RECORDING ENGINEER RUDY VAN GELDER DIES AT THE AGE OF 92.

Rudy van Gelder- in 1988

Only a non-jazz fan would ask “Rudy who?”. Rudy was a renowned recording engineer and the principle sonic architect of the “Blue Note Sound”. A specific sound that is associated with the classic recordings of the golden jazz era of the last 50 years. He worked with many recording companies but is best known for his work with Alfred Lyon’s Blue Note Recording company. He recorded  all the jazz greats, including Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and just about every other major jazz artist of the past 50 years.

He wasn’t always a sound engineer. He trained as an optometrist and that was his “day job”. He went off to work in the morning to his optometry practice to earn his “daily bread” and after hours he spent his time recording jazz. At first in his parent’s living room, then in the iconic studio he designed and built at Engelwood Cliffs in Hackensack, New Jersey. He eventually ditched his day job and became a full time recording engineer.

Here is a Wikipedia quote: “When I first started, I was interested in improving the quality of the playback equipment I had,” Van Gelder commented in 2005; “I never was really happy with what I heard. I always assumed the records made by the big companies sounded better than what I could reproduce. So that’s how I got interested in the process. I acquired everything I could to play back audio: speakers, turntables, amplifiers”. One of Van Gelder’s friends, the baritone saxophonist Gil Melle introduced him to Alfred Lyon, a producer for Blue Note Records, in 1953. Within a few years Van Gelder was in demand by many other independent labels based around New York,  such as Prestige Records, Impulse and Savoy. Bob Weinstock, owner of Prestige, recalled in 1999, “Rudy was very much an asset. His rates were fair and he didn’t waste time. When you arrived at his studio he was prepared. His equipment was always ahead of its time and he was a genius when it came to recording”. According to a JazzTimes  article in August 2016, “jazz lore has formed the brands into a yin and yang of sorts: The Blue Note albums involved more original music, with rehearsal and the stringent, consistent oversight of Alfred Lion; Weinstock was more nonchalant, organizing what were essentially blowing sessions for some of the best musicians in jazz history”. Van Gelder said in 2012, “Alfred was rigid about how he wanted Blue Note records to sound. But Bob Weinstock of Prestige was more easygoing, so I’d experiment on his dates and use what I learned on the Blue Note sessions”. He also worked for Savoy Records in this period, among others. “To accommodate everyone, I assigned different days of the week to different labels”. Rudy was also a  pioneer in the development of live “on site” jazz recordings. In the 1950s Van Gelder also performed engineering and mastering for the classical label Vox Records. Thelonious Monk composed and recorded a tribute to Van Gelder entitled “Hackensack”.

Here is quote that I am  sure will raise the ire of fans of vinyl recordings. From 1999 on, he re-mastered the analog Blue Note recordings, that he had made several decades earlier, into 24-bit digital recordings for the Blue Note’s RVG Edition series and also a similar series of re-masters for the current owners, Concord Records, of some of the Prestige albums he had previously recorded.  He was positive about the switch from analog to digital technology. He told Audio magazine in 1995: “The biggest distorter is the LP itself. I’ve made thousands of LP masters. I used to make 17 a day, with two lathes going simultaneously, and I’m glad to see the LP go. As far as I’m concerned, good riddance. It was a constant battle to try to make that music sound the way it should. It was never any good. And if people don’t like what they hear in digital, they should blame the engineer who did it. Blame the mastering house. Blame the mixing engineer. That’s why some digital recordings sound terrible, and I’m not denying that they do, but don’t blame the medium.”

Van Gelder resided in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey where he died at his home on August 25, 2016.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Three more music legends pass away……….

Ralph Stanley

“Ralph Edmund Stanley (February 25, 1927 – June 23, 2016), also known as Dr. Ralph Stanley, was an American   bluegrass artist, known for his distinctive singing and banjo playing. Stanley began playing music in 1946, originally with his brother Carter as part of  The Stanley Brothers,  and most often as the leader of his band, The Clinch Mountain Boys. He was part of the first generation of bluegrass and was inducted into both the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honour and The Grande Ole Opry.” – Wikipedia. To the general public he was probably best known for the sound track of the film O Brother Where Art Thou  in which he sings the Appalachian dirge O Death. At the age of 88, following a musical career that spanned 70 year Stanley died on June 13, 2016  as a result of skin cancer.

@@@@@@@@@@@@

Guy-Clark

Guy Charles Clark (November 6, 1941 – May 17, 2016) was an American Texas country and folk singer, musician, songwriter, recording artist, and performer. He released more than twenty albums, and his songs have been recorded by other artists including Jerry Jeff Walker, Jimmy Buffett, Lyle Lovett, Ricky Scaggs, Steve Wariner and Rodney Crowell. He won the 2004 Grammy Award for the Best Folk Album My Favorite Picture of you. Clark was born in Monahans, Texas, and eventually settled in Nashville  where he helped create the progressive country and outlaw country genres. His songs L.A. Freeway and Desparados Waiting for  a Train that helped launch his career were covered by numerous performers. The New York Times described him as “a king of the Texas troubadours”, declaring his body of work “was as indelible as that of anyone working in the Americana idiom in the last decades of the 20th century”  … Wikipedia

At the age of 74  Clark died in Nashville on May 17, 2016, following a lengthy battle with lymphoma.

@@@@@@@@@@@@

Alirio Díaz - fotos (1)

Alirio Díaz (12 November 1923 – 5 July 2016) was a Venezuelan classical guitarist and composer and one of the most prominent composer-guitarists of his country. A guitar competition named Concurso Internacional de Guitarra Alirio Díaz has been held in his honor in Caracas and other cities in Venezuela (the April 2006 contest was held in Carora). Many compositions have been dedicated to Díaz including Spanish composer  Joaquin Rodrigo’s  Invocación y Danza…. Wikipedia.

That short paragraph hardly does justice to the magnitude of his status in the classical guitar world. Prior to him emerging on the scene Andre Segovia was “the man”. Alirio Diaz, John Williams, Julian Bream  and others that followed Segovia and were part of the changing of guard in the classical guitar world. Segovia was the bench mark of an “old world” approach to the music. His recordings and performances exhibited a mellow, stately approach that demonstrated that guitar music deserved to be taken seriously. Segovia toured and recorded relentlessly throughout the 20th century and that certainly opened doors for the guitarists that followed. He invented the genre of classical guitar and paved the way for guitarists like Alirio Diaz that allowed them to gain an audience and, ultimately, perform in a different way with an expanded repertoire. Diaz’s sound and technique were way more dramatic than the Segovia school and on the standard pieces like Fernando Sor’s Variations on a Theme by Mozart (“The Magic Flute”) he virtually reinvented the music. I was most fortunate in my youth to attend concert performances by Segovia, Julian Bream, John Williams and Alirio Diaz and the one that left the most lasting impression was Alirio Diaz. At about that same time I acquired a LP called Guitarra De Venezuela that included the following tracks:  Recuerdos de la Alhambra /  Dos Valses Venezolanos / Guaso / Canción /  Quirpa / Asturias / Dos Canciones Populares Catalanas / Minuet / Pavana y Folia / Sonata / Gavota / Fuga / Variaciones Sobre un Tema de Mozart. Here we are a half century later, the recording is still in the catalogue (complete with the original cheesy cover) and is still probably the finest recording of classical guitar music out there. One of his most notable achievements was the introduction of the music of Antonio Lauro (a fellow countryman) to a wider audience. The Valses Venezolanos are part of the modern day standard repertoire. You may have a perception of waltzes as being some what stately affairs, that will change once you hear the Venezuelan waltzes of Antonio Laurio.

