Passing Notes

5/28/11

Listener's Notes - Gil Scott-Heron

We mark the passing today of the great Gil Scott-Heron, songerwriter-poet who gave us so many great sounds and words, the biggest of which has been "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," the most recognized version of which appeared on the B-side of the 1971 single, "Home is Where the Hatred Is." You could check out the original recording on Small Talk at 125th & Lenox. I'll leave the comments on Scott-Heron's career to others -- The Nation and UK Guardian have something, and you might also check out a piece last year from The New Yorker. Imagine that.

I can tell you that in the past few years, in a course I teach in American Studies, when I reach the point in my popular music sequence and introduce the roots of hip-hop -- complete with music blasting out of speakers -- I always make sure that the students listen to the whole of "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." I always get a few cringes over the course of the year at different points from the young people. They like Louis Armstrong, but Charlie Parker is a little to fast for them. The like Muddy Waters, but Bessie Smith is a little too strong. They like Buck Owens, but Hank Williams, Sr. is a little too dark.

When I start up "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," the students get it, right from the first note. They lock in on the groove, they laugh, they admire the flow of the words. They get it: attitude, and all. it's Marvin Gaye meets the Last Poets -- and yes, my students get both of those references. Light a candle, say a prayer, write a poem. May the Godfather of Rap be at peace. His sound lives on.

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5/22/11

Playlist – Jazz Café, 5/22

Song, Artist, Album

Sweet Georgia Brown, Monty Alexander, Uplift

The (One of a Kind) Shimmy, Either/Orchestra, Mood Music for Time Travellers

The Dancing Monk, Eric Reed, The Dancing Monk

An Oscar for Treadwell, Ferit Odman, Nommo

My Love and I, Charlie Hayden Quartet West, Sophisticated Ladies

Infatuation, Matt Nelson Trio, Nostalgiamaniac

Lush Life, Terell Stafford, This Side of Strayhorn

Daleks, Niccolo Farac, Toyko 2674

It's Not Polite To Point, George Goodwin's Big Phat Band, That's How We Roll

Swing Thing, Georg Cocron, Eclectic Electric Guitar

Samba D'Blue, Mulgrew Miller and Wingspan, The Sequel

Get Out of Town, Nnenna Freelon, Homefree

See You At the Fair, Ben Webster, See You At the Fair

Hoe-Down, Oliver Nelson, The Blues and the Abstract Truth

Night and Day, Stephane Grappelli, So Easy to Remember

Birks' Works, Dizzy Gillespie, Jazz Masters 10

Freddie Freeloader, Miles Davis, Kind of Blue

Oh What A Beautiful Morning, Ray Charles & Count Basie Orchestra, Ray Sings Basie Swings

Detour Ahead, Bill Evans Trio, Waltz for Debby

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5/21/11

Guest Host - Jazz Cafe, Sunday 5/22

It's been about a month since I was last on the air, so once again I'll be filling in for Ed Blanco on WDNA's Sunday morning Jazz Cafe from 7-9 am. I'll play the usual mix of non-apocalyptic jazz, blues, and creative backbeats. In the second hour, I'll be making a concerted effort to play a little more than the usual music from a little more than the usual out-of-the-way placed. Tune at at 88.9 FM in Miami or online at wdna.org.
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5/20/11

Listener's Notes - Miami Jazz Cooperative Rent Party on 5/23

5/19/11

PN Video Jukebox - Paul Whiteman

Tough to find, but we've got clips from Whiteman's band -- inclduing dancing lessons for the Charleston and selections from the 1930s film, King of Jazz.

5/18/11

Reader's Notes - Top Ten Jazz Books

Always a fine starting point for debate, here's a top ten list from writer Reggie Nadelson listing her choices for the Top 10 Jazz books of all time. I won't admit to how many I haven't read on this list, but let's just say I need to get to the library someday soon. Toni Morrison's Jazz checks in at Number Two.

