Tag: jazz

Pat Metheny discusses Kenny G

Seth Anderson0 comment

Duly noted. And, ouch, that’s gotta sting a little.

Not long ago, Kenny G put out a recording where he overdubbed himself on top of a 30+ year old Louis Armstrong record, the track “What a Wonderful World”. With this single move, Kenny G became one of the few people on earth I can say that I really can’t use at all – as a man, for his incredible arrogance to even consider such a thing, and as a musician, for presuming to share the stage with the single most important figure in our music.

This type of musical necrophilia – the technique of overdubbing on the preexisting tracks of already dead performers – was weird when Natalie Cole did it with her dad on “Unforgettable” a few years ago, but it was her dad. When Tony Bennett did it with Billie Holiday it was bizarre, but we are talking about two of the greatest singers of the 20th century who were on roughly the same level of artistic accomplishment. When Larry Coryell presumed to overdub himself on top of a Wes Montgomery track, I lost a lot of the respect that I ever had for him – and I have to seriously question the fact that I did have respect for someone who could turn out to have such unbelievably bad taste and be that disrespectful to one of my personal heroes.

But when Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great Louis’s tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible. He, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music inspired by the standards of grace that Louis Armstrong brought to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician. By disrespecting Louis, his legacy and by default, everyone who has ever tried to do something positive with improvised music and what it can be, Kenny G has created a new low point in modern culture – something that we all should be totally embarrassed about – and afraid of. We ignore this, “let it slide”, at our own peril.

His callous disregard for the larger issues of what this crass gesture implies is exacerbated by the fact that the only reason he possibly have for doing something this inherently wrong (on both human and musical terms) was for the record sales and the money it would bring.

Since that record came out – in protest, as insignificant as it may be, I encourage everyone to boycott Kenny G recordings, concerts and anything he is associated with. If asked about Kenny G, I will diss him and his music with the same passion that is in evidence in this little essay.

(click to continue reading JazzOasis.com – Pat Metheny on Kenny G.)

Louis Armstrong is an American hero, Kenny G, not so much…

Via Aaron Cohen, Kottke guest blogger.

Ella Fitzgerald Singing Sunshine Of Your Love

Seth Anderson0 comment

Wowsa. Ella Fitzgerald Live at Montreux 1969

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7tO8xaNtQk

and of course, the original Cream version is much different. Good in its own way, but a bit over-played, and ultimately not as much fun, at least for me.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMIUt42OCbc

(via Chuck Sudo)

Mississippi Goddamn

Seth Anderson0 comment

youtubery in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAYVaHEMK0I


“Verve Jazz Masters 58: Nina Sings Nina” (Nina Simone)

The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam
And I mean every word of it

Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Can’t you see it
Can’t you feel it
It’s all in the air
I can’t stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer

Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

This is a show tune
But the show hasn’t been written for it, yet

Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day’s gonna be my last

Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don’t belong here
I don’t belong there
I’ve even stopped believing in prayer

Don’t tell me
I tell you
Me and my people just about due
I’ve been there so I know
They keep on saying ‘Go slow! ‘

But that’s just the trouble
‘Do it slow’
Washing the windows
‘Do it slow’
Picking the cotton
‘Do it slow’
You’re just plain rotten
‘Do it slow’
You’re too damn lazy
‘Do it slow’
The thinking’s crazy
‘Do it slow’
Where am I going
What am I doing
I don’t know
I don’t know

Just try to do your very best
Stand up be counted with all the rest
For everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

I made you thought I was kiddin’

Picket lines
School boy cots
They try to say it’s a communist plot
All I want is equality
For my sister my brother my people and me

Yes you lied to me all these years
You told me to wash and clean my ears
And talk real fine just like a lady
And you’d stop calling me Sister Sadie

Oh but this whole country is full of lies
You’re all gonna die and die like flies
I don’t trust you any more
You keep on saying ‘Go slow! ‘
‘Go slow! ‘

But that’s just the trouble
‘Do it slow’
Desegregation
‘Do it slow’
Mass participation
‘Do it slow’
Reunification
‘Do it slow’
Do things gradually
‘Do it slow’
But bring more tragedy
‘Do it slow’
Why don’t you see it
Why don’t you feel it
I don’t know
I don’t know

You don’t have to live next to me
Just give me my equality
Everybody knows about Mississippi
Everybody knows about Alabama
Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Ella Fitzgerald, Twelve Nights in Hollywood

Seth Anderson1 Comment


“Twelve Nights in Hollywood” (Ella Fitzgerald)

Another glowing review of Ella Fitzgerald’s residency at the Crescendo Club in the early 1960s, this time by Will Friedwald:

June 1962. The Crescendo Club on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. Ella Fitzgerald and her quartet have settled in for a two-week run in her adopted hometown. In the middle of a set, she starts singing “Too Darn Hot,” which had been a highlight of her 1956 album, “The Cole Porter Songbook.” But a few notes into the song, Fitzgerald is interrupted by the sound of kids dancing the twist in another joint upstairs. She decides to go with the flow: Drummer Gus Johnson and pianist Lou Levy start pounding out a boogie-shuffle beat, and the singer improvises lyrics about how hard it is to sing Porter while everybody’s twistin’. She then launches into the “Kiss Me Kate” show tune with the kind of energy and swing that the young twisters couldn’t even dream about. It’s a brilliant, spontaneous moment, and a wonderful insight into the thinking of one of the iconic interpreters of the Great American Songbook.

