Rob Sudduth to Return to Chez Hanny as Leader

Rob Sudduth playing his saxophone (courtesy of Jazz Chez Hanny)

If my archives are accurate, saxophonist Rob Sudduth gave his last performance for Jazz Chez Hanny in August of last year. On that occasion he was on the front line for a tribute concert for Gerry Mulligan led by Mulligan’s drummer Ron Vincent. Next month Sudduth will lead a quartet of his own called the Rob Sudduth Big Horn Quartet. To be fair, Sudduth’s baritone saxophone will be the only horn in the quartet; but there is no questioning that the baritone instrument is a big one! The repertoire that he will bring to his next appearance will include the partnership of Duke Ellington with Billy Strayhorn, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus.

Sudduth will be joined by pianist Ben Stolorow, who had joined him in last year’s tribute concert. His bass player will be John Wiitala, who performed with the Dred Scott Trio at Chez Hanny towards the end of May of last year. The drummer will be Ron Marabuto, who has been a familiar face at Chez Hanny (even if I have no personal record of any of his performances).

As usual, the show will begin at Chez Hanny at 4 p.m. on Sunday, October 12. As always, the venue will be Hanny’s house at 1300 Silver Avenue, with the performance taking place in the downstairs rumpus room. Admission will be $25, payable by cash, by check made out to Jazz Chez Hanny, or by Zelle through jazz@chezhanny.com. There will be two sets separated by a potluck break. As a result, all who plan to attend are encouraged to bring food and/or drink to share. Seating is first come, first served; and the doors will open at 3:30 p.m. Reservations are preferred and may be made by sending electronic mail to jazz@chezhanny.com.

Charles Mingus in Argentina on Resonance

Cover of the album being discussed

Following up on Sunday’s article about the new Resonance Records release of the Kenny Dorham album Blue Bossa in the Bronx: Live from the Blue Morocco, I am happy to report that, this coming Friday, Resonance will release the two-CD set Mingus In Argentina: The Buenos Aires Concerts. As most readers will expect, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders. Many readers probably know that I do my best to account for every new Mingus album, whether it involves his own performance or others playing his compositions.

This new offering is a quintet album with long-time Mingus partner Danny Richmond on drums. The front line is taken by tenor saxophonist Ricky Ford and Jack Wolrath in trumpet. Rhythm is also provided by Robert Neloms on piano. The tracks include two solo piano improvisations by Mingus. The tracks were recorded at two different venues in Buenos Aires on June 2 and 3, 1977.

Both performances included a salute to Charlie Parker with performances of “Koko” and “Cherokee.” The more I learn about Mingus, the more I have come to appreciate his interest in jazz history. This includes not only Parker compositions but also a serious admiration for Duke Ellington, realized through Mingus having composed “Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love.” As a result, this album is not only a reflection on jazz inventions from the second half of the twentieth century but also an acknowledgement of how those inventions reflected on the first half.

I suspect that Mingus would have cringed if anyone tried to call him a musicologist, but each of the selections he brought to Buenos Aires had its own take on reflecting on the past.

Vincenzo Virgillito’s Diversity of Basses

Cover of the album being discussed

Precondition is a solo album of performances by bassist Vincenzo Virgillito. According to the advance material I received, it was scheduled for release on January 1; but, as those following the above hyperlink will see, all twelve of the tracks are currently available for MP3 download through an Amazon.com Web page. The description of Virgillito as a “bassist” might mislead some unfamiliar with his work. While he is a virtuoso performer on the double bass, for this album he also plays electric bass, fretless instruments with both five and four strings, and analog pedals.

Three of the tracks on the album are tributes. Most importantly (at least to me) is an acknowledgment to the most adventurous jazz bass player of his day, Charles Mingus, with a performance of “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.” I was glad to see that Virgillito’s interpretation was so imaginatively embellished that one could barely notice the tune that Mingus originally composed. The theme for “Danny Boy” is much more evident on the track that was conceived to honor the memory of Bill Evans. The other tribute is an original, “Word Drops,” which is given the subtitle “Jaco’s midnight,” presumably to acknowledge Jaco Pastorius. The remaining tracks are Virgillito originals, including five “Reset” tracks, which serve as “punctuation marks” over the course of the entire album.

Personally, I found the overall listening experience to be a mixed bag. Virgillito clearly had the capacity to evoke a wide variety of sonorities through his diversity of instruments and the supplementary technology. Nevertheless, for all of that diversity, I came away with an impression of rather bland navel-gazing. Perhaps his decision to take composers such as Mingus and Evans as points of departure raised my expectations too high. However, after listening to this album in its entirety, my first impression was to go back and listen to the “source of inspiration” on the Mingus Ah Um album.

Jon Jang Presents Final Shenson Faculty Concert

Last night at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, the Community Music Center (CMC) presented the last of its four free concerts. (The venue was selected because the CMC Mission Branch is currently undergoing alterations.) When this series was announced at the end of last June, the final offering was described as a program entitled Civil Wrongs: Music about Black American & Japanese American Incarceration, performed by Chinese-American composer and pianist Jon Jang. Fortunately, any intimations of agitprop were, for the most part, casually dismissed in favor of a performance that was almost entirely about the music.