Alirio Diaz at the age of 92 died on July 5, 2016

@@@@@@@@@@@@

Paul Bley and Pierre Boulez – not really famous but …….

There are entertainers who are just that – entertainers. There are entertainers who are musicians and musicians who are entertainers. Sometimes it is hard to tell exactly which is which. Then there there are musicians who are just that – musicians. Then again  there are those musicians who go beyond the accepted artistic norms of their era and create their own categories. Two such musicians are the Canadian Jazz Pianist Paul Bley and the French modern classical composer Pierre Boulez. Both of these exemplary musicians passed away this month (January 2016).

Paul Bley, born November 10 1932, died January 3 2016

Paul Bley North Sea Jazz Festival in the Hague in 1990

Paul Bley is a Canadian Jazz Pianist born and raised in Montreal. He was essentially a child of the Be-bop era who performed with some of the jazz greats of the era (including Charlie Parker). He started studying violin at 5 and piano at 8, and as a teenager began playing piano professionally as Buzzy Bley. In 1949, as a senior in high school, he briefly took over Oscar Peterson’s job at the Alberta Lounge in downtown Montreal. Mr. Bley left for New York in 1950 to attend the Juilliard School of Music. During his early years there, he played with the saxophonists Lester Young and Ben Webster. Keeping a hand in his hometown jazz scene, he helped organize the Jazz Workshop, a musician-run organization in Montreal that set up out-of-town soloists with local rhythm sections; in February 1953 he booked Charlie Parker for a concert and accompanied him. That concert was recorded, one of his first extant recordings before his first album as a leader, made nine months later with a trio that included Charles Mingus on bass and Art Blakey on drums. Through the mid-’50s, he was an adept bebop player with a spare style.

As he matured he went further afield in his musical explorations to become involved in what became known as “free form jazz”. In my opinion, what set him apart from the frenzy and frantic performances of other “free form” artists was a more melodic and measured approach. During his time in New York playing with the saxophonists Albert Ayler and Sonny Rollins, he defined as well as anyone the blurry line between the scratchiness of free improvisation and the virtuosity of the jazz tradition. His solo performances are said to have had a significant impact on the extended solo performances of Keith Jarrett.

He often talked about being eager to get outside his own habits. In  the 1981 documentary “Imagine the Sound” he professed not to practice or rehearse, out of what he called “a disdain for the known.” He did not stake his work on traditional notions of acceptability, or the approval of the listener. With that particular musical philosophy it is easy to see why he is not a household name even in his own country.

Paul Bley was appointed a member of the Order of Canada in 2008.

Although I don’t have an extensive collection of his music I do treasure and enjoy the recordings he made in 1961 (Fusion and Thesis) with the Jimmy Giuffre 3 (Jimmy Giuffre on Clarinet, Paul Bley on Piano and Steve Swallow on Double Bass). The albums were re-released as a double CD by ECM records in 1992. For that I am forever thankful. Another CD of interest is the 1993 duo recording he did with fellow Canadian, saxophonist Jane Bunnet called Double Time (released by Justin Time). Although  Jane is better known for her extensive explorations of Cuban music the album shares some of the “spacey” textures of the Jimmy Giuffre 3. I am sure these albums are only the tip of the iceberg.

Here is an audio clip from the Jimmy Giuffre recordings and a clip of Paul Bley in an interview.

@@@@@@@@@@@@

 Pierre Boulez,  born 26 March 1925 , died 5 January 2016

Pierre Boulez

“Pierre Boulez, the French composer and conductor whose career spanned from the avant-garde post-World War II era to the computer age, has died, according to the French culture ministry. He was 90. Boulez famously challenged his peers and his audience to rethink their ideas of sound and harmony. In his music, Boulez often created rich and contrasting layers that were built on musical traditions from Asia and Africa, and on the 12-tone technique pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg — as in his 1955 work, Le Marteau sans maître (The Hammer Without a Master).”

To be honest I am more familiar with his reputation than with his music. Classical music of the 20th century was mostly overshadowed by the music of the Romantic Era and that made it extremely difficult for musicians and composers who tried to create a new vocabulary. Pierre Boulez was one of a number of musicians trying to create a “new music”. Among concert goers “the new music” tends to alienate audiences and it is only though the dedicated efforts of musicians like Pierre Boulez  that the music moves forward and, possibly in time, develop a dedicated audience.

This short YouTube video of his most famous composition LE MARTEAU SANS MAITRE  will give listeners some idea of the challenges they face when exploring the music of Pierre Boulez. This is not your typical symphonic fare.

@@@@@@@@@@@@

These two musicians may not be well known and they played music that, by and large, most audience would chose to ignore. However, they have demonstrated that there is more to music than three guitars and a back beat.

@@@@@@@@@@@@

Remembering Phil Woods – DownBeat 2015/10/02

Remembering Phil Woods – DownBeat Posted 2015/10/02

Phil Woods, a trail blazing bebop saxophonist and an NEA Jazz Master, died Sept. 29 in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. He was 83.

The cause of death was complications from emphysema. Woods, who had battled respiratory problems for years, announced his retirement from music on Sept. 4 after a concert at Pittsburgh’s Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild. That Sept. 4 concert was a tribute to Charlie Parker’s album Bird With Strings. It was, perhaps, a fitting conclusion to the career of an alto saxophonist who was deeply influenced by Parker. But Woods developed his own voice and subsequently became one of the most revered alto players of his generation. Over the course of his illustrious career, Woods toured with jazz icons such as Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Rich, Clark Terry and Benny Goodman.

Born Philip Wells Woods in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1931, he began playing saxophone during childhood. As a young man, Woods studied improvisation with pianist Lennie Tristano, and he studied classical music at The Juilliard School in New York City. In 1968 Woods moved to France, where he formed the European Rhythm Machine and composed music for Danish and Belgian radio. Upon his return to the United States in 1972, he recorded the seminal albums Images (1975, with Michel Legrand) and Live From The Showboat (1976), both of which won Grammy Awards. One of Woods’ most well-known solos was on Billy Joel’s 1977 hit single “Just The Way You Are,” which earned Joel two Grammy Awards. Woods also played on recordings by Paul Simon and Steely Dan.

Other albums in Woods’ discography include Dizzy Gillespie Meets Phil Woods Quintet (1987), All Bird’s Children (1990), The Rev & I (a 1998 Blue Note date featuring Johnny Griffin) and Man With The Hat (a 2011 collaboration with saxophonist Grace Kelly, to whom he was a mentor). Woods topped the Alto Saxophone category in the DownBeat Critics Poll seven times between 1970 and 1980.

