Jazz Profiles: July 2012

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Dave Holland 5tet - Metamorphos [1999]

The musicianship on display in this video by Dave Holland on bass, Billy Kilson on drums, Steve Nelson on vibes, Robin Eubanks on trombone and Chris Potter, making a rare appearance on alto saxophone, his original instrument, is awesome to behold. Program music based around tonal points, chromaticism, motifs and riffs and rhythms. It's the way a lot of young guys hear the music these days. Stick around for Chris' solo beginning at 9:14 minutes. Charles Mingus must be smiling. The tune is Prime Detective.

Monday, July 30, 2012

Bobby, Roger and The Animals

Ahmet Ertegun, one of the co-founders of Atlantic Records, was a big supporter of Rhythm and Blues music as well as a devotee of Rock ‘n Roll in its fledgling years.

His brother, Nesuhi, produced Jazz recordings for the Atlantic label including the Modern Jazz Quartet’s No Sun in Venice and Pyramid, John Coltrane’s Giant Steps and Coltrane Plays the Blues, and a host of other Jazz albums by Milt Jackson, Mose Allison, Jimmy Giuffre and Shorty Rogers, among others.

Ahmet always maintained that his involvement with the commercially lucrative Rock and R & B music enabled him to subsidize his brother Nesuhi’s less-than-profitable ventures into Jazz.

One of his most successful forays into Rock was Ahmet’s decision to record Bobby Darin’s Splish, Splash. It was a record that would sell a million copies for the then, virtually unknown Darin.

Ironically, almost 10-years later, Darin, now and internationally recognized celebrity, would leave Atlantic and establish his own label [Direction Records] over a dispute with Ahmet and Arif Mardin [who had become Bobby’s producer at the label in 1963] involving Bobby’s fervent wish to record the music from Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley’s Doctor Dolittle.

As recounted by Fred Dellar in his notes to Bobby Darin Sings Doctor Dolittle:

“Bobby Darin constantly re-invented himself. Initially, he'd been a teen idol, littering the charts with the likes of Splish, Splash and Queen Of The Hop. Then he opted to become the new Sinatra, fashioning songs such as Beyond The Sea and Lazy River for a whole new set of swingin' lovers. Once, Bobby even moved into R&B to cut an album of Ray Charles songs, using Ray's own back-up singers, while in 1966 he moved on yet again, linking with the contemporary folk field, and emulating the likes of Tim Hardin. After two critically hailed albums (If I Were A Carpenter and Inside Out) filled with material mainly penned by Hardin and John Sebastian, Darin decided that it was time for a change yet again. No-one was going to classify him, place him in some 'file under' category. It was time for a return to show-biz, a time to dust down the tux, head in a Hollywood direction. But, being Darin, it would not be a mere return to former glories. Nothing as easy as that. Instead, Bobby decided to create a whole album based around his interpretations of a film score. His choice for the project was Doctor Dolittle, a musical penned by Leslie Bricusse, who'd previously collaborated with Anthony Newley on The Roar Of The Greasepaint - The Smell Of The Crowd and Stop The World -I Want To Get Off, the latter a Broadway hit that ran for 555 performances.

Doctor Dolittle, a movie that co-starred Rex Harrison, Anthony Newley, Samantha Eggar and Richard Attenborough, featured a score that had taken Leslie Bricusse 18 months to write. During that period he'd discarded 10 songs and constantly reshaped others. Darin, who'd earlier recorded Bricusse and Newley's Once In A Lifetime, heard the score and loved it. His decision to record it as a complete album pleased Arthur C. Jacobs, the film's producer who claimed: "When Bobby came to us and said he wanted to do his musical impression of Doctor Dolittle, we were flattered but felt that the musical content of our production was out of Bobby's usual style. I mean, in one scene Rex sings a tender ballad When I Look In Your Eyes to a seal! How would that sit with a chap who whirred and whirled with Mack The Knife? Bobby's reply: 'Lead me to it'."

Others were even more incredulous that Darin should want to record the score, his album producer, Arif Mardin, advising him not to go ahead with the project. But, after working on a fine set of arrangements with Roger Kellaway, Bobby made that trip to Western Recorders and shaped an album that has stood the test of time. …”

Pianist-composer-arranger Roger Kellaway summed it up best when he observed: “Bobby was a sensation to work with. He had the knack of knowing exactly what was right for him.”

See what you think as Bobby sings Roger’s arrangement of Talk to the Animals in the following video made with the assistance of the ace graphics team at CerraJazz LTD and the production facility at StudioCerra.

Our latest montage is set in HD images, a format we’ve returned after a long absence.

Sunday, July 29, 2012

"Striking Up The Band" with the Kenny Clarke - Lucky Thompson Quintet

The Blue Note in Paris, 1960. Lucky Thompson on tenor saxophone, Jimmy Gourley on guitar, Alice McLeod Coltrane on piano, Pierre Michelot on bass and Kenny Clarke on drums.

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Having "Cheese Cake" with Dexter, Sonny, Butch and Billy

Bring a cup of coffee or tea and enjoy a slice of Cheese Cake with Dexter Gordon and Company. If you are a Jazz fan, it truly doesn't get any better than Dexter Gordon on tenor saxophone, Sonny Clark on piano, Butch Warren on bass and Billy Higgins on drums. Dexter's Cheese Cake is based on the changes to tenor sax legend Lester Young's tune, Tickle Toe.

Brian and Barbara

I have no idea if trumpeter Brian Lynch and vocalist Barbara Casini know each other or have worked together.

I doubt it because Brian is based in New York and Barbara in

Italy

, but given the international and cosmopolitan flavor of Jazz in the 21^st century, it’s certainly is possible.

Where there is a relationship between the two, and what prompted this posting is that both have recorded terrific versions of the tune – You’ve Changed - Brian on his Bolero Nights, Venus Jazz CD [VHCD 1029] and Barbara along with the Jazz Orchestra of Sardinia, Paolo Silvestri conducting on Agora Ta, ViaVenetoJazz [CD VVJ 076].

Okay, I’ll admit it; I’ve got a thing for Bill Carey and Carl Fischer’s tune having featured two versions on a previous blog piece with interpretations by alto saxophonist Andy Fusco and the sublime, “Sassy Sarah Vaughan.

And early this month [July 7^th], I spotlighted [bloglighted?] the version that Hammond B-3 organist Eddy Louiss recorded along with Belgian Guitarist Rene Thomas and drummer Kenny Clarke for Dreyfus Jazz [Dreyfus Disques FDM-36501-2].

The song’s poignant lyrics assume autobiographical, heart-breaking proportions when one reflects on their long association with vocalist Billie Holiday. The themes of lost love, seeking love and unrequited love were a constant in Billie’s brief and turbulent life [she died in 1959 at the age of forty-four].

What intrigued us about Brian Lynch’s rendition of You’ve Changed is that it is done in the bolero style of Latin Jazz and has a corker of a solo by alto saxophonist Phil Woods. Brian also takes a fine solo as does pianist Zaccai Curtis.

And did you know that the island of Sardinia off the western coast of

Italy

has a fine Jazz orchestra? As you will hear on the following video, it does, indeed, and for Barbara Casini’s vocal version of You’ve Changed, the orchestra is under the direction of Paolo Silvestri who also wrote the arrangement. Be sure and checkout the fine trumpet solo by Giovanni Sanna Passino beginning at 2:42 minutes.

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Joris Roelofs: “The Kids Are Fine”

“All around they see not rivals but mentors. Gravitating to living masters and young gurus, they talk not of themselves but of the greatness of others. As a result, their sound is pure, their language is concise. Although perpetually young-looking, they are the opposite of naïve. Their groove is light and precise and the smile in their eyes maintains a near-constant sparkle.”

- pianist Aaron Goldberg commenting on Joris Roelofs

It’s hard to imagine that someone who is only twenty-eight years old could already be so proficient in today’s Jazz world.

Such is truly the case with Joris Roelofs who was born 1984 in Aix-en-Provence (

France

), raised in Amsterdam (

Netherlands

), and plays saxophones, clarinet, bass clarinet and flute. He began to play classical clarinet at the age of six, and the alto saxophone at the age of twelve.

For one so young, Joris has a considerable list of accomplishments and associations.

He was a member of the Vienna Art Orchestra from 2005-2010. Joris also plays lead alto in the Jazz Orchestra Of The Concertgebouw in the

Netherlands

. He graduated in 2007 as a Master of Music at the Conservatory of Amsterdam. In 2001 Joris won the Pim Jacobs Price. In 2003 he received, as a first non-American, the Stan Getz/Clifford Brown Fellowship Award in the

, organized by the International Association Of Jazz Education (IAJE). The IAJE also honored him with a “First Level” price. In 2004 Joris received the first prize of the prestigious Deloitte Jazz Award in the

Netherlands

, a Dutch Award for young musicians who are just about to start their international carrier. In 2008 he was selected for the Thelonious Monk International Saxophone Competition.

Among others, Joris played with Brad Mehldau, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Christina Branco, Lionel Loueke, Joshua Redman, Chris Potter, Chris Cheek, Eric Harland, Lewis Nash, Aaron Goldberg, Greg Tardy, Ralph Peterson, Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, Pete King, Sonny Fortune, Greg Hutchinson, WDR Big Band, Ari Hoenig, Matt Penman, Alegre Correa.

He was recently asked by Brad Mehldau to perform with him at the Carnegie Hall in New York and Sanders Theatre in Boston. At age 16 Joris performed the famous clarinet introduction of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue for a TV show with the Orkest van het Oosten, and in that same show was also featured as a soloist with the Jazz Orchestra Of The Concertgebouw. He also recorded as a special clarinet soloist with the Metropole Orchestra with Laura Fygi (2004). As a leader he performed several times at the North Sea Jazz Festival, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Smalls Jazz Club in NYC, among other places.

In October 2008 he did a European release tour with Ari Hoenig, Aaron Goldberg and Johannes Weidenmueller to promote his debut album Introducing Joris Roelofs. In 2009 and 2010 he did his second and third tour with Aaron Goldberg, Greg Hutchinson, Reginald Veal, Joe Sanders. Joris also plays in a trio with Jesse van Ruller and Clemens van der Feen, they released their album Chamber Tones and toured in

Japan

. Joris’ new CD Live At The Bimhuis will come out the end of August/2011. As a sideman Joris has been playing at a large number of international jazz festivals and jazz clubs, all over the world. He moved to New York City in March 2008.

Pianist Aaron Goldberg wrote these thoughts about Joris and Jazz in New York City for Introducing Joris Roelofs:

“New York remains an artist-magnet. The intrepid flow in from everywhere, their paint brushes or their saxophones on their back, often still searching for a place to sleep. Some show up with a point to prove, and they are usually the first to attract notice. On occasion others arrive with a different kind of special mission. Instead of a moral to teach or an agenda to push, these brave selves search for a lesson to learn. Tey are driven by the love of their art.

All around they see not rivals but mentors. Gravitating to living masters and young gurus, they talk not of themselves but of the greatness of others. As a result, their sound is pure, their language is concise. Although perpetually long-looking, they are the opposite of naïve. Their groove is light and precise and the smile in their eyes maintains a near-constant sparkle.

Perhaps they have some metaphysical guardian, a Vajravarahi [Tibetan Buddhist diety that helps free one from suffering and gain enlightenment through meditations] to help uproot the ego?

