billbeuttler.com

January 1, 1970

Five stories this week, counting the roundup of summer jazz within driving distance of Boston. The best of the lot is the review of David Brooks's surprisingly lame follow-up to "Bobos in Paradise," which Slate gave a mention to in its roundup of reviews (read it here: http://slate.msn.com/id/2101193/ ).

*****

Crowd gets a kick out of Cullum's charm

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent  |  May 29, 2004

Britain's 24-year-old jazz sensation Jamie Cullum brought his working trio to Scullers Thursday night and wowed a crowd that, judging by the gray hair around the room, included a fair percentage of folks old enough to be his grandparents.

The so-called "Sinatra in sneakers" — and Verve Records' best-selling answer to Norah Jones — did so with eight tunes from his new CD, "Twentysomething," and a disarming mix of sometimes cocky, sometimes self-effacing charm.

Cullum slipped onto the stage almost unnoticed, decked out in blue jeans, dark T-shirt, and his customary footwear, and briefly scatted a cappella, calling it his warm-up. He filched an apple slice from a plate on a front-row table and scatted a bit more while munching it. The trio then launched into an agreeable version of Cole Porter's "I Get a Kick Out of You."

Bassist Geoff Gascoyne and drummer Sebastiaan de Krom provided competent jazz backing (as they would all night), and Cullum took a creditable solo seated at the piano — when he wasn't standing on the piano bench, doing a little dance step, and sniffing loudly on the microphone while singing a line about cocaine.

Then it was on to the standard "What a Difference a Day Made," a slow ballad played straight; a cover of the rap hit "Frontin' " — Cullum explaining afterward that the tune's bridge reminded him of Herbie Hancock; and a pair of Cullum originals. The first of these, his hit single "All at Sea," Cullum said resulted from working several months on a cruise ship just after college.

The second, "Twentysomething," has been dismissed elsewhere as insubstantial — true enough when compared to songs by, say, Porter. But its lyrics are cleverer than most anything you'll find on MTV, and they brought appreciative chuckles from the Scullers crowd.

Another pretty ballad, "Blame It on My Youth," was followed by more talk from Cullum about how glad he is to have switched over from rock 'n' roll to jazz, and how much more he has to learn. He nonetheless followed with a jazzed-up cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Wind Cries Mary." As an encore, Cullum got the crowd clapping and singing along to his rave version of "I Could Have Danced All Night."

If sometimes the music may have seemed as slight to jazz purists as Cullum's skinny, 5-foot-5-inch frame, never mind. It was considerably smarter and more interesting musically than most contemporary pop, and jazz can only benefit by occasionally embracing nonaficionados.

Jamie Cullum
At: Scullers, first set, Thursday night 

© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

*****

It's a horn of plenty for Hugh Masekela

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent  |  May 28, 2004

South African flugelhornist Hugh Masekela, born 65 years ago in Witbank, a gold-mining town 100 miles east of Johannesburg, grew up determined to play jazz, preferably in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Instead, he mixed jazz with assorted South African influences and became a Top 40 superstar. His song "Grazing in the Grass" made it all the way to No. 1 in 1968.

Since then he's performed with Paul Simon on Simon's "Graceland" tour, co-written the Broadway musical "Sarafina," penned a popular song celebrating Nelson Mandela ("Bring Him Back Home"), returned to South Africa, and kicked a decades-long addiction to booze and drugs. Along the way he befriended or played with everyone from Herb Alpert to Jimi Hendrix to Marvin Gaye.

He comes to Scullers Tuesday night, touring in support of his just-published autobiography (co-written by University of Mississippi professor C. Michael Cheers) and its identically titled companion CD, "Still Grazing: The Musical Journey of Hugh Masekela."

It all began, he says, with piano lessons at age 6 and childhood exposure to "a potpourri" of jazz and local music.

"South Africa's a country of very voracious record collectors," Masekela says by phone, "and everybody in the township practically had a gramophone. So I grew up with all the music of Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey and Buddy Bolden and Count Basie. . . . Then I was surrounded by a bunch of ethnic traditional music, because I came from a mining town with migrant laborers from all over the neighboring countries of South Africa."

