Zev Feldman: “The Jazz Detective” is haunted by the greatest ghosts of the music

Zev Feldman’s reputation in the jazz world has spread to where he is a consulting producer for the legendary Blue Note label. Here he is with Blue Note president Don Was (left) in the label’s tape archives. All photos courtesy of Zev Feldman

. The name Monk for decades meant jazz giant Thelonious Monk. Then a Emmy-winning TV detective named Monk became the star of a popular series called Monk, claiming new first association for the name in popular culture.

And now, along comes Zev Feldman, to take the detective role back from the TV guy, and for the sake of jazz. So now Feldman is known as “The Jazz Detective.” Detective Monk’s mystical raised hands might have a counterpart in Feldman’s internal musical dowsing rod, sensing the jazz dead, who gravely whisper, “Over here lies my best undiscovered work.”

Hearing such spectral vibes over and over, the researcher-record producer has become one of the most important non-jazz musicians in the art form, responsible for an astonishing bounty of recordings that are helping reshape the legacy of jazz history.

And his musical roots are deep, if not pure, Milwaukee.

The GRAMMY-nominated independent record producer, and the Co-President of Resonance Records, is now also a consulting producer of archival and historical recordings for Blue Note Records, the quintessential jazz label. He’s been dubbed “the Indiana Jones of Jazz” in Stereophile magazine and is widely known as the “Jazz Detective.” Over the last 25 years, he has worked for PolyGram, Universal Music Group, Rhino/Warner Music Group, and Concord Music Group, among others. In 2016, he was voted “Rising Star Producer” in Down Beat Magazine’s International Critics Poll, and he was voted “Producer of the Year” in 2022.

He’s co-produced several other labels’ important historic projects, including the acclaimed Thelonious Monk discoveries Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Palo Alto.

He also co-produced the monumental 2021 release of John Coltrane, A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle on Impulse! Records.

Amid this auspicious career in the music’s archeological byways, Feldman found his seeming destiny when he crossed paths with “my dear friend and mentor (producer) George Klabin at Resonance Records,” he says. “Since Resonance, my life was forever transformed. I was given an intriguing proposition: if I found unreleased jazz recordings, not just reissues, but newly unearthed material, George said I could produce it for release on the label. That was like putting fire on gasoline and led directly to what I’m doing now.”

Feldman with his mentor, Resonance Records president George Klabin

But Feldman’s back story shaped who he would become. He was born in Los Angeles, but his family moved to Madison shortly afterwards and Feldman’s passion for jazz goes to deep Milwaukee familial roots. His great uncle was the stellar Milwaukee tenor saxophonist Alvin “Abe” Aaron, who worked and toured with Les Brown (on all those famous USO tours with Bob Hope and in the studio), Dave Pell, Jack Teagarden, and others. Another uncle, Joe Aaron, also played reed instruments. Feldman’s cousin is longtime Milwaukee flutist Rick Aaron, now based in Florida. His Aunt Dora played guitar in an all-female jazz band in Milwaukee around ‘20s and ‘30s called The Bachelor’s Delight.

Feldman’s Aunt Dora (second from right) played guitar in the all-female jazz band Bachelor’s Delight in the 1920s and ’30s.

“Music, especially jazz, was always around and was passed down from the elders,” Feldman says. “It’s been part of our family’s language since I was a child.

“My mother and father (who were Milwaukee natives) had an awesome record collection in all genres of music. In high school I was all about classic rock from the Beatles, the Stones, Hendrix, the Who, but was also really digging Miles and Coltrane, and eventually the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and so much more. My most memorable live music experience in Milwaukee was seeing my great uncle Joe Aaron perform at a club when I was 18 years old and went with my great aunt, Shirley, and my grandmother. I even had a couple of Heinekens, which was very exciting.”

Feldman’s great uncle was the noted Milwaukee tenor saxophonist Joe Aaron.

 Joe Aaron’s and the great tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins (left)

“Growing up, my grandparents lived right behind Peaches record store in the Silver Spring shopping center. I spent so many vacations visiting their house, and countless hours in Peaches, which eventually became a Mainstream record store. Milwaukee has always been a second home for me and I’m very lucky to be able to say so,” says Feldman, who’s formulative detecting fuel may be his passion for Kopp’s hamburgers.

Talent and Chutzpah

Since becoming a jazz music host and music director at his college radio station, Feldman’s talent and chutzpah led to progress impressively in the music business, at Polygram Records in Maryland as early as age 20 as a merchandiser and marketing specialist. He later went to Rhino Records, the reissue company, and finally national director of catalog sales for the Concord Music Group.

