Mark Stryker

I've read some of the book in an uncorrected advance proof and what I've gone through is excellent. Candid, entertaining and detailed stories, self-aware, readable. We don't have a lot of first-hand documents like this of players of his generation, and, needless to say, his homosexuality creates a personal arc in the narrative that's unique among jazz autobiography. (FWIW, I did find an error in dates related to an all-star tour with with Cedar Walton, Joe Henderson, Roy Haynes and others that in the way Gary writes about it suggests it happened in the early 80s but which in fact had to have taken place a decade earlierr given evidence like bootleg recordings. I sent a note the publisher and a few days later received a nice note back from Gary thanking me for the correction and for pointing out a bootleg that he was not aware of. He said the book was already at the printers but they'd fix in the next printing.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9pccmxOn5c

You know, all three members of the "The Magic Triangle" are now gone -- Cedar, Sam Jones, Billy Higgins. Very special rhythm section. Incomparable feel in the idiom.

I'm seeing reliable voices on Twitter indicating that Cedar Walton has died. I have not seen any news reports yet but the sources include his son, pianist Eric Reed and Josh Jackson's The Checkout,

Long profile of the Detroit-born bassist Rodney Whitaker from today's Detroit Free Press. http://www.freep.com/article/20130818/ENT04/308180038/Rodney-Whitaker-MSU-Jazz-Festival

That Steve Allen clip is one of the more remarkable things I've seen in a long time. Presumably one mic, one dolly, one take. I've watched it a bunch trying to figure out exactly how it might have been done. Yes, Lawrence sounds a LOT like Dean Martin at that point in his career, Re: Gorme -- she's sounds fabulous in that clip of "I'll Take Romance." Very elongated phrasing, good time, gets at the heart of the song. Like many of the pop singers of her generation, she had real skills and musicianship, and when her taste antennae were engaged, she brought real value to a performance.

Drop the needle at 5:58-6:25 and it's like you wandered into a lost track from Miles at the Fillmore.

David Adler review/first-hand account from the Jazz Standard. http://jazztimes.com/articles/98779-wallace-roney-premieres-wayne-shorter-s-long-lost-universe

Folks, if you write for a living -- especially if you write on deadline as we do in the newspaper business -- you're going to make some bonehead mistakes. Everyone does. You try and minimize these occurrences, but shit happens every once in a while. The mind says one thing, but you write another and the synapses that are supposed to notice are out having a smoke. I once wrote a review of a symphony concert where the soloist played the Brahms second piano concerto but I called it the first concerto all the way through -- even though the music I was describing was clearly the 4-mvt second rather than the 3-mvt first. The soloist was originally supposed to play the first but changed to the second at the last minute. I knew this but wrote "the first" anyway. For weeks people accused me of writing about a concert that I didn't attend, even though the details reflected specifically what happened in the hall that night. Moreover, the reality when you have a specialty beat like jazz is that you always know the subject better than the editor, so it's just not realistic to expect either a line editor or copy editor along the chain to know that Carlton was wrong and there would have been no reason not to trust the writer, especially on deadline. You may or may not like Nate -- I do quite a bit, actually -- but if you're going to beat him up, do so for truly substantive stuff rather than what is really an infrequent brain cramp. There but for the grace of God ...

http://thetalkhouse.com/reviews/view/matthew-shipp-keith-jarrett-gary-peacock-jack-dejohnette

Was looking at Peter Erskine's website today for some information and came across an entertaining photo gallery that I thought I'd share. Love the first shot of Erskine at around 7 with Louis Hayes. There also a picture of Jaco Pastorius with what is specifically identified as Wayne Shorter's alto (!). http://www.petererskine.com/photos.html Anyway, some nice photos ... I'm almost postive I heard Peter playing with an Indiana University big band when I was 8 years old in Bloomington, Ind.

