bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Theories of Language Development
Authors: Macaulay Ronald
Published: November 2023

The distinguished linguist James McCawley once remarked in a talk, “When you hear a linguist use the word theory you should put your hand on your wallet.” In the past half century a great many people have been in danger of losing their wallets. The Fagin figure in this dubious enterprise has been Noam Chomsky, whose own theories of children’s language development have spawned many rival versions. (See the appendix for an account of Chomsky’s work.) Fifty years ago Chomsky attacked the then-current theories of children’s language acquisition. The prevailing view claimed that children learned by attempting to imitate the speech of adults and were reinforced to improve their early inadequate efforts by rewards and punishments. Chomsky argued that there was no way that infants could develop language by this method since language is too complex for such an approach. Instead, he argued that human beings are born with an innate knowledge of how language is structured and use this innate knowledge to work out how to acquire competence in the language to which they are exposed. Chomsky initially called this innate knowledge a language acquisition device (L AD) but latterly has referred to it as universal grammar (UG). Central to this notion is the claim that all languages are basically the same, though they differ in many superficial characteristics.
Learning a Second Language
Authors: Macaulay Ronald
Published: November 2023

For some reason, many people seem to find the very notion of bilingualism threatening. Yet bilingualism (or more commonly multilingualism) is the norm for most nation-states. There are fewer than two hundred nation-states and perhaps six thousand languages. Only about ten of the nation-states can be said to be predominantly monolingual (for example, Portugal, Iceland, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Bangladesh, and the Dominican Republic). Even in countries where the overwhelming majority speak one language, as in the United States and Britain, there may be substantial numbers of people who speak other languages. In 1976 the number of people in the United States from a non-English language background was determined to be 28 million, and it is estimated that by the year 2000 this figure will have risen to 39.5 million. However, rather than being seen as an asset, the presence of speakers of other languages is resented by many Americans. In recent years this anxiety has taken the form of “English-only” proposals designed to make English the official language of the United States and to ban the use of other languages in public institutions. This is a reaction to, among other things, the Bilingual Education Act of 1968, which for the first time in decades provided public support for instruction in a language other than English. At the same time, American educational institutions devote extensive resources to instruction in “foreign” languages, with little evidence of widespread success.
The Establishment of African Slavery in Latin America in the 16th Century
Authors: Klein Herbert S , Ben Vinson III
Published: November 2023

The European conquest of the American hemisphere did not automatically guarantee the expansion of African slave labor to the New World. Africans within Europe and the Atlantic islands were still a relatively minor part of the European labor force, and even sugar production was not totally in the hands of black slaves. At the same time, the existence of some 20 to 25 million American Indians seemed to mean that Europeans would have an abundant supply of labor available for the exploitation of their new colonies. Finally, Europe itself was experiencing major population growth in the 16th century and could probably rely on migrations of its poorer peasants and urban dwellers for its American labor needs. Yet despite these alternative labor supplies, America became the great market for an estimated 10 million African slaves in the course of the next >ve centuries, and it was in the New World that African slavery most ? ourished under European rule. Until the 1830s more Africans than Europeans crossed the Atlantic annually and as late as 1750 some 4.5 million of the estimated 6.6 million people who had come to the Americas since 1492 were African slaves.
Slavery and the Plantation Economy in Brazil and the Guyanas in the 19th Century
Authors: Klein Herbert S , Ben Vinson III
Published: November 2023

The impact of the Haitian revolution was not con>ned to the nearby Caribbean plantation societies. It was also to have a profound influence on South American developments as well, both in such major slave societies as Brazil and in the smaller European continental colonies on the northeastern coast. In these regions the elimination of the world’s leading sugar and coffee producer generated renewed growth in both the plantation regime and slavery after 1791. Only in the Spanish American republics was there little economic response to these changes.
Slave Resistance and Rebellion
Authors: Klein Herbert S , Ben Vinson III
Published: November 2023

The growth of a sense of identity and community among African slaves in Latin America was essential for their survival as a society and group. Families were established, children were educated, and beliefs were developed that gave legitimacy to their lives. But many aspects of their lives were controlled by others. Their labor was de>ned by others and was not typically organized by households, as in the case of other working-class persons. Even their social behavior was restricted by whites when it clashed with the needs for control or the norms of behavior found acceptable by whites.
On Speaking
Authors: Smith W Stephen , Chipman Michael
Published: November 2023

Speaking is innate to the human condition; we all do it. It is also the original creative activity. We phonate from the moment of birth, when we come screaming from our mother’s womb. Doctors and midwives worry if a baby doesn’t cry very quickly after birth because in that context, phonation is literally a sign of life (it is also one of the most beautiful sounds in the world). The baby’s first action in life—after taking its first breath—is to phonate, to express fear at being thrust into a new world or to react to the pain, discomfort, and confusion of the birthing process. That compulsion to communicate—the need to express—is what I call the source of utterance.
The First Invention: Simply Speaking Simply
Authors: Smith W Stephen , Chipman Michael
Published: November 2023

