Tag: San Francisco jazz scene

Back in the Apple

Posted on July 19, 2013 by - Columns

It feels great to be home after ten weeks on the road. Even though the tour only had four legs and the shortest length of time spent in one location was a week, being away from home for so long can put one out of touch with one’s inspiration; or at least I have found that to be the case. But it should be said, lest the sentiment is misunderstood, that I have travelled for extended periods with groups before, but I’ve never been away from home for this long at one stretch.

It’s one thing to be traveling with a stable group that is focused on playing music together and it’s an entirely different thing to be traveling by oneself. When I was younger, I had the great good fortune to play in the house band at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge in Detroit, Michigan for three weeks in 1977. I was part of a group that backed up pianist Phineas Newborn, Jr. (with Bert Myrick on drums), vibraphonist Milt Jackson (with Myrick and pianist Terry Pollard), and saxophonist Sonny Stitt (again with Myrick and Pollard). Up to that point in my career I had only toured with artists that brought their own groups with them: Cal Tjader, Jim Pepper, and Joe Henderson. (Although these artists toured as soloists, they also had groups that they took on the road.) In fact, I had played at Baker’s while touring with Joe Henderson and was offered the opportunity to stick around while all the other eligible bassists in Detroit were on the road! It was at this point that I learned two things: 1) that improvising with complete strangers is really hard; and 2) that playing music isn’t always about having a good time. I have found that having fun while playing is a perk, and not a necessity to playing good music. And it should be emphasized that not having fun isn’t a reflection on the people one is playing with—it’s about how one feels at the moment.

During my last week in the Bay Area on this trip, I played on a demo recording and, while I had a good time hanging out with everyone, I was not very happy with my playing, although it sounded fine in the playback. This is mostly attributable to my process of improvisation; I generally know what I would like to play just before I play it. When it doesn’t come out quite right, the process of making what’s “wrong” (admitting that there are no wrong notes) sound right can feel frustrating. To be frank, I also find that the recording studio is one of the least comfortable places I can think of to make music—no audience, bad acoustics, often no direct communication with the others who are recording.

One factor about that recording session that made things work out well is that all of us had spent a lot of time in the same place, New York City. The pianist Dave Udolph is from there, and the drummer Akira Tana lived there in the 1980s; in fact, we worked together there. New York was a point of familiarity for the three of us, even though we have yet to play as a group outside of the Bay Area. I was staying with the pianist and his wife, vocalist Sherri Roberts, for the last two weeks and he and I had quite a bit of time to talk about the aesthetic differences between New York and San Francisco improvising musicians who play jazz. We came to agree that there are great musicians in each city who have never set foot in the other, and they play their instruments very differently. It’s almost as if the reasons for playing music in one city are different than for the other city. We finally came to the conclusion that for someone like Dave, who began his studies while negotiating the scene in New York, San Francisco offered a sane alternative to the frenetic and somewhat dangerous environment that is New York. Very little happens after 2:00 a.m. in San Francisco, and the residents enjoy clean air and a relaxed state of mind. For someone like me, New York offers the opportunity to create my own personal music immersion program that can be accessed until 4:00 a.m. in several locations around town, as well as the chance to hear just about any genre of music on just about any day of the week. A discussion on the subject with another pianist I know from New York who now lives in San Francisco, Bliss Rodriguez, arrived at the same conclusion.

It wasn’t until I was en route home that I realized what we were trying to pinpoint in the playing of New York musicians that was different from, and often desirable to, San Francisco musicians. It was something that someone (I wish I could remember who) told me years ago about New York City. Someone, maybe me, had described the city as a “melting pot” where artists come from all over the world and create new sounds. The person disagreed with the analogy whole-heartedly, describing it as a “mixing bowl,” where artists come from all over the world and meet a few other like-minded artists with whom they create those new sounds. The fact that there are a lot of artists doing this at the same time makes the concept competitive, so that technical proficiency is highly desirable and often rewarded. (Of course, there is a drawback in that technical proficiency, by itself, becomes boring and can become un-interesting.) But I now know that this is what lay at the core of my dilemma. Without access to my “easy listening,” the new music swirling around the mixing bowl of the five boroughs, I lose sight of what I’m working on—the things that I’m trying to get into my head and fingers. The difference between what I feel now that I live in New York City and what I felt when I lived in San Francisco is that when I went on the road then, I found a similar kind of inspiration in the local artists I heard and could bring that back home with me.

