Mark Stryker

Any mainstream recognition like this is positive for the music. Beyond that, I was struck by the byline -- Wayne Shorter and Joni Mitchell (!) I really would have liked to see the unedited prose those two came up with -- I guarantee that it was more in the clouds than the final product, which went through the layers of at least one Time assigning editor and copy editor. There is, for example, this gem that either survived the original drafts or got truncated by an editor: "For a while there, he was really into dotted 16th notes and minor ninths." Um, ok.

On a related note, Willie's next recording is a live CD with Wynton Marsalis' group -- tapes drawn from the J@LC concerts from early 2007 that were discussed here at the time. Release date is early July.

John McLaughlin and the Tonight Show Band, 1980s, "Cherokee" on acoustic guitar.

Absolutely. A friend of mine once said he looks as if the saxophone is playing itself. Maybe it is ...

I know what you mean. it's like his top lip is very "foward" and I can't tell what's happening on the bottom. Still, I think the way he tongues his notes is even freakier (in a great way). Like the articulation of the melody on The Three Marias -- that's super bad.

Sinatra and Presley http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/searc...k-sinatra_music

That's interesting how Clark deals with the idiom -- you don't see that everyday. This may have been posted before but here's Scott Hamilton with Wayne's band around the same time playing a fast blues. The third tenor is Lew Tabackin -- it would have been interesting to hear how he negotiates the territory in which Wayne leaves him but the tape ends with Wayne's solo. Only in Japan! http://youtube.com/watch?v=1cYH4WnP5EQ

Absolutely -- a pioneering teacher who was essentially a classical guy but whose concepts of sound production, embouchure, breath support and all things saxophone are applicable across the board. Still a lot of folks around here who knew him and/or studied with him, but I haven't delved much into his personal/professional history. Don't think there's a book in there but probably a very good dissertation/journal article in the subject. Maybe it's been done already. But I've always wondered about the similarities/differences between, say, the concepts and teachings of Teal and Joe Allard, another guru of sound and woodwinds that a lot of jazz players studied with on the east coast. Back to Joe. He was a Teal student for years and Joe's concept is almost impossible to imagine without that training. Jim's observation about projection vs volume is spot on. Joe could project like crazy because his sound was so focused and supported from the diaphragm. His command of the overtone series surely grew out of Teal too. Joe's mouthpiece was interesting too -- one of the rare jazz guys that used a Selmer "classical" mouthpiece -- I think it was a "D" tip opening (pretty closed for jazz) but not entirely sure what the specific model was called or whether it had been worked on or not. Bennie Maupin used the same mouthpiece early on and he was also a Teal student, used to hang at Joe's apartment when he was coming up and his playing had a lot of Joe in it, from the warm centered sound to the slippery rhythms. (Later, Maupin studied clarinet with Allard.) Javon Jackson (VERY much out of Joe) uses a similar Selmer mouthpiece I think. Sonny used one too in the early '60s -- he's playing it on the cover of the Bridge, but he gets a much louder, more popping sound out of it, but it's also very warm and centered. I've often wondered if Sonny switched from his Otto Link to the Selmer during his sabbitical because he was so involved with digging back into the mechanics of the instrument and the Selmer was a kind of back-to-basics maneuver that allowed him to focus more on the fundamentals of sound production. On the last point, I did grow up as a player (alto). Raised in Bloomington, Ind., school at Univ. of Illinois. History major in college but always playing. Stopped after grad school (journalism) and I got a job.

George is scheduled to play this weekend in Detroit with Steve Turre's Quintet (Billy Harper, Buster Williams, Deon Parsons). Don't know the specifics of George's health, but obviously a wonderful sign that he's on the gig and traveling.

Thank you! Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you!Thank you! I'd not call it "impossible", but I would say that the same things played at/with a different dynamic would take on an entirely different meaning and therefore essentially not be the same thing. So once again - Thank you! You're welcome. To expand a bit, I think there's a trade-off that very roughly speaking breaks down along a fault line of volume vs. finesse. The louder you play the more difficult it is to realize certain kinds of timbral/rhythmic/expressive qualities. If Joe's shit is not "impossible" to play loudly, it's definitely harder to play, and Jim is exactly right that if you were to play everything that Joe would play but do it at a higher volume, the meaning and impact would be radically different. On a related issue, dynamics are one of the most under-utilized expressive tools available to a soloist. Most people either play too loud all the time or completely ignore the idea of dynamic contrast -- and not just a simple start soft and then get louder in a linear path, but a true ebb-and-flow, with dynamics used to enhance or color meaning of a particular melodic, rhythmic or harmonic idea. Thinking off the top, Wayne Shorter is one guy who gets it and plays with artful dynamics and contrast. Who else (from the past or today) would be on the list of improvisers who use dynamics this way as opposed to a one-volume-suits-all approach?.

Larry: Looking through Nexis, I find your reviews from April 23, 1987 and April 24, 1986 that both cover Griffin/Henderson gigs, but nothing from 1991. By the way, Michael Weiss (and Phil Flanigan) are described in the 1987 review as "impressive newcomers." Joe did play really soft -- that's one of the things that allowed him to play so loosely and with such tremendous rhythmic flexibility. It's impossible to play some of Joe's signature flickering and swirling shit if you're trying to blow down the back wall. Still, it was a shock to me too the first time I heard him live -- though it was also revelatory in the sense that I understood a lot more about how he manifested his concept.

