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NEA and Jazz, Part 3

Posted on January 27, 2012 by - Columns

It’s important for the National Endowment for the Arts to bestow honors on individuals who spent their lives performing, producing, and promoting jazz. For one thing, the genre is young enough that the lineage from its inception is intact. While most of the first generation of jazz musicians are no longer living, there still is a group of musicians who got to experience that music during its vital times. There are also musicians alive who knew Charlie Parker when bebop was “killing” real jazz. One of them, singer Sheila Jordan, received her Jazz Masters Award at the January 10 ceremony at Jazz at Lincoln Center. She was introduced by another Parker-inspired singer who revolutionized American music, Jon Hendricks. While instrumentalists, especially trumpeters and saxophonists, are generally considered to be the voice of jazz, it is the vocalists who have been instrumental in disseminating it to the general public through teaching. I was very fortunate to have worked for Mr. Hendricks during the first year after I was done with high school. His regular bass player, the late Bob Maize, and I shared a gig at The Reunion club in San Francisco. He had been working with Jon regularly, but when Hendricks put together a scaled-down version of his show, The Evolution of the Blues, to perform on college campuses in the Bay Area, Bob moved to the front line as part of “Hendricks, Hendricks, Hendricks, Hendricks, and Maize” (the four Hendricks being: Jon, his wife Edith, and his two daughters, Rosa and Michele—sometimes a fifth Hendricks, 10-year old Aria, would also participate). Bob enlisted me to play in the rhythm section with pianist Larry Vukovitch and drummer Benny Barth. It was great on-the-job training, partly because of the high level of music being played and partly because the show was a dramatization of the history of jazz. Jon was teaching in the California university system and figured out a way to spread the lessons to a wider audience.

Sheila Jordan is also a teacher, like many of her protégés (Janet Lawson, Jay Clayton, Mark Murphy, Anne-Marie Moss) and her contemporaries (Hendricks, Betty Carter, Annie Ross, Lodi Carr). Teaching jazz singing highlights the chasm between jazz and “classical” music technique and aesthetics more than jazz instrumental pedagogy, which is steeped in Eurocentric methods, despite its liberal use of extended techniques. Jazz singing is done in a chest, or speaking, voice and not the head voice of opera. It’s a pretty basic difference, much like jazz dance vs. ballet, but goes pretty much ignored when it comes to general discussions about teaching jazz. Instrumental jazz teachers will work on facility, learning solos, and studying harmony while vocal jazz teachers include developing a sound produced in a different part of the body. This might be why jazz is often understood as a genre where the performer can best express his- or herself. After all, what is more easily identifiable than a person’s speaking voice. Louis Armstrong couldn’t have begun to sing in a choir or perform lieder, but he defined jazz singing because of his unique voice, a voice that informed and was informed by his trumpet playing. Jordan takes this one step further and improvises lyrics, literally giving song to what she’s thinking about. Without being self-centered, these improvisations can be biographical, conversational (particularly when jamming with other singers, or when she’s teaching), philosophical, and political.

As I mentioned in the first and second parts of this entry, a common thread of socio-political activism ran through what might become the last open-to-the-public NEA Jazz Masters Award ceremony: Drummer Jack DeJohnette cited the social upheaval surrounding Civil Rights activism of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as his early experiences with the Chicago-based AACM, a seminal force in his musical life; Chicago saxophonist Von Freeman was described as growing up in a house that was a haven for musicians, especially Louis Armstrong, who were diaspora from New Orleans in the early 20th century; and Liberation Music Orchestra co-founder and bassist Charlie Haden’s career has been inexorably linked to political activism since the 1950s.

