Rehearsing The Blues

Foster Care (RIP Frank Foster)

 Frank Foster, a prominent figure in Count Basie's Atomic band who went on to have a solo career too often overlooked, has died. He was 82 years old.

Foster moved from a quiet bebop tenor (his recordings with James Moody) to a soulful but soft-toned hard bop soloist with Count Basie and then (increasingly under the influence of John Coltrane, whose birthday he shared) under his own name, making the few recordings he led say a lot about his musical vision. He also played on a few Prestige jam sessions under the leadership of, among others, Kenny Burrell and Elmo Hope. 

But after his stint with Basie and Prestige ended, Foster's name dropped off the radar. He worked with Elvin Jones in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and also dabbled in fusion with Donald Byrd for an ailing Blue Note Records. His music was good, and stayed good over the years, but he was of the modest, unassuming school of musicianship that included Frank Wess, another accomplished but undersung Basie alum who is 89 at the time of writing, the late pianist Hank Jones, and George Coleman. His last album, Well Water, was released in 2007. 

It is too bad that Foster, like Wess, won't get his due until after his death. But better late than never, and the quality of Frank Foster's music ensures that his due will be quite a celebration. RIP, Mr. Foster. You will be missed.

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You can find an interview with Foster here, circa 1992. NPR's A Blog Supreme has more. Nate Chinen's NYT obituary, and his follow-up at The Gig. 

Passion Of A Woman

The pianist Erroll Garner was once asked whether he thought that his playing was adversely affected by his inability to read music. His response? "No one can hear you read."

"Why is it," asked an anonymous Down Beat writer in 1938, "that outside of a few sepia females the woman musician was never born, capable of 'sending' anyone farther than the nearest exit? It would seem that even though women are the weaker sex they would still be able to bring more out of a poor, defenseless horn than something that sounds like a cry for help. You can forgive them for lacking guts in their playing but even women should be able to play with feeling and expression and they never do." The author concedes that "[w]omen are better performers on strings and piano, which are... more in keeping with their temperament" but states emphatically that "[t]hey do NOT... make good percussionists."

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Drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, whose new album The Mosaic Project has just been released, has set out to prove, as many women jazz musicians have before her, that no one can hear your gender, either. She has brought together twenty-one women musicians for an album that both speaks about the role of women in the world and in music and does not speak about it; a record that makes its point with words and purely by example.

House Party Starting

Nate Chinen's blog The Gig now features a new author photo and an actual post.

Chinen is one of the best, but recently I've been wishing he would do more original writing at The Gig, instead of just filling it up with links to his New York Times pieces. Those articles, good as they are, never quite have the spark of The Gig, so I'm excited to see that Nate has apparently divined my dreams (or at least that one particular dream). Check it out here.

Note: There are some very, very large pictures of Nate Chinen online. Just search his name, you'll be surprised how big these photos are. 

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I don't keep up with David Hajdu's New Republic blog, The Famous Door, like I should. A recent visit revealed a beautiful short article on Sonny Rollins and Bret Primack (aka Bret The Jazz Video Guy Primack). Here's a quote:

The Song Book

Read this. Ethan Iverson has compiled a list of favorite jazz and classical books (excepting biographies) over at Do The Math. I've wanted to do some jazz book reviews here at RTB for a long time, and this is the perfect nudge. As way of an introduction, here's my own list of favorite jazz books (including biographies and repeats from Ethan, and in no particular order):

Visions Of Jazz, Gary Giddins. Giddins can be annoying, but more often he isn't, and I think this was his high water mark (the essay on Ella Fitzgerald is especially good). Much, much better than the recent Jazz.

Being Prez, Dave Gelly. Short, sweet, this is a balanced and insightful look at Lester Young, who is too often oversimplified.

The Jazz Ear, Coltrane: The Story Of A Sound, Ben Ratliff. Ratliff is one of the best critics around, and these are especially good. It's fun to watch Ornette Coleman dodge Ben's questions in The Jazz Ear (one of the best books of interviews after Notes And Tones), and while no book can really do Coltrane justice, The Story Of A Sound tracks the saxophonist's influence on a more general scale than, say, Ashley Kahn does.

Roundup #4 (New Releases)

More 2011 pop and hip-hop releases. Read about others here.

