Tag: jazz

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 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.

Celebration: Remembering—A Tribute to Bob Brookmeyer

Posted on December 23, 2011 by - Headlines, Memorials

Bob Brookmeyer

Bob Brookmeyer

Trombonist and composer-arranger Bob Brookmeyer was born in 1929 in Kansas City, Missouri, ground zero for the original Count Basie Orchestra, which young Bobby B. first heard play live at the Tower Theatre when he was 11 years old. (“Basie gave me my first full-body thrill” was how Bob was fond of putting it.) He died on December 15, 2011, just three days shy of what would have been his 82nd birthday. He began playing and writing professionally at age 14, and remained active and vital right up to the end—his final recording, Standards, was released just two weeks before he left us. The album is a fitting coda to a rich musical life—it feels like the concentrated distillation of Bob’s entire career, a return to the classic American songbook tunes he loved, filtered through a lifetime of compositional exploration.

Brookmeyer first started attracting notice in the early 1950s as a member of groups led by Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan. His gruff, burnished tone and fluid, conversational phrasing on valve trombone made him an instant favorite on the jazz scene, a musician’s musician. At the same time, he was working as an arranger-for-hire out of copyist Emile Charlap’s office—among other things, he ended up ghostwriting a couple of arrangements on the album The Genius of Ray Charles. In 1958 he joined the Jimmy Giuffre 3, which featured the unorthodox combination of Giuffre’s saxophone and clarinet with Brookmeyer’s valve trombone and Jim Hall’s guitar—the group can be seen and heard during the opening credit sequence to Bert Stern’s classic concert film Jazz on a Summer’s Day . He was also an accomplished pianist, having held the piano chair in bands led by Tex Beneke and Ray McKinley, and in 1959, he famously went head-to-head with no less than Bill Evans, in a two-piano record called The Ivory Hunters. It wasn’t Bob’s idea—he’d assumed he would be playing trombone, and only discovered otherwise when he arrived at the date—but he more than holds up his end.

Bob Brookmeyer had a profound impact on multiple generations of musicians, from the legendary figures he came to prominence playing with, to the bright-eyed eighteen-year olds he’d encounter at conservatory workshops. Memories of the man and his music are shared in this post from:
Darcy James Argue
Jim Hall
Bill Holman
Jim McNeely
Joe Lovano
Maria Schneider
John Hollenbeck
Kris Goessens
Bill Kirchner
Dave Rivello
Ayn Inserto
Matana Roberts
Ryan Truesdell
Clark Terry

But it was in the 1960s that Brookmeyer came into his own. He became the principal arranger, lead trombonist, and “straw boss” (de facto music director) for Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band, a nimble 13-piece outfit that was in many ways the precursor for another important large ensemble, the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra, in which Brookmeyer played lead trombone, and for which he wrote five stone classics: the originals “ABC Blues” and “Samba Con Getchu,” and evocative re-imaginings of “St. Louis Blues,” “Willow Tree,” and “Willow Weep For Me.” During this time, he also co-led a popular quintet with Clark Terry—like the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis band (but unusually for the time) the Terry-Brookmeyer Quintet had shared leadership between a black musician and a white one.

In 1968, depressed about declining opportunities in New York, Brookmeyer moved out to California. He kept busy playing on film scores and such in the Hollywood recording studios, but essentially abandoned any kind of creative involvement in music. He was drinking heavily and popping pills. He was 38 years old when he left New York, and did not expect he’d live much longer.

Instead, in 1977, something changed. He went into recovery and began playing jazz again, with Bill Holman’s Los Angeles-based ensemble. In 1978, Stan Getz hired him back for a European tour, and he made his first jazz record in over a decade—Back Again, with pianist Jimmy Rowles, bassist George Mraz, and his old friends Thad Jones and Mel Lewis. After Thad moved to Copenhagen, Mel invited Brookmeyer to rejoin the orchestra as composer-in-residence, ushering in a period of creative rejuvenation that surely ranks as one of the most incredible comebacks in American music.

He began studying composition with New York School composer Earle Brown and conducting with Joel Thome. He recorded two career-defining albums of new music with the Mel Lewis Orchestra, Bob Brookmeyer Composer-Arranger and Make Me Smile. He also started composing for and recording with several European state-sponsored jazz ensembles, including the Cologne-based WDR Band and the Stockholm Jazz Orchestra. He wrote spiky big-M modernist orchestral works, like his Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra, featuring Jim Hall with the Stockholm Radio Symphony, and a Double Concerto for Two Orchestras. He began teaching at the Manhattan School of Music, and co-founded the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop with Manny Albam. During this time, Bob also met the love of his life, Jan, who became his wife and partner—everyone who knows her knows what a positive, transformative influence she had on him.

In 1991, Bob and Jan moved to Rotterdam, where he laid the foundations for what he called the World School of Jazz, an ambitious undertaking that sadly never took root. But it helped plant the seed for Brookmeyer’s New Art Orchestra, a large ensemble he founded in 1995, using handpicked, mostly young, mostly European musicians. It was the first and only big band Brookmeyer would ever lead under his own name. Under his direction, they recorded five albums of his music. Meanwhile, Bob and Jan had returned to the United States and settled in New Hampshire. He began teaching at the New England Conservatory in 1997 and remained on faculty there for the next ten years, well into his seventies.

***

I had seen Bob Brookmeyer live with the Danish Radio Big Band at a jazz conference in 1994, but my first actual interaction with him happened online. Sometime in the late ‘90s, Bob started posting a series of commentaries to his web site. He called them “Currents.” Essentially it was a blog before there were blogs. He would opine on all manner of things—football and politics, but also music. Like any good blogger, Bob was keenly aware that it’s the most opinionated, critical posts that attract the most attention, and he was never one to sugarcoat. At one point, Bob posted something dismissive about a musician I greatly admire, and I must admit, I took the bait.

This would have been in 1999. I was 24 years old and living in Montreal. I’d begun teaching an introductory arranging class at McGill, and I wanted to discuss one of Bob’s scores with my students. I had many questions, so I emailed Bob to ask about various mysterious details in the music. And then, at the end of my email, I could not resist mentioning that I’d read what he’d written about so-and-so, and I didn’t think he was giving him a fair shake.

I don’t know that I really expected a response. But Bob got back to me right away (within a few hours, if memory serves), kindly answered all my naive questions about his music, and proffered an even more pointed and detailed critique of the artist than what he’d originally written. But after that, we got to corresponding, and eventually Bob suggested that I send him some of my own music.

I was terrified, of course, but how do you refuse an offer like that? I remember my hands were shaking as I put the package down on the post office counter. Included was a score and recording of a piece I’d written, Sang-Froid, a shameless carbon copy of Maria Schneider’s early work, with bits pilfered from Kenny Wheeler thrown in for good measure. At best, it was maybe a semi-competent bit of derivative juvenilia (and that’s being extraordinarily generous), but Bob must have seen the spark of something in it, because he invited me to study with him at NEC. Things were finally starting to go well for me in Montreal and I hadn’t planned on pursing a graduate degree, but now Bob had made me an offer I really couldn’t refuse.

I began at NEC in the fall of 2000, still terrified. But Bob turned out to be the most exceptional teacher I’ve ever encountered. Lots of jazz musicians take teaching gigs because they need the money, or they enjoy basking in the admiration of young people. Bob did not take up the mantle of educator lightly—he was as serious about teaching as he was about composing or playing. He had developed a repertoire of assignments, which he gave to all of his students—white-note exercises, intervallic exercises, rhythmic exercises—but as he learned what a student required, he would tailor his approach to each individual. He didn’t do anything by rote, and he judged everyone’s work by the same impossible standards he set for himself.

It’s funny, though. During our first several months together, Bob played his cards uncharacteristically close to the vest. I remember my fellow composition majors trading stories about how mercilessly he would dissect their work. But whenever I would bring in the chart I was plugging away at, Bob wouldn’t say much of anything! He would listen attentively to the recording and perform a detailed examination of the score, but declined to offer any sort of feedback, other than, “Okay…what comes next?” I began to fear that Bob considered my work so thoroughly unremarkable that he could not even be bothered to voice a critique! Finally, as we neared the end of the semester and I had completed the piece—a 13-minute blowout called “Lizard Brain”—and Bob saw the double barline at the end, then the dissection began. (It was gloriously merciless.) Bob later told me: “I could see that you were pushing yourself to do something different, something you didn’t exactly know how to do. But the wheels seemed to be turning okay on their own. I didn’t want to stop the bus before you got to wherever it was that you were headed.”

