billbeuttler.com

January 1, 1970

Three jazz pieces in the Globe this past week: a review of the 50th anniversary Newport Jazz Festival, another of pianist Bill Charlap's opening set at the Regattabar Tuesday night, and yesterday's profile of saxophonist David Sánchez.

Also, the Globe has decided to have me begin its weekly roundup of Jazz Picks, a selection of the best jazz going on around town in the coming week. These are pretty routine stuff, so in future week's they'll probably be omitted from the newsletter. But it's included this week for the novelty of it ... and as evidence that it is dawning on the Globe more and more that I've become the paper's de facto jazz writer.

Finally, Newport coverage distracted me from sending out a newsletter last week. So the profile of trombonist Roswell Rudd that ran on Friday the 13th is included here.

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David Sánchez finds classical inspiration
Saxophonist's new CD with Czech orchestra widens his scope

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent  |  August 20, 2004

One could say that David Sánchez has a thirst for mastering languages. The saxophonist speaks Spanish and English, having moved from his native Puerto Rico in 1988 to attend Rutgers University on a scholarship. Musically, he's long been fluent in the Latin and jazz idioms, having passed through the bands of Eddie Palmieri and Dizzy Gillespie en route to recording his own Grammy-nominated CDs.

Now, at age 35, Sánchez is having a go at classical music. Tuesday and Wednesday, he will bring a quartet to the Regattabar to celebrate the release this month of "Coral," recorded in Europe last year with conductor Carlos Franzetti and the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and featuring 20th-century South American composers Antonio Carlos Jobim, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Alberto Ginastera.

"I wanted to do a project at some point with an orchestra," Sánchez says by phone. "I didn't know it was going to happen this soon. I had an interest in doing something with some kind of hybrid with composers from the Western classical world, or composers who happen to be influenced by the Western classical world. I had been very much inspired by the music and the story of Heitor Villa-Lobos."

"Coral" has a stately calm and maturity not usually associated with someone Sánchez's age. He improvises on his tenor sax over the orchestra's lush strings, supported simultaneously by his sometime sextet, and he contributed a pair of his own compositions as well.

As pretty as "Coral" sounds now, recording it proved challenging. "It was very primitive," recalls Sánchez, who lives in Brooklyn. "You couldn't even overdub in that studio. The technology, unfortunately, is not that great yet in Prague. But the musicians were amazing. We had three days to do this record, including rehearsals."

The Czech musicians found some of the rhythms "a little unusual, especially in the regional pieces," Sánchez says. But that wasn't the only thing the classically trained musicians had to adjust to.

"I had purposely chosen some very short pieces so we could build in other sections that were free and open and could add and mix little inserts into those short pieces," Sánchez says. "Those are the parts where classical musicians sometimes, specifically in the improvised parts, were lost. They were fascinated by it, but at the same time they were like, `Wow, what's going on?' We [also] had to have a translator, because that was another thing — there was a language barrier."

The orchestra won't be joining Sánchez in Cambridge. But with him will be longtime bandmates Edsel Gomez and Adam Cruz, on piano and drums, respectively, with Thomas Bramerie filling in on bass.

Even so, says Sánchez, lessons learned in recording "Coral" will be evident. The band, he says, came away from the recording sessions thinking "more like an arranger, being very sensitive to — and complement — what the other musician is playing. It just influences very much the way we're hearing music as a quartet now."

Sánchez adds that, as an individual, there's no doubt "Coral" has changed the way he approaches music. One example is his growing emphasis on sound over flashy technique.

"The sound is really important," he explains, "and sometimes I wonder, because in general people tend to be impressed with technique. When I say `technique,' I mean velocity and accuracy. The hard part is really to play with beauty."

Sánchez's sound has evolved consistently from studying George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept — the conceptual blueprint for so much of jazz improvisation in the 1960s and afterward — with Ted Dunbar at Rutgers to getting his bebop chops together with Gillespie to putting out his half-dozen previous albums for Sony/Columbia.

"It's a gradual thing," Sánchez says. "I listen to recordings from when I used to play with Dizzy, and I laugh."