After a period of freelancing, he met producer George Klabin of Resonance Records in 2009. “George pulled me out of the sales and marketing realm and put me on the production highway and I’m eternally grateful.”

Since his ground-breaking success at Resonance, Feldman has co-founded a similar label, Elemental Records, and is now releasing with his own “Jazz Detective” imprint. Among the other dazzling array of historical recordings Feldman has dug up over the

The Jazz Detective label logo

years for either label are no less than eight recordings by the beloved, influential pianist Bill Evans, and five by iconic guitarist Wes Montgomery, as well as recordings by Sonny Rollins, Sarah Vaughan, Stan Getz, Charles Lloyd, Eric Dolphy, Jaco Pastorius, Grant Green, Shirley Horn, Woody Shaw, The Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchesatra, and Larry Young, among others. Most recently the acclaimed finds have included “The Lost Album from Ronnie Scott’s” by Charles Mingus for Resonance.

From Elemental has come the massive five-LP, three-CD set of Albert Ayler’s Revelations: The Complete ORTF 1970 Fondation Maeght Recordings. Jazz Detective has recently released two double-disc sets of Ahmad Jamal Emerald City Night: Live at the Penthouse, Sonny Stitt’s Live in Baltimore and Chet Baker’s Blue Room: The 1979 Vara Studio Sessions in Holland, which followed a superb Baker Live in Paris trio album from 1983-84. Both Baker sets give a good idea what the often-sublime trumpeter-singer sounded like when he performed between those two dates at the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery in 1981, which this writer reviewed. 1

No Bootlegs

It’s important to understand the consistent quality of Feldman’s recordings. He never settles for crudely recorded “bootlegs” no matter how great the artists. Rather, he finds tapes done on high-grade recording equipment or, as with Baker’s Live in Paris, professionally recorded for Radio France, but never released as albums. And his packaging always includes substantial critical liner notes, unpublished photos and interviews with artists, often conducted by Feldman.

“For me, it’s literally about pulling out all the stops, and bringing a story to life,” Feldman says. “I truly want to elevate the art of record making…We brought a style, sensibility and classiness to the presentation, and made it completely legal and official with all the rights holders being cleared and compensated.”

A recent Zev Feldman unearthing, a recording of trumpeter-singer Chet Baker live in Paris.

The multiple Evans and Montgomery projects have been memorable experiences for Feldman, as well as historically redefining the artists’ oeuvre.

“Getting a chance to know the families of Wes Montgomery and Bill Evans has been a blessing,” Feldman says. “We’ve done numerous projects together and have become good friends as well. It’s also been a thrill to work directly with Sonny Rollins, Charles Lloyd, and Ahmad Jamal, who just passed away recently. It’s so interesting because they have a chance to share their experiences and weigh in on all the elements that go into a project.”

Globetrotting “jazz detective” Zev Feldman relaxing in his music library.

No End in Sight

What’s on Feldman’s horizon?

“I’m working with the great Sonny Rollins on a four-LP box set, and he’s looking at everything that comes through and playing such an important role.” Upcoming there’s also unissued live recordings from Les McCann in 1966 and 1967. Feldman is especially excited to have recordings of Wes Montgomery with the Wynton Kelly Trio from the Half Note jazz club in New York City in 1965 (a collaboration which produced what Pat Metheny calls “the absolute greatest guitar album ever made,” Smokin’ at the Half-Note). 3.

Also, “George Klabin and I have been looking for a long time for unissued Art Tatum recordings, and we have a glorious three-LP and 2-CD package coming soon of three hours of unissued recordings.”

The sky is the limit? For Feldman, the deepest buried treasures are the limit. How many jazz ghosts would disagree?

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This article was originally published in slightly different form in The Shepherd Express, herehttps://shepherdexpress.com/music/music-feature/the-jazz-detective-searching-for-vintage-music/

1. My review of (and an interview feature with) Chet Baker (Aug. 7 and Aug. 12, 1981) are both in Milwaukee Jazz Gallery 1978-1984, an anthology of the venue’s press coverage and more:

2. The Ahmad Jamal Emerald City Lights sets and the Baker Blue Room set are reviewed in a separate Culture Currents blog, here:

Reviews of two notable “Jazz Detective” albums by Ahmad Jamal and Chet Baker

3. A previous 2005 release from 1965 called The Complete Live at the Half-Note (Wynton Kelly Trio with Wes Montgomery) appears to be an incomplete misnomer.

