Mark Stryker

Here's a link to the 1965 St. Thomas that I alluded to earlier but couldn't put my finger on at the time. Just about 2 minutes of Sonny, then interview with NHOP and bass solo. http://video.search.yahoo.com/video/play?p...;vid=1301156370

That's another thing that bugs me about Sinatra's on stage mannerisms. What's the deal with glamorizing smoking? Surely he knew that smoking could have nothing but a deleterious effect on his singing, yet somehow he apparently felt the need to convey what he must have considered is the "hip" attitude of a smoker. Did he actually really smoke off camera? Hard to believe. In this last show he expresses in a funny, yet no nonsense way, how very important music is (was) in his life, yet the prop that promises to snuff (pun intended) the vitality out of his art has to be present. No excuse that this 1966 program represented a different attitude towards smoking - Surgeon Generals reports had been in the public consciousness for some time. Actually, the landmark Surgeon's General Report was only issued at the start of 1964 so the degree to which it had saturated the public consciousness by 1966 is highly debatable. If you're looking for a watershed mark to measure the impact of the country's evolving attitude toward smoking, I'd suggest the ban on tobacco ads on TV and radio that began in 1971. That said, everybody always knew that smoking was bad for you in some general way and singers knew it was tough on the voice. Sinatra smoked in real life, but my understanding is that he cut back when performing and might go weeks without any cigarettes leading up to important recordings or appearances -- somebody with a good Sinatra bio would have to give us more detail. I suspect he smoked for the same reason that most people smoke -- they are, more or less, addicted to nicotine. Which is not to say that smoking didn't evolve into part of his persona and remain an acting prop on stage. But in his time and milieu, smoking was as much a part of daily life as it was for jazz musicians. I wouldn't say he was glamorizing smoking; I would say he was living a lifestyle. If you want to see something incredible on many levels, check out how he opens his weekly TV show in the '50s with a direct promotion for the sponsor, Chesterfield cigarettes. This is probably 6 years before the Surgeon General's report. They don't make 'em like this anymore. http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/searc...-promotio_music On a related note, I recall reading an interview with Lockjaw Davis who was arguing that jazz musicians should be spokespersons for cigarettes. His point was that jazz musicians should enjoy the same commercial benefits as other celebrities. Now, Jaws had a very sophisticated understanding of the music business, but I believe this interview dates to the mid '60s. Interesting as it relates to attitudes toward smoking.

TCM has posted some videos on their website. Click on "interview/specials." That gives you the choice of four tunes: "Come Fly With Me," "I Get a Kick Out of You," "I've Got the World on a String" and "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World." (On the last is from Part 2; the others are from part 1.) http://www.tcm.com/2008/sinatra/index.jsp#video

Wow! Never noticed that before -- thanks for the insight. Any other tunes with similar Haiku-derived lyrics? FYI, one John Blackburn wrote the lyric to "Moonlight In Vermont." He apparently wrote a lot of songs but this was his only real shot at immortality. Not much info about him out on the web and a Nexis search revealed no major newspaper obituaries when he died in 2006. He does have a brief, sketchy wiki entry and I also found this small-townish story http://www.pioneer.net/~bandee/page7a1.html. Plus this short bio: Composer ("Moonlight In Vermont", "Need You"), actor, director and author, educated at Western Reserve University. He directed the Cleveland Playhouse, and a teaching fellowship at the drama department at Bennington College for 2 years. He acted and directed at the Pasadena Playhouse for two years. He was a film agent and record distribution manager and song plugger, had his own record company, and worked for North American Aviation. He joined ASCAP in 1953, collaborating with Lew Porter and Karl Suessdorf. Suessdorf, by the way, wrote the music for "Moonlight in Vermont."

A programming heads up: Turner Classics is devoting May to Sinatra movies and TV specials. Most notably they're broadcasting the "Man and His Music" programs from the mid '60s. Tonight is No. 2 from 1966 and in some ways it's my favorite, even though Nancy Sinatra takes a up a chunk with her dorky "hits" (ugh -- but nice legs) and the persistent organ in the orchestrations sounds dated to me (apologies to our hosts -- don't ban me!) and the set list isn't as hip as some of the other shows. But Sinatra's voice is in extraordinarily good shape -- much better than on the more celebrated first "Man and His Music" from a year earlier. He sings one those heroic extended ballad medleys, roars through "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" and the version of "Moonlight In Vermont" is un-fucking-believable. Watch how he sings the transition from the bridge into the last 8 the second time around without a breath as the key goes up a step and time suspends in rubuto. My hair stands on end everytime I hear it -- one of my favorite moments in all of music. 8 and 11 p.m. tonight

Got it. Thanks for the heads-up.

Thought the board might be interested in the May list of LPs for sale from Ars Nova, a terrific used store in my hometown of Bloomington, Ind. The store specializes in classical and you can find some fabulous stuff at insanely fair prices. This month's list, which I got today, happened to have an unusual number of interesting jazz LPs, including a bunch of avant stuff (especially Ayler but others too), which is why I'm posting an alert. Prices are steep on the Ayler records, but some of you might be tempted by this or that. FYI, I bought Stanley Cowell's "Ancestral Streams," Carla Bley's "3/4 for Piano and Orchestra" and Cecil Taylor's "Spring of Two Blue Js." Here's the link to the store: http://home.bluemarble.net/~arsnova/ Anybody interested in classical LPs should monitor their lists or, better, ask them to put you on the email list so you get it right off the press. I've bought a lot of stuff here over the years.

http://www.jazzhouse.org/2008finalists.html Note the appearance of LK among the nominees for the Jazz Journalism Lifetime Achievement Award. The nomination only cites his work for the Chicago Tribune, Down Beat and as an author. No mention of his contributions to organissimo. (By the way, I'm not a member -- just passing along the press release.)

