Last night — Thursday, July 9, 2009 — I witnessed the kind of jazz creativity and bravery that at times left me with tears in my eyes.
The occasion was a concert organized by the Swedish trumpeter / cornetist / Louis Armstrong scholar Bent Persson, one of my heroes, in tribute to his hero Louis: “YOUNG LOUIS,” which — in two hour-long sets — demonstrated much about Louis’s first six years of recordings as well as the majesty of players now alive.
The band was a stellar international crew: Mike Durham, tpt, joining Bent at the start and finish, as well as being a most adept and witty master of ceremonies; the gruff trombonist Paul Munnery; the brilliant reedman (clarinet and alto this time) Matthias Seuffert; the nimble pianist Martin Litton; the remarkable plectrist (banjos and guitar) Jacob Ullberger; the very fine brass bassist Phil Rutherford; the frankly astonishing percussionist Nick Ward. The concert took place at the very modern Sage Gateshead in Newcastle, UK — lovely acoustics and a sound engineer at the back who was truly paying attention! I attempted to videotape the whole thing (being a man of daring but not much discretion) but was stopped by an usher who whispered ferociously that there was NO photography of any kind allowed and I would have to leave if I continued . . . so I stopped. But I did capture the band’s second song, a stately rock through King Joe Oliver’s WHERE DID YOU STAY LAST NIGHT? — much as it might have sounded in Chicago, 1922-23. My video doesn’t capture everything — but you can see the graceful arcs of Nick Ward’s arms behind his drum set: I had a hard time taking my eyes off of him.
Lovely as it is, that performance can’t summon up all of what I found so moving in this concert. It wasn’t a pure repertory performance, where musicians strive to reproduce old records “live”; no, what was fascinating was the fervent interplay between the Past and Now, between the Great Figures and the living players onstage. Everyone in this band knew the original records, but they were encouraged to dance back and forth between honoring the past by playing it note-for-note and by going for themselves. Thus, Bent created solos that sounded like ones Louis might have — should have! — recorded, and his bravery and risk-taking were more than heartening. I have never seen him in person, and he would give the most timid of us courage to learn the craft, to shut our eyes, and to make something new. His playing on POTATO HEAD BLUES was immensely moving — watching him dare the Fates and declare his love for Louis in front of our eyes. Bent also sang in several performances — mostly scatting, but once or twice delivering the lyrics in a sweetly earnest way — another example of an artist going beyond the amazing things we’ve already come to expect. It was also delightful to watch the musicians grin broadly at each other as the beautiful solos and ensemble work unfolded.
The concert moved briskly from Louis’s sojourn with Oliver to his work with Clarence Williams small groups, his own Hot Five and Seven, an evocation of Jimmy Bertrand’s Washboard Wizards, Louis’s duet with Earl Hines, his Hot Choruses (as reimagined by Bent over a thirty-year period), with more than a few surprises. One of them — gloriously — was the appearance of bass saxophone titan Frans Sjostrom for a version of BEAU KOO JACK by the trio called, so correctly, the Hot Jazz Trio (their one CD is under that name on the Kenneth label): Bent, Jacob, and Frans. Wonderful both in itself and as a reinvention of that brightly ornate recording. Sjostrom stayed around for the final ensemble celebration on HIGH SOCIETY, which brought tears to my eyes.
I am posting this on Friday morning, hours before the Whitley Bay extravaganza — some 130 bands playing in rotation for three days in four simultaneous locations — is scheduled to begin. There’ll be more magnificent, moving jazz, I am sure! It promises to be both uplifting and overwhelming. (And, as an extra delight, I am joined here by two of my three Official British Cousins — Bob Cox and John Whitehorn — men of great humor, generosity, and sensibility — whom I first met at Westoverledingen, Germany, in 2007, when we were rapt attendees at another Manfred Selchow jazz festival. Always nice to have friends nearby!)
A pstscript: at the concert, copies of an otherwise unknown compact disc were for sale — a recording of a similar YOUNG LOUIS concert from 2002, with many of the same players. I snapped up one copy (paying for it, of course) and by the end of the concert, the CDs were all gone. Let us hope that Bent and Co. choose to reissue that one and other versions. I’m going to treasure it, as well as my memories of the concert I experienced.
David Ostwald, the tuba-playing, wise-cracking leader of the Louis Armstrong Centennial Band, has created a brand-new website: www.ostwaldjazz.com.
You haven’t visited David’s new site yet to hear the free hot jazz, see the lively videos, read about the band and David’s own fine writing about Louis Armstrong? Feel all right? Your eyes look a little glassy. Let me feel your forehead . . . .
Don’t be the last one on your block to be enlightened!
In the past year, there’s been much well-deserved attention paid to the life and music of Benjamin David Goodman, clarinetist supreme, cultural icon, King of Swing, trail-blazer and phenomenal improviser — because he was born a hundred years ago. In 2008, there was another reason to celebrate while invoking his name — the seventieth anniversary of his Carnegie Hall concert.
I don’t wish to take an iota away from the significance of that event, nor do I wish to dull our reverence both for it and the recordings of that evening. It may be heretical that I find the records uneven — but, then again, attempting to capture any live jazz is risky, and that Carnegie came off so spectacularly is a tribute to everyone’s creative energies. (As an aside, I don’t have much enthusiasm for the recent concert recreations where a first-rate jazz band plays the concert, from first note to last, “live.” The original event is irreproducible, another tribute to its essence.) Perhaps my reaction is the result of having listened to the original recordings too many times in my youth, although the jam session on HONEYSUCKLE ROSE is still thrilling.
Here, to celebrate the event, is a snippet from a Goodman documentary: I include it not because of the leaden commentary, but for the silent newsreel footage taken in the hall that night.
A celebration of January 16, 1938 that I can applaud whole-heartedly is Jon Hancock’s wonderful book: BENNY GOODMAN – THE FAMOUS 1938 CARNEGIE HALL CONCERT (Prancing Fish Publishing, 2009).
Before I explain this book’s virtues, I must reveal my own reactions to much of what is published on the subject of jazz in general and Goodman in specific. Having read the best prose and criticism, I dislike sloppy research, poor attribution and inept paraphrase, polemical ideological statements passed off as evidence. I applaud Whitney Balliett and Martin Williams, Dan Morgenstern and Richard M. Sudhalter even when I disagree with them, because of their insight and their evidence-gathering. But many ”jazz writers” have only the opinions and attitudes of others to offer: leftovers presented as fresh.