It’s impossible to imagine what my life would have been like without Bob. Certainly I would never have had the guts or the wherewithal to move to New York or start my own big band! After I left Boston, we kept in intermittent contact—I wasn’t as close to him as some, but I tried to keep him abreast of whatever I had going on. I have a treasure trove of concise but unfailingly encouraging correspondence from Bob: “Congratulations! Very pleased you are making a dent in the big city.” “Good news, my friend!!! Keep it up.” “I have been meaning to congratulate on the commission—read about it and am proud as always.” During his 80th birthday celebration concert at Eastman, I got to sit next to him in the audience as the students played their hearts out on perilously difficult material, like “The Nasty Dance” and “Say Ah.” I’d catch little sidelong glimpses of him beaming with admiration. It’s one of my favorite memories.

Bob's 80th Birthday Concert

(L to R) Dave Rivello, Ryan Truesdell, Bob Brookmeyer, and myself,
from Bob’s 80th Birthday Concert at Eastman.

When Secret Society was invited to perform at the Newport Jazz Festival last year, on George Wein’s suggestion I invited Bob to play a piece with us, one that I would write to feature him. When he accepted, it was beyond terrifying—writing for Bob! At Newport, no less! What the hell was I thinking? It was without a doubt the hardest thing I’d ever had to write. But when the festival weekend came around, Bob fell sick and wasn’t able to make it. He told me afterwards that he owed me a recording, but unfortunately we were never able to make that happen. I also desperately wanted him to hear a recording of the music from Brooklyn Babylon, the multimedia production I co-created with Danijel Zezelj and premiered at BAM last month. Sadly, he passed just days before we finished mixing.

The most important lesson Bob taught me, the one I hope will last me a lifetime, is the importance of patience. You’ve got to give each musical idea time and space not just to be heard, but to be appreciated. Bob’s best music is full of moments of tremendous power that are only possible because he’s set them up so patiently. In life, Bob was not always an entirely patient man, and he was not always fully appreciated. He never really got his due—his music is not widely known outside of a small community of devotees. (Several of his most influential recordings, including Make Me Smile, have languished out of print for years.) But amongst musicians, his status is properly legendary. Bob packed several lifetimes’ worth of music into almost 82 years of living. Now the rest of us have the rest of our lives to try to catch up to where he left off.

*

Bob Brookmeyer and Jim Hall

Bob Brookmeyer and Jim Hall

Jim Hall was the guitarist in the innovative bass-less, drummer-less edition of the Jimmy Giuffre 3, which included Brookmeyer on valve trombone and Giuffre on saxophones and clarinet. One of Bob’s most beloved recordings was Live at the North Sea Jazz Festival 1979, which documents a duo concert with Jim Hall. In 1984, Jim premiered Brookmeyer’s Guitar Concerto with the Stockholm Radio Symphony.

In New York in the ’50s, the scene was pretty amazing, especially around Greenwich Village. There were jam sessions at artists’ lofts, hosted by painters like Ray Parker, Willem De Kooning…Gil Evans was around, and George Russell, Jimmy Rainey, Bill Crow. That’s where I really got to know Bob. We did a lot of playing together at those late-night sessions, with all different configurations of instruments.

Somehow, the trio with Giuffre seemed pretty normal to me. Bobby just could fit in anywhere; it was very easy making music with him, actually, in a duet or a trio or anything. In Giuffre’s trio, we went through several different bass players, but then we got to hanging out with Bob, and it worked so easily that it just seemed natural to get him in the trio.

[On Brookmeyer’s Guitar Concerto] I had never fooled around with any foot pedals on the guitar. I sort of stayed away from those, but Bob had it written in my part that he wanted this effect and that effect, so he broadened my feeling about the guitar. That’s the kind of musician Bob was: if there was something there to be done, he’d find a way to do it. And it was really a thrill to play with a symphony orchestra.

He was an incredibly bright, inventive, creative guy, with a great sense of humor, really. In a way, I think of the painters from those loft parties, Parker, De Kooning…an artist needn’t get just frozen in one place. I’m sure that’s kind of the way Bob felt about it. It certainly is the way I do as well.

*

Bill Holman is a contemporary of Brookmeyer’s, a composer-arranger living in Los Angeles. His tribute to Bob, “Septuagenary Revels,” opens Madly Loving You, an album celebrating Brookmeyer’s 70th birthday.

When Bob made his first record with Stan Getz, I read a review that said he’d played some “erudite solos.” I wanted to see what an erudite soloist was like, and he was coming to town, playing at the Lighthouse, so I went down to meet him… with some trepidation, not quite knowing about erudite people. Within in a few minutes, we were at a liquor store buying a bottle of scotch, so you know, we got together very quickly, and we’ve been good friends ever since.

Years later, when he first went into recovery, everyone was so glad to see him straight, you know? He came in to my band and made several rehearsals and some gigs—I was recovering myself, so I was trying to get my writing going again. And then those first two albums he did for Mel Lewis’s band [Bob Brookmeyer Composer/Arranger and Make Me Smile] really killed me. I knew he’d been getting back together as well, and I was really anxious to hear the result, and they were great.

But then he kind of repudiated the things he’d done before—he disowned them, practically. He didn’t want to have too much to do with the jazz business. He was very eager to get his contemporary chops going. When he wrote the [Gerry] Mulligan tribute [Celebration Suite, composed 1994], I think he kind of reconnected with jazz during that time…I think his music lightened up quite a bit after that. He was allowing himself to hear all those things he’d heard before.

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Jim McNeely and Bob Brookmeyer

Jim McNeely and Bob Brookmeyer

Jim McNeely was the pianist in the Mel Lewis Orchestra when Brookmeyer returned to the band in 1980 and became the group’s composer-in-residence—a position now held by Jim, who also holds down the piano chair in the group, now known as the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra.

The first arrangement Bob wrote for Mel was “Skylark.” I remember Bob saying to me, “If this doesn’t work, I’m just going to not bother anymore.” The first time we played it, I was absolutely blown away. I thought, “Geez, this is an amazing piece of writing….I guess this means he’ll be around for a while.”

Then he started to bring in the rest of the music that would be on his first album with Mel’s band [Bob Brookmeyer Composer-Arranger]—”First Love Song” and “Ding Dong Ding” were the first time I’d ever encountered that kind of thing, where the band stops and you’ve got to just play—the elevator door opens up and there’s no elevator waiting for you!

The music from the next record, Make Me Smile, really opened my ears up; it made me think about form in a different way. There was also what I thought of as a dry kind of tension in his harmony that I really liked. Being a dutiful young jazz pianist in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, I was into some of the newer kinds of harmonies, especially major 7th sharp 5 chords, and Bob was really intrigued by all that. So the piece he wrote to feature me [“McNeely’s Piece”] was full of ’em—I mean, god, there was a whole sequence to play over, moving up in fourths….He kind of called my own bluff, you know? “Oh, yeah, you’re into that chord? Well here, try playing on this!” It was really hard!

We never played that piece too much after we recorded it. I dug it, but I think it was a little too acerbic for what Mel wanted to be doing with the band. Bob was studying with Earle Brown and getting into a lot of postwar contemporary orchestral and chamber writing….He wrote one called “XYZ,” there was one called “The German Hit Parade,” there was “Ezra Pound”…. Mel tried to hang in there with it as long as he could, but I think for people coming to the [Village] Vanguard…they weren’t responding. Bob said that he “wrote his way out of Mel’s band,” which is pretty close to the truth. It was amicable when they parted ways. Mel realized that Bob’s gotta do what he’s gotta do, and I think Bob realized, “Well, I’ve got to find another place to work out this stuff, ’cause it’s not going to work at the Vanguard.”

