Nat Hentoff Article on Aaron Weinstein

[Chalupa]

The Rebirth of the Hot Jazz Violin

LEISURE & ARTS

By Nat Hentoff

1120 Words

21 February 2006

The Wall Street Journal

D8

English

(Copyright © 2006, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

Until I heard the now legendary Stuff Smith (1909-76), I had no idea that a jazz violinist could more than hold his own in a powerfully swinging jazz combo's front line. Smith, who had played with Jelly Roll Morton, recorded with Nat "King" Cole and Dizzy Gillespie, and toured with Norman Granz's dueling horn virtuosi, told jazz historian Stanley Dance: "You can swing more on a violin than on any instrument ever made. You've got all those octaves on the violin. You can slur like a trombone, play staccato like a trumpet, or moan like a tenor." As Jo Jones with the Count Basie band put it: "Stuff was the cat who took the apron strings off the fiddle."

Ardently exemplifying Stuff Smith's credo is 20-year-old Aaron Weinstein in his first CD as a leader, "A Handful of Stars" on Arbors Records (arborsrecords.com, available in major records stores and at Amazon.com).

This session should bring renewed interest in the often overlooked heritage of the jazz violin while heralding the advent of an unmistakably personal improviser who can be intimately tender (as on the Frank Loesser-Jimmy McHugh "Let's Get Lost") as well as so fierily invigorating that you have to move to his music.

A third-year student at Boston's Berklee College of Music, Mr. Weinstein has already performed at the Wolf Trap Center for the Performing Arts and such jazz rooms as Birdland and the Django Reinhardt festivals in France and New York.

Starting at age eight, with lessons on a rented violin in a music-loving home in Wilmette, Ill., Mr. Weinstein first began to find his vocation five years later when he came upon a cassette tape of Joe Venuti, the first internationally renowned jazz violinist.

"The power and authority with which he played," Mr. Weinstein happily recalls, "was so dominating that every note Venuti produced struck me as the absolutely definitive note to have been played at each given moment. It was the first time I had actively listened to a jazz recording."

He went on to the sunnily lyrical Stephane Grappelli, a colleague of the mercurial Django Reinhardt in the Quintet of the Hot Club of France. Describing Grappelli's impact on his own development, Mr. Weinstein indicates he could have had a notable career as a jazz critic, though without having the much greater fun of being inside the music: "By the time he was in his musical prime, Grappelli had created a completely unique style epitomized by long lines of flowing eighth notes that he flawlessly executed at any tempo while always maintaining a feather-light touch."

Then Aaron Weinstein discovered what he calls Stuff Smith's "revolutionary playing." I asked him to elaborate on what he means by "revolutionary." What follows is the most penetrating description of that jazz master I have seen:

"Stuff Smith, more than any other jazz violinist of his day, blended rhythmic elements at the heart of the jazz idiom to the violin. At times, he used his instrument as a full big band, playing call and response between his violin's upper and lower registers. Every phrase Stuff played was pure jazz. He was first and foremost a jazz musician who happened to play the violin. Because of this, he broke the barrier that once separated violinists from other jazz musicians. He earned the respect of other jazz masters of his day, who treated him as a peer rather than an oddity. That is something to which all violinists should aspire."

The growing number of jazz musicians who have played with Mr. Weinstein -- among them the richly lyrical tenor saxophonist Houston Person and the agelessly buoyant guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli on Mr. Weinstein's debut Arbors recording -- regard him as a peer. As Mr. Person says: "Aaron will really go a long way because he's well grounded, and he really has a sense of jazz as it should be."

Among other established jazz violinists who helped ground Mr. Weinstein were Sven Asmussen, Johnny Frigo and Claude "Fiddler" Williams, who made jazz violin history with Count Basie in the 1930s and later with Jay McShann and beyond.

Eventually, however, Mr. Weinstein realized that "I needed to go further than the ideas of the idiom's greatest violinists. For me to understand the ideals at the heart of the jazz idiom, I began to look at many of my other favorite jazz musicians in the same way that I had re-examined the violinists who had made an impact on me."

Absorbing the self-discoveries of Zoot Sims, Lester Young, Bud Freeman, Warren Vache and Scott Hamilton, says Mr. Weinstein, "made me feel like my blinders had been removed. This was the beginning of my true development as a jazz musician."

Also part of that development is Mr. Weinstein's mining of the classic American songbook, bringing back to life evocative melodies and moods far removed from the currently popular boiling cauldron of largely graceless rock, rap and hip hop. Aiding him in this discovery of the quality of ballads that used to attract jazz improvisers is Houston Person, of whom the young violinist says: "He has an incredible respect for melody. Whether he is interpreting a Gershwin song or improvising on an Ellington tune, he's always playing some kind of a great melody -- and he constantly seeks out interesting songs from the depths of the American songbook and is always eager to share his finds."

On his CD, "A Handful of Stars" -- the rewarding result of Mr. Weinstein's discovery of songs that, as he puts it, "have fallen through the cracks," or have otherwise faded from many musicians' memories -- are "A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes," "A Handful of Stars," "Someone to Watch Over Me," "If Dreams Come True" and "Pennies From Heaven."

This celebration of the timeless pleasures of jazz's sounds of surprise ends with the very definition of a jazz groove, a mellow musical conversation between Messrs. Weinstein and Person that transcends the players' ages and styles, achieving the joyous act of communion that has made this music an international language. Credit for this enduring recording is due Mat Domber, the owner and executive producer of Arbors Records, who not only immediately felt the need to record Mr. Weinstein but made this 20-year-old the producer of his first album, in charge of choosing the musicians and the repertory. The rest of the Arbors catalog also reflects Mr. Domber's faith in what he accurately calls "classic jazz."

