Greetings!  I just want to update my bio and let you know what’s been going on since this bio was written.  “Thanks Ira” never came out, but I released a new album on Smalls records called “March of the Malcontents”.  It features the group that I have played with at Smalls for the last 2 years every Saturday night from 7.30-10.00.  My son has made vast strides (he was the reason I booked the gig in the first place) and the group as a whole has now become a well-oiled machine.  I’m currently on the road with Harry so I won’t be back regurlarly until July and hopefully everything can get back to the way it was.  Please come by!

Cheers!

Do you ever watch the NFL and see how when a guy makes a good play of any kind, whether they’re winning or losing, he struts and gloats in the most undignified manner imaginable? It seems like it’s gotten to the point that it’s so ingrained that nobody even notices it (old football players certainly do). This is Martin Luther King’s dream gone horribly wrong. The cult of Mezz Mezzrow has taken hold and the wig party has returned (me being a charter member). Don’t get me wrong. When I hear people put down Hip-Hop culture I say that it’s the only culture we’ve got. I don’t think any Jazz artist of the last 30 years can hold a candle to Biggie Smalls. It’s just the latest incarnation of the process that has fueled this country and the world (musically) for at least the last 100 years. Unfortunately, things don’t change as quickly as idealists would have them do. But back to the NFL. Where exactly does this formerly completely unnacceptable behavior come from? One might say that the huge popularity and eventual universal lionization and resulting acceptence of Muhammed Ali and his behavior, which was once highly repugnant to most, is the reason. This factor cannot be ignored but I don’t think it’s the main cause. It seems clear to me that it comes from rap music and videos. You don’t find this kind of thing in the performances of the funk groups of the ’70’s. It is more characteristic of hard rock and heavy metal. This kind of attitude was ready made for inner city gangster rappers real or invented (Walk This Way). And who is the creator and king of this whole style? Mick Jagger.

Or I into V; the dominant seventh chord is the key building block for Jazz music. In modern European music (post 1600), the dominant chord, through the gravititational pull of its third and seventh dissonant tritone interval (known as the devil’s interval in the not to distant past) wanting to rest becomes the root and third of the all-powerful tonic chord. This relationship defines the overall feeling of that music. What would happen if that whole structure where subtly changed at a basic level? What if the undisputed domain of the root major became a question? Think of a singer singing a standard on a record from the 50’s. The last chord is the I major yet the band plays a big altered 7th chord as an ending; I or V? Both, I in the fact that it’s the final resting place of the tune, V because it’s not truly resolved in the strict sense, leaving the the feeling of unresolvedness. This is the basic feeling of Jazz music. As everybody knows, it comes from Blues and bent strings that altered major chords where eventually the written form of a Blues contains only 7th chords. This is where “funk” (yet another ridiculous label for predominantly black music) comes from. When I say funk, I mean as a feeling as opposed to the genre which came about centuries (or millenia or decades) after what I’m talking about was created. My favorite Funk music was made decades before the great James Brown. Accompaniament to action in a brothel or a burlesque house cannot consist of strict diatonic harmony. When Mingus refers to Jazz as hump music, this is what he’s talking about. It got to the point that JB (a lover of Jazz and standards) actually distilled harmony to just one endless dominant chord. On the flip side, Jazz at the same time abandonded it for a more “serious” sound, which in the best groups was slick at the time, but we’re suffering for it big time now. In the days before the rise of R and B and Rock it was all one and the same. As harmonically advanced as any Monk record might be, that feeling reaches it’s exquiste peak rather than losing it. It seems like all my rants come down to the same bitter end.

I recently reacquired a favorite Coltrane solo from my youth, Om. It still has the same effect it had on me years ago whereas the earlier sixties classics don’t. This actually started when I picked up the live One Down, One Up from the Half Note, which I had never heard. These along with Sun Ship abandon the emphasis on the minor key which tends to lock the music down. Each left hand fifth on one is like a nail. ODOU is a 32 bar form which actually frees him from a formula that was probably getting old for him. Anyway, this late Trane revisit goes along with a new appreciation of the Miles quintet of the same period. These two in the fifties were among the greatest representatives of the second tier of bebop musicians. Their music didn’t reach the greatness of their heroes until the sixties when they used the lessons they learned so well from Bird, Diz, and Monk and branched out in their own highly personal way. The secret, other than their particular and extremely different geniuses, is their deep roots in what is still the status quo of Jazz music, Bebop (which contains all the equally important music which preceded it). Just like I prefer Miles’ work with Bird to his later bebop records (all the way up to ESP), I prefer Wayne Shorter’s tenor playing with Miles to Coltrane’s with him. Once Coltrane devised his Countdown progression which served him well to the end, he found his way, tortured as it was. The end of his Om solo uses this exclusively. The reason they had to take such radical directions (influenced by much lesser lights like Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler) was that Bebop was so complete on its own that it could not be equalled or improved upon, and was as much a culmination as an innovation. Bird cast a very long shadow. For me the last great innovative record in Jazz is “On the Corner” from 1973 I think. Obviously there is nothing to compare to it and it’s predecessors since. The general approach has been predictably to take what are seen as the latest developements, which tend to eschew the blues, and build from there with a cursory glance at best at the great music of the earlier eras. The other side of the coin is the people who reject anything which followed Bebop. I can empathise with both of these approaches, but the sub-mediocre results which are all too apparent speak against either. My lifelong way has been to study the whole history thoroughly as my average powers permit (an excuse for defeat if I ever heard one), distill the escence of what makes the art form what it is (I came up with what I feel this is a long time ago), find the most advanced and universal form of it (I’ve also known this for a while), and expand using as many studies of the various standouts within the form and outside (I’ve been especially interested in Van Gogh, Picasso, Joyce, Bach, and various 20th century music, and more recently, pre-Baroque music, as well as the usual superficial Rennaiscance and ancient culture studies). The goal in these fallow years is not necessarily to advance the form but somehow to recapture a piece of it’s greatness (which has to include the excitement of the new somehow while being valid), a feat that could never be accomplished through sheer imitation, or innovation only. It’s a dilemma that has yet to be solved.

Who, Nice Work (if you can get it) and You’re My Everything now online. Happy listening!