jazzfluteweinstein

Really Cool!!

2011-12-13T11:29:00.001-08:00

My daughter Rebecca has a way of saying 'Really Cool!!' that never fails to warm my heart. And when Dr. Jazz, my radio promoter sent me the cover of this weeks Jazzweek radio chart, that's what I heard: Really Cool!!. So I'm back at number one on the charts (Jazz Brasil hit #1 as did Con Alma). So why do I feel like such a failure. I can tell myself that it's because I rarely perform, or because I'm 71 and feel time running out or because I still long for a relationship with a woman. But I think time running out is up there as the reason for my persistent negativity.

I've been thinking about the philosopher Heidegger despite disregarding him for both professional and personal reasons. I'm a logician and trained in analytic philosophy rather than in continental philosophy, which Heidegger dominated, and he was a Nazi, belonged to the party and etc. But in checking out Wilkepedia, which embarrassingly I rely on more than any self-respecting academic should, I came upon one of his central ideas that I can relate to, as they say.

The basic idea is that we (all of us, even Jews) come into existence with a relationship to the world, that world that manifests itself as the condition for our being-in-the-world as we are concerned with it through our interactions. Our engagement with the very stuff of our existence: the existence that we care for. But being-in-the-world is conditioned by its temporality, our present draws upon its past as we move ahead into the unfolding future. And at 71 it seems that I can't count on very much future at all.

It's not that I think I haven't accomplished anything. My recent interest in Heidegger is sparked by a doctoral student I'm working with who is writing a dissertation on math and ontology. Just being able to say that should shut me up. For god's sake I have doctoral students and built a successful career as an academic after a really shitty start in the 1970's that included being fired when I got my degree, going bankrupt and having to reinvent myself as an educational consultant and getting my first tenure-track position at 47. But I was associate director of an institute for critical thinking, department chair and as a full-professor have a great job, a reliable income and have been able to live out my dream to create a body of work as a jazz musician.

And dammit, I have a #1 record! Again! But somehow it doesn't do it for me. I still miss the life that didn't happen. Being a working musician and celebrating the success of my music with an audience and with other musicians. The life! I know it is a crappy life. Being on the road, not hearing yourself on stage. Not knowing where your next gig is coming from. Feeling your musical worth loosing purchase as younger musicians are called instead of you. Not to mention that there are very few gigs, that jazz is geriatric in its appeal and as Nicholas Payton has recently said in defense of his move into jazz-fusion (as it used to be called) playing jazz requires you to be a necrophiliac. One step beyond Frank Zappa's infamous gibe that jazz wasn't dead, it just smelled funny.

But boy when I look at the photos on my facebook page from the hundreds of musicians that I am friends with, I crumble at the thought that I am not doing it, and it is overwhelmingly probable that I never will. Those photos of smiling guys in airports with their instruments at their feet, or sitting around tables with their arms on each others shoulders. Boy I miss being a musician among musicians. I have lots of recent photos of myself with musicians, a few from every record date. And when I record it is a short trip to musician heaven. Hangin' out with the guys. The being-in-the-world of musicians. I did it for 15 years starting when I was a kid and lasting until my early-thirties. And even though my rotten personality kept me from enjoying it as much as I should have, I look back to that period as a period of intense engagement with life. And I long for the chance to do it some more. Just like I long for the possibility of one more great romance, one more chance to love someone.

I guess that what happens when the future futures seem be closing off. As the limit from above meets the limit from below (think of calculus) defining the vanishing point of existence. As all past pasts meet all future futures in the obliteration of life, everything vanishing, including especially all future possibilities.

Holy shit! You won't believe it, but I'm not depressed, just telling it like it is. Life is the result of choices and contingencies. And every actuality crowds out all of the unactualized possibilities of roads not taken. As Popeye used to say: I am what I am, and as I might add, I done what I done. I stopped playing trombone, I stopped being a musician. I became a philosopher and started playing the flute. But I sat on two chairs, each with a halbe tuchus (yiddish for half an ass) and so didn't end up doing either with a whole heart or with complete dedication. And I'm stuck with it.

ups and downs

2011-09-08T19:39:00.000-07:00

Once again, I've let a lot of time go between posts. But things have been complicated. It started with my trip to Israel in June on a grant to work with Arab and Jewish Israeli educators to develop critical thinking in teacher education. This refers back to what I did during the '80's and 90's when I was deeply involved in critical thinking, both in New York where I directed a program called the Reasoning Skills Project and in New Jersey where I was the Associate Director of the Institute for Critical Thinking at the University I teach at. The idea of getting back into the hard work of developing critical thinking programs that promote change is not all that attractive to me at this point in my life. But the idea of trying to do some good in Israel across the Arab-Jewish divide is very compelling. Anyway everything will depend on getting funding and in this economic climate I am not particularly optimistic.

