TT 217: Mainly Cute Photos
The Look of Love with the Mark Morris Dance Group is at Zellerbach in Berkeley tonight through Sunday, which will be the first time we perform the show since Burt Bacharach’s passing. Preview interview by Joshua Kosman here. (I call Burt’s themes “earworms of the highest order,” which is not bad.)
The band: Jonathan Finlayson, Simón Willson, Clinton Curtis, me, Vinnie Sperrazza, Blaire Perrin, Marcy Harriell.
Friday February 24: solo piano concert at the Mabel Tainter Theater, Menomonie WI (will play my Piano Sonata and Prelude and Fugue + standards etc.)
Saturday February 25: trio with Anthony Cox and Kevin Washington, Crooners, Minneapolis
Sunday March 12: trio with Thomas Morgan and Eric McPherson at the Owl Music Parlor, Brooklyn. Guesting on a tune or two each set: Reggie Parker, dancer
March 31 and April 1: trio with Peter Washington and Eric McPherson at Mezzrow, NYC
Dance Heginbotham’s all-Iverson program plays in Scottsdale on March 25.
Retro__chip did me the amazing honor of setting Jessica Brilli’s cover to Every Note is True in Legos. What!!
Thanks to all who came to my birthday shows at the Jazz Gallery. They really were great fun!
Photo of myself with Buster Williams and Billy Hart by Kijun Lee
I took this one of Billy and Buster backstage
Sarah Deming took this one of the septet + dancer (Reggie Parker, Sam Newsome, Vinnie Sperrazza, Jacob Garchik, Rob Schwimmer, me, Jonathan Finlayson, Simón Willson)
And Tony Creamer supplied an action shot:
Thanks to Julia Weber and Nancy Umanoff for supplying the relevant ornamentation on the official day (it was delicious)
Scott Wollschlager sent me a birthday card! I put a rendition on Twitter. (Note tempo marking.)
The gig a few days ago with Charles McPherson was great too.
At rehearsal with Charles I unthinkingly played a minor eleventh at the end of one of McPherson’s minor ballads. Charles stopped and said, “No.”
I teased him: “I thought you were a jazz cat!”
He shot back: “An old jazz cat! Harmonic minor, please.”
(By “harmonic minor” Charles means a minor tonic with the associated diminished. The notes B, D, F, and A-flat are in the “harmonic minor” scale. In modal jazz — like the C min 11 I was playing — it is uncommon to voice-lead from a diminished.)
While fussing endlessly about my 50th birthday, I quite forgot there was another anniversary of considerable personal importance: 20 years since the release of These Are the Vistas by The Bad Plus. Cover painting by Stephen Collier.
The album is not hard to find in the culture, and comes up once in a while on a house system or the radio. I admit I'm always surprised by how fresh it still sounds. Sincere thanks to Reid Anderson and David King. We did it.
Being in the right place at the right time helps: Yves Beauvais signed us to Columbia, and Lorraine Gordon gave us a week at the Vanguard for the record release.
It was the last of the old system: The peak of CD buying was the year 2003, and These Are the Vistas was displayed in the lightbox at Tower Records on the corner of West 4th street. The CD sold 100,000 copies in America alone.