Heirloom passes the modern jazz tradition down and forward

(L-R) Saxophonist Jeanne Marie Farinelli, drummer Hannah Jonson and guitarist-composer Ben Dameron are the core members of Heirloom.

Heirloom will perform at 8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 15 at Bar Centro, 804 E. Center Street, Milwaukee. For information: https://centrocaferiverwest.com/bar-centro/

One of the brightest and most auspicious recent manifestations of the Milwaukee jazz scene is a band called Heirloom. Their name seems well considered, as one senses how two distinctive talents, a man and a woman, have begat at jazz group with a firm sense of modern jazz tradition—the valuable object, in effect—and the skill and imaginative vision for how to cultivate their sense of it in beautiful and stimulating form.

The group is the byproduct of the confluence of guitarist-composer Ben Dameron and drummer Hannah Johnson, both rather unique musicians who add up to something greater than their parts. Dameron has developed into an electric jazz guitarist of distinct authority after becoming an accomplished classical guitarist. But the jazz bug bit him at some point and the first time I saw him perform was playing jazz solo on his classical guitar, at a house concert he shared with singer-pianist Anthony Deutsch a few years ago.

I first saw the couple sit in for one Thelonious Monk tune at Bar Centro in Milwaukee a few months ago. This one tune signaled the couple’s ease with the jazz tradition. Dameron was fleet and harmonically astute, as excellent as I anticipated on electric guitar. Johnson was an immediate revelation on this tune. I’d heard of her leading her own jazz group and good things about her. But she stunned me with her effortless mastery of modern jazz swing, in the propulsive style that makes the music a stimulating, sparkling conversation. Frankly, Johnson outplayed the drummer in the band she briefly sat in with and, I dare say, after seeing her now twice with Heirloom, she’s as good a jazz drummer as any in the region. I think of one who’s comparable with straight-ahead, yet more versatile, but damn, she swings like a windblown willow tree.

Feeling the Music

She flips out rimshots, tom-tom thumps, triplets, and paradiddles with the accenting flair of a master linguist. The language is jazz but you feel it sooner than you comprehend it, which is the way it should play. 1

Out front is tenor saxophonist Jeanne Marie Farinelli, another superb player. I heard a pensive, lyrical quality in her tone which reminds me of Wayne Shorter, as does her resourceful use of her horn’s full range, with occasional bottom notes for powerful punctuation.

The band opened the set with Miles Davis’s “Nardis” which resembles a Shorter piece in its epigrammatic spaciousness, so I momentarily mistook it for a Shorter tune even though I’ve played it many times on piano and it was actually made famous by pianist Bill Evans. That seamless stylistic commingling, intentional or not, seems one nominal quality of Heirloom’s style.

Similarly, their rendition of Thelonious Monk’s “Let’s Cool One” blended sensibilities: graced with lyricism like a garland of smoke curving around a line that typically rises like a cubist sculpture.

Although Johnson handled band introductions and naming the tunes, Dameron seems to be the conceptual leader. He typically polished the thematic statements to a gleaming sheen by harmonizing his guitar tightly with Farinelli’s sax. That, and his frequent use of a “chorus” pedal, recalled the “bright sized life” of Pat Metheny’s popular quartet.

Impressive originals

Plus, he filled out the two sets with his ambitious, impressive originals. The first one, “Messages from the Deep” was a drink of water you might drown in if your mind can’t swim. When I asked him if it was 64 bars through-composed, he just laughed and said “Yes, it’s pretty long. That came out of me one day when I was really feeling something deep way down inside.”

He explained that he’s a fan of sci-fi, like Dune (another Dameron tune, “Spice Trance,” specifically honors a scene in that book), and enjoys writing with a feel for metaphysical atmosphere, though his tunes are far more substantial than, say, typical New Age music, which often trivializes science fiction and metaphysical sensibilities.

Watching Dameron is revealing and sometimes amusing. He spent most of the gig with his right foot on the “chorus” pedal (though not overdoing the device), but the posture seems ingrained—classical guitarists always use a right-foot stand, which the pedal resembles. Then, while soloing in fast grooves, his left foot swung back and forth like a slightly overwound clock pendulum.

The current bassist is John Christensen, the band’s elder statesman, who lends vibrance, musicality and gravitas to any band. Plus, he’s the living pulse, a crucial quality.

By contrast was a guest pianist. Heirloom has worked as a quartet, which they did when I heard them play a few weeks earlier, at the Brady Street Festival. And outdoors, they cranked the volume and sounded like a great fusion band. At Bar Centro, dynamics and the repertoire were more tempered.

 

Heirloom as a quintet at Bar Centro recently, with pianist Lucas LeBeau (far left) and bassist John Christensen background). 

But Dameron had described the pianist sitting in as “a 17-year-old wunderkind.” Check that box. Slender, dark-haired Lucas LeBeau might resemble a young Jackson Browne, but even more boyish. Yet he has the extraordinary facility of someone deeply trained, if not innately gifted.

LeBeau seemed to ride the sustain pedal a bit much, perhaps striving to approximate the leader’s spiritual atmospherics. But he sounds like a keeper and Dameron hopes he remains one.

The guitarist is an imaginative thinker. But make no mistake, this is a serious but buoyant band. Both leaders, especially Johnson, brim with joy as the group percolates, and you hear their smiles in the music.

This band is a vine-fresh, living heirloom of jazz, something I’d buy as readily as anything in an antique shop, because you always feel their bass pulse and musical arteries, not just redolence of past glory.

Yet, like the most timeless jazz, Heirloom’s improvs reveal the mining and molding of artistic thought in real time.

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This article was first published in Shepherd Express, here: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/local-music/heirloom-at-ease-in-the-jazz-tradition/
1. Hannah Johnson earned a degree in jazz studies at Indiana University’s prestigious jazz studies program.

 

A YouTube recording of “A Tribute to Wayne Shorter” by a Madison jazz sextet brings his often-mysterious music back to life

Wayne Shorter in the era of his celebrated Blue Note recordings

MADISON JAZZ FESTIVAL 2023, Review VOL. 1

This is for anyone who cares about the passing, in the eternal night, of Wayne Shorter. He was a titanic of modern jazz and jazz-fusion, and of American music in general. As with the famous Titanic, there was a certain fatefulness in him, even though he lived to 89. One of his underappreciated albums was Phantom Navigator, and his wife Ana died in 1986, at age 43, in the crash of TWA Flight 880. And his music often seemed to dwell in mystery, not unlike most of the iceberg submerged and waiting for the “unsinkable” ship liner, now once again in our consciousness, due to intrepid if fatefully foolhardy explorers.

The following video’s value is representing a live tribute by a sextet of musicians who handle an intriguing array of Wayne Shorter repertoire with aplomb and dedication as part of the recent Madison Jazz Festival.

The festival, by the way, has evolved to become, in my book, the best Midwestern jazz festival north of the inherently larger Chicago Jazz Festival. These musicians are from the Madison and Milwaukee region, but perform Shorter’s music in a representative manner, as comparable to most any region in America. The concert was at saxophonist-entrepreneur-educator Hanah Jon Taylor’s music venue Café Coda in Madison, which has been one of the Midwest’s hotbeds of such creative and improvisational music for some years now.

Pianist Dave Stoler (left) and bassist John Christensen from the Shorter tribute band. Tribute band photos courtesy Arts + Lit Lab

The tribute event was organized by the Arts + Literature Lab and it covers a discerning array of Shorter’s remarkable oeuvre. It opens with “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum,” one of the uncannily fetching tunes from his masterpiece album of the 1960s, Speak No Evil.

