Performer Blogs@Sequenza21.com
"Art is the creative custodian of the truth"...Heidegger

"There is no true Art without secrecy"...Camus

Jack Reilly is a pianist, composer, and author whose work has achieved a remarkable synthesis of traditional classical music with jazz. His compositions and performances reflect his solid musicianship, intelligence and sophistication. The enthusiastic response his European tour with George Russell's New York Band and his subsequent performance with the band at the Village Vanguard in New York City; his concert at Jordan Hall in Boston with the Jack Reilly Trio, where he was given a standing ovation; his recordings and books --- three volumes on jazz improvisation entitled Species Blues, nine folios of his compositions and the acclaimed book The Harmony of Bill Evans confirms the scope of Reilly's talents and versatility.

Reilly has also presented lecture/recitals at numerous schools in North America and in Europe including presentations at the prestigious International Piano Festival and Competition at the University of Maryland. Formerly chairman of the Department of Jazz Studies at the New England Conservatory of Music, he has served on the faculties of the Mannes College of Music, New York University, The New School, The Berklee School of Music, and as chairman of the Jazz Program at La Musica A Villa Scarsella in Diano Marina, Italy.

His recordings include include albums of original material: Blue Sean Green, Tributes, The Brinksman, Masks, Here's What I Like, Tzu-Jan Volume 1 and 2, and two new releases, Pure Passion and Live in Poland, all on the Unichrom label.

His compositions include Jazz Requiem (1968), an Oratorio comissioned by the NEA (1974), Chuang-Tzu - Theme and Eight Variations for Orchestra (1993), Concertina for Jazz Piano and Strings(dedicated to Bill Evans), Lullabys for Orchestra, Fantasy for Piano and Wind Quintet(dedicated to George Russell), Piano Sonata in D Minor, and Concerto for Harmonica and Strings.

In 2001 his first Piano Concerto for jazz trio and orchestra, titled, Orbitals was premiered in Houghton Michigan,with the composer as soloist, with the Keweenaw Symphony, Jeff Bell-Hanson, conducting.

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Friday, February 02, 2007
Shaping Jazz - Ornette Coleman debate--Given by DARIUS BRUBECK at the 2005 IAJE convention in NYC---

DEAR VISITOR,

I've received many emails asking why the Darius Brubeck paper on Ornette Coleman had been deleted. I didn't delete it. I just gave it a rest for a few weeks. I wanted the chat room "enthusiasts", (dare I call them the thought police(?)( I prefer to call them, zealots but not of the religious visionary type), to take a breather, in hopes they would see the LIGHT and their DARKNESS. Of course I have no control over their thoughts, only my own and what I choose to post on my blog site, "THE BIRTH of an IDEA". I am that I am...............

Here again, is Darius' wonderfully objective, intelligent, perspicacious and discerniong essay on Ornette Coleman.
JACK REILLY


Shaping Jazz – an Ornette Coleman debate
Professor Darius Brubeck

Acceptance and Rejection

The late, great Texas tenor, Illinois Jacquet, told my wife this story in 1979. The setting is Jimmy Carter’s Whitehouse jazz barbecue, the first large collective presidential jazz event. The proceedings included a jam session and a stage was set up on the Whitehouse lawn in the expectation that the musicians present would ‘spontaneously’ form an all-star band. Seasoned players like Dizzy Gillespie had often found themselves in similar situations in the past and knew that once they agreed on some ‘heads’, they could unerringly craft an impressive performance relying on their tacitly shared repertoire of stock devices: intros, horn riffs and trading fours leading to convincing endings after great solos in the middle. As long as it swung. Lack of rehearsal wouldn’t have been a concern, but then, still conscious of carrying the prestige of jazz to a higher level, all were on their best behaviour. Only Ornette Coleman’s presence in what was effectively a bebop line-up added a dimension of musical insecurity. (Does he know any tunes? Will he play in tune? What if he just starts soloing and doesn’t stop?) Without a word spoken, they improvised non-musical manoeuvres on stage so that Coleman was more seen than heard. At the end of the set, following Whitehouse protocol, they lined up to meet the President and the atmosphere was relaxed and cordial. For example, George Benson gave Jimmy Carter a signature guitar. When it was Coleman’s turn to be introduced to the President, he gave him his latest album. Seeing this, Illinois Jacquet reported hearing a colleague mutter, “Oh no, now they’ll never ask us back.”

That Ornette Coleman was considered important and representative by 1979 (perhaps through Martin Williams’ influence at the Smithsonian) is evident in his invitation to the Whitehouse. In 1984, he was canonized by NEA as a Jazz Master along with Miles Davis and Max Roach and now, anyone who has taken a semester of jazz history certainly knows his name and has listened to ‘Lonely Woman.’ Illinois Jacquet and others, however, obviously didn’t believe he was really one of them and were afraid of embarrassment. Doubt extended beyond this particular occasion. The question of whether Ornette Coleman was ‘good enough’ was less important than the conviction that he was unrepresentative of jazz and his music potentially misleading to those not in the know. Jimmy Carter might actually play his record and that would be the end of White House invitations!

What I find intriguing about this story is that it is not ‘hip-versus-square’ bebop comedy, but an example of the hip irony, empathy, complicity and pragmatism of the ‘old guard’ of professional musicians. I also think this story resonates for 21st century jazz educators who, like jazz musicians at the Whitehouse, must take a pragmatic approach to gaining and exploiting prestige – not selfishly - but on behalf of their programs, their students and institutions and, of course, on behalf of jazz as a legitimate academic discipline worth supporting with funds as well as acclaim. I suspect that playing ‘avant-garde’ on the Whitehouse lawn these days would be an audacious act of protest and still not the best tactic for increasing the level of NEA support for jazz. Should students be told to play whatever they can and feel like playing? Most of us harbour suspicions about ‘free jazz’. There are problems with anti-disciplinary artistic extremism despite the fact that avant-gardism keeps the music from stagnating. Ornette Coleman is controversial in his own right but it is how we understand and deal with this dynamic that affects us as teachers and artists.

I first heard Ornette Coleman at the famous Lenox School of Jazz in 1959, when I was twelve years old, spending the summer there with my parents. We were next door neighbours and he was there as a student by arrangement with Gunther Schuller and John Lewis. I certainly became well acquainted with his sound. When he practiced alone it sounded like nothing in particular was being worked on. When he practiced with Don Cherry, it was the opposite; the same phrases over and over again. I now realize they were searching for the precise, yet unnotatable phrasing and inflection that became such a striking feature of their ensemble playing. I don’t remember disliking his sound but it was funny to me because it was so unlike ‘Uncle Paul’ [Desmond] who played a gold-plated Selmer alto sax, not a white plastic one. Of course early exposure does not make one an expert but it did make me, as I hope will be obvious, sympathetic to opposing points of view.