Sheila Jordan (nee: Sheila Janette Dawson) was a teenager in Detroit when she first heard Charlie Parker in the late 1940s. This was a time when white women singers weren’t known for singing bebop. Actually, not many people at all were playing bebop because it was new, yet Sheila found herself pursuing the music of Charlie Parker at full steam. She uses word and song to describe this and other events of her life in an interview on NPR’s Piano Jazz conducted last year. It’s a “must hear” not only because at 82, she’s “still got it,” but because, without intending too, she describes the tradition of jazz education before the current trend of institutional codification which tends to, as one of my jazz history professors put it, study jazz as “a dead art.” Sheila Jordan is not only a consummate artist and virtuoso vocalist, but a link to an important era in the history of 20th-century American music. She describes a time before the Civil Rights movement in Detroit, a city where racial tensions were piano-wire taut. The 1943 riots of Detroit, Harlem, and Los Angeles had no discernible effect on the genocidal tendencies exhibited by certain members of America’s white-male supremacist dominated society. Detroit was a haven for the KKK, Roosevelt’s Fair Employment and Practice Committee had been defunded, and bills to make the practice of lynching a federal crime couldn’t make it to the floor of Congress. It was dangerous to be seen in mixed company, but Sheila Dawson, and two African American singer-songwriters—Leroy Mitchell and William “Skeeter” Speight—formed a singing group, Skeeter, Mitchell and Jean, that wrote and performed vocalise versions of Charlie Parker solos, a decade before Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.

Jordan’s pioneering spirit (I mean pioneering in the sense of Joanna Stratton’s Pioneer Women: Voices From the Kansas Frontier, which is more about escape from social repression into self-actualized living rather than the “pioneering spirit” that seeks to conquer territory for socio-economic gain) led her to New York City and formal studies with Lennie Tristano and informal ones with the jazz community there. Her “informal” teachers included Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Charlie Parker, and George Russell. It was Russell who, in effect, produced her first album as a leader for Blue Note Records, making her one of the first and very few vocalists to appear on the label. It was around this time that she married pianist Duke Jordan, whose discography reads like the Who’s Who of jazz. Their daughter, Tracy, as well as her current bassist, Cameron Brown, attest to Sheila’s passion for creating a world where ethnic diversity is a meeting ground rather than a separation point.

Jordan didn’t gain world-wide acclaim overnight, and she paid heavy dues for her egalitarian temperament. For decades she worked as a legal secretary to raise her daughter and “support the music until it could support me.” This was a time when jazz singing was about singing a melody over a swinging rhythm section and, maybe, including a vocable-based “scat” solo. The most adventurous singers—Jordan, Jay Clayton, Jeannie Lee, Joe Lee Wilson, and Abbey Lincoln—were relegated to “avant garde” status and pretty much ignored by the cultural machine. Betty Carter, Mark Murphy, and Leon Thomas had some commercial success, while singers like Ursula Dudziak and Al Jarreau took to performing more in the commercially acceptable fusion vein. Many artists, like Wilson and Lee, expatriated rather than face second- and third-tier status in the U.S. It was the success of Jarreau and Carter that seemed to make it okay to involve the voice as an instrumental texture that could blend into the group’s overall sound that offered opportunities for singers like Janet Lawson and Sheila Jordan to bring their brand of music-making to a wider audience.

One of Jordan’s re-entry projects began in the 1980s, a duo with bassist Harvie S (nee: Swartz) that piggy-backed on a 1977 Steeplechase recording she made with Arild Anderson that redefined how the Great American Songbook can be interpreted. She wasn’t the first to perform in this setting; vocalist Anne-Marie Moss and bassist Sonny Dallas held down gigs all through the 1960s in New York, and Peggy Lee alluded to the instrumentation with her 1958 hit “Fever.” But Harvey and Sheila’s duo was successful to the point of touring internationally and recording four albums. In 1999, Sheila and Cameron Brown formed another voice/bass duo that will, hopefully, record more in the future. Another association, with pianist Steve Kuhn, continues to this day. Kuhn and Jordan introduced their co-operative group on the 1979 ECM recording Playground. She appeared on four more ECM dates between then and 1983. Sheila Jordan, in her mid-fifties, had finally hit her stride—one that serves as an inspiration to the likes of Judi Silvano, Fay Victor, Roseanna Vitro, J.D. Walter, Melissa Hamilton, Linda Ciofalo, and Vicki Burns.