Goodman, too, is a special case. I have savored Bill Crow’s brilliantly lacerating memoir of the 1962 trip to Russia; Ross Firestone’s affectionate, forgiving biography of Benny, SWING, SWING, SWING told me things I hadn’t known and was therefore valuable. Ultimately, Goodman the musician is a more absorbing study than Benny the neurotic.
Hancock’s book is exciting because it does offer new information about this most singular event. Even better, he has made a point of not taking familiar statements as gospel without tracing them back to their original sources. The result is a fascinating mosaic. I knew, for instance, that Harry James said, “I feel like a whore in church,” joking about his being in the august hall, but I knew nothing of the newspaper reports before the concert: predictions that Big Joe Turner might sing and W.C. Handy might appear, that Mary Lou Williams was writing a “Jazz concerto,” and, even better, that Lionel Hampton was composing a “Swing Symphony” for the occasion.
And there’s just as much pleasure in the visual memorabilia. John Totten was the stage manager at Carnegie, and he collected signatures in his autograph book. One page of this book (beautifully reporduced) has the signatures of Benny, Jess Stacy, Hampton, “Ziggie” Elman, Gordon Griffin, and others; another page has the signatures of George Koenig, Martha Tilton, Pee Wee Monte, and “best remembrances” from Joseph Szigeti. That’s priceless.
There’s also a photogrraph from the Ferbuary 1938 Tempo Magazine of a pre-concert rehearsal for the jam session: Freddie Green, Benny, Lester Young, his high-crowned hat pushed back on his head, a grinning Gene Krupa, an intent Harry James. Is it evidence of Benny’s over-preparation that he would have musicians rehearse to jam on HONEYSUCKLE ROSE — or is it just that he wanted the opportunity to play a few choruses with Lester and Freddie?
A beautiful picture of a young (he had just turned 29) Gene Krupa adjusting his tie between sets in the Madhattan Room has him against a background of brass instruments that, curiously, looks like the work of Stuart Davis or someone inspired — at first glance, I thought that the painter (and occasional drummer) George Wettling had been the artist.
Hancock’s book also reproduces the twelve-page concert program; here one finds announcements for upcoming concerts by Rudolf Serkin and Adolf Busch, advertisements for Schrafft’s and the Russian Tea Room, for Maiden Form brassieres and Chesterfield cigarettes, and (something to live for) notice that the Gramophone Shop would have on sale on January 22, 1938, Teddy Wilson’s Brunswick record of MY FIRST IMPRESSION OF YOU and IF DREAMS COME TRUE.
These lovely artifacts, including a ticket from the concert, shouldn’t make us forget that the real glory of the book is Hancock’s meticulous (but never stuffy) eye for detail — that pro-Franco demonstrators picketed Carnegie the night of the concert, chanting “Benny Goodman is a red from Spain,” necause Benny had played a concert for the Spanish Loyalists in December 1937. Ziggy Elman’s rejoinder, “No, he isn’t, he’s a clarinet player from Chicago!” satisfies me, even if it did little to placate the protesters.
The centerpiece of the book is Hancock’s easy, unforced commentary on the music played at the concert – forty pages of analysis and commentary, neither highflown musicology in the Gunther Schuller way or a fan’s yipping enthusiasm — something to read while the compact discs of the concert are playing. Anything about the concert — the microphone setup, the photographs and newsreel footage — as well as the recordings made, the mythic story of their re-discovery, their various issues . . . . up to Benny’s later appearances at Carnegie — all are meticulously covered by Hancock. And there’s a touching reminiscence of BG at home by his daughter Rachel Edelson that is a masterpiece of gentle honesty.
Reviewers have to find flaws, so I will say that a few names are misspelled, as in the pastoral “Glen Miller,” but since none of these musicians were in the Goodman band, I and other enthusiasts forgive Hancock . . . while applauding his tremendous effort, both enthusiastic and careful. Writing this post, I must add, took a long time — not because my mind wasn’t made up within the first fifteen minutes of looking at the book, but because I kept getting distracted from writing to reading and re-reading. Good job!
Jon has a website, www.bg1938.com., where you can find out more about the book — and the more important information about how to get your own copy. And you can add your own opinion about Just Who the Mystery Man is. Someone has to know!
I have a special fondness for those musicians who never get their share of the limelight — not only Joe Thomas but also Frank Chace, Mike Burgevin, Cliff Leeman, Benny Morton, Shorty Baker, Rod Cless come to mind.
It would be impossible to say who is most underrated or under-recognized, but trombonist Abe Lincoln is certainly a contender for Jazz’s Forgotten Man. Although his astonishing playing enlivens many recordings – the late Thirties West Coast sessions that Bing Crosby and Hoagy Carmichael made with small jamming bands (often including Andy Secrest on cornet) and later sessions with the Rampart Street Paraders and Matty Matlock’s Paducah Patrol, he’s not well known. I first heard him out in the open on a wondrous Bobby Hackett Capitol session, COAST CONCERT or COAST TO COAST, where Abe and Jack Teagarden stood side by side. It wasn’t a cutting contest, but Abe’s joyous exuberance was more than a match for Big T.
There are exceptions — cornetist Bob Barnard is a heroic one — but many jazz brassmen start their solos low and quiet, and work up to their higher registers for drama. Abe Lincoln reminds me of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., leaping from a balcony, sword drawn. There’s no shilly-shallying; Abe starts his solos with a whoop in his highest register and STAYS THERE. He’s dazzling.
I’m currently writing the liner notes for a forthcoming CD on the JUMP label (Joe Boughton’s cherished enterprise) which will feature a “Rampart Street Paraders” group in performance. The venue was called “Storyville,” apparently located in San Francisco in the Sixties. The band? How about Billy Butterfield, Matty Matlock, Stan Wrightsman, Ray Leatherwood, Nick Fatool, and Abe Lincoln. Looking for information in my discographies, I found sketches of Lincoln’s associations: the California Ramblers, Ozzie Nelson, Paul Whiteman, Roger Wolfe Kahn, West Coast radio and film work, soundtrack work for Walter Lanz Woody Woodpecker cartoons, even!
Then I did what has become common practice for researchers: I Googled “Abe Lincoln” “jazz” “trombone” — to separate him from that other Abe who split rails and ended the Civil War.
And THIS came up — a whole website devoted to Abe: thorough, accurate, with photographs, articles, a discography, a video clip (!) and a biography:
It doesn’t make Abram Lincoln (not “Abraham,” by the way) a great deal more famous, but I applaud the site and bless the person who created it. Check it out and enjoy Mister Lincoln.
