Louis Armstrong’s Life in Letters, Music and Art: NYTimes 11.16.2018

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

“Armstrong was an artist who happened to be an entertainer, an entertainer who happened to be an artist—as much an original in one role as the other. He revolutionized music, but he also revolutionized expectations about what a performer could be. In the beginning, he was an inevitable spur for the ongoing American debate between high art and low. As his genius was accepted in classical circles around the world, a microcosm of the dispute took root in the jazz community, centered on his own behavior. Elitists who admired the musician capable of improvising solos of immortal splendor were embarrassed by the comic stage ham. …

To separate Armstrong the sublime trumpeter from Armstrong the irrepressible stage wag … underestimates the absurdist humor that informs his serious side. His ability to balance the emotional gravity of the artist with the communal good cheer of the entertainer helped enable him to demolish the Jim Crow/Zip Coon/Ol’ Dan Tucker stereotypes. In their place he installed the liberated black man, the pop performer as world-renowned artist who dressed stylishly, lived high, slapped palms with the Pope, and regularly passed through whites-only portals, leaving the doors open behind him. Americans loved Armstrong, and he counted on that love to do what only the greatest artists are prepared to do—show the world to itself in a new light. By the late 1940s, fashions changed and many blacks and not a few whites took offense at his clowning, equating it with racial servility. But an Uncle Tom, though he may stoop to conquer, consciously demeans himself. Armstrong would have considered ludicrous an attempt to equate his style of entertainment with self-abasement. He was as much himself rolling his eyes and mugging as he was playing the trumpet. His fans understood that, but intellectuals found the whole effect too damn complicated.”

- Gary Giddins, Satchmo, [pp. 32-34]

"You know you can't play anything on the horn that Louis hasn't played — I mean even modern.”

- Miles Davis

“The bottom line of any country in the world is what did we contribute to the world?

We contributed Louis Armstrong.”

- Tony Bennett

“No him; no me.”

- Dizzy Gillespie

It’s been too long since there was a feature about Pops on these pages and when a friend shared the following piece with the editorial staff at JazzProfiles we thought we’d bring it to your attention as a way of remedying Louis’ absence from the blog.

The original essay contained many links which redirect the reader to more information about the points under discussion and we’ve kept these in the blog posting so you could have the benefit of them as well.

It’s nice to see the Armstrong Legacy being maintained by a current generation writer on the staff of one of the world's most distinguished newspapers.

But then, anytime you write about Louis you also make yourself look good.

Louis Armstrong’s Life in Letters, Music and Art: NYTimes 1.16.2018

By Giovanni Russonello

“Behind his blistering trumpet solos, revolutionary vocal improvising and exuberant stage persona, how did Louis Armstrong see himself? What was it like to be the first pop virtuoso of the recorded era — the man whose earliest releases set the tune for America’s love affair with modern black music, and who went on to become one of history’s most famous entertainers?

Those questions aren’t rhetorical. There’s actually a deep well of resources on hand to help answer them. For his entire adult life, away from the spotlight, Armstrong amassed a huge trove of personal writings, recordings and artifacts. But until this month, you would have had to travel far into central Queens to find them. Now anyone can access them. Thanks to a $3 million grant from the Fund II Foundation — run by Robert F. Smith, the wealthiest African-American — the Louis Armstrong House Museum has digitized the entire collection he left behind and made it available to the public.

Armstrong wrote hundreds of pages of memoir, commentary and jokes throughout his life, and sent thousands of letters. He made collages and scrapbooks by the score. Over the final two decades of his life, he recorded himself to reel-to-reel tapes constantly, capturing everything from casual conversations to the modern music he was listening to.

All told, Armstrong’s is not just one of the most well documented private lives of any American artist. It’s one of the most creatively documented lives, too.

“Posterity drove him to write manuscripts and make tapes and catalog everything,” said Ricky Riccardi, the director of research collections at the Louis Armstrong House Museum and a noted Armstrong scholar. “He was just completely aware of his importance and wanting to be in control of his own story.”

And it wasn’t just posterity. The same things that drove him as a performer — faith in unfettered communication, an irreverent approach to the strictures of language, the desire to wrap all of American culture in his embrace — course through his writings, collages and home recordings.

Armstrong had been largely responsible for shaping jazz into the worldly, youth-driven music it became in the 1930s. He emerged as a symbol of racial pride, crossing Tin Pan Alley gentility with street patois, and sometimes singing directly about black frustrations. But as his career went on, his grinning stage persona — an expansion on the minstrel shows and New Orleans cabarets of his youth — fell out of step with most African-American listeners’ tastes. (“I loved the way Louis played trumpet, man, but I hated the way he had to grin in order to get over with some tired white folks,” Miles Davis wrote in his autobiography.)

