John Litweiler

Yes, a great photo. Aloc, you are a master.

Romualdo, thanks for this Bernie McGann article. John Clare is a good critic and writer.

Wish I could be there. How rare to have a public place in Chicago named after a fine artist. Yet somehow I remember in the 1970s how city pressure forced Fred to close his no alcohol-no food music venue The Birdhouse, which he'd opened in a white neighborhood.

Not long ago I went on a Muriel Spark binge and read probably the great majority of her fiction. A lot of the time I felt she was inspired by grudges and settling scores. She also seemed to me to be afflicted with some residual British empire racism. But her characters are so vivid and her satire is so juicy and her humor is so sly and mainly that she wrote so very well, that I'm afraid I can't resist her An addiction.

Cecil cancelled that concert because of arthritis - this article makes it appear pretty serious: http://www.jazzcorner.com/news/display.php?news=3913

For some reason I can no longer link to my article on Bernie McGann's 70th birthday, so will post the whole thing below: http://www.sima.org.au/2007/06/11/bernie-mcgann-on-cd Bernie McGann on CD author: John Litweiler date: Monday 11 June 2007 section: (music)culture In honour of Bernie McGann’s 70th birthday, SIMA commissioned Chicago-based music writer John Litweiler to survey the celebrated saxophonist’s recorded output. The earliest Bernie McGann CD, Kindred Spirits was recorded in 1987—50 years after his birth, four years after his first LP, and around three decades after he began his career as a jazz artist. Alto saxophonist McGann has led just six other CDs since then, the most recent coming in 2005, and in the CD era he’s been a featured sideman on a handful of other recordings. Like a few others, such as our Chicago-based tenor saxophonists Von Freeman and Fred Anderson, the Sydney-based McGann is apparently a late bloomer who did not emerge on records as a brilliantly original modern jazz figure until well into middle age. Like the two Chicagoans, McGann is a catalyst. He not only obviously lends creative energy to the bands he plays in, he also seems to stimulate others’ creativity. Also like the two Chicagoans, McGann’s value to jazz extends far beyond his own city, and beyond his nation. But McGann’s discography is apparently less than half as long as theirs. Are opportunities to record limited by the size of the jazz marketplace in Australia, which has 1/15th the population of America? Also, Bernie McGann is apparently not well known over here. Though some of his albums are distributed in North America, as far as I know he’s only journeyed to play in the western hemisphere six times. Especially since McGann is such a vital lyric artist, his lack of recognition might seem remarkable. During his early career, was modern jazz in Sydney the music of just a few artists and a small audience, like New Orleans modern jazz (Blackwell, Batiste, Marsalis, a few others) in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s? Or was McGann simply too original to be assimilated into the mainstream of Australian jazz for much of his career? His periods of playing in non-jazz settings, of working non-musical day jobs, even of not playing gigs are not unusual. In America, for a comparison, since the early 1960s most of the best jazz musicians have been supporting themselves by teaching, playing in pop and classical music groups, and working in service jobs, offices, etc. Heaven knows, a life of art is a hard one, and we listeners should be especially grateful for Bernie McGann’s devotion. Most of all, his devotion is to pure jazz. While he’s played fusion music and rock, with this own groups he’s been true to modern jazz—the real thing, unadorned, undiluted. Despite all the alternatives that have emerged since his career began, the hard core of the idiom is so rich with possibilities that he quite stands out from the rest of the bop-era stylistic generations. Who, from Lee Konitz to Frank Morgan, is there to compare to him in a blindfold test? It’s interesting that McGann chose the Johnny Hodges showpiece The Jeep is Jumping for his Live at Side On CD and that he plays in an ABC performance of Sandy Evans’ and Yusuf Komunyakaa’s grand Charlie Parker tribute Testimony. In Evans’ Addie’s Boy and her settings of Moose the Mooch and Koko McGann plays Parker phrases that stand out precisely because McGann’s contexts—his other phrases, his ways of shaping solos—are so un-Birdlike (and his Addie’s Boy solo is especially lovely). As for The Jeep, if his vibrato is narrow and fast like Hodges’ was, the low register ideas that begin McGann’s improvisation and his concluding quote from Miles Davis’ Compulsion are a generation or two after Hodges. (And he plays a bop solo in another Hodges showpiece, Day Dream [ugly Beauty]). All right, just what is so personal, so singular about Bernie McGann’s music? His sound Bud Freeman claimed a jazz musician’s sound was the only enduring element of his/her music. McGann plays his alto sax with a hard, true sound in his middle and upper registers and