TT 458: The Devil's Breakfast

Now, THIS is a photo!

I don’t see a credit, probably Don Jr. handed his phone to someone else who snapped the shot on Trump Force One last week. Junior then put the photo on Twitter.

Elon Musk, Trump, Don Jr, Mike Johnson, RFK Jr., and a mess of McDonald’s

I just love it. An appropriate caption would be “The Devil’s Breakfast.” The most powerful elected official, the richest man, two troubled scions from two troubled dynasties, and even an unwelcome photobomb from comparative nobody Mike Johnson. (They could stop the Speaker of the House from sitting down at their table, but they could not stop him from joining the photo!)

Their unhappy smiles loom over fast food that is almost certainly not going to be eaten.

Truly, a perfect image.

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There was a perfect photo last time as well, taken by Jonathan Ernst for Reuters. This one could be captioned “Pride Before the Fall,” because almost everyone was fired.

Sebastian Gorka, Omarosa Manigault, Rob Porter, Anthony Scaramucci on the phone, and Corey Lewandowski back in 2017

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From the blizzard of post-election think pieces, three I liked, from a jazz cat and two favorite political commentators who specialize in realism:

Sam Newsome, “Substance Over Symbolism: An Honest Look at What Went Wrong.”

If we conclude this election simply proves “America is sexist and racist,” we miss the deeper lesson. These issues matter, but they don’t explain everything. This election suggests a need to move beyond identity politics and address people’s day-to-day concerns. In challenging times, the pressing demands of everyday life—paying bills, securing jobs—can overshadow broader social issues.

Freddie DeBoer, “Don’t Panic.”

The hard times never end, but because they never end, they aren’t really hard times, they’re just times.

Ross Barkan, “The Outer Borough Mind: Understanding Donald Trump.”

In the Democratic Party, Trump sees Manhattan. His followers see Manhattan, too. They exult because they have won, but they lack all patrician grace, or the self-assuredness a technocratic, managerial party might bring to bear in victory. They are ruddy and angry and anxious. They know, when their thoughts go quiet and the TV’s turned down low, this is it—this is the zenith. Second term presidents get unpopular. Majorities slip away. Opponents wise up.

Read Barkan’s mesmerizing piece, and then look at the photo “The Devil’s Breakfast” again. It’s all there.

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There is one possible upside to this catastrophe, which would be the end of Trump-related social justice art. It feels played out. They didn’t care; they re-elected him anyway. And was resistance art really a good idea to begin with?

Two more recent screeds I admire:

Dean Kissick, “The Painted Protest: How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art.” (Cover article in Harper’s Magazine)

We lie to one another and to ourselves that all this humdrum work is inspiring, that it has an influence on how opinions are formed and hearts are won, but, of course, it doesn’t. Nobody cares, which is partly why the exhibitions feel so lifeless.

Kat Rosenfield, “Can We Please Have Less Political Art Now?”

It’s not just that the art produced under the banner of resistance failed to achieve its singular objective (though if anything, eight years of excruciatingly on-the-nose storytelling seems to have irritated audiences so much that they are now in full revolt, flocking to any film, no matter how idiotic, that promises entertainment over partisan signaling). It’s that when you can’t imagine a higher creative purpose than keeping one loathsome politician out of the White House — or a lifespan for your work that extends past the next presidential election — the result inevitably falls short of greatness, or even goodness. The most memorable thing about the art shaped by this paradigm is how forgettable it all is, how small and predictable and shrill and soulless.

The only thing sadder than having spent eight years like this would be to submit to it for even a single moment more. To allow Donald Trump to live rent-free in our heads like some sort of perverse anti-muse. To narrow our songs, our stories, until the barbaric yawp of the artist becomes nothing more than a reactionary squawk of indignation.

TT 457: Shura Cherkassky plays Godowsky encores

something ineffable floats through the air

Leopold Godowsky (1870-1938) was a prodigious pianist and composer whose significant original music includes a monumental Piano Sonata and the innovative Java Suite. However, Godowsky remains best-known for his fabulous virtuoso transcriptions, including a set of 53 studies on Chopin Études that are among the hardest things ever written.

