Dave Brubeck – The Economist Magazine and The Week Obituaries

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

For those of you who do not take The Economist or The Week, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles thought you might find their obituaries of Dave Brubeck, one of the seminal figures in the development of Jazz, to be of interest.

Many readers of these pages had the good fortune to experience and appreciate Dave Brubeck’s music.

In my case, it changed the course of my life – irrevocably.

The images that accompany the obituaries were selected by the magazines.

© -The Economist, December 15, 2012 copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Dave Brubeck, pianist and composer, died on December 5^th, aged 91.

“TO PUT Dave Brubeck in a box was an unwise thing to do. He'd just jump right out again, big, broad and strong, with those horn-rimmed glasses and that crazy, slight­ly cross-eyed smile. Call him cool, and he'd tell you that many of his jazz arrangements were so hot, they sizzled. Lump him with players of white west-coast jazz, and he'd object that he felt more black than white. Suggest he was influenced by the pelting, intellectual strain of bebop that took over jazz in the 1940's, and he would say nope, he didn't listen to it; he only ever wanted to do his own thing. Call him the usher of a new jazz age, put him on the cover of Time magazine, where he landed in 1954, and he was crestfallen. Duke Ellington deserved all that, he said, but not him.

His contrarian ways went further. Give him a few bars of Beethoven, and he'd weave a jazz riff through it; but put him in the middle of a jazz set, and he would come up with classic counterpoint as strict as the "Goldberg Variations". Sing him a tune in C, and his left hand would play it in E flat; give him a jazz line in standard 4/4 time and he would play 5/4, 7/4, even 13/4 against it, relentlessly underpinning the adventure with big fat blocks of chords. He was a jazzman who struggled to read nota­tion and who graduated on a wing and an ear from his college music school; and he was also, in later years, a composer of can­tatas and oratorios who was proud to have written a Credo for Mozart's unfinished "Mass in C minor.”

The musicians he picked for his quartet, which dominated the popular jazz scene from 1951 to 1967, were chosen because they could break out of the box like him: Paul Desmond on feather-light, floating alto sax, Joe Morello razor-sharp and witty on drums, Eugene Wright rock-solid on bass. Their greatest success, an album called "Time Out" (1959) that sold more than 1M copies, was a collection of breezily poly tonal pieces in wild time signatures, center­ing on a Desmond piece called "Take Five" written in teasing 5/4, and "Blue Rondo a la Turk", devised by Mr. Brubeck after hearing street musicians playing in 9/8 in Istanbul. These two pieces alone consolidated the quartet's fame on campuses and in clubs all over America; but Columbia Records re­fused to release the album for a year, just baffled, said Mr. Brubeck impatiently, by the fact that it broke so many rules. It did, but hey, it sounded good.

Whenever he sat down at the piano-an instrument as satisfying, to him, as a whole orchestra-his aim was to get some­where he had never got before. It didn't matter how tired he was, how beat-up he felt. He wanted to be so inspired in his explorations that he would get beyond him­self. He liked to quote Louis Armstrong, who once told a woman who asked what he thought about as he played: "Lady, if I told you, your mind would explode." In his own words, he played dangerously, pre­pared to make any number of mistakes in order to create something he had never created before.

Horsebeat and heartbeat

Several people had set him on this path. His mother had first taught him piano when he preferred to be a rodeo-roper; her rippling playing of Chopin round the house he remembered in a piece called "Thank You". His platoon commander in 1944, having heard him doodling on a pi­ano, kept him away from the front line. And Darius Milhaud, his teacher after the war, taught him to see jazz as the natural id­iom of America and the music of free men. Mr. Brubeck believed seriously in jazz as a force for democracy: in post-Nazi Ger­many, in the Soviet Union, in the fragile post-war world (where he toured on be­half of the State Department) and in Amer­ica's South, where he insisted on perform­ing with his black bassist and, when he could, pushed him to the front of the stage.

Yet his mission was never to make jazz freer or more popular; it was to make mu­sic, pure and simple, any way he could. He sang his first polyrhythms against the steady trot of his horse as he rode round the 45,000 acres near Concord, California, where his father managed cattle. In high school, playing at rough miners' dances in the foothills of the Sierras, he would riskily "screw up the shuffle" by adding triplets to it. He wrote on the road, dreaming up "Un-square Dance" (in 7/4) while driving to New York, and composing "The Duke", his tribute to Ellington, against the beating windscreen wipers of his car. All this, with his use of folk songs and hymns and blues and birdcalls, his little snatches of homage to George Gershwin or Aaron Copland, and the freight-train urging of his playing, gave his jazz a flavour less of smoky dives than of open skies and plains.

Critics attacked him for getting rich from it. He said he had never wanted more than the union scale. They said he was too "European", too college-focused, that his music couldn't be danced to and hadn't got swing; he pointed out the happy feet tap­ping at his concerts, and the number of re­cords he sold. Above all they found it hard to believe that the most successful jazz in America was being played by a family man, a laid-back Californian, modest, gen­tle and open, who would happily have been a rancher all his days-except that he couldn't live without performing, because the rhythm of jazz, under all his extrapola­tion and exploration, was, he had discov­ered, the rhythm of his heart. •”

© -The Week, December 21, 2012 copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The Pianist Who Reshaped The Rhythms of Jazz

Dave Brubeck

1920-2012

“By the jazz world's wild stan­dards, Dave Brubeck was a total square. He didn't smoke or take drugs, and he limited himself to one martini before dinner. The pianist favored expressions like "baloney" and "you bet" over coarser alternatives. But when it came to music, Brubeck was anything but conven­tional. He experimented with challenging time signatures on tracks like "Take Five" and ran through all 12 keys on "The Duke," winning the respect of his harder-living contemporaries. On tour in the Netherlands in the 1950s, stride pianist Willie "The Lion" Smith was asked by a reporter, "Isn't it true that no white man can play jazz?" Smith gestured toward Brubeck and replied, "I'd like you to meet my son."