Egged on by the inestimable Messrs. Riccardi and Hutchinson, I present my unexpurgated and hugely idiosyncratic list of the first 25 selections on my iPod, no cheating. Readers of similar temperaments are encouraged to respond:
Perdido, Stuff Smith
Sleigh Ride, Mark Shane’s Xmas All-Stars
Good Little, Bad Little You, Cliff Edwards (Venuti and Lang)
Blame it On the Blues, Duke Heitger’s Big Four
It’s A Sin to Tell A Lie, Humphrey Lyttelton
Walk It To Me, Hot Lips Page
Gassin’ the Wig, Roy Porter
Under A Texas Moon, Seger Ellis
They Say, Echoes of Swing
Some Rainy Day, Hal Smith’s Roadrunners
Linden Blues, Rex Stewart
There’s Something In My Mind, Ruby Braff
Down By The Old Mill Stream, Benny Goodman
Sweet Sue, Jammin’ at Rudi’s (Rudi Blesh, 1951)
Take the “A” Train, Duke Ellington
My Blue Heaven, Eddie Condon (Town Hall)
Farewell Blues, Eddie Condon (Decca)
Stay On the Right Side of the Road, Bing Crosby
Oriental Man, Simon Stribling
All That Meat and No Potatoes, The Three Keys
Stompin’ at the Savoy – Fine and Dandy, Coleman Hawkins (1967 JATP with Teddy Wilson)
Corrine Corrina, Red Nichols
Fascinatin’ Rhythm, Cliff Edwards
St. Louis Bllues, The Boswell Sisters
I’ll See You In My Dreams, Jeff Healey
Perhaps not a scientific cross-section or a scholarly sample, but those tracks — in that idiosyncratic assortment — offer great happiness. Anyone care to join in?
My iPod isn’t always a subject for philosophical contemplation. More often it’s merely a calming talisman in my battle against airplane claustrophobia and tedium. But recent experiences have made me think about it as more thought-provoking than a twentieth-century version of the transistor radio and cassette player of my past.
It began when I unintentionally erased not only the contents of my iPod but also my iTunes library. How that happened is not a subject for this blog, but I erased eight thousand tracks. (Or, to use “the male passive,” I could write “eight thousand tracks had been erased,” but no matter.) Preparing to go off on vacation far from my CD collection, I began to stuff compact discs into my iTunes library. This, as readers will know, is a nuisance, and at times I wished for a youthful niece or nephew to whom I could say, “Want a hundred dollars? Put each of the CDs in that bookcase into iTunes for me, will you?” The computer did its job well, but it required me to check on it every six or seven minutes. I began with the tail end of my collection — that’s Lester Young, the Yerba Buena Jazz Band, Ben Webster, Lee Wiley, and so on, and worked my way back to the Allens, Harry and Henry Red, in the space of ten days.
And a King — Joe Oliver, pictured top left.
This combination of obsessiveness and diligence resulted in an iPod with more than fifteen thousand tracks on it — the Hot Fives and Sevens, the Basie Deccas, the Lester Verves, the Billie Vocalions, the Teddy Wilson School for Pianists, the Blue Note Jazzmen, Fats Waller from 1922 to 1935, Mel Powell on Vanguard, Ruby Braff and Ellis Larkins . . . all I could desire, more than a hundred full days of music.
But I kept silently asking myself, “What do you need all this music for, knowing that you couldn’t listen to it all in the space of the next twelve months?”
Another King kept insisting that I pay attention to him. He didn’t play cornet; he would have been out of place at the Lincoln Gardens. I had taught a course in Shakepearian tragedy this summer, and ended it with KING LEAR — adding a few scenes from the 1982 Granada television presentation with Sir Laurence Olivier.
Early in the play, when Lear still thinks he has imperial powers (even though he has renounced the throne), he bargains with his daughters about whose house he shall stay at first, casually letting them know that he will arrive with a hundred knights. Although Goneril and Regan are cruelly inhuman, I always feel for them at this point, as they ask their father, with some irritable reasonableness, why he, no longer King, needs a retinue. Lear responds:
O reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is as cheap as beast’s.
In the most commonsensical way, I take these lines to suggest that the difference between a reasonably privileged person and a Maltese terrier is that the person, when the impulse strikes, can go to the kitchen cabinet and have another cookie or pretzel. Choice is at work here, unlike the dog who has to wait for the owner to fill his bowl. “Need” is constricting; luxury is the freedom to transcend mere needs. Or, in other terms, to have merely “enough” — the spiritual equivalent of eight hundred calories a day — is emotionally insufficient.
I knew that I didn’t “have to have” Ella Fitzgerald singing MY MELANCHOLY BABY (Teddy Wilson, Frank Newton, Benny Morton, 1936) in the same way I need food and drink. I could capably replay most of that performance in my mind. But not having it accessible provokes feelings of inadequacy, of being separated from my music. To some, this will seem like an exercise in superfluity: I know there are people in other countries who don’t have clean water, let alone alternate takes of the Albert Ammons Commodores, and I feel for them, but the sensation of having more music than I can possibly listen to is luxuriant bliss. It means that if, upon awaking, I really NEED to hear Dicky Wells and Bill Coleman play SWEET SUE . . . there it is.
Which leads me to the most brilliant feature of the iPod — not the ability to reproduce album cover artwork (!) but the ability to shuffle songs. I plugged it in here and started it up . . . so that Dizzy Gillespie followed Mamie Smith who followed the West Jesmond Rhythm Kings who followed Hawkins . . . . a floating Blindfold Test, full of surprises and gratifications. And no worrying about the hundred knights drinking up all the milk in the refrigerator.
Your many readers who remain in New York for the summer may like knowing that Peter Ecklund will bring his evening of jazz standards and original music back to the Greenwich Village Bistro on Wednesday, July 8th.
The program promises to be an extension of their last outing: high-class, intelligent musicianship, always swinging as expected but with a felicitous penchant for framing the familiar in unexpected ways.
Mike Weatherly on bass (with the occasional vocal) and Will Holshouser on accordion will join Peter on trumpet and flugelhorn, with guest appearances by the Potted Palm Orchestra and the Music Minus One Orchestra.
The coordinates:
Wednesday, July 8th, 9 to 11, at the Greenwich Village Bistro (13 Carmine Street between 6th & Bleecker). For reservations, call 718-213-4736. No cover, no minimum. Suggested donation $5.
On June 26, 2009, SFRaeAnn, that generous jazz videographer, took her camera to “America’s Festival,” in Lacey, Washington, and captured cornetist Bob Schultz’s Frisco Jazz Band playing the now-rare Irving Berlin song, “I’ll See You in C-U-B-A.”
Berlin wasn’t an anarchist; this 1920 song teasingly proposes a visit to a country where Prohibiition wasn’t law. (Other songs looked to Montreal for rehydration.)
The performance has an easy, tango-inflected swing, helped immeasurably by Hal Smith on drums — a master chef behind his set, mixing and flavoring with his wire brushes, swinging without getting louder or faster. I thought of Walter Johnson, among others: watch the way Hal moves! Cornetist Schultz has a fine Spanier-Marsala passion, matched by trombonist Doug Finke, whom I associate with rousing Stomp Off CDs by his Independence Hall Jazz Band.
I recently reviewed a Fifties jazz-goes-medieval effort where the participants earnestly jammed on recorders: they should have studied Jim Rothermel, sweetly wailing away. Thanks to Scott Anthony on banjo, who delivers the song stylishly, Chuck Stewart on tuba, and another one of my heroes, pianist Ray Skjelbred, for keeping the ship rocking but afloat.
Our travel plans for the summer have us heading north, not south – so I’ll content myself with this YouTube clip, spicy and sweet.
I mean no offense to singer Rick MacLaine and Teruki Ishikawa when I suggest that their names might not be as well-known as other musicians. But they deserve much wider attention, as this clip — recorded on Sunday, June 28, 2009 — will show within four bars.
The how and the where? Every Sunday morning and afternoon, there’s a wonderful farmers’ market (urban style) on the Upper West Side of New York City — Columbus Avenue, south of 81st Street. I was on my way there and heard some special street music: a man purling his way ever so gently through a medium-tempo I’M OLD-FASHIONED with a subtle electric guitarist accompanying him. I stood there, delighted and amazed . . . put some money in the hat when the duo had concluded, and scurried back to where I had my video camera.
After chatting with Rick and Teruki a bit to be sure it was OK to capture them, and after positioning myself so that the people with dogs and packages didn’t walk in front of (and through me), I recorded this: EAST OF THE SUN. I think it’s an understated but compelling performance, much better than a good deal of what you’d hear in a club.
Rick has a speaking way of addressing the lyrics and an affectionate reverence for the melody without ever being stiff or formal. If you closed your eyes, you’d hear his essential good humor coming through. Please note the charming mixture of sincerity and casualness, the absolute absence of histrionics, the way both Rick and Teruki handle their phrases as soloists, and their lovely, quiet, intense interplay. Wouldn’t they be splendid at a party? I didn’t get a chance to ask Teruki the obligatory questions, but in a city full of guitarists who treat their instruments aggressively, his thoughtful swing is an oasis. Rick is a graduate not only of Berklee but of the traveling university of Barry Harris — credentials enough for anyone!
P.S. Before completing this post, I toyed with a variety of what I hoped were witty titles: SWING STREET, THE STREET SINGER, and simply WOW! I decided to post their names — perhaps soon those names will be as well-known as Rick and Teruki deserve.
Like most Americans, I commute to work by car, even though I know that my choice has huge adverse effects on the planet. When I can, I take the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan, but the train is at best inconvenient. Even when I bring my iPod or The New Yorker, the LIRR is tedium on wheels.
Here’s the ideal solution to the problem. If my train ride could be like this, morning and evening, I swear I would sell my car:
This catches the West End Jazz Band (with friends) on the South Shore train line, recorded May 31, 2009, on their way to the annual Hudson Lake celebration. (Hudson Lake, as you know, is a sacred site that connects Bix Beiderbecke, Pee Wee Russell, and other kindred spirits.) You hear and see Mike Bezin and Sue Fischer on washboards; John Otto on clarinet; Frank Gualtieri on trombone; Andy Schumm and Mike Walbridge on cornets; Leah Bezin on banjo; Dave Bock on tuba; Josh Duffee on drums, performing LOUISIANA. And a slightly smaller version of the group offers a spirited SOMEBODY STOLE MY GAL.
These clips are courtesy of “manidig” on YouTube — a fellow after my own heart. I subscribed to his channel about two minutes into LOUISIANA. Thanks, Mr. Dig!
A new documentary, CHOPS, is opening tomorrow (that’s June 26, 2009). Directed by Bruce Broder, it’s not another run-through of the life of a famous — and sometimes bedraggled — musician, a life viewed retrospectively. No, this one peeks into the future in a very hopeful way. It’s the story of a group of young musicians from Florida – let’s be honest and call them kids! — who come together to become a jazz band, a swinging community that wins the Essentially Ellington competition.
Here’s a trailer, which should certainly make you smile:
The film’s official website, http://chopsthemovie.com/, has all the information you need — where it’s screening, and more. I don’t normally endorse anything having to do with Facebook, a phenomenon which makes me nearly as anxious as does Twitter, but CHOPS also has a Facebook site, where you can find updates about the film - http://www.facebook.com/pages/Chops/85540964870.
What’s important to me is that these kids are thrilled by Charlie Parker, by playing good hot jazz expressively. Even the young saxophonist who admires Kenny G (much to the puzzlement of one of his bandmates) — give him time. He’ll discover Harold Ashby and Bud Freeman, Norris Turney and Happy Caldwell, Steve Lacy and Harry Carney eventually.
This is a wonderful piece by the Scottish journalist and friend of jazz, in celebration of one of the music’s most free spirits, the trumpeter Jabbo Smith. I would add only that the 1961 sessions she refers to have priceless playing not only by Jabbo, Marty Grosz, and Mike McKendrick — but astounding solos and ensemble alchemy from clarinetist Frank Chace.
The Contender
In Jazz Profiles on June 24, 2009 at 1:07 am
Amongst the many notable jazz anniversaries of recent months, one important one has been pretty much universally overlooked. December 2008 was the centenary of a trumpet legend with whom jazz history has been particularly careless. He was lost, found and lost and found again – so it’s almost fitting that his centenary went by unnoticed. Even in death, he’s an elusive character.
His name was Jabbo Smith, and, at the peak of his powers and the height of his celebrity, he was regarded by many as the only serious challenge to Louis Armstrong’s position as the greatest trumpet player of them all. But just over a decade later, he had slid out of the limelight and was all but forgotten.