from NPR feature

REVIEW

MUSIC REVIEWS

Albert Ayler made sublime music. The world was not ready

The saxophonist’s last recorded concerts appear on ‘Revelations’

“Music is the Healing Force of the Universe” begins and ends Revelations: The Complete ORTF 1970 Fondation Maeght Recordings. The gorgeous box set — one of many archival jazz gems recently released under the care of producer Zev Feldman — features unseen photos, extensive liner notes and commentary from Ayler’s daughter, critics, producers and musicians. But more importantly, Revelations restores two full sets performed by the tenor saxophonist’s band, just months before Ayler was found floating in New York City’s East River. The circumstances around his death remain a mystery, but listening to these concerts — recorded July 25 and 27, 1970 — there’s a sense that Ayler was a musician in transition, the primordial yawp of his saxophone sparkling anew from the music of his youth.

 

 

Reviews of two notable “Jazz Detective” albums by Ahmad Jamal and Chet Baker

ALBUM REVIEWS:

Ahmad Jamal, Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse 1963-1964

and Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse 1965-1966 (Jazz Detective)

and Chet Baker Blue Room (Jazz Detective)

Jazz producer and executive Zev Feldman has long had the nickname of “the jazz detective” for his uncanny skill at finding previously unreleased tapes from the genre’s greats to release as high-profile archival releases. (See related feature article). Now he’s putting that moniker to use for his own label, Jazz Detective, with a distinctive fingerprint logo, along with his typically highest-quality recording and packaging. Plenty of national media, from Variety, The Washington Post, NPR etc., have paid attention.

As a jazz piano aficionado, I’ll testify that the various Bill Evans albums are all treasures, expanding a deep catalog of one of the most beloved and influential modern jazz pianists. But I want to focus on Feldman’s 2022 “Jazz Detective” albums of Ahmad Jamal, a more controversial artist in serious jazz circles. Snobbish naysayers would sniff “cocktail pianist,” as Ahmad Jamal rose to rare jazz popularity with his hit album But Not for Me: Live at the Pershing in 1958. Yes, he’s capable of dazzling ornamentation and glittering fills, but, for the most part, done with stunning grace rather than excess. He’s also a deft and sometimes breathtaking employer of grace notes, of space and silence.

Far more than even that classic album could convey, these two Jazz Detective double-discs prove revelatory. Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse 1963-64, and a same-titled one, recorded in 1965-66, provide vast and varied musical protein. Jamal is technically muscular, and expansive, yet exquisite, dynamic and capable of piston-like, two-handed chording, and hard-swinging (eg. “Bogota” and Johnny Hodges’s “Squatty Roo”). Yet he’s always a master of the grace note, poised with a wizardly sense of silence and space, even building drama with it.

You come to understand how Miles Davis learned the art of lyrical-yet-incisive understatement from him: “All my inspiration comes from him,” Miles wrote in his autobiography, an unusual thing for a trumpeter to say about a pianist. You hear, in these four nights recorded over four years, how, riding chops-to-die-for, Jamal expands his sonic, conceptual and harmonic canvas to mural-like dimensions. Jamal’s deep-in-the-night take on “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” becomes a musical joke, as he nurses a Hamlet routine for over 15 stunning minutes, yet you want to shadow his musical genius every step of the way, as it’s filled with dynamic surprises, a la his radical 1965 composition “Extensions.” Has this evergreen ever been played better, ever fresher?

By superb contrast, Anthony Newley’s “Feelin’ Good” plays out in low registers, funky and freewheeling, repeatedly quoting “Workin’ on the Chain Gang,” and the enduring strength of the blues and spirituals. And worry not, there’s a splendid version of his trademark superhit “Poinciana” in the second volume. Suffice to say, this was one of my three choices for historic album of the year in the 2022 Francis Davis jazz poll.

Annotator Eugene Holley Jr. aptly explains the range of classically-trained Jamal’s sources: “a protean and profound pianism that ingeniously melded pianist Art Tatum’s swing-at-the-speed-of-sound and his hometown (Pittsburgh) hero Erroll Garner’s tender and torrid touch, with Franz Liszt’s boundless keyboard technique and the azure French impressionism of Ravel and Debussy.” He has influenced Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Jacky Terrasson and Aaron Diehl (The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s “artistic partner,” who soloed in his orchestral adaptation of Mary Lou Williams’ Zodiac Suite May 26-28 with the MSO).

