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.

The Jazz of George Benson

I don't attend many concerts these days, and, added to that, I don't have the luxury of having other friends currently contributing posts on the subject of bebop to this blog. This leaves room for creativity and deviation, my favorite norms. So, I am here to talk about George Benson, who I saw in concert last night at Bergen PAC in Englewood, New Jersey, not because he is remotely associated with bebop, but because I just had the pleasure of seeing this smooth jazz master of the past and present perform.

I'll launch with an interesting story Benson told about refusing to open a concert for his friend James Brown when he was a young man because, as he explained to Brown, "I do jazz." Due to that faux pas, it took Benson another 10 years to be recognized in the business, when "James Brown would have made me a star overnight."

Benson is a local, as are other musical greats like Stevie Wonder. I think it's in part due to that, that Benson was so generous, giving a two-hour concert, with a nice long come back after the first closing ovation. He played all the audience's favorites, such as "Give Me the Night," but also the music of his friends, tunes that appear on his most recent album, Guitar Man, which has received rave reviews. For example, he performed a beautiful rendition of his friend "Sir" Paul McCartney's early composition, "I Want to Hold Your Hand," jazzed up and arranged a la Benson. He also offered a tribute to Stevie Wonder, with his version of "My Cherie Amour," and Nora Jones, with a remake of her song, "Don't Know Why." He is accompanied by excellent musicians, particularly his longtime key board player, Joe Sample.

Benson's vocals, energy and guitar playing, remain exceptionally strong. The man is 68, not old by today's standards, but still. He is a wonderful balladeer, and I learned during this concert, an amazing mimic, doing imitations of James Brown, Little Richard and Stevie Wonder, all of them friends, whose music he has played.

Benson closed with his classic, "On Broadway," which was given a real send off by the young Chicago drummer playing with the group who blew the top off the house during a final solo in that number. He is listed only as "George Benson's drummer," playing on YouTube -- I'll be darned if I can find his name anywhere, as there was no program, but everyone had something good to say about him. He'll get an identity of his own yet!

Bergen PAC has hosted some hot and cool jazz over the years, and tonight was no exception.

SILENT MONK

As we approach Monk's birthday, which takes place October 10, and, as my most recent post examined the role of silence in Miles Davis's music, I thought it appropriate to offer homage once again to Thelonious Monk, the founder of bebop. Silence in his music was as audible as the piano keys he played, always a cacophony of surprise -- lilting, funny and moving. But it is the silent Monk that interests me now, the man who is said to literally have spent the last seven years of his life without uttering a word. He spent his last six years with jazz baroness and art patron Pannonica Rothschild in her New Jersey home.

Many have no doubt wondered as I have what it is that drove Monk to the ultimate period of speech. Was it his wife Nellie's death? Was it the calamitous abuse suffered over the years, the beating with a blackjack by police of his hands while en route to a gig at the Comedy Club in Baltimore, Maryland, sadly, on occasion of my birthday, October 15, 1958? Was it the years of drugs prescribed and drugs abused? He was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, also as bipolar; he received shock treatments. One psychiatrist claimed he had experienced brain damage from being given the wrong drugs. Was it perhaps a combination of all these?

In October 2009, Italian satirist Stefani Benni's, Misterioso. A Journey in the Silence of Thelonious Monk, a theatrical production, ran as a double bill with a documentary about patron Rothschild, The Jazz Baroness -- An Unlikely Love Story -- at Riverside Studios in London. Did she perhaps play a role in silencing him? Or did she merely encourage it, let him have what he had wanted so long?

Monk is a man who would enter a room and say nothing, who could exist from day to day without the compulsion to speak, who thought perhaps longer and harder than most people about what the right thing to say might really be. Once, while attending a music lab, after listening to students perform, he paused a long while and then simply advised, "Just keep tryin'." To those frustrated by such verbal minimalism, I say, "Why does it ever have to be more complicated than that?"

Not enough can ever be said, written or interpreted, regarding Monk the man or his music, as far as I am concerned. His ideas, even his style of sunglasses, hats, coats and berets, were copped by other musicians and wannabees. Whatever Monk was, anyone who knows his music knows he is incomparably, lastingly, the true thing, an original.