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5/17/11

Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War

Although American jazz artists had been on international tours in various parts of the world almost since the music was invented, it wasn’t until the 1950s that the United States government began to see the value of jazz – America’s original music – in the fight for America’s interests in the global community. When I say, “America’s interests,” I don’t exactly mean the high ideals of freedom and democracy. In the 1950s, with the United States assuming the colonial mantle being abandoned by France and Britain, the White House and the State Department saw the value of sending popular jazz artists to generate good-will in the very places where, behind the scenes, the US was, well, behaving rather badly. That is to say, back then, although Dizzy Gillespie might be playing a concert in some Middle East city, at the same time, the Central Intelligence Agency might be planning a coup to replace that nation’s president.

This sort of thing happened more often than you might suspect, and in the new book Satchmo Blows Up the World, author Penny von Eschen presents a thorough and intelligent history of how jazz and the Cold War were so intimately intertwined. You might say that jazz music provided the mute to some of the noisier (or at least sneakier) activities of the US during the Cold War.

Beginning with a 1954European tour of Porgy and Bess sponsored by that well-known patron of the arts Dwight Eisenhauer, the State Department soon officially took over the annual recruitment and management of jazz tours to various “areas of special interest” in the world. Dizzy Gillespie’s band visited the Middle East and South America; Benny Goodman and his orchestra swung through Thailand, Cambodia, South Korea, Japan, and other spots in the far east. The Dave Brubeck Quartet traveled through Poland, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and even were even in Iraq during a coup in 1958. On and on the list of musicians and nations goes – Louis Armstrong in Ghana, Duke Ellington in St. Petersburg, Mahalia Jackson in India, Buddy Guy in Zanzibar, and Blood Sweat and Tears in Romania. Professor von Eschen has been thorough in her research, and although she perhaps includes too much detail, the accounts of American artists interacting with local musicians are almost always compelling.

One of the paradoxes at the heart of these government-sponsored tours lies in the double standard they suggest as far as race is concerned. Even as many parts of the United States and many American public officials attempted to interfere with the civil rights movement, overseas, African American artists and integrated jazz bands were held up as embodying American freedom and tolerance.

More encouraging, however, is the growing acceptance in the public and in official circles of government support of the arts. What began in some of Roosevelt’s WPA projects and developed with the State Department’s musical tours soon became official and permanent policy in the forms of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. More importantly, still, is the recognition that of all the gifts American has to offer the world, its rich cultural traditions are often the most appealing ones, and the ones most worthy of official support.

5/16/11

Louis Armstrong and Paul Whiteman: Two Kings of Jazz

Louis Armstrong and Paul Whiteman: Two Kings of Jazz is written by Joshua Berrett, a professor of music at Mercy College in New York. Professor Berrett has his work cut out for him. Although almost everyone knows who Louis Armstrong is, realtively few will know anything about Whiteman.

Paul Whiteman is recognized for a number of things. From the 1920s and well into the 1940s, was the leader and guiding force behind one of the most consistently popular bands of the day, known collectively as Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra. His orchestra was known for cultivating and promoting the talents of musicians like George Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael, Bix Biederbecke, Frank Trumbauer, Bing Crosby, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, and Jack Teagarden, among many others. As you might imagine, his orchestra was, as a recording ensemble and on tour, a model of profitable enterprise. Though he never laid claim to the title, for decades, Whiteman did let himself be promoted as the so-called “King of Jazz.” In 1930, a big-budget movie bearing the title of King of Jazz was released, featuring Whiteman and his players. Paul Whiteman is also known in some jazz circles as the “white man” who stole the creative fruits of African American musicians, watered it down for mainstream white audiences, and took his money straight to the bank, thank you very much. Berett’s book does a fair job of dispelling this unfair characterization.

As for Louis Armstrong, well, everyone knows his essential role in creating the basic vocabulary of jazz expression and, in a larger sense, of 20th century American music. But even as late as the 1940s, Armstrong’s central importance to the music was largely overlooked. In 1949, a Time magazine cover showing Louis with a crown made of trumpets appeared to bequeath the title of King of Jazz to what was more likely its proper owner. Interestingly, Berrett highlights evidence of Armstrong’s playing more traditional – so-called – classical forms of music at certain points early in his career.

Just as Whiteman might not have been as much of a square as some thought, neither was Armstrong completely unschooled in more traditional European forms of music.