Born in Georgia in December 1908, Jabbo Smith was christened Cladys to complement the name of a cousin, Gladys, who was just a few days older. His mother, who played the church organ, struggled to raise him by herself. Eventually, when Jabbo was six, she was forced to hand him over to the care of the Jenkins Orphanage in Charleston, South Carolina. This institution supported itself by teaching the children to play music and then sending its student bands all over the country, to all the major cities. Jabbo quickly mastered trumpet and trombone and was duly sent out on tour from an early age. He invariably used these excursions as a launchpad for an escape bid..
When he was 14 years old, he ran away and remained free for three months, during which time he worked with a professional band in Florida. Two years later, he left the orphanage for good and headed for his half-sister’s home in Philadelphia. There, he immediately found work.
In 1925, at the age of just 17, he was playing in one of the most popular bands of the day, the Charlie Johnson band in New York – having already made his recording debut with no less a bandleader than Clarence Williams.
Jabbo – whose nickname came from an Indian character in a William S Hartman western – was already beginning to be regarded as something of a sensation when he replaced Bubber Miley for the Duke Ellington band’s November 1927 recordings of Black and Tan Fantasy. So impressed was Ellington with Jabbo’s playing that he offered him a job. Happy with the Charlie Johnson band and unimpressed by the money being offered, Jabbo turned him down – a move which he may not have regretted, but subsequent generations of his admirers undoubtedly have.
He went on, in 1928, to join Fats Waller, James P Johnson and Garvin Bushell in the band playing for the Broadway show Keep Shufflin’ – the results can be heard on the four numbers this band, known as the Louisiana Sugar Babies, recorded together.
Keep Shufflin’ closed suddenly in Chicago in 1929 when its backer, Arnold Rothstein, notorious as the mobster who had fixed the 1919 baseball World Series, was the victim of a gangland murder. Jabbo may have found himself stranded in the Windy City, but the show’s impromptu closing had fortunate results for jazz recording history: the Chicago-based Brunswick Record Company offered him the chance to record 19 sides designed to compete with Louis Armstrong’s hugely successful Hot Five and Hot Seven records, which were making money by the bucket-load for the rival Okeh label.
For what became the definitive Jabbo Smith sides, Jabbo not only led the band, which was assembled by the banjo player Ikey Robinson and christened the Rhythm Aces, but he also wrote all the numbers and sang on many of them – in his distinctive scat style. He was still only 20, and his youthful energy simply explodes out of tracks such as Sau-Sha Stomp, Take Your Time and Boston Skuffle.
Not only that, but his style of playing is dazzling. He was technically brilliant, completely at ease playing in the upper register and able to deliver one fantastic break after another. In 1955, the bass player Milt Hinton was quoted as saying: “Jabbo was as good as Louis then. He was the Dizzy Gillespie of that era. He played rapid-fire passages while Louis was melodic and beautiful.” Another trumpet great who was around at the same time as both Jabbo and Louis was Doc Cheatham who said that in the late 1920s, Jabbo was as good as Armstrong but that they were “very different players and that Jabbo shouldn’t be judged by comparisons”.
Despite his astonishing and highly individual style of playing on the Brunswick sides, Jabbo couldn’t shake off hims image as an Armstrong imitator – much to his chagrin. The record company pulled the plug on the Rhythm Aces recordings because the records weren’t the commercial success that they’d hoped for. A year after their release, Jabbo went to Milwaukee and spent several years playing with different bands there and in Chicago. He seems to have drifted between the two cities. Late in his life, he told the trumpeter Michel Bastide: “You get into a little trouble in Chicago – you run to Milwaukee… You get into a little trouble in Milwaukee – you run to Chicago.”
In 1936, the bandleader Claude Hopkins heard Jabbo as he passed through Milwaukee and signed him up for two years. Then, in 1938, Jabbo made what would turn out to be his last recordings for over 20 years, when he recorded four more of his own compositions for Decca – including the gorgeous ballad Absolutely and the jaw-droppingly complex Rhythm in Spain.
Jabbo slid into obscurity but seems to have been content to do so. Although he was wild and unruly as a young man, he has been described by many who knew him later in his life as a quiet, introverted character – something of a loner – who seems to have been quite happy to take whatever came his way. He certainly never sought fame – which is just as well, because he never again reached the heights he scaled when he was just 20.
Jabbo was more or less forgotten about by the mid-1950s when Milt Hinton’s comments for the Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya oral history prompted renewed interest in him. However, it wasn’t until 1961 that he was tracked down to Milwaukee and brought to Chicago for a recording session with a local rhythm section which included the guitarist Marty Grosz.
Grosz has described Jabbo as a free spirit, someone who followed his own path. It’s an assessment which ties in with Milt Hinton’s statement that if Jabbo made enough money for drinks and women in any small town, he would stay put. Michel Bastide, whose Hot Antic Jazz Band toured and recorded with Jabbo in the trumpeter’s seventies, believes that Jabbo was easily distracted by women and might have fared better in his musical career if he had had someone to look after him and advise him in the way that Lil Hardin did for Louis Armstrong.
When Jabbo was tracked down in 1961, he hadn’t touched his trumpet for nearly two decades and had been working for Avis car hire for many years. He said that he had married and settled down in Milwaukee, playing trumpet in a nightclub at first. When the club closed down, he simply put his horn under his bed and found himself another job. But he did continue composing.
After his rediscovery in the early 1960s, Jabbo seems to have retreated from the limelight once more. He next popped up in the mid-1970s when the impresario George Wein invited him to New York to receive an award as one of the greatest living musicians in jazz history. This time, he was back to stay: he began practising the trumpet again thanks to the encouragement of the clarinettist Orange Kellin who invited him to New Orleans, to play in his band. This led to his being hired for the show One More Time which earned him euphoric reviews.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Jabbo enjoyed a last blast of glory. He played the New York jazz clubs and worked with such diverse names as Thad Jones and Don Cherry. He also toured in Europe, in the company of a French jazz band which had been born out of a shared love of his recordings. The members of the Hot Antic Jazz Band – led by trumpeter Michel Bastide – spent three years mastering Jabbo’s 1929 repertoire and were thrilled when he agreed to come on tour and record with them.
Their affection for him and enthusiasm for his music clearly paid off: the resulting LPs (Zoo and We Love You Jabbo) are delightful and provide a happy ending for what could have been yet another sad jazz tale. Jabbo Smith died in January 1991, leaving his trumpet to the Antics’ Michel Bastide.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
* Jabbo Smith: The Complete Jabbo Smith Hidden Treasure Sessions (Lonehill Jazz LHJ10352) is newly out
* Jabbo Smith’s Rhythm Aces 1929-1938 (Classics Records 669)
News, always welcome, from the Louis Armstrong House Museum. I know that July 4, 1900, has been disproven as Louis’s actual birthdate — in some inspired, diligent sleuthing — but I don’t particularly care. Louis thought it was his birthday, and that’s always been enough reason for me to celebrate, especially since I am past the age of getting excited as cherry bombs and M-14s turn the night air into Armageddon.
First, the famous picture: Louis with the kids. Our eyes are drawn, of course, to the fellow on the right with his plastic trumpet, following the Master’s lead. But I am intrigued by the child in the center, who doesn’t have a trumpet (it seems unfortunate that there weren’t dozens to go around, so that Louis could have had his own Corona Brass Band of kids in the street) — notice how earnestly he’s practicing his embouchure until the day that he can get a horn and swing out. I hope he did. His eyes gleam as brightly as Louis’s do — a good sign.
There will be many events celebrating Louis’s life and music (as if the two could be separated) courtesy of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona, Queens. You haven’t been there yet? Chaucer’s pilgrims had Canterbury: the LAHM is easier to get to and I am sure it’s more fun. There will be a scat-singing lesson, a concert by the Red Hook Ramblers, a presentation on Louis’s collages by the esteemed Deslyn Dyer, a tour of the house (don’t forget to admire the turquoise kitchen!).
AND there’s cake. We won’t be there, but cake freezes very well.
Jazz photographer John Herr sends along this jeu d’esprit, a bit of French jazz Manglish. To get the full flavor of it, I suggest that this note — a confirmation of purchase from a French record dealer — be read aloud in a suitable accent. You know, the one we learned from Sid Caesar, from Warner Brothers cartoons.
Bonjour
Votre commande a ete prise en compte !
La livraison interviendra dans les meilleurs delais.
Merci et a bientot
Dear customer,
Thank you for your order.
The delivery of your records will be done in the best delay.
This performance — faster than usual, happily so — took place last night, Sunday, June 21, 2009, at The Ear Inn. Wedged into their usual corner were that night’s brilliant edition of The Ear Regulars: Jon-Erik Kellso, trumpet; Matt Munisteri, guitar; Harvey Tibbs, trombone; Dan Block, clarinet; Jon Burr, bass. The song — written by (among others) Jule Styne in 1927 — is usually taken at an easy lope, but the Regulars tore through it as a change of pace.
To look at this band, you’d think them entirely involved in giving and receiving pleasure: they listen in a kind of rapture to each other’s solos; they construct witty, pointed, empathic backgrounds and riffs. And the communion, creativity, and joy we sense are obviously coming from deep inside them, individually and collectively. But there’s a paradox at work in this performance: everyone on this bandstand had only learned that day of the death of trombonist Joel Helleny — someone they had all respected, played alongside, and known. One way to handle their grief might have been to refuse to play, to go off somewhere to grieve in solitude. But these artists chose to heal themselves by offering their energies as only they could. Their spirit and their choruses healed us.
I just received an email from a UK record company, Edition Records, which offered this inducement:
Pre-order the new DSQ album in return for a credit in the liner notes.
DSQ are giving you the chance to participate in the making of the album in return for a credit in the liner notes. They are offering three levels of contribution starting at £12. At the higher levels you will receive much, much more for your support.
Perhaps this isn’t very different than sending money to a public radio station to support its programming and getting one’s name read aloud over the air, or writing a check to get a PBS totebag. In fact, it harks back to the old model of print publishing, where a privately-printed book could be sold only to a number of readers willing to subscribe and thus underwrite its costs.
I post this to offer evidence about what we all know to be true — namely, that jazz groups and jazz record labels have a hard time of it and find it necessary to resort to ingenious measures. What’s next?
The news of anyone’s death reminds us of how insufficient language really is. I learned of trombonist Joel Helleny’s death last night at The Ear Inn.
Helleny was one of those musicians I didn’t have the good fortune to hear in perfomance, which means I missed a thousand opportunities, because he performed with Dick Hyman, Buck Clayton, Randy Sandke, Frank Wess, Benny Goodman, Scott Hamilton, Warren Vache, Roy Eldridge, Vince Giordano, Eddy Davis, Jon-Erik Kellso, Marty Grosz, and many other luminaries. But I heard him subliminally on the soundtrack of two Woody Allen films, and I have a good number of CDs (Arbors, Concord, Ney York Jazz, Nagel-Heyer, and others) on which he shines. This morning I was listening to his work on Kenny Davern’s EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE (Arbors) and marveled once again: he could do it all: purr, shout, cajole, sweet-talk or say the nastiest things . . . all through his horn.
He played beutifully; he had his own sound. And he’s gone.
Marty Elkins knew him well, and wrote to say this:
I got the news from Murray Wall. We were both old friends of Joel’s, and we are very sad about his death. Joel was a super smart, very talented guy, at the top of his field back in the 80’s and 90’s – doing gigs with Dick Hyman, the Carnegie Hall Jazz Orchestra (where he was a featured soloist), he was a member of George Wein’s New York All Stars and played on sound tracks for Woody Allen films, among other credits. He even toured with the OJays. He was a very loyal and devoted friend, also one of the only people who talked faster than I do!
He and I were really close around the deaths of our parents in the 90’s – providing a lot of support for one another. Joel was an only child and really attached to his folks. He leaves a lot of saddened friends and an empty space in the jazz community. He will be remembered.
But if you never heard Joel play, all this might seem only verbal gestures. Here’s Joel in what I believe is a 1992 television appeance with clarinetist Walt Levinsky’s “Great American Swing Band,” including trumpeters Spanky Davis, Randy Sandke, Glenn Drewes, and Bob Millikan; trombonists Eddie Bert and Paul Faulise; reedmen Mike Migliore, Chuck Wilson, Frank Wess, Ted Nash, and Sol Schlinger; pianist Marty Napoleon, bassist Murray Wall; drummer Butch Miles.
When I get new jazz compact discs to review, a good percentage feature women jazz singers. I am sure that they are wonderful people who love the music, but many of them have odd ideas of forming a style. Some have ingested every syllable Billie Holiday ever recorded; some rely on huge voices with gospel trimmings to get them through; some meow and growl their way through a lyric, suggesting an undiagnosed hairball problem. Almost all of the new singers emote in capital letters, their voices rich with imagined melodrama. None of these tricks works, but the singers press on.
