The Jazz.com Blog
February 08, 2010
Highlights of the Jazz.com Blog
Below are links to some of the highlights from the jazz.com blog.
Life on the Road: The Journal of a Traveling Jazz Musician: Frøy Aagre’s three-part article may be the most insightful account you will ever read about the realities of road life for most jazz musicians. It is not a pretty picture, but it was a story that very much needed to be told.
Jazz and Hip-Hop: Can They Really Mix? Jared Pauley presented a smart mini-history of the courtship between jazz and hip-hop in this two-part article. And he also stirred up a mini-war on our blog pages. Alan Kurtz stepped in to annul this unholy union, responding with his typical rebarbative repartee in a memorable piece entitled Hip-Hop is to Jazz as Termitz R2 Wud. Both articles are well worth reading.
Life at Gypsy Jazz Camp: One of the most interesting developments in the jazz world is the great resurgence of interest in Django Reinhardt and Gypsy jazz. Bill Barnes took us into the heart of this subculture in his three-part article on his experiences at a jazz camp devoted to jazz Manouche.
A Jazz Success Story in Vermont: In a series of articles for jazz.com, Willard Jenkins presented case studies on the people and organizations that are keeping the music alive in various communities around the United States. In this installment, Jenkins explored a jazz success story in Burlington Vermont , and talked with Arnie Malina, the man behind it.
Ornette: The Blue Note Years: In this two-part article, Chris Kelsey looked at a controversial period in Ornette Coleman’s career. Blue Note’s move into the avant-garde was a symbolic moment, and produced music that critics are still debating almost a half-century later.
On Discography: If the jazz world is a subculture, then the most cultish members of all are the jazz discographers. Will Friedwald peers inside the universe of the experts who keep tabs on all of the songs.
Where Copyright Goes Wrong: Jazz.com’s Alan Kurtz is best known for his curmudgeonly critiques and the controversies these engender. But he could have been a lawyer (or at least played one on TV) judging by this convincing assault on the current state of US copyright law.
The Once and Future Strings:When electric guitar first showed up in the jazz world, most fans treated it as a novelty effect. But after the impact of Chicago blues, rock-and-roll and other related styles, the plugged-in guitar has become the defining sound of contemporary music. Bill Barnes looks at the state of the guitar in jazz. This three-part article offers historical perspective on the current situation, and assesses the future potential for this instrument.
The Secret Jazz Festivals: These private events allow a small group of insiders to hear a range of up-and-coming artists. Casual fans are not invited, but concert promoters, booking agents and critics get a glimpse of the new generation of talent. But here's the catch: you won't find them in the US. Thierry Quénum, a leading jazz critic based in Paris, offers an inside look.
And here are links to some other articles of note from the jazz.com blog.
Inside View of a Jazz Success Story
A Forgotten 1959 Masterpiece
The Artistry of George Russell
Keeping Track of 1,144,341 Jazz Tunes
How Jazz is Funded in France
A Fitting Epitaph to Mingus's Score
Remembering Don Ellis
How to Keep a Festival Afloat
Ugly News on the Jazz Audience
Nurturing Jazz in a Tough Town
The Strange Case of Nat King Cole
Talking to Myself About the State of Jazz
Bringing Jazz Back into the Schools
A Giant's Steps: John Coltrane on Atlantic
Peter Gunn Turns Fifty
Listen to These CDs . . . Even if They Sound Awful
Is Bird Dead?
The Future of Jazz Radio
Monk in Morse Code
Radio France Pulls the Plug on Jazz
How Smooooth Can You Get?
Bringing Old Jazz Records Back to Life
The Curmudgeon & Smooth Jazz
The Festival that Avoids the 'J' Word
Remembering Bill Finegan
Revisiting Keith Jarrett's American Quartet
Capitol Records: The Golden Age
Elvis & Jazz: A Cautionary Tale
Putting Queens on the Jazz Map
Conversations with Myself
Could Chet Baker Play Jazz?
Is the Laptop a Jazz Instrument?
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January 06, 2010
The Jazz Detective at Work
Will Friedwald has written several articles in this column about the great jazz detectives who unravel the tangled histories of past performances. Now Will puts on his deerstalker hat and tries to solve one of these mysteries on his own. T.G.
In the 1950s, the song "Ace in the Hole" was a staple of dixieland revival bands—nearly all of them played it: Turk Murphy, Bob Scobey, Lu Watters & Yerba Buena Jazz Band, The Dukes of Dixieland—and, on the English "trad" side of the pond, Humphrey Lyttelton, Lonnie Donegan, and Kenny Ball. Further, it was picked up by jazz and pop singers who were looking for an unusual piece of material: Anita O'Day, not known for her fondness for old-timey tunes, cut it in 1947, and Bobby Darin recorded it on several occasions, famously as a duet with Johnny Mercer (on their classic Two of a Kind album) and also by himself live at The Flamingo in Las Vegas.
It's a marvelous, vivid song; the lyric has the feeling of being antique and contemporary at the same time. "Ace In the Hole" sounds like an old song, something you'd hear on a player piano in an old-timey saloon, but the general idea of the lyric is overtly cynical in a way that's indescribably modern. You can't trust this world and this life, the text tells us, so you have to be prepared to surprise your adversaries with a secret weapon; you have to do some business on the side, and have a special advantage that nobody knows about. Life is a card game, and everyone is bluffing. The only way not to get taken is to out-con all the other con-men out there.
The song is the grandmother of all gambling analogy songs, from "Wheel of Fortune" to "The Gambler." (If any singer wants to do an album of such songs, write me. There's "Solitaire," "The Queen of Hearts is Missing," "From a Jack to a King," "The Cincinnati Kid," and "Losing Hand," for starters.) Early in the song, the narrator even advises that the best way to keep a step ahead of the wolf at the door is to keep a string "of girls on the old Tenderloin." In other words, it's hard out here for a pimp.
Because of the conflicting elements of the song, I could never tell if "Ace In the Hole" was an actual turn-of-the-century tune, or if it was a new song composed in the 1950s, possibly from a musical show or film, deliberately written in the style of an old time song. The major factor which seemed to settle the point me is that I never came across any vintage recordings of "Ace in the Hole"; for years I couldn't find any trace of it from prior to the mid-1940s.
Further confounding my confusion, the title "Ace in the Hole" is not unique to this song. Before we proceed any further, let me clarify that the "Ace In the Hole" that we're concerned with here the song in which the central refrain begins, "Some of them write to the old folks for coin / And that's their ace in the hole." (The song usually starts, however, with the verse, "This town is full of guys / Who think they're mighty wise.") The first "other" "Ace In the Hole" is a jazz instrumental from 1926. Cole Porter then used the title for a song in his 1941 show Let's Face It. Porter's "Ace in the Hole" has also been widely recorded, by Ella Fitzgerald (on The Cole Porter Songbook) and any number of cabaret and musical theater oriented performers, like Hildegarde, Mabel Mercer, Johnny Mathis, and Bobby Short. (The refrain to the Porter song begins, "Sad times may follow your tracks.")
Because a song title can't be copyrighted, in more recent decades there have been other songs named "Ace in the Hole”—there is one written by country giant George Straight, while BMI also lists an earlier hillbilly "Ace" by Merle Travis and Hank Thompson. The country-rock band Little Feat used the song as well, and so did Paul Simon on his 1980 album-film project One Trick Pony.
As near as I can figure it out, the provenance of our "Ace in the Hole" is as follows. It was apparently written in 1909 by a team of songwriters named Jack Dempsey and George Mitchell; who they were and whatever else they wrote, I couldn't tell you. I have no way of knowing how popular the song actually was in 1909, but after consulting with a number of prominent historians of the early recording industry, most notably the redoubtable Tim Brooks, it seems very likely that there is no early recording of the song.
The first "Ace in the Hole" on records is not the Dempsey-Mitchell song, but a hot stomp co-credited to two giants of early jazz, the Italian-born trumpeter Louis Panico and Chicago composer-pianist Elmer Schoebel. The 1926 "Ace in the Hole" was very popular among hot bands in the very early years of electrical recording: it was waxed by any number of groups with colorful appellations typical of the jazz age: Al Katz and his Kittens, The University Six (a California Ramblers spin off with Tommy Dorsey and Adrian Rollini), Earl Gresh and His Gangplank Orchestra (a band that made a big splash), Black Diamond Serenaders (apparently a pseudonym for The Original Indiana Five), and Abe Lyman and his Californians (recording in New York). There were also at least two recordings made by early German jazz bands in Berlin (as listed in Tom Lord's Online Jazz Discography).
That's 1926. Ten years later, for some unknown reason, band vocalist Chick Bullock cut the Dempsey-Mitchell "Ace in the Hole" in March 1936 for the American Recording Corporation. The flip side of Bullock's "Ace" was another song of the era, "My Gal Sal," so perhaps someone at ARC was thinking about featuring Bullock in a program of old-time tunes. The Bullock "Ace" is our song all right; Bullock sings the full verse and chorus. More than most of Bullock's thousands of recordings (no exaggeration), this is a vocal record rather than a dance record, and it's rather unusual for Bullock to be featured so extensively, even on the many sides released under his name.
In 1944, the song re-surfaces, and the mystery deepens. "Ace in the Hole" is commercially recorded in February of that year by the Yerba Buena Jazz Band in San Francisco, a pioneering ensemble of the traditional jazz revival, one of the first groups comprised of young musicians dedicated to playing in the old New Orleans style (in that sense, one of the harbingers of the future, in a funny way). Trumpeter Lu Watters was the usual leader of the YBJB, and its ranks included two other future leaders in trumpeter Bob Scobey and trombonist Turk Murphy.
This particular session, done for Good Time Jazz (the dixielabel run by Lester Koenig and Nesuhi Ertegun, who would both become giant producers in the bebop era) spotlighted the legendary New Orleans trumpeter Bunk Johnson. Bunk was, at the time, the first superstar of the dixieland revival, and, like the song, was only just emerging from obscurity. According to his own account, Johnson had been one of the major players in turn of the century New Orleans, a trumpet king from the era in-between Buddy Bolden and Joseph Oliver. Now the subject of attention from jazz scholars and fans, Johnson was also claiming that he taught Louis Armstrong everything he knows (Armstrong didn't completely dispute him).