The two Godowsky pieces that have the widest circulation are comparatively gentle amplifications of Saint-Saëns “The Swan” and Albeniz “Tango in D.”

The repertory of Shura Cherkassky (1909-1995) stretched from classical staples to modernist masterpieces, but his best playing could be found in the kind of romantic music that allowed in something capricious or even surreal.

Cherkassky was a student of Godowsky’s friend Josef Hofmann and even had some lessons with Godowsky himself; fortunately for posterity, video exists of Cherkassky performing “The Swan” and “Tango in D.”

In “The Swan” the melody stands out from the decorative Art Nouveau ornamentation. (If you compare with other great pianists playing this piece, you might find that Cherkassky has the most differentiation between figure and ground.)

In “Tango” the pianist flirts outrageously with the rhythm, teasing the melody this way and that.

Both performances stop time; for a moment the only thing that matters is beauty.

Playfair Sonatas Release Day

Spotlight on the Trombone Sonata

It’s here, the newest album! Streaming on all platforms and available for purchase everywhere. (Amazon link.)

Recorded December 2023 at Oktaven AudiO by Ryan Streber

Produced by Gene Gaudette

Cover art by Roz Chast

Liner notes by Mitch Tobin:

Ethan Iverson has long been interested in the intersection of jazz and classical music, and his career has been marked by significant milestones in both idioms. In the late 1990s, Iverson was the music director for the celebrated Mark Morris Dance Group, when he played all sorts of classical repertoire for large audiences, including Robert Schumann’s Fünf Stücke im Volkston with Yo-Yo Ma onstage with dancers including Mikhail Baryshnikov. During this era Iverson met the tenor Mark Padmore; eventually Iverson accompanied Padmore in several performances of Schubert’s Winterreise including at Town Hall in New York.

In 2002 Iverson left Morris and formed The Bad Plus, a revolutionary and wildly successful avant-garde trio that The New York Times said was "Better than anyone at melding the sensibilities of post-60’s jazz and indie rock." One of the Bad Plus’s most celebrated projects was a version of Rite of Spring where Iverson essentially played the Stravinsky piano part "straight." Their recording for Sony Masterworks garnered a rare five star review in DownBeat.

Since leaving TBP seven years ago, Iverson has released critically-acclaimed jazz albums on ECM and Blue Note, often accompanied by bonafide jazz stars such as Tom Harrell or Jack DeJohnette. Downbeat has called Iverson "A master of melody" while Hot House recently raved, "Known for his intellectual depth and adventurous musical spirit, Ethan Iverson has traversed the boundaries of jazz tradition while leaving an indelible mark on its evolution."

Piers Playfair has had a long history of curating, producing, and commissioning new work, especially — again — at the intersection of jazz and classical music. He was the founder of 23Arts Initiative, the Catskill Jazz Factory, and more recently has produced a number of shows for opera festivals which have deliberately crossed the two genres. Unsurprisingly, when Playfair and Iverson met, there was immediately a kind of simpatico and shared vision between them.

In 2020, artists everywhere hunkered down to do pandemic projects. Of course, freelancers of all types were often also worried about sustaining a basic economic baseline. Iverson and his wife did a major downsize, moving to a smaller apartment in Brooklyn and loading his grand piano into a cheap studio space. Playfair asked Iverson if he needed help, and Iverson said, "Yeah, I’d love to cover the studio rent for a few months."

Over dinner that summer evening Playfair and Iverson did a deal. In exchange for six months rent, Iverson agreed that he would write six sonatas, and that Playfair would be allowed to choose the instrumentation. Iverson relished the opportunity to create on deadline, and the work went quickly and smoothly.

Indeed, the Playfair project propelled Iverson into much more writing of sonatas and bigger pieces, including a Piano Sonata released on Iverson’s second Blue Note record, Technically Acceptable. Seth Colter Walls praised the piece this past February in the New York Times:

Classical in conception… it also contains traces of crunchy harmonic modernism and the bumptious sounds of vintage American jazz styles.