The idea of Simply Speaking Simply is to learn to speak with clarity. In an ideal world, all of our actions and words would be free from the contamination of insecurity, fear, and ulterior motives. However, in the real world, we often don’t speak with clear, direct, and honest intentions; instead, our words sometimes veil the truth we want to communicate, the emotions we truly want to express, or the needs we want the world to meet. Most of us are unaware of the ulterior motives that entangle our words, actions, and relationships. When we begin to look honestly at who we are and what we want and then access that most authentic part of ourselves, those entanglements become obvious. Seeing our-selves clearly, we have the power to change. Change brings freedom, and freedom enables us to speak with pure intention—the original source of utterance I discussed in Chapter .
The Second Invention: Free-Flowing Air
Authors: Smith W Stephen , Chipman Michael
Published: November 2023

In Simply Speaking Simply we learned to speak with a clean, clear sound, free from entanglements but with full engagement of the vocal folds. In Free-Flowing Air, we go to the other extreme, only minimally engaging the vocal folds so that the air flows freely and consistently in any range. We begin with a simple sigh and then build on that sensation in different ways to achieve a feeling of free-flowing air. Simply Speaking Simply isolates the chiaro or bright part of the sound; Free-Flowing Air isolates the oscuro or dark part of the sound. Neither extreme is a complete chiaroscuro sound, but by isolating them, we can fuse them together healthily later on.
The Fourth Invention: Spontaneous Combustion
Authors: Smith W Stephen , Chipman Michael
Published: November 2023

Just as in Simply Speaking Simply, the basic neurological impulse to speak is the basis for the action in the Fourth Invention, Spontaneous Combustion. Here we return to basic speech and the original source of utterance, the desire to express and communicate. Spontaneous Combustion happens when we are poised— calm, collected, still, and ready. Spontaneity is not the same as impromptu, which implies a lack of preparation; rather, the spontaneous singer is poised and prepared with the ideal conditions for a spontaneous action to occur. In the same way that poise affects healthy vocalism, it affects performance on stage and in everyday life.
The Fifth Invention: The Wobble
Authors: Smith W Stephen , Chipman Michael
Published: November 2023

Why would any singer want to master the art of the wobble? A wobble is usually associated with the elderly soprano in the church choir whose vibrato is big enough to drive a truck through. No singer wants a wobble, and no audience wants to hear a voice wobbling out of control. So why in the world would I use this word? There is a simple reason: I call it The Wobble for its shock effect. It tends to stir people up and get them thinking about vocal control in a different way.
Find Your Own Path
Authors: Smith W Stephen , Chipman Michael
Published: November 2023

Once singers have established a solid technique and are committed to the process of continual improvement, many decide to pursue a professional career in singing. I am often asked how one goes about achieving a successful career as a singer. There is no easy answer to that question because all of the singers I have worked with who have achieved what many would call a successful career have attained their success by following very different paths. The most important principle in pursuing any career should be the same as the principle involved in learning to sing: Be true to yourself.
Weather Bird
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Gary Giddins’s magnificent book Visions of Jazz has been hailed as a landmark in music criticism. Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post called it “the definitive compendium by the most interesting jazz critic now at work.” And Alfred Appel, Jr., in The New York Times Book Review, said it was “the finest unconventional history of jazz ever written.” It was the first work on jazz ever to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Now comes Weather Bird, a brilliant companion volume to Visions of Jazz. In this superb collection of essays, reviews and articles, Giddins brings together, for the first time, more than 140 pieces written over a 14-year period, most of them for his column in the Village Voice (also called “Weather Bird”). The book is first and foremost a celebration of jazz, with illuminating commentary on contemporary jazz events, on today’s top musicians, on the best records of the year, and on leading figures from jazz’s past. Readers will find extended pieces on Louis Armstrong, Erroll Garner, Benny Carter, Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck, Ornette Coleman, Billie Holiday, Cassandra Wilson, Tony Bennett, and many others. Giddins includes a series of articles on the annual JVC Jazz Festival, which taken together offer a splendid overview of jazz in the 1990s. Other highlights include an astute look at avant-garde music (“Parajazz”) and his challenging essay, “How Come Jazz Isn’t Dead?” which advances a theory about the way art is born, exploited, celebrated, and sidelined to the museum. A radiant compendium by America’s leading music critic, Weather Bird offers an unforgettable look at the modern jazz scene.
Chippin’ Off the Old Block (Javon Jackson)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Tenor saxophonist Javon Jackson was a 22-year-old student at the Berklee College of Music when he auditioned for Art Blakey in 1987. Blakey took him on, and three years later, when the roving graduate program known as the Jazz Messengers came to an end, Jackson had seniority among the band’s sidemen. Tracing his early development on records is a gratifying game of cat and mouse. For one thing, his improvisations are short and efficient (he hasn’t the time to outwear his welcome), and for another, he has crafted a cagey style from readily identifiable gambits associated with Sonny Rollins and Joe Henderson, among others. You keep waiting for an authoritative leap, a departure that lets you know the gifted student is now on his own road, and you get plenty of indications. Compare his solos on the title tracks of Blakey’s Not Yet (Black Saint, 1988) and Chippin’ In (Timeless, 1990). The former, five choruses long, starts with two modulated riffs, expands with Rollinsesque triplets and a fluent navigation through the low register, and finishes with a whirling Hendersonian arpeggio. It’s a fine solo, but you can practically see the wheels turning.
Heavy Mettle Thunder (Ronald Shannon Jackson)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