Berrett’s book, Two Kings of Jazz, makes it clear that neither musician thought much of the title of “King.” Likewise, the definition of the word jazz itself has always been somewhat, well, controversial. Whiteman hesitated to call his particular type of popular orchestrated music strictly jazz, usually preferring the term symphonic jazz. In his later years, he often said he hoped he had made a contribution to “the American musical form.” And while Louis Armstrong certainly played jazz music, he was known to have defined jazz as “anything that can be communicated to the public.” Whiteman, it seems, understood jazz as a style that he could incorporate into his largely commercial music; Armstrong understood jazz in a very broad and artistic manner. If generalizations apply in the stories of Whiteman and Armstrong, then, its not as much about the difference between race as the difference between commerce and art.

Where Two Kings of Jazz does a real service is in finding the common ground between Whiteman and Armstrong – in the music they shared, the musicians who played with them both, and in the common musical times they both lived in. To some extent, the segregation between the white world and black was nothing the musicians could have overcome on their own. Racism ran too deep into the roots of American society.

5/14/11

Reader's Notes - Science Fiction Recommendations

From today's UK Guardian is an excellent list of science fiction titles and authors from an excellent list of science fiction authors. Not only do the likes of Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. LeGuin, and William Gibson weigh in on their favorites, each author has written a paragraph of explanation for her or his choice. Even the reader's comments -- with short lists of their own -- are worth a look. Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination earns special merit by twice being named a favorite.

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5/12/11

PN Video Jukebox - Bobby 'Blue' Bland

Still going after all these years, Bobby 'Blue' Bland has a career singing the blues that reaches back to 1951

5/10/11

Bix: The Definitive Biography of a Jazz Legend

Considered a genius by his fans and fellow musicians, Bix Beiderbecke was a master cornet player, and, for those who heard him, one of the most inspiring jazz musicians of his day – inspiring white jazz musicians that is. Leaving behind a long list of recordings from the 1920’s – the historical Jazz Age – Bix’s original style has its roots in New Orleans jazz and classical composers such as Debussy and Ravel. During the 20s, Bix was known for his the legendary amounts of bootleg liquor he drank, to the point where he immune system was badly damaged, hastening his early death in 1931 at the age of 27. Although an excellent novel, The Young Man with the Horn, by Dorothy Baker, has been written based on the life of Bix, the biographical scholarship on Beiderbecke has been, at worst, self-serving and, at best, sloppy.

At long last, here in the United States, we have the publication of Jean Pierre Lion’s Bix: The Definitive Biography of a Jazz Legend, winner of several jazz writing awards in France and a best-seller there to boot. Translated into English by a very skilled team of three writers, Lion’s biography is meticulously researched, thorough without ever being tedious, direct and clear in its prose, and sympathetic to the troubled cornetist without downplaying his faults and personal failings. As Lion reconstructs Bix’s life, it is very clear that from an early age, Beiderbecke cared for little else but playing music, and neither the patience nor the affluence of his family could deter Bix from dropping out of the life he could have had and pursuing the peripatetic, perpetually bibacious life of a jazz musician during the period of Prohibition.

Influenced by the original Dixieland Jazz Band, Bix quickly established himself as a highly-original, sweet-sounding, and lyrical soloist – first in a group called the Wolverines, and then in Jean Goldkette’s Orchestra and other groups with his close friend, the saxophonist Frank Trumbauer. By the end of 1927, Bix was playing with the immensely popular Paul Whiteman Orchestra – a group that played more popular dance music than hot jazz. Contrary to legend, playing with Whiteman’s top-of-the-pops group did not drive Bix to drink – in fact, Lion shows that Bix was quite happy in his role as the “stunt soloist” in the orchestra. If anything, Bix’s chronic drinking – by this point he was a full-blown alcoholic – and his difficulty in reading music made the already demanding work in the Whiteman Orchestra unmanagable for him. Lion clearly demonstrates that Bix’s alcoholism – and its consequences for Beiderbecke’s health and well-being – are what did him as a musician. In the end, the drink overwhelmed his talent.