This performance is one of the many joys of the recently released four-CD boxed set “Twelve Nights in Hollywood,” and it’s also a microcosm of what was occurring in American culture at the time. At start of the ’60s, Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra were the powerhouses of the record-album business. Rock ‘n’ roll was in the doldrums, and even at its earlier height it was mainly a singles market. No less than Sinatra with his concept albums, Fitzgerald and her producer-manager Norman Granz had transformed the long-playing medium with their songbook and live albums. In 1959 and 1960, Fitzgerald brought both these ideas to unprecedented heights with one project that was incredibly ambitious, her five-LP “George and Ira Gershwin Songbook,” and another that was masterful in its simplicity, “Ella in Berlin—Mack the Knife.”

[Click to continue reading Ella Fitzgerald, Twelve Nights in Hollywood | By Will Friedwald – WSJ.com]
[non-WSJ subscribers use this link to read the full review]

Ella Fitzgerald, Rediscovered Tapes of 12 Nights in Hollywood

Seth Anderson1 Comment


“Twelve Nights in Hollywood” (Ella Fitzgerald)

Finally got my copy of the new Ella Fitzgerald boxed set, Twelve Nights in Hollywood. Awesome. Recorded over a two week stay at the Crescendo Club in Hollywood, 1961, with some additional material recorded in 1962 with a trio1


With all the multi-disc jazz boxes that have come out in recent years — the complete Miles Davis on Columbia, the complete Charlie Parker on Savoy, the complete Duke Ellington on RCA and so on — it’s hard to believe that any significant tapes by any major musician might still be languishing undiscovered in a record company’s archives.

Yet Verve has just released “Twelve Nights in Hollywood,” a four-CD boxed set of Ella Fitzgerald singing 76 songs at the Crescendo, a small jazz club in Los Angeles, in 1961 and ’62 — and none of it has ever been released until now.

These aren’t bootlegs; the CDs were mastered from the original tapes, which were produced by Norman Granz, Verve’s founder and Fitzgerald’s longtime manager.

They capture the singer in her peak years, and at top form: more relaxed, swinging and adventurous, across a wider span of rhythms and moods, than on the dozens of other albums that hit the bins in her lifetime.

[Click to continue reading Ella Fitzgerald, Rediscovered – ‘Twelve Nights in Hollywood’ – NYTimes.com]

I haven’t had a chance to listen to the whole thing yet (77 songs, over four hours of music), but what I’ve heard is just spectacular. Highly recommended for fans of the human voice. The band is good, swinging intimate small-combo jazz2, but the highlight is Ms. Fitzgerald’s emotive expressive voice and utter, relaxed joy.

“Twelve Nights in Hollywood” is not a complete document. (If it were, it would consist of more than a dozen CDs, not four.) But it does include what Mr. Seidel regards as the best version of nearly every song — 76 out of 83 — that Fitzgerald sang on those nights. Six of those 76 songs were also included on the “Ella in Hollywood” album. Because Verve was about to reissue it as well, Mr. Seidel, to avoid redundancy, picked different versions of those songs, which she’d sung on different nights from the ones that Granz selected. On five of those six songs, Mr. Seidel’s choices are clearly better — more spirited, more playful, more passionate, even bluesier.

The blues were never Fitzgerald’s strong point; her few stabs at singing them in the studio came off as lame because it was hard to believe she had the capacity to be sad. But on these recordings she sings several blues songs, most notably “St. Louis Blues,” and, while no one would mistake her for Billie Holiday, she takes them for a bumpy, saucy ride.

When she scats on these recordings, she goes higher, lower, faster, more syncopated, more harmonically complex than usual; it sounds like a really good bebop horn solo, not an affectation, as her scatting on studio albums sometimes does.

And when she sings a ballad, she takes the melody in more — and more inventive — directions while still making it at least as heartbreaking as she ever did in a studio or large concert hall.

