Which jazz book are you reading right now?

[Big Beat Steve]

46 minutes ago, ghost of miles said:

Interesting ... and apparently totally under everyone's radar with all that "Listening" talk about Prestige during recent months ...  But ouch ... what a hefty price. 
I'm tempted but am very much on the fence, given how many Prestiges are on my shelves anyway and how many have been shown "for art's sake" in previous books such as "East Coasting" and "Jazzical Moods". 
We'll see ...

 

[sgcim]

Just finished "The Jazz Barn : Music Inn The Berkshires, and the Place of Jazz in American Life" by John Gennari,

Had to do with the Lennox School of Jazz, where Third Stream musicians like Gunther Schuller, Jimmy Giuffre, George Russell and John Lewis taught for the four years it was open.

It goes for 80 pages before anything relating to jazz is mentioned, just woke history of the Berkshires. 

When he mentions the School of Jazz and the concerts they had there, it begins to get interesting, and there are a lot of pictures of some of the teachers and students there that have never been seen before. 

The author is an English Prof. in VT, who thinks that Dave Brubeck composed "Take Five". The type on the book is so small that I had trouble reading iit.

 

[John Tapscott]

[sgcim]

Just finished "At the Jazz Band Ball" by Nat Hentoff. Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene"

I read his YA novel "Jazz Country" as a kid from my school's library, and liked it so much, I never returned it.

The book "ATJBB" is just a series of interviews and magazine pieces that he wrote from 2004-2009.

There's a lot of repetition by NH regarding quotes he repeats in each interview from Ben Webster, Dizzy, Clark Terry, Phil Woods, Hank Jones,etc... that could have been edited out, and there's a jazz and politics section that I just skipped over, but other than those two things, it had some great stuff.

Other than the free stuff, I liked his taste in music, and there was a chapter on Phil Woods which was great. I never knew NH was a Woods fanatic, and that he produced Woods' one release on Candid which Nat owned.

Towards the end, it starts to get deadly serious with two great interviews he did with Jon Faddis and Ron Carter.

Where else would you learn that the Black press in NYC plus Oprah both hated jazz, and did their best to kill it off?

Jon Faddis is very candid about the realities of being a jazz musician in those years, and doesn't sugarcoat anything.

Ron also tells it like it is, and it ain't very pretty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[JSngry]

Archie Bleyer owned Candid. Hentoff was A&R.

[sgcim]

Yeah, Hentoff just produced records for Candid, which meant he wrote down the names and times of the tunes, and then said "Do whatever you want to do."

Hentoff disclosed that he suffered from clinical depression that was cyclical, but he claimed that jazz brought him out of his most serious bout with it. Then he said that musicians used to put him down because he couldn't tell the difference between inside and outside ( which might explain his fervor over Ornette) or what chords they were playing. You've gotta give him credit for being honest about himself. 

 

Then he related a story about a Benefit concert at the Blue Note for Clark Terry. Clark struggled to get out of his wheelchair, and some guy from the audience yelled out, "So how are the golden years Clark?"

Terry turned toward the voice and picked up his trumpet and said "They suck"!- and proceeded to play like he was 20 year-old!  

 

[Big Beat Steve]

6 hours ago, sgcim said:

Towards the end, it starts to get deadly serious with two great interviews he did with Jon Faddis and Ron Carter.

Where else would you learn that the Black press in NYC plus Oprah both hated jazz, and did their best to kill it off?

Jon Faddis is very candid about the realities of being a jazz musician in those years, and doesn't sugarcoat anything.

Ron also tells it like it is, and it ain't very pretty.

Ouch! Who would have thought that??

Did he hint at the reasons for these dislikes? Did they consider jazz too much of a "white thing " at the time they showed their dislikes? (The validity of which would surprise me ...) Or what else was there?

[Ken Dryden]

9 hours ago, sgcim said:

Yeah, Hentoff just produced records for Candid, which meant he wrote down the names and times of the tunes, and then said "Do whatever you want to do."