Wayne Shorter’s 1964 acoustic jazz masterpiece, “Speak No Evil.” Bing images

The title admonishment doesn’t mean that Shorter did not fearlessly peer into the eyes of evil and transmute that into music, among his other uncanny feats. Besides the implicit ominousness of that fable-evoking tune, that shadow-toned album includes the pieces “Dance Cadaverous” and “Witch Hunt,” although one suspects Shorter, a Buddhist fascinated with science fiction, was far more intrigued than put off by the “evil” powers of witches. Tenor saxophonist Pawal Benjamin, employing Shorter’s own horn voice, dug into hearty low notes in a solo both meaty and muscular, though not as oblique as Shorter’s would be. Pianist Dave Stoler came in swinging with some Herbie Hancock-like harmonies. The only drawback here was a rather ragged ensemble reading of the theme.

But that cleaned up in the playing of the ensuing tune, “Lost,” from an underappreciated Blue Note album The Soothsayer. Stoler plays tough here, riding the changes with block chords, really digging into this minor-key mood. As with the first tune, “Lost” has marvelously dense but resounding harmony in the ensemble line, rendering it indelible to memory.

The front line of the Wayne Shorter tribute band included (L-R) trumpeter Russ Johnson, tenor saxophonist Pawal Benjamin, and alto saxophonist Clay Lyons.

The band ensues with their own take on “Nefertiti,” recorded with the Miles Davis Quintet. The original was atypical in that it repeats the sighing, languid theme over and over, with no front-line solos, only drummer Tony Williams sustaining the tune with an explosive solo throughout, so you are constantly listening to his drumming as the theme turns mantra-like. Here the band allowed for a Benjamin tenor solo that slices up the theme nicely while drummer Wayne Saltzman digs into the Williams-esque rock-shuffle feel while striving to approximate the incendiary energy of a drummer who made legend of himself with Miles Davis even in his late teens.

Here Stoler also delivers very Hancock-like block chords and octaves, tart and pungent but still pretty, a fine-honed power.

The ensuing tune, “The Big Push,” also from The Soothsayer, has harmonies I could eat for dinner, as protein-packed as they are, and another oddly engaging melody. About Shorter’s harmonies: Each has a story-telling quality, with a layered ensemble chord a chiaroscuroed image in itself, and the change sequences cast suspense and weird beauty in equal measure.

I’ll touch on the second set somewhat more briefly: a highlight was Shorter’s intense yet atmospheric “Sanctuary,” written for Miles Davis’s slightly satanic yet spiritual album of controversial jazz fusion, Bitches Brew from 1970. It has a loping, free-ish melancholy contour, and here trumpeter Russ Johnson shone — the style is his wheelhouse, unfettered but well-formed improv.

Tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter with trumpeter Miles Davis in the band that produced “Sanctuary,” from the seminal jazz fusion album “Bitches Brew,” which included bassist Dave Holland and drummer Jack DeJohnette. Courtesy www.musicajazz.it/festival-e-concerti

The band then shifted back to the Shorter Blue Notes with “El Gaucho,” another deceptively simple theme from the album Adam’s Apple with a characteristically resonating harmonic structure.

The band encores with, for Shorter, comparative ear candy. The rollicking “Yes or No” is among the composer’s most ingratiating and invigorating melodies and saxophonist Benjamin is cooking the hard-bop brew here, which could have been a Jazz Messengers tune, from Shorter’s days as musical director of that band. But the title’s implicit dialectic is key; this is from the album JuJu, by which time Shorter’s was conceptually delving into paradoxical African powers beyond the ordinary.

Such tension-filled qualities permeated the musical particulars of his writing and soloing style and helped to sustain the intrigue of several generations of jazz musicians as represented here.

So, this critical preview is to help document what you hear but, most of all, to encourage you to sit down, buckle up in the safari jeep, and follow this band longer than you might otherwise, on this Shorter sojourn:

(16) Tribute to Wayne Shorter at Cafe CODA – YouTube

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Remembering Elizabeth “Betty” Lynch of Wisconsin and St. Petersburg, Florida

Cousin Erk Aldrich, Dillon Lynch, Betty and Sheila Lynch. All photos courtesy Sheila Lynch, unless otherwise indicated. 

Everybody knew of the most exalted Elizabeth, by mere virtue of birth, Queen Elizabeth II of England. Among her polar opposites was Elizabeth Lynch of Wisconsin, known humbly as Betty, of Irish-German extraction. One of my oft-obscured middle sisters among six, she was a princess in my book, though I doubt she acted like one a day in her life. That’s why she deserves this remembrance, at the least.

It’s tough writing several obit-remembrances in a few weeks, two for favorite and justly famous artists, author Russell Banks and saxophonist-composer Wayne Shorter. This one is far more painful, as Betty’s life was shorter, by two and nearly three decades-plus, than theirs.

Our beloved Betty Lynch departed yesterday afternoon to the next phase and adventure of life beyond. I have faith her suffering and pain will we be redeemed in some manner, which we might imagine but not really know in this temporal world. She inherited her mother’s predilection for colon cancer, though she died nearly 20 years younger than mom.

I will do my best to limit my remembrance right now to a few remarks about the quietly wonderful woman I knew and loved, and then some brief captions to describe and document the photos shared here.

The fourth of my six sisters, she was the second one to have passed. The loss of a younger sibling carries a true burden on the heart. Yet I am glad we can imagine her somehow joining her parents, Sharon and Norm Lynch, and her older sister Maureen and, if so, rejoicing in reunion.

My spiritual sense of things – and I believe I am probably among a majority of living humans in this regard – tells me something like this will happen, some life-force that shapes a nascent re-presence, maybe not reincarnation, but not mere “the worms-crawl-in” nothingness.

Is the “soul” just a sentimental notion? Where does soulfulness come from? What is music? Form and sounds, and a myriad of sorts of content, mustered by humans and…?

Or the power of soul? Existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzche spoke of “the will to power,” but where does the will come from? “Free will,” yes, perhaps, but that’s still not getting to the heart of the matter, for me. What drives Ukrainians to fight so magnificently against a much larger, criminally genocidal, invading foe? But I digress. 1

***

Thanks to sister Sheila, I was happy to be able to speak by phone “with” Betty two consecutive days before she passed, though she was in a coma. I hope she heard me. I’m told hearing is the last of the senses to go and her brain was not dead until later. In that sense, I was speaking with her, not simply to her.

It was also a way to return some of the good feelings she gave us in the many, many long-distance phone calls that she made from sun-blessed Florida to me and all members of our immediate family over the years. She had a natural disposition and skill at communicating with others, even over the phone in her loving, sometimes laconic, and slightly luminous ways. Sometimes it was just a pause, an invisible smile and a small sigh. She could call up without anything in particular to talk about and yet begin a perfectly enjoyable conversation merely because she wanted to connect, a manifestation of her love of family and of humanity.

Her temperament, tone, sensitivity, skill and love helped make her a valuable community resource specialist in her professional career, in health care, specializing in senior clients.

She was born 64 years ago June 27, one of three Lynch children born within a week of each other, on separate years (the folks were “rhythmic” Catholics). She was the most musical of my six sisters; she played the flute, and loved the best of popular music, most of all The Beatles, of course.

She could come off as shy and “aw-shucks” self-effacing. (OK she didn’t say “aw shucks” very often, but more elevated characterization wouldn’t feel right.) She was more like a slightly meek, “Hi Kevin,” when I answered the phone or called her, almost as if asking if it was OK to greet you by name, yet still imparting that small Betty moment of grace. The meek shall inherit the earth, Jesus of Nazareth once said.