The trouble with most fusion is that nothing ever really fuses. A few surface aspects of jazz and rock are tacked together in a highly calculated manner that only confirms the suspicion that jazz-rock is more often than not an oxymoron—an exceedingly dull one at that. As a movement, fusion is to music what melting-pot civics is to sociology. Which is, I suppose, why it has a huge popular following and a minute body of critical confirmation. A unique situation: Fusion has been with us for a quarter of a century, twice as long as the Swing Era, but virtually all commentary is focused on things like equipment and technique or nostalgia. Yet one recalls, and even revisits, some of the rousing beginnings—Tony Williams’s Emergency! (blemished by the leader’s decision to sing), and the crushing sound-storms created by Miles Davis and John McLaughlin— and wonders anew at how its potential could so quickly be sapped of vitality and innovation.
Go Wes, Young Man (Mark Whitfield)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

You can’t help but suspect that much of the delayed interest generated by Mark Whitfield, the talented 23-year-old no-frills jazz guitarist who made his Village Vanguard debut last week, is related to the surprising fact that he records for Warner Bros. I mean, how many critics, having registered the label affiliation, scanned the cover photos on his first album, The Marksman (young and clean-cut, brown suit and tasseled loafers, no socks, crouching or leaping, guitar at the ready, in quasi–Chuck Berry poses), and tossed it into the maybe-three-weeks-from-Thursdayif-nothing-else-comes-out-in-the-interim pile? Arriving from a company that construes jazz as stylish background music, which is to say polite fusion or, worse, Quincified sampling, Whitfield is as confounding as an IBM researcher who preaches the merits of the pencil: “Inexpensive and portable, doesn’t require electricity or a printer, makes instant corrections and, with practice, can be moved as fast as a cursor. Could be the writing implement for the ‘90s.”
Jazz Danish (The Jazzpar Concert)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Denmark is neither the most nor least surprising nation in the world to sponsor the first international jazz prize. It has enjoyed direct contact with black music’s perceived threat to European values since the first minstrel troupes visited almost 130 years ago. In the 1890s, Copenhagen was host to the Fisk Jubilee Singers and a black opera company; in 1903, Sousa brought over the cakewalk. Yet for half a century, at least until the 1920s, this famously liberal country, which behaved so bravely during the World War II occupation, shared the typical European paranoia about black music, characterizing it as the product of savages and worse. In his three-volume Jazz i Danmark, published in 1982 with a summary chapter in English, Erik Wiedemann identifies five myths that shaped the reception of jazz in Denmark: (1) racism—its creators were “subhuman”; (2) chauvinism—jazz, being primitive and exotic, represented a threat to European culture; (3) reverse racism—jazz can only be played by blacks because they are born with it; (4) biological democracy—jazz is a “natural” music because “everyone is born with it”; (5) aesthetic— jazz is folk, not art, music.
The Glow of Doc Cheatham (JVC 1991, Part One)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Seven years ago, I wrote, “Few educated Americans can name even five jazz musicians under the age of 40.” One measure of how quickly jazz evolves is that I can’t imagine typing such a thing today. “Under 40” is the ide´e fixee of the current JVC Jazz Festival, two-thirds over as I write, and thus far the most genial and satisfying in years. Where racism and sexism wouldn’t dare raise their shameful heads, ageism is casually flaunted. Two kinds of musicians predominate this year—under 40 and over 60. Players who came up in the ‘60s and early ‘70s must be on vacation somewhere; either that, or the programming has been done in collusion with The New Republic and other regressive think tanks that want to put those scarifying years... where? Behind us, of course. Still, it isn’t a bad thing to underscore a phenomenon that scarcely seemed imaginable seven years back. We have gone beyond Wyntonism.
The Advocate (Eddie Condon)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Eddie Condon was a vigorous jazz activist whose barbed tongue and stubborn beliefs were powerful implements for spreading the jazz gospel as he interpreted it. Decades after his death, in 1973, the kind of music he championed was still widely known as Condon-style, though, inevitably, the prophet and his music receded into memory when the last practitioners passed on. They merit our respect all the same. Condon and the success he enjoyed recall a tremulous period in jazz history, when the racial divide was first breached and the very act of playing jazz or representing oneself as a jazz musician conveyed the thrill of anarchy. The suspicion of outlawry was real in the United States, where Ladies Home Journal blamed jazz for an increase in rape, and severe in the Soviet Union, where playing it was a criminal offense. Condon’s career could hardly have been more unorthodox. Though not an important instrumentalist or bandleader, Condon performed on many fine—even important—recordings and fronted countless bands. His accomplishments as a composer were few, yet he helped to codify an enduring school of jazz. He was a radical in his youth and a reactionary ever after, yet he won a lasting respect as one of jazz’s most effective propagandists, heralding America’s brave new music on the bandstand and off, as a musician, organizer, memoirist, broadcast personality, newspaper columnist, and club owner.
Martin Williams, 1924–1992
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

