Paul Bley: 1932-2016

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

“You're telling human beings that they can trust their intuitions to create forms, rather than need forms in which to create intuitions….”

We're talking about a lot of personal work, rather than taught, or learned, work. We strike out for unknown territory. That's what improvising is all about. If the territory is known, it's not that interesting. That's my bias.

- Paul Bley, Jazz pianist

VOICE: “Why do they call you ‘Mr. Joy?’

MR. JOY: “Because I’m unhappy about a lot of things.”

VOICE: “What are you unhappy about?”

MR. JOY: “I’m unhappy about trying to get music to sound the way I want it to sound, about trying to get life to go the way I want it to go, and generally unhappy about the whole thing.”

- Insert notes to Play Bley’s Mr. Joy [Limelight LS 86060]

At one point in my “life in music,” I gave a lot of thought to the above-quotations from the liner notes to Paul Bley’s LP Mr. Joy [Limelight LS 86060].

Even after I left music to pursue other interests, I held onto and tried to model aspects of my professional life around Paul’s notion of “... telling human beings that they can trust their intuitions to create forms, rather than need forms in which to create intuitions….”

I finally did reach a point in my career when I trusted my intuitions to create forms and it was the most rewarding time for me in the World-of-Work in particular and in my life in general.

Paul Bley died on 3 January 2016 and the editorial staff at JazzProfiles wanted to remember him on these pages with the following obituary from The Telegraph, a British daily morning English-language broadsheet newspaper, published in London.

“Paul Bley, the pianist and composer, who has died aged 83, was a moving spirit in the “free jazz” revolution of the 1960s and an animating force in the jazz avant-garde.

In the course of his 60-year career he worked with, and influenced, many of the most prominent and innovative jazz artists of the time, and recorded more than 100 albums of his own.

Hyman Paul Bley was born in Montreal on November 10 1932. He took up the piano at the age of eight and was playing semi-professionally as a teenager. At 17 he followed the local piano hero, Oscar Peterson, into a regular weekend gig. From 1950, he studied at the Juilliard School in New York, but returned regularly to Montreal to accompany visiting jazz stars including Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins.

While in New York, Bley took part in jazz workshop sessions, at one of which he so impressed the bassist Charles Mingus that, in 1953, he set up Bley’s first recording date, with himself on bass and Art Blakey on drums. The record was titled Introducing Paul Bley.

Bley was still playing in the modern jazz style of the day when he moved to Los Angeles in 1957, to play with Chet Baker. It was here that he first heard Ornette Coleman, then completely unknown. Coleman’s alto, saxophone playing broke all the conventions of rhythm, harmony and form which were then deemed essential but it made sense to Bley. He assembled a band of like-minded players around Coleman and presented it at a small club, the Hillcrest. Their subsequent album, The Shape of Jazz to Come, marked the beginning of a whole new phase in the history of jazz.

In the same year, Bley married an aspiring jazz pianist and composer, Carla Borg, then working as a waitress. In 1959 they moved back to New York, where Bley made a point of featuring his wife’s compositions. Although they later divorced, Carla Bley went on to become one of the most original and admired jazz composers of the late 20th century.

Bley formed his first permanent trio in 1963. Once again, convention was overturned. Instead of sticking to their traditional roles of providing rhythmic and harmonic groundwork, the bass (Steve Swallow) and drums (Pete LaRocca) were free to move independently. Some of this freedom has gradually found its way into the playing of otherwise quite straightforward piano trios nowadays. The trio’s album Footloose is still regarded as a classic.

In 1964, now an acknowledged innovator, Bley was a founder-member of the Jazz Composers’ Guild, a kind of revolutionary cell, which helped launch the careers of young players such as Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Michael Mantler and Sun Ra.

Electronic instruments, notably synthesisers, made their appearance towards the end of the 1960s and Bley was among the first to explore their possibilities. He gave one of the first live electronic concerts, using a portable Moog , at New York’s Symphony Hall in 1968.

