I love going to my middle-school-aged son’s concerts, for reasons other than the obvious.
Because I’ve never heard any of the many orchestras or bands he’s played in perform Coltrane or Steely Dan or Dylan or Sonny Rollins or any of my other favorite musicians or their work (the theme from The Beverly Hillbillies being the lone exception).
Most often they play some European composer whose name is hard to pronounce or a Middle American maestro of marches, neither of which I know.
But all of them, no matter their country of origin or genre of music, are good in ways different from jazz or rock as poetry. And invariably I sit, listen, and wonder how I could have pursued so much music and missed something so obviously worthy.
Today’s revelation was an American composer named Samuel R. Hazo, by way of Pittsburgh. I had never heard of Mr. Hazo or his music until performed today by the Seminole Band on the last day of band camp at Florida State University (how proud I would be to say my son was in the Seminole Band at FSU was yet another revelation today).
Turns out my ignorance was my loss. I don’t know if all of Mr. Hazo’s pieces are as beautiful as the Perthshire Majesty — the one the Seminole Band played today — but I aim to find out.
You won’t learn by Wikipedia, because about all Hazo’s page there has is a list of his works and the information he is not Samuel John Hazo the author (who, by a fantastic coincidence unreported on the composer’s Wikipedia page, is the composer’s father).
Hazo’s own web page tells more: his education (Duquesne University), year of birth (1966), awards won (as teacher, composer and alumnus) and work associations (James Earl Jones, Brooke Shields and, most impressively, Lucinda Williams). And that the Perthshire Majesty was written by Hazo for a friend/conductor whose ancestry dates back to the Scottish county of Perthshire.
It can’t tell you how beautiful a piece of music Perthshire Majesty is. If you need to, you’ll have to learn that for yourself. Click the link above to hear the Columbus State University Wind Ensemble perform Perthshire Majesty — they do an able job of approaching the heights the Seminole Band reached today.
James Carter's 1996 album Conversin' With the Elders
Belated birthday greetings to saxophonist James Carter, who celebrated No. 43 on Tuesday, one year closer to being an elder he once was conversin’ with.
Carter is not to be confused with the 39th U.S. President of the same name (who once hosted a group of jazz musicians at the White House and sang Salt Peanuts with Dizzy Gillespie), but he began playing in the last year of his namesake’s presidency, according to his website jamescarterlive.com. Though Carter the saxophonist was recording little more than a decade later, his career has consistently paid tribute to two things: his jazz predecessors and his hometown of Detroit.
“His playing is neither youthful homage nor cynical commercialism,” wrote Don Palmer on the liner notes to 1994′s Jurassic Classics. “There are hints of Gene Ammons, Illinois Jacquet, Sonny Rollins, David Murray, Don Byas, Chu Berry, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, not to mention anonymous players whose solos were scuffed and barbed with the harrowing and cathartic burrs, growls, guffaws and melissmas of deep blues.”
It’s the latter it seems Carter most wants to celebrate. His own list of influences and inspirations is atypical; rather than pile plaudits on artists who are already surrounded by them, Carter has made it a point to cite artists less renowned, whose music, if not obscure, isn’t as well-preserved.
“But the world needs to get hip to its antecedents,” Carter told Howard Mandel on the liner notes to 1995′s The Real Quietstorm, and Carter helped his CD-buyers do just that, artist by artist, song by song, offering by offering off the album.
“Like You Never Told Me That You Care, which John Gilmore played on Sun Ra’s Sound Sun Pleasure in the late 50′s. People focus on Ra’s extravagance, but he came up through Fletcher Henderson, same as everybody else.”
“Don Byas, in terms of antecedents, was playing the Cherokee changes at two and three times tempo prior to Charlie Parker’s Koto . . . Now it’s 20 years since Byas’ death, and I think his obscurity is sad.
“The Stevedore’s Serenade is a clarinet piece for Barney Bigard from an Ellington compilation.”
“I took Born To Be Blue from Gene Ammons; he put a thing on it in the organ combo context.”
