expanded in modern jazz, as the drummers went further beyond the beat, leaving its reiteration to the bassist.) By the early 1950s, all instrumentalists had unprecedented creative freedom in jazz, and the race to find the next great innovation was as competitive as the Space Race.

The introduction of long-playing (LP) records in 1948 quadrupled the amount of time available on an individual record, opened up song structures and brought a vaster range of material to the marketplace. Traditional American musical forms—jazz, blues, gospel, folk—predominated; rock was growing commercially, but did not become a creative force to rival the others until 1964.

The singer Ian Svenonius noted years back that the largest jazz groups are only a quarter the size of symphony orchestras, which are roughly 100 people; Swing Era bands could be half that size, while modern jazz groups of the ‘40s and beyond are usually between three and six people. Today, many artists do huge business as solo acts. Prince, for example, played all 27 instruments on his debut album and for years only used his bands for performances. Computers allow many pop singers and rappers to make albums without using any actual instruments at all.

Traditional European and early American music is labeled with the catch-all term of “classical” largely because of our nation’s record stores. It doesn’t seem to rankle so badly as certain artists who reject the idea of “jazz” as an organizational concept, maybe because the LP ensured that such music would remain in circulation as the country went more toward smaller (and logistically cheaper) groups. Most Americans today would know nothing of classical music if not for LPs and their CD reissues, particularly of the versions recorded in the 1950s and ‘60s. Likewise, although one can see top-notch jazz music anywhere in the world most nights, the closest that most jazz fans can usually get to experiencing serious big-band stuff is CD, or the occasional festival.

Brubeck, who studied with Darius Milhaud at Oberlin, did the industry a favor by wearing his classical affinities on his cuff-linked sleeve. His grounding in that tradition was the impetus to bust out of the 4/4. Max Roach had recorded an entire album, Jazz In ¾ Time, in 1957, and several songs on Time Out are rooted in ¾, as well as the standard 4/4. “Three to Get Ready” is in 3/4 and 4/4. “Kathy’s Waltz” starts in 4/4, then goes into 3/8, while “Blue Rondo ala Turk” starts in 9/8, with Desmond’s solo in 4/4.

Other tracks switch-up the rhythms more explicitly. “Everybody’s Jumpin’” and “Pick Up Sticks” are in 6/4. “Take Five” stays in 5/4 over its five-plus minutes, with Morello’s drum solo the definitive explication of that beat. “Strange Meadowlark” opens with a Brubeck solo running over two minutes with no set time whatsoever—a nod, perhaps, to the nascent free-jazz scene, or to Lennie Tristano, whose solo recordings “Spontaneous Combustion”, “Requiem” and “Turkish Mambo” anticipated much of this.

Take Five has no shortage of highlights, staring with “Take Five”, which is simply one of the greatest songs ever recorded. A masterpiece of dramatic tension, it was an instant classic when released as a single, becoming the first million-seller in jazz history; the album itself would soon follow. To this day, media references “Take Five” to invoke feelings of class and sophistication; it was famously used to launch Infiniti automobiles in America, with cool narration by British actor Jonathan Pryce.

The Dave Brubeck Quartet functioned as a unified whole, working together 16 years, yet each member has distinguished himself as a master of his own instrument. Bassist Eugene Wright is easily overlooked, as he played with little flash and almost no solos, but a close listen reveals how crucial his work was. He kept the group’s forward-reaching sound rooted in the fundamentals, which he learned from the best in hot spots like Kansas City and his native Chicago. Together, Wright and drummer Joe Morello comprised one of the all-time greatest rhythmic tandems, easily ranking up there with such towering twins as Walter Page and Jo Jones (Count Basie); Jimmy Blanton and Sonny Greer (Duke Ellington); Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones (Miles) Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones (Coltrane); Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins (Coleman); Mingus and Dannie Richmond; Scott Lafaro and Paul Motian (Bill Evans).

Naturally, a record built around rhythmic complexity puts special pressure on the drummer, and Morello attained legend status with his work on Time Out. His brush-work on “Everybody’s Jumpin’” anchors a brilliant piece that holds up just fine against its adjacents. “Take Five” is one of the rare examples of a major pop hit built around a drum solo; the other notable case would be “Sing Sing Sing”, an epochal Swing Era anthem by Benny Goodman (and a star-making vehicle for drummer Gene Krupa), recorded in 1937. Like Desmond’s earlier on the same track, musicians and students know their solos better than some know their best friends.

