The Jazz.com Blog
November 14, 2009
Anita O'Day on DVD
Thomas Cunniffe covers the world of DVDs for jazz.com. His most recent review here looked at Charles Mingus's Epitaph and Town Hall Concert. Now Cunniffe turns his attention to two videos featuring the late vocalist Anita O'Day. T.G.
In a vintage interview from the Today show, Bryant Gumbel questioned Anita O’Day about her life filled with rape, abortion, substance abuse and jail time. When he presses her about how she could stay upbeat in the face of such turmoil, she finally replies, “Well, that’s the way it went down, Bryant”. The quote shows up early in the O’Day documentary The Life Of A Jazz Singer and then turns up in full much later, and it aptly characterizes how the film handles the often difficult nature of its subject.
While O’Day momentarily loses her composure when talking about the drug-related death of arranger Gary McFarland (and in the interview out-takes, the deaths of Judy Garland, Zoot Sims and her father), she never expresses any remorse about the courses she chose for her own life. Even the other interviewees seem taciturn when it comes to making judgments about Anita’s lifestyle. Nothing is denied, yet no one really emphasizes the damage.
O”Day’s questionable life choices were not limited to drug abuse, of course. Oddly enough, some of her best performances were made between the mid 1950s and early 1970s, when she was in the midst of a heroin addiction. In her later years, long after she was sober, O’Day’s intonation—never a strong point for her—got worse and worse, and on her last recordings, she was barely able to croak out a melody. Yet the film staunchly defends her late performances as if they were the equal of her earlier work. As a long-time admirer of O’Day’s music, I can tell you that trying to listen to her late recordings is nearly impossible—her voice is so battered that all one can do is ask why is she still singing?
O’Day’s interview clips come from a variety of vintage sources, including 60 Minutes, Tomorrow With Tom Snyder and The Dick Cavett Show. By far, the best interviews of O’Day come from Billy Taylor’s 1990 profile of the singer for Sunday Morning (including several minutes of out-takes not used in Taylor’s piece). The filmmakers of the current documentary also interviewed O’Day, and while the information presented is essential, the footage is harder to watch due to uneven lighting and O’Day’s habit of suddenly going out of frame. The other interviewees include George Wein, Gerald Wilson, Margaret Whiting, Annie Ross, Will Friedwald, James Gavin and Phil Schaap. In one of the best sequences of the film, O’Day talks about her classic LPs for Verve, and each of the surviving arrangers are interviewed in turn, including Buddy Bregman, Russ Garcia, Bill Holman & Johnny Mandel.
There are plenty of fine performance clips and thankfully, the DVD includes the uninterrupted clips in the special features section. There are two soundies with Gene Krupa and Roy Eldridge (“Thanks For The Boogie Ride” & “Let Me Off Uptown”), a forgettable ditty with Stan Kenton (“Tabby The Cat”), two renditions of “Let’s Fall In Love” (these two and a couple of other versions are brilliantly edited together in the main documentary), and versions of “Boogie Blues”, “Honeysuckle Rose”, “Love For Sale” and “Trav’lin’ Light” with a Japanese big band. Also included is the classic “Four Brothers” from the 1958 Timex jazz special, “Tea For Two” and a spellbinding “Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square” from a 1963 Swedish performance, and the quintessential “Sweet Georgia Brown” from Jazz On A Summer’s Day. By far the most illuminating film clip is of O’Day’s version of “Body & Soul” from Art Ford’s Jazz Party. In the first chorus, her interpretation is so abstract that the pianist is momentarily thrown off-course. All is back in order within a few seconds, but O’Day reins in her interpretation for the rest of the performance, a fact she acknowledges when she says “This is for the piano player”.
The 1963 Swedish set is included complete on Anita O’Day: Live in ’63 & ‘70, from the latest set of Jazz Icons DVDs. The bookends of the Swedish program are the same two songs from Jazz On A Summer’s Day: “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Tea For Two”. While there are subtle differences between the Swedish and Newport performances, O’Day sticks to her well-worn arrangements. However, the disc includes two versions of “Let’s Fall In Love” that are even better than the versions on The Life Of A Jazz Singer. It seems that this Arlen classic was a constant source of inspiration for O’Day and both the Swedish version and the one from the companion Oslo concert include rare half-chorus scat solos (she usually scatted 4 bars at a time in exchanges with the instrumentalists). The Oslo concert also includes a splendid medley of the Beatles classic “Yesterday” and the Jerome Kern standard “Yesterdays”, and a beautiful rendition of “I Can’t Get Started”. The closers are the old standbys “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Tea For Two”, but while O’Day acknowledges their presence in Jazz On A Summer’s Day, the performances in Oslo bear only passing resemblances to those recorded 12 years earlier in Newport or 7 years earlier in Stockholm.
Like Jackie Paris, Anita O’Day died before the release of the documentary made about her. However, unlike Paris, O’Day has many recordings still in print, so those who want to hear more O’Day have plenty of choices. The Verve recordings are uniformly excellent, and all of them are still available as single discs. There was also a Mosaic 9-CD set of the complete Verve recordings, but that set is now out-of-print, so the only hope of getting a copy is to find someone willing to part with theirs. Considering the intense adoration of Anita O’Day’s fans, that’s not too likely.
ANITA O’DAY: THE LIFE OF A JAZZ SINGER AOD Productions 101819. 91 minutes, plus 91 minutes bonus material. Directed by Robbie Cavolina & Ian McCrudden. With Anita O’Day, Phil Schaap, Margaret Whiting, George Wein, Gerald Wilson, Joe Wilder, John Pietranowicz, Will Friedwald, Billy Taylor, Annie Ross, Freeman Gunter, John Cameron Mitchell, Denny Roche, Mark Morris, James Gavin, Amy Albany, Charles Britton, Maynard Sloane, Ken Druker, Buddy Bregman, Russ Garcia, Bill Holman, Johnny Mandel, Bert Stern, Nancy Fields O’Connor, Mary Sellers, Dr. David Boska, Karen Kramer, Eddie Locke & Joe Franklin.
ANITA O’DAY: LIVE IN ’63 & ’70 Jazz Icons 2.119015.
Sweet Georgia Brown, Let’s Fall In Love, A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square, Fly Me To The Moon, Honeysuckle Rose, Green Dolphin Street, Tea For Two.
Anita O’Day (vocals), Göran Engdahl (piano), Roman Dylag (bass), John Poole (drums).
Stockholm; June 25, 1963.
Let’s Fall In Love, Yesterday/Yesterdays, Four Brothers, I Can’t Get Started, Sweet Georgia Brown, Tea For Two.
Anita O’Day (vocals), George Arvanitas (piano), Jacky Samson (bass), Charles Saudrais (drums).
Oslo; October 21, 1970.
This blog entry posted by Thomas Cunniffe
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November 11, 2009
How We Got to Be Cool
I’m still a little fuzzy on how I became an authority on acting cool. But sometimes one simply must accept the destiny fate hands out. In any event, I am sharing the wealth with an extract below from my new book The Birth (and Death) of the Cool. I am also doing double duty this week as a guest blogger at Powell’s. Finally, I am making cool appearances (or approximations thereof) next Tuesday (Nov. 17) at the Tattered Cover in Denver and a week from Saturday (Nov. 21) at Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis. Be there or be square! T.G.
Henry Louis Gates relates the story of a group of black high school students in North Carolina who, dismayed over the rigidity of standardized achievement tests, devised one more to their own liking. They convinced a group of employees at publisher McGraw-Hill to take this exam, and these custodians of the written word all received Cs and Ds.
A typical question: “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?” The correct answer, the Harvard scholar tell us is “Your mama.” Gates, in his characteristically dry manner, adds: “It is difficult to explain why this response is so funny.”
