Secret Society

Celebration: Remembering - a tribute to Bob Brookmeyer

My tribute to Bob Brookmeyer is up at NewMusicBox. As important as Bob is to me, I knew my own words would be inaquate to convey the full sweep of his career and the enormous influence he had on generations of musicians — so the piece also includes excerpts from interviews I conducted with Jim Hall, Bill Holman, Jim McNeely, Joe Lovano, Maria Schneider, and others.

RIP Bob Brookmeyer

Bob Brookmeyer was the most extraordinary teacher -- more than a mentor, he was and is the most important shaping force in my musical life. He saw the spark of something in me and invited me to study with him at New England Conservatory, and any succes I've had since is directly attributable to his influence. I'm going to miss him something fierce.

A more extensive tribute is in the works [UPDATE: it's here], but in the menanwhile, here's my post in honor of Bob's 80th birthday celebration -- he would have turned 82 this Monday.

Elsewhere...

The official announcement on BobBrookmeyer.com
Terry Teachout, who broke the news on Twitter.
Ryan Truesdell, who has been Robert Craft to Bob's Stravinsky over the past decade or so.
Nicholas Urie, a fellow composer who also studied with Bob at NEC.
Peter Hum, Jazzblog.ca
Richard Kamins, Step Tempest
Pat Donaher, Brookmeyer alumnus, and friend and collegue from my NEC days.
Marc Myers, JazzWax
NPR
Washington Post
New York Times
The Guardian
Clark Terry, who co-led a quintet with Bob in the 1960's and is one of Bob's oldest, dearest friends.
Jazz Profiles
JazzTimes
Doug Ramsey, Rifftides
Carole Sloane - Bob shared arraigning duties with Bill Finegan on her classic record Out of the Blue. I did not know that it was Carol who first introduced Bob to the Fats Waller tune "Willow Tree," which he went on to arrange for the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis band. Good call.
Jazz at Lincoln Center - uncredited but I think this is by Phil Schaap?
BMI
John Hollenbeck - a sublime tribute from the great drummer-composer-bandleader, and one of Bob's closest collaborators.

Bill Dixon, 1925-2010

 
Bill Dixon at the 2007 Vision Festival
(Photo: DJA)

I'm very honored to be able to present this tribute to the great Bill Dixon by his friend and colleague, cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum. Taylor's post on Dixon's recording November 1981 (reproduced below the fold) inspired me to check out Dixon's appearance at the 2007 Vision Festival, which I wrote about here.  That performance was recorded and released by AUM Fidelity as 17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur. It's an utterly transfixing piece of music and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

— DJA

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GUEST POST BY TAYLOR HO BYNUM

Bill Dixon died in his sleep last night, at his home in Vermont. The news has spread fast, partly a testament to the strength of Bill’s legacy, and partly an example of the hyper-media age we live in, a strange contrast to the timelessness and infinite patience of his music.

I wanted to offer a short remembrance, along with posting a few recent articles I’ve written on Bill’s work: the liner notes to the recent Tapestries for Small Orchestra recording, and an appreciation upon the 25^th anniversary of his November 1981 album. As my own blog is on hiatus, I thank Darcy James Argue and the Festival of New Trumpet for letting me use their platforms for my words. 

— Taylor Ho Bynum

BILL DIXON, 1925-2010

June 17, 2010

I got the news at 9am this morning from Stephen Haynes, my friend, my brother in brass, and the man who introduced me to Bill a little over a decade ago. A little later in the day, I talked to Sharon Vogel, Bill’s life-partner. She has been an amazing presence in Bill’s life, loving and committed to the music and as iron-willed as the maestro. My thoughts and love to her, and there is great comfort knowing Bill’s legacy is in such strong hands.

I visited Bill just last Friday, and it was obvious this day was coming soon, but it is still hard to process. I spent a few hours by his bedside. I played him the pocket cornet I had just received as a gift from our friend Michel Cote. I read him passages from a new book, I Want To Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom, by my friend Danielle Goldman, that includes a fantastic chapter on the important and grossly under-recognized interdisciplinary partnership between Bill and dancer/choreographer Judith Dunn in the ‘60s and ‘70s. (When asked by Goldman why there is not more discussion of their collaboration, Bill offered the classic quote “The history that gets written is the history that’s permissible.” I’m glad he lived to see scholars like Goldman, Andrew Raffo Dewar, Ben Young, and others, establish the standard for a new and deeper level of documentation.)

He also quizzed me about what projects I was working on, and we discussed plans for releasing the concert recording of the performance we had done at the Victoriaville festival two weeks prior. Even in a weakened state, he was engaged in the work.

It’s hard to believe the Victoriaville concert was only three weeks ago. We had been invited to reconvene the ensemble that recorded Tapestries for Small Orchestra in the summer of 2008: Bill, Graham Haynes, Stephen Haynes, Rob Mazurek, Glynis Lomon, Michel Cote, Ken Filiano, Warren Smith, and myself. It was one of the most intense musical weekends I’ve ever experienced. Bill had composed all new music for the occasion. It was clear Bill was fighting for the strength to make it happen, and we all understood the stakes. In his life, he could be demanding, because he refused to compromise the quality of the sound he was always searching for. And he was still pushing us hard in that last rehearsal. Stephen and I quietly shared a smile when he chastised the trumpets for an unconvincing entrance; Bill was definitely still with us! He was telling stories, he was dropping wisdom in his inimitable fashion, he was challenging us to play something new. At one point he said, “You know, they might drop the bomb tomorrow, and this will be the last concert for all of us. Play like it matters!”

When Bill arrived at the soundcheck, after we had set-up and gotten all the basic levels, he took command of the stage. The immediate strength of his presence erased any doubts or concerns we might have had about his ability to make it through the night. The concert was powerful, Bill conducting us through the material, drawing the music out of the band. At the end, Bill took to his feet, gesturing for the brass section to reach beyond what we thought we had left in a final burst of musical intensity. After the show, Bill was full of life backstage, thanking us all for the music, receiving our profound gratitude in return.

It is so hard to lose someone like that. As a Facebook post I saw this morning said “I thought Bill would outlive the planet!” His achievements were extraordinary, as all the obituaries that will come out in the next few days will attest. His legacy is enduring, as all of us fighting for that one true sound continue the journey. And he made it through 85 years, making vibrant, beautiful, world-changing music up until the very end, and what more could you ask for.

When I said goodbye last week at his home, I told him I’d try to visit him again in a few weeks, but I knew that was unlikely. I wish I had the guts to really say goodbye, to tell him how much his music changed me, changed so many of us. To tell him I loved him and would never forget what he taught me. But I like to think he knew.

photo by Isabelle Moisan, Victoriaville, Canada, May 2010

RIP Hank Jones

(Photo: Jimmy Katz)

1918-2010. Quite possibly the most universally-beloved musician in jazz.

UPDATE: Ethan is planning a major blog post on Hank Jones, which promises to be definitive. Meanwhile, everyone is posting their favorite YouTube clips of the late master. Here is mine -- Hank covering his brother Thad's "Lady Luck" -- a brilliant re-imagining of "Taking A Chance On Love," written for their kid brother's 1962 Riverside date Elvin! This version is from 1997 and features Clarence Penn on drums. This is one of those perilous "grown-up tempos" that brutally lays bare the differences between a true master and the rest of us. Hank of course makes it sound effortless, as he always did.

Nate Chinen (The Gig)
Peter Hum (jazzblog.ca). See also Peter's list of Discs To Remember Hank Jones By. (I am naturally most partial to Hank's gorgeous disc of Thad tunes, Upon Reflection, which Peter mentions, as well as the classic 1958 Jones Bros. joint Keeping Up With The Joneses.)
Ethan Iverson's 88th birthday post for Hank (from 2006)
Fred Kaplan (Stereophile)
Howard Mandel (Jazz Beyond Jazz)
Michael J. West (Washington City Paper)
Doug Ramsey (Rifftides)
Matana Roberts interviews Hank Jones for All About Jazz in 2003 (and uh, you guys should probably put Matana's name in the byline... )
Peter Keepnews (New York Times)

RIP Joe Maneri

(Portrait: Sonja Holzwarth Maneri)

It would be hard to overstate how beloved Joe was by the students who took his microtonal improv class at NEC. It seemed he lit a fire in everyone who'd enrolled, through the sheer force of his outsized personality. I never dipped my toe in that well, but I certainly respected him as a true saxophone original and as an inspirational -- practically evangelical -- educator.

Read more from Derek (Bagatellen), Pat Donaher (visionsong), The Volume, and Hank Shteamer (Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches).

RIP Rashied Ali

(Photo: DJA)

The tragic news has been confirmed on his website.

Thought it seems inconceivable now, Rashied was long the object of widespread scorn and even anger, for the crime of daring to be the guy that Coltrane picked to succeed Elvin. But the approach he pioneered, his way of sustaining a breathless surge of momentum in free time, has been so widely emulated that whole great swaths of jazz today are unimaginable without his influence. Pretty much anytime you hear a modern drummer play with a rubato feeling, they are coming out of a Rashied thing. But of course he could play great time, too, gloriously swinging unadorned straightahead time, and that was often the mode he operated in with the bands he'd been leading in recent years.

I first heard him live in a truly revelatory masterclass at New England Conservatory back in 2000. I caught him a few times since, most recently at last year's Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, and his playing was never less than thoroughly transfixing.

RIP George Russell

Boston Globe obit

It's hard to think of anything else in music that gave me as much of a thrill on first discovery as George Russell's "All About Rosie." But that thrill was magnified tenfold (I am not exaggerating) when I heard the later recording by the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band, with Mel Lewis on drums -- the original 1957 Brandeis Festival version (collected on "Birth of the Third Stream") does not really do justice to the immense power of this piece (the famous Bill Evans solo piano break notwithstanding).

"All About Rosie" is one of the most kinetic and propulsive compositions I've ever heard. On the surface it's crazy busy, almost wildly discursive, full of intersecting lines constantly snaking in and out and around each other, all of them vying for your full attention. But underneath the roiling surface, the music is just incredibly tightly controlled. Everything comes straight out of the Alabama children's song-game "Rosie, Little Rosie," and it's the obsessive development of this theme that generates all that insane momentum. It's brilliant and earthy and thrilling and in 1957, there was nothing remotely like it in jazz.

Here's Part 1 of "All About Rosie" - still a two-minute adrenaline rush like no other:

MP3: - "All About Rosie (Part 1)" (comp/arr George Russell, performed by the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band)

The complete version available on this (highly recommended) Gerry Mulligan CJB iTunes compilation. (Ignore the "album review" on that page, which is for a different recording entirely.)

I was fortunate enough to take George's Lydian Chromatic class and play keyboards in his ensemble at New England Conservatory in the early 2000's.

More soon.

RIP Charlie Mariano

(Photo: Paul G. Deker)

"At this moment I'd like to pause for station identification. Station SOUL and LOVE. Charles Mariano, lead alto and alto solos."

This is Mingus, in his liner notes to The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Mariano is the leadoff soloist, and sets up the entire record with his open, heartrending sound -- you all know the moment:

MP3: Track A - Solo Dancer (Stop! Look! And Listen, Sinner Jim Whitney!) (excerpt)

Mariano's playing is all over The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady and it is glorious. Especially his blazing extended solo on "Track C - Group Dancers - (Soul Fusion) Freewoman and Oh, This Freedom's Slave Cries." This record is justifiably beloved -- it's some of the most amazing music ever recorded, and it's unimaginable without Charlie Mariano.

Other places:

Ethan Iverson (Do The Math) highlights a lesser-known Mariano session.
Carl Abernathy (Cahl's Juke Joint) gives The Toshiko Mariano Quartet some love.
David Valdez (Casa Valdez Studios) posts a rare collection of Mariano compositions from the 1960's.
Michael Carlson (Irresistable Targets) has some invaluable info about Mariano's European years.
John Dilberto's reminiscence at Echoes is interesting (a ski mask? Really?) but his lede undersells Mariano considerably: "a second tier bop saxophonist"? You'd find an awful lot of alto players who'd take serious objection to that characterization!
Peter Hum (jazzblog.ca)
Boston Globe (Joan Anderman)

Charlie Mariano Tribute Page

It doesn't hurt when it begins

There have been many fine tributes to David Foster Wallace and some very good accounts of the circumstances leading up to his suicide, but this one, by D.T. Max in the current issue of the New Yorker, is the only one that made me weep. 

