Charlie Haden and the Grammys

Charlie Haden and Hank Jones 1995 album Steal Away

I’ve never watched the Grammys, and don’t intend to start tonight (music, to me, is primarily for the auditory sense, not the visual, which is why I couldn’t find MTV without a well-directed remote or the date of the Grammys without a Hollywood calendar).

But I won’t object if I stumble on to the only few minutes that might be worth it — the recognition of bassist Charlie Haden.

Haden received a Lifetime Achievement Award Saturday, and the timing couldn’t be more appropriate. When he was in his teens, Haden suffered from polio, and it took his singing voice; in his 70s now, Haden suffers from post-polio syndrome, and it’s taken much from the last two years of his life.

According to published reports, Haden has difficulty eating and swallowing, suffers from headaches, tires easily, is in frequent pain and is deprived of interaction with two groups vital to him: fans and students.

He hasn’t played publicly since September 2011, and he only recently returned to the classroom at the California Institute of the Arts, where according to Charles Gans’ Associated Press story, Haden started the jazz program.

“I miss (playing live) very much,” Haden told the Los Angeles Times’ Howard Reich. “A lot of people call me to play . . .

“Oh, man – one of the main things I want to do is play my bass again (publicly). It’s why I live.”

Haden’s playing is why we listen — from Ornette Coleman to the Liberation Music Orchestra to Old and New Dreams to the Quartet West to associations with Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Egberto Gismonti and so many others. He made them all better.

“The one thing that should always be said about Charlie, though, is that there is a whole genre of music with ‘improvised harmony’ that can’t exist without him,” wrote pianist Ethan Iverson on his blog dothemath.typepad.com. “It started with Ornette, then moved to Keith Jarrett, Dewey Redman and Paul Motian . . . All of that canonical music requires Charlie Haden.”

My favorite Haden albums tend to to the softer: his 1996 duet with fellow Missourian Pat Metheny, Beyond The Missouri Sky (written about previously in this entry), and his two releases of spirituals with pianist Hank Jones, 1995′s Steal Away and 2010′s Coming Sunday, the latter recorded just months before Jones’ death.

“Charlie Haden has made it his life’s mission to uplift the lives of others,” wrote The Red Hot Chilli Pepper’s Flea on grammy.com. “In my case he has succeeded dramatically.”

I didn’t know Flea had won six Grammys when I read what he wrote about Haden; I hadn’t seen any. But if they awarded them for writing about music, or explaining Charlie Haden, they’d quickly give Flea another.

“A few years ago, I had the fortune to play with the great Ornette Coleman,” wrote Flea. “. . . I’m just an uneducated punk rocker, but I did my best. I did OK.

“. . . A lot of different musicians played that night, all of whom were very well-respected, but at one point, all the many musicians left the stage, Charlie walked on it, and it was just Charlie and Ornette. After all the intense virtuosity that had gone on through the night, Charlie began to play a simple, bluesy, twangy, country riff, a little folk melody, and I felt Ornette really come alive, saw the audience fall into a reverent silence, and Charlie just schooled everybody, shredded everything that came before.

“He had the ability to play anything, but just came from the gutbucket with the humble truth, and he and Ornette began to dance around each other, and it was the greatest thing I ever saw. These two giants, who turned jazz upside down 50 years earlier, just connecting on the highest level, and the sheer beauty and violence of it reduced me to joyous tears.”

A link below to a piece from Haden and Jones’ version of Take My Hand, Precious Lord off their 2010 album Coming Sunday.

sources: latimes.com, washingtonpost.com, calarts.edu, grammy.com, dothemath.typepad.com

Dave Brubeck: It’s a Raggy Waltz

Dave Brubeck’s Gone With the Wind

Seventeen years ago I came home from Europe to learn, over brunch via the New York Times at the News Cafe on South Beach, that Don Pullen had died. When I told my then-girlfriend, now my wife, she misunderstood me and thought I had said someone was pulling her leg.

When I explained that Pullen was a jazz pianist, she looked at me as if she had bitten into her grapefruit thinking it was an orange.

She wasn’t unsympathetic, only uninterested. Over the years, whenever I would mention a notable jazz performer had died — Mal Waldron, Johnny Griffin, Lionel Hampton, Don Cherry, Ray Bryant, Hank Jones — I would get the grapefruit look. And think of Don Pullen.

So last week, mere hours after Dave Brubeck’s death a day before his 92nd birthday, she called to ask why I hadn’t shared the news. Naturally, I thought of Don Pullen. And saw the grapefruit look on the other end of the phone.

Even she wanted to know about Brubeck, and nothing, of course, could illustrate the difference between the pianist and any living jazz musician: Brubeck was so famous non-jazz fans knew him, and so popular they liked him.