***

Also, I’ll note that the new Jazz Detective Chet Baker studio set Blue Room, from Holland in 1979, reminds us vividly of the sublimely cool trumpeter’s personalizing of Miles Davis’s style. 1 Yet no trumpeter had a more buttery-golden horn tone, on the verge of melting, right from the opening Wayne Shorter tune “Beautiful Black Eyes.” Over the years of an extraordinarily tough, heroin-burdened life (he once spent a year and year a half in an Italian jail, as did his newlywed wife), his solos were consistently shapely, lyrical and swinging.

Elsewhere here, Baker again demonstrates how he was as emotionally affecting a jazz singer as we’ve ever had, on songs like “Oh, You Crazy Moon,” “Candy,” and “My Ideal,” by singing almost despite himself. He sounds like a shy introvert vocalizing to a loved one’s photograph. So, while not overtly expressive, his warm vocal tones unfold rounded, often liquidly limpid, and tender, with whimsy, pain and loss, delicately vulnerable. Yet he also scat-sings several choruses of “Candy” and one of “Crazy Moon” superbly.

Blue Room also reveals how underappreciated Phil Markowitz is as a crystalline, hard-swinging, harmonically deep and potent pianist. 2. As a bonus, Baker, in effect, steals something right from under Miles Davis’s embouchure. Miles wrote the superb tune “Nardis” but, mystifying, never recorded it, instead allowing Bill Evans to appropriate it, often as a centerpiece of the great pianist’s repertoire. Ah, but Baker smartly saw the opportunity, so here we finally hear the austere, lonely beauty of “Nardis” as a Miles-esque trumpeter would handle it. However, one also suspects pianist Markowitz, a deeply Evans-influenced player, and a master re-harmonizer, might’ve suggested this tune to Baker.

Blue Room follows a Feldman’s marvelous 2022 Elemental label’s two-album set Chet Baker Trio (with a French pianist and bassist) Live in Paris.

The Jazz Detective catalog and Feldman’s Resonance and Elemental label dates accumulate, both as limited-edition CDs, and historical vinyl packages. These include two 1970s concerts by pianist Bill Evans in Buenos Aires; a long-lost 1972 recording of bassist Charles Mingus at London’s Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club; French radio broadcasts of Baker in 1983-1984; and, the prize package, a five-disc box featuring Parisian concerts from July 1970 by free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler — some of his last recordings before his death the following November.

The Ayler recordings especially underline how Feldman’s pioneering globe-trotting research and development is contributing to expanding jazz history with recordings by artists with strong influence but unjustly low historic profiles, like pianist Walter Bishop Jr. and Shirley Scott, one of the first female jazz organists to ever record. A third album features saxophonist Sonny Stitt, a prolific recording artist in his day who still doesn’t quite get his due.

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1 Actually it’s debatable who influenced whom, Chet Baker or Miles Davis. Miles was still a bebopper, though with modest technical facility, until his transformation into the deft poet of Birth of the Cool, recorded in 1949. But it wasn’t released until 1958. However, Miles did partake in the less-heralded cerebral all-star “cool jazz” album Conception in 1951, with Stan Getz, Lee Konitz and Gerry Mulligan. When was the real birth of the cool? Baker had been playing a very similar style at least since he began recording as a leader in 1952.

  1. The 1979 Blue Room recordings vividly brought to mind Baker’s live performance in 1981 at the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery. At the time, this reporter described him thusly: “Baker’s music glows with a moody romanticism, which takes his trumpeter into a role uncharacteristic of the normally declamatory instrument…But Baker’s playing is more than moody wafting. The intelligence displayed on the venerable “’Round Midnight” was engineered with skill and imagination. Like a ghost slipping through the crack of a door, Baker slid into the familiar shrouded melody, stripped his second chorus to an elegant spareness, then overlaid it with several plush phrases.

“Baker’s singing reveals an even closer view of his personal expression – lyrics of broken love flowing from a tenor feathered with soft gray textures.”

The Milwaukee Journal, Aug. 12, 1981. from the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery 1978-1984 anthology (For those interested in a copy of the anthology at a retail outlet, I’m aware of only of a single copy remaining at Woodland Pattern, in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood).

 

The Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts is seeking an executive director, a paid position

The Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts in 2020. All photos by Elizabeth Vogt.

The Mark Davis Trio (L-R, Davis, Dave Bayles, Jeff Hamann) at the JGCA Pianofest.

As an arts journalist, I have no formal affiliation with The Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts. Nevertheless I’m very interested in seeing it not only succeed, but grow and evolve. My motives go back to it’s nominal inspiration, the original Milwaukee Jazz Gallery at the same location.