When it came time to record Playfair Sonatas as a set, the collaborators were assembled from the cream of the crop of current classical instrumentalists. Miranda Cuckson is a friend and colleague (Iverson and Cuckson have played sonatas of Louise Talma and George Walker in concert together) and she helped point the way to Gene Gaudette’s Urlicht AudioVisual label and several of the other participants. The colors of each instrument shine in a natural and playful setting. There is not improvisation as such, but everyone was encouraged to play the parts with as much personality as possible.

On top of his activities as a pianist and composer, Iverson has an active career as a writer, publishing significant criticism in The Nation, JazzTimes, and at the Culture Desk of The New Yorker. In February, his first think piece for The New York Times, "The Worst Masterpiece: Rhapsody in Blue at 100" went viral and is already part of George Gershwin reception history.

"People read the headline and thought I hated Gershwin," Iverson explains. "But that’s not true. I love Gershwin, and I call Rhapsody in Blue a masterpiece. However, because the piece was a hit, the blend of jazz and classical starts and almost ends with Rhapsody, and that is simply not good enough. We need to keep knocking on that door, looking towards a future American music where all the options are on the table."

With Playfair Sonatas, Iverson indicates exactly where he thinks fresh sounds can be found. The outer movements of each sonata are simply called "Allegro" or "Rondo" (or whatever relevant title) in the old European manner, while the middle slow movements are dedicated to a predecessor notably interested in blending "jazz" and "classical" music.

"These dedications came about late in the game," says Iverson. "I had scrapped a previous Adagio for clarinet, and wrote a new middle movement I really liked. However, was this ‘oom-pah' rhythm too much like one of Carla Bley's amusing ‘music hall’ pieces? Well, what if I dedicated the movement to her? That would fix the issue of appropriation. As it turned out, Carla passed away the same day I finished ‘Music Hall’ and devised the ‘dedications’ stratagem. The other five salutations to Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Paul Desmond, Joe Wilder, and Roswell Rudd came easily, for they had been in the back of my mind the whole time."

Playfair is delighted with the project. "It’s cool that out of a Covid dinner we were able to put a project together that so encapsulates one of our joint core beliefs, that the divisions that divide music, such as jazz, classical, blues etc, into neat little boxes are really just names that people put on them and shouldn’t define the artists." It was Playfair’s direct suggestion that the cycle needed the bookends "Fanfare" and "Recessional" with all members in consort.

— Mitch Tobin

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Mahler said the trombone was the voice of god. The orchestral palette requires trombone for climatic passages but solo repertoire is uncommon. However, jazz musicians have made the most of this epic and unwieldy instrument. My favorites include Trummy Young, JJ Johnson, Julian Priester, Ray Anderson, and Robin Eubanks.

All three movements of my Trombone Sonata address the blues and the preach; the last movement has some old-time train boogie as well. The middle dedication movement is Hymn (for Roswell Rudd).

I have a special affection for Roswell Rudd, especially the album Trickles with Steve Lacy and various features with Carla Bley. In addition to being a wonderful trombonist, Rudd practiced ethnomusicology, assisted Alan Lomax, and wrote the definitive essay on his friend Herbie Nichols, the pianist who may have done the most of anyone in the 1950s to combine classical and jazz tropes.

I did not really know Mr. Rudd but I met him briefly and thanked him not just for his music but for his writing, for there is no doubt my own scribbling follows his example.

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Scrolling score video of the complete work is on YouTube. Mike Lormand is the soloist. Mike is a great trombonist and understood the music perfectly. Bio:

New York City-based trombonist Mike Lormand performs eclectic contemporary and classical music.  He is a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, IRIS Collective, Riverside Symphony, and Weather Vest. Mike’s love for the orchestral repertoire has led to performances with the New York Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera, Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, The Knights, New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theater, and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. As a soloist, Mike has commissioned numerous new works, with notable premiere performances at Ojai Music Festival, Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival, and Alice Tully Hall.

As an instructor at Brooklyn College and St. Ann’s School, Mike encourages the development of lasting personal relationships with music, sharing the insights of his teachers, Per Brevig, David Taylor, Marta Hofacre, and Robert Schmalz. Mike is a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music (MM) and the University of Southern Mississippi (BM).