It's really too good to excerpt -- the whole thing hits me right where I live. But here are a couple of telling grafs from near the beginning:

The sadness over Wallace’s death was also connected to a feeling that, for all his outpouring of words, he died with his work incomplete. Wallace, at least, never felt that he had hit his target. His goal had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life. “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,” he once said. Good writing should help readers to “become less alone inside.” Wallace’s desire to write “morally passionate, passionately moral fiction,” as he put it in a 1996 essay on Dostoyevsky, presented him with a number of problems. For one thing, he did not feel comfortable with any of the dominant literary styles. He could not be a realist. The approach was “too familiar and anesthetic,” he once explained. Anything comforting put him on guard. “It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most ‘familiarity’ is meditated and delusive,” he said in a long 1991 interview with Larry McCaffery, an English professor at San Diego State. The default for Wallace would have been irony—the prevailing tone of his generation. But, as Wallace saw it, irony could critique but it couldn’t nourish or redeem. He told McCaffery, “Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?”

So Wallace’s project required him to invent a language and a stance of his own. “I want to author things that both restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff,” he wrote to his editor Michael Pietsch while he was working on his second novel, “Infinite Jest,” which Little, Brown published in 1996. He knew that such proclamations made him seem a holy fool. In the interview with McCaffery, he said, “It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies . . . in be[ing] willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I’m scared about how sappy this’ll look in print, saying this. And the effort to actually to do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don’t seem to have yet.” He also said, “All the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can’t be for your benefit; it’s got to be for hers.”

I am not one for artistic manifestos. But if I had to have one, "I want to author things that both restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff" seems like a good one.

RIP Louie Bellson

I am far from an expert on Louie Bellson's career but he sounds great on those records with Ellington's band. Also, the before-its-time double kick drum thing? Kind of badass.

Other places...

Marc Myers (JazzWax)

When Louie joined Duke Ellington's band, there was no music to read, nor was there a drum book. Everyone in the band knew the parts by heart. "Duke took a big risk hiring me," Louie recalled. "I was the only white musician in his band. During our first 1951 tour, just before we headed south for Birmingham, Alabama, he said ‘We’re going down South so we’re going to make you a Haitian.’ That’s how they described me so we wouldn’t wind up in trouble."

Peter Hum (Thriving On A Riff)

Nate Chinen (New York Times)

All About Jazz (press release)

RIP Gerry Niewood and Coleman Mellett

Saxophonist Gerry Niewood was among those who perished aboard Continental Flight 3407 on Thursday night. I had the good fortune to have Gerry perform my music in the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop and in a few Secret Society rehearsals he was gracious enough to sub in. Others -- like Society saxophonist Sam Sadigursky, who has posted an excellent tribute on his own blog -- knew him far better, but in our brief interactions he seemed a selfless, stand-up guy, in addition to being true to his rep as a consummate pro. Deepest condolences to his son Adam (also a saxophonist) and the rest of his family and loved ones.

34-year old guitarist Coleman Mellett was also aboard that flight -- he and Gerry were both heading to a scheduled performance with Chuck Mangione and the Buffalo Philharmonic. Again, my sincerest condolences to those who knew him.

Other places...

Gerry Niewood on MySpace
Coleman Mellett on Myspace
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Sam Sadigursky (The One Seat)

I went to college with Niewood's son Adam and got to know Gerry a little while in school, and even took a lesson with him after finishing college. A few years later, I found myself sitting next to him when subbing in the orchestra for the Radio City Christmas Show. Over a period of three years, I played about seventy shows sitting next to him, and he was always a great source of warmth, encouragement, sound, professionalism, humor, and a real woodwind guru. He seemed to do things his own way, which isn't something I've encountered much playing on Broadway. I always felt that I emerged a better player after sitting next to him, and he always had something nice to say to me after the show, which meant a great deal to me being so new there.

Jason Crane (The Jazz Session) - includes audio interview with Adam Niewood.
Doug Ramsey (Rifftides)
Monk Rowe (Jazz Backstory)
Ron Netsky (Rochester City Newspaper)
Annette Batson (Baristanet) - reaction from Gerry's community in Glen Ridge, NJ.
JazzCorner thread

RIP Blossom Dearie [updated]

One of my all-time favorite singers is gone . She died peaceably, in her sleep, in her Greenwich Village apartment, at the age of 82. Somehow that seems apt.

When I first heard Blossom sing "Surrey With The Fringe On Top," I didn't get what anyone saw in it. Now hers is pretty much the only version of that song I can tolerate. And of course, her sly gender-tweaked reading of Dave Frishberg & Bob Dorough's "I'm Hip" is timeless. ("I don't blow but I'm a fan" -- that's a line that would raise a lot of eyebrows if she wasn't so damn good at deadpan.) 

I think her best record is probably her 1957 self-titled debut for Verve, with Ray Brown, Jo Jones, Herb Ellis, and Blossom's own (very credible) piano playing. I will always be in awe of "Blossom's Blues," in which a mousy, bespectacled child-voiced little white girl confidently inverts all manner of manly blues clichés. ("But Ray Brown told me I was built for speed" indeed.)  And she owns Lorenz Hart's wry, cynical lyrics to "Ev'rything I've Got." When Ella sings this song, she gives away the game, making it very clear she doesn't mean any of it -- she's just kidding around. Blossom's version is the opposite, a sweet and bubbly surface that doesn't quite conceal actual murderous intent. The themes of Mad Men could easily be encapsulated by this one song.

MP3: Blossom Dearie, "Ev'rything I've Got"

Other places:

Terry Teachout (About Last Night)
Doug Ramsey (Rifftides) -- and, via Doug, Blossom's friend and colleague Dave Frishberg, who shares a revealing detail about Blossom's influence on Bill Evans.
Keith Phipps (The Onion A.V. Club)
Maura Johnston (Idolator)
Marc Myers (JazzWax) - he may be an avowed non-fan, but Marc's post has a ton of great biographical detail not found in the big media obits
Anne (Fernham)
Oliver Wang (Soul Sides)
Mustang Bobby (Shakesville)
Stephen Holden (NYT)
Jon Thurber (LA Times)
Rosie Bell links to something I hadn't heard before -- the Bob Dorough-Blossom Dearie version of "Baby It's Cold Outside," surely the creepiest version of that seasonal chestnut ever recorded.

Finally, singer Amy Cervini sent me links to two YouTube videos from a Blossom Dearie tribute gig she did at the Blue Note in December. The (killing) band includes Avishai Cohen, Frank Kimbrough, Dan Loomis, and Matt Wilson. Check out Amy's versions of "A Doodlin' Song" and "Blossom's Blues."

RIP Hank Crawford and Lukas Foss

I was saddened to learn that David "Fathead" Newman's old foil, Hank Crawford, has also died, just a few days after Newman's passing. Bruce Weber has the NYT Obit, and here's Doug Ramsey (Rifftides). 

See also Dave Douglas (Greenleaf), who links Hank Crawford with another departed American original, Lukas Foss. And for a movingly detailed reminiscence of that iconoclastic composer, you must read Matthew Guerrieri's tribute to his former teacher.

RIP David "Fathead" Newman

Remember our long-ago feature on the Top 4 Most Tolerable Rock Sax Solos of All Time? There's a reason why David Newman's work with Ray Charles was excluded from "consideration" in this category. If every rock sax solo was as consistently good as Newman's playing with Ray, there would be no need for sites like this one. Of course, there's much more to Newman's work... see the links below for more on his life and career:

NYT obit (Ratliff)

Rifftides (Doug Ramsey)

WBGO (Josh Jackson)

And via Peter Hum, a great reminiscence from Vancouver-based pianist Tilden Webb, whose trio recorded and toured with Newman.

RIP Freddie Hubbard

(Photo: Jim Stag)

Freddie Hubbard's story has the elements of a mawkish Hollywood melodrama -- the wide-eyed 20-year old kid from heartland America (Indianapolis, Indiana) moves to the Big City and immediately starts showing up all those sophisticated New York trumpet players with his uncanny speed, range, endurance, and huge, rich sound. A brash, swaggering, relentlessly swinging hard bop trumpeter in the mould of his hero Clifford Brown and his peer Lee Morgan, he ended up replacing Morgan in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and his elemental fire ignited what many consider the greatest edition of that band. As a first-call sideman, he made indelible contributions to some of the greatest albums ever recorded -- if you are a young jazz musician learning to play, there is no question that Freddie Hubbard is tearing it up on some of your formative recordings. His albums as a leader during this time are all very fine, but I think (somewhat controversially) that his first truly classic record under his own name -- the first time he played as well as he did on everyone else's records -- is 1970's electrified Red Clay. Freddie's playing had become too blisteringly intense to be adequately supported by a purely acoustic rhythm section, and this early jazz-rock record feels like the most natural setting for his unbound virtuosity.

It's tempting to trace the origin of Freddie's downward spiral to his move to Los Angeles in the 70's -- as he says in this NPR profile:

You know, lifestyle out there is different from mine than in New York. I mean, I was in the Hollywood Hills, above the Bowl. I could look at the ocean on this side. I can hear the concerts free at the Bowl. And I had a big swimming pool. I had parties all the time, and the trumpet just was in the corner a lot of the time, when it should have been on my lips.

Under the influence of record mogul Creed Taylor, Freddie made a series of increasingly overproduced records featuring somewhat dubious studio arrangements by Don Sebesky. (That version of the theme from The Godfather off of Sky Dive is a camp classic.) But despite the Hollywood lifestyle, Freddie's power as a trumpet player remained undiminished, and he did some of the most impressive playing of his career in the late 70s, "standing in" for Miles in the reunited supergroup VSOP, and in the 80s, going head-to-head with his greatest disciple, Woody Shaw.

Freddie's style was fully bound up in his superhuman virtuosity -- he played longer, louder, higher, and faster than just about anyone. With Freddie, it was always full-throttle, balls-to-the-wall all the way. He seemed practically invincible, still playing like a brash and restless 20-year old well into his 50's. But then in 1992, during a hit in Philly, he split his lip, badly. True to form, he kept on playing, trying to fight his way through his injury. It didn't work. The lip became badly infected and doctors, fearing cancer, recommended a biopsy. No cancer was found, but Freddie's embouchure was ruined.

Here's where that Hollywood melodrama would show a sentimental montage of Freddie's struggle to regain his ability to play. Along the way, he would learn Important Life Lessons about what was truly precious to him as a musician and as a human being. The sequence would end with a triumphant return to the bandstand, perhaps with Freddie playing a simple, beautiful, heartfelt melody ("Up Jumped Spring" would be perfect here) -- and we would see that his injuries might have cost him his blazing technique, but they couldn't take away his indomitable spirit.

Sadly, Freddie never had that Hollywood ending. Despite his best efforts and the encouragement of trumpeter David Weiss, Freddie never really found a way to be Freddie Hubbard again. His post-injury output is heartbreaking. You can hear the ideas percolating in there, clamoring to be released, but he just couldn't find a way to execute them.

I never had the chance to hear Freddie play live. But I did see him receive his NEA Jazz Masters award at the 2006 IAJE Convention, which was deeply moving. You could tell it was deeply moving for Freddie as well. The presentation began with a nicely produced biographical video, including a roll call of all of the classic records he played on. The ballroom was packed to the rafters, mostly with young jazz students, who gave him a roaring standing ovation. He didn't need to play. He could just be Freddie Hubbard.

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Favorite Freddie solo: impossible to choose, but I'll go with "One Finger Snap," from Herbie's Empyrean Isles. See also Randy Brecker's Top 12.

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In his own words -- Freddie talks about his lip injury, his work with David Weiss and the New Jazz Composers Octet, and Louis Armstrong, Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan, Maynard Ferguson, Wynton Marsalis, Richard Davis, and others.

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Must-read remembrances from around the blogosphere:

Taylor Ho Bynum (SpiderMonkey Stories)

It’s funny to think that though he’s the quintessential hard bop trumpeter, he was a key participant on three of the most important documents of the 60s avant-garde: Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, John Coltrane’s Ascension, and Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch. And though he might have sounded a little out of place in the ensemble “freedom” of Ornette or Trane, he absolutely tears it up in the angular world of Dolphy. Out to Lunch features some of the most otherworldly trumpet playing on record, a combination of virtuosic post-bop technique and new music risk taking that still sounds thrilling.