Nothing in Brubeck's background suggested that he was destined to be a jazz great. He grew up on the cattle ranch his father man­aged in northern California, said NBCNews.com. His mother, a classically trained pianist, banned her three sons from listening to the radio, believing they should play music if they wanted to hear it. The young Brubeck quickly mastered the piano, learning mostly by ear because he was born cross-eyed and had trouble reading music. Brubeck thought his future lay in ranching and had to be prodded to go to college, where at first he studied veterinary medicine. But he quickly "became smitten with jazz," said the Associated Press, and switched his major to music.

After graduating in 1942, Brubeck enrolled in the Army as an infantryman, only to be pulled from frontline duty and given a military band to lead. There he met Paul Desmond, who would become Brubeck's most important musical partner. The alto saxo­phonist "was a perfect foil; his lovely impas­sive tone was as ethereal as Brubeck's style was densely chorded," said The New York Times. Brubeck led a series of bands after being demobilized, and in 1951 he invited Desmond to join the Dave Brubeck Quartet.  The group's smooth West Coast sound proved a hit on college campuses, and "with the release of Time Out in 1959, Brubeck had an unexpected best seller," said The Washington Post. It became the first jazz LP to sell more than a million cop­ies, even though it included complex tunes like "Blue Rondo a la Turk." The piece is in 9/8 time—nine beats to the measure instead of the customary four beats—and blended Turkish folk rhythms with jazz and Mozart.

This success didn't "come without reservations in the jazz world," said The Guardian (U.K.). Some critics suggested that Brubeck only topped the charts because he was white, even though the pia­nist was a high-profile civil rights activist. He refused to play any venue that barred black musicians—his bassist, Gene Wright, was black—and he turned down a 1958 tour of South Africa when told that he could only perform with an all-white band. Brubeck always believed that race was irrelevant to music, explaining that jazz was based on the universal rhythm of the human heart. "It's the same anyplace in the world, that heartbeat," he said. "It's the first thing you hear when you're born—or before you're born— and it's the last thing you hear."”

Ellington in Stuttgart

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

It’s always a great occasion when more of Duke Ellington’s music is made available through recordings, especially when these are made “in performance” [I hate the word “live;” what’s the alternative – “dead?”].

To my ears, nothing beats the sound of Jazz recorded as it is happening [recording studios can be such sterile places].

I have always enjoyed the simple lyricism and vivid gracefulness of the music composed by Duke and his close associate, Billy Strayhorn.

Duke and Billy wrote some of the most instantly recognizable melodies in the history of Jazz. You hear it, you hum it.

Needles to say, then, that the editorial staff at JazzProfiles was thrilled when JAZZHAUS released Big Band Live: Duke Ellington Orchestra [They didn’t ask our opinion on their choice of titles.]

“JAZZHAUS is the new music label featuring audio (and video) jazz programs taken from live radio and television recordings from the archives of Sudwestrundfunk. Jazz broadcasts by Sudwestrundfunk (SWR) started in the summer of 1947. Today, 65 years later, the archives contain about 1,600 audio and more than 350 television recordings of all major modern jazz artists - probably the biggest collection of unpublished live jazz recordings in the world: 3,000 hours - and almost all of it has never been released before. More than 400 ensembles and soloists are listed - many of them recorded three, four, five or more times over the decades.

For the last three years, the JAZZHAUS team has been thoroughly researching the vaults, carefully making the final selections. The old tapes are currently being re-mastered to high-end technology standards and will be released on CD, DVD, vinyl and as audio /video-on-demand downloads.”

Recorded at the Liederhalle in Stuttgart on March 6, 1967 Big Band Live: Duke Ellington Orchestra [#101703] contains thirteen [13] previously unreleased performance fFrom the Sudwestrundfunk Archives with an Ellington band that features Cat Anderson, Cootie Williams, Paul Gonsalves, Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney,Russell Procope, Jimmy Hamilton, et al.

Michael Bloom’s firm is once again handling the media relations for Naxos of America, the north American distributors of the JAZZHAUS series and he sent along a press release that contains the following review by  Jonathan Woolf which appeared on MusicWeb International.

“The Ellington road show hit Stuttgart in March 1967. Cootie Williams was back in the serried ranks but Billy Strayhorn was nearing the end; he died a few weeks after the concert. The tunes played reflect a diverse range of Strayhorn and Ellington and beyond - beyond being represented by Raymond Fol's tune Salome. According to W.E. Timmer's massive Ellingtonia, a number of other songs were performed but aren't presented in this 73-minute disc, including long time favourites such as Blood Count and Things Ain't, as well as, Mount Harissa and Drag.

We must be grateful for the material that has been preserved and presented in such good sound here. Procope and Hamilton form a formidable clarinet choir, echoing the late 20s days in Swamp Goo with the former taking an extensive cadential passage. Knob Hill is a sinuous Latin American swinger with hints of Horace Silver. Gonsalves rips through it. One can hear Ellington's very ducal piano prompts in that genial finger snapper, Eggo, whilst Cat Anderson's trumpet, like a dazzling Bird of Paradise, is peculiarly iridescent in La Plus Belle Africaine. We also hear Harry Carney's evocative lowing, Jimmy Hamilton's famously 'straight' clarinet and the fine bass playing of John Lamb, often overlooked in discussions on the subject of Ellingtonian rhythm sections.