The vibrancy of that community-oriented music venue was a key factor in my early journalistic career when, in 1979, I started covering it and other jazz (and other music and arts) in a surprisingly blossoming local scene for the pre-merger Milwaukee Journal 1

Today’s JGCA is a more formal non-profit arts organization, heretofore mainly run by dedicated volunteers. It has steered through many lean financial years with dogged determination, vision, applied talent and important involvement from Milwaukee’s Riverwest community.

Drummer Paul Westphal, violinist Linda Binder and bass clarinetist Rick Ollman at the JGCA Seeds Sounds concert series.

The JGCA emerges from the pandemic with growing optimism and even a successful visual arts business year, according to organization president Mark Lawson. The venue’s excellent recent group art exhibit, ReBegin, reflecting on the pandemic experience — which I reviewed for The Shepherd Express and this blog — is an example of its current artistic viability, even if they haven’t had live music since the pandemic shutdown. Lawson says he anticipates live performances returning to the center “sometime in July.”

So, the JGCA is ready to hire its first executive director, a paid, part-time position that could evolve into a full-time job. They are advertising for the position on their website, linked here, with details on the job: JGCA executive director job post

Applications are being received through June 25.

If you are a creative, take-charge person dedicated to the performing and visual arts, and have the right stuff to lead a small but serious arts organization, you might be the person for this job. I imagine, especially among the millennial and Gen-X generations (or perhaps even some baby boomers), there are a number of people in this region who could do this job, especially considering the many under-employed but talented, experienced and aspiring professional people with liberal arts orientations. The center’s music side is geared to jazz, free-improv, experimental music, and hip-hop, etc., but the new ED could help shape that direction as well.

The center owns a fine Yamaha baby grand piano and raised funds for significant recent building renovations and upgrades, including a new digital recording-quality sound system.

Bader Philanthropies, The Greater Milwaukee Foundation, and other funding sources, including many individual donations, have greatly aided the center’s viability.

If you read about the position here and apply, let them know (and let me know) you read about it here.

Good luck to all candidates and the JGCA, and more power to the best person who gets the job.

_______________

1 This writer’s work from that period, and that of other journalists, is documented in Milwaukee Jazz Gallery 1978-1984, an anthology of press coverage and other memorabilia, from founder-owner Chuck LaPaglia’s remarkable grassroots arts venue. The venue gained a strong reputation among many touring jazz musicians. The anthology is available at the JGCA, Boswell Books, Woodland Pattern, and through Amazon.

 

Reflecting on Rich Mangelsdorff and Lake Michigan waves of “raised consciousness”

 

Back cover of “The Collected Essays of Rich Mangelsdorff,” Dustbooks, 1977. Courtesy Harvey Taylor

“I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more…” – Herman Melville, in a letter to a friend, critic-editor Edward Duyckinck, March 3, 1849, three years before the publication of Moby-Dick.

 

Until I visited him in the hospital a few days ago, long-time Milwaukee arts journalist, essayist and poet Rich Mangelsdorff had faded somewhat in my memory, but not my consciousness. I think he would readily appreciate the distinction. Despite his comparative absence from the scene in recent years, part of my sense and critical understanding of the city’s cultural scene is formed by Mangelsdorff.

He wrote insightfully about the importance of “raised consciousness” in his substantial book Collected Essays of Rich Mangelsdorff published in 1977.

Mangelsdorff always cut an imposing intellectual as well as physical figure, as a tall, large-framed man with a high forehead and a fulsome black beard. He spoke deliberately and sometimes with pointed pungency. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Yet, as I describe him in my forthcoming book Voices in the River: The Jazz Message to Democracy, a high-pitched giggle incongruously emitted from his hulking frame, disarming some who might’ve been otherwise intimidated. This man’s character and personality intrigued and attracted me.

Today he remains – even lying in a hospital bed after surgery to diminish his serious bladder cancer – keenly attuned to the idea of comedy. As we talked, he brought up the  acerbic, machine-gun-mouth social-critic comic Lenny Bruce. I’d asked him about what sort of perspective might have been lost from the days when he was writing his essays in the 1970s.

“So much of it has to do with the use of computers and smartphones.” Mangelsdorff said, referencing recent research showing how excessive use of smart phones may negatively impact cognitive and literacy abilities. Ironically, Rich now struggles to speak, due to medications and cancer’s ravages, but his brain remains vise-like. “But also, years ago we had somebody like Lenny Bruce,” he says. “He wouldn’t be listened to now, but I saw him at a Milwaukee club in April of 1966 or 1967, and one woman stood up and called him an asshole. Then there was Mort Sahl, who paved the way for Lenny Bruce and others.”

