Mark Stryker

My understanding is actually the opposite -- that it was Rodney more than Ira who specifically wanted that band to push into contemporary material (modal forms, '60s harmony). Of course, intuitively it makes sense the other way around and that was always my supposition; but in the one interview I did with Rodney (for the South Bend Tribune in the early '90s), he was adament that it was he more than Ira who was the catalyst who set the parameters of the group. (Which is not to say that he was always comfortable in the idiom -- if you can recall the specific interviews mentioned in your post, I'd like to see the way he talks about this.) When I saw a matinee in Chicago at the Jazz Showcase the afternoon of my interview, he was playing with Chris Potter, Gary Dial and the Chicagoans Kelly Sill and Joel Spencer. They played no more than one standard bebop tune per set, plus perhaps one standard ballad. Otherwise, the tunes were almost all Dial originals. Rodney was in great form and sounded very natural to my ears that day in the more modern idiom. He also paced himself beautifully -- he was 63-- keeping his solos short, except for one longer ride each set. Anyway, here are some relevant quotes from Rodney and Dial from that story: Rodney: "I firmly believe that we should continue growing. If you notice, I've got youngsters in my band and have had for the last 12 years. They brought a lot to me; they brought today's music, and I took what was specifically suited for my way of playing. Of course, I learned a great deal from them. I gave them the roots and the tradition and the discipline, and they gave me all of the newness and changes." Dial (who Rodney said was like a son to him) talked about how the trumpeter would come over to his apartment and he would lead him through the material in what were basically informal lessons: "I'd present some material and he would say, 'I like this. I like this. I don't like this.' Then we'd work over it: I'd play the chords on the piano for him and show him, and if there was a specific chord change that was still messing him up, I would maybe write out a little line or a lick or the scale and play it for him until he got it in his ear."

If you can find it, this is a tremendous survey of Kirchner's works for orchestra, chamber music, voice and solo piano. There are two orchestral pieces, one of which is the essential Piano Concerto: http://www.amazon.com/Kirchner-Historic-Re...8217&sr=8-7 I've posted it before, but if anyone is interested in more about Kirchner, here's a profile from 2007, including a video, that we reprinted the other day after he died. http://freep.com/article/20090918/ent04/90918051

Four great records not mentioned yet: Wynton's "Kelly at Midnight" (Vee Jay), trio wtih Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones -- the track "Temperance" is so swinging it's ridiculous. Blue Mitchell's "Blue' Moods" (Riverside). Quartet with Wynton, Sam Jones, Roy Brooks -- more for the trumpeter (his best record to my ears) and Jones (the bass is really well recorded here and he plays great). Sonny Rollins' "Newk's Time" (Blue Note), quartet with Wynton, Doug Watkins, Philly Joe -- really superb Wynton, especially on "Tune Up" and "Blues for Philly Joe." There's one spot on "Tune Up" where he plays this 4th-based pattern that almost sounds like the music suddenly skips ahead 10 years to vintage '60s McCoy Tyner. He also plays an exceptionally ebullient solo on "Blues for Philly Joe," which, by the way, includes one of my favorite Sonny solos -- a textbook of thematic variation. Not as iconic as "Blue Seven" but a lot more fun. John Coltrane's "Coltrane Jazz" (Atlanatic), quartet with Wynton, Chambers, Jimmy Cobb -- one of the lesser celebrated Coltrane Atlantics, with fantastic piano accompaniment ("Little Old Lady"!) and great solos too.

Maybe it was Gunther Schuller, more than Coltrane, who messed with Rollins' mind? I can't imagine what it must feel like to get up on the stage 100s of times every year before a public that expects to hear no less than some sort of miracle of spontaneous thematic improvisation. Trane had it much easier back then. Everybody pretty much knew what he was going to play, and came to hear that. Sonny did suffer from the paralysis-from-analysis syndrome and he has said it was exacerbated (my word) by having read Schuller's influential piece. But I think the larger point is that it was Sonny who most messed with Sonny's mind, and that has been a constant throughout his career.