In addition to presenting Bix in such a fair and balanced manner, author Lion provides interesting portraits of Beiderbecke contemporaries like Trumbauer, Whiteman, Hoagy Carmichael, Mezz Mezzrow. His description of the acoustic recording techniques of the 20s is excellent, and his exhaustive discography of Bix recordings – already available for several years on the web – is included here in an updated print form. This book is an essential text in any well-stocked jazz library.

5/8/11

Reader's Notes - Jazz Profiles: Rudy Van Gelder

Here's an excellent piece on longtime producer and engineering master Rudy Van Gelder from Steve Cerra at Jazz Profiles. Cerra routinely does excellent work in adding a new angle or riff to familiar jazz territory on his blog. Happy Mother's Day -- and I also include the Mothers of Invention, if not Frank Zappa himself.

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5/7/11

Reader's Notes - Free Comic Book Day

A little on the late side for the East Coast, but everyone should remember it's Free Comic Book Day, so get on the InterTubes and look up your nearest comic book vendor. If I'm in Miami, I hit Outland Station, but one of the best in the country is Tate's in Lauderhill.

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5/5/11

PN Video Jukebox - Charlie Parker

Footage is a little hard to find, but here are four good clips of Bird.

5/3/11

Chasin' the Bird: The Life and Work of Charlie Parker

Charlie Parker, arguably the greatest saxophonist of all time, was born in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1920. After that, it seems, the details begin to get fuzzy.

In his biographical study of Parker, Chasin’ the Bird, the Life and Legacy of Charlie Parker, author Brian Priestly tries to clarify some of the facts about the often confusing, contradictory, and catastrophic life of one of jazz’s most notorious figures. As with any cultural figure who achieves iconic status – history has become legend, legend has become myth. Sooner or later, the fragile truth’s of a person’s life become lost amid the babble of historians, critics, and fans.

Author Brian Priestly is the co-author of The Rough Guide to Jazz and has written biographies of Charles Mingus and John Coltrane. He is a prolific critic and a respectable jazz pianist as well. His knowledge of jazz is both broad and deep, and his Chasin’ the Bird examines the life and work of Charlie Parker with intelligence and restraint. It is not an encyclopedia of all things Charlie Parker. Rather, the bulk of the book traces what can be known for sure about his life, his music, and his personality.

There’s a fine bibliographical chapter for folks who would care to do their own research. Given Parker’s relatively spotty, impulsive, and often-bootlegged recording career, the book’s sixty page discography will no doubt be useful to serious collectors. Overall, Priestly seems comfortable with presenting you with what he admits is an incomplete and imperfect portrait of the man. In the end, though, readers will likely appreciate the limits on authorial self-indulgence.

Most people making an effort to get to know the life of Charlie Parker –more than most usefully listening to his music – will have seen the Clint Eastwood film Bird, starring Forrest Whittaker as the legend himself. But because Bird’s own life was such a mess, the movie creates more problems in point of view and chronology than it solves. A few things are clear about Parker’s life. He had a challenging childhood; he was a musical genius, a virtuoso reedman and, essentially, the inventor of bebop; ; he yearned for larger material success and cultural recognition; he was an addict and an alcoholic; he was a victim of racism; some of his peers facing similar problems overcame them and prevailed; other peers could not overcome and succumbed to mental illness and drug abuse. This is why, as Priestly suggests, the music is the most important thing to pay attention to. Those fast, brilliant, perfect lines tell you almost everything you need to know. Charlie Parker could fly in ways that folks never imagined before.

4/28/11

PN Video Jukebox - Wayne Shorter

Clips from the later parts of Wayne Shorter's career.

4/26/11

Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter

With Wayne Shorter’s cooperation, writer Michelle Mercer has put together a hip and solid book, entitled Footprints, taking its name from one of Shorter’s most famous compositions. Shorter himself was interviewed extensively for the book. Between the lines, readers will see that, if anything, Mercer succeeds in helping us understand the complex personality of a jazz legend who is, shall we say, far out.

