Jeremy Steig – Flute Fever

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“It is extremely difficult to attempt a description of Jeremy's abilities. Just a bit of listening to him play will show you, I think, his virtuosity as well as the remarkable innovations he has made in the expressive capabilities of the flute.

These breakthroughs come about as a result of a player's compul­sion to express something which was heretofore not con­sidered part of the technical and emotional spectrum of his instrument. Thus, especially through the medium of jazz, instrumental expressive potential has been continually ex­panded.

Jeremy's playing also has a side of intensity that occasionally might defy belief. I played flute and piccolo for fourteen years and therefore feel a justification for my high estimation of Jeremy's exceptional scope as a flutist.

Certainly one can be sure that he plays his true instrument and perhaps his example exemplifies the difference between playing one's primary instrument as opposed to doubling from one's primary instrument.”

- Bill Evans, Jazz pianist

A friend of these pages who lives in New Zealand recently commented on the number of excellent Jazz recordings from the halcyon days of the music that have never made it to CD.

The context for this observation was the repair of some equipment which allowed him to once again play LP’s … aka … “vinyl.”

I knew exactly what he meant as at the time of his message, I was working on this review of one such album – Jeremy Steig’s Flute Fever featuring Denny Zeitlin on Piano” [Columbia CS 8936].

Actually, I got to Jeremy through the pianist Denny Zeitlin who, under the auspices of the legendary producer John Hammond, had recorded both his Carnival and Cathexis trio albums for Columbia Records around the same time as his date with Jeremy in the mid-1960s. [As an aside, neither of these early Columbia LPs by Denny had made it to the digital world until they were recently reissued by Michael Cuscuna’s team at Mosaic Records as part of its 3-CD Mosaic Select series.]

I doubt that there was any coincidence involved as producer Hammond always had a knack for pairing-up musicians who performed well together dating back to his introduction of vibraphonist Lionel Hampton to clarinetist Benny Goodman in the mid-1930’s which created the classic Benny Goodman Quartet with pianist Teddy Wilson and drummer Gene Krupa.

Another factor that brought Jeremy and Denny’s Flute Fever to mind was my desire to develop a video tribute to Jazz flute players.

I’ve made previous videos for my dadocerra YouTube channel celebrating “the art of …” playing other instruments in a Jazz format, but I hadn’t gotten around to developing one celebrating Jazz Flute players, as yet.

While searching for an audio track to accompany my usual slideshow approach to such videos, I remembered how much I had enjoyed Flute Fever when it was first issued and went searching for it in a digital format.

Sadly, none existed.

In addition to the great music on the album, upon rediscovering my LP version of it, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the liner notes for the album were written by Willis Conover.

I think that Willis did more for the advancement and understanding of Jazz than any, other individual through his worldwide Voice of America radio broadcast. Willis was also the Master of Ceremonies for the Newport Jazz Festival during the early years of its existence. He died in 1996.

I thought it would be great to remember Willis on the JazzProfiles blog with a reprinting of his writings about Flute Fever featuring Denny Zeitlin on Piano” [Columbia CS 8936].

Following Willis’ annotations, you’ll find a video tribute to Jazz flutists with Jeremy Steig’s rendition of What Is This Thing Called Love, on which he and pianist Denny Zeitlin are joined by Ben Tucker on bass and Ben Riley on drums.

“Kookiness is in the eye of the beholder.

You can fit your own flaws into a kind of harmony, so they don't bug you anymore but seem proper parts of the pattern. Toward your own kookiness you can direct a kindly blind spot, as the arsenic-taker gradually doses himself to immunity.

Charity, then, toward kookiness in others. It's a side-effect of the fierce determination to be one's self; and. while flute players often seem to have a corner on it. all artists are kooks, seen against the norm. The norm you can see in any television situation-"comedy" series, also in the commercials, out there by the lake in the woods with the girl smoking menthol. God forbid you should look Mediterranean. The kooks wind up in jails and rest homes and history books, on soap boxes and gallery walls and guillotines and phonograph records.

Ladies and gentlemen: Jeremy Steig. Little young man with no tie, no job. a broken head, a subtone voice and a furious flute. He's been playing flute 8 or 9 years, since he was 12. and playing jazz since 15. Nothing steady; one-nighters from time to time. He had a Sunday group for a while with Paul Bley and Gary Peacock, has been invited to sit in by Jim Hall, Teddy Kotick. Tal Farlow and Joe Roland, and dis-invited by Herbie Mann. As Jeremy says. "Usually in liner notes they write all about a guy's history. I don't have a history."

A year ago, Jeremy cracked up a motor bike and paralyzed his face. Unable to play, he started to draw, even planned to become a muralist. (All the Steigs are artists of one sort or another. The picture on the front cover is by Jeremy.) An operation left one side of his face still partly paralyzed. He wasn't supposed to play again.

"I took a week to decide whether to be a musician again or not. It was a tortured week. After all, I could make a living and a satisfaction at art."

He decided for flute. To permit the paralyzed side of his mouth to blow air into the flute, he cut himself a special blinder-like mouthpiece to insert in his cheek when he plays. He can't play without it.