TT 456: Roy Haynes in the Piano Trio

and a coda with Stanley Crouch

Part three of three

1. Billy Hart on Roy Haynes

2. John Coltrane and Roy Haynes

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It seems like Roy Haynes could play with anybody. Mark Stryker pointed out to me yesterday that he was especially suited to be in a trio with piano and bass. I hadn’t put that together, but it’s certainly true.

Bud Powell, Inner Fires, a live session with Mingus in 1953, one of Bud’s best. “Salt Peanuts” is blazing. Great drum solo here as well.

Thelonious Monk, a short set at Newport with Henry Grimes in 1958. This is primo Monk, and Haynes is very much in evidence, like on the jaunty opening “Just You, Just Me.”

Phineas Newborn, in the trio led by Haynes and featuring Paul Chambers, We Three (1959). The Newborn composition “Sugar Roy” is very complicated for the era, the trio obviously did a substantial amount of rehearsal for this unique date. Nice transcription here of the insane piano part by Anthony Tseng.

McCoy Tyner, Reaching Fourth with Henry Grimes (1962). McCoy’s early albums for Impulse are all top shelf. In this case the accurate transcription of the burning title tune is done by Juan Ortiz.

(It is perhaps worth noting that both the Phineas Newborn and McCoy Tyner albums have a slow greasy blues, “After Hours” and “Blues Back.”)

Chick Corea, Now He Sings, Now He Sobs with Miroslav Vitous, 1968. Many would cite this as Corea’s best record, and it is undoubtedly the most influential album on this page. One more transcription, this time by Daan Schreuder, of “Matrix,” which has Haynes’s famous flat ride cymbal and wonderful snare drum interjections.

So that’s Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Phineas Newborn, McCoy Tyner, and Chick Corea at their highest level in trio with Roy Haynes. Pretty good!

There’s a lot more, of course. I’ve heard Haynes play trio with Richard Wyands, Tommy Flanagan, Jaki Byard, Hank Jones, Red Garland, Stanley Cowell, Joe Albany, Hampton Hawes, Mary Lou Williams, Michel Petrucciani, Kenny Barron, David Kikoski, Danilo Perez, and probably others. Outside of a trio context, Haynes was unbeatable with Andrew Hill, especially on Black Fire, while a good place to hear Herbie Hancock with Haynes is on Jackie McLean’s It’s Time!

A successful trio outlier is the 1978 Alice Coltrane album Transfiguration with Reggie Workman. Haynes seems totally comfortable in this spacey and spiritual environment. On the title track Alice is killing it on organ, her lines are totally fun and fresh. Haynes eventually starts to swing behind her and the music levitates to the next plane.

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I never met Roy Haynes. But I do have one anecdote that I have recounted many times; this story eventually ended up in my Stanley Crouch obit for NPR. On the occasion of Haynes’s passing I can’t pass up the chance to post it again.

Stanley was a great writer, but he might have been an even greater talker. His monologues were florid improvisations. A single prompt brought forth a cascade of insight.

A particularly memorable example concerned Roy Haynes. My wife, Sarah Deming, had also become friends with Stanley. (He told me straight out, "My respect for your sorry ass increased after I learned how cool your wife was.") Stanley would talk jazz with me and boxing with Sarah.

For a year in 2007, Sarah was the New York City brand attaché for Grey Goose, which meant she could expense fancy dinners, as long as her table asked for the vodka by name. (Talk about living in a fairytale.) Sarah took us to Masa for Stanley's birthday, where we ate and drank like Roman emperors. We followed that up with an unsteady stroll over to Birdland, for the second set of the Roy Haynes quartet. The music started and Stanley fell asleep, slumped over in his chair. (Truthfully, after all that food and booze, I was about in that kind of shape myself.)

After the first song, Haynes went to the microphone and said, "I heard Stanley Crouch is in the audience tonight. Stanley! Come up here and tell the audience about how great I am!"

I hurriedly woke Stanley and sent him to do Haynes's bidding. His posture straightened up as he magisterially approached the stage. In full control of the room and the mic, Stanley delivered an impromptu ten-minute lecture on the greatness of Roy Haynes. It was a flawless performance.

