fasstrack

I went to the Y last night and it was wonderful. Chris Byars and company did a great job bringing those charts to life again. Excellent players and treatment of difficult material on little rehearsal and Teddy sounded great. It's a rare privilege to hear stuff live like Gil's arrangement on "You Go to My Head", Teddy's "The Emperor", "Nature Boy", and "Green Blues", Mal Waldron's "Vibrations", Brook's "Showtime----especially since I had the CDs (RCA Jazz Arrangers Workshop and Teddy Charles Tentet. Chris is a hell of a musician, as is John Mosca, and they cared enough to put this together, did a bang-up job,---and it was free. Naturally I took it and ran like a thief.....

I wandered into Fat Cat with my guitar on Saturday. Ari Roland, a bassist, asked me to play the first set with him. Teddy, who was staying with Ari and was to be featured at Smalls that night, wandered in right after me. That impromptu group also included Don Hahn on trumpet/flugel, (great player) and a young tenor player whose name I wish I remember because he was good. The old man sounded great, just like the old records, but leaving more space. He has vitality and ideas to spare. You could sort of hear his brain. The little I spoke with him on break I found him very approachable and humble and having a great time just jamming with the cats. Someone told me he was 84. I should be so lucky......

A very great artist at his best----which was most of the time until the very last years when to me he went for the money and image pimping. Still, there were some great moments even there, if you care to look. (I thought Star People a great love letter to the blues in which MD played his ass off). His playing actually changed the landscape for trumpet, one of the leading instruments in jazz, and he made listeners and musicians see how important both a sound and letting some daylight in between the notes are. As a bandleader his approach---to serve as narrator, set a tone, surround himself with top talent and yield the clean-up spot to them---is a role model to all. Certainly it has been for me. FWIW: He probably could have been nicer. His autobio was, too often, an excercise in self-aggrandizing revisionism. His remarks about Duke Jordan, whose great intros for Bird were an equal if not greater contribution to that band, were unnecessary and full of shit to me. Ditto remarks about Hank Mobley, who was only mentioned once, to say how much he bored Miles. Other times it was moving indeed, as when he talked about his father. I guess what I mean is maybe he wasn't a good man, but he sure was a great one.

Amen. 'Sometimes nothing can be a great hand'.

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=645953 From 1995-2006. Demos, radio shows, live gigs.

Symphony #5. Also various piano music. There was a biopic based on his (controversial) autobiography "Testimony". Also called "Testimony" and starring Ben Kingley. Sample line (about some sort of composer's commie government perk): "First prize is a week with Stalin. Second prize, two weeks with Stalin..."

Why do those whitebread mfs always get the great women? Now excuse me while I continue reading "Portnoy's Complaint".....

I used to have on cassette something called "Everything Swings". Either it's Bean and Red Allen or what passes for my mind is playing tricks on me and it's Roy Eldridge instead. Either way great music.

No, there are two of us. Overrated as hell. (But I liked the line about the Dude drafting the 'original' Port Huron Statement, not the 'compromised 2nd draft'....)

His changes to Arlen's "When the Sun Comes Out" on David X. Young's "Jazz Loft"* were so good I had to cop them. Zoot Sims follows his melody statement in great (and probably drunken) form. *a must have for fans of folks like Jimmy Raney, Bob Brookmeyer, Jim Hall, McKenna, Zoot, Pepper Adams, and others. They are in relaxed, jamming mode. Raney plays up a storm, especially on "Spuds" ("Idaho" changes). Young's paintings, handsomely reproduced, including those of some of the above-mentioned, are also very much worth the price of the ticket. Artistry all around. Hi Chris. Been a while.

Memorial will be March 31st, 7 PM at St. Peters church. E. 54th St. Between Lexington and 3rd Avenues, NYC. Should be memorable if anyone will be in NY.

