Unfortunately, I Was Right About Stan Tracey

I wish there would be some news in the jazz world other than the greats leaving us one-by-one. My premonition last July was correct in the case of Stan Tracey, as I went out of my way while in Scotland last summer to see him at the Edinburgh Jazz Festival, only to be disappointed when he was a no-show at his own gig. I thought it perhaps my last chance to see the legendary house pianist from Ronnie Scott’s, and unfortunately I was right; Stan passed away this week. No more to be heard from the man for whom accompanying the likes of Dexter Gordon and Ben Webster every night for seven years was like "Christmas every day" (shades of Elmo). See his lengthy Guardian obit here.

Jim Hall left us this week as well. Most notable in my book for joining Sonny Rollins’ 1962 re-entry-from-outer-space album The Bridge, Jim played subtle guitar with virtually everybody in jazz, proving that you don’t have to be a million-note-a-minute twiddler to be a great player. If only more would listen and adopt his approach. From his New York Times obit: Mr. Hall never took his mastery of the guitar for granted. “The instrument keeps me humble…Sometimes I pick it up and it seems to say, ‘No, you can’t play today.’ I keep at it anyway, though.”

To think that someone whose mastery of the instrument appeared so effortless was actually still intimidated by it after playing for 73 years. I don't feel so bad now on those days when practice seems like work and I feel like a small child picking up my horn for the first time.

Saxophone Colossus

My tenor-playing compatriot Alan Breen, now located in Phnom Penh, sent me the link to this noteworthy article about Sonny Rollins. Rather lengthy in this short-attention-span world, but definitely worth the read.

One of the first jazz LPs I bought when I was a college student was Saxophone Colossus, and I remember playing it sparingly because it was so great I was worried about wearing it out. Sonny is just the best ever. Imagine jamming with Bird while still a teenager and keeping up, and now at age 82 still having the urge to practice every day – to get better. One of the only times Bird recorded on tenor was alongside young Sonny on Serpent's Tooth in 1953 (try to pick out who is who on that record). Sonny has produced just too much good music through the years to credibly say that one piece, or one era, or one band, or one album is his best. I particularly love the story about the classic Tenor Madness session with John Coltrane in 1956 where Trane reputedly grumbled that Sonny was just messing with him.

Reviews of Sonny’s 1960s RCA recordings – including the article in the link above – usually focus on his comeback album The Bridge, which is a jewel but ultra-conservative for 1962. I prefer the band from later that year with Don Cherry on trumpet, and the album from the following year alongside founding father Coleman Hawkins, which I find incredible. Sonny took some unique approaches during that session – some reviewers describe them as odd – merely to emphasize that he was not Hawk. Not long ago I came across some bootlegs from Ronnie Scott’s in the mid-60s that are undiscovered fun, where Sonny shares the stage with Ronnie himself (recently-discussed master Stan Tracey is on piano).

I've had the chance to see Sonny live twice through the years; once in 1981-82 in Philly in a club where I sat so close I could have shined his shoes. That night he was smokin’. In the mid-90’s I caught Sonny at Symphony Hall in Chicago. The venue was just wrong, the sound was bad, and the tickets were expensive. That gig was a disappointment, an off night.

2011’s Road Shows Vol. 2, where fellow octogenarians Sonny and Ornette Coleman have their first-ever meeting, is notable because Sonny mirrors Ornette’s style when they play together. Unbelievable that they never performed on the same stage before this.

There is a wonderful photo of Sonny on Ellery Eskelin’s blog from about a year ago where Ellery met Sonny sitting in the waiting lounge of Detroit airport. Here is the living link to every major jazz player since Coleman Hawkins and a player who is on absolutely everyone’s best-tenor-saxophonist-in-history list flying coach class and sitting on a hard seat in the public area. This man should be up in First Class and in the VIP Room. A sad commentary on the economics of a playing horn for a living, even at the top.

