Jazz (Jazzers Jazzing)

On the Road with Lenny White and RTF IV: the Montreux Jazz Festival, Sete, France, plus Aosta and Pescara, Italy

2011-09-23T03:18:00.000-07:00

RTF IV onstage

[Editor's Note: Lenny White and his fellow jazz/rockers havealready returned home to the States, and picked up an opening act, and his crack outfit, Zappa Plays Zappa. After touring the EastCoast and Midwest, they have been lighting up the Left Coast. Today's installment was filed as RTF IV werewrapping up in Europe. There's big news here of a DVD-in-progress,plus White's interesting take on the current state of the music industry. Stay tuned for the next editions, coveringtheir recent travels on the West Coast as they revisited the band's original'70s home territory and stomping grounds--and after that, the much-anticipatedreturn to the enthusiastic fans of Japan.]

Lenny White and Esperanza Spalding backstage at Montreux

"While we were in Montreux we did some filming for aDVD we're making. Part of the problem that I have with recording a liveperformance, at a festival like Montreux, is that their cameras and lights areset up and everybody looks the same. Allthe videos and DVDs from there look the same. That isn't necessarily what we would like to do, and if you want a videowith your own personal textures to it, you really can't do that. When we recorded the performance and did thevideo, there were parts of it we didn't like, so we told the audience after theperformance, "We're going to come back and redo parts of it. If you want to stay, you can stay," andalmost everybody stayed. It was likebeing at a movie shoot where we'd have a take, and then the director would say'Cut! Cut! That's good, but this time let's try it a little different,' and wewould do it that way. That's what we didwith the audience, and that, for me, was more special than the actualconcert. During the breaks betweenshots, while the band was having conversations about what they were doing, I'dhave a conversation with the audience. It was really cool. Montreux wasgood. Patti Austin wasthere. Esperanza Spaldingopened up for us."

"After that we went to Sete,France, an absolutelybeautiful setting with a full moon rising over the Mediterranean. The festival was packed with people who wereso enthused, so emotionally moved that people were crying, including a lady whowas with the festival--she had been there, had heard bands for seven weeks, andshe started to cry. She said the musicthat we played touched people so deeply. It was a beautiful setting, a great concert.

RTF IV onstage at Aosta, Italy. From left: Chick Corea, Jean-Luc Ponty, Stanley Clarke,
Frank Gambale and Lenny White

"We played in Aosta, Italy, and then we did Pescara, both outdoor festivals, and theaudiences were great. What's veryinteresting is that Return To Forever is not a fusion band. It's a jazz-rock band. Part of the reason I say that is that we havetwo distinctly different but authentic musical styles that we play on any givennight. Every night we play jazz, and weplay rock. It's very obvious when I seeit from the stage. In certain parts ofthe concert people will be sitting with their arms crossed, their legs crossed,enjoying the acoustic bass, the piano, the acoustic guitar, the violin, almostmaybe like they'd listen to classical improvising... and then we come back foran encore and play "School Daze," and everybody is on their feet,jumping up, clapping their hands, like at a rock concert. For the same band! It's really remarkable to see, and it's atestament to the musicians who are playing. I see it happen every night. Atthe classical music festival that we played in Germany, there were people injackets and ties, and dresses, standing up and rocking. It's really deep! Stanley Clarke says, 'There's arocker in everyone,' and it's been proven every night."

The Aosta fortress

"Not just this version of Return To Forever, but allthe versions, there has been this virtuosity enclosed in some common music andalso within the complexities of the virtuoso music. When you go see a jazz virtuoso play, you gosee Return To Forever, that's what you expect. You don't go jumping up out of your seat, because that wouldn't beappropriate. But when that group ofmusicians starts playing something that makes you move, makes you abandon yourcomposure somewhat, you give it up. Ifyou're in a club with 150 people, that's what you'd expect, but when it's aconcert hall with 3,000 in the audience, the effect is quite different.

"On this tour we're doing music from all the electricReturn To Forever periods. Right nowwe're in discussions about doing a film. Not just a documentary, because I wouldn't want it to be done the sameway every other documentary film is done. I think we're going to approach it from a different perspective, withsomeone who has a real vision, as opposed to just doing a concert film--that'snot really what we want to do. The angleis that the industry really has suppressed music like this. When you see the effect it has on people,there's no reason why this direction in music, and bands like what werepresent, haven't gotten the exposure they deserve. If you look at the number of people thismusic reaches, the per capita concentration of fans we make happy during a liveperformance, we do as well and reach as many people, in effect, as LadyGaga. Without meat dresses, withoutdancing and pyrotechnics. If you thinkabout it, Lady Gaga plays arenas that hold 20,000 people, and we play concerthalls with 2,000 people. I can't competewith Lady Gaga, who plays in front of 10,000,000 people on her tour. Return To Forever can play in front of600,000 on a tour. But per capita, I cansay that we reach fans the same way she does.

Lenny White at work

"There's good justification for the music that we playto be exposed the same way, but that's not the case. From a money standpoint, record labels orcommercially oriented companies want to hire artists with commercial appealbecause they reach more fans. It'seasier for those companies to use them as corporate branding because they reacha larger audience."

"We touch the soul. Pop music touches souls because it has lyrics--most of the time it's thelyrics that touch the soul, not necessarily the performance. You have to be there toexperience a performance for it to touch your soul. You hear the song that has lyrics and youhear it sung--depending upon how great the artist is who is rendering thestory--you get it and you say, 'Wow, that song really touched me,' becausethese words relate to your consciousness, or whatever. Return To Forever has been able to do thatfrom a musical standpoint. That's why we have such dedicated fans, because we've been able toaccomplish that without lyrics."

Photo Credits

All Photos: Andrew Elliott

On the Road with Lenny White and RTF IV: Germany, Holland, and France

2011-08-07T22:39:00.000-07:00

RTF IV: L to R: Chick Corea (p), Jean-Luc Ponty (v), Stanley Clarke (b), Frank Gambale (g), Lenny White (d).

"The gigs in Germany were fantastic, great audiences. The band is starting to hit its stride. In Hamburg, about 1,000 real dedicated fans stood in the rain for the full performance. In Neckarsulm, we played at the Audi performance center inside an Audi car manufacturing plant, a remarkable structure filled with classic and current Audi cars.

"Overall, this is an amazing band. We played in Essen, Germany, at a classical music festival that was held in a hall that had great acoustics. The audience members were subscription season ticketholders and the atmosphere was pretty formal. Chick [Corea] wore a nice jacket and tie for the occasion, for example, although the rest of us were dressed however we were dressed, the way we usually dress for a show.

Riding the elevator to the Audi performance.

"After we'd played the first set, Chick said he felt our performance had been a little reserved, and I told him we probably were, because everybody in the band had seen the audience's formal attire--the men in suits and ties and so forth--and thought maybe we shouldn't play so loud, or whatever. But by the end of the show, all those people in suits and ties were up on their feet, rockin' to "School Daze." It was a great transformation. Even the directors of the festival came to us afterward and told us, 'You were remarkable. You guys play with the power of rock and roll, the sophistication of jazz, and there are tinges of classical virtuosity.'

"There's an aspect of jazz that gets misunderstood. Jazz musicians are not usually given enough credit for their dedication to the music. Their commitment is on par--or, sometimes, maybe even greater--than the classical performers' commitment to their music. The dedication that it takes to be able to perform and improvise at the same time is a little more. Obviously, there are classical musicians who improvise very well. I don't think the great jazz virtuosos get credit, because most music aficionados think jazz is a folk music, as opposed to something from the great European classical tradition.

"Whether it's a trio or quartet, or a quintet, like what we have with Return To Forever, when we play we have five composers composing music in the present tense. Each one is composing their own mini-composition within a composition.

"In Hamburg, Germany, it rained cats and dogs. But in Vienne, France, it rained cows and horses. It was five times the storm that was in Hamburg... lightning, thunder, not just a rain shower, but a rainstorm, a torrential downpour like a monsoon. But the people knew it was going to rain and came prepared. They had raincoats and umbrellas, and they stayed through the whole performance. It was true dedication. The fans really do come out in Europe and support the artists.

"Sometimes in the US, when a music is indigenous to a certain area, people can be a little passive about it. But RTF is popular. As I say to the audience every night, there are a lot of boy bands where no one really plays an instrument, but with a man band like Return To Forever, it's a different dynamic. In the United States, pop music is more of a manufactured product that sells big numbers and draws huge crowds that come out to see the artist because the artist is on TV all the time, or their videos are being played on music channels. So it's a testament to RTF that we play music that's very progressive, without vocals, with a great deal of virtuosity, and people come out to support us. There's hope!

Return To Forever performing at Wollman Rink in Central Park, NYC, on July 28, 1975. L to R: Chick Corea, Al Di Meola, Stanley Clarke, Lenny White.

"The turning point for me in understanding the impact of Return To Forever was the Central Park concert in 1975. Wollman Rink held about 7,000 people, it was enclosed, with actual physical fences. When we got there the concert was sold out, but then some fans broke down the fences and another 5,000 fans came in. There were about 12,000 people there. This was a band that didn't have a lead singer, no vocalist. And I said to myself: "This is big. This is something different now."

[Editor's note: the award-winning actor (and director/playwright) Laurence Fishburne, once came backstage and told his story of being at the historic concert, sitting up front near the stage and seeing the historic Wollman Rink performance. It had been a turning point in his life, too, he said. Return To Forever's appearance on July 28, 1975, in the annual summer series held in the old skating rink at the south end of Manhattan's Central Park, came at the peak of RTF's powers. They had been touring with the new material from No Mystery (Polydor, 1975)--which, like Where Have I Known You Before (Polydor, 1974), had reached the pop Top 40 chart. Within a few months RTF would record Romantic Warrior (Columbia, 1976) and get a gold record--thanks, in part, to a masterful last-minute remix and remaster by none other than Lenny White.]

A view of RTF IV in action, from the top of the Audi performance center.

"But now this band, this version, RTF IV--I don't mean to downgrade any of the other earlier versions of Return To Forever, or put them in a secondary category, but this one is very, very musical. It covers a wide variety. The people at the classical festival made me realize that there were all these different kinds of musics that we dealt with. You have five musicians who have had many, many different musical experiences, and it's kind of a conversation. It's like if you were to be in an audience and listen to five famous actors who had been in the business for 40-50 years, talking about their different roles in films, you would be privy to some information that you wouldn't normally get. What you have in this band are five different individuals who have played every kind of music you can imagine. We have musical conversations every night, and you can be privy to them.

"We're true road warriors. We travel well, but it's traveling. We sleep when we can. This is a vicious schedule--we just did 11 concerts in 12 days. I personally think the performance at the Tollwood Festival in Munich was the best so far. This is worth all the stress of traveling, to see genuine joy on the faces of the fans."

Photo Credits

Page 1: All Photos: Bill Rooney

Page 2: Ria Images

Lenny White and RTF IV: Syracuse, NY and the Canada Gigs

2011-07-09T04:08:00.000-07:00

Lenny White

[Editor’s note: after opening night in Northampton, Massachusetts, Lenny White and his Return To Forever band mates played at the M&T Jazz Festival in Syracuse, New York then headed north to Canada for festival dates in Montreal and Toronto. After filing this report, he and RTF IV played a third festival in Ottawa and then got on a plane to Berlin.]

“It was cold and rainy in Syracuse on the day of the concert, but the rain stopped in time, and the music was good. It was cool because the director of the Jazz Fest presented each of the band members with a proclamation.

Showtime!

“The Montreal Jazz Festival gave Stanley the Miles Davis Award [Ed. note: the festival’s annual award is given each year to honor “a great international jazz musician for the entire body of his or her work and for that musician’s influence in regenerating the jazz idiom.”] Montreal was a sold-out show. The people were really into it. The comments afterward were like “This is the most musical Return To Forever yet.” We are all more mature musicians and instrumentalists, through the years of being around great composers and experimenting with compositions. All the guys in the band are composers, and they play accordingly. It’s not just notes. They play with the idea of creating compositions within compositions—your solo is a composition within a composition. Like Frank Gambale, he’s really doing it now.

“We played two sets in Montreal. But what we’ve been doing now is not announcing the tunes. You know, we’re doing like how some of the old rock guys used to do when they’d asked the audience, ‘Hey, remember this one…?’ and then they’d play it, and the crowd would shout out YEAH-H-H-H-H!!!” So we don’t really announce the songs. We play it and the people say, ‘Oh, YEAH, I remember that one!’

L. to R., Chick Corea, Jean-Luc Ponty, Stanley Clarke, Frank Gambale, Lenny White

[Editor’s note: Return To Forever has been in Germany since July 1. As they continue to play festivals in Poland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Croatia, and Montreux in Switzerland, they will need to follow each festival’s time restrictions. Hence the following comment:]

“We have a set that’s working now, and we’re ironing it out. But you never know. By the time we get back to the States, it might change. But even if you’re a headliner here in the States… you’re playing with other bands, and you go on last, you don’t want people in the audience to be hanging out, saying ‘Wow, this is a long show. You want to keep their attention and make them happy when they leave.

L. to R., Jean-Luc Ponty, Stanley Clarke, Frank Gambale (hidden), Chick Corea, Lenny White

“Ottawa was our fourth gig and if it was any indication of what's in store for the fans... Get ready! The band is starting to gel. We knew there would be mistakes, but I personally think real music is made when you play your way out of a mistake, and this band is SO-O-O MUSICAL. Stay tuned for more notes from the road...”

All photos by Bill Rooney

Return To Forever IV World Tour 2011: On the Road with Lenny White

2011-06-23T23:33:00.000-07:00

Lenny White with his newly-tuned baby blue Innovation drums.

Editor’s note: Lenny White and the other members of the legendary jazz/rock band Return To Forever began a world tour last February in Australia, and on Friday, June 24th resume in Northampton, Massachusetts. After that it’s north to Canada for three dates, over to Europe for a month, then back to the U.S. for the summer. Throughout the tour you’ll have the opportunity to get a unique insider’s perspective on performing live music, as the journeyman drummer regularly posts his comments here. How big is the 2011 RTF IV world tour? Back in the day, Return To Forever and a small handful of other jazz/rock outfits like Weather Report, Mahavishnu Orchestra, the Headhunters and of course, Miles Davis--the fountainhead from which they'd all flowed--were capable of filling stadiums. For that brief period in the late 1960s-1970s, jazz reached levels of popularity not equaled since. How big is an RTF tour? Yesterday Steve Badalament, the founder and CEO of Innovation Drums, came up to Northampton from Detroit to personally tweak and fine tune White’s kit and make sure it’s roadworthy.

Chick Corea at the rehearsals in Northampton, MA.

“Hey everybody, this is Lenny White, on the road with Return To Forever, version IV. I’m up in Northampton, Massachusetts and we’re rehearsing for a tour that starts on the 24th.

“It’s kind of exciting, because we have some new members in the band. It’s Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and myself—the same rhythm section—but we’ve added the famous violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, and a great guitarist, Frank Gambale. This is my first opportunity to play with Frank. He used to work with the Chick Corea Elektric Band, and now he’s in this version of Return To Forever. Frank is a real student of music and has played in a lot of different contexts.

“It’s nice. We were doing some interesting things today, and I think what is really important is that we’re all open to explore different types of musics, and can include those in what we do. It’s fun to be able to do that.

“Jean-Luc’s addition brings another kind of musical element, and orchestration-wise it adds another flavor to some of the older RTF compositions, so we have new sections we’ll be doing. We’re playing a few tunes from the Romantic Warrior album and going back to No Mystery—not playing the tune “No Mystery,” but material from the album.

“We might play a few new pieces, too. We’re debating that right now. See, the situation is that we’re going to go out in Europe, and at a lot of these festivals we only get a certain amount of time to play, so we’re getting together music to do that. When we do shows on our own, we’ll probably expand it a lot and maybe play some of the newer pieces of music.

“We’re more seasoned. All the guys are getting along really well. When we did the Australian tour we only had a couple days to rehearse, and we went out and just hit it. But now we’ve rehearsed more, the music is settled. And it’s always great playing with my friends. It’s special. I think people are really going to like it.

“We’re like the Rolling Stones of jazz. In terms of jazz-rock music, we’re the last band standing. It’s true!

“But I believe what we have to offer is basically from the traditional jazz approach. We incorporate every other kind of music. Some of the bands that were playing, and were around after us, [Return To Forever disbanded in 1977, toured briefly in 1983, and then reunited for a world tour in 2008] were specialists. They specialized in a certain kind of thing. It was great, because they had big followings. But for us to be able to endure this long, we’ve changed perspectives on many different things, and all of us have played and been involved in a lot of different kinds of musics.

“What we’ve done with this particular Return To Forever is to bring in other people who have other kinds of experiences, bring them into the Return To Forever experience. It’s expanded, and I think the perspective is so wide that we could go on and play forever.”

Stanley Clarke and Jean-Luc Ponty hanging out in Northampton.

Stanley Clarke, Jean-Luc Ponty and Frank Gambale during the Northampton rehearsals.

All photos courtesy of Lenny White

You Say You Want a Revolution (We All Want to Change the World): Bitches Brew Live, or How Miles Davis Saved 21st Century Jazz

2011-05-11T01:18:00.000-07:00

Bitches Brew was recognized as the proverbial “shot heard ’round the world” within weeks of being released by Columbia Records in April, 1970. In his musical choices--particularly the electric instrumentation, radically new editing approaches, and recent personnel changes--Miles had set off a fiery explosion that continues to reverberate throughout jazz. A good number of critics have spoken violently against it and still do to this day. Whether they were annoyed or confused by his new direction in music, it’s a case of no harm, no foul. It’s all good. The relentless hue and cry has helped introduce millions of people to jazz through the work of what Miles called the “best damn rock and roll band in the world.”

But until just this last February, no one but a small handful of people had ever heard that band play.

Not live. Certainly not recorded. Not whole tunes, or beginning-to-end performances of contiguous notes or phrases. The only people who had heard them were those fortunate few in May-June 1969, a time when the working band “played to a lot of half-empty clubs,” Miles said later in his autobiography.

Neither could you have heard this band if you had been one of the musicians or engineers, “live in the studio” at Columbia a few weeks later. Miles used the cavernous space and spread the players out, setting them up in a circle so that he could stand or move around at the center like an orchestra conductor and cue the musicians, stopping and starting them by pointing or using other gestures while the tape rolled. In some ways, he was less like a conductor and more like a film director shooting scenes—helping to facilitate what he, and more particularly, producer Teo Macero, were about to do. As the editor, Macero (with help from Miles) sliced and diced all the recorded takes to become part of a grand, interwoven and interconnected whole that bore only a resemblance to its original parts. Joe Zawinul, one of the two pianists on those sessions, is said to have walked into the Columbia offices one day after the album had been released, and asked what the music was that was playing on the PA… only to discover that he was listening to—but not recognizing—Bitches Brew.

No album was ever more aptly titled. Just the same, once all the editing and mixing had been done, the final version’s astonishingly beautiful form was groundbreaking. Despite not adhering to standard recording conventions, it soon became one of the fastest selling jazz records ever, and even more surprising (at least to many industry people) it was accomplishing what hadn’t been done on such a grand scale in many, many years: it was making new jazz fans by the score. Its commercial success, that rarity in jazz, elicited predictable outrage from the Jazz Police who recently had been fond of pronouncing the Death of Jazz—which made no difference to the young rockers who were listening to it, unless it made them feel even hipper in defiantly buying a copy.

Many millions have heard the legendary recording since then. But ardent fans and contrarian critics alike—neither present at the moment of inception—had all necessarily relied on producer Macero’s recombinant versions of what was recorded August 19-21, 1969 (the extent of Miles’ involvement in the editing and mixing is a matter of debate, and is beside the point). For 42 years, the legions who never heard the band play a complete tune had needed to content themselves with little more than rough bootlegs and the voluminous anecdotal lore about that original band’s performances.

Sure, there had been occasional glimpses of Miles’ embrace of funk and rock in his ominously heretical departures from the Church of Orthodox Jazz on 1968’s Filles de Kilimanjaro, and 1969’s In A Silent Way, recorded in February of that year. But for curious listeners, the mystery had always been that first cannonade, fired but never heard, by what the unrequited had dubbed the Lost Quintet. Columbia’s release of At Fillmore and many years later, Black Beauty (recorded live at Fillmore West) and Live at the Fillmore East, March 7, 1970: It's About That Time, gave listeners an idea of what the music eventually evolved into, but, with the subsequent personnel changes and eventual transformations in the material, could never answer the question: What did “the best damn rock and roll band in the world” sound like at the beginning—rough, ready and untamed by expectation? With Bitches Brew Live (Columbia/Sony Legacy, 2011) we finally have the answer. It is the first professional recording ever made of that aggregation. And for fans of historical symmetry, it was made, appropriately, on the same stage where rock’s supreme iconoclast, Bob Dylan, had first performed with Paul Butterfield’s electronically amplified instrumentation in 1965, in the cosmically blessed city of Newport, RI.

With the opening three tracks of Bitches Brew Live we can now hear, at last, the jazz revolution’s Battle of Lexington, the black powder musket reports that signaled the most dramatic changes in jazz since Jelly Roll Morton’s Black Bottom Stomp. Like those militiamen, Miles and company would soon face stern criticism from the starch-collared loyalists of the established order. And on this particular Saturday afternoon they were not only were out-numbered, but short-handed: when he and drummer Jack DeJohnette, pianist Chick Corea and bassist Dave Holland took the stage on July 5^th, 1969, Wayne Shorter was stuck somewhere in traffic. But like the impassioned revolutionaries that they were, the truncated outfit rose to the occasion and, as a quartet, performed what are probably the most exciting, adrenaline-charged versions of “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” and “It’s About That Time/The Theme” ever recorded. “Sanctuary,” minus Shorter, gets short shrift, and at a subdued 45 seconds long, was probably used as a musical interlude, a cool-down after the athletic burner they had opened with.

The CD’s six other tracks are from the Isle of Wight, the last recording ever done with this same Lost Quartet of Miles, Chick, Jack and Dave. Wayne is gone again, this time for good, replaced for the time being by Gary Bartz, while Airto Moreira uses his cuica to enhance the music’s feral other-worldliness, and Keith Jarrett noodles on a little Fender Contempo organ. The Quartet’s the thing. You may have watched in astonishment and listened to this performance on the DVD Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue (Eagle Rock, 2004) but until you hear these newly remastered versions, you really haven’t heard all of them. This audio recording’s fidelity blows it away.

Suffice it to say, one by one, all serious histories and analyses of Bitches Brew and this band of mischief-makers will be amended or re-written as people listen to these three Newport tracks (as well as the remastered Isle of Wight tracks, to a lesser extent). Hearing these recordings captured in the earliest stage of creative development is going to change everything. Weary completists who can’t believe there could possibly be anything more to hear, need to file it in an entirely new category. Everything we’d heard until now was New Testament. Bitches Brew Live is the Book of Genesis. This was the revolution.

II. "In revolutions the occasions may be trifling, but great interests are at stake – Aristotle’s Politics, Book 5.

A year before those pivotal Columbia studio sessions, on a night in August, 1968, Miles Davis and his friend Philly Joe Jones were in the audience at Ronnie Scott’s storied club in London, there to see mutual friend Bill Evans (with bassist Eddie Gomez and drummer Jack DeJohnette) perform. Between tunes they began commiserating.

Both were feeling a little out of sorts. Times had been tough for jazzers, tough enough that wild rumors were swirling, the most famous involving McCoy Tyner: supposedly, after leaving the august company of John Coltrane, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, he had descended so far down from Mount Olympus that he’d begun playing support for Ike & Tina Turner, and when that didn’t pay the bills, driving a cab. It turns out neither were true, but such is the power of myth that these apocryphal stories have persisted. Times were indeed tough.

The year 1968 had much in common with 2011. The United States was a nation at war, which was not only hell, but very expensive. Combined with the spiraling costs of the ever-expanding social programs of the day, the Viet Nam war had created runaway currency inflation. Jazz artists were having a harder time than usual getting customers to open their wallets and come see them.

To make matters worse, despite Philly Joe’s nonpareil drumming skills, the UK Musicians’ Union was preventing him from playing while he held a teaching job in the Hampstead section of the city. Miles and his Second Great Quintet (with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams and Wayne Shorter) were working and selling a few records, but not in the volume Columbia had come to expect from their prize racehorse in years past, and certainly not in numbers comparable to the rockers. Not even close. “…jazz music seemed to be withering on the vine, in record sales and live performances,” Miles said in Miles: the Autobiography. “It was the first time in a long time that I didn’t sell out crowds everywhere I played.”

Problem is, his situation with his record company was uniquely different from any other jazz artist’s. He not only liked to take royalty advances and live well, Clive Davis and Columbia, who were unable to bear the idea of their prestigious icon leaving for greener pastures at another label, had always been willing to accommodate him. In the process they had run up quite a bill together. But that’s how Miles had always rolled, and would continue to roll his entire life. Driving his yellow Ferrari, playing brilliantly lyrical runs on his horn, assembling and leading the best musical talent in the world, all had snuggled together into adjoining chambers of the same heart that beat harmoniously beneath his breast. Art and commerce were component parts of the life he’d chosen, and contrary to popular fiction, he’d understood free enterprise long before he met Clive Davis. The problem in 1968 was that the fickle, unruly world of popular taste had all but left jazz for dead.

The difficulty was part economics, and part sociology. The older, more mature jazz fans were becoming very conservative with their money, less inclined to go out to a jazz club, whereas their carefree children were embracing the Beatles and other British invaders, madly spending their allowances on rock & roll records and shows.

Miles and Philly Joe had been left out. Just as a writer needs readers, a musician needs listeners. No musician ever spent more than two seconds pondering the philosophical quandary that asks “if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?” Because the answer is, “of course… but who cares?” If a trumpeter blows his horn and no one else hears it, he blows the note again. The real question for him is “how do you get that guy in the forest to hear it?”

Something had clicked as he watched and listened to the young bassist playing in pianist Pat Smythe’s trio onstage, a young Brit named Dave Holland. Before Bill Evans’ trio could take the stage for the second set, the germ of a conspiracy had glimmered to life. Miles sent word to Holland through Philly Joe that he was interested in hiring him, and left for the States.

It can be difficult to grasp the kind of power Miles Davis had while acquiring players. It was this simple: Miles got whomever he wanted. He didn’t particularly mind taking someone from another leader—in fact, it was almost a mark of distinction for the cuckolded band leader that Miles had taken his protégé. He was the best known and most successful leader in jazz. He knew he had much more to offer to a musician than just a regular paycheck, that his was the premiere gig at the leading edge of the jazz frontier, and there was hardly a musician in the world who would ever consider turning down an offer to work with him. Two weeks later, Holland, who had steady work with Ronnie Scott, playing with various bands who came through the club or in the support acts, got the word that Miles wanted to replace Ron Carter and needed him to get on a plane to New York for a show in three days.