To be absolutely honest, I did get some inspiration from this extended tour, especially when I was introduced to the compositions of bassist Chuck Metcalf. In fact, I’m going to be including some of his compositions in my personal repertoire. Nevertheless, I’ll still be chanting something Judy Garland told us a long time ago: “There’s no place like home.”
No Place Like Home

Back on the Road

Posted on July 5, 2013 by - Columns

It’s the 5th of July, America is one year older and the 2013 edition of Jazz Camp West is officially over. On Saturday, June 29, everyone packed their belongings and went to the last round of concerts before the barbecue lunch that was our last camp meal. By sundown, all of the campers had left for home or continued their summer activities elsewhere, and the JCW crew began dismantling the miniature theaters that had been erected a week earlier. By the end of Sunday, June 30, all the drum sets, guitar and bass amplifiers, and PA systems would be returned to their owners, and the pianos—37 in all—would be back in the rental room of Jim Callahan’s Piedmont Piano Company in Oakland, California. But, even though the camping out part of Jazz Camp West is over, the artists that comprise its staff and teaching roster continue their work as performers and educators.

I had the pleasure of performing in several concerts featuring JCW artists in the days immediately following this year’s camp. One was a private affair held in the multi-story cellar of the Palmaz Winery in Napa Valley on Saturday night, using the cellar’s pressing area as a stage. The group, led by pianist Dan Zemelman, featured Allison Miller on drums and Bob Roth on saxophone (who was not part of the 2013 JCW roster). While the Palmaz facility was rather impressive, the acoustics of the cellar added a half-second echo and made playing music that relies on group improvisation somewhat challenging, especially when Allison used sticks on her cymbals that resulted in the sound of ticking echoing from 360 degrees. But the occasion was risen to and, in the final analysis, the concert was a success.

On Monday, July 1, I had the opportunity to play with Miller again, only in the more acoustically friendly showroom of the Piedmont Piano Company with pianist Randy Porter in a group led by vocalist Madeline Eastman. Eastman is also the co-director of Jazz Camp West (along with its founder, Stacey Hoffman) and this was her first concert since the camp started on June 22. Despite the concert’s coinciding with day one of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system’s strike, the sold-out audience was mostly comprised of JCW campers who live in the Bay Area and included a fairly even mix of vocal and instrumental students. While it’s impossible to describe music in words with any accuracy, I will say that Madeline is gifted with a beautiful voice that she uses in a diverse range of music—from hard-hitting blues like John Coltrane’s “Mr. Day” to Brazilian samba-influenced arrangements of songs like Burt Bacharach’s “Close To You” to intimate ballads like Victor Feldman and Tommy Wolff’s “A Face Like Yours,” which she performed as a duo with Porter. But there is a part of Madeline’s singing that transcends her instrument and arrangements and even her professional experience. Her delivery of a song involves the listener to the point that he or she feels like a part of the performance. It’s almost as if she’s says, “This can’t happen without you,” to everyone within earshot. I had already seen her do this on the one song she sang at JCW in 2012 (she prefers to not perform much at the camp), so I was honored to be invited to be a part of her Piedmont Piano concert. Of course, getting to play with Randy Porter and Allison Miller was a thrill, too!

Piedmont’s concert series is famous in the Bay Area and offers local and touring pianists a chance to perform on a Fazioli concert grand. I was fortunate enough to be invited to play again with Dan Zemelman at Piedmont on Tuesday in an ensemble with violinist Mads Tolling, and Trio Maravilloso. The second day of the transit strike was a bit harder on the evening’s attendance than the first, but most of Piedmont’s chairs were filled with attentive ears. Our program was a mix of standards and Tolling originals spread across one long set. High points of the evening included Tolling’s “Danish Dessert” (which draws its title from the apparent inability of Americans to pronounce the names of certain dishes found on Danish menus), two pieces that included JCW vocalists Gabriela Welch (Carol King’s “You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman” and Rose Armin-Hoiland on Michel Legrand’s “You Must Believe In Spring”), and Zemelman’s arrangement of Bob Dorough and Terrell Kirk’s “Devil May Care.” But it was Thelonious Monk’s “Blue Monk” that took the most daring turns during its collective and solo improvisations and got the most enthusiastic audience response. Dan Zemelman is one of the Bay Area’s finest jazz pianists and Mads Tolling one of its finest improvising violinists (remembering that the area is the home of the Kronos and Turtle Island String Quartets, the latter of which Tolling recently retired from). So it was, once again, an honor to be playing at Piedmont Piano.