A girl from the North Country who loved balmy climes, she moved to Florida (from California) when my parents relocated to St. Petersburg for a few years for my dad’s job transfer. That didn’t work out well – he was tasked with trying to save/manage a dying branch of his industrial metals company.

This looks like Betty’s “so-long frozen suckers!” farewell, before returning to her home in Florida where she stayed permanently after a short family relocation. Looks like the camera film got bit by the frozen tundra.

So, the folks moved back to Milwaukee, along with baby sister Anne, and second-youngest Sheila went to Cincinnati. But sun-bunny Betty stayed in St. Pete and finished her education there, and later bore and raised a son, Dillon, now 23.

Betty’s frequent phone calls to any of the six siblings, her parents or friends were her way of reaching out, slipping past anyone’s personal posture or attitude, of letting you come closer to her, and perhaps pulling you out of yourself, especially if you were in a lousy mood.

My sole slight pique arose when she called to gloat a tad when the across-the-bridge Tampa Bay Buccaneers beat the Green Bay Packers in a playoff game a few years ago. Now, her slight chortle over the outcome is a precious memory.

Of course, she would suffer through plenty of poor moods due to declining health towards the end, which is why to remember her in her hearty days is so important.

Many if not most people think they’re younger than they are, time-wise. I’m sure Betty couldn’t believe she was approaching death’s doorstep, even when the stage-four diagnosis came. “Time is the greatest mystery of all,” Norman Mailer once wrote. 2

With her psychology degree, and as a Certified Resource Specialist, she applied her special skills and temperament in a long career in health care, especially for senior clients, as a case manager for Suncoast Center, for 12 years, and later as a Community Resource Specialist/Case Management Support Professional at Humana at Home for nearly a decade, both in St. Petersburg. “Strong community and social services professional skilled in Computer Literacy, Crisis Intervention, Family Therapy, Case Management, and Conflict Resolution.” her LinkedIn page reads.

Here’s her LinkedIn professional referral profile photo:

Here’s her LinkedIn page:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynchelizabeth/

Betts was a sweet person, almost to a fault, in that sometimes some people might’ve been inclined to take advantage of her. But she made life more tender, warm, and bearable for her presence.

I could go on, but for now I’d like to comment on a few of the pictures I’m sharing to illustrate who dear Elizabeth “Betty” Lynch was.

It goes back to earliest family days in Milwaukee, first, maybe, from life in our bungalow on South Quncy Avenue, just north of Gen. Mitchell Field Airport, back in the “SONIC BOOM!!!” days! Planes taking off would sear the sky, right over our quaking little house. Here, sequential sisters Betty (left, in the photo) and next-youngest Sheila — the only two blue-eyed sisters in the brood — began forming their natural bond. Their young hearts swell as sugarplum visions dance in their heads while visiting Santa.

I admit, when Sheila sent me this photo a few days ago, it really got me. Betty, you really got me. Tears begone.

One formal portrait from 1963, below, of the first six Lynch kids, maybe the earliest shot I have of Betty the blondie, from my scrapbook assembled by our mother, Sharon J. Lynch.

There is also this formal family below portrait photo from family archives, shot beside the fireplace on Beverly Road in Shorewood, where we all seven children grew a bit older together, the first house with sister Anne (far right) born to this home. In the detail photo below, you see Betty sitting on the floor, the sole blonde in the family, with her shy smile which helps convey her youthful beauty.

See also a feel-good snapshot (below) of mother Sharon, brother Kevin — and Susie the dog again – and, long-limbed in short-shorts, befitting my nickname for her, Betty Boop. This photo reveals, I think, how much Betty blended her father’s and her mother’s looks, even if Betty was much fairer than mom. Picture Betty in long dark hair pulled up in a stylish perm: Betty Boop!

Of course, her blonde hair remains a mystery, but we never had a blonde milkman, that I recall. Our big dimples came from the Lynch side, as in Uncle Jack and Grandma Frances Lynch.

“I see September ’80 in corner. Just before we left for Florida! Anne probably took picture! I sure was white then!” (Betty’s Facebook comment on this photo, taken by youngest sister Anne.)

Then, please behold below one of the happiest days of our family’s history, the 1987 marriage of the eldest daughter of six, my Irish twin, Nancy Lynch to Tony Aldrich. Betty is in the back row (second from the left), warmly radiant in a blue dress suit. Also pictured (L-R) Sheila Lynch, Maureen Lynch, Kathleen Lynch, Sharon Lynch, Tony Aldrich, bride Nancy Lynch Aldrich, Norm Lynch, Anne Lynch, Kevin Lynch, Kathleen Naab Lynch.

Scrapbook shots: Below it’s me and six sisters (count ’em), including Maureen’s spouse Rob Traub, at far right. And below that, Betty’s graduation picture from the Lawton School of Medical Assistance.

Betty and Dillon visited Milwaukee very occasionally in the summer. Here’s a fun outing at the Milwaukee Museum, with Uncle Kev hamming it up (frozen Tyrannosaurus Rex face?) for Dillon’s amusement. Betty and Dillon in foreground, Grandpa Norm seated in background. Photo by Sharon Lynch

Another generation of Lynches. Dillon Lynch, 23, today. He was with his mom when she died. Thanks a million, dear nephew! Now, go Make Betty proud.

In honor of Betty Lynch, the flute player, here’s a piece I think she’d love, “Be Still My Soul,” adapted from music of Jean Sibelius, performed by Rhonda Larson, a blonde flutist.

 

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  1. Because the notion of “the power of soul” is compelling to contemplate for this music writer, I’ve also posted Idris Muhammed’s hit soul-jazz tune “Power of Soul.” See, Betty hung on, on her own breath, in a coma for much longer than anyone anticipated, after they took her off resuscitation. The rhythm of the breath is a powerful force. This is not elegiac or even polite music, but I don’t like strict cultural conventions. And I know the African-American funeral tradition, at the very least, is about lifting spirits. Betty’s son Dillon is part African-American. Not too many seven-minute instrumentals become radio hits. This one did, I know. Take it or leave it:
  2. Mailer’s personal anthology of his writings doubles down on the mystery, with its title, The Time of our Time.  Also, staff writer Jennifer Senior has a thoughtful, well-researched article “On the Weirdness of Aging,” regarding the self-perception of our place in time, in the April 2023 issue of Atlantic Monthly magazine.

 

 

 

 

 

Remembering Wayne Shorter, a jazz traveler as mysterious and beautiful as any in the music’s history

Wayne Shorter, who turned 80 in 2013, won the NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll by a large margin.

Wayne Shorter is gone, finally departed this planet and though, as a Buddhist, his sense of the beyond seemed intellectual, who knows how that translates at this point of metaphysical morphing? As a science fiction buff who increasingly incorporated that far-minded sensibility into his own art, he even co-created a 74-page sci-fi graphic novel for his most ambitious work, the three-album Emanon, an extended concerto grosso of sorts, with his jazz quartet and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. He grew into a larger, more capacious self over his 89 years, as much as any jazz musician. Here’s where he stepped beyond even this open-minded writer to be honest. Before he died, I’d paused in listening to the demanding epic, and now still have never fully taken in all of Emanon, yet.

Though much great music ensued, I’ll concur with the consensus that the Blue Note album Speak No Evil, recorded at age 31, remains his masterpiece, billowing with shades of mystery and humanity, inspected and illuminated with a forensic sensitivity. I mean, “Dance Cadaverous”? The title tune’s swaggering swing conveys both awareness, and characterization, of evil, haunted by its spread-winged whole notes. That album’s exquisite ballad “Infant Eyes” was a favorite of mine to play on piano before becoming manually disabled. Of course, Shorter’s tenor sax rendering is impossibly tender.

