Mark Stryker

Boy, there are just so many great dates with these two together, but if we're talking definitive examples of their art together, two I haven't seen mentioned yet are "Kelly at Midnight," a Wynton Kelly Trio record on VeeJay with the tune called "Temperance" as one of the best of the best; and the Sonny Clark Trio LP on Blue Note ("Two Bass Hit," "Tadd's Delight). Otherwise, I'd say "Milestones" and "Relaxin'" (they kill on "Tune Up" and "Blues by Five" on "Cookin'" too); "Cool Struttin' and "Blue Train." A few others that may not be on the level of the preceding but which come to mind immediately as records that I love are Lee Morgan's "The Cooker," the half of Jackie McLean's "Jackie's Bag" that they play on together; Miles' "Porgy and Bess," Freddie Hubbard's "Goin' Up," Dexter Gordan's "Dexter Calling" and the first Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section record, KD's "Whistle Stop." Larry's on to something about the way they played in the moment, helping craft a unique feel on so many dates, influenced by the material, the players and the mood in the studio, while also, of course, bringing their particularly unique hook-up. I've tried to analyze their time feel and I've always heard it this way -- PC. plays on the beat, a tiny fraction ahead of Philly Joe, so the bass gives the impression of pulling the rhythm section along; meanwhile, Philly Joe's high hat is right on the beat with PC, but his ride cymbal lays back on the time. Together, this creates a really w-i-d-e groove, both intensely relaxed and intensely fiery. But my ears could easly be playing tricks on me since perception of time can be very subjective. Anybody else got ideas on this topic? (Interestingly, I can think of a few tracks where they actually slow down as the piece progresses, but I can't think of any where they actually rush.) One interesting footnote. I think there is only one of Philly Joe's records on which he used PC, but I think most or perhaps all of PC's dates as a leader included Philly Joe.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit is on the west side of Woodward about six blocks south of the Detroit Institute of Arts. It's a significant new institution, obviously devoted to contemporary visual art, but they do present music, though it's mostly been on the rock/experimental side. There hasn't been much jazz of any stripe, though New Music Detroit, a terrific ecumenical contemporary classical music ensemble that plays everyting from Stockhausen to Reich, has performed marathons and other concerts there that have included John Zorn's "Cobra" and other works in the cracks. It's a bit off topic ffrom where the thread started, but if anyone's interested in knowing more about MOCAD, here's a story about the recently appointed first permanent director of the museum, Luis Croquer. http://www.freep.com/article/20090201/ENT0...manent+director

To the extent that any of my previous posts implied the contrary, let me say I agree with Jim's sentiment about celebrating uniquely American freaks. Harvey was a self-invented original, who managed to do what he did for 60 years and signed a 10-year contract at age 82. Everything else aside, that ain't nothing.

I guess the rest of the story is pretty damn complicated, but then, as in most things, it usually is.

Harvey was the subject of an Esquire cover story in Nov. 1978. Here's the cover of the magazine; the short summary from the table of contents says nothing specific, only that his image is not the reality. http://cgi.ebay.com/ESQUIRE-November-7-197...bayphotohosting There are some website references to the article, though interestingly all that I found repeat the exact same language that appears to have been part of a wiki entry at one point but isn't any longer. The quick take from those dubious sites: Harvey stole an airplane and was discharged with a Section 8 (mental illness). So, obviously, one would have to track down the Esquire issue and evaluate the sourcing, documents, etc. Interesting. Anybody got an Esquire collection lying around to check?

I was no fan of Harvey's politics and love a good conservative hypocrisy tale as much as the next lefty. But I've seen no mention in any of the obits about draft dodging. To the contray, Harvey enlisted in the army in 1943 and, according a staff written obit in the Washington Post, was discharged honorably in 1944 for medical reasons following a training injury. I thought this previous profile from the Post reprinted today does a good job of exploring the nuances of Harvey's influence, innovations and his politics, which evolved in interesting ways (came out against the Vietnam war in 1970, supported the ERA, criticized the Christian right) though in most ways he remained right-wing. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/rawfisher..._harveygoo.html

