billbeuttler.com

January 1, 1970

It was a busy week, led off by a Jazz Journalists Association panel discussion on "The Past, Present, and Future of Live Jazz in Boston." Organized and moderated by Jon Hammond of WRIU-FM radio in Rhode Island, the panel included the music producers at the three best jazz clubs in Boston and Cambridge (Steve Bensusan of the Regattabar, Fred Taylor of Scullers, Fenton Hollander of the Real Deal Jazz Club & Cafe), WGBH-FM program manager Steve Charbonneau, pianist-composer Donal Fox, pianist-vocalist (and Berklee voice professor) Maggie Scott, and yours truly. (Maggie Scott replaced vocalist Rebecca Parris, who had to cancel.)

The talk drew a surprisingly full house to Scullers (that is was free helped, as did the pro-bono publicity efforts of Dawn Signh), with WGBH's Steve Schwartz, former Globe jazz columnist Bob Blumenthal, and Christopher Lydon (formerly of The Connection) among those spotted in the audience, along with numerous musicians. There is supposed to be a report on the event on the JJA website soon. If so, I'll send a link to it in next week's newsletter.

In any case, the JJA event started off a week made busier than usual by holiday-related duties and the new Wynton Marsalis CD. If the reference to "preceding discs" in the first Christmas CD summary seems confusing, don't worry. The Globe flipflopped the first and third items on the list to make the list alphabetical (and maybe to let Dianne Reeves photograph lay out more nicely on the page), and my editor figured I was talking about the first three CDs in the series from Justin Time, rather than the other two CDs being commented on here. Oh well. No serious harm done.

Next week's newsletter, by the way, should have my obligatory year-end ranking of the top 10 jazz discs for 2004, for whatever that's worth.

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He bebops back and forth in time

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent | December 3, 2004

Lou Donaldson is coming to town. And Dr. Lonnie Smith will be with him.

In some circles, that's bigger news than Santa Claus's arrival later this month. Donaldson, 78, hasn't played Boston in 20 years, and tomorrow night he and Smith will be at the Berklee Performance Center headlining a benefit for Visions Inc., fresh off a six-night stint at the Village Vanguard that wrapped up this past Sunday.

The two spent the late '60s together cranking out classic organ records such as "Alligator Bogaloo" and "Midnight Creeper" for Blue Note Records, and they are sure to hit that crowd-pleasing material and its infectious grooves hard at Berklee. But Donaldson was a top-drawer bebop player before hooking up with Smith on organ, Melvin Lastie on cornet, George Benson on guitar, and Idris Muhammad (then calling himself Leo Morris) on drums.

And it's on his earlier work that Donaldson's genius as an alto saxophonist shines brightest. Donaldson promises that he and his quartet will be showing the folks at Berklee some of that fleet-fingered technical mastery as well.

People forget that Donaldson plays bebop as well as he does, says Smith, "because they associate him with what we made money off of."

Yet bebop remains Donaldson's greatest love. He was first smitten in 1945, making weekend runs into Chicago to see Charlie Parker perform. Donaldson, a North Carolina native, was in the Navy at the time, stationed north of the city. "Up until then," he recalls on the phone from his Bronx home. "I had been playing sort of like Louis Jordan and Johnny Hodges. And Earl Bostic; I loved Earl Bostic. Then once I heard Charlie Parker, I changed everything."

He didn't dispense with the Hodges influence altogether. On the best of his pre-organ group albums, 1958's "Blues Walk," you can hear traces of Hodges's sweet tone and lyricism on the ballad "Autumn Nocturne" and Parker's breakneck running of chord changes on most everything else.

Donaldson might have happily kept bebopping his way to the present had financial considerations not interfered. "When I started," he explains, "we had to play these ghetto clubs in places like Rochester and Buffalo and Cincinnati and Cleveland. None of these places had a piano, and it was just too expensive to rent a piano." Instead, they dragged an organ around the country in a U-Haul.

Then, too, Blue Note was taken over in the mid-'60s by new ownership that wanted more commercial music from its artists. Donaldson obliged them with "Alligator Bogaloo." That it became as big a hit as it did surprised him. It hadn't been hard for him to write.

"It's just what we call a rhythm tune," he explains. "I used to go and listen to Wild Bill Davis every night, and he played a lot of rhythm tunes."

Funky toe-tappers and bebop have dominated Donaldson's repertoire since. He hasn't much use for jazz genres, such as fusion, that came after them, however.

"Since the late '50s, nobody's played anything," Donaldson says. "It's too technical and mechanical. Not one musician has got even the feeling to play jazz music. You can't get music out of mechanics, you know. That's just like a motor can't drive the car."

Bebop, done right, requires a mix of feeling and monstrous technique. But Donaldson's 78-year-old chops can still handle the trickiest of hairpin curves.

"People are amazed that I'm still playing the same way I played in the '50s," he says. "Whenever I want to I can go back and do that. We played a set the other night of bebop and they went crazy. I had to explain to them, 'Well, that's the way that I started out.' I said, 'I didn't forget it.'"

