Michael Weiss

Re:"Inta Somethin" Jackie told me that on this date, he and KD hid AT's hi-hat cymbals between sets, because they were bugged at how hard he was slammin' them. They felt too boxed in and I guess they had to take drastic measures!

Loyalty is a little too romanticized a term. One decides to take a gig based on the relative values of the economics (present or future) and quality of the music, period. This is no big money making music anyway, so you often make professional choices based on the musical value of the gig. The term Loyalty here to me is a little misplaced.

Thanks Free For All (one of my alltime favorite records). We're looking forward to it. I hear it's a great venue. I'll keep a lookout for Organissimo.

A percussionist who deserves his own thread: Daniel Sadownick. "...tours and recordings with jazz greats such as Michael Brecker, Dennis Chambers, Nicholas Payton, Christian McBride, Richard Bona, Nat Adderley, Dianne Reeves, Nnenna Freelon, Dewey Redman and many others" (me, for instance). A versatile percussionist that does not limit himself to one genre, Daniel has spent the last few years touring and recording with such diverse artists as: Steely Dan, Jennifer Lopez, Billy Idol, Tony, Toni Tone', Maxwell, Angie Stone and Me'shell Ndege'Ocello, Daniel is also a member of the New York based cult band the Screaming Headless Torsos." www.danielsadownick.com We're at the Knickerbocker Bar and Grill this weekend, October 7 -8.

