DO THE MATH

TBP October

07 Gerona, ES -- Festival Jazz De Girona
08 Braga, PT -- Theatro Circo de Braga
09 Coimbra, PT -- Teatro Gil Vincente
10 Lisbon, PT -- Small Auditorium
11 Southhampton, UK -- Turner Sims Concert Hall
12 Bristol, UK -- St. George's
14 Manchester, UK -- Royal Northern College of Music
15 Stuttgart, DE -- Bix Jazz Club
16 Innsbruck, AT -- Treibhaus Club
19 London, UK -- Ronnie Scotts
20 London, UK -- Ronnie Scotts
21 Belfast, IE -- Queens Festival - Spiegeltent
23 Cork, IE -- Half Moon
29 Northhampton, MA -- Iron Horse Music Hall
30 Cambridge, MA -- Regattabar
31 Cambridge, MA -- Regattabar

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Billy Hart 4tet at "The Checkout"

NyTimes covers the Rent Party

Essential 21st century pulp reading:  Battle Royale. It goes as far as you can go. Also, the demon dog is back!  Blood's a Rover is awesome.

In Search of James P. Johnson

James P. Johnson’s Last Rent Party!

Smalls Jazz Club
183 West 10th Street @ 7th
New York City, 10014
www.smallsjazzclub.com
October 4th, 2009

1:00 PM to 9:00 PM

James P. Johnson, the father of stride piano, the composer of The Charleston and The Carolina Shout and one of the founders of modern jazz piano lies, shockingly, in an unmarked grave in Maspeth, Queens, Mt. Olivet Cemetery.

Please join the James P. Johnson Foundation, a non-for-profit organization dedicated to music education and to raise the awareness of James P. Johnson, the Johnson family and Smalls Jazz Club for an all day “rent party” to raise money to buy a monument to commemorate this great musician!

Join us on Sunday, October 4th beginning at 1:00 PM at Smalls Jazz Club located at 183 West 10th street at 7th ave.  The afternoon will begin with a symposium by musicologist and Johnson scholar Scott Brown on the life and work of James P. Johnson.  This will include an exhibit from The James P. Johnson archive housed at The Rutgers Institute for Jazz Studies.

Around 3:00 will then be a steady stream of pianists to play solo piano in tribute to James P. Johnson. 

Suggested tax-free donations are $20 with all the proceeds to go to the James P. Johnson Foundation. (jamespjohnson.org) You may come and go as you please throughout the afternoon.  Refreshments will be served.

Please come by and pay your respects to The Dean of Stride Pianists!

1:00 PM    Doors Open
1:30 PM    Opening Words – Barry Glover and The James P. Johnson Society
2:00 PM    Symposium – James P. Johnson: The Man Who Made The Twenties Roar – Scott E. Brown
3:00 PM    Symposium - James P. Johnson: Invisible Pianist of the Harlem Renaissance – Mark Borowsky
4:00 PM    J Michael O’Neal and Natalie Wright
4:30 PM    John Bunch
5:00 PM    Tardo Hammer
5:30 PM    Conal Fowkes
6:00 PM    Terry Waldo
6:30 PM    Spike Wilner
7:00 PM    Ethan Iverson
7:30 PM    Mike Lipskin
8:00 PM    Aaron Diehl
8:30 PM    Ted Rosenthal
9:00 PM    Dick Hyman

Some heavy hitters on this list.  I'm particularly nervous about meeting Mike Lipskin, the "Terror of San Francisco," who is flying in just for this event. Given the time slots, I guess there's no way he can avoid hearing me play, dammit.  (Watch Lipskin play "Fascinatin' Rhythm" on YouTube, especially after two minutes in:  That's the real stride left hand, ladies and gents.)  Terry Waldo is Eubie Blake's chronicler+NY legend and Dick Hyman plays Johnson with the best of them. (Watch Hyman play "You've Got To Be Modernistic" on YouTube.)  Spike himself is great, and...well, I'm sure everybody's great.

Read this fun article about the Last Rent Party by Devin Leonard in the New York Observer. 

In light of the Last Rent Party, the general dearth of information on James P.,  and my basic emotional empathy with Johnson’s pianism, I thought it would be relevant to jot down the following miscellany.  As far as I know, this is the first systematic look at Johnson’s 1921-1939 solo recordings, his duos with Bessie Smith, “Carolina Shout” in print, the literature about James P., and a description of the IJS holdings.

The regrettable aspect of a post like this is how it seems to set me up an authority.  NO.  I not only fear playing in front of the stride masters Sunday, but also fear whatever they would say about the opinions that follow.  That's one reason this post is called "In Search of James P. Johnson."  I haven't found him yet!  While I feel fairly comfortable on DTM calling it like I see it with Keith Jarrett, Ornette Coleman, or 1970's modern jazz, that's really not true of any music during James P. Johnson's era.