Dave Douglas (Greenleaf Music Blog)

Freddie Hubbard was one of the most skilled practitioners of this art. The joy and freedom in his playing came in part from this complete mastery of the instrument. It always sounded effortless. In the high range his control of air was so sublime that his lines sometimes defied the laws of physics and harmony, resolving in odd ways just by dint of his total domination of the instrument. Freddie grabbed the opportunity of those alternate fingerings to pop in and out of chromatic chord and scale ideas. His attack was always precise and his dodging and darting lines flowed like water through a sluiceway.

A lot of people can play the trumpet well. Technical mastery is far from the reason Freddie Hubbard is the most imitated player of the last half-century. It was what he did with that mastery -- the inventiveness of his harmonies and the ingenuity of his rhythmic propulsion. Freddie's impact is so profound that you often don't have to mention him when noting a young player's influences. Freddie is always there. He had a lot to say, and we all soaked it up.

Kris Tiner (All At Once)

Freddie had that rare combination of tremendous chops + tremendous spirit. I think I can speak for many trumpet players here: Freddie Hubbard is our Coltrane. Like Coltrane, much of Freddie's music represents the highest possible creative manifestation of instrumental virtuosity. When he was at his best, his technical mastery was entirely servile to his supreme artistic sensibility, demonstrating by example that true freedom didn't happen by simply breaking rules, but by developing a strong command of one's instrument coupled with a firm sense of tradition and an ability to fully translate personality to sound, breaking through the tradition rather than breaking from it.

Ethan Iverson (Do The Math)

“Without A Song” from the same album [The Hub of Hubbard] shows how how Hubbard’s time is so good that he can swing he band (which constantly verges on falling apart) from the trumpet on down.

Doug Ramsey (Rifftides)

The compulsion to power his way through good times and bad resulted in glorious music and monumental frustration. I last spoke with Freddie in 2006 at a reception for National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters. He was in good spirits, if rather subdued, and seemed to have accepted that his chops weren't coming back. We sat around remembering good times together in New Orleans and he favored me with a few unprintable Art Blakey stories. Later at a post-function concert that evolved into a sort of jam session, he was asked to sit in. He declined.

Howard Mandel (Jazz Beyond Jazz) - see also Howard's June 2008 Down Beat cover story and his obit for NPR's Morning Edition.

He was not ideologically an avant-gardist; his compositions such as "Up Jumped Spring" had a lyrical playfulness. But he also excelled at expressing urgency with tunes such as "Crisis" and "Breaking Point."

David Adler (Lerterland)

In the late '80s I got caught trying to walk out of the Blue Note without paying. I had hoped the $18 in my pocket was enough, but it wasn't. But that's how badly I needed to see Freddie Hubbard.

It wasn't just Hubbard's ferocity on the trumpet that got me. It was his bands. And at that time I was discovering just what it is that jazz bands do. Hearing Hubbard with Benny Green or Billy Childs on piano, Javon Jackson or Don Braden on tenor, Ronnie Burrage on drums — this was just too hot to handle. I must have heard him at the Blue Note four or five times.

Marc Myers (JazzWax)

Among his classic dates were Open Sesame, Hub-Tones, Goin' Up and Ready for Freddie, which in my opinion is an underappreciated game-changing jazz album. On this 1961 album, we hear three Hubbard originals, one by Shorter and a standard, "Weaver of Dreams." The importance of Ready for Freddie rests in its tension. Unlike previous hard bop albums, the tracks here break new melodic ground and set the stage for Shorter's Speak No Evil recorded three years later. We hear Hubbard and Shorter feed off each other creatively, with Bernard McKinney on euphonium, Art Davis on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. We also hear a brilliant McCoy Tyner, who had just finished recording six powerful albums with John Coltrane. On Ready for Freddie, Hubbard's hot metal sound is countered by Shorter's velvet sledgehammer, and there's a clean articulation throughout.

James Hale (Jazz Chronicles)

Overlooked in that timeline are Hubbard's years with Atlantic Records in the second half of the '60s – a period that I was introduced to on a terrific two-LP set called The Art Of Freddie Hubbard. Like his closest peer, Lee Morgan, Hubbard found himself with one foot in hard bop and another in freer music that was heavily influenced by the Black Consciousness movement. For Hubbard, that played out on tracks like "Black Soldier" from the album Sing Me A Song of Songmy, which featured him reciting words by Turkish poet Fazil Husnu Daglarca accompanied by a string orchestra and some processed electronics. More predictably, he also worked with genre-spanning sidemen like Bennie Maupin, Carlos Garnett and Freddie Waits, as well as a tight quintet sparked by Kenny Barron and Louis Hayes.

To fully appreciate Hubbard's range, consider for a moment the stylistic ground he covered in just 10 years – 1963-73 – and try to think of another artist who stretched so far without sacrificing his own signature voice. A giant to be sure, which makes the last 25 years of his life all the sadder.

----

Mainstream media obits:

Peter Keepnews, New York Times

Mr. Hubbard was once known as the brashest of jazzmen, but his personality as well as his music mellowed in the wake of his lip problems. In a 1995 interview with Fred Shuster of Down Beat, he offered some sober advice to younger musicians: “Don’t make the mistake I made of not taking care of myself. Please, keep your chops cool and don’t overblow.”

Howard Mandel, NPR's Morning Edition -- as mentioned above. Be sure to check out the audio to hear Freddie talking about the style of articulation he pioneered:

"[D]uring that period, I was changing the style of the trumpet. I was trying to play the trumpet like a saxophone. Instead of saying, 'Dah, dah, du, du, di, di, di, do,' I was saying, 'Diddly, do, du, do, dah, do, wham, bam, be,' playing more intervals. And I was trying to make those as long glissando runs, like 'trun, da, dun, dun, da, lun, da, da, da, da, da,' and trumpet players don't do that."

Tom Vitale, NPR's All Things Considered

Hubbard says that the low point in his career came in the early 1990s. After he split his lip and lost the ability to play, he started drinking, suffered an ulcer and almost died.

"I started drinking Jack Daniel's to feel good, you know? Jack Daniel's and Coca-Cola," Hubbard says. "And I had an ulcer. I went over in London and I fell out. I've never passed out, but I lost four pints of blood. And the doctor said, 'You're going to clean up your body, because otherwise you're looking to go.' So I said, 'Well, I'm not ready to go, so let me cool out.'"

Don Heckman, Los Angeles Times

Hubbard was born Frederick DeWayne Hubbard in Indianapolis on April 7, 1938. He was the youngest of six children in a musical household and first played the tonette and then the mellophone.

"I had a sister who played classical piano and sang spirituals," he told Coryell and Friedman. "My mother played the piano by ear and I had a brother who played the bass and tenor. So the music was hot and heavy. You'd hear somebody singing, somebody playing the piano, and always a record playing."

John Rogers, Associated Press

"I met Trane at a jam session at Count Basie's in Harlem in 1958," he told the jazz magazine Down Beat in 1995. "He said, `Why don't you come over and let's try and practice a little bit together.' I almost went crazy. I mean, here is a 20-year-old kid practicing with John Coltrane. He helped me out a lot, and we worked several jobs together."

I want to hear and see everything

Alex Cline on Mitch Mitchell.

As instant Hendrix fanatics, we ardently followed all the subsequent recordings and developments. The music certainly doesn't need to be reviewed at this point, but some of the truly memorable and outstanding examples of Mitch's drumming that I'd like to mention in this moment are the driving groove that exemplifies the title of the tune on which it is heard, "Fire"; the already mentioned "Third Stone from the Sun," where Mitch seems to be pushing a crazy cosmic big band with his flurries of swinging accents and free-form waves of toms and snare; the free jazz/noise insanity of "I Don't Live Today"; the deep pocket-cum-free-against-the-time soling on "If 6 Was 9" (and where he seems to drop a drumstick in the middle of a furious phrase, ending it midstream); the amazingly swinging, pure jazz brushwork on "Up from the Skies"; the furiously blazing bashing on the otherwise totally silly Noel Redding tune "She's So Fine"; the glorious flanger-heavy close of "Bold as Love" (which I honestly felt at the time was sort of the most ultimately perfect, heavenly musical moment I'd heard till then; I used to play it over and over); the astounding solo on, of all things, a slow blues (!), certainly one of the most amazing slow blues jams of all time, "Voodoo Chile"; and the slushy, wonderful slow backing for the moving "Angel" from Hendrix's last album. These are only few standouts in a catalog of consistently stellar performances, as most people already know. Everything Mitch recorded, which sounded so fresh and remarkable at the time it was waxed, still sounds absolutely astounding today. Adding to the astonishment is the fact that when he started making this music he was only 19 years old! I don’t think I ever realized the weight of this until now. It's almost a Tony Williams scenario! I certainly never sounded anything close to that good when I was that age! Mitch was a phenomenon.

Go read.

Respect

Much love to the recently departed Miriam Makeba and Mitch Mitchell.

RIP Neal Hefti, William Claxton

NYT obit.

Also, I apologize for my inability to resist using the above image. Much respect to the architect of this record, which everybody should own.

-----

NYT obit.

A favorite Claxton photo:

Let 'em know you're there

The Self-Styled Siren on the late Paul Newman and his "effortless" charm:

But the Siren is here to talk about Newman's acting, and to remind us that charm does not follow naturally from being handsome, nor does possessing that quality in life mean you can bring it to the screen. […] Newman seems to have been a wonderful man in real life, but that's irrelevant to his talent. The things he was able to bring to the screen came from his dedication to acting, not the Good Fairy Merryweather hovering over his cradle.

For further evidence, you don't have to sit in a dark room with Newman's entire filmography on disc. All you have to do is watch The Silver Chalice, his first movie, from 1954. It is neither, as Newman variously described it, the worst movie ever made, nor the worst movie made in the 1950s. It is bad, however. And Newman, as he would tell every interviewer for the rest of his life, is terrible. […] [W]hat leaps out at you is this: Newman isn't charming. […] He is anticharm, in the sense of antimatter. When Pier Angeli looks at him, it isn't with love, but with wonderment that this gorgeous man has the personality of a just-caught red snapper, with lifeless eyes (can you believe it?) and ungraceful movements.

Well, that was his first role. He was never that bad again. Two years later he took the part intended for James Dean in Somebody Up There Likes Me. Boxer Rocky Graziano was a well-loved figure, but many's the character beloved in real life who comes across far differently in a biopic. This is, after all, the story of a guy who starts out more familiar with jails and reformatories than schools, a member of the Greatest Generation who declines to contribute to the struggle, instead repeatedly going AWOL from the Army and eventually earning a dishonorable discharge for striking an officer. That this selfish, immature delinquent becomes quite lovable is due in part to a screenplay that takes care to show the roots of Graziano's behavior, but even more credit is due to Paul Newman. Some will take this as heresy, but the Siren doubts very much that the intense, fiery Dean would have been as sweetly tentative in the love scenes (again with Pier Angeli, looking as though she can't believe her costar's improvement) or as sympathetically big-lunkish when behaving badly.

What was he doing for the two years between roles? Some television, some theater, classes at the Actor's Studio. What flicked the switch? Hard work, definitely. Accretion of experience, I suppose, and perhaps the knowledge that the movie was a do-or-die second chance. Not to mention the fact that Graziano, a street tough who was about as close to the real-life Newman as Rosalynn Carter is to Sandra Bernard, was nevertheless a part far more suited to the actor's ineffably modern sensibility than some silly Greek slave. Somebody Up There Likes Me was the first inkling of Newman's unique talent for playing antiheros, an ability to burrow down into the lives of the small-time and hard-luck cases and find what could bring the audience to the character's side.

Read the whole thing.

I am not what you see and hear

Isaac Butler on DFW in Buzzline.

RIP David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace, originally uploaded by Steve Rhodes.

Awful, awful news. My sincerest condolences to those who loved him. (God, his poor wife... )

It's hard to know how to even begin to express how important David Foster Wallace was to my artistic development, and how much joy his writing has brought me.

I came to DFW's work via Infinite Jest, right when it came out in 1996. I basically devoured the damn thing -- I've never read a book so quickly or avidly in my life. And when I was finished, I read it again immediately, all 1079 pages. Officially obsessed, I began voraciously consuming his interviews, short stories ("Lyndon" is probably my favorite short story of all time), essays, his flawed but fascinating first novel... I joined the David Foster Wallace listserv, and had a few real-life encounters with people in that virtual community, back when that sort of thing was still a novelty. I became a kind of evangelist for Infinite Jest, basically forcing the book on the people I was close to, with surprisingly decent results. (Pretty much everyone I know who started it ended up loving it.) And, of course, I eventually ended up writing a tune inspired by one of Infinite Jest's infamous endnotes -- and, more generally, by DFW's brilliantly discursive style.