Herman Leonard, the great photographer, once took a picture of Duke Ellington sitting at a front-row table in a small New York nightclub, beaming at Fitzgerald while she sang. More than any other album, “Twelve Nights in Hollywood” gives us an idea of what Ellington was smiling at.


photograph © Herman Leonard – Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington at the Downbeat Club

Footnotes:
  1. Paul Smith – piano; Wilfred Middlebrooks – bass; Stan Levey – drums [↩]
  2. Lou Levy- piano; Herb Ellis – guitar; Wilfred Middlebrooks -bass; Gus Johnson – drums [↩]

Louis Armstrong 20th Century Icon

Seth Anderson1 Comment


“Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong” (Terry Teachout)

We’ve written about Louis Armstrong before1, and concur with the assessment that he was one of the key artists of the 20th century.

Louis Armstrong, a k a Satchmo, a k a Pops, was to music what Picasso was to painting, what Joyce was to fiction: an innovator who changed the face of his art form, a fecund and endlessly inventive pioneer whose discovery of his own voice helped remake 20th-century culture.

His determination to entertain and the mass popularity he eventually achieved, coupled with his gregarious, open-hearted personality, would obscure the magnitude of his achievement and win him the disdain of many intellectuals and younger colleagues, who dismissed much of what he did after 1929 as middlebrow slumming, and who even mocked him as a kind of Uncle Tom.

With “Pops,” his eloquent and important new biography of Armstrong, the critic and cultural historian Terry Teachout restores this jazzman to his deserved place in the pantheon of American artists, building upon Gary Giddins’s excellent 1988 study,


Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong

and offering a stern rebuttal of James Lincoln Collier’s patronizing 1983 book,


Louis Armstrong: An American Genius

Mr. Teachout, the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the chief culture critic of Commentary magazine, writes with a deep appreciation of Armstrong’s artistic achievements, while situating his work and his life in a larger historical context. He draws on Armstrong’s wonderfully vivid writings and hours of tapes in which the musician recorded his thoughts and conversations with friends, and in doing so, creates an emotionally detailed portrait of Satchmo as a quick, funny, generous, observant and sometimes surprisingly acerbic man: a charismatic musician who, like a Method actor, channeled his vast life experience into his work, displaying a stunning, almost Shakespearean range that encompassed the jubilant and the melancholy, the playful and the sorrowful.

At the same time, Mr. Teachout reminds us of Armstrong’s gifts: “the combination of hurtling momentum and expansive lyricism that propelled his playing and singing alike,” his revolutionary sense of rhythm, his “dazzling virtuosity and sensational brilliance of tone,” in another trumpeter’s words, which left listeners feeling as though they’d been staring into the sun. The author — who worked as a jazz bassist before becoming a full-time writer — also uses his firsthand knowledge of music to convey the magic of such Armstrong masterworks as “St. Louis Blues,” “Potato Head Blues,” “West End Blues” and “Star Dust.”

[Click to continue reading Books of The Times – The Voice That Helped Remake Culture, From Terry Teachout – Review – NYTimes.com]

A consummate entertainer, inextricably linked in with the history of the century…

The reader gets a dramatic snapshot in this volume of Armstrong’s life on the mean streets of New Orleans, where he grew up, the illegitimate son of a 15-year-old country girl, among gamblers, church people, prostitutes and hustlers; his adventures in gangland Chicago and Jazz Age New York; the rapid metamorphosis of this shy, “little frog-mouthed boy who played the cornet” into the most influential soloist in jazz; and the long, hard years on the road, crisscrossing the United States dozens of time, playing so many one-nighters that he often came off the stage, in his own words, “too tired to raise an eyelash.”

I’ll let you know how the book is, I’m ordering it right now.

At Amazon, the author writes:

Dear Amazon Readers:

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, my new book, is the story of a great artist who was also a good man.

A genius who was born in the gutter–and became a celebrity known in every corner of the world.

A beloved entertainer who was more complex–and much tougher–than his fans ever imagined.

It’s not the first Armstrong biography, but it’s the first one to tell Satchmo’s story accurately. I based it in part on hundreds of private, after-hours recordings made by Armstrong himself, candid tapes in which he tells the amazing tale of his ascent to stardom in blunt, plainspoken language. I’m the first biographer to have had access to those tapes.

Read Pops and you’ll learn the facts about his 1930 marijuana arrest, his life-threatening run-in with the gangsters of Chicago, his triumphant Broadway and Hollywood debuts, his complicated love life, and much, much more.

You’ll also come away understanding exactly what it was that made him the most influential jazz musician of the twentieth century, an entertainer so irresistibly magnetic that he knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts four decades after he cut his first record.

If you’ve ever thrilled to the sounds of “West End Blues,” “Mack the Knife,” “Hello, Dolly!” or “What a Wonderful World,” this is the book for you and yours. Give Pops a read and find out all about the man from New Orleans who changed the face of American music.