From the Detroit Free Press: A MAN OF INTUITION: Thinking is the enemy once the music takes over, says Sonny Rollins September 25, 2005 BY MARK STRYKER FREE PRESS MUSIC WRITER I have heard tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins play often, but the most memorable night came in Chicago in 1991. It was the quintessential Rollins experience: Half of the concert was profoundly disappointing and half was the greatest live music I have ever heard. Rollins, who performs in Ann Arbor on Saturday, opened then with Jerome Kern's "Long Ago and Far Away," but he sounded distracted, playing little more than worried repetitions that jogged in place. He cut short the band after a second tune and during the unscheduled intermission, I wondered if this was one of those infamous nights when Rollins and his muse were on the outs. Then he launched into a blues, "Tenor Madness," and began trading four-bar phrases with drummer Al Foster. Suddenly, his muse had bedroom eyes. The music poured out of him in a joyous rush of Joycean intuition. He played curlicue bebop and honking gutbucket blues. He brayed, barked, stuttered, strutted, roared. He built mansions of inspiration from Foster's rhythmic blueprint. He crushed the song's melodic riff into atoms and reassembled them like an alchemist -- a hallmark of his thematic approach to improvisation. When it was over I looked at my watch: He and Foster had traded phrases for more than 15 minutes. Rollins is widely regarded as our greatest living jazz musician. Even at 75, with dental problems taking a toll on the once-pinpoint accuracy of his articulation, he can summon the powers of Zeus. On a good night he won't make you see God so much as convince you he is one. He has been a force in jazz since 1949, working or recording with Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Clifford Brown and nearly every other postwar giant. Along with John Coltrane, he is the most influential tenor saxophonist of the modern era, and a huge chunk of his discography is as important to jazz as scripture is to theology. Yet there is nothing pedantic about Rollins' radiance. He is as inviting to newcomers as to the cognoscenti. As critic Francis Davis once put it, "When conjuring up an image of the quintessential jazzman -- heroic, inspired, mystical, obsessed -- as often as not, it is Rollins we picture, because no other jazz instrumentalist better epitomizes the lonely tightrope walk between spontaneity and organization implicit in an improvised solo." Rollins gives few interviews, but he graciously spent more than an hour on the phone recently talking about his creative process, practice habits and stylistic traits. QUESTION: A friend of mine met you once in a music store in Boston around 1963. He remembers two things clearly. First, you were buying a guitar string to attach from the neck to the bell of your horn. Second, you told him to play as much as possible -- anywhere -- and that you'd play on the street if there were no clubs. What was the point of the guitar string and would you, literally, play on the street? ANSWER: I was just experimenting with the concept of the guitar string. I never got it to work like I hoped, so I abandoned it. I was thinking about plucking it at propitious times as accompaniment to my horn playing. I might not be playing on the street, but I'd be playing in private in my own garret someplace. Playing on the street might entail the trappings of a professional performance, but I would definitely be playing all the time. It's where I find a certain meditative value to my everyday existence. It's my way of meditating or praying. Q: How much do you practice? A: It's a little difficult these days because of the encroachments of age, dental problems and all that. So I can't practice as much as I would like. If I'm in the house and for some reason I don't get around to playing for two or three days because of a physical problem, I begin to physically feel ill. I used to play all day, more than eight hours. Now If I get in two hours a day, I feel reasonably satisfied. Q: What do you practice? A: I'm sort of a stream-of-consciousness player. When I was a boy, I used to play and not have anything planned, and I would just be in the house playing for hours and hours. So I just start out playing. I do have projects I work on -- various chord patterns and such. Right now I'm working on a way to have the same facility in, for instance, the key of A major that I might have in C major. I'm trying to find a method to hear the saxophone and intervals in all the keys and be able to play anything in any key. I have sheaves of manuscripts and I work off of those; I'm constantly writing down music -- walking through airports or somewhere and something comes to my mind. So I've got my pad and I refer to that as often as it takes to get these things in my head. If you can go through the patterns, you alleviate the mechanics of playing the horn. Q: Will you practice playing a tune for 20 or 30 minutes? A: I might if I'm trying to learn a tune. I try to find the dead spots, where I'm not exactly getting what's going on, and play them over and over until I can remove them. I practice so that I don't have to practice when I'm playing. So when I'm on the bandstand, I don't have to think. I can just let the song play itself and let the elements that come to bear on improvisation take over. Q: Describe the difference between the way you feel on a good night or a bad night. A: I hate to think about when I'm having a good night because then you're giving me a trauma. (Laughs.) I'm getting to be professional enough that I can sort of overcome the bad nights because it can give you a negative view of your own performance and you can make it worse. I try to avoid thinking about having a bad night, even when I'm having a bad night. On a good night, everything just happens and you don't have to think about it. Things come into my head easier. If I'm having a bad night, I find myself thinking too much. You're not supposed to think. There's no time. If I have to think of an idea and then play it, by that time the moment has passed and it's stale. If I'm thinking too much, I know I've got to change course. Q: That's the great struggle of improvisation: the complex interplay of the conscious and unconscious minds. A: It is complicated but you can will yourself to do it. I just try and act the other way and get to that other side of the mind where I just let things happen. Q: It used to be that if you weren't having a good night, the entire creative mechanism would appear to shut down. Are you better able to work through those periods? A: Yeah, that's about it. I'm able to work through it better. Q: Let's talk about the origins of your style: First, the incredible rhythmic looseness and variety in your phrasing. A: When we were coming up we listened to all of our idols -- Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. We slowed down the vinyl records to hear what they were doing. I did my homework. But I remember an incident where I was with one of my peers in this little band we had. We were playing a song and I started to solo and then he got mad and said, "Uh, oh! There he goes again!" Because I was beginning to play against the time but still, of course, within the time. I guess I was beginning to perfect a way of playing time with more elasticity. I didn't particularly work on it. It was how my playing matured. Q: What is the source of your penchant for thematic improvising and melodic paraphrase? A: I think the fact that I'm more of a linear player rather than a vertical player. Playing themes and developing them was natural to my style from the get-go. I didn't work on it. I think of melody as the prime basic improvising tool or method. I never think about rhythm. Rhythm just comes to me. It's something that's so intrinsic in the whole process that I never even think about it. Q: There's also so much humor in your improvising -- musical jokes, the way you play an idea and repeat it with a nutty twist, the way you use melodic or rhythmic rhymes. A: Well, when I was a little boy my friends used to call me the jester because I used to be a guy who was always playing jokes. It's possible that carried over into my improvising. Q: How much of an impact did working with Thelonious Monk have, given the humor in his music and his use of melodic variation to organize solos? A: I don't know. I was playing with Monk when I was in high school so maybe there's something to that. But it might be too facile a way to explain my playing. Without denying anything I got from Monk, I would want a caveat that everything might not be that simple. Q: Are you still having fun? A: Yeah, but I don't like the characterization of 'having fun' because I sort of have a Buddhist view of life. Life is not necessarily to have fun. If you mean, "Am I enjoying the challenge?" Then, yes. But if having fun denotes using drugs or eating a lot of ice cream or gambling, then no. I have fun because I realize what a tremendous privilege life is and what a tremendous opportunity we have to clean up our karma. I always have fun when I'm practicing my horn. Performing is a little bit different because I've got a lot of responsibility because I'm so well known. Q: Would the ultimate for you be if you could practice and play without having to concern yourself with a career? A: That would definitely be the most fun with one caveat. When you're performing, it raises the level of what you're doing. I can learn so much during an hour performance -- things that you might not get to by practicing at home for six months because there's such an intensity of concentration. But other than that, if there's such a place as heaven, where I could be like one of those angels playing their harps, I'd just be playing my saxophone.

