June 10: All Jazz and Blues Edition

Just too funny:

(Hat tip to A Blog Supreme.)

Woody Allen is not the new face of jazz, but he has been playing and promoting traditional jazz in his small way for many years; it is well known that he plays clarinet publicly every week with his band when he is in New York, and they sometimes tour as well.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-06-01/music/the-jazz-evangelism-of-woody-allen

http://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupreme/2010/06/02/127376442/why-woody-allen-is-good-for-jazz?ft=1&f=104014555

The second piece contains a link to a blog post that gets very worked up about the omission of overt racial discussion in the Village Voice article, which I take to be quite deliberate. There are frequent mentions of black jazz musicians, but no direct commentary on race because, I presume, writer Stacey Anderson wanted to focus on Allen and not go off-topic. Allen regularly gets slammed for racial insensitivity, while the equally "white" Wes Anderson does not, even though Allen is palpably more interested in black culture than Anderson, features recordings by black musicians in just about all his films, and named three of his children after African-American cultural and sports figures. It is true that there are not many black actors in Allen's films -- he has resolutely kept his storytelling within a certain Manhattan social milieu (lately extended to European cities, but it's the same milieu). I still find the criticism of him on racial grounds a mite puzzling, because he so clearly embraces African-American contributions, and considers them part of the American mainstream, in a way that many white Americans haven't yet done. He makes an improbable symbol of cultural imperialism. 

White jazzman Artie Shaw was one of those bandleaders, like Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and my favorite Charlie Barnet, who crossed the color line in hiring when it could cost you gigs to do so. Shaw was a complex fellow, indisputably important musically but --- how shall I put this -- also An Asshole Supreme. Tom Nolan's biography tries to capture all his facets:

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/open-ear-three-chords/  

Shaw had eight wives, another similarity with Barnet, whose marital count is ridiculously confusing: maybe ten.

Marc Myers and David Amram recall a forgotten jazzman who died in his prime, Bobby Jaspar:

Bobby Jaspar is all but forgotten today. Back in the late 1950s, the Belgian tenor saxophonist recorded with Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Eddie Costa, J.J. Johnson, Herbie Mann and many other notable New York jazz artists of the period. Married to singer Blossom Dearie, Jaspar's best-known recordings are probably Interplay for Two Trumpets and Two Tenors (1957), for which he was teamed with John Coltrane, and Chet Is Back (1962), recorded with Chet Baker after the trumpeter's release from an Italian prison. And then Jaspar died. In 1963, at age 37, the saxophonist and flutist suffered a fatal heart attack just as he was gaining recognition.



Married to Blossom Dearie? Seriously? I sometimes learn the darndest things while putting this blog together....

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/06/david-amram-on-bobby-jaspar.html

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/06/david-amram-on-bobby-jaspar-2.html

Jason Crane at The Jazz Session interviews the accomplished, thoughtful, and funny bassist Rufus Reid. Asked how his approach differs when he plays with large and small ensembles, he answers that he always just tries to honor the music, and then adds, "When I play with a big band, I have more people to take down the toilet if I mess up."

http://thejazzsession.com/2010/06/10/the-jazz-session-176-rufus-reid/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rufus_Reid

Chicago bluesman Otis Taylor achieved some wider recognition last year when a couple of his songs were featured in Michael Mann's film Public Enemies, but notoriety or not, he has been pursuing his own path for decades.

Otis Taylor calls the music he plays "trance blues," which is one way of describing a sound that doesn't really have a home in traditional blues circles....His latest album, "Clovis People Vol. 3" (Telarc), gives free reign to his idiosyncrasies. Snaking guitars ride a chord, maybe two, over grooves as steady as a river, while banjo, theremin, violin and pedal steel add spooky atmosphere, and a cornet darts in and out. Once in a while, a guitar solo erupts. It's a hypnotic sound that shares similarities with acid-rock, Afro-beat, and the Mississippi hill-country blues of R.L. Burnside.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-06-04/entertainment/ct-ott-0604-otis-taylor-20100604_1_mississippi-hill-country-blues-trance-blues-otis-taylor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otis_Taylor_%28musician%29

Interesting that the Chicago Tribune should compare Taylor to R.L. Burnside, who also got some well-deserved, overdue attention through a soundtrack appearance, when his song "It's Bad You Know" was used in an early episode of The Sopranos.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._L._Burnside

Here are Taylor and his African Orchestra at the Telluride Blues and Brews Festival in 2009; they are hot.



Among notables born on this date are novelists Saul Bellow and Louis Couperus (Netherlands), dramatist Terence Rattigan, children's writer Maurice Sendak, jazz critic Nat Hentoff, composers Frederick Loewe, Robert Still, and Tikhon Khrennikov (Russia), bluesman Howlin' Wolf, harpsichordist/musicologist Ralph Kirkpatrick, singer/songwriter Joao Gilberto, biologist E.O. Wilson, painters Gustave Courbet, Andre Derain, and Fairfield Porter, attorneys F. Lee Bailey and Eliot Spitzer, and actors Judy Garland, Hattie McDaniel, Barry Morse, Jurgen Prochnow, and Jeanne Tripplehorn. I remember once when I wandering through the impressive Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and came across this Courbet canvas that stopped me in my tracks, Deer in the Forest: