Lazaro Vega

That's 10 p.m. on Blue Lake. www.bluelake.org I think we have Rick Roe on piano, Joe on guitar and Wess "Warmdaddy" Anderson on alto. Follow up to the new CD, "Get Ready," as in Smokey Robinson's "Get Ready," as well as Marvin Gaye's "Inner City Blues." A collection of Motown inspired melodies taken the jazz route.

Friday, June 8th, the Danish saxophonist Lotte Anker’s trio with Craig Taborn, keyboards, and Gerald Cleaver on drums appears at artist Hugo Claudin’s loft, Mexicans San Frontieres, 120 S. Division #226, Grand Rapids, MI 49503, (616) 706-7963. Check out her biography, discography and information at www.lotteanker.com. Known—if at all—in North America for her contributions to Tim Berne’s recording of the open, coma saxophone suite, and her trio appearances with pianist Marilyn Crispell, Danish reedist Lotte Anker has a much higher profile elsewhere. Moving among free improv, contemporary classical music, and a combination of the two, the tenor and soprano saxophonist has composed theater music and worked in Danish percussionist Marilyn Mazur’s ensembles and American Maria Schneider’s big band. However, there are few so-called classical inflections or the sort of mainstream jazz rhythms that Schneider prefers on these CDs. Anker, joined by two completely different casts of characters, works firmly in the free music mold. An outgrowth of her trio with Crispell, Triptych (Leo) could be termed the saxophonist’s “American” CD. It connects her with two New Yorkers, drummer Gerald Cleaver, a carryover from the Crispell trio, and pianist Craig Taborn. Conversely, Live (ILK) unites three generations of Danish avant-gardists—collectively called ICTUS—with French guitarist Marc Ducret, who coincidentally has toured and recorded with Berne. With Anker representing the middle generation, ICTUS consists of the slightly older Peter Friis Nielsen, who plays electric bass and preparations here, and young drummer Stefan Pasborg. Pasborg, who leads a band with Lithuanian saxophonist Liudas Mockunas, has played with innovators such as saxophonist John Tchicai and American trombonist Ray Anderson. Friis Nielsen has been in many bands with drummer Peter Ole Jørgensen and German reedman Peter Brötzmann. Not that you would confuse Anker’s improvising with anything created by those other saxophonists. During the course of Live’s five instant compositions, she clicks, twitters, smears, and rasps, concentrating on wiggling split tones and glottal punctuation, the better to interact with Ducret. His radical string abrasions meander from guitar-hero-like pulsating fuzz tones to intricate, angled microtonal musings. Alongside them both, Friis Nielsen pointedly maintains the bass line’s rhythmic functions while Pasborg shakes and rattles polyrhythmic percussion implements for auxiliary textures. Tunes like “Ping Pånk/Orbituary” involve shredded drum beats and tapped bass-guitar rumbles that set up slinky smears and flutter-tonguing from Anker plus shuffling, scraped guitar lines from Ducret. As the layered improvisation opens up in volume, the bassist’s quivering sequences serve as the anchor between flanged and distorted UFO-like sounds from the guitarist and repetitive reed vibrations from the soprano saxophonist. Other tunes feature the guitarist turning to slurred fingering for angled microtonal effects, piling fuzz-tone pulses on top of one another as Anker responds with polyphonic trills, and spacey blocked multiphonics from both front-liners. Meanwhile Pasborg showcases compressed cymbal battering, rolls, and rumbles. The centerpiece of all this is the nearly 16-minute “The Sky Below/Restoration”, which supplies equal time for all concerned. Beginning with modulated, echoing bass guitar runs that eventually assume an assembly line-like continuo underneath the others, the tune opens up for reverberating licks from Ducret with surprising country & western inferences, as the drummer pops his gong and cymbals and Anker contributes funky vibrations. Pioneering a technique that sounds as if he’s scraping steel wool across his strings, the guitarist downshifts to pinpointed chording as Pasborg displays scatter-shot shakes and inflatable balloon-like abrasions. With Friis Nielsen still shaping the tune’s undercurrent, Anker’s flutter-tonguing dissolves into reed peeps until whammy bar movement and knob-turning action from the guitarist rouse her. Countering his rubato slaps with curvature snorts and arpeggio runs from the lower part of her instrument’s body tube, she forces him to reconfigure his downstrokes into seemingly random scrapes. Less theatrically confrontational, Triptych, like its namesake, is more balanced. Almost from the first, it seems that the pianist and drummer are intent on expressing with rhythms and chords what the saxophonist does with vibrations and blowing. Take “Cumulus” for example. Here Taborn lightly voices his keys and Cleaver barely taps and rattles his percussion, both leaving space for a series of trembling peeps from Anker. Soon however, the saxophonist reverts to trilling, swelled notes, creating her own soprano horn fantasia among the pianist’s deliberately metronomic chord pattern and the drummer’s polyrhythmic fills. Three-quarters of the way through, Anker’s pinched split tones divide into vibrated nodes as Taborn’s double counterpoint becomes stronger and more focused. By degrees, the sounds fade away to echoing resonation from the drummer’s kit. Cleaver’s self-effacing rhythmic calm allows other pieces such as “The Hierophant” to progressively fade, like an old photograph left too long under a bright light. The polar opposite of the bombastic drummer, Cleaver’s contributions here occasionally involve almost literally wiping—not beating—his snares, cymbals, and floor toms as Taborn resonates wide, high frequency harmonics in the bass clef and Anker pitchslides an irregular vibrato sideways into overblown harshness. When the pianist’s walking fills and the drummer’s beats eventually stop, the piece climaxes with saxist’s sturdy echoing overtones. In this collective mind meld, Taborn intermittently strums guitar-like arpeggios and Anker’s low-key soprano sporadically takes on Paul Desmond-like sweetness, But the notable factor linking these seven improvisations is how nonchalantly the staccato coexists with the legato, speed with languidness and silence with clamor. Comparing the lines output by the trio members to ever-spiraling concentric circles, you can hear organic interaction on the lengthy title track. Here Taborn taps not just notes but their voicings and vibrations from his keys; Cleaver scratches his ride cymbal with a drum stick more often than he hits it; and Anker’s waveforms rebound from false register slurring to rotating grace notes, without upsetting the pool of group improvisations. Taken together, Triptych and Live should provide a triple function. They should make Anker’s talents more obvious to North Americans; introduce uninformed jazz fans to other Danish—and one French—improvisers; and solidify the reputation of a couple of self-possessed, maturing American sound makers. Live @ Mexicains Sans Frontieres June 8 120 South Division Ave #226 Grand Rapids MI 49503 tel 616-706-7963

Hope you can join us. And Happy Memorial Day weekend: www.bluelake.org

Billy Mitchell (the tenor player) is gone...though his jam sessions on Long Island left a legacy of players....can't recall clearly from the Chicago Improv list if Victor Sproles is gone (born in 1927)....Do recall talking to Nessa about James Scales. Chuck's friend Terry Martin tracked Scales down at one point and it was a big dissapointment, given Scales approach and sound on those Sun Ra records of the mid 1950's. Scales was out of music. That was a long time ago.

I don't know, man, the baritone saxophone feature is an amazing display of control across a range the horn isn't supposed to have. While the drums might not be the linking fabric of the piece, pianist Craig Taborn is -- he works well between the two worlds of music here, the composed (classical) and improvised. And Corey Wilkes steps up. While Roscoe has been compared to Morton Feldman in print his music strikes me as much less academic than that -- he's working, as Ellington did, with the materials at hand. Much of the recording wouldn't be out of place next to "Round" or "Cards for Quartet" or any of the music he's made with vocalist Thomas Buckner (sp, I'm not getting his last name) and violinist Vartan Manoogian. Roscoe's had this "classical" side for some time now -- and there's a preciseness to his take on that which is not academic, or even conventional, yet systematic. In general the new work lands more on his "space" side than his "sound" side.

Blue Lake!

Ghost, No, thanks for hipping me to them. Swed's book, Space Is The Place, was the last Ra book for moi. Barnes and Noble coupon coming up! LV

Blue Lake Public Radio (www.bluelake.org) will feature the music of Sun Ra this evening from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. From: Robert L. Campbell (<campber@clemson.edu>) Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2007 11:43 AM Subject: Arrival Day present In honor of Sun Ra's Arrival Day [May 22, 1914, Birmingham, Alabama], the Red Saunders Research Foundation site has added a page on his years in Chicago: http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/sunra.html Authors are Chris Trent, Bob Pruter, and yours truly. Keep traveling the Spaceways, Robert L. Campbell Editor, New Ideas in Psychology Webmaster, Red Saunders Research Foundation Professor, Department of Psychology 410A Brackett Hall Clemson University Clemson, SC 29634-1355 USA phone (864) 656-4986 fax (864) 656-0358 http://www.robertlcampbell.com http://www.redsaunders.com

Check out "Rhapsody in Blue."

There's an interview I did with Jackie in 1992 where he spoke about their musical relationship. Will have to dig that out.

"Eddie Johnson told Chuck Nessa that he subbed for Ben Webster in the Duke Ellington Orchestra on more than one occasion--once he was called to Detroit to do so. Presumably this was during Ben Webster's second stay with the Duke, in 1948-1949." Enjoying the Eddie Johnson web site. "Splanky" is thee cut from "Indian Summer." Would love to find out more about this Love archive: "According to Art Zimmerman, a Chicago physician, Dr. Jerome Love, recorded many nightclub performances and concerts by jazz musicians in Chicago between 1952 and 1959. Love made binaural recordings, using a dummy head with microphones mounted on each side. Each reel of tape contained up to 30 minutes of music. The Love archives contain 6 reels from this performance (up to 3 hours of music). Personnel and date as per the Love archives; the leader's name is misspelled "Tate" and the drummer's name comes out "Walden." And the location is not given. From what is known about other recordings in the Love archives, some of the titles will be incomplete."

Zutty with Joe Sullivan and Pee Wee Russell is marvelous, and the Fats Waller record "Moppin' and Boppin'" with Benny Carter on trumpet has some great Zutty. Yes, the Capitol session was Noone's last and we played that out of the big Mosaic box, as well as the reunion with Bigard (they were part of Jelly Roll’s trio out put). I guess there aren't any commercial records with Noone from the early years, though of everything I read they did work together often. Thanks for the word up on the Fat Cat recordings.

"I have yet to hear a convincing Ella interpretation of a truly sad or angry song full of despair." "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered"

This article can be found on the web at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070514/yaffe -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Art of the Improviser by DAVID YAFFE [from the May 14, 2007 issue] On or about November 17, 1959, human character changed--according to jazz mythology, anyway. That week, the Ornette Coleman Quartet debuted at Manhattan's Five Spot, a club owned by the culturally fortuitous (and exploitative) Termini brothers, a watering hole for Abstract Expressionist painters and New York School poets. The Five Spot was on the Bowery, poised at an intersection of Skid Row and gentrified bohemia, old ghettos and an in utero East Village counterculture. For a few dollars and a cheap drink, you could stand at the bar and see jazz history in the making, a glimpse into the future that would become part of a fetishized past. The Five Spot wasn't just any dive but a key to the hipster zeitgeist; just two years earlier, in 1957, when the club featured a six-month residency for Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, Norman Mailer was perched at a table taking notes for his essay "The White Negro." What were these patrons--from the anonymous scenesters to the cultural icons--hearing, and how were they hearing it? Leonard Bernstein, who had recently performed with Louis Armstrong, allegedly exclaimed, "This is the greatest thing that ever happened to jazz!" Bernstein sat in, Lionel Hampton sang Coleman's praises, John Lewis maintained that Coleman was the first true extension of Parker, and Sonny Rollins sat at the end of the bar and moped, in the midst of his Williamsburg Bridge sabbatical. Coltrane came regularly, and he and Coleman would walk out into the night talking music. LeRoi Jones (nearly a decade away from changing his name to Amiri Baraka) would soon hail Coleman's music as the most uncompromising of black aesthetics, a sonic premonition, a soundtrack to the racial upheaval to come. But while Coleman spread the gospel from Baraka to Bernstein, other pace runners were not so impressed--Miles Davis, for example. Davis had worked so hard to be a man of the moment, but the perch felt precarious when someone else, for the jazz intelligentsia, was defining The Shape of Jazz to Come, as the title of Coleman's 1959 album brashly asserted. Staying on one chord was his thing, Davis must have been thinking as he stood at the bar, glaring. But this motherfucker wasn't even playing modes. Coleman sounded like an Abstract Expressionist Louis Jordan, with juke-joint honking and seemingly random splatter. Davis grumpily agreed to sit in and then told a reporter he was sure Coleman was "all screwed up inside." (Coleman would later retort that Davis was a black man who lived like a white man.) Another prominent detractor was Charles Mingus, standing at the bar, arms crossed, making Coleman's bassist, Charlie Haden, tremble. Mingus and Coleman would eventually become friends--Coleman visited Mingus at his deathbed--but Mingus never stopped dissing him. Coleman, he said after the Five Spot gig, was "playing wrong right." Near the end of his life, Mingus harrumphed, "His mama told him he was a genius just because he put the 'm' block next to the 'a' block." It is remarkable to imagine that there were days when aesthetics were a matter of life and death, when a shift in rhythm or harmony would summon the kind of apocalyptic language usually reserved for war or revolution, a time when the classical music of the moment--from the Darmstadt school of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen to the New York school of John Cage and Morton Feldman--struggled to define music's future. Change of the Century, proclaimed Coleman's second Atlantic title. This Is Our Music, thundered the third. These were the days when jazz albums were cultural manifestoes, and when the order, as Bob Dylan put it a few years later, was rapidly fadin'. Nearly half a century later, Coleman's musical revolution has become official enough for the Pulitzer Prize in Music and a Lifetime Achievement Grammy--his first. (The year 2007 may well be remembered as a year of belated awards, when Martin Scorsese and Coleman finally got their due.) Human character did not change. In fact, the revolution wasn't even televised. Coleman was on camera (along with Natalie Cole, who won a Grammy in 1991 for her necrophiliac duet with her great father) to present the Best New Artist Award to Carrie Underwood, a reminder that in the post-Five Spot era, Paula, Randy and Simon are on hand to inaugurate the next cultural moment. But Coleman's lifetime achievement award was presented at a smaller, B-list ceremony at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, where they also gave out the technical awards and other industry marginalia. It is a shame that the entire speech can't be quoted here, because it's probably the most remarkable Grammy speech ever made. Here, though, are some highlights: One of the things I am experiencing is very important and that is: You don't have to die to kill and you don't have to kill to die. And above all, nothing exists that is not in the form of life because life is eternal with or without people so we are grateful for life to be here at this very moment.  For myself, I'd rather be human than to be dead. And I would also die to be human. So you can't die, you can't die to be neither one, regardless of what you say or think so that's why I believe that music itself is eternal in relationship to sound, meaning, intelligence...all the things that have to have something to do with being alive because you were born and because someone else made it possible for you to be here, which we call our parents etc. etc.  