His solo piano album Open To Love, recorded for the German ECM label in 1972, with its free-flowing improvisation, had much in common with Keith Jarrett’s hugely popular solo concert recordings for the same company. Although different in approach, the mutual influence is unmistakeable. In later years Bley returned to ECM, one of the most impressive albums being Play Blue, from a solo concert recorded in Oslo in 2008 and released in 2014.

In an interview around that time, Bley described sustained improvisation of this kind as a process of discovery, “to know something at the end of it that you didn’t know at the beginning”.

Paul Bley was appointed a member of the Order of Canada in 2008.

He was twice married. He leaves two daughters by his second marriage and one daughter by a partnership with the pianist and composer Annette Peacock.

Paul Bley, born November 10 1932, died January 3 2016.”

Francis Wolff - The Gift

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

It is amazing to reflect back on the halcyon days of “modern” Jazz [1945-1965] without seeing it through imagery brought to mind by the photography of Francis Wolff. Without his work, many of the Jazz musicians that created the iconic Blue Note recordings from this period would be shrouded in obscurity.

Of course, Chuck Stewart, Herman Leonard, William Gottlieb, Bob Parent and many other skillful photographers were also making artistic contributions to Jazz Imagery at this time.

But their work did not emphasize the relaxed, informal and nonchalant qualities that featured so prominently in the photographs that Francis Wolff took during Blue Note recording sessions, many of which would prominently displayed on the label’s album covers.

What came out of Francis art was an almost introspective view of Jazz musicians dynamically exposed in the act of creation.

Francis Wolff gave us the gift of knowing what many, if not all,  of the musicians who created this marvelous music looked like while they were at work.

Yet, for all he did to make these Jazz musicians less obscure, surprisingly little is known of Francis Wolff or his life.

Born in Berlin in 1907 or 1908, he enjoyed a comfortable childhood in an environment of academia and the arts.  His father, a university mathematics professor, had earned a substantial amount of money on investments. His mother was reputed to be something of a Bohemian and imbued Frank with a taste for the modern and iconoclastic. By his teens, Frank had already discovered his lifelong loves: photography and jazz. At 15, he met Alfred Lion, who lived in the same neighborhood. Alfred was immediately struck by Wolff's worldly, cosmopolitan style of dress. Their shared passion for the new music called jazz was the foundation of a lifelong friendship.

After studying photography in Berlin, Wolff formed a partnership with Lion to buy jewelry wholesale and sell it in Spain. Fortunately for the future of jazz, this short-lived venture was a failure. In 1933, Lion moved on to South America and eventually to New York. Despite the rise of Nazi activity in Germany, Wolff, a Jew, stayed in Berlin, collecting records and pursuing a successful career as a photographer. When the danger became unavoidable, he caught the last direct boat from Berlin to New York in October 1939.

Frank moved into Alfred's small apartment, which was also the office and warehouse for the ten-month-old Blue Note Record label. As Blue Note grew, Frank managed its business affairs. Although photography was no longer his career, he lent his considerable skills to documenting the next twenty-eight years of historic Blue Note recording sessions.

Wolff was a shy, soft-spoken, and extremely private man, content to remain in the shadow of his dynamic partner. His contributions to Blue Note however, were considerable and crucial.

When Alfred Lion retired in 1967, Frank assumed the role of record producer, and his photographic activity ceased. He stayed at the helm of Blue Note until he died of a heart attack following surgery on March 8, 1971.

Joe Castro - On Sunnyside

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

Joe Castro Box Set Tells Fascinating Story

“Jazz fans who have never heard of Joe Castro might wonder why Sunnyside Records is releasing a six-CD box set of the late pianist's music. It's a valid question, acknowledges Daniel Richard, the veteran producer who assembled Lush Life: A Musical Journey after shepherding  similar  collections  for  Abbey Lincoln, Charlie Haden and Chet Baker.