Or maybe their meditations just focus on the truly important: line and melody, mouthpiece and embouchure, narrative and harmony, and the rest follows inevitably. These are the true faithful. From the inside they may see only detours, but their paths are straight and their bearing upright. From the outside they glow like the enlightened. More importantly, they are a joy to listen to. Joris Roelofs is one of the rare arrivals.”

With all of this by way of background, “The Kids” such as Joris, Aaron, bassist Matt Penman and drummer Ari Hoenig “are doing just fine” as you can hear for yourself on the sound track to the following video montage.

The tune is pianist Aaron Goldberg’s The Rules which is an excellent example of the kind of tension-and-release, repetitive phrases and sustained tones can create in Jazz. Aaron takes the first solo, followed by Ari on drums with Joris’s solo closing it out before the piece’s “surprise” ending.

[BTW, if the music of Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh, and Lennie Tristano comes to mind while listening to Joris' quartet, your memory is a credit to modern Jazz history].

Joris Roelofs recordings are available as audio CD’s and Mp3 downloads from a number of online retailers.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Red Norvo: The All-But-Forgotten Big Red One

“Red Norvo, …, presents an especially acute challenge to jazz historians. His various musical associations flew in the face of stylistic categories and conventions — perhaps ultimately to the detriment of his career. How else can we explain why this illustrious jazz veteran remained all but forgotten during the 1980s and 1990s, when other survivors of his generation were receiving honorary degrees and various accolades, and were venerated as important elder statesmen of jazz? Certainly one would struggle to find another jazz musician who had made his presence felt in so many different ways as Norvo….

Jazz history books have poorly served this master of many idioms; their rigid categorizations seem incapable of dealing with his chameleon career. Yet Norvo's skillful ability to navigate across artificial stylistic and racial barriers merits both praise and emulation.”

- Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz [pp. 84-85]

Fortunately, on behalf of all of us, based at Fort Riley, KS, the First Infantry Division – aka “The Big Red One” is still in existence and the music of Red Norvo – whom we shall refer to as the “All But Forgotten” Master Mallets Man – continues to live on through compact disc and other digital reissues of his recorded legacy.

For the most part, however, Ted Gioia is correct is his assessment of Red Norvo’s undeserved obscurity in Jazz lore, especially considering his huge contributions to the genre as a musician, band leader and composer.

Thankfully, there are lots more details to be found about Red’s career in Richard Sudhalter’s Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945, pp. 653-705. Here are Mr. Sudhalter’s opening thoughts on Red.

“Otis Ferguson, whose commentaries on jazz and other lively arts for the mid-19305 New Republic can still surprise, wrote with particular insight about Red Norvo. ‘A special conception of music’ was Ferguson's verdict in a 1938 review. ‘Balance, restraint, clean ensembles and no tricks . . . And under a complete delicacy of taste he had the urgent carrying beat without which music like this must be sick or pseudo.’1 [“Red and Mildred,” New Republic, August 17, 1938].

No tricks. How better to describe a musical orientation, an aesthetic, of such utter purity? Just how pure, in fact, becomes clear with the realization that Red Norvo's way of playing music on the xylophone (or, as later, the vibraharp) had no recognizable precedent—and, once formed, it never really changed. From 1933, when he made his first records, straight through to the 1980s, when physical infirmity finally put an end to his playing career, his basic concept remained firmly, radiantly, in place.

Fashions changed around him. Ways of dealing with harmony, melodic lines, laying down a beat, and, starting in the World War II years, even the inner aesthetic of music-making underwent startling transformations. But Norvo's musical sensibility seemed equal to all of it, able to acknowledge and absorb everything without compromising itself.

‘All his music is its own signature’ was Ferguson's way of putting it—and that is a statement of incontrovertible fact. It also places Norvo in the small and ultra-select circle of jazz innovators, true originals.” [p. 653]

Through a recognition of his originality and genius, Red has also managed to find his way into Gunther Schuller’s definitive The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1935-1945 [pp. 513-527]. Mr. Schuller begins his treatment of Red and his music with the following observations about Red’s significance to Jazz.

“One of the finest and most consistently creative musicians of the Swing Era – still quite active today incidentally – was Kenneth Norville, known to the music world as red Norvo. The fact that Norvo played the xylophone – in later years he played the vibraphone as well (or the vibraharp, as he preferred to call it) — in the early 1930s a highly unlikely candidate for a jazz instrument, makes his selection as a major soloist in this chapter all the more remarkable. But the fact is that Norvo accomplished for the xylophone what Coleman Hawkins achieved for the tenor saxophone: he took it from its vaudeville environment and single-handedly brought it into the world of jazz.

But Norvo was (is) more than merely a superior instrumentalist. In the thirties he was an influential force as an innovative soloist and a creative orchestra leader, that is to say, one who saw the jazz orchestra as something more than a vehicle for him to front, as Armstrong and Hawkins, for example, saw bands. For Norvo, a jazz orchestra was a collective instrument which through its style, arrangements, and compositions could make important contributions to the music. Norvo has been, through the years, an outstanding uncompromisingly creative improviser, and at times a startlingly gifted (though little appreciated) composer. 22”

[Footnote #22 reads: Norvo destroyed a whole series of early compositions, similar to his Dance of the Octopus (1933), because Jack Kapp, the head of Brunswick Records, in his great business wisdom, regarded such music as meaningless rubbish and tore up Norvo’s recording contract. Given the caliber of Dance of the Octopus, this senseless decision can only be regarded as one of the great tragedies of American music.]

George T. Simon in the 4^th edition of The Big Bands begins his five-page treatment [pp. 386-390] of Red’s larger group with these words of praise:

“For real listening thrills, few bands could match the one that Red Norvo fronted during the fall of 1936. It was only a small band, ten musicians plus Red, and it wasn't a very famous one then. But the way it swung in its soft, subtle, magnificently musical way, insinuating rather than blasting itself into one's consciousness, gave me one of the most remarkable and satisfying listening experiences I have ever felt.

I use the word "felt," purposely, because this was a band with an underlying sensuous as well as musical appeal. Unlike swing bands that overpowered its listeners, this one underplayed its music, injecting into its unique Eddie Sauter scores a tremendous but subdued excitement—the sort of excitement one experiences not during the culmination of something great but in anticipation of something great. It would swing so subtly and so softly and so charmingly through chorus after chorus of exquisite solos and light, moving ensembles, always threatening to erupt while holding the listener mesmerized, until at long last, when he was about ready to scream "Let me up!" it would charge off into one of its exhilarating musical climaxes. There was never a band like it.”

Although it does not appear to have been reissued on compact disc, Richard Gehman, the fine writer whose work was often featured in Cosmopolitan Magazine, wrote this excellent overview of the first thirty years or so of Red’s career as the liner to the 1957 RCA Victor LP HI-FIve, The Red Norvo Quintet [LPM-1420].

“London

It was the late James Agee, I believe, the poet and critic, who once declared in a review of Oklahoma! that it was not necessary for him to see the play because he knew in advance that it was terrible! This always seemed to me to be criticism of the highest sort, for the critic was not permitting himself to be influenced by any of the crass emotion that characterizes so much on-the-spot evaluation we get these days; and for that reason I am happy to report that I am now doing exactly the same. The Atlantic Ocean and the breadth of the United States lie between me and the music enclosed in this sleeve, but I do not have to hear it to know that it is superb, that it is characterized by a bounce at once merry and gutty, that it is backed by a rhythm section that swings as compellingly as the Page-Jones-Green trio did in the old Basic band, that the soloists burst exuberantly from the ensembles and that the background figures are as interesting as the solos themselves. I know, in short, that this is jazz at its very best, for Red Norvo is perhaps the only jazz musician I know who never delivers anything but first-chair goods.

He has been doing it for a long, long time, too. He was born March 31, 1908, in Beardstown, Illinois, where show boats stopped and permitted him to scramble aboard and get his first taste of the music he later was to assist in developing into one of the few contributions this nation has made to world culture. His sister and two brothers, all older, had driven their parents crazy with noodling attempts at the mastery of various instruments, and when young Kenneth declared that he wanted a xylophone, his father shook his head. Red's name then was Kenneth Norville, by the way. He had a pony his brother Howard had given him, and he loved it. Unfortunately, the pony couldn't reproduce the sounds that were demanding expression even then; he sold it and bought the xylophone and. to the astonishment of everyone in the family, rapidly became proficient. A girl in Beardstown had organized a small band that played church socials, school entertainments, and the like. She had a chance to go to Chicago to audition for an agent and asked Red to go along. His mother gave her permission and off they went. Red was around thirteen. He was utterly terrified and accordingly quite relieved when the man told the group to go back home and practice a little more.

Students of jazz—especially some new English friends of mine, who know every bloody fact about every Ace Brigode record ever made, including what hangers-on were in the studio at the time, how the weather was outside, and who fell down drunk — are going to deplore my next statement. I forget what happened to Red after that first Chicago trip. I believe he simply returned to Beardstown High and had every intention of going on to college. Then an agent who had heard him in Chicago wrote him, asking him to come up to go on a band he was organizing. It was called The Collegians. The boys wore blazers and, sometimes, funny hats. They toured the Midwest, playing dances, fairs and other outdoor gigs, and then returned to Chicago, where they disbanded. The same agent then booked Red with Paul Ash, of Paul Ash and his Quality Serenaders fame. Ash could not pronounce "Norville," for some reason; he said "Norvo" so many times Red finally decided it was better to join it than enjoin the leader. He used the name later when he went out in vaudeville as a single. I wish I had seen him in those days: the stage xylophonist then wore a full blouse, dark trousers and a sash. Some of them affected Mexican mustaches, and they tap-danced in breaks. Occasionally American flags, Teddy bears, streamers and other impedimenta miraculously appeared from their instruments. Red went the route. He laughs and shudders when he recalls his act.

By then it was the summer of 1929, and Red's family wanted him to go to college. He had other plans. He played around Detroit until autumn, then went to join Ocky Wes-lin's band in Minneapolis. There Victor Young, who was working in radio in Chicago, heard him and hired him. Red was always rather vague. He took the job with Young despite the fact that he had almost simultaneously taken one with another band. The latter leader let him out, however, and the Chicago period began.

There need be no mention here of what was romping in Chicago in the early Thirties. Condon was there; so were Mezzrow, Freeman. Tough, McKenzie, Sullivan and all the rest. Red never played much with those boys—a xylophone was too heavy to lug around to sessions — but he loved their music and was profoundly influenced by it, and they in turn respected his. Condon later declared that Red was the only man he ever heard who could make the xylophone sound civilized.

Then another influence entered his life: Mildred Bailey. Her soft, subtle voice and Red's delicate, rhythmic playing went together so well it was probably inevitable that they get married. Afterward they went to New York and joined Whiteman. Red lasted a little over a year. He felt buried in the band and decided that unemployment offered more emotional satisfaction. Mildred continued to work with Whiteman. and Red balled around New York with other transplanted Chicagoans. One summer he, Stew Pletcher, Neil Reid and a few other boys were booked into Bar Harbor, Maine, in a band ostensibly piloted by Rudy Vallee. They took along a portfolio of Fletcher Henderson arrangements which, on the first night, considerably diminished the crowd. On the second night the manager informed them that he was short of cash and would be getting shorter if those Henderson arrangements kept up; the boys told him what he could do and went on blowing. Fortunately, a few of them could fish, which they did; Neil Reid could make pies, and there was an apple orchard nearby. They existed on flounder and apple pie for the remainder of the engagement and were finally sent fare to go home by Mildred.