I thought it was interesting that David Foster Wallace's name came up again in this summer's complexity wars. As I alluded to at the time, reading DFW caused a radical shift in my thinking about art. His writing was vivid, undeniable proof that you could be simultaneously erudite and accessible, experimental and addictively entertaining, structurally complex and heartrendingly sincere, high-minded and embracing of pop culture, and seriously fucking funny. His best work (Infinite Jest, the stories in Girl With Curious Hair, the longform essays) remains an inspiration and a constant reminder of the ways in which I need to shape up my game.

I saw David Foster Wallace read at the Strand back in January 2006. He is someone who has written about depression with acute insight, from a place of obsessive familiarity -- his story "The Depressed Person" is brutal and unflinching -- but from all surface appearances, he seemed long past that dark period. He was at ease in front of the packed house, thoroughly charming and engaging. He did not seem at all the tortured, self-destructive, inward-looking type. He was married, well-established, from all reports he loved his teaching gig, he was sought-after by magazines and publishers, worshipped by younger writers... I never would have expected this from him.

I still can't quite grasp that his voice is gone. For years, I've been hoping for a third David Foster Wallace novel. I guess I'll give Infinite Jest another go-round instead. For a book that is so wickedly funny and entertaining, it's also ultimately very sad, with an ending left deliberately, almost cruelly unresolved.

UPDATE: I remember being really knocked out by Laura Miller's interview with DFW in Salon back when it was first published. It's still my favorite interview with him. She has written a beautiful tribute:

He talked about how difficult it was to be a novelist in a world seething with advertisements and entertainment and knee-jerk knowingness and facile irony. He wrote about the maddening impossibility of scrutinizing yourself without also scrutinizing yourself scrutinizing yourself and so on, ad infinitum, a vertiginous spiral of narcissism -- because not even the most merciless self- examination can ignore the probability that you are simultaneously congratulating yourself for your soul-searching, that you are posing. He tried so hard to be sincere and to attend to the world around him because he was excruciatingly aware of how often we are merely "sincere" and "attentive" and all too willing to leave it at that. He spoke of the discipline and of the abrading, daily labor such efforts require because the one imperative that runs throughout all of his work is the intimate connection between humility and wisdom.

Read the whole thing.

Just grab the rope and I'll pull you in

This archival (1994) Fresh Air interview with Isaac Hayes is definitely worth listening to in full. It is really astounding that a kid who grew up literally picking cotton in Covington, Tennessee became one of the most polished, sophisticated, ambitious orchestrators in popular music. I mean, it's no surprise that Randy Newman is a killing orchestrator, he grew up in a family of film composers. But Isaac Hayes, whose skills are unquestionably right up there with Newman's, learned it all on the gig, arranging and producing for Stax.

Here are a couple of choice bits from the interview:

GROSS: Now how did you learn to play piano? Growing up as poor as you did, I know there were times in your life where you didn't have shoes, let alone a piano.

HAYES: That's true. How did I do that? Well... let's see. A friend of mine I grew up with, Sidney Kirk -- used to be my accompanist, we went places and he'd play for me. He joined the Air Force, he wasn't there. There was a call in to him about a gig New Year's Eve. His sister knew that I was destitute and I needed money, so she asked me if I wanted to play. Well I could play maybe "Chopsticks" and stuff like that, and I say "Yeah, I'll take it." I took the gig out of desperation. And when I got to the club I was petrified, I said "Oh my God they're gonna shoot me, I can't play." And musicians started coming in, you know, setting up, tuning up, and I'm sitting there, you know, trying to be cool. I said "God, you know, they're gonna find me out." And the featured artist came in and said "Hey man, do y'all know such-and-such" -- this is the first time this band had been put together, we didn't rehearse or anything -- and everybody say "Yeah, we know it, blah blah blah." And he kicked off the tune, and it sounded horrible -- everybody did. I said, "Wow, these guys can't play either, so I'm comfortable."

And, you know, being New Year's Eve, the clientele was drunk, and they thought we were cooking, you know. And somewhere along the line, the club owner, he was sauced, he came up and was like: "You know, you boys sound real good, y'all want a regular job?" "Yeah, we'll take it." And that was in Memphis. And, um, it was a regular gig, and each night I'd learn something more and more on keyboards. And that's how I got started.

[…]

HAYES: I had been doing arranging all the time. I did a lot of arranging with the horns and stuff at Stax, and the first string arrangements I tried was a thing that Dave [Porter] and I did on Sam and Dave. And that album was like a big flop. But we tried it anyway, but I had a taste for it, and once I tasted the strings I couldn't let it go.

Go listen.

See also LowerManhattanite's extended tributes to Hayes and Bernie Mac.

Hayes was of a generation of great musicians that came through the Memphis public school system's music program (a veritable “Who's Who” of Jazz and R&B legends too numerous to cite here), who stayed in the city and re-vitalized it with his groundbreaking work at Stax. He fused the hard Blues with the roaring fire of Southern Gospel, while adding into the mix more than a little bit of the punchy Jazz style (particularly the horn charts—Basie-esque “smears” and “stabs” on the brass) endemic to the region.

And God, could he write melodies! Melodies that mated perfectly with the scary rhythmic sense he seemed to simply sweat. He had a “golden ear” for arrangements and balance, while having a special knack for building a jam “in-song” from a whisper to a roar, until the song was a big ol' almost living, amoebic thing—pulsing, flying here and there...whispering and shouting...all at once.

RIP Isaac Hayes

Okay, I know everybody loves "Chocolate Salty Balls" and the soundtrack to Shaft, but damn. Isaac Hayes was a great songwriter. Not as prolific as Smokey Robinson, but Hayes and his songwriting partner David Porter were just as integral to the Stax sound as Smokey was to Motown. American popular music is unimaginable without the songs they penned, especially the Sam and Dave cuts -- "Soul Man," "Hold On I'm Coming," "You Don't Know Like I Know"... these are perfect bits of pop craftsmanship, down to the tiniest details (the twangy guitar intro on "Soul Man" that comes back to trigger the key change, the cup-muted trumpet behind the vocals on "Hold On," the oblique vocal harmonies on "You Don't Know"... ).

So basically, I am in total agreement with Andrew Durkin:

I'd be lying if I said I didn't suspect, with some chagrin, that Hayes will be remembered primarily for the latter phase of his career, and particularly as the epic soul artist who brought us the music from Shaft.

Not that I don't love that music -- even if it did set the template for a lot of cheesy porn soundtracks, and even if it did lay the groundwork for later generations of white comedians who could then counter-exploit the aesthetics of blaxploitation by using its definitive music to make fun of their own lack of cool (everyone from Will Ferrell to Conan O'Brien has toyed with this tiresome trope in some form or other). Obviously that stuff wasn't Hayes' fault.

[…]

Unlike a lot of the other music that ends up in constant rotation / Clear Channel / oldies purgatory, much of this stuff defies exhaustion. These recordings are like little perfectly-constructed perpetual motion machines: they don't wear out. They also demonstrate that just because a piece of music appears simple, logical, and apposite in retrospect -- the sort of thing that makes you exclaim "of course!" upon hearing it -- it does not follow that anybody could have written it. (In some ways, I've been trying to pen something as elegant, true, and basic as "Soul Man" for my entire career, and I haven't even come close.)

See also:

Ta-Nehisi Coates (you already read Ta-Nehisi's blog every day, right?)

I came to Isaac Hayes from at least three angles. Hip-hop took me to his 70s joints which I kept on repeat during my early college years. Then hip-hop sent me to Stax (Marle Marl's "Symphony" to Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle"; Salt and Pepa's "Tramp" to Otis Redding and Carla Thomas's original.) I was down with that for awhile (Sam and Dave covering "Soothe Me", The Barkays "Holy Ghost" etc.) and then I found out that Isaac Hayes had basically built Stax as a composer, years before he became a solo act. I count that as Hayes basically living three times. Once as a composer and producer, once as a solo act in his own right, and then again through hip-hop.

[…]

Still the saddest thing, to me artistically, about Isaac Hayes' death is that it's a reminder that a certain class of black artists--I'm talking James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, George Clinton and maybe ending with Prince--is starting to depart the scene. It's not that these guys are somehow superior to the folks I came up on. They just had so much more leeway. My one hope about music business having to cope with online, is that maybe that sort of broad individualism and experimentalism can make a return.

Beneath The Underdog

Only thing I could do was wear my vintage “Black Moses” T-shirt and head out to a local bar in remembrance and reflect. There, I had to confront frustrations of many bar patrons not knowing what the “Black Moses” T-shirt was in reference to – many thought it was some hot T-shirt from H&M or Abercrombie & Fitch – then deal with annoyance of others reducing him to being the crazed black Scientologist who was the voice of Chef on South Park. If I got lucky, I ran into someone who could reference “The Theme from ‘Shaft’” but that was about it. Soon, I realized that it’ll be too exhausting to really talk about the breadth of Isaac Hayes’ legacy in a room full of debauchery. So I had to just go inward and grapple with my melancholy.

Growing up in Mississippi, which is very close to Memphis, Isaac Hayes represented many things to me. But the one that always stood out is his transformation — that a poor Black person from the segregated South could reinvent himself through art, become an international icon and not lose sight of where he came from. He beat the odds.

Matthew Guerrieri (Soho the Dog)

The big news yesterday, of course, was the death of Isaac Hayes over the weekend. I came to Hayes, like every other white kid I knew, through his soundtrack th Shaft, but I think my favorite song of his ended up being "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymystic,", the nine-and-a-half-minute laid-back epic that's only the third-longest track on his 1969 solo breakthrough album, Hot Buttered Soul. It's the sort of song that, when it comes up on shuffle play, all activity ceases, and I just sit around being an Isaac Hayes fan for ten minutes. I once read an appreciation of the song by some well-known DJ (DJ Spooky? One-half of The Chemical Brothers? The internet isn't helping me out here) who said that he would always spin the song at the end of a long evening, when it didn't seem like anyone else was listening anymore. That gets at what I always found to be one of Hayes' most distinguishing features, the way that, even in the most blazing song, he kept that quality of cool intimacy, like he was leaning in to tell you a particularly juicy secret.

Bill Gibron (PopMatters)

Last Interview (Rena Kosnett - LA Observed)

Ben Sisario (NYT)

Never can say goodbye

RIP Isaac Hayes. Damn.

Hayes played Prospect Park on June 13. Unfortunately, I was otherwise engaged, but everyone I know who saw it attested to its killingness.

UPDATE: Here's video:

RIP Hiram Bullock

I am late with this, but the Independent has a wonderful, heartbreaking obit of the former Gil Evans guitarist. As Ethan says, everyone knows his (great) solo on Sting's (not-great) cover of "Little Wing."

Here is a more recent clip, from last year's Wolfsburg Jazzfestival:

RIP Johnny Griffin

Griffin was one of the first great jazz musicians I saw live, at the Commodore Ballroom during the Vancouver Jazz Festival. I was clearly far too young to be at the Commodore but that was back when they had more of a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude towards carding minors. (Brian Nation surely knows the gig I'm talking about.)

Ben Ratliff (NYT)

Adam Bernstein (WaPo)

Peter Hum (Thriving on a Riff)

David Brent Johnson (WFIU Night Lights)

Peter Margasak (Chicago Reader)

Doug Ramsey (Rifftides)

David Adler (Lerterland)

Here's an example of what Griff did best: a burning uptempo blues from the Vanguard (1981) with Ronnie Matthews, Ray Drummond, and Kenny Washington:

RIP Ronnie Matthews

I saw him only once, but it was memorable: a duo concert with Charles Ellison (fluegelhorn) at Montreal's Concordia University, back in my first year of music school. I hadn't yet had the opportunity to hear many genuine masters live, so Matthews was a revelation. The communication between him and Ellison was uncanny, especially on the ballads -- they sounded like old friends.

We learned Matthews had terminal pancreatic cancer last month. There was a living tribute on June 23 at Sweet Rhythm, featuring the likes of Cedar Walton, Randy Weston, George Coleman, Sonny Fortune, Jimmy Heath, Louis Hayes, Gary Bartz, and more. I could not make it, much to my regret.

Doug Ramsey (Rifftides)
WFIU Night Lights
Angela Beener (WBGO)
Organissimo thread
Ethan Iverson (Do The Math)

The late John Hicks and Ronnie Mathews shared something similar in touch and piano attitude. (They could easily have subbed for each other on most of their gigs.) At its best, it felt like “the real thing.” I firmly believe that their style - and indeed, most straight-ahead jazz since the death of John Coltrane - is hard to capture on record. The music that Hicks and Mathews represent is too dependent on a communal feeling for it to be documented. It has less to do with Art than Culture. You need to be there, close to the bandstand, preferably in a small club, hopefully surrounded by other patrons who really love and understand the language.