Still, the point is to generate interest in the man, and the best way for me to do that is to weigh in with an opinionated DTM post.  Obviously, after reading whatever I think, it’s important to listen yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Interview with Keith Jarrett

There’s a big board that has the list of the greatest pianists in history. One of the interesting things about the big board is that these musicians are also the most controversial: Franz Liszt, Art Tatum, Glenn Gould, Thelonious Monk, Josef Hofmann, Vladimir Horowitz, and Bud Powell are all on my big board, but none of them would be on everyone's. (Oscar Peterson, for example, cattily goes out of his way to put down Powell in his autobiography.)

Keith Jarrett belongs on the big board. Amusingly, near the end of this interview when I’m asking him about other jazz pianists, the only name Jarrett is truly dismissive of is Art Tatum. The members of the big board are seldom very generous to fellow members! It’s nice what Jarrett has to say about Powell and Monk.

Thanks to Peggy Sutton of the BBC for initiating this memorable afternoon. Steve Weiss was the engineer and Bradley Farberman handled much of the transcription.

We've Still Got What It Takes

David Becker responds to recent West Coast sightings of Buffalo Collision and TBP. 

Pull quote:  "This was the only show of the festival where noise from passing aircraft improved the experience."

Or perhaps instead:  "Sounding as if Liberace, Oscar Peterson and Gene Krupa were stuck in a room with one sheet of music and a lot of anger."

Leon Kirchner (1919-2009)

Since learning of Kirchner’s passing I’ve been looping his performance of Five Pieces for Piano. It’s a beautiful work that he plays wonderfully well.

Roger Sessions was born in 1896, Kirchner in 1919, and Ralph Shapey in 1921.  They knew and respected each other (indeed, both Kirchner and Shapey studied with Sessions).  All wrote in a complex idiom formed by the harmony of Schoenberg and the rhythm of Stravinsky but touched with a distinctive American accent. Some people will regret my grouping them together but they comprise the committee who I go to when I need a certain emotion.  It’s really Music for Men:  you can almost see an ax chopping down the back 40 as their recondite yet authentic sonata forms unroll with consummate craft.

Piano music was a crucial part of all of their output.  But only Kirchner could play and record his music in public.  In addition to the Five Pieces, an early recording of the Piano Concerto with Dimitri Mitropoulos has breathtaking virtuosity.  I wish that he had recorded his first Piano Sonata:  the famous version by Leon Fleisher is exceptional technically but seems rather flaccid rhythmically.  This sonata is one of Kirchner's most familiar pieces, no doubt due to the advocacy of a star pianist.  But would Kirchner himself brought out the barbaro dance style suggested by the score in a way Fleisher could not?

Influenced by Schoenberg, 20th-century atonalists gave mostly gave up on “composer-pianists,” which was one of the gravest mistakes made by a crew that generally seemed determined to commit career suicide.  It’s an important part of Kirchner’s rich legacy that he could not just conceive abstract designs that satisfy the most demanding of intellectual standards, but that he could play them, too.

Read Jeremy Denk's memorial and his story of a recent visit. (Denk has recorded the Kirchner Piano Sonata No. 2 beautifully: no quibbles with the star pianist this time.) Also, Mark Stryker published a long revealing profile of Kirchner from two years ago.

This two-CD set, if you can find it for a reasonable price, is a perfectly produced assemblage of post-WWII modernism.  In addition to the Concerto, the composer is heard at the piano in important chamber music.

San Francisco Holiday (Worry Later)

This past week we played a nice run at Yoshi's. 

San Francisco is one of the great towns to hang out in.  Culture consumed by the band included the Richard Avedon exhibit at SFMOMA, Nic MeGegan conducting the Philharmonic Baroque Orchestra with Stephen Isserlis in Haydn and Beethoven, and a full range of seafood at the Swan Oyster Bar.

I also went shopping.  The above gentlemen were a gift to Sarah from Super7 in Japantown.

Kayo Books has an extraordinary number of pulp paperbacks at reasonable prices. I have been looking for a copy Red Harvest with that gorgeous cover for years.  Harvest has my favorite first line of any book:

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.

Hod Rod is unknown these days, but it was a big hit in the early '50s.  Probably your father or grandfather read it when they were 11 or 12. My dad kept his copy so I read it at the same age. 

My stepfather once told me he thought Henry Gregor Felsen was as important as Twain.  Rereading Hot Rod now, I can confidently assert this is not true:  Felsen's prose is awful. 

Still, Hot Rod is interesting in how it kills off nearly a whole class of teenagers in violent car crashes.  It's sort of like an explicit drivers-ed documentary gone haywire.  Almost everybody  in the main story dies!  This remains "shocking" (just like the cover blares), and certainly why I remembered this little piece of Americana and had to pick it up again last week.

I love to haunt a music store that still has a decent classical piano score collection.  They are getting rarer, but the Music Center of San Francisco has some deep finds, like that Beryl Rubinstein folio above.  Rubinstein never had a big career but his mildly contemporary music shows marvelous craft, even in this collection for children.  I'd love to hear his piano concertos someday.