According to Mark Jacobson’s article, Sonny is suffering from a lung ailment and hasn't touched his Mark VI for a couple of months. Not good news at age 82. Here’s a prayer that he makes it back. We can’t do without him.

Who's on My Turntable (or CD Player or iPod)

Surprise, all horn players.

Basic everyday vocabulary: 
Coleman Hawkins
Lester Young
Charlie Parker
Dexter Gordon
John Coltrane
Sonny Rollins (*)
Ornette Coleman (*)

And onward, I'm sure I'm inadvertently leaving some out:
Billy Harper (*)
Booker Ervin
Budd Johnson
Charles Brackeen (*)
Chris Potter (*)
Dewey Redman
Eddie Harris
Edward Wilkerson (*)
Ellery Eskelin (*)
Eric Dolphy
Frank Lowe
Fred Anderson
Gene Ammons
Jemeel Moondoc (*)
Joe Harriott
Joe Henderson
John Gilmore
John Tchicai (*)
Julius Hemphill
Kalaparusha (*)
Ken Vandermark (*)
Lucky Thompson
Odean Pope (*)
Paul Gonsalves
Paul Jeffrey (*)
Rahsaan Roland Kirk
Rob Brown (*)
Sam Rivers
Sean Bergin (*)
Tina Brooks
Tony Malaby (*)
Von Freeman (*)

(*) These guys are still around; seek them out and support their performances.

My Musical Biography, Part 6 (Conclusion for Now)

I am never satisfied with my own music – I know every mistake I make – but I also know that you are not taking creative chances if you don’t make some mistakes. The literature about high performance and innovation in every field, not just music, agrees that you have to take chances to advance and that mistakes are part of the learning process. However, street reality is that mistakes are usually penalized. 50 years after Ornette, the thing about 'wrong notes' is still going around...like Monk said as he stared at the piano keyboard, "Show me which note is wrong."

I read a lot about music and get a kick out of academic critics who earn their living by making brilliant statements like “Dexter came in a beat too soon on this phrase” or “Bud played a clashing note while comping in measure 4” or “Sonny hit a clam”. Ha ha, you dimwit. You get behind the horn at 200mph and do something you have never done before, in company of players as good as or better than you who are also creating in the moment. All that said I can’t hardly stand listening to my own playing once I finish mastering the recordings (that’s one thing I have in common with Sonny anyhow). I love playing with other horn players who are better than me. I tend to favor blues and riff tunes and minor scales and disfavor Tin Pan Alley standards (which I never listened to the original of in the first place), although if Pres or Dexter played it, it can’t be all bad. I try to expand my repertoire continually and always introduce new tunes on gigs. My recent repertoire comes from Sam Rivers, Horace Silver, Trane, Rahsaan, Sonny, Monk of course, Cleanhead Vinson, Eddie Harris, Mingus, Cannonball…

Bless the guys who are keeping the music alive. I know you are starving.

State of the Horn, One Player's View

Playing sax is a never ending learning process. Most of the players I like are way older than me – the recently passed Sam Rivers was close to 90, Fred Anderson was in his late 70’s when he left, Ornette and Sonny are now 80, Vonski is about 88 now and still going.

Since my school days the music in many ways has transformed from a vibrant, free, expressive art form to a stodgy, academic, ossified craft you learn in class by studying method books based on John Coltrane’s 1959 approach, an approach he himself rapidly advanced away from. So-called jazz can now be “graded” and there are “jazz competitions” with monetary prizes awarded. I've never understood how an art form founded in self expression could be treated as a competition like weight lifting or horse racing.