Just trying to establish exactly how "around" Ornette actually was and whether he could have had any significant impact on Sonny deciding to leave the scene in April 1959. The discography is just one convenient measure for establishing a timeline; more important, surely, would be contact with live performances, but Ornette literally wasn't heard on the East Coast until the summer of '59 at Lenox and then in November at the Five Spot. He certainly didn't become a cause celebre until after Sonny retreated to the bridge. But the core question becomes: Did Sonny hear Ornette previous to the sabbatical? As it happens, he did, according to an interview I've just come across. Apparently, they practiced together some on the West Coast, which is fascinating and something I didn't know. Sonny's answers here are interesting. Perhaps some will read competitiveness into his words, though I read them more as setting the record straight in an honest, thoughtful fashion. Still, intriguing stuff. I'm willing to concede that maybe Sonny heard in Ornette's playing a degree of abstraction that he himself was striving for and, pace Jim's earlier posting, his inability to realize these ideas to his satisfaction was a contributing factor to the frustrations that led to the first sabbatical. But that is very different from the idea that he was so shook up by Ornette (and Trane) that the only way to deal was to step away -- I still don't believe there's enough evidence to support that position. Anyway, the interview was with a Victor Schermer for All About Jazz in 2006, who asks Sonny specifically about Ornette: The full interview is here http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=23853 but here is the relevant exchange: AAJ: So let's talk about Ornette Coleman, who I believe was a big influence on you. Now, frankly, a lot of listeners don't understand Ornette's music, can't relate to it. SR: Well, first of all, Ornette didn't just influence me—I was a big influence on him as well. It was mutual. Ornette definitely came up with some revolutionary ideas, but I was on the scene before Ornette. I met Ornette on the West Coast. We used to go out and practice together. Then, when he came to New York, he caused a sensation with his group, with Don Cherry and Billy Higgins and all those guys. Ornette put out a record on Atlantic on tenor saxophone, and everyone who heard that record said, "Hey, man, that sounds like Sonny Rollins!" AAJ: That's really true—I heard that recording. SR: Of course that would go against conventional wisdom and might be considered heresy. Ornette is supposed to be completely original, but he was actually influenced by guys like me. But, that being said, I certainly have a great deal of respect for Ornette's playing ... I may sound a little resentful with Ornette because he said in a big newspaper interview that I was one of the guys who was anti-Ornette. But that was untrue. But there were musicians who were straight ahead players and so on who were antagonistic to him on account of his different approach. But I wasn't one of them. I was kind of mad at Ornette for saying that at the time. What Ornette did I think was to play more in phrases and not use so much of the chord structures, which a lot of guys depended upon. So if you're playing a standard like "Night and Day," Ornette wouldn't use those chord structures that were the basis of what most guys were doing. And he also didn't play standards, but mostly his own material, which was based more on phrases than on actual harmonic structures that had been used up to that point. AAJ: He changed the whole face of jazz. SR: I think he changed things to a great degree. Let's say this. He was certainly able to link himself to do something different in a medium that had its own rules and regulations. He was able to become a leader and a bright light in a jazz medium which had already been established. I'd go that far. Everybody doesn't play like Ornette, and some listeners like him and some don't, but that's just the way it goes. What he does is respected. It has merit. But not everyone went in that direction. John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis weren't doing what Ornette did. He did what he did, and it was valid, and it was different.

Nicely expressed, thanks. (Side note: I don't actually know the 1968 bootlegs. Who's on them and what's the best way to get them?)

This also troubles me with the slippery chronology and the assumption of causal influences. "Ornette is around -- Sonny knows Paul Bley" How much did Sonny know about Ornette and had he even heard him on record or live by the time of the first sabbatical and would what he possibly have heard been radical or strong enough to make him quiver in his boots? Ornette's first record, "Something Else" was recorded in early 1958 and released later that year. The second Contemporary album was recorded in early 1959 and wasn't released until after Sonny's retirement has begun. "The Shape of Jazz to Come" isn't recorded until May (after the sabbatical has started); Ornette doesn't come east to the Lenox school until the summer of 1959 and his quartet doesn't open at the Five Spot until November 1959, seven months into Sonny's sabbatical. Even if we assume that Ornette had made his way onto Sonny's radar by early 1959, it's hard to imagine anything Sonny might have heard (say tracks from "Something Else") that would have made him question his own aesthetic relevancy. Also, do we know when Sonny and Paul Bley got to be friends, because for this to play any role before the sabbatical, it would have had to have been after Paul worked with Ornette, but before spring 1959 and then Bley has to be telling Sonny, "There's a cat on the west coast that's going to make us all old-fashioned." What did Sonny know and when did he know it becomes important in making conjectures about motivation.