So, the moral is, go see the older straight-ahead masters now. When they are gone, it is done.

Peter Keepnews (NYT)

Via Doug, here is a great 1981 clip of Matthews with Johnny Griffin, Ray Drummond, and Kenny Washington, playing Griffin's "A Monk's Dream" live at the Vanguard:

Seven words for me to say

Jay Smooth for the win. Again.

RIP George Carlin

Everyone's posting their favorite clips. Here's mine, seventy seconds of impeccable timing and deliciously trenchant commentary:

RIP Esbjörn Svensson

A complete shock. Details sketchy but here's what's known, according to a press release posted to All About Jazz:

He was in a company of divers on Saturday June 14th at a Swedish jetty/landing stage under supervision of a dive-leader when he was found severely injured at the bottom. Resuscitation was unsuccessful. The police will investigate the cause of Svensson's death.

Sincerest condolences to his family and loved ones. Ethan Iverson has a heartfelt appreciation of Svensson's influential and much-loved band, E.S.T.

UPDATE: EST were one of the few new jazz groups to have an audience beyond just hardcore jazzbos. For instance, I don't think I've ever seen an obit for a jazz musician at Brooklyn Vegan before.

Ian Patterson (All About Jazz):

The shocking news of the death of Swedish pianist Esbjorn Svensson in a diving accident off Stochholm, on Saturday 14th June, will surely deeply sadden music lovers everywhere.

I say music lovers, as opposed to strictly jazz lovers, as Svensson himself was neither restricted nor confined by categories, and was perhaps rather perplexed by the need of some to constantly attempt to define what jazz is.

Bruce Weber (NYT)
Phil Johnson (The Independent)
Andrea Canter, Jazz Police
David Adler, Lerterland

A Google blog search reveals tributes pouring in from all over -- most of them are not from jazz bloggers, but from listeners who found something resonant in EST's music.

From swerve of shore to bend of bay

Bob Brookmeyer on the late Bill Finegan:

Today is the funeral for Bill and the body goes into the ground. That is a strange place for my friend but the options just ran out. His daughter, Helen, is a PA so I was kept daily informed of the ups (few) and downs (sadly, many) of Bill's fight to continue his place in our world. At age 91 he had earned far more than he was given but to be great is not always to be rich and famous, as all musicians know well. My comment to students that "Bill had forgotten more than we would ever learn" still stands. He was a remarkably gifted man who felt that he had to work very hard to do well -- a surprising comment offered to me during our increasingly intimate relationship over the past ten or so years. It really started when his wife Rosemary became ill and I started a telephone campaign to keep his spirits engaged. How the whole thing started probably will help you out since this is the story of "Me and Bill" -- the only way I know how to tell it.

Read the whole thing.

RIP Bo Diddley

The man was something fierce -- the apotheosis of rhythmic authority. (Obviously, the notation above is wholly inadequate.) There is no purer joy than hearing Bo Diddley play rhtyhm guitar. If the authentic Bo Diddley beat doesn't take you places, I don't want to be your friend.

Other places: RJ Eskow in HuffPo.

That last tune ends with a derangement of the senses worthy of Rimbaud: "The night was black and the sky was blue/around the alley an ice wagon flew/... somebody screamed. Everybody here oughtta heard what I seen."

Neda Ulaby at NPR.org.

"I wrote a concerto that I wrote on the guitar," Diddley said. "It's called 'Bo's Concerto.'"

RIP Bob Florence (updated with Ingrid Jensen's reminiscence)

More info at All About Jazz and the Ventura County Star.

I knew him only slightly -- although I met him once at IAJE, our interactions were mostly via email -- but I was deeply impressed and flattered that he took such intense interest in what "the kids" were writing these days.

UPDATE: Ingrid Jensen writes in from Alaska:

Bob and I met a few minutes before we were to play on a faculty presents concert at the Port Townsend Jazz workshop, five years ago this summer. Alan Jones (drummer- Portland) and I were both curious and admittedly skeptical as to how the hit would go as we were both A) embarrassingly unaware of Bob's depth and legacy and B) wanting to hit hard and go "places."

Alan and I started in duo, rather ripping tempo-wise, as Bob and the bass player (Chuck Deardorf) hung out while we spun our little ego-wank for a minute or five. I played the head to cue things and when Bob came in on the B with, what is now famously referred to as the "chord of doom," we all about fell off the stage! He basically played the entire bridge of "Alone Together" with one massive sound that just about brought the roof down.

The rest is history and both Bob and his incredible wife, Evie became part of the beautiful family circle that I am so fortunate to be involved in.

When Jon and I married, Bob and Evie accepted our invitation and came all the way to Nanaimo to party with us.

Bob wrote this very sweet song (click to listen, right/ctrl-click to download) that he played during the service, a piece he presented to us the next day at the gift opening, written by hand in very large and perfectly executed calligraphy.

What a darling man and musician! One of my all-time favorite pianists ever, and an absolute joy to share the stage with.

With sadness and gratitude,

- Ingrid Jensen

Reactions from around Blogdonia:

jazz@centrum
Larry's Improv Page
Bish's Beat

Emphasis

Jimmy Giuffre (1921-2008)

In 1994, I had only just begun to buy jazz on CD (having finally upgraded from Walkman to Discman). So the prospect of obtaining four (four!) CDs for the price of one seemed a lot more exciting to me back when I only owned about a dozen CDs, total, than it probably seems to anyone today. But nonetheless, I assure you that I snapped up The Verve Story: 1944-1994 with considerable anticipation. My "collection," such as it was at the time, consisted entirely of discs by Miles, Coltrane, Bird, Heribe, Wayne, Monk, and Mingus -- here was a chance to hear music by older artists that I'd been told I needed to know about, but had not actually heard yet. So this box was, believe it or not, my first exposure to the likes of Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Ben Webster, Stan Getz, Lee Konitz, and others.

The standout cut, though -- the one that quite literally stopped me dead in my tracks the first time I heard it -- was Jimmy Giuffre's recording of "In the Mornings Out There," with Paul Bley (piano) and Steve Swallow (bass). The tune is by Carla Bley. I had never heard anything remotely like it before. I remember thinking, "Wow, this is what Kind of Blue would have sounded like if everyone on it played like Miles."

There is so much space on that cut. All of the usual jazz musician instincts -- to define the time and the harmony, to fill out the sound, and so on -- are completely inverted here. Paul Bley doesn't play any real chords at first. He just rocks back and forth between a pair of mid-register perfect fourths. Giuffre enters with a dark and breathy clarinet sound, moody and introspective and modernistic, a world removed from the swing-era clarinet sound. The first harmonic "change" comes purely by implication -- Giuffre plays Bb instead of B natural, while Bley doesn't change a thing. There are no chord roots to pin down the progression -- Steve Swallow doesn't play a note until a full minute into the tune. The time is ambiguous too, juxtaposing the 12/8 implied by the piano ostinato with an undercurrent of double-time 4/4 swing, most often invisible below a surface of long dark tones. The chiaroscuro mood, which other jazz musicians might have confined to a brief intro (like, for instance, Gil Evans's written piano-and-bass intro to "So What")  is sustained and developed for almost seven minutes. This could easily get precious or boring, but instead Giuffre's quiet, focused intensity is completely transfixing. It still grabs me just as hard today as it was when it first drifted over my Discman earbuds fourteen years ago.

Everyone has a handful of recordings that changed their lives. "In the Mornings Out There" changed mine. I didn't know music could be like that. Here it is:

MP3: "In The Mornings Out There," Jimmy Giuffre 3 (click to listen, right-click/control-click to download)

This track is originally from 1961's Fusion, the first Giuffre-Bley-Swallow trio record. Fusion and the followup, Thesis, recorded one month later, were originally released on Verve, but ECM's Manfred Eicher loved them so much he bought the masters and reissued them both on his own label as the 2 CD Jimmy Giuffre 3, 1961 -- which makes this track kind of an odd choice for inclusion on The Verve Story box set,  but I am certainly not complaining.

If the above track doesn't convince you that you need to own these albums, I don't know what to tell you. You can get them from Amazon or on iTunes. The third recording in this trilogy, Free Fall, is a lot more acerbic but inarguably brilliant.

There have been lots of great blogospheric appreciations of Giuffre, who died last Thursday from complications of the Parkinson's Disease that prematurely silenced his voice. The best is from trumpeter Kris Tiner at his spiffy new blog (#3, I believe), All At Once:

I have been profoundly inspired by this man's music, especially in the past couple of years. He was a true innovator, once heralded by the jazz press but eventually all but abandoned by them as he embraced open improvisation, atonality, microtonality and pulseless rhythm long before it became "acceptable" to do so. But I think the most significant thing (evidenced by his early 60s work in particular) is that he proved that free improvisation didn't have to abandon melody, and it certainly didn't have to abandon the intimacy and quiet dynamics of chamber music.

Read the whole thing. Kris has written a tune in memoriam of JG. He also links to some great videos of earlier editions of the Jimmy Giuffre 3 -- the Bley-Swallow outfit is rightly regarded as his greatest trio, but the bass-free one with Jim Hall and Bob Brookmeyer is also pretty killing, as you can see in this video). He also links to a downloadable live bootleg from 1961.

Other notable links:

Nik Payton, whose blog first broke the news.
Ted Gioia (Jazz.com) places Giuffre's music in the greater context of West Coast jazz.
Ben Ratliff (NYT)
Matt Schudel (WaPo) -- his piece has a nice quote from Brookmeyer.
Andrew Durkin (Jazz: The Music of Unemployment)
Doug Ramsey (Rifftides) -- it is astounding to think that the person who wrote a chestnut like "Four Brothers" for the Woody Herman band also made a record like Free Fall.
Mark Myers (JazzWax) has lots of recollections from West Coast jazz musicians.
blarney/rubble
Harris Eisenstadt (Tie a Bow Not A Knot)
David Brent Johnson (WFIU Night Lights)
Steve Schwartz (WGBH) -- this 1994 interview, conducted shortly after Giuffre had been diagnosed with Parkinson's, is a must-listen.

Also, Secret Society co-conspirator Mike McGinnis emailed me to say "I probably felt musically closer to him and Lacy than any other musicians.  I guess it's up to us to keep it all going."

RIP Jimmy Giuffre

Nik Payton reports that the great Jimmy Giuffre has passed, just a few days shy of his 87th birthday.

More later.

And your grownups all gone bankrupt

It's not our fault, I swear...

Open letter from IAJE President Chuck Owen

Reactions from around the blogosphere:

Doug Ramsey (Rifftides)

Howard Mandel (Jazz Beyond Jazz)

David Adler (Lerterland)

James Hale (Jazz Chronicles)

Andrea Canter (JazzInkBlog)

Willard Jenkins (The Independent Ear) -- see also Willard's April 4 post, which has generated a lot of heated discussion.

It's a bit surreal to think that we performed at the final IAJE conference. Evidently the organization's leadership was a bit of a mess (to, um, put it mildly), but I heard many unforgettable performances at conferences past: Bob Brookmeyer, Clark Terry, Maria Schneider, John Hollenbeck, Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, Josh Redman's early 1990's quartet with Brad Mehldau, Ingrid Jensen, Matt Wilson's Arts and Crafts, and his also his quartet with Andrew D'Angelo (wherein Andrew infamously smashed his saxophone to the ground and began to stomp on it), the Industrial Jazz Group...

Links to my tourblogging posts related to our IAJE 2008 appearance can be found here. And here's my coverage of the penultimate IAJE conference:

IAJE 2007: Day 1. Day 2. Day 3. Photos Day 2. Photos Day 3.

He was some kind of a man... What does it matter what you say about people?

RIP Charlton Heston.

Whatever you may think of his talent, his body of work, or his politics, he was (probably) instrumental in getting Orson Welles hired to direct Touch of Evil.

Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point in Memphis. We've got to see it through.

MLK was killed forty years ago today.

Here is a tremendous video of the John Coltrane quartet playing "Alabama." The melody is based on the cadences of Martin Luther King's oratory.

Also: Read Digby.

One of the things I think people may not completely grok about us loathsome and reviled baby boomers is that our politically formative years were a little bit unusual --- when we were young our leaders and heroes kept getting assassinated. You can imagine how that might shape a person's view of politics. Fortunately that hasn't happened in a long time, which is something we should be grateful for. But for a while, in the 60s, it seemed to kids like me that this was normal.