Not playing, he is wary, almost lost. Playing (or draw­ing), he is bold, wildly humorous, frantic as a bird and apparently awful mad at someone. Musicians playing "angry" often suggest they're playing this way because anger is "in" and Malcolm may be watching; they'll be nice folks when they stop. With Jeremy, I don't know.

His anger sounds real, here. Maybe he was mad at John Hammond. That's possible; I know the feeling. Actually, Jeremy has what always interests John: emotion! His fluting matches Lionel Hampton's vibesing in its mix of near hysteria and high musicianship. He knows it, too.

"I have a different way of blowing. The way I attack the notes, the way I join one note to another, is much more clean than anyone I've ever heard. Not choppy." All right, he's bragging you think, so you're prepared to dislike him. Wait a minute. He's simply speaking as honestly as he plays. Besides, he's answering blunt questions.

There's more.

"I'm not Dizzy Gillespie and I know it. But I have a contribution. If you want to hear that kind of music you've got to come to me."

The contribution?

"I play Jazz on the flute. The easy thing to do is put vibes and guitar with it and play pretty. This is wrong. The flute is a strong instrument. It has more guts than almost any other instrument. It shouldn't be played with a thin sound, and it almost always is, because it's always the second horn for some sax-player."

All this, almost inaudibly. Then:

"There are lots of guys I respect so much I can't even talk to them. Thelonious Monk. Miles Davis, once, I couldn't even come up to talk to."

In most of his performances here. Jeremy sings a haranguing vocal unison with his flute-playing, a kind of glossolalia, not real words. The trick isn't original - Roland Kirk and Sam Most do it. Slam Stewart used to hum with his bass-bowings, and Jeremy picked it up from hearing Yusef Lateef singing with a flute on a rec­ord.  

Jeremy's "speaking in tongues" is neither blarney, however, nor bluster.

"One of the reasons I sing with flute is to show people I know what I'm playing—those are the notes I meant, not just accidents from fooling around experimentally."

Why is there so much door-slamming strength in Jeremy's playing, when he's so quiet the rest of the time?

"I save it up. Since I was a kid I've had a kind of impotent anger. I've never been able to get angry— except in music. Actually, it's an expression of frustra­tion, but not of hate."

His record debut is pretty rich fare, a lot of calories for one setting. The material seems cannily chosen for its appeal to contemporary jazz cliques: Monk (Well, You Needn't), Miles (So What) and Sonny Rollins (0leo and Blue Seven). One suspects it wasn't Steig's decision to odd the two tasty ballads; but a record is to be sold as well as to be heard, and pacing is important.

"Monk's tunes," he says, "are like children's songs. I play Monk for my little sister. They're very free tunes. I never think about the changes, with Monk; I relate to the melody." He praises Horace Silver and Sonny Rollins, too, as writers. Rollins's Blue Seven, he says, "is so far above the usual B-flat blues. Playing it was like being in

the clouds; I was so carried away, I almost hated to come back to the tune." The piece begins with the rhythmic flavor of George Russell's "Stratosphunk." Ben Tucker's bass walking as if avoiding cracks in the sidewalk. All (our musicians solo in this number, sometimes simul­taneously (it could only happen in America). Finally, at the terminal, Jeremy pulls the train whistle.

So What is taken at the faster tempo Miles Davis likes now instead of the original medium-slow pace. Jeremy used to be put down for playing it this way because it was "not the way Miles plays it."

0leo, a last-minute insert in one take, is Jeremy's choice for best track. "Everything I did was original with myself. I wasn't leaning back on anything I'd ever done with Oleo before."

As this is Jeremy's record, and as pianist Denny Zeitlin will star soon in his own album, copy is properly short on Zeitlin, here. And for a first entrance Stage Left may be better than Center Stage: while the star has the spot­light, people whisper "Yeah, but who's that over there?" That's Dennis Zeitlin, a half year from a medical degree at John Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, then in­ternship toward professional psychiatry.

Medical school." Zeitlin says, "is the most rigid pledge-ship I've ever undergone. I've been on a tougher schedule the past 3 ½ years than I'll ever be on, and still played piano. I love medicine as much as music." He'll stay active in both—a neat trick, with dividends; like Somerset Maugham, he won't have to scuffle at his art. "I can play more of what I feel is in myself instead of play­ing what I have to for hamburgers."

In a field blooming with piano-players, the path to Denny Zeitlin leads past Bill Evans ("I've probably ad­mired Evans more than any other pianist") by way of Oscar   Peterson's  articulation  and  George  Russell's searching-with-fire. After that you're on your own, as Zeitlin's playing is. There's remarkable music from the side of the stage. Bassist Ben Tucker, too. was a new face before at a party in Hammond's home. As I said, Jeremy Steig doesn't have a regular group, or a regular job. And "I can do a thousand things I didn't show on this record, but I didn't feel them at the time. And you've got to feel it."

A real kook. An artist, trying to create something, to do his things his way, and then, if possible, to make a living. You may find him sitting in at Page Three or some other joint in Greenwich Village. You'll recognize Jeremy easily. He looks 16, he's beardless even though he car­ries a sketchbook, and when he plays flute he sounds like this.

(At this point, play record.)

WILLIS CONOVER”