a growly rasp in his lowest tones. In every solo he also strains up to the very top of the alto’s range, but he doesn’t dwell up high. That’s his sound most of the time. While his vibrato is usually fast and narrow, in the slow Deep Shallow (**Blues for Pablo Too**) his vibrato slows and, at least for a time, he achieves an Ornete Coleman-ish sound. In some other slower pieces his sound acquires a Lee Konitz-like limpidity. His attack and his swing In his first CD, Kindred Spirits, he loved to play atop the beat or a micro fraction ahead—a powerful attack. This eagerness especially suggests a kinship with Warne Marsh, but by his latest CD Blues for Pablo Too every solo, virtually every chorus includes phrases that lay behind the beat, or start on the beat and drop behind. No doubt some of this sly swing is to contrast with his trumpeter, Warwick Alder. More importantly, he’s had the great advantage of having so often played with drummer John Pochee since the beginning and with bassist Lloyd Swanton since the 1980s. The swing generated by these two seems to inspire McGann and to free his rhythmic trickery. His phrasing He’s a modernist, so of course his ideas often resemble Parker’s. Now and then passing reflections of other modernists appear, for instance of Lee Konitz (**Big Moon** in Bundeena). He reportedly (by Andrew Bisset) began as a Paul Desmond devotee. Desmond had been influenced by Pete Brown and Lee Konitz, and each of these three may have also influenced McGann’s lyricism. His phrasing is typically broken; his solos are full of vari-length phrases and dispersed accents; the rests between his phrases are, even at fast tempos, usually no more than six beats. He doesn’t riff much or play sheets of sound or fast, Coltrane-ish arpeggios. In fact, even on the rare occasions when he double-times, it’s only for a bar or two—that’s extremely rare among post-Parker saxists. His phrasing is as fluid and versatile as ‘60s Hank Mobley, but eclectic, he ain’t. His solo forms Swanton’s tune Blues on the Prairie (in Bundeena) is a takeoff on Sonny Rollins’ classic Blues for Philly Joe; McGann’s improvisation, first over a bass ostinato, then swinging, is shaped like a Rollins set-up. One of the most vivid, even violent, is another fast blues, Salaam (in Kindred Spirits), with eight-bar calls and four-bar replies. After six choruses of staccato lines, the piano enters and McGann suddenly plays a long note for a change. Long tones continue to appear and, beginning in the ninth chorus, several choruses of down-turning ideas—one of his most dramatic solos. McGann will structure solos with contrasts, like the alternation of stuttering and melodic ideas in Playground (**Playground**). He’ll build, from strain to strain or from chorus to chorus, from short to longer phrases (**Southerly Buster**, also in Playground), or from growly low beginnings to his middle register. While he’s usually as uninterested in dynamics as most other bop-era soloists, in the moody samba Malanbar (Bundeena) a very slow, incremental rise in volume level to piano is the main element of form. He’s certainly a sophisticated craftsman, but this lyric artist’s main interest is in shaping flowing melodic lines, and he generally conceives of overall solo forms only in the broadest designs. Every solo of his has a rise to his highest register—usually a leap up, often an octave leap—in the first strain of his climactic choruses. Pochee has always been the drummer on McGann’s CDs, beginning with Kindred Spirits. Swanton has been McGann’s bassist since his second CD, Ugly Beauty. From the fierce pace of that disc’s start, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, it’s clear that this is a trio, and Bluebird of Happiness has especially stimulating interaction, with McGann’s hard-bitten phrases, Swanton’s unforced drive, and Pochee’s Roach-like complexity lending the piece a classic Blue Note or Prestige feeling. Over the years the interplay between these three becomes more subtle, while it has become, if anything, more intense. The true, unamplified sound of Swanton’s bass, the sensitivity of his note choices, his straightforward, on-the-beat lines, and the melodic directness of his soloing make him sound like—this is, I think, the highest possible compliment—a Chicago bassist, in the tradition of Milt Hinton, Israel Crosby, Wilbur Ware. Again and again Pochee’s interplay motivates the trio. An especially striking example is in the terrific Live at Side On version of Brownsville, in which the varying levels of drum interplay are mainly what shapes McGann’s solo. Obviously McGann is not hampered by the pianists in his first CD and his recordings as a sideman. His own trios and later quartets are not piano-less to encourage his harmonic freedom—on the contrary, he improvises on chord changes throughout his albums with these groups. The bop era, especially hard bop, added detail and intrigue to the interaction of soloists and rhythm sections, and the highly refined interplay of himself, Swanton, and Pochee that makes his groups work so well. Probably every listener will have their