With jazz’s identity solidifying as an art music in the 1950s, Armstrong became especially unfashionable to the critical establishment. The autumnal hits he scored in the mid-1960s, “Hello, Dolly!” and “What a Wonderful World,” seemed only to confirm the media consensus that the times had passed him by.

But these archives contain the tools for a better understanding of Armstrong: as idiosyncratic an artist as any, one whose creative instincts only grew deeper and broader over time.

In part, we see a man attuned to race and politics, who took his role seriously as a global ambassador for American culture and kept a close eye on the achievements of fellow African-Americans. When he spoke out against school segregation in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957, he surprised the nation. Some activists said it was too little, too late. The archive, however, shows that he considered it both a proud moment in his career and wholly of a piece with his life up to that point. In the collection is a telegram he wrote to President Dwight Eisenhower on the day Eisenhower announced he would be sending Army troops into Little Rock, urging him “to take those little Negro children personally into Central High School along with your marvelous troops.”

And as solicitous as he was, Armstrong was unwilling to let critical judgments define him. He kept a close eye on reviews, but he wrote acerbically about music critics and sometimes taped his interviews with them — perhaps for evidence, in case they misreported something. On one tape, from 1959, he barks at a journalist after being asked about changes afoot in jazz. “I just live what I play, and I can’t vouch for the other fellow. As long as I feel and hit the notes and I’ve got my own audience, then no critic in the world can tell me how I should play my horn,” he says.

Raised in New Orleans, Armstrong came to fame in his early 20s after joining King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in Chicago; his early recordings as a leader, with his Hot Five and Hot Seven, established jazz as a soloist’s music, and made him one of the first pop musicians of the radio era. By the 1940s and ’50s he was regularly included on lists of the most admired Americans.

Starting in his 20s, Armstrong frequently clipped newspaper articles about himself and bundled them into scrapbooks. The books began as a tool to convince club owners of his legitimacy, but they turned into a historical record. The dozens of scrapbook binders contained in the archive are a window into his self-image as a celebrity: Armstrong looking at us looking at him.

Armstrong began his career as an idol to many African-Americans. Watch the well-circulated video clip of him performing in Copenhagen in 1933 — bountiful and aggressive as he scats over “Dinah,” then carves his way through “Tiger Rag” with a sweltering trumpet solo — and you’ll get why. But as time wore on, many younger people, particularly musicians of the bebop generation, expressed misgivings about his genuflecting stage persona.

Armstrong’s scrapbooks make it clear that he kept a close eye on how he was perceived, as an artist and as a black statesman. When he traveled to Baltimore in the winter of 1931, he donated 300 bags of coal to residents of a needy black neighborhood, and privately saved the news clipping from The Baltimore Afro-American. When his band was arrested in Arkansas simply for traveling in the same bus as its white manager, he saved the article reporting it.

And when a blatantly racist British critic referred to him as “Mr. Ugly” the following year (“He looks, and behaves, like an untrained gorilla,” the article read), Armstrong kept a copy of that too. Reading what arts journalism was like in the late ’20s and ’30s, it becomes obvious how narrow the berth was for a public figure like Armstrong to emerge onto the national stage.

Armstrong wrote constantly — mostly letters and short stories about his life, but also in the form of limericks and pages-long jokes. He wrote in a galloping, oddly punctuated style, treating literature almost as an outsider art. Commas turned into apostrophes; jive talk collided with standard English; words were underlined all over. His musical originality is matched on the page.

When Armstrong joined King Oliver’s famed band, he brought along a typewriter. By 1936, when he was in his mid-30s, he had already published an autobiography. Over the course of his career he wrote more than 10,000 letters to fans, hundreds of pages of personal memoirs and enough lengthy jokes to fill an entire book.

In 1969 and ’70, with his health failing, Armstrong set about writing a long essay about his relationship with the Karnofskys, a Jewish family in New Orleans. When he was 7, he worked as a servant in their house, and they recognized his musical talent early, advancing him a small amount of money to buy his first cornet.

In this essay, which stretches on for 77 pages, Armstrong enshrines a number of other elements of his personal mythology. He reports his birthday as July 4, 1900, an apocryphal but symbolic date he was fond of using. And he describes the importance of the Storyville neighborhood where he was raised, and where much of early jazz was developed.

Just months after he wrote this piece, he died in his sleep at age 69. This story would be collected in a posthumous book, “Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words,” that featured essays from across his career, many of which are included in the Armstrong archive in their original, handwritten form.

Armstrong’s creative hobbies outside writing were less easily wrangled for posterity or publication. One example: the hundreds of collages that he made over the course of his life, cutting out and combining photographs, illustrations and text.