In a January 1982 cover story for DownBeat, Woods reflected on his career and the origin of his style: “Jazz has been good to me, it really has, but I would hate to think that any young man would feel that by copying the Phil Woods sound he could have the same life and career. I never began by imitating. I began by trying to become a musician and an alto sax player. I never thought I sounded like Charlie Parker, though he was an inescapable shadow in the ’40s or in the ’50s, if you were a sax player. You couldn’t be a musician without having his licks pop up. And without Louis Armstrong, we wouldn’t have any jazz licks at all; Bird would be the first guy to tell you that’s the truth.”

In addition to his contributions to jazz as an artist and bandleader, Woods was also a jazz educator who frequently worked with college students at institutions such as DePaul University. Woods was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2007. In a 2006 interview with the NEA, Woods described his first saxophone lessons: “I got a teacher by the name of Harvey LaRose and that’s where my life changed because I was going for lessons and I was faking it. I wasn’t practicing, but I’d go back the following week and I could play the lesson. Now if I’d had one of those more or less straitlaced teachers, he might have said, ‘OK, kid, you’re faking it.’ Mr. LaRose said, ‘You’re using your ear to play music. This ear thing is your most important gift.’ He realized that immediately. Mr. LaRose played alto clarinet, violin, guitar, piano—taught all of those instruments, repaired all of those instruments—and arranged with the local big bands. He … recognized that I had something to say on the saxophone because he drew me in. Within three, four months I was hooked. I loved it.”

(Note: DownBeat will publish a tribute to Phil Woods in our December 2015 issue. To read a DownBeat 2007 interview with Woods, click here. To read a review of Woods’ performance at the 2013 Playboy Jazz Festival in Los Angeles, click here. )

This is Phil Woods in mid-career before his chronic lung disease forced him to use canned oxygen on stage just so that he could play.  He literally performed right up to the end. He announced his retirement September 4 and died September 29th. Remarkable eh!

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Ornette Coleman – “He changed everything” (Lou Reed)

1959 was a pivotal year in the history of Jazz. It was the year that Miles Davis recorded the ground breaking modal jazz master piece Kind of Blue; It was the year that Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond launched their experimental album Time Out that explored the potential of unusual time signatures in Jazz; It was also the year that Charles Mingus wrote his anthems for the civil rights movement that was immortalized in the album Mingus Ah Hum;

Last, but not least it was the year that Ornette Coleman exploded onto the scene with his album The Shape of Jazz to Come. It wouldn’t be too hard to arrive at a majority consensus on the first three albums but Ornette Coleman’s contribution to the jazz lexicon and the innovations of The Free Jazz Movement was controversial in 1959 and here over fifty years later the dust has not yet settled.

Ornette Coleman

Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman (March 9, 1930 – June 11, 2015) was an American  jazz saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter and composer. He was one of the major innovators of the  free jazz movement movement of the 1960s, a term he invented with the name of an album. Coleman’s timbre was easily recognized: his keening, crying sound drew heavily on blues music. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1994. His album Sound Grammar received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Music …….. From the beginning of his career, Coleman’s music and playing were in many ways unorthodox. His approach to harmony and chord progression was far less rigid than that of bebop performers; he was increasingly interested in playing what he heard rather than fitting it into predetermined chorus-structures and harmonies. His raw, highly vocalized sound and penchant for playing “in the cracks” of the scale led many Los Angeles jazz musicians to regard Coleman’s playing as out-of-tune. He sometimes had difficulty finding like-minded musicians with whom to perform. Nevertheless, Canadian pianist Paul Bley was an early supporter and musical collaborator. In 1958, Coleman led his first recording session for Contemporary, Something Else!!! The Music of Ornette Coleman….. Wikipedia.  In 1959 he followed that up with a series of albums and engagements in New York that literally hit the jazz world like a tornado.

Coleman was never really accepted by the mainstream jazz world. Most patrons and a significant percentage of musicians shied away from his music. There were exceptions of course. John Coltrane, John Lewis, Pat Metheny, Charlie Haden, Lou Reed, The Grateful Dead and Don Cherry were among his champions. However, they were the exceptions. However his influence and statue continued to grow throughout his career.

Coleman died of a cardiac arrest at the age of 85 in New York City on June 11, 2015. His funeral was a three-hour event with performances and speeches by several of his collaborators and contemporaries.

Here is probably his most famous composition Lonely Woman

and now played by Pat Metheny

and here is what all the fuss was about….  FREE JAZZ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swJ-BZyCIh8

 @@@@@@@@@@

 

Guitarist John Renbourn dies at age 70

JJohn Renbourn in the 1960's

– John Renbourn in the 1960s.

In the UK and Ireland, the 1960’s were a hot bed of musical innovation. Particularly so for acoustic guitar players. The “folk music revival” of that time fostered interest in the American acoustic finger picking styles of the Rev. Gary Davis, Doc Watson, Mississippi John Hurt, Elizabeth Cotten, Dave Van Ronk, Joseph Spence, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Merle Travis and many more “roots” musician. Guitarists of today probably do not realize the extent of the volatility of the acoustic guitar scene of that era. Memories of that scene have been somewhat over shadowed by the explosive growth of the “British Rock and Roll” phenomenon and electric guitar scene that followed shortly after. At that time acoustic guitarists were very fortunate to be exposed to the increased availability of recorded material, a huge number of touring folk musician legends, and a steady improvement in the quality of acoustic instruments. The acceptance of the guitar into the traditional folk scene was not immediate. The guitar was then considered foreign to the unaccompanied vocal traditions that were prevalent in the folk clubs. However, a number of acoustic guitarists adapted the imported styles and created blends of techniques and musical styles to create new, unique ways of playing “folk music”. Innovators of the day included Davey Graham (the inventor of DADGAD tuning), Nic Jones, Martin Carthy, Bert Jansch and of course John Renbourn. Most of the innovators have gone and the only one still playing at the peak of his powers is probably Martin Carthy. Nic Jones is till alive but still suffering the effects of a catastrophic car accident. On March 26, 2015 at the age of 70 years John Renbourn passed away. Here is a reprint of his obituary in THE GUARDIAN…..

“John Renbourn, who has died aged 70, was one half of the powerful guitar duo of Pentangle, the innovative jazz-folk band of the 1960s and 70s. While his fellow guitarist, Bert Jansch brought great emotion and inventiveness to his playing, it was Renbourn who provided a high level of technical accomplishment. They reveled in one another’s virtuosity.

The two men first met when Renbourn went to a Jansch gig at Bunjies coffee bar, London, in 1964. At the time Renbourn was performing informally at clubs in London, and as an accompanist for the African-American blues and gospel singer Doris Henderson from Los Angeles, with whom he recorded two albums, There You Go (1965) and Watch the Stars (1967). By early 1965, Renbourn and Jansch were flat-sharing, playing guitar together by day and performing in the evenings, developing a style that became known as “folk baroque”.