Furthermore, for most of the evening, Jang did not perform as a soloist. Instead, he led a jazz quartet, whose other members were Erika Oba on flute with rhythm provided by Gary Brown on bass and percussionist Deszon Claiborne. In that setting Jang kept his politics to a relative minimum, acknowledged primarily by a performance of his composition “Reparations Now 1987.”

On the other hand he opened the evening with a medley of tunes by Charles Mingus, beginning with “Meditations on Integration.” My knowledge of the Mingus book is not as thorough as I would like it to be. As a result, I am not sure how many other tunes were in the set. The one that certainly registered with me was “Fables of Faubus,” also listed as “Original Faubus Fables” on the Candid recording. I suspect that Jang is a bit too young to have been around Arkansas in the late Fifties; but that was a time when Governor Orval Faubus was as much a factor in “civil wrongs” as were the incarcerations that took place during World War II.

Jang wrapped up the evening with his one solo performance. He selected “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” which Richard Rogers composed for the musical Carousel. Once he moved from the tune to improvisation, he played out a thoroughly engaging deconstruction of one of the most familiar tunes in the American Song Book. It almost seemed as if he saw “Broadway optimism” as an attempt to sugar-coat a “social order” that had no trouble dismissing communities of Blacks and Japanese as non-PLU (people like us). To his credit, Jang never lapsed into soapbox rhetoric; but he certainly knew how to harness his music to express his opinions.

Conrad Herwig’s Latin Approach to Mingus

Cover of the album being discussed

As I have previously written, it took me some time to learn about Conrad Herwig’s “Latin Side of” series of recordings. As a result, I have written about only one of the albums in this series, The Latin Side of Horace Silver, which was definitely an enjoyable experience. However, at the end of this past September, Herwig released his latest album in the series. It was hard for me to resist adding The Latin Side of Mingus to my queue, since Charles Mingus is definitely one of my favorite jazzmen as both a bassist and a composer.

Depending on the size of the ensemble, Mingus compositions can pass with little difficulty as chamber music or orchestral music by other means. Playing trombone, Herwig leads a front line that cannot really be classified as symphonic but definitely goes beyond the usual band sound. He is joined on that front line by Randy Brecker on trumpet, Alex Sipiagin alternating between trumpet and flugelhorn, and Craig Handy on three instruments from the wind family, tenor saxophone, flute, and bass clarinet. Rhythm is provided by Bill O’Connell, alternating between piano and Fender Rhodes, Luques Curtis on bass, Robby Ameen on drums, and Camilo Molina on congas. One of Mingus’ more overtly political compositions, “No Dejes Que Pase Aqui” (don’t let it happen here), is framed with narration by Ruben Blades reflecting on the rise of the Nazis in Germany.

However, it is clear from his arrangements that Herwig is more focused on music than in politics. Nevertheless, it is interesting how he chose to set Blades’ narration with solo instruments, bringing all those distinctive voices into a chorus for the dark punch line of that narration. This is a case in which the focus may be on the music; but the music, in turn, is giving its own voice to the rhetoric of the text that Blades is delivering.

Personally, I think that Mingus was skilled enough as a composer to develop Latin arrangements of his own. Whether or not that is the case, Herwig can still put his own brand of uniqueness on Mingus compositions. I suspect that I shall draw upon the affordances of a digital platform to explore a few side-by-side (first Mingus then Herwig) approaches to listening. Most likely this will not be a matter of competition but, instead, an appreciation of how different points of view can sometimes be additive!

Mingus Centennial Honored with “Deluxe” Reissue

courtesy of Play MPE

This past Friday (April 22), when I wrote about the forthcoming release of Mingus: The Lost Album from Ronnie Scott’s, I forgot to mention that I was writing about Charles Mingus on the 100th anniversary of his birth! That date also marked a release by Rhino/Parlophone of a new “deluxe edition” of Mingus Three, the 1957 recording of the trio that bassist Mingus formed with pianist Hampton Hawes and drummer Danny Richmond. The original release featured two Mingus originals, “Back Home Blues” and “Dizzy Moods,” coupled for four standards (“Yesterdays,” “I Can’t Get Started,” “Summertime,” and “Laura”), along with a four-minute jam entitled “Hamp’s New Blues.”

The “deluxe” release includes alternate takes of all of these tracks except the one for “Laura." It also includes two additional tracks, two takes identified only as “Untitled Blues,” the second about half as long as the first. That makes for about an hour and a quarter of highly imaginative jamming by all three members of the trio.

The album is being released on both vinyl and CD with a booklet with both photographs and updated liner notes. Sadly, the Amazon release of the MP3 version does not include that booklet. For attentive listeners, however, each of the fifteen tracks on this release speaks for itself with more than sufficient clarity. Those familiar with Mingus’ biography know that he could be difficult (and sometimes downright violent) during recording sessions. In this case, however, all of the tracks were recorded on July 9, 1957; and no undercurrents of hostility ever seem to emerge. When it comes to inventive interpretation and improvisations, this was a gathering of equals all sharing mutual respect; and the result is a spontaneity in performance that is consistently satisfying from beginning to end.

Resonance Records Releases Lost Mingus Album

Once again George Klabin and his Resonance Records label have produced a major archival offering for those particularly interested in provocative jazz inventions from the second half of the twentieth century. Readers may recall that Klabin produced the two-CD album Bill Evans Live at Ronnie Scott’s. One week from today Resonance will release another album from that same venue, Mingus: The Lost Album from Ronnie Scott’s.

This is based on two nights of sessions at Ronnie Scott’s at which Charles Mingus on bass led a sextet, whose other members were Jon Faddis on trumpet, Charles McPherson on alto saxophone, Bobby Jones on tenor saxophone and clarinet, John Foster on piano (and occasional vocals), and Roy Brooks on drums (with a few riffs on musical saw). Two CDs account for a session on August 14, 1972, and a third CD accounts for the following night’s set. As many will expect, Amazon.com is currently taking pre-orders for this new release.

Both evenings favored those in the audience that liked their music to spin out over lengthy durations. On the first program the group invests almost 31 minutes in Mingus’ “Orange was the Color of Her Dress, then Blue Silk,” almost twenty minutes on “Noddin’ Ya Head Blues,” and almost 30 minutes on a Mingus original I had not previously encountered, “Mind-Readers Convention in Milano (aka Number 29).” Mingus then wrapped up that set with 45 seconds of Charlie Parker’s “Ko Ko.”

The second evening began with a 35-minute treatment of “Fables of Faubus.” This is where the vocal work shows up, although it is not as provocative as the recording session for Candid made on October 20, 1960. Orval Faubus was governor of Arkansas between 1955 and 1967. In 1957 he ordered the Arkansas National Guard to prevent black students from entering the Little Rock Central High School to attend classes there. Since Brown v. Board of Education had been decided (unanimously) by the Supreme Court in 1954, this was an egregious flaunting of Federal authority, which probably inspired Mingus to enact his own egregious flaunting of Faubus. How much Londoners knew about this background in 1972 will probably never be established, but I suspect that at least some of them had that Candid album in their possession.

The other major offering on the second night was “Man Who Never Sleeps,” which, like “Noddin’ Ya Head Blues,” ran a bit shy of twenty minutes. These two extended takes were separated by an homage to Louis Armstrong by playing fast and loose with “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The set concluded with “Air Mail Special,” a standard for Benny Goodman’s band, which he composed jointly with James Mundy and Charlie Christian. It is also worth noting that, during the prolonged performances, there are occasional intrusions of tunes appropriated from elsewhere. I have to confess personal delight in the way Faddis summons up memories of Dizzy Gillespie with a few fragments of “Salt Peanuts.”

I have to say that I have more than a little regret that I was never able to attend a Mingus performance. On the other hand his temper was really volatile, so those that did go to his gigs were never quite sure what might happen. Mingus was 50 when he played at Scott’s, but I doubt that age ever mellowed him. (He was only a few months shy of 57 when he died.) Recordings may be the only way to get a sense of what Mingus did and how he did it, but my knowledge of his biography reminds me that I probably would not have felt particularly comfortable in his presence!

Ébène Presents Chamber and Jazz in One Gig

Ébène Quartet members Raphaël Merlin, Pierre Colombet, Marie Chilemme, and Gabriel Le Magadure (photograph by Julien Mignot, courtesy of SFP)

Last night the Ébène Quartet (Quatuor Ébène) returned to San Francisco to give its fourth San Francisco Performances concert. In the past they have performed in both the Jazz Series and the Chamber Series. In the absence of a Jazz Series this season, they prepared a program for the Shenson Chamber Series that presented string quartets by Joseph Haydn and Leoš Janáček in the first half and then provided a jazz gig for the second. Originally an all-male ensemble, the group used to cultivate a “bad boy” image, such as the photograph taken by La Jungle for the inner pages of their Fiction CD:

Ébène Quartet founders Mathieu Herzog, Raphaël Merlin, Pierre Colombet, and Gabriel Le Magadure

This did not always go down well with some of their chamber music performances. However, when violist Marie Chilemme replace Colombet, things tended to sober up a bit; and Chilemme seems to have satisfied a need for focus that has served both chamber and jazz offerings equally well.

This was particularly important on the jazz side, for which all selections were announced from the stage by Merlin. Indeed, Merlin credited the arrangements for the first two selections, Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints” and Miles Davis’ “Milestones,” to the Turtle Island String Quartet. Merlin went as far as to acknowledge Turtle Island with inspiring Ébène to move into the jazz genre. Since I still have my copy of the first CD that Turtle Island released, I appreciated their being cited as much as the techniques through which Ébène cultivated their “responses” to the “call” of Turtle Island.

According to my records, two of the jazz offerings in this portion of the program had previously been performed here as encore selections. These were “Ana Maria” (Shorter again) and “Libertango” by Astor Piazzolla. However, given the current political climate, the most timely selection was their decision to play Charles Mingus’ “Fables of Faubus.”

My guess is that there is now at least one generation of listeners that do not appreciate the significance of that title. It refers to Orval Faubus, who was governor of Arkansas in 1957, when he called out the National Guard to prevent nine African American teenagers from entering Little Rock Central High School. Mingus wrote words to go with this tune (including “Two, four, six, eight: They brainwash and teach you hate.”); but Ébène provided a music-only account. (For that matter, Columbia Records would not allow Mingus and Dannie Richmond to sing them at their recording session.)

The chamber music selections were equally engaging and, perhaps, even a bit provocative. The Haydn selection was the Hoboken III/34 quartet in D major, the fourth of the six quartets published as Opus 20. These were the first quartets in which Haydn began to explore adventurous (and occasionally provocative) approaches to composing for string quartet. Ébène easily negotiated the many twists and turns of Haydn’s inventiveness, making for a delightful edge-of-your-seat listening experience.

This was followed by Leoš Janáček’s first quartet, given the name “Kreutzer Sonata” based on the novella of that title by Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s tale is one of an “eternal triangle,” which made it interesting that the quartet membership should have one woman (the unfaithful wife in Tolstoy’s narrative) and three men (husband, lover, and narrator). However, the music itself is not narrative in nature. Rather, each of the four movements reflects on the intense shadows behind each of the episodes in Tolstoy’s tale. Ironically, all of these episodes unfold at the same “Con moto” tempo; but each one discloses its own palette of emotional dispositions.

Mind you, the same can be said of the expressiveness of all of the offerings in the entire Ébène program!

Before Eric Dolphy’s Tragic Death

This morning I decided to check out another YouTube upload of a Jazz Icons DVD. My selection was Charles Mingus Live in ’64, consisting of selections from three of the concerts that took place during the European tour that Mingus arranged in April of that year. As they appear on the DVD, the concerts are not in chronological order, for which the dates and cities are as follows:

• April 12: Oslo, Norway
• April 13, Stockholm, Sweden (the second of two performances given that day)
• April 19, Liege, Belgium

The first of these, in Oslo, is excerpted, consisting of only the first four of the seven selections:

1. So Long Eric
2. Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk
3. Parkeriana
4. Take the “A” Train (Billy Strayhorn)

The Stockholm program was a curious amalgam of “So Long Eric” and “Meditations On Integration,” seamlessly melding rehearsal and performance. The Liege program consisted of only three selections:

1. So Long Eric
2. Peggy’s Blue Skylight
3. Meditations on Integration

Except for “Take the ‘A’ Train,” all of the compositions were by Mingus.

Mingus put together an impressive sextet for the tour. This musicians were Dannie Richmond on drums, Jaki Bayard on piano, Johnny Coles on trumpet, Clifford Jordan on tenor saxophone, and Eric Dolphy playing alto saxophone, flute, and bass clarinet. Mingus, of course, played bass. On one occasion he suggested that he might move over to piano, but that never happened. Coles collapsed due to a perforated gastric ulcer during the performance in Paris on April 17 (while playing “So Long Eric,” ironically); so the April 19 concert was a quintet gig. Dolphy remained in Europe following the end of the tour. He was performing in Berlin on June 27, when he had to be hospitalized. He died after falling into a diabetic coma on June 29.

As in other Jazz Icons releases, the video quality varies with that of the crew making the video. On this particular DVD, the most satisfying work can be found in the Oslo video. As already noted, the performance in Stockholm seemed to be a bit disoriented; but there was something almost prophetic about the way in which “Meditations on Integration” wrapped up by revisiting “So Long Eric.” The performance in Liege made for particularly satisfying listening, but the camera never seemed to be looking in the right place.

There are any number of stories about the strenuous demands that Mingus would impose on his performers and the hostility with which he reinforced those demands. In that perspective I feel it is important to point out that the group interactions in all three of these video documents were consistently collegial. My only real regret is that the one performance of “Parkeriana” never got past a false start, even if it managed to account for an impressive number of Charlie Parker’s tropes in only a few minutes’ time. On a more positive side, “Meditations on Integration” unfolded as an elaborate multi-movement suite, allowing each of the performers to develop his improvisation around his own “signature theme.”

Dannie Richmond on drums keeping an eye on Charles Mingus (screen shot from the YouTube video being discussed)

As with the other videos, the YouTube site does not provide any information from the 24-page booklet that accompanies the DVD. Personally, I did not mind the loss; but I have the advantage of a rather rich collection of text sources about Mingus’ life and works. Beyond any text or music, however, I was particularly taken with the wildly frenetic energy that Richmond brought to his drum work. However, while his technique made for a very compelling appearance, the drum work itself never tried to dominate any of the other players. For the most part, Richmond’s work was moderated through eye contact with Mingus, which was seldom (if ever) interrupted.

The bottom line is that engagement among all six of the players was never less than scrupulously attentive, resulting in one of the most compelling jazz listening experiences I have encountered for some time.

“Switched-On” Jazz Switches Off Listening

courtesy of Jazzzdog Promotions

The “Editorial Reviews” background material on the Amazon.com Web page for Sam Gendel’s Satin Doll album describes the recording as “a futuristic homage to historical jazz.” For those of my generation, this may well evoke memories of Wendy (then Walter) Carlos’ “futuristic homage” to Johann Sebastian Bach through a series of studio albums beginning with Switched-On Bach. That first album consisted of twelve tracks through which a variety of Bach genres were realized through Moog synthesizer technology. As the Wikipedia page for this album observes, the album “played a key role in bringing synthesizers to popular music, which had until then been mostly used in experimental music.”

That album was released in October of 1968. Half a century later, there is little that is still “experimental” in the use of electronic gear. To the contrary, electronics now play a significant role in “real-time” performance in any number of widely different genres. Those genres include some of the more “avant-garde” approaches to the composition and performance of jazz. Gendel’s album, on the other hand, tries to take the same “historical” perspective that gave Carlos a point of departure. That perspective reaches back to Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” and advances forward all the way to Charles Mingus.