He switched instruments at 13, after seeing "Young Man With A Horn." "Kirk Douglas played the lead there," Masekela recalls, "and he took all the solos and stood in front of the band. And I decided to play the trumpet."

In 1955, Masekela's high school chaplain, the anti-apartheid activist Trevor Huddleston, was expelled from South Africa. Huddleston met Armstrong in the United States, and Armstrong wound up shipping one of his old trumpets to South Africa. The teenage Masekela is photographed leaping for joy with it on the covers of his new book and CD.

By the end of the decade, Masekela was playing in the Jazz Epistles with fellow South African Abdullah Ibrahim. His friend (and future first wife) Miriam Makeba, meanwhile, had left South Africa and was beginning to achieve stardom in New York. She and Harry Belafonte arranged for Masekela to study at the Manhattan School of Music, where his classmates included Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Donald Byrd. Masekela would not live in South Africa again for decades.

Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and others — all friends by now — steered him away from becoming just another hard-bop sideman.

"They all said, 'If you can play your own music, my man, and mix it with whatever you learn from here, you might come up with something we can learn from,'" Masekela says. "And I came up with what I do today, which is sort of a hybrid of jazz and all my other background."

"He's got a unique style of playing jazz," says saxophonist Morris Goldberg, a Cape Town native and classmate of Masekela's in New York. "I think it's that we come from there — growing up with the rhythms from there as opposed to the rhythms from here."

Masekela's break-out hit "Grazing in the Grass" started out as filler, its producer having told the band the song needed another four or five minutes of music to complete an LP. "We did that in half an hour," Masekela says, "and three months later, it was the No. 1 record in the States.

These days, "Stimela" and the more recent "Bring Him Back Home" rank with "Grazing" as the most popular tunes in Masekela's repertoire. Both, he says, were written almost effortlessly. "When you get ideas, sometimes you think you're clever, but I think these things are just sent to you. You don't compose anything; you're just a vehicle."

Masekela is better focused for receiving such inspiration since kicking drugs and alcohol. "I couldn't have finished my autobiography if I'd still been drinking and drugging," he says. "I think in the last six years, since I've been straight, I've achieved far more than I could have achieved in the 44 years I was an addict."

Joining Masekela on his current US tour is a septet, including Goldberg and drummer Anton Fig. A tour of Europe will follow, and then Masekela will return to his 54-acre farm in Tarlton, 60 miles west of Johannesburg.

"Going back to South Africa was not even a dream deferred," Masekela says of his three decades in exile. "It was the impossible dream. And one of the inequities that still exist in South Africa is that the Africans own less than 5 percent of the land. So I promised myself that if I went back, I would own land."

Hugh Masekela performs Tuesday at Scullers Jazz Club at 8 and 10 p.m. Tickets are $30. Call 617-562-4111.  

© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

*****

Parsing 'Paradise'

David Brooks skewers and subdivides American suburbia, only occasionally amusingly

By Bill Beuttler  |  May 23, 2004

On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense

By David Brooks

Simon & Schuster, 320 pp., $25

David Brooks hit a home run four years ago with "Bobos in Paradise," his sharp-eyed, witty, and highly enjoyable examination of "the new upper class and how they got there." Where that book's "comic sociology" helped get Brooks was into the upper class himself: He's now both an op-ed columnist with The New York Times and a moonlighting TV pundit on "The News Hour With Jim Lehrer" and elsewhere. It could even get Brooks into dictionaries someday for coining the word "bobos," short for "bourgeois bohemians."

It's a good thing for him that "Bobos" came first, because its follow-up, "On Paradise Drive," is more of a strikeout.

This time, Brooks promises three things: 1. "I will describe what life is really like in today's middle- and upper-middle-class suburbs"; 2. "I will try to solve the mystery of motivation"; 3. "I will try to answer the question: Are we as shallow as we look?"

