Mark Stryker

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

I published a top 10 list in yesterday's Detroit Free Press. Here's a link: http://freep.com/article/20081228/ENT04/812280321/1039/ent04

Kenn and Barry were very close; Kenn, like nearly every Detroit musician of his generation, more or less came up under Barry's tutelage. There were some lovely thoughts from Barry in the program for the funeral service today in which Barry said that he had talked to Kenn on the phone in the days before he died and when Kenn was too weak to talk he just had him keep the phone to his ear while he played "I'll Keep Loving You" on the piano for him. In a curious twist of fate, Barry is also playing a concert later this afternoon -- for the last 21 years he has played an annual fundraiser at a downtown Unitarian church at the end of December. So, it's an emotional day for the scene here. Re: Johnny O'Neal. He still lives here when not traveling, though he rarely plays around town. Last time I heard him he was ebullient as ever.

sorry, my typo - fixed above. no relation to Strata East, then? Don't know the exact details but it was to be a partnership of sorts. Strata was first and Strata East was to be the East Coast leg of the organization. It never panned out though they kept the Strata-East name. The Detroit folks would know better than me but Cox and company apparently put on a lot of concerts, bringing out all the heavyweights from New York in the late '60s early '70s. I believe Tolliver and Music Inc performed there and that was the start of this. A shame about Kenny. I spoke to him a few times and he was a really sweet and helpful guy. The band of course was incredible but we've talked about this before I believe...... I have the Strata LP of the group, looser and more electric than the Blue Notes.... Kenn told me the story of Strata over the years but details of how the relationship with Strata-East developed still remain slippery, and I hope to sort some of this out with Charles Moore at some point. But my understanding is, as David says, Strata in Detroit was created first and Strata-East was to be a kind of independent satellite, though it became the more visible and active label with bigger names, distribution, etc. Kenn told me that the official dates for Strata were 1967-76. (Strata-East dates back to 1971 and, again to my understanding, grew out of what Tolliver and company saw when they visited Detroit, but I would want to ask Tolliver or Cowell how this went down.) Strata did put on an extraordinary series of concerts over a lot of years. Kenn told me that some of the groups/individuals included Ornette Coleman, early Weather Report, Jackie McLean, Chick Corea (I have in my mind this gig was with Roy Haynes or Tony Williams, but it might have been the first RTF), Joe Henderson, etc. It's not clear to me if there's a documented list somewhere, but I hope to get a more definitive picture of it all at some point.

I was on vacation last week when this awful news came down and wasn't able to write for the paper until today. Here's a link to an obituary/remembrance. I loved Kenn. We first met, by the way, years before I moved to Detroit. My wife and I had driven from South Bend to Chicago in 1993 to hear Jackie McLean live for the first time in Chicago at the Showcase -- it was his first gig in the midwest in forever. We arrived way early because I was so jazzed, but we were second in line. Kenn was first. http://www.freep.com/article/20081223/ENT04/81223006

