Some Jazzy Birthdays This Week and Next

Celebrating those who are here as well as though who are gone —
November 21: Coleman Hawkins would have been 101.
November 22: Happy 80th to Gunther Schuller; Jimmy Knepper would have been 78.
November 23: Happy 80th to Johnny Mandel; Willie The Lion Smith would have been 108.
November 24: Al Cohn would have been 80; Teddy Wison would have been 93.
November 25: Nat Adderley would have been 74 and Paul Desmond would have been 81.
By the end of the month, Ed Bickert and Jack Sheldon will be celebrating their 73rd and 74th birthdays, respectively; violinist Eddie South, Billy Strayhorn, and Gigi Gryce, would have been 101, 90, and 80 respectively.

Chaos – Part 2

Today is the beginning of renovation week #3. Clearly, there will be no Thanksgiving dinner served from my kitchen this year – we’ll be dining at the home of friends. I think the cabinets may get finished today or maybe tomorrow, and then they will start to tile the kitchen floor. The kitchen counter is almost done, but the tiles are heavy and the added few inches in depth now necessitates corbels be added to support the overhang. Also, the expanse of the counter changes the impact of the color of the tiles, which now no longer seem to blend with the color of the family room walls. (It’s hard to imagine a 12’ x 4.5’ expanse when looking at a 13” square tile.) So, I’ve had to pick out a new paint color for the walls. (Funny how these projects seem to mushroom.) I have never been partial to white walls – except perhaps for my parents’ home where the white living room walls make a great backdrop for all the colors and art works that fill the room. My childhood bedroom had yellow flowered wallpaper and the beds were covered with green corduroy spreads. Our bedroom today, once blue, became green about a year ago. John’s office is beige, my office walls are butterscotch, and for several years now the family room walls have been a deep raspberry color. The kitchen has been the only white-walled room in our house. As of today, my new plan is to paint the kitchen Soft Ivory and the family room a golden yellow color called Valley Flower that I think will complement the counter as well as the new bamboo floor to come without requiring a change of the family room draperies. Raspberry and blue will then continue to be the accent colors.

Traffic and Music

A colleague from the other coast is in town for meetings that are taking place on the West Side of Los Angeles. Said colleague, being a connoisseur of good music, decided to take in a concert at Disney Hall, got a pair of tickets to a classical duo guitar performance by Sérgio and Odair Assad, and invited me to join him. We thought to have dinner first, but I warned that rush-hour traffic was likely to make that impossible as his meetings ran until 5 pm — at that hour, the 20-minute drive from the ocean to downtown L.A. was likely to take over an hour… at best. So the plan was to meet at the box office at 7:30. At 7:15 my cell phone rang – traffic was crawling along the #10 Freeway and my friend was barely half way across town. At 7:50, just as I was surmising that we would miss the first half of the show, my intrepid colleague appeared; just after his call, the traffic magically began to move, and so we were able to settle in to our excellent seats just as the lights dimmed.

Brazilian born Sérgio and Odair Assad are brothers, and part of a multigenerational musical family that includes their mandolin-playing father, vocalist mother, sister who also sings and plays guitar, and the brothers’ two daughters. But tonight it’s just the two men, alone on an unadorned stage playing unamplified classical guitars, breathing as one, exhibiting a sympatico between them that belies not only their brotherhood but also the fact that they’ve been playing together for 40 years. The program opened with a piece by Isaac Albéniz that sounded oddly pianistic to me. I was not familiar with this composer, so later, in perusing the program notes by John Henken, when I read that Albéniz was a pianist and that his piano pieces have been transcribed and arranged for guitar, I was pleased that my ears had not deceived me.

The second piece was by Rodrigo, a three-movement composition titled Tonadilla that contains fragments reminiscent of his more famous composition Concierto de Aranjuez. Without comparing the scores, or at least hearing it again, I cannot say whether those fragments were deliberate auditory allusions to Concierto or simply harmonic and rhythmic snippets peculiar to Rodrigo’s sound and style. The program also included pieces by Sérgio, his daughter, Piazzolla, Bittencourt, Gismonti, Dyens, and Brouwer.

The house was not sold out, but the applause was thunderous leading to repeated curtain-calls, and I am happy to say that there were quite a few young people in attendance. The duo reappeared from the wings without their guitars the first two times, but finally gave in and remerged for an encore. Sérgio informed the audience that they grew up poor and had only one guitar, so they would now show us how they played in the beginning. He put down his guitar, stood behind Adair who was seated, and together they played a very intricate and lively piece, four hands, simultaneous, on one guitar. It was amazing! A bravissimo evening to be sure.

Expressive Music

On occassion, the Rifftides staff posts Compatible Quotes. Earlier this week they paired a Bill Evans quote with this one from Igor Stravinsky

Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.

To which I add this line from Aldous Huxley:

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Chaos – Part 1

Well it’s been nearly two weeks and the house still in chaos due to the kitchen and family room renovation, but I can see some progress. The cabinets are getting new sliding shelves and drawers, the backerboard has been affixed to the kitchen floor and is awaiting tiles, and the tiles for the kitchen counter are being placed at this very moment. Still boxed in the garage is the new kitchen sink in a creamy off-white color they call “bisquit,” the “brushed bronze” faucet, and the bisquit colored dishwasher. (Here’s hoping the Sears Kenmore and Kohler versions of “biscuit” match.) Stay tuned. I think progress from here on in will be rapid (at least I hope so).

A Boston “Must-See”

Would that I could be in Boston to see the Syncopated Rhythms , a music and danced themed exhibit of 20th Century African American Art from the George and Joyce Wein Collection. The Weins shared a lifelong passion for all of the arts and it’s sad that Joyce did not live to see this exhibit open at the Boston University Art Gallery. (Joyce died this past August.) If perchance you find yourself in Boston between November 18 2005 – January 22, 2006 I hope you’ll make time to enjoy this collection of paintings, sculpture, drawings and a painted story quilt.