DETROIT FREE PRESS THE COLEMAN EXPERIENCE: THE UNPARALLELED ORNETTE COLEMAN, WHO REWORKED THE RULES OF JAZZ TO DIZZYING EFFECT, PLAYS HERE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN NEARLY 20 YEARS BYLINE: MARK STRYKER FREE PRESS MUSIC WRITER NEW YORK -- Revolutionaries in the 20th Century sometimes reinvented art with such a big bang that they shocked the status quo into apocalyptic fits of controversy and, occasionally, violence. Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" caused a riot at its 1913 premiere. Picasso's first cubist canvas created a scandal in 1907. Jackson Pollock's mid-century abstract paintings were ridiculed as the work of "Jack the Dripper." And there is Ornette Coleman, the single most polarizing figure in jazz history: Fistfights broke out during the alto saxophonist and composer's landmark debut at the Five Spot in New York in 1959. Coleman, who makes his first metro Detroit appearance in 18 years tonight in Ann Arbor, broke so free of the rules that had previously governed jazz that -- as with Pollock's drip paintings -- many suspected a put-on. "I think he's jiving, baby," said veteran trumpeter Roy Eldridge in 1961. "They start with a nice leadoff figure but then they go off into outer space." Time has vindicated Coleman. Leaving Duke Ellington aside, jazz history can be distilled into four defining soloists: Louis Armstrong invented the improvised solo as we know it. Charlie Parker delivered it into the modern age. John Coltrane translated it into post-bop. And Coleman liberated it from traditional harmony, rhythm and form. His untamed solos proceeded according to their own spontaneous yet undeniable logic, free of expected key resolutions and bar lines, thrillingly alive to naked emotions and the possibilities of collective improvisation. Coleman rejected bebop harmony in a strong-willed act of primitivism, not unlike the way Picasso remade the simplified forms of African art or Stravinsky elevated barbaric rhythm. To his supporters, his rejection of harmonic blueprints (chord changes), untethered phrasing and daringly expressive intonation were signs of a prophet. To his detractors, the same qualities were evidence of fraud or incompetence. Miles Davis suggested in print that Coleman was "all screwed up inside," and one angry musician punched him in the face one night at the Five Spot. "In New York, I'm telling you guys literally would say, 'I'm going to kill you. You can't play that way.' " says Coleman, speaking on a recent Saturday in his sprawling loft in Manhattan's Garment District. "It felt terrible, but I never tried to defend anything. If somebody said, 'I'm going to beat you, I don't like how you play,' I didn't say, 'Why?' I just said, 'Well, that's how you feel.' " Forty-five years after Coleman's quartet came east from Los Angeles, the shock waves continue to reverberate. Even though his seminal recordings of 1959-61 long ago entered the canon and he's been honored with a MacArthur "genius grant," Coleman remains a divisive symbol. The mainstream has made peace with him, but it has never reached a detente with free jazz, the permanent avant-garde ushered in by Coleman's aesthetic that sometimes (not always) lacks his melodicism, discipline and links to the core values of jazz. For all Coleman's radicalism, his early music still swings and speaks with a rural blues twang. Many pieces take off from angular themes suggesting a wild bebop hallucination. Still, even Coleman's advocates have sometimes scratched their heads at his jazz-rock explorations, the idiosyncratic way he plays the trumpet and violin, his more extreme group improvisations, and the extensions of his concepts into sui generis classical compositions. Jazz is defined by rugged individualists, but Coleman -- a self-taught musician from Fort Worth, Texas, steeped in the blues, with a homegrown theory of music and maharishi presence -- is beyond category. He belongs in the pantheon of American mavericks alongside Harry Partch, the former hobo who built his own instruments to play microtonal music, and John Cage, the charismatic poet of sound, silence and noise. Given the Bunyanesque lore that surrounds Coleman, it's striking how reserved he is in person. He is a small man, about 5 feet 8, slight across the chest and shoulders, with innocent eyes and a soft handshake. He speaks in a simmering whisper and gentle Texas drawl. His hair is thin and the deep lines across his brow seem to outline the craggy, Bohemian journey of his life. On this afternoon he wears a fraying blue V-neck sweater and dark pants and sits in his glass-wall office surrounded by a high-end stereo, computer and shelves filled with books on physics, chemistry and other subjects and CDs in every possible genre. He has just finished listening to soprano Joan Sutherland. You don't really interview Coleman as much as experience him. His conversation swirls about the room in philosophical riffs that double back on themselves like words of a mystic, sometimes breaking free into aphoristic clarity. Human freedom, transcending race and the unity of all music and life are favorite themes. "What I'm thinking about when I play, what I am experiencing, is how to play ideas that will become something that will waken the senses of the person that's listening. You know how I got that way? From playing with musicians. If you play something that someone likes, they'll come and try to make it better. Music is not a race or a style, it's an idea." Coleman is eager to share his ideas, and is open to any musician who seeks him out. Wynton Marsalis hung out at the loft for two nights til 4 a.m. before last month's Jazz at Lincoln Center tribute to Coleman. But the angle from which Coleman approaches music is so obtuse that it's often bewildering. "He'll say things to me like, 'Which way does a vertical line go?' says Tony Falanga, one of two bassists in Coleman's band. "I'll say, 'It goes up.' And he'll say, 'Why can't it go sideways, too? It's still a line. You have to be open.' " Since the early '70s, Coleman has used the term "harmolodics" to describe his music. Details defy simple explanation -- no one seems to fully understand the system other than Coleman. Essentially it's his unified field theory of music -- a way of organizing music so that all the instruments in an improvising ensemble are allowed to play in any key or any clef at any time. "I call it compositional improvising, meaning that it doesn't sound like you're getting the idea from a chord or a key," says Coleman. "It's an idea that plays itself exactly at that moment." On the surface, Coleman's concepts sound like a recipe for chaos. The players must listen deeply, responding to cues of melody, tonality, mood, texture, rhythm and intuition, without falling back on prescribed roles or rules. Coleman's unusual new quartet has been together less than two years. Bassist Falanga, trained in classical music and jazz, plays bowed melodies, joining Coleman as a second horn. Greg Cohen's plucked bass anchors the ensemble. Coleman's son, Denardo, who made his debut on LP at age 10 with his father in 1966, plays drums. Coleman's tunes, as catchy as nursery rhymes, lead into swirling polyphony, the four players orbiting each other like moons and planets in a cosmic dance. "Ornette is the truest improviser I've ever come across," says Falanga. "But he doesn't believe in squeaks, squawks or honks. It has nothing to do with letting out energy. Everything is melodic." Coleman has been out of step with his contemporaries since his early days in R&B bands, when he was often fired for refusing to sequester his unique vision. Once after a dance gig in Louisiana, thugs who didn't like his playing smashed his horn and beat him bloody. Beboppers threw him out of jam sessions for making up his own harmony as he went along. The chords limited his imagination. "They were only guiding me as if I didn't know where I was going," he says. Only after meeting the sympathetic colleagues in Los Angeles who would comprise his original quartet -- trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden, drummer Billy Higgins -- did Coleman's career find traction. "He has more determination about what he wants to do than anyone I've every seen," says James Jordan, Coleman's slightly younger cousin who helps manage his business affairs. "When he gets his mind made up about something, that's it," says Jordan, director of music with the New York State Council for the Arts. Coleman has spent much of his career underground, with bursts of public activity and recordings followed by long periods of self-imposed exile. Racism and shady characters within the music business have left festering wounds, and his strategy since the early '60s has been to insist on top dollar for recordings and concerts. He would rather write and rehearse in seclusion than feel exploited. When he has signed lucrative record deals or received honors like the 1994 MacArthur grant ($372,000), he has funneled much of it back into music, supporting young musicians out of his own pocket and paying travel expenses overseas. He bought space in Harlem in the late '80s, which has been converted into Harmolodic Studios, a recording facility. Coleman has lived in his current apartment about a decade, and it's a significant upgrade from the ramshackle existence of cold-water lofts in drug-infested neighborhoods that once defined his life in New York. He has done better financially in the past decade, finding the inspiration to perform more frequently and relaxing his more extreme price demands. At more than 4,000 square feet, his loft was remodeled by the woman he's been seeing for several years, a German-born architect. The furnishings are sparse, modern and chic. Art is everywhere, including huge abstract canvases, African sculptures and smaller portraits and surrealist pictures. Coleman himself did some of the paintings in which ghostly doodles float in abstract fields. He became interested in art when leading painters like Willem De Kooning, Larry Rivers and Robert Rauschenberg used to hang out at the Five Spot. At 74, Coleman has lived long enough to see his music, once so maligned, taught in conservatories. He remains a God to the radical wing but also an audible influence on mainstream progressives of many stripes, from pianist Keith Jarrett and guitarist Pat Metheny to the young alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon. Coleman knows this but downplays it. "You know what? The satisfaction is that I'm still alive and I know now that have reached this level and I'm finding freedom -- what I always thought existed. There's nothing that I have to hide or complain about and nothing to make me withdraw from something I believe in." {END} A SAXOPHONE LESSON WITH ORNETTE; HE PULLED OUT HIS CASE, ASSEMBLED THE HORN AND HANDED IT TO ME BYLINE: MARK STRYKER FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER NEW YORK -- Ornette Coleman knew that I was an alto saxophonist and jazz musician before becoming a journalist, so when I pressed for details about his harmolodic theory, he generously offered to give me a lesson right there on the spot. He pulled out his saxophone case, assembled the horn and handed it to me. It was a top-of-the-line Selmer Mark VI that the company gave him in the 1960s. An experimental model -- the company made fewer than 200 -- the horn has an unusual low A-key that allows the player to reach a half-step lower than on most saxophones. The horn was lacquered white, recalling the eccentric plastic alto that Coleman played on his early records. Coleman had left his Meyer mouthpiece and reed attached to the neck of the horn the last time he played, and the whole apparatus was shoved inside the bell -- with no protective cloth and not even a mouthpiece cap to guard the cane. Any teacher who caught a student storing his instrument this way would have a conniption. Coleman apologized sheepishly: "I know I should have a mouthpiece cap." In the harmolodic system, Coleman completely deconstructs normal Western musical syntax. All instruments are treated as if they are tuned in C. All instruments can read from the same part without transposing and still produce what Coleman calls a "unison." Improvisers are allowed to play in any key or any clef at any time. He first had me play the notes A, C, D and E-flat, because in harmolodics these are considered a unison. "One note, four sounds," is a Coleman mantra. Then he had me play three chords that led through all 12 notes of the chromatic scale -- C major 7, E-flat minor 7, D minor with a flat 5, and a final A to account for the 12th note. "That's your first harmolodic lesson," he said. "You can use any tonic and play those same three chords and come up with 12 different notes." Coleman asked me to improvise starting on any note but to keep in mind the intervals I had already been working with. He was trying to liberate me from conventional harmony, and it worked for a few bars before I relapsed into a bebop pattern. "Here," I said, handing the horn back to him. "Show me." Coleman closed his eyes and played a fresh, leaping phrase that, like many of his ideas, ended on a high note that shivered with the aching cry of the blues. I noticed Coleman doesn't keep his top teeth on the mouthpiece, a highly irregular technique that allows the vocalized flexibility of his sound. "You can play sharp in tune and you can play flat in tune," is another mantra. Coleman played a series of zigzagging lines. Some were aggressive blurs like the sweeping gestures of an abstract painter. Others were simple shapes in bold colors. Each idea was as natural as breathing. Each painted the air with swing. Several were melodies worth surrounding with a frame and calling it song. "Don't let the saxophone tell you what to play," he said. "Let your ear tell you. The same note could be any one of the other 12. An E can be the major 7th of F, the minor 7th of F-sharp, the major 6th of G. If you start thinking like that, the saxophone is going to get smaller and smaller. No matter how much technique you have, you're not going to play no music if all you're doing is playing from how the instrument is built." {END} ORNETTE COLEMAN ON CD The best introduction to Coleman is with the 1959-61 Atlantic recordings, beginning with the peerless "The Shape of Jazz to Come," which introduced his quartet with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins and such key compositions as "Lonely Woman" and "Congeniality." Next best is "Change of the Century" and the prescient double-quartet collective "Free Jazz." Others include "This Is Our Music," "Ornette," "Ornette on Tenor." If you can afford it, Rhino has collected the Atlantics on a 6-CD set, "Beauty Is A Rare Thing" ($90). The 1958-59 Contemporary LPs, "Something Else" and "Tomorrow Is The Question" catch Coleman just as he's leaving his bop roots behind. The mid-'60s Blue Notes include two grand volumes with David Izenzon and Charles Moffett, "At the Golden Circle, Stockholm," and "New York Is Now" and "Love Call" with Dewey Redman, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones. From the '70s, the best of the fusion band Prime Time can be heard on "Body Meta" (Verve). The recording of the orchestral "Skies of America" (Columbia) is not how Coleman envisioned the piece, but the results are still fascinating. "Soapsuds Soapsuds" (Verve) is a deliriously lyrical tenor sax-bass duet with Haden. In the '90s, Coleman embraced the piano for the first time in nearly 40 years, recording two quartet CDs for Verve -- "Sound Museum: Three Women" and "Sound Museum: Hidden Man" -- with Detroit-native Geri Allen. Both feature different takes of the same tunes. "Colors" is a duet with pianist Joachim Kuhn