I may well have posted this long profile before, so if it's a repeat I apologize. I was fortunate to spend time with Flanagan on a couple of occasions not long before he died. This piece was written in August 2001, just a few months before his death in November of that year. I first saw him play live in the summer of 1988 at Sweet Basil with G. Mraz and K. Washington. My plan was to hear the first set and then wander to another club, but the trio was so note-perfect and beautifully integrated that I ended up staying all night. I came back the following day with a similar plan and again ended up staying the whole night. Cecil Taylor was there one of those nights and I remember Tommy acknowledging him from across the way on the break with a friendly, "Hey, C.T!" A few years after he died I was talking with Bess Bonnier, a Detroit pianist of Tommy's generation (they were classmates in high school and lifelong friends) and she told me a story that illustrated his dry wit. They were all in a cab on their way to one of Tommy's gigs and his wife, Diana, a very excitable woman who Whitney Balliett once described as a person who moved twice as fast as her husband, was going on and on worrying about how late they were. Finally. Tommy looked at her as they were inching through traffic and said calmly, "We're gaining on it." A LEGENDARY TOUCH THE DETROIT-BORN PIANIST TOMMY FLANAGAN BRINGS HIS SAGE, SATINY AND SWINGING BEBOP HOME FOR THE JAZZ FESTIVAL BYLINE: MARK STRYKER FREE PRESS MUSIC WRITER DATELINE: NEW YORK Tommy Flanagan descends the steep staircase leading from Seventh Avenue to the Village Vanguard and briefly surveys the empty club before shuffling to the piano. His hands fall lovingly on the keys as if he were shaking hands with an old friend. Flanagan -- one of the greatest musicians ever produced by Detroit and a headliner at the Ford Detroit International Jazz Festival -- first played the Vanguard as a sideman with trombonist J.J. Johnson in the late 1950s. More recently, Flanagan's all-world trios have spent many nights in residence at this hallowed temple of jazz, and he's recorded two exemplary albums here. But now, in the afternoon stillness, he plays for himself and the ghosts of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and the other departed jazz heroes whose photos line the smoke-stained walls of the world's most famous basement. One soft-spoken chord meanders into another until a melody emerges from the mist -- "Gone with the Wind," a 1937 gem that reminds you Flanagan doesn't know every tune, just the best ones. He glides into a walk-in-the-park tempo, improvising fluid ideas ripe with insouciant swing, fine-spun counterpoint and elegant bebop melodies whose single-note lines hang on the chords like Christmas ornaments. Flanagan's lyrical touch is legendary -- each note sounds like a pearl wrapped in silk -- and this is the first topic he addresses when the songs ends. "My touch comes from listening and trying to get a sound that I had in my head," he says in a gentle voice that rarely rises above a stage whisper. "I never did get much out of playing too hard. In fact, when I thought I was playing too loud, I'd use the soft pedal. I liked that -- you play harder but get a softer sound. I had an old, harsh-sounding piano at home, anyway." At 71, Flanagan plays like the hippest angel in heaven, seducing listeners through a sublime marriage of grace and guts, swing and sagacity, wit and warmth. It's been two years since he last performed in his hometown -- illness forced him to cancel a 70th-birthday concert at Orchestra Hall last year -- and his festival appearance marks the local debut of his latest trio, with veteran drummer Albert Heath joining bassist Peter Washington. Flanagan's poetic brand of modernism is so universally admired today that it's sobering to remember it wasn't always that way. Until launching the second act of his career in the late '70s, he was a secret to almost everyone but his fellow musicians. Most observers regarded him as a career accompanist. Flanagan's self-effacing personality and his resume worked against him. He spent 14 years as Ella Fitzgerald's pianist, from 1962 to 1965 and 1968 to 1978. (In between was a brief stint with Tony Bennett.) Flanagan recorded sparingly as a leader, releasing zero records under his own name between 1960 and 1975. He recorded prolifically as a sideman, however, appearing on such classic '50s LPs as Miles Davis' "Collectors' Items," Sonny Rollins' "Saxophone Colossus" and John Coltrane's "Giant Steps." The turning point came in 1978, when a heart attack put him in the hospital for 17 days. He quit smoking, cut down on drinking and gave