Lawrence Brown has his feature on Rue Bleue whilst Carney's is on A Chromatic Love Affair where he displays his incredible tonal variety - at points, you'd swear he was playing tenor and not baritone. Anderson finally goes stratospheric on Fol's Salome, whilst his desk partner Williams arrives for a preaching outing on the Gospel-drenched The Shepherd and stays to turn up the heat on his well-loved Tuttifor Cootie. At long last Johnny Hodges casts his hypnotic spell on Freakish Lights before drummer Rufus Jones has an animated, though occasionally tawdry, bash during Kixx.

Ellington kept up a mighty schedule, of which this single concert (or part of it) forms a useful element. The band seldom slipped lower than great. What a privilege it would have been to have seen them in the flesh.”

In his insert notes to the disc, the recording’s producer, Ulli Pfau, offered these observations about the music on Big Band Live: Duke Ellington Orchestra [JAZZHAUS 101703].

“NEVER NO LAMENT

Ellington considered two topics to be off-limits: illness and death. It was for this reason he refused to make a will to the last, fearful of tempting fate and provoking his own demise. He was able to main­tain his orchestra ("the most important thing in my life") with the millions he earned from Tempo, his music publishing company - always conscious of the need to surround himself with individualists; some players stayed with him for decades. Almost constantly on the road following his comeback in Newport in 1956, his career staging posts were largely marked by the studio recordings. He released around 35 albums between 1960 and 1967 alone, including adaptations of classi­cal works, the "Far East Suite" and the "Sacred Concerts".

1967 was a year of triumphs: the outstanding trumpeter Cootie Williams, unbe­lievable in "The Shepherd" and "Tutti for Cootie", was back on board; but then tragedy struck again a few weeks after the Stuttgart concert with the death of Duke's alter ego Billy Strayhorn.

Throwing caution to the wind and refusing to rely solely on time-served hits, Duke and his 14 musicians launch themselves into the new adventure. "Johnny Come Lately" breaks the ice, "Swamp Goo" featuring clarinettist Russell Procope has the magical "Jungle Sound", Paul Gonsalves' tenor sax dances though "Knob Hill", Cat Anderson's trumpet hit the strato­sphere and Harry Carney's baritone horn gives a close-up account of "A Chromatic Love Affair".”

Here’s a sample track from Big Band Live: Duke Ellington Orchestra [JAZZHAUS 101703].

The Houdini’s – “Kickin’ In The Front Window”

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

“There is something very magical about this band called The Houdini's. The six young Dutch masters who first travelled to America in 1991 to record at the legendary Rudy Van Gelder stu­dio, appear to be, like that famous engineer, wizards when it comes to sound. The group combines sophisti­cated, often daring harmonies with clever juxtapositions of rhythms to create the sonic illusion of a much larger band than a three horn sextet.”

- Russ Musto, Insert Notes to Kickin’ in the Front Window [Timeless CD SJP 405]

“If one is trying to understand the everlasting debate about what is happening in the field of jazz nowadays, he will find that the 'know-it-alls', in their tendency of labeling and polarization, have two options available for the new jazz talent. Either the musician gets himself a hip outfit, a stage full of overly expensive electronic-equipment and accordingly a pile of debts, or he puts on a shabby face, dives into the past of bebop and proclaims it sacred. All of this is nonsense of course, since jazz is a very lively and independent form of music, giving its comment on events of its own time. Jazz should not move into rock music's place nor become the musical conscience of those who can't move away from Lady Nostalgia.

If you ask me, THE HOUDINI'S won't have themselves labeled in either way, and that alone is already worth mentioning. During their numerous live-performances this successful jazz-sextet proves that it is very well possible to combine certain acquisitions from the past with more recent musical developments and keep their own kind of music very much alive.

Exciting compositions (most of them are originals) and all soloists with a daring bravura make an unique event out of every live-concert for the audience as well as for the musicians. Therefore it has been a wise decision to record this first HOUDINI'S-CD live in one of the better jazz clubs in Holland. No colorless digital studio sound but a very fine live-recording of an astoundingly hard working jazz group with a more than enthusiastic audience. Thrilling music without boundaries, not made to have itself labeled whatsoever unless you want to label it for its high quality, and there is no harm at all in doing that.”

- Hans Dulfer, Insert Notes to The Houdini’s: Live at The Paradox [Timeless CDSJP 349;translated from the Dutch by Angelo Verploegen]

“The North Sea Jazz Festival every summer in The Hague is an enormous musical buffet. Hundreds of musicians play hour after hour all at once on thirteen stages around the Concertgebouw.  It’s impossible to listen to everything, so I meander from gig to gig. If the music doesn’t excite me I’ll venture elsewhere. If the music is good, I’ll stay a while. But there’s always so much happening that I almost never stay for a whole performance.

One delightful exception at the North Sea 1991 was the performance of a young Dutch band – The Houdini’s …. I was also amused by the name. I mean, whill The Houdini’s play magical Jazz? … [Listening to them play] It felt as though I had walked into a time warp.

What I heard was Village Vanguard in the 1960s [because] what The Houdini’s played was vintage Blue Note, or that’s what the music felt like.

They weren’t playing the actual Lee Morgan or Hank Mobley or Art Blakey tunes. They were playing original tunes, but with a groove and a spirit very much like the Jazz Messengers.

They weren’t imitating the Blue Note sound, they were refreshing it. And it was obvious that for them, playing this music is great fun. I felt the same and stayed to the end.”

Michael Bourne, Insert Notes to Headlines: The Houdini’s In New York [Timeless CD SJP 382]

There’s so much going on in the World of Dutch Jazz  that the editorial staff at JazzProfiles constantly finds itself returning to Holland for themes for its blog features.