As for the leader himself, Brubeck’s playing is spare but efficient, each note pressed for maximum resonance. His solo on “Kathy’s Waltz” is strictly old-school, with hints of Ragtime, while those on “Three to Get Ready” and “Everybody’s Jumpin’” sound downright modernistic, with overt references to future label-mate Monk.

Ultimately, the real star of the album is alto saxophonist Paul Desmond (1924-1977), a fellow Californian whose musical partnership with Brubeck lasted over 30 years. His sound, which typically enters after a few bars’ introduction by Brubeck, dominates the quartet’s output. Desmond is often dismissed by purists for a coolness of tone that can sometimes border on the antiseptic, but the quiet intensity of his playing can be lost on ears trained to listen for strain, sweat and other signifiers of serious effect. If Desmond’s style sounds effortless, it is only because of rigorous practice. After his death, the author of “Take Five” left his split of royalties to the American Red Cross, which receives annual royalties in the low six figures.

1959 was a year of explosive growth in jazz, and Time Out was just one of at least three major events that year. Columbia also issued Miles Davis’ seminal Kind of Blue, which marked the emergence of a new approach to harmony based on modal scales; this gave the soloist—Davis himself, most notably, as well as collaborator Bill Evans—access to unprecedented emotional range, a major factor in the current perception of jazz as a “romantic” music. Due to the constant reissues over the decades, the prevalence of bootlegging and the pervasiveness of digital downloading, it may be impossible to determine which of these is, in fact, the most successful jazz album of all time; yet both helped shift the business model firmly toward the LP, which had only been around for about a decade at that point.

John Coltrane, who spent five years in Davis’ group, played on Kind of Blue, but his sideman work was soon eclipsed by the Atlantic Records release Giant Steps. After years of rigorous experimentation, 1959 saw the emergence of Coltrane’s mature sound, and he would go on to be, arguably, the last true giant of jazz music, a figure whose very name still inspires devotion that borders on the religious, over 40 years after his death. On the surface, it would be impossible to find two more different men, in terms of tone, technique and temperament, than Coltrane and Paul Desmond—but at the intersection of their styles, as heard on these three albums, one hears the future.

1959 also included major works by Ornette Coleman, who along with Coltrane helped bring Free Jazz to fruition, and Charles Mingus, who recorded three brilliant albums for Atlantic that year. Max Roach had already been first to record pianoless groups, and among the first to openly lobby for civil rights through his music; and Thelonious Monk, whose rhythmic and harmonic innovations made him, in essence, the father of modern jazz. The fact that all these men, with volatile personalities and deep-set musical tastes, all gave respect to Brubeck speaks to his chops and credibility.

Brubeck is rightfully lionized by the left for his role in helping to shape a world defined by JFK’s “New Frontier” and Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”. In generational terms, the Baby Boomers’ collective self-definition is rooted in the 1960s, for better and for worse, and jazz artists like Brubeck, Coltrane and Davis are thus regarded almost as highly as the rock bands that would ultimately dominate the American music scene.

 The primary beneficiary of the commercial growth of jazz music was the African-American community, which got its first taste of the free market and was soon able to alter the widespread perceptions of the white majority, and ultimately obliterate many vestiges of racial prejudice in this country. Jazz was the wedge that forced integration; as more and more of the top draws—Goodman, Krupa, Artie Shaw—integrated, and others insisted on playing for integrated audiences, bigotry took a backseat to box-office. By the time of Time Out, integrated bands weren’t exactly commonplace in the US, but they were hardly unusual. Norman Granz’ “Jazz At the Philharmonic”, for example, toured the country with all-stars of all races.

The other major beneficiary of jazz music’s global presence was the United States government, which quickly recognized the value of a uniquely American cultural export. Brubeck, who served briefly under Patton in the Army, would become a front-line soldier in a war of ideas, spreading his vision of musical and personal freedom around the world, often directly in collaboration with the State Department.

The arrival of Louis Armstrong in Europe in 1927 basically introduced jazz to the world; a handful of devoted critics and musicians had imported stacks of jazz records from New York for distribution in London and Paris. By the time Duke Ellington’s band made the same trip, in 1932, jazz had become its own cottage industry, with magazine and radio shows catering to the market, as well as the first generation of European jazz musicians. For the first time, America had a cultural product to compete with Europe, and in this realm we remained well ahead.