It's not as if Castro is an undiscovered Bud Powell or Horace Silver, but he was a likable pianist who made some fascinating recordings with the likes of Zoot Sims, Chico Hamilton, Billy Higgins and Teddy Edwards. Those tapes are released for the first time on the new box set.

A working-class, Mexican-American kid, Castro was a Duke Ellington and Stan Kenton fan who made his living playing in pop-swing bands around the Bay Area. In 1951, at age 23, his band 3 Bees and a Queen was hired to play the Fireman's Carnival in Honolulu. Attending one of his shows was Doris Duke, then a 38-year-old tobacco heiress described in the gossip columns of the day as "the richest girl in the world."

Duke was smitten by the good-looking Castro and they soon became an item. Despite a few breakups, they were together for the next 15 years. Duke, a jazz fan who had taken piano lessons from Teddy Wilson, set up recording studios stocked with Steinway pianos and fine wines at her mansions in Hawaii, California and New Jersey. The facilities and Duke's clout attracted many famous musicians for jam sessions with Castro at the keys. Some of the best of those sessions make up the first four discs on the new box set.

Sometimes Castro was just the engineer, recording sessions such as the wonderful 1955 tracks by Wilson with an especially lyrical Stan Getz. More often Castro was the house pianist, jamming in 1956 with Zoot Sims, Lucky Thompson and Oscar Pettiford, or rehearsing a new quartet in 1959 with tenor saxophonist Teddy Edwards, bassist Leroy Vinnegar and drummer Billy Higgins.

It would be inaccurate to say that Castro dominated these sessions, but he certainly wasn't out of place. He was grounded in swing-era rudiments, but he was also interested in bebop and even free-jazz.

Duke also funded a record label, Clover Records, for Castro to run. The fledgling company recorded the Joe Castro Big Band, the Joe Castro Trio (with Paul Motian), the Teddy Edwards Tentet and singers Anita O'Day and Kitty White. Despite Duke's millions, however, the label folded, releasing only the first of two big-band records and the first of two albums recorded by White. The second big-band project and Edwards' three-trombone Tentet make up the fifth and sixth discs in the new box.

"Joe was in a tough position," Richard said. "Doris' money opened a lot of doors for him, but when jazz musicians talked about him, they didn't talk about him as a jazz musician but as Doris Duke's friend."

Castro and Duke broke up for good in 1966. Castro married singer Loretta Haddad and went on to live a quiet life in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Just before he died in 2009, he approached Sunnyside about releasing his private tapes. His son James helped Richard reassemble the pieces of a forgotten story. Richard is constructing a musical chronology online at http://wwwjoecastrojazz.com./

As reported by Geoffrey Himes

Downbeat

January 2016

Mojo

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

Mojo is one of those fun words that always seems to strike a responsive chord whether you are saying it to yourself, about yourself or to someone else.

Either explicitly or by allusion, it’s also a word that means different things to different people.

In a musical context, according to Wikipedia, it got it start in euphonious lexicons this way:

"Got My Mojo Working is a blues song written by Preston Foster and first recorded by Ann Cole in 1956. Muddy Waters popularized it in 1957 and the song was a feature of his performances throughout his career. A mojo is an amulet or talisman associated with hoodoo, an early African-American folk-magic belief system. Rolling Stone magazine included Waters' rendition of the song is on its list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time at number 359. In 1999, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences gave it a Grammy Hall of Fame Award and it is identified on the list of "Songs of the Century.”

Jazz sophisticate or a downhome blues fan, it seems as though everyone loves the tune.  It’s fun to play on and for a drummer, it’s back-beat heaven.

Sometimes, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles likes to put down its collective pen [turn off the word processor?] and just listen to the music as it accompanies imagery related to the title of a tune.

The following video is a case in point.

The music is provided by Hammond B-3 organist Joey DeFrancesco who along with Jake Langley on guitar and Byron Landam appeared in concert  at The Bimhuis, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on April 30, 2006.