own favorites among McGann’s recordings. To take them in chronological order, I enjoy first the hard-bop spirit of Kindred Spirits (1987). His pianist Bobby Gebert’s Dolphy’s Dance is a pure Blue Note-1960s tune, with both chord changes and one-chord strains and an especially dramatic McGann solo. The optimism of McGann’s Mr. Harris theme and solo is a recurring, perhaps inherent quality that you can hear again and again over the years. The trio’s debut, Ugly Beauty (1991), includes McGann’s very laid-back alto, in deliberate contrast with Pochee’s exuberant calypso drumming, in Barbados. Note also the characteristic McGann up-sweeps in his Lady’s Choice theme, as well as his sweet-singing lines in Bluebird of Happiness. In 1993 Pochee’s daring ensemble Ten Part Invention recorded Tall Stories; McGann creates three excellent solos in this CD. A top trombonist, James Greening, joins the trio and makes wonderful contrasts in McGann McGann (1994). After the broken, post-Parker alto phrases, Greening offers long lines, more dramatic forms, and a rich sound. After another swaggering alto solo in Mail, Greening offers big, slashing lines, and Birthday Blues rises to a ferocious alto-trombone chase. Greening emotes most of all in the modal Lazy Days, especially at the unusual slow-to-fast-tempo turnarounds. McGann is at his most lyrical throughout the album, and this version of Brownsville is a priceless quartet performance. In fact, I think McGann McGann and Playground (1996) are his two most essential albums. McGann’s other horn in Playground is tenorist Sandy Evans (who like Greening plays in both Ten Part Invention and Swanton’s Afro-Carib-jazz combo The catholics). Here her mid-Coltrane harmonic sophistication and brilliant technique meets McGann’s more classic sensibility, and she also composed some sparkling themes. Her spacey tune Snap lifts the altoist into inspired harmonic obliqueness. In her Eulogy for a Friend McGann’s feathery sound and his melodic purity are full of feeling, yet without sentimentality or blues phrasing. Her Skedaddleology really is free jazz, and there’s good humor among the two saxes: he breaks through his usual four- and eight-bar moulds, she plays multiphonics and sheets of sound. In the year between those two McGann quartets he played in soul singer Margie Evans’ Drowning in the Sea of Love, with a playful obligato to her unhappy Another Blue Day and a bar-walking solo in Evil Gal Blues. In the same winter composer-pianist Cathy Harley was more challenging in her quintet CD Tuesday’s Tune. Her songs are modal, or they have unusual chord changes (such as her fast, twisted New Blues) or unusual key changes (a modulation that drops instead of rises in Cross Criss). Her most distinctive settings yield her and McGann’s most clever solos, especially the title tune, with a raw, raspy edge now extending through his entire alto range, Pete Brown-like. It’s a late-hard-bop disc that encourages the altoist’s aggression, including a Jackie McLean-like intensity in Never Too Much. In Rent Party (1998) singer Susan Gai Dowling is joined for standards by pianist Dave Levy and the McGann Trio. While Dowling sounds rather light-hearted in It Had to be You and Fine and Mellow, her quartet, especially soloist McGann, discover more complex emotions. He again took the free jazz dare as a guest of Wanderlust in two short collective improvisations in Song and Dance (1998). Again with Ten Part Invention in Unidentified Spaces (2000), McGann and Greening offer especially expressive solos in a fine Evans piece, North Pole. The alto solo in the far-out setting of Folk Song emphasizes his ease playing outside as well as inside. Bundeena (2000) returns to the McGann Trio, and besides the tracks noted above, note the unperturbed optimism of his alto over the bass-drum threats of Let’s Tangle. Trumpeter Warwick Alder joins them to make another quartet in Live at Side On (2003). An eclectic, he favors the Clifford Brown lineage, with tips of the hat to Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan. He’s legato, McGann is staccato; he conceives of full strains, full choruses as he structures his solos, while McGann’s form are more romantic; he includes decorative flourishes and fanfares, McGann doesn’t. Good contrasts of Alder and McGann here and in the last McGann album, Blues for Pablo Too (2005). But I’ve raved on long enough. True, he’s only led seven CDs and been featured on just a few others. Has any other alto saxophonist, anywhere in the world, produced as many consistently first-rate albums as in the last 20 years? In a period when jazz artists are expected to be versatile just to survive, does anyone else thrive in varied settings as much as McGann thrives? Of course, McGann is lucky to be part of such a gifted community of jazz musicians in Sydney. I sure hope Sydney folks realize how lucky they are to have him in their midst, and that they celebrate his 70th birthday with great delight this month. John Litweiler is the author of Ornette Coleman: A Hamolodic Life and The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958.