For me, the most eternal thing is that I would like to live until I learn what it is and what it isn't...that is, how do we kill death since it kills everything? You would think that there would be nothing to add to this, that the rest is silence, but Coleman eventually concludes thus: It is really, really eternal, this that we are constantly being created as human beings to know that exists and it's really, really unbelievable to know that nothing that's alive can die unless it's been killed. So what we should try to realize is to remove that part of what it is so that whatever we are, life is all there is and I thank you very much. Coleman is, in other words, unkillable. In his Lester Young-meets-gangsta porkpie and impeccably tailored pinstriped suit, the Grammy winner was unjustly slighted by fashion roundups of the ceremony. But he's still larger than death. Like Baby Huey, he keeps coming back. Indeed, Coleman is one of the last immortals. He can still cause ripples in the jazz world, even if that world and its ripples have gotten much smaller. Ornette listeners would wait patiently for him to release a serious jazz album with a serious and worthy rhythm section. Once in a while (the first half of In All Languages in 1987, the two Sound Museum CDs in 1996), he would. Then only live performances, rumors, man-about-town spottings of him at Harlem fried chicken dives and Upper East Side museums and long spells of silence. Pretty soon, people were waiting for him to release something--anything. This was one of the last surviving jazz musicians who changed the way we hear music. Would he get one more chance to preserve it on disc? Last year, after nearly a decade without officially released recordings (with incendiary performances along the way), Coleman released Sound Grammar, a 2005 live recording from Germany, on his own label of the same name. If the title evokes a lesson, The Shape of Jazz to Come, his 1959 album released a few months before the Five Spot gig, announced a prophecy. Could the new title be a shine on those who want to lay down the jazz laws he so legendarily subverted? Is the shape of jazz to come now so well defined that, as the old surviving mavericks roar into their 70s, few even care? When Coleman appeared at the Five Spot, he had already recorded a couple of albums for Contemporary, the second of which, Tomorrow Is the Question!, also blared a jazz future few could hear, delivered on a tiny indie label that paid him next to nothing. Coleman had arrived from LA by way of his hometown, Fort Worth, Texas, a veteran of the rhythm and blues and minstrel circuit who'd been beaten up for playing atonal choruses for crowds that shouted for "Stardust." He had been dissed by beboppers (including Dexter Gordon and Max Roach), who thought him incapable of invoking Charlie Parker (a charge refuted by one listen to "Bird Food" or, really, anything he ever did), in and out of the Jehovah's Witnesses, sporting long hair and a beard in a crew-cut era. He was so ragged and weird, it was a testament to his genius (and more than a little luck) that he found the right people to figure him out. After his tenor saxophone was smashed by hostile listeners, he switched to alto, and the sound he created was, for those willing to listen, the instrument's major step after Parker's revolution in the 1940s; John Lewis was onto something. (In the mid-1960s, Coleman also began playing trumpet and violin without any formal training. His trumpet playing has demonstrated a learning curve over the years but still makes one nostalgic for Don Cherry. His violin playing, on the other hand, remains, shall we say, an acquired taste.) This funky elevator operator got a prized fellowship at 29 to study with the Third Stream guru Gunther Schuller at the Lenox School of Jazz in summer 1959, a contract with Atlantic Records and that Five Spot residency, leading him on an eccentric and improbable path to immortality. Schuller wanted to teach Coleman music theory, but when he finally made a breakthrough, Coleman vomited. There would be no more lessons. In 1959 people were waiting for someone to play outside meter and chords while still providing blues and bop signposts. That year Kline and de Kooning were dribbling; Robert Lowell was confessing; Allen Ginsberg wrote "Lysergic Acid"; John Cassavetes's Mingus-scored, jump-cutting Shadows swept through art-house movie theaters; and curiosity seekers were lining up on that chilly Bowery street to check out the man with the plastic saxophone. Miles Davis's Kind of Blue had come out a couple of months earlier, just a few months after John Coltrane's Giant Steps, each disdaining chord changes in favor of solemn inquiries into chords and modes. Davis's "So What" coolly navigated between a couple of minor Mixolydian modes; Coltrane's "Giant Steps" circled the circle of fifths. Surrounded by a West Coast posse of young, like-minded musicians in short trench coats--including bassist Charlie Haden (who had grown up playing hillbilly music in a family band), Don Cherry (just shy of 23, blowing on a pocket trumpet) and drummer Billy Higgins (who kept time all to himself while sharing his leader's eccentric sense of it)--Coleman showed up at the Five Spot and blew the other band on the bill (Art Farmer and Benny Golson's Jazztet) off the headlines, a gig withered into a footnote. Who wasn't in the band was just as important as who was: namely, a pianist. Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker's pianoless quartet had already popularized "cool" jazz a few years earlier; Sonny Rollins had already cut out the piano and filled in the missing chords on tenor on the trio dates Freedom Suite, Way Out West and A Night at the Village Vanguard. But the absence of piano in Coleman's quartet called attention to what else was missing--chords, rhythms, structures. Coleman's alto was white plastic, like the one Charlie Parker would pick up in haste after leaving his brass one in hock. The plastic was not only preferable for its harsher sound--one with less vibrato than Parker's--but for what was read and perhaps misread, as its aesthetic of artifice: Ce n'est pas un saxophone! Of all the ink spilled on Coleman's impact, perhaps the most memorable came from Thomas Pynchon's 1963 debut novel, V., in which the character McClintic Sphere (with a last name nodding to Thelonious Monk's middle name) sets the jazz world on end at a club called the V-Note, making everyone rethink space and time with a motto of equilibrium: "Keep cool, but care." Sphere's alto is ivory, not plastic, but his impact is similarly divisive and shape-shifting: He blew a hand-carved ivory alto saxophone with a 4½ reed and the sound was like nothing any of them had heard before. The usual divisions prevailed: collegians did not dig, and left after an average of one and a half sets. Personnel from other groups, either with a night off or taking a long break from somewhere crosstown or uptown, listened hard, trying to dig. "I am still thinking," they would say if you asked. Unlike Dylan's 1965 electric performance at Newport (a Rite of Spring for another genre and another orthodoxy), Coleman's Five Spot gig, in one of the great blunders of music industry history, was never recorded. We have to rely on hearsay and conjecture--and Pynchon!