When cool captured the American imagination in the fifties, such unexpected resolutions would constantly come to the fore. Cool would be embedded in a series of paradoxes. It would reveal while keeping things hidden. It would be emotionally involved while maintaining its distance. It would be obsessively focused on style and attitude while always showing its total disdain for these same superficial attributes. And even when it amused, it was sometimes difficult to explain why it was so funny.
No wonder cool came to conquer the world. An approach this flexible, this adaptive to every situation, was a sure winner at the midpoint of the American Century. In the 1950s, everyone was dishing up some new recipe for self-actualization for the general public, but all the others—from Dr. Norman Vincent Peale’s positive thinking to L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics—were ninety-eight-pound weaklings at the beach compared to this new, slick approach that worked for everybody, high and low.
Were you rich? Well, you needed to hone that cool image to match your bank account. Were you poor? Well, my friend, you needed a dose of cool even more than Mr. Moneybags. “Cool is about making a dollar out of fifteen cents,” Donnell Alexander has astutely explained in his provocative essay “Cool Like Me: Are Black People Cooler Than White People?” Cool is “an industry of style that everyone in the world can use. It’s finding the essential soul while being essentially lost.”
Were you beautiful? Then cool for you was like water for a mermaid, the medium through which you swam to show off your finer points. Were you plain or even ugly? Well, cool was your best friend, because with the right attitude and accoutrements you could rise above that pug nose, that double chin. Were you happy? Then cool would make you happier. Were you sad or desperate or resentful? Well, cool could even turn that into a type of allure, making angry young men into something chic and happening.
The American fixation with coolness may seem like a sign of shallowness—until you realize how much this attitude fit in with the essence of the national character. After all, the American dream was all about breaking through the limitations of class, birth, personal history, family—all the baggage that kept the Old World in thrall to the powers that be. Perhaps America didn’t always live up to its aspirations. Yes, there were individuals and groups shut out from its promises. But coolness was, in some odd way, the truest embodiment of what America dangled in front of its huddled masses. It represented the possibility that you could radically reinvent your life, achieve some level of personal heroism and respect, without anyone caring about your family tree or the balance in your checking account or what schools you attended. Cool was the great equalizer. And if you doubted it, just look at the icons of cool—blacks and beatniks and bohemians and a bunch of other folks who were at the bottom of the heap and rose to the top…through sheer hipness. How cool is that?
This was exactly the message that Americans wanted to hear after surviving the Great Depression and World War II. For postwar society, cool was a panacea, a secular sermon with more happy endings than the beatitudes. The cool shall be comforted and have their fill and inherit the earth. And look very stylish in the process.
But a change like this needed role models, and not the usual suspects. Which cool icons could you find to emulate on Main Street in Anytown, USA? Mom and Dad? The mayor or the police chief? The minister? Teachers at the schools? None of these fit the bill. Where do you turn when you want to leave the old ways behind and embrace something cool? What fills the gap when you leave small-town life behind? If you are a farm-raised boy in, say, Davenport, Iowa, and you want to break out and start a new life, who is your role model?
The cool ethos in American life was destined, it seems, to be shaped by bad boys and dropouts. We have a new tone set by Jack Kerouac (dropped out of Columbia), Miles Davis (dropped out of Juilliard), James Dean (dropped out of Santa Monica Junior College), J. D. Salinger (dropped out of NYU), Allen Ginsberg (dropped out of Columbia), Chet Baker (dropped out of El Camino College)…not to mention the legion of high school dropouts (Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Bix Beiderbecke, Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, and others) who never even got enough education to become college dropouts. But if Ivy League degrees were in short supply among this group, the vast majority of these individuals had an arrest, a felony, or even a jail term to their credit. Welcome to the new topsy-turvy world of the cool, where all the traditional measures of suitability and credentialing are turned upside down! Forget the diploma; show us your mug shot!
This is an extract from The Birth (and Death) of the Cool, a new book by Ted Gioia published by Speck Press. All rights reserved.
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November 09, 2009
The Anatomy of a Jazz Festival
Below we conclude Stuart Nicholson’s two-part article on the inner workings of the Molde Jazz Festival—a hugely successful event that brings 100,000 visitors to a city with only 25,000 residents. For part one of this piece, click here. T.G.
Certainly, away from the big festival stage it is impossible not to notice the striking diversity of the Molde Festival programme. All genres of jazz are represented, from New Orleans through to futuristic electronic jazz using laptops and samples. “That has been the tradition before I took over in 2001,” says Jan Ole. “We try and put together a program that shows the whole history of jazz, from New Orleans music to music you might hear in the future. Elvis Costello—when he came to the festival he was playing with Allen Tousaint. They did this project which was based on the Hurricane Katrina, so it was a modern, New Orleans based program they did [on the big festival stage]. And then we present artists that have been influenced by jazz. Stevie Wonder, for example, who we have presented, has influenced jazz musicians and jazz musicians have influenced him.
“Sting used to play with jazz musicians in the 1980s, and started off as a jazz bassist, and Jamie Cullum who is now more a pop star than a jazz musician, is also a guy who is influenced by jazz. What happens is that a lot of young kids come to the festival and see that guys they like are playing things influenced by jazz, and they start checking out the jazz concerts, it’s a kind of education thing bringing those kind of acts to the festival.”
It has been widely reported, most recently in the NEA’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, that audiences for jazz are getting older. Yet there is no shortage of young faces at Molde, and a feature of the festival is the way it works with young people. The Arvelyden is a workshop for kids of all ages held every weekday of the festival at 12.30pm with the artist-in-residence Arve Henriksen; while every morning at 11.30am there is a street parade through Molde, featuring a school children.
Jan Ole explains the festival’s philosophy: “At Molde we have a big children’s recruit program for playing and coming to the festival. Then there’s a street parade starting every day of the festival at 11.30am with 70 youngsters who have four seminars throughout the year, learning how to improvise and play music. Then there are concerts for children during the festival. Here we try and give them a mix of what they can hear at a real concert, and what they are used to hearing on children’s TV or something like that. So we are sneaking the jazz elements into what they are used to. We also have a freestage just outside the Town Hall, where the youngsters are allowed to play. If they have a band, or they play alone, they can perform. And we’re co-operating with the schools in Molde, we have teachers going out in the music lessons to prepare them to play on the freestage.
“This year we have a special project with Arve Henriksen [the festival’s artist in residence] called The Sound of Arve, a workshop where he and [keyboard player] Ståle Storløkken and other musicians are doing samples, and the kids are doing samples of themselves—a kind of mini Punkt—and they are mixing samples themselves and we put them out on the website, so the kids can hear themselves on the Internet. Tonight we have a jam session to end the workshop series, where Arve and Ståle and other musicians come in and join them. All for children, from small children to older kids—it’s open for everyone actually, school children like me!”
Wherever you go in Molde, it is impossible not to notice the army of young, willing and helpful volunteers that help make the festival tick, from stage hands to sound mixers, from lighting engineers to ushers, from administrative staff to stage managers. I met one volunteer who was a doctor at the local hospital who annually takes two weeks holiday in order to help out in the festival office. From him I learned that volunteering was often a family tradition. A grandfather who originally volunteered for the festival in its early days might be working alongside his son or daughter plus his grandchildren.
“Yes, this is often a family thing,” confirms Jan Ole. “We only have five full time festival staff retained by the festival the year around. Then we have 70 people we call ‘key persons’ who are responsible for a venue, or a committee, and so on. And they work with us the year round, and they are volunteers. Then we have the volunteers who work just at the festival week, and they are 750, so altogether there are 820 volunteers and we have a waiting list, this year we had to say no to over 100 people. And we have some guys working from the first festival [49 years ago]. Two of the founders of the festival are still in the organisation, one of them is in the program committee and he meets me every week to discuss the program. He’s retired now so he’s always checking all the jazz websites from around the world for talent, the ones I don’t get a chance to read, and he’s also on the board of directors of the festival. And then there’s sons and daughters and so on. There are seventy leaders who recruit for their own committee, and the key persons, they are all recruiting their staff. Often being a festival volunteer is in families, the grandparents did it, then the parents then their children, jazz is very much part of the community.”