Well, they weren't thinking; they were reacting to Herbie's Grammy win, which got tons of attention and suddenly thrust him back into the the center of popular culture, at least for 15 minutes. Collectively, the folks who put together a list like this don't really know anything about music, art, theater, literature, etc., so it becomes a barometer of which creative people have managed to sneak onto the radar of the mainstream, and it becomes an outlet for the list makers to prove how "hip" they are. Except they're not. But that's why I think this kind of stuff (Herbie's Grammy win; Time magazine, etc.) is good for jazz; it gets the music into the discussion. Not that any single moment will change the world. In the end, it may well end up being meaningless, but if enough little moments can coalesce, it might make a difference. Maybe. Reminds me of the marketing strategy that says any single radio ad, billboard, TV commercial, newspaper ad or whatever is unlikely to move somebody into the "buy" column. But the aggregate has an effect on people. Suddenly, the product "clicks" with consumers and lodges in their mind -- it's the 10th contact that does it, not the first. That's another reflection of the shame of jazz disappearing from TV, radio, general interest magazines, newspapers, etc. Out of sight, out of mind. Another interesting thing about the list by the way, is that Wynton Marsalis is not on it (unless I missed him). Ten years ago, if a jazz musician would have made the list, it would have been him.

Any mainstream recognition like this is positive for the music. Beyond that, I was struck by the byline -- Wayne Shorter and Joni Mitchell (!) I really would have liked to see the unedited prose those two came up with -- I guarantee that it was more in the clouds than the final product, which went through the layers of at least one Time assigning editor and copy editor. There is, for example, this gem that either survived the original drafts or got truncated by an editor: "For a while there, he was really into dotted 16th notes and minor ninths." Um, ok.

On a related note, Willie's next recording is a live CD with Wynton Marsalis' group -- tapes drawn from the J@LC concerts from early 2007 that were discussed here at the time. Release date is early July.

John McLaughlin and the Tonight Show Band, 1980s, "Cherokee" on acoustic guitar.

Absolutely. A friend of mine once said he looks as if the saxophone is playing itself. Maybe it is ...

I know what you mean. it's like his top lip is very "foward" and I can't tell what's happening on the bottom. Still, I think the way he tongues his notes is even freakier (in a great way). Like the articulation of the melody on The Three Marias -- that's super bad.

Sinatra and Presley http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/searc...k-sinatra_music

That's interesting how Clark deals with the idiom -- you don't see that everyday. This may have been posted before but here's Scott Hamilton with Wayne's band around the same time playing a fast blues. The third tenor is Lew Tabackin -- it would have been interesting to hear how he negotiates the territory in which Wayne leaves him but the tape ends with Wayne's solo. Only in Japan! http://youtube.com/watch?v=1cYH4WnP5EQ

Absolutely -- a pioneering teacher who was essentially a classical guy but whose concepts of sound production, embouchure, breath support and all things saxophone are applicable across the board. Still a lot of folks around here who knew him and/or studied with him, but I haven't delved much into his personal/professional history. Don't think there's a book in there but probably a very good dissertation/journal article in the subject. Maybe it's been done already. But I've always wondered about the similarities/differences between, say, the concepts and teachings of Teal and Joe Allard, another guru of sound and woodwinds that a lot of jazz players studied with on the east coast. Back to Joe. He was a Teal student for years and Joe's concept is almost impossible to imagine without that training. Jim's observation about projection vs volume is spot on. Joe could project like crazy because his sound was so focused and supported from the diaphragm. His command of the overtone series surely grew out of Teal too. Joe's mouthpiece was interesting too -- one of the rare jazz guys that used a Selmer "classical" mouthpiece -- I think it was a "D" tip opening (pretty closed for jazz) but not entirely sure what the specific model was called or whether it had been worked on or not. Bennie Maupin used the same mouthpiece early on and he was also a Teal student, used to hang at Joe's apartment when he was coming up and his playing had a lot of Joe in it, from the warm centered sound to the slippery rhythms. (Later, Maupin studied clarinet with Allard.) Javon Jackson (VERY much out of Joe) uses a similar Selmer mouthpiece I think. Sonny used one too in the early '60s -- he's playing it on the cover of the Bridge, but he gets a much louder, more popping sound out of it, but it's also very warm and centered. I've often wondered if Sonny switched from his Otto Link to the Selmer during his sabbitical because he was so involved with digging back into the mechanics of the instrument and the Selmer was a kind of back-to-basics maneuver that allowed him to focus more on the fundamentals of sound production. On the last point, I did grow up as a player (alto). Raised in Bloomington, Ind., school at Univ. of Illinois. History major in college but always playing. Stopped after grad school (journalism) and I got a job.

George is scheduled to play this weekend in Detroit with Steve Turre's Quintet (Billy Harper, Buster Williams, Deon Parsons). Don't know the specifics of George's health, but obviously a wonderful sign that he's on the gig and traveling.