It seems likely that Johnson had played "Ace in the Hole" with him from New Orleans and brought it to San Francisco. Now, Tom Lord does list a private recording made by Watters of "Ace in the Hole" from 1942 (not issued until the compact disc era), but it seems just as possible that Bunk had brought it to their attention. The most important contribution to the Yerba Buena "Ace in the Hole," even beyond Johnson himself may have been Clancy Hayes, the vocalist-banjoist, who sings the lyrics in a very clear, straightforward but lightly swinging fashion.
The biggest part of the mystery is this: after WWII, jazz and popular singers start recording "Ace in the Hole." (The first version I can find after the YBJB is in a piano solo by George Zack, recorded for Commodore Records in 1944.) All of a sudden, in 1947, there were at least a half a dozen singles of "Ace in the Hole" including Gene Austin (accompanied by the Les Paul Trio), the veteran crooner and superstar of the '20s. It wasn't much of a stretch for Austin to sing an old-time song, but it was also waxed in quick succession by sarong-filling movie star Dorothy Lamour (Coast Records), jazz hipster Anita O'Day (Signature), Harry Cool (former bandsinger with Dick Jurgens, on Fredlo Records), Red McKenzie (another '20s celebrity, on National), and singer Dottie O'Brien on Capitol Records.
It seems clear that something must have happened to put the song on the map in 1947—but I can't figure out what: was the song in a movie or Broadway show, was it featured on a big radio show? Did President Truman treat the nation to his own piano solo rendition?
In any case, it was firmly established as a perennial by the start of the LP era. As mentioned, Bobby Darin recorded it twice, and Clancy Hayes sang it it on at least two more occasions, with both Bob Scobey and Turk Murphy. Lee Wiley cooed it with trumpeter Billy Butterfield on her 1957 A Touch of the Blues, and Frankie Laine belted it out. Folk singers like Dave Van Ronk and Burl Ives claimed it as their own, whilst the young Joel Grey sang it in a rather retro fashion. It was also a favorite of old-time-style piano professors, like John Wittwer, Buster Wilson, Paul Lingle, and Poppa John Gordy.
For the last 40 years or "Ace in the Hole" has been the property of contemporary dixieland bands; TJD lists 145 different commercial recordings (I would estimate that less than 20% of these are the Cole Porter song, or other aces in other holes). "Ace" has been played and recorded by EuroDixie bands and other traditional jazz ensembles all over the world. Dixieland represents the song's past, and one would expect that genre to signify its future as well. But you never know; for a song celebrating its hundredth anniversary this year to survive for this long, it certainly must have more than a few surprises in store for us, not to mention tricks up its sleeve.
This blog entry posted by Will Friedwald
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December 16, 2009
Remembering Ray Brown (1926-2002)
In conjunction with Christian McBride’s Guest Artist Dozens, focusing on classic tracks by bassist Ray Brown, jazz.com is publishing Ted Panken’s conversation with the two bassists from 1996. T.G.
Ray Brown’s supple sound, elemental beat, harmonic wizardry, and ability to create striking melodic lines at any tempo made him the definitive bassist of modern jazz. During his 58 years as a professional musician, he played with virtually every consequential figure on the scene. In the first stage of his career, he played on the first Gillespie-Parker combo recordings ("Shaw Nuff"), later making such influential sides as "One Bass Hit," "Two Bass Hit" and "Ray's Idea" with Gillespie's seminal big band in 1946. He joined fellow Gillespians John Lewis, Milt Jackson and Kenny Clarke in the first iteration of the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1951, at which point he had been touring regularly since 1948 with singer Ella Fitzgerald, his first wife, and with Jazz at the Philharmonic.
Indeed, Brown's relationship with Norman Granz led to numerous sideman appearances for Verve and Pablo until the latter 1980's. A short list includes recordings with Louis Armstrong, Gillespie, Parker, Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Johnny Hodges, Benny Carter, Ben Webster, Illinois Jacquet, Sonny Rollins, Milt Jackson, Bud Powell, Hank Jones, Phineas Newborn, Jimmy Rowles, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington.
Many of those recordings found Brown in a rhythm section with pianist Oscar Peterson, whom he met on Peterson's first Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in Montreal in 1949, and whose trio—first with guitarists Barney Kessel and Herb Ellis, and subsequently with drummer Ed Thigpen—he famously anchored from 1952 to 1966. In 1966, Brown came off the road, and settled in Los Angeles, functioning simulaneously as a musician and businessman. Over the next two decades he managed such artists as Quincy Jones and the Modern Jazz Quartet, contracted for the studios, co-founded the L.A. Four, co-owned a nightclub called Club Loa, and continued to freelance extensively.
In the mid-'80s, Brown returned to the road with pianist Gene Harris and drummer Jeff Hamilton. The trio recorded a series of albums for Concord and Paddle-Wheel, evolving an ensemble sound that blended harmonic sophistication with grits-and-gravy blues imperatives. Under contract to Telarc during the '90s, Brown continued to challenge himself, sustaining trio excellence with such hand-picked young talent as pianists Benny Green and Geoff Keezer and drummers Greg Hutchinson and Kareem Riggins, and organizing Super Bass in 1996.
“When Ray laid the rhythm down, it was like a Mack Truck with a Rolls-Royce engine,” Monty Alexander told me in a tribute piece that Downbeat ran after his death. “He was the greatest support player, yet he wasn't about to be a nameless character in the background, just doing the pedestrian work.”
“Ray gave me confidence,” Peterson remarked. “I never had to wonder and worry about where things were going harmonically or rhythmically. He listened to each performance that everyone gave, and adjusted his playing to you on different nights, which not a lot of bassists do. He would walk different lines behind me, change the harmonic pattern, just to see what I would do.”
“If you isolated Ray's basslines and superimposed them over the chords in, say, a higher register, you'd find he was creating beautiful contrapuntal melodies all the time,” Keezer said. “I felt I had complete freedom to go whatever direction I wanted -- and I took it pretty far out.”
“Ray’s approach to teaching wasn't ‘Try this scale on this chord,’ Clayton stated. “Instead he would say, ‘Check out what Oscar Pettiford did on this record, or what Israel Crosby did with this bassline from Ahmad Jamal.’ He turned me on to Eddie Gomez, Richard Davis and Scott LaFaro. People forget that Ray Brown played Bebop, and when it hit, people thought it came from outer space; more jazz lovers could not relate to it than could. And Ray continued to search and stretch and experiment. His later arrangements involved more unpredictable voicings, chord changes and melodic movement than things he did five and ten years before.”
“He saw at an early age with Norman Granz in JATP how to run a business and take care of the musicians,” Jeff Hamilton noted. “He related that Norman once pulled the entire tour off of an airplane because, even though he’d bought a ticket for it, they wouldn’t allow his bass on board. Ray’s pride and sense of self-worth influenced his business techniques. ‘Well, if you don't want me for this amount, you must not want me very much.’ They would inevitably call back. Ray said, ‘No, that was the amount you offered two weeks ago; now the amount is this.’ That kind of self-confidence came through every part of Ray Brown's personality, musically and doing business off the bandstand.”
“After he moved to Los Angeles, we started working a lot together,” said Quincy Jones. “We got closer and closer. After a while, Ray started to take care of booking gigs and travel. He was an astute businessman. Old school played everything. We all played chitlin' circuits. And you didn't sit around whining about what you had to play, man. You played it, and tried to make it all sound good. That's what I loved about Ray. That's where I think our chord struck, in being very curious about what the business side of it was and not wanting to be a victim. We wanted to be more in charge of our own destinies.
“A man never plays more or less than they are as a human being, and Ray was a very confident, take-charge person. He played bass like that and lived like that. He ate 17 different dishes like that. Wherever we were, whatever was good, Ray knew what it was. He’d probably eat a 249-pound catfish if he tried! To me, he was the absolute symbol that if you empty your cup every time and learn to make it a habit, it always comes back twice as full. Give it up every time, man. Don't save nothin'. I learned more and more about that from him all the time. In everything.”
On the final night of Super Bass’ debut gig at the Blue Note in 1996, Brown and McBride joined me on New York’s WKCR for a discussion about his life and times. An edited version appears below.
[MUSIC: Ray Brown/Basie/Roker, "One" (1975); Ray Brown Trio, “Con Alma” (1993); Ray Brown with Dizzy Gillespie Big Band, “One Bass Hit” (1946)]
I’d like to get things started by giving Ray Brown a bit of the third degree on his early years in music. Hearing Count Basie and Ray Brown together puts you in touch with two-thirds of your deepest musical roots, because when you were 11 years old or so, you got to hear the Basie band on a fairly regular basis, didn’t you.
Oh yeah. I went down there every day...
This was at the William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh. You sat under the piano, right near Walter Page.
Right, in Pittsburgh.
How did you find out that this was happening, and what was the cause of your interest at this time?
Oh, I knew everything about music. We had a lot of music in Pittsburgh. We had two theaters that had live shows 52 weeks a year. We had jam sessions at the union every night of the week, and the guys from the theaters came down there and jammed with the local guysThere was a big band in each theater, and a big band played a concert once a week in Pittsburgh. There was a ton of music.
What was the source of your being inclined to it? Was music in your family? Were your parents musicians?
No, they weren’t musicians, but they loved music. When I was a little kid my father wanted me to be a piano player, and he loved Fats Waller. We used to sit up and listen to Fats Waller, and he’d say, “Listen to that left hand; listen to that guy play.” Of course, Fats Waller was fantastic, one of the best of all time. Then he came in with another record and he said, “Yeah, I got another guy I like; you’d better listen to this guy.” Then he put this record on, and it was Art Tatum. So you get pointed in the right direction.
Did you have private teachers?
Yeah, I had piano teachers. The first one was kind of uppity. She would pass me in the street... I’d be playing marbles, and she’d stop the car and pick me up and say, “All right, let’s go.” I had to go home and wash up and come in there. She’d inspect my nails. She was a very proper... I told my mother I didn’t like that piano teacher. So my mother said, “Well, what do you want to do?” I said, “Well, there’s a couple of ladies... There’s a lady named Ruby Young I want to study with.” Ruby Young had her own band. There were two bands in Pittsburgh at that time led by women. One was Gertrude Long and her Nighthawks, and this was Ruby Young and her band. So Ruby was teaching lessons.
