There are two days of “Honoring Billy Hart” at Healdsburg Jazz Festival this coming weekend. This is simply a must-see for jazz fans in the greater Bay area.

June 4 begins with Quest, the classic foursome with Dave Liebman, Richie Beirach, and Ron McClure, followed by Enchance, a new edition of Billy’s famous 1977 A&M album with Eddie Henderson, Oliver Lake, Joshua Redman, Craig Taborn, and Dave Holland.

June 5 starts with the current Quartet with Mark Turner, Ben Street, and me, followed by a new edition of the burning working band that lasted a decade and recorded for Gramavision and Arabesque, Oceans of Time, featuring Mark Feldman, Craig Handy, Chris Potter,  David Fiuczynski, David Kikoski, and Cecil McBee.

This is really kind of an unbelievable collection of all-stars. I’ve been involved behind the scenes a tiny bit and have noted approvingly how everyone has dropped other plans and consented to work for a nominal fee in order to honor Jabali.

—

“Billy Hart, Honored in Healdsburg, Picks His Five Most Important Recordings” by Andrew Gilbert is a worthy read (I admit I’m quoted as the lead).

—

Next week TBP plays on the West Coast, including TBP Josh Redman at the Playboy fest. Sign up for Floyd Camembert Reports for general tour spam and an occasional Easter Egg not found on DTM…

New DTM page: Interview with Houston Person.

This interview is in advance of a week at the Village Vanguard June 14-19: My quartet with Ben Street and Billy Hart featuring Houston Person.

Of course Ben and Billy and I are very familiar with each other, and in fact we plan to play a trio feature for Billy every set drawn from the repertoire of the Billy Hart Quartet.

The surprise is Houston Person.

Houston is 81 and arguably the last of the line in terms of an old-school blues and ballads tenor saxophonist. His sound is big and furry. It sounds like he is gruffly speaking to you; perhaps he’s even offering some kind of recrimination or an authoritative directive to act more honorably in the future. After a particularly bluesy phrase, you start up from your chair and promise, “I will!”

—

At the end of the day, the tenor saxophone is my favorite instrument. I’ve been blessed to play a lot with peers who are avatars: Mark Turner, Bill McHenry, Joshua Redman. But as a fanboy nothing tops little moments with older greats. One time Dewey Redman was in my apartment. He took out his horn and we played Ornette Coleman’s “Broken Shadows” together. That was it.

Likewise, two months ago Houston Person showed up for our first duo rehearsal. He’s a gregarious man who wants to make sure everybody is laughing first. It’s impossible to park in my neighborhood (informally called “Park Nope” instead of “Park Slope”) yet he laughingly found a space a block over. I could see that this was someone who always walks between the raindrops.

Inside, Houston took out his horn, I played a little intro, and he offered a perfect chorus on the old torch song “Once in a While.” Again, that was it.

—

One of my first little jazz tapes was a session of Harry “Sweets” Edison and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis with Kenny Drew and good European musicians in Denmark. I listened to this over and over. It sounded like Sweets and Lockjaw were talking while they played.

Lockjaw had one of those old-school tenor sounds. No one is greater than John Coltrane, but in his wake the sonic concept of the instrument was irrevocably changed, with the sound getting more focused.

Tenors before Coltrane had more leeway. There was lots of vibrato: it was even furry, burry, or murky. There was less emphasis on nailing complex changes, although there was actually more detail per note. Transcribing Lockjaw Davis on a slow blues or ballad is essentially impossible compared to transcribing a post-Coltrane tenor.

In the interview Houston talks a lot of different tenors. He’s open to it all. But he particularly wants credit given to the blues and ballads tenors of his youth.

—

There are some who try to bring back some furry and burry to the tenor today, and more power to them. But calling Houston essentially the last of the line is not just about his sonority, it is about the complex social mechanism that brought his music into being.

A striking anecdote from the interview is about how Houston learned about Sonny Rollins. While in college at South Carolina State College (which of course was then a segregated school), a basketball player from New York City stopped his pre-game warm up to show Houston some Sonny Rollins licks on the horn.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the real 20th-century jazz.

—

Houston is well-known in some circles but not in others. Frankly it is too long since he has played the Village Vanguard.

Ron Carter got it right away. When I told Ron I hired Houston for a week, Ron nodded his head and said, “You want to learn how it goes.”

Exactly.

It was great for my education to transcribe Sonny Rollins’s solos with Bud Powell Modernists on Sonny’s first record date but now these don’t fit with the expanded argument in progress…

“Bouncing With Bud” master:

“Bouncing with Bud” alternate #1:

“Bouncing with Bud” alternate #2:

“Wail” master:

“Wail” alternate:

The late Masabumi Kikuchi has a testament, the solo piano concert Black Orpheus just released on ECM.

It was an honor to get to know Masabumi a little bit. He was the real deal, a 20th-century scoundrel/genius/artist in solitary and stubborn pursuit of his greatest work. The best tracks on Black Orpheus are perfect music.

I was pleased when Manfred Eicher asked me to contribute liner notes. As far as I am concerned, Masabumi is part of the history of this music.

Ben Ratliff review of Black Orpheus.

Masabumi Kikuchi DTM interview.