David: Reasonable points. Let me respond to a few. "Our Thing" was indeed a victim of space -- several things were cut on the fly and I recall dropping a reference to "Our Thing" because at the time it had temporarily fallen out of print and the others were all available and, as great at "Our Thing" is, at least one had to go and it got zapped. I picked Joe and Branford as examples of well-known cats influenced by Joe partly because of their name value to readers (who were more likely to have heard of those guys than, say, Javon Jackson, who frequently sounds as if he swallowed every record Joe ever made) and also because both in various conversations had told me how much they had picked up from Joe. I agree that perhaps Joe's playing is less on the surface in Lovano and Branford than some others, but I still hear it very much in Lovano's fluttery looseness and the reedy darkness of his sound. Branford's playing has changed in the last 10-15 years; I hear less Joe in him today than before. I never warmed to "Lush Life" but I, too, should probably give it another listen; it's been a long time. I loved the big band date. I know for a fact Joe had very ambivalent feelings about "Porgy" and touring with that material. As for lanky -- only 5'8"? Are you sure? That's how tall I am and I recall standing next to Joe once and had the feeling of looking up, plus he was always thin as a rail,which led me to "lanky." I would have guessed 6'1, but you're probably right. My impression was always that he was taller --maybe it's that thing where you always think your heroes are larger than life and he definitely was a hero. Addendum 1: I heard Branford sit in with Joe at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago around 1986. He and Kenny Kirkland (who did not sit in) had played a concert that night with Sting somewhere in the area. The rhythm section was Jodie Christian and Wilber Campbell and a bassist I can't remember, maybe John Whitfield. Another tenor player I didn't recognize and to this day have no idea who it was also sat-in. They played a fast "Tenor Madness" and when Branford soloed he played a bunch of Joe licks as a kind of homage -- a nice moment. I also recall that when Joe came on the Tonight Show after "Lush Life" came out he played "Take the A Train" and Branford's studio band played some of Joe's tunes throughout the show as bumper music coming back from commercials. I specifically remember hearing "Inner Urge," which was pretty hip.

David: Thanks for relaying that Ornette story, as well as your role in viz. Freddie's most recent activities. Jazz.com has a nice "dozens" feature with Randy Brecker picking 12 essential Freddie Hubbard moments on record. It's here: http://jazz.com/dozens/brecker-picks-hubbard. Also, in my previous post, one record I should have also mentioned was "Empyrean Isles." Freddie's solos on "One Finger Snap" and "Oliloqui Valley" are peerless. Actually, the whole band is extraordinary on this record; "Maiden Voyage" gets more ink, and deserves it compositionally, but "Empyrean Isles" is the record I put on when I want to hear Herbie, Freddie, Ron and Tony really play.