The Jazz Camp West afterglow at Piedmont Piano will continue tonight, July 5, with a concert by vocalist Faye Carol, who was also a JCW artist this year. I had the honor of playing an impromptu version of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Night in Tunisia” with her on the opening night of JCW (which included saxophonist Charles McNeal, pianist Ben Heveroh, and drummer Deszon Claiborne) that displayed her stunning skills in vocalise and improvisation. If BART is back up-and-running, I’ll be heading to Oakland tonight! But I plan to be here in San Francisco for another week. I’ll be playing at the 7 Mile House Sunday on drummer Vince Lateano’s jam session series, although Lateano had to get drummer Ron Marabuto to replace him. (Vince is married to Madeline Eastman and, I believe, they are taking a vacation that night.) As much as I would like to play with Vince, I’m really excited about playing with Ron because the last time we played together was over twenty years ago in New York with baritone saxophonist extraordinaire Pepper Adams. I’ll also be playing with him on July 13 at the Hotel Healdsburg in pianist David Udolf’s trio and again on July 14 in Udolf’s tribute to bassist Chuck Metcalf, featuring saxophonist Steve Heckman and vibraphonist Jim Zimmerman at Chez Hanny.

It will be a heartfelt way to end what has been a 2-1/2 month-long tour of Mexico and the Bay Area. Of course, there will be private sessions and public jam sessions, which I hope to cover next week with videos.

More Stones

Posted on May 31, 2013 by - Columns

It’s almost three weeks that I’ve been in San Francisco with three more to go between my mother’s memorial (tonight) and Jazz Camp West (June 22-29). My foraging through her record collection is a work in progress, but progress is being made!

Besides coming across the first recording with a recognized jazz artist I was on (which is not what my discography lists as Syzygy with the Denny Zeitlin Trio, but rather a 1969 University of the Pacific Summer Camp recording with a big band featuring a 15-year-old Jon Faddis), I came across two LPs that are, arguably, turning points in recorded music.

The importance I assign to one of them, Igor Stravinsky Conducts, 1961, might stem more from my own opinion and how that opinion was shaped by hearing the composer conduct his own works. I had been used to hearing his music filtered through the “ears” of the Great American Cultural Machine, a filter that seemed to make every attempt to “elevate” new music into something that resembled the “perfection” of the “great” recordings of the “masters.” In this recording, I heard one of the masters of the musical heritage that the GACM was appropriating create music that he thought typified that heritage. Instead of a musical experience born out of the philosophy of Felix Mendelssohn’s “revival” of Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, that demanded editorial cuts and a reorchestration to fit the musical “taste” of the Berlin audience, the album (Columbia Masterworks MS 6272) invokes how a composer, a self-professed neo-classicist, re-imagines what pre-Romantic music could sound like. (Of course, neither ideals address the issue of using modern temperament to perform music that references a time before the modern piano.)