It is inconceivable to me that anyone ever called Martin Williams, the tireless advocate and critic of America’s native arts (primarily jazz, but also movies, newspaper comics, and TV), Marty. He wore the name Martin, much as he did his inevitable narrow ties, with a casual certitude he was wont to characterize as “insufferable egomania.” He had, in a word, presence. Tall and trim, the slender neckwear accentuating the span of his military frame, and exceedingly vain of his good looks, he did not lend himself to diminutives of any sort; on the contrary, he was more martinet than Marty, yet more Martin than Mr. Williams. His death leaves a gaping wound in the field of jazz criticism and education, and in the lives of all who knew and learned from him. Martin had been undergoing radiation treatment for cancer, which left him vulnerable to the flu. He was found dead in his Alexandria, Virginia, home in the early hours of April 13, 1992. Martin was my mentor—indeed, he instructed a whole generation: critics and listeners and teachers, even musicians, though some of his contemporaries took his measure too lightly, criticizing his austere prose and even questioning the depth of his affections. Others knew he was onto something important, a way of writing about jazz that eschewed familiar anecdotes about colorful semi-mythological musicians in favor of formal but accessible musical analysis. He accomplished this with a diction virtually shorn of metaphor and reminiscence. His ego notwithstanding, Williams’s criticism is remarkably selfless. When he returned to writing in the early ‘80s, after a long and uneasy hiatus, I encouraged him to put more of himself in his work—if not a memoir then at least a personal expression of his involvement with music. He smiled and shook his head decisively. “I can’t,” he said. Thirty years ago, Whitney Balliett referred to him as a man “who thinks about jazz more than any other public observer,” and Martin’s prose did, in fact, suggest an ascetic’s attempt to pose ideas and ask useful questions.
Grand-Lee (Lee Konitz)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Is there any designation more debilitating to the commercial welfare of an artist than that of “musician’s musician”? And is any jazz-man more closely identified with that universally respected yet marginalized breed than Lee Konitz? For 45 years, his work has been the subject of close analysis, imitation, high regard, and occasional bewilderment. In 1947, at age 20, he recorded his first acclaimed alto saxophone improvisations with Claude Thornhill’s band: “Thrivin’ on a Riff” and the splendid “Yardbird Suite,” in which he alights with puckish alertness, a lowercase bird chirping in a timbre shy of vibrato though formidably songful. In those days he astonished simply by virtue of not mimicking (uppercase) Bird, while fully reflecting Bird’s modernist breach in melody, harmony, and rhythm. Konitz’s cool sound, a partial reflection of his clarinet studies with a member of the Chicago Symphony, was so much his own that a school seemed almost destined to grow around it.
Lions in Summer (JVC 1992)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