his notice to Ella. Soon he formed the first in a series of trios specializing in nattily tailored interpretations of exquisite standards and underplayed jazz originals by Thad Jones, Monk, Tadd Dameron, Billy Strayhorn, Ellington and others. Flanagan became a fixture in the New York clubs and recorded a string of thrilling albums, mostly for small European labels. Not until 1998, when Blue Note released "The Sunset and the Mockingbird," did a major American label support Flanagan. By then his brilliance was received wisdom. "Flanagan's position is less a matter of besting the competition than bringing his powers to a peak where competition is irrelevant," critic Gary Giddins wrote a few years ago. "He's perfected his own niche, a style beyond style, where the only appropriate comparisons are between his inspired performances and those that are merely characteristic." Flanagan's style is deceptive. He is known for his satin touch, but he can play with a cunningly sharp attack and swings as deeply as anyone. He is a child of bebop and a master of bop's rhythmic displacements, harmonic challenges and the horn-like style pioneered by pianist Bud Powell. But Flanagan's roots also reach back to pre-bop pianists like Teddy Wilson, Art Tatum, Fats Waller, the transitional Nat Cole and the early modernist from Pontiac, Hank Jones -- all pianists with active left hands and refined elan. "I was first influenced by Teddy Wilson," says Flanagan. "He was a firm player, but he also had a beautiful touch. If that's your first inspiration, you really want to improve on it. In the last 20 years or so my volume has increased. In fact, I had a drummer once who left the group because he said the piano was too loud." Flanagan laughs at the irony. "Imagine that -- a drummer telling the piano player he was too loud." Michael Weiss, one of the legion of younger pianists who revere Flanagan, points out that a large part of his identity is his pianistic approach to dynamics, attack, pedaling and orchestration. "Each note or chord has a carefully considered sonority, as opposed to a generic kind of voicing," says Weiss. "He might start a melody in single-note lines, then play something in thirds, octaves or full chords. That carries over to his improvising. If he's soloing and ascends to a climax, he'll orchestrate that moment -- put a chord under the melody note to color or accent what he's doing." Flanagan manipulates the keyboard pedals like a classical virtuoso, employing the sustain pedal to connect his ideas in a smooth legato without allowing his notes to bleed into a puddle. "Sometimes guys just come and watch my feet," says Flanagan. "You know, there's a way of breathing when you use the pedals. It's like phrasing." Flanagan is a handsome, distinguished man, but he is more frail than in years past, and his clothes hang loosely on his small frame. He has a long face, tender eyes, a sweet smile and wears large round glasses. He lost his hair early, and only a wisp of white remains above and behind his ears. A bushy gray mustache almost hides his dimples. Flanagan does nothing in a hurry, least of all talk. He answers questions in stages, leaving long gaps of silence and looking past his interviewer into an undefined middle distance. Still, when the mood strikes, he is an agile conversationalist with a martini-dry wit. "Tommy may not say much, but when he does speak, it's the truth," says Weiss. Flanagan has lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan since the 1950s, for the last 25 years on 82nd Street with his wife, Diana, a vivacious woman whom he married in 1976. Married once before, Flanagan and has three children from his first marriage and six grandchildren. The apartment is tastefully decorated and cluttered with Diana's books -- a former singer, she was a literature major in college and devours fiction, poetry, history, biography and music tomes. A Steinway grand piano stands in one corner of the living room opposite a sitting area by the window. Photos of jazz musicians like Charlie Parker and Ellington are scattered about, along with paintings, including a small landscape by Nancy Balliett, wife of New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett. A framed caricature of Flanagan by the cartoonist Al Hirschfeld watches over the piano. On this afternoon, Flanagan and Diana nuzzle on the sofa while paging through the recently published "Before Motown: A History of Jazz in Detroit, 1920-60" (University of Michigan Press, $24.95). Flanagan points and smiles at the photos of lifelong friends like Barry Harris, Kenny Burrell, Elvin Jones, the late Pepper Adams and others who were part of a remarkable eruption