The assault on jazz by totalitarian regimes—first the Nazis, then the Soviet Union—only enhanced its appeal to youth across Europe, many of whom risked death to continue playing such music. By this point, the old world had produced its own masters like guitarist Django Reinhardt, while American musicians like Benny Carter and Sidney Bechet had emigrated (not unlike the Japanese who brought judo to the west). World War II brought hundreds of current and future jazzmen into Europe and Asia, either as combat troops or in some musical capacity. The music of the war years deserves its own category in the lineage, but by decade’s end American jazz had become the new music of choice not only throughout Europe, but also in Japan.

Like rock and rap, which came along later, jazz began as an indigenous form of expression within the minority community, then “crossed-over” to become the primary vehicle of white rebellion—a means of drawing cultural lines between generations. Jazz was viciously attacked by the mainstream in the 1920s and ‘30s; such criticisms read now as time-capsule pieces of hyperbolic calumny. By the 1950s, the US State Department saw fit to give jazz its ultimate stamp of legitimacy by backing some leading musicians on international tours conceived as propaganda for post-war America. It was a textbook example of how “soft power” worked in the nascent Cold War.

Penny Von Eschen’s excellent 2002 book Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Harvard University Press) offers a definitive look at the program, organized in 1955 by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and US Rep Adam Clayton Powell (D-NY), whose district encompassed the epicenter of modern jazz. Dizzy Gillespie’s second great big band took the first trip in March 1956, covering parts of Europe, Asia and the Middle East. According to the program’s website: “In 1956, 1960 and 1961, Louis Armstrong [toured] Ghana (then the British Gold Coast), Congo, Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, and the United Arab Republic. In 1963, 1970 and 1972, Duke Ellington toured the Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, and Africa.”

These musicians and others—including Carter, Coleman, Davis, Goodman, Mingus, Charlie Byrd, Lionel Hampton, Woody Herman, Earl Hines, Quincy Jones, Roland Kirk, Gerry Mulligan, Anita O’Day, Oscar Peterson, Clark Terry, Sarah Vaughn and Randy Weston—traveled to the far corners of the musical world before the program ended in 1978. Many such areas were suspicious of western interests, and sometimes openly hostile. George Wein, impresario of the Newport Jazz Festival, was enlisted for logistical support. Brubeck was, of course, a major attraction.

In 1958, his quartet toured Sweden, Turkey, Ceylon, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq. Brubeck’s gigs in Poland that year, repeated in 1970, are considered key moments in the spreading of jazz into the Soviet Bloc. Cadres devoted to “improvised music” began sprouting in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Poland and Hungary soon after, while at least one major group (the Ganelin Trio) made great jazz in Russia itself. He and Armstrong later collaborated on The Real Ambassadors, a musical and recording based on their experiences, in 1961-62.

The musicians and artists in Eastern Europe (with support from sympathetic parties in the west) drove the engine of progress away from Communism and became totems in the way Charlie Parker was for the Beatniks, or Coltrane was for the Black Power movement. Their records were being smuggled into the West long before the Iron Curtain finally fell, at which point those scenes exploded into the creative powerhouses they are today. When Brubeck and other older jazzmen appear in Europe today, they are held to a similar status as their own native masters.

Japan got its introduction to jazz from occupying American soldiers, and has never lost its taste. As domestic sales of jazz records slumped hard in the 1970s and early ‘80s, the Japanese (typically) provided a vital commercial lifeline, helping to keep it vital long enough for the resurgence driven by CD technology. CDs, of course, were invented by the Japanese, while companies like JVC, Polygram and especially Sony bought up all the major jazz catalogs (Verve, Mercury, Blue Note/Capitol, Columbia) to be reissued in their new format. Every American who values their native culture owes a debt of thanks to those Japanese who rescued all that music from likely extinction.

Leading the way among the reissues that began flooding the market, well past the point of cultural saturation, were Columbia’s valedictorians from the class on ’59, Kind of Blue and Time Out, each of which has been re-released in increasingly completist form at least a half-dozen times (including box sets), while their lead singles, “So What” and “Take Five” have become standards. Both retain almost all of its original freshness and potency, despite three generations of innovation that followed its release. In the case of Time Out, time itself has only burnished the luster of an album dismissed by many top critics upon its release; very few would bother to raise any objection now.

sdh666@hotmail.com

October 9, 2009

O Verve Music Group anunciou o lançamento do Verve Select, selo especializado em edições limitadas, deluxe box sets, reedições de álbuns clássicos e gravações inéditas.

Box sets de Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, e Oscar Peterson são os lançamentos inicias, e títulos de Clifford Brown, Stan Getz, Nat King Cole, e Dinah Washington serão os próximos à serem incluídos no Verve Select.

