Jazz History

A Piece Of Technology That Makes Listening To Jazz Better

Maybe you remember when you first realized that the rabbit hole of jazz was far, far deeper than you’d possibly imagined. That the same tenor saxophone player on Kind of Blue also made Blue Train and Giant Steps and A Love Supreme and Interstellar Space and dozens of other albums and who knows how many guest appearances, and that that was just what people recorded of John Coltrane. And that all those records involved scores of other contributors, who in turn played with scores of other people over scores of years. And that this hopelessly convoluted network reflected just a small slice of jazz history to begin with.

What allowed you to dive in was a guide to the data — maybe a book, or a radio broadcaster, or someone you knew who knew something. A voice who could translate the wilderness to human terms, and made it appealing to jump into.

The new Spotify app from Blue Note Records, released yesterday, isn’t the perfect guide. But as a music discovery tool, it’s a huge leap in the right direction, and it’s certainly the first digital music technology I’ve seen which begins to make sense of the dense jumble in which jazz fans happily abandon themselves. Continue reading

On The Future Of Jazz Among Black Folk

Every year, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation throws a concert and panel discussion as part of its annual conference. It’s notable not only as a musical event — this year’s show features drummer Terri Lyne Carrington’s take on the classic album Money Jungle, featuring vocalist Lizz Wright, as well as alto saxophonist Antonio Hart’s quintet with special guest Jimmy Heath — but also as a cultural one. In this century, anyway, it’s become surprisingly uncommon to see documentation of black jazz artists performing for primarily black audiences.

By the time you read this, the concert will be transpiring or over. But earlier in the day, many of its star musicians and a few distinguished authors assembled for a forum in a cramped Washington Conference Center boardroom. Around 100 to 150 people — the majority African-American, in business attire and middle-aged — were in the house for a discussion titled “If You Really Are Concerned: An African-American Agenda for Jazz.” It took its title from a Billy Taylor song, the last stanza of which goes:

If you really are concerned, then show it
If you really want to help, you can
But you’d better start right now
By making changes when you’re able
Or your world will disappear

As one of the panelists, writer and consultant Willard Jenkins, said in his prefatory remarks, every time African-Americans are gathered to talk about jazz, the room sighs, as if it’s lost control over something which emerged from its community. “Nothing has been stolen — we’ve given it away,” he said. “And we’ve given it away through our neglect.” Continue reading

Soul From A Console: Jazz On The Hammond B-3 Organ

Musicians who play the Hammond B-3 — the electric organ found most often in jazz, soul and gospel — can forget about traveling light. The instrument weighs in at around 425 pounds and moving it is a little like schlepping around a refrigerator.

Californian Larry Goldings, who appears with trio-mates Peter Bernstein (guitar) and Bill Stewart (drums) on our Live from the Village Vanguard series tomorrow, was still trying to work out his Hammond moves when we spoke with him last week. He explains why the organ is worth it. Continue reading

Possessed By Joy: A North American Drummer In Cuba

In Afro-Cuban religious ceremonies, it’s common for participants to become possessed by spirits. All sorts of people are possessed: older ladies and teenage boys, lifelong adherents and new initiates. Most are handled expertly by other ceremony participants, who flank the person being “mounted,” make sure he or she doesn’t injure anyone, usher the person out of the ceremonial room and help him or her out of a trance.

In the 11 days that I’d been in the small, bustling, crumbling city of Matanzas, I’d already seen several ceremonial possessions. During my last night in town, I witnessed my fifth Santería ceremony, where batá drummers accompany liturgical song and dance. It was the most dramatic one yet.

There had already been several brief possessions at this last toque for Yemayá, the deity associated with the ocean. Suddenly, a man in his early 20s was mounted. He began to spin in place quickly, like a 33 rpm Sufi dervish played at 45 rpm. He placed his wrists on his hips and pushed his elbows back like a duck. His eyes were wild as he let out loud, periodic cackles, directed primarily at the sacred drums as the rhythms increased in intensity to a frantic but deeply grooving pace. The laughter, I was told afterward, symbolized enjoyment, not menace.

When I left an hour later, I saw the young man who had been escorted out of the building long before. He was still cackling, eyes wide, deeply in trance. Continue reading

A Brief History Of Jazz Education, Pt. 2

As a teaching assistant for UCLA’s undergraduate course “Jazz in American Culture,” I spend much of my time in a scene found on college campuses around the world. My professor, the seasoned jazz guitarist Charley Harrison, lectures eager students on the music’s geniuses. In the evening, he directs the college big band through classic Swing Era repertoire and modern reinterpretations of it. Harrison and his colleagues also lead smaller ensembles that take 1960s hard bop as their aesthetic core. His students are deeply committed to honing their skills as jazz improvisers; most were already indoctrinated in high school or earlier. During the summer, many of them play in a nearby summer jazz workshop, where visiting masters further school them in the intricate art of jazz performance.

UCLA is also home to the prestigious Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance, a highly selective graduate program where students receive mentorship from legends like Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, who have just been named UCLA professors. Meanwhile, the Center for the Art of Performance books the campus’ resplendent concert venue, Royce Hall, with high-profile jazz artists from the international touring circuit. Recent headliners include the Robert Glasper Experiment, the Vijay Iyer Trio, and the Ron Carter Quartet. Continue reading

A Brief History Of Jazz Education, Pt. 1

One year ago, when I began graduate study in ethnomusicology at UCLA, I found myself undergoing what has become a familiar ritual. As I played my trombone in a near-empty classroom accompanied by a play-a-long recording, it occurred to me that I was in the midst of my sixth college big band audition. A professor — in this special case, guitar legend Kenny Burrell — led the proceedings. When he engulfed my hand in his massive grip, I learned that I was in.