The Houdini’s is a sextet that has become a recurring favorite since I first heard it about a dozen years ago thanks to a CD that a friend in Holland sent me.

This year marks the 25^th anniversary of the group’s recording debut under this name. Over this span of time, the Houdini's have undergone some instrumentation [trombone in place of tenor saxophone] and personnel changes in the bass and drum chairs, but its pulsating sound and driving rhythms have remained essentially the same. The group emphasizes very dynamic and well-balanced ensemble playing.

The three original horn players Angelo Verploegen (trumpet and flugelhorn), Rolf Delfos (alto sax and soprano sax) and Boris Vanderlek (tenor sax), started working together in 1986. That's when they recorded the soundtrack of the Dutch movie Blonde Dolly (WEA 242 084-1).

In 1987 they joined the Boulevard of Broken Dreams Orchestra with which they recorded the album Dancing with Tears in My Eyes (Idiot Records 832 714-1) and toured through Europe and Canada.

It was the musical director of this orchestra, Gert Jan Blom, who came up with the idea of putting a hardbop-sextet together for the 1987 Canada tour of Boulevard of Broken Dreams and named it “The Houdini’s.”

When the three, original horn players returned to Holland, they added a new rhythm section consisting of Erwin Hoorweg, piano and keyboards, Stefan Lievestro, double bass and Pieter Bast, drums.

With this line-up, The Houdini’s began performing at Dutch jazz-clubs [the Paradox in Tilburg, Holland] and festivals like HEINEKEN JAZZ FESTIVAL in Rotterdam and NORTH SEA JAZZ FESTIVAL in The Hague and appearing live on the radio-shows JAZZSPECTRUM and TROS SESJUN.

Thankfully, for those of us without ready access to The Netherlands, The Houdini’s have recorded many CDs on Timeless Records (Live At Paradox, Headlines: Kickin' In The Frontwindow), Challenge Records (Hybrid, Play The Big Five, Cooee, Live At Kiama Jazz Festival, Stripped To The Bone), Channel Classics (Porgy & Bess), Munich Records (Chasin' The General), Blue Note Records (Strange Fruit, with Trijntje Oosterhuis) and Social Beats Records (Unleashed and Remixed)

The band toured Europe, the USA, Canada and Australia and did co-productions at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw with a string orchestra, the Amsterdam New Sinfonietta conducted by Richard Dufallo;  the Schönberg Ensemble conducted by John Adams; the Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw conducted by Henk Meutgeert; the film score from Buster Keaton's silent movie The General.

The Houdini’s personnel today is made up of Angelo Verploegen on trumpet, Ilja Reijngound on trombone, Rolf Delfos on alto saxophone, Erwin Hoorweg on piano, Marius Beets on bass and Bram Wijland on drums.

If you are a fan of straight-ahead Jazz,  The Houdini’s is a group that’s well-worth checking out.

The following video features the group performing Kickin’ in the Front Window, one of their signature pieces, at the 1996 Kiama Jazz Festival in Australia. During their Australia tour, Barend Middlehoff was with them on tenor saxophone in place of Ilja Reijngoud.

In Walked Walter Davis, Jr.

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

“A PROBLEM that frequently confronts jazz musicians is the basic one of what to play. Jazz has always consisted on what is, for the most part, a borrowed repertoire. The first jazz bands played marches and quadrilles, and today you hear mostly popular and show tunes. Fortunately, there are certain musicians with the gift for composition, who are able to supply their own material, thereby making a musical statement completely their own, rather than borrowing from a storehouse of music they might find less suitable

.

Of course, every jazz musician is a composer in a sense; in fact, some people define a jazz solo as spontaneous composition. Some solos have been turned into compositions by other hands — Lester Young and Charlie Parker have both received this tribute, and a phrase of Dizzy Gillespie's, for instance, was reworked by Tadd Dameron into the lovely If You Could See Me Now. And the world of jazz history is full of so-called "originals," most of them vanishing with the same speed it took to write them. Occasionally, though, one of these "originals" achieves some degree of permanence, and some of them have passed into the basic repertoire — Milt Jackson's "Bags' Groove," for example.

But beyond this, there are a few men who can rightly be called jazz composers, and, perhaps not so surprisingly, four of the most important of them have been pianists: Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and John Lewis. In speaking of any of these men, you can always get a good argument going about which aspect of their careers are most important — their music, their groups, or their piano playing.

To take this very brief discussion right down to the present, what amounts to a new school of jazz composition is to be found in the person of Horace Silver. The conjunction of Silver and the Jazz Messengers, and the music Silver has written for that and subsequent groups, is probably the single greatest impetus to the "funky" school. Some examples of this work have achieved enormous popularity, such as Senor Blues on Blue Note 1539, and other instances are scattered liberally throughout the Blue Note catalogue, but the one record that may have been the start of it all is Blue Note 1518, which includes such near-standards as The Preacher.

And here, on this album, is a young man, another pianist, composing in the same tradition — Walter Davis Jr. On his first Blue Note album, Jackie McLean's New Soil (BLP 4013) he contributed three tunes, notably the bouncing, humorous Greasy. On this, his first album as a leader, he contributed all the music. There is a difference between composition and the mere sketching out of riffs, and Walter Davis Jr. has gone a long way toward achieving this distinction. It is practically a parlor game in some circles to put the newest "original" on the phonograph and then figure out what song it really is — what standard has had its harmony lifted to provide the basis. This music will afford little satisfaction to players of that game. They are truly compositions, varied in mood, rhythm, and harmony.