Hentoff disclosed that he suffered from clinical depression that was cyclical, but he claimed that jazz brought him out of his most serious bout with it. Then he said that musicians used to put him down because he couldn't tell the difference between inside and outside ( which might explain his fervor over Ornette) or what chords they were playing. You've gotta give him credit for being honest about himself. 

 

Then he related a story about a Benefit concert at the Blue Note for Clark Terry. Clark struggled to get out of his wheelchair, and some guy from the audience yelled out, "So how are the golden years Clark?"

Terry turned toward the voice and picked up his trumpet and said "They suck"!- and proceeded to play like he was 20 year-old!  

 

I remember when Clark Terry played at IAJE and visibly struggled to move from his wheelchair to his chair, then announced to the audience, "The golden years suck" to the audience. I'm sure it was a part of his routine at that point in his career. Sadly, what may have been Clark Terry's final public performance was with the Statesmen of Jazz in Chattanooga on March 30, 2008. He just had gotten over a bout with pneumonia and he stuck to playing flugelhorn for the entire show, with Red Holloway pretty much taking over the ensemble. A recording exists, but his volume is a shadow of what one would expect. Afterward, I remember him sitting alone in the lobby in his wheelchair and I walked up to him to thank him for his many recordings. I didn't see anyone else approach him after that, he probably wanted to get back to the hotel to get some rest. 

Here is the set list:

Blues Walk
Moten Swing
Stardust 
That Old Feeling 
Perdido 
Nuages 
St. Thomas 
Willow Weep For Me 
Locksmith Blues
Ow 
Robbins' Nest 
Mumbles 
Just Squeeze Me 
Don't Blame Me 
Stars Fell On Alabama 
Strike Up The Band

 

The band:

Clark Terry - Flugelhorn, Vocals
Red Holloway - Alto And Tenor Saxophone, Vocals
Harry Allen - Tenor Saxophone
Wycliffe Gordon - Trombone, Vocals
Norman Simmons - Grand Piano
Bucky Pizzarelli - Electric Guitar
Bob Cranshaw - Double Bass
Mickey Roker - Drums
 

Edited May 1 by Ken Dryden

[sgcim]

17 hours ago, Big Beat Steve said:

Ouch! Who would have thought that??

Did he hint at the reasons for these dislikes? Did they consider jazz too much of a "white thing " at the time they showed their dislikes? (The validity of which would surprise me ...) Or what else was there?

Nat and Ron seemed to imply that it was that they felt Jazz came from an "unsavory" background. 

Nat brought up the fact that a poet, Sterling Brown, told him that in the 50 years he taught at Howard University, they never let him teach a course there that had anything to do with jazz, because of the unsavory background thing.

Then he said that "Adam Clayton Powell had a paper in NY in competition with Amsterdam News. I knew the editor and had seen him at jazz clubs- but he never used jazz, and the implication was that it wasn't right for the image".

Then he says to Ron Carter, "So what you said in that interview was that 'the black press,the black media, has a great deal of responsibility  in the lack of, and the possibility of. increasing the visibility and viability of jazz.' "Is that still the case?

Ron Carter says: "The only difference is that if I were writing it out verbally, I would underline all those words."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10 hours ago, Ken Dryden said:

I remember when Clark Terry played at IAJE and visibly struggled to move from his wheelchair to his chair, then announced to the audience, "The golden years suck" to the audience. I'm sure it was a part of his routine at that point in his career. Sadly, what may have been Clark Terry's final public performance was with the Statesmen of Jazz in Chattanooga on March 30, 2008. He just had gotten over a bout with pneumonia and he stuck to playing flugelhorn for the entire show, with Red Holloway pretty much taking over the ensemble. A recording exists, but his volume is a shadow of what one would expect. Afterward, I remember him sitting alone in the lobby in his wheelchair and I walked up to him to thank him for his many recordings. I didn't see anyone else approach him after that, he probably wanted to get back to the hotel to get some rest. 