--to get an idea of what everyone was arguing about. Fortunately, Coleman clocked in hours of studio time in the two-year flurry that followed, resulting in a body of work for Atlantic collected on the six-CD box set Beauty Is a Rare Thing, a title evoking the mélange of lyricism and clangor he was summoning with empathetic musicians. By the time of its 1993 release, it was an expensive canonical artifact, meant for the mantle like a Pléiades edition of Proust. The liner notes were hyperbolic, but by then the people who were going to be convinced already were. Perhaps the most telling measure of Coleman's impact was his influence on his detractors, notably Miles Davis, whose great mid-'60s quintet featured the Ornette-inspired virtuosity of pianist Herbie Hancock and drummer Tony Williams. Mingus, who'd developed a novel approach to collective improvisation in his jazz workshops, would also come around, recording his own version of free jazz with Duke Ellington and Max Roach on the 1962 trio session Money Jungle, and sublimely collaborating with multireedist Eric Dolphy, who teamed up with Coleman on the 1960 landmark Free Jazz. (Free Jazz's original cover was famously adorned with a reproduction of Jackson Pollock's 1954 drip painting White Light.) Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane both plucked members of Ornette's Atlantic ensemble of those anni mirabili for memorable recordings; Coltrane's The Avant-Garde is a classic, and every note on every track of Rollins's On the Outside (also known as Our Man in Jazz) is a revelation. It's astonishing to hear how the era's most powerful improvisers took Coleman's audacious conceptions and ran with them with a broader vocabulary than he was ever technically capable of developing himself. Yet just as Pollock's work still provokes sneers from abstraction's adversaries (my kid could do that!), so Coleman's innovations still draw resentment from older luminaries. I saw the great swing-era alto player Benny Carter at 90 squeak a wrong note in a club date, only to announce, "That was my Ornette Coleman impression." Was Coleman an idiot or an idiot savant? Gunther Schuller and Martin Williams thought that there was a structure to his music; you just had to learn to hear it. But were they imposing order on a chaos that defied definition? Coleman's playing didn't really change no matter what he played. He was already fully formed. The theorists were just gilding a fascinating but inscrutable lily. By the time Coleman came up with a theory, "harmolodics," to explain what it all meant--something about harmony and rhythm being the same (and to justify his bloated, though intermittently brilliant 1972 symphony Skies of America)--it already seemed redundant. Coleman's best work was behind him, and he had disappeared from the scene a decade earlier, having vowed never to play clubs again, only to perform and record for extravagant fees, which he didn't receive often enough despite memorable recorded dates in Stockholm, lofts and infrequent studio appearances. He took sabbaticals from the American scene for long stretches, but like Nina Simone and Jerry Lewis, he was greeted in Paris with amour fou. Ornette has been appearing and disappearing steadily now for the past forty-four years, setting up shop in his Prince Street loft for a spell in the '70s (performing for friends and neighbors and letting the tape roll), only to be evicted; jetting off to record with the Master Musicians of Joujouka and a New York Times music critic, Robert Palmer, on clarinet; hanging out with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin in Morocco; forming the fusion band Prime Time (where the harmolodics act was more droning, repetitive and often dull); performing with body-piercing artists, with Lou Reed, on the Naked Lunch soundtrack and with Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic. He had such a monastic devotion to his art, he once asked a doctor to castrate him (he was talked into getting circumcised instead). He let his son Denardo play drums with him from the age of 10--the result can be heard on the 1966 album The Empty Foxhole--causing listeners to yearn for the days when his drummers included masters like Higgins, Ed Blackwell and, briefly, the titanic Elvin Jones. Since the 1997 release of Colors, a duet with the German pianist Joachim Kühn, Coleman watchers have had to subsist on live performances, reviews, anecdotes and hope. Coleman would reunite with Haden, Cherry and Higgins once in a while before Cherry's death in 1995 and Higgins's in 2001, and his final appearance with Higgins, at an outdoor concert in lower Manhattan's Battery Park in 2000, was vintage Coleman. He spent most of that set playing uninspired ragas with a confused-looking tabla player. Finally, he brought out Haden and Higgins, played some blistering harmolodics (or call them what you will), summoning the shock of the new one more time. Then the park was shut down by Rudy Giuliani, the last call of last calls and an infuriating curfew. Coleman may have called an album and a composition Free Jazz, but the term was in many ways a misnomer. Far from ignoring chords and meter, Coleman's music forces listeners to rethink how they hear them. The notion of complete freedom from formal constraint is