Thank you! Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you! I'd not call it "impossible", but I would say that the same things played at/with a different dynamic would take on an entirely different meaning and therefore essentially not be the same thing. So once again - Thank you! You're welcome. To expand a bit, I think there's a trade-off that very roughly speaking breaks down along a fault line of volume vs. finesse. The louder you play the more difficult it is to realize certain kinds of timbral/rhythmic/expressive qualities. If Joe's shit is not "impossible" to play loudly, it's definitely harder to play, and Jim is exactly right that if you were to play everything that Joe would play but do it at a higher volume, the meaning and impact would be radically different. On a related issue, dynamics are one of the most under-utilized expressive tools available to a soloist. Most people either play too loud all the time or completely ignore the idea of dynamic contrast -- and not just a simple start soft and then get louder in a linear path, but a true ebb-and-flow, with dynamics used to enhance or color meaning of a particular melodic, rhythmic or harmonic idea. Thinking off the top, Wayne Shorter is one guy who gets it and plays with artful dynamics and contrast. Who else (from the past or today) would be on the list of improvisers who use dynamics this way as opposed to a one-volume-suits-all approach?.

Larry: Looking through Nexis, I find your reviews from April 23, 1987 and April 24, 1986 that both cover Griffin/Henderson gigs, but nothing from 1991. By the way, Michael Weiss (and Phil Flanigan) are described in the 1987 review as "impressive newcomers." Joe did play really soft -- that's one of the things that allowed him to play so loosely and with such tremendous rhythmic flexibility. It's impossible to play some of Joe's signature flickering and swirling shit if you're trying to blow down the back wall. Still, it was a shock to me too the first time I heard him live -- though it was also revelatory in the sense that I understood a lot more about how he manifested his concept.