We'll be performing some new orginal music as well as souped up arrangements of not-so-new original music. First return to Detroit as a leader since Detroit Jazz Fest 2000. Come on out! Michael Weiss - piano Jimmy Greene - tenor and soprano Ugonna Okegwo - bass Joe Strasser - drums Daniel Sadownick - percussion Friday, October 21. 8:00pm and 10:00pm DSO Jazz Club The Music Box at the Max M. Fisher Music Center 3711 Woodward Avenue Detroit, MI (313) 576-5111 www.detroitsymphony.com "The songs simply smoke." Detroit Free Press

Now which one(s) of these have pitch control?

Griff was operated on in Marseille yesterday to remove a major blockage in his carotid artery. He came through the operation fine.

I spoke to Griff a little under three weeks ago. Other than a little spotty memory loss, he sounded fine. I'll see what I can find out and post tomorrow.

I count myself fortunate to have befriended and perform frequently with this wonderful person from 1978 until 1981 while as an undergrad at IU. Playing with Pookie, often in the company of Al Kiger and Benny Barth was the best playing experience I could hope for in Indiana. Pookie was a warm, selfless human being always ready to play. Rarely having a bad word to say about anyone or anything, he was a humbling influence at a time when humility was a particularly valuable lesson. Like Junior Cook, in the years that followed, Pookie taught by example. Their musicality was direct - story-telling melodicism: simple and to the point. R.I.P. Pookie.

When I was in Detroit a few years back, the local radio station played the Alexander-Weiss band so heavily -I think I heard it a couple of times every day - that it must have had me remember the sound of the band without my knowing it. I guess Weiss was doing the arrangement in that band too. I saw them - and Stefon Harris too - once at the Ford Detroit Montreux Jazz Festival. I particularly remember Alexander played solo (forgot the tune he did. was it In a Centimental Mood?) and it sounded beautifully into the open air. For the record, there has never been any such entity as an Alexander-Weiss band. The CD you are referring to was my recording for DIW called Power Station, on which Alexander played. On that disc, all the arrangements and six of the compositions are mine. Ed Love of WDET has been a great supporter. In 2000, my septet, with the same personnel listed above, performed at the Detroit Jazz festival. Eric appeared earlier that evening with another group. Nevertheless, as Marty mentioned, you are quite astute to have been able to identify me. I'm impressed! Thanks Marty for adding me to the stew.

Some of the alltime best Bud on record.

My mistake - Phantom Navigator was issued on CD - That's how I own it. I guess I was listing favorite recordings that are just plain out of print that I thought should be reissued.