“Speak No Evil” album cover courtesy uDiscover

By then, he was commenting as a kind of “cosmic philosopher,” as he did with “Infant Eyes,” written for his daughter Miyako: “I saw all infancy in her eyes, everyone who’s ever been an infant. An infant being a new start. People reminisce about past stuff, let it take over the present, but with every moment, you’re born.” Such insight feels especially apt now, as perhaps he’s being reborn somewhere, as a star child. Thus, Speak No Evil proved as communicative and heartfelt as is was captivating and challenging.

Other albums from his mid-1960s frieze of noirish Blue Note masterworks include Night Dreamer, Juju, Adam’s Apple, The All-Seeing Eye, Schizophrenia, and The Soothsayer, all necessary listening to gain a sense of the compositional and conceptual talent that sculpted an unfolding progressive profile of modern jazz. Though a bit of an outlier compared to his other Blue Notes, Super Nova is memorable for Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Dindi,” sung by Maria Booker who was, at the time, splitting up with her husband Walter Booker, who accompanied her on guitar. She dissolved into tears amid the recording, which was retained, and the interpretation quivers with poignancy. Part of the lyric:

Oh Dindi…
Like the song of the wind in the trees
That’s how my heart is singing Dindi, happy Dindi
When you’re with me
I love you more today
Yes I do, yes I do
I’d let you go away
If you take me with you

It’s hard to encompass Shorter’s career, and recording-wise that may remain for a major retrospective project or two, surely to come. For now, Columbia’s two-album set Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter suffices as an admirable overview of his output, at least to 2004. It complements Michelle Wallace’s same-titled biography, capturing the life of a classification-defying original. And yet his music always had an innate way of redefining lyricism, often contrasting heavy-breathed whole notes with vivid yet eccentric eighth-note phrases. Critic-author Gary Giddins commented on the book, “It makes the case that Wayne Shorter was the representative jazz artist of the past forty-five years, from hard-bop to Miles to fusion to a planet that is too often but inevitably defined as Wayne’s World.”

Album cover to “Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter” courtesy Aika Kawasumi 

It’s difficult to argue too much with that artistic range and authority, even given the eminence of relative contemporaries as Miles Davis, Coltrane, Mingus, Monk and others.

Mainstream acceptance followed at a respectful distance as Shorter eventually won 12 Grammy awards.

Live performance is the essence of jazz, and I was too young to see the Miles Davis Quintet’s boundary-expanding multi-night 1965 stand at Chicago’s Plugged Nickel nightclub, thankfully preserved on record. Here’s where “free-bop” was sparked and nourished. Shorter’s trademark tune “Footprints” (if any single one can define him) thrives in live performance beyond intimation on the Davis quintet’s Live at Newport 1955-1975 recording on Columbia. Shorter’s tenor solo slows down the band’s rush and casts odd, glancing shadows across the implied footprints — presence and disappearance — even as it rises to an ominous life-force by the solo’s end.

Shorter found the larger pop-rock-funk audience by slipping into the lurking darkness of Miles’s pioneering electric period, notably on Shorter’s “Sanctuary,” on the genre-shattering album Bitches Brew in 1970. This keyed his transition to join Joe Zawinul and uber-bassist Jaco Pastorius in the original Weather Report, which I did see at the Plugged Nickel. Even live, with Zawinul’s electronics and Shorter’s imaginative reinvention of the soprano sax as a soaring, diving falcon-like creature, the band expanded the sonic parameters of jazz while elevating a standard for jazz-fusion which few bands ever equaled. It ranged from the avant-ish debut album to the exotically cinematic “Mysterious Traveller” to Shorter’s “Palladium” a gleaming, exalted, high-flying celebration, the funk-romp jam “Sweetnighter,” and their cloud-hopping hit “Birdland.”

His soprano work with Weather Report was a harbinger, as he’d go on to advance that difficult-to-play-in-tune instrument as far as anyone has, usually to striking and powerful effect.

Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter, the two masterminds and master musicians behind Weather Report, the non-pareil fusion band. courtesy Pinterest

Yet Zawinul was the group’s dominant personality, so inevitably the taciturn, oracular Shorter found his own visionary ways, and soon, with 1974’s Native Dancer, the gloriously gorgeous collaboration with Brazilian singer-songwriter Milton Nascimento. This redefied the jazz-Brazilian connection — songs like “Ponta de Areia” and “Miracle of the Fishes” (an allusion to Jesus?) are uncannily heaven-on-earth in their lush yet humane expansiveness. Sung in Portuguese, both were written by Nascimento and suggest how, though celebrated justly and foremost as a composer, Shorter understood the value of others’ work, including various classical composers, interpreting over the years Villa-Lobos, Sibelius, Mendelssohn, Leroy Anderson, and others.

Another example that early fed his sense of jazz orchestration was playing on Gil Evans’ “Time of the Barracudas.” This restless piece flowed on the dazzling drumming of Elvin Jones in similar effect, if different style, of how Tony Williams fueled the great ‘60s Davis Quintet, and Jack DeJohnette in the first electric Miles band. Jones had played on most of Shorter’s masterful Blue Notes. Of course, Shorter first made his name in the early ‘60s as the precocious music director of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.

Such great drummers informed Shorter’s brilliant rhythmic sense in the uniquely and beautifully elliptical way he thought and played. Another career highlight in another composer’s piece was Steely Dan’s deliciously hip “Aja,” perhaps the jazzy pop-rock group’s career musical peak, and there, atop its crest, unfurled a Shorter tenor solo that breathed and exhaled like a celestial god but with his feet on terra firma. The suite’s co-composer Walter Becker commented, “Wayne was very intent on forging a novel approach to the piece. He was influenced by the contour of sections other than the section that he actually played over,” which was basically a single modal-like chord vamp.

This solo and most all of his career reflect his composerly sense of form, even at fast tempos. His improvisational line is ever-shapely yet unpredictable. On a piece like “In Walked Wayne” with trombonist J.J. Johnson, you get a sense of ever replenishing melody and harmony as unfolding. That sculptor’s sense of shape reveal the depth and seeming boundlessness of his genius.

This album cover conveys some of Wayne Shorter’s oracular quality. Courtesy ebay

He played like a fire dragon on the Footprints Live! version of “Masquelero” with his intrepid late-career quartet, pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and dummer Brian Blade. How many musicians his age would still pushing the boundaries of music, flirting with a black hole and a quasar?

His sense of the beyond had come heart-breakingly face-to-face with tragedy when his wife Ana died in the in the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800. He responded by turning to perhaps his closest musical friend, pianist Herbie Hancock. They produced 1+1, the duo album which elicited “Aung San Suu Kyi,” something focused yet transcendent, with a limpid Shorter soprano solo, a shortcut to wonder and possibility.  It was dedicated to and named for the exiled Burmese leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner. “Because we affect lives of those who are here,” Shorter said, “the best way to honor Ana’s life is to become the happiest man alive.” Mercer, writing in the liner notes to the Footprints anthology, comments, “Wayne’s courageous response to his grief was the product and culmination of his Buddhist practice.”

Cover of Shorter’s 3-album with graphic novel set “Emanon.” courtesy WFDD

Of course, later Emanon arose, breaking conceptual ceilings, Wayne Shorter, the star-gazer, at age 85. Wherever he is now travelling, ageless in mystery and in light, we can only hope to imagine and follow.

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Discover tonight in the light of darkness: Jazz opens the doors of imagination

“Retroreflector” album cover. Design by B-Side Graphics

Andrew Trim. Courtesy Andrew Murray Triim

Concert Notice:

Retroreflector (Andrew Murray Trim), and Hanging Hearts will perform tonight (Tuesday, September 20), starting at 8 PM, at The Cactus Club, 2496 S. Wentworth Ave. in Milwaukee’s Bayview neighborhood. 