of jazz talent in mid-century Detroit. Diana squeals at the pictures of her husband working around town as a teenager. "Oh, sweetheart! What a darling you were! I would have loved you!" "Stand in line," Flanagan deadpans. He lays the book down on a table and begins to reminisce about his salad days. In 1953, he joined the famous house band at the Blue Bird Inn, working alongside saxophonist Billy Mitchell, trumpeter Thad Jones and drummer Elvin Jones. At the Blue Bird, Flanagan first played with many of the musicians with whom he would later work in New York. "I couldn't have gotten very far without those days in Detroit," he says. "We had good role models. They didn't use that term then, but we had some people we respected who played as well as those people who came into town that we'd go see. We had people like Milt Jackson, Yusef Lateef, Lucky Thompson, Wardell Gray." Flanagan grew up in northeast Detroit in Conant Gardens. He was the last of six children. His father was a postman, and both parents loved music, especially his mother. Flanagan started on the clarinet at 6, but by then he was already climbing up on the piano bench, imitating the lessons he heard his brother practice. Encouraged by his mother, Flanagan started piano lessons at 10 and still has a fondness for Chopin and Ravel. He got interested in jazz when his brother started bringing home the latest Billie Holiday records, which featured Teddy Wilson on piano. "I've been living with this music since I was 6 years old," he says. Flanagan attended Northern High School, where pianists Roland Hanna and Bess Bonnier were classmates. In 1949, after Flanagan backed Harry Belafonte at the Flame Show Bar, Belafonte offered him a gig in New York. But Flanagan's mother thought her baby was too young to leave town, so a disappointed Flanagan stayed put. Then he was drafted and spent two years in the Army. When the orders came to ship out to Korea, he wanted to take the newest music with him, so he stuffed Thelonious Monk's Blue Note 78s into his suitcase. Eventually, Flanagan made it to New York, moving there in early 1956. Outside of music and family, his memories of Detroit are not all pleasant. "I always wished I'd left earlier," he says. "Detroit started to grind on me. There wasn't much freedom to move around. The police were horrible then. They'd hassle you in your own neighborhood. One night when I was about 12, I was walking by a printing shop where they'd found some subversive material and they stopped me, guns drawn. I said, 'What are you going to do? I'm just a kid.' " In New York, things moved swiftly. Within a year, Flanagan had subbed for Bud Powell at Birdland and recorded with both Davis and Sonny Rollins. He cherishes the memories: At the first recording session with Davis, he recalls, the trumpeter pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket containing a barely legible sketch of Brubeck's "In Your Own Sweet Way." Davis supplied the chord voicings for the famous introduction that Flanagan plays, but Flanagan devised the rhythm. Then there was the time J.J. Johnson's Quintet alternated sets at the Vanguard with Jack Kerouac, who would read from his books or extemporize. One night, Flanagan, Elvin Jones and Kerouac -- a world-class drinker -- ended up at Flanagan's apartment. "Before the morning was over, Elvin threatened to kill him," Flanagan recalls. "Kerouac said something outrageous and Elvin took offense. I think I did too, but Elvin was more menacing." Talked out, Flanagan stands up and slowly makes his way to the piano. Stacks of popular songbooks sit on a nearby shelf, and on top of the piano is a folder of compositions by Modern Jazz Quartet founder John Lewis. The pianist had sent the music to Flanagan for a possible CD before his death in March. Flanagan plays a few enigmatic arpeggios before slipping into the the Jimmy McHugh ballad "Where Are You?" with a fanciful twist of harmony that unlocks a back door to the song. He plays a chorus sotto voce and then a second with more volume, dialogue and emotion. The results are so eloquent that a visitor quickly requests "Last Night When We Were Young" to keep Flanagan at the keyboard. It's an unusually abstract pop song; Harold Arlen's melody and harmony move in odd patterns. Flanagan hasn't played it in ages, and he watches his hands with a puzzled look on his face, as if his fingers belonged to another pianist. When he gets stuck for a note, Diana, who seems to know as many songs as her husband, softly sings Yip Harburg's mature lyric from the sofa. The music shudders with feeling. When it's over, Diana has a tear in her eye and Flanagan a faraway look in his. ((END))