For me, there are perhaps a dozen women singing jazz today — if you’ve been reading my posts, you can count them off. Now it’s time to increase that number. May I introduce (or re-introduce) Marty Elkins?
I first met Marty perhaps a year ago when she and I ended up sharing a table at the crowded Ear Inn. We chatted pleasantly, and I really had no idea of her talents until Jon-Erik Kellso asked her to sit in and she sang a few choruses of YOU TOOK ADVANTAGE OF ME with the band. The Ear Inn is more conducive to trumpets and trombones than to unamplified singers, but I could hear that Marty swung, knew the harmonic ins and outs of the song, could improvise neatly, and was expressive without being melodramatic. She used her quiet talents to make the material sound good rather than asking Rodgers and Hart to step aside so that she could shine. When she was through, I asked her if she had recorded CDs that I could hear her better and at greater length. She casually mentioned that she had done a duet session with Dave McKenna years back, and that it would be issued some day.
Now we can all stop holding our breath: it’s here. And it’s splendid.
The disc is called IN ANOTHER LIFE, and it’s issued on the splendidly reliable Nagel-Heyer label (CD 114). It captures Marty and Dave in an informal session with good sound, in 1988 — when Dave was still in full command. The songs suggest a shared affection for solid melodies and a deep knowledge of the great jazz repertoire: WILLOW WEEP FOR ME / DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS TO MISS NEW ORLEANS? / JIM / GIMME A PIGFOOT AND A BOTTLE OF BEER / UNTIL THE REAL THING COMES ALONG / I LET A SONG GO OUT OF MY HEART / WHEN YOUR LOVER HAS GONE / I WISHED ON THE MOON / WILLOW WEEP FOR ME (alternate ) / DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS TO MISS NEW ORLEANS? (alternate) / FUSE BLUES (alternate).
The first thing that must be said will seem tactless, but this CD is not the combination of a young, untried singer with a master pianist. Not at all. The Elkins – McKenna pairing is a meeting of convivial equals. From the very first notes of this session, she shows off her relaxed, expert naturalness. Her naturalness comes from loving the lyrics — that is, knowing what the words mean! — and admiring the composer’s original lines. She has a sweet, earnest phrase-ending vibrato, reminiscent of a great trumpet player, and she holds her notes beautifully. Marty’s delivery is full of feeling and warmth, but she doesn’t shout, grind, or act self-consciously hip. Her voice is also attractive wholly on its own terms — it has a yearning, plaintive quality that fits the material, but that never overwhelms the song or the listener.
On JIM, for instance, a rather masochistic song, Marty embraces and entrances the lyrics without ever suggesting that things are so dire that she needs therapy or an intervention. It’s a performance I found myself going back to several times. And she’s equally home with the somewhat archaic enthusiams of GIMME A PIGFOOT — she sings the song rather than singing at it from an ironic distance. (And, as a sidelight, her diction is razor-sharp, enabling me to hear a phrase in the lyrics that has always mystified me in Bessie Smith’s version.) On a number of the other selections, she avoids the perils of over-dramatization (I’m thinking especially of SUMMERTIME, which has attained the status of National Monument, making it almost impossible to sing it plainly without histrionics) by lifting the tempo just a touch — what Billie and Mildred did in the Thirties. It works. I was able to hear the most famous and well-worn songs on this disc without thinking of their more famous progenitors. On her second choruses, she improvises, subtly and effectively; her voice takes delicate little turns up or down, which seem both new and natural. And she knows the verse to WHEN YOUR LOVER IS GONE! What more could we ask for?
For his part, McKenna is in especially empathetic form: he doesn’t put on his locomotive-roaring-down-the-tracks self, but you always know he’s there. And at times his accompaniment sounds so delicately shaped that I would have sworn Ellis Larkins had slid onto the piano bench.
The alternate takes are revealing — for both Marty’s subtle reshapings of her first inspirations, and for Dave’s inventiveness and drive. The CD’s last track, FUSE BLUES, comes from a 1999 Nagel-Heyer session Marty did with Houston Person, Tardo Hammer, Herb Pomeroy, Greg Skaff, Dennis Irwin, Mark Taylor, and it’s a thoroughly naughty composition of Marty’s that will make you look at your electrician in a whole new way. I think it should be Consolidated Edison’s theme song, but doubt that they’ll take me up on it.
As an afterthought, because the liner notes are very spare, I asked Marty to comment on the session, which she did:
The original recording was just for a demo for me, and Dave really did it as a favor for very little bread as he was an old friend from my days in Boston. I went to Boston U and just kind of stayed up there, hanging around with musicians for about ten years after college. I met Dave at the Copley Plaza hotel, where he was a regular performer, and he let me sing with him and was pretty much my first accompanist. The funny story I always tell is that he said, “When you go out there and sing with other musicians, don’t expect them to play in the key of B…” because he would say “Just start singing, baby, I’ll follow you.” I guess that really was starting at the top! Everyone loved Dave – he was the most accessible guy and not even aware of his own genius. He leaves a lot of broken hearted pals. We did the recording at Jimmy Madison’s (the great drummer) studio on the Upper West Side. I think Dave was in town for a gig at the old Hanratty’s, because by then I was living in New York. The Nagel-Heyers did the remastering, and it really sounds good now. I hear new things in Dave’s playing every time I listen to it. I had hoped it would come out before Dave left us, but it was not to be.
Marty is planning a late-summer CD release party at Smalls — with, among others, Jon-Erik Kellso — and she has promised to let me know the details so that I can alert all of you. Until then, this CD is winning music.
Jamaica Knauer, who seems to bring her video camera along whenever there’s good music, captured this performance for us: the West End Jazz Band performing at the Coon-Sanders Nighthawks Fans’ Bash on May 16, 2009 in Huntington, West Virginia. The WEJB features Leah Bezin, guitar and vocal; Mike Bezin, trumpet; John Otto, alto sax; Frank Gualtieri, trombone; Mike Walbridge, tuba; Andy Schumm, covering the drum chair rather than his usual cornet or piano.
This song, OUT WHERE THE LITTLE MOONBEAMS ARE BORN, recorded by George Olsen and other bands in 1929, was new to me. I couldn’t find its composer credits in the ASCAP database, so I would be interested in knowing who wrote it.
Experienced listeners with good memories might find phrases in it reminiscent (forwards as well as backwards) of more famous songs, but all of that fades away in this sweetly earnest performance. And it passed my tests: I found myself humming it and had to play the clip several times in a row before moving on. Maybe it’s perfect music for all of our yearnings to get away to a magical place where no one can intrude on our romances. See if it doesn’t become part of your mental musical library, too!