Gendel is a saxophonist; and on this album he leads a trio whose other members are Gabe Noel on bass and percussionist Philippe Melanson. Melanson’s gear is all electronic, and that may well include the processing of the the signals picked up by Gendel’s microphone(s). The result amounts to Carlos’ studio-based “switched-on” techniques being applied to a wide variety of jazz standards and a few Gendel originals. The significant difference, however, is that Gendel’s trio was giving a “real-time” performance by virtue of electronic technology that could only be imagined in 1968.

By all rights this could have been a fascinating album of “jamming in the electronic domain.” Unfortunately, this was not the case. There is a bland uniformity of performance style and rhetoric that cuts across all thirteen of the album’s tracks. The result never rises to the compelling diversity of both content and style that could be found in Switched-On Bach.

Mind you, anyone that takes Bach seriously, would observe that much of that diversity could be found Bach’s own music: All Carlos did was follow up on the likes of Edward Elgar and Leopold Stokowski, inventing new approaches to instrumentation. However, tunes like “Stardust,” “In a Sentimental Mood,” and “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” have similarly lent themselves to the stylistic inventiveness of both instrumentalists and vocalists. In that historical perspective, the sonorities of the Gendel trio may have a few new elements; but they lack the rich diversity already afforded by jazz history.

Morrison to Present Chamber Music Theater

Actress Shinnerrie Jackson (from the event page for the performance being discussed)

The next program in the 2019–2020 season of the Morrison Artists Series, presented by the College of Liberal and Creative Arts at San Francisco State University (SFSU) will depart from the usual expectations for a chamber music concert. The music will be performed by a trio; but the trio will consist of cello, piano, and percussion, a New York-based group called THE CORE ENSEMBLE. They will be joined by actress Shinnerrie Jackson to perform a full-length musical theater work entitled Ain’t I A Woman! The text was created by Kim Hines to examine the life and times of four powerful African-American women: novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, ex-slave and abolitionist Sojourner Truth, folk artist Clementine Hunter, and civil rights worker Fannie Lou Hamer. The musical score is drawn from the heartfelt spirituals and blues of the Deep South, the urban vitality of the Jazz Age, and contemporary concert music by African-American composers such as Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach and Diane Monroe.

Like all Morrison chamber music events, this concert will take place in the Creative Arts Building at SFSU, a short walk to the west from the SFSU Muni stop at the corner of 19th Avenue and Holloway Avenue. It will held in Knuth Hall at 3 p.m. on Sunday, March 15. Tickets are free but advance registration is highly desirable. Reservations may be made through the event page for this performance. As usual, there will be a pre-concert lecture, which will begin 2 p.m., also in Knuth Hall. Representatives of THE CORE ENSEMBLE will participate with SFSU Artistic Director Cyrus Ginwala as interlocutor. The talk requires neither registration nor tickets.

Does Jazz Have a Future?

I just finished an article in The New York Times entitled “Blue Note Records at 80: Can a Symbol of Jazz’s Past Help Shape Its Future?,” written by Giovanni Russonello. The online version of this article gave no indication of who the author is or what credentials he brought to writing what turned out to be an impressively lengthy essay. Between my own personal listening experiences and the recordings I have accumulated, I came away with the impression that Russonello did not know that all much about what was going on half a century ago or what role Blue Note played in those activities. However, when it came to writing about those who currently call what they are doing “jazz,” his article turned out to be more informative; and I was glad I had taken the trouble to wade through the muddle of the author’s initial thoughts.

I suppose that my tolerance of Russonello and a lot to do with my grudging acceptance of living in a culture that is “ignorant of history and proud of that ignorance.” Mind you, there are any number of jazz performers here in the Bay Area that are well aware of the giants of the past and impressively capable of standing on the shoulders of those giants. For that matter, this has been the case in general for much of the past, certainly among those recording with Blue Note in its prime. Thelonious Monk had a prodigious appreciation of his predecessors; and his first recording session with Riverside consisted entirely of selections from Duke Ellington’s “book.” (Charles Mingus similarly admired Ellington, even if that admiration resulted in the notorious Money Jungle recording session, which, for the record, eventually found its way to a Blue Note recording.)

The cover of the Money Jungle album, showing Duke Ellington at the piano, Charles Mingus at his bass, and drummer Max Roach (from the Amazon.com Web page for the remastered release of the recording)

So it is not the performers that trouble me. My real concern is with the audiences and my belief that, however wedded to Internet sources everyone may be, earbuds and Internet connectivity will never be an adequate substitute for being in the presence of music being made in-the-moment by skilled musicians. Thus, I am less interested in all the names that Russonello drops at the end of the article in conjunction with recent Blue Note projects and more concerned about how many of those names have followers listening to them in “real-time” performance settings.

When I go over to the SFJAZZ Center, I occasionally encounter someone whose past experiences overlap my own; but, mostly, I find myself among people who happen to be there just because they happen to be there. (I also have to confess that I have had little satisfaction from my few encounters with what SFJAZZ purports to do in the name of “education.” I am all for education; but, to be blunt, those responsible for it at SFJAZZ strike me as having a lot to learn and showing few signs of being motivated to do so!)