Which he did, of course. Next, Miles asked if his drummer Tony Williams would track down fellow Bostonian, pianist Chick Corea. Corea’s recording for Blue Note a few months earlier, Now He Sings, Now He Sobs (Blue Note, 1968) was unquestionably brilliant, and anyone who had heard it knew his grasp of abstracted harmonies and rhythmic invention were mind-blowing. There was an upcoming gig and Herbie Hancock, on his honeymoon and stuck in South America, was confined by a doctor and told he couldn’t fly back until he had recovered from a case of food poisoning. Miles, in his famously Machiavellian way, viewed this as a fortuitous, natural juncture. Herbie had been recording his own projects and mulling the idea of getting out on his own. It was time to change gears. Several of them. Chick got a call from Tony (himself on the way out of Miles’ band to start his own band, Lifetime) who found his friend in a San Francisco hotel working to support his family by playing accompaniment for Sarah Vaughan. Could he get on a plane? Fortunately, Bob James was available to take over the job and Chick was on the first flight he could get.

Both arrived. Neither had ever played with Miles or even met him, but revolutions are like that. Neither had ever played an electrically-amplified version of his instrument before, either. It was time for new directions in music. It was time for jazz to rock and roll. Miles knew it.

III. “You say you'll change the constitution/ Well, you know/ We all want to change your head/ You tell me it's the institution/ Well, you know/ You better free you mind instead.” – “Revolution,” John Lennon

George Wein knew it, too. Since 1954 he had been successfully mounting the Newport Jazz Festival, but like the eponymous folk festival that sprang from it five years later, its ticket sales had been falling off. For awhile, after seeing the reactions to Dylan’s infamous appearance, he’d been a bit shy about showcasing amplified music, but this reluctance was overcome in 1969 by his urge to sell tickets.

There they were, jazz’s biggest promoter (Wein had also created the Playboy Jazz Festival in 1959) and its biggest band leader, trying to find a way back into their own game. In the Bitches Brew Live CD’s excellent liner notes, Michael Azerrad describes how Miles had forsaken his usual practice of staying on a rented yacht anchored nearby while waiting for his set during the annual event—performing when it was time, then getting back on board and sailing home to NYC afterward—but instead, this year remaining through the entire weekend festival and, Wein is quoted as saying: “He watched every group and he watched the response of everyone in the audience, who got the most applause, what music they were playing.”

What makes this comment so significant is who the bands were that Miles was watching. “Bebop, a revolutionary music in its time, had been absorbed into the mainstream of jazz. . . Rock was happening,” Wein told Azerrad. So in addition to Herbie Hancock, Roland Kirk, Art Blakey and Dave Brubeck, the promoter had booked an extensive selection of rockers—Janis Joplin and Johnny Winter, Brits like Jeff Beck, Jethro Tull, Ten Years After and John Mayall, plus funksters James Brown and Sly & the Family Stone.

“Be careful what you wish for,” as the saying goes. On Friday, July 4^th, in a preview of what would unfold six weeks later at Woodstock, the show featured an almost entirely rock & roll lineup and drew 25,000 people, 10,000 more than had ever attended a previous Newport Jazz Festival performance. By the end of the weekend, the estimated attendance of 80,000-90,000 would nearly double the festival’s previous record, overwhelming the tiny harbor town of 37,500. So unprepared were the townspeople for anything but small, polite jazz audiences, and so disruptive were the crowds (thousands of unticketed attendees reportedly crashing fences and/or swarming a nearby hillside, some starting fires, mixing it up with security personnel, etc.) that the local city council feared a riot, and after the Saturday event’s problems asked Wein to cancel the Sunday night performance of the festival’s putative biggest draw, Led Zeppelin. Unnerved by the chaotic situation, Wein acquiesced and announced the shore story that one of the band’s members was too ill to perform, and canceled them. But when Jimmy Page, who felt Newport was an important gig for the fast-emerging band, refused to go along with the ruse and insisted on appearing, Wein reversed his position a few hours later. Thousands of disgruntled attendees had already packed up and left after hearing of the earlier cancellation, but Led Zeppelin took the stage and performed just the same. They, their fans and Wein all shared various hard feelings about the experience for some time to come. Wein would never attempt such a thing again and, in fact, would return to a strictly jazz format eventually and move the program to NYC in 1972. All’s well that ends well, though. In 1981 Wein returned the festival to Newport, and there the elder statesman and the oldest and grandest American jazz festival have ever remained.

Miles had watched the entire spectacle unfold, and couldn’t have been more intrigued with what he’d seen. He and his associates had been playing the new material for a couple months prior to their show Saturday afternoon, but when he took the stage it was with a renewed sense of purpose and urgency. After soaking up rock acts for three days, all his suspicions had been confirmed. He’d never copied the work of other artists, and he wasn’t about to start. He and his band were at this festival to play something no one had ever heard before. It wasn’t jazz and it wasn’t rock. It was jazz/rock, right at the cliff’s edge.

Six weeks later, on the morning of August 19^th, 1969, less than 24 hours after Jimi Hendrix’s last notes had echoed across the hills outside Bethel, NY, Miles would bring these same musicians together again (with Wayne Shorter returned) plus Lenny White, Juma Santos, Don Alias, Joe Zawinul, Harvey Brooks, Bennie Maupin, Larry Young and John McLaughlin at a Columbia studio and commence recording Bitches Brew.

So when you hear his horn come in on “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” at Newport like he’s a fire-eater blowing propane through a Bunsen burner, know that he’d had an epiphany of Miles Davis proportions. He’d assembled an elite band composed of the heaviest hitting players he could find on planet Earth. Stories vary on the kind of direction or instruction Miles might have given these three young men that day--he never was inclined to have long chats with his musicians. But, when you first hear them start to kick it this hard, you’ll know for sure that they’d come to rock.

IV. Bitches Brew Live at Newport

Remember when you first heard the term “jazz/rock,” and the images it conjured of a big, ass-kicking rock and roll backbeat? Didn’t hear much of it. There were rock rhythms, yes, and there were jazz melodies and harmony. But there wasn’t much of that howling explosion from your diaphragm as it pounds your nervous system and takes over fibrillating your heart.

The first thing you’ll hear on “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” the opening tune, is the unison bass line, heavy on the downbeat, Corea on his Fender Rhodes and Holland on the double bass (not well amplified, better on headphones) but the first thing you’ll probably sit up and take notice of is Jack DeJohnette’s drums, coming at you like a cross between a crazy flying saucer and some high speed, three-engine Japanese locomotive getting the train to run hard and run on time, pistons pounding.

About the time you’re feeling the polyrhythmic assault DeJohnette is laying down, you’ll slip back to listening to the infectiously rock-hard bass line Corea is crafting with Holland, its obvious deconstruction of Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child” chugging incrementally into a syncopated funkiness, until the whole band is so tightly ratcheted into the groove that it’s necessary to start releasing the tension with solos. Wave after wave of them, Corea plays so aggressively that he’s almost daring Miles to jump in. Which the boss does, time after time, answering the pianist with blasts and showers of upper register sparks. The two of them go after it like two musical athletes, feverishly running, pouncing, leaping faster and higher and never exhausting their energies or imaginations.

In years to come he would emerge as the leading exponent of all things Fender Rhodes, as he transformed the corny rock-n-roller’s toy into an electronic Steinway. Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul, Jan Hammer, all of them were listening to everything Corea did with it. No one who ever heard him play “La Fiesta” or “Spain” on those early Return To Forever recordings will ever forget it. But no recording (and likely no live performance) before or since, is preparation for exactly what you’ll hear him doing on the three Newport tracks. There have been are a lot of Chick Coreas. This is not the one who comps politely as other players take their turns, or insinuates himself unobtrusively into the musical conversation, taking a tasteful 16 bars for himself here and there; neither is this the flame-throwing technical wizard whose solos weave and soar through the atmosphere, leaving a contrail of stunned silence. Here he has become the hub of the wheel, the center of the band. Miles’ band. His fury and intensity are directed at attacking the music with a force that seems to well up volcanically through his veins, pouring out his fingers and wrapping around Holland’s and DeJohnette’s frenetic rhythmic structures and enfolding Miles—the axle of the flywheel on this machine--who is playing like a brilliantly talented surfer awakened from a dream, only to discover he is atop a terrifyingly mountainous wave.

Miles must have been blown away by this rhythm section. The three of them were welded together, a sovereign union. Earlier in the summer Holland and DeJohnette had joined Corea in recording the monumental Is sessions for Blue Note, a couple hours of freely improvised musical explorations that foreshadowed the kind of work he and Holland would do together in Circle a year later. But as connected on that Newport stage as the three of them were, harmonically abstract and rhythmically complex, they remained in a kind of synchronous orbit around Miles, who recognized the opportunity to let it fly fast and rock hard.

Shorter’s absence was an important part of atmospheric conditions that made this perfect storm possible. His influence on this unit was so great, it couldn’t have been otherwise. Under normal circumstances his soprano sax would have provided an alternate solo voice to Miles’, and the two of them would have been out in front of the rhythm section to a much greater extent. Their interplay, as witness any occasion when all five of them performed, was a defining element. The total effect of the quintet with Shorter involved emphasized a kind of wandering lyricism and tended to utilize subtler rhythms. Without him on this night, Corea necessarily had to step up as a soloist and play more with Miles, which altered his role in the rhythm section dramatically. His comping has a different set of harmonic values, a different feel, his oftentimes intellectual, Bill Evans-like touch replaced by an utter lack of restraint in the way he just goes full out. Holland is playing in such close cooperation with Corea, and in such similar timbral regions, that it is often difficult to tell his acoustic bass’ soft sonorities and the round, oak-barrel plangencies coaxed from the Fender Rhodes apart. That may sound like a bad thing, but it is not at all. On this particular day at Newport, Corea’s rental piano sounds like the Rhodes Mark 1 Stage Piano, which could be attached to an external amplifier for an aching, fat-bottomed resonance and lovely pipe organ fidelity in lower registers. If you’ve ever stood next to a propane tank or cistern and given it a sharp, openhanded slap and heard the cavernous, whale-deep utterance—he’s getting that sound out of it. Holland knew what to do with his own big, upright wooden whale in that contralto-contrabass range, and between them they were making sounds with oceanic depth. DeJohnette is playing like he has four hands, creating a percussive tsunami full of pounding surf, undercurrents, and riptides that have enough tonal range that he, too, is supporting additional orchestrational weight.

And if you listen to the trilling and double-tonguing Miles is doing, it is plain that he has joined the rhythm section himself. Nothing invigorates a virtuoso like another’s virtuosic performance. Miles is so fired up to play that he takes the same tack as Corea. Either because of Shorter’s absence or in spite of it, Miles assumes a second solo voice. The energy level on his solos is breathtaking, and every time he hears the abstracted blues harmonies or syncopated block chords Corea is engaging Dave Holland with, he leaps in with his own in ways that are even more melodic than many other nights with this band. There is an aggressive enthusiasm for the rhythmic drive of the piece that is unrelenting. No one stops. No one lays out. No one maunders. This is balls-to-the-wall musical upheaval.

This was the beginnings of “the best damn rock and roll band in the world,” the rhythm section from hell.

The dynamic reversal of “Sanctuary,” the second piece, is the clue to what Miles’ plan had been for the set from the beginning. Re-arranged and electrified, subdued, slowed down, it’s approached by him and his rhythmnists as a calm, cooler breeze than usual, using it for the release it offered musically to the audience, and for the relief it meant for the musicians. The intensity of “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” had been so great that it’s possible no other piece in their repertoire but “Sanctuary” could have been used to follow it and fill the need so aptly.

Indeed, this version of the tune without the presence of the author changed the dynamic of it. On a typical night Wayne Shorter and Miles had a variety of approaches for it… They could exchange ideas in the many ways a duet allows. Miles might play under him harmonically as he soloed, or he might anchor the root of the chord himself, as he did later in the Copenhagen (seen on the digitally restored DVD included in the Bitches Brew 40^th Anniversary Edition) and let Miles attack his solo more aggressively. But in all instances, the title of “Sanctuary” was a forecast of the change of pace in the performance.

As they went into “Sanctuary” this night it’s clear that they really did view it in the spirit of its name. One easily visualizes Corea, Holland and DeJohnette all pulling out their towels and drying off, lighting cigarettes, shaking out their hands and loosening their shoulders and necks from the workout they’d just been put through. The basic melody and composition are there, but the quiet sanctum of this place is underscored as an artistic rest, a compositional pause, and feels like the musical equivalent of a back stage conversation. Each of them solos, not too hastily, in a way that somehow de-emphasizes the solo and simply contributes to the overall sound as each comps and plays fills in the same spirit, for a soothing, ambient effect.

The serenity of “Sanctuary” segues somewhat mysteriously into “It’s About That Time/The Theme,” the third and final Newport track. Within moments DeJohnette is revving up the engine with rapid-fire snare work. Corea is twisting the dials and making his Rhodes emit resonant, metallic snaps, and when Miles signals that “It’s About That Time” he starts throwing down fistfuls of syncopated block chords that make the wobbly electric keyboard sound like a big, fat Hammond B3, playing rhythms with a drummer’s sensibilities, a la Jimmy Smith (whose Newport performance may have inspired Corea the previous afternoon) in deep counterpoint that rolls along in waves, while DeJohnette’s snare fills ride inside the curl of the thundering surf as it crests and breaks. With Holland girding the bottom harmonies, they’re back at their rocked out pace, bluesier and less complex than they’d been on “Voodoo,” in a groove so fat I wanted them to stretch it twice as long.

V. The Isle of Wight

This same rhythm section made their final appearance with Miles’ working band in front of approximately 600,000 people (double the estimated audience at Woodstock) at the Isle of Wight Festival on the 29^th of August, 1970. Jack DeJohnette would stay with the unit for a little while longer, but Chick Corea and Dave Holland had given notice of their intention to move on and devote their full energies to the free jazz collective they had formed called Circle. This group, whose talents also included saxophonist/multi-reedist Anthony Braxton and drummer Barry Altschul, had already signed on with the visionaries at Blue Note and had already recorded the material that was eventually released as Circling In and Circulus (and possibly Circle 2: Gathering as well, whose liner notes indicate it was recorded on March 17, 1971, seven months later—unlikely, in my mind, because they were touring in Europe at the time.)

Much has been said about the performance at the Isle of Wight. Shorter is gone, replaced by Gary Bartz. This was the last performance of that Lost Quartet consisting of Miles plus his three rhythm nationals, Corea, Holland and DeJohnette, the end of the story for “the best damn rock and roll band.” For the trip to the other side of the pond, Miles had also brought along Airto Moreira and Keith Jarrett. Airto (who says Miles never did formally hire him to work in the band) provided lots of exotic polyrhythms and ethereal sound effects, so his inclusion with this group makes sense. I’ve never known what to make of the meandering little filligrees Jarrett is playing, but they don’t often intrude. Again, the Quartet’s the thing.

But that brings me to the salient feature of these last six tracks on Bitches Brew Live. If you are an aficionado, you have already seen the DVD of the full performance and feel you have heard them. I thought as much myself. This is because I have grown to dis-trust, dis-miss, dis-regard and otherwise diss nearly any CD of a recording pitched by the record company’s marketing people as “re-mastered” or “re-mixed.” Any audiophile knows that the original recording cannot be improved. Enhanced or sharpened or sweetened, yes. Changed, no. “Improved?” By digitally sampling the analog recording? Reissues are most often a re-invention of the wheel for the record label, and hopefully a payday for the artists and/or songwriters... which isn’t a crime, but they often are a lesson in leaving well enough alone. Until very, very recently, the original mastering and mixing usually were much superior to whatever could be produced by digitizing and messing with it.

So the big news on the last six tracks of Bitches Brew Live, taken from that Isle of Wight performance—in actuality, one long suite of tunes and an un-segmented medley-style continuum… are FANTASTIC. If ever there was an argument for re-issuing a recording, this is it. The fidelity on this set of tunes is startlingly better than anything you have heard before, and would be reason enough to acquire it. Richard Seidler and Michael Cuscuna (who has made a career fashioned from labors of love, including those Blue Note sessions in 1970 with the freely improvising Holland and Corea) and the people employed to do the mastering, have taken a curatorial approach to the task of putting this package together. Like those steady-handed art restorers who gave us back the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, their decisions will be analyzed and criticized for some time. But not by me. It was like hearing a new recording, different from anything I’d heard before.

By the bye, in answer to the question, “How much did Miles want to rock?” the answer is that he was slated to have a meeting to discuss a recording project with Jimi Hendrix while he was in old London town for the Isle of Wight festival, but it didn’t happen, and three weeks later Hendrix was gone from this mortal coil.

VI. Final thoughts, un-answered questions (stupid and otherwise)

1. Did Miles “sell out” or incorporate musical forms popular in his day?

2. Is much of the music he recorded from Filles de Kilimanjaro forward an embracing of the culture around him, not an artistic prostitution or a fatally flawed compromise?

3. Did Louis Armstrong really say: "Jazz is music that's never played the same way once?"

4. Did Miles’ love of the popular music of his day—James Brown, Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix—heartfelt, instead of a sign that he had joined Darth Vader and crossed over to the Dark Side?

5. Is there no real reason for the critical backlash against jazz/rock except for the fact that it made money for a few people?

6. Did Duke Ellington really say jazz is “freedom of expression?” And when that wasn’t enough, did he say of jazz that “It’s all music?”

7. Is it true, as is hinted at in Miles’ autobiography, that he and Columbia Records president, Clive Davis, and later George Butler, talked about the future of jazz sales, in particular, his sales and the hundreds of thousands of dollars he owed Columbia, and how he might approach a balancing of the books?

8. In those conversations, did Clive Davis suggest to Miles that his (Miles’) enormous affection for rock and roll and funk might be a good avenue to pursue in his own musical endeavors and artistic expression?

9. Did Clive push and cajole Miles into going along with the idea of letting the rising star and promotional genius, rock and roll’s newly-crowned impresario, Bill Graham, book him into larger venues that held larger numbers?

10. Has Sony Legacy probably got a vault of un-issued Miles Davis recordings that they intend to mine for eternity?

I love this discussion.

My own answers to all the questions I listed are either 1) yes, 2) I believe so, or 3) I hope so. I certainly hope all of those things are true. I personally want jazz artists to think of all kinds of ways to make a living with their artistry, make all the deals they can, and sell as many records and tickets as possible. I want composers to be paid all their royalties, and musicians to get paid well for every bit of their work. Because what I want most of all is for jazz artists to keep making jazz.

Drummer Bobby Previte, whose 11-piece group Voodoo Orchestra devote themselves to the music from the Miles’ Bitches Brew period, answered many of these questions about that seminal music from an artistic viewpoint for an interview with Matt Snyder in the December 1997/January 1998 issue of 5/4 Magazine, in which he said about Bitches Brew:

“Well, it was groundbreaking, for one. How much groundbreaking music do you hear now? It was music that you had that feeling you never heard quite before. It came from another place. How much music do you hear now like that? It was about, you know, a great freedom in music. There was a lot of risk taking in that music, there was a lot of soul in the music: Three things that I feel are very lacking in today’s music.”

The questions Previte didn’t answer in that interview were addressed last year when the Bitches Brew 40^th Anniversary Collector’s Edition was released, and one critic got an unexpected reply from Bob Belden. Belden, a fine musician and producer and one of the world’s key curators who have made sure we still have a jazz recording tradition in the 21^st century, had labored long and well with Michael Cuscuna to produce these recordings for reissue, only to have some people dismiss them as unimportant or worse. His response to one reviewer, published as a comment on the jazz music website AllAboutJazz.com on 11/22/2010, got me to smile because of its forthrightness. Mr. Belden’s epistle is an excellent statement about Jazz, Economics, Miles Davis, how Miles helped to keep the art form viable, and how jazz musicians pay their bills. Jazz Economics 101 is not taught in college for a good reason: no one has written a textbook yet. But when I ran across the note from Mr. Belden, I determined that the elusive textbook’s foreword had been written. Here are a few excerpts:

“Miles was well aware of the need for companies to release all of the music. He was proud of his tenure at Columbia. HE WANTED EVERYTHING TO COME OUT in order to prove the vast nature of his mind. He made deals up to the day he died for unissued music.

“Miles recorded music and let the company determine the LP configuration. He was not concerned about sales as he 'owed' Columbia hundreds of thousands of dollars well into the 1970s as his royalty rate was 2¢ per side, upped to 6¢ in 1971. It remained at 6¢ until the late 70s, when George Butler, fearing Miles would leave the label, upped the rate to 9¢ per side, or 18¢ per LP. Do the math.

“Miles was paid $5000 for Kind of Blue. Coltrane and the rest $160!

“Each musician on "Bitches Brew" made a total of $215 for the 2-LP set. Union scale.

“As far any alternate takes, again, Teo Macero made the decisions not based on anything but how Miles sounded. It was his opinion that determined what was issued and what was not.

“What about "Fun" (composed by Gil Evans and the original title was "Gil's Waltz"), "Circle in the Round", "Directions", the alternates from "Milestones". If any other band had made those tracks their own the would be considered geniuses.

. . .
“Now think for one minute about the concept of a Large, Multinational Corporation with absolutely no real interest in jazz music to allow us to treat Miles like Mozart and create an overview of a body of work at the level that we did. Unprecedented.”

VII. Epilogue

These recordings were made in 1969 at the Newport Jazz Festival and in 1970 at the Isle of Wight. I am eternally grateful to Michael Cuscuna, Richard Seidel, Reice Hamel, Mark Wilder, Mariana Triana, and Donna Kloepfer for pushing this through. These fine people knew the value of their work. If they had backed off from the task because moldy figs and other killjoys had condemned Miles Davis’ post-1967 oeuvre, claiming his estate was just filling the coffers with another re-issue, we would never have heard these recordings. The only chance we ever had of hearing the best damn recording of the “best damn rock and roll band” would have never happened.

So I hope Sony Legacy sells tons of copies of Bitches Brew Live and stuffs their bank accounts with money and declares record profits... and then keeps right on issuing more music. I hope the Miles Davis estate is enriched. I hope a miracle occurs and every working jazz musician makes at least twice as much money this year as last.

In the current economy, most jazz titles sell fewer than 500 copies. Not 500,000, but 500. A big established artist might sell as many as 10,000. Let that register for a moment. Released in the spring of 1970, Bitches Brew was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America in May of 1976, but it was 27 years later, on September 22, 2003, before it earned a platinum record for selling one million copies. Kind of Blue had made it to the same mark by 1997 (and has sold even more vigorously since), but both achievements happened long after Miles had died in 1991. These are unquestionably stellar feats for jazz recordings. But… Rihanna’s album Loud was certified platinum two months and a week after its November 16, 2010 release, on January 25, 2011, in the midst of a worldwide recession. That fact might make you sad, it might make you cynical, but it makes me glad, because she helped to keep the recording industry alive long enough to release Bitches Brew Live a month later.

In the long run it is Michael Buble who keeps the Frank Sinatra estate in business, as much as the other way around. If Miles were alive today, he would go back stage, give Diana Krall a big hug and thank her for what she does with “Fly Me to the Moon” and “Cry Me a River.”

And she would thank him for “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down.”

Casey Abrams: New American Idol Contestant Is a Messenger With a Jazz Message

2011-04-17T10:13:00.000-07:00

Before last Wednesday, I was like more than a few music fans in my instinctive dislike of the American Idol phenomenon. Cheap and showy, lowest-common-denominator entertainment, it was created in the same terrifying cauldron that Fox's 1989 Cops voyeurism and MTV’s 1992 Real World success originally inspired, and which has since produced Survivor, Big Brother, Fear Factor, America's Next Top Model, etc., in addition to permutations like Glee, in a long term strategic response to the 1988 WGA strike, whose effects no member of that union would ever have expected or desired. Like other detractors, I’ve consistently mocked the boardroom mentality that produces this low-cost, writer-free “reality” programming, or writer-lite “unreality” programming in which the writer is a show runner’s joke designer or transcriptionist.

True, like every other person on earth, I’d seen YouTube clips of Simon “Legree” Cowell and read about his bounteous bank account, watched the feel-good videos of tenor Paul Potts’ “Nessun Dorma” and Susan Boyle’s “I Dreamed a Dream.” Pop culture occasionally has its moments.

But in spite of these musical high water marks, I had dismissed the lot of them.

Then last Wednesday, all these prejudices and qualms were washed away in one astonishing tsunami of incredulity as I watched American Idol contestant Casey Abrams, a chubby, red-headed Jewish kid from Idyllwild, California as he accompanied himself on the upright bass and sang “Nature Boy,” the Eden Ahbez standard originally penned for Nat “King” Cole in 1947. Not only sang it, but killed it.

I was floored. I thought, this is American Idol? What have I been missing? Fortunately my wife, a devoted fan of the show, knew the answer(s) to my question(s).

Fan or not, you’ll please forgive my clumsy grasp of the competition’s rules and all the rest of the American Idol culture. I have some catching up to do. Simply, it’s a contest that begins with big un-televised auditions in which the field is winnowed down by a three-person panel, followed by a second phase during which, week by week, Fox TV televises a ten-week round of live performances, during which the contestants are either kept in the hunt, or eliminated, by means of millions of fans’ votes that are submitted online, texted and phoned in immediately following the broadcast. The panel of three judges exerts its influence only in the beginning audition stages, except in one rare instance—the rules state that once per season, if the panel considers a contestant has been voted off unfairly, they can override the popular vote and reinstate the musician. As you might expect, the second-biggest media buzz the show gets each season is when an extremely talented person is unexpectedly eliminated by the voting. The biggest buzz (next to when the final winner is announced) is when the judges find themselves in total disagreement with the vote and can’t do anything about it.

Which happened two weeks ago, with a beautiful, hugely talented ballad singer named Pia Toscano, at one point the odds-on favorite to win it all. When the vote was announced, the studio theatre crowd booed. The judges all blew their diplomatic cool and exploded in resentful anger. Her fellow contestants stared in disbelief. Tom Hanks tweeted: “Don’t have an IDOL habit, but how could the USA vote Pia off? I may be done for the season!” Newspapers made it front page news.

But fortunately for Casey Abrams, the judges couldn’t rescue her only because they had already used their one discretionary veto a few weeks earlier on rescuing him.

Jazz fans the world over should take notice. Jazz musicians should rejoice! Why? Because as soon as Casey’s love of jazz had been validated by this group of three successful professionals, the tide turned. There was no more holding back. He knew this was his hour to shine.

“I don’t think we’ve ever had a musician as talented as yourself,” Randy Jackson told him. The elder American Idol statesman/judge, a producer, manager and bassist who’s played with everyone from Herbie Hancock and Billy Cobham to Bob Dylan, Jackson is joined on the judges' dais by singer/actress Jennifer Lopez and Arrowsmith’s Steven Tyler.