Anyway, I went Israel in June and stayed a few extra days to record an album. That's the guys in the picture. Steve Peskoff, the guitarist who put it together for me is on the left. Steve is the head of the jazz program in a conservatory in Jerusalem. Originally a New Yorker, Steve has been on Israel for about 25 years. I’m next to him, then Steve's son Chaim who played drums, and Gilad Dibrecky a percussionist I played with quite often in the states, who has moved back to Israel. On the right is the bassist Gilad Abro who rounded out the quintet.

We recorded for two days after one day of rehearsal and things went rather well. I put it on a hard drive and took it home. I finally got a chance to pick takes and do a rough mix, which prompted the post. The music is like my other albums, playing jazz in response to world music traditions. We recorded a number of Chassidic tunes (niggunim), three originals (two by me and one by Steve) and a waltz from the 1930's. The engineer says the music is 'Jewish, retro, contemporary' but I guess so are all of my albums. My Cuban, retro, contemporary album El Cumbanchero is mastered the cover is done and going into production.

El Cumbanchero might be the best album I have ever recorded. It certainly has the most beautiful cover, as you can see. I've mentioned this in previous blogs, but it is worth saying again. Aruan Ortiz who wrote the arrangements for string quartet and contributed three original compositions has written one of the most amazing pieces of music I have ever had the pleasure of playing. The fact that he gave this music to me and permitted me to respond with complete freedom is one of the greatest gifts I have ever received.

Although I have complete confidence in the result, I was a bit anxious as to how the music would be received. Since it uses both a traditional Cuban form, the charanga, and recasts the form in contemporary terms. The first test was when I asked Danilo Lozano to write the liner notes. Danilo is a fine classical flutist working out of LA and a serious student of charanga music. His father Jose Rolando Lozano is one if the legendary Cuban charanga flutists along with Fajardo and Richard Egues. For those of you who don't know much about the music, it is played on a 5-key wooden flute that was the basic flute before the Boehm system became available at the end of the 19th century. It is a flute that is favored in many folk kinds of music and is still used by Irish flutists. It was the instrument of choice for Cuban charanga flutists who played it in the extreme high register. Not only did they play the highest notes with a beautiful tone, but they used a fast operatic vibrato, something that requires enormous strength and control. I on the other hand, am a jazz flutist, use a metal flute (a Powell Aurumite) play mainly in the low and middle register, using high notes only to extend the range of my lines, and use a wide harmonic vocabulary. But I have been playing Cuban-based music for 50 years and have a deep respect for the melodic sweetness and rhythmic power of Cuban music. So I hoped that those who love the charanga would be willing to accept my reconfiguring the charanga flute tradition around my strengths as a jazz flutist. Happily I can report that Danilo was happy to write the liner notes, and without tooting my flute too much was quite positive about my flute playing and how I approached the form.

But to be honest I take much less credit for the beauty of the album, which I owe to Aruan. My only instructions to him was to listen to number of tracks from a CD compilation of the legendary charanga Arcaño and su Maravillas and to 'extend the music from the inside.' I knew I was on the right track when for his first arrangements he choose to rearrange were two of my most favorite compositions, 'Doña Olga' and 'Armoniosos de Amalia.' Choosing to recast these classics, originally arranged by Israel Cachao Lopez, was both a tribute and an enormous risk. The way I approached playing the flute presents an even greater challenge, both to the musicians and to the listener. In the liner notes Danilo focuses on the tension between what we did and the expectations for the audience who is deeply engaged with the charanga tradition. And he sees it as ‘a risk well worth taken.’’ I hope his acceptance is any indication of how others will feel and I have great optimism about the success of the album. But acceptance aside, I think it is truly wonderful music and I know it will be a welcome addition to my work over the past 6 years with Jazzheads records. Needless to say, Randy Klein, the president of Jazzheads is supportive of this latest effort and is planning a significant promotional campaign including branching out internationally. I have already seen some success in this regard. Timbassa was licensed by Japanese label and I get quite a bit on play outside of the US.