An alluring melancholy pervaded the 1992 JVC Jazz Festival, as though the music, on the battlements at high tide, wanted nothing more than to linger in the warmth of its glorious past and customarily rattled present; one last and loving look before dawn breaks on the vacant shore. JVC itself is rattled, by competing interests and a dearth of sure-fire attractions. The nine-day commemoration was nothing like a sweeping or even discerning survey of the jazz terrain, but rather a stoic meditation on departed or ailing kings, with tributes proffered by followers, jesters, and a reassuring body of untried princes, only rarely by equals. Opening with the first of two homages to Dizzy Gillespie, whose 75th year is receiving much of the recognition it deserves, JVC unfurled appreciations of gray eminences (Lionel Hampton, Illinois Jacquet, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Ray Charles) and the recently and not-so-recently departed: John Coltrane, Buck Clayton, John Carter, Clifford Brown, Thelonious Monk, and Stan Getz. Gerry Mulligan revived the 52and 53-year-old recordings of the Miles Davis Nonet; Charlie Haden reconstituted the Liberation Music Orchestra; Nina Simone compensated for her no-show of several years ago; and the return of the Brecker Brothers proved that fusion, too, has its memorialists.
Computer Wars (Robert Parker)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Among the finest early jazz recordings are those by the Clarence Williams Blue Five of 1924, in which Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet resolve by example such essential issues as the role of the soloist, dispositions toward repertoire, and ensemble infrastructure. Bechet held his own, occasionally besting Armstrong, which no one else would ever do. “Mandy, Make Up Your Mind” is a less than hair-raising but highly picturesque sample of their work, and it’s unique for boasting the only sarrusophone solo on a jazz recording. The brass double-reed instrument (invented in 1865 and used primarily in military bands) came in a family assortment, descending in pitch from sopranino to contra-bass: Bechet wielded the bass version. Not surprisingly, given acoustical recording techniques of 1924, he produced a clamorous rumble suggesting the kind of internal combustion caused by bad diet. Unless, that is, you listen to the recording as reprocessed a few years ago by the Australian engineer Robert Parker.
Vivid Multitudes (The Best Jazz Records of 1992)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Travel, influenza, and the death of Dizzy Gillespie have all conspired to postpone the onerous task of a 10-best list into the Season of Clinton, which has already delivered a number of sprightly ‘93 releases by some of the very people listed below. The trick in looking back is not to work too hard at it. Go with the records that stand out vividly, that provoked multiple hearings or at least good and stable thoughts. Even so, know that you haven’t listened to everything, and recognize the inevitable: Immediately after your list goes into print, you will find the year’s masterpiece buried in the sofa—still wrapped in cellophane with one of those annoying silver adhesives to ensure the absolute and utterly pointless sterility of the disc. The selections are arrayed alphabetically. Mea culpa in advance. • Muhal Richard Abrams, Blu Blu Blu (Black Saint). “Bloodline” and the title selection, a big production blues of the sort only Abrams can pull off (but hasn’t since 1981’s “Blues Forever”), are peaks in an album that demonstrates perhaps more convincingly than The Hearinga Suite that he is one of the leading big band composers of the day, not least because he makes his soloists shine.
Living Large (Bobby Watson)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

It couldn’t have been his new album, Tailor Made (Columbia), that brought out SRO crowds for Bobby Watson’s big-band debut at the Village Vanguard in mid-May, because it had hardly hit the streets and is something of a disappointment anyway. So credit the turnout to a vestigial jazz alertness periodically sweeping over Manhattan when something good is in the air. Musicians caught up in the presently fashionable winds (long may they blow) of big band repertory have a mission. But a musician who endures the trauma of organizing a big band to play his own new music has an obsession, one to be applauded and encouraged at every step. Soloing before or simply listening to the crashing brasses and swaying reeds, Watson exuded the kind of pleasure—it’s almost sexual—unique to orchestral amplitude, which in jazz means a number in the very low two-figures. With a rhythm section (augmented by Latin percussion) taken from his quintet, Horizon; an equally practiced reed section drawn from the 29th Street Saxophone Quartet (Watson is a member); and brasses boosted by the patented brilliance of Jon Faddis, Watson had reason to beam. The divisions swirled and coiled, lifting his fiery alto sax solos on crests and then floating them in pleasurable anticipation of crests to come. The straightforward, bop-inflected writing made up in limberness what it lacked in depth, and when the voicings got fancier, the mild stretches of balladic prettiness were direct and even ingenuous. This is an orchestra that takes its cue from the 1950s, not for the purposes of revival or homage, but to grasp again that moment when fluent bebop melodies and boisterous Latin rhythms found common cause. Several of the pieces—”Lafiya,” “Old Time Ways,” “Free Yourself”—advanced with storytelling logic and a deft concerto-like regard for the soloists. You’ll want to catch this band on its return.
Gallic Swing (Stephane Grappelli)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

The 85th birthday tribute to Stephane Grappelli, at Carnegie Hall on June 9, was a triumph for the ageless violinist and the particular brand of jazz he has made his own. The swing he invokes is as decisive as a pendulum or an axe, a bright and inexorable thumping that subdivides every measure with four definitive blows, 128 per chorus. The music soars over those demarcations, charged by the beat, but it’s difficult if not impossible to ignore the rigors of that ground rhythm; at times my own bobbing neck and those all around put me in mind of perpetual motion cranes pecking at water glasses. Periodically, you brake the action, the better to focus on the specific notes, but before you know it the chompchomp-chomp-chomp infiltrates an unguarded part of the brain, and the foot begins to tap, the elbow to twitch, and the neck to pitch forward. It’s a kind of hypnosis.
A Surprise Banquet (JVC 1993)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

When the peak of a nine-day jazz festival is scaled by a 75-year-old entertainer whose jazz associations over half a century have been at best tangential and at worst gratuitous, you can assume that the usual suspects flagged terribly or that said entertainer astounded. Lena Horne’s sublime 30-minute performance at the tribute to Billy Strayhorn should become part of Newport/New York/Kool/JVC legend. And yet she wasn’t the only one who performed at a level that may, as time goes by, also qualify as memorable. Thus what looked like thin gruel going in provided something of a banquet. Against all odds, the flagship of impresario George Wein’s global operation turned out to be a modest success—not for the sweep and aspiration by which we usually evaluate it, but for incisive and animated musicianship. The Sound of Surprise surprised. True, the perception may have been helped by diminished expectations. The piano recitals were gone, as were the crossover artists—Ray Charles, B. B. King—who ensure a certain boisterousness. Instead of three major hall concerts per evening, JVC ‘93 offered two or one. New music was conspicuously absent. Several young mainstreamers were pressed into jam session tableaux, but none received important debuts or showcases.
Tremolos and Elegies (Cyrus Chestnut)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