"I would say Dizzy revealed the secret, the magic touch, to really cross boundaries," says Danilo Pérez, who played with Sánchez in Gillespie's band and now divides his time among Wayne Shorter's quartet, his own trio, and teaching at the New England Conservatory.

"With time," Pérez says, "we have learned to immerse ourselves more into a sound that could cross boundaries much more organically."

"I learned many, many things" from Gillespie, Sánchez says. "If I were to pick one, it's the way he would embrace other cultures and other styles of playing. He was always curious. He was the man responsible for one of the most important fusions, between Latin American music and jazz. We already know that he was one of the pioneers of bebop.

"But his vision and all his curiosity . . . I think that's the biggest lesson I could ever learn from him." 

© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Jazz Picks
BILL BEUTTLER (August 20, 2004)

Guitar stars will bookend David Sánchez's two nights next week at the Regattabar, with Pat Martino wrapping up his own two-night stint tonight and "Tonight Show" bandleader Kevin Eubanks coming in Thursday and Friday (two shows nightly in all cases, at 7:30 and 10). . . . Elsewhere, sometime Sting trumpeter Chris Botti has two shows at Scullers tonight at 8 and 10:30, and Freddy Cole — baritone-voiced younger brother of the late, great Nat King Cole — will be singing there tomorrow night at 8 and 10:30. . . . Ryles will be offering the Boston Horns, a.k.a. saxophonist Henley Douglas Jr. and trumpeter Garret Salvu, as this week's "Funk/Soul Fridays" entry, at 9 p.m. . . . On Thursday, Revere native and Berklee alumna Ellen O'Brien plays her mix of R&B, gospel, and jazz at 8:30 p.m. . . . Looking for something a little rawer and more cutting edge? There's always the Fringe's weekly 10 p.m. Monday gig at Zeitgeist Gallery.
 
© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

In American songbook, pianist touches a chord
By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent  |  August 19, 2004

Bill Charlap moseyed into the Regattabar Tuesday night, fresh off an appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival's piano stage two days before, and enraptured the audience with a sophisticated presentation of well-chosen, mostly American classics.

Charlap first drew attention as a sideman in bands led by Gerry Mulligan and Phil Woods. More recently, he has been performing and recording with his own trio, and it's that group — along with CDs such as this year's superb "Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein" — that has begun garnering Charlap recognition as one of jazz's outstanding youngish piano talents. At the Regattabar, though, it was just Charlap and the club's Steinway grand.

He began with "On a Clear Day," by Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane, the first in a series of more than a dozen standards that Charlap would lovingly disassemble and give new life throughout the set.

Playing standards is nothing new for jazz musicians, but Charlap brings more respect and devotion to the practice than most. Whereas others use familiar tunes to call attention to their own brilliance, Charlap is more inclined to offer his ideas and individuality in service of the song. He will dazzle, but subtly, relying more on touch and dynamics than flash, and he will never wander far or too long from a song's melody. He plays more quietly and at slower tempos than other pianists at times, too. At the Regattabar, this seemed to only keep audience members on the edge of their seats.

Charlap played what he called a couple of New York City songs after his opener — Al Dubin and Harry Warren's "42nd Street" and Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers's "Manhattan" — and then dipped into the songbook of his onetime employer Mulligan for "Rocker." On this up-tempo number, Charlap's fingers somehow managed to conjure the horn lines on the famous Miles Davis recording, and he ended the tune playfully, by smashing out a last, low chord with his left fist.

Later, Charlap played "Alice Through the Looking Glass," by his late father, Moose Charlap, and gave a nod to his own new CD with a medley of Bernstein's "Somewhere" and "Cool." As an encore, Hoagy Carmichael's "The Nearness of You" offered yet more proof of Charlap's mastery of the American songbook.

Bill Charlap
At: Regattabar, Tuesday night
 
© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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All-star lineup celebrates Newport’s 50th: From Hancock to Reeves, jazz fans soak in the music but not the rain

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent  |  August 16, 2004

NEWPORT, R.I. — The 50th anniversary Newport Jazz Festival wrapped up without rain, good news to the 6,500 who braved the predicted aftereffects of Hurricane Charley and caught a day's worth of music they're not likely to forget.