sent yesterday - Thanks, Jim

Big Mama Thornton Thornton Wilder Wild At Heart

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/10/books/swing-and-dixieland-period.html Don't know how much of this review I agree with.

Of course that's Douglas and Davis.

That's a wonderful version of "struttin' w/Some Barbeque." Here's another from the same Armstrong era - great swing, great trumpet:

Some pix that I posted on Facebook from this year's CJF: Anthony Davis and Mars Williams The Engines (McBride, Rempis, Bishop, and [hidden] Daisy Hamid Drake, Joshua Abrams, Jeff Albert Ten Freedom Summers: Wadada Leo Smith's Golden Quartet and Pacific Red Coral Satoko Fujii Big Randy above Randy Weston and Geof Bradfield band Roscoe Mitchell Alvin Fielder and ex-student Avreeayl Ra Mike Reed, Alvin Fielder, Avreeayl Ra Chuck Nessa, Ann Nessa, Lazaro Vega

not to be mistaken for Martin Kane, Private Eye, from the same era of network radio

Save postage charges! If you're coming to the Chicago Jazz Festival, I'll hand-deliver Sundidos to you (remember the Organissimo discount).

I too have wondered about that. My memory is shot - it may have been just a rumor.

40 musicians - that's all? I suspect more extensive surveys of people in other occupations would show the same percentage of pathologies. Nothing to see here, move on, folks.

Once again, Elmore Leonard got it right.

Didn't Bill Crow write that sometimes Gonsalves would pretend to be drunk so that Ellington would let him stretch out longer?

A lot of pieces that get played on the Chicago classical-music station, I can't stand to hear them again. "That's A-Plenty" is hateful except for a Wild Bill Davison recording.

A delightful and exasperating man. Albert Murray taught me in a one week seminar in 1974 and I quite appreciated his insights re the influence of African-Americans on American culture, while I thought some of his ideas re jazz were preposterous. For example, 1) blues is not a separate tradition that developed alongside jazz, but strictly a precursor of jazz. The proof this that blues is a folk art and folk art does not change, whereas jazz is a fine art and fine art is ever-changing. 2) (as if to contradict 1)) "avant-garde" is a military term for the front line of soldiers who are sent out to attack the enemy and get slaughtered in the process. He had other derogatory things to say about those doomed soldiers and their musical counterparts. He was a U.S. air-force major. I believe Murray put these in a later book or 2. "The Omni-Americans" first, then "South to a Very Old Place" are his most important works, I think. The first of his novels, "Train Whistle Guitar," is beautiful. His "Stomping the Blues" is alternately right-on and ridiculous. Count Basie's autobiography as told to Murray is another beautiful book, but it may be as much Murray's book as Basie's. For example, Basie's frequent statements that Ellington was his superior look like Murray vamping on his own favorite jazz artist rather than something Basie actually said again and again. Here's a review I wrote of two Murray books: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1996-03-17/entertainment/9603170005_1_train-whistle-guitar-scooter-seven-league-boots. Re Murray's great love of Hemingway, he never seems to have noticed that Hemingway was a racist and a suicide. Murray loved Ellington and the Ellington band and told stories I won't repeat because children are present. He refused to come back to the Smithsonian to teach the next week because (so I was told) David Baker would be on the faculty and he considered Baker a racist.

Homework by Allen Ginsberg Homage to Kenneth Koch If I were doing my Laundry I'd wash my dirty Iran I'd throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap, scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in the jungle, I'd wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico, Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska, Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly Cesium out of Love Canal Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain the Sludge out of the Mediterranean basin & make it azure again, Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little Clouds so snow return white as snow, Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie Then I'd throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood & Agent Orange, Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state, & put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an Aeon till it came out clean

looking forward to that - I saw Dennehy in Krapp's Last Tape at the Goodman Yes, I thought he was very good as Krapp. Not entirely sure Godot will transfer, but maybe someone knows more than me. I was at first a bit sorry that he wasn't Gogo or Didi, but on reflection, I think that would have upset the balance of the play too much (he has just a bit too much star power). Dennehy really gets to chew the scenery in both faces/phases of Pozzo. Yes, Pozzo is a great role for scenery-chewers. In NYC saw John Goodman as Pozzo: a great set-up for Lucky's intense centerpiece.

Who is he? Can't find any references via Google. Sorry, this was an inside joke. John was the husband of Lynne Ludy, a coworker at JRM/Delmark back in the day. John was an introvert and seemed to spend all his time composing. He had stacks of his work next to the piano in their apartment. On rare occasions he would play some of them for close friends. I'm sure John Litweiler heard a few. They moved home to central Michigan in the '70s and divorced. John passed away a few years ago. Sorry for the derailment. Sorry to learn John passed away. A good man and a wide-ranging music lover. Leon Kelert used to warehouse his trad jazz label in the Ludys' bookstore.