Speaking of international connections. I got a chance to play at the Quebec Music Festival in July, thanks to a wonderful woman Jocelyn Michaud who has been promoting my music in Canada. I played with a sextet, two sax players and a rhythm section. I played the parts originally written for flugelhorn. It was quite a different musical context for me, but it was a lot of fun. And I did a few features with the rhythm section that were very well received. All ups so but the downs started the night I got back from Quebec.

When I got back I had no electrical power. I microburst took out a tree which took down all of my external cables. Little did I know that in a few weeks many people would suffer much worse as storms, floods and fires would result in far greater catastrophes. But at the time, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself, even though I was up and running in a few days. I started teaching my usual two section of a graduate course in research methods. Three weeks into the semester I had one of the all-time pain experiences of my life, and I have a few, diverticulitis that led to major surgery in 2000 followed by a large kidney stone a few months later. The kidney turned out to be a lucky break, since when they did a procedure to see how big the stone was they saw a sponge that was left in me when I lost a foot and a half of colon to the diverticulitis. More recently I had a glaucoma attack that was one of the worst headaches I ever experienced. I had disregarded sign of glaucoma for some time, and by the time I got to the emergency room I was very close to losing the sight in my right eye. You think I would have learned not to disregard pain. Anyway, back to the my recent travails. I had been having stomach aches for several months and even after finding out on Google that there is no disease called a stomach ache or even one called indigestion, and that people over 55 should take frequent stomach pain seriously, I didn't pay much attention, assuming it was something I had eaten. Until the third week of my class, on a Sunday I sat with crippling pain for an entire afternoon telling myself I had food poisoning from the smoked salmon omelet I had for breakfast. Then all of a sudden the pain went away and I set down in a room without an air conditioner to watch television. In about a half hour I started shivering violently. I checked my temperature and it was normal, but the shivering got worse. I took my temperature again and it was starting to climb. When it hit 102.4 I went to the emergency room. After 9 days I was finally allowed to leave, without a gall bladder. It was a simple laparoscopic surgery that usually gets you out and about in 24 hours. But not when you have been disregarding stomach pain for several months. I was badly infected with a blocked bile duct, the resulting jaundice and liver malfunctions, plus blood pressure off of the scale. Plus my poor students didn't have classes for the rest of the semester but still had to produce a semester project. Fortunately I could read their papers on the Internet and get them comments by email. I gave lots of A's so nobody got hurt.

Those are the downs.

One more up. I got through Irene with just a damp basement and no trees down despite the fact that I am surrounded by big trees and I thought it was great that my house is covered with English ivy. Unfortunately so are the biggest trees in my back yard and the tree lady says it is only a matter of time before the ivy kills them. But if I don't take warnings seriously about my self, how can I be expected to worry about ivy. There is nothing like being a critical thinking expert who is a complete damn fool.

hope conquers all

2011-04-29T09:11:00.000-07:00

Well my best chance for an end run around the music scene towards recognition has been seriously compromised. NARAS, the folks who give you the Grammys got rid of the Latin Jazz category. That was a funny category in a way, the only subdivision by genre. Jazz was divided into instrumental, vocal, big band, contemporary and Latin jazz. But there was no free jazz, no mainstream jazz, no Dixieland, only Latin jazz. So in a typical year there would be hundreds of entries into instrumental jazz and only dozens in Latin jazz. So you could always hope that you could sneak in at the bottom (the nominations are for the top 5). But with hundreds of jazz records to compete with, everyone from Chick Corea to Vijay Iyer, getting a nomination for a recording on a small independent label (most Latin jazz comes out on small labels) looks pretty bleak.

But anyway, a Grammy nomination would have been the one way to move up in the consciousness of the jazz scene, although talking to guys who got nominated, it doesn’t change things that much. In fact for a long time I thought that was the only way, given my limitations. Teaching full time I can't afford to take tours that would make me have to cancel classes. They know about my music at the university, put since I do my job they disregard it. But if I was making money as a musician in a way that was a detriment to my teaching I’d be out on my ear. No professor’s salary, no recording. So the only way I’ll be known is if my records are taken seriously and a Grammy nomination would have been perfect. But there is no point in crying over spilled milk. And to top it all off, my last record Jazz Brasil debuted at #1 in the country and has been at the top of the Jazzweek World chart and top 10 in Jazzweek Jazz, for 10 weeks. With Kenny Barron on the record, this was my shot for a nomination, but there is no easy way without the Latin jazz category. I’ll put it in the Latin Grammy (if they don’t do something weird) and as instrumental jazz in the regular Grammy (and get to compete with Wynton Marsalis et al). It’s like they took a target away and I got a quiver full of arrows. I guess I’m stuck with the big target in the sky. I have to make records just to make a record of my music. I have to think enough of my music to make it real, and for me real has always meant recordings. As my ex-wife Joyce used to say, it is all about making art objects. But I’ve always been hungry for recognition, never secure enough in my musical abilities to rely on doing the best I could. I wanted the world to tell me how good I was. I’m 70 years old and still as hungry for approval as I was when I was 25. Damn, when will I ever grow up.