I have greater sympathy for Ethan's point here. It's about control of the material and context. There is a difference between having the ability to play time at the highest level but choosing to play clunky for a musical/expressive reason and simply playing clunky/super loose because that's how you play -- or leaving the impression of doubt because it's just not solid enough or clear enough that you're actually making the choice to play "amateurish." And context matters. Like McCall's approach to swing might (or might not) sound more convincing to some on the "In The Tradition" records he made with Arthur Blythe than on "Air Lore" because the specifics/demands of the style and material allow greater leeway or flexibility for certain kinds of interpretation. But the question is: how do you as an artist convince me that your authority over your materials is so great that I'll believe you and then follow you when you start to fuck around with the rules and be delighted, intrigued, wowed and emotionally moved by the authority and creativity with which you break with convention. It's like the issue of Braxton playing changes. I love Braxton's best music -- the Mosaic box was my top reissue of the year and the implications of his ability to navigate between notated and improvised systems, building in such an ideologically open way on free jazz, post-Webern European classical influence and everything else, from Sousa and Ives to Bird/Tristano, Cage and minimalism, is truly profound -- but I think he sounds terrible playing standards, because somehwere between his stiff approach to time and his idiosyncratic approach to harmony it all just sounds random. I don't trust it. I get Larry's point that the ambiguity toward the past is built into the AACM approach, but the line that Ethan is talking about here is real and it's entirely possible to slip over it in some contexts (Air Lore) and not in others (Open Air Strut). A couple of things: In part I was reacting to what seemed to me to be the context of EI's own doubt/uneasiness about his own, in his view, culturally cloistered and terribly "white" upbringing (FWIW, and to the degree that this involves EI's view of WM artistic stature and role, I'd say that EI stands somewhere in a very long line of guys who are WM's age or younger who are more interesting jazz musicians than WM is -- not that there has only been one WM; I'm thinking more of the music of WM since he became a professional role-model who touches little kids from "West Chicago" (he means from the West Side of Chicago) on the head and tells them The Truth. Next, I was reacting to the clip from "Air Lore" that EI attached. It's from a performance I've know since it came out, and I've never had a "problem" with it for a minute. I'm not saying I'm right or EI is wrong about that, just that when I encountered in its original context, it worked for me and still does. By contrast -- yes, I'm among the ones that can't take Braxton on standards by and large. But I think it may be a mistake to put so much emphasis on "trust" and "doubt" in what I sense may be a "Are these guys, or is Braxton in particular, conning me/us?" framework. In particular, I'd say that there's a fairly simple, useful answer to this: "But the question is: how do you as an artist convince me that your authority over your materials is so great that I'll believe you and then follow you when you start to fuck around with the rules and be delighted, intrigued, wowed and emotionally moved by the authority and creativity with which you break with convention." First, that the "how do you ... convince me that your authority over your materials is so great that I'll believe you" stance sounds rather judicial, as in black robes and white wigs and gavels. Second, my experience has always been that when I'm convinced by a work or act of art, I'm convinced pretty much right away by some form of the pleasure principle. If I'm not convinced like that, if I'm not interested in and of myself, no exercise of/appeal to "authority over materials" is going to mean much. The question of whether I as an individual have enough good sense and experience/context for my particular responses to mean much to anyone else always remains open of course, and I'm certainly willing to learning more about what I think I already know and what I don't know. But in this art in particular, after spending 55 out of 66 years with it, I think I'm a reasonable version of the proverbial canary in the coal mine -- in part because I believe that (like that canary) I'm not predisposed to chirp or keel over for reasons other than the actual quality of the atmosphere. BTW, I'm not saying that you are that way, Mark, but I do feel that EI shows signs that under certain kinds of stress, he may be. Good points, Larry. Didn't mean to evoke wigs and gavels and all that -- though I would suggest that, by and large, this board is a rather judgmental group, yes? More seriously, I think when I listen I go with the pleasure principle first too. If I'm pleased, that's a byproduct of the artist's command and conviction and my readiness to receive the message. If I'm not pleased, then something has gone wrong either with the artist's intent or command or my ability or willingness to perceive. That's when the analysis kicks in. Why is this music working for me or why not? I don't think I frame the issue completely as a question of whether I'm being conned or do so in a fashion more than is healthy, but it probably factors in my mix at some level. I understand the danger. Also, there's no question that's always been an issue for a lot of musicians -- "I think they're jiving, baby" was Roy Eldridge's comment on Ornette -- who have an attitude and relationship toward craftsmanship and the technical and musical knowledge demands of their preferred style that can make it hard for them not to hear music outside that style through the trust/doubt/con prisim. Too much of that way of thinking can cut you off from a lot of great art. .

I agree with the notion of the transformation being so convincing that it wipes away other frames of reference. However, the rub (or at least one rub) is the context. "King Porter Stomp" establishes one frame of reference and "Naima" establishes another, so the standard by which we judge how convincing the transformation is can be variable depending on the material and setting. It's slippery. I have mixed emotions about Blythe's "In the Tradition" Columbia LP with Cowell, Hopkins, McCall; I like some things but still have reservations about how McCall-Hopkins are dealing with the time, groove and form. But when I heard that band live at the Vanguard in the spring of 1982 and I didn't have any reservations at all, because in a club, with the air moving in the room, it was simply overwhelmingly great and the fact that time some spots was so loose it slipped into sloppy was simply irrelevant to the imagination on display and the emotional impact of the music. 'Course I was also stoned at the time, so a few dropped eighth notes become less crucial under those circumstances too ...

I have greater sympathy for Ethan's point here. It's about control of the material and context. There is a difference between having the ability to play time at the highest level but choosing to play clunky for a musical/expressive reason and simply playing clunky/super loose because that's how you play -- or leaving the impression of doubt because it's just not solid enough or clear enough that you're actually making the choice to play "amateurish." And context matters. Like McCall's approach to swing might (or might not) sound more convincing to some on the "In The Tradition" records he made with Arthur Blythe than on "Air Lore" because the specifics/demands of the style and material allow greater leeway or flexibility for certain kinds of interpretation. But the question is: how do you as an artist convince me that your authority over your materials is so great that I'll believe you and then follow you when you start to fuck around with the rules and be delighted, intrigued, wowed and emotionally moved by the authority and creativity with which you break with convention. It's like the issue of Braxton playing changes. I love Braxton's best music -- the Mosaic box was my top reissue of the year and the implications of his ability to navigate between notated and improvised systems, building in such an ideologically open way on free jazz, post-Webern European classical influence and everything else, from Sousa and Ives to Bird/Tristano, Cage and minimalism, is truly profound -- but I think he sounds terrible playing standards, because somehwere between his stiff approach to time and his idiosyncratic approach to harmony it all just sounds random and, for me, doesn't swing. I don't trust it. I get Larry's point that the ambiguity toward the past is built into the AACM approach, but the line that Ethan is talking about here is real and it's entirely possible to slip over it in some contexts (Air Lore) and not in others (Open Air Strut).