even less convincing when applied to Coleman standards like "Peace" and "Lonely Woman." (Free Jazz, with its double quartet and layered cacophony, is sloppier but still weirdly ordered.) Coleman and his early collaborators were not merely playing whatever aleatory utterances happened to suit them. Those tunes have melodies (or "heads") and solos to go around, but the musicians were restless, wanting to inject spontaneity and maybe a little shock into what had become a postbop routine. "Lonely Woman" is a standard with chord changes and a melody line, but playing it in strict 4/4 time (as Branford Marsalis has, in an intriguing, intensely brooding interpretation on Random Abstract) won't really get to what Ornette was driving at; pianist Geri Allen's "Lonely Woman," like the Modern Jazz Quartet cover of 1962, made the melody clear without diluting its unsettled glory (eventually inspiring Coleman to break his forty-year recording ban on pianists to hire her for his band). Coleman once remarked that he wished he could have an entire ensemble play like an off-tempo Robert Johnson, all scattered emotions and wailing without having to keep time, as if there were nothing more outside than being the King of the Delta Blues. It was not for nothing that Coleman called a classic (currently out-of-print) Prime Time album Of Human Feelings. Feeling, not theory, has always come first for Coleman, harmolodic explanations notwithstanding. There's a hypnotic pulse to the 1959 "Lonely Woman" that defies explanation. You hear Higgins's high-wire cymbal rides with Charlie Haden strumming against the beat, a disconnected melody to match discombobulated emotions. Coleman said he was inspired to write the song watching a woman fight with a man, but the loneliness is also pure Coleman, a sound that has inspired shock, misunderstanding, even violence, while persuading listeners--sometimes delicately, sometimes forcefully--to hear the world the way he hears it. "He plays all the notes Bird missed," says one of the McClintic Sphere onlookers in Pynchon's V., and nearly half a century later, those notes sound like an indelible vocabulary. What you also hear in Coleman's work--which is more debatable in the free jazz of, say, pianist Cecil Taylor--is swing and the blues, and this has helped his work of this period make its way into the Jazz at Lincoln Center canon, stretching the boundaries of what, for lack of a better term, is called swing. According to this version of jazz history, the Coleman Atlantics represent its ultimate culmination, a blues as deep, in its own way, as Robert Johnson's, and a particular kind of flexibility that is the rhythmic bedrock of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker--the canon. What was called avant-garde now sounds more like a culmination of a tradition. And whether he played funk, rock, symphonies, ragas or as a Grateful Dead sideman, he sounded like the same Ornette Coleman who drew from this well and came up as himself. You can hear that tradition--and Coleman's ingenious flight from it--on the Sound Grammar version of "Turnaround," which Coleman first recorded on Tomorrow Is the Question! in February 1959, months before the turmoil on the Bowery. The blues, which would become one of Coleman's most covered and requested compositions, is one of the less adventurous tracks on the album, not least because it is one of only three numbers with the comparatively mainstream bassist Red Mitchell. (The other tracks had the more enabling and endorsing Modern Jazz Quartet bass player Percy Heath.) Despite the odd fact that it is an eleven--as opposed to twelve--bar blues, Coleman's punch line comes, as the title suggests, on the turnaround, when a repeated blues phrase is given a response in a few different keys, veering outside just for a few bars before coming back to where the blues began, suggesting a shape of what was to come. On Sound Grammar's "Turnaround," Coleman's blues lines are given a polyphonic response, with Greg Cohen plucking with enough open space to let Coleman breathe and Tony Falanga bowing a lyrical counterpart. (By featuring two bassists, Sound Grammar finally makes good on an experiment Coleman started on Free Jazz, when he played with Charlie Haden and Scott LaFaro.) Denardo meets his father's phrase with a thud, and Coleman, not usually known to quote, throws in Stephen Foster's "Beautiful Dreamer" and, maybe unconsciously, the start of Vernon Duke's "I Can't Get Started." It was more of a Sonny Rollins moment in improvisatory allusion, but in a world Coleman made. What would have been a concession in 1959 is a valediction in 2005. On June 16, 2006, on what happened to be the 102nd anniversary of Bloomsday, Ornette Coleman played Carnegie Hall in the most anticipated performance of the JVC Jazz Festival. On a day that was the setting for James Joyce's Ulysses--a novel that had begun as avant-garde and ended up on the top of the Modern Library list--paying respects to a revolution turned inevitability seemed appropriate. Coleman added a third bassist, Al McDowell on electric, to the ensemble that played on Sound Grammar, muddying the polyphony and the hall's acoustics. But even if McDowell hadn't plugged in, this was not to be a night on par with those triumphs of a few years earlier. Bernstein had crashed the Five Spot back in 1959, but now the musical chairs were reversed. Coleman had been more accustomed to playing concert halls for some time, and the music he played was about as avant-garde as Mozart or King Oliver. A 76-year-old virtuoso played some crowd-pleasing versions of "Lonely Woman" and "Turnaround," pained, heartfelt and defiant, on an alto that somehow sounded as clear as a bell. Even if his tone was more refined, it seemed no less wounded. Outside the hall, it was a new century, one that he would not change. A few months later, 1,085 pages of a new Thomas Pynchon novel would thud into selected mailboxes, opening with a cryptic Thelonious Monk epigraph: "It's always night, or we wouldn't need light." All these years later, a couple of elusive tricksters from the old twentieth century still had some mysteries to illuminate.