He swings wildly and misses on point one, having somehow lost his knack for effective satire. The first sign this may be a problem comes in his introduction, when Brooks warns that "if at times the book seems exaggerated, caricatured, impious, or sarcastic, my only excuse is that one of the distinctive traits of Americans is that we have often tried to tell the important truths about ourselves through humor, whether in the tall tales of Mark Twain, or the wisecracks of Will Rogers, Mr. Dooley, H. L. Mencken, or Garry Trudeau."

Well, duh. But it's impossible to imagine any of these fellows — Twain or Mencken, especially — issuing such a caveat. Neither, for that matter, would the Brooks of "Bobos," and one wonders what sort of booboisie he imagines himself to be writing for this time out.

His disclaimer isn't the worst of it, though. Brooks works his caricatures so hard hoping for laughs that there's very little time left over for describing "what life is really like" on his fantasized driving tour through America's geographically defined social strata. He moves from the "bike-messenger land" of hip urban neighborhoods through two types of inner suburbs ("crunchy" and "professional zones") and then out to the "suburban core" and beyond, but the only places he demonstrates having a genuine handle on are the bobo-dominated professional zones (no surprise), the suburban core (where he himself was raised), and the fast-growing, free-floating exurbs exemplified by towns like Mesa, Ariz., and Henderson, Nev.

The satire, for the most part, is annoyingly ham-handed compared with the subtler, funnier stuff in "Bobos" — four full paragraphs, for example, are devoted to ridiculing a "discount but morally elevated" grocery chain found mostly in the crunchier inner suburbs, climaxing with the assertion that "if you smuggled a bag of Doritos into Trader Joe's, some preservative alarm would go off, and the whole place would have to be fumigated and resanctified."

Brooks plays things straight initially as he passes through exurbia, the description of which is at least moderately fresh and interesting. Here, in these burgeoning new population centers, says Brooks, a managerial class of sales and marketing types tends to vote overwhelmingly Republican — sometimes 70 percent Republican — despite what Brooks deems an instinctive lack of interest in politics. "They come here, remember," writes Brooks, "with visions of friendships and happy barbecues."

Alas, this soon launches Brooks into a tedious parable of "Patio Man" and ''Realtor Mom" making their rounds (he on a grill-buying excursion, she on a trip to the local Sam's Club) that is neither as funny nor as telling as he seems to believe.

"As the happy couple emerges from the vehicles," it concludes, "it is clear that they are both visibly flushed and aroused. With the juices still flowing from their consumer conquests . . . the two erotically charged exurbanites mischievously bound up to the master suite and experience even higher stages of bliss on the Sealy Posturpedic mattress, on the stainproof Lycron carpeting, and finally and climactically, atop the Ethan Allen Utopia-line settee."

Mercifully, Brooks backs off from the hyperbolic humor about a quarter of the way through "On Paradise Drive" and switches over to describing the American mind-set that links us all. Americans are future-obsessed, imaginative, hard-working, and idealistic, we're told, and Brooks trots out a long list of previous writers to buttress his case: Emerson, Whitman, John Adams, Santayana, Luigi Barzini, David Potter (whose 1954 book, "People of Plenty," was a model for this one), and many, many others.

Which is to say that there isn't much here that hasn't already been explained better many times over. The mystery isn't so much what motivates Americans; the mystery is why we need Brooks to rehash all this for us.

Brooks does offer at least one interesting new idea in the course of this, though: that this mind-set of ours has propelled us to "an unprecedented position in world affairs," that our being a suburban nation makes this "the age of the First Suburban Empire," and that "the paradox of suburbia is that people move there to pursue their private dreams."

Which brings us to the question of whether we're as shallow as we look. "No, we are not," Brooks answers, summarily.

There is truth in that, of course, but by now Brooks himself has already offered ample evidence to the contrary as well. Those grill-happy exurbanites too busy pursuing private dreams to pay close attention to how all that unprecedented power is wielded on their behalf, for instance, may just deserve a catchphrase of their own. Call them "bozos in paradise."

Bill Beuttler is a former senior editor of Men's Journal and Boston magazine.  

© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

*****

Newport fest is a family affair for bass legend Percy Heath

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent  |  May 23, 2004

Percy Heath knows a thing or two about summer jazz festivals. The great bassist, now 81 and best known for the 37 years he anchored the Modern Jazz Quartet, is one of but three musicians in this year's Newport jazz festival who also played at the first fest 50 years ago. (Saxophonist Lee Konitz and pianist George Shearing are the others.)

Since then, Heath has performed at countless festivals stateside and overseas, usually with the MJQ or the Heath Brothers, the quartet that he shares with his younger brothers Jimmy (77, saxophone) and Albert (a.k.a. "Tootie," 68, drums) and that is rounded out these days by pianist Jeb Patton, who turns 30 two days after their Aug. 15 appearance at Newport.

"It's wonderful to have all the old guys and this guy who's maybe a third of my age playing," Percy Heath says from his home in Montauk, N.Y. "He went to Queens College for his master's, where Jimmy was a professor for 10 years, and was a piano student of Sir Roland Hanna there."

The same basic group, minus Jimmy and with a second bassist, Peter Washington, performs on "A Love Song," a disc that was billed, a bit preposterously, as Heath's debut album as a leader when it came out late last year. Heath's more than 300 albums with the MJQ and the Heath Brothers, and as sideman to Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and many others, hardly qualified him as a rookie in the studio.

"What does it matter who says they're the leader?" scoffs Heath. "If you're performing on a recording, you represent yourself every note you play."

"A Love Song" features Heath's dignified tributes to both Percy Heath Sr. ("Suite for Pop") and Heath's late MJQ colleague John Lewis. (Heath plays the melody to Lewis's "Django" for the first time, after 37 years of playing the bass part at virtually every MJQ concert.)

Heath retains a couple of vivid memories from playing that first Newport festival — principally that John Lewis accompanied Ella Fitzgerald in her set that same day, rather than joining his MJQ mates Heath and Milt Jackson in theirs.

Heath also recalls being embarrassingly underdressed for a swank party at the home of Newport socialite Louis Lorillard, who with his wife had helped Boston club owner George Wein organize the first festival. Heath was wearing jeans and sandals when he was invited at the last minute, and after getting received by the Lorillards, he went over to a table in the corner where a man in a tuxedo was sitting.

"I said, `Gee, man, I feel out of place here. I didn't know I had to come to the reception, so I had changed to get on the bus,' " Heath relates. "He said, `Oh, don't worry about it.' He said, `My name is Sullivan. I'm the mayor. I feel out of place, too. They could buy a new mayor tomorrow.' So me and Sullivan — I forget his first name — Mr. [John] Sullivan, his honor — sat there in the corner for a little while."

The festival, now staged primarily at Fort Adams State Park, is no longer so hoity-toity. But this year longtime promoter Wein is putting it back on a strict diet of jazz; in recent years, some crossover acts have played there. And he's happy to have the Heath Brothers.

"They've wanted to play [Newport] for a long time," he says, "and they're all wonderful musicians and wonderful people." 

© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company


*****

Ready to roar: Jazz

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent  |  May 23, 2004

Summer is festival season, and this summer is better than most, even with the Boston Globe Jazz & Blues Festival on hiatus (so that promotional resources can be directed toward the Democratic National Convention). The big daddy of such events, the JVC Jazz Festival in Newport, R.I., turns 50 this year, and George Wein is bringing in a purist-pleasing lineup to celebrate. The festival gets underway with nightly special events Aug. 11-13, but the bulk of the action takes place at Fort Adams State Park on Aug. 14 and 15. All-star concerts honoring much of the jazz pantheon — Armstrong, Ellington, Monk (twice), Gillespie, Parker, Goodman, Basie, Coltrane, Mingus, Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers — will involve such names as McCoy Tyner, Clark Terry, Wynton Marsalis, Ron Carter, Roy Haynes, Michael Brecker, Jackie McLean, and Phil Woods. Other stars will represent themselves: Among them are Branford Marsalis, Dave Douglas, the Heath Brothers, Lee Konitz, Dave Brubeck, Ornette Coleman, and a quartet made up of Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Dave Holland, and Brian Blade. 401-847-3700; www.newportjazz50th.com .