The bottom line is that whatever it is that we choose to call “jazz” will only have a future if there are audience bases that allow it to do so. Going to places like the Red Poppy Art House (and, for that matter, Union Square during the summer) indicates that such audience bases can be found in San Francisco. From a more “mainstream” point of view, I have been impressed by what San Francisco Performances has done in offering jazz in a variety of different settings. Whether such efforts are sufficient to build audience interest and support to a “critical mass” remains to be seen. Nevertheless, when I see many of the results of efforts by both the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Opera to strike a healthy balance between past and present, I feel as if I am in the right place to see if that critical mass will emerge.

Post Script: Tomorrow’s print edition of The New York Times will run another article by Russonello entitled “A History of Blue Note Records in 15 Albums.” (As the hyperlink indicates, this article is now available online.) I decided to see how many of those albums were in my collection (whose growth depended heavily of mailings I would receive announcing new Mosaic albums). Only four of Russonello’s selections are in my collection; but my own view of jazz does not give as much attention to the recent past as Russonello does! Indeed, four of the items on his list did not exist when I was building my collection.

Yoko Miwa’s New Trio Album

Courtesy of Braithwaite & Katz Communications

A little over a month ago, Ocean Blue Tear Music released the latest trio album by jazz pianist Yoko Miwa, entitled Keep Talkin’ (which is also the title of the first track, composed by Miwa). The other trio members are Will Slater on bass and Scott Goulding on drums, with Brad Barrett taking bass on the final track, another Miwa composition entitled “Sunshine Follows.” Miwa is a professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston; and there is an almost academic quality to this album, demonstrating the scope of trio improvisation through the inventiveness of all three players and featuring six of Miwa’s compositions.

In terms of pedagogy, this album is a valuable resource. However, for all of its polish, there is an overall sense of blandness. This is most evident in the performance of Charles Mingus’ “Boogie Stop Shuffle.” This is one of those Mingus pieces that only showed up in recording on the Columbia label, where it had been subjected to the slings and arrows of outrageous bowdlerization by producer Teo Macero. When Mingus was allowed to be Mingus, his performances were aggressively raw and frequently provocative. When listening to the Mingus Ah Um album, the Mingus aficionado can come close to detecting those qualities struggling to make themselves heard, only to be smoothed over by technical production values. Unfortunately, Miwa’s account of this piece has more to do with Macero than with Mingus (so much the worse for the Mingus legacy).

The one Thelonious Monk track, “In Walked Bud,” fares much better. Slater takes the lead with his bass work; and, as was the case with Frank Kimbrough’s sessions for his Monk’s Dreams complete anthology, the emphasis is on the music itself, rather than Monk’s idiosyncratic approaches to the piano keyboard. The result is an upbeat account in which all three trio members seem to be having fun exercising their respective capacities for invention. Would that Miwa’s own pieces could raise spirits to a similar height!

Rousing Jazz from Bernstein’s MTO West

Steven Bernstein with his slide trumpet (from his SFJAZZ event page)

Those who read this week’s Bleeding Edge article know that one of the major events of the week was trumpeter Steven Bernstein’s four-night residency at the SFJAZZ Center, which involved three different programs presented in the Joe Henderson Lab. Bernstein is engagingly brash in his arrangements, which cover music from some of the earliest days to jazz all the way up to the rich diversity of pop during the last quarter of the twentieth century, as well as his original compositions and his capacity for improvisation. For the first two nights of his residency, he led his Sexmob quartet, whose other members are Briggan Krauss on saxophones, Tony Scherr on bass, and Kenny Wollesen on drums. The first night took on music that Nino Rota composed for films made by Federico Fellini, while the second night shifted to the extensive repertoire of Duke Ellington.

Last night was the first of two nights at which Bernstein scaled up to the repertoire of his Millennial Territory Orchestra (MTO). MTO was formed in New York, where Bernstein is based; but last night he presented a “Western edition” (my shameless appropriation of someone else’s pun) featuring Bay Area jazz luminaries. The members of Sexmob formed the core; and they were joined by Jenny Scheinman on violin, Ben Goldberg on clarinet, Howard Wiley on tenor saxophone, Jeff Cressman on trombone, and George Samuels on guitar. The core of the repertoire draws on music from the pre-swing era territory bands that crisscrossed the country in the Twenties and Thirties; but the performances are grounded solidly on the rich diversity afforded by our “new millennium.” Thus, while last night’s selections were grounded heavily in the book of Count Basie, at least one of the Basie selections was heavily colored (in purple?) by the influence of Prince. (Was this a deliberately prankish “Prince meets Count” move by Bernstein?)

Nevertheless, over the course of last night’s first one-hour set, MTO covered far more than Basie originals. The group opened with W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” with a nod to Basie’s arrangement. Bernstein explained that, shortly after the original MTO was formed, the group played the piece at the funeral of Lester Bowie (co-founder of the Art Ensemble of Chicago), who had died on November 8, 1999. After that Bernstein decided that every subsequent gig would begin with “St. Louis Blues,” honoring the recent past of Bowie with the more distant legacy of Basie and Handy. That elegiac synthesis of recent and distant past also surfaced in “Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love,” which Charles Mingus composed a few month’s after Ellington’s death. (Mingus had played bass for Ellington early in his own career and was subsequently fired by him.) Bernstein turned to Mingus because he felt the music the group was playing needed more harmony, and Mingus brought to jazz some of the richest harmonic textures to be encountered this side of Richard Wagner.

