NOTES ON TIME BEING

I was recently introduced to the music of Derwyn Holder by his girlfriend 
Lia Di Stefano, who created the interesting cover on his disk, Time Being. 
Listen to the disk if you can. It is available from NEEN RECORDS in 
Weehawken and features pianist/composer Holder, saxophonist Sue Terry, 
and bassist Ron Naspo. Holder leans toward the heady as well as lyrical and 
has performed with the likes of Sonny Stitt, Zoot Sims and Cassandra Wilson. 
According to Lia, he is focussing more on composing these days.

JAZZ FICTION

I remain amazed at the few outlets for jazz fiction at this time in the literary world. With so many people loving jazz--and many people do--you would think there would be more affiliations in the literary realm. I mean music and the written word are practically synonymous. I would, for example, love to see another anthology celebrating jazz short fiction.

In the meantime, check out www.jerryjazz.com, an award-winning jazz website run by Joe Maita and praised by critic Nat Henthoff. Not only does JJM carry diverse news about jazz and fascinating gifts and ideas, it has the audacity to actually pay writers for their jazz-inspired fiction. See a short story of mine, "So What," published there in 2012. The title comes, of course, from the famous cut on the even more famous Miles' album, Kinda Blue.

Check out Jerry Jazz Musician. Support jazz fiction. Read about jazz.

JAZZ SPACES

       There are places inhabited by the music, and I don't just mean dives or bars where it plays. When I lived in Ithaca, New York, in the mid 1990s, when it was still an undiscovered paradise, it was Dexter Gordon and me, traipsing along the snowy sidewalks. I listened to the beautiful, sensuous and warm saxophone of his playing, lifting me up and out and setting me down ever so lightly in the town in which I lived then, that was marked definitively, as Dexter's. And mine. Because of the music.

        Jazz seals you to times and places. I was born during the hard bop era and it's in my blood. And while it never made sense at first, it does now, that jazz was part of my creation too, in the melding between a North American dad as cool as Iowa wind in winter, and a mother as intemperate and warm as the Colombian sun. To be bicultural when I was brought up in the 60s and 70s was to know jazz and to be it. For the music is born of irreconcilable differences that due to the magic of performance and invention of musicians creates a new and better realm, a pathway of possibilities.

         It is probably said more often of the jazz medium than any other kind of music that the kind of performance you experience in a given time and place, live, can never again be repeated or recreated. Such is the magic of the moment and its importance in the creation of jazz.

        And just as I can go to Ithaca, New York, as I did recently, and hope to recreate that moment, it is irretrievably lost, gone. That place is no longer what it was, refined and touristy as it has become, and I am no longer who I was. And what is the best jazz, if not a rare conversation, an authentic meeting ground between differences? Dexter and our time together on those streets is a part of my internal history, is all, and while the memory of his ballads fused in a moment remains, I will never again feel about his music the way I did then and there, when no place was warmer than the street with his music in my ears.

       I haven't known too many jazz spaces i could call home, but Ithaca was definitely one.

The Case for Hard Bop

This is a blog about bebop, or mostly bebop, although I realized recently during a conversation with my sister Marcela, who is a jazz critic, that while I enjoy bebop, I am mostly a hard bop fan. We both are.

When I talk about jazz, I refer almost exclusively to Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Charles Mingus, Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell, Clifford Brown, as if these were the only names in jazz, or at least, the only artists worth listening to. They are all hard boppers. In 1954, Horace Silver (of Horace Silver and The Jazz Messengers) wrote a bluesy, highly rhythmic composition, "The Preacher." That, and Miles Davis's album, "Walkin'", produced the same year, are said to have launched hard bop. The term, which describes the decade of jazz from 1955 to 1965, apparently originated with critic and pianist John Mehegan.

Hard bop compositions are based on original choral changes and employ several horns during the head and in riffs. The soloing takes on more of a vocal approach. Bebop, the style of jazz of the 1940s dominated by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker ("Bird"),  used fast tempos and complex twists and turns, while hard bop was influenced by blues and gospel, and often dubbed, funky.

Some of the great albums to come out of hard bop, considered the east coast evolution of bebop, were: Art Blakey's Ugetsu, Thelonius Monk's Brilliant Corners, Sonny Rollins' Saxophone Colossus, Charles Mingus's Mingus Ah Um, and of course, Miles Davis's Kind of Blue.

If you want to understand more about this style of music read David Rosenthal's excellent book on the subject -- Hard Bop, published by Oxford University Press in 1992.

I am sure there are contemporary hard boppers, but I keep returning to the originals. In my mind I am always dressed in black, smoking cigarettes, listening to Miles and Coltrane. Stories inspired by their music float out of my brain, and join their shadows on an eternal stage.