Thanks Chuck. Did you ever have this one? Also looking for Zutty with Jimmy Noone on record. My Bruyninckx is at work....

Tonight's Jazz From Blue Lake features Zutty, and came across this one but don't know it, who plays on it or what quality of jazz is on it. Sometimes Zutty was put in an historic context even though he was "more" than a trad drummer, that is he adapted to the high hat, wire brushes, etc.

Thanks Allen. I've run into a musician, Micheal Sweeny, who said Al Haig was at Michigan State in the 1970's -- probably just to play? Don't think he ever lived in Michigan....

Bessie Couldn't Help It

Jazz From Blue Lake Monday, May 14, 2007 Artist—Song Title – Album Title – Record Label 10 p.m. Eastern Time The Port of Harlem Seven—Summertime—The Port of Harlem Jazzmen—Blue Note Bechet-Spanier Big Four—Sweet Lorraine/China Boy—1940—Swaggie Sidney Bechet—Blues In Thirds/Save It Pretty Mama—Master Takes 1932-43—Blue Bird Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra—I Got Rhythm/I Cried For You/Contrasts—Contrasts—Decca Kenny Davern/Ken Peplowski—If Dreams Come True—Dialogues—Arbors Alvin Batiste—Bumps—Honors Series—Marsalis Music 11 p.m. Sidney Bechet and Bunk Johnson—Days Beyond Recall—Hot Jazz—Blue Note Sidney Bechet’s Blue Note Jazzmen—High Society/Blue Horizon—Hot Jazz—Blue Note Harry Connick Jr.—Petite Fleur—Chanson Du Vieux Carre—Marsalis Music John Coltrane—Blues To Bechet—Heavyweight Champion—Rhino Kurt Elling—Tight—Nightmoves—Concord Maynard Ferguson—Darn That Dream—The One and Only—Maynard Ferguson Trust Anat Cohen—Lonnie’s Lament—Poetica—Anzic Rachel Z—Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone—Dept. of Good and Evil—Savoy Fay Victor—Earth—Cartwheels Across the Cosmos—Artist Share Lazaro Vega Blue Lake Public Radio 300 East Crystal Lake Road Twin Lake MI 49457 WBLV FM 90.3 / WBLU FM 88.9 www.bluelake.org

Jazz From Blue Lake Sunday Night Sunday, May 13, 2007 Artist—Song Title – Album Title – Record Label 7 p.m. Eastern Time Jay McShann—Things Ain’t What They Used To Be—Man From Muskogee—Sackville Eddie Cleanhead Vinson—Somebody Sure Has Got To Go/Old Kidney Stew Is Fine—Kidney Stew—Delmark The Bop Session—Blue N Boogie—The Bop Session—Gazell Carnegie Hall Jazz Band—In the Mood—Music Director Jon Faddis—Blue Note Joel Frahm—My Ideal—We Used to Dance—Anzic Jane Monheit—If You Went Away—Surrender—Concord The Bad Plus—Everybody Wants to Rule the World—Prog—Heads Up Bireli Lagrene—We Are the Champions/We Will Rock You/It Was A Very Good Year—To Bi or not to Bi—Dreyfus Alan Bergman—The Windmills of Your Mind—Lyrically--Verve 8 p.m. Rosario Guilani—Invisible—Anything Else—Dreyfus Ronnie Ben-Hur—One Second Please—Keepin’ It Open—MTM Pamela Hines—East of the Sun—Drop 2 Terrell Stafford Quintet—Old Folks—Taking Chances—Max Jazz Anat Fort—Rehaired—A Long Story—ECM Paul Motian—Party Line—Time and Time Again—ECM Enrico Rava—Serpent—The Words and the Days—ECM Fred Hersch Trio—Rhythm Spirit—Night and the Music—Palmetto 9 p.m. Misha Tsinganov—Anthony—Always Going West—Powerlight Jerome Sabbagh—Middle Earth—Pogo—Sunnyside Jimmy Ponder—Wild Is the Wind—Somebody’s Child—High Note Nino Josele—The Peacocks/I Do It For Your Love—Paz—Norte Seattle Women’s Jazz Orchestra—Self Portrait—Meeting of the Waters—OA2 Bob Montgomery/Al Hermann Quintet—United/Ladybird—On the Brink-Summit Lazaro Vega Blue Lake Public Radio 300 East Crystal Lake Road Twin Lake MI 49457 WBLV FM 90.3 / WBLU FM 88.9 www.bluelake.org