With their vote of confidence he has forged ahead, fearlessly demonstrating show after show exactly what Jackson had enunciated.

So fearlessly, that perhaps my favorite moment so far in all this new Idol pastime came in one of the backstage film clips the show uses. It is a very revealing look at not only this guy’s strength of character, but his artistic integrity and commitment to his music. In the clip (which you can see momentarily, if you haven't already), he is being coached by heavyweight record producer Jimmy Iovine, who is arguing with him over his song choice for the upcoming performance. Iovine is encouraging him to do Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” and quite actively discouraging him from considering “Nature Boy.” But no one who eventually saw Abrams’ performance will ever doubt the artist’s decision to go with his instinct. “It is so hard to find a song that defines me as an artist, and this week, thank God, I have a song that I really just love,” he says in response to Iovine’s criticism, “and the thing is, I don’t want to lose myself in this process.”

There’s Casey Abrams, treading on the world stage and getting seriously Big Time, professional advice from a producer who has worked with everybody from John Lennon and the Raspberries, to Eminem and Lady Gaga. But instead of taking the advice and singing the Collins tune, which he considers would be the safe--but wrong--path, he follows his heart.

Gulp.

That night he went out on stage and absolutely tore it up with “Nature Boy.” Killed it like you've rarely heard it done since Cole and Sinatra were doing it. Once again the panel of three judges couldn’t contain themselves, and effused and enthused over his performance, and the crowd went crazy for him. It was clearly the most artistic performance of any so far. Had he taken Iovine’s advice, we never would have heard him do that highly idiosyncratic, unsafe, uncommercial, but crazy beautiful version of “Nature Boy.”

Or heard what came next.

Thursday April 14th, the night following this triumphant performance, he showed what a real jazz artist he is. There have been many great jazz players over the last hundred some years, but the best have always been defined by their ability to amplify and enhance what they do in their collaborations with others. Miles Davis… added to John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderly, Bill Evans, Jimmy Cobb and Paul Chambers results in a Kind of Blue. Throughout his earlier performances Abrams had shown a clear understanding of this, but this particular Thursday he really showed it in a duet with fellow contestant Haley Reinhart.

American Idol is broadcast on back to back nights, as I’ve now learned. On Wednesday the musicians perform pieces competitively and the fans vote. Thursday’s program (in American Idol culture, Results Night) consists of a drawn-out, dramatic disclosure of who is still alive in the contest and finally who’s been dropped, punctuated by live performances from a mixture of well-known guest artists and some of the contestants themselves.

Meet Haley Reinhart. From the beginning it’d been obvious she has tremendous vocal abilities: beautiful, bright tone, sharp technique, great range, and power to burn. But she had been all over the map in her song choices. The week previous she’d impressed the judges with her version of Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” but she had left me cold, very cold. Not because of anything technical. Not even because she couldn’t do a blues rasp, because she could. Because her heart wasn’t in it. Worse yet, her soul wasn’t in it. If you happened to be around when Janis Joplin was singing, you’ll remember she arrived like a fiery comet. It’s tempting to say she was a white singer who sounded like she was black, but the blues aren’t about race. They aren’t just about specific notes or flatting certain intervals. The blues are about feeling something. It didn’t seem to me she could feel it. The worst part of it is, a couple broadcasts earlier I’d heard her do Bill Mack’s “Blue,” the tune he’d written in the early 1960s for Patsy Cline to record, but hadn't had the chance. Because of Cline’s untimely death, he’d held out hope of some day recording it right, in 1997 finally giving it to the supremely talented 13-yr-old LeAnn Rimes. They won a Grammy with it. The problem, for me, with Rimes’ nearly perfect impersonation of Cline, was that it sounded like... an impersonation, an imitation. But a few weeks ago when I heard Haley Reinhart doing “Blue,” I was across the house, not even watching the program, and when I heard her singing the chorus I thought it was Patsy Cline and raced across the house to stand in front of the TV and listen to her. Patsy Cline’s singing isn't the same as Bessie Smith's, but it's as authentic as the blues gets. Like Joplin, she laid open her heart and soul when she sang, and for just those few moments, so did Haley Reinhart. I hope Bill Mack was watching.

So… Last Thursday when I saw Haley Reinhart of Wheeling, Illinois, join Casey Abrams as he sang the opening lines of “Moanin’,” I held my breath. I knew instantly that Abrams would be going for the glory, but uncertain which Haley would show up. The song, written in 1958 by pianist Bobby Timmons for Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers (a killer assemblage which included Lee Morgan, Benny Golson and Jymie Merrit) was so popular that after the eponymously titled LP was released, the classic Blue Note recording became forever more known as Moanin’. To longtime jazz fans the tune is amongst a small handful of the most recognizable ever recorded. That’s a lot of jazz and blues tradition for two kids to roll into a song with.

As it turned out, a third Haley appeared, and this one was so fired up and filled with the jazz spirit that she was shooting sparks. She and Casey were howling, growling, harmonizing and singing the blues with such commitment that when it came time for a quick round of scatting they just fearlessly scatted. On live television. On American Idol. Who knew?

And it was their fiery, boisterous chemistry that did it. Casey Abrams, jazz messenger, had taken Haley Reinhart’s wandering eye and focused it straight at the pinnacle. Instead of two American Idol contestants standing next to each other, what we got to see was two artists and three talented backup vocalists collaborating in a most intimate way, as they dusted off a classic 53-year-old jazz standard and made it relevant to millions of people who had never heard it before (it’s true—when you look at some of the YouTube video upload titles, you’ll see what I mean: one of them is given a Gen X cultural frame of reference with the title “Casey Abrams: Why Don’t You Do Right (Jessica Rabbit Song).” But that’s okay. Call it anything you want. I’ll take that many people hearing "Moanin'" for the first time any way I can get it.

Who knows what we’ll see next Wednesday? These are live performances on live television, so anything can happen. What I do know is I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Does it bother the jazz elitist in me that I'm looking forward to seeing the highest-rated program on television? No. Do I think jazz does better when it is marginalized, or marginalizes itself and stuffs itself uncomfortably into a corner with other musical forms that are not a big part of popular culture? No. For one, jazz was once the most popular music in our culture--the first Gold Record ever awarded was for Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo Choo" when 1,200,000 copies of the 78 had been sold. For another, even in times when other forms have been more popular, the separation from jazz has been but a very thin, porous membrane that allows the musics to migrate back and forth between genres. John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" and Miles Davis' "Someday My Prince Will Come" were arrangements of Disney movie music, some of the most popular music of the day. Jazz has always borrowed proudly from popular culture. It's a pleasure to see someone borrowing some jazz.

This has been a remarkable year so far. It was just two months ago that Esperanza Spalding won a Grammy for Best New Artist, the first time it’s ever happened for a jazz musician. This alone would have signaled 2011 as a year of momentous change. But now we have a young jazz artist blowing people away on American Idol as he paves the way to a big career. Could this be a banner year for jazz and popular culture? Or is that reading too much into Esperanza’s or Casey’s accomplishments? After all, sea changes in popular musical taste really are difficult to forecast. Remember when Norah Jones won five Grammys while selling two million (on its way to 10M) copies of Come Away With Me in 2002? Remember how many people saw that coming? The execs at Blue Note probably still keep their oxygen tanks and defibrillators next to their desks. No matter what Jimmy Iovine predicts will happen, there will be plenty of surprises for everyone.

This could be the year of the jazz bassist!

* * * * * * *

Casey Abrams singing Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put A Spell On You”

Casey Abrams singing Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia On My Mind”

Haley Reinhart singing Bill Mack’s Blue”

* * * * * * *

RTF IV Hymn of the 7th Galaxy Tour : First Stop, Australia

2011-02-28T03:28:00.000-08:00

Earlier this month the newly re-constituted jazz/rock supergroup Return To Forever kicked off its RTF IV Hymn Of The 7th Galaxy world tour with two weeks in the land Down Under. Jean-Luc Ponty’s superb violin has been added and Al DiMeola’s guitar has been replaced by Frank Gambale’s.

All five musicians in RTF IV possess famously world-class chops, but getting players who have the technical prowess to do the job has seemingly never been an issue for Chick Corea and his various outfits called Return To Forever, now or ever: his own technique, sharp ears and advanced skills as both a composer and leader have given him a reputation as a rainmaker and kept him in the company of the world’s best jazz musicians since the beginning. Even in those early days, in November of 1971 when they were a nameless band booked for a gig at the Village Vanguard on the basis of Chick’s name, the personnel included Stanley Clarke on bass (who has been the bassist in every edition of RTF), Horacee Arnold on drums, Hubert Laws on flute and Flora Purim doing the vocals.

But that’s all history. It’s also really beside the point.

In this band, technique is a given. Chops are a requirement and just a stamp on the passport into the group. Every member of RTF IV can stun you with a 16^thor 32^ndor 64^th note run or play a jaw-dropping solo, but the real question is, what does this new configuration of musical talents mean in practical terms?

In a recent phone conversation with drummer Lenny White, he told me it means a high level of musicality. Which sounds simple, but in fact, is the result of a complex weaving of the sum total of melody, harmony, rhythm, texture, dynamics and other elements into a pleasing whole, some of which has been rehearsed and some which is improvised on the spot. Collaboration is the thing. It is measured by the aesthetic results. Musically, the real creativity and fun begins when the all the component parts come together and complement each other. It’s fine for a musician to have a big ego, as long his level of admiration and respect for his musical collaborators is just as big. It’s not as easy as it looks. How many artistic relationships formed in the 70s and 80s have lasted into the new millennium? How many are still friends, and are writing new material? Exactly.

RTF IV is the real thing, organically grown, not another all-star grouping which looks good on paper but which, like an All Star team full of big name players, has the marquee value needed to sell tickets but no real life in it. So another word White used to describe this astonishing lineup—Chick Corea, p.; Stanley Clarke, b.; Lenny White, d.; Frank Gambale, g.; and Jean-Luc Ponty, v.—was “maturity.” As in, possessing the qualities of cooperation, wisdom and judgment one could expect from people who have been at this game for awhile, plus the musical breadth of knowledge, the understanding of the idiom and its history, that can be used to exchange meaningful musical ideas every night. As an example, he said that one of the surprises about the addition of versatile Frank Gambale was what RTF could do now with the blues. Long an admirer of the talents of former RTF band mate/guitarists Bill Connors and Al DiMeola, White has the ears of a producer (he used them to co-produce Stanley Clarke’s recent Grammy winner Stanley Clarke Band on Heads Up Records) and appreciates what Gambale’s musicianship has brought to the band. His enthusiasm for the unique possibilities that come with the guitarist’s addition was obvious. Despite what he characterized as “not much” available rehearsal time before they started their tour, he said the results were “magical.”

The only other dates announced so far by booking agent Ted Kurland are two in France next July:

07/07/2011 Return to Forever IV
Hymn Of The 7th Galaxy Tour Vienne Jazz Festival
7 Rue du Cirque
Vienne
France

07/14/2011 Return to Forever IV
Hymn Of The 7th Galaxy Tour Theatre de la Mer
Route de la Corniche
Sete
France

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Sydney opera house 15 Feb 11

Leonard Feather demonstrates the blues

RTF IV Hymn of the 7^th Galaxy Tour official video

Photo Credit for shot of RTF on stage at the Sydney Opera House: Ed Pozza of Canberra Jazz Blog

The Ten Best Moments at the 53rd Annual Grammys

2011-02-21T00:28:00.000-08:00

Before this year’s Grammy awards are incorrectly written off as a series of acrimonious disappointments and bizarre twists, it's important to quickly note several very good things that happened.

Not that it’s easy to overlook the Grammy for Record of the Year going to a country band’s tune that could well become subject to a plagiarism suit over the changes borrowed almost note-for-note from the Alan Parsons Project 1982 “Eye in the Sky,” (George Harrison was successfully sued for less) or the bewildering award of Album of the Year to a collection of aging-teen angst clichés that so successfully extinguished the buzz of the evening’s festivities that when the recipients enjoined the assembled revelers to go home as they played a final encore, their request was entirely unnecessary--tear gas would not have cleared the room any faster.

No question, the sight of a candy-assed media fabrication like Justin Bieber sashaying his way through an engineered Toontown of a recording career, accompanied by pubescent girls and adoring accountants wetting themselves, is not easy to endure (the mere fact that he didn’t win a Grammy almost made the cut for my Ten Best Moments.)

Nor is being subjected to Eminem’s glowering self-pity as he did his rendition of a musical John Dillinger ambush, attracted to the glow of Staples Center by the prospect of seeing his own latter-day Myrna Loy… only to be disappointed to find Lady Gaga there instead, her pale-but-faithfully energetic impression of Madonna being sucked skyward by the tornado of popular taste.

But those were just annoying interruptions. Although your cynicism could make you want to pour yourself a strong drink, the only real cure for resenting another’s success is to succeed yourself. Instead of feeling defeated by a force of nature, Jeff Lynne declared in 1971 that his Electric Light Orchestra would pick up where the Beatles had left off. How big an ego does that require? One big enough to keep you at it until you succeed. John Lennon later admiringly called ELO the Sons of the Beatles… though they never won a Grammy, that's almost as good. (There will be no further discussion here of Grammy nominees who should have won.)

Here is my Top Ten List of the egos that were big enough. Thankfully.

10. Jeff Beck, the impossible-to-categorize car mechanic who is welcome in any venue as one of the most expressively versatile electric guitarists in the world, was nominated for 6 Grammys and won three of the most improbable: one for his work on Herbie Hancock’s Imagine project (Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals), one for Best Pop Instrumental Performance for his inspired turn playing the aria from the final act of Puccini’s Turandot, and Best Rock Instrumental Performance for his keyboard player Jason Rebello’s “Hammerhead,” a nifty little jazz/rock homage to Jan Hammer. In accepting his awards at the sparsely attended pre-broadcast Other Grammys, he looked genuinely humbled as he said: “It just proves if you keep going, you might get there.” Couldn’t have happened to a better guy.

9. Beck’s old buddy and fellow jazz/rock pioneer from the 70s and 80s, Stanley Clarke, invited Japanese pianist Hiromi, saxophonist Bob Sheppard and legendary Manhattan Transfer vocalist Cheryl Bentyne, among others, to join him in recording with his working band and producer Lenny White last March at a Burbank studio. That the resulting CD, Stanley Clarke Band, won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Jazz Album, means there’s hope for jazz and jazz/rock. Who knows, maybe even for rock. Nobody today believes that jazz was ever meant for more than 100 people in a dark, crowded club, or that, as the 70s spilled into the 80s, bands like Return to Forever and Weather Report were playing to thousands of people at a time.

8. Something happened as the 80s got underway. Ask some jazz musicians or fans knowledgeable about that period in jazz and you’re likely to get a face, an unpleasant one. When musical instrument designer (and guitarist/songwriter) Roger Linn accepted his technical Grammy, he said “Sometimes I have a hard time explaining to people what I do for a living. I’ve found that the following usually works pretty well. I’ll say, do you remember back in the early 1980s when pop music started using drum machines and consequently lost all of its soul and humanness? Well, I’d say, it’s my fault.” Truthfully, I always think of that time period as being a pop music golden age filled with the innovative outpourings of people like Prince and Thomas Dolby and Peter Gabriel and Michael Jackson. It’s the jazzers who lost their souls in the 80s, when they became desperate to get in on the action and sold out to the New Age money devil. Not that Jeff Lorber and the Rippingtons and Chick and Herbie didn’t make any good music, but the tidal wave of crappy fusion that was spawned almost killed the franchise. In fact, even now the prognosis for jazz’s body politic is shaky, as we scan the horizon for a doctor who’ll discover a cure for the epidemic of quiet recital music and empty clubs. You know you’re still in trouble when the brand name familiarity of standard covers and tribute albums can still beat out original material for a Grammy. Not that there's anything wrong with that (as Seinfeld used to say). You gotta make a buck. I'm just sayin'.

7. When John Mayer, Norah Jones and Keith Urban sang Dolly Parton’s “Joleen” they demonstrated why country music has become such a dominant force in music. The wheel has come all the way around. After Hank Williams and Patsy Cline opened the gates for the group of singers and songwriters that included Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley, they brought with them their passionate love of the black singers like Ray Charles, Little Richard and Fats Domino. At that musical nexus there were no categories where all these popular musical forms could fit, so before there was folk, or rhythm and blues, or country or rock and roll, there was music. Norah Jones and her two guitar-strumming beaus reminded us.

6. I’d never heard of Mumford & Sons before last Sunday night’s Grammy broadcast, but suffice it to say, as they played I didn’t hear folk or country or blues or bluegrass, I just heard music. There is no category that adequately describes their rambunctious, over-the-ramparts enthusiasm for telling a musical story. Sun Records founder Sam Phillips would have listened to these brilliant young musicians and their elemental, high amperage passion and signed them immediately. John Hammond, as he did with Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan, would have signed them with Columbia and personally driven them all to Studio B in his own car.

5. Roy Haynes will celebrate his 86^th birthday next month. You’ll often hear a musician casually say about a fellow player, “He/she’s played with everybody.” But if you ever hear Roy Haynes say it about himself, it will actually be true. When he received his Special Merit Award Grammy, he had contributed to and played with Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Eric Dolphy, Bud Powell, Stan Getz, Sara Vaughn, Jackie McLean, Gerry Mulligan, Art Pepper and Sonny Rollins, as well as younger players like Chick Corea, Gary Burton, and Pat Metheny, and younger players still, like Christian McBride, Wallace Roney and Kenny Garrett. You might say that if the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences couldn’t manage to recognize people like Roy Haynes with Grammys, the awards would have no meaning at all.

4. Cee Lo Green won a Grammy for Best Urban/Alternative Performance for the brilliantly produced “Fuck You.” I have no idea what the other performances were, but frankly, with a bomb like this song it didn’t matter and never will. Arranged with classic mid-70s Motown instrumentation, Cee Lo charmingly was engineered to sound like he’s channeling Marvin Gaye, Al Green and Eddie LeVert as he sings the oldest song in the world. Maybe the funniest, most honest version yet. For his performance at Grammys LIII, Cee Lo dressed up in his most outlandish George Clinton threads, and backed himself with the Muppets plus Gwyneth Paltrow, defusing the dirty bomb CBS felt they had to censor (I’m uncertain if they did, I didn’t read Cee Lo’s lips.) I can’t imagine anyone listening to the song and not smiling. If there is such a person, this video (my nomination for video of the year, amateur or professional, no runner-up) would be the cure:

3. The opening number was an Aretha tribute that burned. It burned so hot that it eclipsed the memory of the 2006 Grammys opener when Sting, Dave Matthews, Vince Gill and drummer Pharrell Williams ripped it up on the Lennon-McCartney tune “I Saw Her Standing There.” Not only did Christina Aguilera vindicate herself after her mnemonically-challenged Super Bowl XLV rendition of the U.S. national anthem, she lovingly shredded “Ain’t No Way” and along with her sisters Florence Welch, Jennifer Hudson, Martina McBride and Yolanda Adams provided monster back-up vocals for each other and totally killed on “Till You Come Back To Me,” “Natural Woman,” “Respect,” and “Think,” among others. If you missed it:

2. Esperanza Spalding’s Grammy could well have been my #1 choice. Her Grammy and my joy at her receiving the award are self-explanatory in many ways. Stunningly beautiful and hugely talented, she is the first jazz artist to ever receive the Best New Artist award. Imagine the YouTube searches on her name the next day! The friendly new Google search engine was completing the word "j-a-z-z" before the searcher reached the second "z"! And how did a jazz artist beat out a tsunami of public sentiment in favor of Justin Bieber? The only explanation is that members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences were listening to the music.

1. How good was Mick Jagger’s first appearance onstage at the Grammys? So good that I have to pick it over Esperanza's Grammy win because in the end, it's not about the accolades, it's not about who's deserving and who's not, the money, the vaporized CD sales or the apocalyptic economy. It's not about the big picture, it's about the little one. Through the magic of music Mick Jagger stripped away every worry and concern and thrust us headlong into a magnificent arrangement full of horns and a humping backbeat, and for that instant in time he captured the moment so completely that it's all there was. One NARAS attendee, an acclaimed singer/songwriter who was seated close enough to the stage to see the sweat on his face, told me of hoarseness the next day from prolonged screams of approval during Jagger’s performance--so severe that singing would have been impossible. The leader of “the greatest rock and roll band in the world,” who had begun his career in Alex Korner’s jazz-influenced Blues Incorporated nearly fifty years earlier, pranced, strutted, and sang “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” in tribute to Solomon Burke, with the fervor and commitment of a born-again rocker preaching to the choir. Like all great performances, the electricity and immediacy came from the artist’s embrace of the crowd in front of him, instead of some imagined international audience that would hear and see it broadcast later. Within seconds he had the audience of his peers in the palm of his hand and revved up to a shouting hysteria. From the moment the spotlight hit him as he stood center stage--back to the audience, turning slowly while his cape was lifted from his shoulders a la James Brown--he took command of the room with the authority of a matador and gave one of the great performances of his lifetime.

Lenny White: Live and New York Hot with the Anomaly Band at Catalina's

2010-08-31T02:00:00.000-07:00

West Coast jazz has traditionally been cool to the East Coast's hot. Dave Brubeck is always pictured in white linen slacks playing an open air concert-by-the-sea, while Charlie Parker is shown popping a Saturday night sweat in his sharkskin suit, squeezed onto a crowded nightclub stage.

The iconography extends to the West Coast audience. Like a glass of chablis, chilled, slow and laid back compared to an East Coaster's whiskey shot, feverish, fast and hard. The stereotypes are simplistic and a bit unkind, but contain a kernel of truth.

Which made the way in which the West Coast tradition was stood on its head all the more fun last Friday, Saturday and Sunday (August 20-22) when Lenny White took the stage with his Anomaly Band at Hollywood's Catalina Bar & Grill.

Catalina's lazy Blue Note-style dinner club atmosphere that has set the tone for the L.A. scene along with Vitello's, the Baked Potato, Jazz Bakery and Herb Alpert's new Vibrato Grill, filling the void created by the disappearance of 50's West Coast club institutions like Shelly's Manne Hole and the Lighthouse, was about to get loud.

Minutes before the first set guitarist Jimmy Herring, the jazz/rock-blues shredder of jam band Widespread Panic fame who regularly plays at 110+ dB in large arenas, voiced his concern for the cocktail-sipping diners seated at the tables in front of the stage. He said he had been fussing with positioning his monitor before the show, trying to find a way to angle or baffle it to save their ears. Then he smiled. The boss had just said it was time to go on.

White smartly started the set with the same high- energy track he uses to open his new Anomaly CD (Abstract Logix, 2010), "Drum Boogie," a funky, full tilt New Orleans- flavored bouncer that started simply with bassist Richie Goods playing a smoothly articulated but hard- plucked line that jolted the song to life like a pair of defibrillator paddles and gave it a hard push that kept it going to the end. When Vince Evans came in, leaning hard on the organ keys and goosing the amperage, the band jumped enthusiastically and exploded into this great set-opener like a vigorous heartbeat.

Before anyone in the band could cool off, the rhythm section of White, Goods and Evans lowered the gear into a range where I've never heard a "jazz" band go. "We Know" is hard, hard, fat-bottomed rock and roll bravura like what Cream and the James Gang did in the 1970's, a song of such auditory impact that Herring's earlier concerns made immediate sense. In truth, the monitors were not revved that high, but the sheer neural impact on the small room of a couple hundred people was of a similar magnitude as stacks of Marshall amps in a baseball stadium. The sound filled every molecule of matter in every corner of the building. And when the guitar solos started flying from Tom Guarna and Jimmy Herring. the deal was sealed. No one would ever confuse what these guys were doing with any jazz they'd ever heard before. This wasn't just jazz/rock, it was jazz/ROCK. This was new.

When the music ended, the stunned audience of Angelenos sat and quivered for a minute. As they did, White grabbed a microphone and stepped out from his kit into the lights and deadpanned, "Welcome to a quiet night of jazz at Catalina's."

After a beautifully serene "Dark Moon," written by guitarist David Gilmore, the band tore into White's magnificently deconstructed and re- arranged composition "Door #3" from his Present Tense (Hip Bop, 1995) which, among other things, showcased the individual talents of the players by letting each take a solo. White's arrangements don't always do this. Gratuitous soloing has overtaken much of mainstream jazz, live or recorded, for reasons of fashion and crowd-titillating commerce as much as anything else, but not White's (asked why, White simply said, "It's boring.") So until Evans opened "Door #3" with a growling, sweetly bluesy Jimmy Smith- like organ solo, his sturdily sensitive comping had not drawn any attention to itself... in many ways, the test of true artistry. But then, did he ever pull the ripcord on his parachute. With a sizzling foundation rumbling under the floor, the guitarists stepped in and began the kind of weaving of rhythm and lead guitar that is only possible with accomplished players (Dicky Betts and Duane Allman come to mind) playing so seamlessly that it sounded like one eight-handed guitarist playing two guitars.

The tune which is probably the heart and soul of this band arrived the next night.
Ushered in by an opening keyboard cascade, "Election Day," no matter where it is placed in the set, is a warning of the storm that is always brewing on stage. Named simply for the day it was written, November 4, 2008, it is in many ways the signature anomaly of White's recently released CD. It is arranged by White in a way that opens it to what only these seasoned jazzers could have made it do. They made it swing. Ferociously. Not only did it thunder, it danced and shook. Each time Goods and the guitars pushed the bridge (reminiscent of the little cadenza at the end Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker") White would push it a little harder from the drum kit, shifting the rhythmic emphasis just slightly until this all-out rocker was sliding and slamming like an anvil on the back of a flat bed truck.. This is energy and muscle not heard since the earliest days of rock and roll, when for brilliant moments the music rocked and rolled.

Properly warmed up, the band launched into a deftly-composed Tom Guarna piece called "If U Dare," a deceptively simple- sounding piece of jazz/rock that utilizes a combination of Lenny White's vigorous drum corps/ rock and roll drumming to set the pace and ethereal jazz chording. His fluid soloing opened up enough room for Jimmy Herring to join in the fun, and was a perfect companion piece to the classic Joe Henderson piece "Gazelle," which White had first performed and recorded with Henderson 40 years earlier at the legendary Lighthouse, along with Woody Shaw, George Cables and Ron McClure. In the sure hands of a jazz/rock composer/arranger (and aficionado) like White, "Gazelle" was transformed by his band into the purest kind of jazz/rock, a description which undoubtedly rankles purists but which speaks a higher language for anyone who has been listening to jazz since Miles worked over James Brown's "Cold Sweat" beat (whose composer, Pee Wee Ellis, ironically, was working over Miles' "So What") on 1968's Filles de Kilimanjaro and has heard subsequent works like Emergency!, Bitches Brew, Sweetnighter, Red Clay, Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy, Birds of Fire or Head Hunters. Pure Jazz/Rock is such a delicately conceived blend that, like a perfect martini, it fills your head as nicely as it fills your senses. White's version of "Gazelle" loped along, gracefully coiling and flexing before each jump but never exerting itself and sounding like it could run forever. In the tradition of Henderson's Milestone recording that produced "Gazelle," In Pursuit of Blackness, White grabbed Guarna and Herring in the dressing room just before they were ready to go on stage Saturday night and excitedly explained a last-minute change in the tune's break. The two guitarists played it together incorrectly once, figured it out and practiced it right twice, then said as one, "we got it." When the band finally played it as the final number of the set, Guarna and Herring ripped it up.