Mais informações em vervemusicgroup.com.

At the risk of becoming a complete bore on the subject of bebop I thought I’d follow up an earlier post on the joys of jazz with this brilliant performance of yet another Charlie Parker tune, not by the man himself, but by one of his disciples.

I was lucky enough to hear Sonny Stitt  live a number of times and he was always brilliant; he died in 1982. He was criticised by some jazz buffs between  numbers during one gig I was at with the words “You’re just playing like Charlie Parker!”, to which he replied by handing his alto saxophone to the twit  in the audience and saying “Here then. YOU play like Charlie Parker.”

Anyway, in the late 1950s (after Charlie Parker had died) Sonny Stitt sat in as on alto saxophone with the Oscar Peterson trio of which Ray Brown (bass) and Ed Thigpen (drums) were the other two members. They made a classic album for the Verve label which features a number of Charlie Parker numbers. Oscar Peterson isn’t my absolute favourite jazz pianist but it has to be said that he and his sidemen build up a colossal head of steam on these records, especially the one I’ve picked which is called Au Privave.

I tried for ages to unravel this intricate little tune. It’s basically a twelve-bar blues, but it is built  on much more complicated chords than the usual blues cycle. In its simplest form, this involves only three chords. The foundation is a  “tonic” chord (T) based on the root note of whatever key it’s played in, often a basic triad consisting of the first, third and five notes of a major scale starting on that note or including the dominant 7th. The next chord is the subdominant chord  (S), shifting things up by a perfect fourth relative to the tonic, and then finally we have the dominant (D) which brings us up by a fifth from the original root note.

The basic twelve-bar blues has one chord per bar. The first four bars are accompanied by the tonic, then the subdominant S takes over for two bars followed by a return to the tonic for another two. The last four bars introduce the dominant (but only for one bar), followed by S for one and then back down to the root for the final two.

In a standard blues in F the sequence would thus be

| F| F| F |F | B♭| B♭| F| F | C| B♭| F| F|,

or possibly with F7 etc. The slow and relatively simple progression of chords gives these  blues a rather statuesque form: the soloist has to be really good to keep the thing going without getting bogged down. When played by a master even the simplest blues can be immensely powerful, but they can also be very dull when played not so well. It may be simple, but it certainly isn’t easy.

Au Privave is in F but has considerably more complicated changes than the bog-standard F blues. Parker inserted several intermediate chords to keep the harmonies moving and dispensed with some of the conventional progressions.  There are also more chords, usually two per bar rather than just one. The sequence here looks more like

| F| Gm7C7| F |Cm7F7| B♭| B♭| F7Gm7| Am7D7 | Gm7| C| FD7| G7C7|,

although I’m not sure I got them right as it tends to be played very fast! It’s a lot more to remember, but it’s also a much more dynamic setting  to improvise in which is what people like Charlie Parker wanted to create. Instead of moving quasi-statically through perfect intervals each chorus, you run helter-skelter through a constantly shifting harmonic environment. Notice also that there’s no comfortable return to the tonic at measure 12, even. The appearance of a C7 chord here is called a turnaround. Complicated? Yes, I suppose it is. But whenever I hear it played by Sonny Stitt it’s always just four minutes of sheer exhilaration.

Oh, and there’s another thing. Listen to the chorus that starts about 2:58. Did he really play all twelve bars without breathing?

I am playing some records at Benetti’s Coffee Experience on Sunday, to kick off the store’s weekly Sunday Spins.  I will have a sign-up sheet for you to bring an album next week, so will hopefully I will be providing fewer records each week.

Most of the time at these events, I will play entire sides of albums.  To keep things mixed up, I have chosen only to play one side of each album.  I’ll occasionally break from this and play an entire album if warranted, like when I play A Love Supreme in a few weeks.  (I already anticipate people’s criticisms about only playing half of these albums, but trust me, you will still get plenty of deep album cuts and non-singles.)

Since album sides usually run about 20-25 minutes, you can plan on a different side about every half hour.  I’ll start at 6:00, so plan accordingly, if you want to hear a particular record.  (I’ve included links describing the albums, so do your homework.)