Now in his seventies, Shorter has been in the midst of a career renaissance. Behind his so-called comeback might be a moment in 1991, when Shorter paid a visit to his longtime friend and creative collaborator Miles Davis. Davis said what would be the trumpeter’s final words to his friend. “You know,” he told Shorter, “you need to be more exposed.” From that point, you might say, Shorter has tried to find his way back to his jazz roots of composition, an eclectic interest in world music, and acoustic playing. And that has made all the difference. This fall’s release of a two-CD career overview, also entitled Footprints, is another part of this process of Shorter’s genuinely humble approach to staking his claim as being a living legend.

Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1933, Wayne Shorter was on the fast track to becoming a jazz legend, it seems from the very start. Raised in a family that cultivated his interest in visual art, movies, literature, and music, Shorter was always confident in his creative abilities. Growing up in Newark and studying music at New York University also meant that Shorter was as close to the most innovative music of the day – bebop – in his formative years. In a sense, having his formative years coincide with those of bebop encourages in Shorter an ongoing drive in his music for finding new realms of music to explore.

By the late 50s, Shorter was playing tenor and contributing his own compositions to Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, and from there he moved to the celebrated Miles Davis Quintet of the mid-60s – a band which featured, as most will know, not only Shorter, but Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. With Shorter writing for the group and serving, in Davis’s words, as the “intellectual musical catalyst,” the Quintet experimented with what they called anti-music, that is, improvisation with the idea of taking apart the structure of the song. Listen to the Shorter composition, “Dolores,” on Miles Smiles and you’ll hear a hint of things to come. Much of what the Quintet began exploring in those few memorable years led to Davis’s work on Bitches Brew and afterwards, as well as Shorter’s next group, the fusion conglomerate Weather Report. When any discussion of jazz history gets to fusion – mercy, things get uncomfortable. Fusion, as this book presents it, was a by-product of money, ego, and technology that, in the end, led to the dissipation of the talents of many jazz musicians. Fortunately, Shorter did manage to play with his old Quintet buddies (along with Freddie Hubbard) in VSOP during those years. But, Mercer’s biography is charitable when dealing with Shorter’s years among the stadiums, synthesizers, and studio services -- although he was always writing his own music, and, occasionally, recording. It hasn’t been until recently that Shorter has found musicians – those relative youngsters in his current Quartet – who seem technically and creatively capable of keeping up with him in a live and acoustic setting. Wayne, some of us have wanted to ask, where have you been?

Of course, Shorter had just been getting on with his life, and there’s plenty of material other than music in this biography. We learn of Shorter’s interest in Buddhism, of his love of movies, and of his personal struggles and family tragedies. But for Shorter, it seems, the footprints of his life never stayed far from the path of music. The music, in the end, always led him back home.

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4/24/11

Dizzy: The Life and Times of John Birks Gillespie

It’s a strange but true saying that nice guys finish last, and this saying applies, in some ways to the great jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie. Although Dizzy in no way finishes last in any jazz conversation – you never get too far down the list of jazz giants before Gillespie’s name appears – he importance is often overshadowed by contemporaries such as Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.

In a new biography by Donald L. Maggin, whose last book examined the life of tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, the legendary Gillespie receives his due share of historical reassessment. Dizzy’s crucial importance in the history of jazz’s development may be overlooked in part because he made very difficult things look very easy, and, in part, it may be because his life story lacks the sordid or mysterious glamour of Parker and Davis.

But biographer Maggin makes it very clear just how prodigal and ambitious Gillespie was from the very beginning. Determined, with his family, to escape the sharecropping life in South Carolina, Dizzy quickly found that music was his magic carpet to ride to personal fulfillment and material success. Barely more than 20 years old in 1938, Gillespie would find himself in New York City on the verge of developing – along with Kenny Clarke, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk – an entirely new approach to playing music. Gillespie and his colleagues called it modern jazz – although it came to be known as bebop – and it offered a wide-open and virtuosic style of writing and improvisation that made the prevailing swing music of the time seem slow and boring. Historically, most people credit Charlie Parker with “discovering” bebop, but Dizzy more than anyone else was able to synthesize all the contributions of its founders into a coherent new way of playing. And Gillespie was bebop’s public face and leading emissary in the new music’s struggle for mainstream acceptance in the years to come.