Starting in the early 1950s, few pieces of paper were safe from the blade of Armstrong’s scissors: magazines, risqué photographs, even a Christmas card from Richard Nixon wound up cut and collaged. Most of the time, he taped his collages onto reel-to-reel tape boxes; they were purely decorative. Elsewhere, he turned larger pieces of paper into what amounted to a personal hall of fame.

In one such collage, he crammed a page with almost a dozen photos of Jackie Robinson. On another, Duke Ellington and Kermit Parker, the first black man to run for governor as a Democrat in Louisiana, gaze toward each other from across the page.

And on the collage above, a photograph of King Oliver is pasted inside an image of Armstrong’s head, as if to make clear how much Armstrong felt he owed to Oliver. To their left are two other trumpeters: Bix Beiderbecke, a prominent jazz star of the 1920s, and Bunny Berigan, who drew heavily from Armstrong’s influence, both as a trumpeter and a vocalist. Other musicians pictured include Duke Ellington, the R&B vocalist Ruth Brown, and Big Sid Catlett, an influential early drummer who played with Armstrong’s big band at the height of its popularity.

When Armstrong died in 1971, his wife, Lucille, ensured that the house they shared in Corona, Queens — the place where he recorded his tapes, made collages and wrote his manifold letters and notes — remained exactly as he had left it.

At first, Armstrong didn’t want the house. But Lucille bought it in 1943, the year after they married, while he was on a lengthy tour. He eventually fell in love with the narrow two-story brick home, and with the working-class block into which it was tucked. Armstrong — whose four marriages never resulted in a child — proudly became an avuncular presence on the block, and bragged in a 1971 manuscript that he had watched three generations grow up around him. Years later, when Lucille eventually wanted to upgrade, he insisted they stay. So she made improvements. The ornate, Fifth Avenue-rate bathroom is a prime example. And the “Throne,” as Armstrong called it in his writing, was of prime import.

Armstrong took health and diet very seriously, partly because of having been raised by a single mother who focused, for lack of a doctor, on keeping her children healthy with natural remedies. After Lucille introduced him to Swiss Kriss, an herbal laxative, he became a zealous proponent and offered his endorsement for free. The couple wrote a diet plan that called for regular consumption of Swiss Kriss, and they circulated it among friends and fans along with a comical photo of Armstrong seated on his decked-out Queens toilet, with his “Satchmo-Slogan” printed below: “Leave it All Behind Ya.”

Starting in December 1950, Armstrong used a tape recorder to capture casual conversations, ambient road hangouts, interviews with journalists, radio broadcasts he liked and more. Most often, though, he would simply record his shellac and vinyl discs to tape, consolidating the music and making it easier to carry. He kept careful documentation of the track lists, and together the tapes and their accompanying lists provide a revealing glimpse into his broad music tastes.

Ever the careful documenter, Armstrong wrote out a playlist anytime he recorded music to tape — whether it was a recording of his own concert, a dub of an entire album or a more piecemeal mixtape.

The range of his listening is striking. He was as likely to listen to the Beatles as he was to Rachmaninoff. On one playlist, the old vaudeville singer Al Jolson and Miles Davis butt up against each other. “The man was obsessed with all kinds of music,” Riccardi said. “Anywhere he’d go — if he’d go to South America, he’d bring back South-American records. If he went to Africa, he’d bring back African records. He’d go to record stores everywhere.”

On a disc marked “Reel 24,” he is listening mostly to the bebop musicians that had succeeded him in the jazz spotlight of the 1940s and ’50s. On the audio of the tape itself, you can hear him announcing the tunes like a radio D.J.

After that tape plays, Armstrong introduces another: a bootleg recording of a jam session at Minton’s, the venue where bebop was born. After he plays it, he expresses approval. “Cats jumpin’, man,” he says, apparently unperturbed by the beboppers’ sometimes-ambivalent relationship to his own legacy. Later on, he jumps to a track of his own, “Among My Souvenirs.” In the handwritten playlist, Armstrong closely notates each turn in the tape, including the moment when he pauses to mention the children playing outside.

These are the children that Armstrong said he was thinking of when he sang his most famous song, “What a Wonderful World.” Here we have their very voices, documented for all time.”

DEBUT - Julian Oliver Mazzariello

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

Julian mostra un tocco leggero e un fraseggio con note tratteggiate; è molto bravo nel dispiegare lunghe e liriche imitazioni. Il modo di suonare di Julian non è forzato, scorre. Lui sa dove vuole andare nei suoi assoli e lui arriva lì in un modo che è pieno di colpi di scena interessanti.

Julian è un abile musicista, ma non sta cercando di impressionarti con la sua tecnica, anzi, è più interessato a fare musica. Il suo tono e il tocco creano una chiarezza cristallina al suono che induce dal pianoforte.