No question, it was the killer tune of the set.

***************************************

For the most comprehensive interview ever done with Lenny White, check the article I wrote for AllAboutJazz.com, "Lenny White: Jazz/Rock Collides Again":

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=37232

**************************************
And as for the big question... by the time you read this, there will be but one more chance to see this band of killer-virtuosi jazz/rockers: November 20-21, the Abstract Logix Music Festival, 2010, to be held at the Lincoln Theatre, 126 E. Cabarrus St. between Wilmington St. and Blount St. in the beautiful southern city of Raleigh, North Carolina. In addition to Lenny White and his Anomaly Band, Souvik Dutta, president/founder of Abstract Logix Records and event organizer, has already confirmed jazz/rock giant John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension, the Jimmy Herring Band, Wayne Krantz, Wayne Krantz (ex-STEELY DAN) with Anthony Jackson and Cliff Almond; Alex Machacek Trio with Jeff Sipe (APT Q258) and Neal Fountain; Human Element (Matt Garrison, Scott Kinsey, Arto Tuncboyaciyan); Introducing Ranjit Barot (India's Best Kept Secret on Drums); and an All Star Tribute to John McLaughlin as the Grand Finale.

L.A.’s Jazz Bakery Still Homeless But Alive This Week at the L.A. Premiere of New Film, “The Anatomy of Vince Guaraldi”

2010-07-29T19:36:00.000-07:00

The Jazz Bakery, one of Los Angeles’ most revered jazz establishments, is still homeless after closing its doors last spring, but it is still alive and living off the fat of the land.

Running a non-profit jazz club that features big national acts and low ticket prices 7 days a week ain’t easy. When your philanthropic landlord dies and the new owner(s) announce they’re turning your club into a furniture store, you need to be imaginative. http://jazzjazzersjazzing.blogspot.com/search?q=ruth+price

What Owner/Chief Bottle Washer Ruth Price has done since May 31 of last year is what she calls a Moveable Feast. Even if there is not a permanent place to hear them, jazz artists line up and play for Ruth’s club wherever it happens to be this week. Regina Carter, Tierney Sutton, Hubert Laws, Mose Allison, Dave Frishberg, John Beasley, Benny Golson and his quartet of Bill Cunliffe, Bob Magnusson and Roy McCurdy, Tomasz Stanko, Antonio Sanchez, Pharaoh Sanders, the list of musicians who support and have been supported since last summer goes on and on. The Jazz Bakery will never die because it lives in their hearts.

This Sunday, August 1^st, the Moveable Feast starts with a 3:00 p.m. wine reception at the Silent Movie Theater (611 North Fairfax, Los Angeles, CA 90036) before the curtain goes up at 3:30 p.m. on the Los Angeles premiere of “TheAnatomy of Vince Guaraldi”, a film by Andrew Thomas and Toby Gleason. The film features Dave Brubeck, Dick Gregory, George Winston, Irwin Corey, John Handy, Malcolm Boyd and David Benoit, among others. Leonard Maltin will moderate a Q & A. Tickets are $20.

The promo I received points out to astute observers that despite the name of the theater, the film about Vince Guaraldi is “definitely NOT a silent film.”

2010-07-25T22:19:00.000-07:00

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ANNIE ROSS!

How is jazz legend Annie Ross celebrating her 80th birthday? By performing this Tuesday (and each Tuesday) night at 9:30 in the Metropolitan Room at 34 West 22nd Street in NYC. Imagine that, at a time in life when ma people are inclined to sit in a rocking chair and sip tea, Annie Ross dolls herself up and does the second set at a swanky cabaret while the swells sip at their martinis and enjoy a style of music that few recall, and many fewer still perform. In Ms. Ross's case, it is a brand of musical magic that only she has ever attained. Or to be fair, that she, Dave Lambert and Jon Hendricks attained. So in a way, it stands to reason that she keeps performing. Anyone who had the energy to write the crazy, swinging jazz standard “Twisted”, full of its harmonic hairpin turns and rhythmic gear changes, and then sing it, could easily feel the need to eschew artistic quietude sing as regularly as she can. There must have been something in the water supply back in the day, because I recently heard from a New York jazz fan that Jon Hendricks has been fairly active performing as well, and that he and James Moody had engaged in "a scat-sing cutting contest that you wouldn't believe" at the Blue Note last year. At the time, Jon was 83 years old and Moody 87...

For ticket prices and directions to the Metropolitan Room:
http://www.metropolitanroom.com/component/jcalpro/view/50/98.html

Annie Ross's career was in full swing long before she began work with Dave Lambert and Jon Hendricks, in 1952 penning lyrics for and performing Wardell Gray's "Twisted." After joining forces in 1957 to create the landmark vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, they were the premiere jazz vocal group in the world. Along with Hendricks and Lambert, she continued to pioneer the emerging field known as vocalese, the difficult but highly rewarding writing and singing of lyrics to already-composed jazz tunes and helped to make this sophisticated form sensationally popular. Various people are credited (or take credit) for "inventing" vocalese, but no one ever took on the bop harmonies rhythms and did it like Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.

An inspiration to singers from Joni Mitchell and Bette Midler, to Cheryl Bentyne and Janis Siegel and Lorraine Feather, Annie Ross is the undisputed champion.

To a musical queen, long may you reign.

Annie’s 1952 classic, “Twisted,” courtesy of YouTube:

And courtesy of wolfgangsvault.com, Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks and Annie Ross live at the Newport Jazz Festival on July 2, 1960 “Swingin’ ‘til the Girls Come Home” by Oscar Pettiford

Happy Birthday, Annie!

Lorraine Feather: On the Road (Less Traveled)

2010-07-21T11:44:00.001-07:00

Lorraine Feather’s live performances are legendary. Her skills as a lyricist, well known to fans of her recordings of Waller and Ellington material, and recent work like her critically-acclaimed new CD Ages (Jazzed Media, 2010), bloom wildly under the stage lights. Where some performers like to glance sideways with short anecdotes between songs, Feather prefers to be a real raconteur and plunge in headlong, punctuating her insightful musical commentary with tales that are integral to the performance.

As Will Friedwald wrote of her performance at the Algonquin in his New York Sun review of February 8, 2008, “Lorraine Feather is expanding the jazz repertoire in her own idiosyncratic way and showcasing the power of composition as much as the power of performance.”

But despite the great press Feather has always gotten for her live shows, she’s not been much of a road warrior of late.

Part of the reason for this has been logistics. After being based in Los Angeles and performing with pianist/composer Shelly Berg, she and her husband Tony Morales moved to the San Juan Islands north of Seattle, while Berg accepted a position as Dean of the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. Literally, they’d moved to opposite ends of the continental U.S.

“I've had something of a hiatus from live performing with Shelly. It's challenging to work things out logistically/financially with us so far apart, but we just booked the Lakeshore Jazz Series in Tempe, AZ for February of next year, and we'll be doing more." Their geographic separation has also been an artistic barrier for her, because in a world teeming with jazz pianists, Berg is that uniquely adept stylist whose vast technique and repertoire have enabled him to successfully channel Feather’s ghostly songwriting “partners” like Fats Waller and keep her tidal wave of stride and lyrical intricacies flowing fast enough and accurately enough to support her in performance. Shelly Berg has been a hard act to follow.

But just this last week the lyricist/singer got together with the phenomenally gifted young pianist, Stephanie Trick, for two days of rehearsal. Already considered by many of her peers to be among the best stride pianists in the world when she was but 21 years old, Trick was invited to perform at the 2008 International Stride and Swing Summit in Boswil, Switzerland and has been invited back again this fall.

Feather described their first collaboration with admiring praise, saying “. . . she not only is spectacular but she learned “You're Outa Here” [Feather’s lyricised rendition of Waller’s “The Minor Drag”] for the occasion, transcribing it herself exactly as Dick Hyman played it [on Feather’s recording New York City Drag (Rhombus, 2001)], supporting the melodic or rhythmic variations I did on the original track .”

The result is that she and the 23-yr.-old St.Louis-based phenom are putting together a stride show “we are going to launch in the spring. Irvin Arthur (iarthur@parkavenuetalent.com) of Park Avenue Talent is booking it.”

All of which portends well for thee and me.

"I'm ramping up to do more live singing. I had a great gig June 12th at Bake's, near Seattle, with two terrific Seattle musicians, pianist Randy Halberstadt and bassist Jon Hamar [doing material from Ages] and will be doing a big band thing with the Spokane Jazz Society on September 26th. Russ [Ferrante, composer of the haunting “The Girl with the Lazy Eye” on Ages and founding member of the Yellowjackets] and I are going to be performing in L.A. together before long.”

If you have the opportunity to see Lorraine Feather perform live in one of these venues, don’t hesitate.

She’s also been hard at work writing and recording a new CD.

"The process of doing a new album, with writing involved, takes about a year from starting the first song to the mastering process at the end for me. I have songs in the works with Eddie [Arkin] and Russell, and there's one that's an adaptation of a piece by the Italian pianist Enrico Pieranunzi. There is a concept, which I'd describe as being on the mysterious and trippy side.”

So it’s good news for Lorraine Feather fans, who can look forward to a “mysterious and trippy” concept album, and a year that will feature live performances in small, intimate settings as well as bigger ones, including a big band romp through her rich Ellington-based material. Dates will be posted as they become available.

Stanley Clarke Returns to the Studio with Hiromi and Saxophonist Bob Sheppard

2010-03-07T06:03:00.000-08:00

Stanley Clarke and Lenny White recording a solo with Hiromi.

Stanley Clarke was in the studio this past week with producer Lenny White to record some sonic pyrotechnics with Japanese pianist Hiromi and guest saxophonist Bob Sheppard. Clarke's working band were also on hand: Ruslan Sirota on keyboards, Ronald Bruner, Jr., on drums, and Charles Altura on guitar. This "fiery" (as Clarke aptly described them) band of young guns play their instruments like thrill-seeking street racers and bring it with more than enough horsepower to support Clarke's high-energy musicality.

The diverse tunes featured on the album will include a nugget from Clarke's and White's days with Return To Forever - although I missed getting to hear them record it, White supplied a clue: "Wait 'til you hear what we did with 'No Mystery,'" he said wide-eyed. "It is rocked-out." Amongst the other tunes is a tribute to the great tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins penned by Clarke, and a tune written for Clarke by his keyboardist Ruslan Sirota.

Producer Lenny White and keyboardist Ruslan Sirota.

Asked to describe his composition, Sirota says "it's called 'Soldier.' It's a very story-like piece. When hearing it, you clearly get the different chapters of the journey: the contemplation, the battle, the realization and the hope, and it's all laid out for the bass guitar."

Balancing the seriousness of that, Sirota noted that the Sonny Rollins tribute "is a funkyfied homage" that he thinks "may very well be the happiest tune Stanley ever wrote."

That's saying something. Stanley Clarke has been writing happy songs right from the start, and has written some of the happiest and most memorable jazz tunes ever recorded. By the time he was 26 years old he had written three of them that were destined to become standards: "Light As A Feather," "Silly Putty" and "School Days."

Here comes another one.

Jazz/rock legends Stanley Clarke and Lenny White.

Contented composer and bassist, Stanley Clarke.

Producer Lenny White.

Jazz/Rock Collides Again: Lenny White's First CD of Original Material in 10 Years Due in the Stores This May

2010-02-21T17:38:00.000-08:00

Drummer Lenny White is set to open the bomb bay doors next May and drop his first CD of original material in 10 years. When Anomaly (Abstract Logix) detonates there will be a big, LOUD technicolor explosion of musical colors. It won’t be quite what anyone expected next. But with Lenny, it never is.

“It’s back to what I used to play. But it’s a little more… rockin’ than anything I’ve done. If people thought Astral Pirates was rock… this is rock. The CDs that are made today are usually more funky oriented—fusion… it’s close to R&B, that kind of vibe. I didn’t want to do that.”

Anomaly is decidedly not fusion, but jazz/rock, with the emphasis on the rock half of the conjoined form. In fact, if jazz/rock is jazz with rock sensibilities, this is rock/jazz, rock with jazz sensibilities.

“It’s a little more of an experiment for me to really go back to playing rock. Roots. It’s got other things, too. But the rock really is… rock,” he continued, his face breaking into a wide grin. “It’s called Anomaly...”

How much of an anomaly is it?

“This album is angular,” he said in his thoughtful, measured way. “It goes in different directions. I was just making music I like to make. It’s probably the first recording I’ve done just of things I like to do.”

Which means rock, as you will soon discover. Unlike many jazzers who came up strictly in a jazz tradition, White grew up steeped in rock and roll as well. It means that when Miles Davis needed another set of drums added to Jack DeJohnette’s to provide textural colors for Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1969), he used Jackie McLean’s 19-yr.old drummer, Lenny White.

It also means opera. Opera? An extended piece on Anomaly is based on a selection from an opera he had been writing for several years. But it isn’t your mother’s kind of opera. He says the passage he performs was written when Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. “It woke me up. The idea is that it’s time to be accountable.” Titled “The Wait Has Lifted the Weight,” he characterized this symphonic work, which features everything from him doing a spoken word introduction to the talented Bernard Wright using his magically wired keyboards to play one of the most inspired “guitar” solos I’ve ever heard, as “a spiritual that is about my roots.”

Another track called “Water Changes Everything,” featuring impassioned vocals from R&B diva Nicki Richards in some exotically glistening world music, means to transport the listener to a new level of understanding, a state of grace, and succeeds.

Another track is a fairly straight rendition of a composition done by White’s old collaborator and friend, saxophonist Joe Henderson, “Gazelle,” done as the purest kind of jazz/rock, an even 50-50 mix reminiscent of those great early 1970s CTI sessions, with hard bop space and rock repercussions.

Yes, the key concept on this recording is the way it keeps coming back to a sharp, rock-centric focus, a hard-hitting kind of rhythmic drive that pushes the listener along, tune after tune, in a visceral, heart-pounding, headlong rush.

Remember the feverish, exhilarating excitement of hearing Sly and the Family Stone’s Woodstock performance of “I Wanna Take You Higher,” or the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter?” Remember the first time you were propelled pell mell through the musical universe created by Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” or Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love?” Remember the seismic energy of the bass as it pummeled you and took over your breathing, and the drums as they overtook your heartbeat?

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Like a great number of jazz fans, I’ve been listening religiously to Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1969) for many years. When he made this revolutionary recording with White and DeJohnette, guitarist John Mc Laughlin, bassists Dave Holland and Harvey Brooks, pianists Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul, and all the other great musicians, Miles had referred to them collectively as “the best damn rock and roll band in the world.” Like a few, I’ve repeatedly listened to the box set of the complete recording sessions, plus every other recording of that virtuosic ensemble that I could lay my hands on. And I’ve listened to a great deal of the music it has spawned. But as profoundly as I love so much of what Miles and many of the others did, I’ve never really thought of it as rock and roll.

But it's undeniable there was a renaissance in jazz that began with those Bitches Brew sessions, after Miles had gotten a running start on Filles de Kilimanjaro (Columbia, 1968) and In A Silent Way (Columbia, 1969). For a dozen years afterward, jazz and rock collided to produce sublime kinds of music no one had ever heard before, music heard only rarely since. The collision of the two forms produced what was eventually labeled Jazz-Rock.

White soon joined his friends Stanley Clarke and Chick Corea and played with Return To Forever, one of the seminal bands that sprang from the Bitches Brew matrix. The new music had the power and volume of rock and roll, but the harmonies and rhythmic approach of jazz. Mahavishnu Orchestra rocked it a little harder. Weather Report improvised it more, and the Headhunters funked it up. All were magnificent artists playing brilliantly.

But, with no disrespect intended for Miles or anyone else involved, I’d never thought of it as rock and roll. So when Lenny had said “it’s rock,” the reality of what he was saying didn’t quite hit me. Not that I didn’t trust him to tell me the truth. Lenny White places great value on communication and is among the more honorable people I’ve ever known – the first time I ever interviewed him I told him to feel free to retract any statement he later regretted making, and his response was: “It’s okay. I don’t say anything that I don’t mean.”

No, the reason his statement wasn’t registering is that I had redefined rock & roll in my own mind as it relates to jazz. Over the years I had developed an idée fixe, a fixed idea, about what constitutes rock and roll, much in the same way some jazz purists tolerantly accepted jazz/rock as an art form but say it is not jazz. On one level this is just wordplay, because the music exists as itself no matter what it is called. The musicians play it well or not. You like it or you don't. But the music is called something and it is discussed. The discussion that blew up when Bitches Brew was released in 1970 became an argument over not only what to call it, but whether it was jazz. Or rock. Or neither one.

Or both. It is jazz/rock. Going back recently to the "cold sweat" beat of Filles de Kilimanjaro and the straighter rock beats of Bitches Brew, I've already discovered a lot of room inside the the word "rock." And thanks to this new recording of Lenny White's, I'm going to keep listening.

Anomaly was recorded last year whenever Lenny had a few hours to spend in the studio. It was a busy time for him, culminating in a world tour with two of his old Return To Forever band mates. Corea, Clarke & White, as they eventually billed themselves (instead of the original Power of Three, which implied that their name was really Return To Before Forever or the Power of Four Minus One) had opened their tour September 2 at the Hollywood Bowl shortly after a brilliant, wildfire-orange sunset. Ten weeks later he and the boys had taken a short break over Thanksgiving, and during a 12-hour layover at LAX on his way to Tokyo to begin the Asian leg of the tour, Lenny opened his laptop and cued up the first tune, “Drum Boogie.” Then he handed me a pair of headphones, put on a pair of his own, and turned up the volume. I was immediately struck by the fattest bass line I’ve heard in years, an ominously dramatic Victor Bailey funk riff that feels like he’s gunning a dangerously hot engine. The explosion that follows goes from zero to 60 in a couple bars and takes off like a nitro-fueled dragster, all tightened and powered up by White’s driving drum kit rhythms. When guitarist Nick Moroch (a veteran of Adventures of Astral Pirates band and several other of White’s recordings) blisters his distorted attack like he’s pouring it through a supercharger, I could scarcely believe my ears.

I looked over at Lenny, who was watching my reaction.

But before I could say anything the next track, “We Know,” had started. The only way I could ever have known this was music produced by Lenny White is that he was sitting right next to me. What I was hearing had the hard, low-frequency bottom of a James Gang or Bad Company recording. Anchoring the rhythm section with him is his friend and frequent collaborator, Stanley Clarke, a very rare bassist whose training on upright bass has enabled him to employ the electric instrument as a guitar and not just an amplified washtub, a bass guitarist who plays his axe like it’s a Stradivarius. Clarke is soon joined by Moroch playing a blazing guitar solo with chords voiced in ways only a jazzer could conceive. A second guitar solo comes from another veteran of White’s collaborations, David Bendeth (known more these days as the producer for bands like Paramore and Breaking Benjamin) who picks up where Moroch left off and puts on a shredding exhibition that goes until the tape stops running. At the end of the tune I took off the headphones and just stared at Lenny for a minute. My astonishment must have been obvious, because he laughed at me. “I told you it was rock!” he said.

So make that clear in your mind. “Drum Boogie” and nine of the other tracks on this CD are the most inspired, hardest driving rock anyone has done in years, recorded by a master jazzman who knows how to hit a down beat. It is also fresh and new. It is not Fusion. It is not updated Prog Rock or sweetened Grunge Rock. It is not re-tooled Metal or juiced-up New Age. It is cranked up, grab-you-by-the-balls Rock played with jazz sensibilities and values.

Jazz-Rock collides again

In fact, this music collides with a force you’ve never quite heard jazzers play before. This is hot, hissing explosiveness, much closer to Jimmy Page or Brian May than Django Reinhart or Pat Metheny. Like a real racing engine, the bone-jarring thunder created by White and his various guests will pin you to the back of your seat.

What makes jazz/rock jump is the rhythms. The key to the unusual musical hybrid is contained quite literally in the drum sticks, so it’s probably quite logical that the genre’s next great recording would come from a drummer. In no other form do the timekeeper’s acute engineering skills play a bigger role in the music’s locomotion, the way the other band members set their clocks. Every member of a rock ensemble hears that downbeat in his head like a hammer on an anvil, but a jazz player is always challenged to play his sophisticated changes over the top of it, and even leave it behind. The band know that any one of them can have a bad night. But if it’s the drummer who is having a bad night, everyone else is in for a bad one, too—no band can be any better than its rhythmic foundation.

Conversely, if he’s having a good night, the gig has a chance to be a good one. It is how the music is built. John Lennon's story of the Beatles' formative period when he and McCartney knew they needed a seasoned professional on the drum kit and went after Ringo Starr, speaks directly to the point. To form rock’s first real supergroup, drummer Ginger Baker recruited a bassist and guitarist to form a trio with people famous for their mutual dislike for each other, but through his leadership and single-minded determination was able to overcome the attendant obstacles and keep Cream together long enough to make history. A short while later it was another drummer, Billy Cobham, who joined forces with jazz’s premiere electric guitarist to create Mahavishnu Orchestra's very rock-oriented jazz. It was soon after that when Lenny White’s phone started ringing.

In late 1972, Chick Corea was mulling the idea of forming an electric band with a rock and roll rhythm section and called White from Japan. He asked his friend from the Miles Davis sessions if he was interested in joining him and Stanley Clarke, to replace Airto Moreira (who needed to return to New York with his wife, Flora Purim, and their newborn child) for an upcoming engagement at San Francisco’s Keystone Korner. White jumped at the chance to play what he knew would be (and has since characterized as) a week of “fantastic music… really great.” On the last night of that fortuitous gig, three other local musicians sat in with them: guitarist Barry Finnerty, plus two players who were soon offered spots in Corea’s newly formed electric edition of Return to Forever, ex-Santana percussionist Mingo Lewis and guitarist Bill Connors. Corea also offered the drum chair to White.

Who respectfully turned him down. He liked the band he was playing with, the large Latin rock band Azteca. Formed by ex-Santana percussionists Coke and Pete Escovedo, this talent-rich group employed 17 musicians, including bassist Paul Jackson, trumpeter Tom Harrell, and ex-Santana guitarist Neil Schon, and had recorded an excellent debut LP for Columbia, Azteca (GNP Crescendo.)

Then a few months later another juicy offer came his way. This time from Herbie Herbert, who was managing some groups around the Bay area and had an idea for a new band he wanted to form with Neal Schon and bassist Ross Valory. What Herbert had in mind was a supergroup, a power trio, and he needed someone on the drum kit with rock and roll power. White was part of the Santana circle, part of the swirl of talent that flowed through that organization and through the band Azteca. White accepted the invitation to rehearse with them, but when it was time for a decision, he said he had to decline. White’s accountant may never forgive him for not taking the job with the band soon to be called Journey, but as the poor bean-counter must know by now, Lenny White has always listened very closely to his Muse.

He’d gotten another call from Chick Corea. Airto was gone. Upon their return to New York, Corea had hired his old friend Steve Gadd, but despite Gadd being a talented and well-regarded drummer, he was not a perfect fit. What was needed for this band was a unique combination of jazz sensibilities plus rock and roll power, precisely the kind White could supply. What he wanted was the drummer he had offered the job to in the first place. Clarke, who was creating the band alongside Corea, also knew White’s wide range of capabilities from the work they had done together in Joe Henderson’s band. Corea had written new material that he wanted to record. This was electric jazz that needed rock’s rhythmic concussion and bluster. And the young guitar player, Bill Connors, was playing like he wanted to un-seat John McLaughlin and Eric Clapton from their thrones. Was he interested?

Lenny White stood at a crossroads. He was in high demand as he stood at the precise point in time and space where Jazz and Rock were converging. It was unlikely that Chick Corea had spent much time listening to the Beatles, or that Neal Schon had heard Kind of Blue more than once or twice. What is important, however, is that Lenny White had.

Soon after arriving in New York, he joined Corea, Clarke and Connors in the studio and they recorded the seminal Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy (Polygram.) Together with Mahavishnu’s Birds of Fire (Sony) recording, these two recordings invaded the airwaves and shook the musical universe. The kids may have been listening to Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, but they were listening to Return To Forever. The bar had been raised to an all-new level of virtuosity and power, and the second phase of jazz/rock, what might be termed Power Jazz/Rock, had begun.

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I’d like to suggest that with Lenny White’s Anomaly, a third phase may have begun. Yes, it’s true that Progressive Rock could legitimately have made that claim. But that was then. This is now. This is new music. Call it Phase IV if you like.

A few quick takes on the different tracks:

1) Drum Boogie – As stated in other words elsewhere, this is high-pressure, rip-it-up funk that Sly Stone and George Clinton, Bernie Worrell, Bootsy Collins will be listening to. I can’t get enough of Victor Bailey’s opening riff and Bernard Wright’s beefy, in-your-face organ work. This tune went straight to my top 10 all-time favorite opening tracks.

2) We Know – Described earlier, but wait till you hear the sublime guitar choir of Nick Moroch and David Bendeth, with Stanley Clarke on bass. There’s great electric guitar, and then there’s electric guitar played by journeyman jazz musicians who can play anything, and have chosen to play rock.

3) Forever – Song stylist Nicki Richards has written the lyrics and stirring vocal arrangement here, and then used her powerful vocal instrument to sing them on this tribute to Michael Jackson. White’s composition and orchestration demonstrate, once again, his skills with writing music for the human voice.

4) Dark Moon – Guitarist David Gilmore’s lilting, swinging guitar work suits his writing on this tone poem, which finds everyone in the band in a kind of expansive, uptown Saturday night mood, ready to hit it and take in the night.

5) Gazelle – Easily one of my favorite tracks on this CD, this has a killer groove that lopes and prances along with the energy and grace of the African antelope it is named after, and features one of Lenny White’s rare drum solos that does just as intended: without presenting a distraction from the other musicians, he advances the song’s concept with rhythmic figures that dance along inside his composition with his signature sense of poly-rhythm and counterpoint.

6) If U Dare – This Tom Guarna composition is played by the same personnel as are on “Gazelle” – White, Guarna, Bailey and talented keyboardist George Colligan. These guys have a naturally complementary sound that seems to allow them to find and hit their stride almost instantly. Featuring Lenny’s one other drum solo on this CD, this tune and “Gazelle” create such a classic jazz/rock sound that they beg to be stretched out in live performance.