Manufactured Music - "The Song Machine"

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

“The advent of computerised music software in the 1970’s made virtuosic instrument-playing or singing redundant: producers could obtain any sound they wanted synthetically, and string together vocals by using the best individual syllables from a large number of takes ("comp-ing") and running them through a pitch corrector. Subsequently, the advent of internet downloading shifted the primary unit of musical consumption from the album to the single. That sharply increased demand for melodic hooks, to lock listeners in within the seven seconds before they are likely to turn the radio dial.

“These inventions shifted the balance of power from performers to production teams.” 

- The Economist Magazine

Try as I might, I have a difficult time understanding today’s popular music. And it’s not much better when it comes to music that accompanies television shows and movies.

I mean, I’m not expecting The Great American Songbook, The Jazz Standards, Classic Rock, or the likes of Pete Rugolo-Jerry Goldsmith-Hank Mancini to reappear anytime soon, but I need something to get my ears around so that my mind can follow this new, so-called “music” in a linear fashion.

The logic of a 32-bar AABA tune or a 12 or 16-bar blues would be nice or even a sequence of chords or modes to serve as the basis for following the music would be helpful.

But instead, what I get are fragments, sound effects and noise.

However, all is not lost because after reading the following review of John Seabrook’s The Song Machine I’ve have come to the realization of what the root of my problem is - today’s music is not composed, it’s manufactured!

Welcome to the world of “... industrial, music production” made possible by “… the advent of computerized, music software.”

Does anyone out there know what a “... funky Cherion back beat is”?

Read on.

Pop Music

BOPPING BRILLIANT

The Story of How Pop Was Made - And Who Made It

The Song Machine

John Seabrook

W.W. Norton

338 pages

$26.95

Reviewed in The Economist,

November 14th, 2015

“EVERY musical genre has its canon: Bach and Mozart for classical, Armstrong and Parker for jazz, Dylan and the Beatles for rock, Biggie and Tupac for hip-hop. Only pop music - the "bubble gum" or "teeny-bop" tunes played on nightclub dance floors and Top 40 radio - lacks similar critical analysis and acclaim. True, Michael Jackson has been given his due. But it took an early death for the public to value his contributions fully. And no one would mention today's "manufactured" stars, such as Katy Perry (pictured) or Miley Cyrus, in the same breath as the King of Pop.

John Seabrook takes another tack. "The Song Machine", a history of the past 20 years of pop music, takes for granted two assumptions, both convincingly demonstrated via a highly engaging narrative. The most basic is that modern "earworm" pop is a high art form, as worthy of appreciation as any other: he calls Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" "magnificent", for example, and the "hooks" (catchy, repeated snippets of melody) in Rihanna's "Umbrella" are "wonderful" and "lovely". The second is that the public unfairly dismisses such masterpieces, because its expectations of the creative process were set during the rock 'n' roll era, when singer-songwriters were the norm. In fact, the 1960’s and 1970’s were a historical aberration, and what may seem like a soulless new wave of industrial music production is a return to the "hit factories" of years gone by.

During the first half of the 2Oth century, many of the biggest names in popular music were not performers but songwriters, based on the stretch of West 28th Street in New York known as Tin Pan Alley. Whether solo composers like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin or inseparable duos like George and Ira Gershwin or Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, these hitmakers remain far better known than the singers who performed their work. Much of early rock, including many Elvis Presley classics, was written by teams in or around the Brill Building in midtown Manhattan. And even after folk rockers and the Beatles established a precedent that performers should write their own material, Motown maintained a musical assembly line that would have made Henry Ford proud.

The protagonists of "The Song Machine" are not headliners like Taylor Swift, but rather the men (they are indeed mostly men) behind the music. Mr Seabrook sees their ascent as the product of broader social trends. One thread that runs consistently through his tale is technological disruption. The advent of computerised music software in the 1970’s made virtuosic instrument-playing or singing redundant: producers could obtain any sound they wanted synthetically, and string together vocals by using the best individual syllables from a large number of takes ("comp-ing") and running them through a pitch corrector. Subsequently, the advent of internet downloading shifted the primary unit of musical consumption from the album to the single. That sharply increased demand for melodic hooks, to lock listeners in within the seven seconds before they are likely to turn the radio dial.