These comics fearlessly spoke truth to power, as harpooners of squirming hypocrites. Bruce fought the law and the law won – the battle, but not the war.

Front and back cover of Lenny Bruce album, “What I was Arrested For,” Douglas Records,  1971.

A brief Lenny Bruce bit from “What I was Arrested For,”  which punctures conventions of perception based on skin color:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lzUsNrvWAQ

And here’s a more provocative and funny Bruce bit: “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties” from the album Buyer Beware:

To me, Rich Mangelsdorff, even now, hooked to an oxygen respirator, is like a great, graying Buddha. Perhaps, the laughing Buddha, but also one who, back then, in his trademark black leather jacket, could as readily fall into meditative silence, sometimes stewing about injustice, corruption or unheard prophets.

As for the rise of Donald Trump, Mangelsdorff says those who voted for him and continue to support him reflect, aside from delusion, “a malignancy of spirit. People actually choose the path of division rather than the path of unity. People think that Hillary might’ve had an easier time, but I don’t know.  It’s like we’re constantly dealing with an old, drunken, ranting white man.”

As for my aforementioned Mangelsdorff “consciousness” factor: He was my counterpart as jazz critic for The Milwaukee Sentinel in the 1980s, while I was covering jazz for The Milwaukee Journal. I often had the advantage of seeing Mangelsorff’s review of what I was writing about. The morning Sentinel’s first edition circulated The Journal newsroom to the few people still at work late at night, while I wrote my review, which would run in the afternoon.

I never mimicked his insights, but they helped refract my own perspective on what I had just experienced. You can see for yourself our parallel critical commentary in the journalism anthology Milwaukee Jazz Gallery 1978-1984, published in its second edition last year, and available at Boswell Books and Woodland Pattern, as well as online.  Mangelsdorff had to shoot from the hip, with tough-minded, vivid accuracy.

I still picture him on his tight, morning newspaper deadline — a dark, furrowed brow, harrumphing softly to himself, as an insight or phrase came to mind.

But to see how he thinks about jazz, here’s an example from when he wasn’t on such a tough deadline. It’s from his book Selected Essays, and notice his unassumingly deft comparative plumbing of the creative webs that entwine jazz and poetry:

“I’d personally like to see more poets take off in that direction – not the jive it could easily degenerate into, or the slavish imitation of some favored ethnic rap, but rather, synthesis in the direction of something loosely brilliant, like Elvin Jones or Billy Higgins playing drums (and how many poets with big ears has jazz loosened up, speaking of latter-day influences?).” 1

Or check out this long, powerful riff by Mangelsdorff, which marks the dynamic immediacy of the era’s contemporary jazz and presages the ascendance and profound impact of rap and hip-hop music in 1972: 

“I’d always felt this gap between the means and language of poetry in the kind of swift, mental-energy exchanges that black people could get down on rapping in the street, that comics like Lenny Bruce communicate & that they’re spritzing back room precursors, by-passing explanational trappings, could communicate even more truly, that jazz musicians (and Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Shepp and the All-Star Blue Note lineups of Hancock, Davis, Williams, Hutcherson, Hubbard, et. al. were fueling my head like butane in those days) evidenced with grippingly articulate abandon and/or snake charming wiliness.” 2.

How many people of any stripe have seen such connections, taken these sorts of double-dip deep dives, back then?

Rich and I were mutually respectful competing journalistic colleagues, but also friends, especially as two of the closest compadres of the late but unforgettable Jim Glynn. Despite being paraplegic from a Jeep crash while serving in Europe during the Vietnam War, Glynn possessed uncanny dynamism and charisma, especially as a high-flying culture vulture, a vision of inspiration lifting his disabled body improbably along to the hippest or most important music event in town.