Coleman versus Modern Jazz

Ornette Coleman’s emergence and the eruption of ‘free jazz’ in the 1960’s marks the beginning of the end of jazz modernism until it resurfaces in the academy under the aegis of jazz education. Already in the ‘50’s, modern jazz was bending towards classical music and away from earlier jazz styles and R&B, although ‘soul jazz’ and ‘funky’ playing was a universally enjoyed corrective and release from too much seriousness. Musicians’ tastes and interests were certainly not restricted to the stereotypical styles assigned to them in condensed jazz histories and record buyer’s guides. For example, Charles Mingus’ name does not spring to mind among those linked to Third Stream music, yet at the time, he was as much a part of that movement as John Lewis was. In 1959, Dave Brubeck recorded Time Out while developing separate projects with Louis Armstrong and Leonard Bernstein. Miles Davis was collaborating with Gil Evans on Sketches of Spain at the time he made Kind of Blue. (With the exception of Armstrong and Gil Evans, all of the musicians I have just mentioned plus members of their working groups and many others, met at Lenox during the summer Coleman was there.) That scene, for all its rich diversity, was remarkably consolidated and interwoven compared to today.

Even players working in the same realm – for example, Oscar Peterson, Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans playing standards in piano trio format – demonstrate that different aesthetic codes could be, indeed were meant to be, applied without abandoning the fundamentals that made jazz jazz. In a broader sense, jazz, despite a contemporary taste for breaking it into sub-genres such as hard-bop or West Coast, was an overarching style built on a core repertoire of blues and popular song with adherence to swing and improvisation, instrumental proficiency and consistent performance codes. Successful experiments with counterpoint, modes, time-signatures, orchestration and form were extrapolations from a set of ‘givens’. Innovation was one of the chief features and indeed selling points of modern jazz, but nevertheless listeners always knew what they were getting. Such was the robust creative milieu that Coleman entered proclaiming a radical alternative.

In this ferment of old and new competing trends with the reward of stardom for successful jazz musicians at stake, it was important for listeners and musicians alike to feel confident about differentiating between ‘charlatans’ and genuine innovators, between ‘acts’ (a trade term inherited from vaudeville) and serious artists, even though criteria were elusive. (These were great days for professional jazz critics.) At least the ascent of bebop ten years earlier established that jazz was a specialised form of music requiring a high level of skill. Musicians never considered technique the essence of jazz or an end in itself but the level of jazz then, as Scott DeVeaux shows in The Birth of Bebop was the direct outcome of jam sessions and cutting contests that determined rank and respect in the professional world. Vestiges of this persist to this day.

Bebop in the narrow sense was already dated in 1959, but its standards of musicianship carried over into every modern style. Unlike his contemporary Bill Evans, who was at Lenox as a teacher that year, Coleman would never have succeeded in the regular professional scene with its daily demands – sight-reading, playing in tune and consistency of execution. However, with respected and articulate champions in John Lewis, Gunther Schuller and Martin Williams and a contract with Atlantic Records, he never had to. A question for us, is whether we sometimes over emphasize professional skills?

Coleman was heralded as the leader of the new avant-garde when he opened at the Five Spot in New York concurrently with the release of his first Atlantic LP in 1959. This sudden celebrity and top-billing did not endear him to musicians used to such acclaim only after years of ‘scuffling’ and ‘paying dues’. Not many knew about Coleman’s personal struggle prior to Lenox, which according to Schuller, was ‘almost heart-breaking.’(1) Even though this was no longer Texas or the Deep South where Coleman had endured threats and assaults, Max Roach, as if personally insulted, actually hit Ornette outside The Five Spot. According to jazz-scholar David Ake, Coleman’s problematic relationship to skill and prowess amounted to undermining ‘accepted ideas of masculinity in jazz.’(2) Anger at Coleman may not have been unrelated to the fact that the club was packed night after night with jazz fans as well as musicians. Envy aside, he was seen by some as guilty of a major, albeit unintentional, transgression that I will come to presently. By any yardstick, his band of young musicians made a spectacular debut on the New York scene with their new sound.

Down Beat 1960

A short preface to an article in Down Beat in May 1960 states that ‘In the wave of controversy over the playing of Ornette Coleman, there have been few cool, reasoned attempts to evaluate the work of this startling alto saxophonist and his colleague, trumpeter Don Cherry. It continues: Down Beat assigned the task to a man who is not only one of the most important jazz musicians of the present era, but a calm, analytical and literate commentator as well: Julian (Cannonball) Adderley.’ Adderley begins his article by reporting the reaction of other respected musicians:

Dizzy Gillespie stood in front of the Five Spot Café in New York, folded his arms, and looked disdainfully at the musicians as he asked, “Are you cats serious?” Thelonious Monk is reported to have said, “Man, that cat is nuts!” “He is an extension of Bird.” That description is attributed to John Lewis… But whatever the views expressed, it cannot be denied that there had been more talk, pro and con, about Coleman than anyone in jazz in the last decade.

The article mentions as ‘suspect’ his ‘intonation theories.’

They [Coleman and Cherry] explain this phenomenon as “human pitch" and suggest that this is also freedom of expression.

Adderley sums up the controversy while giving a concise picture of the brilliant musical milieu in which it takes place:

There are many important musicians who are advocates of Ornette’s freedom theory of improvisation. But there are fewer who would use his approach to sound and harmony. I would say 75 per cent of jazz musicians dismiss Ornette’s whole thing. But he has caused more reflection and analysis than anyone since Bird, Diz, and Thelonious.

But the so-called ‘music of tomorrow’ theme which accompanies his performances is more harmful than good… I feel that though Ornette may influence future jazz, so will George Russell’s Lydian concept of tonal organization, Coltrane’s sheets of sound, Miles’ melodic lyricism, and Gil Evans’ clusters of sound in rhythm. Ornette Coleman is an innovator of the first water. But he is certainly no messiah.(3)

Charles Mingus’ remarks, also published in this issue of Downbeat as ‘Another View of Coleman’, begin with: ‘Now he is really an old-fashioned alto player.’ Mingus considered instrumental proficiency, exemplified by Charlie Parker, ‘modern’. Note that Coleman’s perceived technical limitations make him ‘old-fashioned’, the antithesis of prophetic; and the clash between his lack of ability compared to veteran jazzmen and his claim to showing the way to a universal future is what provoked the violence. Coleman seemed determined to make a public display of his ignorance of and disrespect for the musical achievements of modern jazz, of the narrative of progress and, by implication, all those who contributed to it and believed in it. Worse, white socialites and intellectuals, the Dorothy Kilgallens, Leonard Bernsteins and Nat Hentoffs loved it. Primitivism contradicted the messages that musicians like Miles Davis were sending out at the time.

But, Mingus’ tone suddenly changes in a way that is as confessional and illuminating as the sudden shifts in his own music:

Now aside from the fact that I doubt he can play a C scale in whole notes … in tune, the fact remains that his notes and lines are so fresh.
So when [radio DJ] Symphony Sid played his record, it made everything else he was playing, even my own record that he played, sound terrible… I’m not saying everybody’s going to have to play like Coleman. But they’re going to have to stop copying Bird… You can’t put your finger on what he is doing. It’s like organized disorganization, or playing wrong right.(4)

The Change of the Century

At the end of the 1950s, Ornette Coleman’s music inspired a new genre, known at first as ‘free jazz’ and later ‘improvised music’, a more comfortable label that puts some breathing space between its practitioners and the jazz canon. According to Schuller, ‘90% of the students [at Lenox] thought that Ornette was wacko…They put him down a lot…’ However, at least one of them, David Baker, while not a ‘convert’ had second thoughts.