**********

GONGGGG!

Hear ye, hear ye!

Discover tonight in the light of darkness: Jazz opens the doors of imagination: Jazz opens the doors of imagination. This is the night to lay bare the lifeblood of possibility dwelling within the fecund womb of two extraordinarily creative bands, Retroreflector and Hanging Hearts. They’re two of the most audaciously adventurous “jazz” groups in the Midwest. I quotationally modify the word jazz because, as capacious as the term is, these two band seep into it’s vast realm from their very own secret inlets, deeply blessed in shadows and substrata. yet capable of virtual starbursts and meteor showers.

I have written about Retroreflector as an album title under the guise of Milwaukee-based guitarist-composer Andrew Murray Trim. Here is that review:

Guitarist Andrew Trim reaches for the moon on “Retroreflector”

But now the Retroflector term has become nominal. And who, or what, is the name retrospectively reflecting? The entity that rises most immediately  to mind is WEATHER REPORT, perhaps the most celebrated and exploratory and maybe among the funkiest jazz-fusion band of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s: Weather Report. That may seem incrongruous given that that historical band did not include a guitar — this band’s leader’s primary axe.

Also what certainly distinguishes Hanging Hearts from any presumption of Weather Reports vast realm is that the former group’s saxophonist, Chris Weller, primarily plays tenor, whereas Wayne Shorter, who made his name as a tenor saxophonist and astonishingly gifted composer, played primarily soprano saxophone in the group co-founded and led with keyboardist-composer Joe Zawinul.

Okay. I am not suggesting that either of these bands is nearly as accomplished as Weather Report, given that group’s longevity and profuse and consistent acclaim. Rather. these bands seem to possess the uncanny blend of some of the myriad aspects that made that legendry group’s music magic, as much as just about anything.

And after listening to some of their music, one might make the slippery generalization that Hanging Hearts is a saxophonist’s band (including a keyboardist and drummer) whereas Retroreflector is not quite as explicitly and obviously a guitarist’s band. (Geographically, both bands are Chicago-based.)

Hanging Hearts (L-R), Chris Weller, saxophone; Quin Kirchner, drums; Cole DeGenova, keyboards. 

Hanging Hearts most recent album cover.

Weather Report, by contrast, was a diaphanous amalgam of, at its best, democratic collective improvisation. That was the overall impression of their self-titled first album in 1973, and they continued in that vein until the band began latching onto funk grooves (their third album included, they claim, the first-ever recoded hip-hop rhythm and rap) which simplified their music, by laying down repeated bass patterns and ostinatos, upon which other players jammed. That said, I think these two Chicago bands strive for such ideals.

I won’t go into further detail because perhaps the most important thing at this late date is to make your plans to catch these group’s tonight, if possible, although I do recommend you take a look at my above-posted review of the album Retroreflector.

I just tend to doubt that you will be disappointed if you are open to courageous leaps off the cliff, into the virtual arms of atmosphere.

See you at tonight at The Cactus Club!

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Jazz has led the way in integration as a social and cultural model at least since 1938

George Shearing, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington and Buddy Rich, at the Madison Square Garden Jazz Festival in New York, in 1959. Photo: Herb Snitzer /MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVE/GETTY

Sure, pianist George Shearing (pictured, above left) was literally blind, to color and everything else (and once made an album with all three Black Montgomery brothers –Wes, Buddy and Monk). Nevertheless, this photo – which prompted this brief essay – signifies, for me, the pan-racial solidarity of jazz as a social model, including brash, super-egotistical Buddy Rich — in 1959. 1

I’m no Rich expert but, a cursory examination of his noteworthy 1967 album Speak No Evil, reveals how integrated his sensibilities and practices were by then. The title tune is by the great African-American saxophonist composer Wayne Shorter. The album also includes compositions by black artists Earth, Wind and Fire; Natalie Cole; The Pointer Sisters; and The Isley Brothers. His band at the time featured these black musicians: arranger Richard Evans, piano soloist Kenny Barron, bassist Bob Cranshaw, tuba player Howard Johnson, and vocalist Retta Hughes. Speak no evil, indeed.

There were certainly plenty more of integrated jazz bands by 1967, but let’s especially note examples of pioneering pre-’60s white bandleaders whom one might assume could travel and work easier in racially charged regions of America without the “white man’s burden” which is actually “the black man’s burden,” (as author/editor Greg Tate has eloquently documented 2.) of conforming to societal restrictions on integration, and thus helped advance the burgeoning civil rights movement.

The integration saga begins with Benny Goodman who hired star soloists from the Ellington and Basie Orchestras for 1938 at his epic Carnegie Hall concert, and his contemporary quartet with pianist Teddy Wilson and vibist Lionel Hampton. Earlier in the ’30s, he’d hired Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, and arranger Fletcher Henderson. In the ’40, Goodman hired guitarist Charlie Christian, trumpeter Cootie Williams, and saxophonist Wardell Gray.

Among notable 1950s Latin and Afro-Cuban jazz musicians and bands and musicians were Chano Pozo, Machito, Chico O’Farrell, Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaria, Cal Tjader, Prez Prado, Astor Piazolla, Xavier Cugat, singer Harry Belafonte and, yes, that the eclectic Brit George Shearing.

Then in the ’50s, among the most noatable integration developments came from Milwaukee-native and big band leader Woody Herman. He hired a variety of African American musicians in the 1950s, including vibraphonist Milt Jackson, trumpeters Ernie Royal, Reunald Jones, Nat Adderley, and Howard McGee, and bassists Keter Betts and Major Holley bass. Charlie Parker was guest soloist with the band in early ’50’s.

Herman also hired (white) trumpeter-singer Billie Rogers, one of the first female instrumentalists in a male-dominated band who wasn’t a singe or pianist. *

Speaking of women, in the 1940s, we can’t forget the integrated all-woman big band The International Sweethearts of Rhythm.

The saxophone section of the 1940s tri-racial orchestra The International Sweethearts of Rhythm Courtesy Rosalind Cron 

Besides Shearing, Herman and Buddy Rich, integrated bands with white leaders included The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Lennie Tristano, Art Pepper, The Gerry Mulligan Quartet, Stan Getz, the black and white co-leadership and integrated personnel of the standard-setting Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra and The J.J. Johnson-Kai Winding Quartet.

Among integrated black leaders of the late 1950s: Miles Davis (famously on Birth of the Cool, and Kind of Blue), Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, 3 John Coltrane, George Russell, Sarah Vaughan and Bud Powell, who recorded with Buddy Rich back in 1951.

Also, pioneering Black pianist-composer Mary Lou Williams worked with white trombonist Jack Teagarden, and had arranger Milt Orent assist in arrangements for her ambitious 1940s Zodiac Suite.

I know I am forgetting other “integral” leaders from both races.

l’ll just touch lightly on matters of early modern jazz “influence.” Bebop rose as a virtuosic, self-consciously Black-innovated style (like most all major jazz idioms) to deter whites from “stealing” and profiting by mimicking and marketing their style — as happened profligately with swing. Still, bop had a few notable Bud Powell-influenced white pianists, such as Dodo Mamarosa, Joe Albany, and Al Haig. Among 1950s white pianists influenced by Thelonious Monk (and perhaps Herbie Nichols) was the tragically-short-lived Richard Twardzik. 4.  