Detroit Free Press August 25, 2002 Riding the rhythm The ever-hip Louis Hayes, who made a name for himself during an era of great rummers, returns to his hometown to headline the Detroit jazz festival BYLINE: MARK STRYKER FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER DATELINE: NEW YORK It's almost impossible to look hip behind the wheel of a rented Ford Windstar. But nobody makes the scene quite like Louis Hayes, a leading drummer in jazz since arriving in New York 46 summers ago as a 19-year-old Detroiter with quick hands, sharp ears and a driving cymbal beat that would become his trademark. On this sweltering July Fourth, Hayes wears a stylish muscle shirt, linen pants and oversized designer glasses. Riding shotgun is his wife, Nisha, a Manhattan real estate agent. Hayes performs in Atlantic City on the boardwalk in 9 hours. It's little more than a 2-hour trip from Manhattan, but Hayes has insisted on an early start because he follows a strict preperformance regimen of practice, rest and concentration. "He's always on a schedule," says Nisha. "I went to Paris with him, and he's been 50 times and had never seen the Eiffel Tower. I had to drag him there." Hayes heads for the Lincoln Tunnel. Nisha points out the correct lane, but Hayes -- who is not as attentive a driver as he is a drummer -- comes within a few feet of merging into a bus. Nisha looks horrified: "Louis, he doesn't care that you play the drums!" Hayes barely raises an eyebrow. At 65, Hayes returns home to Detroit this week -- fortunately, on an airplane -- as a headliner at the Ford Detroit International Jazz Festival. He'll appear Friday with a veteran quintet, the Legends of the Bandstand, with tenor saxophonist David (Fathead) Newman, pianist Cedar Walton, bassist Earl May and trombonist and native Detroiter Curtis Fuller, a running buddy of Hayes' since 1955. Hayes' resume is a monument to his stature. He anchored two of the defining bands of East Coast hard bop, leaving Detroit in 1956 to join Horace Silver's Quintet, then jumping to the Cannonball Adderley Quintet in 1959. Hayes played with Oscar Peterson for three years in the mid-'60s and by the end of the decade was coleading a group with peers Freddie Hubbard and Joe Henderson. In the 1970s, Hayes led a series of artistically vital if financially challenged groups. In the '80s, with a daughter entering college, he returned to a sideman role with pianist McCoy Tyner. Since 1989, he has worked and recorded steadily with his own groups. He has appeared on hundreds of records. The late '50s and early '60s, when independent labels like Blue Note, Riverside, Prestige and Savoy might call Hayes two or three times a week, were an especially fertile period. "I was so fortunate," Hayes says. "I came to New York with a job and worked straight through with a major group all the way up until 1968. I wasn't written about all that much, and I had some tricky times later on in the '70s. But the major thing is being creative and making history. That's still the way I look at things." Hayes came of age in an era saturated with great drummers, but he quickly took his place near the top of the pecking order. He was a stylist who corralled his influences into a recognizable voice that married powerful swing with a graceful touch and a hipster's wit. Though not an innovator, Hayes has influenced drummers of several generations, including the late Tony Williams. Before he reshaped jazz drumming in the 1960s, Williams would take the train from Boston to New York just to hang out with Hayes on weekends. The heart of Hayes' style is the unique way he phrases the ride cymbal beat -- the ding-dinga-ding rhythm at the core of modern jazz. The cymbal beat is like a drummer's DNA; no two will be exactly alike. Hayes plays with a crisp but elusive quality, like a hummingbird. He places his beat just ahead of the basic pulse, never committing the sin of rushing, but generating the forward momentum of a downhill skier. "Louis is the kind of a guy, even to this day, if you were to handcuff his left hand to the drum stool and just have him play time on the cymbal, it would swing just as much," says drummer Kenny Washington, 44, a Hayes protege. Hayes also turned heads in New York with his quick reflexes and the clever way he would accent a melody or respond to a soloist with a sleight-of-hand rhythm. He mastered the art of "tippin' " -- swinging with fierce intensity but soft-shoe elegance. Washington notes that Hayes also was the first drummer to smooth out ultra-fast tempos into a continuous wave of rhythm. The night before his Atlantic City gig, Hayes talked about his life at his home in Riverdale, a leafy neighborhood in the northwest corner of the Bronx. The Hayeses own a 10th-floor co-op with a spectacular view of the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge. The apartment is decorated with African masks and sculptures, vaguely Afro-centric paintings and photos of family and friends. Hayes is a compact man, in good shape save a slight paunch, looking 15 years younger than he is. He walks with a streetwise gait and slight shoulder hunch that gives the impression of a coiled spring. To beat the heat on this sultry New York night, he wears shorts with no shirt; his forearms are as toned as a boxer's. In conversation, he stares at you intensely, with his eyes wide open and a blank expression on his face. He responds in discursive fragments, and if he agrees with you, he'll nod his head and exclaim, "That's mellow-D!" or "You're right on it!" "Louis deals with everyone the same way," says Rick Germanson, a young pianist who often works with Hayes. "He doesn't put on an act around younger or older musicians or critics or record producers. He's always himself." Fuller warns not to be fooled by Hayes' laid-back demeanor: "He's very knowledgeable, even if he doesn't seem like it. He'll stand back in reserve and appraise the situation, and then make his comment." Hayes grew up on Detroit's west side. Both parents were avocational musicians; His father, an autoworker, played drums, while his mother, who waited tables and eventually owned her own diner, played piano. Hayes started on the piano at 5 and the drums at 10. The key influence in Hayes' early development was his cousin Clarence Stamps, an accomplished drummer who grounded Hayes in technical fundamentals and taught him lessons that have stuck for life. Hayes remembers, "He'd say, 'If anything in the band goes wrong, it's your fault. When you're playing and you look out into the audience and you don't see anyone pattin' their feet, then you're not playing (expletive). And you can't just play the drums and not know where you are in the tune. You have to be in control of the band, and you have to make music out of the drums.' " By the time he was 15, Hayes was spending all day in the basement practicing, memorizing Charlie Parker solos and dabbling on piano and vibes. At 18, in 1955, he leapt into Detroit's major leagues, joining Yusef Lateef's quintet, along with Fuller, at Klein's Show Bar. At the same time, bassist Ernie Farrow introduced Hayes to the records of Kenny Clarke, the bebop pioneer who first moved the pulse from the bass drum to the ride cymbal. Hayes would spend hours listening to Clarke's pristine cymbal beat and hours more practicing his own version. Meanwhile, in New York, gutsy hard bop -- an alliance of bebop and bluesy roots influences -- was brewing in the seminal bands of Art Blakey and Horace Silver. When the latter needed a drummer, the Detroit-born bassist Doug Watkins had a recommendation: "Get the baby boy out of Detroit," he told Silver. Hayes was now working with one of the most influential pianists, composers and bandleaders in jazz. Silver's formally sophisticated compositions were girded by a finger-poppin' beat, a combination ideally suited to Hayes' strengths. The money wasn't great -- $125 a week. But Hayes was young, with no responsibilities other than music. Hayes made five classic albums with Silver before leaving in 1959 to join alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley's newly formed quintet, which mixed soul-jazz hits like "Work Song" and "Jive Samba" with more substantial hard bop. The combination proved as audience-friendly as a backyard barbecue. Hayes and bassist Sam Jones formed a dynamic duo at the heart of Adderley's band, and as their reputation soared, the pair began to show up on countless record dates together as sidemen. "Sam and I had this great rapport on and off stage," says Hayes. "We were so similar in the way we thought about time and the way we felt the beat. He was Mr. Dependable. The sound of Sam and I playing together just laid out this red carpet for anyone who played with us." Hayes left Adderley in 1965 when the band took a more commercial turn. In retrospect, Hayes says that he and Jones should have started their own group. Instead, both ended up joining Oscar Peterson's trio. Hayes liked Peterson personally, and the pianist's celebrity meant that Hayes' salary nearly doubled. But Peterson's scripted concept was like a train that ran on just one track, and Hayes felt stifled. He chafed under the restrictions, and Peterson often had to lecture him. Sometimes Hayes would go to a party, have a couple of drinks and lecture Peterson, who would respond by firing him -- for a day. This happened a dozen times, Hayes recalls. Since then, Hayes has generally led his own bands. Around 2 p.m., Hayes navigates the Windstar down Atlantic Avenue to the Trump Taj Mahal, a 1,250-room hotel roughly the size of Rhode Island, with an Ali Baba decor that redefines the meaning of kitsch. A few hours later, Hayes is deep into his preconcert routine. He sits in an overstuffed purple chair with a practice pad propped up in front of him. His right hand is a blur of motion, and it takes a moment to realize that he is playing his cymbal beat at a racehorse tempo. The TV is tuned to CNN, and Hayes also answers questions as the calisthenics continue. He plays nonstop for 20 minutes, takes a 30-second break for water and then goes back to work. Hayes practices far more today than when he was on the road 40 years ago. "The older you get, the harder things get," he says. "I could do things when I was younger that now I really have to practice to even attempt to be able to do. My peak was when I was about 40 -- I was liable to do anything. " A few hours later, Hayes is setting up his drums at the amphitheater at the south end of the boardwalk near Chicken Bone Beach, a once-segregated playground frequented by the African-American elite before the civil rights movement. Hayes has changed into loose-fitting pale-yellow pants and shirt and a necklace adorned by a large earth-colored stone. "Wow, he sure looks good," a middle-aged woman says as she watches nearby. "How old is he?" "Sixty-five." "Mmm. Mmm." The group is Hayes' Cannonball Adderley Legacy Band, a relatively new venture for him, devoted to the saxophonist's repertoire. Hayes enjoys the old tunes and is mindful that he is the sole survivor of Adderley's original 1959 group. The other members of the Legacy band, including the exciting alto saxophonist Vincent Herring, are about 30 years younger than Hayes. The group tears through a 75-minute set, with Hayes firing on all cylinders, playing with greater precision than he sometimes reveals in other settings these days; his style grew splashier during the '70s and '80s. Hayes' right hand swarms over the cymbal; his left-hand pops snare drum accents like a pistol. As fiercely as he plays, Hayes is not flashy. His limbs stay close to his body. His head sways a little, but there are no histrionics. Hayes solos sparingly, and he doesn't even trade phrases with the horns until the fourth tune. After the set, he fields congratulations while packing his gear, stopping to shake hands, pose for pictures and chat when older fans tell tales of hearing him as a kid in Philly or New York. As the line winds down, the journalists who have been tailing him step in to say farewell. "We're sure looking forward to hearing you at the Detroit festival," says one. Hayes pauses before breaking into a wide grin. "OK, that's mellow-D!" {END}

Jazz legend comes home with the blues on his mind BYLINE: Mark Stryker, Detroit Free Press Sep. 4--Jazz aficionados have been buzzing for weeks about the rumor that Yusef Lateef was going to play the blues when the 86-year-old Detroit-born legend returned home to perform Monday night at the Detroit International Jazz Festival. In this case, "the blues" was meant literally as in the 12-bar elemental musical form, as well as a metaphor for the kind of fundamental modern jazz that the tenor saxophonist, flutist and oboist used to play back in the day. In his last appearance at the jazz festival in 1999, Lateef explored a multi-ethnic idiom with his band Eternal Wind. The music's abstraction upset the festival's bebop fan base, and even those who appreciated the aesthetic questioned whether the large Amphitheatre at Hart Plaza was the proper venue for such experimentation. This time Lateef was fronting a traditional piano-bass-drums rhythm section. But nobody should have been surprised that his landscape for improvisation remained rooted in a pan-Asian, Middle Eastern and African sound world of earthy rhythm, exotic texture and open form. This is the music that Lateef -- whose nascent experiments with non-Western ideas came 50 years ago -- has been committed to for a long time. Still, he did play the blues, the 12-bar kind. In the middle of his set at the Pyramid Stage he picked up his oboe and, with the rhythm section laying down traditional swing in a slow walking tempo, blew several spare choruses with plangent expression and bent pitch. The traditional harmonies were enriched by extensions and substitutions that coated the down-home soul with a sophisticated glaze. The jam-packed audience took to it like catnip. The performance had an air of ritual. Lateef, physically imposing in a purple dashiki, recited poetry, played flutes of various kinds, including two wooden ones of his own invention, and manipulated an Indian double reed whose sound he colored by cupping his hands around it. The cast of the music was moody, meditative and prayerful, as if Lateef were pleading for peace in a world gone mad. On one long piece, pianist Alex Marcellos, bassist Avery Sharpe and drummer Kamal Jones played a rolling vamp that sounded like a cross between a swampy shuffle from the Gulf Coast and a West African chant. Lateef's plaintive tenor phrases suggested field hollers -- on some level, of course, Lateef has never stopped playing the blues, even when he ventures a long way from the 12-bar variety. It's as much a part of his DNA as Detroit. Lateef's energy seemed to come and go, but there were times when the spirit welled up within him and the music ascended to a higher plane of muscularity and excitement. One came during a long free-jazz duet with Jones' aggressive drums during which Lateef's quick bursts expanded into squawks and rippling phrases running up and down the horn. His tenor tone billowed, gaining weight and stamina. When the set was over, Lateef's old friend Dave Usher, who produced Lateef's early recording taped live at Cranbrook in the '50s, gave him the festival's Jazz Guardian Award for his lifelong contributions. Lateef accepted humbly and then read one of his poems filled with lovely imagery of flowers, natural beauty, the inevitability of death and the glory of the Creator. It seemed a fitting close for a spiritual man whose autobiography is titled "Gentle Giant." {END}

Thanks, Bill. Jazz is only part of my job here, but I have to say my Free Press editors have been very supportive over the years in recognizing how important jazz is to the cultural fabric here and allowing the space and resources to do the stories I think need to be done. The one area we don't do much of is live jazz reviews -- most of my concert reviewing is on the classical side -- because the profiles and features are a more efficient use of my time and provide a bigger swath of readers coverage that makes a greater impact. The one exception is that we review performances from our big Labor Day festival. I'll post a few of those as we go along.