Sincerely yours,

Terry Teachout

For an artist as prolific for so long as Louis Armstrong, you might not know where to start listening. I can’t say there are any Louis Armstrong albums that I own that are bad2, but my favorite era has always been the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens


“The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings” (Louis Armstrong)

Everybody knows Louis Armstrong–even if it’s just for his heart-pleasing renditions of “Hello Dolly” and “What a Wonderful World.” Well, this four-CD box set marking the 100th anniversary of his birth–give or take a year–contains some of his most groundbreaking, historic works. Recorded between 1925 and 1929, the Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings find Armstrong with more than able cohorts, including pianists Earl “Fatha” Hines and Lillian Hardin (Armstrong’s second wife), clarinetist-saxophonist Johnny Dodds, and trombonist Kid Ory. Recorded when Armstrong was emerging from the influence of his idol, Joe “King” Oliver, these sides feature the main staples of the Armstrong canon, including “Potato Head Blues,” “Big Butter and Egg Man,” “Cornet Chop Suey” and the Armstrong-Hines duet “Weather Bird.” The jewel of the collection is “West End Blues,” with Armstrong’s stratospheric, pyramid-structured solo, which ranks as one of the greatest in the history of music. The sessions also mark an important technological breakthrough, with the transition from acoustic to electrical recording.

Armstrong’s virtuosity on the cornet and trumpet alone would have been enough to ensure his fame. On the 1927 song “Heebie Jeebies,” he forgot the lyrics and scatted them and became the first jazz singer, paving the way for Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Betty Carter. All in all, this set shows that Louis Armstrong’s heroic talents enabled him to become the alpha and omega of 20th century music. As author Robert O’Meally, who wrote the superb liner notes to this well-packaged collection, puts it, “like Chaucer’s poetry, which virtually begins the process of codifying the English language as a medium for sophisticated versification, Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens provide a wide launching pad from which the history of the art of jazz takes flight.”

Footnotes:
  1. and a few other times or more [↩]
  2. there could be some crap albums, in other words, but I’ve never heard one, and don’t know if they exist [↩]

Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix

Seth Anderson7 Comments

My mom bought me the Miles Davis box set, The Cellar Door Sessions for my birthday a couple years ago.

The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (Miles Davis)
“The Cellar Door Sessions 1970” (Miles Davis)

In reading the liner notes, I was struck by the thought that one of the greatest musical tragedies of the early 70s was that Jimi Hendrix never got to make an album with Miles Davis. They had talked about it at some length apparently, with Keith Jarrett, and maybe Michael Henderson and the rest of Miles Davis’ crack funk-jazz band of this era, but they never got around to actually recording/playing before Hendrix died, at least that I’m aware of.

Electric Ladyland
Electric Ladyland

Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland1 remains one of my favorite albums, especially in the moody, jazzed up sections. However, Hendrix received so many accolades for being a bad-ass guitar wizard that I think he allowed himself to get lazy in subsequent years, playing down to (or occasionally up to) the level of his jam buddies. If Hendrix and Miles Davis had recorded an album, there would have been no way that Miles, as serious a musician as has ever been born in the States, would have accepted anything other than stellar work, and Hendrix would have obliged.

The Cellar Door sessions

This music reveals a truly muscular Miles Davis at the top of his form as an improviser and as a bandleader with the most intense and nearly mystical sense of the right place-the right time-the right lineup. These shows, played in a club instead of a concert hall, provided a virtual laboratory for possibilities Davis was exploring. The money for the gig was nearly non-existent compared to what he was used to making playing halls, so he paid the band out of his own pocket.

..What happens as the band plays each night is that the sense of adventure grows, while the utter relaxation and confidence in each member is carried through to Davis who pushes the buttons and in strange, nearly wordless ways, communicates what he wants on-stage, and the other players give it to him. There are so few rough moments here where someone drops a line or doesn’t quite make it; when it does happen on that rare occasion, some other member picks it up and goes with it. And DeJohnette’s drumming, in his virtual mind-lock with Henderson, is some of the best playing of his career.

Hendrix would have fit right in. A real tragedy this collaboration never occurred.

Footnotes:
  1. aka Electric Dylan Lad [↩]

The definition of Cool

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Kind of Blue (Legacy Edition)” (Miles Davis)

Speaking of police arresting iconic black dudes, Miles Davis had his own dustup with the police, as Bernard Chazelle reminds us:

Why didn’t Professor Gates keep his cool? Not sure. Let’s ask the man who gave birth to the cool. In the words of Leonard Feather,

After escorting a young white girl out of the club to a taxi [outside Birdland in NYC] he was standing on the sidewalk when a patrolman came by and asked him to move on. When Miles said, “I’m not going nowhere — I’m just getting a breath of fresh air,” the patrolman threatened to arrest him. Miles said, “Go ahead, lock me up.” When the patrolman seized his arm, a scuffle ensued during which a painclothes cop passing by began hitting Miles with a blackjack. With blood dripping all over his clothes, he was taken to the police station where, with his distraught wife, Frances, at his side he was booked on charges of disorderly conduct and assault. At a hospital, 10 stitches were taken in his scalp.

