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

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)

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...

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

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

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

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 virtuosi 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

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

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!