‘All of us were trying to find our voices: the only one with any secure idea of where he was going in vision was probably Ornette.’(5)

Recalling first hearing Coleman, Baker’s admits, ‘We hadn’t even had our day in the sun and all of a sudden there was a new movement and I really felt dreadful about it. Now I realize in retrospect that the threat was about ego rather than the validity of the music.’

Maybe ‘ego’ is too harsh. Like most aspiring musicians then and now, Baker had already invested in the rigours of bebop, at least as a well-tried route to finding his own voice. Yet Coleman played a very effective ‘jazzy’ and individual kind of music, ignoring musical procedures that, until then, had been fundamental to playing jazz. It seemed unfair that he gave himself authority to change the game to suit his needs, like playing tennis without the net.

Coleman’s famous aphorism, ‘From realizing that I can make mistakes, I have come to realize that there is an order in what I do.’(6) is the pronouncement of a confident, self-aware artist and it is quoted by Martin Williams in the liner notes to Shape of Jazz to Come recorded that very year, 1959. Baker was proved right about Coleman’s security of vision and voice. He continues:

My question, which kept on coming up, when I would ask “What’s supposed to take the place of the changes?” Because I had talked with Gunther and some other people who went to Indianapolis to see Wes Montgomery and this conversation came up…where was the next movement going to go in jazz?
Was it going to be atonalism, was it going to be what? ‘Free’ never entered into the discussion because that wasn’t a concept that anybody had even envisioned, but we talked about “would it be twelve-tone music?” Would it be the experiments that were going on the West Coast at the time? What would it be? … ‘How do you start playing? How do you get rid of, what do you do in place of, playing changes?’ It never occurred to anybody that we would stop playing changes.

The question that began to bother John Coltrane after he recorded Giant Steps in the same year as Coleman’s Shape of Jazz was the inverse. He told a French journalist, ‘I didn’t know where I was going next.’ Coleman had ‘done a lot to open my eyes to what can be done… I don’t know if I would have thought about just abandoning the chord system or not…And he came along doing it, and I heard it, I said, “Well, this must be the answer.”(7)

Forty-five years later

British writer, Andy Hamilton interviewed Coleman backstage at Sage Hall, Gateshead, England in 2005. He remains remarkably consistent about his beliefs, musical values and motives, and, in my opinion, about what he wants us to believe about him. Coleman never mentions a short-coming, doubt or fault; he doesn’t talk about trying to improve in any way and never admits to learning anything from anyone else. He speaks with a biblical certainty that pre-empts critical discussion or any possibility that he might revise (or even better define) his ideas. Yet he is soft-spoken and tolerant in the faith that differences will evaporate once the rest of the world understands what he is on about. Some of his statements are beautifully evocative like his music, but some are nonsensical. Because of the subtle force of his personality and respect for his music, most people take him at his word. I quote:

I think music itself is an idea. It's not a style, it's not a race, it's just an idea.

And everybody has ideas. That's why music is so free for people to cherish and so open – because it's how the idea is affecting you, and how you express what it means to you, regardless of what the style is.

I don't think people realized that I knew any music, [they thought] that I was just playing. But I never thought about trying to prove what I could do.

Yes, I wanted it to be heard. But I was having musicians that time telling me, “Oh, you can't play like that”. I was being beaten up, my horn thrown away. I was saying “Oh my goodness me, that's just crazy”...I realized that whatever reasons the person had to make them treat me like that, it was what they had experienced [that made them do it] – that whatever they were doing, if they didn't succeed, why should I succeed?

I was only just playing the way I'm playing right now. I have never tried to be different. It's like I'm sharing what I'm sharing with you.(8)

His aesthetic resonates with the Romantic idea of music being a special language of emotion, if that is what he means here by ‘sound grammar’.

In sound grammar, we can express any form of emotion, of the deepest depth or the highest... In other words, the emotion, in some way, has no gender, it has no race, it has no goal, it has no purpose. It's only to let you know the state that's affecting you at the moment. It's true.

So far, so good. The direct link between music and emotion is valued in every culture and is one of the truly brilliant qualities that animates so much of Coleman’s music. But his own long-standing attempt to systematize his musical universe appears as unrealized and irrelevant as it ever was. The interview contains torturous passages of pseudo-theoretical discourse. Since his music is not set within normal conventions anyway, why the obsession with certain technical terms (transpositions, pitches, notes, unisons and modulations)? None of this relates to what he plays and how he improvises. He still struggles to explain the familiar Coleman theory which he promises will be expanded to book length:

I found out that in Western culture you have the Bb, the C, the Eb and the F instruments – those are the four dominant transpositions…The note of the saxophone is different to the sound of the saxophone…To this very day, I've been working on a concept called harmolodics, which means that the four basic notes of Western culture are all the same sound on four different instruments …

It is likely that Coleman didn’t know about transposing instruments when he started playing. What he ‘found out’ is the result of instrument design, mechanics and notational convenience, not ‘the four basic notes of Western culture.’ The question is why didn’t he simply learn about transposing instruments and notation? Is it really true that he still doesn’t know? Humble demeanor notwithstanding, he strangely believes he is on to something the rest of us might not have seen and that this might lead to startling revelations and revisions. He maintains that notation and common theory represent immutable ‘rules’ or rather long-standing fallacies from which he has freed himself and eventually the rest of mankind:

Yeah...One thing I don't believe is hiding any information that can advance anybody... They have never tried to use this [my approach] to see what's wrong with it. A hundred years ago, someone invented this (here according to Hamilton he gestured toward the piano keyboard) and they made some rules and the rules haven’t changed since.

While musicians don’t normally try to account for their personal style in abstract, universalizing terms, Coleman seems to believe he must, so it is frustrating that his idiosyncratic brilliance as a player has so little to do with the issues he seems eager to talk about. Harmolodics seems to start and end with some murky ideas about vertical pitch relationships. To understand Ornette Coleman, study the music and not what he says.

What do we hear then, if not ‘harmolodics’, that makes him so identifiable? First of all, his controversial pitch – and we’re used to that now. Since 1960 we’ve also heard plenty of music from other cultures using various tuning systems. Non-standard tuning is also a signifying sound used by jazz musicians laying claim to a non-western identity. Secondly, the rhythms and phrasings of his melodies sound logical and natural but in notation reveal unconventional phrases, meter changes – much deviance from our expectations of 4 and 8-bar phrases. This makes his music challenging to play although musicians, like Pat Metheny for one, do play it. Finally, of course, the forms he uses for improvisation are never harmonically determined and not usually pre-determined at all. This alone was the new idea underlying the original ‘free jazz’ freak out. Today, a lot of the music one hears – hip hop, for instance – and of course much contemporary jazz, isn’t any longer based on fixed forms and ‘playing changes.’ So, in a very practical sense, Ornette Coleman’s music was, in 1959, music of the future, certainly the direction of the century, if not the change of the Century.

I believe the main reason he still expounds his theories dates back to his arrival at Lenox when John Lewis, Martin Williams and Gunther Schuller were intrigued and happy to defend what he was doing. At Lenox, there were discussions about modes and applying classical forms to jazz, as in the case of the MJQ. Excitement about ideas permeated the atmosphere; it was a time and place where verbalization was rewarded. George Russell is still teaching the Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. Coleman had talent, immense self-belief and very little formal education. Rather than enter into a desperate struggle to ‘catch up’ when he already had the respect of important people, he chose to invent his own rationale. The term ‘harmolodics’ only came up in 1972, but in typical Coleman fashion he back-dated it; it was something he always knew.

The avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s, as we all know, opened up a non-imitative space for improvisers, especially European musicians, for whom the disciplines and ‘standards’ (in both its meanings) of bebop were of marginal relevance. ‘Jazzing’ no longer required identification within a system of American cultural references of generations past (e.g. film music, Broadway, social dancing, religious music). Ornette Coleman offered an alternative to revising the past.

Branford Marsalis, who does it all, recently told Jazz Times, ‘I would learn shit from the 50’s, 40’s and ‘30s exactly to the letter. And by learning it that way I earned the right to not have to play it that way. But that right is earned.’(9) Let’s suppose Branford Marsalis didn’t ‘earn this right’: so what? I certainly believe in the value of formal training and historical grounding, but how best to communicate this holistically? Ornette Coleman’s career demonstrates that there are people who simply don’t follow ‘the rules’ and have more to give as a result. On the other hand, we need all the other ‘shit’. Hope you ask me back!

Notes:

(1)All remarks attributed to Gunther Schuller are from my interview at his home in Newton, Massachusetts, 3 April, 2000. A complete transcription of this interview is in my M. Phil thesis, Jazz 1959: The Beginning of Beyond at Nottingham University.

(2)David Ake, ‘Regendering Jazz: Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Scene in the Late 1950s,’ Jazz Cultures, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002,

John Litweiler, Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life, William Morrow and Co. New York, 1992

Ake and Coleman biographer John Litweiler both report that Max Roach physicaly assaulted Coleman at the Five Spot Café and later shouted threats from the street in front of Coleman’s apartment. The original source given in Litweiler is John Snyder, ‘Ornette Coleman’, an unpublished essay.

(3)Julian Adderley, ‘Cannonball Looks at Ornette Coleman’, Down Beat, Vol 27, No.11, 26 May, 1960

(4)Charles Mingus, ‘Another View of Coleman’, Down Beat, Vol 27, No.11, 26 May, 1960

(5)All remarks attributed to David Baker are from my interview at his office at Indiana University in Bloomington, 17 April, 2000. A complete transcription of this interview is in my M. Phil thesis, Jazz 1959: The Beginning of Beyond at Nottingham University. A slightly modified version appeared in Jazz Educators Journal, September/October 2002, Vol. 35, No.2.

(6)Martin Williams, liner notes, The Shape of Jazz to Come, Atlantic Records SD 1317

(7)Benoit Quersin, ‘Entretiens: La Passe Dangereuse,’ Jazz Magazine, January 1963, Transcribed by Lewis Porter and Carl Woideck in Porter, John Coltrane, cited in Ake.

(8)Andy Hamilton kindly sent me his article which was published as ‘Interview: Ornette Coleman’, The Wire, issue 257, July 2005. The interview took place backstage at The Sage Concert Hall, Gateshead, 29 April 2005.

(9)Nate Chinen interview with Branford Marsalis, ‘Committed’, Jazz Times October/November Vol. 34, Number 9, 2004.
posted by Jack Reilly

Thursday, February 01, 2007
Thoughts on the Future of Jazz-by Jan Stevens, Jazz pianist, composer and webmaster/founder of the Bill Evans Pages.

Dear Friends,

Here's another reposting; give it some thought and let's hear your comments.
Jack Reilly




by JAN STEVENS, guest columnist



What we might need first is an agreed-upon definition, and that of course is virtually unattainable, so let’s try and level the playing field and just call jazz improvisational in character, or agree to disagree, if that is necessary, and just get on with it. Or, we can play the name game, and ask does X =Y (i.e., is Joe Lovano or Bill Charlap as valid as Modeski, Martin, and Wood or David Sanborn; does Brad Mehldau’s usage of rock and R&B themes make for good jazz, etc.). But then we run the risk of alienating some of the best and brightest. What jazz is expected to be and how it is supposed to grow is an age-old argument, and I wouldn’t venture a conclusive axiom that would satisfy anyone, including myself. Some of the best critics and writers have been at it for decades, and the modern era’s post-bop jumping-off point often cited is Miles’ “Bitches Brew” album, but let’s not even go there. One can find early diatribes and polemics of the same kind in some old magazines (like Etude, and ancient issues of Downbeat, or the long-defunct Metronome) that asserted -- in the 1920s, for one example -- that this “new” jazz, with its jitterbugging teenager adherents, would destroy the dearly held musical belief systems of the time – or how anything post-Scott Joplin was morally corrupt and musically invalid. Some of these same emotionally-packed issues were rehashed in the late forties after Bird and Monk and Diz blew it all wide open for us again. Flash forward to the early sixties and Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp at al, and we hear it all over again. Then in the nineties, in what I have referred to in another essay as the “triumvirate” *– Wynton Marsalis, jazz critic Stanley Crouch and the writer Albert Murray (and their megamedia mouthpiece, Ken Burns) indicated that “real” jazz (whatever that is) apparently ended in, roughly, the mid-sixties, until, of course, Mr. Marsalis brought it back in the 90s. As a major tenet of the faith, they contend -- or at the very least, strongly imply -- that jazz was derived (and must continue to develop) from a direct and traceable African -American musical lineage, steeped in the blues, and ostensibly, with only a handful of worthy Caucasian sympaticos. This is culturally, spiritually, and historically insane, and it’s just plain faulty thinking, and it’s all been argued well elsewhere by Gene Lees and others*.

So with all that out of the way, let’s put forth a few questions and perhaps approach a few issues that may be deserving of more thought and future discourse. Firstly, jazz is music of improvisational innovation and progression. Are there, or can there ever be any more real innovators in jazz? Depending on which critic or commentary you read, this can go either way. Some argue that since the music has long thrived on innovators, that they are indispensable, and that there are just simply not any alive right now. Others say that it’s “all been played before”, and because the jazz world is exponentially much bigger than it was even twenty years ago, and seminal figures hard to come by --true innovation is probably a thing of the past. In other words, can there even be a “next Coltrane”? It’s hard to be objective on this and discern where the truth lies, but here is much to be said for this latter view in our times. Whereas back in the seventies there was just a handful of schools seriously teaching this art form, like Berklee and North Texas State, jazz courses and curriculums at the college level are quite common, turning out thousands of aspiring players every year, most of who will never make it, or not make even a passable living from it. Many are well-disciplined in the bebop language, and have had a solid grounding in theory and harmony. But how many are taught about the passion and commitment this music requires, the courage and mindset to break barriers, or are told about paying your dues? A vast majority of those students who are now out on the scene, and trying to be working jazz musicians, are recording on their own, and are forced by the economics of the music industry to put their CDs out themselves – and spend their own money to promote them on Web sites and other venues. (Unless you’re the next Norah Jones, try getting a record contract with a label that will even market jazz records at all or even a healthy independent that has decent distribution). That being said, if there are any real innovators out there, it may take a long time to even become aware of them, let alone see them acknowledged as such. Spend a few hours on allaboutjazz.com, and you can hear MP3 samples of hundreds and hundreds of fine players – many of whom are hustling for any jazz gig they’re lucky enough to find. Most of these will barely ever make back their CD’s costs. Yes, many are good improvisers, many are competent, but very few are truly special. Who can honestly say who the last truly great “innovator” was? The late Jaco Pastorius is often mentioned-- a unique composer-arranger with a very advanced harmonic sense, but known primarily as the man who revolutionized the electric bass for all time. He died back in 1987. Some have gone back further and said the last great innovator in jazz was Bill Evans -- surely no one since has escaped his pianistic shadow, and no one has built anything as stylistically influential, or has surpassed his comprehensive approach to the piano since -- and he’s been gone for twenty-six years. Maybe we ought to ask ourselves, does jazz really even need new innovators, in order to remain fresh and viable? Or is it OK as is- - the more the merrier, and the music often just another copy of its former self? Or are we better off towing the line with the young lions and super-traditionalists making sure at any cost that the music always has the discernable imprint of Armstrong or Ellington or Bird? (As a caveat, let me say that I am firm believer in the traditions: no doubt, there will always be ways to play the great standards and coax new life from them in unique ways.)

What about all the jazz hybrids? Have they all been exhausted yet? Jazz has a history of being the most creatively pliable music, since there is so much room for stylistic expression and nuance and accessibility to other related genres. Early on, there were Art Tatum’s classical arabesques within his dazzling jazz piano wizardry that made even Rachmaninoff sit up and stare in wonderment; there was Bix Beiderbecke’s glorious “In a Mist”, there were the “third stream” works of George Russell, Gunther Schuller and John Lewis. The forties brought the major influx of Latin rhythms into the music of Dizzy Gillespie, Duke and many others, breaking new barriers that continue to revitalize jazz permanently. There were the late 50s and early 60s funky experiments of Horace Silver, Lee Morgan, Quincy Jones and the influential R&B-jazz recordings of Ray Charles, --all which led to some of the future work of Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul and many others, and of course their mentor, Miles Davis. As a result, there’s also been acid-jazz and free-jazz, and avante garde, and classical-jazz and world music-jazz fusion and jazz-funk and jazz-rock and on and on. Obviously, straight ahead jazz and hard-bop has survived beautifully above all. Do we really need these labels? Some would argue it may be conceptually inexpedient , but apparently we do, since it’s hard to have any serious discussions with any serious jazz folks and not find oneself using them -- if nothing else, for lack of a better terminology or reference points.

Not all of these sub strata entries have produced valid music, and surely some of it has been trash, but there have been some impressive and lasting innovations, if not always great innovators within. Then we must acknowledge players and arrangers like Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Gary Burton, John McLaughlin, Joshua Redman, Maria Schneider and Bill Holman – who are still able to somehow smoothly ignore any preonceived barriers and incorporate so many of these playing styles naturally; they boldly blur the lines while developing their work into a fresh and contoured whole. It is almost a cliché now to quote Duke Ellington’s long held statements about not labeling it “jazz” – it’s just music that’s either good or bad, he said. But in a post-modern world, it’s still true that one man’s jazz is another man’s schlock or tedium.

Regarding the future of jazz, hasn’t it always been a matter of what tastes will allow, what the current consensus may be (if indeed, there’s any consensus left among jazz musicians and writers anymore ), and what the market will bear?

Jazz has always been inclusive (unless Wynton garners even more power and influence than he already has) and yes, it originated from African-American traditions, but coupled with a sophisticated Western harmonic system derived from European traditions. It has since the beginning encompassed the rhythms and aesthetics of various ethnicities, and that is healthy. For the listener, it usually begets new names and some creative players, some quite notable, some not, and some that ought to be heard widely but aren’t. That’s long been the case. And the latter won’t be the musicians’ faults, by and large. Jazz lore is full of long-lost journeyman musicians of note, but names spoken of rarely and in ever-dwindling circles of academics and historians. Guys like Dodo Marmarosa, Serge Chaloff, and Sonny Clark, just to name a few.

But the music has always required willing listeners who have an open mind and hopefully an educated ear, but it has never approached general popular acceptance --except in the Big Band era, when it was primarily a dance music. We’ve all accepted that, all these years since. Yet some still strain with definitions and the validity of certain idioms in jazz, and often disallow for its expansion, in light of the some of the very clever innovations and experiments of the last forty years or so.

In a media marketplace of instant gratification, cheap thrills, the ever-dwindling capacity of music as a communal experience in the age of iPods, and the shallow and offensively mediocre amateurism of the current popular music milieu -- the future of jazz may be filled with ever-challenging pitfalls. It remains a vital cultural force due to its loyal audience, though fragmented and often marketed poorly. It seems now that most of the legendary “giants” are gone (except Sonny Rollins and precious few others) so it’s often a music almost without a face. Yet the pendulum may yet swing back, if those involved in its presentation and performance respect and pay heed to its rich history, and yet are inspired to be unburdened and unbridled in adding to it.

posted by Jack Reilly

Thursday, January 18, 2007
LETTER TO EDITOR OF DOWNBEAT by GIOVANNI PETRANICH

I received this email from Giovanni and thought my blog site readers would enjoy it. If you don't read Down Beat get the current copy, February, and let's start a fracas!

Signor Petranich will return with some reviews.....................

It's been sometime since I've published on my site. Did you miss me? That was a rhetorical question..................................................

JR

Caro Down Beat,

DB's Brad Melhdau feature in the new issue is full of narcissistic overload
and hyperbolic "JIVE". Per esempio: He says he didn't listen to Bill
Evans much. Mi dispiace, for if Brad heard the Eddie Costa "GUYS and
DOLLS" CD re-issue with Evans as a sideman(1958 recording), both he and
Matheny would forever hold their arrogant, haughty, supercilious tongues.
Evans' playing on this recording redefines what it means to "SWING" and
Melhdau would have stayed in the "shed" a few more years to fully absorb
this genius.

I don't think Melhdau and Matheny know their Jazz History very well, let alone understand and absorb its significance to their own development!!

Evans is America's Chopin. His music timeless will out last Mehldau's and Pat's.
Matheny revealed his lack of a discerning musical psyche when DB quoted him
as saying he didn't care for Evans' music!! It's tantamount to saying
Chopin is now a footnote in the evolution of Western Classical Music.

Everyone's entitled to an opinion. But the truth is true always. Evans'
music is the Truth.

Such ramblings of two ego maniacal lesser talents should have been dismissed by
DOWN BEAT.

Respectfully Yours,

GIOVANNI PETRANICH....TORINO, ITALIA
Via Email: spetranich@hotmail.com
posted by Jack Reilly

Friday, November 17, 2006
World Premiere in 2007; Jan/Feb. by JACK REILLY: BARGEMUSIC/WALES/LONDON concerts

On Thursday January 4th, Jack Reilly will begin celebrating his 75th year by giving the world premiere of "THE BLUE SAGE:THEME AND FIVE VARIATIONS/with IMPROVISATIONS". Included on the program are the following Reilly Compositions; BLUES FOR ALL, CLARA'S BELL, LAMENT FOR A CLOWN and UNICHROM. Dedications sre to Martin Murphy, Lennie Tristano, Claire Lian, Krey the Clown and Ron McClure, respectively.

The concert will be held at BARGEMUSIC, Fulton Ferry Landing, Brooklyn..
Concert begins at 7.30m PM...Tickets are $35.00 (no senior/student discounts).

Info and reservations; 718-624-2083

Harvie S the great American bassist will assist Reilly.