La redazione di JazzProfiles.

When Matteo Pagano, the owner-operator of Via Veneto Jazz, sent me a preview copy of the latest CD by pianist Julian Oliver Mazzariello, I was somewhat baffled by its title - DEBUT (Jando Music/ Via Veneto VVJ 125 – 8013358201250).,

I mean, wasn’t this the same Julian O. Mazzariello that I’d heard on recordings by tenor saxophonist Daniele Scannapieco, trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso, trombonist Enzo Pietropaoli and his Yatra band, soprano and alto saxophonist Stefano Di Battista, singer and songwriters Edoardo De Crescenzo and Fabio Concato and Jazz vocalist Maria Pia de Vito?

Much to my surprise, it turns out that the answer to the “Debut” riddle is that this is the first recording that Julian has made as a leader.

The Jando Music/Via Veneto Jazz media release approaches the puzzle and its resolution this way:

“How many albums do you have of Julian Oliver Mazzariello? Think about it. It’ll probably be difficult for you to answer. Perhaps you won’t be able to recall the precise number, but there’s definitely at least one in your music collection. What’s more, that elegant touch of his on the piano is unmistakable, instantly recognizable, not to mention his remarkable Anglo- Neapolitan name.

But the truth is you haven’t got any of Julian’s albums. That’s because, although Julian has performed in the bands of many of his colleagues, he remained undecided as to whether to step into the role of band leader until Debut.”

I for one am delighted that Julian Oliver Mazzariello decided to make this maiden voyage CD on which he is joined by André Ceccarelli Drums and Rémy Vignolo on Double Bass because I find it especially satisfying to hear more of his playing as the lead voice instead of his more accustomed role as an accompanist.

As the The Jando Music/Via Veneto Jazz media release expresses it:

“So, finally we have the chance and opportunity to listen to Mazzariello in all his creative flair and compositional dynamism: groove, swing, refined technique; along a path of differing styles which he approaches with heightened awareness.”

Julian displays a light touch and a dotted eighth note phrasing that is very reminiscent of Cedar Walton and, like Cedar, he is very good at unfolding long, lyrical lines. Julian’s playing is not forced - it flows. He knows where he wants to go in his solos and he gets there in a manner that’s full of interesting twists and turns.

Julian is a skilled player, but he’s not trying to impress you with his technique, rather, he is more interested in using his considerable “chops” to make music. His tone and touch create a crystal clarity to the sound he induces from the piano.

Julian’s improvisations reflect a taste, phrasing and use of his technique that brings to mind the styles of Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, and Kenny Barron from the modernist tradition and, more recently, the approaches of Alan Broadbent, David Hazeltine, and Kenny Drew, Jr.

As he displays on Funky Chunks, Julian can get down ala Bobby Timmons, Wynton Kelly, and Joe Zawinul and play a mean groove, and yet, he’s equally at home with the introspective harmonies of Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner as is reflected on Dream Cycling [to my ears, there’s also a bit of Michel Petrucciani’s phrasing to be heard in the “tag” on this piece].

The nine selections that make up the music on Debut also provide a look at the compositional side of Julian O. Mazzariello and it’s a very rewarding one at that as he turns out to be a writer of intriguing melodies.

As always, drummer André Ceccarelli is his “Old Soul” self throughout the recording, wisely knowing what to play to keep the heartbeat of the music full of energy while also knowing how not to overplay. And in bassist Rémy Vignolo, Julian has found a companion who beautifully frames the chords, plays unison lines flawlessly and solos with authority .

On this their first musical trip together, Julian, André and Rémy Vignolo masterfully guide the listener through a voyage of discovery.

One can only hope that such sojourns will continue beyond this remarkable Debut.

Debut will be released on 14 December 2018 and you can preorder it through Forced Exposure by going here.

John Scofield - COMBO 66!

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

Multiple Grammy Award Winning Jazz Guitarist John Scofield Returns with New Album: Combo 66! - Released on Verve Records on September 28th

We received the following from Crossover Media and thought we’d share it with you. John has always been one of my favorite, especially when Bill Stewart is in the drum chair, and we are curious to hear Gerald Clayton as the latest member of John’s group on keyboards as he has always knocked me out on piano with the Clayton Brothers band.

A YouTube track from the recording is featured at the end of the text.

“Grammy Award-winning jazz guitarist, band leader and composer, John Scofield is set to release his new album, Combo 66, marking his 66th birthday, on September 28 via Verve Records. The album, which features long-time drummer Bill Stewart, bassist Vincente Archer and pianist/organist Gerald Clayton, combines jazz with genre-defying elements, allowing Scofield to find new modes of expression.