The simple answer to what happened to James Newton is that his career took a left turn into academia in the early 1990s, when he started teaching at the Univ. of Calif at Irvine and focused his attention on (more or less) classical composition. There's a very interesting recording on New World that documents these activities, "As The Sound of Many Waters," which came out in 2000. I'm not sure where/if he's still teaching. His website seems to indicate that his last academic job was at Cal Intitute of the Arts-LA and ended in 2006. Nor do I know how the impact of the suit. I've lost track of him. But FWIW, I reviewed that New World CD back in 2000. Here's what I said: In case you were wondering whatever happened to flutist James Newton (b. 1953), one of the most compelling left-of-the-mainstream instrumentalists to emerge in jazz in the late '70s, here is the album to get you up to speed. It turns out that about a decade ago, he quietly traded a life in the maelstrom of vanguard improvised music for the relative serenity of the academy, where his focus has become primarily composition and the intriguingintersection of the experimental jazz tradition and contemporary classical music. Not that life at the University of California-Irvine has dulled Newton's creative fire. The music here -- including pieces for solo flute, solo violin and small combinations of winds, strings, percussion and soprano -- encompasses unusually diverse compositional strategies, though almost everything pulsates with energy, surprise and the kind of clarity and craft that enhances the emotional thrust of the music rather than dulling it. The 14-minute title track is a tour de force solo performance by Newton. There are brilliantly improvised passages in which glissandos and multiphonics (playing more than one note at a time by singing through the instrument and false fingerings) add monumental weight to the cavernous vocal sound of his tone. His quick reflexes and the freedom of his phrasing suggest his jazz background, but there is also a fleeting yet telling quote from Bartok's "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta." "Violet" for flute, clarinet, cello, piano and two marimbas is a highly rhythmic work reflecting African roots music but transformed by the imagination of a Western composer too smart to merely go slumming in the music of another culture. The layered polyrhythms, repeating cells, brief but memorable melodic gestures and the luminous tonal colors all suggest, for those looking for a classical reference, the music of Olly Wilson. But Newton doesn't sound like anyone but himself.

Tayor is a maverick. He graduated with honors from Harvard with a degree in Math. He won the bronze medalist at the Van Cliburn competition in 1993 when he was in his early 20s. He played the Goldberg Variations at the competion (highly unusual repertory choice) and it's clear that the reason he didn't win that year was because he didn't fit the standard competition pianist mold. Since then he's built a teaching and performing career on his own model -- he's not at a big conversatory but at the University of Wisconsin (nothing against UW; I'm just saying), he's written scholarly articles on philosophy and instead of doing standard rep with big orchestras he focuses on recitals and modern and contemporary repertoire, from Ligeti and Messiaen to Bolcom (though he still plays Liszt, Beethoven, etc.) Generally, I think he's brilliant, though I found a program of standard repertoire he played in metro Detroit earlier this fall a mixed bag interpretively. Here's the review. There were two concerts, one with a quartet that tackled Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time" and the second a solo recital. Also, though it's not mentioned in the review because of space, it's almost surely the case that the more conventional program he played was influenced by the presenter, which is notoriously backward when it comes to contemporary music -- I've bashed them in print many times over this. http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article...ENT04/810060366

A big strong HELL YEAH on that one! Thanks for the heads-up. I'll add this to my list. I looked at it on Amazon a moment ago and there's no real info. I don't recognize the cats. Also, where's the Cellar?