Another past-in-the-present offering was the Bessie Smith song “Put It Right Here (or Keep it Out There)” (performed without a vocalist to keep the evening G-rated). Smith had sung in the film St. Louis Blues, an early two-reeler based on the Handy song (which Smith sang). Of a similar vintage was the account of “The Boy in the Boat,” originally given an overtly effeminate delivery by George Hannah accompanied at the piano by Meade Lux Lewis. Bernstein referred to the song as X-rated without going into details. (It was about sex between women; and, again, the music was performed without the words.)

As diverse as the repertoire were the styles of performance contributed by the individual MTO West players. Bernstein is a generous leader, making sure that each of the band members had more than ample time to exercise his/her own interpretations of the tunes. Those receiving particular attention were Wiley for his tenor work and Scheinman on violin. Samuels was a newcomer to the group, put he had a chance to display some engagingly intimate duo work playing against Scheinman’s pizzicato.

Bernstein himself has established his talent on the slide trumpet, an instrument about as obscure as the “Boy in the Boat” song. By using a slide, rather than valves, Bernstein could color his melodic lines with a portamento delivery that recalled vocal styles of a century ago (Smith being a good example). Given the size of the instrument, pitch control is far more difficult than on a slide trombone; but there was never any uncertainty in Bernstein’s melodic lines. Over the course of his set, he also played both a standard valve trumpet and flugelhorn.

Nuts-and-bolts-aside, though, what made last night memorable was the consistently vigorous energy coming from the group as a whole. Bernstein’s attention to harmony meant that all accompanying textures were solidly well-blended; and this was most evident in the subtle shadings that emerged when Goldberg, Wiley, and Krauss played as a group. MTO West was probably the largest ensemble I had encountered in the Henderson Lab, but they never sounded too loud. Rather, they delivered vigorous accounts of every selection with each player consistently given his/her all while Bernstein kept control over who was doing what and for how long. The group will return to Henderson tonight for sets at 6 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. As of this writing, the later set is almost sold out; but tickets are still available for both.

50-Year-Old Civil Rights Songs Surface at CMC

Betty Reid Soskin (standing behind violinist) with the CMC Teen Jazz Orchestra and vocalist Jamie Zimmer (third from right), photograph by Lisa Lee

Since the rise of the civil rights movement in the Fifties and Sixties, Betty Reid Soskin was doing her part by writing songs. Through her music she offered up her own poetic reflections on her experiences as a mixed-race woman confronting segregation at work and in the East Bay housing market. She built up a library of her work on personal tapes that were never released commercially or even produced in more professional settings.

Soskin is now 96. At that age she is America’s oldest park ranger. She is also a beneficiary of new technology through which all of her old recordings have been digitized to provide a historical record of the breadth of her songwriting efforts. Last night jazz bassist Marcus Shelby, who directs the CMC (Community Music Center) Teen Jazz Orchestra, prepared arrangements of a selection of these songs to bring them to the attention of a full concert audience. Shelby also recruited local jazz artist Jamie Zimmer to serve as vocalist.

The results of Shelby’s efforts were presented yesterday evening in the CMC Concert Hall. Soskin’s words and music could not have been more timely, particularly in light of the historical fact that last April 4 was the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King. Those of us who believe in steady progress would have thought that this would have been an occasion to appreciate how far things had advanced, particularly with the election of the 44th President of the United States. However, anyone who pays close attention to the daily news knows that regress is threatening to unravel all of that progress; and Soskin’s words could not be a better reminder of where that regress will take us (if it has not already done so).

Zimmer was an excellent choice for bringing Soskin’s words to performance. Between the clarity of her diction and her solid sense of pitch, the attentive listener could relish the full impact of every phrase in Soskin’s text. Her delivery was judiciously seasoned with improvised vocalizations that reflected the poignancy of the text, particularly in its expression of frustration. Soskin was skillful in keeping the anger under control; and, in doing so, she left that intensity to be filled in by any listener paying close attention to her words.

Soskin’s share of the program was preceded by a final “report” on the progress of the CMC Teen Jazz Orchestra. Shelby clearly wants this group to appreciate the legacy of past jazz masters in its repertoire. For this particular concert those masters were Herbie Hancock, Benny Golson, Duke Ellington, Freddie Hubbard, and Charles Mingus. All of his selections deserve attentive and informed listening; and, from a technical point of view, there was no hiding that the CMC players were not quite up to doing these pieces justice.

Nevertheless, Shelby brought a positive spirit to the occasion; and one could see how he was encouraging the group to keep going in their efforts to bring these thorny pieces under control. More importantly, however, was Shelby’s emphasis on the fact that any jazz playing worth listening to, no matter how modest the effort, deserves to be seasoned by some serious improvisation. If all of the CMC players still have a way to go before getting a piece like Mingus’ “Better Get Hit in Your Soul” under control, there was no mistaking all of the positive energy behind those who stood up to improvise their own takes on the tune. This may be “work in progress” jazz; but the committed jazz aficionado should have no trouble seeing where that progress is heading.