But she doesn’t rest on her laurels at all and is more active than ever. She has added a new facet to her life story, which is part of her music making. This was revealed during Jon Hendricks’s introduction of Jordan at the Jazz Masters Award ceremony when he confessed that both he and Jordan have Cherokee ancestors. When she took the stage, she greeted Hendricks (“the genius of vocalise”) with a Native American chant that I assume is Cherokee. I have contended since 1976, when I first heard the Tikigaq singers in Alaska, that jazz has a strong, but unrecognized, Native American musical component. So many jazz musicians have Native American ancestry—Max Roach, Jack Teagarden, Don Cherry, Kay Starr, Mildred Bailey, Chief Russell Moore, Kirk Lightsey, and the list goes on and on (Professor Ron Welburn of New Hampshire has been compiling names for a yet-to-be published project)—that a non-existing musical influence is unthinkable. But part of the genocidal tendencies mentioned before is an agenda to erase indigenous North American culture and replace it with an African American historiography. While Hendricks played up his Indian heritage in his introduction, Jordan played it down somewhat. But her approach to her career is one of complete involvement, for her and her audience, and, after thanking the people in her life who she credits with helping her get off the ground, she invited the audience, largely of her peers, to join her in a call-and-response singing of praise to Charlie Parker. The melody that unfolded was strangely non-Western and not African, either. It can be heard here. Scroll to around 85:30.

The next segment of the event was a wonderful tribute to Count Basie, performed beautifully by the JALC orchestra under the direction of Wynton Marsalis. The guests were saxophonists Benny Golson and Frank Wess and pianist Kris Bowers playing Wess’s composition “Magic” (the program listed Frank Foster’s “Who Me?”). At 90, Frank Wess has lost none of the signature lyricism that placed him in Lester Young’s chair in Basie’s “second generation” band of the 1950s. His, thankfully, lengthy solo was followed by another one by the 82-years experienced Golson that was a marvel of improvisational architecture. Rising star Bowers, still a Julliard student, but also a Thelonious Monk Award recipient, delivered a masterful solo that promises great things to come.

Next and last in the NEA and Jazz blog: Jimmy Owens—jazz activist and advocate.

NEA and Jazz, Part 4

Posted on February 3, 2012 by - Columns

The final recipient honored at the NEA Jazz Masters Awards gala ceremony held January 10, in New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center venue at Columbus Circle, was trumpeter, composer, arranger, educator, and advocate Jimmy Owens. He received the A. B. Spellman Award for Jazz Advocacy.

A. B. Spellman is an author, poet, music critic, and scholar who wrote Four Lives in the Bebop Business (also published under the titles Black Music: Four Lives and Four Jazz Lives) in 1966, which offered an up-close examination of how pianist/composers Cecil Taylor and Herbie Nichols and saxophonist/composers Ornette Coleman and Jackie McLean negotiated their careers in a racially divisive socioeconomic milieu. Indirectly, Spellman suggests to his reader that “the only true history of America is recorded in its music,” and that since “America doesn’t have any other culture of its own, except what the Negro gave it and what it borrowed from Europe,” “it’s the Negro musician who keeps the culture of America alive” (p. 4). Whether or not one agrees with this hypothesis, jazz is generally accepted as America’s premier indigenous—as well as a principally African American—art form, which lends credence to the opinion expressed in Four Lives (especially if the idea of “American” includes input from the ancient indigenous cultures of the Western Hemisphere).