Mangelsdorff’s Selected Essays remain paramount in his still-underserved literary legacy. Read insightful literary criticism of the iconoclastic poet Charles Bukowski and others influenced by him, like Doug Blazek, T.L. Kryss and Bill Wantling. In another essay, he holds up to light the period’s best contemporary experimental fiction: “Its exterior is complex, even baffling, to anyone not sufficiently high to get into it. Yes, that’s what I said. Raised consciousness. That’s what she’s all about. Read people like Wildman, Chambers, Sukenick: they’re talking to a new and different fictive sensibility, even if, as was the case with Joyce and his Dublin (and Dubliners), it is one which has already generalized itself through our lives and times.” 3

Note his vernacular use of the female pronoun. Mangelsdorff sounded a unifying, if challenging, clarion for all sensate beings, right from his first-ever piece of criticism for Kaleidoscope, the pioneering alternative newspaper in Milwaukee in the 1960s:

“Serious rock (music) is a constant pushing forward of the shores of awareness, expanding the frontiers of sound and, as the liner notes to Jimi Hendrix’s album state: put(ting) the heads of…listeners into some novel positions,’ i.e. consciousness expansion…” 4

In that Kaleidoscope essay Mangelsdorff also underscores specifically the “psychedelic experience,” as an empowering medium which may yet provide incalculable potential for humanity. It’s easy to poo-poo such notions today, when we assume most of our power lies in a click under our finger, a mouse that potentially roars. That click can also sound like a solitary cricket — meandering, lost, easily manipulated. Surely we need fresh, diverse ways to tackle the intransigence of our political and social institutions. 4

Mangelsdorff’s writing still carries a load, as America grapples with marijuana legalization, with the herb’s great medical value, and reputation, anecdotally and deeply researched, for expanding consciousness, to frontiers far beyond the shores of reactionary stumbling blocks.

He long foreshadowed rock songwriters as Nobel winners, how various American artistic vernaculars generate “novel” intellectual and spiritual positions, which lead to enlightened action. Could we still imagine alt-music and culture growing against the craggy crevasses of “malignancy,” like a healing, marching cry along “the path of unity”? Might the culture yet form diverse yet converging paths, rising in rough-but-ready harmony, powered by a sum greater than their individual massed strengths?

Steve Cohen, the renowned blues-jazz harmonica-guitar virtuoso, is among many local musicians who hold this writer in high esteem. “When he was in full swing, I thought Rich was the best music critic in town,” Cohen says. “When my band Leroy Airmaster made an album, I wanted to him to do the liner notes and he did a great job. He would also visit my radio program on WMSE in the 1980s and offer his insights, which I thought were as great as any in the world.”

As Mangelsdorff sits now in his seventh floor hospital room, he can see the classic North Avenue light tower, standing over Lake Michigan’s vast horizon of darkly brooding clouds, like a sentinel. We talked for nearly two hours, so I suspect he was exhausted, although he was happy and urged me to come again.

North Avenue Water tower, Milwaukee. Courtesy cpd.typepad.com

I suspect he soon fell asleep, but I’d prefer to think such a mind – long immersed in cutting-edge literature and culture – might have rechanneled its consciousness, maybe alighted upon the great rhetorical pondering of Philip K. Dick: “Do androids dream of electric sheep?” That, of course, was the original title of the Dick novel that became the pioneering noir sci-fi film Blade Runner. The novel, published in 1968, is set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco. Planet Earth, ravaged by nuclear global war, is invaded by android aliens who may – or may not – threaten human survival. Most animal species are endangered or extinct from extreme radiation poisoning, and owning an animal, an “electric sheep” is now a sign of status and empathy.

That attitude brings myriad intelligent species on a path closer to survival, like a new Noah’s ark at a wary dawn, where perhaps little remains of Milwaukee’s magnificent shore, but that sentinel tower on North Avenue.

Rich also would likely know that “The Sentinel” was the original name of Arthur C. Clarke’s story, upon which was born the mind-expanding film 2001: A Space Odyssey. No matter where Rich Mangelsdorff’s consciousness soon ends up, the arrow in his well-stocked quiver will aim for the stratosphere.

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1, Rich Mangelsdorff, “Towards Understanding How We Sound,” from The Selected Essays of Rich Mangelsdorff, Dustbooks Press, The “American Dust” Series,” Vol. 8, 1972, 13

2. Mangelsdorff, “I Still Think About Ole Magazine,” Selected Essays, 31

3. Mangelsdorff, “Consideration of Panache Magazine,” Selected Essays, 17

4. Rich Mangelsdorff, from www.zonyx.netRich Mangelsdorff’s debut rock criticism (on Jimi Hendrix) in “Kaleidoscope” newspaper.  On this link, scroll down a ways in Mike Zettler’s lead article “The Oral Freedom League..Kaleidoscope Revisited,” for the Mangelsdorff quote.