Here's our Detroit Free Press obituary: http://freep.com/article/20090226/ENT04/90...end++dies+at+66

Good God, I've got to stop. But his one by Ira Gershwin is interesting for setting up the context of the chorus in just two extremely efficient sentences. There are many many crazy things That will keep me loving you. And with your permission May I list a few. (chorus) The way you wear your hat ...

Not many jazz versions of "The Girl Next Door" that I can think of, but it's a lovely waltz with a very melodic and interesting verse that always surprises me; it's as if the song seems to start in the middle. The moment I saw her smile, I knew she was just my style. My only regret is we've never met for I dream of her all the while, But she doesn't know I exist, no matter how I persist. So it's clear to see there's no hope for me, Though I live at fifty-one thirty-five Kensngton Avenue, And she lives at fifty-one thirty three.

and another classic: (verse) My story is much to sad to be told But practically everything leaves me totally cold The only exception I know is the case When I'm out on a quiet spree, fighting vainly the old ennui Then I suddenly turn and see Your fabulous face (chorus) I get no kick from champagne ...

A favorite ... (verse) It was winter in Manhattan, falling snowflakes filled the air The streets were covered with a film of ice. But a little simple magic that I learned about somewhere, Changed the weather all around, just within a thrice. (chorus) I bought you violets for your furs and it was spring for a while, remember? ...

Horrible jazz-related news that board members will want to know about: The Associated Press just moved an alert quoting Chuck Mangione's publicist that two of his band members were killed in the Buffalo crash, saxophonist Gerry Niewood and guitarist Coleman Mellett.

I've intentionally stayed out of all this so far, but the recommendation angle forces the issue a bit. So without getting into the parsing, philosophy or any of the rest of it that any Jarrett discussion compels, let me say that the best of the Standards Trio is desert island music for me (or damn close, depending on how much I get to schlepp to the island). But I don't think you can just drop the needle on any of the records. There's definitely a top tier of inspiration and execution and it includes, to my ears, "Standards Vol 2," "Standards Live," "More Live," "The Cure" and, maybe, from the later years "Whisper Not." If pressed for just one, however, it would be "Standards Live" without question.

Funny you bring this up, because the other night I had tried to think of some jazz musician analogy of this sort for Aretha's Columbia records. Nothing came readily to mind so I let it drop. I don't think Trane is exactly right. Yes his time with Miles was formative but all of the elements or specific materials (modality, Giant Steps harmony, pentatonics, etc) that came to the fore in later Trane were not yet there in any form in the early work whereas to some extent Aretha's stylistic fundamentals were all there early and it became a process of distillation, revision, etc. as she matured. I may not be articulating this clearly and don't have the time to ponder more this morning, but that was a first pass. Addendum: This thought occurs. One reflection of perhahps a similar distillation in Trane is the way that he went through the "sheets-of-sound" period and then "Giant Steps" (both baroque ideas in their way) but came out the other side, and began to prune as he went forward. Couldn't have gotten to where he got to without going through those periods ...

partly because I can recall (a bit) this kind of eclecticism in pop music; also because the "considerably more porous" thing is still true in, say, Brazil. My thought is that we N. Americans are pretty intent on categorizing music and artists, while a lot of Latin Americans are far less interested in that than we are - "popular" in Brazil means something very different than it does here. (Lots of Brazilian "popular" music would be labeled as folk, traditional, "roots music" - or whatever - up here.) My guess is that a lot of Aretha's contemporaries thought very much as she does - Marvin Gaye comes to mind, for one. Your point re: Brazilian music is interesting. I was not aware of that that lack of categorization in that music. Re: YMB's last point about "Respect" and "What's Goin' On" being what Franklin and Gaye are about: I don't think anyone's arguing the point, at least I'm not to the extent that these represent the definitive statements of those artist's mature aesthetic. But the journey they took to get there is interesting and may have more lasting value than merely being a stepping stone to something else (though in some cases it might only be a stepping stone or, in fact, something less). On another Aretha topic unrelated to music, my paper ran an interesting story two days after the inauguration about the hat she wore at the ceremony and the Detroit milliner who created it. http://www.freep.com/article/20090122/COL27/901220379?imw=Y