1. Duke Ellington – 70th Birthday Concert (side 1)
2. Ray Charles – Greatest Hits (side 1)
3. Oscar Peterson – Night Train (side 2)
4. The Supremes – Where Did Our Love Go (side 1)
5. The Kinks – Kinkdom (side 2)
6. Buddy Miles – We Got to Live Together (side 2)
7. Yes – Close to the Edge (side 2)
8. Herbie Hancock – Head Hunters (side 1)
9. Jimmy Cliff – The Harder They Come (side 2)
10. Elvis Costello – This Year’s Model (side 2)
11. XTC – Black Sea (side 2)

Oh yeah, and I’m going to post the next episode of Radio Free Raytown tomorrow morning, making your Friday even better!

alto and tenor player sonny stitt.

a disclaimer: this post isn’t really about charlie parker. this is the first of four projected posts about bird, but more than bird himself i want to write about his influence on other players, and on jazz itself. bebop is now considered an isolated part of jazz, rather like dixieland or free jazz. wynton marsalis and the young lions used bebop in the ’90s, but they combined it with a reverence for the past and a traditionalism that doesn’t quite match what bebop was when it arrived in the 1940s. then, it was avant-garde, not tradition, and it sought to break free of musical conventions and blaze a new trail through swing and dixieland. charlie parker certainly influenced all of jazz – some would say that bird had an influence on every musician who heard him, and still does. he definitely changed the landscape of jazz playing, both in terms of style, mentality and the ideas people began having in and about their music. the first major bird-influenced musican i’m going to look at here is another altoist, sonny stitt. bird once told stitt that he was giving him “the keys to the kingdom,” and sonny certainly carried the banner for bird long after parker’s death. but did he keep an identity of his own? let’s look at “au privave,” from “sonny stitt sits in with oscar peterson trio,” recorded in 1958. sonny’s alto is a little less piercing on this cut, a little softer in tone than bird’s can sometimes be, and this is a big difference. he also tends, like fellow altoist donaldson, to roughen his tone at times, both on high notes and low, to add some depth to his ideas. bird could play the blues as well as anyone (better than most, in fact), but his blues playing was rooted more in the bebop language than in a less sophisticated, less hip, and more down-to-earth music. and unlike parker, there are less whirlwind runs from stitt in this tune, less mind-boggling sixteenth and thirty-second notes. and unlike donaldson, stitt tends to keep away from the more clichéd aspects of bird’s playing, and the more hackneyed bebop licks of the time. i’ve always found sonny more listenable then i have bird. perhaps the most similar aspect of sonny and bird’s playing, however, is to make their styles fresh over and over, and to make every tune a new experience for the listener. this, i believe, is what makes sonny stitt great, and not just a wanna-be bird. he rises above his influence while still respecting it, and in doing so creates a style all his own.

It’s hard to find a copy in the United States of the original Bedazzled film score, the one that Dudley Moore composed, without paying an arm and a leg. I had to find mine new overseas for about $40–a Christmas present to me. Tonight I saw on Amazon.com that a used album costs $500. It can be downloaded on mp3, but I don’t have one of those. I still like something that I can hold in my hands, like a DVD or a CD.

People forget, or don’t know, that “cuddly” Dudley was a composer and a musician who occasionally recorded his favorite classics (some for parody) or jazz pieces. He wasn’t just an actor. Only 5′2″ and with a club foot, Moore was treated badly and mercilessly by schoolmates and strangers, and at home, was virtually unloved by his parents. He took refuge in music, starting out in choir, and then graduating to violin, piano and organ. For his efforts, he received a music scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he majored in music and composition, and later performed in comedy revues and jazz concerts which gave him his start in entertainment. His jazz influences turned out to be Erroll Garner of “Misty” fame, and Oscar Peterson. Between films and other projects, he continued to record, collaborating with the likes of Sir George Solti and Michael Tilson-Thomas on the classical side, and producing at least sixteen jazz albums, until the late Nineties.

The “Lillian Lust” theme was for Moore’s scenes with then-sex goddess Raquel Welch, who plays, of course, the personification of lust. She serves Dudley’s character, Stanley Moon, breakfast in bed in the bed. All the seven deadly sins are depicted in the film (including the future Dame Edna Everage), but of course, her scenes got the most interest. Peter Cook’s rendition of the main theme as the self-absorbed Drimble Wedge is always hilarious. At one point, it helped me get over a bad relationship.

This is Moore at the height of his first fame; Blake Edwards’ 10 was his second wind. It was, unfortunately, the height of the Dudley Moore-Peter Cook collaboration. Moore went onward and upward, but Cook’s accomplishments never equalled that of his former partner. He became an alcoholic, later drinking himself to death after the passing of his mother in 1995. Dudley Moore died in late March 2002, from the effects of progressive supranuclear palsy. Its early symptoms in human beings mimic drunkenness; I hate to think that when I saw him in the Arthur films, he may not have been acting at all.