The importance of the other is less about my personal opinion than it is its being a landmark in how the GAMC has made jazz a part of the European art music tradition (at least in how it is marketed). The album, Haydn/Hummel/L. Mozart: Trumpet Concertos, is another CBS Masterworks product and is seminal to its featured trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis, who is pitted against a ripieno comprised of the National Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Raymond Leppard. Well, there is a personal story I could attach to this recording. I never bothered listening to it until I found out that Leppard was the musical director of the Indianapolis Symphony. Not because I thought there was anything wrong with Marsalis recording the pieces, but because I already knew them well from listening to my father’s recording of Maurice André playing the same works in the 1960s. In fact, my friends and I used the André recording as a model for our own playing of the pieces when we were in junior high school. But the Marsalis/Leppard album has forever changed how the denizens of “highbrow” society look at and understand jazz musicians and the music they make. No longer does a rebellious debutante and her companion(s) need to go “slumming” to hear great musicians who are on the cutting edge of a music that fills the waiting room of a new, and better, world where socio-economic stratification and skin color aren’t the key considerations for determining one’s deportment towards someone else. Now one can go to a special concert hall and hear jazz performed as “equal” to the works of Salieri and Lully. No need to walk through a neighborhood filled with the street life of after-hours entrepreneurs and their vagabond clientele.

This might explain why so many jazz musicians appear to lead “double lives” where their on-stage personae are erudite, articulate, and fashionably genteel, while in the “real world” they might be gas station attendants or winos. One pianist explained to me why he quit his job with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, “I’d rather not be getting $1,000 per trick when others who don’t play as well can walk up the street and make $5,000 a trick.” I know it sounds harsh, but many of the crème de la crème of every artistic stripe freely talk about how they feel “dirty” after playing to the adoration of large audiences of concert subscribers, as if their artistic integrity had to be compromised to placate the congregation in the Temple of the Familiar, a topic that was introduced last week. Before the reader thinks that I agree with any analogy to the so-called “world’s oldest profession” being alluded to above, I want to be clear that I see the whole concert hall paradigm as a way to lease entitlement to a leisure class. Like the restaurant, where diners can pay a nominal to exorbitant fee for being served a repast as if they were royalty, concert goers get an ersatz Esterházy experience where they time share the services of their own orchestra that will give them the same sense of disassociation from the hard work experienced by the rest of humanity.

To be clear, I don’t begrudge anyone going to hear live music in a concert hall. My mom spent quite a bit of her hard-earned bucks on her subscriptions to the San Francisco Symphony, Ballet, and Opera. They’re world-class outfits and are worthy of the ticket price to hear them (especially since Michael Tilson Thomas has taken up the cause of championing the music of Charles Ives), but I think of how the current trend to make jazz a concert hall music is gutting the source of that music: the jazz club. Fortunately, the conservatory-to-concert hall pipeline hasn’t entirely supplanted the necessity of the jam session and jazz club as a place to impart jazz pedagogy. This becomes obvious in a city like San Francisco, where the 3,000 plus miles between it and the nexus of jazz, New York City, creates a vacuum that can only be filled by a network of urban griots who bring the news of what’s new with the new. Who knew that I would find myself in this position when, after two weeks of nothing but focusing on my mom’s affairs, I decided Tuesday night to go out on the town? (Actually, I went out a few days earlier, but that will be addressed later.)
The only jazz club in San Francisco that’s within walking distance of where I’m staying is the Club Deluxe. I’ve mentioned it in previous posts and highly recommend it to anyone coming to San Francisco who has the time and interest in hearing representatives of the up-and-coming Bay Area jazz musicians who are determined to be the best they can be. The establishment also has served the royal me some of the best pizza I’ve ever eaten, but since I arrived after 10 p.m., when they close their kitchen for the night, my status is in decline because I only drink their hand-squeezed grapefruit juice.

The musical festivities on Tuesday were led by Smith Dobson, the son of a fantastic pianist of the same name that I used to play with before I left for New York in 1977. It was a jam session that night and I knew the pianist, Adam Schulman, from when I played at Chez Hanny several years ago with him and clarinetist-saxophonist Sheldon Brown. The bassist, a great player named Robert Overbury, was playing an instrument that is easily a carbon copy of my first bass, right down to the height of the strings. He let me sit in on it and, between going through the records and books of my childhood and his beautiful hand-assembled pre-war Juzeck bass, I felt like I was back home. But the thing that brought me back to reality was listening to Dobson play. When I came in, he was playing drums, but by the time I was playing bass, he was playing tenor saxophone. The experience reminded me of Adam Niewood, another son of an old friend who died tragically. (Adam’s father, Gerry, was a saxophonist who died in the airplane crash outside of Buffalo that filmmaker Michael Moore referenced in his movie Capitalism: A Love Story. Smith Dobson, Sr., was killed in an automobile accident a few years earlier.) When Adam decided he wanted to play the saxophone, his father taught him by giving him a set of drumsticks and making him accompany the elder saxophonist for years. Smith, Jr., began his musical career on drums, adding vibraphone and saxophones later on. Both are extremely masterful as percussionists and woodwind players. (The saxophone-drummer model is fairly common. Saxophonists Joe Lovano, Dave Liebman, and William Drewes are all accomplished drummers.) After the music was over, I expressed to Smith that I was sorry I didn’t get a chance to play with him on drums. He suggested that I should come by on Wednesday to rectify that.