Ho ho ho: December is traditionally when the hotels housing Regattabar and Scullers put a crimp on the local jazz scene by commandeering those rooms for corporate holiday parties.

But the jazz world does some yuletide celebrating of its own.

It gets underway this year at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Marblehead, where Rebecca Parris will be singing songs from her CD "The Secret of Christmas" tomorrow night.

Parris will be at it again a week from Sunday in Cambridge at the Real Deal Jazz Club & Cafe, joined by Herb Pomeroy, Brad Hatfield, Peter Kontrimas, and Matt Gordy for sets at 2:30, 5, and 7:30 p.m.

A week after that, on Dec. 19, the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra will perform its 32d annual Christmas concert at Emmanuel Church, which will include music director Mark Harvey's new tribute to the international relief organization Doctors Without Borders.

© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Seasoned with jazz

By Bill Beuttler  |  December 3, 2004

Every year begets another handful of holiday jazz albums.At least three of this year's batch are genuinely worth a listenand capable of making one'smerry-making a little hipper.

Assorted artists, "JustinTime for Christmas Four." Hank Jones's solo piano take on "The Christmas Song" is the one cut on this anthology that indisputably measures up to the preceding discs. But others come pretty close. Highlights include pianist Oliver Jones leading a quartet through "Let It Snow," and the Rob McConnell Tentet's "Christmas Medley."

The Ramsey Lewis Trio, "Sound of Christmas." Newly reissued by Verve, this all-instrumental 1961 album set a standard for holiday hipness that few have matched since. Then, the trio of pianist Lewis included Eldee Young on bass and Redd Holt on drums, and here they're supported with strings on half of the 10 cuts. Lewis's own "Christmas Blues" and "The Sound of Christmas" flesh out swinging, bluesy takes on holiday classics and R&B pioneer Charles Brown's "Merry Christmas, Baby."

Dianne Reeves (above), "Christmas Time Is Here." Here's a miracle for you: a Christmas album even Scrooges can enjoy. Reeves, high on any list of today's best jazz vocalists, sings — and occasionally scats — her way through reinvigorated holiday chestnuts, Mel Torme's "The Christmas Song" among them. Two of the 11 tunes stand out for their unfamiliarity: Thad Jones's "A Child Is Born" and "Christ Child's Lullaby," the latter inspired by folkie Shawn Colvin's version.

© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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CD Report

Wynton Marsalis
UNFORGIVABLE BLACKNESS
Blue Note

Wynton Marsalis's latest is the soundtrack to Ken Burns's "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson," a two-part documentary set to air next month on PBS. Marsalis takes a totally different approach than Miles Davis did on his earlier, rock-edged tribute to the first black heavyweight champion, stepping back in time to conjure up 15 originals to join six classics by Jelly Roll Morton, W.C. Handy, and others. Songs in Johnson's day were on 78s, which limited them to 3 minutes in length, and most of the 21 songs here are in that range — the longest being a cover of Morton's "Deep Creek" that clocks in at 5:12. Doug Wamble's banjo, Victor Goines's clarinet, Eric Lewis's stride piano, Wycliffe Gordon's tuba, and the leader's own muted-trumpet effects enhance the time-machine effect. Highlights include three versions of Marsalis's "Jack Johnson Two-Step" theme and the mournful "Trouble My Soul," but there's not one clunker in the bunch.

BILL BEUTTLER  

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

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Fortune showed prowess, power

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent  |  December 3, 2004

CAMBRIDGE — The great saxophonists can hold an audience's interest without piano accompaniment. Think Sonny Rollins backed by bass and drums at the Village Vanguard, or John Coltrane's late-'60s duet excursions with drummer Rashied Ali.

Sonny Fortune must have been thinking that way for Tuesday night's performance at the Regattabar with bassist Cecil McBee and Ali, and maintained that belief when McBee begged off at the last minute to accept a more lucrative gig in Japan, leaving Fortune paired with Coltrane's old partner.

Judging by his relentless 90-minute set, Fortune didn't overestimate his prowess.

He and Ali started off as boldly as possible with an hour-plus long investigation of Coltrane's "Impressions," with Fortune keeping the ideas flowing with stunning invention for most of the tune's length. For all the rapid-fire notes he played, he stayed melodic even at his most passionate. When he finally broke off his alto solo after roughly a full hour, half of the audience stood up to applaud him (the rest, more conventionally, did their clapping seated).

Ali took no breaks and supplemented his free-flowing drumming and cymbal support with rumbling accents from his bass drum that at times almost seemed to conjure McBee's missing bass. He played solo for a few minutes when Fortune concluded his solo, and then Fortune stepped back to the microphone to trade bars briefly and restate the song's theme.

After that came their ballad, Duke Ellington's "In a Sentimental Mood." Ali started off the piece on brushes (he would move through sticks and mallets by piece's end), and Fortune proved he can play as prettily as he can play fast and do so without scrimping on the high level of creativity of his more up-tempo work.

The set concluded with the standard "Four." Playing it as an abstract waltz freshened it up and gave it some extra edge. With its rhythm set deliberately askew, the piece fell pleasingly between the earlier tunes in complexity and mood. 

© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company