Greensill Leads a Quintet for This Year’s Labor Day

Yesterday afternoon at Old First Presbyterian Church, jazz pianist and vocalist Mike Greensill made his annual Labor Day Weekend visit to the Old First Concerts series, an event that traditionally launches the new season of this series. Things were more crowded than usual up on the altar, since this year Greensill led a quintet featuring two wind players, Charlie McCarthy on tenor saxophone and flute and Joe Cohen on alto saxophone, along with rhythm provided by John Clark on bass and Bob Blankenship on drums. Sadly, illness prevented vocalist Wesla Whitfield (Greensill’s wife) from making her usual “mystery guest” appearance.

Once again the program consisted of familiar standards and Greensill’s own pieces. However, he called three of those pieces “parodies,” since they amounted to reflections on other standards. The most ambitious of these was “Better Zip it in Your Ghoul,” which was meant to be based on Charles Mingus’ “Better Get Hit in Your Soul,” a wild and wooly evocation of a prayer meeting, which, even in its first studio recording version (on Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus) is as much theater as music, if not more so. Greensill tended to fall back on the underlying harmonic progression with a result that just as easily could have been confused with Miles Davis’ “All Blues.”

Nevertheless, that is how music rolls; and it has been doing so far longer than “jazz” was part of our working vocabulary. Greensill’s “parodies” were neither more nor less than the sixteenth-century “parody mass” form, in which a pre-existing piece of music (often secular) would get appropriated as the cantus firmus in a polyphonic setting of the Mass text. (As Martin Luther purportedly said while working on his own hymnal, “The Devil can’t have all the good tunes for himself!”) More recently (1967) Frank Tirro wrote about how many bebop “originals” were actually based on a “silent theme,” such as “How High the Moon” for Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology” or “Whispering” for Dizzy Gillespie’s “Groovin’ High.” (Ella Fitzgerald’s scat improvisations for “How High the Moon” would sometimes include references to “Ornithology.”)

Greensill’s parodies involved different “levels of silence” for his sources. It was not hard to detect the presence of “Tangerine” in “Puce,” while the Mingus treatment was more elliptical. (Was “All Blues” the silent theme of Mingus’ composition? Mingus claims he stole “Better Get Hit” from himself; but who knows?) The most original departure came in “Something Over There,” which came from Bobby Timmons’ “Dat Dere,” best known these days for the lyrics by Oscar Brown with one of the most memorable lines to be set to music: “Daddy, can I have dat big elephant over dere?”

The rest of the group was given ample opportunity to strut their stuff. McCarthy not only delivered some impressive sax work but also served as one of the composers with his “The Romance Blues.” For basic tune delivery, Cohen and McCarthy had excellent chemistry in their parallel octaves, where McCarthy was below with his tenor or above with his flute. Greensill gave Clark several opportunities for extended bass work, all of which were consistently absorbing. Blankenship’s drum work, on the other hand, was almost as consistently understated; but his contributions to the overall fabric were consistently distinctive.

The new season has now officially begun; and, once again, Greensill could not have been a better harbinger.

Jazz Pianist Arturo O’Farrill Sharpens a Political Edge on his SFP Debut

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances (SFP) launched the Jazz Series for its 2016–2017 season with a rare solo gig by pianist Arturo O’Farrill, making his SFP debut. He is the son of Cuban composer, arranger, and conductor Chico O’Farrill, who founded the Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra, which Arturo now leads. However, as a piano soloist, the younger O’Farrill’s interests go far beyond the Afro-Cuban repertoire, combining hard bop influences with the roots of both folk and spirituals and then adding his own unique approaches to composition. O’Farrill’s playing took in about 90 minutes, including verbal commentary that boldly ventured into the political domain.

O’Farrill is far from the first jazz artist to “go political” in his work. However, while there was a wealth of elegant embellishing riffs in his keyboard work, his reaction to the results of the Presidential Election had shot-from-the-hip directness. Thus, one of his most recent original pieces has been called “The Donald Blues;” and, while it may not have had the in-your-face agitprop of Charles Mingus’ “Original Faubus Fables,” it was difficult to disregard the seething undercurrents of the music. (The Mingus selection on last night’s program was “Jelly Roll,” which amounts to jaundiced nostalgia for the early days of jazz.)

“The Donald Blues” was followed by an almost lyrical take on Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susanna;” but O’Farrill made it clear that nostalgia was not what he had in mind. Instead, he played up the early history of that music in minstrel shows, an entertainment genre that tried (and, in its day, succeeded) in turning racism into public entertainment. (The original sheet music described the music “as Sung by The Ethiopian Serenaders.” What is particularly striking about this song is the way in which the words celebrate absurdity:

It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry;

The sun so hot I froze to death—Susanna, don’t you cry.

Such patent defiances of commonsense logic now feel like a poignant echo of the absurdities we had to endure over the last several month of political speechifying (and this clearly involved more than one candidate). Ironically, one of the major hard bop selections of the evening was Horace Silver’s “Peace,” perhaps offered up as “a consummation devoutly to be wished.”

Moving away from political connotations, O’Farrill was at his best in starting with very simple tunes and then spinning them out into elaborate webs of thickly embellished prolongations. He could almost be considered as a latter-day incarnation of one of the contributors to the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. The child’s tune “Hot Cross Buns” appeared twice during the evening. The first time around it contributed to the “landscape” of a piece O’Farrill wrote about being a dog in Havana. However, it then returned in its own right as the final offering of the evening; and it this latter capacity it left listeners with the perfect example of O’Farrill’s ability to turn the utmost simplicity into the most thoroughly engaging complexity.