Just like summer, jazz festival season has come to an end.  But there’s still plenty of live jazz music to be heard all across the city. Check out these great series continuing throughout 2009 – 2010.

Old Mill Inn
Thursdays are the new Fridays at the Old Mill Inn when jazz dominates the Home Smith Bar. Join Russ Little every Thursday night, return on Fridays for the Outstanding Jazz Vocalist Series or be entertained as Piano Masters take over on Saturday nights.

Quotes Bar & Grill
Friday’s At Five returns to Quotes with the live jazz instrumental series. Best of all, there’s no cover charge and no reservations required.

Sounds of Jazz
Canada’s longest running jazz series returns with nine special concerts. Brought to you by JAZZ.FM91, some of the featured performers include Ranee Lee, Larry Coryell, Diana Panton, Hendrik Meurkens and Lenny Solomon.

enews@tojazz.com

tojazzenews@tojazz.com

STARS IN OUR EYES: What a weekend for celebrity-spotting in Our Town.  In addition to Penelope Cruz, Colin Farrell, Jeff Bridges, Jason Bateman, Hugh Hefner, Drew Barrymore, Ewan McGregor (who walked the red

McGREGOR: took flight

carpet, then dashed to Pearson International to catch a flight) and too many more to mention here, Anne Murray hosted the stars receiving Walk Of Fame honours on Saturday night at the Four Seasons Centre. New sidewalk star owner Kim Cattrall, back in New York this morning shooting Sex And The City 2, also sparkled at George Christy’s 25^th annual filmfest family reunion at the Four Seasons, as did Michael Caine, Rachel Ward & Bryan Brown, Norman Jewison, Michael Sheen, Rex Reed, novelists Ron Base & Shinan Govani, Seamus O’Regan, Chaz & Roger Ebert, Ben Mulroney and An Education scene-stealer Carey Mulligan, who flew to Manhattan yesterday to start shooting Wall Street 2 with Michael

CATTRALL: Back to Manhattan

Douglas. A few blocks away at Il Fornello TIFF co-founder Bill Marshall & Sari Ruda hosted their annual All-Star Lunch for directors Fred Schepisi, Patricia Rozema and Don Shebib, satirist Rick Miller, filmfest veteran Tony Watt, columnist Martin Knelman, ex-Toronto mayors David Crombie & Art Eggleton and many more. Veteran filmfest programmer Hannah Fisher and producers Pierre Sarrazin & Suzette Couture were among the guests soaking up the sun and snacks at Tonya Lee Williams’ lively networking reception at The Pilot for her ReelWorld Indie Lounge. And producer Laszlo

CLOONEY: with Oprah

Barna and dozens of TIFF participants showed up to shmooze at the Canadian Film Centre soiree hosted by CFC chief Slawko Klymkiw at The Spoke Club.

Biggest crowd-pleasers of the weekend: George Clooney, who greeted cheering fans Friday night at the premiere of The Men Who Stare At Goats and then showed up with Oprah Winfrey on his arm for the Saturday screening of Jason Reitman’s crowd-pleasing Up In The Air. (My spies tell me Reitman’s Thank You For Smoking star Aaron Eckhart also was there. Who knew?) La Wnfrey herself drew thunderous applause last night at the premiere of Precious, as did Mariah Carey. But it was Michael Caine who earned the most affectionate TIFF standing ovations yesterday in his stellar Q&A session with Canada A.M. stalwart Seamus O’Regan.

TIFF TALK: TIFF visitor Tilda Swinton reportedly wants to star in a new screen version of Mame, more along the lines of stage & screen Mame Rosalind Russell than movie musical Mame Lucille Ball … popular music-makers Terri

SWINTON: new Mame?

Clark and Hawksley Workmen are among the entertainers appearing this week at the Hard Rock Café as part of the fifth annual TIFF-related Canadian Music Café …  Canuck luminaries ranging from Christopher Plummer, Norman Jewison and David Cronenberg to Margaret Atwood, Oscar Peterson and Louise Pitre are currently showcased in a new 30-year retrospective by photographer Edward Gajdel at the o born contemporary gallery on Yonge street … Bobby Del Rio is living the Actor’s Dream. He’s in every single scene of Mio Adilman’s short TIFF film Unlocked … and organizers of the Dubai International Film Festival pulled the plug on tonight’s planned Park Hyatt cocktail soiree. All in all, not Dubai’s best year for public relations. Maybe all the headline-grabbing fuss about the TIFF salute to Tel Aviv scared them off?