DETROIT FREE PRESS THE COLEMAN EXPERIENCE: THE UNPARALLELED ORNETTE COLEMAN, WHO REWORKED THE RULES OF JAZZ TO DIZZYING EFFECT, PLAYS HERE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN NEARLY 20 YEARS BYLINE: MARK STRYKER FREE PRESS MUSIC WRITER NEW YORK -- Revolutionaries in the 20th Century sometimes reinvented art with such a big bang that they shocked the status quo into apocalyptic fits of controversy and, occasionally, violence. Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" caused a riot at its 1913 premiere. Picasso's first cubist canvas created a scandal in 1907. Jackson Pollock's mid-century abstract paintings were ridiculed as the work of "Jack the Dripper." And there is Ornette Coleman, the single most polarizing figure in jazz history: Fistfights broke out during the alto saxophonist and composer's landmark debut at the Five Spot in New York in 1959. Coleman, who makes his first metro Detroit appearance in 18 years tonight in Ann Arbor, broke so free of the rules that had previously governed jazz that -- as with Pollock's drip paintings -- many suspected a put-on. "I think he's jiving, baby," said veteran trumpeter Roy Eldridge in 1961. "They start with a nice leadoff figure but then they go off into outer space." Time has vindicated Coleman. Leaving Duke Ellington aside, jazz history can be distilled into four defining soloists: Louis Armstrong invented the improvised solo as we know it. Charlie Parker delivered it into the modern age. John Coltrane translated it into post-bop. And Coleman liberated it from traditional harmony, rhythm and form. His untamed solos proceeded according to their own spontaneous yet undeniable logic, free of expected key resolutions and bar lines, thrillingly alive to naked emotions and the possibilities of collective improvisation. Coleman rejected bebop harmony in a strong-willed act of primitivism, not unlike the way Picasso remade the simplified forms of African art or Stravinsky elevated barbaric rhythm. To his supporters, his rejection of harmonic blueprints (chord changes), untethered phrasing and daringly expressive intonation were signs of a prophet. To his detractors, the same qualities were evidence of fraud or incompetence. Miles Davis suggested in print that Coleman was "all screwed up inside," and one angry musician punched him in the face one night at the Five Spot. "In New York, I'm telling you guys literally would say, 'I'm going to kill you. You can't play that way.' " says Coleman, speaking on a recent Saturday in his sprawling loft in Manhattan's Garment District. "It felt terrible, but I never tried to defend anything. If somebody said, 'I'm going to beat you, I don't like how you play,' I didn't say, 'Why?' I just said, 'Well, that's how you feel.' " Forty-five years after Coleman's quartet came east from Los Angeles, the shock waves continue to reverberate. Even though his seminal recordings of 1959-61 long ago entered the canon and he's been honored with a MacArthur "genius grant," Coleman remains a divisive symbol. The mainstream has made peace with him, but it has never reached a detente with free jazz, the permanent avant-garde ushered in by Coleman's aesthetic that sometimes (not always) lacks his melodicism, discipline and links to the core values of jazz. For all Coleman's radicalism, his early music still swings and speaks with a rural blues twang. Many pieces take off from angular themes suggesting a wild bebop hallucination. Still, even Coleman's advocates have sometimes scratched their heads at his jazz-rock explorations, the idiosyncratic way he plays the trumpet and violin, his more extreme group improvisations, and the extensions of his concepts into sui generis classical compositions. Jazz is defined by rugged individualists, but Coleman -- a self-taught musician from Fort Worth, Texas, steeped in the blues, with a homegrown theory of music and maharishi presence -- is beyond category. He belongs in the pantheon of American mavericks alongside Harry Partch, the former hobo who built his own instruments to play microtonal music, and John Cage, the charismatic poet of sound, silence and noise. Given the Bunyanesque lore that surrounds Coleman, it's striking how reserved he is in person. He is a small man, about 5 feet 8, slight across the chest and shoulders, with innocent eyes and a soft handshake. He speaks in a simmering whisper and gentle Texas drawl. His hair is thin and the deep lines across his brow seem to outline the craggy, Bohemian journey of his life. On this afternoon he wears a fraying blue V-neck sweater and dark pants and sits in his glass-wall office surrounded by a high-end stereo, computer and shelves filled with books on physics, chemistry and other subjects and CDs in every possible genre. He has just finished listening to soprano Joan Sutherland. You don't really interview Coleman as much as experience him. His conversation swirls about the room in philosophical riffs that double back on themselves like words of a mystic, sometimes breaking free into aphoristic clarity. Human freedom, transcending race and the unity of all music and life are favorite themes. "What I'm thinking about when I play, what I am experiencing, is how to play ideas that will become something that will waken the senses of the person that's listening. You know how I got that way? From playing with musicians. If you play something that someone likes, they'll come and try to make it better. Music is not a race or a style, it's an idea." Coleman is eager to share his ideas, and is open to any musician who seeks him out. Wynton Marsalis hung out at the loft for two nights til 4 a.m. before last month's Jazz at Lincoln Center tribute to Coleman. But the angle from which Coleman approaches music is so obtuse that it's often bewildering. "He'll say things to me like, 'Which way does a vertical line go?' says Tony Falanga, one of two bassists in Coleman's band. "I'll say, 'It goes up.' And he'll say, 'Why can't it go sideways, too? It's still a line. You have to be open.' " Since the early '70s, Coleman has used the term "harmolodics" to describe his music. Details defy simple explanation -- no one seems to fully understand the system other than Coleman. Essentially it's his unified field theory of music -- a way of organizing music so that all the instruments in an improvising ensemble are allowed to play in any key or any clef at any time. "I call it compositional improvising, meaning that it doesn't sound like you're getting the idea from a chord or a key," says Coleman. "It's an idea that plays itself exactly at that moment." On the surface, Coleman's concepts sound like a recipe for chaos. The players must listen deeply, responding to cues of melody, tonality, mood, texture, rhythm and intuition, without falling back on prescribed roles or rules. Coleman's unusual new quartet has been together less than two years. Bassist Falanga, trained in classical music and jazz, plays bowed melodies, joining Coleman as a second horn. Greg Cohen's plucked bass anchors the ensemble. Coleman's son, Denardo, who made his debut on LP at age 10 with his father in 1966, plays drums. Coleman's tunes, as catchy as nursery rhymes, lead into swirling polyphony, the four players orbiting each other like moons and planets in a cosmic dance. "Ornette is the truest improviser I've ever come across," says Falanga. "But he doesn't believe in squeaks, squawks or honks. It has nothing to do with letting out energy. Everything is melodic." Coleman has been out of step with his contemporaries since his early days in R&B bands, when he was often fired for refusing to sequester his unique vision. Once after a dance gig in Louisiana, thugs who didn't like his playing smashed his horn and beat him bloody. Beboppers threw him out of jam sessions for making up his own harmony as he went along. The chords limited his imagination. "They were only guiding me as if I didn't know where I was going," he says. Only after meeting the sympathetic colleagues in Los Angeles who would comprise his original quartet -- trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden, drummer Billy Higgins -- did Coleman's career find traction. "He has more determination about what he wants to do than anyone I've every seen," says James Jordan, Coleman's slightly younger cousin who helps manage his business affairs. "When he gets his mind made up about something, that's it," says Jordan, director of music with the New York State Council for the Arts. Coleman has spent much of his career underground, with bursts of public activity and recordings followed by long periods of self-imposed exile. Racism and shady characters within the music business have left festering wounds, and his strategy since the early '60s has been to insist on top dollar for recordings and concerts. He would rather write and rehearse in seclusion than feel exploited. When he has signed lucrative record deals or received honors like the 1994 MacArthur grant ($372,000), he has funneled much of it back into music, supporting young musicians out of his own pocket and paying travel expenses overseas. He bought space in Harlem in the late '80s, which has been converted into Harmolodic Studios, a recording facility. Coleman has lived in his current apartment about a decade, and it's a significant upgrade from the ramshackle existence of cold-water lofts in drug-infested neighborhoods that once defined his life in New York. He has done better financially in the past decade, finding the inspiration to perform more frequently and relaxing his more extreme price demands. At more than 4,000 square feet, his loft was remodeled by the woman he's been seeing for several years, a German-born architect. The furnishings are sparse, modern and chic. Art is everywhere, including huge abstract canvases, African sculptures and smaller portraits and surrealist pictures. Coleman himself did some of the paintings in which ghostly doodles float in abstract fields. He became interested in art when leading painters like Willem De Kooning, Larry Rivers and Robert Rauschenberg used to hang out at the Five Spot. At 74, Coleman has lived long enough to see his music, once so maligned, taught in conservatories. He remains a God to the radical wing but also an audible influence on mainstream progressives of many stripes, from pianist Keith Jarrett and guitarist Pat Metheny to the young alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon. Coleman knows this but downplays it. "You know what? The satisfaction is that I'm still alive and I know now that have reached this level and I'm finding freedom -- what I always thought existed. There's nothing that I have to hide or complain about and nothing to make me withdraw from something I believe in." {END} A SAXOPHONE LESSON WITH ORNETTE; HE PULLED OUT HIS CASE, ASSEMBLED THE HORN AND HANDED IT TO ME BYLINE: MARK STRYKER FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER NEW YORK -- Ornette Coleman knew that I was an alto saxophonist and jazz musician before becoming a journalist, so when I pressed for details about his harmolodic theory, he generously offered to give me a lesson right there on the spot. He pulled out his saxophone case, assembled the horn and handed it to me. It was a top-of-the-line Selmer Mark VI that the company gave him in the 1960s. An experimental model -- the company made fewer than 200 -- the horn has an unusual low A-key that allows the player to reach a half-step lower than on most saxophones. The horn was lacquered white, recalling the eccentric plastic alto that Coleman played on his early records. Coleman had left his Meyer mouthpiece and reed attached to the neck of the horn the last time he played, and the whole apparatus was shoved inside the bell -- with no protective cloth and not even a mouthpiece cap to guard the cane. Any teacher who caught a student storing his instrument this way would have a conniption. Coleman apologized sheepishly: "I know I should have a mouthpiece cap." In the harmolodic system, Coleman completely deconstructs normal Western musical syntax. All instruments are treated as if they are tuned in C. All instruments can read from the same part without transposing and still produce what Coleman calls a "unison." Improvisers are allowed to play in any key or any clef at any time. He first had me play the notes A, C, D and E-flat, because in harmolodics these are considered a unison. "One note, four sounds," is a Coleman mantra. Then he had me play three chords that led through all 12 notes of the chromatic scale -- C major 7, E-flat minor 7, D minor with a flat 5, and a final A to account for the 12th note. "That's your first harmolodic lesson," he said. "You can use any tonic and play those same three chords and come up with 12 different notes." Coleman asked me to improvise starting on any note but to keep in mind the intervals I had already been working with. He was trying to liberate me from conventional harmony, and it worked for a few bars before I relapsed into a bebop pattern. "Here," I said, handing the horn back to him. "Show me." Coleman closed his eyes and played a fresh, leaping phrase that, like many of his ideas, ended on a high note that shivered with the aching cry of the blues. I noticed Coleman doesn't keep his top teeth on the mouthpiece, a highly irregular technique that allows the vocalized flexibility of his sound. "You can play sharp in tune and you can play flat in tune," is another mantra. Coleman played a series of zigzagging lines. Some were aggressive blurs like the sweeping gestures of an abstract painter. Others were simple shapes in bold colors. Each idea was as natural as breathing. Each painted the air with swing. Several were melodies worth surrounding with a frame and calling it song. "Don't let the saxophone tell you what to play," he said. "Let your ear tell you. The same note could be any one of the other 12. An E can be the major 7th of F, the minor 7th of F-sharp, the major 6th of G. If you start thinking like that, the saxophone is going to get smaller and smaller. No matter how much technique you have, you're not going to play no music if all you're doing is playing from how the instrument is built." {END} ORNETTE COLEMAN ON CD The best introduction to Coleman is with the 1959-61 Atlantic recordings, beginning with the peerless "The Shape of Jazz to Come," which introduced his quartet with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins and such key compositions as "Lonely Woman" and "Congeniality." Next best is "Change of the Century" and the prescient double-quartet collective "Free Jazz." Others include "This Is Our Music," "Ornette," "Ornette on Tenor." If you can afford it, Rhino has collected the Atlantics on a 6-CD set, "Beauty Is A Rare Thing" ($90). The 1958-59 Contemporary LPs, "Something Else" and "Tomorrow Is The Question" catch Coleman just as he's leaving his bop roots behind. The mid-'60s Blue Notes include two grand volumes with David Izenzon and Charles Moffett, "At the Golden Circle, Stockholm," and "New York Is Now" and "Love Call" with Dewey Redman, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones. From the '70s, the best of the fusion band Prime Time can be heard on "Body Meta" (Verve). The recording of the orchestral "Skies of America" (Columbia) is not how Coleman envisioned the piece, but the results are still fascinating. "Soapsuds Soapsuds" (Verve) is a deliriously lyrical tenor sax-bass duet with Haden. In the '90s, Coleman embraced the piano for the first time in nearly 40 years, recording two quartet CDs for Verve -- "Sound Museum: Three Women" and "Sound Museum: Hidden Man" -- with Detroit-native Geri Allen. Both feature different takes of the same tunes. "Colors" is a duet with pianist Joachim Kuhn