I am sad beyond words. Chris was an extraordinarily warm, sensitive, honest person and a rare artist. He really was original---a claim falsely made about many. He definitely was an unique solo player, that's for damn sure. His secret in taking the tunes to the places he did, besides being harmonically gifted of course, was that he knew those tunes with the original melodies and changes inside out. He was an authority on the songbook. That's what gave him the license. I knew this day would come and feared it, yet am very grateful for the time I got to spend with him and that we got to play a bit. Sure glad you were here, Chris.

'Brotherhood of Man'..... Makes me smile just thinking about it.....

The impressive thing about Oscar to me was that when he wanted to he could be a very laid-back, even subservient (sp?) accompanist---as witness dozens of recordings w/the likes of Pops, Ben Webster, Hawk, Fred Astaire. He also was a master of a kind of blues-drenched staright 8th funk, as on a tune I can't recall the name of on the 'with the Singers Unlimited', also known as 'In Tune'---and one of my favorites of his and theirs. Also the 'composer' series. I, like others here, didn't love every note he played for aforementioned reasons, but he sure owned that piano, didn't he? And his range was deep from exciting swing to beautiful, subtle balladeering. There was a reason he was so beloved for so many years. RIP, OP. You gave years of joy to people the world over.

Ugh.....

Bob Brookmeyer: always the essence of thought, space, reflectiveness in motion, and balance between notes played/inferred. Just found and enjoyed this Mulligan quartet with BB from what looks like the set of Ralph J. Gleason's Jazz Casual. Hope you do too. (It's on Youtube, where people have been known to be swallowed alive. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7AWpoy68Us...feature=related