John Musto is one the best of many composers currently using jazz harmony to power concert music.  The celebratory Improvisation and Fugue can be seen on YouTube played by Nobuyuki Tsujii, who has been blind since birth. Musto's recent Piano Concerto (with the composer at the keyboard) is also something I'd love to hear.

Paradox Redux

The modern folk hero of jazz education returns.  First there was Alpha, now there is Beta.

Whether AB is kidding or not has been hotly debated in my immediate circle.  The new video proves it:  he knows exactly what he's doing.  Major props for pulling this off.  What a badass.

The Dog is Not Bored

I am stealing a page from S/FJ  and have just started using my own photos to illustrate DTM. I am also trying poetic titles for posts. (We’ll see how long all this lasts.)

TBP in September:

06 Rimouski, QU -- Rimouski International Festi Jazz
09 Boulder, CO -- Boulder Theater (w/ Marcus Benevento)
11 San Francisco, CA -- Yoshi's SF
12 San Francisco, CA -- Yoshi's SF
13 San Francisco, CA -- Yoshi's SF
14 Santa Cruz, CA -- Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Related events:

Buffalo Collision (Tim Berne, Hank Roberts, Ethan Iverson, David King) plays the Dakota in Minneapolis on 18 and 19 and the following day hits the Monterey Jazz fest.

The Billy Hart quartet with Mark Turner, Ethan Iverson, and Ben Street plays the week of 21-27 at the Village Vanguard except for Saturday, when Barbara Streisand is there instead.

UPDATE (correct date now posted):  The Chris Morrissey quartet with Dave King, Mike Lewis and Bryan Nichols plays the NYC record release party for The Morning World at Joe’s Pub on September 7.  More info on this excellent bassist and his band here. 

An ornate and virtuosic transcription of Reid Anderson’s “Lost of Love” is featured on Christopher O’Riley’s latest album, Out of My Hands.  In addition to the superb playing this is one of the best sounding solo piano albums I’ve heard.  Chris plays Le Poisson Rouge on September 8 with Caroline Goulding and others. 

Crate Diving with Ethan Iverson

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Howard Mandel initiated a interesting Twitter campaign for jazz, and his follow-up post indicates success.

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I don't know much about Twitter except that it is cool, especially Justin and his Dad (“The dog is not bored, it's a fucking dog. It's not like he's waiting for me to give him a fucking rubix cube. He's a god damned dog”), but as anyone who knows DTM will guess, I think the various instantaneous free e-communications are really valuable for in-depth perspectives that no editor of a conventional print magazine would allow. 

Steve Coleman easily outdoes my Lester Young collection with this phenomenal Charlie Parker birthday bash.  I have heard rumors of Coleman’s ornithological knowledge for years, and it is a true pleasure to see some of what he thinks about selected prime Parker.  Note that he doesn’t use the term “jazz” once in his writing.  It is a confusing word:  his recommendation of Braxton’s phrase “the Armstrong-Parker-Coltrane continuum” makes sense.

Lester Young Centennial

Lester Young was born 100 years ago today. He died just over 50 years ago, in March 1959.  

Young is the most important link in the chain between early jazz and modern jazz.  He sounded good playing with both New Orleans-style musicians and beboppers. If he were around now he could probably go to Smalls tonight and sit in with whoever was on the bandstand without any problem.

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While few other jazz musicians from the pre-1950 era continuously invented new phrases, serious Young lovers get every record he’s ever made because they know that there’s always the possibility that he will play something they haven’t heard before. In addition, Young had one of the most swinging beats in the history of the music.  And though he could deliver a honking, stomping tenor, even his most frantic outbursts sound curiously relaxed.  He never tried too hard or worked for the impossible.  He just was:  Cool.  

In fact, he may have literally invented the word “cool” and given it to the English language, for his verbal jousting and pre-beatnik beatnik behavior gave him a iconic mystique almost inseparable from the sounds coming out of his horn.

The improvisation, the beat, the cool, and the mystique has made him one of the most well-loved musicians of the 20th century. These posts document my attempt to learn from Lester Young in the 21st.  

I ask the forbearance of dedicated Young fans and scholars. They are sure to find errors and incorrect assumptions in my work.  If I ever to decide to officially publish I promise to clean up all errata and double-check all suppositions. For now, this is just a private journey made public.  

1) 18 with Lee K.

2) Oh, Lady!

3) Calling the Masters

4) The Power of Vulnerability

5) Miles Davis and Lester Young

6) A Beginner’s Guide to the Master Takes

7) The End and the Future

8) Top and Bottom

9) Footnotes

10) Further Reading

1) 18 with Lee K.

A couple of months ago I called Lee Konitz and the first thing he said was, “I heard that session of Benny Goodman and Lester Young together on the radio today.  Benny was playing that clarinet, so full of vibrato, and then Lester came in, so clean and pure, and I started weeping.  No one else has meant so much to me.”  A photo of Lester Young hangs in Lee’s practice room.