These inventions shifted the balance of power from performers to production teams.

Today, the process starts with producers laying out beats and chords. They then recruit "topliners", who are often women, to try out melodies and vocal snippets and see what sticks. Lyrics are an afterthought. The finished product is shopped around to star singers, who do their best to "preserve the illusion" of authorship. "I get this feeling of a big painter's studio in Italy back in the 1400’s," one Swedish artist says in the book. "One assistant does the hands, another does the feet ...and then Michelangelo walks in and says, That's really great, just turn it slightly ...Next!'" The book is full of cautionary tales of singers whose careers went off the rails when they rebelled against their labels and demanded creative control.

The second engine of change in "The Song Machine" is cultural globalisation. The Cole Porters of today hail primarily from Scandinavia: Max Martin, a Swedish uber-producer, has written more chart-topping hits than the Beatles. Mr Seabrook thinks it is no accident that American listeners have become hooked on tunes from abroad. Although white artists borrowed from African-American blues in the early days of rock, by the 1990’s black music had moved on to spoken, beat-focused hip-hop, while white bands like Nirvana screeched with dissonant grunge rock. I

By contrast, Sweden, the country that produced ABBA, never lost its appetite for soaring melodies. Its government offered free music education. Moreover, its artists were not constrained by racial boundaries in American music, and could produce "a genre-bursting hybrid: pop [white] music with a rhythmic R&B [black] feel". And because English was not their first language, they were free to "treat English very respectless", as Ulf Ekberg of Ace of Base, a band, says, "and just look for the word that sounded good with the melody".

Mr Seabrook clearly enjoys writing about pop music. He walks readers through the hits measure by measure. Britney Spears's single "...Baby One More Time", he writes, "is a song about obsession, and it takes all of two seconds to hook you...first with the swung triplet 'Da Nah Nah' and then with that alluring growl-purr...Then the funky Cheiron backbeat kicks in, with drums that sound like percussion grenades." He paints vivid pictures of his protagonists; Ms Spears was "scared" the first time she saw Mr Martin's "lank hair, a fleshy grizzled face...and the sallow skin of a studio rat.”  And he brings little-known stories to life, from the con man who developed the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync and is now in prison for fraud, to a singer who delivers a laugh-out-loud funny, profane tirade against Ms Perry for ripping off her song title "I Kissed A Girl".

"The Song Machine" will not lead anyone to confuse Mr. Martin and his partner, Lukasz "Dr Luke" Gottwald, with John Lennon and Paul McCartney - even Mr. Seabrook makes clear that his first love remains classic rock. But getting clubgoers out of their seats and drivers bopping in their cars is its own rare kind of genius. “

Miles Davis At Columbia, Records That Is ....

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

Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus, Benny Goodman, Buck Clayton, Eddie Condon, Erroll Garner, Woody Herman - at a point in time in Jazz’s halcyon days, it seemed that every major Jazz artist issued records on the Columbia label.

Of course Verve, Capitol, RCA and many other recording labels that were exclusively devoted to Jazz such as Blue Note, Prestige and Pacific Jazz had their stable of notable Jazz artists, but Columbia seemed to have more of the trendsetter and signature Jazz performers.

Miles Davis was the musician whose appearance on Columbia in the mid-1950’s surprised me the most.

In my nascent awareness of what was going on with the Jazz recordings of that era, Miles seemed ensconced at Prestige, one of the Jazz boutique labels. Relaxin’ Steamin’, Cookin’, Workin’ and one LP simply entitled Miles just appeared one after another on Bob Weinstock’s Prestige label that I thought that Miles was a permanent fixture there.

But with Miles being a savvy businessman, there was a lot going on behind the scene in terms of his move to Columbia as Michael Cuscuna explains in his Introduction to The Complete Miles Davis and John Coltrane on Columbia, 1955-1961, six CD boxed set [65833].  These were among his first Columbia recordings and would go on to become the bedrock upon which Miles built his claim to international stardom.