David: Reasonable points. Let me respond to a few. "Our Thing" was indeed a victim of space -- several things were cut on the fly and I recall dropping a reference to "Our Thing" because at the time it had temporarily fallen out of print and the others were all available and, as great at "Our Thing" is, at least one had to go and it got zapped. I picked Joe and Branford as examples of well-known cats influenced by Joe partly because of their name value to readers (who were more likely to have heard of those guys than, say, Javon Jackson, who frequently sounds as if he swallowed every record Joe ever made) and also because both in various conversations had told me how much they had picked up from Joe. I agree that perhaps Joe's playing is less on the surface in Lovano and Branford than some others, but I still hear it very much in Lovano's fluttery looseness and the reedy darkness of his sound. Branford's playing has changed in the last 10-15 years; I hear less Joe in him today than before. I never warmed to "Lush Life" but I, too, should probably give it another listen; it's been a long time. I loved the big band date. I know for a fact Joe had very ambivalent feelings about "Porgy" and touring with that material. As for lanky -- only 5'8"? Are you sure? That's how tall I am and I recall standing next to Joe once and had the feeling of looking up, plus he was always thin as a rail,which led me to "lanky." I would have guessed 6'1, but you're probably right. My impression was always that he was taller --maybe it's that thing where you always think your heroes are larger than life and he definitely was a hero. Addendum 1: I heard Branford sit in with Joe at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago around 1986. He and Kenny Kirkland (who did not sit in) had played a concert that night with Sting somewhere in the area. The rhythm section was Jodie Christian and Wilber Campbell and a bassist I can't remember, maybe John Whitfield. Another tenor player I didn't recognize and to this day have no idea who it was also sat-in. They played a fast "Tenor Madness" and when Branford soloed he played a bunch of Joe licks as a kind of homage -- a nice moment. I also recall that when Joe came on the Tonight Show after "Lush Life" came out he played "Take the A Train" and Branford's studio band played some of Joe's tunes throughout the show as bumper music coming back from commercials. I specifically remember hearing "Inner Urge," which was pretty hip.