One of the things that Walter Davis Jr. has kept in mind on this album is one of the best lessons of the great Duke Ellington, a lesson so simple it is often overlooked — write for the men who are going to play your music. As I mentioned, Davis is in the Silver tradition. At present, he is pianist with Art Blakey and he has chosen as soloists two men associated, at various times, with these musicians — Donald Byrd [tp] and Jackie McLean [as]….

Sam Jones and Art Taylor, on bass and drums, are veterans of several Blue Note sessions, and provide here their usual sympathetic support….”

- Joe Goldberg, insert notes to Davis Cup [Blue Note B-232098]

Up the street from the “old” Yoshi’s Jazz club and restaurant in Berkeley, CA was a small shop that sold LP’s [or, as they are referred to today – “vinyl”] and CD’s.

In typical Berkeley fashion, the shop had a distinctive name – D.B.A. Brown – and although I never asked, I assume the “D.B.A.” reference was to the standard initials for the phrase “doing business as.”

After driving over from San Francisco to catch pianist Benny Green’s trio at the club, I had a little time to kill before the first set so I parked my car in the nearby Dreyfus Ice Cream factory lot and strolled over to D.B.A. Brown.

While browsing the music on offer at the shop, I came across a solo piano CD by Walter Davis, Jr. entitled In Walked Thelonious [Mapleshade 56312] which I purchased with the idea that it would “keep my company” on the drive back to the city.

When the doors to the club opened, I was able to get a table close to Benny’s piano. I laid the Walter Davis, Jr. Monk tribute disc on the table, took off my jacket and placed an order with the cocktail waitress.

After playing a magnificent first set with his trio consisting of Christian McBride on bass and Kenny Washington on drums, Benny stepped down from the bandstand, noticed the In Walked Thelonious CD and said to me: “Isn’t Walter Davis, Jr. a gas?”

The next thing I know, Benny had seated himself at my table and began to regale me with stories about how Walter Davis, Jr. and Walter Bishop, another pianist who played in the style of Bud Powell, had helped him when he moved to New York [Benny grew up in Berkeley] and how much he had learned from them over the years. He couldn’t say enough nice things about these men.

Interestingly, although it was many years apart, we both first experienced Walter Davis, Jr. by listening to him on Jackie McLean’s New Soil Blue Note recording.

In addition to his marvelous Bud Powell/Horace Silver-inflected piano solos and accompaniment, Walter had contributed three, original contributions to New Soil [BLP 4013].

Alfred Lion of Blue Note Records was so impressed with Walter that soon thereafter, he featured him on his own LP entitled Davis Cup. [CDP 7243 8 32098 2 8]

I must admit that I hadn’t really followed Walter’s career that closely after those early Blue Note recordings.

But I’d really loved his writing and enjoyed his piano playing enough to pick up the Mapleshade CD featuring his solo piano interpretations of Monk’s tunes.

Walter’s treatment of Thelonious music was a revelation to me for as Pierre M. Sprey, the producer of the CD put it: “… in listening to Walter play Monk, I learned more about the inner workings of Monk’s music than in my previous thirty years of listening to the original.”

Talk about the serendipitous way that Life works: I had not heard Walter Davis, Jr. play for almost three decades and here I was listening to him play what has to be considered as one of the definitive solo piano treatments of Monk’s music ever recorded.

Pierre M. Sprey’s complete insert notes to In Walked Thelonious [Mapleshade 56312] are as follows.

© -Pierre M. Sprey, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Walter Davis, Jr. had been thinking about a solo recording project ever since he left Dizzy Gillespie's group in 1986. There was no question in Walter's mind as to what the album would be. It would be dedicated entirely to the music of his mentor and close friend, Thelonious Monk—a thank-you to the New York bebop giant who had taken Walter, a gifted East Orange, New Jersey teenager, under his wing in 1949.

Until the day he died in June, 1990, Walter did things the hard way. The Monk project was no exception. Rather than picking eight or ten comfortable Monk stan­dards and rehearsing them for a few days, he immersed himself in fifty of Monk's toughest compositions for two months, deliberately leaving the choice of which to record until the moment he sat down at the studio Steinway. As though things weren't difficult enough, he limited himself to three minutes pertune, saying, "I just want to get in, say what I have to say, and get out—no endless b.s. solos."

A week before the long-planned first recording session, Walter, a deeply mystical man, called me early one morning. Without saying hello, he said with a quiet intensity, "Man, you won't believe what happened to me last night. I sat down to my electric piano and Thelonious came into the room. I played for three hours and never even turned on the piano" For Walter, this was no vision or metaphor. Thelonious Monk really was in his basement practicing room, giving him specific technical lessons on how to play Monk, correcting Walter's tempo on one tune, revamping his chord voicings on another, showing him how to put more "stride" feeling into a third.

Still, I didn't fully understand how deeply Walter felt that this recording was to be a dialogue between himself and Monk until we got started. Most of the five days we worked in the studio, it was just Walter at the beautiful old Steinway and me at the tape recorder. But Walter was clearly playing for someone else. Every time he'd pull off a tricky time change or voice a chord in some startling way, he'd shoot a sly look of triumph sideways at the air—the kind of look you see when jazz musicians play to impress each other.

At one point, Walter was falling short of the strict standards he had set for himself. The tune was "Gallop's Gallop," intricate and laden with pitfalls. Walter had already tried eight takes, breaking off, deeply dissatisfied and frustrated, in the middle of each one. When I couldn't bear it anymore, I suggested he proceed to another tune, maybe return to this one later.

Walter replied instantly, "You don't understand, Pierre. If I don't do the hard ones, Thelonious will be laughing at my ass for the rest of my life." And indeed, on the ninth take, he whipped off a witty and jewel-like rendition—one that, no doubt, earned an approving chuckle from Monk.