Feather doesn’t tell us if President Eisenhower had the cops over for a beer.

[Click to continue reading A Tiny Revolution: “So What”]

[Miles Davis after resisting arrest]

From Miles Davis’ autobiography:

I had just finished doing an Armed Forces Day broadcast, you know, Voice of America and all that bullshit. I had just walked this pretty white girl named Judy out to get a cab. She got in the cab, and I’m standing there in front of Birdland wringing wet because it’s a hot, steaming, muggy night in August. This white policeman comes up to me and tells me to move on. At the time I was doing a lot of boxing, so I thought to myself, I ought to hit this motherfucker because I knew what he was doing. But instead I said, “Move on, for what? I’m working downstairs. That’s my name up there, Miles Davis,” and I pointed to my name on the marquee all up in lights.

He said, “I don’t care where you work, I said move on! If you don’t move on I’m going to arrest you.”

I just looked at his face real straight and hard, and I didn’t move. Then he said, “You’re under arrest!” He reached for his handcuffs, but he was stepping back. Now, boxers had told me that if a guy’s going to hit you, if you walk toward him you can see what’s happening. I saw by the way he was handling himself that the policeman was an ex-fighter. So I kind of leaned in closer because I wasn’t going to give him no distance so he could hit me on the head He stumbled, and all his stuff fell on the sidewalk, and I thought to myself, Oh, shit, they’re going to think that I fucked with him or something. I’m waiting for him to put the handcuffs, on, because all his stuff is on the ground and shit. Then I move closer so he won’t be able to fuck me up. A crowd had gathered all of a sudden from out of nowhere, and this white detective runs in and BAM! hits me on the head. I never saw him coming. Blood was running down the khaki suit I had on. Then I remember Dorothy Kilgallen coming outside with this horrible look on her face–I had known Dorothy for years and I used to date her good friend Jean Bock–and saying, “Miles, what happened?” I couldn’t say nothing. Illinois Jacquet was there, too.

It was almost a race riot, so the police got scared and hurried up and got my ass out of there and took me to the 54th Precinct, where they took pictures of me bleeding and shit. So, I’m sitting there, madder than a motherfucker, right? And they’re saying to me in the station, “So you’re the wiseguy, huh?” Then they’d bump up against me, you know, try to get me mad so they could probably knock me

[Click to continue reading Hot House: Race Relations, 50 Years Later]

Miles Davis after being arrested for standing next to a white girl, helping her catch a taxi

Back to Mr. Chazelle who subsequently enters into another kind of discussion, the kind I can read all day without really understanding the details. Just the feeling is enough. D-minor is a favorite chord of mine, albeit on guitar. I have never had a piano of my own that I could noodle/learn on, so haven’t ever figured out what chords are what without laboriously putting them together. I mean, I can create melodies on a piano, but don’t have enough formal musical training to sustain an entire 10 minute jam, much less explain what the hell Dorian modal scales are.

OK, What about the music? “Kind of Blue” is the most extraordinary jam session ever, featuring a dream team of jazz musicians (Miles, Evans, Coltrane, Adderley, Cobb, Chambers). It’s one of the most influential albums in jazz. It broke from bebop in a big way by going modal. But that’s not why I can listen to it a million times without ever getting tired. The reason for that is the dream team. All the modality does is give them space to breathe and explore melodic ideas that are ruled out in chord-heavy bebop (unless you’re Bird and you can play a full-fledged melody in two-and-a-half seconds).

“So What” is harmonically straightforward: you go Dorian for the first 16 bars, then move up half a step for 8 bars and then back to the original key for the last 8. Sounds so simple. Until, of course, it’s your turn to solo right after Coltrane. Good luck! It’s often said that jazz introduced modes to modern music. Nothing could be further from the truth. Satie, Debussy, Ravel and all those guys used modes heavily a good 50 years before Miles, using far more complex arrangements. But who cares? This video alone gives you a good sense of why jazz is the music of the 20th century par excellence.

Click to continue reading A Tiny Revolution: “So What”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4TbrgIdm0E

Miles Davis and John Coltrane play one of the best renditions of SO WHAT ever captured on film-Live in 1958. Edit : in fact, was in New York, april 2, 1959. Recorded by CBS producer Robert Herridge. Cannonball Adderley had a migrane and was absent from the session. Wynton Kelly played piano–he was the regular band member at this time–but Bill Evans had played on the original recording of “So What” on March 2, 1959. The other musicians seen in the film were part of the Gil Evans Orchestra, who performed selections from “Miles Ahead”. Jimmy Cobb on drums.