-/-

Anwesende: Thomas, Wolfi (Wählt mich!)

Thema: “Ach, bin ich sensibel! / Zahnarzt – Humor”

JazzWorkshop, die sensibelste Radiosendung der Welt, untersucht heute den “Michael – Jackson – Skandal” – Jetzt ist er tot, und kommt trotzdem nicht nach Wien! Ein Horror für sensible Gemüter. Sowie: Ein lustiger Zahnarzt – Humor (Hörspiel)

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Musik von: Lynyrd Skynyrd, Michael Jackson Tribute, Bonsai Garden Orchester, Oscar Peterson, John Coltrane, Hampton Hawes, Phil Woods & Red Garland, Oliver Nelson, Fats Domino, George Lewis

Bis in 14 Tagen…. wenn wieder alles funktioniert!

Anwesende: Thomas, Dr. K. Lamprechtsdorfer

Thema: “Transfette und Toni Sailer/der Kaiser”

Der Herr Dr. Lamprechtsdorfer erzählt ihnen heute….. Toni Sailer ist tot, wer macht uns jetzt die Germknödel? Sowie: Musik aus der Völkerwanderung oder auch nicht.

Musik von: Gerry Mulligan & Ben Webster, Charles Mingus, Hampton Hawes, Palaestrina, Barney Kessel, Oscar Peterson, Sun Ra, K. Lamprechtsdorfer

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Bis in 14 Tagen!

Workshop @ Vancouver Internatinal Jazz Festival (June 27, 2009)

Fans that turned up at Tom Lee music store on Granville St. were treated to a rare experience Saturday afternoon, when pianist Hiromi Uehara attended a free workshop to discuss her musical evolution, her band Sonicbloom and to entertain a range of questions from the enthusiastic audience that jammed the intimate theatre to capacity (a prelude to her sold out performance at the Vancouver Jazz Festival on Saturday evening).

In concert, Hiromi has a growing reputation as an animated improviser whose physical style and commitment to the moment, can leave audiences both delirious and energized by a whirlwind of music. So this was a special opportunity to hear and learn a little more about the artist behind the keyboard. In person, Hiromi proved to be utterly charming, generous and engaging with a quirky sense of humour – all qualities that are translated poetically in her music.

Hiromi

She set the tone with an extended joyous improvisation that spanned the keys, filled with dazzling runs, stride anecdotes and percussive jabs before plunging hands-first into the baby grand and beating out some catchy bass figures from inside the piano’s inner sanctum. She later revealed the tune was called “Pâte a Choux” (French for Cream Puff) – a tasty musical offering that will hopefully land on an upcoming album soon.

Although her music is often fuelled by elements of fusion and rock, she is equally rooted in the Jazz tradition – conjuring the spirit of Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson with impressive displays of nimble-fingered melodic invention and a muscular rhythmic attack. When asked to describe some of her influences, Hiromi offered a diverse list ranging from ambient dance music to progressive rock, musicians from Jeff Back to King Crimson. When the house lights mysteriously flickered, she quickly added Michael Jackson to her list, getting a good laugh from the crowd.

When it comes to musical boundaries there are none for Hiromi – an audience question she decided to answer by performing another piece. “Pachelbel’s Canon” began with the universal melody we all recognize, but was first gently teased by a sharp or flat which pricked the ears. Then the rhythm subtly lagged, staggered and was nudged forward again, progressively more displaced from the original meter. Increasingly complex rhythmic patterns stacked one on top of another and the melody now whirled in harmonic flux until Pachelbel’s masterpiece became a Hiromi invention, yet the original melody always remained within earshot.

Asked about her musical roots, Hiromi explained that no one in her family had a musical background – her father is notary, mother a housewife, while her grandparents are green tea farmers. When she was seventeen, she raced home to excitedly tell her parents she had met and played with Jazz legend Chick Corea. Her parents did not have the faintest clue who he was – but after a little research and careful listening they were duly impressed.

Hiromi’s first piano teacher had a profound early influence on her development and although lessons began with classical technique, they frequently ended by swinging a little Handel (which Hiromi happily demonstrated for a minute or two).

Then, as Hiromi describes, she began jamming with Ray Brown and Herb Ellis, or with drummer Roy Haynes, or a host of other Jazz luminaries. But she quickly concedes that these memorable jam sessions were accomplished by adjusting the channels of her stereo, so she could dig in, and play along with her idols while gradually mastering the jazz vocabulary that she displays so effortlessly today.