An often overlooked contribution of Gillespie’s, too, are his approach to leading a band. Dizzy insisted upon an extremely high standard of technical mastery from all those he played with – in fact, developing the idea of a “virtuoso ensemble” where everyone – all the horn players and the rhythm section – could play anything at any time and in any way imaginable. In his big bands and small combos, too, he set up the idea – later copied by Art Blakey and Miles Davis – making his groups both a laboratory for developing new ideas from young talent and as a musical finishing school for those players.

Gillespie, too, was central in bringing Latin elements into the vocabulary of jazz – first in his development of Afro-Cuban jazz with 1940s musicians Mario Bauza and Chano Pozo, into the 80s and 80s with Arturo Sandoval and Paquito D’Rivera. Just as Gillespie was interested in expanding the harmonic vocabulary of music through bebop, he expanded the music’s rhythmic vocabulary as well with the infusion of Chono Pozo’s polyrhythms in his early Afro-Cuban music, which paid tribute to the Yoruba ancestors that both Gillespie and Pozo had in common.

Some would argue that Gillespie lost his way a bit in his later decades when he became caught up in his role as sometime musical ambassador to the world, in participating in the civil rights movement, even in his half-serious campaign for president. But Gillespie, who never succumbed as did his contemporaries to his darker demons, was a man of generous spirit and social conscience. He remained, to the end, an expansive musical thinker, a bighearted teacher of his knowledge of music, and a champion of the universal appeal of the music he loved.

4/21/11

PN Video Jukebox - Oscar Peterson

A real treasure trove of clips from the great pianist Oscar Peterson, including a complete set of segments from Peterson's appearance on the BBC's 'Words and Music.'

4/19/11

My Sax Life: A Memoir by Paquito D'Rivera

Born in Havana, Cuba in 1948, Paquito D’Divera was raised from a very early age – under the close supervision of his virtuoso father – to be a musician of the first order. A child prodigy on the clarinet and saxophone, D’Rivera became famous in Cuba and in Puerto Rico performing in classical concert halls and on television in all sorts of musical styles. While working in the inconsistently tolerant artistic environment of Castro’s Cuba, as a young man, he became one of the founding members and eventually the conductor of the Orquesta Cubana de Musica Moderna. D’Rivera was also a founding member and co-director of the innovative musical group Irakere, whose explosive mixture of jazz, rock, classical and traditional Cuban music had never been heard before. The group toured extensively throughout America and Europe, won several Grammy nominations and a Grammy. Then, in the early 80s, stepping off a plane in a Madrid airport, D’Rivera left his musical life – as well as his wife and son – behind in Cuba, defecting in hopes of a better life. In very little time, at least professionally, D’Rivera had settled in New York and was performing, recording, and writing music – in both the classical and jazz worlds -- as never before. These days, of course, D’Rivera has reunited with his family and rebuilt his life as have so many Cuban exiles – two million, is it? – around the world.

With talents that reach beyond the world of music, D’Rivera published a novel, Oh, La Habana, and now the English translation of his memoir Mi vida saxual, known to us gringos as My Sax Life. Weigh in in at a generous 349 pages, My Sax Life is a bawdy, intelligent, artistic, and unconventional work of autobiography. Without being egotistical or self-indulgent, and with good-humor and a great deal of heart, this book offers more than a poquito of Paquito on every page. Although I’ve never met the man, it seems safe to say that the personality of the author comes across in each anecdote from his native Cuba, each detailed memory of performing, each gleefully recounted practical joke or naughty story, each off-the-cuff rant against Castro and communism. There is rarely a dull moment.

D’Rivera is at his best when he writes about music, musicians, and other artists, when he describes the distinctive qualities of the Cuban national character – if there is such a thing. He is most shockingly entertaining when he permits himself to be profane and even crude. Unfortunately, he is most tedious when, as often and understandably happens, he falls into the one-note political riff so many Cuban exiles are – understandably – prone to. But, as anyone in Miami will know, you can’t dislike someone like Paquito for long for his politics – he’s just got too much talent and charisma. And My Sax Life is no different. Like any good jazz performance and jazz performer, you won’t know quite where you’re going when you get started with D’Rivera, and you might not like a few things along the way, but when the show’s over you heard some things you’d never heard before and you were glad you came.

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