If anyone's interested, here's my take on the program, which Eighth Blackbird performed in Ann Arbor a week prior to the NY concert. Mature Eighth Blackbird flies high: Ensemble performs beyond the fringe BYLINE: Mark Stryker, Detroit Free Press Apr. 12--It's been a thrill for metro Detroiters to watch Eighth Blackbird grow into a leading new music ensemble, because we've known about the group's charisma and skill longer than most. The sextet made its local debut at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival in 1997, a year after its founding at the Oberlin Conservatory. Earlier this year the group won a Grammy award for its CD "Strange Imaginary Animals" and on Thursday reached another milestone, a University Musical Society debut. The ambitious program featured music premiered last month. Steve Reich's "Double Sextet" found the ensemble performing live with a prerecorded tape of itself. "Singing in the Dead of Night" is a collaboration by the three founding composers of New York's Bang on a Can, David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe, with restrained but effective choreography by Susan Marshall. The chain of influences was alluring. Reich, 71, is a founding hero of minimalism, whose pulsating rhythmic grids, spare harmonies, vernacular leanings and self-reliant spirit left a huge imprint on the post-classical aesthetic of Bang on a Can, whose do-it-yourself model has inspired young ensembles like Eighth Blackbird. "Double Sextet" features Reich's trademark gleaming surfaces and phase-shifting rhythms, but there is also the sneaky melodic lushness that has crept into his music in recent decades. Piano and vibes (and their taped counterparts) acted a rhythm section, creating a web of head-bobbing, asymmetric rhythms. Violin, flute, clarinet and cello laid slowly revolving melodies on top, creating a glint so bright you almost needed sunglasses. In the slow movement, piano and vibes merged into a pool of open harmony and the melody took on a beautiful yearning quality that reminded me of a meditative John Coltrane ballad. The performance had energy but felt a bit stiff, as if the players were still settling into the work, and the impact would have been greater if the tape had been louder. The piece sounded less like a dialogue between equals than a live sextet with taped accompaniment. In "Singing in the Dead of Night," three sections by Lang surround movements by Gordon and Wolfe. The best music came from Lang (who won a Pulitzer for another piece this week). The bright and prickly mix of piccolo and glockenspiel and the complex rhythms in his prologue suggested Oliver Messiaen's birds with a groove, while the bell-like tolls in his central movement had the quiet intensity of poetry. Gordon's agitated movement pitted jaunty fiddling and woodwind jamming against a sliding cello, humorously sudden percussive clangs and even a touch of harmonica and accordion. Wolfe's night music started promisingly but seemed overly long. The music had a tactile quality that merged comfortably with Marshall's staging. There were two especially memorable moments of theater. In the first, one player so loaded another's arms with metal cans and percussion that he couldn't keep them all afloat. They sprang a leak, falling one-by-one until they all went in a final tragicomedic crash. Played against the gentle music, the scene was charged with existential angst that wouldn't have been out of place in a production of "Waiting for Godot." The other great moment came as the players pushed sand around on an amplified table during Wolfe's movement to create an eerie whoosh; at one point pianist Lisa Kaplan's whole body rolled on the table. Still, less is more in this idiom and the falling instruments and magic-sand tricks grew wearisome after several repetitions. On the other hand, the players -- Kaplan, flutist Tim Munro, clarinetist Michael Maccaferri, violinist Matt Albert, cellist Nicholas Photinos and percussionist Matthew Duvall -- attacked the music and theater with such vibrant virtuosity that it was easy to overlook the imperfections.

Detroit Free Press JULY 3, 2001 JOE HENDERSON: JAZZ MAN PUT FREEDOM TO WORK BYLINE: MARK STRYKER FREE PRESS MUSIC WRITER For most of his career, tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, who perfected his craft in the crucible of Detroit's jazz scene of the late 1950s, had the unfortunate distinction of being the most underrated jazz musician on the planet. His peers revered him as an innovator, lining up three-deep at the bar to catch him in a club; students memorized his licks like scripture. Yet the wider jazz audience shrugged, and so did most critics, who should have known better. Then fate did a somersault. After 30 years in the trenches, Henderson -- who died Saturday at age 64 in San Francisco from heart failure brought on by emphysema -- became an unlikely star in the 1990s. A minor backlash against the young-lion craze in jazz prompted industry giant Verve to sign Henderson. Powered by major-label marketing muscle, he found an audience. The CDs -- crafty concept albums that included tributes to Billy Strayhorn, Miles Davis and Antonio Carlos Jobim -- flew out of stores, and Henderson suddenly found himself on the cover of jazz mags, pocketing headliner bread, polishing four Grammy Awards on his mantel and flying first-class, where he could stretch out his lanky frame. The irony was monumental. This was a musician known to colleagues as "the Phantom" because of his elusive personality, quirky behavior and analytical mind. On stage he played long solos, dense with ideas, with a soft, reedy sound as mysterious as smoke. He rarely spoke, not even to introduce tunes or sidemen. He just played his butt off. Every night. Every set. For 40 years. "I always wanted to be an improviser of the likes that hasn't been seen out here," Henderson told the Free Press in 1996. "And I learned one thing along the way that served me pretty well: I considered it a sin, in the same way God might consider an act a sin, to ever play an idea more than once. If the world didn't hear it that one time, well, too bad." Henderson was born in Lima, Ohio, on April 24, 1937, but came of age studying at Wayne State University from 1956 to 1960. He haunted the city's jazz temples like the Blue Bird and the Bohemian Club, rubbing shoulders with Yusef Lateef, Barry Harris, Terry Pollard and other local heroes. "It was a powerful scene," Henderson recalled. "One of the best learning, growing, getting-it-all-sorted-out scenes you could've been in on at that time." Detroit was a bebop town. If you didn't speak the language of Charlie Parker and Bud Powell, you didn't survive. Henderson arrived with his own sound; Detroit taught him harmony, tunes and the rules of bebop. But Henderson's ears were also open to the radical ideas of saxophonist Ornette Coleman, then upsetting the jazz world by throwing away the traditional rules of harmony and form. Henderson credited his Wayne State studies of Hindemith, Stravinsky and Bartok with keeping his mind flexible. Henderson's early records revealed a synthesis of the discipline of bebop with the exploratory freedom of the avant-garde. Henderson played free within structure. A whole gang of young musicians was working along similar lines in the '60s -- Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Bobby Hutcherson among them -- and their artistic victories became the basis of today's jazz mainstream. Henderson offered an alternative to the laser-like sonorities, modal improvisations and devotional manner of John Coltrane, the era's leading saxophonist. Henderson's roots were in the rhythmic freedom and wit of Sonny Rollins. No one played with more flexible rhythm than Henderson; he was a drummer channeling through the saxophone. His solos came out of his horn like Silly String. He'd suspend time and harmony in a fog of flickering trills and whirlwind arpeggios. He'd swoop from his high register to the basement of the saxophone in the blink of an eye. He'd start a phrase in a veiled corner of the beat, hold it up to the sun and then bury it again. He'd play anything at any time. Henderson's Blue Note albums from the '60s -- "Page One," "Inner Urge," "In 'n' Out," "Mode for Joe" -- contain much of his best work. He also recorded as a sideman with most of the key musicians of his time, including McCoy Tyner, Lee Morgan, Kenny Dorham, Larry Young, Horace Silver and Chick Corea. Several of Henderson's compositions have become talismans for musicians because of their beguiling structures, including "Recorda-Me," "Inner Urge," "Isotope" and "A Shade of Jade." And large chunks of his style can be heard in the playing of saxophonists ranging from stars like Branford Marsalis and Joe Lovano to fresh conservatory graduates. Henderson's final appearance in metro Detroit came in January 1997, when he performed at the Michigan Theatre in Ann Arbor with bassist George Mraz and drummer Al Foster. The last tune was Strayhorn's ballad "Lush Life," which the trio deconstructed in rubato time. Henderson wandered phrase by phrase through the song, ending each melodic cell with a symphony of improvisation lasting anywhere from 10 seconds to more than a minute. His playing made old men out of almost every other musician in jazz, and when it was over he slipped into the shadows without saying a word. {END} HENDERSON ON DISC Looking for the essential Joe Henderson on CD? Start with the the classics recorded for Blue Note in 1963-67. "Inner Urge" and "In 'n' Out" both feature pianist McCoy Tyner and drummer Elvin Jones and are favorites of musicians. "Mode for Joe" features a septet and Henderson's most finely wrought compositions. "Page One," his debut, documents his partnership with trumpeter Kenny Dorham and includes two calling cards, Henderson's "Recorda-Me" and Dorham's "Blue Bossa." Henderson contributed to dozens of other Blue Note sessions. Don't miss Dorham's "Una Mas," Lee Morgan's "The Sidewinder," Larry Young's "Unity," Andrew Hill's "Point of Departure," Tyner's "The Real McCoy," Horace Silver's "Song for My Father" and "Cape Verdean Blues." Henderson's Milestone sides (1967-1976) are collected in an eight-CD box. The music is inconsistent, but the best albums are indispensable: "Power to the People" straddles acoustic-electric sound worlds with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnette. "In Japan" is a firecracker. In the '80s, Blue Note released two volumes of "The State of the Tenor," a pair of sonically poor trio records taped at the Village Vanguard. The reissue repaired the sound and packaged both together. "Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn" kicked off Henderson's Verve contract in 1992; unfortunately, it's overproduced and suffers from green sidemen. But the authority of "So Near So Far" and "Double Rainbow" -- tributes to Miles Davis and bossa nova giant Antonio Carlos Jobim -- is breathtaking. Hearing 17 pieces play cockeyed Henderson licks makes "Big Band" (1996) a kick. But "Porgy and Bess" (1997), Henderson's last album, is again overproduced and flat.