Perhaps an efficient way to enhance and conclude this brief historical integration story is to note the 1950s phenomenon of “cool jazz,” and here I’m plucking straight from Wikipedia, to dispel the notion this popular genre was the exclusive realm of white West Coast musicians: “Some observers looked down upon West Coast jazz because many of its musicians were white, and because some listeners, critics, and historians perceived that the music was too cerebral, effete, or effeminate, or that it lacked swing.[12][13][14] However, African American musicians played in the style, including Curtis CounceJohn LewisChico HamiltonHarry “Sweets” EdisonBuddy ColletteRed CallenderHarold LandEugene Wright and Hampton Hawes.”

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* Thanks to Curt Hanrahan, music director of The Milwaukee Jazz Orchestra, for information on Woody Herman.

  1. Thanks to my good friend, Stephen Braunginn, formerly jazz program host of WORT-FM radio in Madison, and of the Jazz Enthusiasts Facebook group, for posting this photo (at top).
  2. Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture, edited by by Greg Tate, Broadway Books 2003. This book addresses what is now known in P.C. terms as cultural appropriation. But it seems to me that white jazz artists who cover and pay royalties to black composers, and who fairly hire black musicians are, as Spike Lee would put it, “doing the right thing.”
  3. Though most famous for his piano-less “free jazz” Ornette Coleman used white pianists on his important earliest recordings, the Live at the Hillcrest date with Paul Bley (a true quiet giant) and Walter Norris on Coleman’s Contemporary label recordings, recently re-released as a 2-CD box set.
  4. Twardzik’s composition “Yellow Tango,” is a Latin-flavored small masterpiece of offbeat jazz, well represented on The Chet Baker Quartet featuring Dick Twardzik Live in Koln.

Madison’s 40th annual Atwood Fest had plenty to fill up the senses, the mind, and the spirit

 

Lead singer Jeff Taylor and The Altered Five Blues Band were among the big crowd-pleasers at the 40th Annual Atwood Fest on Madison’s east side last weekend. All photos by Kevin Lynch

I had a fabulous sun-soaked weekend at the 40th annual Atwood Fest, on Madison’s east side. This is the best street festival I have attended in some time. For starters, Madison lived up to its colorful and left-leaning reputation, something you could see, hear and smell — in the steady scent of burning cannabis drifting into our nostrils among a group of people gathered under some shade trees listening to Steely Dane, on Sunday.

However I didn’t quite see everything I might have, to get the full experience.

I had my head down and was wearing my broad-brimmed sun hat as I riffled through used CDs at the WORT radio station booth. I heard my girlfriend Ann say, “Kevin, you just missed a topless woman, who walked right by.”

That did get me to look up, long enough to catch what is called “the philosopher’s view” of a striking woman (which Ann assured me she was), receding into the distance. But from 20 feet away I saw her liberally tattooed back, and attached to her (covered) derrière was a sign that read “MY BODY, MY CHOICE.”

She was clearly and boldly making a protest statement about the recent Supreme Court overturning of Roe versus Wade which had guaranteed women legal abortions since the mid-1970s. It was a vivid bit of symbolism, signifying her gender and sexuality and the inherent motherhood of the female bosom. (Of course me, the inveterate music album browser, had to miss the full impact). Still I give the woman credit and for her courage and commitment to, um, raising consciousness, as well as eyebrows.

Elsewhere, less, provocatively, we saw several senior women walking around with blue hair. One younger woman had several piercings adorning every facial orifice, and created a few new orifices. It’s really something to see women of a several feminist generations in full force. And of course, tattoos advertised individuality (or now-dated trendiness?) galore, artfully bespeckling both genders

There was also plenty of delicious food, but I’m here to offer you a photo essay on the music. I was drawn back to the city I worked and lived in for nearly 20 years after marvelous day at the Madison Jazz Festival, on the Wisconsin Union Terrace beside Lake Mendota, earlier this summer.

For us, the music started relatively low-key with Inside Pocket, a jazz quartet leaning toward contemporary and post-bop styles with several shapely compositions by guitarist composer Pat Metheny, even though there’s no guitarist in this group. However the group’s tenor saxophonist Bob Kerwin pulled us into a fine afternoon mood with, slightly brooding yet lyrical playing somewhat reminiscent of the cool-to-bop school of Lester Young and Dexter Gordon.

Tenor saxophonist Bob Kerwin of the jazz quartet Inside Pocket eased us into the stimulating atmosphere of Atwood Fest Saturday afternoon. 

The next group we heard was actually playing their debut gig. Called with droll, non-P.C. panache, Lawnmower, it’s led my a fascinating and accomplished guitarist-singer-songwriter Louka Patenaude. A UW Madison music department lecturer, Patenaude has performed globally in a wide array of world music and American vernacular styles and contexts, including playing on recordings by Metheny and The Grateful Dead. Patenaude has played with most of the region’s top jazz musicians, including the award-winning Tony Castaneda’s Latin Jazz Sextet. I ran into Tony as he took in this sun-drenched set. Louka’s eclecticism is a tribute to both musicians’ open-minded voraciousness, given that what Tony, the master Latino conga-player, was listening to was something like bluegrass music. This group didn’t even have a percussionist.

Guitarist-singer-songwriter Louka Patenaude leads his new progressive bluegrass group Lawnmower (above L-R: Shauncey Ali, fiddle; Patenaude, guitar, Dave Havas, bass; Aaron Nolan guitar; and Isaac DeBroux-Slone, mandolin) and (below) takes a solo accompanied by bassist Havas.

Louka’s band had the peculiar soulfulness of bluegrass mixed with sophisticated string-playing interplay, by turns lilting and rhythmically charged. As Castaneda said to me, “call it progressive bluegrass.” Fair enough. They performed mostly original songs by Patenaude, who’s worth checking out on his most recent album of mostly originals under his own name, titled Testing Your Patience.  However, he did end the set with an exemplary version of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe.” The album includes Louka doing a sardonically laconic rendition of Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Annotator Joy Dragland calls the album Louka’s “fever dream.”

Tony Castaneda split to check out the New Orleans band Sam Price and The True Believers at another stage, understandably because, he said the group’s percussionist was borrowing Tony’s conga drum. Price’s band was next on my list of “must hear” bands and they hardly disappointed. This was the most collectively high-energy group I saw that weekend with a swampy, funk style reminiscent of Little Feat, replete with slickly woozy organ playing, and a vibe both jittery and jumping. It also included a feisty, bouncy female singer and Price, a leather-lunged singer and bassist. They spilled over the whole street of Atwood with an infectiously greasy, gumbo boil.

Now we be dancing despite ourselves, lubed a bit, in my case, by a sudsy glass of Oktoberfest beer.

Sam Price, and The True Believers, straight from New Orleans, rock and boogie the Heritage Stage at the top of Atwood Fest, in it’s 40th year.

We then moved to the Clyde Stubblefield Stage to catch The Altered Five Blues Band, from Milwaukee. the band sure plays like it’s altered, in the best sense, probably with some of “Milwaukee’s finest.” Lead guitarist Jeff Schroedl was ripping off a searing solo just as we walked up, as the whole band doled out heaping helpings of steamy electric Chicago-style blues, interspersed with the hard rock edge that blues-style helped infuse the venerable vernacular with.

Lead singer Jeff Taylor rides the power as Brew City’s Altered Five Blues Band fills it up with contemporary Chicago-style blues, with a full Milwaukee head. 

Rotund but rollin’ and tumblin’ lead singer Jeff Taylor may be “a heart attack waiting to happen” as retired NP Ann commented. But on this waning afternoon, he belted out the good gooey blue stuff with gusto, and a stentorian vocal heartiness recalling B.B. King. You can see and hear why this band as won awards, including current nominations from The Blues Foundation, for best contemporary blues album, Holler If You Hear Me, and the title song for “best song.”