In February Jack will play at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff on the 23rd of February with a trio workshop for students on the 22nd and 24th Feb. A gig at The GATE, a renovated church in Cardiff, is in the offing with Paula Gardiner on Bass...date TBA.....Then off to London to play a solo recital at RAY'S JAZZ SHOP on Wed., 28th Feb. The next nite, 1st of March, Jack plays a trio gig at London's Spice of Life Jazz Club. Except for the Gate gig, all are trio concerts. His trio consists of UK musicians Steve Keogh, drums and Dave Green, bass. "The Blue Sage Theme and Variations" will receive its UK premiere in Cardiff......On March 2nd the trio travels North to Halifax to play the Dean Clough jazz club. Word has it that the clientele are very focused jazz fans, attentive, enthusiastic and looking forward to hearing Jack's music.

Other dates TBA...

For further info...in USA call 732-818-0840....in the UK call 29 20 752656 ask for Anil, Jack's manager.............

Posted by Sean Murphy Ortega
CEO, Unichrom Label
posted by Jack Reilly

Sunday, November 05, 2006
Cortland Linder : A Most Unusual Student

I am in the habit of writing praise, bordering on the hagiographic, about my former teachers, (Tristano/Overton/Ulehla/Maneri). Today I am going to tell you about Cortland Linder, a most unusual man and my student since 1986. It was in 1986 that Cortland showed up at my first Bill Evans classes in NYC at the Lucy Moses studios on 67th street near Broadway. He was 76 then and full of the enthusiasm of teenager desperate for knowledge but with the charm of a seasoned executive, confident and self assured and full of wit and an unusual zest for life.

The Evans classes met once a week for 6 weeks. Cortland and I talked after each class about other pianists; one he enjoyed and admired alot was George Shearing. When the Evans seminars ended he asked if I would take on a student his age. I said age is not a factor in my teaching philosophy; I accept anyone eager to learn and with a desire to practice the lessons. We began the next week after the last Evans class.

His first lesson revealed a man with a marvelous ear for harmony, sophisticated two-handed piano voicings, and a wide knowledge of all music. His only weakness was in linear improvisational skills. I was excited by the challenge of opening up horizons for him to conquer. He would always bring to his lessons tons of questions; questions about song form structure, chord progressions and their functions within the structure; he even brought in some Bach contrapuntal works because he saw the relevancy and relationship to the jazz repertoire we were studying. I always answered by referring to a chapter in the SCHOENBERG THEORY of HARMONY text. (I studied Schoenberg's harmony/counterpoint course with Joe Maneri in the 60's). The first time I mentioned the Schoenberg text he came in the following week with the book under his arm, asking me to outline the chapters that I referred to the previous weeks! He wanted to study this course!

Lessons continued regularly for about 2-3 years in NYC. Then I had to give up the NY studio so he traveled to my Park Slope Brooklyn home studio for another 2-3 years. He lived in Pauling NY at the time so he had to take a 40 minute subway ride after an hour on the New York Central. He never complained about traveling almost 2 hours for his piano lessons at almost 80 now!. He would make light of it saying he caught up on some much needed reading he had to do for his consultation work or some analysis he had to complete for his lesson.

A move further away in 1996 ended formal lessons. However, we spoke regularly on the phone. He always had more questions. I would always answer with sending him musical examples to study and analyze from the jazz/classical literature. He also took a keen and sincere interest in my own blossoming composing/performing career. I'd send him tapes of my concerts, a new CD I had recorded, etc. If I hadn't heard from him in a few months I'd give a shout and we'd talk for over an hour.

More questions; more challenges for me to answer to his satisfaction. I used to joke, saying that once you're a Jack Reilly student it's for a lifetime. 'Tis true. I've taught 100's of students and after they stop, I always get a call from 80% several times a year. It's one of the unexpected joys of teaching; to stay in touch with your students. Private teaching carries with it a responsibility nurturing a delicate, highly personal relationship; different with each student, and spiritually rewarding. I will probably never retire from private teaching.

Cortland Linder has retired from studying. He passed away a few weeks ago at age 96. We hadn't spoken in a few months and when the call came in from his son Mark, I knew immediately he was gone.
Like father like son, we chatted for almost an hour about his father's love and dedication to music to the very end. It was just a few months ago that Cortland called to say he had heard Bach's E Major French Suite and wanted to know the best edition to buy. He wanted to study and analyze one movement and send it to me for a look see. I responded by ordering the complete French suites for him. A week later after he received them, his analysis arrived in the post. I corrected it and sent it back. I told him I would send him my analysis. If I were to grade him, Cort would receive a mark of 90% or an A letter grade! I never got around to sending him my harmonic analysis of the suite. I'm sure he's continuing his pursuit of music on another plane of consciousness.

Mr. Linder, I will never forget you. You have enriched my life and I am forever grateful.
...............RIP.........................

Posted by Jack Reilly 11/05/06
posted by Jack Reilly

Friday, July 07, 2006
Hall Overton - Ashes to Ashes

The cigarette dangled out the right side of his mouth, the smoke rising causing his left eye to squint, the ashes from the burning bush got longer and longer, poised precipitously to fall at any moment on the keyboard. Hall always sat at the upright piano smoking, all the while playing, correcting, and making comments on my new assighment, exercises in two-part modern counterpoint. I was perched on a rickety chair to his left, listening intensely to his brilliant exegesis, waiting in vain for the inch-long+ cigarette ash to fall. The ashes never fell! Hall instinctively knew the precise moment to stop playing , take the butt out of his mouth and flick the ashes in the tray on the upright piano to his left. He would then throw the butt in the ash tray and immediately light another cigarette. His concentration and attention to every detail of my assighment made him unaware that he never took a serious puff on the bloody cigarette. I think the cigarette was his "prop" so to speak, his way of creating obstacles that tested my concentration on what he was saying. In other words, Hall was indirectly teaching me to block out any external distractions when doing my music, even when faced with a comedic situation like wondering when the cigarette ashhes would fall on the upright keyboard or even on his tie. Yes, Hall wore a tie, and a shirt and a jacket. All memories of Hall Overton by his former students 9 times out ot 10 begin with the Ashes to Ashes situation. A champion chain smoker and indeed, a master ash flickerer, never once dirtying the floor, piano or his professorial attire.

Hall Overton, composer, jazz pianist, advocate/activist for the New Music of his time and a lover of Theolonius Monk's music, was my teacher for one year beginning in 1957. I first heard about him from a fellow classmate at the Manhattan School of Music, which at that time was located on East 103rd street, between 2nd and 3rd avenue, an area then known as Spanish Harlem. This chap was playing in one of the basement practice rooms where I heard him playing Duke Jordan's "Jordu". I liked what I heard so much so I asked him where he learned to play that way. Hall Overton, was his reply. I took down Hall's number, called him and said I wanted to take jazz piano lessons. He sounded warm and gracious over the phone which made me feel relaxed because I was nervous about playing for him. I had been playing jazz gigs and casuals since my teens but still felt light years away from my vision of myself as a complete jazz pianist. Hall was going to push the envelope. We set up weekly lessons.

Hall taught in his 2nd story loft located on 6th Avenue between 26th and 27th street. The New York Times did a feature article on the building last March, 8th, 2005.