Scofield has been on a serious roll since 2015, when his release, Past Present, earned a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album. He followed the release with the 2016 album Country For Old Men, which earned him two Grammy Awards for both "Best Jazz Instrumental Album" and "Best Improvised Jazz Solo ("I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry")."

In 2017 Scofield joined forces with old pals Jack DeJohnette, Larry Grenadier and John Medeski for the rural New York jazz band of the ages, Hudson, the quartet romping the world from Boise to Berlin and back again.

John Scofield keeps his talent and his trusty Ibanez AS200 guitar burning brightly on Combo 66, which finds the New York native with a new quartet and fresh compositions in celebration of his 66th birthday.

"I wrote all new tunes for this record, Combo 66," Scofield notes from the road. "I called it that because I'm 66! And 66 is the coolest jazz number you can get because if you hit 66 you're doing ok. Remember all the great records from the 60s? Brasil 66. 'Route 66.' It hit me that it would be poetic to use that title."

Born of searing groove, soul-touching melody, and kinetic improvisation, Combo 66 swings effortlessly to the condor-like rhythms of drummer Bill Stewart, Scofield's percussionist since 1992s What We Do. Scofield chose upright bassist Vincente Archer of Robert Glasper's Trio when it came to bass rhapsodies and called upon 34-year-old organist/pianist Gerald Clayton, son of bassist John Clayton of the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra for keys.

"Guitar and keyboard is not always the easiest match," Scofield says. "Because of its percussive nature, piano is very similar to the guitar. But Gerald has a beautiful touch and though he is quite modern, his touch reminds me of Hank Jones or Tommy Flanagan. And that really is a beautiful legato sound that works well with guitar. Even though he's got super roots in traditional jazz, he can do everything. I'm just thrilled to play with Gerald."

The album begins with a track called "Can't Dance" - we're not talking the Sinatra standard, but a late afternoon swinger imbued with a sense of urban danger. "It just has this kind of groove quality and since I can't dance, really, I thought I would dedicate it to myself," Scofield laughs.

"Combo Theme" recalls the spooky grandeur of a great Henry Mancini soundtrack melody, balanced by Scofield's wry guitar solo, the equivalent of a Hollywood noir thriller, while the track "Icons at the Fair" plays on chords and progressions of Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis.

"We really got some heat happening on this one," Scofield says of "Icons at the Fair." "Years ago, I did a record and a tour with Herbie Hancock, for his album, The New Standard. He had this arrangement of 'Scarborough Fair' and I really liked the chords. I used those chords and then wrote a melody which was reminiscent of a lick that Miles [Davis] used to play. So, between Herbie and Miles and Paul Simon's 'Scarborough Fair' I called this 'Icons at the Fair."

The conversational "Willa Jean" was titled for Scofield's granddaughter, followed by "Uncle Southern," a light-stepping ¾ dance which touches on his mother's Southern roots. "Dang Swing" is a swing tune with a bit country: a dab of the devil's music and "New Waltzo," melds waltz with rock.

Something he almost never does, "I'm Sleepin' In" is a ballad - a calming yet slightly mysterious number titled, as is most every track on Combo 66, by Scofield's wife, Susan Scofield.

"It's quiet and pensive, and I hope, sensitive," Scofield explains. "Susan's title seemed to reflect the feeling of the song. What's more sensitive than a human being when they're asleep?"

Combo 66 closes with the track "King of Belgium," dedicated to Belgian harmonica maestro, Toots Thielemans, a man of great humanity, and purportedly, a great sense of humor.

"If you can't have fun with the music, let's go home," Scofield says, alluding to his working credo. "I am so deadly serious about jazz, but the fact of the matter is jazz only works if you are relaxed and don't give a shit. If you try too hard it doesn't work. Humor really helps me to get to a better place with music."”

Randy Weston - Afrobeats - Gary Giddins

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

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles begins its retrospective on the musical career of pianist, composer and bandleader Randy Weston [1926 - 2018] with the following excerpt from Gary Giddins’ Vision of Jazz as it offers three important takeaways: [1] a concise analysis of the elements that make up Randy’s piano style, [2] a general overview of Weston’s recorded music and [3] a descriptive and informed view, by one of Jazz’s most distinguished critics, of the discography itself.

© -  Gary Giddins: copyright protected; all rights reserved; used with the author’s permission.

“In the educated European tradition, great composers mine their own ethnic backgrounds as a matter of course: Beethoven appropriates a drinking song, Liszt cavorts with gypsies, Bartok adapts the folk songs of Hungary and Ives those of America. And in the early decades of this century, many composers, including Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, and Milhaud, made a show of their demotic wit by borrowing from jazz. Copland opined that jazz's primary value was as source material, Paul Whiteman was praised for having made a lady of jazz by introducing Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, and Gershwin himself called jazz a "very powerful" American folk music. Now, however, jazz's favorite dictum is that it is American classical music — not an ethnic or folk foundation for art but the thing itself.