Back in New York, Red organized a small band and played around 52nd Street. In 1936 he and Mildred formed the celebrated Mr. and Mrs. Swing combination, which in my own private view was the epitome of the style and attitude of the swing-band era that Goodman blew in. How they jumped, and what soloists they were! Even Condon, who ordinarily cannot stand any band made up of more than eight men, listened attentively. There was Herbie Haymer on tenor, for example, and the wonderful Fletcher on trumpet (Fletcher once told Red he would never play with anyone else—and when that band broke up, he never did) and Hank D'Amico on clarinet, and Red's gently phrased, softly pushing xylophone playing obbligatos behind Mildred's sweet voice. Some band. Some marriage, too, characterized by then by various scuffles and rows—to such a degree, in fact, that one day when Red was telling me of some of the battles he and Mildred had had, Lee Meyers leaned over and asked, "Who are you writing this for, Dick? Nat Fleischer?" They finally broke up but remained close, even after Red married Eve Rogers, Shorty's sister.

In 1943 Red switched to vibes. He was the first of the old Chicagoans, with the possible exception of Dave Tough, to recognize the importance of some things Dizzy, Bird and the rest of the boys from uptown were doing. He felt that vibes offered him a better chance to grow. He began to develop with Goodman and Herman, and finally went out on his own again, first with a small band and then with a trio. He and Eve moved to California and settled down to bring up kids and dappled dachshunds. Meanwhile he continued to work and study, and the results are noticeable in his music. In the summer of 1956 he decided the trio was no longer suitable for the expression of the ideas he had, and added a flute and, sometimes, a tenor saxophone. This band is composed of Bill Douglass, on drums; Bob Carter, bass; Bob Drasnin, flute, clarinet and alto sax; Jimmy Wyble, guitar; and, of course, the Man himself. It is substantially the same band that kept me going to The Castle, a Los Angeles restaurant, every night of a three-week visit I made to California last October. It is a wonderful band—wonderfully swingy, wonderfully subtle, wonderfully creative. I wish I could hear it right now, as I write this, and I envy every fortunate buyer of this album the privilege of hearing these numbers.”

A fitting conclusion to our brief visit with Red Norvo, one of the legendary figures in Jazz, can be found, perhaps, in these words from Richard Cook and Brian Morton’s The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6^th Ed.

“Though by no means a one-dimensional figure, Norvo held to a steady course from the early days of bebop to the beginnings of a swing revival in the 1950’s and 60’s. His technique is superb and prefigures much of Milt Jackson's best MJQ passage-work. The early trios are unquestionably the place to begin [Jimmy Raney [g] and Red Mitchell [b]; Tal Farlow [g] and Charles Mingus [b]], but there's plenty of good music later and newcomers shouldn't be prejudiced by the instrumentation. Norvo plays modern jazz of a high order.”

You can hear Red’s trio with guitarist Tal Farlow and bassist Charles Mingus performing Denzil Best’s bebop classic Move on the following video tribute.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Nick Brignola: Roaring and Soaring on Baritone Saxophone

“He favored the big side of the horn, playing a hard-bop vocabulary with great power and command. … his virtues are a great sound, great time, smart tune selection, and a band that cooks at a great temperature.”

- Richard Cook & Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6^th ED.

Having previously posted features on baritone saxophonists Pepper Adams [two parts], Serge Chaloff, Ronnie Cuber, Gerry Mulligan [four parts] and Gary Smulyan, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought it might be fun to spend a little time with the music of Nick Brignola.

As Jazz author and critic, Herb Wong has pointed out: “Although the baritone saxophone is his instant identification, Brignola has a masterful command of a veritable arsenal of a dozen woodwind instruments.” In addition to Nick’s work on baritone, I am especially fond of his work on soprano saxophone.

When Nick solos, the burners are switched on to maximum for as his counterpart on baritone saxophone, Gary Smulyan proclaims: “Nick doesn’t just blow into the horn – he screams into it!”

As is the case with Smulyan, Nick started off as an alto saxophone/clarinet player.

“‘A little more wind and you can play the same stuff.’

Maybe not one of the more interesting quotes in jazz history, but that remark — made by ‘the guy at the music store’ where aspiring alto saxophonist/clarinetist Nick Brignola went to get his alto repaired — changed the course of Brignola's musical life back in the distant '50s. See, the guy at the store didn't have an alto to lend Nick, so, since the baritone's in the same key, he laid the big horn on him.

‘When I brought it on the gig,’ says Nick, ‘the musicians that were on the gig — well, I guess they just hadn't heard a baritone, 'cause they all wigged out. It was like. 'Oh, that's the axe you should play.’” [Lee Jeske, insert notes to Raincheck, Reservoir RSR CD 106].

In interviews, Nick ventured that he was “trying to showcase the baritone saxophone which I think is the horn that best expresses me” and added that what he was trying to do with his music was “… to make a statement, extending the range of the horn.”

When you listen to what Nick can do on the baritone sax, there seems to be little doubt that he has accomplished his objective. The man is all over the axe and seems to take it wherever he wants to go – effortlessly.

This ease of execution on such an awkward instrument can lead to taking what Nick does on the baritone sax for granted until you stop and realize the complexity of the improvisations he is creating.

“When I start playing, swinging is automatic,” Brignola notes, “and I like playing long interesting lines utilizing substitute chord changes.”

Trombonist Bill Watrous says of Nick: “His ideas are unending … he is unflagging and his thrust is unbending.”

Trumpeter Ted Curson observed: “Nick is a natural player. And lot’s of people can get into what he’s doing, but he doesn’t sound like any other musician.”

In his insert notes to Nick’s L.A. Bound CD [Night Life Records NLR 3007] Dr. Herb Wong comments that “Brignola’s solos are fiery and animated. … The character of his playing includes personalizing every note – whether the notes are part of a brief comment or an elongated musical essay.

A value judgment from Woody Herman adds a summary of interest. He has said on several occasions that besides the late Serge Chaloff [the vanguard bop baritone saxophonist of the early Herman “Herd” on the 1940s], he would cite Nick Brignola as ‘the other dynamite baritone player’ he has really dug in the bands that he has led over his 40+ year career as a bandleader.”

With the help of the crackerjack graphics team at CerraJazz LTD and the production facility at StudioCerra, we have developed the following video tribute to Nick on which he is joined by trombonist Bill Watrous, pianist Dwight Dickerson, bassist John Heard and drummer Dick Berk in a performance of Horace Silver’s Quicksilver.

And here is an audio-only performance by the same group of Kenny Dorham’s Blue Bossa this time with Nick featured on soprano saxophone.

Friday, July 20, 2012

Ella and Duke: A Musical Love Affair

According to the following insert notes by Alun Morgan to Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald: Live at the Greek Theater Los Angeles [Status DSTS 1013]:

“The night Benny Goodman played his first Carnegie Hall concert - January 16, 1938 - turned out to be a momentous occasion in many ways. After Carnegie Hall many went along to New York's Savoy Ballroom to witness a "Battle Of The Bands" between the orchestras of Chick Webb and Count Basie. Duke Ellington was in the audience (and he was cajoled into playing some piano himself) and that may well have been the first time Duke heard Ella Fitzgerald, for she was Chick Webb's vocalist and on the threshold of her highly successful career.

Over the years Duke and Ella became amongst the biggest and most important names in music but it took impresario Norman Grant to bring them together on record, for the first time, in 1957 for Ella's "Duke Ellington Song Book" 4-LP set. It was Grant who booked them to appear together at the 1966 Nice Jazz Festival and a few months later they were together again for a seven day engagement at the open-air Greek Theatre in Griffith Park, North Hollywood. The standard Ellington discographies list an appearance at the Greek on September 24, 1966 but this CD comprises previously un-issued material from concerts the previous day when Duke opened the proceedings followed by Ella and her trio, then a closing segment by Ella and the Ellington band.”

As the music on the video tribute that concludes this piece attests, Ella and Duke were made for each other.

Scatting and Ella were also made for each other and unlike many vocalists who make what virtually amounts to sound effects when their scatting, Ella knew what she was doing.

She improvised on the melody of the tune and developed “lines” that flowed, fit and made sense. Many horn players admired the improvisations that Ella sang when she was scatting.

She was one of the very best at it because she wasn’t just trying for the “effect.”

Ella understood that what made scatting effective was understatement.

Which is why she didn’t use scatting very often, preferring instead to rephrase the actual lyrics of the tune, especially in the form of rhythmic riffs to add extra punch and power to the music.

On our video tribute to she and “The Duke of Ellington,” Ella sings Sweet Georgia Brown, a tune which Ted Gioia describes in his recent published The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012]:

“The popularity of this … [song’s chord] progression among jazz musicians is well warranted. The harmonies, which move leisurely from dominant chord to dominant chord, are ideal for supporting blues and funk licks of every denomination; and the final resolution offers a pleasant surprise since the tonic chord doesn't appear in the first 12 bars of the song, an opening that proves in retrospect to be a masterful exercise in misdirection. Finally, thanks to endless proselytizing by a world-famous group of itinerant basketball players [i.e.: The Harlem Globetrotters], the song is invariably recognized and greeted with enthusiasm by audiences everywhere, no matter how modest their jazz expertise.”

Ella and the band do four choruses of Sweet Georgia Brown in an emphatic medium tempo that is interspersed with a little scatting and a lot of call-and-response interplay and rhythm ‘n blues riffs. It closes with a cool tag which kicks in at 2:24 minutes.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Martijn van Iterson: The Whole Bunch

Dutch guitarist Martijin van Iterson has always impressed me as someone who phrases in the style of Jim Hall while using the technique of Pat Martino, a very difficult blending of approaches to super-impose on this extremely, unforgiving instrument.

Rene' Steenhorst, Jazz reporter of De Telegraaf newspaper has said of him: "Martijn is a man of few words. That's just the way he is. He prefers to express himself by way of his music. In melodies, themes and grooves. In it he can express nearly everything. This is how he tells us what he wants to, reflecting the color of his emotions."

A former student of the legendary guitarist Wim Overgauuw [he still plays the Gibson ES-125 guitar that Wim gave him as a gift], Martijn says of his nature: "I'm somewhat turned in on myself. That's true of many guitar players. I'm a bit of an introvert."

If you are not familiar with Martijn's guitar playing, you can check it out on the following video. The audio track is comprised of his composition - The Whole Bunch - on which he is joined by three, exceptional musicians: pianist Karel Boehlee, bassist Frans van Geest and drummer Martijn Vink.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Max on Monk

Max on Monk

The “Max” in the title of this piece does not refer to the more obvious connection to Thelonious Monk – drummer, Max Roach – but rather, to one of the more original, urbane and erudite perspectives in Jazz writing, that of, Max Harrison.

To attribute to Max his comments about Monk in the opening sentence of the following essay “… his singular originality was enough to ensure a hostile reception” – would be to put the matter lightly as Mr. Harrison’s musings always seemed to enflame passions wherever and however they were expressed.

Perhaps the strong reactions from some Jazz fans engendered by Max’s opinions had to do with the fact that he generally knew what he was talking about and wasn’t afraid to express his views very directly.

He’s not always easy to read, but if one is willing to make the effort, one usually comes away from Max’s essays well-rewarded with more knowledge and a totally different “take” on Jazz and its makers.