Miles Davis' Poetic Sounds

I've been listening to Miles Davis's "Poetics of Sound: 1954-1959," and enjoying the sheer beauty of its lyricism and quiet power. That quiet power is derived as much from Miles's strengths as a musician, as it is from his understanding of many traditions and influences. I am thinking specifically of 'Concierto de Aranjuez', which I am listening to right now. You can hear Miles's understanding of the Spanish tradition and soul of this piece on a feeling level in the music. At the same time, there isn't any piece of music on this album that doesn't smoothly, contextually, relate to another. There is no disruption of sound, no lack of poetry. I include silence in that poetry.

This is an appropriate place to interject that, while bebop was a creative revolt against commercialism and restrictive elements in society and music, Miles's particular contribution is to the poetry of the medium. I am a lover of poetry and of the poetics in jazz. And Miles is the master. I also can't think of a more important quality missing in the sounds of music today than poetry. The commercialism has tackified so much that might have relevance, for example, flattening and simplifying the classical to fit genres like hip-hop.  The fusion of sounds is mostly just plain ugly. I am speaking specifically to what one hears on the radio just about anywhere you turn the dial on AM and FM, with the exception of a couple of stations, jazz-based or related.

I also feel that anyone wanting to return poetry to music, as opposed to lyrics, might turn to Miles Davis for instruction. Just as anyone who writes poetry in general should listen to Miles. He understood a great deal and is able to impart a great deal through his music, and equally through his silences. These are delicate things to state because we are not talking about facts, but intuitions and feelings, understandings beyond words that are translated nevertheless. And from which you grow in your own understanding of music and traditions.

So can we grow from silences in music such as jazz, just as from the silences or caesuras of poetry in which the reader/listener actually apprehends a multiplicity of meaning. And hear poetry and music, and derive meaning from it, even in the silence.

"The Poetics of Sound" might more aptly be named, "The Poetics of Silence" for this is what I believe Miles is playing upon, the meaning inherent in the pauses as well as the notes. There isn't a single cut that doesn't resonate with the listener on this theme.

The diverse listing on the album is as follows: "Solar"; the lilting, "It Never Entered My Mind," which is a Rodgers and Hart tune from the 1940 musical, Higher and Higher; "Bags' Groove," from a 1954 Davis recording. The 'Bags' reference is to vibraphonist Milt Jackson.

"When I Fall in Love," written by Victor Young and Edward Heyman, was a hit made popular by Doris Day in 1952 that was popularized by others as well, such as John Mathis, in 1959, and Etta Jones, in 1961.

"Dear Old Stockholm" is a Swedish folk song that was interpreted as well by Paul Chambers and John Coltrane, and Stan Getz, among others. 

Then there is the haunting American standard, "Bye Bye Blackbird," a tune, listeners' may forget, about a prostitute leaving the business and returning home to her mother, written and composed in 1926 by Mort Dixon and Ray Henderson.

"Milestones" is, of course, the title track from a 1958 album of the same name by Davis.

"It Ain't Necessarily So," with music by George Gershwin and lyrics by Ira Gershwin, is another American standard.

Then there is the ever-delicious "So What," from the seminal album, Kind of Blue, given a slightly mellower character here.

"Concierto de Aranjuez" was composed by Joaquin Rodrigo, originally for classical guitar. The concert intervals are intended to transport the listener by evoking sounds of nature via a dialogue among instruments, and also the instrument of silence. The inspiration for the Spanish composer's second movement is said to be the 1939 bombing of Guernica. The third movement is mixed metre, alternating between 2/4 and 3/4.

What is heard in the silence in Miles Davis' music is, alternately, the death of the old, and the birth of the new, whispering reframing of notes and phrases in a freer time and space.

Dexter Gordon's Ballads

What is there to say about Dexter Gordon's ballads? During the two long winters I spent in Ithaca, New York, I would walk for hours listening to his "Ballads" on my headset: "Darn That Dream " "Don't Explain." "I'm A Fool to Want You." "Ernie's Tune." "You've Changed." "Willow Weep For Me." "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out To Dry." "Body and Soul." Most of the tunes were recorded between 1961 and 1964, and some appear on some of his other albums such as "Doin' All Right," but not in as beautiful an arrangement as here.