Here is the set list:

Blues Walk
Moten Swing
Stardust 
That Old Feeling 
Perdido 
Nuages 
St. Thomas 
Willow Weep For Me 
Locksmith Blues
Ow 
Robbins' Nest 
Mumbles 
Just Squeeze Me 
Don't Blame Me 
Stars Fell On Alabama 
Strike Up The Band

 

The band:

Clark Terry - Flugelhorn, Vocals
Red Holloway - Alto And Tenor Saxophone, Vocals
Harry Allen - Tenor Saxophone
Wycliffe Gordon - Trombone, Vocals
Norman Simmons - Grand Piano
Bucky Pizzarelli - Electric Guitar
Bob Cranshaw - Double Bass
Mickey Roker - Drums
 

Yeah, it sounds like that jerk that yelled that out wound up contributing to CT's act!

[Big Beat Steve]

6 hours ago, sgcim said:

Nat and Ron seemed to imply that it was that they felt Jazz came from an "unsavory" background. 

Nat brought up the fact that a poet, Sterling Brown, told him that in the 50 years he taught at Howard University, they never let him teach a course there that had anything to do with jazz, because of the unsavory background thing.

Then he said that "Adam Clayton Powell had a paper in NY in competition with Amsterdam News. I knew the editor and had seen him at jazz clubs- but he never used jazz, and the implication was that it wasn't right for the image".

Then he says to Ron Carter, "So what you said in that interview was that 'the black press,the black media, has a great deal of responsibility  in the lack of, and the possibility of. increasing the visibility and viability of jazz.' "Is that still the case?

Ron Carter says: "The only difference is that if I were writing it out verbally, I would underline all those words."

 

"Unsavory"?? Does this mean they still were bothered by those stereotypes of Storyville brothels? Or the cliché of all jazz musicians being junkies? Nothing learnt after the best part of a century? 
How prude can you be??

By that yardstick, what music WOULD they have accepted? Certainly not anything even remotely connected with Rap or Hip Hop, that "gibberish of criminals"? 

My my ...

Edited May 2 by Big Beat Steve

[sgcim]

"Bass Notes- Jazz in American Culture A Personal View" by Chuck Israels

Chuck was the bass player for the Bill Evans Trio, after Scott La Faro (25 years old) died in a car accident, for six and a half years. This is the third book written by a Bill Evans sideman in the last few years. There was a book written by Evans' 23 year-old girlfriend, there was a novel written that deals with the time when Evans' took an "Intermission" after LaFaro died, now there's going to be a movie about that book, there was a documentary made about Evans that I went to the New School to see the premiere of, and I got in an argument with a friend of Denny Zeitlin's, and finally there were two bios of Evans that came out at the same time.

There was also a recent book called "Three Shdes of Blue" about three musicians who played on the most popular jazz album ever, "Kind of Blue", Miles Davis, John Coltrane and of course, Bill Evans. And yet there are people here that think that BE had nothing to do with the greatness of that album.

Anyway, Chuck is about 90 now, and he is not going gentle into that great dark night. He takes down everyone in this book, even Bill Evans. 

This is an autobio of sorts. He talks about his one great fault; when he was young, he never thought that people studied or practiced to get good at what they do; they were just born with that particular talent.  He was good at math, so he wound up getting into MIT majoring in engineering. He had a natural talent for the cello, so he became a cellist in his HS orchestra, and later switched to bass. He found he had a natural  ability for playing bass in small jazz groups, and he fell head over heels in love with jazz. So much so, that he realized he had to study for the first time in his life at MIT and couldn't catch up and flunked out of MIT 

He was a "Red Diaper Baby" so his family had connections, and Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a letter that got him into Brandeis, where he happened to meet Bill Evans at the famous 1957 Third Stream Concert featuring works by George Russell, Gunther Schuller, etc... and impressed Bill a great deal at a jam session they had in the cafeteria.

In early 1958 he became friends with the famous producer Tom Wilson and made a trip to NYC with him to play on his first jazz recording session with Cecil Taylor. On the session were Kenny Dorham, Louis Hayes and John Coltrane.

They warmed up with a few standards, and it became obvious that Cecil was in one place rhythmically, and the other four musicians were in another place. Thus begins the observations of CI which make this a fascinating book. Check it out.