7) Election Day – Written in 2008 on election day, this is another metal monster like “We Know” that is a group of untamed jazzers in a rock-and-roll blowing session that just builds and builds, Lenny stomping out endless bass drum variations under the chorus’s guitar bridge that is reminiscent of Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker,” until Moroch and Guarna come in with their Tabasco-hot guitar solos. Along with a triple keyboard attack from Wright, Colligan and Vince Evans, the wall of sound would overwhelm if it weren’t swinging so hard.

8) Coming Down – Just what it sounds like, this is a musical interlude that eases the listener down from a great height, firmly if not always quietly. Tom Guarna’s expressive guitar solo sizzles and Victor Bailey’s fretless bass solo smokes like the embers of a slowly dying fire. This time the White-Guarna-Bailey-Colligan quartet are joined by Bernard Wright and Vince Evans on keys, amplifying one of the nicest jazz/rock sounds in a long time.

9) Catlett Out of the Bag - Lenny White pairs up here with legendary Headhunter drummer Mike Clark for a crazy rhythmic interplay that every funk drummer in the world will listen to and study like a drum clinic. It starts innocently with a straight snare and cymbal figure, but then turns abruptly into a rippling back-and-forth exchange between White and Clark that layer-by-layer adds elements, first with Vince Evans’ keys and then Bernard Wright’s slowing rolling synth bass. When Danny Walsh’s sax comes in with Jerry Z’s organ, and then Tim Ouimette’s trombone, you’ll hear a sweet sound unlike anything you’ve likely heard since those old Headhunter days, and finally when Guarna comes in with his fire-breathing guitar, he blows the lid off and the slow-cooking stew boils over (if you listen closely you’ll hear Guarna play a lick that Jimi Hendrix first did and that Skunk Baxter later did a variation on with Steely Dan...and which he multiplies times ten.)

10) Water Changes Everything – The sounds and textures of far-off thunder and the cleansing downpour of pure water that it ushers in, make this strike a humanitarian chord for me that goes far beyond politics. More fundamental than money, easier to drill for than gold or silver, pure drinking water is the difference between life and death, the make-break point between civilization and barbarism. Writing with Sammie Williams and Rennie Hurst, White employs six vocalists and creates a wall of aural sound that is at once light air and more than big enough to fill the room.

11) Anthem – The title says it. Part heavy metal grandeur, part spiritual, part stadium rock that would look and sound great with space opera light-and-laser show to open a live concert in a big venue.

12) The Weight Has Lifted the Weight – This is an extended blues performed orchestrally and operatically to convey Lenny White’s thoughts about his roots, and his reflections on the cultural paradigm shift that occurred with the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Many times a blues composer will fall into the abundance of clichés we have come to identify with this musical form, but not so here. It is firmly in the tradition without being tied to it. I have seldom heard a composition that struck me with such emotional impact, in large part because of an extended guitar solo -- which, I learned after hearing it, is actually being played by the fantastically talented keyboardist Bernard Wright, on some combination of keyboard sampler/synthesizers that I don’t technically understand. But if perception is reality, what I hear Wright playing whenever I listen to this piece is as much a guitar as it would be if he were plucking strings. Lenny told me he had originally thought of a number of different guitarists for this, Eric Clapton among them, but that from the beginning he had thought Wright would be the best, provided it could be done. Let me assure you, it can be done. This is an inspirational, heart-rending work, best understood in its own terms, as is all great music, and best experienced simply by listening to it. Lenny White and I are both citizens of arguably the last free nation in the world. It is the only nation in modern history to ever have fought a civil war in order to emancipate an enslaved population and then freed them; the only nation to ever have fought successfully to preserve the rights and personal freedoms of anyone granted citizenship, regardless of race, creed, property or station; the same country which, all these years later, elected a black man to the most powerful position of leadership in the world. May God grant that it remain so.

Personnel in addition to Lenny White:

Bailey, Victor – electric and acoustic bass

Bendeth, David – electric guitar

Blackman, Donald – organ piano

Clark, Gregg – lead and backing vocal

Clark, Mike – drums

Clarke, Stanley – electric bass

Colligan, George – keyboards

Evans, Vince – keyboards

Fambrough, Charles – upright bass

Gilmore, David – electric guitar

Goods, Richard – electric bass

Guarna, Tom – electric guitar

Herring, Jimmy – electric guitar

James, Irene – backing vocal

Moroch, Nick – electric guitar

Ouimette, Tom – trumpet, trombone

Richards, Nicki – lead and backing vocal

Thomas, Vaneese – lead and backing vocal

Walsh, Danny – alto and tenor sax

Weeks-Reynoso, Michelle – backing vocal

Williams, Chris – lead and backing vocal

Wright, Bernard – keyboards

Z, Jerry – organ

The Platinum Legacy of Bitches Brew

2010-02-07T16:38:00.000-08:00

This photo was taken during a recent video interview I did with Lenny White (parts of which will be published here on this blog, later in an interview and article and in a documentary film-in-progress... and as soon as I can manage, a snippet on YouTube.) Between the two of us we are holding the platinum record awarded to Miles Davis on September 22, 2003 when his 1969 recording Bitches Brew was certified for sales of 1 million copies. (Thanks for the photo help to Aaron at Bluebird Imaging)

We were setting up lights and cameras in the living room of Vince Wilburn's house to do the taping while Lenny was in town to master his new CD, Anomaly (Abstract Logix) scheduled to be released in May. As my DP, Mike, and his assistant Nolan, raced around getting everything ready, Lenny and I got involved in a discussion of Bitches Brew. From up on the second floor of the house, Vince, who had overheard us, shouted down the stairwell asking if we'd like to see Miles' platinum record that he'd been awarded. The answer, of course, was hell yes...

Miles Davis' record sales were a big topic of conversation in Miles: the Autobiography for a number of reasons, all stemming from the fact that Bitches Brew had sold so many copies. After it was released in 1970 no one at Columbia, not even Clive Davis, had ever seen a jazz album sell so briskly.

Miles fueled the discussion of its commercial ascendancy for years with his claim that the revolutionary recording was the bestselling jazz album of all time. No question, the sales figures were staggering. But in truth, in 1986 -- many long years before his own platinum record was awarded -- the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) had certified Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters platinum. Miles' boast was probably true for a period of time, roughly from April 1970 through the end of 1973. But Herbie Hancock's album Head Hunters, issued in October of 1973, sold at such a rate that it was the first jazz recording ever certified gold by the RIAA -- a mere 6 months after it had been released -- thanks largely to the enormous influence of Bitches Brew on both the buying public and the people at Columbia, who, emboldened by Miles' success, were devoting large resources to marketing the new jazz/rock genre. It took another two years after Head Hunters went gold for Miles' own landmark recording to reach the required 500,000 sales plateau. But in fairness to Hancock's mentor, it would require a fair bit of diligent research to determine, one way or another, what the best-selling jazz album truly was as of 1989-1990 when Miles' autobiography was being written and published.

There wasn't always an RIAA, and even after their arrival as the industry arbiter in 1952, there have been frequent changes in the award criteria. Ten years before the RIAA even existed, Glenn Miller had received the very first gold record as a gift from RCA for having sold 1.2 million copies of his 78 rpm single "Chattanooga Choo Choo". Four years later, in 1958, when the RIAA boys started handing out their own gold records as sales awards, and began establishing standards for such matters, the criteria for a gold record was $1 million in sales. At 1941 prices, that's a lot of choo choos.

But the real problem in corroborating Miles' assertion is that the byzantine accounting methods, like many things about the record industry, have never been particularly transparent. The advent of easily downloaded digital musical files in the last 5 years or so may or may not have made the record-keeping less complex. Frederick Dannen's excellent book, Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business, might have us ascribe the industry's ills these day to its own nefarious business practices and avarice. Though that's a matter for discussion on a different day. As with prizefighting, another industry that places questionable characters in close proximity to large piles of cash, the devil is in the details.

But as is true of all life, including the worlds of music recording and prizefighting, the truth shall set you free. Informed of the most up-to-date, accurately calculated sales figures per the RIAA, Miles would be very pleased. On October 7, 2008, they certified that his own Kind of Blue had sold 4 million copies. And this was a year before that spectacular recording was reissued by Columbia/Legacy as part of the extended celebration of its much heralded 50th anniversary. Miles Davis' Kind of Blue is unquestionably the best-selling jazz album of all time.

As for the most revolutionary jazz album of all time, there can be no doubt that Bitches Brew has had greater impact than any modern jazz ever recorded. Like it or not, it changed not only jazz but blues, and ultimately rock and roll. It changed what was recorded and how it was recorded. Lauded by many and excoriated by a few, it was the matrix for the personnel who went on to play in Tony Williams Lifetime, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, Headhunters and Return To Forever.

Which brings me all the way back to Lenny White. Lenny has produced a most startling recording called Anomaly. Aptly titled. It's more than a breath of fresh air, it is a damned hurricane. We have heard a lot of good jazz/rock in the last 40 years. But while Return To Forever and Mahavishnu Orchestra rocked it pretty hard, this new recording is the first jazz/ROCK I've ever heard.

Check back right here on jazzjazzersjazzing.blogspot.com next week for the whole inside scoop on Lenny White's CD, Anomaly. Like the title implies, Lenny figures this is nothing like what you'd expect from him. Take it from me, he's right. And if you'd like to hear rock and roll played by jazzers, you are going to dig it. A lot.

Stay tuned.

Stanley Clarke Trio: Live at Catalina's

2009-10-18T19:46:00.000-07:00

Last December, when Stanley Clarke gathered drummer Lenny White and piano phenom Hiromi together to do his first-ever trio album, Jazz In The Garden (Telarc, 2009), no one knew quite what to expect.

Hiromi was clearly the new kid on the block, at least in this straight-ahead context. Clarke and White were both veterans who had made their marks before she was born.

The question was whether a fusionista like Hiromi could be brought successfully into a musical world that would measure her not simply by her ability to flash a fancy solo, but her ability to speak the language of an idiom and swing on a groove. Testing her mettle with such high profile players was risking a lot.

After the show at Catalina’s in Hollywood Wednesday, October 7th, she had something to say about that, as she addressed the comment that she had come out swinging with very intense, aggressive energy on the first number of the set. “Three Wrong Notes” is an infectiously melodious bop tune penned by Clarke for his recent CD. It swings fast and hard right from the opening notes. A Monk-like time signature at the break surrounded on all sides by Brubeck-ian bounce. Responding to the comment on her energy level, she smiled and said: “I had to, just to keep up with these two.”

That is the truth. But while she’s got a ways to go before she catches up with “these two”, she’s catching up pretty damned fast.

In fact, she came out hitting so hard on “Three Wrong Notes”, that at times Clarke and White were keeping up with her. And the capacity crowd at Catalina’s went nuts for it. Clearly, the majority had come to see the legendary bassist and drummer, but it was the brilliant young Japanese prodigy who stole their thunder with her rambunctious blues figures and glistening arpeggios. Playing with a ferocity usually reserved for later in a performance, if not the encore, Hiromi tore into her solos with such intensity that it immediately engaged the crowd and fired up Clarke, whose own solo went places the studio recording never would have predicted. Near the end of the tune White traded a series of fours with Hiromi, snappy little snare rolls that kept it jumping. Both were smiling by the end. It was a perfect tune to open the set.

The next number was also from Clarke’s CD, “Sakura, Sakura”, which stands as Japan’s best known folk music in the West. Too well known, perhaps, because pretty as the melody is, by dint of being included on the soundtrack of nearly every Western film ever made about Japanese culture, this low-energy ditty about blossoming cherry trees has become a tiresome cliché. But they were able to pull it off, the clash of Hiromi’s angular, urban-sounding improvisation rescuing it from toxic sweetness.

Just as familiar to the audience was a composition borrowed from the set list for Clarke’s and White’s current world tour with Chick Corea. “No Mystery”, which both have played (and Hiromi has undoubtedly heard) hundreds of times, took off like a shot from the opening unison phrases. In this case, familiarity has bred perfection, not contempt. When the inevitable live CD is released, the first track to hear will be this one. As she took up the melody, her soaring solo lines broke it out into strangely new and beautiful territory. Late in the tune, as a run-up to the composition’s breathtaking coda, Stanley indulged his new fascination with hand drumming on the body and neck of his big upright in an explosive, hammering display that no one who saw and heard will ever forget. Corea will undoubtedly grin widely when he hears it.

After only a few bars of Joe Henderson’s “Black Narcissus”, it was plain that Hiromi was not only keeping up with “these two”, she was stealing the show.

Not that Clarke and White were trying to stop her.

The piano-bass-drums trio configuration by its nature results in a timbral spectrum. The high frequency sounds, naturally, are more audible than the lower frequencies and jump out at the listener. But even if the arrangements gave Clarke plenty of opportunities to play higher on the strings, and White used a lot of snare and cymbal, the trio’s orchestrational design put the solo spotlight on the piano whenever a main theme or melody needed to be stated. By design.

Stanley Clarke’s soloing abilities have been unquestioned for 30 some years. Shortly after he first gained worldwide recognition playing with the early edition of Return to Forever, he set the gold standard for every electric bass player in the world with solo recordings like “Silly Putty” and “School Days”. So when he pulled out his bow and caressed those fat strings on the next number, it was not to tease, but only to please the audience. The tune, unnamed, with the only commentary from Clarke coming at the song’s conclusion when he turned to Hiromi and said “crazy!”, turned into a pleasantly frenzied free-for-all jam that built to a three-way duel between them. The Cheshire grin on Hiromi’s face was evidence of who had won.

White is the kind of timekeeper only an attentive listener will ever notice. Put another way, he’s noticed when he wants to be noticed. He gets the train to run on time, and makes sure the locomotive pulls into the station. At the end of the intro to “Paradigm Shift (Election Day 2008)”, he does both with a startling rimshot. Partisan politics aside, when a black man was elected President of the United States last November 4th, racism was officially rescinded as a national policy. This is a piece of music which calls for the dramatic, and delivers. White, who seldom takes a real solo (he has certainly avoided gratuitous displays in his career, just to show off his chops) took a solo that was mesmerizing. Not the machine-gun barrage of notes that often passes for a performance, but a musical interlude that was as notable for what it didn’t do as what it did. Reminiscent of Max Roach on an introspective evening, he played different parts of the kit in an organically developed melody, with the rhythmic qualities of echoing counterpoint, like water condensing and splashing inside an underground cave.

At the end of White’s solo, a young man’s voice from the back of the room began shouting enthusiastically, “Lenny White! Lenny White! Lenny White! Lenny White!” in a kind of Tarzan-esque bellow. Embarrassing though it may have been for White, one and all of the assembled understood completely. No question.

When the musicians returned for their encore, they did yet another tune from Clarke’s trio CD, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ crooner’s ballad “Under the Bridge”, a big radio hit that had always seemed like a terrible mistake. His arrangement is a curious one, not a deconstruction at all, but a re-interpretation. The familiar piano intro is kept intact while he plays a faithful rendition of the vocal melody line on a fretted Fender Victor Bailey Acoustic/Electric Bass, a sweet-toned guitar that looks like an oversized version of what Gene Autry used to strum on horseback, but which Clarke was able to pop and pluck vigorously. In Clarke’s hands the tune is stripped clean of the ironically lilting but deeply morose pathos of the original’s lyrics, turned inside out and transformed from a junkie’s lament into a swinging, upbeat song of redemption. Here the City of Angels becomes, for a moment, that glittering, mythic sanctuary called Hollywood where a lost soul can find succor for his artistic dreams. Passionately playing his axe like a lead guitarist, Clarke burned. Which of course prompted Hiromi to tear apart the piano line. The abstracted chords she pounded out on the big Yamaha grand were jarring, sometimes harshly voiced as she seemed to utilize all 88 keys in an embrace of a wide spectrum of emotional contradictions as she went further and further outside the boundaries of the compositon, over and over skirting dissonance and disaster, but always returning safely and staying just this side of chaos.

And then White brought the train into the station. Clouds of steam plumed as the brakes hissed and coughed, and the tracks trembled. One by one the three of them stood up, walked forward to stand on the platform and take a bow.

Later, backstage, Hiromi came up to White to say good night and ask if they had recorded the show, and White told her yes, the first set. She had clearly preferred the second, the one that had just concluded, but there would be other shows. White rearranged himself on the comfortable couch and returned to the conversation he had been having. Leaning forward, he tried to respond to a friend’s comment about what Miles Davis had supposedly once said about jazz, that “sometimes mistakes are the baddest shit that happens.” “Music,” White said in correcting him, “is how you get out of your mistakes, how you get from the point where you’re lost… finding your way back from that lost point.”

INTERVIEW - Tierney Sutton: Not A Material Girl

2009-09-08T01:00:00.000-07:00

Vocalist Tierney Sutton discovered jazz while immersed in Russian language and literature studies at Wesleyan University. During her college years she also abandoned her earlier atheism and became engaged in a lifelong study of Man's spiritual nature. She has adopted no halfway measures in any of these pursuits. Though she hasn't yet written lyrics, she brings the passion of a poet to the use of language and lyricism in her singing. Her religious devotion is Dostoevskian in its upright clarity of purpose. And what she does as a jazz singer with the Tierney Sutton Band--pianist Christian Jacob, bassist Trey Henry, bassist Kevin Axt and drummer Ray Brinker, who have been playing together since 1994--is entirely unique on the jazz landscape. As a result she is one of the brightest and fastest-rising stars in the jazz firmament.

Describing her friend and collaborator, lyricist/singer Lorraine Feather said: "Tierney (with her unbelievable band) manages to create something really thought-provoking and original out of material we have heard hundreds of times. Her sense of rhythm was the first thing that electrified me when I heard a cut of hers on the radio one day; it was 'Squeeze Me.' [Pianist] Shelly Berg once described her as a great intellect and I agree. Not many of those around."

Earlier this year the Tierney Sutton Band released the breakthrough recording, Desire (Telarc, 2009).

Jazz (Jazzers Jazzing): I want to start with a discussion of your most recent recording, Desire. It's sort of a departure. You've traditionally been using a spiritual approach to your music, but this one is a bit of a departure, because the theme is a very pronounced and explicit theme. It's hung on a hook, and says: This is a concept. Was there something in particular that inspired this?

Tierney Sutton: I think it's something that's been coming for 15 years in terms of the process of the band, to a certain degree. I've been a practicing Baha'i for over 25 years and definitely approached my work and my singing from a spiritual perspective. But as a band leader, and as a band partner, as the years went on--because my band are now legal partners--it's all [been] done by a collaborative process. This is our eighth album where we collaborate on the concepts, the arrangements--the whole thing.

So that being the case, I would never have imposed my own personal spiritual beliefs and any particular outlook on a project, unless it emerged from the band process. And so, 15 years in, that's what started to happen. Over the last three years, more and more conversations within the band were about how, when we take to the stage, we're basically engaging in a spiritual process. We're meditating. Sometimes at the end of a set we can't remember consciously what happened. And the goal of any performance that we do, or any time we play together, is basically to have a transcendent experience. I mean, that sounds kind of high falutin' but that's really what we're going for all the time. So it kind of became logical to kind of be out with it a little bit. As we started putting a collection of songs together, there were certain songs I really liked, because of what they said.

One is a brilliant Dave Frishberg song that he wrote with Blossom Dearie, called "Long Daddy Green," which Blossom used to say was about the almighty dollar. But I think it's much more than that. The first part of the lyric says "Long Daddy Green is an old, old friend/He hangs around the rainbow's end/dealing out dreams from a potful of fortune and fame/fanning the flame/Hear him calling your name." Now if that doesn't basically nail what's going on in American culture right now, I don't know what does. Even though the song's probably 25 years old, or whatever it is. I just think it's brilliant, and it's completely timely in terms of materialism in western culture. Period. End of story. So I heard that song and I said "I want to record this song."

And that got me thinking. We were experimenting as a band with me doing some spoken word and improvised praying, basically, over some grooves that bassist Trey Henry and drummer Ray Brinker had put together with a guitarist friend of ours. We really liked the results, and we thought we'd like to integrate something of that into our work.

I had this idea that there was this one song that was, to me, about materialism and really brilliant. Then we had this idea that maybe we should bring the spiritual element that we're always talking about, which is in the background of what we do, and put it in the foreground. And so, that's how that began.

J(JJ): I've got to tell you my experience listening to this, because this is... Honestly, I haven't been this bowled over by a recording in awhile. I always look forward to this experience, because when I listen to a recording, I'm always anticipating hearing something that'll just, you know, just rock my world, and this one did.

TS: That's great.

J(JJ): I actually stopped it at the half-way point and walked into the living room, because I was sitting in my office. I told my wife, "I'm just freaked out... I haven't heard anything like this in so long."

TS: Oh, wow!

J(JJ): It's just changing, as I go. It's changing the way I'm looking at things.

TS: That's the nicest thing you could say, that it changes the way you look at things. Because for me, if I really get into a great song... I mean, this is why it's really hard for me to turn away from the great American songbook, and the few songs that stand next to it, which are Frishberg and a few other people that can stand in there.

When you find material that's so pregnant that every time you sing it, there's something else that you see that you didn't see before, that's what you want. Anything that's monochromatic or one-dimensional isn't good enough anymore. And the way that the band plays; when I listen to our recordings I'm always hearing this little counter-thing that Ray is doing on drums that I never realized before. Or some brilliant piano fill that Christian did here or there that actually echoes the lyric I was singing without him even being conscious that he was doing it.

Those layers are the things that keep us interested in what we're doing. So for us, we want to be changed, even if we've played it eighty-seven times. We want this time to be different than any other time, and we want to say "Oh, I just realized here..." Like, for example, on "Cry Me a River," which I'm really proud of in terms of the arrangement. Arthur Hamilton, who wrote it, has heard us perform it and really likes the arrangement, too.

That bridge... the guys come up with this thing where, to me, it's like insomnia and a migraine headache where you're playing the story of this romance gone bad. "You drove me, nearly drove me out of my head/while you never shed a tear/Remember? I remember all that you said.../told me love was too plebian/told me you were through with me, and/now you say you love me." Now, that bridge, everybody's heard it a million times. But to me, that is a really well-crafted lyric in terms of the truth of what you go through in that situation. In real life when someone messes you up, you're awake at night and you replay every conversation that you had. That is the truth.

And some of it is ridiculous. So even the word "plebian" doesn't bother me at all--there was this one strange conversation you had where he said this to you, and you're replaying it, and you're thinking "what did that mean?" So, to have this kind of pulsing, migraine headache kind of vibe going on behind that, it's like they took the emotion that I was feeling singing the lyric and singing the melody, and put it into their part of the arrangement.

J(JJ): I was thinking about that same thing. Somebody else did that--Joe Cocker. The arrangement had that kind of pulsing bass line in it and, you're right, that the sort of discomfort is exactly right. It's not supposed to be a real comfortable thing to listen to, because you're describing something very painful.

TS: Exactly, yeah. And so it's supposed to change us. It's supposed to change us, even in the time that we're doing it. And a lot of times in our arrangements, if they work well, there are things I see in them after playing them for several years, that I didn't see in the beginning. So I'm hoping that that's the way it is.

J(JJ): Well, it sure did it for me.

TS: Well, good! We're delighted. I will pass it along to the Crust Brothers, as I like to call them.

J(JJ): Please do. At the beginning and end of the recording you quote from Baha'u'llah. I've gone back and studied this, but I'm not a student of Baha'i teachings, so I'm not completely clear on it. I think it would be interesting to just kind of sort it out, because it's part of the recording. Could you help me understand a little bit, what those lines are about?

TS: It's really interesting, because the central tenet of the Baha'i religion is the oneness of all religions, and the oneness of all people. So our basic belief is that, you know, the un-knowable essence that is God has expressed himself/herself to humanity through a series of messengers throughout history. So we affirm the holiness of Jesus Christ, of Mohammed, of the Buddha, of Krishna, and Baha'u'llah says he's just the most recent of these same beings, the same spirit expressed to humanity throughout the ages.

Now, because of that, when I was first looking for writings about materialism, I knew that the Baha'i writings were not the only source of those things, so I quite literally read through the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, cover-to-cover several times, and the Koran, and the Old and New Testament. My son and I, for many years, have been doing a multi-faith Sunday school, so I have this big bag that one of the mothers that does it with me, and I, call the Big Bag of God because it's just all these different holy books. We would get writings to share with the kids about different virtues... truthfulness; stuff that everybody agrees on. We try not to get into the big, controversial stuff, but there's a lot that isn't controversial between the religions--you're not supposed to lie, you're supposed to be nice; this kind of thing.

So, my original was not necessarily to use Baha'i writings. I just wanted very pithy, focused statements that would frame the songs in terms of materialism and the soul's nature. And what I found was that the Hidden Words of Baha'u'llah, which is a book that he says he's taken the essence of the spiritual writings of the religions of the past and cloaked them in a garment of brevity. I found that he wasn't kidding, because I really tried to find little, pithy things in all the different holy books. I found the essence there, but they didn't necessarily fit poetically as a short statement that then I could sing "Paper Moon" after. And then, once I had one, there's a rhythm to the hidden words. "O! Son of..." something. "O! Son of Being." Several of the Hidden Words start "O! Son of Desire," and I had already decided to call the album Desire. So I thought, 'Okay, I'm trying to be very ecumenical here, and I don't want to be, in any way, shoving my own faith down anybody's throat, but if these are the writings that actually work, then that's what I've got to use.'

And I was trying different things with the guys on the road. I would read something from the Bhagavad Gita. Sometimes a lot of the holy writings that are from deep in the past might use imagery like... you know, there's oxen and there's yokes, and things that sort of take you out of the moment for a second, even though the essence of what's being said spiritually is exactly the same and equally profound, and all the rest of it. So in the end, I settled on these writings. You know, Hidden Words is a very short book. It's not that long and there are I don't know how many of them, maybe eighty, of these little writings. I realized that the essence of this book is materialism.

The hidden word that I read on the record says, "O! Son of Being. Busy not thyself with this world. For with fire we test the gold, and with gold we test our servants." Then you think of the New Testament, it says it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get to heaven. This idea that wealth and things--material things that we desire--keep us from our true nature. And so, the essence of The Hidden Words of Baha'u'llah, as I see it right now--which may change as the years go by--is that our time here on earth is a kind of spiritual obstacle course, that we're constantly being sucked into desiring things and some of those things are just flat-out bad for us. Sometimes it's really obvious that they're bad for us, and then other times it's not so obvious. In the personal relationship category, that's when it gets really mysterious, because you can really desire a person and it can seem perfect and lofty. But it's never perfect and lofty; it always goes somewhere else.

J(JJ): Which is the theme, at least part of it, in...

TS: "Then I'll Be Tired of You."

J(JJ): Yeah, there's another one, it's "My Heart Belongs to Daddy." It's like this strange dichotomy of what you want, and what you need, something like that.