Jansch played on a couple of tracks on Renbourn’s eponymous first solo album for Transatlantic Records in 1965, and Renbourn repaid the compliment on Jansch’s Jack Orion (1966). Both were influenced by the guitarist Davey Graham, and their joint, largely instrumental album, Bert and John (1966), set the scene for their Pentangle collaboration with its modern jazz influences.

By the time of Renbourn’s second solo album, Another Monday (1967), he was collaborating with the folk singer Jacqui McShee, whose renditions of traditional songs inspired him to make jazz-blues rhythmic accompaniments similar in style to those in Graham’s 1964 Folk Roots, New Routes album with Shirley Collins.

Renbourn was the catalyst who brought together his two performing partners – Jansch and McShee – plus the jazz musicians Terry Cox, a percussionist, and the upright bass player Danny Thompson to form Pentangle. After a residency at the Horseshoe pub in central London, which McShee later described as public rehearsals, they made their concert debut at the Royal Festival Hall in May 1967. Their performances brought together all their wide and varied influences – jazz, blues, traditional folk, original songs, medieval themes – in a fluid, improvisatory style. Often described misleadingly as a folk-rock band – Renbourn’s rhythmic accompaniment and Cox’s percussion matched the patterns of the songs without imposing a rock beat –  Pentangle paved the way for further innovations in folk music.

Their first album, The Pentangle (1968), was released to critical acclaim, and by 1969 they were touring the US, appearing at Carnegie Hall, the Newport folk festival and Fillmore West in San Francisco with the Grateful Dead, as well as the Isle of Wight festival in the UK. Their third album, Basket of Light (1969), took them into the charts when the opening track, Light Flight, was chosen as the theme tune for the television series. Take Three Girls. During this time there was little space in the schedules for Renbourn’s solo concerts, although he recorded solo albums, The Lady and the Unicorn (1970), with an emphasis on medieval music, and Faro Annie (1971), which revisited his folk and blues repertoire. The relentless touring with Pentangle took its toll and they disbanded in early 1973.

Renbourn returned to solo concerts and occasional duo performances with Jansch, then embarked on a new band collaboration with McShee – the John Renbourn Group – plus Tony Roberts, Keshav Sathe and Sue Draheim. Two albums, A Maid in Bedlam (1977) and Enchanted Garden (1980), were followed by Live in America (1981), which received a Grammy nomination. Solo albums such as The Hermit (1976) and The Black Balloon (1979) emphasized his continuing interest in early music.

Renbourn was born John McCombe in Marylebone, London: his father, Robert, was killed in the second world war, and his mother, Dorothy (nee Jopling), married Edward Renbourn, a physician, in 1952, when John’s surname was changed by adoption. The family moved to Surrey, where John had piano lessons and was introduced to early music. He took grade examinations in classical guitar, which influenced his later folk and blues guitar arrangements.

By the 1980s, Renbourn was taking a more analytical approach to his music, wanting to build upon his earlier formal music studies. From 1972 he had been producing books of compositions and guitar tablature, and in 1982 he enrolled on a degree course in composition and orchestration at Dartington college in Devon. He described this as “an awesome experience”, covering much music of which he had been completely unaware. On one occasion he had to request special permission to re-sit an examination as it clashed with an appearance at Carnegie Hall with the legendary American musician Doc Watson.

His new musical awareness led to invitations in guitar teaching, and he produced further publications. In 1988 he joined the staff at Dartington to head up the first degree course in steel-string guitar. But concert performances and collaborations continued. He formed a duo and recorded several albums with the American guitarist Stefan Grossman, and worked with Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band. He formed Ship of Fools, initially for a concert in New York, with   Maggie Boyle, Steve Tilston and Tony Roberts, and his solo concerts took him to Hong Kong, Malaysia, Japan and Alaska.

Renbourn was only briefly a member of the re-formed Pentangle in the 1980s, but in 2007 he joined the other original members to receive a lifetime achievement award from Sir David Attenborough at the BBC Radio 2 Folk awards, at which Pentangle performed. The band formally came together the following year with concerts, including Glastonbury festival, and television appearances. For the last couple of years Renbourn had been touring with one of his early 1960s colleagues, the folk and blues guitarist  Wiz Jones. They were coming towards the end of their tour when Renbourn died.

He is survived by three of his four children: Joel and Jessie from his first marriage, to Judy Hills; and Ben from his second marriage, to Jo Watson – their other child, Jake, died in 2014.

@@@@@@@@@@

I was very fortunate to be in Banff on Thursday, September 26, 2001. I was coming off a back packing trip to Mount Assiniboine when I spotted a poster for a concert by John Renbourn at the Banff Centre. I was fortunate enough to land a seat no more than six feet away from John. I had smuggled in my camera and I managed to snap some illegal photos right at the end of the show. That was just before I was nailed by the usher. It was a small price to pay for the opportunity. Apart from the music the thing that struck me most about the master musician was how old looked. He must have been only in his late 50’s but he looked more like eighty. He did have a reputation for living hard and it showed when he shuffled on stage, sat down and had to physically hoist his one leg across his knee to support his guitar. That didn’t seem to impair his technical ability or his musicianship. Here are two illegal images from the concert….
 John Renbourn Sept 26, 2001 ed John Renbourn-ed
and, as a bonus,a  clip from YouTube

@@@@@@@@@@

Crossing the Rainbow Bridge

600. Clancy 2005 ed

Clancy became part of the family one Christmas fourteen years ago. He is a Labrador cross who was found, along with his siblings, those many years ago, abandoned at a dump site. The SPCA took him into care until he was placed with us. Since that time he has been Mae’s best fiend and my constant walking companion. He loved to walk. He has been a very healthy dog up until very  recently. Of course he has aged and in the past 12 months he started slowing down. In the past three months he become afflicted with a respiratory problem that started to make walking slow and difficult. Yesterday (March 17, 2015) while walking on the crown land he had an almost catastrophic collapse and it was only with difficulty Mae managed to get him home. We decided that his days of  long walks were over. This morning we only walked him around the yard and once again he collapsed. He recover enough to start searching around in the bushes for a place to die. We had been warned that his respiratory condition would lead to this final outcome. It was with great sadness that we had to make the final decision to have him euthanized. So, at 4pm today, Wednesday March 18, 2015, the staff of the Tanglefoot Veterinary Clinic assisted Clancy on his final journey over “the Rainbow Bridge” to the place where all pets must eventually go. He started on this final journey from one of his favorite sunny spots at the front of the house. It was a very sad but peaceful farewell.

R.I.P CLANCY – MARCH 18, 2015

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Here is something Mae has had stuck on the refrigerator door for many years…

PETS TEN COMMANDMENTS

  • My life is likely to last 10-15 years. Any separation from you is likely to be painful.
  • Give me time to understand what you want of me.
  • Place your trust in me. It is crucial for my well being.
  • Don’t be angry with me for long and don’t lock me up as punishment.
  • You have your work, your friends, your entertainment, but I have only you.
  • Talk to me. Even if I don’t understand your words, I do understand your voice when speaking to me.
  • Be aware that however you treat me, I will never forget it.
  • Before you hit me, before you strike me, remember that I could hurt you, and yet, I chose not to bite you.
  • Before you scold me for being lazy or uncooperative, ask yourself if something might be bothering me. Perhaps I am not getting the right food, I’ve been in the sun too long or my heart might be getting old or weak.
  • Please take care of me when I grow old. You too will grow old.
  • On the ultimate difficult journey, go with me please…. Never say you can’t bear to watch. Don’t make face this alone. Everything is easier for me if you are there, because I love you so.