The 25th annual Festival de Jazz de Montreal, June 30-July 11 (actually, it opens with Diana Krall on June 29), is touted with some justification as "the biggest and best jazz festival on the planet." More than 500 concerts will include sets by Tony Bennett (June 30), Keith Jarrett's trio with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette (July 1), Oscar Peterson (July 10), the Wynton Marsalis Quintet (June 30), Chick Corea in assorted contexts (June 30, July 1 and 2), and Charlie Haden (July 6-9) with Dewey Redman, the Liberation Music Orchestra, and Quartet West — and that's just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. 888-515-0515; www.montrealjazzfest.com .

Closer to home, Tanglewood kicks off with a Latin beat this Labor Day weekend, with Eliane Elias and seven-time Grammy winner Eddie Palmieri (Sept. 3). Marian McPartland will do a live taping of her radio show "Piano Jazz" (Sept. 4), with Harry Connick Jr. and his orchestra headlining that evening. Branford Marsalis's Cambridge-based record label dominates the festivities the next afternoon (Sept. 5), with Marsalis, Connick, Doug Wamble, and Miguel Zenon each leading a quartet; Dave Brubeck wraps things up later that night, his quartet augmented by a string symphonette. 888-266-1200 ;www.bso.org .

The up-and-coming Litchfield Jazz Festival (Goshen, Conn.) will play host to Stacey Kent (Aug. 6); Bobby Watson, Cyrus Chesnut, Stefon Harris, Eric Reed, Frank Wess, Carl Allen, Lew Tabackin, Roberta Scott, George Shearing (Aug. 7); Brad Mehldau, Trio Da Paz, and John Pizzarelli (Aug. 8). 860-567-4162; www.litchfieldjazzfest.com .

Marblehead Summer Jazz 2004 will host Yoron Israel and Organic featuring Billy Pierce (June 12), Makoto Ozone (June 26), New Guitar Summit with Gerry Beaudoin and J. Geils (July 10), Mose Allison Trio (July 24), Eric Alexander Quartet (Aug. 19), and Rebecca Parris (Aug. 28). 781-631-6366, www.marbleheadjazz.org .

EcoTarium's Jazz at Sunset series in Worcester means weekly Friday night concerts starting June 11, with highlights including the Greg Abate Quintet featuring Claudio Roditi (June 18), Herb Pomeroy Quintet with special guest Donna Byrne (July 16), the Bebop Guitars meet Maggie Scott (Aug. 6), and a season-ending David "Fathead" Newman concert to benefit WICN public radio (Aug. 20). 508-929-2700; www.ecotarium.org .

Not everyone leaves town, of course, and the area's leading clubs won't be quiet. Regattabar highlights include Regina Carter (June 4-5), Either/Orchestra (June 9), and John Scofield (June 14-15), and a Bad Plus date at the Somerville Theatre (July 23). 617-876-7777 ,www.concertix.com .

Ryles welcomes Greg Abate with Claudio Roditi and Guillermo Nojechowitz (June 17), the Don Friedman Trio (June 24), Cuban Jazz Reunion (June 26), organists Bruce Katz (July 8) and Ken Clark (July 17), and the Bruce Gertz Quintet, featuring Adam Nussbaum, John Abercrombie, Joey Calderazzo, and Jerry Bergonzi (July 24). 617-876-9330 ;www.ryles.com .

And Scullers will sizzle with Arturo Sandoval (June 3-5), Russell Malone (June 9), Chris Potter (June 10), Shirley Horn (June 11-12), Janis Siegel (June 22), Gato Barbieri (June 24-26), Andy Bey (June 30), Larry Coryell and John Abercrombie (July 13), Kendrick Oliver and the New Life Orchestra featuring Kevin Mahogany (July 23-24), Dianne Schuur (Aug. 12-13), and the David Benoit & Russ Freeman Project (Aug. 18-19). 617-562-4111; www.scullersjazz.com . 

© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company