Here's one from August 2001, about three months before Tommy died. I think it's the last major piece anyone wrote about him but I may be wrong. Detroit Free Press AUGUST 26, 2001 A LEGENDARY TOUCH THE DETROIT-BORN PIANIST TOMMY FLANAGAN BRINGS HIS SAGE, SATINY AND SWINGING BEBOP HOME FOR THE JAZZ FESTIVAL BYLINE: MARK STRYKER FREE PRESS MUSIC WRITER DATELINE: NEW YORK Tommy Flanagan descends the steep staircase leading from Seventh Avenue to the Village Vanguard and briefly surveys the empty club before shuffling to the piano. His hands fall lovingly on the keys as if he were shaking hands with an old friend. Flanagan -- one of the finest musicians produced by the golden age of modern jazz in Detroit and a headliner at the Ford Detroit International Jazz Festival -- first played the Vanguard as a sideman with trombonist J.J. Johnson in the late 1950s. More recently, Flanagan's all-world trios have spent many nights in residence at this hallowed temple of jazz, and he's recorded two exemplary albums here. But now, in the afternoon stillness, he plays for himself and the ghosts of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and the other departed jazz heroes whose photos line the smoke-stained walls of the world's most famous basement. One soft-spoken chord meanders into another until a melody emerges from the mist -- "Gone with the Wind," a 1937 gem that reminds you Flanagan doesn't know every tune, just the best ones. He glides into a walk-in-the-park tempo, improvising fluid ideas ripe with insouciant swing, fine-spun counterpoint and elegant bebop melodies whose single-note lines hang on the chords like Christmas ornaments. Flanagan's lyrical touch is legendary -- each note sounds like a pearl wrapped in silk -- and this is the first topic he addresses when the songs ends. "My touch comes from listening and trying to get a sound that I had in my head," he says in a gentle voice that rarely rises above a stage whisper. "I never did get much out of playing too hard. In fact, when I thought I was playing too loud, I'd use the soft pedal. I liked that -- you play harder but get a softer sound. I had an old, harsh-sounding piano at home, anyway." At 71, Flanagan plays like the hippest angel in heaven, seducing listeners through a sublime marriage of grace and guts, swing and sagacity, wit and warmth. It's been two years since he last performed in his hometown -- illness forced him to cancel a 70th-birthday concert at Orchestra Hall last year -- and his festival appearance marks the local debut of his latest trio, with veteran drummer Albert Heath joining bassist Peter Washington. Flanagan's poetic brand of modernism is so universally admired today that it's sobering to remember it wasn't always that way. Until launching the second act of his career in the late '70s, he was a secret to almost everyone but his fellow musicians. Most observers regarded him as a career accompanist. Flanagan's self-effacing personality and his resume worked against him. He spent 14 years as Ella Fitzgerald's pianist, from 1962 to 1965 and 1968 to 1978. (In between was a brief stint with Tony Bennett.) Flanagan recorded sparingly as a leader, releasing zero records under his own name between 1960 and 1975. He recorded prolifically as a sideman, however, appearing on such classic '50s LPs as Miles Davis' "Collectors' Items," Sonny Rollins' "Saxophone Colossus" and John Coltrane's "Giant Steps." The turning point came in 1978, when a heart attack put him in the hospital for 17 days. He quit smoking, cut down on drinking and gave his notice to Ella. Soon he formed the first in a series of trios specializing in nattily tailored interpretations of exquisite standards and underplayed jazz originals by Thad Jones, Monk, Tadd Dameron, Billy Strayhorn, Ellington and others. Flanagan became a fixture in the New York clubs and recorded a string of thrilling albums, mostly for small European labels. Not until 1998, when Blue Note released "The Sunset and the Mockingbird," did a major American label support Flanagan. By then his brilliance was received wisdom. "Flanagan's position is less a matter of besting the competition than bringing his powers to a peak where competition is irrelevant," critic Gary Giddins wrote a few years ago. "He's perfected his own niche, a style beyond style, where the only appropriate comparisons are between his inspired performances and those that are merely characteristic." Flanagan's style is deceptive. He is known for his satin touch, but he can play with a cunningly sharp attack and swings as deeply as anyone. He is a child of bebop and a master of bop's rhythmic displacements, harmonic challenges and the horn-like style pioneered by pianist Bud Powell. But Flanagan's roots also reach back to pre-bop pianists like Teddy Wilson, Art Tatum, Fats Waller, the transitional Nat Cole and the early modernist from Pontiac, Hank Jones -- all pianists with active left hands and refined elan. "I was first influenced by Teddy Wilson," says Flanagan. "He was a firm player, but he also had a beautiful touch. If that's your first inspiration, you really want to improve on it. In the last 20 years or so my volume has increased. In fact, I had a drummer once who left the group because he said the piano was too loud." Flanagan laughs at the irony: "Imagine that -- a drummer telling the piano player he was too loud." Michael Weiss, one of the legion of younger pianists who revere Flanagan, points out that a large part of his identity is his pianistic approach to dynamics, attack, pedaling and orchestration. "Each note or chord has a carefully considered sonority, as opposed to a generic kind of voicing," says Weiss. "He might start a melody in single-note lines, then play something in thirds, octaves or full chords. That carries over to his improvising. If he's soloing and ascends to a climax, he'll orchestrate that moment -- put a chord under the melody note to color or accent what he's doing." Flanagan manipulates the keyboard pedals like a classical virtuoso, employing the sustain pedal to connect his ideas in a smooth legato without allowing his notes to bleed into a puddle. "Sometimes guys just come and watch my feet," says Flanagan. "You know, there's a way of breathing when you use the pedals. It's like phrasing." Flanagan is a handsome, distinguished man, but he is more frail than in years past, and his clothes hang loosely on his small frame. He has a long face, tender eyes, a sweet smile and wears large round glasses. He lost his hair early, and only a wisp of white remains above and behind his ears. A bushy gray mustache almost hides his dimples. Flanagan does nothing in a hurry, least of all talk. He answers questions in stages, leaving long gaps of silence and looking past his interviewer into an undefined middle distance. Still, when the mood strikes, he is an agile conversationalist with a martini-dry wit. "Tommy may not say much, but when he does speak, it's the truth," says Weiss. Flanagan has lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan since the 1950s, for the last 25 years on 82nd Street with his wife, Diana, a vivacious woman whom he married in 1976. Married once before, Flanagan and has three children from his first marriage and six grandchildren. The apartment is tastefully decorated and cluttered with Diana's books -- a former singer, she was a literature major in college and devours fiction, poetry, history, biography and music tomes. A Steinway grand piano stands in one corner of the living room opposite a sitting area by the window. Photos of jazz musicians like Charlie Parker and Ellington are scattered about, along with paintings, including a small landscape by Nancy Balliett, wife of New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett. A framed caricature of Flanagan by the cartoonist Al Hirschfeld watches over the piano. On this afternoon, Flanagan and Diana nuzzle on the sofa while paging through the recently published "Before Motown: A History of Jazz in Detroit, 1920-60" (University of Michigan Press, $24.95). Flanagan points and smiles at the photos of lifelong friends like Barry Harris, Kenny Burrell, Elvin Jones, the late Pepper Adams and others who were part of a remarkable eruption of jazz talent in mid-century Detroit. Diana squeals at the pictures of her husband working around town as a teenager. "Oh, sweetheart! What a darling you were! I would have loved you!" "Stand in line," Flanagan deadpans. He lays the book down on a table and begins to reminisce about his salad days. In 1953, he joined the famous house band at the Blue Bird Inn, working alongside saxophonist Billy Mitchell, trumpeter Thad Jones and drummer Elvin Jones. At the Blue Bird, Flanagan first played with many of the musicians with whom he would later work in New York. "I couldn't have gotten very far without those days in Detroit," Flanagan says. "We had good role models. They didn't use that term then, but we had some people we respected who played as well as those people who came into town that we'd go see. We had people like Milt Jackson, Yusef Lateef, Lucky Thompson, Wardell Gray." Flanagan grew up in northeast Detroit in Conant Gardens. He was the last of six children. His father was a postman, and both parents loved music, especially his mother. Flanagan started on the clarinet at 6, but by then he was already climbing up on the piano bench, imitating the lessons he heard his brother practice. Encouraged by his mother, Flanagan started piano lessons at 10 and still has a fondness for Chopin and Ravel. He got interested in jazz when his brother started bringing home the latest Billie Holiday records, which featured Teddy Wilson on piano. "I've been living with this music since I was 6 years old," he says. Flanagan attended Northern High School, where pianists Roland Hanna and Bess Bonnier were classmates. In 1949, after Flanagan backed Harry Belafonte at the Flame Show Bar, Belafonte offered him a gig in New York. But Flanagan's mother thought her baby was too young to leave town, so a disappointed Flanagan stayed put. Then he was drafted and spent two years in the Army. When the orders came to ship out to Korea, he wanted to take the newest music with him, so he stuffed Thelonious Monk's Blue Note 78s into his suitcase. Eventually, Flanagan made it to New York, moving there in early 1956. Outside of music and family, his memories of Detroit are not all pleasant. "I always wished I'd left earlier," he says. "Detroit started to grind on me. There wasn't much freedom to move around. The police were horrible then. They'd hassle you in your own neighborhood. One night when I was about 12, I was walking by a printing shop where they'd found some subversive material and they stopped me, guns drawn. I said, 'What are you going to do? I'm just a kid.' " In New York, things moved swiftly. Within a year, Flanagan had subbed for Bud Powell at Birdland and recorded with both Davis and Sonny Rollins. He cherishes the memories: At the first recording session with Davis, he recalls, the trumpeter pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket containing a barely legible sketch of Brubeck's "In Your Own Sweet Way." Davis supplied the chord voicings for the famous introduction that Flanagan plays, but Flanagan devised the rhythm. Then there was the time J.J. Johnson's Quintet alternated sets at the Vanguard with Jack Kerouac, who would read from his books or extemporize. One night, Flanagan, Elvin Jones and Kerouac -- a world-class drinker -- ended up at Flanagan's apartment. "Before the morning was over, Elvin threatened to kill him," Flanagan recalls. "Kerouac said something outrageous and Elvin took offense. I think I did too, but Elvin was more menacing." Talked out, Flanagan stands up and slowly makes his way to the piano. Stacks of popular songbooks sit on a nearby shelf, and on top of the piano is a folder of compositions by Modern Jazz Quartet founder John Lewis. The pianist had sent the music to Flanagan for a possible CD before his death in March. Flanagan plays a few enigmatic arpeggios before slipping into the the Jimmy McHugh ballad "Where Are You?" with a fanciful twist of harmony that unlocks a back door to the song. He plays a chorus sotto voce and then a second with more volume, dialogue and emotion. The results are so eloquent that a visitor quickly requests "Last Night When We Were Young" to keep Flanagan at the keyboard. It's an unusually abstract pop song; Harold Arlen's melody and harmony move in odd patterns. Flanagan hasn't played it in ages, and he watches his hands with a puzzled look on his face, as if his fingers belonged to another pianist. When he gets stuck for a note, Diana, who seems to know as many songs as her husband, softly sings Yip Harburg's mature lyric from the sofa. The music shudders with feeling. When it's over, Diana has a tear in her eye and Flanagan a faraway look in his. {END} (SIDEBAR:) TOMMY FLANAGAN ON CD Tommy Flanagan has recorded prolifically as a leader since the late 1970s, and his work is remarkably consistent. The finest overall introduction to his trio is probably "Jazz Poet" (1989) with George Mraz and Kenny Washington, but it's hard to go wrong with any of the following: "Elypso" (1977), "Super Session" (1980), "Sea Changes" (1997), "The Sunset and the Mockingbird" (1998) and "Beyond the Bluebird" (1990), the latter featuring Kenny Burrell. Flanagan has also recorded a series of brilliant songbook albums devoted to John Coltrane ("Giant Steps"), Thad Jones ("Lets"); Thelonious Monk ("Thelonica") and Ella Fitzgerald ("Lady Be Good"). "Our Delight" is a gorgeous duet album with the Pontiac-bred pianist Hank Jones. Two early albums worth seeking out are "Overseas" (1957) and "The Tommy Flanagan Trio" (1960). Among Flanagan's countless appearances as a sideman, don't miss Coltrane's "Giant Steps," Sonny Rollins' "Saxophone Colossus," Miles Davis' "Collectors' Items," Kenny Dorham's "Quiet Kenny" and Ella Fitzgerald's "Ella in London."