David: Thanks for relaying that Ornette story, as well as your role in viz. Freddie's most recent activities. Jazz.com has a nice "dozens" feature with Randy Brecker picking 12 essential Freddie Hubbard moments on record. It's here: http://jazz.com/dozens/brecker-picks-hubbard. Also, in my previous post, one record I should have also mentioned was "Empyrean Isles." Freddie's solos on "One Finger Snap" and "Oliloqui Valley" are peerless. Actually, the whole band is extraordinary on this record; "Maiden Voyage" gets more ink, and deserves it compositionally, but "Empyrean Isles" is the record I put on when I want to hear Herbie, Freddie, Ron and Tony really play.

Detroit Free Press August 25, 2002 Riding the rhythm The ever-hip Louis Hayes, who made a name for himself during an era of great rummers, returns to his hometown to headline the Detroit jazz festival BYLINE: MARK STRYKER FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER DATELINE: NEW YORK It's almost impossible to look hip behind the wheel of a rented Ford Windstar. But nobody makes the scene quite like Louis Hayes, a leading drummer in jazz since arriving in New York 46 summers ago as a 19-year-old Detroiter with quick hands, sharp ears and a driving cymbal beat that would become his trademark. On this sweltering July Fourth, Hayes wears a stylish muscle shirt, linen pants and oversized designer glasses. Riding shotgun is his wife, Nisha, a Manhattan real estate agent. Hayes performs in Atlantic City on the boardwalk in 9 hours. It's little more than a 2-hour trip from Manhattan, but Hayes has insisted on an early start because he follows a strict preperformance regimen of practice, rest and concentration. "He's always on a schedule," says Nisha. "I went to Paris with him, and he's been 50 times and had never seen the Eiffel Tower. I had to drag him there." Hayes heads for the Lincoln Tunnel. Nisha points out the correct lane, but Hayes -- who is not as attentive a driver as he is a drummer -- comes within a few feet of merging into a bus. Nisha looks horrified: "Louis, he doesn't care that you play the drums!" Hayes barely raises an eyebrow. At 65, Hayes returns home to Detroit this week -- fortunately, on an airplane -- as a headliner at the Ford Detroit International Jazz Festival. He'll appear Friday with a veteran quintet, the Legends of the Bandstand, with tenor saxophonist David (Fathead) Newman, pianist Cedar Walton, bassist Earl May and trombonist and native Detroiter Curtis Fuller, a running buddy of Hayes' since 1955. Hayes' resume is a monument to his stature. He anchored two of the defining bands of East Coast hard bop, leaving Detroit in 1956 to join Horace Silver's Quintet, then jumping to the Cannonball Adderley Quintet in 1959. Hayes played with Oscar Peterson for three years in the mid-'60s and by the end of the decade was coleading a group with peers Freddie Hubbard and Joe Henderson. In the 1970s, Hayes led a series of artistically vital if financially challenged groups. In the '80s, with a daughter entering college, he returned to a sideman role with pianist McCoy Tyner. Since 1989, he has worked and recorded steadily with his own groups. He has appeared on hundreds of records. The late '50s and early '60s, when independent labels like Blue Note, Riverside, Prestige and Savoy might call Hayes two or three times a week, were an especially fertile period. "I was so fortunate," Hayes says. "I came to New York with a job and worked straight through with a major group all the way up until 1968. I wasn't written about all that much, and I had some tricky times later on in the '70s. But the major thing is being creative and making history. That's still the way I look at things." Hayes came of age in an era saturated with great drummers, but he quickly took his place near the top of the pecking order. He was a stylist who corralled his influences into a recognizable voice that married powerful swing with a graceful touch and a hipster's wit. Though not an innovator, Hayes has influenced drummers of several generations, including the late Tony Williams. Before he reshaped jazz drumming in the 1960s, Williams would take the train from Boston to New York just to hang out with Hayes on weekends. The heart of Hayes' style is the unique way he phrases the ride cymbal beat -- the ding-dinga-ding rhythm at the core of modern jazz. The cymbal beat is like a drummer's DNA; no two will be exactly alike. Hayes plays with a crisp but elusive quality, like a hummingbird. He places his beat just ahead of the basic pulse, never committing the sin of rushing, but generating the forward momentum of a downhill skier. "Louis is the kind of a guy, even to this day, if you were to handcuff his left hand to the drum stool and just have him play time on the cymbal, it would swing just as much," says drummer Kenny Washington, 44, a Hayes protege. Hayes also turned heads in New York with his quick reflexes and the clever way he would accent a melody or respond to a soloist with a sleight-of-hand rhythm. He mastered the art of "tippin' " -- swinging with fierce intensity but soft-shoe elegance. Washington notes that Hayes also was the first drummer to smooth out ultra-fast tempos into a continuous wave of rhythm. The night before his Atlantic City gig, Hayes talked about his life at his home in Riverdale, a leafy neighborhood in the northwest corner of the Bronx. The Hayeses own a 10th-floor co-op with a spectacular view of the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge. The apartment is decorated with African masks and sculptures, vaguely Afro-centric paintings and photos of family and friends. Hayes is a compact man, in good shape save a slight paunch, looking 15 years younger than he is. He walks with a streetwise gait and slight shoulder hunch that gives the impression of a coiled spring. To beat the heat on this sultry New York night, he wears shorts with no shirt; his forearms are as toned as a boxer's. In conversation, he stares at you intensely, with his eyes wide open and a blank expression on his face. He responds in discursive fragments, and if he agrees with you, he'll nod his head and exclaim, "That's mellow-D!" or "You're right on it!" "Louis deals with everyone the same way," says Rick Germanson, a young pianist who often works with Hayes. "He doesn't put on an act around younger or older musicians or critics or record producers. He's always himself." Fuller warns not to be fooled by Hayes' laid-back demeanor: "He's very knowledgeable, even if he doesn't seem like it. He'll stand back in reserve and appraise the situation, and then make his comment." Hayes grew up on Detroit's west side. Both parents were avocational musicians; His father, an autoworker, played drums, while his mother, who waited tables and eventually owned her own diner, played piano. Hayes started on the piano at 5 and the drums at 10. The key influence in Hayes' early development was his cousin Clarence Stamps, an accomplished drummer who grounded Hayes in technical fundamentals and taught him lessons that have stuck for life. Hayes remembers, "He'd say, 'If anything in the band goes wrong, it's your fault. When you're playing and you look out into the audience and you don't see anyone pattin' their feet, then you're not playing (expletive). And you can't just play the drums and not know where you are in the tune. You have to be in control of the band, and you have to make music out of the drums.' " By the time he was 15, Hayes was spending all day in the basement practicing, memorizing Charlie Parker solos and dabbling on piano and vibes. At 18, in 1955, he leapt into Detroit's major leagues, joining Yusef Lateef's quintet, along with Fuller, at Klein's Show Bar. At the same time, bassist Ernie Farrow introduced Hayes to the records of Kenny Clarke, the bebop pioneer who first moved the pulse from the bass drum to the ride cymbal. Hayes would spend hours listening to Clarke's pristine cymbal beat and hours more practicing his own version. Meanwhile, in New York, gutsy hard bop -- an alliance of bebop and bluesy roots influences -- was brewing in the seminal bands of Art Blakey and Horace Silver. When the latter needed a drummer, the Detroit-born bassist Doug Watkins had a recommendation: "Get the baby boy out of Detroit," he told Silver. Hayes was now working with one of the most influential pianists, composers and bandleaders in jazz. Silver's formally sophisticated compositions were girded by a finger-poppin' beat, a combination ideally suited to Hayes' strengths. The money wasn't great -- $125 a week. But Hayes was young, with no responsibilities other than music. Hayes made five classic albums with Silver before leaving in 1959 to join alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley's newly formed quintet, which mixed soul-jazz hits like "Work Song" and "Jive Samba" with more substantial hard bop. The combination proved as audience-friendly as a backyard barbecue. Hayes and bassist Sam Jones formed a dynamic duo at the heart of Adderley's band, and as their reputation soared, the pair began to show up on countless record dates together as sidemen. "Sam and I had this great rapport on and off stage," says Hayes. "We were so similar in the way we thought about time and the way we felt the beat. He was Mr. Dependable. The sound of Sam and I playing together just laid out this red carpet for anyone who played with us." Hayes left Adderley in 1965 when the band took a more commercial turn. In retrospect, Hayes says that he and Jones should have started their own group. Instead, both ended up joining Oscar Peterson's trio. Hayes liked Peterson personally, and the pianist's celebrity meant that Hayes' salary nearly doubled. But Peterson's scripted concept was like a train that ran on just one track, and Hayes felt stifled. He chafed under the restrictions, and Peterson often had to lecture him. Sometimes Hayes would go to a party, have a couple of drinks and lecture Peterson, who would respond by firing him -- for a day. This happened a dozen times, Hayes recalls. Since then, Hayes has generally led his own bands. Around 2 p.m., Hayes navigates the Windstar down Atlantic Avenue to the Trump Taj Mahal, a 1,250-room hotel roughly the size of Rhode Island, with an Ali Baba decor that redefines the meaning of kitsch. A few hours later, Hayes is deep into his preconcert routine. He sits in an overstuffed purple chair with a practice pad propped up in front of him. His right hand is a blur of motion, and it takes a moment to realize that he is playing his cymbal beat at a racehorse tempo. The TV is tuned to CNN, and Hayes also answers questions as the calisthenics continue. He plays nonstop for 20 minutes, takes a 30-second break for water and then goes back to work. Hayes practices far more today than when he was on the road 40 years ago. "The older you get, the harder things get," he says. "I could do things when I was younger that now I really have to practice to even attempt to be able to do. My peak was when I was about 40 -- I was liable to do anything. " A few hours later, Hayes is setting up his drums at the amphitheater at the south end of the boardwalk near Chicken Bone Beach, a once-segregated playground frequented by the African-American elite before the civil rights movement. Hayes has changed into loose-fitting pale-yellow pants and shirt and a necklace adorned by a large earth-colored stone. "Wow, he sure looks good," a middle-aged woman says as she watches nearby. "How old is he?" "Sixty-five." "Mmm. Mmm." The group is Hayes' Cannonball Adderley Legacy Band, a relatively new venture for him, devoted to the saxophonist's repertoire. Hayes enjoys the old tunes and is mindful that he is the sole survivor of Adderley's original 1959 group. The other members of the Legacy band, including the exciting alto saxophonist Vincent Herring, are about 30 years younger than Hayes. The group tears through a 75-minute set, with Hayes firing on all cylinders, playing with greater precision than he sometimes reveals in other settings these days; his style grew splashier during the '70s and '80s. Hayes' right hand swarms over the cymbal; his left-hand pops snare drum accents like a pistol. As fiercely as he plays, Hayes is not flashy. His limbs stay close to his body. His head sways a little, but there are no histrionics. Hayes solos sparingly, and he doesn't even trade phrases with the horns until the fourth tune. After the set, he fields congratulations while packing his gear, stopping to shake hands, pose for pictures and chat when older fans tell tales of hearing him as a kid in Philly or New York. As the line winds down, the journalists who have been tailing him step in to say farewell. "We're sure looking forward to hearing you at the Detroit festival," says one. Hayes pauses before breaking into a wide grin. "OK, that's mellow-D!" {END}