How old were you when you started playing?
Oh, God. Young. 10, 11, somewhere around there. But anyway, I took my first lesson with Ruby Young, and after the lesson I said, “Can you play some jazz for me?”—and she struck out then! I told my mother, “Now, that’s it.” She just sat up and played some stride and everything, and then I was very happy. This is what I wanted to do and this is what I wanted to hear.
I gather you lived next door to a trombone player who played with Gertrude Long’s Nighthawks.
Right. I used to go over and sit on the floor while they were rehearsed. I was around music all the time. And my father liked Fats Waller so much that when my folks gave parties, he hired a guy who looked like Fats Waller, who played very little piano, he sang a little bit, but he wore tails and a top hat just like Fats Waller, and my father would tell all the guests, “After you get a few drinks, he sounds real good.” [LAUGHS] This guy would imitate Fats Waller, singing “Your Feet’s Too Big,” sang all those songs, and he played the piano. My father couldn’t get Fats Waller, but that was the best thing he could do. So there was music all the time in my house.
So come 1937 with the Basie band sort of on their workshop month preparing for their sojourn in the north, you were there regularly, huh?
That’s right. He had Sweets and Buck Clayton and Dickie Wells. All those guys were in the band. Jo Jones, Walter Page, Freddie Green. So I met all these guys when I was a kid.
Do you remember the interaction, things you asked them, what they said to you?
No. I just remember sitting there listening. So that record has two people who were very-very influential to me, Dizzy Gillespie (who we don’t even have to talk about) and Count Basie.
But you weren’t playing the bass at all in 1937 when you saw Walter Page.
No, I wasn’t playing the bass at all.
That happened when you heard Jimmy Blanton, I gather.
Well, it didn’t happen right away, but I was aware of Jimmy Blanton, and then when I started messing around with the bass it became very prominent.
How did it come about that you made the transition from being a piano player to a bass player?
Well, it was very simple. I went to junior high school, and I signed up for orchestra, and they had about, I don’t know, 28 piano players and they had 3 basses and only 2 bass players. So every day, there was a bass laying on the floor, doing nothing. And I’m sitting over there waiting for my 15 minutes a week to sit down to the piano. It’s difficult for teenagers to sit around all day and not do anything and stay out of trouble. So I asked the teacher, “Hey, if I was playing that bass, I could play every day.” He said, “That’s right. We’re looking for another bass player.” I said, “Okay, you’ve got one.” And that was it.
Was there a good teacher there?
No-no. I just played it. Just figured it out. The schoolteacher showed me what... He had to show everybody every instrument. He tuned up everybody’s instrument and he showed you, gave you five minutes maybe, and then you were on your own. But I was bringing these things home; I was practicing with the records. And I luckily played a lot with Duke Ellington, because the guy who was on that record sounded best to me. So I played with that record all the time. Any Duke Ellington record.
So Jimmy Blanton was the guy you played along with.
Daily.
When did you start gigging on the bass?
When I got to high school, a guy who I used to deliver papers to named Henry Foster was looking for some guys, and I said, “Hey, I play the bass and my friend plays the piano” -- a guy named Walt Harper. He hired both of us, and we started working with them on Friday and Saturday and Sunday, making $3 a night. That was a lot of money then. There were no taxes either.
What type of places would you play, and who was coming to hear you?
Just local people. I don’t know... A lot of that stuff is dim now in terms of me giving you accuracy about the people showing up. All I can remember is playing and learning the tunes.
Was it piano-bass-and-drums...
Piano, bass and drums and saxophone.
Do you remember what kind of repertoire you were playing at the time? Did you ever have room for features for yourself?
Not really, no. But we played just the tunes of the day. “Tea For Two” and “Satchmouth Baby” and “Honeysuckle Rose.”
And all this time you’re still going to the theaters to hear the big bands...
Oh yeah. Well, when I got to high school we started playing hookey to hear... We were listening to Lester Young, Bud Powell with Cootie Williams, Oscar Pettiford with Charlie Barnet, way before he ever joined Duke Ellington.
In Pittsburgh what was the top level of bass playing you could hear when you were coming up?
I guess the top bass players were a guy named Bass McMahon, who wound up playing with Eckstine’s band. Then a guy who wound up here in New York, who they called Crusher, named Carl Pruitt, and he was with Roy Eldridge’s band. They were the top guys in Pittsburgh.
Hearing Roy Eldridge’s name, and he being from the Pittsburgh area, makes me want to ask you which of the many famous musicians who emerged from Pittsburgh were you in contact with, were your peers when you were coming up.
There’s more famous people out of Pittsburgh, I think, than any place in the world, which is just ahead of maybe Philadelphia and Detroit. You go back to Earl Hines and Roy Eldridge and Maxine Sullivan and Billy Strayhorn and Billy Eckstine, and come up to Art Blakey and Erroll Garner and Stanley Turrentine and Tommy Turrentine, Mary Lou Williams, George Benson... It’s a long list. Dakota Staton. Henry Mancini. Pittsburgh had zillions of bad dudes come out of there! A lot of people came out of Pittsburgh. So there was a lot of music in Pittsburgh. I think in towns (Philadelphia was like that, Detroit was like that) where there’s a lot of music going on, I think it inspires young people to get into it.
Now, the only guy I ever had any contact with (I didn’t know Roy or Eckstine or any of those people) was Erroll Garner, who was a few years older than us, but we used to play hookey, go over to his house and listen to him play the piano. He used to come by, this little band that we worked with... He lived around the corner, and on Sunday night we played this North Side Elks; he’d slip in there around 11:30 and come in there and jam with us. It was a lot of fun when he showed up.
Was he playing the same then as later...
Well, he swung the same way. But he was playing more like Fats Waller then.
Did you get to see Jimmy Blanton play in person? Do you remember that experience?
I saw him at the theater, yes. The problems with the bass back in 1940-41, which is when Blanton was very prominent (or any other bass player), there were no amplifiers. There was a microphone in front of the band, and the saxophone player came up and played solos off it, the singers sang, and the leader would make announcements on it. I mean, there was just one microphone up there. Until Duke Ellington showed up and had a special mike on Jimmy Blanton standing in front of the band, you never heard the bass that well. I mean, you heard the guy playing, but you couldn’t do anything fast on bass because nobody would be able to hear it. So Blanton was an oddity in the first place, and a lot of people didn’t understand it. They said, “Why does Duke Ellington have this guy up there playing all them bass solos?” “Hah! Yeah, sure.”
From you, a quick evaluation how Jimmy Blanton changed the face of the bass.
Oh, he just changed it. From black to white. That big a change. Just picking it up, he was different. I mean, he had the best sound you ever heard. He played the best lines. He played the best solos. He did everything! And everybody was into Jimmy Blanton. I mean, I delivered newspapers to Carl Pruitt’s house, and I don’t care when I went by his house; he was playing those records and practicing with the records just like everybody else. This must have been done around the world. Everybody said, “What?” They heard a guy play a bass like that... PSHEW!
Let’s take you from Pittsburgh in a capsulized way to 1944 to New York and hearing Dizzy Gillespie. What were the circumstances of leaving Pittsburgh?
I would have left Pittsburgh before I finished high school, but my mother said if I did she was going to have me picked up by the police. So I had to finish high school. Schenley High School. What happened, really, Cootie Williams’ band was at a big theater downtown with Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots and some dance team, Cook & Brown or something like that. It was a big show. They had Benson & Hedges’ hot record, “Put Me In Your Brass Bed,” or whatever the name is... Anyway, that show was hot. The bass player in that show got picked up by the Army because he didn’t pick up his draft notice. They came and got him from backstage, put him in a truck and drove him off to the Army base. So now they’re looking for a bass player, and they got Crusher, Carl Pruitt, and he finished out the week. But somebody told them about me, and I went down there, and they tried the jacket on me -- and Carl Pruitt was too big, the jacket fit me, and they offered me the job. [LAUGHS] So I ran home and told my folks. I said, “I got a job with Cootie Williams’ band.” They said, “You have no job.” You’re going to school. And I cried and rolled over and died a few times. But my mother said, “You’re going to finish school.”
So you had to stay in Pittsburgh a little while more.
Absolutely. If you knew my folks, you would have stayed, too!
So after high school, then what?
As soon as I finished high school, I went on the road. I went to Buffalo with a guy named Jimmy Hinsley in ‘44.
Wasn’t Hank Jones in Buffalo at that time?
Yes, that’s where we met.
I’ve read about you meeting after the show, drinking milkshakes and then going to hear Art Tatum after you were done.
Yes. What happened was, I got a room at the YMCA, and a couple of days after I’d gotten there I was coming down going to someplace I was going. I used to take the stairs down, and you passed a door that was the door to the cafeteria. They had a piano, for some reason, in the cafeteria. And I heard what I thought was this record we had at home of “Begin The Beguine” by Art Tatum, which I knew very well. I played it many times. I knew it practically by heart. And I heard this record playing, and I stood outside the door and I said, “Wow, there’s that Tatum record,” and I sat and listened to it and it played -- but when it got to the end there was some more playing! I said, “Whoa!”
I went through the door, and there’s a guy sitting up there playing the piano. I walked over to him and said, “Hey, man, that was that Art Tatum record, ‘Begin The Beguine.’” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Oh yeah!” That was Hank Jones. That’s how we met. So after that, every day I would bring my bass home, and we would go down to the cafeteria and play -- every day. We were on different jobs, but we just played together every afternoon.
What sort of things would you play?
Anything he wanted to play, and I followed him.
You were part of the first group of musicians where the general level of knowledge required seemed to be more. How much do you think your piano background helped you in dealing with the music you had to play later on?
Well, the piano has always helped me in music. The bass helps you hear the chord, but the piano then spells it out for you, in case you don’t know what the other notes are. The piano plays all the notes. So between the bass and the piano you have everything.
Let’s get you back on course to New York City. You’re in Buffalo with Jimmy Hinsley, you meet Hank Jones, you’re playing in the cafeteria. The story I hear is that you were on the road with the Snookum Russell band, then you left that band and went to New York City. Snookum Russell was one of those band that had major figures before they became major figures.