Take a moment today to thank God for our pets. Enjoy and take good care of them. Life would be a much duller, less joyful experience without God’s critters.

Please pass this onto other pet owners. We do not have to wait for heaven, to be surrounded by hope, love and joyfulness. It is here on earth and has four legs.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Jazz Man Clark Terry dies at 94

Clark Terry It is unfortunate that for most pop/rock musicians the history of music started around 1965 and ended around 1985. There is a lot of truly great music and musicians that falls outside those parameters. One in particular is the jazz trumpeter Clark Terry . His music spanned a greater part of the twentieth century. In death he was honored with lengthy tributes in Down Beat (March, 2015) and the New York Times (Feb 23, 2015). I am sure there will be other tributes from all around the world. Here is a reprint of the Down Beat Tribute.

Trumpet master Clark Terry died on Feb. 21 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, eight days after moving from his home to a nearby hospice. He had been suffering for several years with failing health exacerbated by diabetes. He was 94.

Some of Terry’s recent activities (from 2010 to 2013) were intimately documented by director Alan Hicks in the film Keep On Keepin’ On. The documentary chronicled Terry’s decline with an unflinching honesty and lack of vanity, as he faced, among other things, amputation procedures for both legs. “I hurt all over, everywhere,” he murmured to his wife, Gwen, at one point. Through the health crises, he continued to mentor his latest protégé, pianist Justin Kauflin. The film, which was produced by Quincy Jones—yet another Terry protégé from long, long ago—debuted to great acclaim and award recognition in April 2014 at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Most musicians—trumpet players in particular—foretell their demise through their horns: shorter solos, weakening intonation, the strained high note or imprecise phrase. Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and even studio stalwarts like Harry Edison all buckled in their late years. Reluctant to give up the stage, they chose instead to devise ways of concealing and patching their weaknesses.

Clark Terry postponed that reckoning longer than nearly anyone, thanks to reserves of technique and an unquenchable optimism. Even as an octogenarian, he delivered masterful work. In 2005 I gave his recording of Porgy & Bess with Jeff Lindberg and the Chicago Jazz Orchestra a rare five-star review in DownBeat. It was a virtually perfect performance.

I saw Terry perform around the same time at the Iridium in New York City and found that it was not a mirage of post-production trickery. Though walking with a cane, Terry still played with the effervescence and elegance I remembered as a 15-year-old fan sitting a few feet from the Duke Ellington Orchestra at Chicago’s Blue Note club back in 1957. At the Iridium, as Terry’s eyesight and legs were failing him, his sound, breath control and attack seemed beyond the reach of time.

In 2008 Terry retired from performing, ending a career that spanned more than 60 years. His sound and phrasing were impossible to mistake for anyone else’s. It’s a kind of exclusivity shared by only a few trumpet players—Armstrong certainly, Ruby Braff and perhaps Edison. All had a signature sound. One could add Bix Beiderbecke, Gillespie and Davis (who is said to have studied Terry), of course, but they all became “schools” unto themselves and spawned many imitators and talented disciples. Terry owned his style so completely and protected it with such an impenetrable and subtle virtuosity that no one was capable of infringing on his territory.

“He taught so many cats,” Wynton Marsalis told me in Chicago just a week before Terry’s death. “Everybody’s been touched by him because he took his time with everybody. He carried the feeling of [jazz] with him, so when you were around him, you were around the feeling. He didn’t have to explain a lot. He just had to be himself. I’ve known him since I was 14. He’s the first person I heard who really was playing. It was the mid-’70s. Everybody was playing funk tunes. Miles was playing rock and funk, so nobody was playing jazz. But Clark Terry was playing. And no one played like CT.”

Terry was so good, so unerring, for so long, that he suffered the penalties of perfection. He was taken for granted—probably because he was never caught climbing out of a cracked note, a clumsy turn of phrase or an indifferent 12 bars. His performances were a fizz of wit and urbanity, never anguish or indecision. Worst of all, he made it all look so easy.

If he was underestimated, the last several years saw a rush to correct the record. He was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 1991. Readers elected him to the DownBeat Hall of Fame in 2000. The Recording Academy recognized his lifetime achievement four years ago. He even scored a hometown star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. But surely the most direct love letter to Terry has been the film Keep On Keepin’ On. “You’re looking at the best man that ever lived,” says Quincy Jones lovingly in one scene.

Virtuosity means different things to different people. Musicians worship it when they encounter it because they understand its elusive mystery and endless process. But critics sometimes distrust it as a distraction, suspicious that a veneer of well-practiced skill may be camouflaging an emotional or creative apathy. Consistency may be admirable, but inconsistency often makes a better story. Terry’s surprises were subtle and came in oblique miniatures, easy to overlook and often undervalued. He was just so consistently brilliant, the wonders he wrought were hidden in their familiarity.

But musicians never overlooked him. One of the earliest to spot him was trumpeter Charlie Shavers, who had heard him playing in the late ’40s with the George Hudson band, a regional orchestra in St. Louis, where Terry was born on Dec. 14, 1920. As musicians do, Shavers spread the word. While making A Song Is Born for Samuel Goldwyn in 1947, bandleader Charlie Barnet asked Shavers if he knew a good jazz trumpet player. He immediately recommended Terry, who had become so captivated by the trumpet as a 10-year old that he made one of his own from a section of hose and a funnel.

“I took Charlie’s word and sent for him,” Barnet later wrote. “This was the start of a long friendship with a man who is probably the greatest trumpet player in the business. He was a fine gentleman, and he could do anything on the trumpet. … He was truly a super musician.”

Terry was not a player whose style grew and evolved in public view over the years. He hit the Barnet band fully formed and singularly distinct, becoming an instant soloist in a brass section that also included Jimmy Nottingham and a young Doc Severinsen.

On his first record date with Barnet in September 1947, his arrangement of “Sleep” was already in the book, showcasing his long, glancing phrases and sudden flame-throwing dynamics. So was his wit. He tossed off casual references to Shavers and even Harry James. On “Budandy,” his triple-tongue pirouettes contrast sharply with Barnet’s swaggering masculinity. But the best, most dazzling Terry work from the Barnet band was captured on its December 1947 Town Hall Jazz Concert, released by Columbia in the 1950s.

Terry’s singing—he called it, more accurately, “mumbles”—was an explicit extension of his trumpet phrasing, a kind of rat-a-tat scat of double talk: bubbling yet precise, with a bottled-up restraint that seemed itching to escape. It was a small sideshow among his talents that Barnet never used on a commercial record and remained something of a secret until it became familiar to audiences via The Tonight Show in the 1960s.