By their tunes ye shall know them. So in welcoming pianist Cyrus Chestnut as he emerges from the ranks of accompanists into the limelight of leadership, let’s begin with the tunes—those he writes and those he interprets. Last week he debuted with one trio at the Village Vanguard and with another on his first major album, Revelation (Atlantic). The 31year-old, Baltimore-born, Berklee-graduated, and widely apprenticed pianist is a prolific composer, and he favors his own material. But not exclusively. The album’s two exceptions suggest something about his range and taste. The jazz genealogy of Jules Massenet’s “Elegie” as one of Art Tatum’s pet morsels is well known. Tatum elaborated the tune with characteristic e´lan, his variations partaking of stride bass, supersonic arpeggios, and a rubato close, all underscoring the source melody. Chestnut is less respectful of the original. He begins improvising over a pedal-bass, then buttresses himself with a descending four-chord figure that suggests nothing so much as the turnback for “Sweet Georgia Brown,” which is his immediate set-up for Massenet’s tune. The pop reference is echoed in the introduction of a standard old-time four-note descending bass vamp. He wails on that and then on the chord changes he has adduced, kicking into overdrive with propulsive riffs and, unlike Tatum, completely escaping the gravitas of the original. Chestnut reprises the tune only at the end, as a head, incorporating the four-note vamp on piano before a quick and not inelegant fade. In stately contrast, “Sweet Hour of Prayer” is an old hymn sweetly played, peeled of all complexity, with a slow-motion Bach mordent as the kicker.
The Power and the Reticence (JVC 1994)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Competing big bands, controlled jam sessions, piano duets, salutes, jazz al fresco, Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck, Ray Charles and Mel Tormé. Where the hell are we—the Newport Jazz Festival of 1958, the Newportin-New York Festival of 1972, Nice, New Orleans, a Savoy Ballroom of the imagination? No, we’re right here on the sun-scorched terra firma of New York City in 1994, where the JVC Jazz Festival gazes stoically at the future through a rear-view mirror. Satchel Paige had it wrong: Always look back, because if you’re lucky, your old and just possibly better self may be gaining on you. The iconoclast in me wants to catalog what JVC ought to be, especially by example of what Europe routinely offers in the way of summertime jazz festivals—at Norway’s Kongsberg Festival, where I dropped in for a day, the performers included the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Randy Weston, Steve Coleman, bluesman Johnny Copeland, and opera singer Barbara Hendricks, who presented an evening of songs from Ellington’s three Sacred Concerts in the local church. But you’ve heard that spiel before and, in any case, the reporter in me prefers to honor that most resilient of impresarios, George Wein, for once again taking cheapjack and making Jack Daniel’s. I’m not referring to the more adventurous afternoon concerts, a welcome return to the street events of Newport’s early years in New York, but to hall-bound exhibits that transcended expectations. Not for the first time has a schedule that looked tepid on paper produced magic in the playing. You’ve heard that spiel before, too, yet this year the surprises were a little more intense than usual.
Leonard Feather, 1914–1994
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Leonard Feather, who passed away on September 22, 1994, nine days after his 80th birthday, always insisted that John Hammond was the most important of all jazz critics. That’s not surprising if you recall that Feather, who was Hammond’s junior by four years, initially made his way through the British jazz world in the early ‘30s, when Hammond’s articles in The Gramophone and Melody Maker were stirring the jazz waters as no English-speaking critic had or would again until Feather himself took up the sword for modern jazz in New York a decade later. Hammond encouraged him to make the move, in 1935; 20 years later, he helped midwife publication of Feather’s Encyclopedia of Jazz. Yet it was also Hammond with whom Feather conducted the most vitriolic of several public feuds. Hammond was the prototype writer-activist, enforcing his critical pronouncements with a regimen of recording, promoting, producing, and general agitation, mostly on behalf of new talent and new movements— he helped launch the Swing Era. He was also unstinting in his devotion to civil rights, in and out of the music biz. With varying degrees of success, Feather would follow his lead, adding his by no means negligible abilities as lyricist (occasionally aided by his wife, Jane) and composer. Indeed, his early years here were devoted almost exclusively to producing, arranging, and composing. Not until the early 1940s, when he became associated with Metronome and Esquire, did he begin to function primarily as a critic.
Festival Blues (JVC 1995)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

