Lazaro Vega

A Primer by Bob Hicok I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go to be in Michigan. The right hand of America waving from maps or the left pressing into clay a mold to take home from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan forty-three years. The state bird is a chained factory gate. The state flower is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical though it is merely cold and deep as truth. A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,” can sincerely use the word “sincere.” In truth the Midwest is not mid or west. When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio. There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam, which we’re not getting along with on account of the Towers as I pass. Then Ohio goes corn corn corn billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan. It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing. The Upper Peninsula is a spare state in case Michigan goes flat. I live now in Virginia, which has no backup plan but is named the same as my mother, I live in my mother again, which is creepy but so is what the skin under my chin is doing, suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials are needed. The state joy is spring. “Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball” is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April, when February hasn’t ended. February is thirteen months long in Michigan. We are a people who by February want to kill the sky for being so gray and angry at us. “What did we do?” is the state motto. There’s a day in May when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics is everywhere, and daffodils are asked by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes with a daffodil, you know where he’s from. In this way I have given you a primer. Let us all be from somewhere. Let us tell each other everything we can.

What Art Tatum website? Link?

His work with Woody Shaw, too, though the McCoy influence is pretty heavy throughout the entire band.

Carlin on Jazz: "Jazz musician is the only profession where you work for four hours and get payed and then you go to something called a jam session and work for another four hours for free."

Yep. "Ida Lupino"

Largest Internet audience we've ever had for night time jazz programming during Dapogny's hour. What a band. The harmonized transcription of Armstrong's solo on "Beau Koo Jack" killed me. That and King Oliver's famous break on "Snag It." Great version of "Pass Out Lightly."

http://www.pkorecords.com/members/jdapogny.htm

The finale of this season’s “Live From Blue Lake” radio concert series is June 19th at 10 p.m. with Phil Ogilvie’s Rhythm Kings playing the arrangements and transcriptions by pianist James DaPogny of music from the 1930’s when jazz pioneers Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver as well as a young Duke Ellington began to explore sections of instruments, enlarging the instrumentation of the classic jazz ensemble. At 10 pieces Phil Ogilvie’s Rhythm Kings is the largest jazz ensemble “Live From Blue Lake,” now wrapping up its second season, ever presented. The grant Blue Lake Public Radio receives from the Holland Area Arts Council and the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs to produce this series stipulates an emphasis in booking bands from Michigan. Last year Blue Lake focused on west Michigan musicians including The Western Jazz Quartet from Kalamazoo, bassist Paul Keller who grew up in East Grand Rapids, Dr. John Hair’s Quintet and Sweet Willie Singleton’s Quintet featuring the late saxophonist Mel Dalton (both bands from Grand Rapids). Additionally, saxophonist Wess “Warmdaddy” Anderson, Wynton Marsalis’s alto saxophonist for decades, led a trio live on the air celebrating his new position at Michigan State University. This year we’ve continued to bring you live jazz from area musicians with Michael Doyle and Evidence featuring West Michigan Jazz Society “Jazz Musician of the Year” Steve Talaga, yet Blue Lake also invited musicians from the University of Michigan faculty to the airwaves: pianist Geri Allen, bassist Robert Hurst and, finally, pianist/arranger/scholar and historian James Dapogny. This May “Live From Blue Lake” brought you an international ensemble co-led by New York trombonist Steve Swell and Berlin-based woodwind virtuoso Gebhard Ullmann with Little Jimmy Scott’s music director, bassist Hilliard Green, and the legendary jazz drummer Barry Altschul. None of this programming would be possible without the corporate support of Mack Avenue Records, a Detroit based jazz record label featuring music by George Shearing, Terry Gibbs and the Gerald Wilson Orchestra as well as local favorites and up and coming Michigan musicians. “The Road to Great Music, www.mackavenue.com”. Also see www.dirtydogjazz.com for Mack Avenue owner Gretchen Valade’s new Gross Point Farms jazz/diner club. (313) 882-5299. Please join us via FM or the Internet Thursday, June 19th at 10 p.m. for the conclusion of this year’s “Live From Blue Lake” with Phil Olgilvie’s Rhythm Kings (www.porkjazz.com ).