Next year, Molde will celebrate its 50th anniversary, making it one of the longest consecutively running festivals in Europe. It seems as if their annual jazz festival has put this small town on the cultural map of Europe. “That’s true,” says Jan Ole. “If you ask people all over the country about Molde, they will say two things. First jazz, and then roses. The climate here is very good for roses, there are always a lot of roses here! Currently, Molde has 25,000 people living here and during the festival between 80,000 to 100,000 people come to town either to go to the concerts, or check out the festival atmosphere, the free concerts and so on. These people are coming from all over the country, [the jazz festival] is a tourist destination, they come by plane, train, road and in the harbor people come by boat, to be part of it.”
And looking at the festival program, there is little wonder they come in such numbers. It’s a festival with a sure sense of its identity, exemplified by a dawn concert on the final day. “In the 1960s there used to be a jam session in a small café called Varden in the mountains overlooking Molde,” explains Jan Ole. “From the first session in ’61 until the early 1970s it used to be jam sessions late at night, starting when the concerts end, so from 1am to 2am in the morning until 6 or 7 o’clock in the morning they played up there.
In ’69 Karin Krog [the Norwegian vocalist] was there and she and her husband came out at seven in the morning and the sun was rising, and later that day they drove back to Oslo and on the way they played “Ida Lupino,” the Carla Bley tune, on the car radio and Karin started to sing her own words. When they got home, her husband sat down and wrote those lyrics which became the song, “Break of Day in Molde,” and that was recorded as a single the year after. It has become quite a famous song in Norway, and it has been played a lot on the radio, especially around the festival time, and Norwegian Broadcasting always open with “Break of Day in Molde,” so last year [2008] I got the idea we should do a concert early in the morning, inspired by the song named ‘Break of Day in Molde.’ So we did that on the last day of the festival at seven in the morning.
Karin Krog wrote a third verse to this song, and she sang it, with Arild Andersen on bass, who was on the original recording, and then Marilyn Mazur and some other musicians came in and did a concert at seven in the morning. It was amazing, 1,500 people were sitting up there having their picnic breakfasts. So it was quite a moment. Tomorrow at 7am, we have a special project with Arve Henriksen, Jon Balke, Terje Isungset, Svante Henryson and Therese Skauge and a dancer and they will do their version of ‘Break of Day in Molde.’ So the slogan for the festival was ‘Where music meets nature,’ so this was really a contact point between nature and music [since the concert was held in a performing space on the side of a hill surrounded by pine trees on three sides and a view of coast on the other].”
What Sir Thomas Beecham would have made of music festivals today, let alone a jazz festival is anybody’s guess. But if his adage of attracting trade to a town is true—and this is increasingly the reality for many festivals today—festival producers must more than ever preserve their artistic independence from the pressures of commerce or the result will be safe, but unadventurous programming. Dictionaries describe a festival as “a joyous celebration; a merry making; a musical entertainment on a large scale” and Molde is exactly that. It shows how the not-for-profit jazz festival may be the way of the future, allowing festival producers to back their aesthetic judgement without having to watch the bottom line at every turn.
Clearly, with large amounts of public and private money at stake, they have to balance the books and not work at a loss. But, as Molde shows, using profits accrued here to produce imaginative and creative programming there, plus a long term audience development program is rewarded by public support. More importantly, it leaves artists free to develop their music without having to shape it to appeal to the profit orientated businessmen. Sir Thomas may well have approved.
This blog entry posted by Stuart Nicholson
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November 03, 2009
Inside View of a Jazz Success Story
Stuart Nicholson looks at the inner workings of one of the most successful jazz events in the world—the annual Molde Jazz Festival. Now in its 50th year, the festival draws 100,000 fans to a city with a population of only 25,000. Below is the first installment of Nicholson’s two-part article. T.G.
From the early 20th century until his death in 1961, conductor Sir Thomas Beecham transformed musical life in the United Kingdom. And while London still has two symphony orchestras that were founded by him, The London Philharmonic and the Royal Philharmonic, he is often remembered today as much for his mordant wit as his musical achievements.
A master of the double entendre, some of his best quips can be found in Beecham Stories, published in 1978. In classical circles in the UK, Beecham stories are traded like Benny Goodman stories in the jazz world, the only difference being Beecham was his own one man Monty Python show fifty years before the TV series. His admonishment of a cellist during an orchestral rehearsal is pure Python: “Madam, you have between your legs an instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands—and all you can do is scratch it.” He was equally unforgiving of festivals, “They are for the purpose of attracting trade to a town,” he said dismissively. In many cases the latter judgment still holds true today. The challenge, of course, is on what musical terms “trade” is attracted. How do you produce a festival of musical integrity and vision while still managing to draw the crowds?
It’s the $64,000 question. With many festivals put together for the purposes of profit, there is a need to maximize ticket sales by appealing to the broadest possible constituency. The result is often a lowest common denominator approach that results in a roster of big names and safe bets at the expense of more challenging artists or up-and-coming talent—since there is a general market perception that more adventurous or lesser known musicians do not generate the same box office returns as players in more mainstream realms. One way around this conundrum is the not-for-profit festival, which is a way many European festivals are structured.
Not-for-profit festivals are possible with subsidy and in Europe it is often a mix of national, regional and local governmental grants plus an element of private sector sponsorship. They are able to attract such funding lines because, as dear old Sir Thomas presciently noted, they “attract trade.” But they also bring added value. This is seen in terms of the cultural and artistic prestige a successful, critically acclaimed festival can bring town or region. It can put them on the map of Europe, enabling them to portray themselves as a desirable tourist destination or the sort of place in the global economy that that is attractive to inward investment, an agreeable environment in which to transact business and a vibrant and exciting place to live.
More importantly, not-for-profit festivals provide a degree of artistic freedom from the ubiquitous bottom line when programming. As Bo Grønningsaeter, former director of the Molde Jazz Festival and the Bergen Nattjazz Festival and currently director of the West Norway Jazz Centre and General Secretary of the Europe Jazz Network points out, “Because European festivals have public funding there’s more idealism among festival organizers as they have a fixed salary,” he says. “You’re not in it for the money. If you have a successful festival you don’t get a huge bonus, your pay remains exactly the same, but of course you have the satisfaction of creating something audiences want to see. You relate to jazz differently from a profit-orientated businessman. It’s not a question of maximum profit; it’s a question of making a good program and being able to make the wheels go around financially.
“We’re not in the business of making money, but we have to make the books balance. There is an opportunity to aspire to aesthetic balance in the composition of the program because you’re not in it for personal profit. You’re actually doing it because you’re interested in it, even though you’re being paid less than you would be in another job!”
One of Europe’s oldest and most successful jazz festivals is held annually at Molde, on the west coast of Norway. Its director is Jan Ole Otnaes, and we talked recently about the lines of funding necessary to produce a festival like his. “This year’s budget for the festival was 27.8 million Norwegian Krone ($1 = 6.1 Norwegian Krone, August 2009),” Jan Ole begins. “That was made up of a number of funding lines, and, of course, ticket sales which this year amounted to 10.5 million Norwegian Krone (NOK) which represented 37.8 % of our overall budget. Then we have our restaurant and merchandizing facilities which brought in a revenue of 4.3 million NOK (15.4%). Private sponsors are very important to us, and they provide 4.5 million NOK, representing 16.2% of our budget. The balance is then made up of national funding, which accounts for 5.1 million NOK (18.3%), regional funding amounting to 1.7 million NOK (6.1%) and finally local funding 1.7 million NOK (6.1%).”