—

Masabumi believed in one thing: trying to make each note a private singularity. Of course he had influences, he even made concept albums, but “being Masabumi and no one else” was the end goal.

That’s always the goal for every serious poetic artist, although in the postmodern era it gets harder and harder to do. As Mark Turner says, “It takes longer to be great now because there is so much more to learn.”

—

Speaking of Ben Ratliff and the pursuit of knowledge, I learned a lot reading Ratliff’s latest book. Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen In an Age of Musical Plenty is a manifesto of the postmodern age, declaring that is our duty to take on all kinds of music with equal seriousness.

“Musical plenty” is very much our moment. Perhaps it will remain our moment until the human race outgrows the personal computer.

The question remains: How deep are you listening to all that “plenty?” Ratliff hears a tremendous amount, and his fluid and poetic prose style is always a pleasure to read. His mildly sardonic yet utterly sincere attitude when addressing Mariah Carey or Grateful Dead fandom is almost a kind of genius.

Ratliff was first known as a jazz critic, not as a general music critic, but an important harbinger of his eclectic tastes was an early insistence on Afro-Cuban as essential to jazz. (Most jazz players know this but it few critics have emphasized it like Ratliff.)

The real point of something like Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen In an Age of Musical Plenty is to make the reader go buy some records. Ratliff got me with Patato & Totico.

There are many distinctions to Patato & Totico, the record made in 1968 with Totico Arango singing over Patato Valdés’s percussion, accompanied by Arsenio Rodríguez on tres, Cachao Lóoez on bass, three players on claves, and a five-man vocal chorus. It is the closest thing the the 1960s New York rumba community—an exile Afro-Latin culture that regularly gathered to play in public spaces—had to an authoritative document.

(…)

Its tracks are poetic rituals, not like most of what we listen to in this world. They’re street-rumba tracks, but they’re untrue to street-rumba reality: they are not field recordings or standard, flat, fast-and-cheap documents. They include a guitarist, or actually a tresero: categorically an ingredient not normally heard with rumba, and specifically the best tresero ever to have lived. 

I can’t remember the last time a CD refused to leave my home stereo player quite like Patato & Totico. It just stays in there. I play it for everybody who comes over. What an album, perfect in every way. The presence of tres and bass make it perhaps especially relevant for comparatively unhip jazz players like myself, a gateway to assimilating a tiny bit more detail about the vast mysteries of Afro-Cuban music.

—

Billy Hart knows a lot about Afro-Cuban music. The very first time I went to his house he played field recordings from Africa and Los Muñequitos de Matanzas.

There’s a new release of a historical gig, Getz/Gilberto ’76, a night at the Keystone Korner with João Gilberto playing Gilberto music with Stan Getz’s quartet with Joanne Brackeen, Clint Houston, and Billy Hart.

Of course, I am a Billy Hart disciple and devotee, but: Jabali deserves a special award for his stunning drumming on Getz/Gilberto ’76. The subtle syncopations of Gilberto’s guitar are matched perfectly by Billy Hart, first by “simple” dry cross-sticking clave patterns and then by peaceful undulations with the whole complement of drums and cymbals. Billy definitely studied for this one.

—

I’m actually in Brazil right now. It’s raining softly: the window is open slightly: João Gilberto is singing.

—

While the blues fest was raging outside in Paraty last night I was in bed, reading Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues, a new volume edited by Paul Devlin. Sincere thanks to Devlin for this important labor of love.

Murray was kind of like Masabumi Kikuchi in a way, a man committed to one precise vision. Part of their genius was to be provocative. Thomas Chatterton Williams’s recent important article about Murray in The Nation posits Murray and Ta-Nehisi Coates as antipodes.

At any rate, Murray is rare touchstone writer for jazz. Indeed, there’s an argument that the later career of Wynton Marsalis and the entire edifice of Jazz at Lincoln Center is founded on Murray’s work. This is the only case of a major jazz musician treating the work of a major jazz writer with such reverence.

I’m still reading Murray Talks Music –the highlight so far is Murray’s interview of an outspoken Billy Eckstine–but wanted to mention it on DTM in order to preview an event at the National Jazz Museum of Harlem on Wednesday (that I’ll be very sorry to miss): Murray Talks Music: A Book Party and Discussion.

Related DTM:

Notes on Albert Murray Memorial

Study Up on Albert Murray by Paul Devlin.

New DTM page about Red Garland: Red’s Bells.

New DTM page: Interview with Wayne Shorter.

—

Very sorry to have recently lost the marvelous BBC program Jazz on 3. Through Peggy Sutton I interviewed Keith Jarrett, Django Bates, Gunther Schuller, and Henry Threadgill. The Wayne Shorter interview was something Peggy and I worked on for years to make happen; in the end I did it under the oversight of Chris Elcombe as Peggy was on vacation.

The “voice” Jez Nelson interviewed me a couple of times, the last on the occasion of Paul Bley’s passing. And Jazz on 3 also taped The Bad Plus in concert, perhaps most memorably at a gig with Django Bates. In fact I believe that TBP/Bates gig may have even been Jazz on 3’s idea!

At any rate, certainly Tony Dudley-Evans is correct when he says that for the last 18 years, Jazz on 3 was a “leading influence in the development of the UK scene.”

Thank you all! Hope to see you in London the next time I’m there.