When I got to Club Deluxe the next night, the group was led by Patrick Wolff, who plays alto and tenor saxophones, with Adam Schulman again on piano, a relatively old acquaintance and excellent bassist Eric Markowitz, and Smith on drums. They were in the middle of a tune which I don’t remember, but joining them was a fantastic young vocalist, Tiffany Austin, and a baritone saxophonist who I thought familiar, but couldn’t place until after he had left. His name is Dayna Stephens, and I know him as a tenor saxophonist who lives in New York. It turns out that he, like Jon Faddis, grew up in Berkeley, California. Stephens was in town visiting family and playing at the Healdsburg Jazz Festival as well as a celebration of the music of Dave Brubeck with the Oakland Symphony. He sounded absolutely brilliant on baritone, and I hope I get a chance to play with him before he and/or I have to leave the West Coast. Although Stevens had left before I played, Ms. Austin led us on a version of Arthur Schwartz’s “Alone Together” that, owing to my avant-garde tendencies, went to very interesting places. I was honored to play with such open-minded and creative musicians. Sadly, though, I’ve learned that Club Deluxe will no longer be serving pizza. So ends the reign of King Ratzo.

I did, however, get to play the role of griot to the musicians of Club Deluxe. I told them of my experiences playing in New York in stories from my past and from recent days, as I’m sure Mr. Stephens did as well. It’s important that this be done, because if all that the musicians in San Francisco know of what’s going on in New York is what they hear from Jazz at Lincoln Center and the “name” clubs, like The Blue Note, The Village Vanguard, and Birdland, then how will they know about artists like William Parker, Fay Victor, Stacey Dillard, or Melissa Hamilton? There’s so much that the GACM doesn’t know … not to mention what it doesn’t want you to know!

This brings me to the night that I said I would talk about earlier, the one where I went out “on the town” to hear music before Tuesday. I had been given a ticket to see the Philip Glass Ensemble perform at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on May 25. They were performing music for Jean Coctaeu’s classic film, La Belle et la Bête, and two things left me scratching my head that I’ll share with you. The first had to do with the people in the seats next to me. They were a well-groomed couple, male and female and I’m guessing separated by some 20-30 years, who were chatting away in Portuguese, a language I don’t understand but recognize. As I was sitting quietly, waiting for the performance to start, the younger of the two leaned across her partner to ask me if I knew “whether the opera tonight is in French or English.” When I answered that I did not know, she seemed to be upset that I didn’t and wanted to point out that I should. I apologized and explained again that I didn’t know. She returned to her chattering without bothering to thank me for answering her. Now I truly believe that I am the exemplification of a stupid American. I am not conversant in anything but English and have to admit that it’s no fault but my own, even though I prefer to blame Ronald Reagan for cutting the language requirements in elementary schools when he became governor of California.

But I don’t believe this means that total strangers are permitted to rub it in, and I had to scratch my head about what the point of it all is. So, as the house lights were dimming, I asked my neighbor, “Wouldn’t it be funny if they sang in Spanish?”, to which they both replied, “No, we’re speaking Portuguese!” All I could say to that was “Muito Obrigado” in what I hope was a Brazilian accent, and hope we could all enjoy the performance, which was as great as Philip Glass performances always are. But the second, and more significant point has to do with the piece, which was listed as an “opera/film” in the program notes. Is music composed to replace the soundtrack of a film truly an opera, especially if the singers don’t move more than to sit down in a chair when not singing? The only staging was the screen to project the film on, and there were no arias, only the melodicization of the movie’s dialog. Because so much of the audience in attendance are probably not music historians, will calling this performance an opera lead the way to a redefining of the genre? Even though the word “opera” doesn’t semantically refer to music or acting or a division of the affects (storytelling to emotive display), isn’t the term as a musical one contingent on those references?