Here’s a sampling.

“If his singular originality was enough to ensure a hostile reception, it still is ironic that for many years comment on Monk centered around his supposed incompetence as a pianist. On his best days his public performances demonstrated, with a clarity which no recording ever could approach, that this musician was, in his highly individual command of the instrument and absolute control of his especial musical resources, as remarkable a virtuoso as, say, Earl Hines. The two transcendent techniques were, obviously, quite different, and in Hines's case the dazzling texture of his music, although shaped by an eminently characteristic melodic and rhythmic invention, was firmly rooted in the scale, arpeggio and chordal formations that have always provided the basis of tonal keyboard music.

In sharp contrast, Monk's pianism, strictly in accord with other aspects of his work, if it did not lead us to go quite so far as Andre Brassai, who wrote "awkwardness means greatness and lack of skill means talent and these things are signs of genuine creativity" (i), still had little connection with established conventions, and was of a purer, more directly musical order. His strength lay not in complex executive feats but in a deployment, at once sensitive and vividly incisive, of some of the basic elements of jazz: time, metre, accent, space. This is why, with minor exceptions like the Dutchman Stido Astrom, his influence was not on other pianists but on players of other instruments: the lessons he offered were purely musical, not arising of necessity out of the keyboard.

Certain of Monk's recorded solos, or sections of them, consist of rhythmic variations on the thematic line with shifting metres and evolving patterns of accentual displacement. When he first appeared, in the 19408, such a method seemed dangerously radical in comparison with the then usual system of basing improvised lines solely on the chordal harmonisation of the theme, not on the theme itself. That was because people who listened to Monk had never heard Jelly Roll Morton, and people who knew of Morton's use of motivic development wished to hear nothing of Monk. To both, of course, thematic variation was an essential process.

Much was made of Monk's harmonic innovations, and his pungent, hard-biting sonorities were the aspect of his language which aroused nearly as much adverse criticism as his playing. Yet this shows how right Stanley Dance, a tireless advocate of progress in jazz, always a friend of the latest development, was to complain of the jazz audience's frequent "inability to appreciate the joy of the musician in expression through harmonies rich and strange", of listeners' "narrowed sensibility which does not permit them to perceive, through its subtlety and complexity, the inner integrity of much of the later jazz" (2). Certainly in Monk's harmony, and perhaps more immediately than in his exceptionally subtle rhythm, we apprehend a needle-sharp intelligence which rigorously avoids the commonplace.

Yet however striking this music may be on rhythmic and harmonic planes, it is always informed and directed by the requirements of melody. If the melodic construction is often severe in its economy this is because Monk knew precisely what he wanted to say and how to say it, because he had full command both of his ideas and their means of communication. Thus is explained much of the immense temperamental drive and magnetic cogency of his finest work—again, not fully conveyed on any recording. In his most representative moments all effort was devoted to the true expressive aim, none wasted on mere decoration. Such control is an authentic sign of mastery, but naturally Monk could not bring it off every time; indeed, he was in the same situation as a sculptor for whom one false stroke could ruin the whole statue.

In fact it is misleading to discuss the separate aspects of Monk's work too much in isolation. All elements of rhythm, melody and harmony interact so closely that it is unrealistic to consider one without the others. Monk did not offer an assemblage of easily identifiable trade marks in the manner of a popular soloist: his improvisations are new wholes, not just accumulations of pleasing objects. He was, in short, a composer, not simply because he wrote many 'tunes', or even themes, but because the compositional mode of thinking is evident in everything he did. One instance is his accompanying of other improvisers, for, instead of providing the normal type of chordal support, he often set modified fragments of the theme beside—not behind—the soloist's line in such a way as to give extended performances a closer-knit feeling of thematic reference. A different illustration is his treatment of popular songs like Smoke gets in your eyes, where he abstracts and rearranges the components to a quite drastic extent.

Just as Monk's pianism was unusually direct in its musicality, so his recordings, for all their self-consistent idiosyncrasies, have a curious air of objectivity. Even when the choruses follow the conventional AABA pattern of four eight-bar phrases, they are in the tradition of 'compositions for band', like Morton's Cannonball blues or Bix Beiderbecke's Humpty Dumpty, rather than jazz versions of mere songs. As such, pieces like Epistrophy or Criss cross are altogether foreign to the world of popular music in a way that, for example, even masterpieces of transmutation such as Coleman Hawkins's Talk of the town or Charlie Parker's Embraceableyou can never quite be. And, with a few exceptions like the train piece Little roo tie-too tie, his works never attempt to establish a particular atmosphere, as does Mood indigo by Duke Ellington, or to suggest a specific place, like Tadd Dameron's Fontainebleau.

They are, rather, investigations of perfectly specific musical ideas, such as the minor seconds idea of Mysterioso or the diminished fifth ideas of Skippy, which arise out of his unusually acute awareness of the expressive weight of a given melodic interval or rhythmic or harmonic pattern (3). If, however, there remains, even in the most violent

passages, a kind of detachment, a feeling of objective exploration, it should not be imagined that all Monk offers is a series of abstractions. It is his achievement that in following such a path he created jazz which balances the rival claims of surprise and inevitability. Such music, to quote Brassai again, is "a rebellion against the misdeeds of a mechanised civilisation" (i), but also shows the artist, at an extreme pitch of technical and psychic tension, coming to terms with violence and disorder in the self and in the public world; indeed, that presumably is what its reconciliation of opposites is really about.

Monk's best jazz has, then, a more substantial intellectual content than most, and, while it would be naive to imagine that lessens its power to move us, this world is not the easiest to enter. The private, self-contained nature of his music, its strange, mineral toughness, make it hard to grasp, and help explain the disproportionate popularity of a relatively untypical piece like Round about midnight. It may also account for undue emphasis on the humour in his work. A sharp wit, as ever manifesting itself in directly musical terms, is clear in such things as his caricature of Tea for two, with sophisticated bitonal harmony countered with deliberately stiff rhythms. But whenever we saw Monk at the piano he presented that admirable and, in the jazz world, rare spectacle of a serious artist wholly possessed by the urgency of the matter in hand, the creation of music. Humour was evident in his eccentric platform demeanour—away from the instrument—which, however offhand, clearly aimed if not to amuse then at least to disconcert. This may be regarded as a characteristically oblique comment on the social isolationism and outright rejection of the audience practised by other musicians of his generation, such as Charlie Parker. With typical parochialism, the jazz community believed the boppers' attitude to be unique, and uniquely reprehensible, while, as Monk's very dryness implies, it was a mild gesture compared, say, with the cubist painters' hermeticisation of content several decades earlier in protest against a commercialised academic tradition.

It is a deceptive simplification to say that we get the art we need and deserve, yet it may be that Monk was a little like the court jesters of old, who clothed their home-truths in just sufficient foolery. Whenever we saw him, the stiff-limbed, ungainly movements and bland smile appeared to be those of a buffoon, yet the harsh rhythms and acidulated dissonance of the music he played us said something altogether different (4).”

Jazz Journal, June 1961, as quoted on pages 28-31 of Max Harrison, A Jazz Retrospect, New York: Crescendo Publishing, 1976.

Footnotes:

1 Andre Brassai: Graffiti (Stuttgart, 1960).

2 Stanley Dance: 'Towards Criteria' in Jazzbook 1947 edited by Albert McCarthy (London, 1947).

3 Certain of these "specific ideas" are helpfully illuminated by some of Andre Hodeir's treatments of Monk themes, which are in effect musical instead of verbal commentaries. Instances are his variations on Mysterioso titled Osymetrios /and // (American Philips PHM2OO-O73) and his atomisation of Round about midnight (American Epic LN3376).

4 Further reading: Lucien Malson: Les Maitres du Jazz (Paris, 1952; rev. ed. 1972); Gunther Schuller: 'Thelonious Monk', Jazz Review, November 1958; Max Harrison: 'Thelonious Monk' in Just Jazz 3 edited by Sinclair Traill (London, 1959); Grover Sales: 'Monk at the Black Hawk', Jazz, Winter 1960; Nat Hentoff: Thelonious Monk—a List of Compositions Licenced by B.M.I. (New York, 1961); Nat Hentoff: The Jazz Life (New York, 1961); Andre Hodeir: Toward Jazz (New York, 1962); Wilfrid Mellers: Music in a New Found Land (London, 1964); Max Harrison: entry on Monk in Jazz on Record edited by Albert McCarthy (London, 1968); Jack Cooke: entry on Monk in Modern Jazz: the Essential Records 7945-70 edited by Max Harrison (London, 1975).

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Jessica Williams – A Pianist with Taste, Touch and Temerity

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles was prompted to put this piece together by the arrival of the correspondence that closes it.

I first “met” Jessica around 1980. This was back in the days when one could kill a few minutes waiting for a business appointment or a luncheon while perusing the local record store.

Usually privately-owned and operated, every community in southern California seem to have one and some of these Mom-and-Pop stores even had a Jazz section.

It was during one such diversions that I noticed an LP in the cut-out bin by Jessica Jennifer Williams entitled Orgonomic Music [Clean Cuts CC703]. On the back of the album sleeve was the following quotation by Wilhelm Reich:

"Love, work and knowledge are the well-springs of our life. They should also govern it.”

I didn’t know who Reich was, nor did I know anything about “Jessica Jennifer Williams” and the only musician in the sextet featured on the album that I was [barely] familiar with was trumpet player Eddie Henderson.

But what the heck, Philip Elwood of The San Francisco Examiner said of Jessica that she was a devotee of Reich’s whose sentiments I agreed with, the LP was only a buck, so I gave it a shot.

Boy, am I glad I did. I’ve been listening to everything I can get my hands on by Jessica ever since.

However, it wasn’t until 1992, thanks to a fortuitous business trip to San Francisco, that I had the opportunity to hear Jessica in person as a part of pianist Dick Whittington’s on-going Maybeck Recital Hall series.

I “stayed close” to Jessica’s music in the 1990’s thanks to my association with Philip Barker, the owner of Jazz Focus Records for whom Jessica made a number of recordings including her Arrival CD which has the distinction of being the very first disc issued by Philip’s label [JFCD001].

Thanks to a tip from Gene Lees in one of his JazzLetters, I was also able to score one of the limited edition [1,000] Joyful Sorrow compact discs that Blackhawk Records issued as her solo piano tribute to the late, Bill Evans.

It was recorded at The Jazz Station, Carmel, CA on September 15, 1996 on the 16^th anniversary of Bill’s death.

Sadly, too, The Jazz Station in Carmel is no more, but Joyful Sorrow endures as just about my all-time favorite Jessica recording.

Thankfully, Jessica has subsequently released quite a number of solo piano and trio Jazz recordings, many of which are available as audio CD’s and Mp3 downloads.

Jessica is a powerful and pulsating pianist. He music literally “pops” out at the listener it’s so full of energy and enthusiasm.

She records many solo piano albums, a format which can sometimes be a recipe for self-indulgence and excessive displays of technique. But Jessica’s music is always tasteful and informed. You can hear the influences from the Jazz tradition in her playing, but you also hear innovative probing and forays into her unique conception of what she is trying to say about herself and how she hears the music.

Her touch on the instrument is such that she makes the piano SOUND! It rings clear and resonates as it only can in the hands of a masterful pianist.