He greeted me with his warm smile and asked me to play anything I wanted for him. I chose "Tangerine", a favorite jam session tune. He liked what I did and immediately gave me a basic approach to the 3-note voicing concept plus melody, for arranging any song so that it sounded full and sonorus. He then had me listen to a lot of Horace Silver and imitate his style. Horace had just recorded a new trio LP and Hall made me transcribe one of Horace's songs, "Ecaroh" and arrange it using the 3-note concept. Each week I was assigned a tune to learn by ear but he would also write out a Monk tune for me. (I still have the piano chart for Monk's "Criss Cross"). I had to memorize everything. He always demonstrated at the piano what he taught. The biggest surprise after a few weeks of lessons was graduating to playing with a bass and drums at the lessons. People like Joe Hunt, Chuck Israels, Steve Little, Chuck Andrus, Teddy Kotick and other top players on the New York jazz scene were invited by Hall to play at my lesson and accompany me on my repertoire assignments. Hall knew that learning to play jazz piano meant more than practicing alone; it meant interacting, playing/jamming with others, but above all learning to listen to what's going on around you!

I was constantly challanged with difficult Monk tunes to learn and more advanced voicing concepts which I had to practice in all keys and from all 12 roots. One interesting exercise Hall showed me was to take only one note and think/hear it as the melody note, then harmonize it in all possible ways, using all appropriate chord qualities. That was revelatory. It taught me to hear the same melody note as different parts of the chord, for example, as the root, the flatted ninth, the ninth, the sharped ninth etc., etc., etc.

Hall also assigned the Paul Hindemith "Elementary Training for Musicians" manual. I knew the book because I was already practising it. In 1956 I toured the country with the then popular Art Mooney big band. We played the Aragon ballroom in Chicago for 4 weeks, 3 hours a night, 6 nights a week, $140 per week. So in the morning I studied/practiced the Hindemith book and then jammed with the bass player the rest of the day. The Hindimith book is a complete course in ear training that leaves no stone unturned. Each chapter includes sight-singing plus rhythmic studies that trains you to read two different rhythmic lines at once dividing them between the hands. Other exercises combined melodic and rhythmic figures. Here you had to sing the melody while at the same time tapping the rhythm; first with the right hand then with the left. By the end of the book one was fluent with all the 5 clefs needed for orchestral and string quartet score reading; Soprano, Alto Tenor, Treble and Bass clefs.
This book trains the student/musician to read, hear and imagine anything on manuscript and in your mind's ear.

I got to know the composing side of Hall and after 3 months of jazz piano I asked him if I could take composition lessons. I showed him my piano sonata. He liked it and said, " let's begin". The first thing he had me do was buy the Bartok String Quartet scores and recordings. He taught me to follow the scores, one instrument at a time, as I listened to the recording. We continued to thoroughly analyse all six quartets.

Concurrent with the Bartok quartet assignments, Hall started me on counterpoint studies. He explained all the contrapuntal devices; augmentation, diminution, retrograde, imitation, canons at the unison, second, third, fifth, etc. He always composed all examples on the spot. I was assigned first to compose in 2-parts, progessing to 3 then to 4-part counterpoint. I must have written a total of 1000 exercises for him. He would sight read them all, comment, flick the ashes and light up another Camel and make the next assignment!!

Then we started the study of polytonalty. This led to an analysis of the piano music of Darius Milhaud. Hall studied with Milhaud. All my composition and jazz assignments were presented in an orderly fashion. Nothing was haphazard with Hall. He methodically covered every possible theoretical point when presenting a new concept, always composing examples on the spot and then assigning the homework! His teachings led from the simple to the complex and sometimes, the reverse. After 3 months of Bartok, counterpoint, and polytonal exercises, Hall said why don't you compose your first piece with me, and let's start with applying and using the polytonal concepts. The work turned out to be a 3-movement piano suite that included improvisational segments as part the structure. He was pleased. I titled it "La-No-Tib Suite". Ten years later I composed a bass and drum part to expand the score into a trio piece. I included this new version on my debut recording, "Blue Sean Green". Ten years after that my wife, Carol Lian, recorded the original 1957 piano score on her debut LP, "Carol Lian Plays". She learned to improvise by studying this piece. We might say that Hall's teaching had left its mark on Carol, indirectly influencing her career, pushing her creative instincts in a certain unexpected direction. Because later on she recorded two cds, in duo, with the percussionist Ronnie Bedford, all totally improvised, free-form music!!! Great teaching continues its spell.

I had been studying the piano music of Ravel before I met Hall so he suggested we tackle the orchestral and chamber music of both impressionistic geniuses, Debussy and Ravel. This led to my first chamber work, a trio for violin, viola and cello. It was a tough assignment or so I had thought. I discovered I was able to conceive the work mentally without recourse to the piano as a crutch. I owe this to Hall's insistence on developing the ear, intuition and the imagination, all at the same time. Of course it helped being a jazz player and a free form improvisor. It meant that my inner hearing was advanced enough to give me the confidence to compose a String Trio. Each week I'd bring in pages of the trio composition in progress; I was amazed at the ease at which Hall was able to sight read my score in his head, and then play it on the piano to demonstrate what was not quite right. He'd then make suggestions in pencil, all the while smoking, flicking, ashes to ashes.

Hall was involved with Max Polikoff, a free lance, highly respected, New York violinist/composer, who conducted "readings" for budding composers. They were held uptown at Columbia College and open to the public. All kinds of scores were played, even jazz oriented classically conceived pieces were accepted. Hall got a committment from Polikoff to have my string trio played at a session but unfortuately I didn't have the parts copied on time!! I had to copy them myself and it was a tortuous task. On the night my reading was scheduled I was still copying parts in the men's bathroom, no less. 'Tis true!! Hall came looking for me and was in stiches laughing at me stuggling to get the copying done on time. Alas, there was no time left. The concert ended without me getting a reading. My tight schedule precluded getting another chance at the Polikoff "readings". From that point on, I decided to always hire a copyist to have parts ready on time. Later I had some money to hire some string players to read my trio score in private. Of course I recorded it for study purposes. Hall was pleased with the work. And so was I. We had worked hard together on this piece, so chock full of Ravel's and Debusst's influences. It was my "impressionistic" period. And now I was ready to move on.

Throughout the year with Hall, he never once admitted to or voiced a negative thought about the scarcity of venues for new music and the difficulty of getting one's music heard. He encourged me to follow through on all assighnments; he introduced me to players, conductors; he invited me to join him at new music concerts, especially when he had his own works played. For an "emerging composer like my self, it was a thrill-and-a-half to be sitting next to Hall, my guru of a teacher and hearing his work performed on stage, seeing him smile as he listed and then taking a bow; such inspirational jolts, wow!! However, the most generous gift he gave me was his time, eight months of free lessons. I hit a dry period during 1957, from April to December. I called and told Hall I had to stop studying because of financial pressures. He wouldn't hear of it!! He said, "Don't you worry about paying me, just keep coming. Just keep writing and work hard". I'll never ever forget that kindness. It indirectly natured my ego, made me more dedicated and gave me reserve confidence in my musical talents.