Crouch is gone, Haynes is gone, so many others are gone. During my time as a denizen of New York City, I count myself very lucky to have been in the same room with so many 20th-century giants.

TT 455: John Coltrane and Roy Haynes

"Dear Old Stockholm" and "It's Easy to Remember"

In the best modern jazz, the drummer is loud and busy. It is a basic structural requirement of the music. Probably this intensity relates to the traditional African drum choir, where a thicket of rhythm is produced from a team of community-sourced experts.

John Coltrane was the apex. But Coltrane could have not gotten there without Elvin Jones. Andrew White wrote in his treatise, Trane ‘n Me:

“Trane was structuring his music around Elvin. This was the main source of the symmetry in Trane’s music… Breath is life. The music must breathe. Elvin was the breath in Trane’s music. …It was the manipulation of standard devices that established Coltrane as a thorough improvisor as well as a spontaneous creator, but it was the Elvin Jones grammar that brought these elements into clear focus.” (see footnote 1.)

Elvin Jones ended up not being able to make every gig, so Coltrane needed a sub. What to do? Not every drummer could fill Elvin Jones’s shoes…

On his 50’s records, Coltrane mostly used Philly Joe Jones and Art Taylor. Philly Joe and A.T. were two of the greatest of all time, but they were also simply not busy and interactive enough for the structure of Coltrane’s 60’s music. Trane tried a few people, but the one who ended up being on official releases was Roy Haynes. (In time, Michael Cuscuna collected the Coltrane/Haynes tracks on the two-fer To the Beat of a Different Drum.)

On paper, this might have seemed like a surprising choice, for Haynes was an old-school swinger who had spent much of the 1950’s supplying tasteful accompaniment for singer Sarah Vaughan; Haynes was also older than Coltrane and the rest of his quartet with McCoy Tyner and Jimmy Garrison.

But — unlike most of his generation — Haynes knew how to play busy enough to make the basic Coltrane grammar work.

Two tracks are among my particular favorites. On April 29, 1963, at Rudy Van Gelder’s, the band plays “Dear Old Stockholm” in C minor (see footnote 2). For his solo, Coltrane rejects the familiar chord changes and mostly blows on B dominant. After getting it going, McCoy lays out and you hear Jimmy Garrison and Roy Haynes clearly. Incredible vibe from the bass and drums. It’s not “latin jazz,” it is swing, but the kind of know-how Garrison and Haynes are showing is intimately related to the Cuban diaspora. It’s definitely B dominant, but Garrison is playing a lot of open A string, putting the music in a cosmic place. Haynes’s snare drum chatters, marches and struts. A grand pulsation. It’s fun to hear Coltrane encourage Garrison to return to C minor, which eventually happens. McCoy then blows on the changes, which is also great, but that feel in the sax solo is really something else.

Then there’s a live session at the Showboat from July 1963 that has never seen authorized release. The whole thing (which can be heard on YouTube) is wonderful, but I have special reverence for “It’s Easy to Remember,” trio with Garrison and Haynes. It is a lo-fi recording and Garrison is barely audible (in sharp contrast to the noisy audience). But Coltrane is astonishing, especially for the way he plays call-and-response counterpoint with himself midway through the track. Goosebumps.

It’s a superb walking ballad tempo. Haynes starts right in there with sticks (not brushes) and helps push Trane to the other side of majesty:

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• Footnote 1: The 60-page Andrew White treatise Trane ‘n Me is so fun and so good and probably never will be reissued. I have added it to my dropbox of teaching PDFs. If you don’t have the dropbox, just reply to any TT email with a request.

• Footnote 2: “Dear Old Stockholm” is an old folksong with a slightly obscure history; the Wikipedia article is helpful. As far as I know, the 1951 Stan Getz version with the excellent pianist Bengt Hallberg in B-flat minor was the first time a jazz musician recorded “Dear Old Stockholm”; I’ve heard that it was Hallberg’s idea. Miles Davis made it a common practice standard through two terrific recordings, the second one with Coltrane on Round Midnight. Davis added an ominous vamp — was this one of the first cases of a pedal point interlude? — and played on the dark-hued changes. It’s not quite modal jazz yet, but definitely headed in that direction.