THE BEST IN JAZZ LITERATURE

BEST Jazz Reads:

KANSAS CITY LIGHTNING, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CHARLIE PARKER by Stanley Crouch. The long-awaited (and recently published) book on Bird is well worth the wait, and you won't want to put down. An expert on the art and aesthetics of jazz, Crouch offers fresh stories and insights on the man and myth. An essayist, columnist (The Daily News) and novelist, Crouch is perhaps best known for his long stint serving as artistic consultant for jazz programs at Lincoln Center.

THE BLUE MOMENT by Richard Williams. An interesting attempt to place the influence of Miles Davis in a wider musical, cultural and historical context.

COLTRANE by Ben Ratliff. An extraordinary, thrilling and often heady examination of the sound, technique and influence of the great saxophonist John Coltrane.

JAZZ by Bob Blumenthal. A primer on the subject by long-time critic Blumenthal, who has written for The Boston Globe and received Grammys for best album notes for Coltrane: The Classic Quartet/Complete Impulse! Studio Recordings in 1999 and the following year for Miles Davis & John Coltrane: The Complete Columbia Recordings 1955-61.

FOOTPRINTS: THE LIFE AND WORK OF WAYNE SHORTER by Michelle Mercer. An invaluable compendium of interviews and rich insights into this national living treasure, his struggles and his music.

HARD BOP by David H. Rosenthal. A standard. Read it if you want to know how bebop transitioned into hard bop.

JAZZ by Gary Giddins and Scott Deveaux. Superior photographs and a rich text, intelligent and chock full of love and appreciation for the music.

LUSH LIFE, A BIOGRAPHY OF BILLY STRAYHORN by David Hadju. A short, openly gay African-American dynamo, Strayhorn worked closely with Duke Ellington as a composer and collaborator. Among Strayhorn's defining compositions are "Take the 'A' Train," "Lush Life," and "Satin Doll."

A former writer for  The Village Voice and Rolling Stone magazine, Hadju is currently music critic for The New Republic and teaches at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

READING JAZZ, edited by Robert Gottlieb. Readable and delightful, a must for any jazz aficionado.

SO WHAT, THE LIFE OF MILES DAVIS by John Szwed. A gorgeous, elegant, well-researched book. Szwed also wrote a bio on Sun Ra. He teaches music and jazz studies at Columbia University and is Director of the Center for Jazz Studies there.

BEST Magazine Reads:

Brilliant Corners - in hard copy only, this is the only national journal focussing on jazz-related lit, and has published some of the biggest names writing on the subject such as Yusef Komunyakaa and Philip Levine

Jerry Jazz Musician - only online, it features videos, articles and short stories on jazz. Historian and music critic Nat Hentoff called JJM "a wonder" -- "The site encompasses what could be called American civilization with jazz as the centerpiece."

A JAZZ SHORT STORY by Arya F. Jenkins on JJM

Jerry Jazz Musician, an online jazz website, just launched a series of jazz short stories by Arya F. Jenkins. The first is called "Soliloquy," and features McCoy Tyner.

http://www.jerryjazzmusician.com/2013/09/soliloquy-arya-f-jenkins/

Thanks for reading. And peruse the excellent JJM website.

REMEMBERING NABIL

I shouldn't feel shy about saying hard bop lives, it does, even after the masters die, it does. The ever funky Horace Silver, who began as a tenor sax man and moved onto piano, started The Jazz Messengers with drummer Art Blakey, and is still with us. Horace's mother was born in New Canaan, Conn., where I grew up and Horace was born in Norwalk. But it wasn't Horace who seeped me in the world of hard bop, it was Nabil, one of the great double bass jazz men ever, who lived in Bridgeport and also played with many hard bop greats.

In the 1950s, bassist Nabil Totah, came home from the Korean War to the Big Apple an aspiring musician and, after only three days of jamming in sessions was hired by Charlie Parker. He was mentored by bassist Oscar Pettiford and worked with Charles Mingus, among others. Nabil's home was an homage to jazz greats with photographs and sketches of them covering nearly every wall. He made me homemade hummus and Ethiopian coffee whenever I came to visit and and played jazz records for me in his studio and would invite me to recite my poems into his recorder and sometimes let me play his piano.