I remember telling Mel, “You know, he’s going to learn a lot doing this stuff, and I think some day he’s going to come back and meet somewhere in the middle”—which I think he did. The last number of things he wrote were rhythmically pretty straight-ahead, but his sense of form, and the storyline and the shape were just magnificently structured. And I think everything he was doing in his last few years with the New Art Orchestra, it was all informed by what he had learned in the process of really sticking his neck out there for a while.

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Saxophonist Joe Lovano, like McNeely, was a member of the Mel Lewis Orchestra during in the 1980s. The two of them were also members of Brookmeyer’s ’80s sextet, a group which also included Dick Oatts (alto saxophone), Michael Moore (bass), and either Mel Lewis or Adam Nussbaum (drums).

My dad [saxophonist Tony Lovano] had a great record collection. Jim Hall was from Cleveland too, and was a friend of my dad’s, so we had the Jimmy Giuffre 3 recordings with Jim and Bob…also the Stan Getz band, and the stuff with Gerry Mulligan—I heard all those things growing up. And Bob just touched me immediately, with his tone and beautiful approach…so melodic, you know? And that way of playing, that contrapuntal improvisation, became what it was all about for me. The roots of that, of course, are in New Orleans, but the modern jazz players of Bob’s generation really set the pace for the whole creative flow of the music. That way of playing became really important for me.

I was also really into the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis band, those early records with “Willow Weep For Me” and all those pieces Bob orchestrated and wrote. The band came to Cleveland when I was a senior in high school, and that was a big thing. I was like, “Man, how do I get myself together to play in that band someday?” It was something to reach for.

Ten years later [in 1980], I joined the band, right around the time Bob came back. We went to Europe, and Bob fronted the band on that tour. He was conducting and playing his ass off! He would lift the entire band with his ideas, his rhythm, his phrasing…that was the first time I really played with him, stood toe-to-toe with him.

When we went in for the first rehearsal of the Make Me Smile charts, we didn’t know what Bob was bringing in….It was incredible to play through that music. “The Nasty Dance” was a feature for me that had a lot of free, open spaces in it, and also amazing harmonic sequences….It had many things within that form. It was something he wrote for me, he gave me a lot of trust, so right from the get-go, it was like, wow, I have a lot of room to be myself—and yet, I have to deal with playing this structure. There are a lot of open moments where it’s up to you as a soloist to tie things together and to play with a sense of orchestration. That was the beauty of Bob’s writing: he was a collaborator. He created environments and atmospheres in his music for others to create within.

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Bob Brookmeyer and Maria Schneider

Bob Brookmeyer and Maria Schneider

In 1985, Maria Schneider received an NEA Apprenticeship Grant to study with Brookmeyer, before going on to become the most acclaimed composer and bandleader of her generation. Through it all, she remained close to Bob and was instrumental in persuading him to record what would be his final album, Standards, for which she also wrote the liner notes.

When I first started studying with Bob, I was kind of baffled by him, baffled by all the questions he would ask me, “Why is there a solo? Why do you have chord changes there?” He would ask me about things that, to me, were just the most obvious and only solutions. And then slowly, what I started to distill from everything, subliminally, was, “Wow, I guess there are a lot more choices. We don’t have to write jazz big band music as if we’re putting up a prefab house, here.”

This was also exactly when I met Gil Evans, so I was working for Gil and studying with Bob Brookmeyer at the same time. What was interesting is that Bob used to express a little bit of intimidation about the mystery of Gil, he so admired him…and Gil was the same way about Bob. I had mentioned to Gil that I was studying with Bob, and Gil started saying, “Oh my god, he’s so amazing, he’s so intellectual…” and I could tell that Gil sort of shrunk in his confidence. Not that either of these two people were competitive in that way. It wasn’t that so much as just this admiration that made them wonder if somehow I was comparing them to each other. And I thought it was so beautiful. It was like, wow, here’s two men whose music is so different from each other, yet both so powerful, and they both have such tremendous reverence for each other.

In our lessons, Bob would throw his arm in the air with the pencil, almost like he was conducting something, using the body to show how he wanted you to get strength and power into the music, to not sit there and just be all in the head—to make the music physical.

We became close friends, but you know, I was always still a little scared of Bob—he was so intense, I always approached him with a little bit of fear. But for being so intimidating and scary, when you needed support and kindness, there was not a more generous soul and heart on the planet than Bob.

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New Art Orchestra--Madly Loving You session

New Art Orchestra–Madly Loving You session

John Hollenbeck was the drummer in the New Art Orchestra, a handpicked group of mostly European musicians (Hollenbeck was the exception) which Brookmeyer assembled in 1995 and continued to lead for the rest of his life. The following is excerpted, with John’s kind permission, from the extensive Brookmeyer tribute he has posted to his website—I implore you to read the whole thing.

The New Art Orchestra evolved out of The Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival Big Band, which was initially run through the auspices of this northern Germany Festival. We performed as the S-H MF Big Band at the Festival and in subsequent years, we’d get on a bus afterwards and head out to perform in other cities as the New Art Orchestra. Bob used to joke that once we drove far enough out of town, it was time to change the sign on the bus to the “New Art Orchestra.”

From the beginning, Bob taught NAO how to be a band. He had this educational talent that is unique, mainly due to his exhaustive experience and dedication. His musical life was a personal trip through jazz history. We worked persistently on sound, phrasing, and ensemble playing. He told me, as the drummer, what he loved about Mel and Elvin too, but mostly Mel, the drummer/magician who had the unique gift to make a band sound great with grace and coolness. But he also said: Do not even bother trying to copy, because no matter how close you get, you will never be Mel. But knowing what Mel did that Bob loved was extremely helpful. He told me to play with perceived abandon while never forgetting about the groove or setting up the band, but making it all sound like a happy coincidence. He always wanted a lot of activity on the snare drum so that the band could always feel the beat. Cracking the code on how to play drums in a big band is what I imagine learning to drive an 18-wheeler is like. Bob coached me for years until I got to the point where I could easily conjure his advice in my head and integrate it as I was playing.

The New Art Orchestra meant a lot not only to the players, but also to Bob—to have a band of young, enthusiastic people who loved him and listened intently to every word he said was a gift that Bob sincerely appreciated and he told us this often. We learned so much about music and how to make exceptional music with a large group of people.

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Bob Brookmeyer and Kris Goessens

Bob Brookmeyer and Kris Goessens

Kris Goessens was the pianist in the New Art Orchestra, and also performed and recorded with Brookmeyer in more intimate groups, including a duo that became one of Bob’s favorite playing situations.

He was an incredibly intelligent man, able to express and grab the essence of things in just a couple of words, just as he did with his music. I’ll never forget the time we were playing duo for a week in La Villa in Paris. One of those nights, we ended the concert with “In Your Own Sweet Way.” As we never planned anything in advance, we ended up playing single lines together for about six, seven minutes, or maybe even longer, as an outro. We were skating, a very nice blend in sound, time, and contour of the melodic lines. When we finished, it was clear by the audience’s reaction that they had just experienced what we had. As we got off stage Brookmeyer turned and said, “They believed us.”

I was lucky to have spent time with Bob and his amazing life companion, Jan, while they were living in Rotterdam. We spent a couple of years playing in duo for hours at my home, three times a week, listening to and talking about music and life, to always end up playing chess.

During that period, he founded his New Art Orchestra, for which he wanted to engage young musicians. He knew exactly which ingredients he needed for his band. One could apply to audition by sending a recording, and I remember that Bob would know in a few seconds who he wanted, why, and on which chair in the band. Hardly any changes have been made ever since. Playing his music with these musicians is like playing in a large ensemble with the feeling of small ensemble.

I know Bob loved Jan a lot. His words were, “It’s hard not to…” and this I can only confirm. I think Bob and the guys would allow me to say that she is an important member of the band. The lady who breathes love. Without Jan it would have been very difficult to keep the band going and make the recordings and concerts we did.

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Bill Kirchner is a jazz musician, producer, historian, and educator. He contributed the liner notes to the Mosaic Records box sets The Complete Verve Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band Sessions and The Complete Solid State Recordings of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, among other important documents of Brookmeyer’s work. His composition Variations On A Theme By Brookmeyer was recently premiered by the Manhattan School of Music Concert Jazz Band.