Glad to hear it, Ohio! Jazz a la Carte Saturday, May 12, 2007 Artist—Song Title – Album Title – Record Label 7 a.m. Eastern Time Kurt Elling—I Like the Sunrise—Nightmoves—Concord Michel Camilo—Solar (Explorations)—Spirit of the Moment—Telarc Miles Davis—Solar – The Chronicle—Prestige Jeff Darrohn—Henry—T’Bird ‘ 60 – Jazzed Media Jack Cortner New York Big Band – Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise—Fast Track—Jazzed Media Jazz Datebook Nino Joselle—Never Let Me Go—Paz—Norte Abby Lincoln—Should’ve Been—Abby Sings Abby—Verve Larry Willis—Nardis—Blue Fable—High Note Bob Montgomery/Al Hermann Quintet—Collard Greens and Black Eyed Peas—On the Brink-Summit 8 a.m. Alvin Batiste—Skylark—Honors Series—Marsalis Music Bill Charlap—Godchild/The Lady Is A Tramp—Live at the Village Vanguard—Blue Note Miles Davis—Boplicity—Birth of the Cool—Capital Jazz Datebook Hank Jones/Joe Lovano—Budo—Kids—Blue Note Jennifer Hall—Walkin’ Shoes—Meets…--Sea Breeze Jack Sheldon—Lady Bird—Listen Up—Butterfly Bob Florence—Claire De Lune—Eternal Licks and Grooves—Mama John Coltrane—I’m Old Fashioned—Blue Trane—Blue Note 9 a.m. Jelly Roll Morton—Grandpa’s Spells—Birth of the Hot—Blue Bird King Oliver—Snag It/Sugar Foot Stomp—Sugar Foot Stomp—Decca Jimmy Noone—Apex Blues/My Monday Date—Apex Blues—Decca Louis Armstrong—Dinah/Tiger Rag—Vol. 8—Legacy Jazz Datebook Charles Mingus—My Jelly Roll Soul—Complete Atlantic—Rhino Glenn Miller Spectacular—American Patrol/In the Mood/Rhapsody In Blue—All Time Greatest Hits—MPI Count Basie—Doggin’ Around—Complete—Decca Count Basie—Taxie War Dance—America’s #1 Band--Legacy Lazaro Vega Blue Lake Public Radio 300 East Crystal Lake Road Twin Lake MI 49457 WBLV FM 90.3 / WBLU FM 88.9 www.bluelake.org

Jazz From Blue Lake Friday, May 11, 2007 Artist—Song Title – Album Title – Record Label 10 p.m. Eastern Time Duke Ellington/John Coltrane—Take the Coltrane—Duke Ellington/John Coltrane—Impulse John Coltrane—Moment’s Notice—Blue Trane—Blue Note John Coltrane—Naima—Heavyweight Champion—Rhino Jazz Datebook Ray Kamalay—Come On Back—Meet Me Where They Play the Blues—Perfect Number Kurt Elling—Tight—Nightmoves—Concord Bill Charlap Trio—Godchild—Live at the Village Vanguard—Blue Note Wess Anderson—John Lewis—Live From Blue Lake, 12-14-06 Whitaker/Allen—Summer (the Sweet Goodbye)—Get Ready—Mack Avenue 11 p.m. Miles Davis—Round Midnight—Round About Midnight—Columbia Thelonious Monk—Ruby, My Dear—With John Coltrane—OJC Thelonious Monk—Bye-Ya—Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall—Blue Note Miles Davis—So What—Kind of Blue—Columbia Jazz Datebook Nino Josele—I Do It For Your Love—Paz—Norte John Taylor Trio—Up Too Late—Angel of Presence—Cam Jazz Mark Murphy—My Foolish Heart—Love Is What Stays—Verve 12 a.m. Out On Blue Lake Miles Davis—Milestone—Milestones—Columbia John Coltrane—My Favorite Things—Heavyweight Champion—Rhino John Coltrane—Impressions—Live at the Village Vanguard—Impulse SF Jazz Collective—Naima—SF 2—Nonesuch Joshua Redman—India—Back East—Nonesuch Jazz Datebook 1 a.m. Matt Ray—Central Park North—Lost In New York—CAP Avishai Cohen—Bass Suite #1—As Is….—High Note Anat Cohen—Cry Me A River—Noir—Anzic John Coltrane—Like Sonny—Heavyweight Champion—Rhino Miles Davis—On Green Dolphin Street—Stockholm 1960—Dragon Hancock/Brecker/Hargrove—Transition—Directions in Music—Verve 2 a.m. Joe Zawinul/WDR Big Band—In A Silent Way—Brown Street—Heads Up The Bad Plus—Everybody Wants to Rule the World—Prog—Heads Up Billy Bang Quintet feat. Frank Lowe—Nothing But Love—Above and Beyond: An Evening in Grand Rapids—Justin Time Abby Lincoln—Blue Monk—Abby Sings Abby Kendra Shank—Down Here Below—A Spirit Free—Challenge James Falzone—A Cord of Three Strands….Broken—And the Thing Signified—Allos Roscoe Mitchell Transatlantic Art Ensemble—Part 5—Composition/Improvisations No.s 1, 2 and 3—ECM John Coltrane—Out of This World—Coltrane—Impulse

"By the late 1920s, trumpeter Louis Armstrong had taken the collectively improvised polyphony of early New Orleans jazz and turned it into a soloist’s art. Soon after, swing-era musicians expanded the music’s harmonic palette while introducing ever more sophisticated techniques of arrangement and orchestration." The second part of that sentance was also happening in the 1920's, well before the Swing Era (which is usually sighted as starting with Goodman's Palamor Ballroom concert). Then this: "the last great expansion in the basic vocabulary of the music took place over thirty years ago, when a generation of performers wedded the free-ranging approaches of Coleman, Taylor, and others..." Would that be John Colrane, perhaps? Yikes!

Media Files, my good Doktor -- as in HARD DRIVE (Johnny Griffin with Art Blakey hard). Review: http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/3530