“MILES DAVIS WAS A CANNY BUSINESSMAN AS WELL AS A GREAT ARTIST.

The difference in his approach to recording sessions for Prestige and Columbia underlines that point. The first Columbia session was made on October 26, 1955, while he was still under contract to Prestige and it marks the inaugural recording of the great quintet with John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. Despite the session's artistic success, it only yielded four quintet tunes, two of which he would remake in 1958. Listening to the alternate takes on this session and throughout this set, it is evident that Miles is working hard to achieve truly great and beautiful performances.

At Prestige, he was generating whole albums in a single or double session, often with personnel that was assembled only for the date. And once he had this quintet in place and a Columbia contract in hand, he was able to record thirty-one tunes, five albums worth, during three recording days over the next year, to complete his Prestige obligations.

His entire studio output at Columbia, from his first session until the spring of 1959, consisted of two albums with Gil Evans and the equivalent of four albums with his small group. And the tunes he recorded for Columbia were most often the ones that he played live. Clearly, Miles understood the power of a major label and what he had to do to make it work for him.

In lesser hands, this careful, conscious approach to recording could create music stiffer than Guy Lombardo. But in the hands of any artist of this caliber who understood the weight of a note and impact of space, the results are astonishing.

The first three sessions on this set (October 26, 1955, June 5 and September 10, 1956) are by the original quintet and parallel the group's sessions for Prestige (November 16, 1955, May 11 and October 26, 1956). Of the ten tunes for Columbia, six made up the first Columbia album, 'Round About Midnight, while two were issued on anthologies of the time and the remaining two did not appear until the Seventies.

In 1957, the Quintet disintegrated through a series of departures and firings. But Miles was concentrating on recording Miles Ahead with Gil Evans and made no small group recordings during this year of flux. He reformed the original quintet in December, adding Cannonball Adderley on alto saxophone.

The next February and March, he recorded Milestones with this sextet. Available only in mono or electronically rechanneled stereo for four decades, it makes its first appearance in stereo (along with an unissued "Little Melonae" and three magnificent alternate takes| in this box set.

The fact that Red Garland showed up so late to the March session and that he appeared only on the third and last tune certainly contributed to his dismissal later that month. Philly Joe quit in May. Bill Evans and Jimmy Cobb were their replacements and the sound of the band began to change.

The new edition of the Sextet went in the studio in May and recorded four tunes, three of which were used to fill out Jazz Track, an album with Miles' score to the French film L'Ascenseur pour L'Echafaud.

Live gigs at the Newport Jazz Festival and a Columbia Records Jazz Party at the Plaza Hotel were taped, but shelved until 1964 and 1973 respectively. (To preserve the flow and development of the studio material by the Davis band with Coltrane, these live sessions appear out of chronological sequence at the end of this set.) Between those gigs, Miles would record Porgy And Bess with Gil Evans.

By the end of that year, Bill Evans had left to form his own trio. Wynton Kelly would replace him. However, Evans would return in March and April, 1959 as pianist (on four tunes), composer ("Blue In Green") and liner note writer for the ground-breaking modal masterpiece Kind Of Blue.

John Coltrane, who'd recently left Prestige to sign with Atlantic Records, left the band in May to start developing his own group. But he was drafted back in several times before his final stint, a European tour in March and April, 1960. His last professional appearance with Miles was the trumpeter's first small-group studio recording since Kind Of Blue. Trane played on two pieces during those March 1961 sessions that produced Someday My Prince Will Come.

This set charts the development of two of the most influential and ever-evolving artists in American music. Their growth from take to take, session to session and year to year is an astonishing thing to behold. Despite, or perhaps because of, their drastically different approaches to improvisation, they made one of the more magnificent teams in jazz.”