DETROIT FREE PRESS AUGUST 27, 2000 PROFESSOR OF BEBOP AT 70, NATIVE DETROITER BARRY HARRIS SHARES THE SECRETS OF THE JAZZ TRADITION WITH STUDENTS IN NEW YORK BYLINE: MARK STRYKER FREE PRESS MUSIC WRITER DATELINE: NEW YORK On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, just beyond the shadow of Juilliard, the bejeweled conservatory of classical music, sits the Lincoln Square Community Center. A gritty gathering place cut from cold concrete, it is the current home to the longest running master class in jazz. The professor is pianist Barry Harris, one of the greatest musicians ever produced by Detroit. At 70, Harris remains the foremost bebop muse on the planet, channeling the spirit of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk through his own foxy wit, harmonic imagination and rhythmic rumble. Widely recorded, Harris has worked with many of the key figures in jazz since the '40s. Less well known is that he has long been considered a legendary teacher, a mentor to scores of musicians since his days as a precocious teenager in Detroit more than 50 years ago. A bebop guru, Harris has codified the modern jazz language into an integrated system. Today, he holds weekly workshops in which, like a swinging Socrates, he guides students in a quest for Truth, Beauty and the hippest chords to play on "Body and Soul." The students -- fresh graduates from overly starched music schools, mid-career pros searching for new avenues of expression, middle-age amateurs with a passion for jazz and the warm camaraderie of the class -- flock to Harris. They come because of his subtle charisma and because his system comes stamped with Talmudic authority. In an age in which the traditional apprentice system has all but collapsed in jazz, Harris represents a direct link to the pantheon. "The tradition of learning a folk music is to learn it from the folk that do it," says pianist Rodney Kendrick, 40, who began studying with Harris 20 years ago and still attends class, even though he's recorded several CDs. "The only way you can teach this music is by example, as opposed to going to some schools where these cats tell you about ' 'Round Midnight,' 'Cherokee' or some song. They don't have a clue. They haven't played with anybody but the guy next door, who's just as clueless as they are." Harris teaches on Tuesdays. The students show up in waves: pianists at 6:30 p.m., singers at 8:30 and horn players (saxophonists, trumpeters, guitarists, even violinists) at 10:30. They pay a one-time registration fee of $30 plus $8 a night. The space is large and hollow, like an elementary school gym, with dingy light and two baby grand pianos pushed to one side like orphaned twins. As the clock ticks past 6:40 on a recent Tuesday, Yoko Kawaguchi, 31, moves to a piano and begins to play "Over the Rainbow" in a ballad tempo. Nearby, Harris cocks his ear, shuffles over to the piano bench and takes a seat next to her. Those milling about the room notice, and soon a dozen other pianists are huddled around them, some standing on chairs. Tape recorders are turned on. Manuscript paper is readied. Class is in session, though even Harris doesn't know the agenda. Kawaguchi, a newly minted graduate of Indiana University, works carefully through the song, measuring each phrase like a cook wedded to a recipe. When Harris hears a missed opportunity to add a new spice, to improvise, his hands dart to the keyboard. He plays a clever descending sequence of diminished and dominant arpeggios that excites a transition with flavor and texture. Kawaguchi smiles. She copies the notes, tripping at first. Harris repeats the idea slower. Back and forth they go, Harris making up variations, exploring the problem from several angles. "OK, get up," he says. The other students take turns playing the sequence. An hour passes. "Each class takes on its own shape," says pianist Michael Weiss, 42, a close friend of Harris who is also leading a band at the Detroit jazz festival. "Barry puts something on the table and says, 'Let's solve this together.' " Harris has always been fascinated with the nuts and bolts of harmony: the bittersweet lyricism of chords layered on top of each other; voice-leading and finding new harmonic colors to apply to standard songs the way a painter like Bonnard might use six shades of red in a landscape. The relationship between chords and scales is another favorite topic. "A scale gives you movement," he tells the class, repeating a lesson learned decades ago from tenor saxophone master Coleman Hawkins. "Don't play chords, play movement." Now it's time to play stump the teacher. Weiss, who has stopped by class to say hello, gets drafted into the colloquium on harmony. "Have you thought of this?" he asks, fingering complex chords derived from a minor scale. Harris looks puzzled. "Don't say nothing," he says before Weiss can jump in with an explanation. Then Harris tries the sequence, savoring each odd consonance like sips of an exotic wine. It's 9 p.m. the following day, and Harris is downing sushi at a favorite Japanese restaurant on 8th Avenue in Midtown. He breaks into a gap-toothed grin. "I must be the dumbest kid in the class 'cause I've been in it the longest, and I'm the biggest thief in the class 'cause I steal from everybody," Harris says in his gentle, gravelly baritone. Harris has hunched shoulders, a high forehead, a drooping bottom lip and soft, puppy eyes that peer above glasses. His hair -- full on the sides, thin on top -- is ivory white. A few black streaks darken his mustache. "The more I learn, the more I can see where Bird (Charlie Parker), Bud, Diz and those cats didn't do it all... You need to learn the rules so you can bend the rules, extend the rules and come up with new answers." Growing up in Detroit, Harris had two kinds of music teachers. Formal instruction began with his mother, a church pianist. But like all musicians of his generation, Harris learned jazz from the rhythm of the streets, on the bandstand, at jam sessions and by copying solos from recordings. Harris would stand behind his friend and contemporary pianist Tommy Flanagan and steal chords. Saxophonist and composer Frank Foster, who would later write dozens of classic arrangements for Count Basie, gave Harris a cheat sheet around 1950 crammed with orchestration tips that Harris still keeps. Harris anchored the house trio at the hallowed Blue Bird Inn, backing stars of the day like Miles Davis. A quick study, Harris soon took a leadership role in Detroit's close-knit jazz community, mentoring slightly younger peers like bassist Paul Chambers, trumpeter Donald Byrd and trombonist Curtis Fuller. All became stars. Harris' reputation grew, and musicians traveling through Detroit began stopping by his house to jam and study informally, including the nascent revolutionary saxophonist John Coltrane. Harris' system made him unique, and the fundamentals he devised in the mid-'50s remain the backbone of his teaching. Harris put the virtuoso improvisations of Parker, Gillespie, Powell and other modern jazz pioneers under a microscope. He discovered the musical syntax and grammar that makes the bebop language work -- scales, chords, passing tones. He then organized a set of rules that helps musicians play like natives, without an accent. "Barry's theory is derived directly from the practice, and more often than not in universities they have it backward," says Weiss. Not all of Harris' lessons have to do with the mechanics of music. Detroit-bred alto saxophonist Charles McPherson, 61, one of the leading keepers of the bebop flame, used to go to Harris' house nearly every day as a teenager to play. One day, Harris spied his report card littered with Cs. "Charles, this is real average stuff. You must be an average guy." "Yeah, well, what's wrong with that?" "Man, all your heroes, they're not average at all. Cats like Bird are very well-read. Bird could sit down and talk about philosophy and paintings; he was very erudite. You can't possibly play this kind of music and be an average guy. There's too much going on." The talk changed McPherson's life. He started reading. Made the honor roll. Taught him a lesson some musicians never learn: "The more you know the more you have to play about," McPherson says. "You have more to say, other than just F minor to B-flat-7." Harris inspires a striking level of devotion from his students, some of whom have been schlepping 90 minutes to class from Long Island every week for a decade. Schoolgirl crushes are not unusual. At class, a young student from Japan, who speaks little English, brings Harris special cookies from her homeland. Harris thanks her with grandfatherly pecks on the cheek. The students know that no other musician of Harris' stature is willing to practically give away his secrets at group seminars rather than pricey private lessons. They know if money's tight they can skip the cover charge. They know that much of the income Harris derives from the class covers expenses, and that it is not uncommon for him to pay airfare to Europe for several students when he conducts clinics overseas. "Everybody wants a piece of heaven, and when you see it, you go to it," says Kendrick. Like many teachers placed on a pedestal, Harris finds the adulation intoxicating. Yet nothing gives him more honest pleasure than the twinkling smile of a student graced by the sudden shock of discovery. "Everything's worth that smile," he says. Harris' classes have been permanent fixtures somewhere in New York since about 1970. "One day I forgot about the class," he recalls. "At 7 o'clock -- I was supposed to be there at 4 -- I realized I forgot, and I jumped in a cab up to 58th Street. Everybody was still there waiting for me! That's when I said, 'We're going to have the class from now on.' " By 10:40 p.m., the nearly three dozen singers -- whom Harris taught lyrics and elementary phrasing by rote -- have retired. Now Harris sits facing some 20 horn players and, like a hip drill sergeant, puts his squadron through rigorous calisthenics designed to train the fingers, ears and mind to work as a single unit. He sings melodic phrases and the class plays them back in unison. The instructions come quickly, given in numbers and letters that sound like secret code to the uninitiated: "Start on the tonic of A-flat and come down the scale, put a half-step between the 6 and 5 and stop at the 3rd of F." Harris links ideas together like the cars of a train, and soon the students are playing serpentine lines that jitterbug through the harmony, dancing with syncopation and leaping intervals. One idea leads to another and, before long, Harris finds himself orchestrating an arrangement based on a 55-year-old Gillespie introduction to "I Can't Get Started." Harris assembles the pieces like a puzzle. First the saxes croon supple chords. Then the trumpets play a nimble melody carved from curlicue rhythms and snazzy harmony. A lone tenor sax adds a moving counter-melody inside the ensemble. It's after midnight by the time Harris completes the eight-bar construction, and when the professor finally hears it played in a single take, he beams. "Oh man, that's fun!" {END}

