Sally’s Music Store
I guess it was about 25 years ago, while hosting two weekend jazz programs on WYRS (later WJAZ) here in Stamford, that I first met up with someone who presided over a record shop that was both quaint and stockpiled with LPs and later CDs. Sally White’s store, Sally’s Place in Westport, Ct., is still there selling everything you could want in music but her specialty is jazz. I would go there to beef up my collection for airplay back in my radio days and today I still go there. A Jazz Listener’s Thoughts blogspot features a nice tribute with a link to a local video tribute to Sally worth watching.
- Scott Wenzel
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Miguel Zenon: A Different Kind of Jazz Work
In this Boston Globe article, saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenon describes the recent multimedia work he has conceived to depict his vision of the Puerto Rican diaspora. Combining video interviews, video creations and music, it’s at once a departure from the conventional notion of jazz composition, or even long-form composition, but in many ways a natural outgrowth of the art forms Zenon has investigated and championed.
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Tadd Dameron: One Of Music’s Great Composers
Tom Reney’s essay on New England Public Radio’s site evokes the success and disappointments of the extraordinary Tadd Dameron, a composer and arranger who contributed mightily to big band at the end of the swing era and to be-bop at its inception. Although a forgotten master, there are those who won’t let his memory or his music be forgotten.
-Michael Cuscuna
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In the room with the Mary Halvorson Quintet
I was glad to see this NPR Tiny Desk Concert featuring Mary Halvorson’s Quintet. Her strong group occupies an intriguing region, observing hard bop configuration and presentation, but her compositions transport the music to open and unfettered textural and harmonic spaces that are entirely her own. She’s an original, and a welcome voice.
-Nick Moy
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Read MoreJazz Literature: Riding On A Blue Note – Gary Giddins
”Jack Teagarden, the best trombone player in the world, just blew into town from Oklahoma City.”– Pee Wee Russell in a 3A.M. call to Bud Freeman
I never saw Jack Teagarden except in films. He’s always seemed unreal to me: a sheet-white face chiseled as abruptly as a cigar\u00ad store Indian’s-some thought he was Indian, though he was actually of German descent-and a towering but modestly carried frame. He had black slicked-back hair, and when he smiled his eyes and mouth formed two parallel slits. You can see him per\u00ad form “Basin Street Blues,” which he played and sang nightly for twenty-five years, in a Mickey Rooney film called The Strip He appears as a member of Louis Armstrong’s 1951 All-Stars, with Earl Hines and Barney Bigard. Something about his presence matches the restraint in his music. He seems shy and distant, professional but tired, pleasant but mechanical.
When Teagarden died in 1964 at the age of fifty-eight, his place in jazz seemed assured. Leonard Feather wrote in The Encyclopedia of jazz in the ’60s) “Always years ahead of his time, the possessor of a wholly individual sound both as instrumentalist and vocalist, he ranks with Armstrong, Beiderbecke, Coleman Hawkins, and a handful of others as one of the unquestioned titans in the history of jazz.” Martin Williams, in his Saturday Review obituary, placed him similarly in the “advanced guard” of the ’20s. Indeed, the prose temperature he inspired was consistently warm, patient, and frankly prejudiced. He was the subject of possibly the only noncritical cover ode ever published in Jazz Review as well as two fan bio\u00addiscographies; in a lyrical 1962 review, the New Yorker’s Whitney Balliett concluded, “Bless Teagarden, and may he prosper, too.” His admirers apparently identified pretty strongly with him.
I started listening to Teagarden shortly after his death and became an instant enthusiast, marveling at his technique and sound, his cool, finding in it a complete personality at the service of material, time, and place. He was nothing if not emotionally honest, and part of the reward of listening to him, especially his later work, was his detached yet vulnerable strength. The performance level was astonishing; no matter how wretched the material or arrangements, Teagarden’s trombone was implacable. But at the same time there was something private and wounded- that oblique sensibility, perhaps, that white jazz fans respond to in some white jazzmen, sensing a bond of recognition and safety in a black and exotic music.
A Condonesque ensemble might be brimming with Dixieland cheer, but when Teagarden’s trombone attains the spotlight it evokes another world. He was always himself regardless of the musical setting. Teagarden’s lazy time, the casual triplets percolating unexpectedly from his warming Texas blues riffs, the technical aplomb, the richly powerful but pliable timbre, and the forthrightness of his solos all served to illuminate his moods. He was the perfect foil for Louis Armstrong, an incisively muted counterpoint to Louis’s thousand wattage.
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You don’t get to heroic stature as a jazz musician without establishing a genuine connection to your forbears.
Chris Potter has emerged over the past 15 years as one of the most engaging and creative tenor saxophonists today. Like Mark Turner and Marcus Strickland and others of that generation, Potter seems to need a number of different ensembles to realize and express everything he’s hearing as a saxophonist and composer.
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John Coltrane’s Neighborhood: Philadelphia as Post-War Jazz Capital
All About Jazz is hosting a series of articles about the Philadelphia where John Coltrane spent his formative years. And not just Coltrane: the Heath Brothers, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Smith, Philly Joe Jones, Benny Golson, Lee Morgan and Reggie Workman, among many others. In this article, Rob Armstrong revisits the Philadelphia local culture that, as Odean Pope asserts, harbored the most important US jazz scene between World War II and the mid 1960s.
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Read MoreCecil Taylor, Alone with the History of Jazz
This fascinating documentary clip is loaded: Cecil Taylor summoning the spirits of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Derek Bailey, Judy Garland. And of course, there’s Cecil himself, whose explanations make it all seem so, well, simple.
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The Singular Sound of Yusef Lateef
Doug Ramsey provides a link to a two-hour edition of Nick Spitzer’s wonderful syndicated radio show“American Routes”. Robert Randolph, Clifton Chenier, Aaron Neville, Lena Horne and the amazing 92-year-old Yusef Lateef are covered on this wonderful program. Doug also unearthed a 1963 kinescope of Yusef playing the blues (on oboe!) with the Cannonball Adderley sextet. The rhythm section is Joe Zawinul, Sam Jones and Louis Hayes.
-Michael Cuscuna
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Michael Brecker- Interview, Lecture & Performance e
Randy Brecker used to sing the praises of his younger brother Michael when Mike was still a college student in Indiana. And when Mike finally came to New York and joined Randy in Horace Silver’s quintet, the band Dreams and Billy Cobham’s group, he more than lived up to his brother’s advance praise. A beautiful person and a magnificent saxophonist, Michael Brecker left us way too early after a handful of agonizing years in search of a bone marrow match. This lengthy 1984 talk and performance at North Texas State makes us miss him all the more.
-Michael Cuscuna
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