Virtually every college and university in the United States (as well as many overseas) has a jazz studies program of some kind. But jazz musicians who want to teach in these institutions, who once only had to show a few recordings they played on, are now expected to produce post-graduate degrees as part of their credentials. Still, in terms of status, jazz programs take a back seat to just about every other discipline, especially sports and homeland security courses, while the socioeconomic milieu that many artists find themselves negotiating is, in a word, bleak. I mentioned something about this in my September 16 entry when I had the good fortune to stumble into a benefit concert at Le Poisson Rouge for the Dizzy Gillespie Memorial Fund, a donor-only supported organization based at New Jersey’s Englewood Hospital that partners with the Jazz Foundation of America to provide medical services to jazz musicians who lack the resources to pay for them. While organizations like Lincoln Center Jazz and its affiliates do make it possible for their artists to have decent wages and benefits, the majority of jazz musicians would consider annual income grossing five figures a windfall. Few nightclubs, even in New York, offer salaries to their artists of much more than $100.00 per night and far too many “successful” establishments offer no money at all, even going as far as to charge their artists for the honor of packing in customers who have to buy a minimum amount of food and beverage. This “no risk” approach to including American culture in an establishment’s dining experience is relatively new, but old enough to become a weird kind of tradition. I remember my first job as a jazz musician was playing five nights per week in a room that served good food and booze and had no cover charge. I was paid relatively well for an 18-year old in 1974 ($225 per week), and all of my benefits were covered; when I stopped working there, I received unemployment compensation. And I was lucky because most of my peers were working part-time jobs.

It wasn’t uncommon, then, for a jazz club to hire a group for weeks at a time. When I moved to New York in 1977, most of the bona fide jazz clubs were doing that. Some would bring in a group for one day a week as part of a regular rotation. While the pay was somewhat low, the work was somewhat steady. And the club and artist had a relationship where the risk was taken on mostly by the clubs, not the artists. Still, the jazz community was much larger than the clubs could support. The cost of living index was rising and $45 a night was becoming too little to survive on. Jazz musicians today are still often offered $50 a night for their services, which often comes out of the band leader’s unsubsidized pocket. And I can’t think of a club that is hiring for a week at a time anymore; four days seems to be the most anyone can get.

In 1974, the National Endowment for the Arts was awarding less than half a million dollars through their “Jazz/Folk/Ethnic Program” towards the development of individual artists and organizations. Ninety-one individuals received grants ranging between $250 and $2,000. The rest went to university programs and other presenting organizations. One such organization, Collective Black Artists, received a fairly healthy grant that year ($10,000; $3,000 less than the median income for a family of four). The organization was founded in 1969 by pianist Stanley Cowell, bassist Reggie Workman, drummer/percussionist Warren Smith, and trumpeter Jimmy Owens. They mounted “six concerts a year at Town Hall” featuring guest artists (many are now NEA Jazz Masters) backed by the CBA big band. That’s about $588 per musician per year (assuming an even split). Not great, even by 1969 standards. Owens, a fine trumpeter who came up through the ranks of big-band trumpet sections that include Lionel Hampton, Thad Jones-Mel Lewis, Count Basie, Gerald Wilson, and Duke Ellington, as well as small groups led by Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Archie Shepp, and Billy Taylor, knew that music is a tough business to get by in, that saving money for retirement was an idea most professional musicians found laughably ironic. He began to devise strategies that he could share with his peers to overcome this obstacle. A short list of his career as an advocate includes stints on the directing boards of Local #802 (American Federation of Musicians), the NEA, the International Association of Jazz Educators, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, The American Arts Alliance, Jazzmobile, and the Jazz Foundation of America. He is a highly active educator who is currently on the faculty of the New School for Social Research’s Jazz Program and tours regularly as a guest artist and composer/arranger.

Fortunately, New York is a jazz-enlightened metropolis where one can find great performances going on almost any time of the day, every day. It’s played in coffee shops, bars, restaurants, libraries, community centers, parks, street corners, and in private homes. People do actually pay money to go out and hear jazz music performed live. But, as was mentioned before, the artists are oftentimes not paid well, if at all. Owens mentioned in his acceptance speech that “in 1959, the American Federation of Musicians started a pension fund […] that exists today with more than two billion dollars in it.” He pointed out that, while it’s not a huge amount, it does offer some relief to the widows and families of musicians whose work qualified towards their being vetted in the fund. (I think I’ll get $186 per month when I retire and if I get my dues back in order!) But most jazz musicians don’t qualify for that because of “the kind of work they do and where they do that work.” Owens explained that jazz club owners in New York agreed to pay into the fund as part of the repeal of an 8.25% entertainment tax, but “reneged” on the agreement. So, in Owens’s words, “none of the jazz clubs you go to, and spend your money at, pay into the musician’s pension fund for the musicians who are working there. And I say none of them because that’s the truth!”

To me, it was refreshing to see Owens not take a break from his work as a jazz advocate (or activist) just because he was receiving an award in one of New York’s premier jazz venues. His solo rendition of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” a tribute to the late Dr. Billy Taylor and the other Jazz Masters “who are no longer physically with us,” was beautiful, soulful, and masterful; a classic example of what jazz performance is about. And the final performance of Jazz Master Ornette Coleman’s “When Will the Blues Leave,” with an impromptu greeting to Coleman by Sheila Jordan, was perfect, but too short. The entire event is still available for viewing online. Owens’s section starts around 1:42:45.

There are three upcoming benefit concerts/events to help the Jazz Foundation continue its work and two of them will happen this month. The first, labeled “Tammany Societies: A Jazz Review,” will occur Wednesday, February 8 from 7-11 p.m. at 152 Orchard Street in New York City’s Lower East Side with groups led by Greg Bandy and Micah Gaugh plus Harriet Tubman featuring Brandon Ross. The second will be held at the renowned Apollo Theater in Harlem on Friday, February 24, and is called “Howlin’ for Hubert: A Celebration of the Musical Legacy of Hubert Samlin and His Influence on Every Guitar Hero of Today.” It will feature performances by Eric Clapton, James Cotton, Keith Richards, Susan Tedeschi, Dr. John, and others. The third event, the 11th Annual “A Great Night In Harlem” concert will be held Thursday, May 17, also at the Apollo. I hope you’ll let your jazz and blues loving friends know about them.

This is the last entry about the NEA Jazz Masters Award Ceremony. I didn’t think it would go on this long, but the over-arching themes in each of the five recipients’ presentations demanded a little more than the few paragraphs recommended, especially considering how funding for arts programs are being cut left and right. While the idea of “free-market” support for the arts may have been part of the history of jazz, it is definitely not part of its recent legacy. Maybe there is some way that the arts can survive without being directly on the “public dole,” but unregulated practices have proven to not work towards this end. Organizations like the American Federation of Musicians have done quite a bit to make that a reality, but it’s only one very small union that has been under attack for decades by an industry that would prefer to own the public domain rather than to enhance the cultural legacy that the arts represent. And if Ms. Jeanne Phillips, the person quoted by A. B. Spellman earlier, is correct, that legacy and all it represents depends on our keeping the arts foremost in our collective attention. When I began writing this series, I thought it would be a good thing to save NEA funds by not presenting an annual “gala” event for NEA Jazz Masters. But now I’ve changed my mind. I believe, now, that the message(s) of the 2012 awards ceremony should be reviewed every year to as wide an audience as possible.

NEA and Jazz, Part 1

Posted on January 13, 2012 by - Columns

According to its annual report, “The National Endowment for the Arts…carries out programs of grants-in-aid given to arts agencies of the states and territories, to non-profit, tax-exempt organizations and to individuals of exceptional talent.” It was established in 1965 but didn’t include jazz within its purview until President Lyndon Johnson appointed Duke Ellington and Willis Conover to its National Council on the Arts in 1968. The next year, $5,500 was allocated to foster jazz in the United States in the form of a single Jazz Composition Award given to George Russell. In 1970, the NEA established a real jazz panel and gave out 30 grants to institutions and individuals totaling $20,050—compared with half as many grants for orchestras totaling $931,600 and eight grants to opera companies totaling $836,000. Even Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (parenthetically allocated for the New York Film Festival) was given $25,000!

In 1980, one of the assistant directors of the NEA’s music board, Aida Chapman, suggested a Hall of Fame to honor the jazz genre. Two years later, the NEA announced the creation of the Jazz Masters Awards, to be “given to those musicians and advocates who have had a significant impact on the field” (according to NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman). These awards included a $20,000 gift and were privately given to three individuals annually (but in 1991 four were given out) until 2004, when the number of recipients was raised to seven, the amount of each gift was raised to $25,000, and the awards were presented at the annual International Association of Jazz Educators convention, wherever it was held. With the demise of the IAJE in January 2008, the award’s ceremony was moved to the Jazz At Lincoln Center’s facility in the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle in New York.