This article was originally published in shorter form at The Shepherd Express at Paying Tribute to Milwaukee’s Rich Mangelsdorff

Special jazz show and book-signing for the newly revised Milwaukee Jazz Gallery Anthology

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By Kevin Lynch (Kevernacular)

Milwaukee’s jazz history and jazz present converge on Friday night, Dec. 2, at the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, 926 E.Center St. Milwaukee. The featured band, Manty Ellis and the Milwaukee Jazz Foundation, includes two musicians – esteemed guitarist Ellis and bassist Billy Johnson – who were among the many local, regional and national musicians who made the original Milwaukee Jazz Gallery one of the nation’s great jazz venues from 1978 to 1984.

The current center for the arts, in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood, occupies a modified version of the same space occupied by the original Jazz Gallery.

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The Mike Pauers Quartet with trumpeter Kaye Berigan performed recently at The Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, which is the site of the original Milwaukee Jazz Gallery. Photo by Elizabeth Vogt.

Ellis is a Milwaukee legend and mentor to many great players. He co-founded the jazz program at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music that gained national recognition during the era of the original jazz Gallery where it’s most luminous students developed into striking young stars, including Grammy-winning trumpeter Brian Lynch; pianists David Hazeltine and Lynn Arriale; bassists Johnson, Gerald Cannon, and Jeff Chambers; and drummers Carl Allen, and Johnson’s brother Mark Johnson. Manty Ellis, to this day, is an earthy and dynamic player,  an original stylist influenced by Wes Montgomery and John Coltrane.

A Milwaukee native, bassist Johnson is now based in New Jersey, and has played with numerous nationally-known artists. The band, performing from 7 to 10 p.m., also includes the superb drummer Victor Campbell and Eric Schoor, faculty saxophonist for the Jazz Institute at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, and a member of the Conservatory’s faculty jazz ensemble, We Six.

This is also a great opportunity to gain historical insight on the jazz gallery’s great legacy from primary-source journalistic sources. That’s because the event will celebrate the publication of the second edition of the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery Anthology, which includes most of the actual journalistic coverage of the club during its hey-day.

Among the national jazz and blues performers whose Milwaukee performances are reviewed in the book are Dizzy Gillespie, Freddie Hubbard, Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, Freddie Hubbard, Art Pepper, Betty Carter, Woody Shaw, McCoy Tyner, Koko Tayor, Sunnyland Slim, Max Roach, Jimmy Smith, Jack DeJohnette, Milt Jackson, Dave Holland, Charlie Haden, Don Cherry and Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers with the Marsalis brothers, among others.

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Jazz vibes giant Milt Jackson performing at the original Milwaukee Jazz Gallery. Photo by Tom Kaveny

Organized chronologically, the 244-page, 8.5 x 11-inch anthology also includes musician interviews, news and features, as well as many of the venue’s monthly event calendars, which tell its story in a different way. The book was assembled by Milwaukee Jazz Gallery original owner Chuck LaPaglia. Now based in Oakland, LaPaglia can’t make the event.

However, this writer will be on hand to sign copies of the anthology. I wrote an introduction to the new edition, and much of the journalistic coverage reproduced in the book is my own, primarily from when I was writing for The Milwaukee Journal. The anthology also includes Jazz Gallery coverage by noted jazz critic and author Bill Milkowski (Jaco: The Extraordinary and Tragic Life of Jaco Pastorius), and current Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel book editor and feature writer Jim Higgins, among others.

chuck-at-jgChuck LaPaglia, the founder and owner of the original Milwaukee Jazz Gallery, in his club during its run as a major jazz venue from 1978 to 1984, documented in a newly revised anthology of the club’s extensive press coverage. Courtesy Milwaukee Jazz Vision

Those years were extraordinary, exciting and unforgettable times, and Friday’s live music and this revised and improved anthology help to bring it all back into sharp focus. Back then you could hear and feel – in the intimate, pulsing confines of the Gallery – the fire in the belly of these great players, the passions borne of modern jazz and the struggles for civil rights and social justice, as well as the pure joy of such creative music-making. Some of those historic names are gone, or remain somewhat underheard, what I call “voices in the river” in my forthcoming book Voices in the River: The Jazz Message to Democracy.

That book is about jazz, creative writing and the democratic process, and includes several memoir sections of my recollections of life and covering the Milwaukee jazz scene during the years of the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery.

The Milwaukee Jazz Foundation, formed by Manty Ellis, is an organization sponsored by by The Jazz Foundation of America, to aid and support jazz musicians in the Milwaukee area.

Proceeds for sales of The Milwaukee Jazz Gallery 1978-1984, will go to the Riverwest Artists Association, the nonprofit organization which runs the current Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts and which published the anthology.