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Mr. Hentoff writes about jazz for the Journal.

[birdanddizzy]

The work of Aaron is conventionally predictable. There are truly great and exploratory violinists out there and Aaron is nowhere near them and never will be.

[Larry Kart]

The work of Aaron is conventionally predictable.

Well, these days that's what a lot of the stuff that Arbors and others package (per Hentoff) as "classic jazz" is all about.

[Larry Kart]

Also revealingly inane is Nat's "'Absorbing the self-discoveries of ... Warren Vache and Scott Hamilton,' says Mr. Weinstein"....

[AllenLowe]

haven't heard this guy, but for my money Andy Stein is the best "mainstream" jazz violinist around -

[Joe G]

Watch out for Jeremy Kittle. I hear he's been growing by leaps and bounds.

[Ken Dryden]

I don't think that Aaron Weinstein's CD is all that bad, though I don't think that he's a groundbreaker by any means. Give him time and some seasoning and see what happens. Few 20 year old musicians are ready to make any major impact on jazz.

I'd rather hear any Arbors release than CDs by those who dumb down their music with sampling, turntablists and forgettable poetry.

[Nate Dorward]

"dumb down"? You mean you hate that stuff, of course, but I don't see why the blanket smear is needed against the honesty & intelligence of those trying to experiment a bit.

[frank m]

To Larry Kart----Can you conceive that it is possible to indulge YOUR taste in jazz, without denigrating as "inane" the taste of others?

[AllenLowe]

I think it was a typo - Larry meant "insane" -

[JSngry]

I'm not at all sure that playing what is already known isn't more of a "dumbing down" than trying to play what isn't. In a way t's like I'm being told that the most I'm capable of is having a Pavlovian reaction. Gee, thanks... NOT.

Comfort food has its place, but let's call it what it is and enjoy it likewise.

[Larry Kart]

To Frank M -- All I was saying is that if Hentoff thinks that Vache and, especially, Scott Hamilton have made "self-discoveries" akin to those that Zoot Sims, Lester Young, and Bud Freeman have made (they were the others he mentioned in that sentence), then he's been smoking the old opium pipe.

Actually, that's not all I meant to say. What Hentoff set in motion in that piece in general, and in that sentence in particular, is a characteristic flim-flam operation, even if the person being flim-flimmed is to some extent the writer himself. The writer fastens upon a genuinely, permanently worthy figure from the music's (and usually his own) past -- in this case, Stuff Smith -- and links him to some young player of today who has an essentially revivalistic and/or preservationist relationship to that older figure's music. I'm not saying BTW that the music of Stuff Smith, Bud Freeman, etc. is no longer "relevant'; rather it's that the process whereby some present-day figures manage to engage in real dialogue with figures from or aspects of the music's past is a very tricky one that tends to be endangered or corrupted by the presence of nostalgia and dreams of "rebirth." For an example of IMO true musical engagement with aspects of the jazz past that one would have thought were gone forever, let me recommend the string of CDs that Le Petit Jazzband de Mr Morel, led by French cornetist-arranger Jeanne-Pierre Morel, has made in recent years for the Stomp Off label: Delta Bound, Baby!, Farewell Blues, Cafe Capers, and Au Petit Journal Saint Michel, working with pieces from the '20s and early '30s by the likes of Elmer Schoebel, Morton, Tiny Parham, Clarence Williams, A. J. Piron, Santo Pecora, Alex Hill, Sam Morgan, Bennie Moten, etc. To quote from the annotator of the Farewell Blues CD: "This is very original music using an old idiom as its means of expression."

[Larry Kart]

More info on Le Petit Jazzband de Mr. Morel can be found here:

http://www.jazzbymail.com/ViewArtist.aspx?...nd+De+Mr.+Morel

Now known as just Le Petit Jazzband, they appeared at last year's Chicago Jazz Festival. I can't tell you how good these guys are. Clarinetist Alain Marquet and tenor saxophonist Michel Bescont are superb soloists, wholly idiomatic yet quite individual and in-the-moment. (BTW, Morel's first name is Jean-Pierre, not Jeanne-Pierre. Must have had Jeanne Moreau on my mind.)

Also worth seeking out, in a related vein, is the music of the late Australian composer-bandleader Dave Dallwitz. His Ern Malley Suite (1976) on Swaggie is a work of genius, and there's a lot more where that came from -- from Dallwitz and quite a few other gifted Australians (Graeme and Roger Bell, Frank Johnson, Ade Monsborough, et al.) who arose in the post-war era in what can be called a "trad" bag, though it is far from what usually is charactered as "trad." A sound though brief overview can be found in Terry Martin's "Jazz in Canada and Australia" in "The Oxford Companion to Jazz." Martin writes: "Seemingly simultaneously and independently, musicians in the southern arc of the continent (Melbourne, Hobart, and Adelaide) took spirit froom the great Chicago recordings of the '20s to generate a style that, while sharing some aspects wwith the slightly earlier revivalists in the United States, had in its prime a joy of liberation and swing all of its own."

With this music itself in one's head (and with the music of Morel and his fellow Frenchmen in there too), Martin's reference to "liberation" may be the key. It's as though something nascent (but up to that point only nascent) and personal in the souls of these men has been released by their specific, loving, immediate contact with the music of the jazz past.

[AllenLowe]

bumping up because Larry knows what he's talking about and Hentoff is a butthead - can't believe he won that big NEA award -

[paul secor]

Beavis has spoken.