After a period studying law in Japan, Hiromi decided to follow her muse, venturing to America where she attended Berkeley School of Music. Once again the stars were aligned for Hiromi, when an assignment she handed in to her Jazz arranging professor begged him to ask ‘who’ was playing piano on the recording. When Hiromi revealed that it was she, the professor insisted on passing it along to a good friend named Ahmad Jamal, the legendary pianist, who became another ardent fan and mentor for the young musician. Hiromi feels entirely blessed that her chosen path has fatefully led to friendships with both Chick Corea and Ahmad Jamal – two venerable jazz musicians.

When it comes to the repertoire featured on her recent album Beyond Standard, Hiromi explains that these are all songs that she has ‘lived’ with for some time. An audience member asks specifically about her arrangement for the standard “Caravan” and Hiromi likens her approach to redecorating an apartment or living room. You are intimately familiar with each piece of furniture and sometimes it’s fun to find new ways to redesign your living space. An ear-bending groove that runs through her take on the Jeff Beck classic “Led Boots” comes from a divot on her well-worn vinyl copy of the song that skips at a certain spot –  Hiromi ingenuously includes the rhythmic ‘skip’ in her version. The crack band Sonicbloom also features the immense talents of David Fiuczynski on guitar, Tony Grey on bass and Martin Valihora on drums.

In person, Hiromi is brimming with life and ideas; just like her music; in the early stages of a career that is already engaging listeners of all ages, many new to the diverse sounds of Jazz in the 21^st century. Poised at the keyboard, Hiromi is an animated, creative and vigorous player, with flawless technique, but never one to exploit it at the expense of exploring new ideas. For an encore, someone asks if she’ll play “The Tom And Jerry Show” (her fiendish take on the theme from the original cartoon classic) and she generously obliges. Listening to Hiromi’s version is like watching the cartoon on fast-forward – reanimating the cat and mouse antics with new twists and turns, bouncing from ragtime romps to stride escapades and exhilarating chromatic chase scenes up and down the breadth of the piano.

Hiromi’s philosophy shines through her words and music: “I try to play every show, every day, like it’s my first and last.”

Simple Song. Simple Acoustic Trio. “En toda la historia del jazz en nunca he conocido una banda como ésta”, proclamaba orgulloso el trompetista polaco Tomasz Stanko con motivo de su grabación “Soul of Things” en el sello ECM de 2001, y motivo de la unión de estos tres jóvenes músicos al ya aclamado Stanko como uno de los mejores trompetistas de Polonia. La historia del trío empieza en 1990, cuando Marcin Wasilewski y Slawomir Kurkiewicz, dos estudiantes de 15 años de la escuela de música Koszalin, se juntan a tocar Jazz. Marcin tuvo formación clásica y posteriormente se interesó por el Jazz, “empecé a escuchar cintas de mi padre de Oscar Peterson, Chick Corea y Herbie Hancock, un día encontré una cinta de video de un concierto de Keith Jarrett en Japón, que le rogué a mi madre que me la comprara, y recuerdo verla diariamente durante año y medio”, el pianista polaco estuvo completamente hipnotizado con la música del pianista norteamericano. En 1993 se une a ellos Michal Miskiewicz configurando definitivamente el trío, y debutan con el nombre de Simple Acoustic Trío con el que son premiados en su país, publicando varios discos en sellos locales, comenzando por el titulado Habanera, de 2000.

En 2004 publican su primer disco en el sello ECM. Manfred Eicher, productor de sonido y propietario del sello, se encargó de “suavizar” el toque del piano y crear un “ambiente” para la grabación. Nada más publicarse “Trio” ganan directamente el premio Quarterly Prize of the German Record Critics, llegando su eco hasta la crítica estadounidense. Su segundo y hasta ahora último disco es “January”, publicado en 2007, e incluye composiciones de Gary Peacock y Carla Bley. Los dos discos de Marcin Wasilewski Trío destacan por la sutileza de los tres intérpretes, la limpieza del piano, el contrabajo y el “toque” de percusión, que recuerda a la genialidad de otros tríos como el mítico de Bill Evans Trío en el Village Vanguard, subyaciendo al tiempo el recuerdo de Jarrett. En 2008 se enrolan en una larga serie de actuaciones, continuando su colaboración con Stanko y el percusionista Manu Katché perteneciente también al sello ECM.