Having grown up in the age of the “jazz-education industrial complex,” as Nate Chinen and others have called it, educational institutions such as high schools, summer camps and universities have provided the setting for much of my jazz experience. As I continue down the rabbit hole of jazz academia, I have come to appreciate some of the quirks and contradictions of these strange organizations. They’ve allowed me to wear many hats besides “big band trombonist”: history student, theory teacher, radio DJ, journalist, blogger, advocate, critic and diehard music fan. Continue reading

Tito Puente: 90 Years Of Getting People To Dance

The percussionist and bandleader Tito Puente would have celebrated his 90th birthday this weekend on April 20. And the recently released box set Quatro: The Definitive Collection is a great place to start celebrating the once and forever King of Latin Music. It captures the driving sound of big band mambo and cha-cha-cha that launched people onto dance floors for decades.

When he died in 2000 at age 73, the New York City native had more than 100 recordings to his name. The new box set features his recordings for RCA in the 1950s, when he was at the height of his popularity. That includes the 1958 release Dance Mania, which remains one of Puente’s most popular recordings.

Quatro features tracks from Puente’s move to RCA records (from a smaller indie label specializing in Afro-Caribbean dance music). In his book Mambo Diablo: My Journey With Tito Puente, biographer Joe Conzo points out that Puente hoped that RCA would allow him to stretch out and incorporate more jazz elements into his records. Continue reading

How One Singer Made Four Debut Albums

About a month before she died last week at age 76, Sathima Bea Benjamin finally properly celebrated her debut album. That’s a bit of a complicated claim, of course, because depending on how you count, the South African vocalist either made her debut album in 1959, 1963, 1976 or 1979.

In 1959, as Beatty Benjamin, she recorded the LP My Songs for You. It was produced by the pianist Dollar Brand, who was later known as Abdullah Ibrahim; he was also her boyfriend and later became her husband. However, it was never released.

In 1963, then living in Europe, Benjamin recorded with Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Danish violinist Svend Asmussen and Ibrahim’s trio. Ellington personally paid for Ibrahim, his band and Benjamin to travel to Paris to make two separate albums for Reprise Records, the label founded by Frank Sinatra. (It’s a wonderfully serendipitous story worth reading in full, as told to several interviewers.) Reprise put out Duke Ellington Presents The Dollar Brand Trio, jump-starting her future husband’s career, but never released Benjamin’s languid, plotted album; the label was supposedly pessimistic on its commercial prospects. Continue reading

In New Afro-Cuban Music, Ancient Tradition Meets Future Shock

In Henry Dumas’ short story “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” three “afro-horns” have been forged from a rare metal found only in Africa and South America. One rests in a European museum; a second one is believed to be somewhere on the west coast of Mexico among a tribe of Indians; and a third is owned by Probe, a jazz musician. When Probe finally plays the afro-horn in public, the sound is devastatingly powerful.

The drummer Francisco Mora-Catlett was working with Sun Ra, the iconic Afro-Futurist keyboardist and conceptualist, when he discovered the story. “I was impressed by the surrealistic ways in which he explained things and by the subtleties that were going on,” Mora-Catlett says.

Around the same time, pianist Michele Rosewoman was getting involved in two different musical communities. While growing up in Oakland, Calif., she studied jazz with pianist Ed Kelly in the early ’70s, and befriended many members of St. Louis’ Black Artists’ Group and its Chicago-based kindred-spirit organization, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. At the same time, she was studying Afro-Cuban and Haitian percussion. Continue reading

How Taxes And Moving Changed The Sound Of Jazz

When many of us at NPR rushed to file our U.S. federal income-tax returns, I’m reminded of a moment in jazz history. Namely, the mid-1940s, when a new style called bebop came into popularity.

As a recent Wall Street Journal article relates (behind the paywall, unfortunately), jazz is not immune to transience or taxes. A stiff federal cabaret tax imposed on New York nightclubs in 1944 had much to do with why bebop became popular, and why jazz has moved from dance-hall ballrooms to sit-down clubs for focused listening. So argues the trombonist, singer and bandleader Eric Felten:

Clubs that provided strictly instrumental music to which no one danced were exempt from the cabaret tax. It is no coincidence that in the back half of the 1940s, a new and undanceable jazz performed primarily by small instrumental groups — bebop — emerged as the music of the moment.

“The spotlight was on instrumentalists because of the prohibitive entertainment taxes,” the great bebop drummer Max Roach was quoted in jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s memoirs, To Be or Not to Bop. “You couldn’t have a big band, because the big band played for dancing.”

The federal excise tax inadvertently spurred the bebop revolution: “If somebody got up to dance, there would be 20 percent more tax on the dollar. If someone got up there and sang a song, it would be 20 percent more,” Roach said. “It was a wonderful period for the development of the instrumentalist.”

While I wouldn’t argue with Max Roach, I think Felten overstates his case, if only by omitting many of the other reasons for bebop’s emergence. Continue reading