Only a single live broadcast from the Barnet period documents Terry’s early vocal style: a version of “The Sidewalks Of New York.” Back then, his singing was less mumbles and more straight bebop, not unlike Gillespie’s hip vocal jesting. But Terry’s vocals didn’t appear on a record until Oscar Peterson + One, released by Mercury in 1964. That album included a few Terry compositions, including “Mumbles,” featuring his vocal routine.

Shortly after the 1947 Town Hall concert, Terry (and later Nottingham and tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves) left Barnet for Count Basie’s band. The timing could hardly have been worse. James Petrillo, head of the American Federation of Musicians, called a strike against the record companies, shutting down the entire industry through 1948. Bookings fell off, and one famous band after another shut down.

Terry stayed with Basie through 1949, but the records from the period are not memorable. One exception is “Normania” (a.k.a. “Blee Blop Blues”) from Basie’s final RCA session in August 1949. Terry etches a stunning solo, crowded with a dry pointillist precision that had no precedent in the Basie book. It was a kind of prickly virtuosity jazz had never encountered—fluid, contained and full of Haydenesque detail. But the band was in its final months and finally broke up on Jan. 8, 1950. For Terry, though, it would only be a brief layoff. He was back in a month, this time in a Basie combo that included clarinetist Buddy DeFranco and soon tenor saxophonist Wardell Gray.

It was a transitional interlude. Terry marked his time as Basie struggled to rebuild. His trumpet was the backbone of the octet, but he soloed rarely on the few sides it made for Columbia in 1950–’51. In the DownBeat polls of the era (which reflected a time lag of several months), Terry’s name first appeared at the end of 1948, largely on the impact of his earlier Barnet work, and then disappeared entirely through the Basie period. He remained with Basie through the start-and-stop beginnings of the New Testament band in the spring and summer of 1951. Then that fall Duke Ellington beckoned.

Terry joined Ellington on Nov. 11, 1951. It had been a period of swift changes and recalibrations for the band. Alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges and drummer Sonny Greer had departed in February, taking with them two of the most primary spectrums of the band’s color scheme. Ellington might have tried a patch job. Instead, he bet on a reformation. Between March and November 1951, two men—Terry and drummer Louis Bellson—would become a wind of modernity sweeping through the band.

Ellington immediately presented Terry with what would be the first magnum opus of his career, a concert-size version of “Perdido,” a piece that had been in the book since 1941. Within six months Terry polished it to a high gloss, making it a full-dress, eight-minute summary of his entire work—a thesaurus of every lick, trick and aside in his playbook. Triple-tongued arcs flared like geysers, then leveled off, spreading into long, cool landscapes that rolled evenly across half a chorus without a breath. When he twisted a pitch or broke composure with a sudden spritz of schmaltz, it was always with a sardonic wink. Some compared him to Rex Stewart, of an earlier Ellington era. But Terry was sui generis. His playing flexed and bristled with an unforced passion wrapped in a strict sense of form and musical intelligence. When he played, his physical presence was circumscribed in a remarkably statuesque stillness, never betraying a twitch of exertion or strain in his face, lips or eyes.

“Perdido” was recorded in July 1952, just in time for Columbia to add it to what would become Ellington’s first landmark album of the long play era, Ellington Uptown, issued the following May. The band had suddenly stumbled into a new peak period, invigorated by Terry’s crackling audacity and Bellson’s barreling drive. For Terry, “Perdido” and Ellington Uptown were a career-making twosome that put him in the big time. But just as that album was released, the band moved to Capitol for an indifferent two-year period during which it was largely eclipsed by the sensational renaissance of Count Basie.

Then came the legendary performance at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival (and subsequent concert album Ellington At Newport). Suddenly Ellington was back on top and on the cover of Time magazine. For the next three years, Terry would play to the largest audiences of his career and develop a fan base of his own. He became a fixture in a band of extraordinary fixtures: Gonsalves, Hodges, Juan Tizol, Ray Nance, Britt Woodman, Harry Carney and Ellington himself. The struggle for solo space was a competitive sport.

“Duke does have a beautiful trumpet player in the section,” Quincy Jones wrote in 1958, referring to Terry. “But he doesn’t use him enough.” Many agreed. But after the 1956 Newport fest, Ellington grew more ambitious, and Terry was well represented in the flow of new works. He became one of the first musicians to bring the flugelhorn into the jazz scene with “Juniflip” (from Newport 1958). There were wonderful odds and ends, among them “Spacemen” (from The Cosmic Scene) and “Happy Anatomy” from his final Ellington project, Anatomy Of A Murder. Best remembered may be “Lady Mac” and “Up And Down, Up And Down” from 1957’s Such Sweet Thunder.

“Terry,” wrote Leonard Feather in DownBeat in October 1957, “who has wasted the last six years playing ‘Perdido’ night after night, finally gets a couple of perfect frameworks for his witty sound and style.”

By the time he left Ellington’s band in 1959, Terry had passed Roy Eldridge and Louis Armstrong in the DownBeat Readers Poll. “Of all the men who have joined Duke Ellington’s orchestra since the great turnover in the Forties,” The New York Times’ John S. Wilson wrote, “Terry is the only one who can be considered on a level with the great Ellingtonians of the past.”

As Terry rose on the Ellington tide, other opportunities opened. He moonlighted on sessions with Clifford Brown, Maynard Ferguson, Dinah Washington and Horace Silver on EmArcy Records. He joined Thelonious Monk for the landmark 1957 album Brilliant Corners (Riverside). Monk returned the courtesy, appearing on Terry’s In Orbit (1958). And Hodges was never without him on his Ellingtonian excursions on Verve.

Late in 1959 Terry left Ellington, worked on and off with Quincy Jones, then Gerry Mulligan and Bob Brookmeyer. But Terry’s real quest was to get off the road and stay in New York. The chance came in 1960 when the major networks, after years of pressure, finally began to integrate their staff orchestras. Terry became the first African American musician to join the NBC staff.

He may have settled down a bit, but the 1960s would become his most productive decade. Nearly half the jazz recordings of his career would be done in that decade. There were reunions with Basie, Ellington and Jones, plus one-time encounters with musicians ranging from Bud Freeman to Charles Mingus, Lionel Hampton to McCoy Tyner. There was no environment in which Terry was not sought after, even advertising jingle sessions where he would often find himself sitting alongside old friends like Nottingham and Hank Jones.

It was also the decade in which Terry became widely known beyond the jazz world. When Johnny Carson took over The Tonight Show in October 1962, conductor Skitch Henderson brought Terry into the band, where he proved a natural showman with his “mumbles” scat singing. A regular feature of the show became “stump the band,” in which Carson would invite audience members to make offbeat tune requests. No request was too obscure for Terry, who would raise his hand. “I think Clark has it,” Carson would say. Terry would then mumble a made-up scat line as the other musicians nodded in mock recognition. He became the most famous sideman in America’s most famous jazz band.