Bob Brookmeyer’s growth as a musician, especially as a composer-arranger, was one of the most extraordinary evolutions in jazz history. He began as a distinctive and progressive, but still rather mainstream, jazz musician in the 1950s and ‘60s. But from the late ‘70s onward, his writing in particular took on a more unusual flavor, inspired considerably by his interest in such contemporary classical composers as Witold Lutoslawski and Earle Brown. He also became more interested in expanding the possibilities of form and development in jazz composition. As he told his students, “Don’t introduce an improvising soloist until you’ve exhausted every other possibility.”

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Dave Rivello and Bob Brookmeyer

Dave Rivello and Bob Brookmeyer

Dave Rivello is a composer/bandleader based in Rochester, New York, and was Bob’s longtime copyist, confidant, and friend. He organized the 80th birthday tribute concert at the Eastman School of Music.

Back in 1995, on [arranger] Manny Albam’s recommendation, Bob contacted me and hired me as a copyist for the piece he had written for Clark Terry’s 75th birthday. It was a four-movement suite, and I never copied so fast in my life! Pages were coming in by FedEx every day…. When I was calling him with copying questions, I mentioned that I’d really like to take a lesson with him sometime, and he told me, “Okay, we can work that out. You can come here and bring some of your music, and then you can decide if you want to work with me and I’ll decide if I want to work with you.” And I remember thinking, well, half of that equation is already figured out!

So for my first lesson, I flew to Hanover, New Hampshire [from Rochester, New York]. He picked me up from the airport in his Camaro, we had our first lesson, he drove me back to the airport, and I flew back to Rochester, but I had a four-hour layover in Philadelphia, so it was like a 23-hour day by the time I got home…and I couldn’t remember anything Bob had told me! I didn’t bring a recorder, either! But over the course of the next several days, it all sort of sifted out in my brain….It was the beginning of 15 amazing years that I had with Bob.

I consider my time with him a doctorate without the piece of paper. What he taught me and what he gave me, I’ll still be figuring out when I’m 80 years old.

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Bob Brookmeyer and Ayn Inserto

Bob Brookmeyer and Ayn Inserto

I first met composer Ayn Inserto when we were both students at NEC. She was instrumental in organizing the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, a student ensemble directed by Bob and dedicated to performing works by NEC jazz composition majors. She currently leads her own Boston-based jazz orchestra.

I remember when I was going through a tough time emotionally during my second semester at NEC, I said to him, “I don’t know if I’ll be one hundred percent at my lesson,” and he told me, “You need to come up here this weekend!” So I went up to his home in New Hampshire, and we just hung out and listened to music. He took me and Jan to dinner, and then at the end of the night, he gave me this look and asked, “You wanna get some ice cream?” So there was Bob Brookmeyer, in the middle of Ben and Jerry’s in mid-February, counting change and buying me ice cream, as if he was, like, “Uncle” Bob!

His voice is always still in my head—my favorite thing that he says is: “You can’t get attached to your tune; you’ve got to be able to able to take it apart, or throw it away.” He would talk about “taking your ear and putting down on the table”…meaning listening as if you’re not you, as if you hadn’t written it.

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Saxophonist and composer Matana Roberts is another friend from my NEC days. In addition to his private teaching and his stewardship of the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, Brookmeyer also used to teach improvisation workshops, which is where Matana first encountered Bob.

I remember I was afraid to go to this workshop because I knew it would be me and a bunch of really amazing traditional bop players, and I was worried I would stand out uncomfortably. Anyhow, Bob immediately welcomed me and, after my first solo, made the whole band stop and lectured the other guys good-naturedly on how important it is to find an original voice in this music. I was floored by his kindness. He also made some hilarious, slightly off-color jokes about white folks that I greatly appreciated, being the only black person/woman in the room. It made us all laugh at the ridiculousness of difference.

He was really open to modernism, but still dedicated to traditionalism in a way that was so refreshing—which is not something I can say about everyone of his generation. I don’t know where he got it from. I think it might have been because he came up around so many innovators…and also was thankful just to still be out there.

But above all that, he had a deep, critical integrity towards his own work, and I hope that’s his lasting legacy. He inspires me to have high critical standards towards my own approach. He inspires me to keep asking questions.

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John Hollenbeck, Bob Brookmeyer, and Ryan Truesdell

John Hollenbeck, Bob Brookmeyer, and Ryan Truesdell
in Hamburg, December 2010, working with the NDR

Composer Ryan Truesdell also studied with Brookmeyer at NEC, and in recent years became one of Bob’s most valued associates. In addition to working as his assistant, copyist, and archivist, he actively persued making Brookmeyer’s scores and parts available from his website, and produced his recent radio recording with the Hamburg-based NDR Bigband.

There aren’t too many people around who have the kind of history that Bob had—and he was completely and utterly clear about all of it, too. He remembered what he had for lunch on some day in 1945. It was incredible!

These last few years were tough for him; he would have these bouts of fatigue and his health would kind of roller coaster up and down. But throughout all of that, he always had this laundry list of things that he wanted to do. He was very ambitious with his planning. Whatever his health situation was, Bob was always looking for the next new great project that would challenge him and offer him some sort of education within his own writing.

I was fortunate enough to see Bob rehearse a lot of bands: student bands, European groups, the Vanguard band. And leading up to the rehearsal, he might not have been feeling well; he might have been sick in bed for the past week. But whatever his mood was beforehand, the minute walked into that rehearsal and sat down on a stool in front of the podium, he was in his element. It was like he was twenty-five years old again.

He loved working with young musicians, even though it was exhausting for him, because he would just pour out every bit of energy that he had to share. I know that he was still buying CDs like crazy; anybody’s new CD that would come out, he’d give it a listen. Probably nine times out of ten he didn’t like it—but he was always interested in wanting to hear where music was going and what people were doing.

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Clark Terry and Bob Brookmeyer

Clark Terry and Bob Brookmeyer

Terry and Brookmeyer

Trumpeter-fluegelhornist Clark Terry is one of Bob’s oldest and dearest friends. In the ’60s, they were both members of the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band, and co-led an influential quintet. Over the years, Brookmeyer wrote a number of pieces to feature Clark, including “El Co” from Bob Brookmeyer Composer/Arranger and a 75th birthday suite, the first movement of which is viewable on YouTube. The following is reprinted, with permission, from Terry’s 2011 autobiography, Clark.

Bob Brookmeyer and I had a “mutual admiration society,” loved playing together, so much so that we got a little group together in the early ‘60s. We named it the Clark Terry/Bob Brookmeyer Quintet and got a nice gig going at the Half Note—Eddie Costa on piano, Osie Johnson on drums, and Joe Benjamin on bass. It was one of the best groups ever. [N.B. later it was Roger Kellaway (piano) Bill Crow (bass), and Dave Bailey (drums).]

The harmony that Bob and I had was super. I was digging the valve trombone that Bob played because that was the first instrument I was given in high school, but the way its sound married with my flugelhorn sound was something special. We could feel each other’s next moves and enjoyed the way we managed to play simultaneously throughout the changes. We called it “noodling.” Usually one player wants to outshine the other, but we had a way of blending together that allowed both of us to shine. We really tried to make each other sound beautiful.

Terry, who just celebrated his 91st birthday, is currently recovering from major surgery. His wife, Gwen, has released the following statement via his website :

Clark was very, very saddened when he heard that Bob had passed away. After he gained his composure, he said, “We had a very special friendship. We knew that we loved each other.” He wasn’t able to say much more.

Not much more needs to be said. Rest in peace, Bob. We loved you madly.

Stan Kenton at 100

Posted on December 16, 2011 by - Columns

I was sitting in the kitchen of my mom’s San Francisco apartment, grumbling about not being able to come up with something to write for this week, when she offered to write my entry for me. For a minute, I thought about taking her up on the offer (although not an improvising musician per se, she’s a good improviser when it comes to negotiating alien territory). We began talking about improvisation—how humans (and all living things, really) improvise as a matter of course—and the subtleties of musical improvisation. Our conversation fairly quickly deteriorated into an argument about whether improvisation is instinctual or cultural, invoking an analogy with walking that included Googling articles on feral children. We couldn’t agree on whether or not improvisation exists independently from culture before I saw a blurb announcing two concerts at the Manhattan School of Music to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Stan Kenton next month.