As good as some of the recordings are, I'd encourage anybody to try and hear McPherson live -- the melodic ecstasy and rapture of his phrasing and the luminosity of his sound really make their best impact when you can feel the air move in the room. He doesn't play licks -- though he's totally coming from the vocabularly of Bird and Bud (and his mentor, Barry Harris). To me, Charles' best stuff is rooted in the go-for-broke spirit you hear on certain live Bird recordings and the elaborate melodic and rhythmic drapery of Bird on "Just Friends." Re: "The Child of Death" I did a piece about Charles a few years ago in which the premise was that I played various recordings -- most of which he played on -- to get his reaction and use it as a jumping off point to talk about his life and music. One of the pieces was "The Chill of Death." Here's that section of the story: McPherson joined bassist-composer Charles Mingus in 1960 shortly after arriving in New York. He and Hillyer were recommended to Mingus by former Detroiter Yusef Lateef. Mingus auditioned them at an afternoon jam session at a coffeehouse, hired them on the spot and had them report to work that night. Mingus' aesthetic was gloriously chaotic. Lush Ellingtonian colors collided with roiled textures, searing intensity and extended forms. Mingus also loved Charlie Parker and in McPherson found a fresh disciple to fold into his sound world. Recorded in 1971, "Let My Children Hear Music," a masterpiece with an expansive ensemble of winds, brass and strings, includes a Mingus recitation of his own heart-of-darkness poem to dense and brooding accompaniment. McPherson then improvises freely against a hallucinatory backdrop. "Oh, wow," McPherson says softly at the sound of Mingus' voice: The chill of death as she clutched my hand/ I knew she was coming so I stood like a man. McPherson, who was given no music at the sesson, was told to react to the abstract sound around him. "This is pretty good," he says. "It didn't make me cringe. What I'm consigned to do is not easy. There's no standard harmony or sequential construction. And look what this is about: The emotions are foreboding, mystery and fear. How do you play that? I don't know if melodicism is what you need. Dissonance might be what's called for. I did some of this fairly well, but there were some areas where I think I get too tonal. If I did this now, I'd be less concerned with trying to be melodic. I'd think about how to melodically handle dissonance."

Well, that explains that. Thanks. I don't really know much about Coleman. Looks like a world-class bon vivant -- something to aspire to.

Playboy's Penthouse was on for a couple of years 1959-60, maybe 61. Playboy After Dark was a late '60s reincarnation of the show. Those of our more, um, mature board members may have more specific memories. At least in the early years, jazz (and cabaret/adult pop cousins) was integral to the party concept of the show, just as jazz was central to the original Playboy philosophy. Here's some youtube evidence: Sammy Davis Jr. (at 34, with the whole schmear: full band, singing, dancing, clowning, impressions; when he keeps his focus, it's swinging.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPhdzxytTcU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXnkkK5oldk...feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY-9AbLFewQ...feature=related Lambert, Hendricks and Ross with Count Basie Trio (with Tony Bennett in the audience) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StDLnFrbi78 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqmUgDUx7o0...feature=related Cy Coleman (singing "Witchcraft" with a second half chorus that I've never heard. Was this part of the original that Sinatra's arrangement just passed on?)i ("The Best is Yet to Come. Anybody know who the trumpet player is? ) Ella Fitzgerald: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XxhmV5-9pw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWWph2FxwwU And, good God, just for fun: James Brown on "Playboy After Dark" (dig all the white chicks chanting "I'm black and I'm proud.")

Not fascinating at all. The whole point of Playboy was that it was supposed to be a sort of road map to sophistication for the postwar male. Jazz was a part of that sophistication. What IS fascinating is that the mastermind who dreamed this up now surrounds himself with a bunch of bimbos with boob jobs and bad plastic surgery. I thought he had better taste than that. To be clear, what's fascinating to me are the specifics discussed by the participants, the perspective from the trenches in 1964 viz. our view today and the fact that jazz has slipped so far off the radar of popular culture. I get that Playboy in its early years offered a road map to sophistication for the post-Eisenhower male; what's intersting is how/why/when jazz fell out of the equation as far as the wider culture was concerned and the degree to which it could/should be restored.

In the Nat Hentoff thread down below, I mentioned a 1964 round table discussion on the state of jazz with a stellar panel (Dizzy, Cannonball, Schuller, Mingus, Brubeck, Russell, etc.) that ran for an amazing 17,000 words in Playboy. I found a copy online so I thought I'd post a link here. (I don't think it's been posted previously.) Fascinating on many levels, including the realization that jazz was still considered relevant and interesting enough to the wider cultural dialogue that a general circulation magazine like Playboy would devote so much space to such a rarified discussion. Such a thing would never happen today. This was, by the way, billed as a special Jazz & Hi-Fi Issue on the cover. FWIW, I found my copy in a used bookstore down by the University of Chicago (forgot the name of the store; it wasn't Powell's) about 6 years ago. No wisecracks, please. The issue just happened to be sitting on the top of a stack in the corner. I really did buy it for the articles! The unnamed moderator is Hentoff, who also wrote a separate overview piece. Anyway, here's the link: http://www.cannonball-adderley.com/article/playboy2.htm

To return to the original intent of the thread, I found this to be a really terrific CD, with an emphasis on the poetry of bebop, even on the uptempo tunes. Think of the lyricism inherent in Dameron's music or a song like "Con Alma" -- that's the spirit of the album. There's a nice cross-generation vibe in the band too, with bassist Todd Coolman and drummer Adam Nussbaum.