No jazz festival in the world could compete with the combination of ace musicianship and star power that was New York’s bounty during the last two weeks in June. You had your choice of Benny Carter, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Elvin Jones, David Murray, Javon Jackson, Kenny Burrell, Anita O’Day, Dick Hyman, Don Byron, Roy Hargrove, and Charnett Moffett in the upscale clubs alone. An additional 108 (so they say) bands were corralled by the Knitting Factory for the “What Is Jazz?” festival, featuring Cecil Taylor, Lester Bowie, Dewey Redman, Marty Ehrlich, Henry Threadgill, Evan Parker, Rashied Ali, and James Blood Ulmer. Parks and pubs likewise brandished their finest jazz wares. And oh yeah, the JVC Jazz Festival was around, the presumed excuse for all this, with its gloried history and invincible publicity machine. Shall we be charitable and surmise that most of the major artists had already been booked for the aforementioned gigs, leaving JVC no options beyond Al Jarreau, the Ohio Players, a Russian rock band, and Helen Schneider? No, we shall not. Impresario George Wein didn’t merely trim back; he zoned out. He had at his disposal two of the city’s great concert halls plus Bryant Park. He had a couple of aging legends whose very appearances prompted vertical ovations. What he lacked was an idea or a theme that might manifest a concern for, love of, or interest in jazz. There were moments, yes—there always are. But calling those disparate events a festival is like calling the Republicans a party.
Young and Verbal (Carmen McRae)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Someone once claimed that nobody could impart more emotion and meaning to certain words—like love—than Billie Holiday. It was a compliment she relished. No question, she could penetrate the core of intention in any song, even a fatuous one: The phrase “me, myself, and I are all in love with you” is banal on paper, but what a buoyant declaration she makes of it. She wasn’t the first, of course, but until the mid-’30s, Louis Armstrong focused his singing more on music than words, Bing Crosby was most expressive as a ballad singer, and Mildred Bailey explored a gentler dramatic range. The blues singers were relatively generic and, by Cafe Society standards, primitive, though not as dated as the torch singers, who made do with one overheated recipe for tears. So whatever else Holiday achieved, she located meaning in songs while simultaneously freeing them from melodrama, and in that respect and others she was a beacon for Frank Sinatra, her exact contemporary, who pared singing down even further. In studying the precise message of a lyric, Sinatra defined the abyss between a good pop singer and a poor one: the good one subordinates instrument and technique to the art of interpretation; the poor one is too in love with the sound of his or her own voice to bother with the song.
Three by Three (Tim Hagans / Dave Douglas / Roy Hargrove)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Jazz trios built around wind instruments don’t quite scan. Exceptions from Sidney Bechet to Sonny Rollins to Leo Smith notwithstanding, the rules of jazz deportment dictate that a saxophonist is not fully dressed without a complement of three; nor is a trumpet star complete without a full rhythm team or a front-line partner. Such customs spring from the assumption that a brass player’s chops cannot withstand a solo regimen unsupported by at least one other improviser, and from the fear that reprieve-choruses will be taken up by bassist or drummer. However emphatic the conception, the suspicion abides that the poor fellow has lost his fourth wheel. Judging from the appearance of three new trumpet trios, tricycles may soon make a comeback. attributes are displayed on the title selection, and then emphasized on “Unhooking the Safety Net” (he’s good with titles), with its opening cadenza and a sort of Mediterranean march-dance that savors of Flamenco trumpet. The East European mode is felt on “Taking Sides,” which combines unison and part writing, and the Spanish tinge permeates the extended “Maquiladora.” In contrast, he offers a superb rendition of Herbie Nichols’s “The Gig,” which is built on hesitations that sound strangely European in this context, a thorny meditation on “Scriabin,” and a reading of a Schumann duet subtitled by Douglas “mit Humor.”
Different Drummer (Modern Jazz Quartet)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Long ago, in the depths of adolescence, I stood shoulder to shoulder with a friend and future jazz critic at a Duke Ellington concert and dance. I had seen Ellington before, including a recent performance of virtually the same set—a point I made with jaded impatience to my friend, who was hearing him live for the first time. He turned on me with justifiable irritation for trying to divert his awe. Taking in his slack jaw and glazed eyes, as he stared at the bandstand, I recalled my own first encounter with Ellington, my own slack jaw and glazed eyes, and quickly recovered my sense of wonder. The first time with Ellington is, like the first time with sex or Charlie Chaplin or really good asparagus, epic. Later you may have to call up your purer self to defeat the deadening effects of sophistication. A great concert is ultimately a collusion between artist and listener, in which the alertness of one is inseparable from that of the other. The musicians may savor the joys of a shining performance before a dull audience, just as a falling tree may crash through an uninhabited forest, but art truly burgeons when its nuances are shared. The Modern Jazz Quartet, now at the close of its 43rd year, opened the 1995 San Francisco Jazz Festival with a performance worth savoring—a performance that restored the wonder elicited by this longest-lived chamber ensemble at its best.
Lost and Found (Brian Barley / Andrew Hill)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