He does a good job on the discussion of Sun Ra and the AACM.

Listened to a few samples, and based on my memories of many other Tatum recordings, especially the well-recorded late solo Granz albums and the fantastic stuff recorded at a party at Ray Heindorf's house, the note-to-note relationships sound "off" in terms of time and attack -- too raw, abrupt, and clattery, lacking in shading/nuance. That's true. First reaction -- it doesn't sound like Tatum but some Conlin Nancarrow doppleganger of him. Wonder what Nancarrow would do with this technology?

Came in two days ago. Always wondered about these "covers." Heard Vandermark play "New York Is Full of Lonely People" at the concert/service for Lester Bowie. Good to have that now on CD.

Like Muhal. When talking about 50's Chicago and the ideas of Black Experimentalism in the bebop era of Chicago two things: Johnny Griffin's "Woody N You" from his sextet album on Prestige which unfolds like a mini-suite, instrumental recombinations occuring as regularly as a Jelly Roll Morton chart; and Ira Sullivan talking about playing on the South Side and saying the musicians there weren't as predisposed to say "This is the right way" but if there were just a drummer and a tenor, they'd hit it.

Henry Threadgill's story about his early life in the gospel music world was wild. "Pulling snakes out of people's mouths." Having to start your playing at the back of the stage and making sure, by the time you walked up front, that you had the audience with you or else.

