In the summer of 1978, the critics polled by DownBeat could not settle on a single jazz album of the year – at the time, perhaps the premier honor in jazz. So they bestowed it on five: Ornette Coleman’s Dancing in Your Head; two by Dexter Gordon, Homecoming and Sophisticated Giant, the records that marked his return from expatriation in Copenhagen; Roscoe Mitchell’s Nonaah. Read More
Not long after I began hosting Jazz Spectrum in 1989 – I can’t track down the specific date – Lourdes College hosted Marian McPartland for a live solo performance at the Franciscan Center. I was privileged to hang out with her before the show, although, as I think back, I should have recognized that, so close to going live, she was deep into whatever mindspace she entered to be prepared to play. Still, she was, as you would expect, gracious and witty. Then it was time for me to introduce her. I walked to the microphone as she remained behind the curtain. Read More
Duke Ellington said Mary Lou Williams was “perpetually contemporary.” He should know. And he did. In describing Mary Lou, he also coined the phrase that gave this week’s Jazz Spectrum Friday featured album its title: she was, he said, like “soul on soul.” Dave Douglas’s album, Soul on Soul, is an unusual and illuminating tribute to Mary Lou. Often, a tribute album tries to make its claim by looking backward. Read More
When Fritz proposed featuring the debut album of Art Farmer and Benny Golson’s new band, Meet the Jazztet, he included a comment that warranted a pause for thought. He texted: “I’m not sure I have anything I can cite to prove the point, but they strike me as an underappreciated pairing.”I agree but have even less to cite. I will, though, test my genuine appreciation to see if it is adequate to their accomplishment.Read More
In 1992, I sat in the Toledo Peristyle, rapt and awestruck, along with the rest of the full house, listening to the Toledo Symphony Orchestra play a new piece by a Toledo native, a piano concerto written in honor of another Toledo native. At the piano was the composer, Stanley Cowell. The pianist being honored, Art Tatum, had been dead for thirty-five years. I have a recording of the performance, and I’ve listened to it now and again over the nearly thirty-five years — a symmetrical thirty-five years, now that I think about it — since that memorable night. Read More
We’ve spent the week trying to see John Coltrane clearly. Tuesday, I proposed to think about the arc of his career as one, long unbroken search rather than as a series of reinventions. Wednesday, the focus was his two indispensable apprenticeships, looking at what he took from his time from Miles, and, more decisively, what he carried forward from Monk. Yesterday, a handful of records that deserve your attention alongside the more usual suspects. Now it’s Friday. The occasion for all this is Coltrane’s centenary. Read More
The Essential Coltrane. If you go looking for that, whether by talking to mavens or mining what these days passes for Intelligence, you’ll get variations on the same core of recordings: Giant Steps, A Love Supreme, probably My Favorite Things, maybe the live Vanguard recordings. Nothing wrong about any of that. But “essential” is an interesting word — per the OED, “Absolutely necessary, indispensably requisite.” Sure. Also, “Of or pertaining to essence, specific being, or intrinsic nature.” Right again. Read More
John Coltrane came to Miles Davis’s band in the fall of 1955 more or less by default, a result of Miles’s moving to Plan B after Sonny Rollins, Plan A, withdrew from circulation to kick a heroin habit — Sonny would spend part of the next year working construction and boxing in Chicago as a way of staying clean, an application of the same discipline that would lead to his famed self-imposed exile on the Williamsburg bridge, insisting to himself that, despite the widening acclaim from fans and musicians alike, he was falling short of his own lofty standards. Read More
On Wednesday, John Coltrane turns 100. He was born September 23, 1926, in Hamlet, North Carolina. He passed on July 17, 1967, in Huntington, New York, of liver cancer. Forty years old. Take a moment with that. Read More