In those five days of listening to Walter play Monk, I learned more about the inner workings of Monk's music than in my previous thirty years of listening to the original. Yetthis album presents neither a mere skillful imitation nor a Davis-style reinterpretation of Monk (even though Walter could have performed either task had he wanted). Instead, this album is a brilliant illumination of the elements that made Monk unique and unforgettable: the little boy playfulness, the devilish delight in startling harmonic or rhythmic twists, the teasing with slightly changed quotations from familiar standards, the old-time "stride" piano sound in the midst of modern harmonies, and the stark emotion of those angular, unadorned ballad lines. Walter has somehow managed to intensify each of these facets—in a way that sounds just like what Monk would have played had he chosen to let us in on his secrets. Yet he has also fused these elements into concise, polished gems quite different from Monk's own constructions.

For sheer playfulness, check out Walter's "Green Chimneys." For ballad lines of austere beauty, listen to what he does with "Ruby, My Dear." In "Criss Cross," Walter dissects Monk's devilish trickiness. "Gallop's Gallop" becomes a swinging vehicle for clarifying the stride roots in Monk's composition.

If you want to come to grips with what has been achieved here, compare some of Walter's versions side by side with Monk's. Pick something as overplayed as "'Round Midnight." If you listen first to Monk's solo version (on Blue Note's Genius of Modem Music, Vol. 1), then listen to either of Walter's versions, your immediate reaction will be surprise at how much Walter's improvisation differs without violating any aspect of Monk's spirit. Your second reaction will probably be to put the Monk solo back on the turntable because Walter's clear exposition has suddenly made you aware of the subtleties you missed the first time around.

Perhaps the most spontaneous tribute to Walter's otherworldly achievement in these sessions comes from Dwike Mitchell, the pianist in the Mitchell-Ruff duo. Several months after these sessions, I happened to be playing the tapes for Dwike. I had told him nothing about Walter's immersion in the Monk project or about Monk's "visit" to Walter's basement. After two cuts, Dwike stopped the tape and said, "I've been listening to Walter all my life and I know exactly how he plays. What's on this tape is not Walter; it's Monk playing through Walter's hands."

Here’s a sampling of what’s on offer in Walter Davis, Jr.’s In Walked Thelonious [Mapleshade 56312]. The tune is Monk’s rarely heard Gallop’s Gallop.

Christian Escoudé and la France Profonde

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

“France’s position as the world’s leading tourist destination is no accident, and not just because of the scenery or the food. To many people it stands for a dream, encompassing the revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity and epitomizing … the promotion of culture, literature and intellectual debate, even the very notion of civilization.”

In its 14-page Special Report on France [November 17^th-23^rd 2012 issue], The Economist magazine goes on to explain:

From deep rurality to multi-ethnic suburbs, non-metropolitan France matters:

“THERE IS SO much more to France than Paris. Cities like Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon, Nice and Toulouse count for a lot, both economically and politically. The country's variety is en­trancing, one reason why so many foreigners come to France and so relatively few French people holiday abroad. France boasts some of the world's most beautiful Gothic cathedrals, such as Amiens, Chartres, Notre-Dame de Paris and Reims, as well as some of its finest medieval sculptures in Autun and Vezelay. There are Flemish towns like Lille and Arras, Italianate ones such as Nice and Menton and Teutonic cities like Strasbourg and Metz. And along with Loire valley chateaux such as the fairytale Chambord and the river-crossing Chenonceaux there are the gorgeous multicoloured roofs of Beaune and Dijon, spectacular hilltop villages along the Cote d'Azur and in the Cathar country of the Languedoc - and some of Europe's most modern and fash­ionable ski resorts.

The political significance of regional France is enhanced by the tradition of multiple mandates, which has meant that many ministers and deputies in Paris have simul­taneously been presidents or mayors of lo­cal regions, departments or towns. The effect of this lingers …, thanks to successive waves of decentralisation, regional and local government accounts for a fifth of public spending.

The  weight  of what is sometimes known as la France profonde is greater even than this number suggests.

Geographically, France is western Europe's biggest country (even if you leave out the French overseas departments), and much of it has remained well hidden until surprisingly recently….

Farming also matters far more in France than in many other countries. The population became urbanised relatively late: even in 1920 over a third of French people lived in rural areas, a far bigger share than in most of the rest of Europe. The cult of the paysan remains: many of today's Parisian sophisticates can trace their ancestral roots to the countryside, and plenty still keep a property in the country-something that came in useful during and just after the second world war, when food was scarce. Even today the French fervently believe in the magical qualities of their local vineyard or of the terroir and politically, agriculture also packs a big punch.”

So what has all of this to do with Jazz?

It’s simple really.

Because of their affinity for things cultural, cosmopolitan and sophisticated, the French have always viewed and respected Jazz as an art form.

From the earliest years of the music, the French have embraced Jazz and treated the musicians who performed it with the highest regard and dignity.

Some have maintained that when Jazz fell-out-of-favor in its native United States, primarily after 1960, that Jazz went to Europe - to live. Many expatriate Jazz musicians would settled in France because they were so warmly received there.

Not surprisingly, the home grown form of Jazz in France would be reflective of “the deep rurality” and paysan qualities which dominate in the French countryside.

For while the Parisian sophisticates were welcoming American Jazz musicians, the paysan of “la France Profonde” were creating their own versions of Jazz using acoustic guitars, violins and accordions.

Indeed, the three have become so interwoven that it is almost impossible to say French Jazz without mentioning the guitar, violin and accordion in the same breath.