Columbia and John Hammond have taken it on the chin over the years for trying to force Aretha into a jazz-supper club mold to which she was ill-suited, and the records are certainly an inconsistent lot. But there's some great stuff there -- the "Jazz to Soul" sampler mentioned earlier is a particularly good collection. I also wonder if it's not misleading to think of the Atlantics exclusively as the "real" Aretha. No doubt the Atlantics mark the beginning of the mature Aretha and they remain the defining Aretha, but the earlier records are no-less real for documenting her formative years. She was just 18 when signed with Columbia and it took her years to hone the ideas, assimilate the influences and weed out the things she didn't need, before she was capable of making the records she made for Atlantic. Her relationship with jazz and pop is really interesting. When she was coming up, the divisions between jazz, adult pop, blues, R&B and nascent gospel-influenced soul were considerably more porous than they would become in the '60s. She isn't a jazz singer, of course -- she never really phrased like a horn and her improvising was always rooted in gospel or blues traditions rather than jazz -- but she could always swing and jazz is somewhere in her DNA. It's interesting that she played jazz clubs in the early '60s, including the Village Vanguard, appeared on bills opposite Horace Silver and Art Blakey and won the Down Beat critics' poll New Star Award in 1961. In her autobiography, she wrote, "For a long while I had a trio and sang jazz-tinged standards, covered some hit songs of the day, and interpreted bluesy ballads. ... During my early trio days, modern jazz was going through a soul period, rediscovering its funky and church roots. I was part of that mix." Beyond her gospel roots, she says she listend to everyone from LaVern Baker to Doris Day and paid close attention to singers who jumped stylistic fences like Dinah Washington, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Ruth Brown. I love the spellbinding version of "Over the Rainbow" from her first Columbia date, accompanied by the Ray Bryant Trio, in which she phrases not with the smooth legato of jazz but the speech rhythms of a sermon. "Today I Sing the Blues" sends shivers down the spine with the stinging intensity of her limber young voice and some melismatic flourishes and moans that foreshadow her later style. And near the end of her tenure with Columbia there's a racehorse version of "This Could Be The Start of Something" that swings with joyous abandon and features pinpoint diction and a precision so different from her later work. Still, she clearly had mixed emotions as her career progressed. She once said, "I was being classified as a jazz singer, and I never, ever felt I was a jazz singer. I can sing jazz, but that was not my format to begin with." It's usually said that at Atlantic Jerrry Wexler took Aretha down to Muscle Shoals and put the church back into her music. Presto, Queen of Soul. True enough. But those Columbias really did represent her wide-ranging tastes, and I read an interesting cultural history of soul music by Craig Werner in which he argues that her repertory represented a crossover strategy that mirrored the early civil rights movement's commitment to desegregation. I've often thought that the Atlantics didn't so much put the church back into Franklin's music as take out all the confounding elements of jazz and pop, which by then were masking the truest expression of her musical personality as it had evolved. One other thought: While Aretha's Atlantic recordings comprise one of the great leaps forward in popular music, they surrender something, too. There's an attention to detail and expressive restraint in her Columbia work that she rarely equaled. I wouldn't trade the Atlantics for the Columbias, of course, but I'm glad to have both, and I especially miss some of those early qualities when I hear some of her more recent work in which her style atrophies into mannerism.

Willie Mays Smith Mark (the Bird) Fidrych Red Dick Allen (ouch) Walter Sy Johnson John Kirby Puckett Pee Wee Russell Reece Jackie McLean Robinson Roy Campanella Haynes Philly Joe Torre Chet Baker Lemon

I disagree with the first sentence. It's not that the great musicians' point-of-view is infallible. Far from it. It's that the insights are almost always valuable -- but often not for what they tell us about the musician who is the object of the analysis but what they tell us about the musician making the judgment. Tristano or Miles on Monk opens a window into the aesthetic preferences and the ears of Tristano and Miles more than it might about Monk -- and actually it offers an interesting perspective about Monk's ideas and choices, too, even if we might vehemently disagree with the thumbs up or down evaluation. It is often true that musicians make problematic critics because their own aesthetic point-of-view and values are so strong that it makes it hard for them to appreciate or understand ideas that spring from very different values. But if you remain cognizant of that, you can get a lot out of what any great musician has to say, both in terms of nuts and bolts and big picture philosophy.