Well, everybody in those days... There were a ton of big bands, and when you left school and went on the road, you normally went, in those days, with a big band, and you would play with the big band and then you would get better and you would move up to a better big band. Eventually, you would wind up with one of the major big bands, as you became better. Two guys who were in Snookum Russell’s band just before I joined it were was Fats Navarro and J.J. Johnson. Those are not too bad names!
What kind of music was he playing?
I guess you could call it almost a commercial jazz band. He covered the hits of the day. If Lucky Millinder had a hit with Bull Moose Jackson, “Who Threw The Whiskey In the Well,” we would be doing that. What happened was, I joined Snookum, and then he found out that I knew all of this stuff that Jimmy Blanton and Duke Ellington had done, so he started doing it between the two of us -- because he of course loved Duke Ellington. So he started featuring me doing the Blanton stuff. There was a saxophone player in that band named Charles Carman(?) out of Sandusky, Ohio, and this guy was a Lester Young freak. He knew everything Lester Young ever made—every note! When I met him, and we were talking (after he’d been in the band for a little while), he said, “Do you know anything about Prez?” I said, “Sure.” He said, “What do you know about him?” I said, “Well, what do you want to know?” He said, “Do you know any of his solos?” I said, “Call one.”
What you need to know is when I was going to high school we had a club of musicians, and every record that came out, as soon as it came out, you’d buy it (and it cost like 29 cents, a ‘78), you had two days to learn any of the major solos on there, and if you didn’t learn it in two days then nobody would let you in the house, because you had to sing it before you could get in the guy’s house. So you had to learn every solo off of every record.
So I said, “Which one do you want to hear?” He said so-and-so and so-and-so, and then I started singing it to him. I couldn’t get rid of him after that. Now, Lester Young and Slam Stewart had these records with Johnny Guarnieri and Sid Catlett, and we started doing those things—““Sometimes I’m Happy,” all that stuff. So we were covering everything.
So Snookum Russell was a stimulating experience.
Oh yeah.
But you left. It’s a funny story I’ve heard, there were four or five of you, they were going to leave the band, and they backed out...
Well, we all said we were going to go to New York and try our luck. We had been with Snookum about eight months, and we’re reading Downbeat magazine and reading about Coleman Hawkins and 52nd Street and all these things. We said, “We’ve got to go to New York.” Because you had to go to New York to make it then. You couldn’t make it anyplace else. You had to come to New York. I said, “Well, then, let’s go to New York.” So five of us decided we were going to go to New York. And the night before we were supposed to leave, I started packing, I looked around, and everybody was sitting around. I said, “What’s going on?” One by one, they said, “Naw...” The other four guys backed out. So I started to back out, and then I said, “No, I’m going.” I had talked to an aunt in New York and she said I could stay with her. So I said, “I’m going.”
How did you travel?
On the train. Took two days.
What happened when you got here?
I went to my aunt’s, washed up, she gave me some dinner, and I asked her son, who was my age, “Where is 52nd Street?” He said, “Well, you’ve got to get the subway to get down there.” I said, “Well, as soon as we eat, let’s go down there. I want to see it.” And he took me.
And who was on the Street?
Oh God, I can’t remember every band, but it was frightening. I know the Downbeat, the second club on the right, had Art Tatum and Billie Holiday. Stuff Smith was across the street (I can’t remember the other band). Benny Harris and Don Byas. There was one band that I went to see every night for a month (I didn’t miss a set), which was a trio with Erroll Garner, J.C. Heard and Oscar Pettiford. Never missed a set. Never did miss a set. It was ridiculous. You would have died if you could heard that group, man. Obnoxious. But anyway, the third place there had Coleman Hawkins featured, and Billy Daniels was singing intermissions, and he was being accompanied by a piano player, and it said, “Hank Jones.” So I ran in there, and I asked if Hank Jones was around. They said, “Yeah, he’s back there,” and I went back there, and we sat down and started to talk. While we were talking, “Oh, there’s Dizzy Gillespie coming through the door.” I said, “Oh yeah? Introduce me. I want to meet him.” Because I had heard all his records and stuff. So he called Dizzy, and Dizzy came over, and Hank said, “This is a good friend of mine; he’s a good bass player; he just got in town.” Dizzy looked at me and said, “Can you play?” I said, “Well...” I mean, what are you going to say? Hank said, “Yeah, he can play.” So he said, “You want a job?” And I said, “Yeah!” And he gave me a card and said, “Be at my house tomorrow night 7 o’clock for a rehearsal.” I got up there, and there was four guys in there—Bud Powell, Max Roach, Dizzy and Charlie Parker. Can’t beat that. If you won the lottery tomorrow, it wouldn’t be as good as that.
What happened then?
Well, I had a heart attack first, and then we started to play some music.
What did the music sound like to you? Was it along lines you were thinking about?
Like nothing I’ve ever heard before. They played tempos and keys and songs that I had never heard of, and you’re just standing there watching and trying to keep up. Dizzy and Charlie Parker played so good, it was a frightening experience.
Dizzy Gillespie was famous for showing musicians how to play the music that he developed. Did he do that with you at all?
He did that with all of us. He used to show Max a lot of stuff. They were very meticulous about what they wanted from the drums, especially Dizzy. But if you’d ask him, then he would show you. I know after I had been with him for about three or four weeks, I said, “How am I doing?” He said, “Well, you’re doing pretty good, but you don’t play the right notes.” [LAUGHS] So I said, “What do you mean?” He took me over to the piano and showed me. He said, “Now, this note is right.” Then he played the chord and showed me. He said, “You play this note. It’s right. But that’s not the note I want.” They were using a lot of substitutions. So I would be playing a D, but he would want me to play a B. I didn’t hear that at first, and then after he showed me I started finding out.
A few words about your relationship with and impressions of Charlie Parker.
Charlie Parker was unique. I don’t have to tell anybody in their right mind how well this man played his instrument. But what you don’t realize is, he’s the only guy I ever heard who could cover everything. If you wanted to play “Cherokee” as fast as you could play it, he would eat it alive. If you wanted to play some swing, like “Now’s The Time” or something like that, he would kill that. If you wanted to play a ballad like Bird with Strings, he would eat that up. And then, he was the best blues player you ever heard! He just covered everything. There was nothing he couldn’t do.When you ask me for a few words about Charlie Parker, in a capsule that’s covering it pretty well.
Did he always play fairly short solos? Was the way he plays on records or the various broadcasts with four or five choruses the rule, or did he extend...
He stretched out a few times. But I’ll never forget what he told me. One night somewhere we were playing, and after one of the sets I walked up to him and I said, “Bird, it feels so good when you play, why don’t you play more?” And he looked at me and he said, “Raymond, if I played any more, I’d be practicing. I do my practicing at home.”
A few words about Dizzy Gillespie.
Wow, that’s difficult. I don’t know where to begin. He was responsible for a lot of things that happened to me. And he taught me a lot of things. This is something that we as musicians don’t talk a lot about to people, but we learn many things from our mentors or people who we work for or who we admire or who are in front of us. You don’t even realize how much you’ve learned from them. You carry it with you all your life, and then you pass it along. I just learned a tremendous amount of things from Dizzy Gillespie. Needless to say, he was a magnificent trumpet player, and he was a prolific songwriter, and he was a prolific arranger. But I just keep going back to his knowledge of music. Because in that band, which was a fantastic band that I just talked about... In fact, they picked up Milt Jackson a couple of weeks later. Dizzy organized all the music. He laid all the music down. What can I say? It’s history!
Were you in there at the very beginning of the big band?
He had a big band before, but it didn’t go, and he had to give it up. I joined him when he had given up the big band and was getting ready to start another small band. That’s when I showed up. Then when we came back from California, he told Milt Jackson and I, “Listen, I’m thinking of getting another big band, and if you guys want to stay with me, you let me know.” So we both said, “Absolutely!” Then we opened up on 52nd Street.
What were the early rehearsals like? Is it true that Monk was involved...
Monk was the piano player in that big band before John Lewis.
Was that a similar experience to hearing Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in 1944 on coming to New York? Did it sound like anything you’d ever heard?
No, not like any big band I’d ever heard. Very exciting. The music, the writing, the approach was all different. The harmonies. The only guy who experimented with harmonies to that extent was Duke Ellington, and he was always ahead of his time.
How did your first and still famous features for the band come to be?
Well, most leaders look at a band and they see who they have there to exploit, who has some talent that they can feature. When he looked at this band, I guess it was Jackson and I, and James Moody who enjoyed a lot of the solo space along with Dizzy. Other guys got solos, but we got a lot of space.
It was a great opportunity to really develop your conception in a variety of ways.
Yeah, but all these things are designated by the leader. It’s like Jimmy Blanton joins Duke Ellington, and six months later he’s standing in front of the band playing solos all night. So Duke Ellington saw something and he was right. He was absolutely right! Here’s a guy who had under his thumb at any given time, Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster and Harry Carney and Ray Nance and Cootie Williams—all those guys! But this was a diamond he had just discovered, and he did something with it.
In talking about Blanton before you were mentioning the difficulties bassists had in big bands because of the lack of amplification. Now, you had to play very fast with Dizzy Gillespie. Did you have amplification by that time? How did you deal with...
Well, I didn’t play fast solos. We were just playing fast tempos.
CMB: “Things To Come”! [LAUGHS]
When I was talking about playing fast I was talking about the way Christian McBride plays now. 20-30-40 years ago you wouldn’t have heard all those notes he’s playing. Now you can hear every one of them.
But then, from what I gather, people heard you pretty clearly, and those are some tempos that haven’t been caught up with yet!
We’re not discussing tempos, now. We’re discussing solo lines. That’s a big difference. Nobody dared play anything that fast because you couldn’t hear it. Oscar Pettiford played some magnificent solos, and you didn’t really get to hear him until he joined Duke Ellington.
I’d like to talk you about Coleman Hawkins and your impressions of him. I read a story that you and Hank Jones were trying to work out ways to trick him...
[LOUD LAUGH]
...on “Body and Soul” or something, and he just threw them right back at you.