When The Tonight Show moved to Los Angeles in 1972, Terry remained in New York and became increasingly active with younger musicians through a growing network of jazz educators, often recording with various student bands. He toured with a big band of his own periodically, playing festivals, cruises and other venues. (Vanguard released Clark Terry’s Big B-a-d Band Live At The Wichita Jazz Festival 1974).

Terry’s most consistent recorded output through the ’70s and ’80s was on Pablo, where the label’s famous founder, Norman Granz, regularly featured him with Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson and on his own leader projects. Terry also recorded with endless pick-up groups and rhythm sections as he traveled the world. But alongside the playful spirit and adroit craft lived a powerful blues player as well, never more so than on Abbey Lincoln’s 1990 album, The World Is Falling Down.

On the bandstand, Terry combined his formidable instrumental skills with a strong sense of showmanship. “Being able to entertain is very important,” he said in a June 1996 DownBeat cover story. “The real jazz fans may think that’s commercial—playing the horn upside-down or working with both horns at once. But the idea of playing music to an audience is to present it so they’ll enjoy it. If you don’t want to do that, you may as well rent a studio and play there. I try to pass on to young players the importance of remembering that when you’re onstage, you’re entertaining. Playing jazz is not heart surgery. You’re there to vent your feelings and have fun. We don’t work our instruments. We play them.”

Among Terry’s last important sessions were Friendship (a collaboration with drummer Max Roach) and the Porgy & Bess project in 2003 with the Chicago Jazz Orchestra. “Clark was 83 at the time we did the recording,” the CJO’s Jeff Lindberg recalled recently. “It was a big venture for him. By that time, his eyesight was quite poor, so I had to blow up the solo parts 200 percent. The long session would have been a strain to somebody half his age. But he gave it his all and got the result we all aspired to.”

Terry also had an important impact as a pioneering jazz educator. In addition to conducting clinics and workshops, he had a long stint as an adjunct professor at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. He donated instruments, correspondence, sheet music and memorabilia to the university in 2004.

Clark Terry lived a long life—with a coda that gave his many friends time to say their goodbyes. Some are movingly captured in Keep On Keepin’ On. But one special goodbye came last December. The entire Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra diverted from its tour route and played a special birthday concert at Terry’s hospital bedside. It was quite a concert. “We didn’t want to stop,” Marsalis later wrote on his Facebook page, “but it was time for all of us to go. But before that somber moment, we gathered around the bed and played ‘Happy Birthday’ for him. When he went to blow out the candles, he broke down. Many of us joined him. We all said goodbye and he once again recognized each individual with a touch and some kind words. … And then it was that time. What is deeper than respect and love? That’s what we felt: veneration.”

On Feb. 23, bassist Christian McBride posted a tribute on his Facebook page in which he reflected on Terry’s influence: “Every musician in the world who ever met Clark Terry is a better musician and person because of it. He now belongs to the ages.”

John McDonough

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Here is a YouTube video clip of the Clark Terry Quintet performing at Jazzwoche Burghausen 2000.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Rock Legend Jack Bruce dies at 71

It’s an age thing. There comes a time when we become that caricature of the elderly pensioner whose first scan of the newspaper is the obituaries. I am not quite there yet but it seems to be getting closer. It seems that these days there is an overabundance of legendary musicians “passing away”. In the last little while the list seems enormous – Charlie Haden, Jim Hall, Johnny Winters, Buddy MacMasters, Dave Brubeck, Joe Sample, Gerald Wilson, Pete Seeger and Paco de Lucia, just to name a few. The latest is Jack Bruce.  Here is reprint of a very recent Down Beat article.

 

“Jack Bruce—singer, keyboardist, bassist, harmonica player, guitarist and composer—died of liver disease at his home in Suffolk, England, on Oct. 25. He was 71. A significant influence on generations of electric bass players, he attained rock-star renown as a member of the 1960s band Cream with guitarist Eric Clapton and drummer Ginger Baker. In a long solo career away from the glaring lights of pop music, Bruce found his true calling as an adventurer in jazz and its creative offshoots. Soon after Bruce’s passing, Clapton released a statement: “He was a great musician and composer and a tremendous inspiration to me.” Baker also issued a statement: “I am very sad to learn of the loss of a fine man.”

Born on May 14, 1943, in Glasgow, Scotland, John Symon Asher Bruce was first exposed to music by his father, who played Fats Waller-style jazz piano at home, and by his mother’s folk-song singing. A gifted classical cellist, he attended the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and studied composition as a youth. He heard jazz performed jazz performed at concerts by the Modern Jazz Quartet with Percy Heath and the Jazz at the Philharmonic band with Ray Brown during the 1950s.

Bruce took an interest in the string bass at age 14, and by his late teens, he was working in jazz combos at U.S. Air Force bases in Italy. “Once a week there was a jazz evening when people would play records,” he told DownBeat in a February 2009 article. “They had an amazing record library, and me being a bass player, one of the guys said, ‘You’ve got to hear this guy!’ There it was: Charles Mingus. That changed the direction of my thinking because he became the person that I wanted to emulate. Before that it was a player like Scott LaFaro, but Mingus was a composer, which was what I wanted to be.”

After moving to London, Bruce joined other up-and-coming musicians in jazz groups that absorbed the bebop and free-jazz emanating from the States. Drummer Jon Hiseman was part of the scene. Hours after Bruce’s passing, he recalled that playing with the double bassist “was like working with an erupting volcano beside you.”

Encouraged by saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith, Bruce brought his Mingus-like jazz sensibilities to guitarist Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated band, whose drummer in 1962 was a fresh faced Baker. When Blues Incorporated’s singer-organist-alto saxophonist Graham Bond quit to form his own jazz-rock band, the Graham Bond Organisation, he took Bruce and Baker with him and soon added guitarist John McLaughlin.

In 1966 Bruce and Baker joined heavily hyped guitar deity Eric Clapton, fresh out of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, in the blues-rock power trio Cream, which ascended to global popularity before its wild two-year run ended in 1968. Lengthy flights of improvisations on songs like “Crossroads” and “Spoonful’ were a band hallmark, as were well-crafted, quick-witted songs composed by Bruce with Beat poet and lyricist Pete Brown. Clapton lent them a hand in composing “Sunshine Of Your Love.” Both “White Room” and “Sunshine Of Your Love” were Top 10 pop hits in the States in 1968. Cream reunited for shows in 1993 and 2005.

Bruce’s infallible musicianship and his relentless curiosity and ardor for jazz, blues and probing rock placed him in good stead for solo projects from the late 1960s to his last days. His acclaimed jazz album Things We Like (recorded before Cream disbanded but released in 1970) featured Bruce alongside McLaughlin, Hiseman and Heckstall-Smith. One of the album’s highlights, “HCKHH Blues,” pointed to Mingus.

The rock masterpieces Songs For A Tailor (1969) and Harmony Row (1971) further illustrated Bruce’s boundless musical imagination, combining elements of hard-bop, blues, folk, Bach, Messiaen and the British music hall tradition.