“And Jackie McLean recorded Ballad For A Doll on Jackie’s Bag . . .”
Real Quietstorm was one of Carter’s earliest releases, preceded by Jurassic Classics (a collection of standards) and soon followed by Conversin’ With The Elders (cover above). On the latter, Carter saluted and played with five of his favorite artists — trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison, saxophonist/clarinetist Buddy Tate, the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Lester Bowie, the World Saxophone Quartet’s Hamiet Bluiett and Detroit saxophonist Larry Smith — and referenced his favorite recordings of all. In little more than half a decade, three of the elders had died.
Carter didn’t stop there, though. The 2003 release Gardenias for Lady Day was in memory of Billie Holiday, the 2000 release Chasin’ the Gypsy was dedicated, while not specifically to Django Reinhardt, according to Carter, but to the Paris music of the 1930s associated with Reinhardt and bandmate Stephane Grappelli. ”Although Carter insisted that the record wasn’t an outright tribute,” wrote Nate Chinen for jazztimes.com, “its title, repertoire and instrumentation pointed resolutely in the direction of Django Reinhardt, gypsy guitarist and spiritual leader of the fabled Hot Club of France. Atlantic, which didn’t share Carter’s reservations, emblazoned copies of the album with a sticker playing up the Reinhardt angle.”
On Carter’s 2004 live album Live At Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, he performed with saxophonists David Murray, another of Carter’s favorites from the WSQ, and Johnny Griffin, who was 73 when the album was recorded in 2001 and died at 80 in 2008.
“I’m not inspired by individual players,” Carter told Palmer on the liner notes to Jurassic Classics. “A lot of players get hung up on someone like Trane. They look at the superficial elements, the finished product, and get the tune down. I feel I need to get to the spirituality of the piece and how he got to the finished product.”
A link below to a cut from the 2008 album Present Tense. According to jazz.com the cut Pour Que Ma Vie Demeure (For That My Life Remains, if our translation is close), is a Reinhardt piece Reinhardt never recorded and “pays unabashed homage to the nonpareil Sidney Bechet.”
Sonny Rollins' 1991 album Here's to the People. Here's to Sonny.
Birthday greetings to octogenarian/saxophonist Sonny Rollins, born Theodore Walter Rollins, who celebrates No. 81 today.
There was certainly a time when it seemed Rollins would never enjoy such longevity or be the elder statesman of jazz – he was arrested at age 20 for armed robbery (three-year sentence), he was addicted to heroin and he was homeless for a time, as Rollins described in Neil Tesser’s story on chicagoreader.com.
But Rollins defied the stereotypes of creative and tortured artists, and did most of his best work — and it is voluminous — after quitting drugs.
“I’m not proud of many things in my life,” Rollins told Tesser, “but I’m proud of that — of defeating the dragon.
”. . . I was ‘carrying the stick. You know what that means? It means you’re homeless, like a hobo; I was sleeping in parked cars during the winter and all this stuff. I was doing very nefarious things.”
Rollins turned nefarious into virtuous. “Rollins really blossomed after his return from Chicago in 1956,” wrote Ira Gitler on the liner notes to Tour De Force; Chicago is where Rollins told Tesser he went to stop using.
The album Saxophone Colossus in 1956 was a colossus and Newk’s Time introduced his nickname — a cab driver thought Rollins was Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Don Newcombe — and in all, he’s been the leader on more than 50 albums, despite a hiatus in the early 60′s where he gained acclaim for practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge in New York.
From Nat Hentoff’s liner notes to the album Sonny Rollins on Impulse: “In his chapter on Sonny Rollins in Jazz Masters of the Fifties (MacMillan), Joe Goldberg quotes jazzman Steve Lacy: ‘I’ve never seen anyone in love with the tenor saxophone the way Sonny is. He really loves that horn and understands it. He knows everything about it.’ ”
A link below to Rollins and a live version of St. Thomas, which pays tribute to his roots in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Music is more than lyrics and notes. There is always a story to hear, play and sing. And I will try and bring you those stories from genres and artists far and wide.
DAVID M.
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