Marian McPartland's "Reprise"

[Larry Kart]

This "live' reunion of McPartland's Hickory House Trio (Bill Crow, Joe Morello) is excellent. I think MM got better with age.

[Ken Dryden]

Larry, were you there for her trio set at the first Toronto IAJE? She kicked ass and ran over, there were no complaints. While I have never lived close to NYC, I managed to see Marian in concert 15-20 times between 1988 and around 2008. She was also a fun interview.

 

[Larry Kart]

No, never saw her live, I'm sorry to say.

[jlhoots]

Ordered a copy for $5 including airmail shipping!!

[Peter Friedman]

When I was living in Rochester, NY I saw Marian live many times. She would come to Rochester often, and one reason was to visit with her good friend Alec Wilder who lived in Rochester part of the year.

Also saw her in Toronto at least once while I was there visiting my good friend John Norris.

I agree with Larry that her playing seemed better over time. Her earliest recordings on Savoy were much less interesting to me than her sessions on Concord.

[JSngry]

What I liked about her was that she knew her place, not as in accepting somebody else's definition, but like she knew for and within herself what and who she should be and went about the business of becoming that and not wasting time trying to be anything other than that.

That confidence of identity specificity...I guess it's called being comfortable in your own skin, and she sure seemed to be that. I never really got into her playing at any time, but I always dug her supreme Marian McPartland-ness, she was the ultimate Marian McPartland, right?  How cool is it for anybody to be the ultimate them? It's like, I don't need to ever hear her play to dig her.

Now, having said all that, what year is the album under consideration here, in what year was it recorded?

[mikeweil]

9 hours ago, jlhoots said:

Ordered a copy for $5 including airmail shipping!!

Lucky guy!

[Larry Kart]

3 hours ago, JSngry said:

What I liked about her was that she knew her place, not as in accepting somebody else's definition, but like she knew for and within herself what and who she should be and went about the business of becoming that and not wasting time trying to be anything other than that.

That confidence of identity specificity...I guess it's called being comfortable in your own skin, and she sure seemed to be that. I never really got into her playing at any time, but I always dug her supreme Marian McPartland-ness, she was the ultimate Marian McPartland, right?  How cool is it for anybody to be the ultimate them? It's like, I don't need to ever hear her play to dig her.

Now, having said all that, what year is the album under consideration here, in what year was it recorded?

"Reprise" rec. live at Birdland in Sept. 1998. McPartland born March 1918.

I dig what you're saying about MM, but I liked this album for pretty specific musical reasons, which I'll try to outline after I listen again. Not that they're strange/mysterious, but they are a bit subtle and elusive -- in part because they involve MM not doing some things that a lot of pianists have been doing for a good while, especially harmonically, and because they also involve her doing some things (albeit in individual ways) that some pianists of earlier eras used to do but that almost no one does anymore. That said, by 1998 there was nothing retro about her, if there ever was. (Time out for a bit of re-listening.)

The main thing for me about MM was how she thought from the bass line upwards. In this, she might be thought of as an unlikely cross between Jess Stacy (I wouldn't be surprised if Stacy was an early model) and Al Haig (IIRC Allen Lowe mentioned Haig in reference to MM a while ago), with maybe some vintage Sir Charles Thompson or Clarence Profit thrown in. Listen to any piece on "Reprise" and home in not only on MM's left hand but in particular on the lowest notes her left hand is outlining in relation to all the rest, and I think you'll find a unique (the Stacy factor perhaps) clarity and cleanness of bass-line driven melodic/harmonic thinking. Within MM's left-hand chords, or her single note left-hand lines, there's often a kind of deep bell-like "ring" or "bong" effect -- a sense that certain privileged, semi-isolated notes are being singled out, harmonically and through touch, so as to vibrate upwards into the overall texture, an almost Monk-like effect, if you will. Further, the touch that does a good deal of the emphasis of those "privileged notes" is quite something -- as precise as Haig's but with a relaxed spare evenness to it that for me brings Sir Charles to mind (or his model Basie for that matter). Again, though, I don't think that MM intends to or is summoning up or referring to the jazz past. Though not overtly boppish, by 1998 her time, a la Haig, is certainly modern, no  hint of East Side Manhattan in the mid-'50s rhythmic complacency. And getting back to her bass-line driven melodic/harmonic thinking, when those bass-line "bells" of hers begin to ring, they ripple up through and shape the whole texture of her pianism in a unique manner.

Was she a great player? Well, for one thing, as Jim may have implied above, MM almost always gives one the sense of a certain reserve, that she's playing within herself. Which is not to say that she's "ladylike" -- rather, I'd guess that is has to do with her British origin, of a national temperamental tendency toward implication and understatement. But she was, at best, one heck of a subtle, individual pianist. 

[Ken Dryden]

Marian McPartland was one of the more versatile pianists during the last few decades of her long career and she was always interested in learning new songs and digging up forgotten chestnuts. That helped make her Piano Jazz radio series interesting, dueting with a wide range of musicians, from Art Hodes to Cecil Taylor.