Bruce sang on keyboardist-composer Carla Bley and wordsmith Paul Haines’ jazz-opera LP Escalator Over The Hill (1971), and he employed Bley for one of his 1970s bands. Bruce worked with saxophonist-keyboardist John Surman and Hiseman in an excellent but little-known free-jazz trio, and he also recorded with Frank Zappa.

The bassist was a member of drummer Tony Williams’ 1970s band Lifetime. In the 2000s, Bruce saluted Lifetime. In the 2000s, Bruce saluted Lifetime with concerts in Japan. He joined drummer Cindy Blackman Santana, guitarist Vernon Reid and keyboardist John Medeski in the Liftetime tribute band Spectrum Road. That band released a self-titled album on the Palmetto label in 2012.

“We can freely improvise and come up with a sophisticated form,” Bruce said in a July 2012 DownBeat cover story on Spectrum Road. “It’s a revelation that I can go onstage and just play a bass line or melody and everyone will pick up on it and it will become a thing, not just jamming, but some music with an identity.”

Additionally, Bruce collaborated with rock guitarist Robin Trower for albums and tours, fronted two German jazz big bands, performed as often as he could with keyboardist Bernie Worrell, played occasionally with Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band and expressed his enthusiasm for Afro-Cuban and Latin jazz playing with fellow free spirit Kip Hanrahan and other notables. In early 2014, Bruce released the last of about 20 albums, Silver Rails, which generated favorable reviews.

As news of Bruce’s death spread, he received an outpouring of high praise from colleagues.

Trower said, “[Jack was] one of the few musicians that can be truly called a force of nature.”

Hiseman offered, “He was more than the most fantastic singer, player and composer. He was so far ahead, I suspect no one has caught up yet. They probably never will.”

McLaughlin wrote, “Jack Bruce and I were playing together by 1964. At that time he only played acoustic bass, but great! We were with Ginger Baker in Graham Bond’s band, and it was a trip from start to finish. Not only was Jack a fine musician, he also had a very funny sense of humour. I learned a lot in that band, and playing with Jack was a treat. We parted ways, and the next thing I knew, he had joined Manfred Mann. I thought, what he is he doing with Manfred? It didn’t last long, as Cream came along and Jack had moved to bass guitar and singing, and playing blues harp. Our occasional jams with Duffy Power had really influenced him

Cream was a great band. A couple of years later, I introduced him to Tony Williams and he joined Lifetime for a year. Jack was a real character and a fine musician, and I’ll miss him.”

Frank-John Hadley

 Also check the wikipedia entry Jack Bruce

 

 @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Play List #1 – THE JAZZ CRUSADERS

The Jazz Crusaders – The Pacific Jazz Quintet Studio Sessions (6 CD Boxed Set : Mosaic MD6-230) jazzCrusadersPacificI am more a child of the “Hard Bop Era” than the “Hard Rock Era”. While in my 20’s Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Miles Davis, early John Coltrane, Julian Adderley and many others were very much part of my musical soundtrack. So it came as a surprise when I recently stumbled on a Mosaic Boxed Set of The Jazz Crusaders. Despite my Hard Bop inclinations I was not familiar with their music.

For those who don’t know the name, Mosaic it is a boutique Jazz label that specializes in “complete” collections of the significant jazz performers of the past century. (check their website Mosaic Records.) They are not into the actual recording of performances but rather they obtain a license from the original recording company(s), track down the best recording masters, clean up the sound, research and document the artists, and publish the recordings as collections in limited numbered editions. Once the edition is either sold out or the license expires the set is off the market. I keep an eye on their website to make sure I don’t miss something of interest. Occasionally I misstep and a prized set gets by me. I am still cursing the day when I missed out on the Complete Gerry Mulligan Quartet Pacific Jazz boxed set. On Mosaic’s recent “running low list” The Jazz Crusaders were about to be deleted from their catalogue. Jazz Crusaders ???? who are they???? As I have mentioned in previous blogs it is possible to live through a musical era and not be aware of what may be common knowledge. I guess for me The Jazz Crusaders fits into that category. I checked the sample tracks on the website and I was intrigued by the music. Who are these musicians and how did they get by me? A little research revealed that they were a “territory band” originally out of Houston Texas who are thoroughly schooled in the Texas Funk Blues tradition.

For most casual jazz fans the geographical jazz universe revolved around New Orleans, Chicago and New York. But a more serious look reveals that Kansas City, that capital of sex, sin and gangsters in the 1930’s also had a huge influence on the evolution of Jazz. Kansas City was the epicentre of “the Territory Bands” . After the city was “cleaned up” many noted bands and musicians, after leaving Kansas City, went onto shape jazz as we know it. Count Basie’s band was the most famous to come out of the “territories” along with the legendary bassist Walter Page, tenor sax player Lester Young and that giant of post WWII modern jazz Charlie Parker. They all came out of Kansas City. The list is almost endless. Without Kansas City the “swing era” would not have swung as much and modern jazz may not have been invented.

Good jazz in “the territories” didn’t end in the 1930s. The case in point is The Jazz Crusaders originally out of Houston Texas. In the late 1950s, as a teenager, Joe Sample (piano and keyboards) formed a band with tenor sax player Wilton Felder, drummer Nesbert “Stix” Cooper and trombonist Wayne Henderson. This was a “hard bop” outfit from Houston Texas who relocated to California in the 1960s and in an over a nine year period, recorded 16 albums on The Pacific Jazz label. In some ways it was an odd coupling. The Jazz Crusaders were hard bop “jazzers” and The Pacific Jazz label was better known for its associations with the West Coast “cool jazz” school. At the end of the association with Pacific Jazz the band changed their name to The Crusaders and went onto to become a major force in the jazz/pop/soul music of the 1970s and 80s. While the style of their music underwent a change from their original emphasis on hard bop to a Texas funk /soul sound and later on when they incorporated electric keyboards, synthesizers, drum machines bass guitar onto a more smooth jazz sound the common denominator remained a tight front line of tenor sax and trombone. That, along with great arrangements and strong instrumental have left their mark on both Jazz and Pop music. As The Crusaders, in the period from 1971 through 2004, they recorded over twenty albums.

What can I say about this box set? There is so much material – over six hours and over 100 tracks and all of it first rate. From the opening track, the 6/8 blues The Geek, right through to the final track Another Blues, it is all worth adding to a play list. The only weakness, for me, in the whole set, are some of the shorter tracks that were intended for release as singles. On these compositions longer solos would have been welcome. The style of The Jazz Crusaders continue to mature throughout their career and towards the end of this boxed set there is strong evidence of the influence of John Coltrane on their music. One track that deserves special mention on disc one is the performance of Freedom Sound. This composition became one of the jazz world’s civil rights anthems. It is right up there with Charles Mingus’ The Fables of Faubus.

On a sad note, reported in the November 2014 issue of Downbeat, Joe Sample, the keyboard player in The Jazz Crusaders and The Crusaders passed away from Lung Cancer in a Houston Hospital on September 12, 2014. He was 75 years old.

Joe Sample

 

 

 

 

 

 

and here is FREEDOM SOUND from the Jazz Crusaders

@@@@@@@@@@@@@