We saw Brubeck a few years back in our small Southern beach town, where a colleague says folks like both kinds of music: country and western. Maybe that’s one reason why Brubeck was so popular: he brought his music into places others thought arid for jazz.

Brubeck was frail of walk that night, but when he sat at the piano, no one in the building was more devilish.

He could be inspiring — how many 86-year-olds are still working, let alone touring? — but he also could still be inspired. He talked about an upcoming visit to Poland and another he had made nearly 50 years previous, when he said the Poles let him know the jazz he played symbolized the freedom they lacked.

He had gone on a goodwill tour during the Eisenhower years, which was fitting — every Brubeck show was a goodwill tour. Being the most popular kid in class and the edgiest is normally mutually exclusive, but not for Brubeck. He sold records — Take Five, written by the quartet’s saxophonist, Paul Desmond, took off — without selling out.

“Dave Brubeck told me one of the greatest, funniest stories I ever heard,” the bassist Christian McBride said on his Facebook page after Brubeck’s death. “Upon meeting Miles Davis, Miles said to him, ‘Dave you sound great. You swing your a** off. I don’t know about them other m***f**** you got with you, but YOU sound great.’ ”

McBride wrote that Brubeck “always got a big laugh from that story.” He didn’t say if Brubeck filled in the blanks. Maybe that was left for Brubeck’s fellow pianist, Eric Reed. From ericreed.net:

“When I was 4, my Aunt Barbara gave me an inch high stack of used vinyl records that she purchased for about 25 cents from a flea market. Included in that stack was Dave Brubeck’s “Time Further Out”, recorded May/June 1961. When I put on the first track, ‘It’s a Raggy Waltz’, it struck a chord with the funny, adventurous side of my ‘old soul.’ That’s all I knew; here’s what I DIDN’T know then:

“I didn’t know that this record was over 10 years old.
“I didn’t know that Mr. Brubeck was a leading force in the ‘Cool Jazz’ era.
“I didn’t know that he, along with Max Roach, was a master of odd time signatures.
“I didn’t know that Dave Brubeck was White and Modoc.

“I didn’t know any of that, and I didn’t care.”

Like Potter Stewart’s obscenity, even a young Reed knew swing when he heard it, even if he couldn’t define it. And maybe that’s not a bad legacy, if a simple one. Dave Brubeck swung. And didn’t miss.

Below is a link to It’s a Raggy Waltz, which made an impression on a young Eric Reed. From allmusic.com: “. . . this piece isn’t exactly a waltz or a rag but a choppy piece with constantly shifting accents that don’t predictably fall where the listener expects. It had immediate appeal on concert dates . . .”

source: ericreed.net, allmusic.com

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Kenny Werner: Beyond the Forest of Mirkwood

Kenny Werner’s Beyond the Forest of Mirkwood: he was Ken then

Allmusic.com called Ken Werner’s Beyond the Forest of Mirkwood “one of the best-kept secrets in his extensive discography.” Now I’m beginning to wonder if it’s one of mine — from me.

The album is a solo piano release from Inner City in 1981; I’m not sure how long I’ve owned it but it’s long enough to have forgotten it was there. Whenever I bought it, it was cheap, because the price tag is $1.99 from the late, great Plastic Fantastic record store in Philadelphia (Ardmore, Pa., to be exact), which stocked a good part of my collection.

I found the album Monday — Werner’s 61st birthday ironically enough — where it’s been hidden all these years in the oddest place: in perfect alphabetical order, squeezed between the many Eberhard Weber albums and the even more Randy Westons.

Sometimes new music is in the place you least expect — where you put it years ago after having never listened to it, or played it just once, while distracted, missing the treasure of it and assigning it, unjustly, to record collection purgatory. It certainly wasn’t because it was inexpensive because there are few greater pleasures than paying little for a piece of music you enjoy a lot. Thankfully, time occasionally appeals such injustices.

(The W’s are among the hardest for me to get to in my collection, because they’re on the bottom and require bending, which requires motivation. But the door to the W’s has been open all month because I had reverted to college-era habits and played The Who’s Quadrophenia non-stop in anticipation of their local concert appearance earlier this month. Monday I made my way down the W’s from Mal Waldron to Weber to Werner).

“On this beautifully recorded album of solo piano, his seven originals show a lot of depth. . .,” read the allmusic.com review. “. . . this should be considered one of Kenny Werner’s essential recordings.”

There are many more, of course, which is the next benefit of this re-discovery. Werner has much work as a leader and much as a collaborator with Joe Lovano and others; in the last part of his career, he played in a trio with drummer Arie Hoenig and bassist Johannes Weidenmuller, from where the link to the performance of The Little Blue Man from a 2004 live New York performance below is drawn.

He also goes by Kenny now instead of Ken, and has for most os his career. I’m wondering if it makes Beyond the Forest of Mirkwood more valuable since Ken Werner albums are so much rarer than Kenny’s.