Ornette is back to being considered radical again more than 50 years after he established the mainstream. Learning jazz is now mostly “take a random mathematical pattern like 1-3-6-5, memorize it in every key, then play it as fast as you can”. Harmonic complexity is treated as the only value worth striving for; formulaically twiddling up and down chords at high speed is what makes you a good horn player. The more complicated the better. Memorizing solos, other people’s solos, is mandatory (but only those that slavishly follow chord changes, the kind of music the pioneers abandoned in the late 50’s, mainly because formulas can be replicated but creativity cannot). The conventional wisdom after 30 years of musical Reaganomics is that music is like speech – you imitate your mother to learn to speak, so you must imitate other musicians to play jazz. An inaccurate analogy – I learned to speak from my mother but my voice sounds nothing like hers, I never needed to ape her voice pitch, emphasis, and inflection to speak, and I never had to copy her exact words, grammar, and syntax to be understood. There is still a pocket of creativity in the music today but it is small and the giants are leaving us one by one. Much of what I hear labelled “jazz” is corporate pap and the word is close to becoming meaningless since many uncritical listeners confuse lounge music that incorporates a bit of syncopation and a blue note or two with the creative storm that stems from the tradition of Pops, Pres, Bird, Miles, Trane, and Ornette. Where I live it is difficult to hear a horn at all.

My Musical Biography, Part 3

The 1970’s were the height of the New York loft scene; a live show costs just a couple of bucks in those days and most places did not clear the floor between sets. I used to take the train frequently to NYC, where my Lab School best friend Gilbert lived. Gilbert loved music and had the world’s largest record collection but he never had any musical talent himself (his amazing talents lie elsewhere - he is now a world-renowned artist, see http://www.gilberthsiao.blogspot.com/). I guess we have that in common, no innate musical talent. I used to go hear live music all the time – Studio Rivbea and the Tin Palace come to mind. Once I walked across lower Manhattan blowing my alto in the street the whole way; when we walked in front of Ali’s Alley, Rashied Ali himself came out to see what the commotion was – can you imagine doing that in post-Giuliani NYC? Probably get locked up.

Some of the greats I’ve had the fortune to see and hear live: Miles Davis (his pre-retirement electric band with Sonny Fortune and Pete Cosey), Charles Mingus (with George Adams and Danny Rich-man; Mingus cussed me out with some racial epithets when I naively tried to say hello between sets in Montreal), Dexter Gordon (once with Woody Shaw on trumpet; Dexter was a real gentleman), Dizzy Gillespie (who was interested in my wife and not the least bit in me), Sam Rivers (at Rivbea), Sonny Rollins (in Philly where I sat so close I could’ve shined his shoes), Leroy Jenkins (at the recording session for his JCOA album), Clark Terry (I interviewed him for WHRB), Archie Shepp (I interviewed him for WHRB and got to hang out with him and Dave Burrell in their hotel; he certainly never showed any hostility towards white people to me), James Moody (in Terre Haute!), McCoy Tyner (maybe his best band with Junie Booth and Azar Lawrence), Kalaparusha (I had, and still have, a real taste for the AACM), Muhal Richard Abrams, Ornette Coleman with Prime Time, towering Randy Weston, Max Roach (with the fabulous Billy Harper on tenor), Dewey Redman (whose music puts his much more highly touted son to shame), Julius Hemphill (Tim Berne was his manager at the time and sent me some unreleased cassettes of Julius), David Murray (the saxophone prodigy of the day, not much older than me), Jimmy McGriff, Lou Donaldson, Ray Charles, Pepper Adams (in Munich’s famed Domocile), Chicago’s great Fred Anderson, Joe Henderson (whose introverted style I never really understood until I saw him in person), Jackie McLean (one of his last concerts), Cecil Taylor (who plays the piano like he has three hands), Paul Quinichette at the West End, Art Blakey (not one of his best bands unfortunately) and Sun Ra and James Brown multiple times…JB twice with Wilson Pickett on the bill. My favorite is Vonski Von Freeman who instructed me that “Music is not mathematics.”

Someone I didn’t see…Rahsaan…one of the dumbest things I ever did in my life. Big Dave called me to come down to Bloomington and see Rahsaan at the Bluebird and I was too lazy to make the hour drive by myself. Rahsaan died that night after the concert. Big Dave is gone now too.