Plenty of them were still there, bundled up against the cold and the occasional stray droplet, when Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Dave Holland, and Brian Blade wrapped up their festival-ending set last night. Shorter squeezed off a few final notes on his soprano sax, the four men took their well-earned bow, and another George Wein-produced extravaganza — now officially known as JVC Jazz Festival-Newport — was history.

The Hancock-Shorter-Holland-Blade combo was meant to be among the highlights of the festival, as was the performance of Ornette Coleman's quartet immediately before it, and both sets lived up to their billing and then some. But there were other moments Saturday and yesterday that were equally as worth cherishing.

Among those was James Carter's special guest turn with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. Carter reprised Paul Gonsalve's famous tenor sax solo with Duke Ellington's orchestra at the 1956 Newport festival, earning himself a huge ovation from the audience before he'd even finished his extended solo, and more than making up for the absence of the orchestra's director, Wynton Marsalis, who had called in sick.

Art Blakey and Charles Mingus had each already been honored with main stage sets earlier in the day, and Bill Cosby had fooled around on drums while "conducting" an all-star group billed as The Cos' of Good Music.

But history was being made next door at the Dunkin' Donuts stage as well, and that's where Gunther Schuller and much of the jazz press were spending time. They were there to see Dave Douglas and Vacation Blues, with trombonist Roswell Rudd, play some of the most forward-looking music of the festival while looking backward, toward the music of Rudd's late friend and mentor Herbie Nichols.

Douglas and company were followed by alto sax great Lee Konitz, one of just two performers in this year's lineup to have played at the first Newport festival in 1954. The other, Percy Heath, came on right after Konitz for a sparkling set with his brothers Jimmy and Tootie. Konitz's group was billed as a trio, but he managed to get trumpeter Roy Hargrove to sit in with him for a few tunes hearkening back to Konitz's cool-school days with Miles Davis.

Saturday had been as sunny as yesterday was overcast, and the only worry for the 9,000 who showed up that day had been figuring out how to split up their time among the festival's three stages. Dave Brubeck and his quartet built a fine set toward the obligatory rendition of his signature piece, "Take Five," with particularly fine alto sax work by Bobby Militello. The power-lunged pipsqueak Jamie Cullum then followed Brubeck onto the main stage and thrilled the crowd with his energy and charm.

Meanwhile, Ron Carter and his sometime trio of guitarist Russell Malone and pianist Mulgrew Miller were proving themselves the closest thing to chamber jazz we have remaining since the passing of three quarters of the Modern Jazz Quartet, a point that was emphasized as they closed out their set with John Lewis's "The Golden Striker."

Dianne Reeves is herself the closest thing we have to Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, and she proved it on the main stage with some terrific singing and scatting. Then Jon Faddis brought out his jazz orchestra and special guests James Moody and Clark Terry each did a bit of scatting themselves.

The Faddis set, a tribute to Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie, opened with Faddis doing his best high-pitched Diz imitation to start "Manteca." Clarinetist Ken Peplowski, alto saxophone greats Jackie McLean and Phil Woods, bassist Carter, Moody, and Terry then each took turns as special guests, Terry concluding his by demonstrating why he's called "Mumbles" with a comic, one-sided dialogue in mime and gibberish, Faddis mugging away beside him as straight man.

A tribute to John Coltrane wrapped the day up Saturday, with Ravi Coltrane providing surrogate soprano sax and Michael Brecker conjuring up Trane on tenor. Those two and bassist Christian McBride laid out at one point so that their elders, drummers Roy Haynes and pianist McCoy Tyner, could each take a masterful solo turn.

Only one musician failed to make it onstage because of the weather. Kenny Drew, Jr., never was able to catch a flight to Newport from his home in Florida. 

© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Festival performers to honor mentors

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent  |  August 13, 2004

Several artists have influenced trombonist Roswell Rudd's career through their music, friendship, or both — none more so than Herbie Nichols, Thelonious Monk, and Steve Lacy. So it's only fitting that he pay tribute to them.