Then I remembered the hours sitting in front of mom’s stereo, listening to Kenton’s Sketches on Standards, Artistry in Rhythm, and Back to Balboa, featuring the arrangements of Bill Holman, Pete Rugolo, and Johnny Richards as well as Kenton. I was mesmerized by the density of the Kenton sound and intensity of the band’s swing. What I sensed, and later learned to be the case, was that no matter how hard the band swung, Kenton was playing music he wanted his audience to listen to that primarily focused on the compositions and arrangements of his stellar orchestrators rather than on his star soloists (which included Maynard Ferguson, Lee Konitz, and Art Pepper, to name a very few).

So I searched out City of Glass, the landmark Bob Graettinger composition, and found that the entire body of Greattinger/Kenton collaborations can be heard online for no charge (other than an internet connection). These works were on the vanguard of the wash of “experimental” music produced after the Second World War but have slid into relative obscurity only because of an affected disdain towards so-called “middlebrow” culture in the critical dialectic. Because Kenton had a dance band, his attempts to create and present new music that embraced cutting-edge compositional and orchestration devices were marginalized. To sell his music, marketing strategies were employed that attached adjectives like “progressive” and “space age” to his name. To this day, Kenton’s contributions are somewhat marginalized, even in the jazz academy. I can remember hearing one of my professors describing him as a modern Paul Whiteman because he championed new music and mostly hired white musicians. Even if one discounts the disingenuity of pulling the race card on Kenton, the fact remains that Kenton’s music was jazz, no matter how many French horns, mellophones, or string players he added to the core big band. Another professor made regular asides about how he thought Kenton looked like a car salesman. But, for that matter, so do some professors (at least the healthy ones)!

But even discounting the “experiments” of Greattinger (like City of Glass, which so clearly influenced Bernstein’s West Side Story), Kenton produced a body of work that set a standard for big-band arranging and pedagogy. I wish I was the person who first noticed that one of the salient features of Kenton’s charts is that they can be played by almost any competent band and they sound like they’re supposed to. One doesn’t have to take the idiosyncrasies of a group’s personnel into account to perform Kenton’s music. All one has to do is play what’s on the page correctly and in tune—an interesting idiosyncrasy in itself!

I certainly hope that there will be many tributes and commemorative concerts during Kenton’s centenary. He left quite a legacy that deserves to be revisited. I don’t know if any of the radio stations that specialize in playing jazz noted the date (December 15, 1911). I’m sorry I didn’t it until it was almost over.

Happy Birthday, Stan Kenton!

Dave Liebman: Unabashed Eclectic

Posted on January 1, 1999 by - Conversations, Cover

[Ed. note: This conversation between saxophonist, composer, band leader and one-time Miles Davis sideman Dave Liebman and Richard Kessler, then the Executive Director of the American Music Center, was originally published on the American Music Center’s website on January 1, 1999. It was the fourth in a series of interviews entitled “Music In The First Person” that was published in the year before the launch of NewMusicBox on May 1, 1999. “In The First Person” served as the model for one of the primary components of NewMusicBox which still continues on the site as “Cover.”]

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1. Jazz in the 1990s

RICHARD KESSLER: How do you feel about the recent growth and interest in jazz?

DAVE LIEBMAN: It’s a double-sided coin. By appealing to the wider public, jazz gets watered down by necessity. What people consider jazz — which ranges from the commercial type you hear on easy listening stations to a lot of nostalgia-type jazz — is not, for the most part, the jazz I consider artistic.

In order to have more people like something, the language has to become more common, and in that watering down, you’re going to lose a certain depth of what was there in the first place. It’s funny in a way, because when jazz started out it was entertainment. The reason jazz was popular in the ’30s was that it happened to fit with what people wanted to do: dance and listen to the radio and so forth. That changed, of course, and became much more of an esoteric thing in the ’60s and into the ’70s. Now it’s swung around the other way to become another arm of the entertainment business.

The positive side is that more people are aware of it, the negative side of it is that what they’re getting isn’t the real deal. On the other hand, there’s always the potential for those who are getting into it to go further and become more educated and more sophisticated in their tastes, and that’s the hope we hold out for as musicians.

RK: I read with great interest your thoughts about the pressures that commercial entertainment interests can have on art. What are your thoughts and concerns about the growth of corporate sponsors and global entertainment in jazz?

DL: I think it’s a terrible thing. I mean, most jazz musicians’ lifestyles in the early days, if anything, were not part of ordinary middle-class life, and for them to be controlled financially by the system is probably the worst thing that can happen to the art. And it’s going on even in the education system. We’re having a big debate now in some of our journals about the record business getting in on the International Association of Jazz Educators (I.A.J.E.) convention, and how they’ve taken over a couple of the evening’s performances. But we’re just catching up with the rest of the world. This is happening everywhere. It’s an unfortunate by-product of the age we live in.

RK: I think to some extent what you’re talking about is deeper than some people even see. It’s the issue of for-profit education, of a financial market seeing education as one of the next great frontiers of investment and earnings, and that’s a potent force that can change things. I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, but a lot of people find it disconcerting at least.

DL: Well, definitely some of us middle-aged dinosaurs remember jazz not being institutionalized at all. I’m one of the last of a generation that didn’t have jazz education in the school system as a matter of course. From the ’70s on, everybody had it, and for the last 30 years we’ve accepted it. But we all need to be part of the education system. All the musicians you talk to are teachers somehow, and many of us are making a good part of our living by doing it, so we can’t debunk what we’ve become. The thing we need to consider is that when it gets into the institution, it becomes academized. And once that happens someone says, “Oh it’s a package, let’s just take it over.” One thing definitely leads to another. It’s an inevitable cost and I don’t see how we can get away from it.

RK: Do you think it’s changing the way people play, the fact that there’s sort of a jazz education institution as opposed to let’s say, a Charlie Parker learning to play jazz in the Jay McShann band?

DL: I talk about this all the time, this question is usually put this way: What do you think of the so-called “Young Lions” movement that occurred in the ’90? The recording industry took these guys and raised them up to the pinnacle of fame (and often to the detriment of people of my generation, who were right in the middle – not old enough and not young enough). My answer is: You can’t blame these guys because they’re a product of the conformist society we’ve been living in since the ’70s and ’80s. It used to be when you recorded on Blue Note or any of those labels in the ’60s and you had your first record, the unspoken pressure was to do something different. And now the unspoken pressure — and even spoken — is to do something like. So therefore, in that respect, it’s obvious that younger musicians are attempting to join the crowd rather than fight it in order to be whatever they have to be.

This whole institutionalization has resulted in conformity, which in an art form that especially prides itself on its individuality is probably the worst thing that can happen. Individuality is the most important aspect of jazz; to be yourself is the whole point. From the first note, you’re supposed to be able to tell that it’s John Jones rather than John Henry. And now, with that not being the value system, we kind of lost the whole essence of jazz in a certain way.

2. The Historical Continuum in Jazz

RK: In your writings you have covered the idea of a historical continuum in jazz. You certainly see things from that historical continuum.

DL: I was an American history major, and I tell you it really influenced my thinking.

RK: How do you characterize today, the late ’90s, as part of this continuum?

DL: Well, it’s the retro-cycle, the cycle of recollection: looking back and reassessing all that happened.

Jazz seems to move in 10-year cycles. The ’40s were kind of innovative; the ’50s (really until the end) were not. I mean, it was what Bird [Ed.: Charlie Parker] put down being explored in various tentacles. And then the ’60s were quite, quite heavy, while then the ’70s were a retrenchment period. Unfortunately the ’80s went back to the other side, which should have been a rebellion. In a sense, it was a rebellion against the ’70s, against the fusion part of the ’70s. It was about: “Let’s get back to the roots.”