RIP Jules Dassin

The above is an image from Dassin's Rififi, one of my favorite films of all time. Dassin directed and also played Cesar the safecracker, pictured above. The movie is famous for a 30-minute tour-de-force B&E + safecracking scene, in which the team of jewel thieves go about their work without speaking a single word. They are, after all, professionals.

The movie is a terrific heist flick, beautifully shot in a late noir style and very influential on the French New Wave directors. François Truffaut called it the best noir he'd ever seen, and I'm inclined to agree.

But it is also, in its own oblique way, a response to McCarthyism, the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Hollywood Blacklist.

Dassin was on that blacklist. His name looks French, but Jules was born in Middletown, Connecticut (in 1911), and grew up in Harlem. Like a lot of Americans of the time, he was disgusted by the iniquity and brutality of robber baron capitalism, and joined the Communist party in the 1930's.

Dassin said in 2002 (quoted again in his NYT obit):

“You grow up in Harlem where there’s trouble getting fed and keeping families warm, and live very close to Fifth Avenue, which is elegant,” he told the newspaper. “You fret, you get ideas, seeing a lot of poverty around you, and it’s a very natural process.”

As the obit goes on to say, he left the party in 1939, Stalin's nonaggression pact with Hitler being the final straw. But despite having severed his ties with the Party, Dassin was nonetheless swept up in the anti-Communist witch-hunt of the early 1950's. He was fingered by two of his fellow directors.

Dassin refused to indict others in turn, and fled to Europe, his career in tatters. Even there, he could not find work -- US distributors made it clear to the European studios that they would not carry any film with his name on it. After five years of this, now completely broke and desperate, he finally managed to land a gig on a low-budget adaptation of a trashy, pulpy French novel.

The film he made is stunning, brilliant, almost note-perfect. I think it's one of the greatest movies ever made. I wish I could afford to buy everyone reading this blog a copy of the Criterion DVD. It's really that good. (After that, you'll want to go check out his earlier films, especially Brute Force, The Naked City, and Night and the City.)

For more, read filmmaker Jamie Hook's beautiful essay on the film, "Love Made Invisible."

And from around the blogosphere:

Campaspe (Self-Styled Siren) on the appalling AP obit:

It's been sixty years, people. You can stop pretending that protecting us all from Jules Dassin movies was essential for national security.

Matt Browner Hamlin (Hold Fast):

Seriously, just watch Rififi and you’ll find about a third of Tarantino’s themes.

noirFAN on Night and the City:

But Dassin doesn’t let us sit back and gawk at the grotesquery of the characters. Instead, he pulls us into their world, makes us feel for them as their dreams fall apart- even pulls off one of the most difficult tricks in storytelling- creating empathy for characters on both sides of a conflict so that we gain no easy satisfaction from the triumph of one side over the other, just an escalating tension which resolves itself into sickening inevitability.

Glenn Kenny (Premiere.com)

Dassin's run of pictures between 1947 and 1955—Brute Force, The Naked City, Thieves Highway, Night and the City and Rififi—was about as inspired as any director ever pulls off, and Dassin didn't break his stride of inspiration even as he was going into exile.

UPDATE: Issa Clubb at On Five: The Criterion Colletion Blog:

As a person, he belied the “great director as tyrant” stereotype—there was something elegant, sophisticated, and almost gentle about him. For one thing, as much as we tried to get him to talk about the blacklist, he was extremely reticent to do so. He refused to “name names,” which I suppose would have been out of character. He would only specifically mention people who had gone out of their way to combat the hysteria—especially pointing out Gene Kelly. But Dassin refused to talk about the people who had taken the easy way out. The one person whom he reserved the right to speak ill of was Roy “I Can Tell in Five Minutes If a Person Is a Communist” Brewer.

I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.

RIP Arthur C. Clarke.

RIP Dennis Irwin

UPDATE: You must read this post from Dennis Irwin's brother Dave, who was at the March 10 benefit concert that sadly became a memorial concert.

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He was just 56 years old. My sincerest condolences to Dennis's family and loved ones. Cancer fucking bites.

Read Ethan's tribute.

[via The Jazz Clinic}

Vanguard Jazz Orchestra
dennisirwin.org
Richard Kamins (Hartford Courant blog)
David Adler (Lerterland)
Ben Ratliff (NYT)
Jeff Tamarkin (Jazz Times)
Doug Ramsey (Rifftides)

Blogger and journalist Spencer Ackerman, who is a friend of Dennis's son Mike.

RIP Teo Macero

A belated shout-out to [rasp] Teeeeee-o.

Kyle Gann reminds everyone that Teo was also a composer in his own right.

One of the saddest things I witnessed during my time at New England Conservatory came during a visit by Macero, who had been welcomed to the school as a guest artist. The concert in his honor was to include several of his orchestral works, to be performed by the NEC Orchestra. The students in this ensemble threw an abominable hissy fit at the idea that they be required to perform Macero's music, which they considered beneath them. They took their complaints to the Dean, and if I recall correctly, they had the backing of several classical teachers at the school. The concert went ahead, but you can imagine what the rehearsals were like.

Anyway, more obits here:

Ben Ratliff (NYT)
Phil Freeman (Running the Voodoo Down)
James Hale (Jazz Chronicles)

And via WMFU, a YouTube video:

RIP Oscar Peterson

Between the holidays and the preparations for the tour, there's little time to blog and so I am rather late with this, but I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention the passing of the lion of Canadian jazz musicians. Everyone knows his chops were fearsome, but I always greatly preferred relaxed, swinging Oscar to The School of Velocity Oscar. He sounded his best when he played like he didn't have anything to prove.

There's a lot of of Oscar on YouTube, but this clip from 1958 is the best:

Don't miss David Ryshpan's post, J.D. Considine's Globe and Mail obit (though his list of "players whose ideas were stronger than their technique" is perplexing), and Richard Severo's piece in the NYT -- the accompanying photo is hard to look at, but speaks to Oscar's tenacity -- he continued to practice his art until the very end.

Headline news had me so abused

This headline is wretched even by New York Post Post standards.

[Via Phil.]

Amanda has a conflicted but clear-eyed post about Ike's passing -- as she says, it is curious that someone who was "just one of many, many, many men of genius in history who was also a violent, wife-beating nightmare of a person — will be one of the few remembered more for the evil in him than the beauty." Unlike his contemporary, James Brown, Ike's musical legacy became completely obscured by his penchant for domestic violence. Rather than being remembered as the father of rock and roll, he effectively became Wife Beater Number One. No doubt this has mostly to do with the fact that the person he was beating on all those years wasn't some anonymous woman with no public presence of her own -- she was his musical partner, a star in her own right long before she left him. But Tina's best and most lasting work remains the sides she cut with her husband, a great musician and awful human being. It's not like the former excuses the latter, obviously. But it shouldn't erase it, either.

UPDATE: Jon Pareles obit (NYT).

RIP Karlheinz Stockhausen

While recovering from my car accident, I studied a lot more of Stockhausen's concepts of music. I got further and further into the idea of performance as a process. I had always written in a circular way and through Stockhausen I could see that I didn't want to ever play again from eight bars to eight bars, because I never end songs; they just keep going on. [...] Through Stockhausen I understood music as a process of elimination and addition. Like "yes" only means something after you have said "no."

— Miles: The Autobiography, Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe

Paul Griffiths (NYT obit)

Alex Ross

Thread at Sequenza 21

sharkskin girl (Obscene Jester) deftly addresses the infamous "9/11 = greatest work of art in the whole of the cosmos" controversy.

Photo of Stockhausen at Disneyland (1966) by Betty Freeman. Image stolen from The Standing Room.

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A gentle reminder that our fall fundraiser is in full swing. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation.

RIP Joe Zawinul

Give it up for the guy who wrote "In A Silent Way" -- surely one of the prettiest melodies of all time.

AP
Reuters
All About Jazz
Steve Smith (Night After Night)
Larry Blumenfeld (ListenGood)

Joe Zawinul was one badass mutha. At 70, he could swim a mile, hard. Or outdrink you, glass after glass of that sweet Slivovitz wine he favored. Or kick your ass -- OK, maybe just scare you in to to thinking he would with a single glare.

Yonga Sun

Google Blog Search

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UPDATE 1: I was out at Queens College today giving a masterclass, so I didn't have time to post anything substantial earlier, but I definitely think Joe Zawinul is an important composer, and a genuine harmonic innovator. He welded McCoy Tyner-derived fourth chords and extended jazz harmonies to rock/pop root motion, basically setting the palette for 1970's electric jazz. I'm by no means a Zawinul expert, but I did spend some time during my formative years checking out the keyboard voicings and characteristic chord progressions Joe used with Weather Report. This is an influence that still manifests itself all over my music, sometimes in unexpected places -- for instance, there's a whole section of "Chrysalis" (from about 3:40 to 4:45) where the harmonies are straight out of mid-1970's Zawinul.

Obviously, he was a technological trailblazer, but unlike many (okay, most) fusion and prog bands, in Weather Report the music was never upstaged by the gear. Joe made the cutting-edge synths and electric pianos we now refer to as "vintage" speak in his own voice, which is actually a pretty remarkable achievement if you think about it -- you only need to hear a few seconds of any Zawinul recording to know it's him, no matter what kind of rig he's using.

Here is an excerpts from the Joe Zawinul interview from The Great Jazz Pianists -- I think it goes some of the way towards explaining how a working-class kid from Austria ended up where he did:

When did you first start playing piano?

Actually, I started on accordion and played it for several years. We didn't have a piano. Of course, in Austria during the war there wasn't anything going on musically. Later on I started learning the piano like everyone else. Nothing special. I played a lot of gigs like weddings and entertainment music. My academic training is a pretty dubious matter, although I had a great teacher once in Austria. Her name was Valerie Zschorney and she was a pupil of a Professor Wingartner, who was a pupil of Franz Liszt. I went once a week for a few years, but I didn't take it seriously. I was out there on the streets. When I was eighteen, I got into an orchestra where there was a lot of reading to do. The reading you do at home, where you can practice, is one thing, but going into an orchestra, where you get a score that's nothing but notes, is completely different. To be a musician in Austria, you've got to play a lot of different stuff. It's an international place. We used to play in nightclubs, walking around to the different tables playing horas and gypsy music. That was on accordion. I loved it.

When did you start to take music seriously?

Tomorrow.

Did you play any other instruments besides piano and accordion?

Oh, man, I played trombone, bass trombone, clarinet, trumpet. This was in Friedrich Gulda's band, one of the best jazz bands in Europe. In my home every real musician plays a lot of instruments. In this band we played everything, even Strauss overtures. You can't play jus one instrument in Europe and ever become what they call a Muzikant. Everybody had to learn all the instruments to be considered a real musician. I wrote arrangements down from Woody Herman and Dizzy Gillespie records. That's another way I learned. The more instruments you know, the better you write. You have to know what's possible on the instruments. I can get a clarinet sound from a synthesizer not because there's a button that says "clarinet" but because I can blow the thing myself.

How did you get interested in electronic keyboards -- first of all, the electric piano you played in the sixties?

I was turned on by electric instruments for the first time in 1949, when I was playing in an American servicemen's club in Austria. They had a Hammond organ in the mess hall, and I played every afternoon when nobody else was around. I played a lot of organ in the fifties and made a record on it over there. After Maynard's band, I worked with Dinah Washington for two years, and we once went on a tour with Ray Charles. He carried a sixty-six key Wurlitzer around, and he was really the first person I'd ever heard on electric piano. On a gig down South, we came across a really dead piano, so Dinah asked if we could use the Wurlitzer. It was beautiful. They had the same kind of Wurlitzer in the Capitol studio when I was recording there with Cannonball Adderley in the mid-sixties, so I recorded "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" on it. I carried the Wurlitzer on the road for a while, until Victor Feldman told me that Rhodes made a piano that was really smokin'. I got one. Miles Davis heard me play on it and liked it, and then Herbie got one, and later we recorded In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew using it.

What was your introduction to synthesizer?

I was reading about Milton Babbitt and wondering about people like Morton Subotnick and John Cage. I could hear that there was really something in those instruments, although their music always seemed sort of pulled out of a hat to me. At that time I was in Cannonball's band, just making enough to survive, I couldn't afford anything new. Later on Weather Report went to Boston, and I met Roger Powell, who was working for ARP. He showed me some basics, and I've slowly been moving along since then.