But this afternoon, with beer in hand, I felt like the good-time strut of the band’s “Great Minds Drink Alike” :

After this set, gal pal Ann was running out of gas a bit, and my cup was drained, so we exited despite more good music to be had.

We planned to be back right when everything kicked off on Sunday with Steely Dane.

***

It was 12 noon when some folks are still in church, but the crowd gathered at the Clyde Stubblefield Stage ended up attending their own revival meeting. The resurrection is the music of Steely Dan. I’m normally not inclined to indulge much in cover bands. But I’d heard Steely Dane live previously and, frankly, they’re a gas. This band’s nominal wordplay conveys that it’s band members all reside in Dane County, the surrounding region of the one-of-a-kind capital city that is sometimes referred to as “sixty-four square miles surrounded by reality.” The way this world is right now, I was hungry for the hip escapism of those 64 squares, as epitomized by Steely Dane.

It’s a 13 to 15 member band, with four horn players, three female backup singers, and two keyboard players along with two guitarists, bass, percussion, and drums. Three members share lead vocals, striving to approximate Donald Fagen’s raring, chameleon-cobra singing. That fulsome force provides the pulsing flexibility of extremely dynamic musical muscles, which makes Steely Dan’s music so intoxicating and almost good buddy-like in it’s catchiness.

Steely Dane horn section (top): (L-R) Al Falaschi, Jim Doherty and Courtney Larsen, with keyboardist-musical director Dave Stoler. Another SD personnel segment (above) includes (L-R) guitarist-vocalist Jay Moran, bassist Phil Lyons, singer-keyboardist-co-leader Dave Adler, and background singers Megan Moran and Lo Marie.

So the effect was that this big joyous big crowd were SD true believers who knew many of the lyrics they sang along with, not unlike biblical verses duly memorized. Except wafting herb, as mentioned, is the substitute for incense. And Steely Dan is as secular as music gets. Steely Dan’s resident genius Donald Fagen crafted songs about love, loss and “the royal scam,” with a variety of intriguingly romantic, roguish and eccentric characters, and even sweeps us back to high school days without seeming corny or trite.

Steely Dane’s frontman Dave Adler’s evident Donald Fagen wannabe-ism has morphed, with diligent practice and zeal, into a Fagen might-as-well-be-ism. As gal pal Ann Peterson commented during the band’s exuberant 90-minute (without a break) set, “If you close your eyes, you can easily imagine that it’s Steely Dan.”

If that sounds like a perfectly ingenuous critical comment, it’s also spot on. This band has taken in, mastered and absorbed what sounds like most of Steely Dan’s repertoire, and they’ve got it down cold, that is to say, cool, but also quite hot, and utterly convincing.

The co-founder of the band, along with Adler, is the accomplished and respected Madison jazz pianist Dave Stoler.  And what a contrast in stage presences. Dave Adler bounces around, flailing limbs like Gumby on steroids. He sings with a kind of please-love-me-to-death ardency. You get the feeling he’d perform ’till he woke up the moon and, remember, this was noon.

By contrast, band co-founder Dave Stoler, studious and nearly immobile, is a Buddha with dancing fingers, yet absorbed in awareness of the musical whole, given that he does the arranging for this big ensemble. He’s previously fronted a full jazz orchestra project. To intro one song, Stoler also delivered an cappella piano solo brimming with extended chords and slowly spiraling substitutions.  

Guitarist Jay Moran does his best to muster the bite of Walter Becker’s guitar and ably handles some of the vocals. None of the lead singers quite matches Fagen’s elastic, gut-to-the tongue sass.

But the Dane ensemble is so strong, supple and committed to this material, and with gospel-like call and responses, it plunges into the memory and heart, and mainlines Steely Dan’s “when-Josie-comes-home” nostalgia amid sardonic philosophizing.

Here’s saxophonist-vocalist Al Falaschi, Adler and Moran highlighted in a goes-down-so-easy version of “Do It Again,” recorded at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee.

Similarly, In this band’s hands, “Aja” still unfolds as a gorgeous little suite, that breathes and arches its back like a big ol’ tiger. The “up on the hill” refrain has strong spiritual overtones, but mainly about social acceptance, and consolidation. “When all my dime dancing is through, I’ll run to you.”

. Tenor saxophonist Falaschi did a reasonable, though hardly imitative, Wayne Shorter solo. And drummer Joey Banks rippled through the long, polyrhythmic “Aja” outro made famous by “Bad” Steve Gadd.

By contrast, “Reeling in the Years” allowed listeners to dance way out on the memory line, with all the euphoria that caught everybody’s ear when Dan first hit the charts. The Dan-by-way-of-Dane waves of slithering funk is too delicious to deny, and you sense this is as good as it’ll get – especially given that the real Steely Dan rarely toured live, being largely a recording studio creature, as gleamingly brilliant and contagious as those got with hip, R&B-jazzy song jammin’. 1

During a short stint in the 1970s, I worked at the North Shore Milwaukee audio store Sound Stage, and SD’s masterpiece album Aja, was our favorite demo record, to show off the equipment. You see, the album’s production level, with Victor Feldman’s souped-up marimbas like tolling redwoods, is about as high as the music can get you. It felt about that way Sunday, as high noon unfolded into the after’s Mary Jane-filled glow.

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  1. Steely Dane has recently won “best cover band” awards from both Madison Area Music Awards and Madison Magazine.

 

 

Retrieving Lost Moments in Time with Stan Getz

A portrait of Stan Getz. Courtesy RW Theaters.

Why now? Why Stan Getz now? Because he’s a voice in time and beyond time, a voice within and wherever. Wherever I go, I’ve come to know, I yearn to hear him, and all he has to say.

I understand now, as well as a non-saxophonist can, what John Coltrane meant when he said of Getz, “We’d all sound like that if we could.”  Coltrane was, among other things, a supreme master of balladeering, where many saxophonists make their bid for a sound as beautiful as possible.

My own analogue to Coltrane’s indirect superlative: I would carry Getz’s sound with me further than any other instrument’s, if forced to forsake all but one. Maybe it’s a Sophie’s choice between Getz and Miles Davis.

As a relatively young journalist, I had already reviewed a Getz performance at the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery for The Milwaukee Journal, a highlight among many superb artists I heard and reviewed there. Two years later, I interviewed him in Chicago, then wrote a feature previewing a Getz performance at a Rainbow Summer concert in Milwaukee. There I met him again afterwards and, though brief, the reacquaintance still holds a tight grip on my heart. You see, after a brief exchange of pleasantries, I agreed to accompany him in a walk to his hotel room, but he had one small condition.

Would I please carry his saxophone for him? After the performance, he was fatigued, partly the byproduct of years of abuse of his body with drugs and alcohol.

I accepted the task gladly, and the instant thrill of carrying one of the world’s most revered artistic instruments, beside its owner and artmaker, inspired a short poem, “Bossa Not So Nova.” 1

So, I’ve written about Getz in three modes but, mea culpa, it still doesn’t seem enough.

Lately I’ve revisited him upon buying a used copy of the Getz musical biography Nobody Else But Me, by Dave Gelly. It discourses across the artist’s career with close readings of numerous Getz recordings, his legacy beyond memories, as he died in 1991.

This excellent book prompted me to dig out an array of Getz recordings.

As I write, I’m listening to him essay “Infant Eyes,” an exquisite ballad by another giant of the tenor sax, Wayne Shorter, and each limpid whole note unfurls with delicious tenderness and knowing delicacy.

The album “Moments in Time,” recorded in 1976, was released in 2016. Courtesy Resonance Records.

But he’s much more than a fatherly cradle-rocker.