I can’t really say much has happened in the ’90s. The one really positive thing (…and this may be come to light in a few years as a reaction to the ’80s…) is this incredible influx of world music influences not just upon jazz, but also pop. To me, the only recourse that music has is to look outside of its borders. I don’t see any other future except to look to the other parts of the world beyond the western axis. They learn our language; we learn their language. It’s intermarriage physically, musically and culturally. That’s the hope. And this has been the first time that it’s been so prevalent. The ’60s was the beginning of that kind of thing, but now it’s become a kind of fad, this intercultural musical thing. And I think it’s very positive. Maybe the ’90s will be looked upon as a bit of rebellion against the retrenchment of the ’80s. I’m not sure.

3. Unique Voices in Jazz

RK: Many people believe or feel that there are fewer unique voices in jazz today, that the days of instant recognition for new artists — in a way that you hear Coltrane, you instantly know it’s Coltrane — are over. Do you agree? What do you think about that perception?

DL: Well, that’s exactly what we’re talking about, the institutionalization of it, being taught by rote. That’s the negative side of it. You come out sounding like whatever the norm is, in whatever style. And the search for individuality…let’s put it this way: It becomes a longer process to find individuality. Whereas when you didn’t have a school system and the books and the how-to stuff so prevalent, you had no choice but to be yourself and to carry through whatever you heard around you. If you were in New York or Chicago, you heard certain people, they influenced you, but you basically were a combination of yourself and what you heard.

Now with the whole oral tradition being put down on paper and video and so forth it becomes much more difficult at the beginning. But my contention (and this is what I teach to those who get to the level where I can really speak about aesthetics) is that there’s a lot of water under the bridge. It might be more difficult to come up with unique trumpet or saxophone tones because there’ve been, let’s say, 20 or 30 styles, whereas 15 years ago, there were only 10. That might be true, but if you look hard within yourself, and you look outside of your own little world and go a little further, there’s no reason why you can’t turn out something that is you. It might just take longer these days.

So I’m always optimistic that someone will, but my problem is that most of them go in there not wanting that. And that’s part of the attitude of, “Well, let’s be a jazz major in school,” like English literature or psychology in the ’60s. It has some positive things, because it does teach you a lot about a lot of music, but it’s not about having an original voice. It’s about vocation, not art. And the whole thing is really the difference between craft and art. We’re in that age where craft is being touted and elevated to the level of art, and it’s just not.

RK: Many people believe or feel that there are fewer unique voices in jazz today, that the days of instant recognition for new artists — in a way that you hear Coltrane, you instantly know it’s Coltrane — are over. Do you agree? What do you think about that perception?

DL: Well, that’s exactly what we’re talking about, the institutionalization of it, being taught by rote. That’s the negative side of it. You come out sounding like whatever the norm is, in whatever style. And the search for individuality…let’s put it this way: It becomes a longer process to find individuality. Whereas when you didn’t have a school system and the books and the how-to stuff so prevalent, you had no choice but to be yourself and to carry through whatever you heard around you. If you were in New York or Chicago, you heard certain people, they influenced you, but you basically were a combination of yourself and what you heard.

Now with the whole oral tradition being put down on paper and video and so forth it becomes much more difficult at the beginning. But my contention (and this is what I teach to those who get to the level where I can really speak about aesthetics) is that there’s a lot of water under the bridge. It might be more difficult to come up with unique trumpet or saxophone tones because there’ve been, let’s say, 20 or 30 styles, whereas 15 years ago, there were only 10. That might be true, but if you look hard within yourself, and you look outside of your own little world and go a little further, there’s no reason why you can’t turn out something that is you. It might just take longer these days.

So I’m always optimistic that someone will, but my problem is that most of them go in there not wanting that. And that’s part of the attitude of, “Well, let’s be a jazz major in school,” like English literature or psychology in the ’60s. It has some positive things, because it does teach you a lot about a lot of music, but it’s not about having an original voice. It’s about vocation, not art. And the whole thing is really the difference between craft and art. We’re in that age where craft is being touted and elevated to the level of art, and it’s just not.

4. Changing Audiences

RK: Well, let’s turn it around from the performer to the listener, to the audience. You’re a musical creator. How do you think audiences are changing? There’s a noticeable shift in the pop world towards rhythm much less than melody and harmony. If you listen to rap (although rap is starting to evolve), the harmony’s becoming more complex and the melody’s probably becoming a little more complex. There’s a lot of pop becoming dominated by rhythm in ways we haven’t seen in this century. Do you perceive a difference in the audience?

DL: No question about it. I mean, when I started out in the late ’60s, and into the ’70s, it used to be (…well, it’s always been…) musicians, fellow artists, intellectual-type people and their cronies who you played for. And of course, a certain sprinkling of nightlife people. The audience I’m talking about was there to really hear the advancement, the evolution, the intricacies of the music. I mean, musicians and non-musicians alike were still interested in how it was changing, and they were probably seeing it through the eyes of their art or their intellectual interests.

Now, as we slowly turn into a non-intellectual culture, your audience’s attention span is quite small and you have an audience that can’t really listen to this music for the most part, except the musicians. That’s basically who I’m playing for, because it’s really gone into the entertainment thing. It’s not the people’s fault. It’s the culture. I mean, nobody’s sitting down listening to a full record anymore. First of all, 60 minutes is impossible — nobody has time — and jazz absolutely demands rapt attention and intensity of listening.

That’s completely the opposite of what’s going on. I always say to my students, “Listen, the people don’t know anything. In fact, most of the musicians hardly know, so you cannot play to them, you have to make a decision at some point in your life who you’re playing for because in fact, that is probably the most important decision you will make which will determine your career. Or what you would like you career to be.” If you’re playing for the people, that’s definitely the decision you make. Now, I have no problem with entertainment. It is, after all, entertainment that people are paying for. But if you’re playing for the art then you’ve also made a decision and you’d better be in for the long run, and you’d better learn how to make a living some other way for a while. It’s really black-and-white; it’s not gray anymore.

RK: When do you think it will occur that jazz players will start having light shows and concerts that look like rock concerts?

DL: Well, it has occurred. I mean, Pat Metheny does it. Weather Report did it in kind of an antique way in the ’70s. With the technology, that’s just part of getting out on stage in front of 10,000 people. You have to do that.

See, here’s the real problem: it’s gotten too big. And the question is, did it have to? Well, of course, society took it that way. Should it? is the real question, and in my very strong opinion, jazz is not meant for many people. It is not supposed to be a popular music. It’s supposed to be played for a few hundred at the most. It is absolutely an esoteric art form, and you know, I get into discussions, because everyone says “Oh, what a terrible view to have,” but I have no problem with that because that’s what I, and probably several other people and certainly some musicians, are interested in. I have no problem playing for those few people around the world and being in contact with them like a small and private club. It’s not to be excluding or prejudicial, but it’s the way it is. And I’m not against those who look further. You want to play in a style that attracts 5,000 — or even 50,000 — I have no problem with that.

My point is, make a very clear decision somewhere along the line for yourself as an artist about whom you want to play for. It’s almost a number. You can almost say, “I wish to play for 5,000-plus people” and that determines almost exactly how you’re going to play. In a sense, I could put a line between that and link it on a piece of paper to style and music: what you have to wear, who you have to talk to, how you have to talk. I mean it could almost go down like that. So, really, by determining that, you have determined your stance. And there’s enough around for everybody. That’s the good thing about our age. There is room for specialization. You can get a shoe made that’s one of a kind, and there are probably five people who’ll wear it. And you can have music for five people, or 50, or 500, and probably make a living at it. I don’t have a problem with that, I just think it should be clear.

RK: Yeah, although how can anybody who has a halfway deep understanding about jazz compare going to the Vanguard to going to Alice Tully Hall or Avery Fisher?

DL: I don’t see it as a problem. It’s what’s relative and what’s proper in proportion. It’s music that doesn’t speak to everybody, and I don’t see it as a problem. I think there are people who are very interested in the intricacies of what I do or what Coltrane was doing in ’66 or ’67, let’s say. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And now with the media, with the technology and communication, we can reach those people in Indonesia or eight people in Chicago, so really that’s the problem of our time: how to link up to those who want that specialized need? How do you find your audience? And that’s not unlike any other business. I think they’re out there, I’m just not sure they’re at the North Sea Festival or reading Downbeat Magazine anymore, that’s all.

5. Miles

RK: When you look back on your time with Miles, what stands out in your memory?

DL: I’m doing a clinic tomorrow out here in Allentown (Pennsylvania) that’s called the Dark Magnus Workshop. And this guy here that runs a school for kids thought it would be great to run something about that period of Miles I was involved in which has gotten a lot of attention nowadays because of re-releases and the rappers and people discovering the early ’70s and Miles.

RK: Rappers discovering Bitches Brew?

DL: Well, Bitches Brew and on. Especially the stage I was in was even more chaotic than Bitches Brew. Get Up With It and On the Corner and all that and they’re discovering this and seeing it as a harbinger of what they’ve been doing. Not only rap, but let’s say acid jazz and all that. I was just thinking that probably the one thing that I remember most or that I got out of it besides musical things was that Miles couldn’t care less. You have to keep in proportion the fact that he did change mid-course from pure jazz to rock-fusion, but he didn’t seem to really give a shit about the audience.

RK: At that point, he used to turn his back on the audience.

DL: He really didn’t care. I mean, he really played for the musicians. He was a very canny and sly kind of guy, and in the back of his mind, he knew what was gettin’ over, and what wasn’t. But I got to tell you, my time with him wasn’t a very popular period. It wasn’t like people were standing, clapping, and cheering. No standing ovations; no encores. I mean, we went on, did our fifty, or hour, or hour-and-ten depending on the night, and walked off and people were mostly like dribbling or dragging out of the place. They were hardly applauding even. The music was a shock.

RK: Some of them must’ve been resentful.

DL: Well, it was a shock. Some of it was incoherent. Technologically, it wasn’t refined. It was loud and raucous. And it was not really organized very tightly, which is probably what the charm of it is now, in a certain way. But in that period, it was very off-putting. I mean, he just kept doing it. Personally, I would’ve been hard-pressed to keep going out night after night and not let that passive reaction have an effect upon what I would present as an artist. And I must say that was an amazing lesson to me. Of course, he was Miles, with 30 years behind him; he didn’t have to care anymore what people thought. But to see somebody go out and just do what he wanted to, regardless of the reaction, was amazing. And it made me think very differently about it. This is Miles Davis, after all. This isn’t somebody on my corner. This is Miles Davis who’s playing for himself and a few people. And I guess that’s one of the kind of ways my vision has been formed.

6. Younger Artists & Underappreciated Artists

RK: Who are some of the younger artists that you find interesting?

DL: I enjoy a young saxophone player — well, I guess he’s not so young anymore, Ellery Eskelin, who’s been around quite a bit. He took some lessons from me years ago; he uses an accordionist and is kind of into free things. There’s a fine saxophone player named Tony Malaby who’s been around. A good writer named Joey Sellars has also been around. I mean, New York is full of interesting music; I just don’t get down and hear a lot of people. Paris is full of interesting music, mixtures of African and Vietnamese, and rock stuff. There’s a lot of great stuff going on… and there’s a lot of hype going on. They’re all trying to find their niche. I think there’s a place for all of that stuff.

The thing about jazz I hope will always be there is that a guy goes out on a tightrope with maybe a safety net below him… which you hope is a drummer and bass and piano… but he’s basically balancing himself. He’s taking chances; he’s taking a step. He may fall, but he comes back. And it’s that process you don’t hear in world music in the same way. You don’t hear (…certainly in classical or pop music…) that chance, that bravery, that courage. The good ones are those who know what they’re doing and their next step isn’t going to be off the tightrope. To witness that live (…because records, forget about it, it’s over now with digital editing; nothing’s real anymore…) is an amazing, existential experience that I hope will not be lost. That spirit of questing, of looking, of searching, of not being afraid to miss the note, miss the chord, get lost, play out of tune, whatever. Because you know you’re searching; you’re not afraid to fall because you know you have enough musicianship to recover. I hope that will still exist.

RK: Who were some of the great jazz artists of the past that go unappreciated, unrecognized? Or have just become lost through history?

DL: There’s a guy who’s unappreciated named Tisziji Muñoz, a guitar player who kinds plays out of a Santana/Sonny Sharrock vibe. On an historical level, Hank Mobley, an incredible improviser who played with Miles, did a lot of great records and was really a deep improviser who never got the accolades. Paul Bley is another great who is known primarily in Europe. He works a lot and he’s famous in Europe. He has a real revolutionary approach, but I think he hasn’t gotten his due respect. Lennie Tristano is another for sure, due to maybe the school of thought he was attached to. Being blind, it wasn’t easy for him to get around. But I studied with him, and I have to say he was a genius. He was unbelievable… the things he did in the’50s.

There are so many people who don’t get recognition. I just came across a guy named Bob Graetinger who wrote for Stan Kenton and died very young from a drug overdose. In 1947, he wrote music that is still unapproachable as far as complexity with the Stan Kenton Orchestra, with strings and woodwinds and so forth. There are unknown guys that come along. (It’s true in classical music too, guys come along like Mompou.) Guys come along that you never heard about who just didn’t hit the imagination or didn’t take care of business or whatever. There are so many of them. And in music like jazz, it’s really great when you find a guy who’s undiscovered and you say, “God, what a body of work!” and you go into it, and it becomes a source that’s not known. That’s one of the ways that you can try to find an original and personal voice, to find some sources that are not so standardized and not so well known. And of course this doesn’t mean that Charlie Parker should not be studied, but it means that when you find someone who’s not so obvious… my God, you have a gold mine of influences to dig into. That’s something we all try to look out for. In fact, if there’s anything that musicians talk about, it’s probably “Did you hear this thing by this guy?” or “I just heard a tape, I never heard of it before.”

7. Liebman as Composer & Listener

RK: I’ve known your work for years and admired it as a performing artist. I also (from one particular album) know your work as a straight composer because bass trombonist Dave Taylor is an old friend of mine. I used to do a lot of playing with him. Where does your work as a composer fit in with your career right now?

DL: I am an unabashed eclectic. The ’60s was a period when someone like myself, without much looking, could find music from everywhere without having to go to Bali to do it. In the same day you could listen to Ravi Shankar, John Coltrane and Buddhist music. Coltrane took me first. But then I was exposed by friends and the kind of people I was referring to earlier who said, “Man you gotta get this Tibetan chant, you gotta get this gamelan music, or check out Bartók’s violin concerto, etc.” I learned about things that normally wouldn’t have come down the pike 10 years earlier, not to somebody like myself of my generation. So that affected me and made me really like all this music and find that I could (or would like to) express myself in various idioms. And they range of course from straight jazz (from be-bop to all styles) to free jazz to classical (I mean contemporary 20th-century classical) to pop and world music.

The thing you’re talking about with Dave is one of those aspects (trombone with string quartet); I just love the sound of quartets. I haven’t done brass yet because I don’t know the instruments that well, but I’ve done several things for three or four woodwinds and strings. Especially in jazz, three to four voices intrigue me. It’s the string quartet in essence. I’m not a classical music expert, but when you talk to guys they say, “Look, in the end, the string quartet will tell you the whole thing anyway.” It’s a cut-down version of the real deal, and in the final analysis I feel that three or four voices is really what you want to hear. It takes into account the whole scene: you’ve got your chord, you’ve got your harmony, and so forth, taking the rhythm out of the question here. And that’s why I was very interested in Dave Taylor: he heard a string quartet I did and he approached me. That’s how that particular piece, “Remembrance” [Ed: published by Advance Music], came about.

I’ve done several things in that genre, and I’ll tell you, next week, I’m going to Dublin doing three very nice nights. One is a concerto (written for me by Bill Pobbins); the next night, I’m doing string quartets (several of mine and a new one by a composer); and then the third night, we’re playing jazz in a club. So that is exactly what I would like to do. That is for me a perfect week artistically, because it allows me to manifest myself in all those various ways. And I think the challenge, for any artist, is to be yourself within various genres and backgrounds. Coltrane did it for 15 years; Miles did it for 30 or 40. And to me, that’s really the challenge: to be yourself; to have your voice; to have something of worth to say; and to surround yourself in (hopefully) interesting and challenging backgrounds that are different and changeable. In some ways it has been bad: it has diffused my audience and my critical appeal, because there are those who like one aspect of my music.