Hall was teaching composition and theory at the Juillard School of Music during my period with him but he never talked about those classes. He was always busy playing, composing, recordong and jamming with different jazz cats like Jimmy Raney, Phil Woods, Teddy Charles and later in 1957 he came up with the Music Minus One concept and recorded the very first Music Minus One album, complete with scores for piano, bass, drums, and alto sax.. One side was MMO and the other was with a quartet playing and interpreting how the the charts should sound. The LP even included transcriptions of the improvised alto solos by Phil Woods.

Hall's love of Monk found him accepting an invitation by Monk to arrange his music for Big Band at a concert that was held at Town Hall, 1959, NYC and repeated with new arrangements in 1961. These concerts were recorded and they now rank as two of the most important recordings of all time, along side of the 1957 Brandeis University Concert that gave us George Russell's "All About Rosie", (with the remarkable solo by Bill Evans), Charles Mingus' "Revelations" for Symphony Orchestra and other commissioned works by Jimmy Giuffre, Milton Babbitt, Howard Shelley and Gunther Schuller. Schuller also conducted all the works.

Hall also found time to moderate a PBS TV weekly Jazz series in the 60's. It was broadcast from the New School For Social Research, now The New School University. Each jazz guest spoke about their work, interviewed by Hall and offered plenty of time to perform their original music. I wonder what shelf or warehouse those tapes are rotting away in ? "Tis a pity if they are.

Hall Overton's energy, genius and creativity were boundless. I'll forever be grateful for having been part of his teaching legacy and am truly blessed for being encourged by this intense, kind, generous man with a highly complex mind and a fascinating persona. He was definately a musical genius. It was a year that changed my life and thinking forever!! Hall died in 1972. I miss him!!

Below is a bio of Hall and a NYX review(1972) of his opera "HUCK FINN". I have added this to my "ASHES TO ASHES" post to give you some idea of the breadth and scope of this undervalued giant musician.
In the FAll of 2009 there will be a special concert devoted to his works and those of several of his students who have gone on to fame and some to fortune.

Hall Overton
Biography From Wikipedia


Hall Franklin Overton was born in Bangor, Michigan, on February 23, 1920. He was the first of three sons born to Stanford and Ruth (Barnes) Overton and grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As a youngster in this small mid-western town, he found that his few piano lessons didn't satisfy his longing for that elusive "something" he was seeking in music. He was fortunate in having a high school music teacher who recognized his gift, and urged him to study at The Chicago Musical College. It was there that he studied theory and compostition from 1940 to 1942. The latter year marked his entry into the armed services, and from 1942 until 1945 he served in overseas combat duty with the U.S. 3rd Armored Division. It was during that time that he learned to play jazz.

Upon his discharge from the army he pursued his musical studies at The Juilliard School of Music, studying composition with Vincent Persichetti. He graduated in 1951 with an M.S. degree, and then became a member of the faculty there.

In later years he also taught at The Yale School of Music and The New School of Social Research. He received awards from both The Koussevitzky Foundation and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

His New York City loft at 821 Sixth Avenue, sublet from David X. Young in 1954, provided the perfect setting for jazz musicians to jam into the wee hours. The October 2000 release of Jazz Loft comprises many hours of these priceless sessions recorded by Young.

Among his private students were many jazz greats as well as billionairess, Doris Duke.

While he was writing his classical compositions, he was also deeply immersed in jazz. He recorded with such notables as Stan Getz, Duke Jordan, Jimmy Raney and Teddy Charles. Thelonious Monk selected him to score his piano works for full orchestra. A performance of these compositions in New York City was recorded live on February 28, 1959 and released on the album The Thelonious Monk Orchestra At Town Hall. In 1963 Monk recorded a second live album with orchestra arrangements by Overton at the New York Philharmonic Hall titled Big Band And Quartet In Concert.

His opera, Huckleberry Finn, commissioned by the Barney Jaffin Foundation, was presented by The Juilliard Opera Company just months before he died on November 24, 1972.

He married Nancy Swain in 1949, and they had two sons: Richard Adair (Rick) Overton and Steven Swain Overton. Rick is a comedian/actor/writer now living in California, and Steve is in New Mexico pursuing both music and advanced math. He is also survived by his brothers Harvey and Richard Overton.

About his music, Hall Overton said: "Since I am both a composer and active jazz musician, my work reflects both of these sources of musical experience. As a composer, my main interest has been in the exploration of non-systematic, intuitive harmony, both tonal and dissonant from which other elements -- melody, counterpoint and form -- can be derived.

"I am not particularly concerned whether this places me in the middle of the road, left or right. Or even if there is such a thing as a road to be on or off. There are only individual expressions for which we must find the right language. Some are good, some are bad.

"My attitude towards jazz is one of deep respect. Having attempted to master this difficult and exacting art for several years, with some small degree of success, I feel that I have come to know it in a way that is possible only through actually performing and creating in this idiom.

"Jazz has had a strong influence on my compositional style, but purely on a subconscious level. For I am opposed to the practice of trying to make jazz respectable through the unnatural imposition of classical forms or materials."

Hall Overton was a player, composer, arranger and perhaps most importantly... a teacher.

(Article information provided by Nancy Overton. Photo scan by Nancy Overton from promotional brochure circa mid 1950s. Photography by W. Eugene Smith.)


Review of Opera "Huckleberry Finn"
The New York Times, May 16, 1971

This 'Huck Finn' Is Not for Children
By RAYMOND ERICSON

The Juilliard Opera Center's last premiere, given in late March, was Harold Farberman's "The Losers." It was about today's youth, specifically a gang like Hell's Angels. The company's next premiere, due this Thursday and Saturday, is about the youth of another and more innocent era, the characters in Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn." The opera is by Hall Overton, a 51-year-old composer on the Juilliard faculty. He collaborated on the libretto with Judah Stampfer.

Overton was commissioned to write an opera dealing with youth, which would hopefully appeal to young people and relate to the way they feel today. The composer thought the Twain novel would fill the bill. "Huck," he says, "was concerned over issues of conscience, over moral issues. He rejected civilization as he saw it. He ran away from it. His main goal was to run to some place where he could be free. His strongest relationship was with a black man."

Overton says that the libretto will not please everybody, because they had to leave so much out. "We have concentrated on three main areas: the characters and relationship of Huck and Jim; crowd scenes -- it was important that they be represented because Twain uses them as a foil for the closed world of Huck and Jim; and the symbolic forces of the river and the raft and the freedom that seems to be there wherever the river takes you.

"We have tried to preserve Huck intact as much as possible. He is what he is in the novel except that we have advanced his age from 13 to 16. Jim's character is altered somewhat. He represents an older, wiser man who instructs in his own way. Towards the end, we have made a real change, Jim is freed, as in the novel, by his former owner, but instead of going back with Huck and Tom Sawyer, he takes off on his own to continue his original mission to free his immediate family."

Overton waited until he had a workable libretto before he developed the opera's musical style. "The thing I felt had to be preserved was the language. Twain is a master of the vernacular, and I had to start with that. I took the rhythms and inflections of the spoken language and wrote a continuous recitative, with arias, in most cases, being implied. The music is sometimes dissonant, sometimes very tonal, but at all times, I hope, consistent with the aim of the piece -- the American language as Twain so truly recorded it. I have utilized by background in jazz for Jim."

People who have heard about "Huck Finn" have frequently asked if it is a children's opera. Definitely not. It is a serious opera by a serious, well-regarded composer.
posted by Jack Reilly