[felser]

I saw her at the Keswick theatre sharing a bill with McCoy Tyner, probably in the late 90's though I am not totally sure of the time frame.  She played beautifully and did great in the obiligatory duets with Tyner, as mentioned by others, knowing who she was and wasn't.  I also loved her Marian McPartland-ness, and also enjoyed much of her late-career playing quite a bit.

[Teasing the Korean]

Always loved her bossa album on the Time label:

 

[Ken Dryden]

I recorded hundreds of her Piano Jazz broadcasts and still haven't gotten around to listening to many of them. I remember how terrible Paul Schaefer was, who came unprepared though claiming to be familiar with the show, as she told me. McPartland wanted to get Keith Emerson (I shared his phone number, as I had recently interviewed him), but he felt like his jazz chops weren't sufficient and he declined her invitation. She introduced me to a number of musicians I might have otherwise overlooked. 

 

[Dmitry]

On 5/20/2017 at 11:21 PM, Larry Kart said:

Was she a great player? Well, for one thing, as Jim may have implied above, MM almost always gives one the sense of a certain reserve, that she's playing within herself. Which is not to say that she's "ladylike" -- rather, I'd guess that is has to do with her British origin, of a national temperamental tendency toward implication and understatement. 

Is there such a thing? There are English, Scotts, Irish, Cornish, Welsh, etc. I don't know if one can lump them together into a group who love the understatement. Men in skirts, soccer hooligans, Sex Pistols..I dunno.

[Larry Kart]

5 hours ago, Dmitry said:

Is there such a thing? There are English, Scotts, Irish, Cornish, Welsh, etc. I don't know if one can lump them together into a group who love the understatement. Men in skirts, soccer hooligans, Sex Pistols..I dunno.

It seems to me that English (perhaps better in this case than British?) men and women of McPartland's middle-class social background (and above, too, and below as well) often are (or were)  given to understatement and implication when expressing themselves. In the latter case, I'm also thinking of conveying one's meaning through tone of voice rather than literal choice of words. I recall a long telephone interview I did with my favorite novelist of the 20th Century Anthony Powell (1905-2000). During its course, Powell said the word "yes" more than a few times; and depending on his tone of voice that word meant anything from "Of course -- doesn't everyone knows that?; let's get on with it" to "That's interesting; I've never thought of it quite that way, please elaborate" to a good many points between those poles, if indeed those were the poles. BTW even the "let's get on with it" pole didn't seemed at all rude, just economical in expression and perfectly precise. The assumption was that this is how people who are on the same wavelength tend to communicate; that Powell felt right off, even though he was English and I was American and some 40 years younger, that we were enough on same wavelength that he could express himself in this habitual manner was pleasing to me.

 I'm reminded of the incident that gave Powell the title  of "A Question of Upbringing," the first volume of his twelve-volume cycle of novels "A Dance to the Music of Time." Powell and a friend were riding in a car late one night down the Great West Road when they suddenly saw another car approaching them head-on at a high rate of speed. In that brief moment, Powell's friend, who was behind the wheel, said,"This will be a question of upbringing." The crash was avoided -- I don't recall how, but I assume that Powell's friend chose either to swerve to left or to the right, while the other driver either continued straight ahead or swerved to the other side. In any case, the prior remark of Powell's friend was a kind of understated semi-joke about the fact that one makes such potentially life-determining choices on the basis of acquired habits (if indeed one isn't just paralyzed by fear and makes no choice at all).

P.S. Part of that semi-joke was its implicit acknowledgement that probably no habits or upbringing could fully prepare one for the grimmer potential aspects of what might happen next, even though one might well fall back on those habits of understatement rather than scream bloody murder.

[Dmitry]

4 hours ago, Larry Kart said:

It seems to me that English (perhaps better in this case than British?) men and women of McPartland's middle-class social background (and above, too, and below as well) often are (or were)  given to understatement and implication when expressing themselves. 

That would suit it better, I think. Remember Pink Floyd - Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way ?

Not imperial British, but squarely English.

 

Edited May 22, 2017 by Dmitry

[JSngry]

fwiw, it was either here or Board Krypton, either way, a long time ago, that I was corrected rather unambiguously by an unimpeachable source that English was a language, Britain a country, or a collection of nations, or some such. Where the hell that left England, I didn't ask.

Either way, the cat didn't dig "English", so since then, I have bewared, kinda.

 

[gvopedz]

10 hours ago, Ken Dryden said:

McPartland wanted to get Keith Emerson (I shared his phone number, as I had recently interviewed him), but he felt like his jazz chops weren't sufficient and he declined her invitation.

 

Was this before or after Keith Emerson jammed with Oscar Peterson?

Edited May 22, 2017 by gvopedz

[Ken Dryden]

I'm pretty sure that I interviewed Keith Emerson in 1993, though I'm not sure when I gave Marian his phone number. I still have all of her letters and postcards, though I'm not sure that she mentioned it in the letter. I doubt that it was more than a few months after the interview.

I have the Emerson/Peterson duet of "Honk Tonk Train Blues" on audio and video, though I don't recall if a recording date was given. That was Carl Palmer in the glasses accompanying Emerson.

 

 

Edited May 23, 2017 by Ken Dryden