Given big numbers like these, I asked Jan Ole if there is any room for idealism when programming a festival as big as Molde—since it was impossible not to notice some headline artists, past and present, had a somewhat tenuous connection with jazz, such as Leonard Cohen on this year’s festival roster. “Oh, there’s room for idealism,” he says with a smile. “Look, tonight we’ve sold almost 10,000 tickets for Leonard Cohen, and he is not cheap! But we try and make a profit and that allows us to do things with the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, a brand new commission, for example, and various other projects we commission. So any profit we make goes back into the festival by way of subsidising some of our jazz presentations.”
This is the end of part one of Stuart Nicholson’s article on the Molde Jazz Festival. Check back soon for the second and final installment.
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October 31, 2009
The Best Tracks of the Month
Five days per week, jazz.com highlights an oustanding recent track as part of its Song of the Day feature. The aim is to guide listeners through the confusing array of new CDs on the market, and direct them to superior music they might otherwise miss.
Some of the names below will be familiar, and a few—Hank Jones, Gerald Wilson—are famous veterans who were gigging back in the Swing Era. Yet many of the tracks highlighted come from new or little-known artists who have released self-produced disks or are working with small indie labels.
Given the gradual retreat of major labels from jazz music and their reluctance to promote new artists that deviate in any way from proven commercial formulas, the situation grows ever more confusing and fans have greater need for knowledgeable, impartial guides in their efforts to find the best new music. In this environment, it becomes harder—but all the more urgent—for critics to open their ears and search out the hidden gems amidst the glut of releases.
Below you will find links to reviews of the songs featured in October. Each review provides full personnel and recording info, a candid assessment, a scoring on jazz.com’s 100-point evaluation system, and a place you can go to purchase a (legal) download.
Happy listening!
Song of The Day: Featured Tracks from October 2009:
Joey DeFrancesco: Fly Me to the Moon
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
Ike Sturm: Kyrie
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
Jeff Hamilton: The Serpent's Tooth
Reviewed by Thomas Cunniffe
Hank Jones & Oliver Jones: What Am I Here For?
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
Quartet San Francisco: Strange Meadowlark
Reviewed by Thomas Cunniffe
Loren Stillman: Man of Mystery
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
Ayelet Rose Gottlieb: Some Kiss
Reviewed by Mark Saleski
Egberto Gismonti: Sertões Veredas
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
Krantz-Carlock-Lefebvre: War Torn Johnny
Reviewed by Eric Novod
Jon Irabagon: January Dream
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
Ben Allison: Fred
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
Mika Pohjola: Blues Chacarera
Reviewed by Bill Barnes
CéU: Vira Lata
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
Barrett Martin: Shapeshifter
Reviewed by Mark Saleski
Gerald Wilson: Detroit
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
Anouar Brahem: Stopover at Djibouti
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
Hailey Niswanger: Oliloqui Valley
Reviewed by S. Victor Aaron
Wayne Wallace: Freedom Jazz Dance (Baile de Libertad)
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
John Proulx: Let's Get Lost
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
Watermelon Slim: Wreck on the Highway
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
Poncho Sanchez: Cantaloupe Island
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
This blog entry posted by Ted Gioia
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October 28, 2009
The Birth (and Death) of the Cool
This week marks the publication of my new book, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool. With the permission of the publisher, I am sharing an extract below. Also, note that I will be making an appearance in the Los Angeles area this Friday, October 30, at Book Soup—on 8818 Sunset Boulevard—at 7 PM. T.G.
For a long time, coolness has been measured primarily at the cash register. So much so, that the word cool today is used most often to describe a gadget or a product or something else available for sale. Back in the 1950s, the term might be affixed to a person or a style of music or an attitude. But with each passing year, cool is less and less a personal vibe and more an attribute of merchandise.
A Google search for cool and iPod comes back with ten million hits. You get the idea; of course you do, it’s pounded into your head a thousand times a day by every marketing message that tries to co-opt coolness. This depersonalization and commoditization of the cool has perhaps been its greatest success—but also a leading cause of its decline. Cool has been a great concept and has served its corporate bosses loyally for as long as it could, but now it is approaching its point of exhaustion.
A postcool society? You may think that strange, but here is something stranger: the people who are leading the way are those who, a few years ago, would have stood out as the coolest of the cool. The cool is crumbling from the inside. The trendsetters are now the most vehement in moving beyond the cool. And for that very reason, the retrenching of the cool is one trend that will not be reversed any time soon. This postcool attitude is not just another style, but a rejection of the stylized. It is not just another trend, but a distaste for trendiness. It is not just another pose, but a dismissal of the poseurs.
And what is that new worldview? What comes after the cool? To some extent, life after cool will remind us of what life was like before cool came on the scene. Cool was defined by its reliance on image and irony, by its artifice and playful fluidity. It was marked, above all, by an outward focus on trends and fashions. The notion of lifestyle—a term that hardly existed outside of academic literature during the first half of the twentieth century—became of paramount import during the Age of Cool, and the idea that one could shape one’s persona and way of living as though they were works of art (a foreign concept to most people during the Great Depression) became widespread.
Postcool, in contrast, is built on a new earnestness and directness, a celebration of simplicity and authenticity. Irony is out; plainspokenness is in. The natural and down-to-earth are preferred to the glitzy and fashionable. The real is valued above the contrived, honesty above artifice. Communications—from the simple text message to the spin-doctoring of prominent pundits on the boob tube—are quicker and to the point. Postcool is less exciting than cool, but more practical and results oriented. It’s less malleable and fluid, but far more predictable in its behavior patterns.
Yet the shift to a postcool mentality is not without its downsides. Above all, many problems are created when society loses its cool. The directness and bluntness of postcool life are only a step away from outright hostility and confrontation. We already see this in talk radio and cable television and other spheres of social interaction, where the decibel levels quickly rise and conversations easily collapse into shouting matches. Talk radio becomes scream radio. Town hall meetings turn into WWE free-for-alls. Back in the days of cool, indirect and ironic styles of communication were the norm, and ways of interacting were more stylized and often fanciful. As a result, social exchanges were slower to escalate into confrontation and denunciation. But postcool prides itself on its directness and is suspicious of rhetorical flourishes that soften our interactions. In short, life will be rougher and tougher after cool has left the building.
And the postcool lifestyle? Actually, there is more than one. Of course, many people nowadays are simply burnt out on the hip and stylish, opting out of cool’s glitzy promises by choice or necessity. If cool were a credit card, these people maxed out long ago and are now on a different path. But a growing number of individuals have deeply set values and priorities that put them at odds with the cool. Many are tuned into concepts of sustainability and eco-friendly living; these people inevitably find that green values are incompatible with the increasingly consumption-oriented precepts of cool. Others pursue what were once called alternative lifestyles, but they aren’t so alternative anymore when tens of millions of people embrace them. Ways of living, previously on the fringe and captured under the catchall rubric New Age have now gone mainstream; they encompass everything from meditation to macrobiotics, but share the confidence that they have gone beyond fashionability and cool attitudes.
Still other builders of the postcool society have less flamboyant ways of rebelling against trendiness—in fact, their lives are often so nondescript that the media struggles with labels, such as “soccer moms” or “NASCAR dads,” in their attempts to comprehend their very unvoguish values. A host of religious movements promise the same thing: check out the growing chorus of believers who urge us to be uncool for Jesus…or Buddha or Muhammad or some other spiritual force outside the gravitational pull of pop culture. Meanwhile, others look to a more biological type of redemption, seeking a pure and healthy life; and though these folks may be ignorant of the latest fads and fashions, they are excited by words like organic, unprocessed, unadulterated—a fixation with the natural that was once on the fringe, but is increasingly part of the mainstream. A separate constituency adopts a political stance in their opposition to cool, rebelling against Nike and other merchants of fashionability as part of protest against cultural and economic imperialism. This shift in the Zeitgeist, as we shall see, cuts across all political ideologies and demographic categories.