As Grover Sales, the distinguish author and lecturer on Jazz has commented:

“Jessica Williams belongs to that exclusive group Count Basie dubbed "the poets of the piano" that includes Roger Kellaway, Sir Roland Hanna, Ellis Larkins, Jaki Byard, Bill Mays, Alan Broadbent, Cedar Walton, the late Jimmy Rowles and of course, Bill Evans. All share in common a thorough working knowledge of classic piano literature from pre-Bach to contemporary avant garde as well as the classic jazz tradition from Scott Joplin to the present.

All developed an astonishing and seemingly effortless technique that enabled them to venture anywhere their fertile imaginations wished to take them. All take to heart the dictum of Jelly Roll Morton in his epic 1938 interview for the Library of Congress: ‘No pianist can play jazz unless they try to give the imitation of a band.’

And for all of their varied influences from Earl Hines to Bill Evans and beyond, all are instantly identifiable—unique in the literal sense of this often misused word.”

Writing in the insert booklet to Jessica’s Maybeck Hall CD [Concord CCD-4525], Jeff Kaliss notes:

“It's all there in the first track. Within a few choruses, Jessica Williams shows her hand, or hands: the harmonies in seconds (hit way off to the side of the piano), the punchy attack, the dust-devils in the upper octaves, the nutty quotes. It's familiar Jessica, but she's got plenty up her sleeve for the rest of this remarkable entry in the Maybeck menagerie. …

She came to my awareness as a word-of-mouth legend, a Baltimore-bred genius whose history and personality were said to be as mysterious and unpredictable as her keyboard inventions. As soon as I got to hear her, I was into the reality of her spontaneous magic and not much concerned with the legend. …

[She] has remained a best-kept secret … commanding awe and quiet in the clubs she visited … [her playing] filled with energy and imagination.”

One gets more about her sense of “energy and imagination” when one reads the following notes that Jessica wrote about herself and her music for her Intuition CD [Jazz Focus JFCD 010]:

“I'm occasionally asked where I studied to learn to do what I do; who taught me, what "tricks" are involved, what secrets enable me, how does the process occur... how does one "distill magic out of the air?" The truth is that there are no practice techniques, no miracle drugs, no mantras, no short-cuts to creativity. I tell them that I've played piano since I was four, that I've played jazz since I was twelve, that I've never taken another job doing anything except what I've always known I should be doing in this life: playing music. And maybe that's a part of the answer, if indeed there is one. It's about Castenada's PATH, Campbell's BLISS; you follow it no matter where it leads, and over many years you learn to control it, channel it, allow it to happen.

You become the bow; the arrow is the gift. You never fully own it, just as you can never explore all of its depths, because it springs from the infinite possibilities within you. In this realm, your only ally, your only guide, is intuition. It is seeing instead of looking, knowing instead of believing, being instead of doing. It is Coltrane on the saxophone, Magic Johnson on the court, Alice Walker on the printed page; it is the primary intuition of "right-brained" activity, the birthing of idea into existence.

Perhaps it cannot be taught, but it certainly can be shared...and it is in the sharing that we all experience the best parts of ourselves. We instinctively intuit our organic truth; when we learn to live it, our planet could be paradise.

Your dreams are your sacred truth. …”

You can listen to Jessica’s quite stunning pianism on the audio track of the following video tribute to her on which she performs Alone Together from the Joyful Sorrow Bill Evans tribute CD.

As to Jessica’s temerity, let alone downright courage, it’s all here in the following notice which she sent out recently to her fans.

I hope you’ll heed and help Jessica in her time of need.

I CAN NO LONGER PLAY THE PIANO

Dear friends, critics, fans, friends of fans, anyone who loves my music or at least has enjoyed it:

FEEL FREE TO SHARE THIS WITH OTHERS, IN PUBLICATIONS, EMAIL CAMPAIGNS, PHONE CALLS, ETC. GO TO

http://www.jessicawilliams.com/donations/index.html

================

DONATE TO JESSICA WILLIAMS’ SPINAL SURGERY RECOVERY FUND VIA PAYPAL or any credit cards:

http://www.jessicawilliams.com/donations/index.html

================

SEND DONATIONS

You can opt to send personal checks or money orders to

· Jessica Williams

· PO Box 2391

· Olympia, WA 98507

· email: jjw1@me.com or jessica@jessicawilliams.com

· Please make checks payable to Jessica Williams

================

BUY CDS:
http://www.jessicawilliams.com/shop.html
Every dollar counts and is deeply appreciated.

================

I CAN NO LONGER PLAY THE PIANO. NOR CAN I WALK, SLEEP, EAT WELL, STAND OR SIT. MY PAIN IS INTRACTABLE, AND 30mg daily of Vicodin (NORCO) does very little to cut it. 35 YEARS AGO I had a disc surgery (a Laminectomy, L5-S1) but many years of flying and playing music have taken their toll. I am in DIRE NEED OF RADICAL SPINAL SURGERY. MY SURGEON IS DR RICHARD ROONEY AT THE NEW MADISON ST POLYCLINIC.

This is NOT a solicitation for help to pay for the surgery as I HAVE INSURANCE: This request for donations is for the time AFTER surgery, the 6 months to perhaps a year that I won't be able to play or perform. Instead, I'll be doing physical therapy, pain management, and recuperation.

Without a spinal operation I face trunk and leg paralysis, the possible loss of renal function, and constant intractable pain. If it progresses up the spine and reaches the thoracic and cervical spine, I will lose all movement or sensation in my arms and hands. I have moderate scoliosis which increases the possibility of this happening.

Fortunately I have medical coverage. This request for donations is for the time AFTER surgery. It may be a year or more before I can play again, or it could be months - I won't know until it's done.

My surgeon - http://www.polyclinic.com/richard-rooney-md-facs - has decided to do a lateral-entry cage-fusion of L5, L4 and S1. I have had other opinions but I've chosen the premier neurosurgeon in this state (WA), and my age - 64 - rules out fancy but still unperfected alternatives like Pro-Disc©. My surgery will be scheduled soon, probably for some time in LATE JULY or EARLY AUGUST of 2012. (I presently have an viral upper-bronchial infection, so we need to wait until that clears.)

I'll be in the hospital for about 10 days, and then recuperating for 6 months to a year. I feel very lucky and very secure to have chosen the great surgeon who will do the procedure, making it possible for me to get back to my life's work.

I am so happy I can give back through my music. The music that awaits is why I am here.

And THAT, friends, is why I'm asking for help. I know that the people who love my music are the kindest, gentlest people in the world.

But a lot of us tend not to be billionaires. I, for one.

I need your help.

================

I'm sure that the results will be positive. My surgeon is the best there is, an artist of neurosurgery. He loves my music. I have a lot of NEW MUSIC TO MAKE.

Please make a donation of any size that you can afford. Each of you who makes a donation will get a signed copy of my newest CD for OriginArts - my personal favorite - Songs of Earth. And you'll get your name included in the drop-down "Life Savers Menu" on this donations page.

And if you ORDER MY CDs, that'll help too, and you can do that HERE. Every order and every extra dollar helps, as I can no longer play or pay the bills for a while.

Thank you from my heart, with peace, sanity, love, and freedom, Jessica

DONATE PLEASE!!! You can use paypal or any credit cards: go to

http://www.jessicawilliams.com/donations/index.html

================

A message from good friend and fellow pianist and composer Richard Rodseth:
Dear friends,
Some of you have attended or played at house concerts I have hosted in my home. Some of my happiest
and proudest moments.
I was introduced to the concept by pianist Jessica Williams, and since 2005 she has enthralled listeners in my living room once or twice a year, most recently on March 17, her birthday.
I'm sorry to report that Jessica needs our help, and is not well enough to play for us at this time. It would mean a great deal to me if you would read her heartfelt request at the following link and support her if you can: http://www.jessicawilliams.com/donations/
Whether you purchase one or more of her wonderful CDs (which make excellent gifts), or are able to make a donation, you will have supported a wonderful artist who has touched many with her beautiful music.
Thanks so much, Richard - P.S. I apologize if you receive this message more than once. Feel free to share it with others.

==========

See MRI/DICOM scans of my L5/L4 compression/degradation and my scoliosis and disc deterioration here:

http://www.jessicawilliams.com/donations/

==========

For removal from this list, click here:

http://www.jessicawilliams.com/news/remove.html

==========

I wish you happiness, wisdom, peace, and above all, HEALTH. Stay well and love each other, Jessica

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Coming June 22, 2013 - A Profile on Tal Farlow

"In retrospect, can you imagine the enormity of Tal’s accomplishment? Here’s someone who played a little hillbilly guitar and had no formal musical training who altered his work schedule as a sign painter so that he could listen to nightly radio broadcasts and transcribe by ear Charlie Christian guitar solos and who, after hearing pianist Art Tatum’s broadcasts, would later buy all the Art Tatum records he could lay his hands on to learn these note-by-note and play them on a guitar?! This latter feat involved a pianist whose solos were so brimming full of ideas and were played so speedily that when other pianists heard him on radio or via records for the first time, these pianists thought that they were listening to two pianists!! The scale of Tal’s achievements boggles the mind, and this from a guitarist who, shy to begin with, later became so embarrassed because he couldn’t read music that the magnitude of what he had achieved was self-effaced to a point that forced him to retire from playing music in public for long periods of time. What a way to treat genius." - The editorial staff at JazzProfiles.

Geroge Russell and New York, New York

“Think you can lick it? Get to the wicket.

Buy you a ticket. Go!

Go by bus, by plane, by car, by train...

New York, N.Y..

What they call a somethin' else town.

A city of more than eight million people,

with a million people passin'

through every day. Some come just to visit

and some come to say. If you scuffle hard enough

and you ain't no dunce, you can always get by

in New York City. I heard somebody say once. Yeah...if you can't make it

in New York City, man, you can't make

it nowhere.

So where do people come to scuffle? Right here.

Think you can lick it? Get to the wicket. Buy you a ticket. Go! New York, N.Y., a city so nice. They had to name it twice. It may seem like a cold town,

but man. let me tell you, it's a soul town.

It ain't a bit hard to find someone who's lonesome or forlorn here...

But it's like findin' a needle in a haystack to find somebody who was born here.

New York, N.Y., a somethin' else town, all right!

East side, west side, uptown, downtown.

There's one thing all New York City has and that's Jazz.

A while ago, there were cats readin' while cats played jazz behind them, but wasn't nothin' happening, so the musicians cooked right on like they didn't even mind them.

I wrote the shortest jazz poem ever heard.

Nothin' about lovin' and kissin'...

One word...LISTEN!!”

- Jon Hendricks, vocalese introduction to Manhattan

With Milt Hinton’s string bass and Charlie Persip playing brushes on snare drum in the background, Jon speaks these poem-like lyrics on Manhattan, the opening track of George Russell’s album New York, New York [Decca DL 9116].

Each time I listen to Jon’s vocalese, the orchestral arrangement and the individual solos on this track, I am enthralled anew by the way all of these “moving parts” fit together so smoothly.

It is a magnificent piece of Jazz scoring.

Manhattan runs over 10 minutes and George uses the space well allowing for generous solos by trombonists Bob Brookmeyer and Frank Rehak, pianist Bill Evans, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane and trumpeter Art Farmer to be interspersed throughout his consistently swinging arrangement.

George’s chart is constructed in segments which serve to launch each soloist. The band then drops out leaving the soloist accompanied only by the Milt Hinton’s walking bass line for a chorus. The drummer joins in playing double time for the second chorus with the band returning to provide a background until the next solo is propelled forward.