Art Blakey - Golden Boy - Colpix Buddy Montgomery - The Two-sided Album - Milestone Sonny Red - Breezin' - Jazzland Wayne Shorter - Phantom Navigator - Columbia

I don't remember what tunes were played. The singer Lodi Carr was fronting the gig. I was stuffed in a standing-room-only area and it was difficult to concentrate. This was twenty years ago. To my dismay as well as yours, I don't remember any more than I told already. I wish there was more to it than that.

I think around that same year, a friend and I called him up in Philly and asked if we could visit him, but it didn't come together. He was living in some kind of halfway house. I heard Hank at the Angry Squire with Duke Jordan. He was a shadow of his former self, but it was unmistakably the shadow of Hank Mobley! My vague recollection was that it was something pre-orchestrated with musicians not directly related to the proceedings. In other words it wasn't memorable - to me anyway.

Kenny Washington has his dates wrong. It wasn't 1993. We (Johnny Griffin Quartet) were in Seattle at Jazz Alley, May 4-9, 1987. We never worked there again. Lucky came in one night. He was very nice - friendly. Kind of evasive about what he was doing with himself, but seemed happy. I had to trade about 10 LPs for it, but I got an original copy of Lucky Thompson Plays Jerome Kern and No More. I think it was finally reissued on CD together with another Moodsville? This is a PERFECT record.

I learned Deep in a Dream off of this great record. I played it for Hank after nearly everyone had left the jam session that followed the Town Hall Blue Note concert of 1985. While I was playing he was egging me on with stuff like "yeah, come up this chord, now come down that scale." A precious memory. As most people in-the-know know Hank wasn't invited and appeared anyway. At the end of the night he apparently lost his overcoat, had no money, so Kenny Washington and I cabbed him to Penn Station and gave him trainfare back to Philly.

A memorial service for Percy Heath will take place at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem this Friday, June 10, 7:00 - 9:00pm. 132 West 138th Street between Lenox and 7th Avenues. Many musicians and speakers to appear.

June 24-25 I'll be at the Knickerbocker restaurant (University Place at 9th Street) from 9:45pm. with Gerald Cannon, bass and Daniel sadownick, percussion. No Cover. Michael Weiss

I'll never see another dime from SteepleChase, so I'm not as interested in promoting that recording as my last one, which was self-produced. While I'm not displeased with Milestones, it doesn't have any original compositions of mine and was produced on a shoestring, while Soul Journey's contents are all originals and was made using the finest ingredients (studio, engineer, mastering - not to mention personnel). On my CDBaby page all nine tracks have mp3 samples. I don't know why Amazon doesn't have any samples of Milestones.

[shameless plug] Gotta keep those units moving! cdbaby.com/cd/mweiss

Having grown up in Dallas, I played with Marchel on a number of occasions, beginning with the Recovery Room in the 1970s. Coincidentally I got a call from him yesterday. But for the Jazz Under the Stars concert I brought down Eric Alexander, John Webber and Joe Farnsworth with me. That was in 1998. Haven't been back since.

Having seen them both recently, I'd love to splice together two scenes (and repeat them endlessly in a loop): 1. the parrot in the movie, The Ladykillers, bobbing up and down 2. Keith Jarrett in the Miles Davis Isle of Wight DVD bobbing up and down. Highly recommended!

If I'm not mistaken, the Carnegie Hall concert was produced by my old friend, Kenneth Lee Karpe, who passed away a year and a half ago. Kenny Karpe had a loft in the mid fifties at Park Avenue and 28th street which became a rehearsal space and hang out for a number of musicians - Oscar Pettiford and his big band, Thelonious, Tommy Flanagan, Cedar Walton, Max Roach and many others. Kenny was involved along with Jules Colomby with Signal Records. He also had some role later on in producing Ravi Shankar. Kenny was a fixture on the NY scene until he became ill a few years ago. He appears briefly in the film Straight No Chaser bumping into Monk on Amsterdam Ave.