TS: I think of "My Heart Belongs to Daddy"-- there are different ways to look at it, but I think of it pretty much as a woman who is materialistic and is with a man because he's got money. And she actually is more interested in other men, but she's not going anywhere because he treats her so well. I always thought of it as kind of a tongue-in-cheek, happy little song. But then I thought, 'This isn't really funny.' If you think of the fact that every spiritual tradition seems to affirm that there's more than this, and that this is a finite thing, and the other part is bigger. But what we do here really has a big effect on what's going to happen after, whatever tradition you follow.

Maybe it's reincarnation, maybe it's Heaven and Hell, maybe it's whatever it is. There's some sense of that. So, we live in a world where the society sucks us into basically selling our souls on a daily basis, and it is just not easy to fight that. So, to me, that's what the record is about. We know, we get glimpses. We get glimpses of a higher desire, we get glimpses of something really beautiful, something that is more than just being rich or just being famous. We get little glimmers of it, and that's what "Skylark" is about: "Can you tell me where my love can be?" And then you think of the idea of a skylark as a Christ figure: "In your lonely flight/haven't you heard the music in the night/wonderful music." The people that really represent the pure in this society, suffer. It's just not the place where it's easy to do that.

J(JJ): The rules are set up for the one whose heart belongs to daddy, because that's the paycheck. And speaking of that, this album has got the greatest opening I've heard in years. "It's Only A Paper Moon" has got a set of lyrics that are just mind-blowing. These were great songwriters, but...

TS: It was a long time ago.

J(JJ): ...they weren't essentially philosophers, right? They were songwriters, and they made their livings writing hit tunes. And this song--there's a line that I'm going to quote, because it just knocks me out. You were talking about Baha'u'llah being "clothed in brevity," something like that?

TS: Clothed in a garment of brevity

J(JJ): These little stanzas are like microcosms of the entire album. Like, "It's a Barnum & Bailey world."

TS: "Just as phony as it can be." Think about that; turn on the TV for five minutes. And if you're spending time with an art form that's not phony--that is deep, of someone that is really engaged in craft and process and taking time--and then you see what's prevalent in the world, it's alarming. I mean it's just stunning, and crazy and weird, once you're sensitized to it. But it's very easy to get desensitized to it. Really easy, because it's so prevalent. But it is, it's a Barnum & Bailey world, just as phony as it can be.

J(JJ): But then the resolution is...

TS: "But it wouldn't be make-believe..."

J(JJ): "if you believed in me." That's working on several levels at one time. Because it could be between two people who, if they would just gain some trust and believe in each other, then they could make all this sham and phoniness go away. And it's also that spiritual thing of "Skylark," where it's a person talking to a deity, a soul seeking God, "if you believe in me."

TS: I think ultimately it's always that. I grew up an atheist, basically, and I was an atheist until I was about 18. And even when I first became a Baha'i, I couldn't use the word "God" for the first two-and-a-half-to-three years. And even now, it's hard for me to use it because it's so badly used in the culture, and I think it's cheapened.

The Baha'i definition of God is the unknowable essence, so that right now, right away it takes it out of that "some guy with a beard, and he makes the rules, and smites you, and is nice to you"; whatever. I think when we look at anything that is transcendent--and sometimes, the way that you feel about a person can be transcendent--when it's right, you see the God that's within them, you see the nobility within them. You see something of them that is not phony, and is not part of the Barnum & Bailey world, and you get that glimpse. And you crave it.

Often the attachments that we have, really that's what we're looking for; and we get it in different ways. I've often said that I think that the reason that a lot of the great heroes of jazz fell into drugs is that the transcendence that you get to feel when you're inspired is so intoxicating, so powerful, that you want to have it, you want to have it at all costs. And you can't always have it, night-after-night. So, they would try things, because the pain of separation from that inspiration was so great.

It's a mystical pain, and we have that. We are mystically separated from God, and trying to move toward God, and doing the best we can in this society that has no clue and is telling us the exact wrong things to do. And so we're trying to find it and we attach ourselves to a person, or to a thing, or to money, or to a career; but all of it is our soul trying to get to a better place, trying to get to a higher place, trying to desire something good.

J(JJ): Miles Davis has a night off, and he's missing this transcendent experience from the night before, and there he is, and what's he going to do? What's he going to do? He wants to transcend it, he wants that again, only the culture says well, what you do is load up a syringe and stick it in your arm.

TS: Or even if the culture doesn't say that, the pain, you want to deaden the pain of that separation, of not feeling oneness. We often say a prayer before we perform in the band, and the prayer says: "Oh God, maketh me a hollow reed from which the pith of self hath been blown, so that I may be a clear channel through which thy love may flow to others." I've never said that to a musician that didn't get the concept right off the bat, because what you feel when it's going right is lack of your self. You don't feel your self. You feel one with the other musicians, with the music, with something other than your self. You feel hollow, and free.

Selected Discography

Tierney Sutton Band, Desire (Telarc, 2009)
Lorraine Feather, Language (Jazzed Media, 2008)
Trish Oney, Dear Peg (Rhombus, 2008)
Tierney Sutton Band, On the Other Side (Telarc, 2007)
Grant Geissman, Say That! (Futurism, 2006)
Tierney Sutton Band, I'm With the Band (Telarc, 2005)
Tierney Sutton Band, Dancing in the Dark (Telarc, 2004)
Mark Isham, The Cooler (Commotion/Koch, 2003)
Tierney Sutton Band, Something Cool (Telarc, 2002)
Tierney Sutton Band, Blue in Green (Telarc, 2001)
Tierney Sutton Band, Unsung Heroes (Telarc, 2000)
Tierney Sutton Band, Introducing Tierney Sutton (Challenge, 1998)

Bill Connors Returns to Play with Corea, Clarke & White

2009-06-18T02:03:00.000-07:00

A few hours ago Chick Corea tweeted and facebooked an announcement that he and friends Lenny White and Stanley Clarke will be joined September 2nd at the Hollywood Bowl kick-off gig of their fall tour by Jean-Luc Ponty, Chaka Khan and Bill Connors.

That's right. Jean-Luc Ponty, the great violinist.

Chaka Khan, the wonderful song stylist.

And Bill Connors. The preeminent guitarist Corea originally chose to bring into the band in 1973 so that Return To Forever could "make your hair move" musically like his friend John McLaughlin was doing with Mahavishnu Orchestra. Connors will join his former band mates when they open their tour at the storied Highland Ave. venue in Los Angeles.

At least for one night. When pressed for details of whether he would join them for what has recently grown into a world tour, a man-sized little birdie told me it isn't known yet. Implying that if everything clicked, it could happen.

It could also not happen. It's been 35 years since they last played together. That plus the fact that Connors has made a career out of never making a predictable career move, beginning with leaving Return To Forever just as their stars were rising. They had recently recorded what is arguably their finest electric album, Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy (Polydor, 1973) and were engaged on a successful worldwide tour when he announced he was going to depart. He may well have harbored various disagreements with the direction the band was taking, but his immediate immersion in an intensive study of classical guitar was far and away his aim and the most significant clue to how he conducted himself over the next decade, as he literally re-trained himself to use all his fingers in ways utterly alien to the picking methods used with an electric guitar. Other jazz guitarists like John McLaughlin, Paco de Lucia and Al Di Meola have all advanced their technique and stretched and extended their stylistic limitations over the years, but Bill Connors stands alone in his tireless pursuit of greater and greater skill. Over the course of his career his constant determination has taken him through technical realms most guitarists never imagine. Celebrity and its accompanying paycheck have not so much eluded him as they have been ignored by him; artistic growth has been his raison d' etre.

So this is good news, very good news.

If you live in Los Angeles, treat yourself and see Bill Connors perform with Corea, Clarke and White on September 2nd. It may well be your only chance to see this most lyrical and soulful guitarist play again with these fine musicians, but no matter what actually happens after September 2nd, it will certainly be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Get your tickets soon.

09/02 - Hollywood Bowl - Los Angeles, CA

09/04 - Detroit International Jazz Festival - Detroit, MI

09/05 - Lehigh University - Zoellner Arts Center - Bethlehem, PA

09/07 - Dakota Jazz Club - Minneapolis, MN

09/08 - Dakota Jazz Club - Minneapolis, MN

09/10 - Anthology - San Diego, CA

09/11 - Anthology - San Diego, CA

09/12 - Anthology - San Diego, CA

09/15 - Yoshi's - Oakland, CA

09/16 - Yoshi's - Oakland, CA

09/17 - Yoshi's - Oakland, CA

09/18 - Yoshi's - Oakland, CA

09/20 - Monterey Jazz Festival - Monterey, CA

09/22 - Humboldt State University - Van Duzer Theater - Arcata, CA

09/25 - University at Buffalo - Center for the Arts Mainstage - Buffalo, NY

09/26 - The Royal Conservatory Telus Centre for Performance and Learning Koerner Hall -Toronto, Ontario CANADA

09/29 - Bergen Performing Arts Center - Englewood, NJ

10/22 - Turcoing Jazz Festival - Turcoing, FRANCE

10/24 - Palace Hall - Bucharest, ROMANIA

10/26 - Skopje Jazz Festival 2009 - Skopje, MACEDONIA

10/27 - 50! Jazz Festival Ljubljana - Ljubljana, SLOVENIA

10/31 - Theaterhaus Gessnerallee - Zurich, Switzerland

11/13 - Oosterpoort Main Hall - Groningen, NETHERLANDS

11/27 - Blue Note Tokyo - Tokyo, JAPAN

11/28 - Blue Note Tokyo - Tokyo, JAPAN

11/29 - Blue Note Tokyo - Tokyo, JAPAN

11/30 - Blue Note Tokyo - Tokyo, JAPAN

12/01 - Blue Note Tokyo - Tokyo, JAPAN

12/02 - Blue Note Tokyo - Tokyo, JAPAN

12/05 - Esplanade Concert Hall - Singapore, SINGAPORE

REVIEW: Hubbard / Henderson / Corea / Clarke / White: Echoes of A Hard Bop Era

2009-05-30T15:44:00.000-07:00

(This review will run on AllAboutJazz.com beginning June 2nd, 2009, and will also be archived separately with my other reviews at http://jazzjazzersjazzingviewsandreviews.blogspot.com/)

Wolf & Rissmiller's Country Club, April 7, 1982. Walking forward to the front of the stage, producer/drummer Lenny White held a microphone to his lips to announce the members of the band, beginning with "I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce you to the world's greatest musicians..." A subjective statement, yes, but he had a point.

Four days earlier this same mutually evolved, once-in-a-lifetime band--trumpeter/ flugelhornist Freddie Hubbard, tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, pianist Chick Corea, bassist Stanley Clarke, and White himself--had brought down the house with their show at the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos, California, now reissued on the 2-disc Griffith Park Collection 2--In Concert (Wounded Bird, 2008). This after having recorded two studio albums with the same personnel in the eight preceding days.

A man with a mission, White had selected these veteran players from his own experiences playing alongside them. Not only had he performed with each in a multitude of settings, but each of them had also played with each of the others in various groupings over the years. All were itching to play again in a straight-ahead hard bop context. This was no hastily assembled all-star band. Instead, it was a gathering of five star-crossed collaborators capable of supporting each other so well that they anticipated producing some of the hottest work any of them had ever done. They did not disappoint.

Echoes Of An Era
Rhino Records
2003

First up was a studio album, Echoes Of An Era, a selection of well-chosen standards done the old-fashioned way with mics on everybody, no more than two takes of anything, no overdubs--but departing from the norm by featuring the vocals of R&B siren Chaka Khan. To many in the jazz world's amazement (and delight, for it earned the singer a Grammy nomination) Khan skillfully runs through the paces on a series of Corea's athletically demanding arrangements. First, the Pinkard/Tracy/Tauber standard "Them There Eyes," then the Ella Fitzgerald-esque swoop-and-scat "All Of Me," followed by a galloping romp through Thelonious Monk's "I Mean You" that is full of unison jumps and masterful comping and soloing from Corea, as he does some of the best interpreting of Monk since Monk. The titles are all familiar--George Gershwin's "I Loves You Porgy," Billy Strayhorn's "Take The 'A' Train," Frank Loesser's "I Hear Music"--but Khan's fresh approach is anything but familiar.

Griffith Park Collection
Wounded Bird Records
2008

Realizing the wealth of talent that had assembled, Bruce Lundvall at Elektra/Musician asked for an album featuring just the instrumentalists. The reissued Griffith Park Collection opens with White's "L's Bop," a 60's Blue Note paean showcasing some vintage Hubbard hornwork that evokes those sunny days when Blue Note producer Alfred Lion was repeatedly capturing the blinding brilliance of an era. Clarke's "Why Wait" is a blues that sneaks up barefooted as the bassist strums a slow amble of a walking rhythm, White riding a cymbal step-for-step, Hubbard and Henderson blowing sweet unison notes and somehow managing to create the additional harmonic of a trombone between them, when Corea's aggressive comping style finally gives the meter a push and Henderson punches a full-throated solo with his thick, unmistakable copper-and-zinc tone. A little over a minute into it when White bounces a snare roll that introduces the chorus' arrival like the low roar of an incoming tide, the boys are swinging so hard that you can feel it in your body.

Griffith Park Collection 2: In Concert
Wounded Bird Records
2008

This is a stunning live recording of these same tunes. Magically resurrected from a soundboard cassette of one of the shows during the group's five day California tour, Griffith Park Collection 2: In Concert starts with "Why Wait," this time at a slightly slower tempo that seems to open up the arrangement and allow the soloists room to swing even harder. Like wanderers returning to their home hearth, they play with a mounting sense of urgency and passion as the night wears on, pursuing the music like it was the source of life itself.

Stalwart rhythm aces White and Clarke could both have turned in longer and more frequent solos, but this particular night they were largely content to lay down strong-shouldered support for the incendiary energies of Hubbard, Henderson and Corea--three players bursting with energy and clearly in a mood to solo on some unrestrained bop. Especially Hubbard. (In January 2009, multi-reedist Bennie Maupin got a roar of laughter from a church full of mourners with the opening line of his eulogy for the departed legend. With his trademark Cheshire grin, Maupin said: "Every musician knew that if you were going to play with Freddie Hubbard, you had to be ready to be humbled.")

These guys were certainly ready for something. Without preamble Hubbard starts by blowing a series of runs that sound like cascades of sparks sprayed from an arc welder's torch (it's tempting to imagine the other players wearing protective goggles as they watch him intently.) No question, Hubbard's unbridled, over-the-ramparts approach might have had a daunting effect on another stage, but on this spring evening it leads the charge and sets a standard. Each player's solo invites the next until it is clear that each is ready to take full advantage of this rare opportunity. White's "Guernica" is an unforgettable, hair-raising blowing session that evokes the passionate emotional landscape of that war-torn Spanish city. Hubbard's flashy, headlong bopper "Happy Times" is followed by Corea's tone poem "October Ballade," and then it's back to the races with a hard-driving "I Mean You," and finally a gently swaying "Here's That Rainy Day" with a handful of lyrical flourishes from Hubbard to close things out.

Chick Corea - A Very Special Concert
Image Entertainment
2003

The laudatory band introduction from Lenny White, quoted earlier, was occasioned by their spectacular last performance. Good mobile recording equipment and several cameras recorded the evening's events, so although record company politics/economics have kept Echoes of An Era 2: the Concert (Elektra Musician, 1982) from being reissued on CD, rights acquired from Sony have resulted in two DVDs: Chick Corea--A Very Special Concert and Chick Corea Band with Nancy Wilson--A Very Special Concert (available only as a Japanese import). Re-packaged or hard-to-find imports, oddly titled by front-running labels in pursuit of sales though they may be, these are treasures worth digging for.

In place of Hubbard's horn, singer Nancy Wilson's elastic vocals are added to the mix on six of these tunes. A mature stylist who had sung with everyone from Cannonball Adderley's quintet to the Billy May Orchestra, Wilson's doing tunes so familiar to her that she is able deconstruct and improvise new renditions of them on the spot, achieving a level of slippery bop intensity only possible with musicians of this caliber behind her. Working with the same book of material as they had used with Chaka Khan, these journeymen deftly adapt the songs to Wilson's broader approach and pull them off as self-contained performances.

But as good as they are with Wilson, their fiery explosiveness engages on an entirely new level when these four, limber and lathered as cheetahs chasing a gazelle, tear after a tune at hard bop speed. Henderson comes out of the gate so fast and pours such ferocity into White's "L's Bop" that the pace pulls it out of the station at top speed. Shortly after Corea takes the solo duties from the saxophonist at the half-way point, a camera comes in for a shot over his right shoulder and catches Clarke nimbly flying along the neck while staring across at the pianist, doing a double-take as Corea furiously pummels the keys with an awe-inspiring musicality that is guiding the rhythm section until the moment he can let the drummer take his solo. And what a solo--if White's mentor, Tony Williams, had been in the crowd that evening, he might well have been on his feet. These are monster musicians who had been playing together every day for a month. On this last recorded-and-filmed gig they are pouring everything they have experienced together into a bravura performance that probably could never happen again. And if Flora Purim's 6-octave skydiving on Return to Forever (ECM, 1972) is the definitive vocal version of "500 Miles High," the trio version that Corea, Clarke and White do here could well be the definitive instrumental rendition.

The world's greatest musicians? Who knows... What is certain is that the kind of mastery and dynamic synergism on display in these performances comes from musicians who possess that exceedingly rare ability to listen as well as they blow. As Lenny White said when asked about his composition "Guernica": "When you write for musicians like this, all you need to do is give them a few notes and let them play."

Tracks and Personnel

Echoes Of An Era

Tracks: Them There Eyes; All Of Me; I Mean You; I Love You Porgy; Take The A Train; I Hear Music; High Wire/The Aerialist; All Of Me; Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most.

Personnel: Chaka Khan: vocals; Freddie Hubbard: flugelhorn, trumpet; Joe Henderson: tenor saxophone; Chick Corea: piano; Stanley Clarke: acoustic bass; Lenny White: drums.

Griffith Park Collection

Tracks: L's Bop; Why Wait; October Ballade; Happy Times; Remember; Guernica.

Personnel: Freddie Hubbard: flugelhorn, trumpet; Joe Henderson: tenor saxophone; Chick Corea: piano; Stanley Clarke: acoustic bass; Lenny White: drums.

Griffith Park Collection 2: In Concert

Tracks: Why Wait; Guernica; Happy Times; October Ballade; I Mean You; Here's That Rainy Day.

Personnel: Freddie Hubbard: flugelhorn, trumpet; Joe Henderson: tenor saxophone; Chick Corea: piano; Stanley Clarke: acoustic bass; Lenny White: drums.

Chick Corea - A Very Special Concert

Tracks: L's Bop; Why Wait; 500 Miles High; Guernica.

Personnel: Joe Henderson: tenor saxophone; Chick Corea: piano; Stanley Clarke: bass; Lenny White: drums.

Chick Corea Band with Nancy Wilson - A Very Special Concert

Tracks: I Want To Be Happy; I Get A Kick Out Of You; 'Round Midnight; But Not For Me; Yesterday; Them There Eyes; Take The "A" Train.

Personnel: Nancy Wilson: vocals; Joe Henderson: tenor saxophone; Chick Corea: piano; Stanley Clarke: bass; Lenny White: drums.

Visit Lenny White, Stanley Clarke, Chick Corea, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Nancy Wilson and Chaka Khan on the web.

Richard Bailey: Credit Where Credit is Due

2009-05-23T23:35:00.000-07:00

I received an email a few days ago from Richard Bailey, requesting that the record be set straight re: who did the drumming on Jeff Beck's seminal jazz/rock fusion album, Blow by Blow (1975, Epic/Sony Japan). Simple. It was Richard Bailey. Seems that a rumor has been making the rounds on various blogs and print outlets that the wonderfully intricate, high-octane work on tunes like "Scatterbrain" was actually done by another great drummer from that period, Billy Cobham. This is patently untrue. As Bailey said in his email, he was "the one and only drummer on Blow by Blow", that esteemed work that infuenced so much of the rock, jazz and jazz/rock fusion that followed, as well as two other tracks for Beck's subsequent jazz/rock monster, Wired(1976, Epic/Sony Japan) -- the Mingus tune "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" and "Head for Backstage Pass".

Bailey's versatility has made him a first-call kitman for four decades. In addition to the work he did with Beck, he's recorded with ex-Rolling Stone Mick Taylor, Steve Roach and Brian Eno. More recently he has been an integral part of Steve Winwood's two important return-to-form recordings, 2003's About Time (Wincraft) and last year's Nine Lives (Columbia), and he regularly performs and records with the excellent acid jazz/rock/soul fusion collective Incognito.

DULY NOTED

2009-05-10T19:31:00.000-07:00

Corea, Clarke and White to open a fall tour at the Hollywood Bowl Sept. 2

Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Lenny White have booked a handful of engagements for later this year, commencing Sept. 2 at the Hollywood Bowl. No, it isn't the Return To Forever Returns II that we were all anticipating. The initial agreement to play together this year was apparently consummated last summer while they were touring as Return To Forever, but their agent Ted Kurland Associates has recently begun to book them aggressively. Guitarist Al Di Meola, who publicly claimed to take severe umbrage at the idea that he hadn't been included, has hopefully moved on. Hell hath no fury like a guitar god scorned.

Note on Corea, Clarke and White's Hollywood Bowl show here in Los Angeles: the Hollywood Bowl was selling subscription tickets only until last week, but single tickets are now available. John Scofield and his Piety Street Band will join them on the bill. http://www.hollywoodbowl.com/tickets/performance_detail.cfm?id=3963. Reasonably priced, I might add.

09/02/2009
Hollywood Bowl
Los Angeles, CA

09/04/2009
Detroit International Jazz Festival - Chase Main Stage
Detroit, MI

09/20/2009
Monterey Jazz Festival - Lyon's Stage
Monterey, CA

09/26/2009
The Royal Conservatory - Telus Centre for Performance and Learning - Koerner Hall
Toronto, Ontario CANADA

10/24/2009
Palace Hall
Bucharest, ROMANIA

10/26/2009
Skopje Jazz Festival 2009 - Universal Hall
Skopje, MACEDONIA

10/27/2009
50! Jazz Festival Ljubljana - Cankarjev Dom, Cultural & Congress Centre
Ljubljana, SLOVENIA

11/13/2009
Oosterpoort Main Hall
Groningen, NETHERLANDS

11/27/2009 to 12/02/2009
Blue Note Tokyo
Tokyo, JAPAN

Duly Noted

2009-04-05T14:58:00.000-07:00

L.A.'s Jazz Bakery closing May 31, to reopen soon... Godspeed!

I read the news today, oh boy. The Jazz Bakery, one of the few places in Los Angeles that features national jazz acts, has lost its lease. Not figuratively, as in the landlord has raised the rent to an intolerable price, but literally, as in... the landlord wants to turn the old building into a furniture store? Well, that's what L.A. Times writer Yvonne Villarreal says.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2009/03/jazz-bakery-los.html

I'm no economics professor, but I'd be shocked down to the ground if anyone in their right mind started investing money in a furniture store. I know people over there on the west side who like to display their wealth and/or earning power by getting themselves a little new furniture something-something, but even they are inclined to sit on their hands in this economy. At any rate, Godspeed to you, Jazz Bakery. For you Angelenos who want a place to see inexpensive live jazz, minus drunks, the non-profit club's proprietor, Ruth Price, says she will sponsor gigs throughout the summer to keep the name alive until she gets new digs. Keep on top of the calendar and go see some jazz this summer!

http://www.jazzbakery.com/calendar/

Speaking of inexpensive live jazz...

If you haven't heard of Goldstar, these guys could double the amount of live jazz you hear this year. For taking five minutes of your time to register your email address, you can start getting your live jazz tickets at HALF PRICE. Goldstar appears to be some kind of promotional service that a venue can use to pump up flagging ticket sales. I recently used them to see jazz at Cal State L.A.'s Luckman Theater, and am planning to use them to buy tickets to see more jazz there and at local places like Catalina Bar & Grill, Jazz Bakery and UCLA's Royce Hall. It looks like they have deals with these venues to post a notice on a particular engagement starting about a month before the calendar date. The idea, like I said, is to pump up the advance sales, so their deal expires the day before the performance. You have to not wait until the last minute, but make up your mind to go. And it isn't just jazz tickets. Theater tickets, too. And all the sporting events, the Dodgers and Angels, Clippers, Kings... or in New York, the Yankees and Mets, Knicks and Islanders... or in Chicago, the Cubs and Sox, the Bulls and Blackhawks...

Did I say the tickets are HALF PRICE?

http://www.goldstar.com/home

REVIEW: Duet

2009-04-04T00:27:00.000-07:00

[NOTE: This and my other reviews are archived separately at http://jazzjazzersjazzingviewsandreviews.blogspot.com/ The first four paragraphs of this review of Duet will appear April 6, 2009 in AllAboutJazz.com]

Combined with his abilities as a soloist, Chick Corea's uncanny accompanist's instinct for supporting and focusing the spotlight on another player's efforts has produced celebrated duets with everyone from Gary Burton and Herbie Hancock to John McLaughlin and Bela Fleck. With Hiromi Uehara he has done it again.

Duet captures the two pianists in an engagement at Tokyo's Blue Note club in September of 2007, and finds them repeatedly achieving ecstatic heights of ingenuity and inventiveness. At first blush the opening tracks might feel too quiet as an introduction to the Sturm und Drang of this dynamic pairing, but if the anticipated energy, the bounding, rampaging, red-eyed thunder-and-lightning this partnership promises to deliver is not immediately evident as the first of two discs opens with Bill Evans' "Very Early" and Antonio Carlos Jobim's "How Insensitive," don't touch that dial...

Once these two get their hands warm on "Déjà Vu," the first of Hiromi's contributed compositions, they ignite things with a respectfully deconstructed version of "Fool on the Hill" that hews neatly to the lilting Lennon/McCartney melody line and harmonies right up until the closing three bars, when Corea unexpectedly plucks a few portentous notes inside the piano. The cubist conflagration long-time Corea fans perennially yearn for then flares dramatically on a joyful, abstracted version of his enduring "Humpty Dumpty," ending with his throwing down fistfuls of Cecil Taylor-esque tennis-ball chords, and his protégé enthusiastically throwing them right back. When he next engages Hiromi in some gravity-defying rhythmning on Thelonious Monk's "Bolivar Blues," the first disc's final track, it is plain she's in a mood to play.

A meandering "Windows" opens the second disc, but then it's off again on a stunning steeplechase of a composition, Hiromi's "Old Castle, by the River, in the Middle of a Forest," featuring some vintage unison dressage. By the time the last notes are sounded they are both energized and ready for a quirkily non-traditional distillation of "Summertime," using the Gershwin standard to continue widening the degree of abstraction as they travel through a sublimely ordered track sequence (a good argument in favor of albums, and against selective MP3 downloads). Musically, the end of "Summertime" dovetails into Hiromi's evanescent "Place to Be," which manages to slow the heart rate a few more beats per second before the disc concludes with a free-playing romp on Corea's "Children's Song #12," re-titled "Do Mo," and finally, an off-kilter rendition of "Concierto de Aranjuez/Spain" to provide an insouciantly perfect coda.