A Canadian label that morosely calls itself Just a Memory has re-released three recordings from 1967 and 1970 that turn a belated spotlight on an obscure saxophonist named Brian Barley. A search of periodicals and books turned up not a single reference to him outside of discographies, so all I know of him is drawn from the blurb on his sole album as a leader—born in Toronto; took up saxophone under the influence of Lee Konitz; favored “Coleman, Coltrane, Dolphy, Rollins, and Shepp”; died “a tragic and accidental death” in June 1971, at 28. Not much. His playing on these CDs makes you want to know more. The earliest is Maynard Ferguson Sextet, a radio transcription session coordinated with Ferguson’s homecoming during Expo ‘67. This was a transitional period for Ferguson, whose long association with Roulette had ended in 1964, leaving him foundering among labels and alternating between big band and sextet. The Canadians hired him to stock both units with homegrown talent. In the sextet, they got a credible rhythm section and a front line comprising Ferguson’s blaring trumpet, an untuned altoist, and the 24-year-old Barley, whose tenor saxophone displays a promisingly forthright middle register and a penchant for growls and pitch deviations. It’s his blues solo over a walking bass on Mike Abene’s “To and Fro” and his soul-style variations on an otherwise flat performance of Lanny Morgan’s “Polecat” that make the album worth Hill, and there is something preposterous about hearing him in a restaurant, where the slightest chatter or table noise can throw off your (but apparently not his) concentration. Still, his opening set at Iridium last week settled any fears that he might actually have learned a standard over the years, or written an AABA tune in which each letter represents eight bars.
Drum Dada (Han Bennink)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Some performers, like Chaplin, are not ensemble players—you train the spotlight on them and hope for the best. No one who knows the 54-yearold Dutch drummer Han Bennink exclusively from the diverse recordings he has made over 35 years would put him in that category. Yet at the Knitting Factory’s Bennink festival, which consisted of eight hourlong duets with as many partners over four nights, he emphasized his theatrical inclinations. Looking trimly Aryan with a close-cropped blond pate, he opened each set with a gunshot whack on the snare, attended his associates’ initial forays with rudimental support, and then departed for the realm of Dada in a series of gestures, anarchic and funny, that transported the audience into a realm of prudent but grateful tittering. Boring he is not. The presentation was far more musical and rewarding than it can possibly sound autopsied, but here goes. In practically every show, he did much or all of the following: accoutered himself in wooden clogs and, seated on the floor, played them like drums; placed a cymbal on his head and rang it like a gong; snapped scissors in rhythm; bunched sheets of newspaper percussively; rested his right foot on the tom-tom; deadened the snare with a towel; flipped, dropped, and threw away his sticks; carried the snare to the stage apron; placed the end of one stick in his jaw and rapped on it with the other; held the snare to his mouth and screamed; played the backside of the bass drum through his legs; produced various rattles, bells, and other noisemakers; pushed over parts of the traps and tossed cymbals in the air or threw them to the ground— always rhythmically, of course.
Classic Ambition (Wynton Marsalis)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Longer than Don Giovanni, Aida, or the combined playing time of Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige, Max Roach’s We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, and Hannibal Peterson’s African Portraits, Wynton Marsalis’s Blood on the Fields, an oratorio that—like the latter three works—takes as its subject the African American slave experience, is, in short, long. The first question posed by a three-hour piece must be: Does it justify its length? Beethoven, attacked for self-indulgence in his Third Symphony, doubled the duration in his Ninth; time may tilt the scales for Marsalis as well. But the audience for the February 24 Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra performance was unwilling to wait; some two-thirds of the sold-out house rose to its feet (“feet in the butt,” the work proclaims, “beget recognition”) and fled, greater clumps scurrying with each ensuing episode. Marsalis anticipated that response in an unusual opening plea for the house to stick. “It gets there,” he pledged. I was reminded of the screening of Otto Preminger’s Exodus during which Mort Sahl rose and petitioned the director, “Otto, let my people go!”
Hard of Hearing (JVC 1997)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

The 25th edition of George Wein’s New York jazz festival, now firmly sponsored by JVC, was all over the map, musically and geographically, including a series of potentially canny shows at the Kaye Playhouse that promised to look at neglected areas tangential to jazz. For the first two nights, though, good intentions were undone by what one observer called the Worst Wives Clubs. Ignorant of Rich Conaty or his radio show, “The Big Broadcast,” I had foolishly assumed the concert of that name would be a look at ‘30s radio and maybe the Paramount movie series that celebrated it. But it was merely a vanity production, with Conaty producing comedy routines that caricatured the good old days as a dreary joke. A reasonably likable baritone named Allan Marks sang “I’d Rather Lead a Band” in a Batman mask (no explanation). A girl group proved that deedle-dee-dees do not the Boswells make. A boy group crooned all too soberly in spite of ceaseless mugging by a little guy in the middle.