(From Jazz Corner.com, probably written by Lois Gilbert) Jazz Showcase in Chicago is Back!! (soon) Cans of paint and crumpled dropcloths are scattered everywhere. Bare windows and half-empty walls stare at a couple of dusty cabaret tables and a few wooden chairs. But come Thursday, if all goes according to plan, this space-in-progress will emerge as ground zero for jazz in Chicago. Or perhaps we should say "re-emerge," for Jazz Showcase founder Joe Segal has been presenting music in this city for 61 years. He has done it in nondescript halls at Roosevelt University, starting in 1947, and in borrowed showrooms from the South Side to the North. Along the way, his son Wayne joined the cause, the duo bringing the world's greatest jazz stars—and local icons, as well—to celebrated spaces in the Blackstone Hotel and, more recently, at 59 W. Grand Ave., in River North. Now comes the latest and potentially the most sumptuous home yet for the Jazz Showcase, which was forced to find new quarters after losing its lease on Grand Avenue in 2006. "This is the last place," says Segal, 82, sitting alongside Wayne in their new spot, in Dearborn Station at 806 S. Plymouth Ct., the afternoon sun pouring in through floor-to-ceiling windows. Sun? In a jazz club? "Don't worry—we're getting curtains," says Wayne Segal, though the light might be a welcome feature for the Sunday family matinees that long have been a draw. The mere fact that the Segals have ordered window treatments—"burgundy and chocolate-colored drapes," brags Wayne—says a great deal about the ambition of the enterprise, and how it stands apart from much of what came before. "So many places we walked into, they were built out already, and we just hung up the pictures," says Wayne. "Here, we could decide where the walls would go, where the stage would stand, what the colors would be. Everything." Redefining the club The design the Segals have settled on represents something more significant than just a color scheme. Essentially, they appear to have redefined the nature of the Jazz Showcase, using their self-styled space to alter the room for 21st Century sensibilities. Rather than position the club as something close to a concert venue—in which audiences listen devoutly to a set, then stream out once the last note is sounded—they've tried to make the new Showcase "a hang," as Wayne Segal puts it. A large, three-sided bar anchors the back of the room, which seats 171 people in 3,500 square feet (slightly larger than the Grand Avenue spot, which seated 150 in 3,400 square feet). Still-to-be-ordered sofas and other amenities will encourage visitors to linger, the Segals hope. The nature of the bustling South Loop neighborhood would seem to facilitate the Showcase's recasting itself as a social nexus, albeit a somewhat rarefied one. "We've always been a classic jazz club, a sit-and-listen kind of place, and that won't change," Wayne Segal hastens to add. "But we also want it to be a place that's not just for listening but also for hanging out. People used to treat us as a concert hall, and we want to make it more conducive" to meeting, talking (softly) and having a drink or three. Creating a place to 'hang' At the head of the room, a large, raised stage— 2 feet high and thus more imposing than the low-slung one at either Grand Avenue or the Blackstone—is spacious enough to seat a roaring big band comfortably. State-of-the-art, accessible bathrooms will come as something of a shock to jazz clubgoers, where facilities typically lean toward a Third World ambience. But the bigger changes will emerge in the programming, say the Segals. For starters, the Tuesdays-through-Sundays engagements that have been a Jazz Showcase signature will be relegated to the past. Instead, most visiting headliners will play Thursdays through Sundays; the empty houses that the Showcase often endured Tuesdays and Wednesdays explain the change in strategy. In addition, sets will start earlier—7 p.m. and 9 p.m. every night of the week, to better attract folks who have to work in the morning. Most intriguingly, at 10 p.m. nightly, Chicago musicians will preside over informal jam sessions; big bands and still more jam shows will unfold Mondays through Wednesdays. Theoretically, the looseness of that format will encourage musicians and listeners to drop by for the informal "hang" that Wayne Segal covets. In that way, he hopes the room "will have the energy we used to have on Rush Street, where jam sessions would go on, and musicians would come in just to see if they could sit in." Ah yes, Rush Street. Back then, in an era when polyester suits and platform shoes were considered chic, the 1970s Jazz Showcase thrived a few steps below ground, underneath the Happy Medium (which presented plays, musical revues and, inevitably, disco). Segal's hippest setting It was by far the most glamorous, high-profile setting the Showcase had enjoyed, up to that point, and it had taken Segal a long haul to get there. Born in Philadelphia and smitten with the big bands he heard in the city's famous Earl Theater, Segal had taken trombone lessons as a youngster but soon realized his musical limitations. While stationed in Champaign, Ill., in the Army Air Corps in the mid-'40s, he routinely rode the Illinois Central train into Chicago's Randolph Street Station and immersed himself in jazz in the Loop, the Near North, the South Side—everywhere. By 1947, he was enrolled at Roosevelt University and began inviting jazz musicians who were playing clubs around town to appear there, snaring Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Lester Young, Dexter Gordon and the Modern Jazz Quartet. "If you were a student, you could hear the big-time players play," says Chicago trumpeter Art Hoyle, who recalls being blown away by the action at Roosevelt in 1949. "It was so exciting." 'He always found a way' After a decade of presenting music but never graduating, Segal moved on, presenting his beloved jazz stars at long-forgotten clubs such as the Gate of Horn and the French Poodle on the North Side, the Sutherland Lounge on the South Side. Not that it was easy. The rise of youth-oriented rock 'n' roll in the '60s forced many clubs out of business. Oftentimes, Segal would pay his musicians, then ask if he could borrow a buck for the ride home. "In spite of anything that interfered, he always found a way of making it work," says Charles Fishman, former personal manager of Dizzy Gillespie and executive producer of the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival in Washington, D.C. Though Segal has outlived many of his earliest fans, perhaps most listeners today best remember the rooms he had at the Blackstone Hotel and on West Grand Avenue. But this time, the stakes are higher. Wayne Segal, who's president of the Showcase corporation, put up his own equity as collateral to borrow money for the build-out—the first time that the Showcase has taken out a loan. Though the Segals decline to specify the amount, work of this kind often hovers in the low-to-mid six figures ( Fred Anderson's remodeling of his Velvet Lounge, two years ago at 67 E. Cermak Rd., cost more than $160,000). Would they be back? Nearly two years ago, after the Segals had lost the place on Grand Avenue, they wondered if they ever would be back. They had spent months surveying dozens of possible sites, but downtown rents were high, and build-outs are never cheap. During their down time, the Segals kept hearing the same question. "I'd go to [jazz] concerts at Symphony Center, and people would constantly be asking when the Showcase was coming back," recalls Wayne Segal. "You don't understand the impact of what you're doing, until you step out of it." Eventually, neither of the Segals could stand being without their club, which is second only to the Village Vanguard, in New York, in presenting jazz continuously in the United States (the Vanguard opened in the 1930s). So the Segals found the room at Dearborn Station, an unusual space in that it has no columns obstructing the view (practically a requirement for a jazz club). "This is our last home," says Wayne Segal, echoing his father. "The Jazz Showcase is back."