That’s what I was talking about with all of the great saxophone players, how they differed. For instance, let’s take Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins. We were on Jazz at the Philharmonic, and Coleman Hawkins was playing “Body and Soul,” which he had to play whenever he took his saxophone out. Hank Jones and I rehearsed in the daytime, we devised about 15 different sets of changes on “Body and Soul.” And it didn’t make any difference. Whatever we played, he just ate it up! He just turned around, looked at us and said, “Hmm, THBBF,” and would go right through it. We just broke up. But it was good. This guy had a magnificent ear! On the other hand, Lester Young, you could play what you want back there. Doesn’t matter. He’s playing little stories. He makes up melodies of his own, so he’s not interested in the changes. He didn’t miss the change, but then he had his own interpretation of how to do it.
CMB: What about that story you told me about Ben Webster, when you were doing one of those Jazz at the Philharmonics. That one wasn’t as smooth, huh?
Well, but that’s how you learn, though. That’s why I can play songs in all the keys now. He’s kind of responsible for that. They had a ballad medley on Jazz at the Philharmonic, and each guy would walk up... They had ten horns. Each guy would walk up two bars before the other guy finished and tell the rhythm section what he was going to play in what key. So Coleman Hawkins would say, “‘Body and Soul’ in D-flat,” then he’d go out and play. Roy Eldridge would come by and say, “‘The Man I Love,’ E-flat.” It was just like that. Until you get to Ben Webster, and Webster would come up and say, “‘My One And Only Love,’ B-natural.” And we’d be back there scrambling for those changes! So after the show was over, I would be in the back, packing up my bass, and somebody walked up behind me and hit me on my head. I turned around and it was Ben Webster. He said, “You messed up the chords tonight.” I said, “Man, you were playing in B-natural.” He said, “Don’t you have a B on that bass?” Enough said. Christian likes that story!
CMB: I’m sure we’ve all been through that a couple of times!
But it’s good for somebody to bring that to your attention. All it does is, it improves you as a musician.
All those saxophonists had very different sounds and different approaches to projecting sound. Ben Webster, for instance.
Oh yeah. That may be the best saxophone sound I ever heard in my life, just the sound he made coming out of that horn.
You once described it, I think, as he and Coleman Hawkins and Johnny Hodges had the most mature sounds that you had heard.
Well, Charlie Parker used to call Johnny Hodges the Lily Pons of the saxophone. Now, Lily Pons was a famous opera singer; what a beautiful voice. That’s what Bird called Rabbit, the Lily Pons of the saxophone.
Staying on various personalities, Hank Jones was obviously very important to you at that time.
We call him “Mr. Piano.” There’s just not a lot of people around who are that prolific on that instrument as he is. He plays everything well. I mean, he’s sort of like I said about Charlie Parker; this guy just does it all. Magnificent player. Wouldn’t you say so, Christian?
CMB: Oh, definitely. I’d like to ask Ray about the short movie clip of Dizzy Gillespie’s Big Band, Jivin’ in Bebop? You were saying how Duke used to put Jimmy Blanton in front of the band, and Dizzy does that to you on the video where you guys play “One Bass Hit.”
Oh yeah. Well, they didn’t have to put me up front, but I guess if you’re featured on a tune, doing this movie the tendency was to bring the soloist up front. It was unusual for the time, but they did it even with a bass player.
CMB: Every note you played came through crystal-clear.
Such as it was.
I’d like to talk to you about some of the drummers you’ve played with, since bass and drums are so interlocked. First of all, Kenny Clarke, a fellow Pittsburgher.
That’s right. I didn’t name him, but I left out a lot of people. Kenny Clarke was a special drummer. I never will forget, I would come to work on 52nd Street... Because he was in that first rhythm section, Monk, myself and Kenny Clarke. He said, “Now, I want you to stand behind the bass drum, because I want your bass notes to go through the bass drum so it doesn’t come out BOOM-BOOM-BOOM. It will sound almost like a bass coming out of there. And he would come down early and have a damp cloth and wipe down his bass drum and tune it, and then tell me exactly where he wanted me to stand, because he said that makes the rhythm section sound better. Most guys aren’t that meticulous about music. He was special. And he could swing. That’s another thing about those Pittsburgh drummers. Art Blakey, PSHEW! Boy, those guys had some beat. They had a beat, man.
But we were talking about Hank Jones. We did a session, and I challenged him on this... I said, “Do you ever remember a song that Fats Waller used to sing called ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’?” He said, “Hell, yeah, I knew that tune. I grew up with that.” I said, “Well, let’s play it.” And we played it on this record date. So this is just for Hank Jones. I hope he’s listening, because he’ll fall out.
[MUSIC: RB/HJ, “Your Feet’s Too Big” (1976); RB/HJ/Bags, “Nancy” (1964); OP/RB/Ella, “Street of Dreams”]
That was Ray Brown’s selection of music with your first wife, Ella Fitzgerald.
Well, there’s been so much since she passed away. They’ve done so much. I’ve heard it on the radios everywhere we’ve gone, Europe and the United States. We’ve just lost one of the best ones. A magnificent woman and a magnificent singer. One of the best who ever did it. I have great memories just for the fact that... The first trumpet player, and one of the best of all time, Mr. Louis Armstrong, he and Ella did a lot of stuff together, and I was fortunate to be on a lot of that stuff. But I’ve been overly blessed to play with all the way back to Louis Armstrong and all the way up to guys like Christian McBride now. And I’m just elated to still be able to go up on the bandstand and play. It’s a great feeling! And to have gone through all of those people I’ve played with. All of those saxophone players, Prez and Hawk and Ben and Sonny Rollins, Johnny Hodges and Bird and Cannonball. Sweets and Roy and Fats and Dizzy...Clark Terry. I can’t name everybody. All the piano players I’ve played with, all the guitar players, and all the drummers. Just I’ve worked with almost everybody in this business, and that’s a blessing. can’t describe it. It’s just too overwhelming.
Just a few words on how This One’s For Blanton came to be.
Well, I made maybe half-a-dozen sessions with Ellington, whom I had always wanted to play with ever since I was knee-high to a duck. But Norman Granz said to me, “You and Duke ought to do some things like he and Blanton did.” I said, “Oh, I don’t know about that!” But I said, “Well, let’s talk about it.” He tried for years to get us together. We were just in different places all the time. Duke was busy and he was someplace, and I was busy someplace. Of course, this was the last record he made before he passed, and I was fortunate enough to get in the studio with him. The second session we did, he was pretty sick. He had a fever. But he came in and played magnificently.
This blog entry posted by Ted Panken
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December 09, 2009
The Best CDs of 2009
I’ve been making a list, and checking it twice. Okay, I admit it, I made two lists, and only checked them once. In any event, you know what that means—it’s time for the best of year picks.
First up, my selections for the best blues and roots music CDs of 2009. Ten albums made the cut. Here they are, in alphabetical order.
The Best Blues and Roots Music CDs of 2009
Fiona Boyes: Blues Woman
Buckwheat Zydeco: Lay Your Burden Down
Various Artists: Chicago Blues: A Living History
Shemekia Copeland: Never Going Back
Ramblin' Jack Elliott: A Stranger Here
Tinsley Ellis: Speak No Evil
Seasick Steve: Man From Another Time
Otis Taylor: Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs
Various Artists: A Tribute to The Mississippi Sheiks - Things About Comin' My Way
Derek Trucks: Already Free
Watermelon Slim: Escape from the Chicken Coop
Woodbrain: Swimming in Turpentine
And now for my choices for the best jazz CDs of 2009. Below are my 25 selections, in alphabetical order.
The Best Jazz CDs of 2009
Claudia Acuña: En Este Momento
Ben Allison: Think Free
Darcy James Argue: Infernal Machines
The Bad Plus: For All I Care
Stefano Bollani: Stone in the Water
Gary Burton, & Pat Metheny: Quartet Live
Cyminology: As Ney
Fly: Sky and Country
Egberto Gismonti: Saudações
Fred Hersch: Fred Hersch Plays Jobim
Vijay Iyer: Historicity
Julian Lage: Sounding Point
Joe Lovano: Folk Art
Gretchen Parlato: In a Dream
Enrico Rava: New York Days
Bobby Sanabria: Kenya Revisited Live
Daniel Santiago: Metropole
Andy Sheppard: Movements in Colour
Matthew Shipp: Harmonic Disorder
Luciana Souza: Tide
Tierney Sutton: Desire
Allen Toussaint: The Bright Mississippi
Sam Yahel: Oumou
Denny Zeitlin: In Concert
Miguel Zenón: Esta Plena
And if you still have sufficient appetite to digest another list, you can check out my picks for the best works of fiction during the last decade. But since this final list has no connection to music, you need to leave the confines of jazz.com and go here instead.
Happy listening!
This blog entry posted by Ted Gioia
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December 02, 2009
The Great Frim-Fram Mystery
During his exhaustive research last June into "The Strange Case of Nat King Cole," jazz.com's self-styled sleuth Alan "Woodstein" Kurtz uncovered startling evidence debunking the myth that the lyrics to Cole's 1945 hit "The Frim Fram Sauce" are, in a word, nonsense. That itself, contends Woody (as Alan is known among the select community of jazz investigative reporters), is nonsense. Although jazz.com is pleased to set the record straight, anyone with attention deficit disorder is strongly cautioned to consume the following morsels in short, skeptical bites. Bon appétit! T.G.
"Frim fram," the late William Safire wrote in 2002, "is one of the oldest terms surviving as slang, cited in John Heywood's 1546 book of proverbs: 'She maketh earnest matters of every flymflam' about a woman easily deceived. Flimska is 'mockery' in Old Norse, and flim 'a lampoon.' Thus … 'frim fram sauce' is the oleaginous goo of deceit poured over some unsuspecting dupe." Sadly, the celebrated columnist and language guardian appears to have been afflicted with Emily's Ear, an auditory disability named after Gilda Radner's character on Saturday Night Live.
Emily Litella: What's all this fuss I keep hearing about flimflam?
Straight man: No, Miss Litella, I said frim fram.
Emily Litella: Oh, that's different. Never mind.