I couldn’t have responded to this recording much earlier than a few years ago, when I obtained a copy of the Getz album Moments in Time, recorded live by Getz’s Quartet in 1976, but not released until 2016 on Resonance, a label specializing in what I’d call “jazz archeology.” 2

And there’s more affinity between Getz and Shorter than a few of Wayne’s tunes in Getz’s repertoire. The sound of their voices resonates similarly, an exquisitely soft vibration, a singing like a distinctly masculine bird that — warbles and vibratos aside — can hold a note like a distant horizon of destiny. Both saxophonists have lived lives deeply shadowed by tragedy, likely informing their profound sensibilities.

Indeed now, the tune playing is “The Cry of the Wild Goose,” by trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, and it belies one misplaced reservation I held about Getz in the past.

He disabused me of it when I saw him in 1982 at the Jazz Gallery.

But I’m referring to back in the mid-1960s, when he broke into broad public awareness with his lilting bossa nova luminosities. He could hold and caress a note as if it were palpable and breathing which, with him, it truly was. Such audible tenderness enchanted me as much as any other single jazz artist did with one recording, Getz/Gilberto.

Cover of the famous album “Getz/Gilberto.” Connect Brazil.

And sure enough, right now with Horace Silver’s “Peace” (from Moments in Time), Getz is beguiling yet again. Getz/Gilberto, created, arranged, and recorded by virtually all Brazilian musicians, racked up unprecedented sales for a jazz recording (2 million copies in 1964) and became the first non-American album to win a Grammy Award for Album of the Year, in 1965.

But back during the bossa nova craze, for all my admiration, I doubted whether Getz was capable of anything approaching what I call “The Cry.”

I do hear a cry in the “wild goose cry” tune I’d just heard, but I’m referring to a sound often heard among saxophonists in the 1960s, during the same time Getz lulled and seduced with “The Girl from Ipanema.”

Getz and vocalist Astrud Gilberto who sang the huge international hit, “The Girl from Ipanema.” which propelled the album “Getz/Gilberto” to great sales heights and an “Album of the Year” Grammy.

The notion of “The Cry” is the expressionism that numerous saxophonists especially began manifesting during that period of social upheaval and raised consciousness over racial injustice. It’s a heavily freighted topic and subtext. So perhaps its unsurprising that a naturally lyrical white saxophonist isn’t easily associated with it. Nevertheless, over the years, the true and extraordinary range of Getz’s expressive power expanded, and his own version of “The Cry” arose, as such a vivid contrast to his inherently singing style that it carried the weight of striking effects, like a sculptor’s chisel discharging chards and sparks, to convey how life can force us to extremes of feeling and response.

To me, Getz seemed to be universalizing the plight and poignance conveyed in “The Cry,” most often associated with African-American musicians. This is not to minimize the racial suffering those artists endured and expressed, but to find the shared humanity in it. Getz’s suffering might be arguably his own demons’ making, more than of a cruel society built on systemic racism. He even was capable of violence under the influence, which he always regretted, even serving brief incarceration.

Gelly insightfully notes a great irony, how the drugs and liquor might’ve facilitated an “alpha state” in which, Getz explained, “the less you concentrate the better. The best way to create is to get in the alpha state…what we would call relaxed concentration.”

Such can be the price of art. Does that make it ill-begotten? Illegitimate?

As a Russian Jew, he may have had ancestral instincts of suffering and class oppression hounding his psyche. Accordingly, he seems a different sort of expressive animal — “Nobody Else But Me” as he might say. The simplicity of the declaration also may reflect Getz’s uniqueness, his fingerprint identity, his sonic originality as a pied piper whom, when heard, we still feel compelled to follow, decades after bossa nova first sailed across waves and valleys. Years after his last living breath.

Thank the music gods for his voice, retrieved and captured.

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1 a poem about Stan Getz (written to the cadence of “Girl from Ipanema.”)

2 Moments in Time comprises mainly classic and modern jazz standards with Getz’s working quartet at the time: pianist Joanne Brackeen, bassist Clint Houston and drummer Billy Hart. However, Resonance also released simultaneously a Getz album Getz/Gilberto ’76, highlighting guitarist-singer Joao Gilberto, and Brazilian songs,

pps. I also wrote about Getz when I found a used copy of his album Sweet Rain, as few years ago.

 

3. Here’s a review of a live Getz performance at The Milwaukee Jazz Gallery, in 1982:

 

Saxophonist Adam Kolker travels in the long shadows of Wayne Shorter

Review: Adam Kolker Lost (Sunnyside)

It’s been a longtime coming, a tenor saxophonist doing justice to Wayne Shorter in an album statement. 1

Kolker embraces Shorter’s almost-mystical genius, beautiful yet elliptical, invariably evident even in his verbal pronouncements.

He traffics in his subject’s tone, manner and visionary values. And he lives up to Shorter’s ideal of originality superseding conventional or inherited aesthetics.

Yes, Coltrane’s astringent tone and passion dwell within Shorter and, by extension, Kolker. Yet Shorter made his own art as compelling and sublime as any preceding jazz. He did this partly by employing shadow and indirection, shapely asymmetry, and by allowing the fissures of ambiguity to open fresh roads to possibility and new definitions of beauty and truth. At times, Shorter can sound as confessional as he does otherworldly.

Adam Kolker, Courtesy Jazz Times

Kolker has learned well. There’s a certain bite to his well-honed tone. So the Lost album opens with ingenious obliquity, with not a Shorter piece, but Gil Evans’ “The Time of the Barracudas,” originally an orchestral vehicle for Shorter’s tenor.

Both Shorter tunes interpreted, “Lost” and “Dance Cadaverous,” are as disquieting as they are strangely engaging. The album’s chosen title, “Lost,”  feels wholly apt, as a tribute not to the man himself but to his long, winding road of quest, or The Way, a Buddhist concept of rather selfless enlightenment, long-embraced by Shorter. 2

(On the other hand, incorporating Shorter’s name into the title would’ve likely helped market the album to its intended audience.)

Though first conceived as an album of Shorter tunes, Kolker offers two of his own beguiling originals, which also betray formal qualities of Monk and Steve Lacy. Kolker also gives two standards, by Jimmy Van Husen and Bronislaw Kaper, Shorter-like re-imaginings.

Kolker has mastered for himself Shorter’s limpid aura of expressive intimacy, seeming to be whispering to you, the lone listener, in superbly burnished tones when he plays his saxophonists. On soprano, Kolker may have more restrained mastery than his elder’s model.

So, this album is far from musical hagiography, or the convention of a complete dedication album of an honoree’s repertoire.

A superb accompanying trio — pianist Bruce Barth, bassist Ugonna Okegwo and drummer Billy Hart — buoy the music like seamen expertly managing sails in tricky crosswinds. Shorter’s compositions and style are often as oddly tilted in the time/space continuum as they are nuanced.

If not quite a transformative work, Lost sets sail for a distant shore and gives us fresh lenses on Shorter’s still-too-little understood legacy. That Kolker accomplished an historical kind of perspective before Shorter’s passing testifies to this achievement.

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1. To date, the strongest acknowledgement of Shorter’s legacy as album statements have come arguably from pianists, as in the 1983 piano-duo album Shorter by Two, by Kirk Lightsey and Harold Danko. This may partly be due to Shorter’s own comparatively long career, always exemplifying the reach beyond, rather than glorifying the past.

Rickey Ford’s Shorter Ideas is also a worthy covering of Shorter’s compositions.

2 Shorter originally recorded “Lost” on his 1965 Blue Note album The Soothsayer. “Dance Cadaverous” is from Shorter’s 1964 Blue Note masterpiece Speak No Evil.