But, most of all, we see the death of cool in a pervasive change in attitude sweeping all segments of society. We see it in a marked lessening of irony and sarcasm and cooler-than-thou vanity in the public sphere—behavior patterns that dominated the last half century—and their replacement by a new earnestness, almost a cult of sincerity. We see it in the rapid growth in styles of art and ways of living that emphasize authenticity, simplicity, and getting in touch with nature and natural ways. We see it in a return to roots, in which individuals, families, and communities find renewed meaning in shared rituals and traditions. We see it in a growing distaste for marketing, hype, and exaggerated forms of expression, and a preference for stick-to-the-facts honesty. These down-to-earth attitudes have always been present, and back in the 1930s and ’40s they actually were dominant in social and community life. But with the media-fed cult of the cool, they were pushed to the sidelines.
Guess what? They are coming back stronger than ever. Such old-fashioned ways are easy enough to ridicule—and many are quick to point out that authenticity and earnestness are the slipperiest of concepts—yet these ideas are becoming the powerful forces again in public discourse and private lives. Who can be surprised, when Merriam-Webster reports that the word most frequently looked up in its online dictionary is integrity? This is exactly what people are looking for today—and not just in the dictionary.
A comparison between two magazines, with their opposed mind-sets and diverging histories, gives us a flavor of this seismic shift in attitudes. In 1999, Tina Brown, former editor of trendsetting Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Tatler, put together what promised to be the biggest—and coolest—magazine launch in history. Supported by a host of high-profile people and enormous financial resources, Brown raised the curtain on Talk with a blowout party at the Statue of Liberty—an event described by one newspaper as “the most opulent ever thrown” in the history of Manhattan media. With Lady Liberty looking on, the A-list of socialites, power brokers, and arbiters of taste—Madonna, Henry Kissinger, Salman Rushdie, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Newman, Kate Moss, and Matthew Broderick, among others—gathered for what seemed to be a defining moment in the history of cool. Give me your huddled millionaires yearning to eat Brie. You couldn’t get hipper than this, and celebrities clamored to get their names and photos in the pages of the magazine that was poised to define fashionability for the new millennium.
And then? Well, the magazine went down in a spectacular manner. True, it attracted advertisers, and name writers, and all the beautiful people featured in the articles—but it couldn’t interest readers, who looked at Talk and just yawned. The magazine closed its doors two and a half years after the Statue of Liberty bash. The harder Brown strived to be cool, the less people paid attention. Certainly it wasn’t for lack of investment capital. Talk was not cheap. It burned through $50 million—an extraordinary amount for a periodical—during its brief life. Despite the massive hype, circulation peaked at a modest 670,000.
Meanwhile, at virtually the same time that Brown was flogging Talk, an absurdly low-profile magazine took life with a very understated name. Called Real Simple, this periodical ignored coolness at every step, presenting itself with an austerity that seemed to defy every rule of media survival. Its goal was to provide “beautiful, actionable solutions for simplifying every aspect of your life.” Huh? You need a magazine for that? Few in the media paid attention, and those who did often laughed at the concept. Some derided the periodical as an “aphorism in search of an audience.” Even its editor happily proclaimed “this magazine doesn’t have a personality.” Yet Real Simple flourished while Talk faltered, pushing its circulation up to two million and now occupying the same wire racks at the supermarket checkout stand that once held Tina Brown’s oh-so-cool paean to the trend of the month. In 2006, Real Simple made the move to television with the launch of a companion show on PBS. Brown had dreamed of a media empire with offshoots from her magazine, but the ascetic periodical with the strange, understated name is now the player who is spreading into new markets.
This is an extract from The Birth (and Death) of the Cool, a new book by Ted Gioia published by Speck Press. All rights reserved.
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October 27, 2009
The Brooklyn Big Band Bonanza, or, Revenge of the Six-Way Mustache
Tim Wilkins, a regular contributor here, recently attended the Brooklyn Big Band Bonanza, a blowout event with so many large jazz ensembles on hand that the musicians almost outnumbered the audience. His report is below. T.G.
Are big bands cool? Darcy James Argue doesn't think so. "It's a dorky way to make music, and always will be," he told me.
This may surprise some who know Argue as the bandleader whose 18-piece group, Secret Society, has been called "a wholly original take on big band's past, present and future," and who has been compared to Ellington by Newsweek.
Argue thought for a second, then qualified his answer: "Maybe there are enough dorks out there to make some interesting things happen."
Enough dorks turned out – a hundred and fifty in the audience, plus sixty or so on stage - to make interesting things happen at the "Brooklyn Big Band Bonanza" at The Bell House, a converted warehouse in the once-desolate Gowanus industrial zone last Monday. Argue put together a bill with two local bands, his own and Travis Sullivan's Björkestra, and Andrew Durkin's Industrial Jazz Group (IJG), visiting from the West Coast. Plans to include another local band, led by saxophonist Andrew D'Angelo, fell through.
It is to Argue's credit that he has used his notoriety, which has grown since his CD release Infernal Machines and the Newsweek article this spring, to draw attention to other bands and leaders who like him try to reimagine large-format jazz.
"It's taking something old and kind of fashioning it into something cutting-edge," he told me the day after the show. "Having this very kind of old-fashioned way of making music, the jazz big band, and taking the core of that and reconfiguring it for the 21st century."
The evening had many surprises, foremost of which was the level of enthusiasm and imagination in a genre which has always been precarious for financial reasons, even in the best of times.
"Big bands are part of the romantic ideal," said Adam Schatz from Search and Restore, a nonprofit which helped put on the show. "It's the artist saying, 'We're going to transcend logic; we're going to put aside common sense for a minute and just do this thing.'"
First up was the Björkestra. Sullivan, an alto saxophonist, formed the group in 2004 to recast songs written by Icelandic singer Björk as jazz. The idea is more than a gimmick: Björk's harmonies are minimal yet unclichéd, much in the way Hoagy Carmichael's or Joni Mitchell's are. Her lyrics are also full of potent self-disclosure, which speak more directly to contemporary listeners than some saccharine "neo-standards," which ape the conventions of jazz singing from the past.
Of course, none of this would matter without the Björkestra's superb arrangements and execution. Against a backdrop of dance and electronica-inspired beats, the band's soloists, especially Sullivan and baritone saxophonist Carl Maraghi, confirmed how well Björk's harmonies invite jazz, and in particular intervallic, improvisation. The band's singer, Becca Stevens, was simply astonishing as she twinned her own unerring musical sense with the emotional honesty of Björk's lyrics. Midway through the set, she switched to a more forgiving vocal mic, but she hardly needed to – her intonation was as precise as a jeweler's blade. Most of the numbers she and the band performed, like "Hyperballad" and "Alarm Call," can be heard on their 2008 Koch CD Enjoy!, but this a group best heard live.
Next up was the Industrial Jazz Group. There's nothing even remotely "industrial" about the IJG, which combines Zappa-esque whimsy with Situationist satire, complete with funny hats and partial (male) nudity. The band's 16 pieces ripped through unpredictable-sounding charts full of abruptly shifting moods and tempos.
"It's more like structural improvisation," Durkin told me. "There's enough of a tune so that everyone knows where we're going, then I try to subtract some things so there are spaces, so they can own it and it sounds like it's being created on the spot. It's harder to play than it sounds."
To understand the IJG, imagine what Charles Mingus would have sounded like if he ran a house band for the sketch comedy show Laugh-In. The band's shirtless bass player, wearing a Roman centurion's helmet, wiggled incessantly while two singers offered running commentary in faux-operatic tones, encouraging audience members to wear the fake "six-way mustaches" they tossed into the crowd, and to have "Dinner at Applebee's, then f**k all night!"