Recorded in 1958, the arrangements on New York, New York were the first extensive showcasing of George system of voicing instruments which he termed – “The Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization.”

In his Visions of Jazz: The First Century, Gary Giddins provides the following background to, and description of, George Russell’s Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization:

“Cycles and cycles within cycles are the meat of the matter. One could argue that jazz is a music based on cyclical motion, a strictly defined chorus, usually twelve or thirty-two measures, repeated until a musical statement has been made. Cycles are fomented by radical evolutionary movements, each of which contains the seeds of its own destruction. One example: during the ferment of jazz activity in the '40s, when modern jazz, or bebop, was born, the intoxicating harmonic ingenuity of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie blinded sympathetic fans from recognizing the anti-harmonic implications of George Russell's modal composition, Cubana Be/Cubana Bop written for Gillespie's orchestra. In a day when Thelonious Monk's clattering minor seconds and rhythmic displacements were dismissed as the fumblings of a charlatan, Russell's work was appreciated as something of a sui generis novelty.

Russell codified the modal approach to harmony (using scales instead of chords) in a theoretical treatise that he says was inspired by a casual remark the eighteen-year-old Miles Davis made to him in 1944: “Miles said that he wanted to learn all the changes and I reasoned that he might try to find the closest scale for every chord.’ His concept, published as the Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, is based on a perfect cycle of fifths generated by the Lydian mode, which sounds more complicated than it is. Russell was exploring relationships between chords and scales that would foster a fresh approach to harmony. Davis popularized those liberating ideas in recordings like Kind of Blue, undermining the entire harmonic foundation of bop that had inspired him and Russell in the first place.” [pp.5-6]

Richard Cook and Brian Morton explain Russell’s achievement this way in their Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6^th Ed.:

However important Russell's theories are, they are even now not securely understood. Sometimes falsely identified with the original Greek Lydian mode, The Lydian Chromatic Concept is not the same at all. In diatonic terms, it represents the progression F to F on the piano's white keys; it also confronts the diabolic tritone, the diabolus in musica, which had haunted Western composers from Bach to Beethoven.

Russell's conception assimilated modal writing to the extreme chromaticism of modern music. By converting chords into scales and overlaying one scale on another, it allowed improvisers to work in the hard-to-define area between non-tonality and polytonality. Like all great theoreticians, Russell worked analytically rather than synthetically, basing his ideas on how jazz actually was, not on how it could be made to conform with traditional principles of Western harmony. Working from within jazz's often tacit organizational principles, Russell's fundamental concern was the relationship between formal scoring and improvisation, giving the first the freedom of the second and, freeing the second from being literally esoteric, 'outside' some supposed norm. [pp 1282-83].

In his Jazz Retrospect, Max Harrison offers the following insights into Russell’s accomplishment:

Simply, he examined the entire harmonic resources of Western music, saw and systematized an entirely fresh set of relationships that had always been present within the traditional framework and which, as it were, only awaited discovery. Far from being a constricting set of regulations, Russell's precepts made available resources whose full possibilities, in the composer John Benson Brooks's words, ‘may take as much as a century to work out’. And according to Art Farmer, trumpeter on many of these discs, the Lydian Concept ‘opens the doors to countless means of melodic expression.

It also dispels many of the don'ts and can'ts that, to various degrees, have been imposed on the improviser through the study of traditional harmony.’ Of course, it is necessary to remember Schoenberg's words, ‘ideas can only be honored by one who has some of his own.’ [emphasis, mine]

That is to say Russell offers no magic formula to transform mediocre soloists into good ones. But the gifted improviser is not the only one to benefit. These investigations led Russell to produce music that has strong individuality yet which is very subtle, that teems with invention but is absolutely consistent stylistically. And in the sheer variety of his thematic materials he surpasses all Jazz composers except Duke Ellington. [pp. 58-59; paragraphing modified].

In Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some Of Its Makers, Doug Ramsey offers this essay on George’s work which he originally prepared in 1966 to air on Jazz Review, a program that Doug wrote, produced and broadcast on WDSU-FM and WDSU-AM in New Orleans:

“Over the next few programs we're going to consider the recorded work of George Russell, not only because his music is interesting, absorbing, listening, but because of his influence on the development of jazz in the sixties. Russell's impact, I believe, is more profound and widespread than is generally recognized, even by many musicians. It may well develop that he is having as great an effect on the course of jazz as any composer or arranger at work today, as important as that of such imitated innovators as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.

Russell believes that jazz must develop on its own terms, from within. He believes that to borrow the concepts of classical music and force jazz into the mold of the classical tradition results in something perhaps interesting, perhaps Third Stream music, but not jazz. Faced with this conviction that jazz musicians must look to jazz for their means of growth, Russell set about creating a framework within which to work. In 1953 he completed his Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization. The system is built on what he calls pan-tonality, bypassing the atonal ground covered by modern classical composers and making great use of chromaticism. Russell explains that pan-tonality allows the writer and the improviser to retain the scale-based nature of the folk music in which jazz has its roots, yet have the freedom of being in a number of tonalities at once. Hence, pan-tonality.

That's a brief and far from complete summary of Russell's theory, on which he worked for ten years. It's all in his book, The Lydian Chromatic Concept for Jazz Improvisation, published by Concept Publishing Company.

Freedom within restrictions, however broad.

Discipline.

Improvising Russell's way demands great technical skill. Listening to his recordings, one is struck by the virtuoso nature of the players. …. All that talk about concepts and theories and pan-tonality and chromaticism may have led you to expect something dry and formidable. On the contrary, there's a sense of fun and airiness in the music. The humor is subtle and, I should add, more evident after several hearings. …

In 1959 there was a good deal of thought being given to the directions jazz would take and strong indications that one important departure would be along the path of freedom.

Russell was an invaluable guide along that path, providing the player a means of achieving greater freedom of expression without falling into licentiousness. The means was his Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization. It gave the improviser a theoretical base from which to play with fewer harmonic restrictions than in be bop. Even musicians who have never studied the theory have been influenced by it because it is a spirit that has moved through the music. In the close community of jazz musicians, new ideas spread rapidly. So, in a tangible sense, this was one of the first recordings of the so-called New Thing. It is a good demonstration of Russell's theory. But, theories aside, it is delightful music.” [pp. 266-267 and 269].

Particularly germane to New York, New York is the following commentary by Burt Korall which served as the liner notes to the original LP:

“New York, N. Y.... the most fascinating address.

New York, N. Y. is a world unto itself, a world of tumult and silence, love and hate, towering buildings and tenements, big people and small... and the gradations between.

New York, N. Y. is a look up and live town, or a sigh, cry, die town; the big juicy apple that tempts and magnetizes, nourishes or consumes, but is never forgotten.

New York, N. Y. has a face of concrete that menaces those who have not found the key to her heart. And she is a woman—fickle, sometimes cold, warm to those who know her ways. It takes time to know and love her. She is not easy.

New York, N. Y. is always on the move; motion is native to her torso, and whether good or bad, profitable or not, it's there, day and night, like the beat of a tom-tom or a heart — faster by day, slower by night; pushing, easing time along.

New York, N. Y. has many moods. She broods and all her glitter is but a well spring for sadness. She is just as frequently happy, even frivolous, fresh and new, depending on your view.

New York, N. Y. is a blues/dues town. She can take and forsake ... and without conscience. In no time, her beauty can become unforgivable to those to whom she yields nothing.

New York, N. Y., a compound of all those that live within her arms, is liberal and bigoted, probing and disinterested. She is affected, phony, and unstintingly real. All these things and more ...

She is rich and poor—Sutton Place and Harlem, Madison Avenue and "The Village", Park Avenue and "Hell's Kitchen"; Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island, too; all the boroughs and sections, streets and avenues, in sum, are New York, N. Y. ... and contribute to her heart, body and soul.

In essence, New York, N. Y. is people; each one important, each one in need of the other.

* * * *

New York, N. Y. is filled with the sounds of jazz.

Jazz musicians come pouring into New York, N. Y. ‘Let's go to the Apple, man, that's where it is,’ they cry, not realizing that the taste of it is reserved for only the equipped. Many return to their home hamlets disappointed; some, more than a little changed for being here.

New York, N. Y. is a cruel mistress. Bring her something new and she is torn between a desire to understand and an inclination to resist change. ‘Prove it!’ she tauntingly says to those who come to her bearing the future in their hands.

‘New York, N. Y. is a challenge,’ claims composer-arranger George Russell. ‘Youth comes here to accept the challenge.’

‘I've had a running love affair with this town since I first saw her as a child,’ he continued. "I'd rather sink here than swim anywhere else."

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 23, 1923, Russell's first manifestations of interest in music occurred in early adolescence. At 15, he was earning his living as a jazz drummer in a Cincinnati night club. At 17, on scholarship at Wilberforce University in Ohio, he was studying music and playing with The Collegians, the college dance/jazz band.

Shortly after his twentieth birthday, Russell left school, joined the Benny Carter band on drums, and came to New York.

‘I got to hear Max Roach. He was too much,’ Russell explained. ‘Max had it all on drums. I decided that writing was my field.’

Returning home to Cincinnati determined to learn all he could about writing, Russell culled as much as he could from jazz writers around town. Proceeding by the ‘trial and error’ method, the budding writer used the house band at the old Cotton Club as a laboratory for his work. The band would play his arrangements and compositions, allowing him to err and correct, to progress.

Benny Carter was the first person of significance to take an interest in Russell's writing. In the course of one of his tours through Ohio, Carter passed through Cincinnati, heard one of Russell's compositions, liked it. and made a request for an arrangement of it for his band.

‘It took me five months and a trip to Chicago,’ Russell recalled in an interview with Down Beat Magazine, ‘but I finally caught the band at a downtown theatre, and they rehearsed it. Benny was very happy with it, and on top of that he paid me for it.’

On recommendation, the young writer then wrote for Earl Hines and shows at the Rhumboogie and El Grotto clubs in Chicago.

In 1945, the height of the modern revolution in jazz, everybody was talking about Parker, Gillespie, Powell and Monk etc. and 52nd Street, the center of it all. All who could came to New York to see and hear. Some came to learn.

George Russell arrived in New York in 1945. He took a room on 48th Street and Sixth Avenue, four blocks from "Swing Street." He met and became closely associated with many of the key figures creating the upheaval. Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Max Roach, among others, were frequent visitors at his lodgings.

‘I began writing for Dizzy's big band,’ Russell reports. ‘I was learning. Just being on the scene and listening helped so much.’

Unexpectedly, illness interfered as the composer-arranger was getting his start with Dizzy's band, and he entered the hospital. Unfortunate as illnesses are, this one cannot be considered in a completely negative fashion. During the 16 months spent in a hospital in the Bronx, Russell evaluated his position, found himself in need of further education, and began an intensive research into tonality. This resulted in the coming into existence of elements of his Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization, a thesis that would eventually free him, lend the facility for full expression.

Upon discharge from the hospital, Russell accepted an invitation to live at the home of Max Roach. He continued his investigations, staying on nearly a year.

‘While working on my theory,’ says Russell, ‘I lived all 'round town—East Side, West Side. John Lewis and I roomed together for a time. He helped me to truly appreciate traditional classical music.’

Until the Lydian thesis was completed, Russell composed infrequently, and for short periods, at that. He would run into problems while working within his concept that had to be ironed out before he could proceed further. As progression was made toward his ultimate goal of freedom within his own set of disciplines, he became more and more the master of his materials.