The French even used more guitars instead of bass and drums as a rhythm section in some of their earliest Jazz combos.

The sound of French Jazz with its links to the paysan instruments of guitar, violin and accordion were immortalized in the 1930’s recordings of The Hot Club of France, a group under the leadership of guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stephane Grappelli.

Over the years, Django has become a Jazz legend and the tradition of gypsy-Jazz guitar stylings has been carried on by a number of both French and international guitarists.

One of these modern-day, regional France counterparts is guitarist Christian Escoudé, who, in 1989 put together an octet and recorded an album entitled Gipsy Waltz [Emarcy 838772-2].

While it is representative of The Hot Club of France style of paysan Jazz, the music on this album has been embellished in a number of ways.

Escoudé adds three other guitarists [Frederic Sylvestre, Paul Ferret and Jimmy Gourley] to form a vehicle for four-part-guitar harmony while also using a bass [Alby Cullaz] and an accordion [Marcel Azzola].

Somewhat uncharacteristically, drums [either Philippe Combelle or Billy Hart] are added to the mix as is a cello [Vincent Courtois] which adds another sound dimension when it is phrased in unison with the accordion on a number of tunes.

The result is as described by Alain Tercinet in the recordings insert notes: “Escoudé constantly plays on the association of different sounds: an accordion, by turns one, two or three guitars, a zest of guitar-synthesizer or cello, all joining together, playing off each other or separating at the whim of the scores that are rich but avoid ostentation.

Relaxed, and at the peak of inspiration, all the musicians speak out with infectious warmth and enthusiasm.

Besides paying a magnificent tribute to his musical heritage, Christian Escoudé also paints his autoportrait here; that of a guitarist to be numbered among the best – irrespective of nationality or class.”

The Ultimate Organic Tenor Groove Experience

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

We put this feature together essentially to pay homage to the venerable tradition of the jam session.

As defined by Gunther Schuller in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, the jam session is:

“An informal gathering of jazz musicians playing for their own pleasure. Jam sessions originated as spontaneous diversions when musicians were free from the constraints of professional engagements; they also served the function of training young players in a musical tradition that was not formally taught and accepted in music schools and academic institutions until the 1960s.

In the late 1930s jam sessions came to be organized by entrepreneurs for audiences; this under­mined their original purpose, and by the 1950s true jam ses­sions were becoming increasingly rare.

However, in the 1970s and 1980s the concept of "sessions" has made a comeback among younger jazz musicians, especially those trained in con­servatories. An "open" session is one in which anyone who is more or less competent may take part. The so-called loft scene of the late 1970s in New York may also be seen as a quasi-commercial offshoot of the jam session. (B. Cameron: "Soci­ological Notes on the Jam Session," Social Forces, xxxiii (1954), 177) - GUNTHER SCHULLER “

And Paul F. Berliner, in his wonderfully informative, Thinking in Jazz, The Infinite Art of Improvisation, offers these observations about the jam session:

“As essential to students as technical information and counsel is the understanding of Jazz acquired directly through performance. In part they gain experience by participating in one of the most venerable of the community's insti­tutions, the jam session. At these informal musical get-togethers, improvisers are free of the constraints that commercial engagements place upon repertory, length of performance, and the freedom to take artistic risks. Ronald Shannon Jackson's grade school band leader allowed students to conduct daily lunch-hour jam sessions in the band room. "During those years, I never saw the inside of the school's official lunch room."

Ultimately, sessions bring together artists from different bands to play with a diverse cross section of the jazz community. "New Yorkers had a way of learning from each other just as we did in Detroit," Tommy Flanagan says. "From what I heard from Arthur Taylor, Jackie McLean, and Sonny Rollins, they all used to learn from just jamming together with Bud Powell and Monk and Bird. Even though Bird wasn't a New Yorker, he lived here a long time and got an awful lot from it."

Some sessions arise spontaneously when musicians informally drop in on one another and perform together at professional practice studios. Improvisers also arrange invitational practice sessions at one another's homes. Extended events at private house parties in Seattle "lasted a few days at a time," Patti Brown remembers, and they held such popularity that club owners temporarily closed their own establishments to avoid competing for the same audience. Guests at the parties "cooked food and ate, [then] sat down and played," Brown continues. Musicians "could really develop there. Sometimes they would really get a thing going, and they would keep on exploring an idea. You would go home and come back later, and it was still going on.... [Improvisers] some­times played a single tune for hours." Other sessions were similarly very re­laxed: "Everybody was in the process of learning. Some guys were better than others, but it was always swinging, and the guys went on and on playing. We played maybe one number for an hour, but nobody ever got bored with it.”

Jazz organizations such as the Bebop Society in Indianapolis and the New Music Society at the World Stage in Detroit, where Kenny Burrell served as president and concert manager, promoted more formally organized sessions. Others took place in nightclubs, especially during weekend afternoons or in the early hours of the morning after the clientele had gone. In Los Angeles, according to Art Farmer, opportunities abounded for young people. "During the day you would go to somebody's house and play. At night there were after-hours clubs where they would hire maybe one horn and a rhythm section, and then anybody who wanted to play was free to come up and play. Then these clubs would have a Sunday matinee session. We used to just walk the streets at night and go from one place to another."

Musicians distinguish some sessions in terms of the skills of participants. The New Music Society would have a group "the caliber of Elvin Jones, Barry Harris, Tommy Flanagan, and Kenny Burrell," and then they would have "the next crew of guys" like Lonnie Hillyer and his schoolmates, who rehearsed a couple of weeks in advance to prepare for their own session. The youngsters "wouldn't interfere" with those involving "the guys of high caliber." At times, the arrival of musicians from out of town intensified session activities—artists like Hampton Hawes and John Coltrane "who'd be working in some band and had that night off. It was a hell of a playing atmosphere going on there.”