Jazz legend comes home with the blues on his mind BYLINE: Mark Stryker, Detroit Free Press Sep. 4--Jazz aficionados have been buzzing for weeks about the rumor that Yusef Lateef was going to play the blues when the 86-year-old Detroit-born legend returned home to perform Monday night at the Detroit International Jazz Festival. In this case, "the blues" was meant literally as in the 12-bar elemental musical form, as well as a metaphor for the kind of fundamental modern jazz that the tenor saxophonist, flutist and oboist used to play back in the day. In his last appearance at the jazz festival in 1999, Lateef explored a multi-ethnic idiom with his band Eternal Wind. The music's abstraction upset the festival's bebop fan base, and even those who appreciated the aesthetic questioned whether the large Amphitheatre at Hart Plaza was the proper venue for such experimentation. This time Lateef was fronting a traditional piano-bass-drums rhythm section. But nobody should have been surprised that his landscape for improvisation remained rooted in a pan-Asian, Middle Eastern and African sound world of earthy rhythm, exotic texture and open form. This is the music that Lateef -- whose nascent experiments with non-Western ideas came 50 years ago -- has been committed to for a long time. Still, he did play the blues, the 12-bar kind. In the middle of his set at the Pyramid Stage he picked up his oboe and, with the rhythm section laying down traditional swing in a slow walking tempo, blew several spare choruses with plangent expression and bent pitch. The traditional harmonies were enriched by extensions and substitutions that coated the down-home soul with a sophisticated glaze. The jam-packed audience took to it like catnip. The performance had an air of ritual. Lateef, physically imposing in a purple dashiki, recited poetry, played flutes of various kinds, including two wooden ones of his own invention, and manipulated an Indian double reed whose sound he colored by cupping his hands around it. The cast of the music was moody, meditative and prayerful, as if Lateef were pleading for peace in a world gone mad. On one long piece, pianist Alex Marcellos, bassist Avery Sharpe and drummer Kamal Jones played a rolling vamp that sounded like a cross between a swampy shuffle from the Gulf Coast and a West African chant. Lateef's plaintive tenor phrases suggested field hollers -- on some level, of course, Lateef has never stopped playing the blues, even when he ventures a long way from the 12-bar variety. It's as much a part of his DNA as Detroit. Lateef's energy seemed to come and go, but there were times when the spirit welled up within him and the music ascended to a higher plane of muscularity and excitement. One came during a long free-jazz duet with Jones' aggressive drums during which Lateef's quick bursts expanded into squawks and rippling phrases running up and down the horn. His tenor tone billowed, gaining weight and stamina. When the set was over, Lateef's old friend Dave Usher, who produced Lateef's early recording taped live at Cranbrook in the '50s, gave him the festival's Jazz Guardian Award for his lifelong contributions. Lateef accepted humbly and then read one of his poems filled with lovely imagery of flowers, natural beauty, the inevitability of death and the glory of the Creator. It seemed a fitting close for a spiritual man whose autobiography is titled "Gentle Giant." {END}