I dug him in those days. The record with Frog, Soulmates, is a m asterpiece. Great Joe, great Ben, Great Thad. To put a qualifier on my earlier comments---I wanted to avoid talking about music (so I won't answer your Barry v. Joe gambit) I have to say for clarification mostly that listening agian Weather Report to me is a bit turgid and pompous. Very little holds up. Also a guy I'm staying with here in Holland played a Zawinul Syndicated world tour CD and it also sort of bored my ass off. Again, I say this for for, er, clarification purposes....yeah, yeah. That's it.... Well there you go. You don't particularly like where Zawinul went. Fair enough, but are you sure that's not coloring your other opinions? I mean, any decent musician (and I stress musician because I don't expect non-musicians to have an interest in too much beyond whether or not they like the way something hits them) should be able to look at Zawinul's post-Cannonball music and recognize that it's not just a bunch of flashy formulaic easy bullshit. There's plenty of meat there, whether or not its a type of meat that's to your liking. Now, if you, as a musician who I'm sure recognizes the various elements that go into a composition, can't at least hear that much, then I just have to say that you got your head up your ass, which would offer a feasible enough explanation of why your ears would be full of shit. Is he wrong? It doesn't mean Barry is a bad player (he's a monster) but there are stylists and there are innovators. Zawinul didn't want to be a stylist, he wanted to innovate and so he did. Simple as that. It doesn't mean Barry's music is any less valid in the general sense, it just means that Zawinul didn't want to go down that route. Thankfully, he lived up to his own expectations of himself! I really don't agree with this. You don't 'choose' to innovate.' You evolve. Otherwise it could very well end up being awfully self-indulgent. To me the proof of and in part the definition of 'innovation' is usefulness to other people. That's why we call them trailblazers, right. I really mistrust this thing of wanting to innovate and then poof it happens. Real individuality is very, very rare. I've known a lot of guys that sang that song and their music didn't hold up. Again, there has to be a use of the innovation because it replaces and improves something that came before and outlived its usefulness. And that, I thhink, is one of the biggest lies of the post-Wynton generation, that one shouldn't "choose" to "innovate" because it's something that you can't make happen. Well, no, you can't force it, but you can seek it by challenging yourself to go beyond what you already know. Remember Miles' dictum to "don't play what you know. Play what you don't know"? Whatever happened to that? No, this whole, "I'll explore what's already known because pursuing my own individuality is going to be a dead end anyway" thing is a cop-out masquerading as "humility". Even if you'll never be an "innovator", you owe it to yourself to at least be an individual. And this fatalism towards accomplishing wven that little bit of not too much is what's allowed a lot of boring people with no ambitions beyond becoming competent craftsmen to kid themselves and the world at large into thinking that it's some sort of major accomplishment to to stand pat and just polish what's already been polished. That's a caretaker's job, nothing more and nothing less. It sure ain't the stuff that makes for progress in music or, more to the point, in life. Of course you can't "choose" to innovate. You either have it or you don't. But you sure as hell can choose to dig inside yourself to see what's in there beyond what's already been put there by history. I mean, sure, it's a "challenge" to perfect one's own abilities in a pre-existing paradigm, but let's be real - pretty much all the questions have already been answered, and the "challenge" mostly lies in getting the fingers to do the work. No small challenge, that, but if you already got a map, somebody else has done the really hard work. Don't get me wrong, I respect the hell out of craft & craftsmanship (and I have real issues w/people who try to "move ahead" wthout it), but it really pisses me off when I see craftsmanship equated with spirit. They're not at all the same thing, and this implicit contention that they are is nothing but a goddamned motherfucking LIE. A spirit that allows itself to be content with "mere" competence is a spirit that is content to leave things as they are, and that can be for only one of two reasons that I can see - either the way things are are already to your liking and you don't want to be "upset" or else you're at root, a coward who's afraid to find out what's really inside you. (and I'm using "you" rhetorically here, no personal directiveness intended) If you reached the first zone after doing a lot of searching & discovering (like, say, Horace Silver), hey, more power to you then, you've earned it (as long as you (hopefully) continue to evolve through refining and don't just turn into a regurgitator living off your past glories). But otherwise, it's a concession that to one degree or you're "done" as a growing, actively evolving human spirit. And quite possibly you never took the first steps towards even realizing that you could be such a thing. You're just going to be one of those people who accepts your role as defined by somebody other than yourself and who goes about the business of being a happy servant to a master who you chose w/o first exploring all the options (especially the ones that may or may not reside within yourself). Volunteered Slavery. Fuck that. Whatever one's opinions are of Zawinul's music (and for the record, I'm a big fan of a lot of WR, as well as that live Syndicate thing, but find a lot of "failures" along the way as well), I'd think that it must be noted that he was not somebody who chose to accept somebody else's definition of who/what he "should" be, and that alone makes him a hero of mine, as it does damn near every "jazz musician" who's worth a flying fuck in my book. He's stayed treu to his own definition of himself, even when the results weren't what they should have been. And when they were (more than often enoug imo), he accomplished something that the "craftsmen" of the world never can, will, or maybe even be able to conceive of - he built a house to live in that was of his own making. Some people rent forever (and DAMN is the joke on them...). Some people buy pre-owned and leave it as it is (oh well...). Some people buy pre-owned & rennovate (not a bad deal there, if you can pull it off). Some people buy new and either do or don't keep it fresh after they do (America is the land of opportunity, even if the opportunity is to get somewhere and stop). But a few people take up the challenge to design and build what they want how they want it. That's the Old World/Pioneer spirit at its finest if you ask me (especially when no indiginous peoples are exterminated, and I sure as hell don't see Zawinul "exterminating" Barry Harris or anybody else), and to hear all this talk that it's not even a goal worth pursuing in the first place tells me a lot about why the Jazz Cave continues to get mustier and mustier. WHY I OUGHTTA... Limited time here due to being in a for pay Internet station in Den Haag Biblioteek. Jim, you have a lot to say as always. BTW I just looked and my head is not up my ass but next to some boxes in the farmers market. I'll figure it out and get back to you. Glad I provoked some thought from you guys. My Weather Report etc. comments were for fair disclosure. No slam on Zawinul's considerable talents, that was never my intent. More like, as Jaki Byard used to say 'you just have to roast these cats sometimes!'. As far as the 'innovation' thing, of course it's great and exciting to innovate. It's what we all would want. But I really do believe that it can't be forced. It evolves, usually after a lot of trial and error. And other avdanced thinkers let us know by incorporating the innovation. Innovation and originality are not the same, and are too often confused. There's bad originality and good originality. Again usefulness to at least some others is a good benchmark of quality. And my own very personal take---the thing I myself reach for---there is something in music reachable by/to all people. Bill Evans called it 'the universal musical mind'. It has to do with a musician reaching people on a human level in a way they can't even explain but can feel. When the human and the original intersect like with Pops, Miles, and a handful of others this is an exciting thing and to me a most desirable goal. But again it can't be forced. Keep it real. The people will know.....