So the question arises: If jazz is so cultivated, how does it explore its own roots? One obvious answer is via the songwriting fellowship that sprang from Tin Pan Alley. The irony here — predominantly white songwriters viewed as a kind of folk source (if you can imagine Jerome Kern as folk) for black performers — is bizarre, given who gets the money. A more obvious answer is via the blues: the only musical form to develop in the United States, a product of the African American experience, an apparently bottomless reservoir of inspiration for jazz musicians.

Even so, blues in jazz is primarily structural, not emotive. Those occasions when jazz embraces its rural roots, from Louis Armstrong recording with country shouters to Hannibal Peterson interpolating rural blues into his symphonic pageant, are rare. And although gospel is embedded in jazz's call-and-response, rarer still is the use of other African American folk musics, from work songs to spirituals (whose novelty appeal is surely one reason Charlie Haden's and Hank Jones's Steal Away found a receptive audience). White musicians are more likely to explore black musical traditions than their own. A few Jewish players have milked their ethnic backgrounds, from Benny Goodman's "And the Angels Sing" to John Zorn's band Masada, but a black musician, Don Byron, fully explored klezmer in a jazz context. In recent years, Asian American jazz musicians have begun to recover their own. But have Italian or Irish jazz musicians ever thought to exploit or interpret opera or reels as jazz?

The most wide-ranging and influential alliance between jazz and another musical culture is the Afro-Cuban movement, pioneered by Dizzy Gillespie and others in the '40s. Yet Latin jazz is an alloy, and while Chico O'Farrill is undoubtedly correct in observing that jazz influenced Cuba more than the reverse, it remains something of a third stream, that is, Latin clave and percussion aren't tangential influences, but partners in the mix. Another example of ethnic borrowing was Stan Getz's bossa nova. In a similar way, the worldbeat movement of the past twenty years has flavored jazz with a vast array of international fillips. In the early '70s, Ellington wrote a piece about the didgeridoo; a few years later, Craig Harris was playing one. For a while, tablas were almost as popular as congas, and there was an invasion of flutes and whistles and gourds, as well as kalimbas and bandoneons and other instruments with exotic names.

Not surprisingly, Africa exerted the most appeal by far. Always a part of jazz in song titles and vague musical references, it became a genuine musical influence, especially after its own pop music was successfully exported. Africa provided numerous allusions for jazz in the '20s, when it was widely considered the adventurer's last playground and Marcus Garvey's last hope. In New York, Ellington's Jungle Band indulged in faux Africanisms with growly brasses and sexy dances; in Paris, Josephine Baker, nude but for a string of bananas, incarnated the fabled lure of primitive eros. If Gillespie looked to Africa by way of Cuba in the '40s, the following decade produced real interest in the mother continent. Folkways and other companies released field recordings, musicologists traced the African influence on blues, and Afrocentric pride was reasserted.

Randy Weston once observed that it was Thelonious Monk who alerted him to the link. But it was Weston who developed it. And though he didn't travel to Nigeria until 1961, he was premeditating an African American alliance much earlier, before he began recording. Born in Brooklyn in 1926, he witnessed firsthand the development of jazz's Afro-Cuban nexus, which jibed with the Afro-Caribbean rhythms and melodies that flourished in his neighborhood and were part of his own heritage. In the mid-'40s, he forged lasting relationships with musicians who would appear on his recordings a decade later, including baritone saxophonist Cecil Payne, trumpeter Ray Copeland, and bassist Sam Gill, who made a serious study of African and Middle Eastern musics and, in the '50s, adopted the Muslim name Ahmed Abdul-Malik. In those apprenticeship years, Weston became fascinated with Monk, whom he heard with Coleman Hawkins. After he was discharged from the army in 1947, he visited Monk at his home and began to spend time with him, absorbing his spare and percussive attack and his devotion to the blues. Weston was the first pianist to craft a distinctive keyboard approach that derived from Monk.