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Lupe Fiasco, Lasers (Atlantic) I don't know what would have happened if Lupe Fiasco, one of the best rappers working today, had released the original conception of this album: a three-disc set called LupE.N.D. that would have been the rapper's last release ever. However good or bad that record might have been, though, I'm glad Fiasco's contract obligates him to two more albums, because it means there's more of him coming in the near future. And I don't think the three-disc full-stop that he originally wanted could have come close to Lasers - and if this is how good Lupe has become, I don't think it could have come close to his next two albums, either. Lasers is a lean, concentrated hip-hop statement, full of anger, sadness, joy, hope, and fear - all of the humanity that mainstream hip-hop has lost. Fiasco is a major-label artist, and while some in the rap community wish he would go indie (think what heights he could achieve, they cry, and with reason), I'm glad he hasn't: the major-label rap game needs songs like "Till I Get There," a relentless track packed with piano, drums and Lupe himself ("Doctor doctor please, the fame ain't painless enough / That's 'cause you ain't famous enough / You got a little name, but your name ain't ringing enough"), or the witty "All Black Everything" ("First 400 years, see we actually enjoyed it / Constitution written by the W.E.B. DuBois / Were no reconstructions, Civil War got avoided / Little black Sambo grows up to be a lawyer"). An indie Lupe might be able to do these songs better, but I'll happily settle for the Fiasco we have. He's up there with Kanye and Common, and he'll just get better over the next two albums. If Lasers was all we ever got, it would be enough.

Roundup #3 (New Releases)

Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here. Those installments were for 2011 jazz releases; this article is for pop and hip-hop releases. Read on.

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Tyler, The Creator, Goblin (XL Recordings) Say what you will about Tyler, The Creator - he's offensive in en entirely new way. This is why, if I was called upon to give Goblin, Tyler's first non-Odd Future release, a star rating, it would be 4 stars. Love it or hate it, you've got to respect the guy. I happen to hate it, but that's beside the point. The real point, for me at least, is that Tyler is forging his own path through rap, with a unique rhyming style, a distinctive production sound, and signature themes for his songs (signature not in their subjects but rather in how extremely those subjects, usually violence, apathy and sex, are portrayed). It's not good, not yet anyway, but it's important. This is far from a mature musical statement, and from what I know of its maker, he doesn't want it to be. Tyler's challenge for the future will be to make a balanced, mature album that unabashedly promotes his immature themes - only then will he be able, by combining a clarity of vision he now lacks with the rawness of his present material, to make this one-man's-trash into everyone's treasure.

Count 'Em '88 (Two)

Why do we think that Earl "Bud" Powell broke? There have been more than a few notable broken musicians in jazz history: Lester Young's mind and his music broke after World War II, although the break does not happen cleanly in 1945, as some claim; Billie Holiday's voice split and slowly fell to pieces, although her musical mind never dulled. Bud Powell is another famous broken jazz musician, and we even has police brutality and electroshock therapy to prove it. But did Powell's music really decline after 1953, when the second Amazing Bud Powell and Jazz At Massey Hall were recorded, or after 1955, when Charlie Parker died?

Given, Powell probably couldn't have produced a whirlwind like "Un Poco Loco" after 1953 - but, illness (physical and mental) aside, the question is why not. Can we ascribe his music's deterioration to that illness, or can we find another explanation? I think that we can find another - partially because, if we discard the usual Powell story for a moment, it is easy to discard his musical deterioration (his "broken" recordings) with it.

Shhh! I'm Grunting!

 

Keith Jarrett has made some of the most important piano recordings of the last forty years. In light of this, I'm sure that he has on occasion bemoaned the fact that the accolades his music has received are inevitably accompanied by some comment on his habit of consistently, and often loudly, humming (or singing, or grunting, or moaning, or screeching) along with his piano. Jarrett gets special attention from critics and audiences in this regard, probably because of his (unrelated) insistence on complete and utter silence during his performances. The fact is, however, that not only is Jarrett in good company when it comes to extraneous noises in performance, but it might actually be easier to count those great jazz musicians who did not produce some kind of sound with their mouths as they played. A sampling:

Count 'Em 88 (One)

Ahmad Jamal

To spend time refuting Martin Williams's claim that Ahmad Jamal in the 1950s was only a cocktail pianist better versed in crowd-pleasing than music-making only wastes it; Williams demonstrated a rare laziness in dismissing Jamal out-of-hand, and just as a picture paints a thousand words, so does the music Jamal made with his various trios in the 1950s and 1960s put that laziness to shame better than any critical argument could.

Unfortunately, Williams's dismissal, and others like it (all equally uninformed) have nevertheless kept Jamal out of the pantheon of great pianists.