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UPDATE 2: More links...

WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Miles Davis' "In a Silent Way", for which Zawinul composed the title cut, is one of my all time favorite albums. Zawinul was picked to participate on it the night before the recording session and was asked to "bring music". The composition he brought was pared down by Miles (who thought there were "too many chords") and then was ultimately re-arranged by producer Teo Marceo who artfully cut and pasted various sections of the recording into its final state. Zawinul's drone organs were the glue that held it all together...

Emalsye (Stuff-Em-Up the hill backwards)

He was electronic music without the cold mechanistic tones of sequencers and with enough musicality and free creativity to reach out beyond any narrow muso only elitest genre.

Sturgell (mog.com)

“There is no difference between a Stradivarius or a beautiful synthesizer sound,” Zawinul told Jazziz magazine earlier this year. “People make a big mistake in putting down electronic music. Yes, it’s been misused and abused, but that’s true of every music. There is nothing wrong with electronic music as long as you’re putting some soul behind the technology.”

Ethan Iverson (Do The Math)

The technique of music doesn't know race. Only environment matters, but even that can be a red herring.  Perhaps the most obvious man to illustrate this still-debated point is Joe Zawinul, who died today. Zawinul had such a passion for funky black American music that he overcame the severe handicap of being born in Austria before becoming an essential member of Cannonball Adderley's band in the 1960's. For some, Zawinul's piano work with Adderley is more in the pocket than his predecessor, Bobby Timmons.

Phil Gallo (Variety.com)

Every other fusion band  wanted to fall into a groove and sit there or else clobber the listener over the head with  blazing instrumental passages. Weather Report occupied a spot alone in that world.

Pat Donaher (visionsong.com)

I bumped into Danilo Perez today, who was terribly bummed. He'd seen [Zawinul] at a festival this summer, and gushed about it. He will be missed.

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UPDATE 3: Here is some crazy early Weather Report (1971), playing Zawinul's "Directions" (a staple of Miles's Cellar Door sets):

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UPDATE 4: Tributes and obits still coming in -- keep checking Google News and Google Blog Search. The JazzTimes piece is a good one.

But Zawinul, influenced by the great American jazz pianists, among them Duke Ellington, Erroll Garner and George Shearing, had his sights set on the United States, and he landed here in 1959, a scholarship for the Berklee College of Music in hand. He stayed in school exactly one week before hooking up with trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, in whose band Zawinul remained for eight months. A two-year stint with Dinah Washington was followed by a nine-year residency with Cannonball Adderley’s quintet. Zawinul is largely credited with modernizing that band, which enjoyed a major hit on the pop charts in 1967 with Zawinul’s composition “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.” Zawinul also penned “Country Preacher,” a 1969 Adderley recording that honored the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Here's a fun clip of Joe with the Cannonball Adderley Sextet in 1962, on a TV show called "Jazz Scene USA," hosted by Oscar Brown Jr. -- this is "Primitivo":

UPDATE 5: Damn, Wayne Shorter's comments in the LA Times obit are fucking heartbreaking:

"The only thing that he said to me," he recalled, "was something really quick: 'I've got this cancer, man.' He just kind of tossed it off. Not that he was in denial. It was more like he was talking about a nuisance. That was Joe."

In August, Shorter, finishing a European tour, visited Zawinul at a concert in Hungary. Although they had spoken several times about a Weather Report reunion, it had never actually taken place.

"As we drove in from the airport," said Shorter, "his son said that this could be the last time Joe and I would play together. When we got to the concert, I went on stage near the end of his program. Joe and I did the introduction to 'In A Silent Way,' which is the part that his wife, Maxine, liked. When we played together, it was very concise and to the point -- very eye to eye, that kind of thing. When we finished they got a wheelchair, and that was the first time, and the last time, I saw him in a wheelchair."

DJ Durutti has blogged movingly about what Zawinul's music has meant to him:

Zawinul, Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorious and the rest of Weather Report were responsible for creating and nurturing my interest in love for and obsession with jazz as a kid in the 1970s. I can't even begin to tell you how important Weather Report's 1977 release Heavy Weather and Jaco Pastorius' 1976 debut albums were to my musical development. Weather Report and Herbie Hancock's jazz funk sent me exploring Miles Davis' Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way. Both of those landmark albums --- which remain favorites to this day -- benefited tremendously from Zawinul's compositions, organ, and electric piano work.

He has also posted Joe's own recording of "In A Silent Way" (from 1970's Zawinul). The chords and melodic gestures that Miles excised have been restored. The indescribably beautiful theme is played on soprano sax by a very Wayne-sounding Earl Turbinton (who, I am sad to learn, is also recently deceased) . If you haven't heard this version before, you need to.

WaPo:

Mr. Zawinul, who performed with a towering bank of electronic keyboards and synthesizers, won the "Best Keyboardist" award from Down Beat magazine 21 times. But his forays into electronica led some critics and musicians to accuse him of abandoning the traditions of swing, restraint and balance that are at the core of jazz.

In 1990, pianist Barry Harris said that groups such as Weather Report had "ceased to be jazz musicians."

"I know the cats like Joe Zawinul can play all the standards," Harris said, "but they haven't been jazz musicians for 10 or 15 years."

In his defense, Mr. Zawinul said he was interested only in "Zawinul music," not in conforming to any particular style.

Doug Ramsey (Rifftides):

On one of those occasions, with Joe grinning and shaking his head, Cannon told the story of "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy." They made the recording in a studio full of guests who were fed and served drinks as if the setting were a club. The issued take was not the one he wanted. He thought the band was better on an earlier version, the one that had a Zawinul solo so hot, so funky, that a woman in the audience yelled, "Play it, you little white darlin'." A Capitol Records executive, nervous in the racial climate of the sixties, rejected the take.

David Adler (Lerterland):

I'll go out on a limb and say Miles Davis couldn't have done it without him.

UPDATE 6:

NYT (Peter Keepnews)

It was uncommon then for a black bandleader like Adderley to hire a white sideman like Mr. Zawinul and touring could be problematic. “I often had to sit in the bottom of the car when we drove through certain parts of the South,” Mr. Zawinul said in a 1997 interview. But, he added, with characteristic bravado, “Those kinds of things never fazed me; I wanted to play music with the best, and I could play on that level with the best.”

Mike Sheehan (Scholars & Rogues)

I loved Weather Report, but the Zawinul recording that made the most impact on me was his 1986 solo masterpiece ‘Dialects.’ I have yet to hear keyboards come more alive on any work in any genre since.

RIP Hilly Kristal

NYT  (Ben Sisario)
Village Voice (Camille Dodaro)
Jen Carlson (Gothamist)
Brooklyn Vegan (w/MP3s from some of the classic CB's scene bands)
FreeIndie.com

I never met the dude, but Secret Society got our start at CB's, which I always felt was fitting.

Here's an excerpt from Hilly's online history of CBGB:

The beginning of what we now think of as CBGB came early on. I was on a ladder in front of the club fixing the awning in place, when I looked down to notice three scruffy dudes in torn jeans and T shirts looking up at me inquisitively.

"WHAT'S GOIN' ON?" or something of that nature, was the question they asked.

They were Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell, and Richard Lloyd, three of the four members of the rock group "Television." A few days later, Terry Ork, Television's manager came around to try and get the band a gig at CBGB.

He was a pudgy little dynamo with a penchant for non-stop talking; energy and enthusiasm up to here. He believed Television was going to be the hottest new sound since John Cage first played his "clothes line."
Since at that time we weren't open on Sunday, I decided to give Television a try out, about three and a half weeks hence, on a Sunday.

The admission was one dollar. ----It was not an impressive debut (at least not in my opinion). There were only a few paid customers and not too many more friends. They not only didn't pay admission but didn't have any money for drinks.

I thought the band was terrible; screechy, ear-splitting guitars and a jumble of sounds that "I just didn't get." I said, " NEVER AGAIN!!!" After much cajoling and haranguing, however, Terry Ork persuaded me to let them play again with another "hot' new rock group from Forest Hills, Queens. They were called "The Ramones." Terry said that the Ramones had a big following and the combination of the two bands will make a great show. I thought, "What the hell, what do we have to lose!!?....Ha!"

Well the anticipated night came, and there were not many more people than before.

As for the Ramones, they were even worse than Television. At that first gig at CBGB, they were the most untogether group I'd ever heard.

They kept starting and stopping-equipment breaking down- and yelling at each other. They were a mess.

Little did I suspect that both Television and the Ramones would eventually get it together and become two of the most important punk bands of the 70's.

It taught me to be more forgiving in judging new bands, and to listen a little more closely. I think both the Ramones and Television teach a valuable lesson for aspiring artists. They were wonderfully talented, they believed in themselves, they had integrity, they were persistent, and they worked hard. The Ramones to this day have millions of fans all over the world and to many kids they are still the quintessential punk band. Television was an inspiration and a great influence on bands that came after. Rock critics today, still rate Television's debut album as one of the ten best albums of the 70's.

Since their inauspicious beginnings, both groups have played over a hundred sets each at CBGB.

UPDATE: Brooklyn Vegan has pictures of the impromptu shrine fans set up yesterday outside the skeletal remains of CB's.

Dr. Free-Zee

Drummers aren't supposed to be intellectuals. The instrument is so direct and intense that it purportedly attracts only your more, ah... physical types. We all know the jokes — Q. How can you tell if the stage is level? A. The drummer is drooling out of both sides of his mouth. And so on.

Max Roach was an intellectual — the best kind of intellectual. He was constantly pushing against the boundaries of what was expected of him as a drummer, as a jazz musician, as an African-American artist. He started his career by creating the template for modern jazz drumming, taking Kenny Clarke's proto-bebop style and making it more conversational and interactive. His playing propelled Bird and Diz to new heights -- their best moments all came with Max behind the kit. He was just as concerned about color and timbre as he was about timekeeping, and his playing is shot through with intricate details and subtle shadings. He is legendary for coming up with truly oddball choices and making them work, somehow. (See Ethan's post for a few great examples of this.) His solos are models of rigorous, methodical development.

Like Blakey, in 1954 he co-founded a canonical hard bop band, and like Blakey, he eventually assumed sole leadership of the group. Unlike Blakey, though, Max contributed original compositions to the band. In fact, even while he was one of the busiest drummers in jazz, he had also been enrolled as a composition major at the Manhattan School of Music. (He graduated in 1952.)

At a time where virtually no one played tunes in 3/4, Max released an entire record of them. Then he went on to prove he could play just as effortlessly in 5/4 and 7/4, both in his own groups and alongside the young firebrand Booker Little.

In 1958, he played (beautifully) on Sonny Rollins's Freedom Suite. The record doesn't sound angry or solemn or even overtly political — it's classic Sonny, ebullient and witty. I mean, Side B opens with a Noel Coward tune, and the 19-minute title track is vibrant, tuneful, singsong-y. But because the sleeve included a brief authorial note from Sonny, which shockingly observed that "America is deeply rooted in Negro culture," the record was quickly pulled, stripped of its original liner notes, and reissued as Shadow Waltz.

Two years later, Max came out with a blisteringly explicit political statement of his own, consisting entirely of his original compositions. The title literally shouts in your face — WE INSIST! Max  Roach's Freedom Now Suite. It's possibly the only jazz record to open with a song that begins with a slave getting raped. The vocals are by Max's wife-to-be, Abbey Lincoln, who on the vocal-drum duet "Triptych (Prayer, Protest, Peace)," combines some of the most beautifully poignant singing you've ever heard with full-throttle screaming that makes Yamatsuka Eye sound like a piker. And it closes with the haunting "Tears for Johannesburg," decades before the horrors of South African apartheid were anywhere close to being on white America's radar -- after all, we had only just barely begun to acknowledge our homegrown apartheid. The Freedom Now Suite is among of the most powerful, innovative, and artistically coherent political works ever — in any genre, in any artform. (You can listen to the second cut, "Freedom Day," over at Destination Out.)

In 1962, he released another record of original compositions, It's Time, augmenting his sextet with a 16-piece choir. He also thought it might be fun to play on one of the most kickass piano trio records ever.

In 1970, he enlisted some of the best jazz drummers around to start his own all-percussion ensemble, M'Boom, presaging Steve Reich's Drumming by a year. Joe Chambers recalls:

[A]lthough I had been playing piano, I really didn’t ever think of playing the mallets until [Max] called me and the rest of the [M'Boom] members in 1970 — it was 1970, in the summer of ‘70 — with the idea to this and I remember I said that I was very excited to get the call and I said “Damn! What are we going to do? Have six guys on a drums set?” (laughs) Max said “No, no, no. We’re going to play percussion.” So we had to learn all of this. That’s when I really got into this.