For the record: it was in Jazziz (a BS rag if ever there was one) in 2000 (1999?). Some kind of 'looking back on Jazz's 1st century' deal.

Is he wrong? It doesn't mean Barry is a bad player (he's a monster) but there are stylists and there are innovators. Zawinul didn't want to be a stylist, he wanted to innovate and so he did. Simple as that. It doesn't mean Barry's music is any less valid in the general sense, it just means that Zawinul didn't want to go down that route. Thankfully, he lived up to his own expectations of himself! I really don't agree with this. You don't 'choose' to innovate.' You evolve. Otherwise it could very well end up being awfully self-indulgent. To me the proof of and in part the definition of 'innovation' is usefulness to other people. That's why we call them trailblazers, right. I really mistrust this thing of wanting to innovate and then poof it happens. Real individuality is very, very rare. I've known a lot of guys that sang that song and their music didn't hold up. Again, there has to be a use of the innovation because it replaces and improves something that came before and outlived its usefulness.

I dug him in those days. The record with Frog, Soulmates, is a m asterpiece. Great Joe, great Ben, Great Thad. To put a qualifier on my earlier comments---I wanted to avoid talking about music (so I won't answer your Barry v. Joe gambit) I have to say for clarification mostly that listening agian Weather Report to me is a bit turgid and pompous. Very little holds up. Also a guy I'm staying with here in Holland played a Zawinul Syndicated world tour CD and it also sort of bored my ass off. Again, I say this for for, er, clarification purposes....yeah, yeah. That's it....

just a tad full of himself? This is old news but the taste is still in my mouth for some reason: In an article maybe a month or two ago in the NYT on his group playing at J@LC he first---seemingly humbly---allowed as how he was proud and honored, etc. Then in the next breath he went off on Wynton (please Lord, I don't want this to become one of 'those' threads) saying how for all his knowledge he's stuck, etc. He may have some points, but in the frickin' NYT and after the guy hires your group? I'd be rippin' if I were Wynton. Arrogance aside it seems Mr. Zawinul has failed PR---not to mention diplomacy. But it reminded me of something I saw maybe 7 years ago where they interviewed him about influences and he said---about Barry Harris no less---that someone had come up to him and asked if it were he or Barry (who predated him with Cannon) on a record and his words were almost verbatim: "That's when I went home and threw out all my records. Because why should I imitate an imitator (presumably of Bud Powell?)" I mean, Jesus. Either he was misquoted or this MF is gonna need a real big hat pretty soon. Add to that the size of his ego in his cameos in the recent Wayne Shorter bio...... I mean Is it just me?

Uh oh. UH OH Um, lemme go get my flak jacket and riot gear

Still dealing w/Chopin's Prelude # 4. The challenge is to get that top note to sustain and not die with a chord also sustaining underneath it----on guitar, not notable for its highest string holding long notes. The one LP I felt I HAD to bring overseas in my move was Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony's Bartok: Concerto for Orchestra. A great reading of a great piece. Hi Michael. Joel Fass here.

Yes, that made me feel really good. The site is a great way to meet people and have them meet you. And thanks again guys for all the nice comments. I'm an immigrant trying to figure out a strange country---but with music you can go home again.

Thanks. Topsy was from a concert at Mercy College in the Bronx. It was Black Heritage month and I got James Chirillo, John Beal, and Eddie Locke. The kids were looking at us crosseyed until Eddie played some solos. I also asked him to speak to them and he did movingly. Everybody played his ass off and they were cheering at the end. A great day in the Bronx.