On Tuesday, January 10, I attended the NEA Jazz Masters 30th anniversary award ceremony. The five 2012 award recipients were: drummer/pianist/composer/bandleader Jack DeJohnette, who first came to prominence in Charles Lloyd’s quartet (which also included bassist Ron McClure and pianist Keith Jarrett) in 1966 and then debuting with Miles Davis’s group on Bitches Brew in 1969; Chicago-based saxophonist/bandleader Von Freeman, whose career spans over 70 years and who is the father of saxophonist Chico Freeman; bassist/composer/educator/bandleader Charlie Haden, who was part of the original Ornette Coleman Quartet, the original Keith Jarrett Quartet, and co-founder of the Liberation Music Orchestra; vocalist/educator/lyricist Sheila Jordan, who was one of the first and few, if not only, vocalists to record on Blue Note and ECM; and trumpeter/composer/educator/activist Jimmy Owens, who, when not teaching, composing and arranging, touring, and concertizing, dedicates much of his time to establishing and sustaining organizations, such as the Collective Black Artists and the Jazz Musician’s Emergency Fund, that help musicians in life/career crises.

As in previous Jazz Masters events, the awards’ presentations alternated with performances by select past Masters that occasionally included “emerging” artists considered worthy of inclusion. I don’t know exactly how or who decides this. To be honest, I haven’t thoroughly read all the literature handed to my wife, Francesca, as we entered and exited the event (a playbill listing all of the event’s performers and a program of the concert, a large book that includes single-page biographies of all the past Jazz Masters, and a folder with letter-size descriptions and vision statements of the National Endowment for the Arts, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and some of their ancillary programs); but my initial perusal hasn’t revealed anything about that. Maybe the next read-through will be more informative.

The event opened with a performance of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Things to Come,” an up-tempo minor-key variation on “I Got Rhythm,” by the JALC Orchestra that featured the 2007 Jazz Master Phil Woods and Grace Kelly as guest soloists. Both played alto saxophone. At 80, Woods is venerable, legendary, and still plays his ass off. Nineteen-year-old “saxophonist/vocalist/composer/lyricist/arranger” Kelly’s website lists an impressive career that dates back to 2002 when her first CD was released. Her performance kept up with Woods and matched the tightness of the Orchestra’s execution of Gil Fuller’s arrangement. Because the entire 134-minute concert and ceremony are available to be viewed online, I won’t go into a play-by-play (although the well-paced ceremony’s musical performances are well worth words, of which jazz journalist Howard Mandel has written wise ones (another excellent synopsis, ostensibly by NEA’s Liz Auclair, is worth reading, too).

One thing about this year’s event I thought was interesting and significant was a slant towards the “political” that might have been a reaction to the recent National Public Radio article suggesting that the Jazz Masters program will be discontinued, but this is not the case. (It looks like opera funding will be cut instead.) There is a possibility that the ceremony/concert might be scaled back or eliminated, or even that fewer awards might be given, but the individual award amount will not be reduced.

The political slant began when 2007 Jazz Master Ramsey Lewis, before introducing Chairman Landesman, made a point of “declaring that this music is vibrant, that it’s here now, and it will be here forever.” While Lewis’s oration was presented in a dignified manner in perfectly spoken English, the NEA Chairman’s presentation was peppered with jazz-style colloquialisms (“really knocked-out,” “really cool”). But one got the feeling that Landesman’s enthusiasm for jazz is sincere as he announced that $135,000 will be given to twelve presenting organizations this year.

The evening’s politicalness continued in Jack DeJohnette’s award reception, emphasizing his connection to the avant-garde of the 1950s and ’60s Chicago scene (being “discovered” by 2010 Jazz Master Muhal Richard Abrams, founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, who also introduced him to the audience) and his prominence in the 1970s music of Miles Davis and other artists at a time when “consciousness was rising up” and “everything felt possible.” He underlined this experience in his acceptance speech: “It seems to me that, once more, we are in momentous times, historically. As in the sixties, it is a time of changes and huge paradigm shifts. I believe the music has always played a profound part in the emotional and the spiritual development of people and, therefore, we as artists have a great responsibility to contribute to the ongoing changes in a positive way and contribute to the future of world peaceful co-existence.”