In the interests of honesty and total disclosure, I have a small quibble with this album (which may require a couple paragraphs to express): if I had produced it I would have trimmed it to a single CD and kept only the heart-pounding fireworks. There's more than one reason I'd have done it.

One, I think the markets for this U.S. release are the jazz-rockers who have been listening to Hiromi and her band Sonicbloom or have heard about them, plus a smaller secondary market consisting of Corea fans who have heard the buzz about how wild these gigs got. The first group are the same crowd who packed a couple dozen large venues for the Return To Forever Returns tour last summer, the ones who turned out to see Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller and Vic Wooten last Fall and who at this very moment are packing large venues for Chick Corea and John McLaughlin's Five Peace Band tour. The second group have been listening to Corea since his early recordings, and can be won only through word-of-mouth buzz generated by stellar performances. Neither are the same kind of adoring audiences who filled the Budokan in 2007 to see Chick and Hiromi perform this material - the major difference being that those people in Tokyo were devoted Hiromi (and Corea) fans who didn't need to be introduced. Chick's considerable drawing power notwithstanding, they throng to any performance she gives. American fans do need an introduction to her. You know the old saying, "You never get a second chance to make a first impression"? Why would a producer select Bill Evans' "Very Early" and Antonio Carlos Jobim's "How Insensitive" to open the first CD?

The second point is related to the first. The more I listen to the slower material like the Evans and Jobim tunes, and even Corea's "Windows" (which, once again, ill-advisedly opens the second disc) the more dispensible it sounds. These tunes have the feel of warm-up material, the kind of crowd-control music played to settle down the diners and get them involved with the music as the tables are cleared. Even the faithful who have packed the Blue Note can only manage polite applause. Whether it is Chick's restraint or Hiromi's still-developing sense of swing that keeps these tunes from bursting into flame, really doesn't matter. They are pleasant enough and were probably exactly right for the occasion. But why include them on the CD? Trim one more track, say Hiromi's "Déjà Vu," and the remaining 8 tracks would fit nicely on a single CD that would tear along like Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

All that said, I cannot recommend this recording highly enough. My tastes have undergone several overhauls and re-orientations listening to Chick Corea's many musical phases and faces over the years. As he moved through Blue Note bopper, Miles Davis' Rhodes scholar, and Circular logician into the engineer who drove the Return To Forever locomotive, he never strayed too far from being the intellectually curious composer and improvisational pianist who can out-think any harmony and out-play any composition. Through the Elektric Band and Akoustic Band, Origin and the Remembering Bud Powell band, and right up through his current Five Peace Band collaboration with John McLaughlin, he's always kept me listening for those moments of predictability when he changes direction. Tweaking the time-space continuum, he switches directions harmonically and rhythmically from wherever he was apparently going to somewhere else entirely. He has remained faithful to a social contract that only a few jazzers are able to adhere to, the one that promises me that I'll always be surprized. I'll always hear something new and fresh.

This recording with Hiromi lands right in the middle of a 3-day binge of newness. When he invited Hiromi to join him at the Blue Note he knew he was setting up two of those screaming-ass high-speed Japanese trains on the same track, not really knowing what would come of it, whether they would collide head-on or launch each other into space. But he knew it would be new. No matter how may times you have heard Bitches Brew or Circle - Paris Concert or An Evening with Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, you are not prepared for what Chick does with Hiromi on this recording. You most emphatically have not heard it before. This is new.

Visit Chick Corea and Hiromi on the web.

New Return To Forever "Returns" 2CD set release date(s)

2009-02-17T00:59:00.000-08:00

There has been some confusion about the release date for Return To Forever's 2CD set of material, Returns, recorded during last summer's reunion tour. I just received an email from Chris Hewlett, whose London firm is handling PR and publicity for the release. Here is what he said:

"The CD will be released in the UK on 2 March. The date for the US seems to be the 17th."

There you have it.

POLL: the 5 best Jazz/Rock Fusion recordings of all time

2009-01-29T22:54:00.000-08:00

I have been researching the history of what is called Jazz/Rock Fusion for many years. I believe the legacy of this music needs to be preserved, documented and forwarded. Toward that end I am researching and writing a book in conjunction with a documentary film that is being done on the subject. You can help with this effort by answering the following poll.

[Note: Sorry about the confusing earlier edition of the poll, done with blogger.com software - it didn't have the capability for others to nominate and add new items to the list, which is the basis of how this poll is being conducted.]

POLL: On the following list please select what you consider the 5 best Jazz/Rock Fusion albums of all time. If there is a recording(s) that you believe should be included, you can nominate it and I will add it to the list. In-print or out-of-print, old or new, email me at jazzjazzersjazzing@gmail.com (if you don't want further emails from me, just say so) or post a comment on this blog entry. Simply go to the bottom of the article and click on the link that says "3 comments"... once you leave a comment, it will say "4 comments" or "5 comments" or whatever the count is. If you do, I can add the album(s) you suggest, count your vote(s) and add them to the list.

Here are some albums to start off the discussion:

6 - Supersilent
8:30 - Weather Report (1)
Adventures of Astral Pirates - Lenny White (1)
Agharta/Pangaea – Miles Davis
A Go Go - John Scofield (1)
Alivemutherforya - Billy Cobham
All Kooked Out - Stanton Moore, Charlie Hunter (1)
American Garage - Pat Metheny
An Evening of Magic, Live at the Hollywood Bowl – Chuck Mangione
Anti-Social Club, The - Alan Pasqua (1)
Arbeit Macht Frei - Area (1)
As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls - Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays
Assembler - Bill Connors
Atavachron - Allan Holdsworth (1)
At Fillmore - Miles Davis (1)
At Fillmore East - Allman Brothers Band (1)
At the Mountains of Madness - John Zorn & Electric Masada (1)
Awakening - Pharaohs
Badfoot Brown and the Bunions Bradford Funeral & Marching Band - Bill Cosby (1)
Believe It - Tony Williams Lifetime (9)
Beneath the Mask - Chick Corea Elektric Band (1)
Best Laid Plans - David Torn
Belladonna - Ian Carr & Nucleus
Big City – Lenny White
Big Picture, The - Adam Holzman and Brave New World (1)
Birds of Fire – Mahavishnu Orchestra (5)
Bitches Brew – Miles Davis (16)
Black Sheep - Jan Hammer
Black Market - Weather Report (3)
Black Rock - James Blood Ulmer (1)
Blow by Blow – Jeff Beck (4)
Blue Nights - Bill Bruford, Tony Levin, David Torn
Blue Train - John Coltrane (1)
Breezin' - George Benson
Bright Size Life - Pat Metheny
Buena - Morphine (1)
Burnt Weeny Sandwich - Frank Zappa (1)
CAB - CAB (1)
CAB 4 - CAB (1)
Captain Marvel - Stan Getz
Caravanserei - Carlos Santana (1)
Casino - Al Di Meola
Cellar Door Sessions, The - Miles Davis (1)
Chasing Shadows - Tony Grey
Chicago Transit Authority - Chicago
Chicago (AKA Chicago II) - Chicago
Chicago III - Chicago (1)
Chicago VII - Chicago (1)
Chick Corea Electric Band - Chick Corea Electric Band
Children of Forever - Stanley Clarke
Chinese, The - Janne Shaffer
Close to the Edge - Yes (1)
Consequence of Chaos - Al Di Meola
Cosmic Messenger - Jean-Luc Ponty (2)
Coup de Tete - Kip Hanrahan (1)
Court & Spark - Joni Mitchell
Crossings - Herbie Hancock
Crossings - Steve Khan
Crosswinds - Billy Cobham
Dancing In Your Head - Ornettte Coleman (1)
Devotion - John McLaughlin (2)
Dinosaur Swamps - Flock (1)
Double Nickels on the Dime - Minutemen
Double Up - Bill Connors (1)
Dr. Hee - Scott Henderson and Tribal Tech (1)
Dragon's Head - Mary Halvorson (1)
Dropper, The - Medeski, Martin and Wood (1)
Dry Humping the American Dream - Gutbucket (1)
Eat A Peach - Allman Brothers (1)
Elastic Rock - Nucleus
Electric Rendezvous - Al Di Meola (1)
Electric Bath - Don Ellis
Electric Byrd - Donald Byrd (1)
Electric Guitarist - John McLaughlin
Elegant Gypsy - Al Di Meola (4)
Emergency! - Tony Williams Lifetime
Enigmatic Ocean – Jean Luc Ponty (3)
Escalator Over the Hill - Carla Bley
Evolution - Tony MacAlpine (1)
Expresso - Gong (1)
Extrapolation – John McLaughlin
Farewell Shows - Seattle, WA - Zony Mash (1)
Feels Good to Me - Bill Bruford (1)
Filles de Kilimanjaro - Miles Davis (1)
First Album, The - Ella Guru (1)
First Light – Freddie Hubbard
First Seven Days, The - Jan Hammer
Five Hundred Miles High/Live at Montreux – Flora Purim
Flesh on Flesh - Al Di Meola
Floating Point - John McLaughlin
Flock, The - Flock (1)
Focus - Jan Ǻkerman (1)
Fourth - Soft Machine (1)
Free – Airto Moreira
Freefall - Dixie Dregs (1)
Full Circle (Coming Home) - Bon
Funky Serenity - Ramsey Lewis (1)
Gary Burton and Keith Jarrett - Gary Burton, Keith Jarrett (1)
Gazeuse! - Gong (1)
Gil Evans Orchestra Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix, The - Gil Evans Orchestra (1)
Good - Morphine
Grand Wazoo, The - Frank Zappa (1)
GSM3 - Frank Gambale, Steve Smith, Stuart Hamm (1)
Hatfield and North - Hatfield and North
Hapless Child, The - Michael Mantler (1)
Hard Normal Daddy - Squarepusher
Head Hunters – Herbie Hancock (5)
Heaven and Hell - Shin e (1)
Heavy Metal Be-Bop - Brecker Brothers (1)
Heavy Weather – Weather Report (11)
Hejira - Joni Mitchell
Hot Rats – Frank Zappa (3)
Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy – Return To Forever (3)
Imaginary Day - Pat Metheny (1)
Improvision - Alex Machacek, Jeff Sipe, Matthew Garrison (1)
In A Silent Way – Miles Davis (5)
Industrial Zen - John McLaughlin
Infinite Desire - Al Di Meola
Inner Mounting Flame, The – Mahavishnu Orchestra (17)
Innervisions - Stevie Wonder
Introducing the Eleventh House – Larry Coryell
Inside Out - Chick Corea Elektric Band (2)
I Sing the Body Electric - Weather Report (1)
It's A Beautiful Day - It's A Beautiful Day (1)
Jaco Pastorius - Jaco Pastorius (2)
James White and the Blacks - James White and the Blacks
Jazz from Hell - Frank Zappa (1)
Jewel in the Lotus - Bennie Maupin
Jing Chi - Robben Ford, Vinnie Colaiuta, Jimmy Haslip (1)
Journey to Love – Stanley Clarke (2)
Juju Street Songs - Gary Bartz
Kamakiriad - Donald Fagen
Kinesthetics - Scott Kinsey
King Kong- Jean Luc Ponty
Kiss My Axe - Al Di Meola
Land of the Midnight Sun - Al Di Meola (1)
Last Train to Hicksville - Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks
Larry Carlton - Larry Carlton
Lawrence of Newark - Larry Young
Light As A Feather – Return To Forever (2)
Light Years - Shin e (1)
Like Children - Jann Hammer/Jerry Goodman (1)
Live at the Fillmore East (March 7, 1970): It's About That Time – Miles Davis
Live at the Greek - Stanley Clarke (1)
Live at the Baked Potato - Greg Mathieson, Abraham Laboriel, Michael Landau and Vinnie Colaiuta (1)
Live at the Rainbow - Focus (1)
Live from Elario's (the First Gig) - Chick Corea Electric Band
Live In Tokyo - Weather Report (2)
Live On Tour In Europe - Billy Cobham - George Duke Band
Love Devotion Surrender - Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin
Mad Hatter - Chick Corea
Man-Child - Herbie Hancock (1)
Masques - Brand X
Merry-Go-Round - Elvin Jones
Metal Fatigue - Allan Holdsworth (3)
Michael Brecker - Michael Brecker (1)
Miles in the Sky - Miles Davis (1)
Milestones - Miles Davis (1)
Mind Transplant - Alphonse Mouzon (1)
Mint Jam - Yellowjackets (1)
Modern Man - Stanley Clarke (1)
Moon Germs - Joe Farrell
Moonshadows - Alphonse Mouzon
Moonshine - Dave Douglas and Keystone
Moroccan Roll - Brand X (1)
Morph the Cat - Donald Fagen
Mountain in the Clouds – Miroslav Vitous
My Spanish Heart - Chick Corea
Mysterious Traveller – Weather Report (2)
Mystical Adventures - JeanLuc Ponty (1)
Napoli Centrale - Napoli Centrale
Native Dancer - Wayne Shorter
New Grass - Albert Ayler (1)
Nightfly - Donald Fagen (1)
Night Passage - Weather Report (2)
No Mystery – Return To Forever (4)
Elastic Rock - Nucleus (1)
Octave of the Holy Innocents - Jonas Hellborg, Buckethead and Michael Shrieve (1)
Of Human Feelings - Ornette Coleman (1)
Oh Yeah? - Jan Hammer
One of a Kind - Bill Bruford (3)
One Size Fits All - Frank Zappa (1)
On the Corner - Miles Davis (3)
Out of the Woods - Oregon
Overtime - Lee Ritenour
Pachuco Cadaver - Captain Beefheart (1)
Panthalassa - Bill Laswell
Passion and Warfare - Steve Vai
Pat Metheny Group, The - Pat Metheny (1)
Personae - Jonas Hellborg, Shawn Lane, Jeff Sipe (1)
Picchio dal Pozzo - Picchio dal Pozzo
Pieces - Matthew Larkin Cassell
Planet End - Larry Coryell
Polytown - David Torn, Mick Karn, Terry Bozzio (1)
Powers of Ten - Shawn Lane (1)
Preludes and Rhapsodies - Deodato (1)
Present Tense - Lenny White (1)
Primal Scream - Maynard Ferguson
Progressivity - Tunnels (1)
Pyramid - Eef Albers
Red Clay – Freddie Hubbard
Return to Forever – Return To Forever (2)
Return of the Brecker Brothers - Michael Brecker, Randy Brecker
Return to the Emerald Beyond - The Mahavishnu Project (1)
Rip, Rig & Panic - Rashaan Roland Kirk (1)
Road Games - Alan Holdsworth (1)
Rocks, Pebbles and Sand - Stanley Clarke
Romantic Warrior – Return To Forever (20)
Rotters' Club, The - Hatfield and North
Sad and Tragic Demise of Big Fine Hot Salty Black Wind, The - Universal Congress of
Safe As Milk - Captain Beefheart
Sand - Allan Holdsworth (1)
Save the Robots - Conrad Shrenk and Extravaganza (1)
School Days - Stanley Clarke (3)
Secrets - Allan Holdsworth (1)
Seven Songs - Fredy Studer
Sextant - Herbie Hancock (1)
Shack Man - Medeski, Martin and Wood (1)
Shangrenade - Harvey Mandel
(sic) - Alex Machacek (1)
She's Too Much for My Mirror - Captain Beefheart (1)
Sky Train - Barry Miles (1)
Smokin' in the Pit - Mike Mainieri and Steps Ahead (2)
Soft Machine, The - Soft Machine
Soul Experiment, A - Freddie Hubbard (1)
Song X - Pat Metheny (1)
Soul Vaccination: Live - Tower of Power
Spaces – Larry Coryell
Spectrum – Billy Cobham (3)
Spice of Life - Kazume Watanabe (1)
Splendido Hotel - Al Di Meola
Staircase - Keith Jarrett
Stanley Clarke - Stanley Clarke (1)
Step It - Bill Connors (1)
Still Warm - John Scofield (1)
Super Nova – Wayne Shorter
Sweetnighter – Weather Report (2)
Tales from the Acoustic Planet - Bela Fleck
Tales of the Exonerated Flea - Horacee Arnold
Tauhid - Pharoah Sanders (1)
Temporal Analogues of Paradise - Shawn Lane, Jonas Hellborg and Jeff Sipe (2)
Tennessee 2004 - Praxis (1)
Then! Live - Allan Holdsworth
There and Back - Jeff Beck (1)
Third - Soft Machine (1)
Thrust - Herbie Hancock (2)
Thunder - Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, Vic Wooten (1)
Time Control – Hiromi (2)
Timeless - John Abercrombie w/ Jann Hammer, Jack DeJohnette
Tolonen - Jukka Tolonen
Total Eclipse - Billy Cobham
To the Bone - Bon (1)
Touchstone - Chick Corea
Tour de Force Live - Al Di Meola (1)
Toys of Men - Stanley Clarke (1)
Tribute to Jack Johnson, A - Miles Davis (3)
Trio of Doom, The - John McLaughlin, Jaco Pastorius, Tony Williams
Trout Mask Replica - Captain Beefheart (3)
True Stories - David Sancious (1)
Turn It Over – Tony Williams Lifetime (2)
Tutu - Miles Davis (1)
Ultimate Adventure, The - Chick Corea
Uncle Meat - Frank Zappa (1)
Unspeakable - Bill Frisell (1)
Unorthodox Behaviour - Brand X (3)
Venusian Summer - Lenny White
Vertú - Lenny White (1)
Visions of the Emerald Beyond - Mahavishnu Orchestra (2)
Vitalization - Steve Smith
Vital Tech Tones - Scott Henderson (1)
Volume Two - Soft Machine
Waka/Jawaka - Frank Zappa (1)
Wardenclyffe Tower - Allan Holdsworth
Warszawa - Praxis (1)
Way Up, The - Pat Metheny
Weather Report - Weather Report
What If – Dixie Dregs (3)
Where Have I Known You Before – Return To Forever (4)
Wired – Jeff Beck (6)
Yes - Morphine
Zawinul - Joe Zawinul
Zoot Allures - Frank Zappa
Zurich - Praxis (1)

INTERVIEW: 9 things you didn't already know about Hiromi...

2009-01-26T19:18:00.000-08:00

Hiromi Uehara is just a few months shy of 30 yrs. old, yet she is already a firmly established international star on Jazz's world stage.

There's something to be said for starting early. She says she believes that her mother's own frustrated childhood musical career resulted fortuitously in her finding a piano teacher for her daughter in their hometown of Shizuoka, Japan, and subsequently enrolling her in private training. Fortunately for Hiromi, her teacher was not only an effective classical piano instructor, she was a big jazz fan. We all owe that teacher, Noriko Hakita, a great debt of gratitude for the day she played an Errol Garner recording for her young student. At that moment the twin topics of jazz and improvisation entered Hiromi's world. At age 8 the young prodigy immediately began learning to improvise on the Mozart, Haydn and other pieces she was studying, and at the same time began listening to a variety of jazz recordings that Noriko played for her. Eventually she heard Japanese jazz artists like Yosuke Yamashita, Toshiko Akiyoshi and Sadao Watanabe, but as natural as the transition from one genre to the other might have been at that point, for largely cultural reasons her studies continued to follow a fairly traditional classical path. She did well. She did very well. At the tender age of 14 she was accomplished enough to be invited to perform with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. But when she chanced to meet Chick Corea at the Yamaha building in Tokyo at 17, and, at his invitation performed with him the very next day, her kharmic wheel took a big turn toward jazz.

Hiromi says she had always wanted to study jazz, and knew that the United Sates was the place to do it. She made her move and enrolled in the Berklee College of Music, where she met another mentor, Ahmad Jamal. Jamal was so impressed that he introduced her to people at Telarc and co-produced her 2003 debut album Another Mind on the label. Her life hasn't been the same since. She says that her Berklee experience has continued to be a wellspring for her -- not only did it help her to get gigs playing piano bars and weddings while she was a student there, Dave Fiuczynski, the guitarist in her current band, Sonicbloom, was recruited from the ranks of its faculty. And just this last New Year's Eve, National Public Radio opened its annual live radio broadcast with Hiromi and Sonicbloom (Fiuczynski, Tony Grey, bass, Martin Valihora, drums) performing live from Berklee's Performance Center.

As it was with many others who have commented on their meeting with her, I was immediately taken with Hiromi's guileless charm and free spirit. It is very real. What you hear in her performances is the expression of a very sincere desire to reach her listener. Her astonishing inventiveness in both improvisational and compositional contexts comes from an incredible, indefatigable energy that she pours into all that she does. The world is a better place for her endlessly creative musicianship and the bright, refreshing tonic it provides us.

The interview I began with Hiromi at midnight in a recording studio had to be cut short and continued by email as she traveled between countries, on what has become the non-stop tour that is her life. This week she's in Switzerland. Hopefully, when she gets a few minutes to breathe, the conversation with Jazz (Jazzers Jazzing) will continue.

J(JJ): You toured Japan with Oscar Peterson in 2004. How did that experience help you with your approach to performance?

It was such an emotional moment. He played Requiem for Ray Brown, and I was watching from the side of the stage. His notes themselves talk. It was some of the deepest music I have ever heard.

J(JJ): You told me at Mad Hatter Studios last month that recording with Chick Corea "was a real learning experience." What did you learn from Chick?

It was like walking in a huge library. His musical vocabularies are so wide and huge. It was like there were so many drawers and I was opening and trying things out and seeing how it goes with what I had.

J(JJ): Which other musicians and composers do you enjoy listening to or studying?

FRANK ZAPPA

J(JJ): When you give workshops or masters classes to music students, what ideas do you like to communicate to them?

I answer questions from the students... not much on specific things. Sorry, not a good answer.

J(JJ):The music you perform with your band Sonicbloom is very high-energy. How is performing with them different than performing a duet, or solo?

Fundamentally it is the same. "FOCUS" is the single most important thing. Then really dig into the music deeply and internally, and then express it to the outside in different ways.

J(JJ): In a recent article about you, the writer emphasized how positive your music is. This positivity and energy was a key aspect of the early jazz/rock and fusion of bands like Return To Forever, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Headhunters, Weather Report, etc. Do you think the popularity of your music is an indication of a return to this musical style?

I never think in terms of "musical style", so I don't know. I just feel so happy to be able to play music live and communicate with people with energy. Music can turn every kind of emotion into something positive, even the negative feelings such as sadness and madness. That is the magic of music.

J(JJ): When a musician sees a fellow artist become successful, sometimes despite very poorly-made music, do you think this causes resentment, or does it create a desire to make better music?

I never compare with people, so I don't know.

J(JJ): The music I heard you record with Stanley Clarke and Lenny White last month has many surprizes, but it is pretty much a straight-ahead session. Are there other jazz musicians you would like the opportunity to perform or record with?

Far too many. I wish Frank Zappa was still alive....

J(JJ): I know you have been keeping a very busy touring schedule recently. What projects do you have planned for the future?

I would love to work with an orchestra, write my own piano concerto some day.

Waking and skydiving: a royal send-off for Jazz's first chair trumpet player, Hub-style (Frederick DeWayne Hubbard, April 7, 1938 - December 29, 2008)

2009-01-18T15:50:00.000-08:00

Minutes after I had passed the Inglewood Forum, former home of the Los Angeles Lakers, I parked in the Faithful Central Bible Church overflow lot and sat in my car, trying to eat some lunch. But I was too anxious to have an appetite. At the invitation of a friend who had performed and recorded with him, I was there to attend funeral services for Freddie Hubbard, the most accomplished trumpeter of his generation. I had read about and seen photos of the jazz funerals in New Orleans when musicians marched along behind the casket playing their instruments, entertaining their departed friend as well as onlookers, but beyond that I had no idea what to expect. Until that Tuesday (Jan. 6th) afternoon, I had attended but two funerals in my life, my father's in 1986 and my mother's sixteen years later. Both were difficult lessons in life and filled with the pain of losing a parent. I'd watched parts of televised funerals for Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Princess Diana and Ronald Reagan, all painful on different levels. In Freddie Hubbard I had lost a jazz hero, but I wasn't sure what to feel. With Miles and Tony Williams, Joe Henderson and then a little over a year ago, Joe Zawinul, each one's death seemed to be a greater loss than the last. It felt like the architects of post-bop, jazz-rock and jazz-since-1968 were starting to disappear. This one felt different, though. More personal. Instead of heavy dreariness and anguish, it felt lighter, as though something were resolving.

It was eerie, because just a few hours before I learned of his death I had gone online to order a pair of CDs he played on. Originally produced by Lenny White in 1982 with a band that consisted of Freddie, Lenny, Joe Henderson, Stanley Clarke and Chick Corea, the resulting recordings were released on the subsequently problematic Elektra Musician label. I had managed to collect them all on vinyl but despaired of ever seeing a digital reissue. So when I chanced to hear that the Wounded Bird label had released them on CD a few months earlier, I was stoked. This is some of the best group playing I've ever heard from any of these guys. Truly great, truly inspired stuff. Freddie is smoking hot and shooting sparks, but better than that, he's teamed up with four high-flying jazz heavyweights who aren't intimidated by him, whose bop musicianship is such that they are all capable of playing with him, not behind him. And man, oh man, do they swing.

I was tracking the shipment of the CDs three days later, on New Year's Day, when I saw the email inviting me to attend his funeral.

Standing outside the church, I was taken aback by the enormity of the building. Built not in the grand old tradition of a European cathedral, this building had been constructed instead with the long, low, utilitarian lines of an airplane hangar. I was perplexed. Why here?, I thought. Shouldn't there be flocks of doves and the peal of big brass church bells for a state funeral like this? Freddie D. Hubbard was not only a hall-of-famer, he was jazz royalty.