I fell in love with the hulking tenor sax player during what turned out to be for me an extraordinary period of musical appreciation, when I actually had time to listen to the music I loved, especially jazz. Shortly before he died, Dexter played the part of the amazing, lyrical, drunken sax player in the 1986 film set in Paris, "Round Midnight." Paris had been good to Dexter, as it was to many musicians, and Dexter's performance, which garnered him an Academy Award nomination, turned out to be a kind of homage to artists like Lester Young, and others like Bud Powell, who inspired him and with whom he had played.

I also tried to pay homage with a poem to the artist who brought so much tenderness and warmth into my life with his music:

Ballad to Dexter

Drunk with ballads and piano now
after a snowy walk past lamppost arms
and warm benches with their sleeping ghosts
all day a madman sits there
face red shivering in his thin black suit
and fallen socks
but now he's gone
I think i see his shadow there
drifting in the park
so full of silence you can hear it
as the cars shiver by
in the slow snow rain
and blue windows like a holy horn
pain a kind goodnight for somebody
somewhere

Smoke drifts over the sidewalk
with its lone scattered footprints
and i hear a voice inside
maybe dexter's say
don't go let it snow rain
watch it come down like
love it blows away
it flys too soon
but tonight it seems
inside this dusk
perfume these
wandering prints
will take me  home
no don't go
pretend you'll stay
pretend this all
won't go
won't go away.

(published in The Cafe Review, Winter '96 issue)

SO WHAT

I don't know anyone who loves jazz who ever listened to Miles Davis's Kind of Blue just once. Kind of Blue is considered by many to be the greatest jazz album of all time. Recorded in two sessions on March 2, 1959 and April 22, 1959 at the 30th Street Columbia Studio in New York City, it featured an extraordinary sextet: pianist Bill Evans (also Wynton Kelly); drummer Jimmy Cobb; bassist Paul Chambers; John Coltrane on tenor sax; "Cannonball" Adderley on alto sax; and Miles on horn. The album, based entirely on modal jazz which uses scale improvisations, came out Aug. 17, 1959; it wasn't the first modal album ever, but it mesmerized a generation, and has become a musical treasure.

In 1959, I was barely an item in the universe, a bicultural kid, living in Talara, Peru, who probably had never heard the word, jazz. It awes me how it is I would wind up loving jazz the way I do, how it is the music can touch my mind and soul the way it does -- unless music travels through time and space and can reach us even if it doesn't come through our ears. I do have this pretty simple theory that the music our parents loved, particularly when we were in the womb and very young, somehow settles into our genes. This would explain why so many of us born in the 50s and 60s dig bebop, hard bop, modal jazz, the jazz of the 50s. Similarly, I've found that many of the kids born to parents who as youths loved disco in the 70s, grow up to love disco music and its styles too. Clearly, the love of certain kinds of music, just like musical talent, has mysterious sources.

That said, I didn't know anything about modal jazz or much about Miles when I first heard Kind of Blue in the early 90s. A kid working in a basement record store in Northampton suggested it when I asked him to recommend the best jazz ever recorded, and predicted it would "blow me away." As a poet, I was experimenting with typing to different kinds of music, mostly modern jazz, on an old Remington, a manual typewriter that allowed me to hear the music within, if you will. Jazz inspired me to break out of my own molds, preconceptions about music and rhythms, and reach into my own word songs and poetry.

The kid in the record store was right. I was really blown away by Kind of Blue, especially "So What," a modal composition based on two scales: 16 measures of the first, followed by eight of the second, then eight again of the first. There have been periods in my life, when I couldn't wait to hop in my car just so I could play that Miles' piece on my CD, over and over. It never inspired poetry, but a short story, named after the composition. Throughout the years, "So What," like its parent album, has never lost its hold on me. I derive a special excitement from knowing what the horns and other instruments are going to do when I listen to it. The soloists on it, in order, are: Miles, Coltrane, "Cannonball," Evans (and horns), and Chambers.

Listen to it sometime. It is just so damn cool.