Von Freeman, who could not attend, was represented by his sons, Chico and Mark Freeman. They described their father as a musician dedicated to the furtherance of a musical legacy that included very close ties to Louis Armstrong, who used to stay with the family on his earliest forays to the Windy City and play duets with his father, a policeman who also played piano. Von Freeman, who will turn 90 this year, has been playing since 1938 but recorded his first album as a leader in 1972. But, as 1996 Jazz Master Benny Golson attested to in Freeman’s introduction, he has always been a moving force on the Chicago scene and an advocate for maintaining high standards in a local jazz milieu that may have felt second rate when compared to New York. Mark quoted his father’s response to the question of why he kept working in such a difficult career stream as, “for the love of the music.”

Bassist Ron Carter (1998 Jazz Master) and flutist Hubert Laws (2011 Jazz Master) performed a subdued and heartfelt duo (“Memories of Minnie” and “Little Waltz” ) that reminded me, by contrast, of the work of Eric Dolphy and Richard Davis, as well as Sam Rivers and Dave Holland. Rivers, who passed away on December 26 at the age of 88, will not receive a Jazz Masters award, which are only bestowed on the living. When A. B. Spellman read a list of recently deceased Jazz Masters, the unspoken name of Sam Rivers rang in many ears in the audience.

Rising star trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, soprano saxophonist (incorrectly listed in the program as an alto saxophonist) Dave Liebman (2011), pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi (2007), and conguero Candido Camero (2008) joined the JALC Orchestra in Horace Silver’s “Señor Blues” (arranged by Carlos Henriquez). Akinmusire clearly felt the heat of having four of the world’s heaviest trumpeters sitting behind him, and still put in a fantastic performance. Akiyoshi channeled Silver’s style perfectly and Liebman proved why he is a Jazz Master with an amazing performance consisting of his trademark chromaticism.

NEA and Jazz, Part 2

Posted on January 20, 2012 by - Columns

A minor correction from last week: I should have said “centered on” rather than “consisting of” when referring to the signature chromatic approach developed and codified by soprano saxophonist Dave Liebman. It distinguishes him from his contemporaries (Michael Brecker, Jerry Bergonzi, Steve Grossman) even when he plays on their principle instrument, the tenor saxophone.

I attended last year’s NEA Jazz Masters award ceremony when Liebman received his award. I couldn’t help but reflect on his early work with Elvin Jones, Miles Davis, and the first tour with his own collective group, Lookout Farm, during the 1970s. His playing was and is heavily influenced by John Coltrane’s legacy, but Liebman created a body of work that transcends that legacy and has offered a new direction in improvising, composing, and teaching that has been too underrated in the jazz academy and the corporate culture machine that hosted the ceremony. While this might be a result of pedigree (the term sounds odd, but it covers the difference between coming up through the “ranks” or being “placed”), a dichotomy in aesthetics is also involved. A comparison of two of jazz’s “Great Names,” Charlie Parker and the above mentioned John Coltrane, illustrates this well. Both were: improvising saxophone virtuosos whose work has sparked a reexamination of what is called American music; incessant practicers and studiers who learned everything they could about music (the younger Coltrane had more formal training); highly personal stylists who “piggybacked” on the work of previous masters; and continue to be, imitated widely. Both developed improvising strategies that made their work easily identifiable, even when compared with their imitators. But Parker drew on the outer world for his inspiration, quoting other musicians and popular songs in his solos, while Coltrane was inspired by his internal vision and arrived at a point where he pretty much stopped quoting anyone but himself. And while Parker mostly played in groups that performed in a “swing” tradition—playing over the chord changes of popular songs or on 12-bar blues, albeit with a high degree of harmonic sophistication, Coltrane formed groups that developed unique sonic environments, often playing music with few chords and very open (free) forms. Newcomers to Parker (except, possibly, Miles Davis) tended to play in his style and had little lasting effect on his playing, while newcomers to Coltrane (Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders) greatly influenced his approach and musical output. I see Liebman as an example of the Coltrane model, right down to quoting himself more often than quoting others. This might be why he has gone largely ignored, except by those who need to know what great saxophone playing is about: he’s a musician’s musician. So it’s great that he is recognized as a jazz master, but that was then…