When Rudd, 68, performs at the Newport Jazz Festival Sunday with Dave Douglas's Vacation Blues, they'll emphasize Nichols's music (along with a few pieces by Rudd and Douglas). Vacation Blues gets its name from an unfinished Nichols tune that Rudd put chords to more than two decades after Nichols died of leukemia in 1963. In three weeks, Rudd and Douglas will hook up again at the Chicago Jazz Festival in Monksieland, the Monk-inspired ensemble Rudd co-led with Lacy.

Lacy had Douglas join the group for performances at the New York club Iridium in March, not long before Lacy's death from liver cancer. The Chicago performance reunites the group to honor Lacy and Monk.

"We'll have a semblance of a Dixieland instrumentation," Rudd says from his home near Woodstock, N.Y., "and we'll approach a handful of Monk's tunes that way. It was a lot of fun with Steve, because when Dave got in the mix and we had the trumpet up there in the front line, it went automatically into another style of playing."

The Dixieland connection is fitting. Rudd grew up in northwestern Connecticut playing Dixieland and swing, as did his father, an athletic coach and amateur drummer. He kept at those two styles of jazz during his college years at Yale, performing and recording in a band of classmates called Eli's Chosen Six. "It was the music of our parents, really," Rudd says. "By going around to fraternities at different colleges on the East Coast on the weekends, I was able to put together enough change to pay for my education."

Rudd graduated in 1960, but before year's end, he was playing Dixieland gigs in New York with Nichols, who at that point was already an accomplished composer and pianist, but one so ignored he had to make ends meet playing Dixieland piano sideman jobs. But Nichols was still writing his own distinctive, highly modern compositions, and he would gather together young acolytes such as Rudd and Archie Shepp to rehearse them whenever possible.

Nichols's music, Rudd says, "was just so beyond me. I'm still learning from it, but at that time it was really hard for me to touch it. For any of us, actually. I think that's what he liked about the young guys — they would dig into it in a way that, well, maybe we didn't play it very well, but we tore it apart in ways that made it really interesting and opened other windows for it."

Meanwhile, Lacy was spending 1960 playing with Monk. Rudd and Lacy had met earlier, when Lacy filled in on gigs with Eli's Chosen Six, and in 1961, the two put together a group to focus on Monk compositions. That band stayed together two years, recording an album released long afterward as "School Days."

Rudd's career passed through several distinct phases. He emerged as a preeminent avant-garde trombonist, working alongside artists such as Shepp, Cecil Taylor, and Carla Bley. He spent several years teaching college in Maine, then moved to upstate New York and spent several more years in the show band of a Catskills resort hotel.

"The thing was, I was working," Rudd says of the Catskills days when he was out of the jazz public's eye. "I was almost making ends meet with the music at that point. But it did keep me away from the city and recording."

Rudd reemerged from the Catskills in the mid-1990s. Since then his CDs as a leader have included a pair of Nichols tributes, "The Unheard Herbie Nichols," Volumes 1 and 2. He and Lacy also reconnected for another Monk tribute CD, "Monk's Dream."

In April of last year, Rudd and Douglas were artists-in-residence at Harvard. Douglas surprised Rudd by proposing to name their performance together for a Nichols tune.

"Dave said, `Why don't we call it "Beyond Recall"?' I said, `You're talking about Herbie Nichols, right?' He said, `Yeah, I really like his stuff, and here are a couple of [Nichols tunes] that I play.' "

Tom Everett, the Harvard band director who brought them together for the residency, says Douglas has delved deeply into the work of Wayne Shorter, Mary Lou Williams, and others, much as Rudd has delved into that of Nichols and Monk.

"Dave never articulated this," Everett says, "but it was my impression that he had been first exposed to that [process of exploring an older composer's work] by Roswell Rudd and Steve Lacy, who did a lot to try and not just investigate Monk's repertoire, but to get it out there so that other people would tackle it, too.

"I think in a way it was an acknowledgment to Roswell on certain levels, saying, `I know that much of your life you've been keeping the name of Herbie Nichols out there, and I'm with you on this.'" 

© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company