Does the status “highbrow” remove the responsibility of the griot to impart knowledge of culture accurately? And if La Belle et la Bête isn’t an opera, what is it?

The Second Oldest Profession? (Part 2)

Posted on December 7, 2012 by - Columns

In last week’s post I tried to dispel the myth of music being a form of the world’s oldest profession by referencing the Biblical character of Jubal, “the father of all such as handle the harp and organ” (Genesis 4:21); a distinction that would seem to include string and wind players, but not percussionists and vocalists. While it might seem glib to look at the development of the pianoforte as a grand effort to repatriate those who would bang on rocks and logs into the family of musicians, there are still certain individuals who consider those making music by manipulating their respiratory systems as members of a musical subclass comprised of uneducated performers whose artistic expression relies more on body language than musical acumen; but, of course, anyone with sense knows that musicianship includes singing. Furthermore, the opening chapter from the aforementioned compendium describes the creation of all things as the result of vocalization—that, in essence, we are sung into being. So it’s not so much of a stretch to declare that the first, and thus oldest, “profession” is…music! Which brings me to this week’s post from the road.

San Francisco is a city that seems to want to exist very much apart from the milieu of the Great American Cultural Machine and, in doing so, has occasionally become a trend-setter for it. It was here that the so-called “Summer of Love” ushered in the “psychedelic ‘60s” (which seemed to take up more of the ‘70s in my memory) with groups like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, the Sons of Champlin, Moby Grape, Santana, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. It was in San Francisco in 1966 that the Beatles followed the lead of Glenn Gould four years earlier in Los Angeles by retiring from the concert stage. It was also in San Francisco in the previous decade that vibraphonist Cal Tjader developed a small-group Latin jazz style that became known as “salsa.” In 1961, a Tjader sideman, San Francisco-born pianist Vince Guaraldi, recorded an unexpected hit tune, “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” that heavily influenced the new-age performance styles of George Winston and David Benoit— if not serving as the genre’s Alberti-bass intensive model. (One wonders if, by improvising over the dominant key left-hand ostinato of the “A” section’s principle theme instead of using the swinging “B” section of Guaraldi’s original and by substituting an anticipated lower octave tonic for Guaraldi’s close-fisted left-hand roll in its cadential consequent, Winston was agreeing with the Gould-ian argument on disauthenticity in period performance.)

In that same year another San Francisco native, Mary Stallings, came to national prominence in a collaboration with Tjader, Cal Tjader Plays, Mary Stallings Sings (Fantasy Records, 1961). Her voice is still a marvel of precision and technique that has been presented for the last 24 years, three nights a week, at the downtown San Francisco restaurant Bix, where she is currently accompanied by pianist David Udolph. Being a Cal Tjader alumnus, I was especially thrilled to perform with them at the Kirk Douglas Theater last June. The restaurant’s owner, Doug Beiderbecke, has adopted the nickname of the iconic trumpeter Leon Beiderbecke and applied it to his eatery. He also shows his love for jazz by presenting music there seven days a week. However, the clientele is comprised more of what we used to call “yuppies” (back in the day) and often exceeds by decibels the average amplitude of the performing musicians. Still, 88-year-old pianist-singer-songwriter Bob Dorough successfully engaged the audience at Bix in sing-along and call-and-response numbers during his three-day stint there last November, which was probably due more to his being the composer and performer of much of the music on the television show Sesame Street than his role as Crab Man in Porgy and Bess or his work with Miles Davis.