From Ben Opie: Hello: I'm still recovering from my extra-extended weekend with Anthony. What can I say, it was pretty freakin awesome. (I can probably say something better than that.) We had a fun duet session, rehearsed and actually pulled-off a smoking creative music orchestra concert, my high school students got to work with him, we played at the Aviary with the birds, etc etc. Everything was recorded and we could see as many as six CDs and a DVD of *good* stuff come out of this weekend. I am posting photos and a narrative of the time at www.myspace.com/braxtonplayspittsburghplaysbraxton. While I make no assumptions, if you have any accounts of photos to contribute, please let me know. -Ben More pictures from Pittsburgh, courtesy of Michael Pestel, hopefully more to come: http://flickr.com/photos/prouthillfarm/set...57605406757947/

There's a new Golden Quartet on Cunieform with Vijay Iyer, piano; John Lindberg, bass; and Shannon Jackson, drums. The piece "Rosa Parks" draws on some of that Miles inspired work, while "DeJohnette" lets it out. Have to check out the long title track yet, "Tabligh." Did the French Radio broadcast include composition titles?

This notion of the autodidactic and the schooled musician is a very important discussion, too. On the one hand you get all these distinctive, funky sounding instrumentalists (Von Freeman, example, on in New York, Jackie Mac), yet at the same time there's a need to learn from the dance band players who've been through it, who read well and play in sections. The Fate Marable part of Louis Armstrong's journey, if you will. There are stories of Budd Johnson teaching Pres, wasn't it? That evolution, the way the music was passed from generation to generation, and the way the music becomes standardized in jam session formulas because of economics, is an important discussion to have nowadays.

Norton's label, barking hoop records, offers some widely exploratory music.

p.s. and yes, it is that Andrew Bishop. He did an album of music by Hank Williams (with dedications to Willie Nelson, too). We played that version of "Buckets Got A Hole In It" last night to start "Out on Blue Lake," then went into his original music. Funsville.

Dan, you caught me with my article down! "Out On Blue Lake" is a regular Wednesday night feature of Jazz From Blue Lake, airing from Midnight Wednesday to 1 a.m. Thursday morning, then the program continues on until 3 a.m. Gasser ALOC made it through those three hours with us, wow, and heard some Either Orchestra recorded live in Grand Rapids back in 1999 with alto saxophonist Jaleel Shaw who we featured last night during the rest of the program, but not during Out on Blue Lake.

ALOC, Your enthusiasm is gas. Have you listened to much Kevin Norton? And that Andrew Bishop on saxophones -- he's coming here to play live with a 10 piece band that specializes in proto big band arrangements of music by Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver from the 1930's as they expanded their instrumentation into sections. Early Ellington, too. www.porkjazz.com . And there he is on his own albums with Tim Flood and Gerald Cleaver sandblasting away forms. LV

Payment sent. LV

That book from a couple of years ago about Leonard Chess did a good job of bringing to life the scene surrounding Tommy Archia and the tavern musical culture in Chicago. The first chapter in "A Power Stronger Than Itself" with the thoughts of Muhal, Jodie Christian, LeRoy Jones and Malachi Favors woven into the narrative is even more vivid. Lewis's premise that academia represents more powerfully than journalism, if done with a different set of questions going in, is right on. Jargon or not he's taking on presuppositions that have come from journalism and clouded the musical/historical narrative. The scene they're describing, too, and how the music was learned -- rich.

I think so. He's added sections on contemporary pianists and singers since WWII.

Produced by Michael Cuscuna