FWIW, I had an insane phone conversation once with Smith in 1996. It was a cold call -- I was calling to confirm he was playing with Kenny Burrell at the Detroit Jazz Festival and I was in front of the official festival announcement. I knew casually that he was a piece of work, but he was so aggressive and crude that I was really taken aback. I recognized that he was trying to intimidate me -- another "goddman white writer asking stupid questions about the old days" (his words). So I hung in there and tried to give him a bit of attitude and humor in return. To the extent I kept him on the line for a couple minutes without him hanging up on me I guess I was marginally successful. But I couldn't get anything usable out of him, not even a kind word about Kenny -- he was determined not to give me the satisfaction of getting anything quotable. On the other hand, his wife was very friendly and helpful.

Oops -- yeah, I overlooked JATP from the '40s. Pivotal. Wonder what's in the Granz bio relating to this. Will look later.

Possible thought...maybe because live music was so common, being asked to buy a record of what you could go out an hear live seemed kind of a con? One of the first selling points of LPs was that, liberated from the 3-minute 78, you could finally truly approximate what people sounded like in live performance. But of course that doesn't quite get at the idea we have in jazz of the primacy of the "live" performance as a more authentic reflection of the heart of the music, or at least a typically more exciting representation of it. Would be interested to hear from some of our veteran board members if they remember how record buyers or advertising approached the initial wave of live LPs. Were there any jazz sides from the 78 era that were "live" and was the fact that they were live trumpeted it as a selling point? The Goodman Carnegie Hall concert I think was first issued as an early LP in 1950. What were, in other words, the very first live jazz recordings? Brubeck's Blackhawk and Storyville sides were from 52, yes? Could the popularity of those specifically spurred BN to do Blakey at Birdland in 53, or was the idea of live recording more just in the air. The Massey Hall concert is in there too. On another front, certainly, live radio broadcasts were a feature of the music going back forever, and anybody with ears knew that, say, Bird's broadcasts were showing a remarkable side of his genius you didn't get in the studio. Basie, Ellington and for that matter Goodman, Shaw and others also came across differently in live broadcasts too. Interesting - the "cult" of the live performance document in jazz -- origins, influence, meaning. Discuss.

Well, yes, that's it exactly. So many of the great Blue Notes capture an intensity and inspiration in the studio that we associate with "live" playing and yet with a focus and precision that you don't always get live. Perfect balance. How? Preparation, rehearsal, a pool of musicians completely comfortable with each other musically and personally and their shared idiom captured at a particular point in their lives and the history of the music when everybody shared similar values and were playing and recording together ALL the time. Not to say that you didn't get an extra spark sometimes with a live performance, but BN so often made such magical records in the studio that they didn't necessarily need to always go on location to get more out of a group of musicians.

Coda: I also in no way ever considered Blakey's live Blue Notes superior to his studio dates. Stanley Turrentine's two "Up at Minton's" LPs and Ornette Coleman's two "Live at the Golden Circle" LPs should be added to the master list of live Blue Notes. I always thought of Blue Note as a pacesetter in live recording in the rush of the early LP era with Blakey, Smith, Rollins. But then the label slowed down, either because the novelty wore off or because it was a pain in the ass or it didn't make sense aesthetically for most of their projects. Still, they recorded or released things occasionally. The five live Blue Notes never made that I wish would have been: Grant Green/Larry Young/Elvin Jones Freddie Hubbard's "Breaking Point" band Herbie Hancock's "Empyrean Isles" quartet Any Wayne Shorter ensemble playing his music between 1964-67 Horace Silver's band with Woody Shaw and Joe Henderson -- there is a bootleg tape of this band from I think the Half Note that's killin'

Sonnymax just beat me to the punch. The Byrd/Watkins Transition sessions recorded in Cambridge or Boston were not live. On the other hand, Transition did originally issue Byrd/Lateef concert (with Harris/McKinney/Jackson/Gant) that was taped live at the World Stage in Detroit in August. 1955. That's the material most easily found on Delmark. (Actually, the World Stage was technically in Highland Park, a separately incorporated city inside Detroit's borders.)