Udolph’s wife, vocalist Sherry Roberts, told me about Dorough’s Bix appearance. I was calling to talk to Dave about rehearsals for our appearance Sunday afternoon at Chez Hanny with trumpeter Dave Bendigkeit and trombonist Wayne Wallace (to balance out the lack of drums on this concert, I’ll be playing with Bendigkeit and drummer Vince Lateano in a piano-less trio on December 16 at David’s dojo in Pacifica). She also informed me about a workshop she attended at the Jazzschool in Berkeley by another vocalist who has kept her voice in top form over the years, 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Sheila Jordan. I missed Sheila’s 84th birthday celebration in New York, but saw that the Jazzschool was presenting a fundraiser for themselves and a tribute to Jordan at the Freight and Salvage Coffeehouse last Monday and I planned to attend it. The venue’s name doesn’t do the 220 seat theater justice. The sound system is excellent, and there is an uninterrupted line-of-sight view of the stage from every point in the room; literally, not a bad seat in the house. The concert opened with a few words from the head of the Vocal Jazz Studies program at Jazzschool, Laurie Antonioli, who also acted as the evening’s emcee. After a brief video presentation (produced by vocalist and Jordan biographer Ellen Johnson) of accolades for Sheila by her friends and colleagues in New York—including Mark Murphy, Jay Clayton, Theo Bleckmann, Judi Silvano and her husband Joe Lovano, Connie Crothers, Andrea Wolper and her husband Ken Filiano—the music began with Antonioli singing Jimmie Davis and Charles Mitchell’s “You Are My Sunshine” in saxophonist/bass clarinetist Sheldon Brown’s arrangement based on the classic one by George Russell and co-realized by pianist Matt Clark, bassist John Shifflett, and drummer Jason Lewis. Antonioli told the audience that this is the group she regularly uses on her projects, a point that was made obvious by the ease and depth of their interaction.

Although there are no bad seats at Freight and Salvage, there was one back at my home-on-the-road where my computer died the following morning. Unfortunately, I lost two drafts of this article and all of the charts I brought to play on Sunday! I wish I had taken hand-written notes instead of putting them on the computer’s hard drive because I’ve lost all of the details of the event I had hoped to include here. However, I can report that each vocalist paying homage to Jordan performed two songs (I don’t remember who did what) and that the order of their performances were: Antonioli, Ed Reed, Madeline Eastman, Kitty Margolis, Ellen Johnson, and Kyra Gordon, the winner of last year’s Mark Murphy Scholarship. Jazzschool founder Susan Muscarella then presented the winner of the 2013 award to Kathy Blackburn. This was followed by three tunes performed by Sheila Jordan that ended with all of the singers paying tribute by joining in a round-robin trading of eight-measure long scat solos on Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation.” The other song titles I remember are: “Some Other Time,” “It’s Only A Paper Moon,” “Squeeze Me,” “It Never Entered My Mind,” and “Sheila’s Blues” (sung by Jordan). There were seven or eight more songs, but I don’t remember which ones they are. However, I plan to continue researching the event’s program while I’m in the Bay Area and will use the comments section to make updates.

What is so great about seeing this tribute, besides the phenomenal musicianship of everyone involved, is that it was like being at a private party, albeit one in a large amphitheater. The principal performers are all long-time associates and friends and the warmth, camaraderie, and respect they all expressed in word, humor, and song was genuine. I’ve seen this happen a lot between singers, even when competing with one another for the limited opportunities to ply their craft. I remember Vicki Burns creating a regular series for herself at the Pigale restaurant in Manhattan and sharing it with her network of associates, which included Linda Ciofolo, Judi Silvano, Melissa Hamilton, and many other chanteuses who would regularly drop by and sing with each other. Sadly, and unceremoniously, the establishment discontinued its music policy after a few months. There are, however, several venues in Manhattan that specifically target jazz singers: Studio 100 in the Mariott Residency Inn, which features jazz vocalists every Thursday, and Saul Rubin’s Zeb’s on West 28th Street that does so every Wednesday are just two. The 55 Bar (where I’ll be playing in Fay Victor’s series on Dec. 27), the Zinc Bar (which just hosted Melissa Hamilton’s CD release), the Kitano Jazz Club, Somethin’ Jazz on Manhattan’s East Side, Small’s Jazz Club in Greenwich Village (which hosts a vocal workshop by Marion Cowings and a session afterward every Sunday) are New York venues that regularly present singers of the highest caliber.

When I get home, I think I’ll assemble a comprehensive list of them. I’ll put together one on San Francisco for next week!