Heartfelt thanks to the WEJB and to Jamaica for preserving this sweet moment.
Drummer and jazz scholar Kevin Dorn and I were discussing these historical drum ads at Birdland last week. Although we delight in them, we share the same skepticism. A drum company representative came up to George Wettling, say, and asked, “George, would you like a new set of _ _ _ _ _ drums for free? And we’ll give you a hundred dollars to let us use your picture in an ad?” Wettling or anyone else always could use another set of drums, as well as the money, so he posed for a photo behind the set of drums that he swore were his favorites. Perhaps a thousand young men went out and beleaguered their parents to buy just that set because their idol played it.
Mildly fraudulent or not, full of language we doubt the drummer himself used, these pages are enchanting. How many times in our lives will we see Dave Tough (not Davey, mind you) advertising something in a magazine — as if people would follow his lead? It suggests a pre-Fall universe, now vanished. This ad (like the Ray Bauduc autograph in the previous post) is available for purchase at eBay. A thrilling oddity, never to come again.
Aspiring novelists in Creative Writing classes are told, “Write what you know.” In jazz, musicians play what they know; they live what they know.
And sometimes they sign autograph books with what they know and wish to convey to us. Hence this page inscribed by the inspiring percussionist Ray Bauduc (an artifact now up for bid on eBay).
I may have overwhelmed readers of this blog with my new enthusiasm for the Whitley Bay International Jazz Festival, less than a month away. But I hope you understand.
However, when falling in love with something new it would be ungracious in the extreme to forget the familiar — and, in this case, the familiar (but ecstatic) is Joe Boughton’s western New York State extravaganza, Jazz at Chautauqua. This year the dates are September 17-20.
I know all of the reasons people decide not to go to jazz parties. The money. Their health. The potential inconvenience. The economy. And so on. I would be remiss if I suggested that any of these reasons should be ignored. But I am writing this post, of my own accord, to tempt people into Pleasure.
Although at times the modern world seems to be a gaudy hedonistic circus, I still think that Pleasure gets a bad rap. We’re always urged to hang out with Prudence, that rather severe woman in the corner. You know — she’s drinking water when everyone else is having Campari; she doesn’t eat anything fried, ever . . . she knows what’s in her 401K plan to the penny. Prudence will outlive all of us. But is she having any fun? Do her investments make her tap her foot and bob her head?
Here endeth the sermon. I’ll suggest, however, what the Beloved and I are looking forward to at this year’s Chautauqua:
Leaves under our feet in the walkways between the houses. Stories, on and off the bandstand, from that bow-tied master of badinage Marty Grosz. Joe Wilder playing SAMBA DE ORFEU. Jon-Erik Kellso saying naughty things through his plunger mute. Jim Dapogny rocking the piano in the parlor with a song no one’s ever heard before. Newcomers Andy Brown (guitar), Petra van Nuis (vocal), Ehud Asherie (piano), and Tom Pletcher (cornet) making everyone lean forward, intently, when they play. Andy Schumm, Dave Bock, and Tom bringing Bix into the Hotel Athenaeum. Duke Heitger leading the troops through some romping ensemble. Dan Block and Harry Allen caressing a ballad. Rebecca Kilgore being tender or perky, as required. Dan Barrett being himself. Vince Giordano, likewise, and leading the best version of the Nighthawks anyone could imagine.
I can hear it now!
That’s only a small sampling, and I mean no disrespect to the musicians I’ve left out of my list.
So perhaps you might consider slipping out the side door while dour Prudence squats watchfully in the kitchen, making sure that no one puts butter on their bagel. You can always explain to Prudence when you get back! Tell her that it was your moral duty to be there. Moral duty she understands. And perhaps you can bring her a CD, too.
For details, prices, and availability, you can visit the Allegheny Jazz Society website at www.alleghenyjazz.com, or call the ever affable Apryl Sievert at the Hotel Athenaeum (1-800-821-1881.) Remember, no one has yet invented a way to make carpe diem work retrospectively.
My iPod isn’t always a subject for philosophical contemplation. More often it’s merely a calming talisman in my battle against airplane claustrophobia and tedium. But recent experiences have made me think about it as more thought-provoking than a twentieth-century version of the transistor radio and cassette player of my past. 
Another King kept insisting that I pay attention to him. He didn’t play cornet; he would have been out of place at the Lincoln Gardens. I had taught a course in Shakepearian tragedy this summer, and ended it with KING LEAR — adding a few scenes from the 1982 Granada television presentation with Sir Laurence Olivier. 
Amongst the many notable jazz anniversaries of recent months, one important one has been pretty much universally overlooked. December 2008 was the centenary of a trumpet legend with whom jazz history has been particularly careless. He was lost, found and lost and found again – so it’s almost fitting that his centenary went by unnoticed. Even in death, he’s an elusive character.
I just received an email from a UK record company, Edition Records, which offered this inducement:
Perhaps this isn’t very different than sending money to a public radio station to support its programming and getting one’s name read aloud over the air, or writing a check to get a PBS totebag. In fact, it harks back to the old model of print publishing, where a privately-printed book could be sold only to a number of readers willing to subscribe and thus underwrite its costs. 
I post this to offer evidence about what we all know to be true — namely, that jazz groups and jazz record labels have a hard time of it and find it necessary to resort to ingenious measures. What’s next?
The disc is called IN ANOTHER LIFE, and it’s issued on the splendidly reliable Nagel-Heyer label (CD 114). It captures Marty and Dave in an informal session with good sound, in 1988 — when Dave was still in full command. The songs suggest a shared affection for solid melodies and a deep knowledge of the great jazz repertoire: WILLOW WEEP FOR ME / DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS TO MISS NEW ORLEANS? / JIM / GIMME A PIGFOOT AND A BOTTLE OF BEER / UNTIL THE REAL THING COMES ALONG / I LET A SONG GO OUT OF MY HEART / WHEN YOUR LOVER HAS GONE / I WISHED ON THE MOON / WILLOW WEEP FOR ME (alternate ) / DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS TO MISS NEW ORLEANS? (alternate) / FUSE BLUES (alternate). 
However, when falling in love with something new it would be ungracious in the extreme to forget the familiar — and, in this case, the familiar (but ecstatic) is Joe Boughton’s western New York State extravaganza, Jazz at Chautauqua. This year the dates are September 17-20. 