He was also the first modern musician to record for Riverside Records. At his second Riverside session, in 1955, he debuted "Zulu," a percussive riff that might have been called "Thelonious," and in 1958, he followed with "Bantu Suite" and his breakthrough composition, "Little Niles," a piece actually written in 1952, in which an engaging jazz waltz is given a North African twist with an undulating figure that reappears in much of his music. Weston's '50s recordings for Riverside (expertly supported by Cecil Payne), Dawn, Jubilee, Metro, and United Artists are among the most charmingly anomalous in the postbop era. His penchant for triple time, pentatonic melodies, and a shrewdly rhythmic piano attack, heavy on bass, was established before he went to Africa and developed further during the course of two tours of Lagos, Nigeria, in 1961 and 1963, and a 1966 state department visit to fourteen African countries. By 1969, he had settled in Morocco, living in Rabat and Tangier, where he operated the African Rhythms Club. At the same time Weston's South African counterpart, Abdullah Ibrahim, was bringing Cape Town rhythms to the United States, Weston was bringing jazz to Africa.

Weston recorded sporadically after 1960, mostly for independent and obscure labels (when American musicians relocate abroad they become invisible no matter how widely acclaimed they were before the move); the theme of Africa remained resolute in his music. A couple of his pieces, "Hi-Fly" and "Little Niles," had become jazz standards, and Weston, who has always been community minded, performed in schools, libraries, and churches. A towering and congenial man, he offered workshops and musical lectures. But now he sought a larger musical canvas that combined jazz, poetry, African song, and rhythmic pageantry. The result, in 1960, was Uhuru Africa (Roulette), a collaboration with the poet Langston Hughes, employing a griot-like narrator, trained concert singers, a big band, and an international percussion section including Olatunji, Candido, Max Roach, and others. The work feels dated now, its exuberance ersatz, its ambition didactic, except when the jazz elements take over (as in "Kucheza Blues"). It proved most significant in affirming Weston's flair for large ensembles and his musical bond with arranger and trombonist Melba Liston. Liston had previously arranged a sextet and trombone choir for Weston, but Uhuru Africa was the first of their many big band projects (they revived it at a 1998 concert in Brooklyn). A former writer for Gerald Wilson and Dizzy Gillespie, she was ideally suited to expand Weston's engaging themes for a full complement of brasses and reeds.

A second, less flamboyant big band album, Music from the African Nations (Colpix, 1963, reissued as Highlife on Roulette), received less attention but is the more rewarding work, and the more important compositionally: several pieces became standard in his repertory, including two by African composers (Bobby Benson's "Niger Mambo" and Guy Warren's "The Mystery of Love") and his own "Congolese Children" and "Blues to Africa." Liston's seductively dissonant arrangements are layered over buoyant rhythms that were way ahead of their time and sound surprisingly fashionable today. Weston's anchoring piano is well recorded, and the soloists, especially the great tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin, are less forced and more forceful than those on Uhuru Africa. Still, it stirred little interest. A year later a frustrated Weston went into the studio on his own and self-produced an irresistible album, The Randy Weston Sextet; finding little interest in the industry, he created a mailorder label, Bakton, to release it. With excellent playing by Ray Copeland and the urgently distinctive Ervin, the band offers defining performances of two signature Weston themes, "Berkshire Blues" and "African Cookbook," and engendered enough enthusiasm for the Monterey Jazz Festival to book the sextet plus Cecil Payne in 1966.

Weston's career should have taken off; instead, he took off for Africa, a timely flight considering the dark days that lay ahead for jazz as the rock juggernaut flattened even its most celebrated musicians. During the next eight years, he recorded hardly at all: two 1965 sessions (solo and trio) were released by Arista Freedom in 1977; the 1966 Monterey set was not issued until Verve bought the tape in 1996. The occasional albums he recorded in Europe had titles like Afro-Blues and Randy Weston's African Rhythm, as did most of his new compositions. After six years, he returned to the United States and enjoyed an improbable hit with Blue Moses (CTI), a funky big band compromise, arranged by the meretricious Don Sebesky with Weston on electric piano. He returned to form in 1973 with Tanjah (Polydor), reuniting with Liston, resurrecting "Hi-Fly" and "Little Miles," and introducing notable new pieces, including "Tanjah" and "Sweet Meat," the latter featuring altoist Norris Turney. An Ellingtonian flavor is palpable not only in the specifics — Turney's appearance, Jon Faddis' high-strung, high-note trumpet, the undulating melodies — but in the broader achievement of tackling and extending what Ellington coyly described as the Afro-Eurasion eclipse.

Again his career should have taken off, but while Tanjah enjoyed respectable sales, Weston's big band projects were put on hold for the next fifteen years while he recorded almost exclusively as a piano soloist, mostly for exceedingly obscure labels (Cora, Arc), until 1987, when he and David Murray attained a meeting of minds on The Healers (Black Saint). Two years later he was signed by Antilles/Verve, and for the first time in two decades he came fully alive as a recording artist, making up for the lost time with one or more releases a year throughout the '90s. These records are among his best and they represent a remarkable accomplishment: the crafting of a Brooklyn-Moroccan connection that is now as natural as any idiom in contemporary jazz.