Sadly, Charlie Haden, like Von Freeman, could not attend the January 10, 2012, NEA Jazz Masters award ceremony where his daughter, Petra, accepted his award for him. A short video collage prefaced each award recipient’s introduction. Haden’s emphasized his gentle, yet persistent, political activism. One got the idea that his entire career has been one long soulful commentary on the affairs of humanity. Journalist and past president of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation Stanley Crouch delivered Haden’s official introduction and used the bassist’s tone as a springboard to discuss his belief that “jazz provides a symbolic metaphor as an answer” to “this period that is very dehumanizing…cold…[and] mechanical.” Ostensibly, that metaphor is “the deep meaning of jazz, which is empathy,” which is one of Charlie Haden’s most salient qualities. Another and much more profound one, humility, was revealed in the acceptance speech Haden wrote for his daughter to read:

I learned at a very young age that music teaches you about life. When you’re in the midst of improvisation, there is no yesterday and no tomorrow—there is just the moment that you are in. In that beautiful moment, you experience your true insignificance to the rest of the universe. It is then, and only then, that you can experience your true significance.

When one considers that Haden was arrested for dedicating a performance of his “Song For Che” to the “Black peoples’ liberation movements in Mozambique and Angola and Guinea,” the phrase “courage of one’s convictions” comes to mind. Apply it to the Jazz Masters’ tool kit as one would cheese to a quesadilla. The next musical interlude, a duet performance of Dave Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way” by vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson and pianist Kenny Barron, exemplified this. Hutcherson, who now uses an oxygen tank to help him breathe, delivered a performance of the harmonically strict yet beautiful standard that held true to his roots as an avant-gardist and to his early work with Eric Dolphy. Many of his phrases seemed to begin on the “wrong” chord, but always deftly resolved to the “right” one (even when it wasn’t!). I was fortunate enough to work for Hutcherson during 1974, before I began touring with vibraphonist Cal Tjader. Then I saw the latter as a master lyricist and the former as a powerhouse (which he was). This performance, though, showed a sense of lyricism that embraces stark atonality and matched Barron’s deep respect for Brubeck’s chord progression. This was a command performance and the standing ovation, begun by the JALC orchestra, was well deserved.

In last week’s entry, I said I wouldn’t engage in a play-by-play listing of the Jazz Masters ceremony. It looks like that is what’s happening, though. So be it. It will probably be somewhat more provocative than the standard journalistic reportage, since the idea that this would be the last time an NEA Jazz Masters award would be given hung over the proceedings. Even though it turns out not to be the case, there is a very real possibility that the ceremony itself will be dispensed with. So this event was more about the soul of the music and its proponents than about who won and who didn’t. The messages delivered by the recipients, as well as by the planners and emcees, were sincere in their attempts to describe the value of this music as being more than mere entertainment, as transcending the profit motives of the very corporate sponsors who began marketing jazz in 1917. (That’s right, the music is only 95-years old.) Mark Lomanno, a pianist and scholar I had the pleasure of being a junior classmate of in Rutgers University’s Jazz History and Research Program, also attended the ceremony and put it well:

The arts are not just entertainment. Music, visual art, and poetry have all been the means by which the dispossessed, the marginalized, and the disadvantaged have expressed ideologies, preserved histories, educated communities, and cultivated understanding. Supporting the arts—not just through spending money, but also through personal and community action—does not have to be about personal indulgence and consumption, but could (and should!) be an opportunity to be a committed ally and advocate for those who might not have another means of expressing their ideas, their culture, and their visions.

Next week: Sheila Jordan and Jimmy Owens.