The mysterious atmosphere of the occasion deepened when I approached the church entrance and was stopped by a professionally outfitted pair of photographers who posed me and took several shots. Not because I was some kind of Big Noise, however. Nearly everyone was being stopped for a photograph, for reasons that would soon become clear. When we had finished I commented to one of them that it was a tough day to be trying to manage a smile. He shrugged it off and said, "Yeah, but it's better than suffering". The tone in his voice betrayed not the slightest trace of sorrow. He was talking about Freddie, of course. Not me. I think. Either way, his cheerful demeanor was a little disconcerting.

photo by Massimo Vitali

When I entered the building I noticed that the lobby was jammed with people queued up to sign the guest book in the lobby. In fact, no one was failing to sign it. As I stood in line I read through the program that a young usher had handed me, feeling waves of cultural cluelessness evaporate off of me as I did. Just reading the names of the pall bearers was cause for startlement. This was indeed going to be a jazz funeral. Although I was just beginning to understand what that might mean. Looking around the lobby I was a little concerned that there were so few people of white European descent who had turned out. It perplexed me that I was the only Caucasian in this roomful of African-Americans, but it probably meant only that this occasion had brought out more musicians than fans. I could think of several L.A.-based jazz artists and jazz fans who might have turned up, but it appeared there hadn't been much publicity for the funeral services. Their absence could be explained by the odd black/white sociology of jazz that has been a source of amusement and bemusement to me for years, but more likely the problem was the tradition in which white Europeans have been steeped, the terrifying Calvinistic theology of a bleak, dust-to-dust-and-then-you're-off-to-Heaven-or-more-likely-Hell existence that inevitably includes a funeral, accompanied by a dark suit and feeling depressed. Obviously they had never attended a funeral like this, either. Whatever the reason, it was of only passing concern to me, and even less to the people around me. As our eyes rested upon each other's, the light of recognition I saw on the faces of these strangers was as spiritually inviting as any I've ever experienced. These were people who loved Freddie Hubbard as much as I did. I was in a house of God. When I spotted George Duke coming through, happily hugging and greeting people as he went, it dawned on me. Freddie had already arrived in Heaven and I'd been invited join him. The party had already started.

I've since learned that this divine musical portal's location a few blocks off Manchester Ave., though new to me, has been known by many for a very long time. Three years ago the Faithful Central Bible Church was the site of Billy Preston's memorial service, occasioning a eulogy from Little Richard and a heart-rending version of "You Are So Beautiful" sung by Joe Cocker to the song's author. This memorial service was getting me hipped. I was learning. The differences between my white European Protestant tradition and the Black American Protestant tradition were certainly not in terms of numbers or scope of acceptance. It was a difference in cultures. In my culture, a tabernacle bespeaks carved stone and gargoyles and a huge pipe organ that consumes one end of the building. In this one the definition of a tabernacle is taken from the original Hebrew meaning of a portable sanctuary, usually a large, sturdy tent used by the Israelites as they fled through the Egyptian wilderness. Although now in 2009 the culture of wandering is a thing of the past, the austerity and pragmatism is not. And it has worked. This ministry has succeeded well enough that they purchased the legendary Inglewood Forum when the Lakers moved to the Staples Center some years ago, so that their Sunday services can be delivered to 17,000+ worshippers.

Soon after arriving in New York from his hometown of Indianapolis (where he had studied the mellophone, French horn, tuba and finally the flugelhorn and trumpet with Max Woodbury, principal trumpeter of the Indianapolis Symphony) Freddie Hubbard became regarded by knowledgeable jazz fans with a level of astonishment and admiration that bordered on reverence. Unquestionably the most technically proficient trumpet player of his generation, he influenced every horn player who ever heard him. The day Miles Davis met him he supposedly walked into the club where Freddie was playing and stood off to the side listening for awhile, then finally walked up to him and said, "Freddie, you're trying to play too many notes!"

I walked around a bit and found a place to sit as people continued to stream in and fill the seats of the cavernous room, and as they did I looked around. Portable, interlocking chairs, not pews, were laid out in a semi-circular pattern and directed at a massive stage with full stage lights and a large PA system. One of Freddie's horns was overturned and stood on its bell atop the pulpit, posed in profile just like the cover of his Grammy-winning LP First Light. As my eye glided across the people in the front rows I saw George Duke again, and then noticed a few more familiar faces. Bassist Stanley Clarke towered above the others, and right next to him was his old friend, drummer Lenny White. As the man in the next seat pointed out saxophonist Javon Jackson, a small group of people came walking briskly up the aisle on my right, led by Hubert Laws and his beautiful wife.

Just after Freddie's wife Brigitte plus son Duane and his family had been seated, Bishop Kenneth Ulmer, himself a pianist who had once played with Mahalia Jackson when her accompanist failed to show, strode to center stage. After a short prayer he announced in commanding tones that "Today we are here to celebrate a life well-lived." Celebrate, he said. Well-lived. Damn, I thought. This is how to give a send-off to Jazz's first chair trumpet.

After Dave Weiss, Freddie's manager and an accomplished trumpeter himself, led a brass choir of Chuck Finley, Sal Marquez, Richard Grant and George Bohannon in playing a somber composition called "Lament", bassist and producer extraordinaire Marcus Miller walked quietly up to the pulpit and began the delicate but necessary task of lifting the pall of grief from the room. I could tell from the slight bounce in his step as he approached that this funeral, unlike either of the ones I had experienced or the others I had seen televised, was going to be radically different in at least one respect -- it was going to contain at least some element of fun.

The eulogies I've read or heard in the past have tended to be either maudlin attempts to be profound, or unrelenting orgies of grief. But this cool cat was interested in neither. Marcus said he had only met Freddie on two occasions, but felt he had really gotten to know him through his music. It was funny to hear this from a jazz musician. I had communicated this same sentiment to some of the musicians I know, including Airto Moreira, who expressed amazement one day when I told him I felt as though I knew many musicians so well through their music that I considered them my friends. Marcus said that "if there is one word that describes Freddie Hubbard, it is BAD". No question at all, Freddie was bad, badder and the baddest.

When George Duke stepped up to the mic, any vestiges of funereal gloom were annihilated with his opening line: "The first thing I want to say about Freddie is, he was a nut!," he exclaimed, getting a big laugh from the crowd. He then went on to describe Freddie Hubbard's seemingly limitless sense of humor. He also expressed admiration for the way Freddie had been able to create and maintain a distinctly un-Miles style and sound in an era that Miles so clearly dominated, thereby clearing the way for many other trumpeters and their unique styles.

Hubert Laws began his remarks by reading a passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes that addressed the value of a good name. His words flowed like a biblical jazz solo by first stating a theme and then going on several 8-bar excursions before returning to the theme, taking a very creative route to get there. He said that while studying at Juilliard with the famous horn instructor, Julian Baker, he discovered in the man the condescending dismissal of jazz that is often found with classical musicians. So he invited the professor to go to Birdland one night to see Freddie Hubbard. It worked. Hubert says that this night at the New York jazz club changed the way Baker looked at music and resulted in his having a newfound respect for all of jazz, based only on the experience of hearing Freddie Hubbard play. Hubert had spread the good name of Freddie Hubbard and as Julian Baker talked to his colleagues and forwarded Freddie's good name, he began bestowing goodness on the name of Jazz.

In his eulogy Bennie Maupin told the story of going to work for Freddie when the great trumpeter hired him to play in his band. "Every musician knew that if you were going to play with Freddie Hubbard," he said, a smile curling at his lips, "you had to be ready to be humbled. He played so fast. So when I first started playing with him I would go to bed at night and I'd hear that trumpet in my head. When I woke up in the morning, I'd hear that trumpet! Finally I got the drummer, Freddie Waits, to agree to practice with me. We would practice three hours a day, every day. Finally, something clicked, and I had it." As Bennie told it, one night he and Waits just took off, and were in control of the music. Hub stopped the band. "Wait a minute!," he shouted, "This is MY band!' " When the crowd in the church stopped laughing, Bennie continued. "It was the highest compliment he could have paid me. By saying that he gave me a great gift. Of course, I had never played that fast before, and I've never played that fast since."

As the musicians were setting up for "Birdlike" from Hubbard's masterwork recorded on Blue Note, Ready for Freddie, Dave Weiss looked expectantly toward the back of the church and said "Is that Christian McBride? Is Christian here? His plane was delayed. Oh good, he's here. Can you play?...we have a bass for you up here. Please?" Weiss's pleas sounded like he was planning to try to push the band at something approximating the same pace of the original piece of music. But even with the aggressive drumming of Roy McCurdy driving the bus, it was going to be tough matching the frenetic hard-bopping drive of Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, Wayne Shorter, et al. As expected, Christian McBride just walked straight up to the stage and lent a hand to the boys. They danced and flew and pulled off a beautiful rendition that ended with Christian's breakneck, bravura solo. Of course.

The next surprise was one of those electric moments when a giant strides through your midst. I'd seen Reggie Jackson do it when he stepped into the batter's box. As he would grip his fat-barreled black bat and cock it over his shoulder, he would draw the attention and energies of 50,000 people and rivet them to their seats. I'd heard the story of Bob Dylan coming into the Palomino in L.A. one night and disrupting his friend George Harrison's performance -- stopping it, actually -- just by taking a seat. Or all the stories about how Miles would walk through the doors of a club to check out a particular musician and electrify the entire room for the 15 minutes it took to order a drink at the bar and leave. With no forewarning, Herbie Hancock had appeared from somewhere near the front of the crowd. As he walked up the steps to the stage the entire assemblage of mourner/celebrators became suddenly more animated, more alive, talking more and moving more, as though the oxygen supply in the room had suddenly doubled. When he got to the pulpit he just stood there and smiled that killer grin of his, smiled and looked out at the 500-600 people who sat transfixed by him. Like Reggie Jackson, Herbie was up there to be the straw that stirs the drink. He proceeded to preach a little old-time religion... speaking passionately from his lifelong Buddhist faith, he spoke of how Freddie Hubbard would always be alive. Freddie would always live in his heart, just as Miles Davis always would. A spirit isn't something that dies. "That's not going away," Herbie said. Then he recounted a story about playing with Freddie one time in Japan. "It was raining cats and dogs. It was the kind of rain that felt like bricks hitting the roof. The stage was covered, so the musicians were staying dry, but everyone in the audience was getting soaked. Do you know that not one body moved?" Herbie's story took on fantastical proportions as it was being told to a church full of citizens of Los Angeles, a city where you see baseball fans dribble through the Dodger Stadium turnstile well into the 2nd or 3rd inning of a game, then leave if the sun goes behind a cloud. Herbie said the rain poured and poured, but no one made a move to leave. So Freddie decided to help them out, help strengthen their resolve and give them courage. In the middle of a solo he stopped and played one of his patented high notes and held it, and then stopped... to which the crowd responded by shouting a resounding YEAH! Then Freddie played two long high notes, holding each one, and then abruptly stopped. And once again the crowd thundered another deafening YEAH-H-H-H-H-H-H-H! "Freddie was uniting the crowd," Herbie continued, "uniting them against the elements. No one left. Freddie loved to pull humanity together. Freddie pulled the crowd together. They'd shout back, and he'd embrace them and pull them together."

Sid Miller, Jr. came to the pulpit and read a couple of the messages that had been sent. One was from Bruce Lundvall, President of Blue Note Records, lauding Freddie's brilliance and proclaiming his pride in having signed him to recording contracts twice, first at Columbia and then later at Blue Note. Another was read from the great guitarist and singer, George Benson, whose message said, in so many words, that he'd like to be there but the loss was too great to bear.

Then another ripple of energy ran through the crowd and heartened them as Hubert Laws appeared in an aisle off to the left of me and walked toward the stage, holding Stevie Wonder's right hand and guiding him. As the buzz of the crowd grew louder, other musicians were taking their positions in various places on the stage. Dave Weiss was back, so were Roy McCurdy, Phil Ranelin, George Bohannon, Bennie Maupin, Christian McBride. The brilliant young saxophonist Javon Jackson appeared from somewhere.

After a brief onstage discussion of what to play, someone said "let's just jam" and that's all it took. Stevie Wonder grabbed a gigantic chromatic harmonica and started to blow. The others in the band were comping along respectfully and trying to settle into a groove when Stevie blew up with a solo that parted the clouds, ascending higher and higher, then higher and higher, sounding like a cathedral's carillon. In Stevie's upper octave Hubert held his flute to his lips for his solo and began to soar, circling and gliding gracefully in and out of Stevie's harp in the synchronous manner I've always imagined Tchaikovsky wanted for that unrequited first performance of his 1812 Overture in the square of Moscow's newly-built Cathedral of Christ the Saviour -- scored for full orchestra and accompanying brass band, chimes and bells from all the surrounding churches, plus live cannon, it would have attracted and flushed every flock of birds in the city. Freddie had Tchaikovsky's bells and doves that I wanted for him, at last.

The jam began to take on increasingly mystical religious proportions when one of the saxophones quoted the melody line that Freddie opens with on "Why Wait", the Stanley Clarke tune from the Griffith Park Collection CDs I had ordered the night before Freddie died. When all the other horns fell into a unison choir, the divinity of the spontaneous orchestration felt like the cornfield scene in the movie Field of Dreams. Phil Ranelin was attacking his trombone solo with short, staccato blasts the same way Freddie often would at the beginning of a solo, going "T-T-T-T-T-T-T-TEST ...T-T-T-T-T-T-T-TEST...T-T-T-T-T-T-T-TEST" into his horn to see if it was ready, and Phil played just like the man was on his shoulder giving directions. It really did feel like Freddie was in the room swinging right along with the rest of the cats in the band. There were moments when it sounded for all the world like Joe Henderson was up there with them, and I half expected to see Tony Williams do a snare fill and take a solo. Besides having a sweet, sweet melody, the song's title of "Why Wait" in many ways also perfectly embodied Dave Weiss' earlier sentiment when he was describing Freddie's constant willingness to "lay it out there", to never hold back, or in the sports vernacular that Freddie loved, "to leave it all on the field". The man never seemed concerned with saving anything for the next set or the next show. He blew his horn with every ounce of strength he had, every time, every night.

The full-tilt approach to life can have its drawbacks. In late 1992 on a gig in Philadelphia, Freddie split his top lip by playing without having warmed up properly, and this on the heels of a European gig playing in Slide Hampton's band, during which he had "started playing high notes with [Jon] Faddis and got carried away." http://www.shout.net/~jmh/articles/freddie01.html Damaging those two sensitive folds of flesh is bad news for a trumpeter. But it happens, and split lips can be mended just like broken bones. Unfortunately, instead of seeing a doctor and tending to the tedious business of healing his injury, he ignored it and played a week at the Blue Note... and then flew back to Europe for a big band date! He pressed on, Hub-style, and in an act of will, simply toughed it out like an injured athlete who refuses to go onto the disabled list. Talk about holding nothing back and "leaving it all on the field". Problem is, the tear in that little bubble of fat and muscle had become infected, and by the time he finally did get around to getting real medical attention, severe damage had been done. As he took time off to allow the lip to heal over the ensuing months it became apparent that the breach in his golden embouchure was worse than he ever could have imagined.

He said that if he had left the horn alone a few more months and had spent a longer time rehabilitating, he could have averted the disastrous decline that followed. But the story gets muddled at this point, the focus fuzzy, and line between excuse and reason blurred. Like many a person who believes his foolish negligence has cost him his career, Freddie numbed the pain with alcohol and God knows what else. But there's nothing hard to understand about that. Just as you could drive a painter to drink by stopping him from painting, to drive a trumpeter to drink all you would have to do is convince him he can't play his horn. What is hard to understand is how a human being and artist of his calibre could ever have been convinced he'd been defeated.

But that's what happened. As a result, climbing out of the hole he had dug for himself, and reaching the top of the mountain again, took him the rest of his life. The only reason he ever fell at all is that, for a long while, he accepted that he had been defeated. Whether he started it all through self-pity and found it validated by his critics, or listened to his critics for too long and let them grind him down, he had been knocked out, and by a split lip, no less. A damn TKO.

He would have been better off if he had never listened to a single critic. But you know Freddie... he'd listen to anybody. All the talk about the Decline of Freddie Hubbard was only because 1) he had fallen from such a great height, and 2) it was as the result of a disintegration in that aspect of musicianship most easily appreciated by the casual listener, his very advanced technique. Mind you, calling what Freddie possessed "advanced technique" is like calling a Rolls Royce "a car". He was so good when he arrived in New York in 1958 that he shortly found himself getting invited over to John Coltrane's place after jamming with him one night at Count Basie's in Harlem. Word of his prodigious technique spread rapidly when, supposedly after hearing Freddie for the first time, Miles got ahold of Alfred Lion at Blue Note and exhorted him to sign him immediately. Phenomenal technical skills? Legendary chops? He was supernaturally talented, a man, as Quincy Jones points out in the second video below while he's introducing Freddie at the 1975 Downbeat Awards, who had "his own brand of liquid laws". Quincy could have been right -- maybe he was actually surpassing the laws of physics.

But the truth is, the quality he had that inspired us all was his heart, his fiery passion -- his phenomenal technique was never anything more that a means to express it. That's the irony of this sad chapter in his life. It's as if a great lion with a broken foot had been convinced he was no longer a lion.

But I've been listening to the last recording he did, the one he did last year with the New Jazz Composers Octet to celebrate his 70th birthday. I think the proud old lion was on his way back. It isn't Ready for Freddie or Open Sesame, that's a certainty. But comparing anyone's recent work to something earlier isn't only unfair, it's silly. We all change as we live our lives. We all learn to look forward, if we're smart. And it sounds to me like Freddie was starting to look forward again. He was starting to have fun again, especially on the title track "On the Real Side" that he wrote for the new album. There's a sound, a tone he produces that reminds me of all those sunny days and hopeful times that he gave me in his early recordings, and the ones he made such enormous contributions on, like Out to Lunch, Maiden Voyage and Empyrean Isles, Speak No Evil and Blues and the Abstract Truth. It's a faint reminder, but I can hear it, like a weakened pulse that's getting stronger. Each time I hear it, it's stronger. Maybe it's just me, wishing on a star, but his horn work and the arrangements he and Dave Weiss do with the other tunes sound like Freddie again.

Somebody posted a wobbly little 2-minute camera-phone video on YouTube of the show he did at Catalina's for his 70th birthday. Terrible audio, terrible video. But the thing that struck me was the way he's cheering on the crowd. Instead of holding a high note like he did with Herbie in Japan, he's doing it with his arms, like an exultant receiver doing a dance in the end zone, rallying the crowd with a musical cheer. He's embracing the crowd, embracing humanity.

Like most great artists, Freddie tended to be his own worst critic. He admired and wanted the soul of Lee Morgan. He wanted Dizzy's harmonic sensibilities and Miles' nerve. He wanted it all, forever, because he wanted to give it all back every night.

For my part, he always gave me all he had. He never slacked off or cheated me out of a single moment. In fact, he always seemed to give me more than I ever expected. If he was standing in front of me at this very moment, I'd argue that he had everything he ever admired in Lee or Clifford or Dizzy or Miles. He had it all from the very beginning, straight on through to the finish, every step of the way.

And he'd say, Well, have you heard my last recording, On the Real Side, the one we did for my 70th birthday?

I'd say, Yeah, I did, and I liked it.

He'd say, Seventy! I'm getting too old for this shit! And then he'd laugh.

I'd say, Seventy ain't nothing but a number.

He'd say, I can't play those fast runs anymore, like back in the day.

I'd say, I'll take one of your low and slow ballads anytime.

He'd say, I can't blow for 32 bars like I used to. Nowadays I just play 8 and lay out.

And I'd say, Yeah, Freddie, but for eight bars it's the sweetest sound I ever heard.

He'd laugh and say, Glad you like it, man, glad you like it.

I'd say, You're sounding good, you're on your way, Freddie.

He'd say, Yeah, I've been gone a little while but I'm coming back...

Jazz Messenger

Jazz-Rocker

Bopper

Blower

Hard Bopper

Balladeer

The Case of the Missing DVD (Dark Tales of the Black Forest) Part 3

2008-12-31T14:21:00.000-08:00

The plot thickens.

CDJapan is now listing a DVD called "Recorded Live At Montreux Jazz Festival/Chick Corea & Return To Forever" as available for pre-order, with a release date of February 18, 2009 - two weeks prior to the scheduled release of the 2CD set. It is listed as a single disc, but at 151 minutes and priced at ¥3800 or $41.29, it may be two discs.
http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/detailview.html?KEY=YMBA-10001

That's the good news.

The not-yet-good news is that here in the States you will need a modified region-free DVD player to see it, because the listing says it is "Region Code: 2 (Japan, Europe, Middle East, and South Africa only)".

Hm-m-m-m. What this means for us Yanks is hard to tell at this point, but as soon as I know it will be published here.

To be continued.

Hiromi and Sonicbloom's performance at Berklee to be streamed live New Year's Eve

2008-12-30T11:15:00.000-08:00

Hiromi Uehara and her band Sonicbloom are scheduled to kick off National Public Radio's annual live New Year's Eve broadcast tomorrow night at 8:00 p.m. EST. Hiromi and Sonicbloom (David Fiuczynski, guitar, Tony Grey, bass, Martin Valihora, drums) will perform live from the Berklee College of Music Performance Center. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98688651&ft=1&f=1039. The performance will be broadcast on Boston's WGBH and streamed live as part of NPR's Toast of the Nation, although local broadcast times on the member NPR stations may vary: http://www.npr.org/stations/

If you miss the live broadcast tomorrow night, the performance will apparently be archived by National Public Radio NPR.org/toastofthenation.

Return To Forever Live CD to be released March 2nd, 2009

2008-12-23T10:45:00.000-08:00

Good news! The most reliable of sources at Chick Corea Productions emailed me to say that a release date of March 2nd, 2009 has been set for the much-anticipated CD of live performances from Return To Forever's phenomenally successful 2008 tour. Very soon the info on price and availability will be appearing all over the web. It's not too late to write a letter to St. Nick if you mail it fast. Just tell him you'll fill him in on the details later...

At long last we will get to hear those four incredibly talented jazz/rock viruosi play their music again, live and loud. Get those speakers and headphones ready for a workout!

No news yet on the DVD, but as soon as I know the date it will be published here.

Stay tuned.

"Chick Corea's Five Peace Band: Live In Europe" double CD to be released in February 2009

2008-12-19T12:26:00.000-08:00

photo by Noridamar

Chick Corea's Five Peace Band: Live In Europe, a double CD of Five Peace Band's live performances in Europe, is scheduled to be released in Japan on February 4th next year on the Universal Music label. Cost in Japan is ¥3500, $37.91

You can pre-order at these prices from CDJapan. I've purchased CDs from them and they are great - they ship inexpensively and fast in very sturdy containers.

http://cdjapan.jp/d.html?KEY=UCCJ-3021

Stanley Clarke trio (Stanley, Lenny White and Hiromi) studio recording coming soon

2008-12-16T21:30:00.000-08:00

What I heard coming from the mixing board late last Sunday night at Mad Hatter Studios was the deconstructed melody line of a very familiar tune. It took me a few seconds after walking through the door before I recognized it as the Red Hot Chili Peppers' tune "Under the Bridge". It got me to smile as I recalled a similar musical incongruity listening to a radically re-arranged tune a few years ago... "We decided when we were planning this tour that we needed to do a standard as part of our set," Lenny White dead-panned as he introduced the number that night. When he put the mic back on its stand and joined Larry Coryell and Victor Bailey in a de- and re-constructed version of Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog", the contextual atmosphere of Catalina's Bar and Grill (Hollywood's counterpart of New York's Blue Note) was so completely different from any setting for my previous hearings of the tune that it took me until the refrain to recognize it. And when I did, man, did I listen to it!

Such is the power of well-played music. Finely wrought jazz, particularly in the bop tradition of deconstruction of a familiar tune, can wield this power with great force. This incorporation of popular tunes, interpretation of the simplicities of the everyday into the sophisticated language of jazz, reawakens the senses to the world, and deconstructing a tune, when done with musical precision, results in a kind of musical re-birth that can teach the listener to hear what he's never heard before. It makes the ordinary extraordinary. It wakes the dead. Like John Coltrane's take of "My Favorite Things" or Miles Davis' many renditions of "Someday My Prince Will Come", two songs written for Walt Disney movies and rescued from trite musical oblivion by artistic geniuses, such jazz compositions grab a real listener by the ears and take him through expanded realms of expression. Everything old is new again.

So as I listened to these three geniuses reinvigorating and reinventing "Under the Bridge" the thought came to me, once again, that something truly new was happening. Hiromi's lyrical solo began to soar beyond the sad sentiments of the original song of a junkie's lament into a paen to the beautiful, brave new streets of my home town of Los Angeles. Incredible! Like a magnificent sculpture being freed by Michelangelo's hands from a block of stone, the original's beautiful melody was freed from its maundering lyric by these three masterful musicians and transformed into a jazzer's "I Love L.A....Despite Her Many Serious Flaws". Los Angeles through Hiromi's and Stanley's and Lenny's eyes is a new place, or at least a place I had long forgotten exists. This tune never sounded so good.

Other tunes on the recording (barring Mr. Clarke's disapproval, in accordance with his exacting tastes) will include a mind-blowing version of Joe Henderson's "Isotope", "Bass Folk Song," a re-visited tune of his own from the original Return To Forever catalog, a jazzed version of the traditional Japanese song "Sakura, Sakura", and a killer bass and drum duet with Lenny called "Take the Coltrane" -- of which I heard three takes and liked them all. The very last is probably what you will hear when Stanley releases the record, but whichever one it is, you will like it. Stanley's exquisite touch on the bass and Lenny's endlessly imaginitive drum work go different places each time, and I wish you could hear them all. But no matter. This composition has one of those indestructible hooks that sounded good every time Stanley and Lenny played it.

When this recording shows up, you could very well pinch pennies and wait around for some website to post a set of MP3 files for you to download. But my advice is, go buy it. Play it on a real CD player and listen to it through big, fat speakers. This music is alive.

By the way... over the weekend, a confident-ial but unim-peachable source told me that he had just received advance copies of the 2CD Return To Forever 2008 reunion tour compilation and the accompanying performance DVD. He'd been busy and said he hadn't had the chance to see/hear them, but he assured me they now exist. For real. It's only a matter of time before me and thee will have the same chance.

Merry Christmas to all!

Dark Tales of the Black Forest - Part 2

2008-11-25T10:41:00.000-08:00

It had to happen eventually, didn't it? Return To Forever's DVD and CDs of their 2008 reunion tour were lost somewhere in the deep recesses of the Black Forest of Deception, Half-Truth and Law.

So one day an enterprizing angel of mercy at Spain's national radio and television corporation (RTVE) posted 80+ minutes of professional footage shot at the San Sebastian gig http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/player/263967.html , and lo and behold! After several weeks spent languishing quietly in the RTVE archives, the link to it began to appear on the internet courtesy of a few desperately eager European RTF fans. Then in the evening of the very day that Web 2.0 (in the form of aspwin posting it on the return2forever.com forum) really took over, the dark clouds began to clear, and a ray of hope shone through:

aldimeola
Post subject: Re: From the R2F website
Posted: Mon Nov 24, 2008 9:24 pm
Joined: Thu Dec 28, 2006 2:24 pmPosts: 83
Here it is: 1. As of today it looks as though the RTF live DVD and CD may come out as planned. 2. As for my new projects: I plan on having brand new music ready for at least 1 or even 2 new CD's next year! Fingers crossed on the 2nd one! By the way these are separate from "La Melodia" Live in Milano and Diabolic Inventions! 3. Also there will be a new CD of myself and Eszter Horgas with a great Hungarian band combined with Gumbi and Peo from my "World Sinfonia" group. This should come out soon!! Thanks everyone! Al Di

Stay tuned.