Citing an obscure 400-year-old book and a language archaic for six centuries hardly explains a 1945 song that never mentions flimflam. The fact is, frim-fram sauce dates back precisely to 1893, and not a day sooner. That year the vessel Fram—"forward" in Norwegian—embarked on its historic polar expedition. With a crew of 12 and a 5-year stock of provisions, intrepid explorer Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930) sailed to the New Siberian Islands, where he allowed his 400-ton, 3 masted schooner to freeze into the icy Arctic Ocean on the untested theory that powerful currents would carry the floe, and with it the Fram, to the North Pole, where Nansen would be first to plant the Norwegian flag. When, after two years, the floe had failed to flow, Nansen and his faithful cook Torvald fled the Fram and attempted the Pole across pack ice using skis, dog-drawn sledges, and kayaks. Although Nansen and his cook came up short, they got closer to the Pole than anyone before, and made useful meteorological, oceanographic and gastronomical observations.
In 1922, for his humanitarian efforts to relieve Russian famine, Nansen was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But in one of those heartless ironies that characterize history, the world beyond Norway soon forgot him. What survived instead was a shipboard culinary treat first described in Limes of the Ancient Mariners, a best-selling cookbook by ship's chef Torvald Hikkup. The immortality denied to Kaptein Nansen went instead to his cook's recipe for a sauce made of limes, a staple at sea since the 18th-century discovery that said fruit, rich in ascorbic acid, prevented scurvy, a virulent gum disease caused by vitamin C deficiency.
What made the Fram's sauce unique was that its limes were fried, not stewed. Torvald's proprietary batter, which for a time became quite the rage in Scandinavia, consisted of flour, powdered eggs and saltwater. According to Torvald, his delectably tart dish was originally called fremmed Fram sauce, meaning foreign to their ship, which is how the crew at first reacted to a food that was scarcely indigenous to Norway.
Torvald overcame their initial reluctance by reminding his mates of Assen feighet—literally, cowardice in Assen, The Netherlands provincial capital where sailors would often undergo painful dentistry to treat their gingivitis. Thus arose the familiar crewman's mealtime order, "I want the fremmed Fram sauce with the Assen feighet." To this was soon appended, "With sjef få-få on the side," sjef being as close as Norwegian gets to chef de cuisine and få-få meaning to receive repeatedly—in other words, beseeching Torvald to stand by with second helpings.
Songwriters Joe Ricardel & Redd Evans amusingly captured the crew's insistence on their chef's confection, including the tagline "Now, if you don't have it, just bring me a check for the water." Needless to say, Check for the water was a common expression on the icebound voyage of the Fram. However, the real triumph of Ricardel & Evans was their cunningness in obscuring the song's meaning. The resultant mystification has accorded "The Frim Fram Sauce" a shelf life the envy of songwriters everywhere.
Jazz.com's demystification is not meant to torpedo anyone's fun or scuttle royalties, but to serve the larger good of public enlightenment. And even if not entirely true (Torvald Hikkup?), our version is nowhere near as yucky as William Safire's "oleaginous goo of deceit poured over some unsuspecting dupe."
Now, if you're not swallowing any of this, just send me a bill for the piffle.
This blog entry posted by Alan Kurtz
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November 24, 2009
Why Jazz Fans Should Avoid Illegal Substances
What if your great moment in jazz arrived, and you slept through it. Walter Kolosky relates the story below. T.G.
My approach to the appreciation of jazz, and all the arts, has been shaped by a series of illuminating personal experiences and unique tales relayed to me by friends. These events and stories have become part of my human fabric. There is not a day that goes by that I do not benefit from these unexpected lessons, which I can pluck like apples from a tree. I hope you may get some use from them as well. That is why I periodically offer them to jazz.com readers.
My good friend Chuck swears to me the following story, told to me in the 1980s, is true. For the record, Tim and Joe are made-up names because Chuck couldn’t quite remember their real names.
Sometime in the 1960s, Chuck and his buddies, Tim and Joe, had spent a long day at work. After putting in their grinding shifts they decided to fight their fatigue and go out and grab a few beers and enjoy the nightlife the city had to offer. On the way to their underdetermined destination, the guys most likely lit up a joint, as this was their routine in those days.
As they drove through the streets of downtown San Francisco, Chuck saw a marquee that read, “Roland Kirk Tonight.” “Hey, hey guys. Look. Roland Kirk is playing! We got to check it out,” he said. Joe waved the suggestion off, but Tim and Chuck outvoted him and they headed in for a few.
The club was small and the food was nothing to talk about. At least the beer was cold. Chuck, who was a real Kirk fan, told Tim and Joe about Kirk being blind and how he used a circular breathing method that allowed him to sustain a very long note without taking normal breaths. He explained that sometimes Kirk would actually play two saxophones at once and that he would often shout out political rants to the crowd to get a reaction. Joe and Tim kept their eyes focused on Chuck so they wouldn’t nod off. A few beers didn’t help much. All three were in danger of drifting off at any time.
By the time the band finally came out, the guys were barely awake. The greatest moment of Chuck’s life as a jazz fan was about to happen—and he would have to be told about it later.
After the set, Tim and Joe woke up Chuck. “Hey, Chuck. You missed the whole set,” Tim laughed.
“Why didn’t you wake me up, you bastards?” Chuck asked.
“Well, we tried a few times at the beginning, but you just wouldn’t wake up, and it would have ruined the show anyway,” Joe said.
Chuck was groggy and confused. “What do you mean ruin the show? What does that mean?”
Joe explained, “You should have seen and heard it. But if you did, it wouldn’t have happened, so we didn’t want to wake you. We couldn’t, so we didn’t. You missed a great show. The band was on fire. You sure were right about Roland. That cat is from another planet! Man, he can play the hell out of those horns. I can’t wait to go buy a record.”
Chuck grunted. “Get to the point. What do you mean waking me up would have ruined it?”
Joe continued, “About two or three tunes into the set, while Kirk is playing this amazing solo, he looks out and sees your big head in your arms and notices you are sleeping like a baby. He keeps wailing away but also keeps looking at you. Then he picks up one of those wooden flutes. I think you call it a recorder. He steps off the stand and slowly starts walking over to you. As he got closer, he lowered his volume and slowed down the tempo of his playing.
After a minute or two, the audience realizes what he is doing and they all start smiling at you. Tim and I are amazed. Kirk sort of gives this look to us that we understand means not to wake you up. He gets closer and closer and his music becomes soft and soothing. Chuck, the crowd was dead silent as he stuck his horn right next to your ear. I am not kidding you. He put it right next to your ear and started playing a gentle lullaby. It was amazing. He stayed there for about three minutes playing just for you man. Just for you. He finally looked up a bit, smiled, and made his way back to the stage to end the tune. The crowd went nuts clapping and laughing and waving to us.”
“Yeah,” Tim added, “you should have been awake for that, but if you were, it wouldn’t have happened.”
Over forty years later, that unheard music is still with Chuck. But he still can’t explain how a blind man could have seen him. Music and dreams can mix you up that way.
This blog entry posted by Walter Kolosky
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November 14, 2009
Anita O'Day on DVD
Thomas Cunniffe covers the world of DVDs for jazz.com. His most recent review here looked at Charles Mingus's Epitaph and Town Hall Concert. Now Cunniffe turns his attention to two videos featuring the late vocalist Anita O'Day. T.G.
In a vintage interview from the Today show, Bryant Gumbel questioned Anita O’Day about her life filled with rape, abortion, substance abuse and jail time. When he presses her about how she could stay upbeat in the face of such turmoil, she finally replies, “Well, that’s the way it went down, Bryant”. The quote shows up early in the O’Day documentary The Life Of A Jazz Singer and then turns up in full much later, and it aptly characterizes how the film handles the often difficult nature of its subject.
While O’Day momentarily loses her composure when talking about the drug-related death of arranger Gary McFarland (and in the interview out-takes, the deaths of Judy Garland, Zoot Sims and her father), she never expresses any remorse about the courses she chose for her own life. Even the other interviewees seem taciturn when it comes to making judgments about Anita’s lifestyle. Nothing is denied, yet no one really emphasizes the damage.
O”Day’s questionable life choices were not limited to drug abuse, of course. Oddly enough, some of her best performances were made between the mid 1950s and early 1970s, when she was in the midst of a heroin addiction. In her later years, long after she was sober, O’Day’s intonation—never a strong point for her—got worse and worse, and on her last recordings, she was barely able to croak out a melody. Yet the film staunchly defends her late performances as if they were the equal of her earlier work. As a long-time admirer of O’Day’s music, I can tell you that trying to listen to her late recordings is nearly impossible—her voice is so battered that all one can do is ask why is she still singing?
O’Day’s interview clips come from a variety of vintage sources, including 60 Minutes, Tomorrow With Tom Snyder and The Dick Cavett Show. By far, the best interviews of O’Day come from Billy Taylor’s 1990 profile of the singer for Sunday Morning (including several minutes of out-takes not used in Taylor’s piece). The filmmakers of the current documentary also interviewed O’Day, and while the information presented is essential, the footage is harder to watch due to uneven lighting and O’Day’s habit of suddenly going out of frame. The other interviewees include George Wein, Gerald Wilson, Margaret Whiting, Annie Ross, Will Friedwald, James Gavin and Phil Schaap. In one of the best sequences of the film, O’Day talks about her classic LPs for Verve, and each of the surviving arrangers are interviewed in turn, including Buddy Bregman, Russ Garcia, Bill Holman & Johnny Mandel.
There are plenty of fine performance clips and thankfully, the DVD includes the uninterrupted clips in the special features section. There are two soundies with Gene Krupa and Roy Eldridge (“Thanks For The Boogie Ride” & “Let Me Off Uptown”), a forgettable ditty with Stan Kenton (“Tabby The Cat”), two renditions of “Let’s Fall In Love” (these two and a couple of other versions are brilliantly edited together in the main documentary), and versions of “Boogie Blues”, “Honeysuckle Rose”, “Love For Sale” and “Trav’lin’ Light” with a Japanese big band. Also included is the classic “Four Brothers” from the 1958 Timex jazz special, “Tea For Two” and a spellbinding “Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square” from a 1963 Swedish performance, and the quintessential “Sweet Georgia Brown” from Jazz On A Summer’s Day. By far the most illuminating film clip is of O’Day’s version of “Body & Soul” from Art Ford’s Jazz Party. In the first chorus, her interpretation is so abstract that the pianist is momentarily thrown off-course. All is back in order within a few seconds, but O’Day reins in her interpretation for the rest of the performance, a fact she acknowledges when she says “This is for the piano player”.