"I like that kind of Rabelaisian kind of side to it," Durkin said. "Part of it is an attempt to let our hair down a little bit; to not be quite so serious about playing music. We're not purists."
Durkin's nod to François Rabelais, the sixteenth-century French creator of the carnivalesque novel, was no surprise: he holds a PhD in literature from USC, where he started the band as a quintet nine years ago. In fact, many these "dorks" seem quite literate: Durkin and Argue are prolific bloggers, and Argue frequently compares his music to "steampunk," an artistic movement which, as he explained it, "takes tropes from Victorian literature" to imagine a world where outmoded technologies – like the steam engine, or the 18-piece big band – are still vital. But on Monday night, thanks to the virtuosity and conviction of the players, these big bands radiated their own vitality; no tropes were needed.
Argue's compositions are full of gothic harmonic twists and a driving, rock-inspired pulse. This heady mix can sound muddled in a less-optimal performance space, as it did when I heard them on a hotel stage at the last IAJE in Toronto, but the high wooden ceiling and broad stage of the Bell House, which normally books rock bands, was ideally suited to these large groups - moreso than any comparable venue in New York. For the music's sake, I hope they will book more jazz events in the future.
Secret Society is an A-list of New York's younger instrumentalists, which includes trumpeters Seneca Black and Ingrid Jensen, and saxophonist Erika vonKleist. The group was augmented for the set by others including tenor saxophonist John Ellis, who offered one of the evening's most memorable solos.
The band played several charts from Argue's CD release, including "Phobos," "Zeno," and "Transit," his homage to Chinatown's cheap bus service between New York and Boston, well known to Berklee students and alums.
Then came the anarchists. As Secret Society streched out the last chord to "The Perils of Empire" and the crowd began to applaud, a cacophony of honks rippled up from below the stage. Five or six bearded men in army fatigues stormed in, looking as if they were back from an anti-WTO protest, molotov cocktails in hand. Instead, they pulled out baritone saxophones and indulged in Braxton-esque multiphonics, sowing sonic havoc as they wove through the crowd. One of them tossed a camouflage hat up onto the stage, where the Secret Society's bari man, Josh Sinton, grabbed it and and joined in. The renegade horns then wended out into the street, where the joyful cacophony continued.
These were members of the Baritone Army, an ad-hoc group led by Stefan Zeniuk, who recruits bari players to form musical flash mobs, startling patrons at McDonald's, in subway stations and at other public venues around the city.
"Dude, it was awesome, I loved it!" said Argue, who knows Zeniuk but had no idea he planned to crash the party. " It was one of those those kind of crazy, memorable moments that can only happen at live shows."
Zeniuk's flash intervention ended the evening on a high note of hilarity, a fitting cap to a concert which demonstrated that even oft-wooly big bands can defy expectations. Indeed, the main thing these bands had in common, aside from their unfailingly high levels of musical craft, was their sense of fun.
"We're just trying to have a good time, and we're hoping people are gonna enjoy the show and have a good time," said Durkin. "And we think there's a way to get people to love jazz that maybe don't typically listen to it."
Schatz agreed that fun is a key to developing a new and younger audience for jazz, and big bands in particular. Another is to make the music affordable, which he tries to do by keeping tickets under $20 and opening shows like the Big Band Bonanza to all ages.
"Everyone who's on stage is visibly enjoying themselves; that's why they do it," he said. "It's a great example of the music winning out against everything else."
For me, the Brooklyn Big Band Bonanza answered another important question: where, since the demise of the IAJE, can you go to hear insanely great lab bands, with no respect for authority, but great jazz chops and ideas to burn? Just head down to an abandoned warehouse in a city near you, and look for the guys and gals wearing six-way mustaches: they'll tell you.
(Editor's note: a previous version of this article mistakenly identified the Björkestra's baritone saxophone player on Monday night as Lauren Sevian, who played on the band's 2006 CD release.)
This blog entry posted by Tim Wilkins
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October 24, 2009
Guitar Hero, Jazz Style
Bill Barnes concludes his three-part article on the role of guitar in jazz below. Click here for parts one and two. T.G.
The “audience factor” can no longer be ignored. We are fast approaching a period in which jazz musicians may outnumber the people who want to hear them play. When that happens, we will no longer have a living, breathing art; we will be left with a hobbyist-driven artifact, the musical equivalent of Latin, a dead language spoken only in lecture halls and courtrooms.
So the questions remain: Who will save performance jazz? As much as I’d like to suggest that a few caped “jazz guitar heroes” will swoop down from the sky, dazzling stadiums full of newly-enraptured jazz Moonies, we know that’s probably not going to happen.
In reality, the future viability of jazz is dependent on two radical changes in our cultural environment. First, music education must become a priority in our public school systems, with emphasis on jazz and classical music in elementary school curricula. Like foreign languages, complex musical concepts are more easily assimilated if taught early and have the additional benefit of increasing a child’s right brain-left brain connection.
Second, musicians must be willing to communicate more and connect with their target audiences. This would be a cultural compromise of sorts—‘opening up’ the public ear, with a bit of ‘sweetening up’ from jazz artists. After all, even the boldest pioneers knew when to pitch camp and dig in after opening up new territories. John Pizzarelli gets it—with an aura of urbane charm and the judicious use of comfortable, flowing bop lines he has made a career of repackaging the Great American Songbook. George Benson has been climbing the charts for years, though his prowess as a player is sometimes kept in the background by his vocal finesse.
It’s no accident that Herbie Hancock has sold millions of records and filled concert halls, revitalizing his audience base by incorporating elements of hip hop, funk and techno into his compositions and utilizing guitarists like "Wah Wah" Watson and Lionel Loueke along the way. After winning a Grammy for Album of the Year for his interpretations of Joni Mitchell tunes and his projects with vocalists Elvis Costello and Christina Aguilera, Herbie is the closest thing we have to a popular jazz superstar. His music has enough broad appeal to reach the neophytes. They may not understand it but it still makes them want to dance.
“Horrors,” you say? Well, if you happen to be in Paris, pay a visit to the Caveau Huchette. You will see an ancient cellar full of young people dancing to bebop, swing and cool jazz. Huchette is not exactly avant-garde, nor is it the hippest jazz salon in Europe, but its patrons are having fun. What’s wrong with that?
Today jazz guitarists are in a position to effect positive change as trailblazers of the next wave, nujazz or whatever you wish to call it. These frontiersmen may choose to dazzle with pyrotechnics and shatter existing tenets of music, or they can choose to communicate with clarity. I don’t suggest that we ‘dumb down’ the music. There is a world of difference between vapidity and clarity. What we need is deeper simplicity, a value often embraced by guitar virtuosi like Jim Hall, Joe Pass, Pat Metheny and Earl Klugh.
Playing it safe never factored into the equation for any of these artists—in their hands, simplicity is merely the thoughtful restraint of brilliant ideas. In the wrong hands, simplicity is nothing more than mediocrity with the safety on, banality disguised as taste. By the same token, we can’t force the public to listen to angry, strident, chaotic exhortation in the name of Great Art. There must come a time when jazz once again enjoys a broad appeal, without losing its soul, when people everywhere no longer feel threatened and intimidated by its complexity and have no qualms over dancing joyfully to its boundless energy.
If we play it, they will come; but only if they can hear it—and if they dig what they hear. As Thoreau famously said, “It's not enough to be busy. The question is what are you busy about?” It is high time we redoubled our effort to find common ground with the public ear.
Jazzers don’t have to be the victims in this technological revolution. The tail has been wagging the dog much too long—we must use mass media and technology in a proactive, intelligent way, striking a balance between art and commerce. Imagine multi-media events where a growing legion of young, musically savvy fans dance a superlocrian dervish generated by hypnotically rhythmic world-beat newsion guitarist ensembles. Just as Charlie Christian changed the playbook with his use of the tube amplifier, the next generation of digitally supercharged jazz guitarists can forge a future limited only by its collective imagination.