Today, Russell is not bothered by composing problems for long; he is able to make any needed adjustments within his concept. Through extended study of music and himself, the composer has found his way into the open.

'My Lydian concept has changed my whole mode of life,’ Russell explained. "It took years, but I now feel that I function logically. At last, I'm organized and ready. I realize that music, like life, must have an inner logic. George Endrey, a scientist friend of mine, taught me how mathematics relates to life and music. Without him, I would never have understood logic for what it is.’

‘There are many others to whom I owe a great deal. The Gil Evans composer conclave of 1949-50, composed of Gil, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, John Carisi and myself, opened my eyes to many things. Gil and John are special friends and have exercised more than their share of influence upon me. Composers Alban Berg, Bela Bartok, Igor Stravinsky and Stefan Wolpe are just a few of the others who have helped shape my thinking.’

Reviewing his output before completion of the Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization in 1953, we realize that the composer had a few fruitful periods. The results are memorable.

In 1947, he penned Cubano Be and Cubano Bop, a two part composition that successfully combined modern jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythms, for the Dizzy Gillespie orchestra. Bird In Igor's Yard came off his writing desk in 1949. It was performed and recorded by the Buddy DeFranco big band. Ezzthetic and Odjenar were created for Lee Konitz around the same time.

‘I was hardly prolific,’ commented the composer. ‘Four compositions and a few arrangements for dance bands — Shaw, Thornhill and Charlie Ventura — is not much to show for six years, but I felt that I had to finish my thesis before I could say what I wanted to.’

Keeping body and soul together by working a variety of jobs in New York, N. Y., an ever evolving knowledge of self and the importance of his work, coated his senses and dulled extraneous pressures and annoyances.

In 1955, after two years of experimental writing employing all the facilities of his concept, Russell felt ready to make a statement. Jack Lewis, a jazz adventurer, provided the recording circumstance. Reception for the composer's first statement of policy was tremendously encouraging. Ground, at last, had been broken.

A commission to write an original composition for the Brandeis Music Festival, which garnered kudos for its author, followed. Offers to score albums for important jazz artists began to trickle in. An invitation to teach at the School of Jazz in Lenox, Massachusetts was extended and accepted.

George Russell's presence on the American musical scene is being felt; the avenues for his talent, only beginning to present themselves.

* * * *

The extended musical statement herein is New York, N. Y. as George Russell sees, hears and feels it. In a sense, it is an expression of this composer's belief in the city, the city he feels is symbolic of life and culture.

The city is drawn in terms native to Russell's basic orientation. He is a jazz writer. His concept was born of jazz and its needs.

It was his intention to showcase many of the important jazz soloists on the New York scene in this program. He did so, pulling no punches in his writing, providing an intelligent, functional, dramatic frame for the soloists. The framework is not arbitrary, but a thematically controlled entity from beginning to end.

New York, N. Y. is important in that a statement of depth and scope is made. Never self conscious, though often quite impressionistic, it is challenging to the senses, yet has the feeling of emotional completeness.

A community project notable for the love and enthusiasm of all the participants, New York, N. Y. moves from old jazz territories to new and back again, breaking the barriers of tonality, presenting the jazz orchestra in a truly modern, linear sense, yet retains the earthy taste basic to the idiom.

An American composer, only beginning to tap his resources, is revealed.”

In order to afford you with an interesting vehicle to watch while listening to Manhattan, the opening track on George Russell’s New York, New York, with the help of the ace graphics team at CerraJazz LTD and the production facilities at StudioCerra, I have created a montage of the cover art from nearly all of the Jazz LP’s that Decca Records released, primarily in the 1950s.

Although it had been a major label for Jazz during The Swing Era [circa 1930-1945], Decca was never a “major player” on the modern Jazz scene in the

USA

. Therefore, many of the album covers in the video may be relatively unknown to you.

Remembering Jeri Southern

The contributions that Orrin Keepnews and Gene Lees have made to Jazz over the past fifty years are immense and go well beyond anything that can be described in this brief introduction. Orrin’s work in recording and reissuing the music and Gene’s in writing about it have made the world of Jazz a far richer place because they devoted so much of their talent and creative genius to it.

Teaming up to develop and describe this retrospective of Jeri Southern’s early recordings at Decca is certainly an indication of the respect and admiration that Orrin and Gene have for this member of the Jazz family, a female vocalist who was not accorded enough of either in her lifetime.

When the likes of Orrin Keepnews and Gene Lees have so much praise to offer about the song stylings of Jeri Southern, the least I can do is to listen to them and to recommend that you do so as well.

The Very Thought of You: The Decca Years, 1951-1957 [Decca GRP – 671]

“Here is a good clear look at one of the very best singers to emerge from the Pop/Jazz/Show-tune musical world that flourished in the mid-century years. By now this era can seem incredibly long ago and far away, but at its strongest it still retains all of its power to charm us and move us - and to demonstrate that, in the best of hands, this area of popular music is a true art form.

It has been my pleasure to work on this project with Kathryn King - a long-time friend with a solid track record of her own as a record producer, who has the considerable added incentive of being the daughter of the artist who is heard here in retrospect. Jeri Southern began her significant recording career with the half-dozen years at Decca from which this CD is drawn, As we picked our way through an extensive body of music, finding that our individual lists of preferred songs were looking remarkably similar, it did seem best to follow chronology in a general way, but without being excessive about it. As a result, tempo and instrumentation and the emotional content of these songs have led to a program that seems to pretty much set is own pace.

I knew Jeri Southern hardly at all; I only met her after she had ended her singing career. But I first heard her a long time ago, and have been fascinated over the years by what I consider to be a striking example of one of the major show-business paradoxes. This woman, a warm-voiced, sensitive, intelligent interpreter of the wonderful repertoire that a lot of us insist on capitalizing as The Great American Song Book, had all the qualities that I associate with two closely allied, important and consistently undervalued fields: being a jazz singer and being what for want of a better name is often called a cabaret singer. In Jeri's case this included the helpful fact that she was an excellent musician [among some attributes that in my view she shares with Carmen McRae is that she may well have been her own best accompanist]. But like so many of the best qualified female singers of the pre-rock days of the Fifties and early Sixties, she was typecast into a ‘pop vocalist’ category and as a result suffered through deliberate (although presumably quite well-intentioned) efforts to make her sound like everyone else and concentrate on the kind of lower-level Tin Pan Alley music that only a song-plugger or a music publisher could love.

The only two women I can think of who entirely fought their way through that mess and emerged as universally acknowledged major artists were obviously very strong, very tough, and supported by even tougher friends and associates. Ella Fitzgerald, who of course had Norman Granz as her all-American blocking back; and the totally indomitable Peggy Lee [who was a good friend of Jeri’s and, I’m inclined to suspect, would have been her role model if Ms. Southern had by nature been a more hard-shelled personality]. But that was not the way it worked out for Jeri; it should realty not be surprising to learn that her relatively early retreat from the show biz battlefront was basically the result of her being - to apply a phrase usually used to describe a jazz musician whose work goes sailing way over the heads of his audience – “too hip for the room.”

Way back when I first heard this voice, I was in Chicago visiting a World War II army buddy - it couldn’t have been past the very beginning of the Fifties, maybe earlier. He and his wife insisted on my listening to the laidback late night disc jockey who was The Man of the moment, Dave Garroway, soon to become one of the very first of the star night time (and subsequently early morning) casual television hosts. But all that lay ahead. What Garroway was doing at that particular time was shouting the praises of a great young locally-based singer by the name of Jeri Southern.

I became a fan at first hearing, then admittedly cooled off as her career seemed to be going in directions that I didn’t care for – you’ll note that we have not included one of her most popular recordings, a folksong tear-jerker called "Scarlet Ribbons.” Consequently, it took me much too long to become aware of some important factors. One was that her voice remained a great instrument, and another that she was singing a very high percentage of the right kind of songs - merely note in passing that the writers represented here include Rodgers and Hart [four times], Cafe Porter [twice], Jerome Kerr [two more] and Kurt Weill.

It also seems apparent that she was doing battle energetically and in two ways against the kind of arrangements that were all too often in deadly vogue in those days. For one, in a period when a singer’s worth seemed to be measured by the size of the accompanying orchestra, she nevertheless succeeded fairly often in working on records in much the same setting as she would appear in clubs: backed only by a rhythm section, which on five of these numbers is led by guitarist/arranger Dave Barbour [long and closely a collaborator with Peggy Lee). It’s a formula that at times even allows her to be the piano player - check out the Southern solos on Ray Noble's I HADN'T ANYONE ‘TILL YOU and her own I DON T KNOW WHERE TO TURN. And secondly, even when the writing behind her was lush and potentially overbearing, someone -- perhaps the artist herself, or a properly- motivated manager or other colleague - often was able to keep the background writing under control. Or, when necessary, she seems to have been able simply to overcome it. I refer to my own listening notes on possibly my personal favorite in this collection, the magnificent Kurt Weill/Ira Gershwin MY SHIP. It was a specific and private comment, not intended for publication, but it now strikes me as quiet generally applicable to this compilation, and indeed as a summation of the artistry of Jeri Southern. “The strings are a matter of taste I wrote, "but it is such a great performance of a great song.”

- 0rrin Keepnews

Remembering Jeri – Gene Lees

"Once upon a time, America was blessed with any number of small nightclubs that featured excellent singers singing excellent songs, and even the' big record companies were interested in recording them. Some of the best of them played piano, ranging from the competent to the excellent, Most of them were women, and there was a glamour about them, superb singers such as Betty Bennett, Irene Kral, Ethel Ennis, Marge Dodson, Lurlean Hunter, Audrey Morris, Shirley Horn, and even regional singers, such as Kiz Harp of Dallas. Many of them are forgotten now; Shirley Horn alone has enjoyed a resurgence.

They were sometimes called jazz singers, although they were no such thing, or torch singers a term I found demeaning, not to mention horrendously inaccurate. Male singers were with equal condescension from an ignorant lay press called crooners.

The songs they sang were drawn from that superb classic repertoire that grew up in the United States between roughly 1920 and the 1950s, and had any of us been equipped with foresight, we’d have known that the era was ending, doomed by “How Much is that Doggie in the Window?” and “Papa Loves Mambo” and “Music Music Music “even before the rise of Bill Haley and His Comets, Elvis Presley, arid the Rolling Stones.

Of all these singers, one of the greatest was Jeri Southern, born Genevieve Lillian Hering near Royal, Nebraska on August 5, 1926, the baby in a family of two boys and three girls. Her grandfather had come from Germany in 1868, and in 1879 built a water-powered mill on Verdigris Creek. His sons and grandsons, including Jeri’s father, worked there. I am indebted to Jeri’s sister, Helen Meuwissen), for this information about Jeri’s early life.

“She could play the piano by ear when she was three, Helen said. She started studying at six. I don t think she ever quit taking lessons. (I car confirm this Jeri was doing some formal study of piano to the end of her life.) She went to Notre Dame Academy in Omaha, and always credited the nuns there for her background. She took voice lessons in Omaha with Harry Cooper. It was her desire to be a classical singer.”

Jeri also studied classical piano in Omaha with a much beloved teacher, Karl Tunberg. But her ambitions in the classical world evaporated one evening when she walked into a nightclub and heard a pianist playing jazz. She loved this music, and the experience changed her life. After high school graduation, she moved to Chicago.