IM Becoming a Serious Business Tool

In light of my recent post regarding timely responses to email, I thought I’d share this report from The Center for Media Research.

According to a newly-released IDC study, the worldwide enterprise instant messaging applications market jumped 37% in terms of year-over-year revenue in 2004, and the value, necessity, and use of IM applications for business use is expected to grow from $315 million in 2005 to $736 million in 2009.

Robert P. Mahowald, program director for IDC, said “With more than 28 million business users worldwide… sending nearly 1 billion messages each day in 2005, and many more crossover corporate consumers who use consumer instant messaging networks in the workplace, these products are clearly reaching more mainstream users. Especially in compliance-driven sectors like Wall Street, financial services, and government, instant messaging is a critical differentiator… IDC expects instant messaging – once the plaything of teenagers – to continue to grow into its role as a substantial business collaboration application.”

(c) 2005 MediaPost Communications, 1140 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10001

I wonder if one of the reasons that businesses are embracing Instant Messaging is as a means for circumventing the mountains of emails that are sitting in our emailboxes. As we moved from snailmail to fax to email, for the most part we abandoned the prior method rather than using the each newer faster delivery vehicle only as needed. Now that we are being overwhelmed by a larger and larger volume of email at work, I suspect that Instant Messaging is being adopted as the latest means of prioritizing urgent messages. Given time, when we get buried underneath a mountain of IMs, someone will have to come up with something else.

And remember when we didn’t have answering machines? If your call went unanswered, you had to call back later. Now my voice mailbox is full of messages from people who choose to call at their convenience rather than during my business hours and I have to figure out how to return all the messages in a timely fashion. Convenience is great, but I can place only a limited number of calls in a day. And call waiting? I love the fact that I don’t have to worry about missing an emergency call, but as common as it has become, some people still don’t like being put on hold so that you can talk to someone else.

What is your preferred method of communication? When was the last time you wrote a letter and handed it to a mail carrier?

I Just Bought Yet Another Book

DevraDoWrite devotees know that writer Walt Harrington is one of my gods (if you did not know that go here and here and here and here). I recently learned that his new anthology, The Beholder’s Eye: A Collection of America’s Finest Personal Journalism, is now available from Grove Press. With this collection Walt celebrates what he calls the “oft-belittled personal journalism form.” Amazon’s Book Description portrays the collection’s contributors as “reporters who were willing to reveal themselves in order to bring readers insights that were deeper than supposedly objective third-person stories.” This is the type of writing to which I aspire.

This is a must read…and so grows my reading list.

I’ve Got Mail: A Valid Question

I recently posted a link to a young German guitarist and commented that I found his audio clips “intriguing.” A reader has written to ask:

What does that mean, please? What is intriguing about them? Is that a positive or negative stance?

It’s not only a valid question, but one that I myself would be likely to ask. In fact, back in July I took Don Heckman to task for the same ambiguity. Here’s an excerpt (you can read the whole thing here):

He describes Lesa Terry’s solos as “briskly swinging, jazz-driven” and mentions Cheryl Keyes “inventive flute soloing and dark-toned vocal,” but does that mean they were good? Lori Andrews “demonstrated a remarkable capacity to produce blues-bent improvised lines,” but to what end? Phyllis Battle may have been ebullient, but was she in good voice?

My reader’s question deserves an answer. It’s true that if I had loved it, if I thought it was the greatest music I had ever heard, I would have said so, probably with exclamatiuon marks. I might even have gushed as I have done on rare occassion, such as a review I wrote of Lynne Arriale Trio: Live at The Montreux Jazz Festival for Jazz Improv a few years back. You can read the whole review if you’d like, but here’s a taste of me gushing:

The bossa-tinged ballad “Estate” has all of the complexity and delicacy of a spider web. From the beginning to the end of this nine-minute track, goose bumps ripple through my soul and I am caught in this perfectly formed, beautiful trap. After Ms Arriale proves once again that a beautiful melody can stand alone, she adds layers while twisting and turning the lines as if reflected through a prism. The beautiful melodic bass solo is laden with pregnant notes and again, as is true throughout, Davis’s percussive contributions are so tasteful and delicate at times that I feel I must call your attention to the lyricism in his playing.

Conversely, I don’t like to write bad reviews, so if I had thought the music was really awful I would not have even mentioned it, let alone posted a link to the musician’s web site.

Now you’re still wondering what I thought, and the truth is that I was intrigued because I wasn’t really sure what I thought. The clips are short and without context, but snippets of what I heard were atmospheric, aural paintings evoking a mood. That’s good, and if I were to hear a whole piece, to hear the shape in it’s entirety and take the journey from beginning to end, I might have a clearer opinion…pro or con. But in all likelihood, this is music I would not have “reviewed” because I don’t have a feel for it. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, but it may be beyond my comfort zone.

My personal tastes are not very adventurous — I like to be able to identify the melody and follow the harmonic changes. Rhythmically, I like to be able to feel “one” and when I get lost, finding it again makes me smile. That’s the joy of listening to a master improviser like Sonny Rollins (or my dad, for that matter) — they take you on trips and if you get lost, they’ll eventually bring you back home. Perhaps my ears are not big enough to adequately follow this young man’s music; I can’t follow Ornette Coleman, either. No, I’m not equating the two, just trying to say that I don’t believe it fair to pass judgement on things I don’t yet understand. But bottom line: to me, intriguing is a good thing. If you arouse my interest and capture my attention, you’ve accomplished something.