The 1963 Swedish set is included complete on Anita O’Day: Live in ’63 & ‘70, from the latest set of Jazz Icons DVDs. The bookends of the Swedish program are the same two songs from Jazz On A Summer’s Day: “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Tea For Two”. While there are subtle differences between the Swedish and Newport performances, O’Day sticks to her well-worn arrangements. However, the disc includes two versions of “Let’s Fall In Love” that are even better than the versions on The Life Of A Jazz Singer. It seems that this Arlen classic was a constant source of inspiration for O’Day and both the Swedish version and the one from the companion Oslo concert include rare half-chorus scat solos (she usually scatted 4 bars at a time in exchanges with the instrumentalists). The Oslo concert also includes a splendid medley of the Beatles classic “Yesterday” and the Jerome Kern standard “Yesterdays”, and a beautiful rendition of “I Can’t Get Started”. The closers are the old standbys “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Tea For Two”, but while O’Day acknowledges their presence in Jazz On A Summer’s Day, the performances in Oslo bear only passing resemblances to those recorded 12 years earlier in Newport or 7 years earlier in Stockholm.
Like Jackie Paris, Anita O’Day died before the release of the documentary made about her. However, unlike Paris, O’Day has many recordings still in print, so those who want to hear more O’Day have plenty of choices. The Verve recordings are uniformly excellent, and all of them are still available as single discs. There was also a Mosaic 9-CD set of the complete Verve recordings, but that set is now out-of-print, so the only hope of getting a copy is to find someone willing to part with theirs. Considering the intense adoration of Anita O’Day’s fans, that’s not too likely.
ANITA O’DAY: THE LIFE OF A JAZZ SINGER AOD Productions 101819. 91 minutes, plus 91 minutes bonus material. Directed by Robbie Cavolina & Ian McCrudden. With Anita O’Day, Phil Schaap, Margaret Whiting, George Wein, Gerald Wilson, Joe Wilder, John Pietranowicz, Will Friedwald, Billy Taylor, Annie Ross, Freeman Gunter, John Cameron Mitchell, Denny Roche, Mark Morris, James Gavin, Amy Albany, Charles Britton, Maynard Sloane, Ken Druker, Buddy Bregman, Russ Garcia, Bill Holman, Johnny Mandel, Bert Stern, Nancy Fields O’Connor, Mary Sellers, Dr. David Boska, Karen Kramer, Eddie Locke & Joe Franklin.
ANITA O’DAY: LIVE IN ’63 & ’70 Jazz Icons 2.119015.
Sweet Georgia Brown, Let’s Fall In Love, A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square, Fly Me To The Moon, Honeysuckle Rose, Green Dolphin Street, Tea For Two.
Anita O’Day (vocals), Göran Engdahl (piano), Roman Dylag (bass), John Poole (drums).
Stockholm; June 25, 1963.
Let’s Fall In Love, Yesterday/Yesterdays, Four Brothers, I Can’t Get Started, Sweet Georgia Brown, Tea For Two.
Anita O’Day (vocals), George Arvanitas (piano), Jacky Samson (bass), Charles Saudrais (drums).
Oslo; October 21, 1970.
This blog entry posted by Thomas Cunniffe
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November 11, 2009
How We Got to Be Cool
I’m still a little fuzzy on how I became an authority on acting cool. But sometimes one simply must accept the destiny fate hands out. In any event, I am sharing the wealth with an extract below from my new book The Birth (and Death) of the Cool. I am also doing double duty this week as a guest blogger at Powell’s. Finally, I am making cool appearances (or approximations thereof) next Tuesday (Nov. 17) at the Tattered Cover in Denver and a week from Saturday (Nov. 21) at Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis. Be there or be square! T.G.
Henry Louis Gates relates the story of a group of black high school students in North Carolina who, dismayed over the rigidity of standardized achievement tests, devised one more to their own liking. They convinced a group of employees at publisher McGraw-Hill to take this exam, and these custodians of the written word all received Cs and Ds.
A typical question: “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?” The correct answer, the Harvard scholar tell us is “Your mama.” Gates, in his characteristically dry manner, adds: “It is difficult to explain why this response is so funny.”
When cool captured the American imagination in the fifties, such unexpected resolutions would constantly come to the fore. Cool would be embedded in a series of paradoxes. It would reveal while keeping things hidden. It would be emotionally involved while maintaining its distance. It would be obsessively focused on style and attitude while always showing its total disdain for these same superficial attributes. And even when it amused, it was sometimes difficult to explain why it was so funny.
No wonder cool came to conquer the world. An approach this flexible, this adaptive to every situation, was a sure winner at the midpoint of the American Century. In the 1950s, everyone was dishing up some new recipe for self-actualization for the general public, but all the others—from Dr. Norman Vincent Peale’s positive thinking to L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics—were ninety-eight-pound weaklings at the beach compared to this new, slick approach that worked for everybody, high and low.
Were you rich? Well, you needed to hone that cool image to match your bank account. Were you poor? Well, my friend, you needed a dose of cool even more than Mr. Moneybags. “Cool is about making a dollar out of fifteen cents,” Donnell Alexander has astutely explained in his provocative essay “Cool Like Me: Are Black People Cooler Than White People?” Cool is “an industry of style that everyone in the world can use. It’s finding the essential soul while being essentially lost.”
Were you beautiful? Then cool for you was like water for a mermaid, the medium through which you swam to show off your finer points. Were you plain or even ugly? Well, cool was your best friend, because with the right attitude and accoutrements you could rise above that pug nose, that double chin. Were you happy? Then cool would make you happier. Were you sad or desperate or resentful? Well, cool could even turn that into a type of allure, making angry young men into something chic and happening.
The American fixation with coolness may seem like a sign of shallowness—until you realize how much this attitude fit in with the essence of the national character. After all, the American dream was all about breaking through the limitations of class, birth, personal history, family—all the baggage that kept the Old World in thrall to the powers that be. Perhaps America didn’t always live up to its aspirations. Yes, there were individuals and groups shut out from its promises. But coolness was, in some odd way, the truest embodiment of what America dangled in front of its huddled masses. It represented the possibility that you could radically reinvent your life, achieve some level of personal heroism and respect, without anyone caring about your family tree or the balance in your checking account or what schools you attended. Cool was the great equalizer. And if you doubted it, just look at the icons of cool—blacks and beatniks and bohemians and a bunch of other folks who were at the bottom of the heap and rose to the top…through sheer hipness. How cool is that?
This was exactly the message that Americans wanted to hear after surviving the Great Depression and World War II. For postwar society, cool was a panacea, a secular sermon with more happy endings than the beatitudes. The cool shall be comforted and have their fill and inherit the earth. And look very stylish in the process.
But a change like this needed role models, and not the usual suspects. Which cool icons could you find to emulate on Main Street in Anytown, USA? Mom and Dad? The mayor or the police chief? The minister? Teachers at the schools? None of these fit the bill. Where do you turn when you want to leave the old ways behind and embrace something cool? What fills the gap when you leave small-town life behind? If you are a farm-raised boy in, say, Davenport, Iowa, and you want to break out and start a new life, who is your role model?
The cool ethos in American life was destined, it seems, to be shaped by bad boys and dropouts. We have a new tone set by Jack Kerouac (dropped out of Columbia), Miles Davis (dropped out of Juilliard), James Dean (dropped out of Santa Monica Junior College), J. D. Salinger (dropped out of NYU), Allen Ginsberg (dropped out of Columbia), Chet Baker (dropped out of El Camino College)…not to mention the legion of high school dropouts (Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Bix Beiderbecke, Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, and others) who never even got enough education to become college dropouts. But if Ivy League degrees were in short supply among this group, the vast majority of these individuals had an arrest, a felony, or even a jail term to their credit. Welcome to the new topsy-turvy world of the cool, where all the traditional measures of suitability and credentialing are turned upside down! Forget the diploma; show us your mug shot!
This is an extract from The Birth (and Death) of the Cool, a new book by Ted Gioia published by Speck Press. All rights reserved.
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November 09, 2009
The Anatomy of a Jazz Festival
Below we conclude Stuart Nicholson’s two-part article on the inner workings of the Molde Jazz Festival—a hugely successful event that brings 100,000 visitors to a city with only 25,000 residents. For part one of this piece, click here. T.G.
Certainly, away from the big festival stage it is impossible not to notice the striking diversity of the Molde Festival programme. All genres of jazz are represented, from New Orleans through to futuristic electronic jazz using laptops and samples. “That has been the tradition before I took over in 2001,” says Jan Ole. “We try and put together a program that shows the whole history of jazz, from New Orleans music to music you might hear in the future. Elvis Costello—when he came to the festival he was playing with Allen Tousaint. They did this project which was based on the Hurricane Katrina, so it was a modern, New Orleans based program they did [on the big festival stage]. And then we present artists that have been influenced by jazz. Stevie Wonder, for example, who we have presented, has influenced jazz musicians and jazz musicians have influenced him.
“Sting used to play with jazz musicians in the 1980s, and started off as a jazz bassist, and Jamie Cullum who is now more a pop star than a jazz musician, is also a guy who is influenced by jazz. What happens is that a lot of young kids come to the festival and see that guys they like are playing things influenced by jazz, and they start checking out the jazz concerts, it’s a kind of education thing bringing those kind of acts to the festival.”
It has been widely reported, most recently in the NEA’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, that audiences for jazz are getting older. Yet there is no shortage of young faces at Molde, and a feature of the festival is the way it works with young people. The Arvelyden is a workshop for kids of all ages held every weekday of the festival at 12.30pm with the artist-in-residence Arve Henriksen; while every morning at 11.30am there is a street parade through Molde, featuring a school children.
Jan Ole explains the festival’s philosophy: “At Molde we have a big children’s recruit program for playing and coming to the festival. Then there’s a street parade starting every day of the festival at 11.30am with 70 youngsters who have four seminars throughout the year, learning how to improvise and play music. Then there are concerts for children during the festival. Here we try and give them a mix of what they can hear at a real concert, and what they are used to hearing on children’s TV or something like that. So we are sneaking the jazz elements into what they are used to. We also have a freestage just outside the Town Hall, where the youngsters are allowed to play. If they have a band, or they play alone, they can perform. And we’re co-operating with the schools in Molde, we have teachers going out in the music lessons to prepare them to play on the freestage.
“This year we have a special project with Arve Henriksen [the festival’s artist in residence] called The Sound of Arve, a workshop where he and [keyboard player] Ståle Storløkken and other musicians are doing samples, and the kids are doing samples of themselves—a kind of mini Punkt—and they are mixing samples themselves and we put them out on the website, so the kids can hear themselves on the Internet. Tonight we have a jam session to end the workshop series, where Arve and Ståle and other musicians come in and join them. All for children, from small children to older kids—it’s open for everyone actually, school children like me!”
Wherever you go in Molde, it is impossible not to notice the army of young, willing and helpful volunteers that help make the festival tick, from stage hands to sound mixers, from lighting engineers to ushers, from administrative staff to stage managers. I met one volunteer who was a doctor at the local hospital who annually takes two weeks holiday in order to help out in the festival office. From him I learned that volunteering was often a family tradition. A grandfather who originally volunteered for the festival in its early days might be working alongside his son or daughter plus his grandchildren.
“Yes, this is often a family thing,” confirms Jan Ole. “We only have five full time festival staff retained by the festival the year around. Then we have 70 people we call ‘key persons’ who are responsible for a venue, or a committee, and so on. And they work with us the year round, and they are volunteers. Then we have the volunteers who work just at the festival week, and they are 750, so altogether there are 820 volunteers and we have a waiting list, this year we had to say no to over 100 people. And we have some guys working from the first festival [49 years ago]. Two of the founders of the festival are still in the organisation, one of them is in the program committee and he meets me every week to discuss the program. He’s retired now so he’s always checking all the jazz websites from around the world for talent, the ones I don’t get a chance to read, and he’s also on the board of directors of the festival. And then there’s sons and daughters and so on. There are seventy leaders who recruit for their own committee, and the key persons, they are all recruiting their staff. Often being a festival volunteer is in families, the grandparents did it, then the parents then their children, jazz is very much part of the community.”
Next year, Molde will celebrate its 50th anniversary, making it one of the longest consecutively running festivals in Europe. It seems as if their annual jazz festival has put this small town on the cultural map of Europe. “That’s true,” says Jan Ole. “If you ask people all over the country about Molde, they will say two things. First jazz, and then roses. The climate here is very good for roses, there are always a lot of roses here! Currently, Molde has 25,000 people living here and during the festival between 80,000 to 100,000 people come to town either to go to the concerts, or check out the festival atmosphere, the free concerts and so on. These people are coming from all over the country, [the jazz festival] is a tourist destination, they come by plane, train, road and in the harbor people come by boat, to be part of it.”
And looking at the festival program, there is little wonder they come in such numbers. It’s a festival with a sure sense of its identity, exemplified by a dawn concert on the final day. “In the 1960s there used to be a jam session in a small café called Varden in the mountains overlooking Molde,” explains Jan Ole. “From the first session in ’61 until the early 1970s it used to be jam sessions late at night, starting when the concerts end, so from 1am to 2am in the morning until 6 or 7 o’clock in the morning they played up there.
In ’69 Karin Krog [the Norwegian vocalist] was there and she and her husband came out at seven in the morning and the sun was rising, and later that day they drove back to Oslo and on the way they played “Ida Lupino,” the Carla Bley tune, on the car radio and Karin started to sing her own words. When they got home, her husband sat down and wrote those lyrics which became the song, “Break of Day in Molde,” and that was recorded as a single the year after. It has become quite a famous song in Norway, and it has been played a lot on the radio, especially around the festival time, and Norwegian Broadcasting always open with “Break of Day in Molde,” so last year [2008] I got the idea we should do a concert early in the morning, inspired by the song named ‘Break of Day in Molde.’ So we did that on the last day of the festival at seven in the morning.
Karin Krog wrote a third verse to this song, and she sang it, with Arild Andersen on bass, who was on the original recording, and then Marilyn Mazur and some other musicians came in and did a concert at seven in the morning. It was amazing, 1,500 people were sitting up there having their picnic breakfasts. So it was quite a moment. Tomorrow at 7am, we have a special project with Arve Henriksen, Jon Balke, Terje Isungset, Svante Henryson and Therese Skauge and a dancer and they will do their version of ‘Break of Day in Molde.’ So the slogan for the festival was ‘Where music meets nature,’ so this was really a contact point between nature and music [since the concert was held in a performing space on the side of a hill surrounded by pine trees on three sides and a view of coast on the other].”
What Sir Thomas Beecham would have made of music festivals today, let alone a jazz festival is anybody’s guess. But if his adage of attracting trade to a town is true—and this is increasingly the reality for many festivals today—festival producers must more than ever preserve their artistic independence from the pressures of commerce or the result will be safe, but unadventurous programming. Dictionaries describe a festival as “a joyous celebration; a merry making; a musical entertainment on a large scale” and Molde is exactly that. It shows how the not-for-profit jazz festival may be the way of the future, allowing festival producers to back their aesthetic judgement without having to watch the bottom line at every turn.
Clearly, with large amounts of public and private money at stake, they have to balance the books and not work at a loss. But, as Molde shows, using profits accrued here to produce imaginative and creative programming there, plus a long term audience development program is rewarded by public support. More importantly, it leaves artists free to develop their music without having to shape it to appeal to the profit orientated businessmen. Sir Thomas may well have approved.
This blog entry posted by Stuart Nicholson
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November 03, 2009
Inside View of a Jazz Success Story
Stuart Nicholson looks at the inner workings of one of the most successful jazz events in the world—the annual Molde Jazz Festival. Now in its 50th year, the festival draws 100,000 fans to a city with a population of only 25,000. Below is the first installment of Nicholson’s two-part article. T.G.
From the early 20th century until his death in 1961, conductor Sir Thomas Beecham transformed musical life in the United Kingdom. And while London still has two symphony orchestras that were founded by him, The London Philharmonic and the Royal Philharmonic, he is often remembered today as much for his mordant wit as his musical achievements.
A master of the double entendre, some of his best quips can be found in Beecham Stories, published in 1978. In classical circles in the UK, Beecham stories are traded like Benny Goodman stories in the jazz world, the only difference being Beecham was his own one man Monty Python show fifty years before the TV series. His admonishment of a cellist during an orchestral rehearsal is pure Python: “Madam, you have between your legs an instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands—and all you can do is scratch it.” He was equally unforgiving of festivals, “They are for the purpose of attracting trade to a town,” he said dismissively. In many cases the latter judgment still holds true today. The challenge, of course, is on what musical terms “trade” is attracted. How do you produce a festival of musical integrity and vision while still managing to draw the crowds?
It’s the $64,000 question. With many festivals put together for the purposes of profit, there is a need to maximize ticket sales by appealing to the broadest possible constituency. The result is often a lowest common denominator approach that results in a roster of big names and safe bets at the expense of more challenging artists or up-and-coming talent—since there is a general market perception that more adventurous or lesser known musicians do not generate the same box office returns as players in more mainstream realms. One way around this conundrum is the not-for-profit festival, which is a way many European festivals are structured.
Not-for-profit festivals are possible with subsidy and in Europe it is often a mix of national, regional and local governmental grants plus an element of private sector sponsorship. They are able to attract such funding lines because, as dear old Sir Thomas presciently noted, they “attract trade.” But they also bring added value. This is seen in terms of the cultural and artistic prestige a successful, critically acclaimed festival can bring town or region. It can put them on the map of Europe, enabling them to portray themselves as a desirable tourist destination or the sort of place in the global economy that that is attractive to inward investment, an agreeable environment in which to transact business and a vibrant and exciting place to live.
More importantly, not-for-profit festivals provide a degree of artistic freedom from the ubiquitous bottom line when programming. As Bo Grønningsaeter, former director of the Molde Jazz Festival and the Bergen Nattjazz Festival and currently director of the West Norway Jazz Centre and General Secretary of the Europe Jazz Network points out, “Because European festivals have public funding there’s more idealism among festival organizers as they have a fixed salary,” he says. “You’re not in it for the money. If you have a successful festival you don’t get a huge bonus, your pay remains exactly the same, but of course you have the satisfaction of creating something audiences want to see. You relate to jazz differently from a profit-orientated businessman. It’s not a question of maximum profit; it’s a question of making a good program and being able to make the wheels go around financially.
“We’re not in the business of making money, but we have to make the books balance. There is an opportunity to aspire to aesthetic balance in the composition of the program because you’re not in it for personal profit. You’re actually doing it because you’re interested in it, even though you’re being paid less than you would be in another job!”
One of Europe’s oldest and most successful jazz festivals is held annually at Molde, on the west coast of Norway. Its director is Jan Ole Otnaes, and we talked recently about the lines of funding necessary to produce a festival like his. “This year’s budget for the festival was 27.8 million Norwegian Krone ($1 = 6.1 Norwegian Krone, August 2009),” Jan Ole begins. “That was made up of a number of funding lines, and, of course, ticket sales which this year amounted to 10.5 million Norwegian Krone (NOK) which represented 37.8 % of our overall budget. Then we have our restaurant and merchandizing facilities which brought in a revenue of 4.3 million NOK (15.4%). Private sponsors are very important to us, and they provide 4.5 million NOK, representing 16.2% of our budget. The balance is then made up of national funding, which accounts for 5.1 million NOK (18.3%), regional funding amounting to 1.7 million NOK (6.1%) and finally local funding 1.7 million NOK (6.1%).”
Given big numbers like these, I asked Jan Ole if there is any room for idealism when programming a festival as big as Molde—since it was impossible not to notice some headline artists, past and present, had a somewhat tenuous connection with jazz, such as Leonard Cohen on this year’s festival roster. “Oh, there’s room for idealism,” he says with a smile. “Look, tonight we’ve sold almost 10,000 tickets for Leonard Cohen, and he is not cheap! But we try and make a profit and that allows us to do things with the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, a brand new commission, for example, and various other projects we commission. So any profit we make goes back into the festival by way of subsidising some of our jazz presentations.”
This is the end of part one of Stuart Nicholson’s article on the Molde Jazz Festival. Check back soon for the second and final installment.
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