On Hal Galper's website I came across a wonderful and long interview with him, apparently from Cadence in 2007. He tells colorful, honest and insightful stories, including some truly priceless stuff about Sam Rivers and his legendary practice books, the Boston scene, the early days of Berklee, jazz education, evolving style and the jazz life broadly defined. There's no direct link, but if you go to http://www.halgalper.com/ and then click on 'interviews," it's the top article. I think Hal's a great player, by the way, cursed with the underrated tag. The '70s modal post-bop records he led, including the two with the Breckers and the quartet date with Terumasa Hino, McBee and Tony Williams are dynamite, and in a quite different vein, his more recent trio records are quietly subversive -- lots of inside wit, Jamal-like orchestration and drama. Plus, the early attempts at playing free on standards with Rivers ("A New Jazz Conception") were prescient, and, in fact, he's returned to that concept more recently, documented on a trio record called "Furious Rubato" (Origin). Looks like an upcoming record, "Art-Work" (Origin) with Reggie Workman and Rashied Ali continues the concept. The group's version of "Autumn Leaves" from the CD can be heard on the Newsletter Spring 09 page. Addendum: I haven't checked it out yet, but I notice there's also a recent radio interview just below the Cadence piece that includes sound clips of a TV show Hal did with Sam Rivers' quartet in Boston in 1965. Larry Richardson is the bass player, Steve Ellington the drummer. Three tunes: a Galper original "H.I.T" and Sam's "Beatrice" and "Dance of the Tripodols."

I was just skimming through a newly published history of film music yesterday that might help. It's by Mervyn Cooke, "A History of Film Music," and it has detailed discussions of the development of jazz scores. http://www.amazon.com/History-Film-Music-M...8610&sr=8-1. For what it's worth, I was doing some research on the Ellington score to "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959), which is cited as the first non-diegetic jazz score by African Americans -- non-diegetic being music whose source is not implied or actually seen in the film as part of the story world like from a band you can literally see or you know is in the picture performing. I assume this is what you are looking for, right? True background music on the soundtrack creating emotional moods, developing character, etc. Cooke, by the way, has a few other interesting things to say about the score to "Anatomy" -- that is was signifcant because its use of jazz was the first to break away from cultural stereotypes and that the music shows an independence from the visuals that anticipates the New Wave cinema of the '60s.

Amen. For me this is the benchmark recorded version. George Coleman plays the solo of his life, especially the second chorus -- the mix of straight-ahead ideas with phrasing exploring the parameters of the abstract time and harmony created by the trio, melodic rhyme, taking real chances. Miles' control of the trumpet here, the nuance of sound, emotional range, naked high notes, gives lie to all the cliches about him not having technique (which admittedly he developed over time, but he played the shit out of the trumpet in the '60s.) The telepathy of the rhythm section is amazing, and, remarkably, from what I recall reading, the cats said they had trouble hearing each other that night on stage at Avery Fisher.

Update on James Newton's whereabouts: According to a note in the January issue of Downbeat, Newton is now a professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA, teaching jazz composition and co-directing the the school's contemporary jazz ensemble with Kenny Burrell.

Nice tribute David. I'd encourage everyone to check out the 1957 bootleg of "Tadd's Delight," which precedes his formal debut on record with the Montgomery Bros. He's really sounding like Clifford Brown, but with lots of personality, authority and poise. He would have been 18 or 19 at the time. Also interesting to hear James Spaulding at this point playing tenor rather than alto and not really making all the changes. Of course, you could argue that even later he never really made all the changes either ... The rest of the cats are Al Plank, Larry Ridley, Paul Parker. The lead-in discussion starts at about the 36-minute mark. You can move the cursor forward to get to it directly. Baker mentions in passing that Freddie studied briefly with a trumpet player in the Indianapolis Symphony. Maybe that's commong knowledge in the trumpet world but I had not heard that before. Would be interesting to know who that was and what he did for Freddie, because while Freddie must have had natural chops to play the way he does, and while he certainly practiced like crazy I wonder the degree to which his natural gifts were focused early on with fundamentals. Technique like that can't all be just a freak of nature.

On the "there's way more good music out there than it's humanly possible to hear" front: I haven't heard a single one of your picks, Mark! I sympathize. As much as I'm priviledged to hear a ton of recorded music, there's just so much that passes by unheard. Case in point: Here's a link to the Village Voice Jazz Poll results published this week in which 79 critics voted. If you follow the related content links, you can look at every single individual ballot. Talk about more music than is humanly possible to hear ... but the value of such lists is that it does put stuff on the radar. (In the Voice poll, we were asked to vote for three reissues and best debut, vocal and Latin jazz albums too. One detail about my choices: For the Free Press, I had a hometown-bias change-of-heart and subbed in Detroit-native Bennie Maupin's "Early Reflections" for John McNeil/Bill McHenry's "Rediscovery." ) http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-12-31/mus...zz-poll-winners