To the first point, I have no doubt that Sonny heard Trane with Monk in 1957 and Miles in 1958 and took serious note; I'm objecting to the reductiveness of the argument that Trane so messed with Sonny's mind that by 1959 he had to take a sabbatical. In the New Yorker piece, Freddie Hubbard is quoted about this period as saying Sonny was playing so powerfully you couldn't believe it and that he scared other tenor players to death. Further, having played with both Trane and Sonny at this time, he says that Sonny was definitely the strongest. To the self-doubt issue, yes, people are complicated, but they also change a lot, and Rollins the human being of the 50s is not the same as in the 60s, 70s and beyond. Just so I'm clear, I don't necessarily view self-doubt in heroic terms or deny that a kind of insecurity came into play at certain times, but I'm less sold on the jealousy angle, particularly as it relates to the sabbaticals.

I think we need to be careful with the notion that the sabbaticals in particular were inspired by Coltrane's emergence as the dominant tenor player. First of all, the chronology doesn't make sense. Sonny "retired" in the spring or very early summer of 1959; his last recordings are the bootlegs from Europe in March. Trane was rising fast but I don't think the evidence is there in any way to suggest that he had eclipsed Sonny in terms of public, critical or peer-group reputation. Sonny's sabbatical essentially started at exactly the same time that "Giant Steps" was recorded in April and that record wasn't even released until 1960; "Kind of Blue" was recorded in March and released in August. Trane didn't form his first quartet until spring 1960, at which point Sonny had been off the scene for a full year. Now, once Sonny came back on the scene, it was a different story, with Trane and Ornette in full glory and representing the cutting edge. Sonny clearly was searching for ways to reconcile his bebop roots with the avant-garde -- hiring half of Ornette's band, "Our Man in Jazz" and vacillating wildly between repertoire and concepts. These years 63-64 may represent a crisis of some sort, though they produced some incredible music, along with episodes of frustration. By 1965 I think he was really back in a more comfortable pyschological place both with himself and his music. That begins to change I suppose around 1967-68, leading to the second sabbitical, though I think the issues here really had more to do with personal stuff rather than purely musical directions, though there was bound to be a relationship between the two. Sonny's own comments about his first sabbitacal have been consistent through the years, focused on the notion that he distrusted his own press clippings, felt dissastisfied with his playing and thought he was letting down his audiences and wanted to study music and his horn more and get away from the rat-race, etc. The self-doubt that has shadowed him ever since seems to date from this period, but at least initially I don't think it anything to do with feeling that suddently the vangaurd of the music had passed him by. By the way, there is a good discussion of lots of this in Stanley Crouch's long New Yorker profile of Sonny from four years ago. There are no links and you have to be subscriber to access it. .

That clip is probably from the Copenhagen '65 video available on the Jazz Icons Rollins DVD. Marvelous trio set with NHOP and Aln Dawson. Here's a brief taste -- on fire! This is exactly the Sonny I was thinking about when I mentioned having to choose just one period of his playing.

Apropos of this comment, I would add that, personally, if metaphysics allowed me to choose any period to hear Sonny live on a good night, it would unquestionably be in the mid '60s. I am deeply glad too, hearing the rising consideration for Rollins' work of the '60s, his last great, major period of creativity. Often -and mainly in the past, maybe- this 'middle' period has been overlooked because of the masterpieces in the previous decade, the hystorical collaborations he had (Davis, Silver, Monk, Roach etc.) and maybe because it gets close to the fusion years, the lower inspiration Rollins' music showed (it had to happen one day) in the '70s, after the second rertire from the musical scene. The merit of Sonny's playing since the second sabbatical has been much debated here in other threads, but since I'm quoted above I want to say for the record that while I think that Sonny's greatest playing came in the '60s and this is the period I would choose if I could only choose one, I would not at all characterize those years as "his last great, major period of creativity" with the implication that all that came after represents a period of decline. The later work is far more inconsistent to be sure and there are various other issues, especially with the recordings and the quality of certain sidemen, but it is still great. A different kind of great, but great nonetheless. At times genius great. To cite one example, the opening track on "Road Shows" -- "Best Wishes" (Tokyo, 1986) -- contains some of the finest, most explosive and sheer authoritative playing on every level that Sonny has ever produced. What I really want to hear is the rest of that particular concert.