RK: So you haven’t focused on a market?

DL: If you look at my recording discography, I am among maybe three or four other people (like Steve Lacy or David Murray) who are on literally dozens of labels. It’s because one producer likes one aspect of your work, another guy likes another. If you work on it enough, you can spread yourself out. And that’s been the bad part from the business standpoint. On the other hand, I know that in the long run, doing what I’m doing is going to be OK as far as the public is concerned. It’s just that you’ve got to add on another 10-to-15 years because you didn’t stay in one style, and because you weren’t in one clique. I’ve really made sure of that now that I can see it. I don’t belong to any school of thinking. I wasn’t part of M-Base or part of this or that. We started out together in the late ’60s in a kind of situation a lot of guys together playing free jazz, but then I just found my own voice. I can’t compare myself to anybody else, and I feel very proud of that. And now it’s too late to change.

RK: What are you listening to today?

DL: Well, to be realistic, with the little time I have, I’m usually listening to my own stuff, or editing, or trying to catch up with what I have to do. Like right now, I’m sitting downstairs about to listen to the string quartet that I have to play next week. I mean, people like us have very little time to listen to things of choice. The second area I usually listen to is tapes of students or people who send me their stuff to check out. If I just turned off the hose and said, “No tapes, no CDs,” I would probably have time to listen. I’d love to get back into Mompou and this Graetinger-thing with Kenton because it has been on my mind, or something that’s apropos to a mixed project I’m doing, and so forth.

But being a teacher and an educator is part of my personality, and I feel a debt to it. I answer everybody. They send me tapes and I might write three or four words quite quickly, but I’m in connection with a lot of people — student types or musicians who want me to hear their music. So that takes a lot of time, and it keeps piling up. Every couple of months I leaf through and just listen and make comments when necessary when I feel it has to be. So sometimes I can’t even listen to the things I want to. For example: yesterday I talked to the guy over at Verve, and he’s going to send me something called 20th Century Genius (Art Tatum) that he says is unbelievable. I have the box that came out last year, Coltrane Live at the Vanguard, but I still haven’t listened to the outtakes. Because I’m so busy and involved, I just don’t have the time to concentrate, and I haven’t had it for probably 10 or 15 years. It’s a terrible, unfortunate part of being an artist today, because so much time is spent on business and logistics and the mechanical aspects of getting your stuff out there. That’s just the way it goes. I don’t have a manager; I do it myself.

8. Upcoming Projects

RK: What are some other projects you have on the back burner?

DL: The next release is on a label called Arkadia. It’s with Pat Metheny and it’s called Water, Giver of Life. I’m portraying the element of water in various manifestations and writing programmatically, which I like to do. So I want to complete the cycle of the four elements over the years on some label or another somehow and the next one I’m looking into is Earth. I have some themes that I have used for a ballet a couple of years ago called The Stones. I don’t know what’s really going on in general, maybe it’s living out in the country (…I’ve been here in the Poconos for about 10 years…). I see my perspective changing towards outside of me as I mature. But I’m also a very subject-literal minded person. I mean I like a subject. Give me a subject; say “blue” and I paint blue. I see my interests moving away from the personal view, the personal theme which was so much of the first ten, twenty years. It’s more of what’s around you.

And I’ve done a record lately called The Tree, a record called Time Immemorial, this water thing, and then Earth and Fire and so forth. I’m trying just to paint the things that are around me in music. If I have a subject, it makes it much easier for me to get to the heart of the matter rather than just perform a musical exercise (which other guys do very well and I respect that). I like a subject. It could be very literal or figurative, but it really helps me out. So right now I’m going to try and produce a cycle over the next three years.

RK: Great. I have no more questions, but you know it’s a funny thing you mentioned Dave Taylor. You remind me of Dave Taylor. You know Dave’s from Brooklyn, by the way…

DL: You’re Jewish too, right?

RK: I am.

DL: Happy New Year!

RK: Yes, Happy New Year.

DL: Happy year 5,000-something.

RK: Happy 5,734-something. Anything else you want to talk about?

9. The International Scene

DL: I’m at a point where I’ve been around for a while. I’m an “established” artist, at least among those who know, and you have to be careful not to be sour grapes on anything that comes after your time. It’s like your father’s stuff: “Well, you know the good old days.” You start talking to your kids like that: It’s not the same, therefore it’s less. I think about that all the time when I get these kind of questions, about the way it’s changing, and the demographics and the corporate stuff and all that which we spoke about. It’s terribly negative from the standpoint of what this art form purports to be, of what people like us are trying to do.

On the other hand, I really have to try to come up with the positive side, which as I mentioned, is influencing the world. The education thing has to be good in the end. People knowing something have to turn out better than not knowing something. So I’m always tempering my remarks about the loss of individuality and of standardization and everything with the fact that we live in an incredible period of openness and communication and availability of knowledge. Maybe things aren’t right now, but someday the scales will balance the negative side of this period we’re living in. And I think that’s important to everyone. When we get negative and say, “Where are the good old days?” or “Nobody’s really playing it like that anymore,” we gotta remember that the other side of that is an incredible explosion of knowledge and opportunity. I must say the most positive thing I’ve done has been the teaching.

In 1989, I founded an organization that we named International Association of Schools of Jazz. (It’s on my web site.) After all my traveling and teaching (…I did so much of it in the ’80s…), I saw that so many people were doing the same thing, especially in Europe, and the boundaries, borders, were really separating people. It was amazing that they didn’t know each other two hours away from Germany to France. And I took it upon myself to put these people I knew together. In 1989, we organized, and 10 years later we have this wonderful association. We have schools from 35 countries — I mean Slovakia, Lithuania, Japan, etc. — that meet once a year. We have a meeting where students come. We have a newsletter, a magazine. My point is that by my exposure to these teachers and students from all these countries I really see that the future of jazz is outside of America. It truly lies in those places where it’s still considered a new thing. That what’s going to revitalize (or let’s say continue to vitalize), this music: input from cultures that you would never think would have anything to do with jazz or western music as we know it. It’s happening in pop a little bit, and I really believe that in jazz it’s going to be a little purer, on a higher level. I really think that that’s the future.

It’s not that America is over, or finished, but the truth is that the birthplace of the music has had its time. It had its hundred years, or whatever, and the innovators were here and are done. But for this music to exist and go on, it had to get infusions from other cultures and other peoples, and it’s happening. A lot of people in America are not aware of it because they’re insulated and they don’t get out, but people like myself, and people who travel to a lot of countries and teach, are. There are young people who are really for the most part optimistic because they are bringing something to it. It may be a Danish folk song in a jazz style, but it’s an attempt to bring what they have to the music they’re learning. And I think that’s a very positive thing.

RK: I’ll tell you, I was in Vienna last week at a conference for the International Association of Music Information Centers and we went for a day trip to Bratislava where the mayor had us to lunch. We got to the town square and a jazz band was playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” I mean there’s a trip: you’re looking at a place where Liszt lived and all of a sudden you walk into the square and hear this. And it’s a good band too!

DL: And probably in a school down the street, somebody’s talking about Charlie Parker. This thing is happening. People here are just not aware of it because America is a fortress. But this is happening, I see it through this organization. There’s attention towards internationalization of this music. I mean, we’re working with UNICEF. In the mid-’80s I was so blue about the business that I was applying to law schools to get out of the whole scene. But I realized that what would make me personally feel good was not so much just the music (…’cause I’d already understood that music was a very personal, egotistical self-entertaining thing…), but something that could be international and that could use the power and energy of the music for communication. It’s very simple. And that’s really what propelled me into this teaching thing in the ’80s. If there’s one thing that makes me feel optimistic about this situation we discussed earlier, it’s the internationalization of jazz on a level so unprecedented that you have no idea how much is going on. It’s really incredible.

RK: These are terrific sentiments. Thank you for your time and the candid thoughts.