But I’m stuck with it. I have another record finished, the modern charanga album, El Cumbanchero, written by Aruan Ortiz (scroll down a few entries) and the tango album with Pablo Aslan (2 nominations, Grammy and Latin Grammy, in 2010 for Latin Jazz) is just about done. And I’m going back to Israel in June to make a record there. And I’m going into the studio tomorrow to work on the tangos and I’m writing the blog as a bit of occupational therapy. I have to get past the Grammy crap (me and everyone else have been on facebook and twitter, signing petitions all day) and get into the head to play music.

The picture above is from my trip to Isreal last June. I’m sitting in a park overlooking the old city. I videotaped myself playing and have still not gotten around to editing it down (I recorded about an hour). I have to stop, and get ready for a day in the studio tomorrow.

I'm back! The photo above is the trio that recorded the last half of the tango album, guitarist Francisco (Pancho) Navarro on my right and on my left, Pablo Aslan, who managed 2 GRAMMY nominations in 2010 for the same album, one on the Latin Grammy and for Latin Jazz in the Grammy. That is the 3rd album I recorded with Grammy nominees (the others were Con Alma with Mark Levine and Tales From the Earth with Omar Sosa). Well who knows, the Latin jazz community is up in arms with petitions to NARAS to reinstate the Latin Jazz category, and all sorts of theories about why it is being dropped (all focused on the rise of the indie labels and backlash from the pop establishment, since Esperanza Spaulding got the big prize in 2010). If any of you want to get involved, here is a link to the petition.

I was obsessed with the Grammy controversy when I started this post and since then I have been taught an object lesson in why negativity is a meaningless response to disappointment. The Grammy awards are open to every one who is a member of NARAS and the scuttle-butt is that that majors make everyone who works for the label join so that they can swamp the voting without doing campaigning, which is actually in violation of NARAS rules. So among us small-fry the word is that it is all 'politics' with music taking second place to connections. Not that anyone complains when they beat the system and get a nomination. But the real test of your status in the jazz cosmos was always the Downbeat critics poll (and I can't even get a review in Downbeat, so that's out) and the Jazz Journalists Association. The JJA is a group of jazz writers who represent the most informed group of individuals, including musicians, since they represent all of those who focus on jazz through an intellectual and critical perspective. Every year they vote in a broad number of categories, including flute. And, mirabilis dictu, I have been nominated as Flutist of the Year for 2011. I'm one of five, and I don't think I'll win, since some flute stalwarts are in the running. To get a sense of how prestigious the group of nominees is check out the 2011 nominee list. So I'm back up off the floor after a glancing blow to the heart from NARAS and full of hope that somehow my music will survive. That is the point of recognition after all. When I was younger a big part of being a musician was the hope that it would yield romance. It did in a way. I met my first wife playing bass in a pre-hippie illegal club called the Jazz Zoo, a block away from Brooklyn College during my freshman year. And that was a disaster, since I was married shortly thereafter, and that put a stop to my romantic aspirations. I was not happily married to say the least. Playing trombone got me a few cherished affairs, being on the road has fringe benefits for unhappily married musicians and I met Souix, my teenage sweetheart playing the flute in the park. But generally speaking, it has been my experience that playing music is over-rated as a seduction strategy. For most guys the major fringe benefit of being a musician is getting to 'hang' with the guys. It certainly was for me, and the recognition that you get from the musicians you play with is as good as it gets. But at 70 years old, and only starting recording at 56 my main fear was that my recordings wouldn't make enough of an impact so that they would be part of the consciousness of musicians and music lovers after I have moved on to the proverbial green pastures. Getting good reviews and radio play was a sign that my fears were somewhat less than reasonable. Getting the JJA nomination gives me a real sense that I am making an impact with my recordings and that my music well be seen as a contribution to that ethereal world, distributed among the artifacts and minds of human beings that is the only world for which artists have concern. Wouldn't it be a gas if the Lord liked jazz, according to the Good Book, He certainly loves singing.