Apropos of this comment, I would add that, personally, if metaphysics allowed me to choose any period to hear Sonny live on a good night, it would unquestionably be in the mid '60s.

Picking two or three becomes excruciatingly difficult, but picking one is easy: "A Night at the Village Vanguard" -- Sonny's the greatest chord change player ever and "Striver's Row" and "Old Devil Moon" prove it. Plus, Ware and Elvin (!) That record could have been recorded yesterday it's so timeless.Side note: Is it even possible anymore to get the original sequencing on a single CD? Not that everything isn't great, but that's an instance where they really did pick most of the best stuff for the original LP. I can second "Alfie" and, from the same period, would add into the mix the incredible "There Will Be Another You" (import only at this point). From more recent times I'm partial to "+3" and "This Is What I Do."

C'mon folks, we've been through this many times: Posting entire stories violates copywright laws, and by denying clicks it harms the cause because the less traffic we get for jazz stories, the easier it becomes for editors to decide to do away with the coverage altogether. Seriously. Just post links. To that end, if anyone wants to see all of the coverage of the Detroit festival you can find it all here: http://freep.com/article/99999999/ENT04/90...e=2009_JAZZFEST

Amen.

For folks who might be interested, here's coverage related to the Detroit International Jazz Festival this weekend. Profile of John Clayton, who has written a 30-minute commissioned piece honoring the Thad, Hank and Elvin Jones (the fest is dedicated to them) http://freep.com/article/20090830/ENT04/90...in-Detroit-jazz The line-up with annotations: http://www.freep.com/article/20090901/ENT0...z-fest-schedule Highlights pulled out: http://freep.com/article/20090901/ENT05/90901061

Not a recording but a TV show. Jimmy Smith accompanied by -- wait for it -- Fred Astaire (!) who dances to "The Cat" in 1965. The collaboration comes at about the 5:30 mark, after a Smith trio tune and an Astaire monologue.

For what it's worth, there's a dynamite bootleg cassette of Bunky from the Chicago Jazz Festival -- I think from 1978 but I could be wrong -- with Art Hoyle on trumpet, John Campbell on piano, Steve LaSpina on bass and Joel Spencer on drums. My copy had three tunes on it -- "Tune Up," a Bunky original called "The Israelites" and "Blues in the Closet." He plays the shit out of everything, with his homemade outside-in approach to harmonic sideslipping and what a friend likes to call "pentatonic universe" and, affectionately, "chromatic dribble." The intensity is almost overwhelming, though the verite quality of the recording adds to the outness quotient. Hoyle and a very young Campbell sound great too. But Bunky is a force of nature. He willed himself into greatness.

Seems to me that Chastain was primarily interested in promoting herself. The Firefly is fairly close to my home, and I would have gone more if I could see acts other than Ms. Chastain. But I am not gloating over this development at all. I did see Tony Monaco over there, as well as Organissimo a few times. Others are entitled to a different read of course, but the notion that the Firefly Club was some sort of vanity project meant to glorify the owner is from my perspective as far from the truth as imaginable; her heart was in the right place. She rarely performed at the club as a leader; instead, most of her appearances were singing a few tunes here and there as a sideperson with one or another of bassist Paul Keller's bands. As a 7-night-a-week club (plus happy hours, etc.) the Firefly provided steady work for dozens of local musicians with regular bands, in all kinds of styles, given the opportunity to work week after week and develop an identity. On another front, thinking off the top, here are some of the national names I heard there in recent years: David Liebman, Hank Jones, George Cables, Frank Morgan, Sheila Jordan, Ken Peplowski, Jason Kao Hwang, Tim Berne, Tomasz Stanko, Lionel Loueke, Patricia Barber, Fathead Newman, Larry Coryell, Javon Jackson and Jimmy Cobb, Astral Project, Johnny O'Neal, Monty Alexander, Buster Williams, Geoff Keezer, Andy Bey, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Ingrid Jensen. Without passing judgement on any business or moral failings real or imagined, the loss of a jazz club of this stature is a tragedy.

http://freep.com/article/20090814/ENT04/90...ed-by-the-state Here's a much more detailed story from the Free Press.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/showcase-34/?hp

Thanks to all for the good wishes, with a special nod to David for starting the thread with such kind words. Go Bloomington!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/arts/mus...=1&ref=arts Best quote: "There are some people who would kill their own mother for the only copy of a Son House record,” Mr. Heneghan said. “And they sure as hell would kill your mother, and you.”