Hypnotic Brass Ensemble

Seth Anderson0 comment

I forget where I first heard of the formerly-based-in-Chicago band, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, but I bought their CD recently1. The disc arrived a day or so before this New Yorker review by Sasha Frere-Jones, which begins:

The first time I encountered the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, I was walking through the Times Square subway station toward the No. 1 train. It was hard to miss the sound of eight men playing brass instruments—two trombones, four trumpets, one sousaphone, and a euphonium—while a ninth man added drums. The men stood side by side, swaying, looking a bit like James Brown’s Famous Flames. As I listened, the sousaphone player locked in with the drummer, the trombones played what sounded like a bass line, and the rest of the horns circled and echoed the main motif. Certain genres sprang to mind—a New Orleans second-line band, say, or big-band jazz—but the music wasn’t jazz, exactly. The songs set small, compact melodies against a steady hip-hop beat, and everyone played simultaneously and continuously. The band had eliminated one of the dreary commonplaces of jazz, that class-recital rhythm of soloing—you go, I go, and so on, until the main melody returns.

Several months later, I saw the band again, in front of the Whole Foods in Union Square. As I snapped a few photographs, mostly to remind myself to figure out who they were, one of the trombone players walked up to me. “You can’t take a picture unless you buy a CD,” he said, smiling. He held out three albums in slimline cases, each titled “Hypnotic Brass Ensemble” and featuring an identical black-and-white photograph of the band, beneath a field of color—one red, one orange, and one green. I bought all three (ten bucks apiece), and the trombone player slapped me on the back. “Support live music, people,” he called out, stepping in line with his bandmates. “Bring back real music before it’s too late.”

With the exception of the drummer, Gabriel Wallace, the members of Hypnotic are all brothers. Their father is the jazz trumpeter Kelan Phil Cohran, who was a leading figure in Chicago’s black avant-garde-jazz community in the fifties and sixties, and was a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra. In the spring of 1965, Cohran and about forty other musicians gathered in his living room on Chicago’s South Side to form the A.A.C.M. (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), a nonprofit that supports black artistic expression in local communities. “We had lived through the greatest decline of professional musicians in Chicago and wanted to do something about it,” Cohran says. Some of the best-known members of the A.A.C.M. include the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, and the Pharaohs, whose members eventually formed Earth, Wind, and Fire.

[Click to continue reading Serendipity: Musical Events: The New Yorker]

Even better. The album is quite good. If I wasn’t lazy and pressed for time, I might have elaborated on the thought that their sound is jazz music you could dance to. Mr. Frere-Jones concurs, albeit more eloquently:

The music that Hypnotic plays might best be described as highly composed instrumental hip-hop. If it is jazz, it’s closer in spirit to jazz from a hundred years ago: accomplished and energetic music parcelled out in short songs designed for dancing. It stays in key for long stretches, and moves in easy-to-follow periods. In a typical Hypnotic song, the shifts in key and the emergence of themes happen against a sound of massed horn parts that provide a sense of solidity. The music stays rooted to the cycle of the beat and the riff, and the players don’t leave the center behind to leap around as they might in hard bop or free jazz. Unlike the musicians in the avant-garde community that Hypnotic grew up in, these players have no interest in dissonance or “out” passages of squeaking and skronking. They keep their compositions lean and their harmonies broad and varied.

Footnotes:
  1. oh, I remember now, Uncut had a piece about Honest Jon’s records and Damon Albarn. I blogged about it here [↩]

Reading Around on March 28th through March 29th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected March 28th through March 29th:

  • The Washington Independent » After the Laughter, Grim GOP Numbers – While reporters hooted at the comically simplistic charts and lack of details in the House Republican leadership’s budget plan, the green eyeshade types at Citizen’s for Tax Justice crunched the numbers (PDF). They conclude that a quarter of all households, most of them poor, would pay more taxes under the GOP plan, while the richest one percent would pay $100,000 less.

  • TidBITS Media Creation: iMovie ’09 8.0.1 Update Brings More than Just Bug Fixes – “I understand that Apple isn’t creating its products for writers, and it can (and does) change features whenever it wants. The updates here are great for iMovie users. But since the development teams must keep internal lists of what’s changed anyway, is it really so hard to spend an hour and turn those into useful release notes?”

    Amen to that. Maybe make a preference toggled in Software Update: terse details as the default, but have the ability to set a preference and get more detailed release notes. Please Apple, it shouldn’t be so difficult to say what’s new.

  • Mady Comfort – Biography – Mady (or Mattie) Comfort was a jazz and lounge singer, dancer, and model. She was married to bassist Joe Comfort, who worked with Lionel Hampton and Nat King Cole, and who played on many of the Frank Sinatra/Nelson Riddle Capitol recordings. Gene Santoro, in his biography of Charlie Mingus (Myself When I Am Real), says that she was also a girlfriend of Duke Ellington, and that she is the “Satin Doll” about whom Ellington, Strayhorn, and Mercer wrote the song “Satin Doll.”