.

Likewise in Chicago, musicians knew that the session "at a certain club down the corner was for the very heavy cats and would not dare to participate until they knew that they were ready," Rufus Reid recalls. As a matter of re­spect, "you didn't even think about playing unless you knew that you could cut the mustard. You didn't even take your horn out of your case unless you knew the repertoire." At the same time, naive learners did periodically perform with artists who were a league apart from them. David Baker used to go to sessions including Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray "when they came to Indianapolis." He adds with amusement, "I didn't have the sense not to play with them."

Although initially performing at sessions in their hometowns, musicians from different parts of the country eventually participate in an extensive net­work of events in New York City, "mixing in with players from everywhere." In the late forties and fifties, they made their way each day through a variety of apartments, lofts, and nightclubs, where they sampled performances by im­promptu groups and joined them as guests during particular pieces, a practice known as sitting in. In addition to having pedagogical value, the sessions served as essential showcases. As Kenny Barron points out, "That's how your name got around." Count Basie's club in particular "was like a meeting ground" during Monday evening sessions, as was the renowned club Birdland, although the latter was difficult "to break into without knowing somebody.”  There were also well-documented sessions at Minton's Playhouse and Monroe's Up­town House in Harlem.

Tommy Turrentine's fondest memories of the mid-forties concern Small's Paradise Club "in Harlem.... Everybody used to come there." Spanning four musical generations, the artists included trumpeters Red Allen, Hot Lips Page, Idres Sulieman, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Clifford Brown; saxophon­ists Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean, and Stan Getz; pianists Bud Powell, Walter Bishop Jr., Walter Davis, and Mal Waldron. The house band was led by Big Nick Nicholas, who knew "every tune that's ever been written." Nicholas was, in fact, an important teacher of the community for his role in challenging players to expand their repertories by constantly choosing unfamil­iar compositions on the bandstand. Within the context of such a rich and varied repertory, the improvised interplay, night after night, served as inspiring learning sessions for Turrentine and his friends. "That was Paradise University. You would hear so much good music each night that, when you went to lay down, your head would be swimming!"

Rivalry among the participants added spark to an already charged atmo­sphere. "During that time, there was somewhat of a mutual respect among the musicians, and they had cutting sessions. They would say, “I am going to blow so and so out.' It wasn't with malice. It was no put-down; it was just friendly competition." Turrentine goes on to describe actual events. "Maybe two tenor players would get up; maybe there would be about seven horn players on the bandstand. Everybody had the sense to know that saxophones was going to hang up there tonight — they was going to be blowing at each other — so we all got off the bandstand and let them have it. Maybe the next night, two trumpet players would be getting up there at each other; then there would be drummers. I have seen it many times. It was healthy really, just keeping everybody on their toes."

Interaction with an increasing number of musicians in these settings pro­vided aspiring artists with stimulus for their own growth as improvisers. Don Sickler speculates that one renowned trumpeter "became so great" because he was aware of the competition around him: "Booker Little was born just a few months before him, and Lee Morgan was just a little younger. He really had to work hard to keep up with that level of competition."

Of course, any instrument was generally welcomed in a jam session, but somehow, to my ears, at least, the tradition of the jam session is best exemplified by the sound of “battling” or “dueling” tenor saxophones.

Over the years, there have been many such pairings including Lester Young and Herschel Evans; Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster; Illinois Jacquet and “Flip” Phillips; Don Byas and Buddy Tate; Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray; Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt; Al Cohn and Zoot Sims; Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott; Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and Johnny Griffin; Frank Foster and Frank Wess; Pete Christlieb and Warne Marsh.

The title of this piece gets its name from two Dutch tenor saxophonists – Simon Rigter and Sjoerd Dijkhuizen – who along with guitarist Martijn van Iterson, organist Carlo de Wijs and drummer Joost Patocka – revived the jam session tradition with their appearance on August 18, 2006 at the Pure Jazzfest which was held at De Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague, The Netherlands.

For their performance at the Pure Jazzfest, the group adopted the name -  The Ultimate Organic Tenor Groove Experience – and I have absolutely no idea what the “organic” in the title is in reference to – sign of the times, maybe?.

By way of background, Simon and Sjoerd enjoy a major presence on the Dutch Jazz scene as both perform with The Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw and with the Rotterdam Jazz Orchestra. Sjoerd can also be heard regularly as a member of drummer Eric Ineke’s JazzXpress.

Martijn van Iterson has his own quartet and often wroks with The Metropole Orchestra in Amsterdam.  Carlo has also performed with The Metropole Orchestra, Lucas van Merwijk’s Cubop City Big Band and alto saxophonist Benjamin Herman’s group to which drummer Joost Patocka also belongs.

Both in their late thirties, Sjoerd Dijkhuizen and Simon Rigter formed their own quintet as an outgrowth from their appearance together with the late Dutch pianist Cees Slinger on his "Two Tenor Case" recording. In addition to their work in The Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw,” they are also a part of a group called "The Reeds,” a sax ensemble and rhythm section.

As  far as I can determine, Simon and Sjoerd in combination with Carlo, Martijn and Joost made only one public appearance together and that was at the 2006 Pure Jazzfest.

You can view images of all the members of The Ultimate Organic Tenor Groove Experience in the following video montage which is set to the group’s performance of Dexter Gordon’s Sticky Wicket.

As we’ve noted before, straight-ahead Jazz is alive and well – in Holland!

R.I.P. David Warren Brubeck, 12.6.1920 - 12.5.2012