Ben Sisario's profile of Zorn posted today on the New York Times website. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/arts/music/turning-60-john-zorn-sees-his-eclecticism-as-a-musical-norm.html

Agreed. As a coda: Here's Barry playing (and singing) his beautiful song "The Bird of Red and Gold." The lyric is his as well. Sums up his cosmology as well as anything. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rT5RYPGd60

Thanks for this -- appreciate it!

Folks, I'm trying to determine approximately how many appearances Barry Harris made on Xanadu LPs as a sideman. (As a leader there were five). As always, thanks.

Re: Larry Rivers and Freelancer's comment above: Rivers is one of those artists whose best work inhabits such a different world than his worst, and there was so much of the latter, that it's easy to forget how good he could actually be. We had an art theft in Detroit last year that included a Rivers drawing. The theft got a lot of ginned-up media coverage, so in response I wrote the following piece that includes my take on Rivers. The link is dead so I'm copying it here in full. The stolen drawing that I write about is here -- it's No. 23 of 23 in the slide how, so you have to scroll to get to it. If you click on left button at the scroll, you'll go right to it. : http://www.tibordenagy.com/exhibitions/larry-rivers/ Also, he really could play -- not A or B list but competent, like a middle-pack "local" musician. ------------- Money doesn't just talk in America, it screams. That's a problem when it comes to art. The noisy gawking at price tags too often drowns out an honest dialogue about, you know, actual art. Money buys art, but it doesn't validate it. Quality, emotional resonance, innovation, historical importance, influence and the test of time are the true bellwethers, not the market. Too many people -- from the news media to the general public to an alarming number of collectors and art-world insiders -- confuse the issue. The reaction to last week's news of an art heist in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood offers another example. When the FBI reported the missing stash of 19 pieces, print and broadcast media, buying the feds' spin, hyperventilated that the art was worth millions. Because he was the only artist with a recognizable name, the press especially trumpeted an Andy Warhol silkscreen apparatus used to produce one of his famous "Flowers" paintings or prints. Art prices can sometimes seem to be based partly on empirical evidence and partly on voodoo, so this is slippery terrain. Auction records and interviews with dealers say a more reasonable estimate for the missing works we know about is roughly $200,000. The FBI didn't release details of all 19 pieces, and it's possible they're keeping mum about more expensive works as a gumshoe tactic. But it's also true that if they didn't float a value of at least $1 million, it's doubtful anyone would have paid attention. Art is big business too, and money is clearly a valid measure of newsworthiness. Yet so bedazzled was nearly everyone by the sheen of cash that only the Free Press bothered with routine fact-checking. The Warhol, as it turned out, wasn't even an actual piece of art but rather a studio tool with a market value of maybe a couple thousand dollars. But the key metric is not price; it's quality. Briefly: The stolen works include lesser pieces by a number of notable contemporary artists: Drawings and prints by Larry Rivers, Rene Ricard, Francesco Clemente, Terry Winters and Matthew Day Jackson; a photograph by Andres Serrano; a painting by Peter Schuyff; a cartoon by Rube Goldberg, and unidentified works by Philip Taaffe and Joseph Beuys. (The FBI didn't disclose the collector or the business where the works were being stored.) The collector has some taste but not a killer eye. But there is one real knockout: a 1954 drawing by Larry Rivers depicting a nude Frank O'Hara, one of America's most celebrated post-war poets. The drawing is a study for River's iconic monumental painting "O'Hara Nude with Boots." The black-and-white pencil sketch, 25 inches tall, shows O'Hara full-frontal, naked but for combat boots, and frankly tumescent. There are two sets of arms, one folded in front of his chest in a standoffish manner, the other raised behind his head in a more revealing, self-confident pose. You sense Rivers mulling his options; the arms are raised in the finished painting. The drawing carries an electric charge sparked by Rivers' authoritative draftsmanship; his animated line breathes life into the figure. The homoeroticism is blatant, but there is a sly wit, and Rivers manages to wink at the French romantic tradition without mortgaging his modernist edge. Rivers, who died in 2002 at 78, could be exasperating and tasteless, especially later in his career, when a more-is-more attitude overwhelmed his virtues and his reputation fell considerably. But, man, could he draw. His sweet spot was from 1953 to about 1967. He was an important transitional figure, helping art move from high-minded abstract expressionism in the '50s to the knowing irony and figuration of pop art in the '60s. He was part of a group of figurative expressionists, who kept painting the human form but favored loose, gestural brushwork pushing toward ambiguity and abstraction. Rivers was a quintessential bohemian, a part-time jazz saxophonist and a hedonist with voracious sexual appetites that took in women and men. He and O'Hara were close friends, sometime lovers and occasional collaborators. One of the most captivating things about the study is how it opens an evocative window on a magical nicotine-stained era of New York cultural life -- when innovative artists, poets and jazz musicians were all part of the same hip scene, all mad to live, busting open the button-downed conformity of the Eisenhower '50s. A Rivers work on paper can sell for anywhere from a few thousand to more than $50,000 depending on size, quality and medium. His reputation has risen in recent years, and the historical significance of this study combined with O'Hara's allure could push its price into high five figures. But that's not why I hope the collector recovers his treasure. I hope the drawing turns up because, even in reproduction, it fires the imagination and reminds you just how good Rivers was at his best. That's what makes it valuable, not its price tag.

Now THAT'S a good deal. Re: Jackson. I heard him once with Herbie Hancock in a trio. (The bassist was Kenny Davis.) Herbie and Jackson really got loose with the forms. Great stuff. Good drummer.

Maybe this was discussed previously but it was news to me: Per trumpeter and board member David Weiss' newsletter:,Wayne Shorter gave Wallace Roney two large ensemble pieces he wrote for Miles in 1967-69 but never recorded or performed, "Legend" and "Universe," with permission for Roney to mount performances. I don't see a way to link to the newsletter. David usually posts them I think but in the meantime here's that item with performance details for July and August. Exit question: Is "Legend" the piece written for Monterey, and didn't that get played but not recorded? Wallace Roney Orchestra Premieres Wayne Shorter's Universe Wayne Shorter is certainly one of the most important composers in the history of this music and arguably the greatest living composer in Jazz today. In what must be one of the grandest musical gestures imaginable, Wayne bestowed on to Wallace Roney the scores to two large scale, large ensemble pieces that Wayne conceived and composed for Miles Davis while he was still in Miles' band but were never recorded (or even performed) and told Wallace he was now the person who could best fully realize these works. These two major works- Legend (composed in 1967) and Universe (composed in 1968 and 69)- are amazing in their scope and breadth (they are written for as many as 18 pieces, including English Horn, Bassoon, French Horn, Flutes and Clarinet along with more traditional jazz instrumentation) and show Wayne to already be a fully formed masterful composer and orchestrator of large scale works at this early date in his career. These compositions represent a major discovery in the canon of one of the greatest composers in the history of jazz and it's is a fitting tribute to Mr. Shorter to debut these important, historical works in celebration of his 80th Birthday this year. Wayne also included a third unrecorded composition, Twin Dragon which was written for Miles in 1981 at his request as he was looking for material to perform for his comeback. The major concert hall premiere of these works will be at the Strathmore in North Bethesda, MD on August 3 (as part of a 80th Birthday Celebration for Wayne which will also include my Endangered Species band opening for Wallace) but we will be doing a dress rehearsal of sorts at the Jazz Standard July 25-28. I am honored to be part of this project and have the opportunity to delve into these previously unknown major works from the pen of the great Wayne Shorter. I promise you this is some amazing music and strongly encourage you to check this out if you can.

Roscoe and Chuck in the same class would be a poetic gesture. A few folks not mentioned so far who would deserve consideration: Tootie Heath, Al Foster, George Mraz Advocacy: Michael Cuscuna, Bruce Lundvall