    Also sang the hell out of a Nat King Cole song, I’d Rather Have The Blues (aka Blues From A Kiss Me Deadly) in the 1956 noir film, “Kiss Me Deadly”“. Whoa.

More Satchmo

Seth Anderson0 comment

More Satchmo is a good thing, an essential thing, in fact.

After virtually inventing the lexicon for jazz soloists with his epochal Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings, Louis Armstrong set up shop at Decca Records in the mid-thirties. The Armstrong Deccas have not fared as well as their forebears, having been knocked about on compilations of dubious legality and dogged by various aspersions—mainly, that Armstrong had become a puppet for his manager Joe Glaser, who had turned Armstrong into a happy-go-lucky song-and-dance man ready to ham it up on cue.

     But as “The Complete Louis Armstrong Decca Sessions, 1935-1946” (Mosaic Records) attests, Armstrong wasn’t one to be intimidated by his past. The corking take on “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue” makes the Okeh version seem positively weak-kneed, with Armstrong’s big band ripping through the breaks. Armstrong the vocalist is arguably at his apex here, and it was through his vocalizations that Armstrong’s chamber jazz took on a second life as pure pop manna. “On the Sunny Side of the Street” is a glorious hybrid: a mix of Stephen Foster-esque Americana and unprecedented vocal inflections that must have pricked up the ears of Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan. The Decca sessions even venture into hardcore R. & B. terrain, once the drummer “Big” Sid Catlett turns up. A fleeting discographical presence over his career, Catlett was at his best with Armstrong, his offbeat accents on “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home” presaging soul’s infatuation with syncopation.

[From More Satchmo: Recordings: The New Yorker]

Looking forward to my copy of this, once the CD becomes available.

Monk with mikes: A jazz history

Seth Anderson0 comment


“The Thelonious Monk Orchestra at Town Hall” (Thelonious Monk)

On the short list of American musical geniuses, Thelonious Sphere Monk is certainly included.

The cardboard boxes are everywhere, stacked almost to the ceiling, in the Manhattan loft where W. Eugene Smith, the renowned American photojournalist, once shared living space with Hall Overton, an obscure composer and pianist. Inside the boxes are wigs, maybe thousands, the inventory of a Chinese business that now holds the lease. Nothing about this nondescript building in the flower district betrays its decade-long history as a bustling clubhouse for the jazz scene, beginning in the mid-1950s.

So it takes some effort to picture Thelonious Monk, one of jazz’s great composers, pacing these floorboards early in 1959 as he prepares for his momentous large-group debut at Town Hall, which would help lay the groundwork for a career beyond clubs. It takes imagination to place him and Overton at a pair of upright pianos, hashing out chord voicings for one after another of his songs. But these things did happen; that much we know from an extraordinary cache of tape recordings made by Smith, who had wired most of the building with microphones.

The Monk-and-Overton tapes account for just a fragment of some 3,000 hours of material amassed by Smith from 1957 to ’65. Because of the light they shed on both musicians, their value is inestimable. Monk, famous for his cryptic silence and cavalier methods, comes across as exacting, lucid, even voluble — an eccentric genius, yes, but also a diligent one. Overton, enlisted to orchestrate Monk’s knotty compositions, is revealed as a patient amanuensis and a brilliant foil.

“What’s obvious is their mutual respect, and the extent of their precision,” said the pianist Jason Moran, 34. “It’s crazy to hear how specific everything was.”

Moran is among a handful of people to have listened to the loft recordings at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, which is in the process of cataloguing all of Smith’s tapes. On Friday, as part of a 50th anniversary celebration of the Town Hall concert, Moran will perform a postmodern tribute, complete with excerpts from the tapes. Together with a concert on Thursday — a more literal re-enactment led by the trumpeter Charles Tolliver, which will be broadcast live on WNYC-FM in New York — it’s among the more anticipated jazz events of this year.

[Click to continue reading Home life with mikes: A jazz history – International Herald Tribune]

I assume these recordings will find their way to a box set at your local jazz store: I know I’ll be anticipating listening to them.


“Complete Prestige Recordings” (Thelonious Monk)

When Fats Waller Met Al Capone

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“The Very Best of Fats Waller” (Fats Waller)

Kottke pointed out this great incident in Jazz history.

One evening Fats felt a revolver poked into his paunchy stomach. He found himself bullied into a black limousine, heard the driver ordered to East Cicero. Sweat pouring down his body, Fats foresaw a premature end to his career, but on arrival at a fancy saloon, he was merely pushed toward a piano and told to play. He played. Loudest in applause was a beefy man with an unmistakable scar: Al Capone was having a birthday, and he, Fats, was a present from “the boys”.