This blog entry posted by Bill Barnes
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October 19, 2009
A Jazz Success Story in Vermont
Willard Jenkins continues his series on grassroots jazz organizations in the US with a look at a remarkable success story in Burlington Vermont . Jenkins shares below his dialogue with Arnie Malina, whose efforts in jazz advocacy could serve as a role model for other local jazz organizations. T.G.
When it comes to presenting the performing arts Arnie Malina is a force of nature. He has won numerous awards, including citations from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) and the Governor’s Arts Award from the state of Montana. Arnie is a past APAP board member and current board member of the National Performance Network. Additionally Arnie was one of the distinguished arts presenters profiled in the definitive 1990 arts presenting guidebook Twenty One Voices: The Art of Presenting Performing Arts by Naomi Rhodes. (DIYers alert: get that book!)
I had the pleasure of first meeting Arnie in 1991, as co-architect of the former Lila Wallace-Readers Digest National Jazz Network (NJN) of presenting organizations, when he was part of the Network representing Helena Presents. (The NJN also included past participants in this series of jazz.com conversations John Gilbreath, Marty Ashby, and Tom Guralnick). A warm and generous man with a quick wit and a sharp eye for unusual arts programming, though a multi-discipline presenter Arnie quickly became one of the leaders of that pioneering network of jazz presenters. Since then I’ve viewed with great interest the excellent work he’s done in Burlington, VT, where he’s the artistic director and chief programming officer of the Flynn Theatre and their Discover Jazz Festival. Here’s a man who knows how to build jazz audiences in unlikely places!
How’s a NY guy like you wind up presenting in such unlikely jazz havens as Helena, MT and Burlington, VT.
I grew up in New York City and left when I was 21. I went to Music & Arts HS and I actually remember giving a report in an English class on jazz, and I remember getting help from a senior who lived in my neighborhood who was a jazz saxophonist. Somebody said I must know everything about jazz, and I said ‘oh no, I don’t know anything… [jazz] is such a complex endeavor and [I] hope to continue to learn.’
I went to City College in New York then I went to the University of Colorado in Boulder, so that was my first leap out of the city. When I got to Boulder there weren’t even sidewalks where my dorm was.
Eventually I married a woman who was from Helena, MT, so that’s how I got to Helena. It’s really beautiful there, yet there was not a whole lot to do—especially for someone who loved going to foreign films, independent films. . . . so we opened up a film society to fill that craving and it turned into a community cultural center. And it became the most exciting thing I’d ever worked on, it was like my baby.
When did you first present jazz in Helena?
In 1976; we really started out showing films, this was even before video. Even in a place like Helena, MT there were local people who have a hunger for jazz and there were jazz artists there, so I became one of their champions. I started presenting local jazz artists, some of whom were my friends. Then we eventually established a performing arts series out of this film society; three years into it we ended up having a major performing arts series. Because we started presenting very adventurous things we were always the maverick in town. First they were worried that we were presenting porno films…
With the performing arts series I started out with four events and one of them was always jazz. I was always a multi-discipline presenter and I always presented stuff that wasn’t the norm. I tried to contribute and expand the community’s cultural interest. In Helena, MT at that time the only thing that was commercially viable was a Dixieland jazz festival that happened every year. It was very successful but very tame. My focus was to bring stuff that wasn’t the norm. We developed an adventurous audience between the films and the jazz, and we started presenting modern dance—the first modern dance event in Helena, MT, probably the first so-called progressive jazz events.
I started out presenting people like Sonny Rollins, but I also presented really unusual things for that area, like the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the World Saxophone Quartet… before I left Montana we’d presented the World Saxophone Quartet four times.
What prompted your move to Burlington, VT?
I was asked to come here. People really wanted me to take this job so people started calling me from New England, people I had worked with from the various jazz networks. . . . I took over in ’97 for the very talented Philip Bither when he went to the Walker Art Center. I was a perfect fit in a way because [Philip and I] belonged to similar networks. From my work in Montana we got to be part of the NJN and also the National Performance Network, and the Flynn was also part of those networks. The Flynn had the same kind of programming profile I had developed in Montana.
Back to Montana for a moment, talk about the extraordinary project you did with Don Pullen.
I got to know Don Pullen totally blindly when I went to the Miami New Music Festival back in 1988. I heard him perform for the first time and I remember he had bells on his ankles and really loved it. I got in touch with him and at first he thought ‘who the hell is this guy’? But he was game and he came to Montana and we did a little residency in a church because we were in the process of renovating the jail into a performing arts center. So now what’s called Helena Presents, or the Myrna Loy Center, is headquartered in an old jail that we renovated into a performing arts center that opened up around ’91. This [Pullen residency] was before the jail but I’m thrilled to say that Don Pullen got to perform in the jail [laughs]; the project was finished before he passed on. I presented him a number of times, including his African-Brazilian Connection twice, I presented him as a soloist. . . . this was after the Don Pullen-George Adams Quartet.
I had also presented the Garth Fagan Dance Company and in those days you were able to apply for major bucks to develop new works and a 3-year residency program. In Montana I also had a lot of experiences with Native American drumming groups, and various rituals and ceremonies, so I got the idea to do a jazz-Native American project. And I also thought it could be a dance-jazz project. Garth Fagan became very excited about it and Don Pullen was thrilled to participate. We wrote a grant, it was a huge undertaking and the second time we got a three year grant. That was a very ambitious project that included a ton of residency activities, both on the Salish-Kootenai reservation north of Missoula, MT and in Helena.
Ultimately Don did a number of residencies but he became ill and there were times that he would unbelievably arrive at the Helena airport just coming from chemotherapy. It was an astonishing experience for me but it really felt like this project was keeping him alive. Don also made dear friends with the Native Americans. We’d go to different native music groups so that he could learn about their music.
Where was this work performed?
It was performed in quite a few places: in Helena, MT, on the Indian reservation in the gymnasium where a line of people a mile long waited to get into the theater. It was performed in Washington, DC under the auspices of what was then District Curators. It was performed in Seattle, WA, in Missoula, MT, and it was performed in New York City at Lincoln Center Out of Doors. And [Sacred Common Ground] was recorded by Blue Note Records and I’m a co-producer with Michael Cuscuna. I’d never [produced a record] before so I got a little taste of what that was all about. Don did record the album but he died before he was able to perform it with the project complete. So we got DD Jackson, who was a protégé of Don Pullen, one of his students; he was able to perform the work in all those places, but Don made the recording and that was a blessing.
What other projects involving jazz musicians and composers are you most proud of?
I presented the world premier of Steve Lacy’s Vespers in a cathedral in Helena, MT in 1991 that was very exciting. We also had a 3-year residency with Lester Bowie ’97-’99 in Burlington. That was extraordinary because we went to all these rural towns and Lester did things like perform in a supermarket; he did a residency at BF Goodrich rubber plant. . . . I also remember his former wife Fontella Bass was part of that and also the dancer-choreographer Diane McIntyre. What was fun about that was that Diane McIntyre also danced with Don Pullen. She came up to Burlington as part of the Lester Bowie residency.
Is it safe to say that since you got to Burlington your jazz presenting has escalated?
The [Discover Jazz Festival] is huge for us here and it’s expanded since I got here to two weekends.
How about as far as your overall annual season at the Flynn Theatre…
We have two theatres here that we present jazz in; one is 1450 seats, which dictates a certain kind of performance, and since I’ve been here we’ve also developed a black box theater in 2000, which we call the Flynn Jazz Cabaret Space. In all the genres it has enabled us to do more experimental things because it doesn’t cost as much to run… When we do something in the Flynn main stage we have to charge ourselves $3,000 rent to help pay for the space, there are union tech crews which are $3,000-5,000 per show, much larger advertising budgets—$5,000. . . . But in the Flynn [black box] space, which is only 180 seats, we can do [marketing] more through email, the rental is only $400 and we can experiment more and have smaller houses, so it’s a godsend. We do that not only with jazz but also with some new music, theater, and even with some dance. For jazz it’s a really great space.