He built on his M'Boom experience to create solo percussion concerts. And in 1979, up at Columbia, he played a legendary duo concert with Cecil Taylor, having absorbed enough of Cecil's language to meet him on his own terms. But by exerting his own gravitational force, Max was able to eventually draw Cecil into his orbit.

In the 1980s, he began writing music for the stage, and for dance companies -- Bill T. Jones, Alvin Ailey, and others. He augmented his working quartet with the Uptown String Quartet, led by his daughter Maxine -- this was the first string quartet with the rhythmic authority to play jazz convincingly. And in 1983, just in case anyone needed any further evidence that Max Roach didn't give a damn what the retrograde forces in jazz thought, he played a hit at The Kitchen with Fab Five Freddy.

Here is a video that includes footage of some of these late-career creative highlights, along with terrific commentary from Max:

Many of the obits so far have focused on Max Roach's well-deserved place in the pantheon of the greatest drummers of all time. There is no question that he deserves every last one of those accolades. Hell, he deserves them for the first five years of his career alone. But Max Roach was so much more than "just" a brilliant, innovative, prolific, sensitive, massively influential, swing-your-ass-off jazz drummer. He was an artist — a great one, and, paradoxically, an underrated one, despite all the accolades. His most personal and creative works aren't widely known, even amongst jazz musicians and aficionados.

It would have been easy for him to rest on his laurels, but Max lived a life of constant artistic renewal. He always kept his ears open to what was going on in the jazz scene, and in the culture at large. He found a way to let the fight for civil rights and social justice enrich his music and broaden, not limit, its scope. He idolized older players, especially Papa Jo Jones, but he never let his love for the past constrain his vision of the future. His career spanned almost 70 years, and every single one of them was spent setting new challenges for himself — as a player, as a composer, as an artist.

I can't think of anyone who exemplifies what I personally love about music better than Max Roach. I never met him, but I will miss him dearly.

RIP Max Roach

Via Steve Smith and David Ryshpan.

What I was listening to when I found out.

More later.

UPDATE 1:

NYT  — Peter Keepnews.

TONY blog — Hank Shteamer.

Foucault's Lunchbox — Crawjo.

Who Walk In Brooklyn. (Max was a Brooklyn kid -- he grew up in Bed-Stuy.)

3 Quarks Daily — Robin Varghese.

There was a semester in the late 1980s at UMass, where both Roach and Shepp taught, during which they would have weekly afternoon sessions in the Hatch, one the university bars. There was never really more than 8 of us in the audience. The happy hour beers were $1.50 or so. A half a dozen private concerts by Roach and Shepp--my introduction to jazz. Enviable, no?

Vast Wasteland — Chris.

Bryan Vargas.

UPDATE 2:

SpiderMonkey Stories — Taylor Ho Bynum.

But as amazing as he was as a drummer, we must be sure to celebrate him as far more than simply a master instrumentalist. (Though for that alone, he earned immortality.) As I got to learn more about his career, and heard more from other musicians who were friends and collaborators of his, like Braxton or Cecil Bridgewater or Warren Smith, I saw what a profoundly innovative and truly revolutionary artist he was. He refused to accept the boundaries imposed upon him by others, be it race or genre or discipline; he exploded definitions while creating art that was relevant, vibrant, and always searching.

Soho the Dog —  Matthew Guerrieri.

It's probably not an exaggeration to say that Roach changed drumming the way Liszt changed piano playing.

Via Phil Freeman (Running The Voodoo Down), this classic clip:

Lerterland — David Adler.

Howard Mandel (Jazz Beyond Jazz) has an interview with Max (drawn from his upcoming book), and some thoughts of his own.

Chicago Tribune — Larry McShane.

His place in the pantheon of jazz greats long since secured, Roach collaborated with drummers from around the world, with a string quartet that featured daughter Maxine, and with rapper Fab Five Freddy.

"I try to show my students the correlation between hip-hop and Louis Armstrong," he once said. "That's how well-rooted hip-hop is, coming out of an environment where people were denied any kind of cultural enrichment."

Gary Susman — Popwatch.

But maybe that appellation "old guard" didn't really suit Roach, a rebel who never stopped challenging the formal boundaries of jazz. Forget what I wrote a couple paragraphs ago; Max Roach never grew old.

Matt Schudel — WaPo.

This only scratches the surface — for more, try this Google Blog Search and Google News Search. There are many more great clips on YouTube.

I'll have my own remembrance up once I get the chance to collect my thoughts.

UPDATE 3:

Doug Ramsey — Rifftides.

The winner, Carl Payne, a gripman who over the years won the contest ten times, showed up one afternoon at Keystone Korner with a cable car bell mounted on a frame. Roach was waiting at his drum set. Mr. Payne could meter on that cumbersome brass bell. He invented patterns that stimulated Max and the two spent a half hour or so playing for, to and with one another. I have never heard anything quite like it -- Max Roach trading fours with a cable car gripman. It made a good story on that evening's six o'clock newscast, and a memory that has stayed with me for a quarter of a century.

Destination Out.

Many obits will stick to those historic moments and they are indeed impressive. But Max Roach never rested on his laurels. Like few others, he spanned jazz history from bebop to the furthest reaches of the avant garde. And unlike many of his peers, Roach restlessly sought to play in different contexts and embrace new musical modes. He embodied the idea that music was one great continuum and shredded the received notion the avant and the tradition were somehow at odds.

UPDATE FOUR:

Ethan Iverson — Do The Math. (Be sure to check out the audio clips.)

The 1953 records of "Confirmation" and "Chi-Chi" with Al Haig and Percy Heath feature the highest-level ensemble playing recorded in a studio with Parker.  If Percy and Max showed up anywhere in the world right now playing just how they played for Bird in 1953 they could take anybody's gig.  (This is not true of the performances of the bass and drums on most classic bebop.)

Pat Donaher — Visionsong.

UPDATE FIVE:

Me.

UPDATE SIX:

The tributes keep pouring in:

NPR's Morning Edition. (With links to his appearances on Jazz Profiles and Piano Jazz.)

Ben Ratliff (NYT) has a selected discography, with commentary. Unfortunately, he lists nothing from between 1962 and 1989. Many of these recordings are unfortunately out of print (including the double quartet dates), but you can get the first (self-titled) M'Boom record, Birth and Rebirth (duets with Braxton), and In The Light (with his 80's quartet) from iTunes.

Kris Tiner — Stop the Play and Watch the Audience.

If only so many of those who will be lauding Roach from the lofty edifice of jazz education would recognize that he didn't just help to create a style, but that he continued to push the music, and continued to recognize and support others who were pushing the music, far past the crystallization point of bebop in the 1950s.

Andrew Durkin — Jazz: The Music of Unemployment.

We all mourn in our own way, of course; what's "appropriate" is what feels right. As for me, I choose the celebratory mode, both in pondering Max's life and the "state of jazz." For one thing, Max's contribution to music (indeed, to art) was not limited to something finite, like the elements of a style (he swung in such and such a way, he pioneered the use of this piece of the kit, etc.). Those things are of course important, but like Ellington, Zappa, Mingus, Monk, and umpteen other heroes of mine, Max left behind what Joseph Conrad called a "how to be": in this case, a philosophy of artistic survival, vitality, and growth (one of the elements of which was a sense that art is socially important -- imagine that!).

Dave Rawkblog — The Rawking Refuses To Stop! gives it up for Money Jungle.

[T]his is not an Ellington album any more than it is a Roach album or a Mingus album. Everyone deserves top billing here, and they certainly earn it: take the title track, where Mingus goes nuts with desperate high-fret machine-gunning before slipping back to the lower register and letting Roach take center stage.

Nolan Strong — allhiphop.com.

"Hip-Hop is complete theater," Roach told the Los Angeles Times in 1991. "These kids don't have rhetoric courses, so they've created their own script in rhyme--it's verbal improvisation. They don't have formal musical training, so they make music from the tones and rhythms of human speech--they'll sample Malcolm X saying, 'Too black, too strong.' They've even created their own instrument--the turntable. They have nothing but the inclination to be involved. And like Louis Armstrong, out of nothing they create something."

Jason Chervokas — newcritics.

The jazz world today–like the world of constitutional interpretation–is lousy with neocons seeking to etch the old verities in stone, protecting them from heretical impurity. But for Roach jazz was a living art form and the spirit of jazz WAS the spirit of innovation, that’s why, in his teens he could play with Duke Ellington and in his 60s he could play with Fab Five Freddy. There’s no doubt that Roach’s legacy as a drummer is secure. But I suspect that for Roach, a man who was both musician and educator, his lessons of innovation and imagination would be just as important.

Kenneth Woods — A View From The Podium.

He was a virtuoso in the best sense of the word, but also a poet- no drummer ever had a sweeter touch or a more effortless sense of swing. Jazz fans like to talk about how hard a drummer swings, but with Max Roach it never sounded hard, but cool and electric.

Mark — The Oak Room.

On a personal level, he was a key figure in opening my eyes and ears to jazz in particular and a wider range of musical possibility in general. In high school, when I was still at the stage where Neal Peart seemed like the pinnacle of percussion prowess, Roach gave a clinic that I attended. I was completely awed by what he could accomplish with nothing more than a high-hat.

E. "Doc" Smith — BeyondChron

Max Roach was born in New Land, N.C., on Jan. 10, 1924. His family moved four years later to a Brooklyn apartment, where a player piano left by the previous tenants gave Roach his musical introduction. Using player piano rolls of Jelly Roll Morton and Albert Ammons, Roach played along by putting his fingers on the keys and pedals as they rose and fell.

UPDATE 7:

There are far too many wonderful tributes coming in from all corners of blogdonia for me to keep up with -- remember, Google Blog Search is your friend. (And if you have authored something good that I missed, don't be shy about letting people know about it in the comments.)

Here are just a few more:

Helmut — Phronesisaical.

I listened to Steve Lacy, Peter Brötzmann, and a couple others, but generally thought jazz was dead. Then there was a piece on the radio in that winter landscape that truly stunned me. It turned out to be a recent piece by Max Roach from 1991. Just a few years ago I came across a journal entry I had made later that day. It was one sentence written to myself in bold letters, as if an epiphanic answer to some torturous metaphysical conundrum, that read: "More Max Roach!"

Howie Klein — Crooks and Liars.

Doug Shulkind's Give the Drummer Some broadcast on WFMU.

And here is information about the memorial at Riverside Church:

A public viewing will be held at Riverside Church for jazz great Max Roach, who died of complications of dementia/Alzheimer's Disease at 12:45 a.m. Thursday in New York at the age of 83. His daughters Maxine and Dara were at his bedside, according to family spokesperson, Terrie M. Williams.

Roach's public viewing will be held on Friday, August 24 at Riverside Church, 490 Riverside Drive in Manhattan from 9:00 A.M. to 10:30 A.M. with a funeral service from 11:00 A.M. to 1 P.M. The legendary drummer will be buried in a private ceremony at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Born on January 10, 1924 in Newland, North Carolina -- which he always referred to as "the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina" -- Roach is survived by his five children Daryl Roach, Maxine Roach, Raoul Roach, Ayo Roach and Dara Roach.

The family issued a statement: "We are deeply saddened by his passing, yet heartened and thankful for the many blessings and condolences we have received during as we grieve. As a musician, educator and social activist, are fortunate to share his life and his legacy with the world."

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be sent to Alzheimer's Association, 225 N. Michigan Ave., Fl. 17, Chicago, Ill. 60601- 7633, http://www.alz.org/.

 

RIP Barry Beyerstein

Barry, originally uploaded by Lindsay Beyerstein.

There aren't a lot of fathers whose first reaction, upon finding out that their daughter was planning on moving across the country to shack up with some jazz musician he'd never met, would be "Cool! Can you get him to send me one of his CDs?"

Barry welcomed me into his family with open arms, for which I am eternally grateful. He was a tremendously accomplished scholar and activist and a wonderfully warm and compassionate human being. I still can't quite believe he's gone, and I will miss him more than words can express.

Lindsay has posted a tribute to her late father on her blog, and the head of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry has also posted his remembrance of Dr. Beyerstein.

I am out in Vancouver with Lindsay, her brother Loren, her mother Suzi, her grandmother Christine, and her uncle Dale. No more blogging for a while.