Lots of insightful comments here. Thanks, Bev. At the risk of stealing from my own upcoming review in Sunday's Detroit Free Press, let me add some thoughts. 1. I love the record: poetic, patient and full of concentrated adventure. Beyond Vitous, the players are not stars but they're really in tune with each other and the whole is greater than the sum, etc. At 50 minutes, there's no filler, no meandering and it can be digested in a single sitting. It's a reminder that most CDs today are way too long. 2. While Vitous eschews some of the obvious sound world elements of early Weather Report like the electric shimmer, the collectivist aesthetic here is deeply rooted in Zawinul's mantra "We always solo, we never solo" (or is it, "We never solo, we always solo"?) 3. Bev's point about Miles' is right on. One of the interesting things about the record is the way it reminds you how indebted conceptually WR's early aesthetic was to the Second Quintet and the Holland/Corea extension. 4. In a blindfold test you could probably guess that the bassist was the leader by the way by the action tends to flow through him; Vitous' tightly wound, springy sound (pizzicato and arco), cuts through the diaphanous textures and lives in the forefront of the ensemble. 5. The obsessive avoidance of an explicitly stated groove is the one weakness. There are two moments of a few seconds each where the music develops to a point where Vitous begins to walk and drummer Gerald Cleaver responds with a 4/4 ride cymbal. But the bassist immediately stops and shifts directions, as if he were afraid of breaking a rule against swinging. Of course, there's nothing wrong with not wanting to swing in the traditional sense, but there is something wrong about refusing to let the music go where it so obviously and naturally wants to go -- and, in fact, has already gone, until Vitous pulls it back. Frustrating. 6. Finally, I do hear the references to both Miles and Dvorak in "When Dvorak Meets Miles." The melody is an abstracted variant of the spiritual-like "Largo" ("Goin' Home") from the "New World Symphony."

Thanks for posting the reading, David. First time I've heard O'Hara's voice. This is, of course, one of O'Hara's finest poems, a quintessential example of the "I do this I do that" genre that he pioneered. "City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara" by Brad Gooch includes some interesting background surrounding the creation of "The Day Lady Died." The last time O'Hara heard Holiday was at the Five Spot in 1957. At the time, the club was becoming a replacement for the Cedar Bar as a gathering spot for artists. The Cedar was where the abstract expressionists had hung out, and O'Hara, who wrote for Art News, worked as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art and was tight with Pollock, DeKooning, Kline, Motherwell, David Smith, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, et. al., had been a regular. But publicity surrounding the Cedar was beginning to turn it into a tourist trap, so a migration to the Five Spot had begun. Kenneth Koch and Larry Rivers started holding jazz-and-poetry performances there. One night Koch was reading his poems with Mal Waldron at the piano, and Holiday showed up to see her accompanist and was persuaded to sing a few songs with him. Gooch points out that this was illegal, because at the time Holiday didn't have a Cabaret Card due to the drug busts. This is how Koch remembered that night: "It was very close to the end of her life, with her voice almost gone, just like the taste of very old wine, but full of spirit. Everybody wanted her to sing. Everybody was crazy about her. She sang some songs in this very whispery beautiful voice. The place was quite crowded. Frank was standing near the toilet door so he had a side view. And Mal Waldron was at the piano. She sang these songs and it was very moving." Gooch concludes his discussion with more detail about O'Hara's activities on July 17, the Friday that Holiday died. He wrote the poem on his lunch hour and later took the train out to East Hampton to meet up with painter Michael Goldberg and his wife, Patsy Southgate, for dinner (the Patsy and Mike in the poem). O'Hara and Goldberg talked about the tragedy of Holiday's early death on the drive from the station and when they got to the house Goldberg put on a Holiday record. After Southgate put the kids to bed, O'Hara, who hadn't mentioned the poem before then, pulled it out of his pocket and read it for his hosts.