If drafted, I will not run. If nominated, I will not accept. If elected, I will not serve. Actually, since there seems to be interest, I'll post a few things as I get a chance. Thanks for the nudge, guys.

I see my name has come up here -- Larry, thanks for the kind words. Means a lot coming from you ... I wish I had a homepage on the Free Press site that collected my best stuff, but, unfortunately, the only permanent link, which Larry provided above, takes you to a list of weekly what's-going-on-around-town columns, a tiny sliver of what I do and not a place for deep thinking or writing. I've asked our web folks to set up a page that kept my most recent jazz and classical reporting and criticism available in one place, plus some of the more substantial efforts from the past. (I cover both classical and jazz here, plus with cutbacks in recent years, the Detroit Institute of Arts.) I've also asked for a Detroit Jazz Corner that would keep evergreen links available to stories from the last dozen years about Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, Elvin Jones, Charles McPherson, Geri Allen, Louis Hayes, Ron Carter, Kenny Garrett, Bennie Maupin and many others. So far my requests have fallen on deaf ears, but hope springs eternal. Onward.

Frank Sinatra sings the hell out of "Like Someone In Love" on "Songs for Young Lovers/Swing Easy." These were the first two Capitol sides from 1953/54 originally released on 10-inch LPs, then combined on a 12-inch LP (I think) and now on CD. Essentially stuff. Great version of "Violets for Your Furs," his first crack at "I Get a Kick Out of You" and lots more. Instrumentally, in addition to those already mentioned, Kenny Dorham plays it beautifully on Art Blakey's "At the Cafe Bohemia, Vol. 2" (Blue Note) -- same arrangment that became Lee Morgan's feature on Blakey's "Like Someone in Love."

I always had fun trying to play through some of the patterns in Slonimsky's "Thesaures" but also found it baffling since, as has been mentioned here, it's a descriptive rather than prescriptive book, and you have to have a lot of harmony already under your belt to truly assimilate the information in a meaningful way. The book does have a short intro meant to suggest how the materials can be applied to tonal harmony, but, again, it's not for beginners and the terminology can be dense, especially if your prior references are all jazz-education based. The book, of course, has a storied place in jazz lore. It was an important reference for Trane, who practiced out of it. McCoy too, and then Herbie studied it too, 'cause he heard that McCoy and Trane used it. I asked Herbie about the book once and he mentioned one specific place you can hear its influence is during the piano solo on "Driftin" from "Takin' Off." It's the lick in bar 6 of his second A section. He plays a rapidly ascending figure that in this bluesy hard-bop context sounds like it comes from outerspace. (Herbie didn't identify which pattern from the Thesaures this actually is, so if anybody can find it, you get a gold star.) In Lewis Porter's Trane's bio he notes that David Dempsy has tied the second eight bars of "Giant Steps" to one of Slonimsky's "ditone" progressions (dividing the octave into three parts by major thirds). A pattern on the top of page 40 is Trane's melody for the second half of the tune transposed to a starting note of C. Porter also points out that on page vi of the intro you can find essentially the same melody underpinned with chords similar to what Coltrane uses. (Porter's discussion of all this is on pages 149-150). Surely, other patterns and intervals in the Thesaures made their way into Trane's playing, and Slonimsky's ideas would seem to merge logically with his sheets-of-sound aesthetic and the later modal playing. For what it's worth, anyone looking for a practical book that to help expand your harmonic vocabularly of scales and arpeggios should take a look at Walt Weiskopf's "Around the Horn." Lots of information very thoughtfully organized.