In 1989, he recorded three volumes of "portraits" with a quartet (piano, bass, two percussionists). The subjects are Ellington, Monk, and himself, and taken together they acknowledge his primary influences and illuminate what he has made of them; on the Monk especially, he manages to be radical and reverent at the same time, though there are passages where the extra percussion sounds more like a gratuitous overlay than an integral component. Two enormously satisfying albums with Melba Liston led to the brilliant small band, African Rhythms, which is a culmination of everything he has achieved. The Spirits of Our Ancestors (1991) introduces the musicians who would make African Rhythms one of the most exciting touring bands of the day: the seasoned trombonist Benny Powell and tenor saxophonist Billy Harper and Weston's prize discoveries, alto saxophonist Talib Kibwe and bassist Alex Blake. Once again he recycles his repertory, salvaging "Blue Moses" from the fusion era and refashioning "The Healers," "African Cookbook," and others.

Weston never made a more blithely entertaining record than Volcano Blues (1993), on which he and Liston finally share equal billing. (Jazz arrangers, like Hollywood screenwriters, get only as much respect as they can wrangle. Benny Goodman's tributes to Fletcher Henderson were unusual in their day; Gil Evans never did split a marquee with Miles Davis until he was dead.) With a cast ranging from veteran Los Angeles tenor saxophonist and composer Teddy Edwards (who is masterful on a definitive trio performance of Guy Warren's "Mystery of Love") to urban blues singer and guitarist Johnny Copeland (on a revival of Basie's "Harvard Blues"), Weston presides over a chameleonic celebration of the twelve-bar sonnet that provokes and amuses and deepens with every hearing. But Volcano Blues could only exist as a record. Saga is an accurate reflection of the African Rhythms septet Weston debuted in New York in 1995.

Coming after its rousing predecessor, Saga may seem relatively staid, but its power emanates from the casualness of its virtuoso cultural blend. The balance between ensemble — arranged by musical director Talib Kibwe — and soloists is riveting and the rhythm section flawless, with guest Billy Higgins on drums, Neil Clarke on percussion, and the remarkable bassist Alex Blake, who pushes the beat with robust double-stops. Weston's piano is at the center, binding all the elements, and his playing is imbued with an unmistakable sense of delight. As usual, many of the compositions are old, reworked to suit this band and these rhythms.

Unlike a good many Afrocentric musicians, Weston never changed his name, and a similar lack of camouflage graces his musical borrowings. Some of his rhythms are so familiar one doesn't necessarily think of them as African, and that may be his point: a link exists, the family is more closely settled than previously thought. Nor does he fold in African instruments or chanting. In short, he hasn't gone native; he's taken what he can use to amplify his own music. That consists chiefly of African rhythms that lend a vivacious spark to jazz rhythms without overpowering them. On Saga, Weston plays in three, four, five, six, and eight — Africa accommodates him.

"Loose Wig" originated as a trio on the 1956 LP The Art of Modern Jazz (Dawn) and is given a ravishing face-lift in the 1995 septet version, with an extended bridge and unison scooped notes; its rhythms are heightened at every turn by Blake, who has developed a strumming/ slapping/plucking technique that rocks the ensemble, and Billy Harper plays with impregnable authority. The classic swinging poise of "Saucer Eyes," a better-known piece from the '50s, is now underpinned by carnival rhythms and unfolds as a saxophone battle. One of Weston's most attractive melodies, "Tangier Bay," was a memorable piano solo on Blues to Africa (Arista Freedom, 1974); with Kibwe playing the seductive forty-bar theme over a jubilant vamp, it is completely refurbished. Perhaps the most impressive revision of all is the piano treatment (he's recorded it at least twice before) of "Lagos," in which Weston works in and out of rubato with unswerving equilibrium, lending the piece a rare and stately enchantment. More recent pieces include "F.E.W. Blues," a piano-trombone dialogue with an introduction that leads you to expect an old-fashioned blues, though Benny Powell and Weston use altered changes and textural devices to circumvent every expectation, and "The Three Pyramids and the Sphinx," a piano-bass duet with a strong, piquant melody.

Not everything is equally successful, but Saga is a formidable addition to a canon that, after more than forty years, is still subject to neglect. At New York's Iridium, with slightly altered personnel, Weston played to a full and eager house, yet he often seems an outsider, showing up in clubs sporadically, whether he is domiciled in Brooklyn or Morocco. Perhaps his most distinctive quality also undermines his appeal and that is his temperance. Weston's powerful hands relish the ringing of overtones between notes. Like Monk, he plays rests. Saga is a beautiful example of his restraint. Colorful, melodic, rhythmic, it borrows merely the seasonings of ethnicity to define Randy Weston's own archetypes.”