She started playing standards in clubs, and got more experience as a pianist in local Chicago big bands. Eventually, as her reputation grew, she was advised that she could make more money if she would sing, a standard casting for women pianists in those days: women were not supposed to be instrumentalists, they were supposed to sing, or, just maybe, play the harp. So she did start to sing, and accompanied herself at the piano. She abandoned her trained operatic voice and began singing in her speaking voice, which had a smoky sound, with a very soft enunciation and a haunting intimacy. And her career took off.

Her greatest popularity was in the 1950s. The first of her records I heard was YOU BETTER GO NOW, the oldest track on this CD. I was blown away by it: the simplicity, the exquisite lack of affectation or mannerism. She recorded it for Decca in late 1951, just after she turned 25. She then turned out a series of superb performances for Decca, through to the Rodgers and Hart gems she recorded November 26, 1957: YOU'RE NEARER and NOBODY’S HEART. I met Jeri probably two years later, in 1959. She eventually left Decca and went on to record for other labels.

Unlike many performers, her stage career represented a great struggle for Jeri. First, she was extremely shy. I remember her telling me during our Chicago friendship that the first time she arrived at a nightclub and saw her name on the marquee, it terrified her. She deeply felt the responsibility of drawing and pleasing an audience – she was intimidated by the look of expectation in their eyes.

There are performers who passionately crave the audience. They will climb over footlights, climb over the tables, do anything to claim the audience’s attention and, I suppose, love – or the illusion of love. Jeri wasn’t like that. She simply loved the music. The music was everything, She was almost too much a musician, and certainty a perfectionist. Her philosophy of performing was the diametrical opposite of Carmen McRae's, who not only wouldn't do a song the same way twice, but probably couldn’t remember how she did it the last time. Jeri worked on interpretation until she got it ‘right,' which is to say the way she wanted it. She would then stick with her chosen interpretation. She was also disinterested in scat singing. I have noticed an interesting thing about those with the harmonic and instrumental skills to scat-sing - they often don’t and won’t do it. Nat Cole was a classic example of this fidelity to the original melody; so was Jeri.

As her reputation grew, her handlers – the managers, agents, publicists, record company executives - set out to make her into a pop star. Certainty with her Germanic beauty, she had the basic material for it. They dressed her in fancy gowns. They took her away from her beloved piano and stood her in front of a microphone with some else to play for her. Nothing could have been more diabolically designed to send her fleeing from the spotlight. And so, like Jo Stafford [and for the record, Greta Garbo, Doris Day, and others], she simply quit. She walked away from the business and the discomfort it brought her.

But the musicianship was always there, and she took to teaching. She wrote a textbook, Interpreting Popular Music at the Keyboard. She enjoyed composing, and over the years wrote pop songs with various partners [one of which, I Don’t Know Where to Turn is included here], and even ventured into other genres like orchestrating film scores and writing classical songs.

I used to drop by to visit her every once in a white at her apartment in Hollywood. Illustrating some point in a discussion of this song or that, she would go to the piano and play and sing for me. She simply got better throughout her life, and during these occasional private performances, I could only shake my head and think what the world was missing. Her piano playing in those last years was remarkable. It had grown richer harmonically, and the tone had evolved into a dark golden sound.

She was working on a book of piano arrangements of songs by her friend Peggy Lee, also a friend of mine. One sunny afternoon a few years age, I telephoned Peggy. How re you doing? I began.

‘I’m very sad,’ she said. ‘Jeri Southern died this morning.’

As I learned later, she succumbed to double pneumonia. The date was August 4, 1991. The next day, August 5, she would have turned sixty-five.

Once she told me that during those Chicago years, she considered me her closest friend in the world. It is an honor I will not forget. I truly loved Jeri, not only the singer but the person inside who through music so diffidently allowed us glimpses into her all-too-sensitive soul.”

- Gene Lees

Jeri Southern at Home

"Jeri Southern was essentially an intensely private person whose talent for music thrust her into a public career. Since Gene Lees and Orrin Keepnews have done such a fine job of describing my mother's public life, I thought it would be of interest to her still devoted audience to learn something of her private life. as I knew it.

My mothers life was unusual in a number of respects, not the least of which was the fact that a great deal happened to her at a very early age. She started performing as a pianist while still in her teens, moved from Nebraska to Chicago, developed a following there, married, signed a record deal, had a baby, and had her first great commercial success as a recording artist, all by the time she was 25. At 36 she retired from her public career. For the next 30 years her time was as much taken up with music as it had been before, but as a teacher, a writer and a composer - she never went back to performing.

Shortly after recording YOU BETTER GO NOW, my mother moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, where she lived for the rest of her life. Taking the title of one of the songs she recorded perhaps a little too closely to heart ( Married I Can Always Get"), she married four times; three of her husbands were musicians, one a radio der5onatity. My earliest memories are from the house we had in Malibu, a wonderful place right on the water, where she and I would take daily "walks' with our hyperactive Irish Setter. The intellectual pursuits, the preoccupation, the pleasures my mother enjoyed at the Malibu house were the ones she carried with her throughout her Life – she loved reading, exploring the whole dimension of the mind, summoning the restorative powers of the sun, and most of all, playing the piano.

She always practiced classical pieces, although she never performed them. Some of her favorite things to play were Beethoven sonatas, Grieg’s Holberg Suite, Debussy’s Images, and in later years the Brahms Intermezzi. She would also compose and improvise at the piano. Because she suffered from what could only be described as a crippling case of performance anxiety, she hated to be observed while she played, and only really enjoyed herself when she thought that no one was listening. So it was that I got in the habit of sneaking

She had the most exquisite command of harmony, so that when she played a tune, she would basically use it as a launching pad for an extended improvisation which often went very far afield harmonically. Sometimes, as I sat surreptitiously listening to these explorations of hers, I would be certain she could never figure out how to get back to the original key of the piece, but she always did, and in the most spectacular way, with subtle and elegant voice leading and chord progressions that were simply stunning. For a period of years she also studied guitar with a fuzzy-voiced Italian whose greatest contribution to our lives, notwithstanding the guitar lessons was probably the killer spaghetti sauce recipe she induced him, after much cajoling, to surrender.

When she was at home she spent a lot of time reading. She was fascinated by the work of Carl Jung, whose ideas became an essential part of her world view. She was also very taken with Gurdjieff, and even got interested in numerology toward the end of her life. She found it exciting to contemplate both the innumerable possibilities of inner space, so to speak, and the complexities of the physical world.

Another pursuit of her life at home was listening to the work of other singers. Her perfectionism made her a tough audience, but there were a few to whom she would return again and again. As one can immediately discern from listening to her recordings, she felt that the most important criterion for a great singer was a reverence for and communication of the lyric. She was not swayed by technical brilliance; the only singer with astonishing vocal technique whose work she enjoyed was Mel Torme, and that was because he delivers a lyric so well. She also loved Frank Sinatra, Nat Cole, Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, Lucy Reed, Jackie & Roy, and the Hi-Los.

Music was really the playing field for her entire life. And with a few important exceptions, all of her most important relationships were with musicians, with whom she could share her opinions, her discoveries, her delights. Though she lived in Hollywood most of her adult life, she was not involved in that world. To say that she was reticent socially would be a mammoth understatement.

She hated parties and social gatherings, and had the same small circle of friends the day she died that she’d had for decades before. But for those of us who were privileged to be close to her, she had that rarest of gifts - acceptance. She was a loving, supportive, non-judgmental friend and mother. She loved her family and, in an important part of her mind and heart, she never really left Nebraska.

I still miss her so much, but it fulfills the dream of a Lifetime to be able to put this package together, to remind the world of what a wonderful singer she was."

- Kathryn King

Remembering Gene Lees: 1928-2010

"In the past few years, I have been only too aware that primary sources of jazz history, and popular-music history, are being lost to us. The great masters, the men who were there, are slowly leaving us. I do not know who said, "Whenever anyone dies, a library burns." But it is true: almost anyone's experience is worth recording, even that of the most "ordinary" person. For the great unknown terrain of human history is not what the kings and famous men did — for much, though by no means all, of this was recorded, no matter how imperfectly — but how the "common" people lived. When Leonard Feather first came to the United States from England in the late 1930s, he was able to know most of his musical heroes, including Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. By the end of the 1940s, Leonard knew everybody of significance in jazz from the founding figures to the young iconoclasts. And when I became actively involved in the jazz world in 1959, as editor of Down Beat, most of them were still there. I met most of them, and became friends with many, especially the young Turks more or less of my own age. I have lived to see them grow old (and sometimes not grow old), and die, their voices stilled forever. And so, in recent years, I have felt impelled to do what I can to get their memories down before they are lost, leading me to write what I think of as mini-biographies of these people. This has been the central task of the Jazzletter."

The Drums in Jazz

"The basis of Jazz has always been rhythmic. The development of jazz and its innovation from the early days of ragtime at the turn of the century to the many highly sophisticated, exciting and challenging styles of jazz that can be heard today, has always derived from that basis. In the European concert tradition, the drums serve as a noise-making device, aiming to create additional intensity or dramatic fortissimo effects. They do not effect the continuity of the music and could even be left out without creating the breakdown of a Beethoven or a Tchaikovsky symphony. In Jazz the drumbeat is the ordering principal which creates the space within which the music happens. The beat of a swinging drummer forms the basis of the musical continuity of a jazz performance." - Introduction to the Properbox set - THE ENGINE ROOM: A History of Jazz Drumming from Storyville to 52nd Street."

The Piano in Jazz

"At the turn of the century-before the age of radio, television, high-fidelity recording, and computerized video games-the piano was one of the focal points of American family life in the home. The image of Mother seated at the keyboard with the children gathered around her and Father in his pinstriped shirt and suspenders looking on proudly epitomized the American dream. White American families purchased moderately priced "uprights" at the rate of nearly 250,000 per year. In black family life the piano was one of the first major purchases made by those who could afford it. Although they were less likely than white families to own instruments, blacks frequently heard piano music in churches, which were the center of community life, or in the urban "tonks" and "juke" houses (the ancestors of the jukebox). Indeed, black pianists were largely responsible for the instrument's acceptance as "part of the family." The music they played and composed during the late 1890's, eventually known as ragtime, was a major source of the piano's popularity in the two decades that followed."

Jazz Improvisation

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Tuesday, July 31, 2012

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Coming June 22, 2013 - A Profile on Tal Farlow

Gary Giddins - "Rhythm-a-ning"

Doug Ramsey of Rifftides on JazzProfiles

Remembering Sam Most: 1930-2013

Geroge Russell and New York, New York

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George Wallington Quintet - "In Sallah" [Mose Allison]

"Gracias" by Frank Foster

John Lewis/Grand Encounter - "2 Degrees East, Three Degrees West"

Grant Green - "The Kicker"

Mulgrew Miller - "Comes Sunday"

JazzProfiles Mission Statment

Remembering Jeri Southern

Jazz Writers and Critics

Big Band Jazz from St. Petersburg, Russia

Remembering Gene Lees: 1928-2010

What Heaven Looks Like to a Drummer

"Jazz is only what you are." - Pops

Alain Gerber - "Portraits En Jazz"

A Note of Appreciation

Something To Think About

The Drums in Jazz

The Piano in Jazz

Noal Cohen - Jazz Historian and Discographer

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