Nabil was born in Palestine to a Palestinian Quaker minister and an American teacher and once performed at a gallery show I curated for three artists in my home in Black Rock. I was fortunate to see him play his beautiful bass with his trio many times at the Silvermine Tavern in New Canaan and at Bread and Roses in Bridgeport. He was brilliant, warm and generous and the world's worst driver--it's a wonder he didn't go out of this world in his pale blue Lincoln--and, like many musicians of his time, an awful drunk until he quit. He quit cigarettes too a few years after letting go the booze, and passed away at 82 last June 7. I still play his gorgeous album, More Double Bass, which he recorded in 1998 with pianist Mike Longo and drummer Ray Mosca.

Here's "Subaru Mama," the last cut on the album, written by Nabil. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5AO_kDLF7k

Long live, Nabil. May you keep playing the double bass in heaven.

BIRD'S ABILITY TO PERCEIVE

Sculptor Julie Macdonald was taken with Bird and "the wonder about his ability to perceive." She and Bird met on his last trip to California, a year or so before he died. Macdonald is known for her extraordinary sculpture of Bird's head, a black and white photograph of which, incidentally, graced the cover of Downbeat in 1965, on the event of the 10th anniversary of Charlie Parker's death. The sculpture is made of sandstone, is almost twice the actual size of Bird's head, weighs 275 pounds and is attached to a polished black granite cube. It is said to capture the many conflicting and captivating traits of Bird's character and personality--the old man and young child, for example--and holds a resemblance to both Egyptian and African art. Macdonald's sculpture of Bird's head is in the collection of Robert George Reisner, who later wrote a biography of Bird that is comprised of interviews with 81 of Bird's closest friends.

Bird's last visit to California was interrupted by news of his three-year old daughter Pree's death. Initially, he reacted to the news by getting drunk on Alexander's. Then he got off heroin and alcohol, before returning east, to be there for his wife Chan through the ordeal of their loss. Many painful incidents in Bird's life were yet to come, but he was willing to put aside the drugs and make an effort to be the man his wife needed him to be in his last months.

For most of Bird's life, he was known as unreliable in all but his playing, a mooch par excellence. He never had enough money, food, cigarettes, booze or drugs. His appetites for all these and women too have been likened to those of Picasso. And yet he was a man who listened with his whole being, and was completely attuned to life. He once noted that if a person could hear every sound there was, he would go mad, which Parker did. He listened that intently to people, to everything.

Although Bird's life was tragic, some of the episodes that led to his being put away "in rehab" are humorous. For instance, once, while Bird was staying in a cheap hotel in L.A., he determined he had to make a phone call and went down to the lobby to use the phone. The manager behind the desk was horrified when he saw Bird, as he had no clothes on. Bird went back upstairs to remedy the problem and came down a short while later. He had put on a coat, but still had no pants on! Soon after that, he was sent to a police psychiatrist, then to Camarillo.

In 2010, musician/artist/performer Charles Wsir Johnson created a beautiful homage to Bird, using makeshift instruments, called "A Bird in Camarillo," about Bird's 1946-1947 visit to that hospital. Bird apparently wrote a short tune while in rehab there called, "Relaxing in Camarillo."

For most of Bird's life, and after it, people viewed Bird's erratic behavior as part of his nature instead of part of the diseases of alcoholism and drug addiction that afflicted him most of his life. Unfortunately, his addictions helped grow his myth. What remains indisputable is Bird's uncanny gift of music and his ability to perceive.

References: "Charlie Parker: A Genius Distilled," by Richard Williams, The Guardian, Mar. 21, 2010.
The Legend of Charlie Parker by Robert George Reisner, Da Capa Press, 1977.
"A Bird in Camarillo," by Charles Wsir Johnson, YouTube video.

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.