What jazz did you present last season?
We presented the Chick Corea-John McLaughlin Five Peace Band on the big stage, we presented the Maria Schneider Orchestra—and I’m very proud to say that we commissioned a work by Maria that’s on her latest CD “Sky Blue,” so we have a credit on that. . . . We presented Omar Sosa and his Afreecanos Quartet [in the black box]. We tried to present Cecil Taylor but it didn’t work out. We’ve been presenting a continuous stream of Dutch jazz. This season we’re presenting the David Binney Quartet, Dafnis Prieto, the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Hiromi, a duet between Joshua Redman & Brad Mehldau, we’re presenting the Dutch jazz Trio Kaufmann/ Gratowsky/deJood, the Imani Winds with Stefon Harris, and 4-6 things that we haven’t yet scheduled in the smaller space. Hiromi, David Binney, and Dafnis Prieto are in the small space.
What kind of community audience support for your jazz presentations have you been able to garner?
We’ve definitely developed some University of Vermont audience; we’ve worked very closely with the University of Vermont jazz department, which was a fledgling department and I’m sure the director there would agree that we have helped him grow, and since then they’ve added [trumpeter] Ray Vega to their department. We do a number of projects with the UVM jazz department. Each year we have an event where we bring in a jazz artist that works with the jazz band there and the second half of their program is [the visiting artist] with their [own band]. Our visiting artist will come for two days to rehearse their material with the UVM band.
Has this relationship with the University assisted you with your audience development?
Yes, because that way we get some of these younger students to come, faculty members, and we get some support from the department. It’s also a real bonding.
What about the general populace of Burlington?
It’s not easy to fill up the auditorium it’s much easier to fill up Flynn Space, the smaller auditorium. We’re not any different. . . . the big names sell. . . . We sold out the Five Peace Band, which is 1,450 seats, which is a huge, huge amount in a town of 45,000 people!
So your sales are still very much driven by the (artist) attraction. . . . Do you have a significant portion of your audience which comes purely because of your reputation for excellent programming that may be willing to take a chance on people they’ve never heard?
We definitely have that happening, but it’s not a huge number. First of all you have the jazz fanatics. . . . DJs and a small number of fans—around 50 people. Then you have people who really love what we do and get turned on and are willing to take chances. . . . I don’t know what the numbers are but maybe that’s another hundred people. Then you have educational connections that enlarge the audience. Our community is jazz-drenched to a certain extent. I don’t know how it compares to other places; but for instance as part of the jazz festival we showcase 45 high school and jr. high school jazz bands every year. So they know that they’re getting ready to do their final big concert in the context of this jazz festival.
And these school bands are all from the general area around Burlington?
No, they’re from the state of Vermont. We still sponsor the IAJE day [with the still-active Vermont state unit of the former IAJE]. We contribute to that significantly by giving them the theater and all of our various spaces; so there are adjudications and all the various high school bands play. We have an education component here; we have a jazz combo course for kids that sign up—we have two sections, younger kids and high school kids—that happens throughout the year and we also have a sort of Latin-centered jazz camp every summer.
What was the genesis of the Discover Jazz Festival
It’s 27 years old. I wasn’t here but the genesis was a community idea that was originally put together by the city and the Flynn became a partner. Eventually the Flynn became the sole producer, in association with the city.
How has the festival grown over the years?
It’s gotten much larger. It’s now over two weekends. This year it was June 5-14. The most activity occurs on the weekends. During the week we have what we call the Flynn Space Adventures in Music series, and a few other things. This year we had [pianist] Luis Perdomo on a Monday night, Grace Kelly on Tuesday, we had a Dutch group on Wednesday, Trio Braam/deJood/Vatcher, on Thursday we had a woman from Burlington who has moved to Chicago named Jennifer Hartswick who’s a trumpeter and a vocalist. We have the Discover Jazz Big Band which consists of players from around here which is quite good and we’ve had all these projects including one with vibist Cecilia Smith, the tribute to Mary Lou Williams. It was extraordinary; we had local choruses involved, the Discover Jazz Big Band, we had special guests, and a wonderful singer that Cecilia brought.
So there were special guests, local people, and the whole educational impulse of learning about someone that most people don’t know much about—Mary Lou Williams—and honoring a woman with a woman conducting. . . . People were so moved by it—it wasn’t easy to get an audience, we had about 800 people—and the big band loved working on the project.
When we were up there for the festival when we had the first Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest National Jazz Network meeting in ’91, back when you were part of the network with Helena Presents, the Discover Jazz Festival had a lot of activities in off-site spaces.
We still have a variety of spaces, but Flynn Space has become so attractive and much more easy to use, [so] we use it more often. But we have tents—a World Music Tent, a Gospel Music Tent, we’ve had a Blues Tent down by the waterfront. . . . We still occasionally use a space at City Hall which seats about 300, but not as often. During the jazz festival we work with many clubs and they do [complimentary] programs; some of the clubs really support the festival in terms of money and some of the younger artists might be presented there.
Do you see a correlation between the Discover Jazz Festival audience and the audience for your year-round jazz presentations?
Certainly the ones we talked about before—the 50 fanatics. And not only do they come to both but they’re active participants through dialogue, through suggestions, through playing stuff on radio. . . . Then there’s the other hundred-something. . . . It’s certainly true that because the jazz festival is also a party, and a summer thing, and a lot of it is free, it attracts a wider audience. We get people from around New England, New York state, Quebec, etc.
What have been some of your most successful efforts at developing audiences for jazz in Burlington, a place better known for Lake Champlain or Ben & Jerry’s?
How do you develop audiences? Part of it has to do with the programming. . . . We love educational events and we do those as part of a discourse. Whether they actually develop audiences is really hard to say, but to me it’s part of education, part of intellectual activity. . . and we do a lot of those. Even Q&As are such wonderful adventures, especially in Flynn Space. We have meet-the-artist sessions and they’re very well attended. We also have a huge student matinee program; we have 45,000 kids coming to performances. For example this year the students are coming to see the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra and Dafnis Prieto. We are dedicated to having at least one student matinee be a jazz program. The kids come from a 50-mile radius, mostly from Vermont. We try to pull out all the stops!
This blog entry posted by Willard Jenkins
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October 15, 2009
Come to Our Gallery Opening
We can't offer any wine or cheese, but we do invite you to attend our gallery opening. Jazz.com is launching a new online exhibition of classic images from the Sony archives. This unique collection of photographic images captures iconic figures from the past at sessions and live performances. As such, they embody the essence of jazz in a way that a posed studio portrait can never match. Jazz.com is delighted to share these images, featuring the great jazz artists associated with Columbia, and highlighting the artistry of photographer Don Hunstein.
Below is a small sampling of the works in the gallery.
Here are Miles Davis and John Coltrane from the 1959 Kind of Blue session that produced “All Blues” and “Flamenco Sketches”.
Photo by Don Hunstein
Below is the classic Dave Brubeck Quartet in the studio to record Time Out.
Photo by Don Hunstein
Billie Holiday is captured in mid-phrase at a 1956 session.
Photo by Don Hunstein
And finally, Thelonious Monk takes a break during a performance at the Blue Angel in 1963.
Photo by Don Hunstein
You can see the rest of the gallery here. Jazz.com visitors can purchase prints of these photos and other jazz collectibles from Sony by visiting their site. Please note that reproduction or use of these images without the written consent of the copyright holder is strictly prohibited.
This blog entry posted by Ted Gioia
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