• MICHAEL CUSCUNA

Ken Burns Jazz - A Retrospective Review - Part 1D

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

The following posting is Part 1D of the JazzProfiles retrospective review of the Ken Burns PBS television series Jazz which will run consecutively as Parts 1A, 1B, 1C and 1D. I have divided Part 1 into four segments to make it more manageable for me to develop into postings and to make it easier for the reader to absorb the writer’s arguments about the series. Parts 2 and 3 will follow shortly.

Many critics who took exception to the Murray-Marsalis-Crouch ideological approach to the subject matter had praise for the film at a technical level. Not so Robert Parker, the brilliant Australian jazz scholar and recording engineer who a few years ago did the remarkable restorations of 1920s jazz in quite convincing stereo, issued on CDs by the BBC. Parker, who now lives in England, wrote me:

“A friend has sent me the first three episodes of the Ken Burns PBS Jazz series. I was horrified.

The picture quality is excellent. Little care, however, was taken with much of the early silent film material, which was not slowed down to correct viewing speed — easy to accomplish in these days of vari-speed tape replay, and de rigeur for all UK historical productions. The resulting pixilation of the action is an insult to the era depicted.

The sound quality of the historic jazz recordings is, frankly, appalling. On a budget reported to be $5 million there is no excuse for this. There are now around a dozen sound engineers, several working in the USA, who could have produced superb reproductions from this source material.

But even worse — where was the jazz? Buried behind endless, turgid voice-over and talking head interviews, that's where. And all too often, not even the right jazz. Burns must rate early jazz so lowly, or understand it so poorly, that it took him until near the end of episode three to let us hear any of these master-works under discussion in full — West End Blues.

All well and good, perhaps, if what we were hearing from the pundits was a deathless revelation of the heart and soul of jazz. What we got was reasonably factually correct, true, but laced with so much needless hype and turgid political correctness and so endlessly repetitive as to become, ultimately, just plain boring. I mean, how long does it take to say "jazz is an amalgam of European and African culture, is largely improvised, comes straight from the heart and soul and is a great force in the world for racial social justice and general enjoyment and life enhancement"? Four hours?

If only Burns had musical as well as social perception he might have realized that the heart and soul of jazz is the music. West End Blues said more in three minutes than all the talking heads laid out in line from New Orleans to Chicago to New York and back. And if you don't understand it, from just hearing it, all that explanation will make not a whit of difference to your ability to feel the emotion being transmitted from Armstrong's amazing brain to your own poor instrument.

My friend's fourteen-year-old watched the first ten minutes or so of episode one and then left the room. Later, asked why, he replied, "No music."”

Inevitably, whenever there is a travesty — and the Burns ecries is nothing less — laughter eases the pain.

Claudio Slon is an outstanding Brazilian (although he was born in Argentina) percussionist, who was with Sergio Mendes for several years. This went zipping along the e-mail circuit:

Announcing Claudio Slon's PBS 12 Part Series "Samba"

Part 1: Creation of Samba by White East African tribes.

Part 2: Arrival of tribes in Brazil.

Part 3: Commercialization of music by Portuguese sailors.

Part 4: Milton Nascimento and social unrest.

Part 5. Accidental discovery of Bossa Nova by Stan Getz.

Part 6: Wynton Marsalis on Louis Armstrong's influence

in Antonio Carlos Jobim's Wave.

Part 7: Louis Armstrong.

Part 8: Luis Bonfa and racial tensions.

Part 9: Louis Armstrong.

Part 10: Louis Armstrong, Barbra Streisand, and Dindi.

Part 11: Louis Armstrong.

Part 12: (last ten minutes, if enough time left) Heitor

Villa-Lobos, Guerra Peixe, Pixinguinha, Tom Jobim, Edu

Lobo, Chico Buarque, Dorival Caymmi, Noel Rosa,

Milton Nascimento, Marcos Valle, and a special tribute

to  Louis  Armstrong,  Stanley  Crouch,  and  Wynton

Marsalis by Sergio Mendes and Brazil '01.

To Be Continued...