The party lasted three days. Fats exhausted himself and his repertoire, but with every request bills were stuffed into his pockets. He and Capone consumed vast quantities of food and drink. By the time the black limousine headed back to the Sherman, Fats had acquired severeal thousand dollars in cash and a decided taste for vintage champagne

[From First encounters: When Fats Waller met Al Capone | Independent, The (London) ]

I’ve always had an affection for Fats Waller (and in fact, we have a song of his that is ‘penciled in‘ to our screenplay), now I love him even more. What a cool cat.

By the way, you could purchase a home previously owned by Al Capone (seen here getting an autographed baseball at Comiskey Park1 ), if you were so inclined:

Want to own a notorious piece of Chicago history?



The modest, red-brick home once owned by Al Capone is expected to hit the market this spring for an estimated $450,000, marking a new chapter for the infamous South Side landmark that has had just two owners since the death of Capone’s mother in 1952.



“I think there’s some value in the home’s history,” said Barbara Hogsette, 71, who has lived in the house since 1963

…

For more than a century, the two-flat home with large bay windows has stood near the corner of 72nd Street and South Prairie Avenue in the working-class Park Manor neighborhood. Cook County records show the Capones bought the home for $5,500 in August 1923, part of a wave of first- and second-generation European immigrants who moved to that part of the city in the Prohibition era.

Footnotes:
  1. Gangster Al Capone and his son having baseball autographed by player Gabby Hartnett aka Charles Leo Hartnett from Capone’s front row seat [↩]

Netflixed: Bob Le Flambeur

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Bob le Flambeur – Criterion Collection” (Criterion)

[Netflix page]

A Criterion Collection release of a 1955 Jean-Pierre Melville movie, this one I rented on the strength of Touchez Pas au Grisbi some time ago [Netflix page] (and the magic of the Netflix suggestion engine)

The plot to the Bob Le Flambeur1 could be explained in ten lines2, but that isn’t really the point of the film. Ambiance is. The ambiance of French cafés and nightclubs, jazz, neon signs, glistening streets, characters who go to sleep at 6 AM, and arise by noon, casual sex, gambling, and gamblers, and male friendship. You get the idea. Certainly worth looking for if you haven’t seen it before, and worth a re-watch if you have.

Roger Ebert reviewed Bob le Flambeur as part of his “Great Movies” series:

Before the New Wave, before Godard and Truffaut and Chabrol, before Belmondo flicked the cigarette into his mouth in one smooth motion and walked the streets of Paris like a Hollywood gangster, there was Bob. “Bob le Flambeur,” Bob the high-roller, Bob the Montmartre legend whose style was so cool, whose honor was so strong, whose gambling was so hopeless, that even the cops liked him. Bob with his white hair slicked back, with his black suit and tie, his trenchcoat and his Packard convertible and his penthouse apartment with the slot machine in the closet. Bob, who on the first day of this movie wins big at the races and then loses it all at roulette, and is cleaned out. Broke again.

Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Bob le Flambeur” (1955) has a good claim to be the first film of the French New Wave. Daniel Cauchy, who stars in it as Paolo, Bob’s callow young friend, remembered that Melville would shoot scenes on location using a handheld camera on a delivery bike, “which Godard did in ‘Breathless,’ but this was years before Godard.” Melville worked on poverty row, and told his actors there was no money to pay them, but that they would have to stand by to shoot on a moment’s notice. “Right now I have money for three or four days,” he told Cauchy, “and after that we’ll shoot when we can.”

This film was legendary but unseen for years, and Melville’s career is only now coming into focus. He shot gangster movies, he worked in genres, but he had such a precise, elegant simplicity of style that his films play like the chamber music of crime. He was cool in the 1950s sense of that word. His characters in “Bob” glide through gambling dens and nightclubs “in those moments,” Melville tells us in the narration, “between night and day … between heaven and hell.”

[From Bob le Flambeur :: rogerebert.com :: Great Movies]

and offers this brief bio of the director:

Melville (1917-1973) was born Grumberg. He changed his name in admiration for the author of Moby Dick. He was a lover of all things American. He went endlessly to American movies, he visited America, he shot a film in New York (“Two Men in Manhattan”), and Cauchy remembers, “He drove an American car and wore an American hat and Ray-Bans, and he always had the Armed Forces Network on his car radio, listening to Glenn Miller.” He inhaled American gangster films, but when he made his own, they were not copies of Hollywood but were infused by understatement, a sense of cool; his characters need few words because so much goes without saying, especially when it comes to what must be done, and how it must be done, and why it must be done that way.

One unrelated note, I wish Netflix compiled a list of all the Criterion Collection films they offer. I did suggest it to a Netflix staffer years ago, but they haven’t gotten around to doing it yet. There are user-generated versions, but these are decidedly less useful.

Footnotes:
  1. Flamber (verb, French): To wager not only the money you have, but the money you don’t have. [↩]
  2. as Daniel Cauchy exclaims in an included interview [↩]