new year, new music

2011-01-02T15:30:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to all! Well it's official. Jazz Brasil is officially released; promotion starts in the next few week with albums sent out to reviewers and radio stations and if it works out I'm finally moving into the 21st century with twitter. I'm trying even harder to get my music noticed and I'm going to work to build more of a presence through social media. This is partly the idea of the record company. To try to broaden my fan base, mainly people who listen to Latin jazz, to other groups that might appreciate what I'm trying to do. A few blogs ago I mentioned my performance at the National Flute Association (NFA), and I still see flute players as a group that I want to reach out to. Jazz Brasil is going to be included in an article on jazz flute players who performed at the NFA in the groups very classy periodical, The Flutist Quarterly, but if I am going to keep the attention of classical flute players, many of whom are flute teachers, I'm going to have to do something that relates to their needs and interests.

From what I pick up from flute lists, a few more school jazz ensembles are using flute players, and the general increase in interest in jazz at all educational levels should be able to be connected to the literally thousands of kids, teens and college students who play flute. My idea is to start another blog geared to aspiring jazz flutists and to introduce classical flutists to the possibility of playing and teaching others how to play jazz on flute. What I'm planning, although I'm not sure whether it will prove technically or financially feasible is to have a place where aspiring jazz flutists can post links to their recordings or videos and where others can listen and comment on the music. Sort of a virtual master class for jazz flute. That will be supported by jazz flute discussions including responses from more experienced jazz flutists and flute teachers to start to build a community of support and awareness of the potential for flute as a major contributor to jazz.

Among the incentives to put up the blog is my desire to make my early (pre-Jazzheads) recordings more available so that my own development as a musician is acoustically available to those who are interested in my music. This blog tells the on-going story, but it is, after all, about the music. That brings me back to Jazz Brasil. Jazz Brazil is my fourth significant effort to record Brazilian music. It is preceded by Lua e Sol and O Nosso Amor, both of Jazzheads and a number of earlier efforts. Jazz Brasil is probably my most 'inside' album. As I mentioned in the previous blog, playing with Kenny Barron landed me right in the center of my bebop roots. I came up in Brooklyn in the late 50's and early 60's and the musicians I was connected with, especially the African-American musicians like Ronnie Matthews, who was part of a group of musicians centered around Red Hook Projects (where I lived as a toddler) had a distinctive perspective on where to take bebop (white musicians who came out of the Brooklyn scene included the brilliant clarinetist and saxophonist Eddie Daniels). I was an undergraduate at Brooklyn College (as was Eddie) which supported a community orchestra in which I played trombone that included Jimmy Garrison in the bass section. But the strongest influence on me was composer and pianist Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, who was probably best known in the jazz world for his work with Max Roach. 'Perk' as we called him, was the orchestra conductor and on the side he had a jazz sextet that he wrote for in which I played trombone from time to time. I wish I could remember all the musicians in it. But it was a 'rehearsal band' and so different guys played at different times. I was the only student in the group and I was in awe of the music and the musicians. Booker Ervin, who I played with later in a sextet led by a very talented but obscure pianist-composer Paul Knopf around the same time, sometimes played tenor, also alto player Bobbie Brown, who also played with me and Paul Knopf as well. But I digress!

Anyway, playing with Kenny was pure bliss, although the record date had some tensions (both Nilson and I were very much aware of the fact that we were recording with a jazz master). And since there were no rehearsals, the session was intense. So intense that we didn't take any pictures (nobody wanted the intrusion of photographs while we were recording. But we did take pictures during a break. I like this one (Phil Ludwig my engineer is standing next to Kenny Barron, with Nilson Matta and drummer Marcello Pelliterri on the other side):

My playing on Jazz Brasil is in interesting contrast to both the records that preceded it, Timbasa and Lua e Sol. Both of the earlier albums were very much cutting edge. The young Cuban musicians (Axel Tosca Laugart and Panagiotis Andreou both won Best Latin Jazz of 2010 awards for their work on Timbasa on piano and bass, respectively) were playing beyond anything I have heard. That album, in its own way, is so far in advance of what is going on in Latin jazz that I expect it to be years before the musicians integrate what those guys were doing with the music. And my playing of the album drew upon everything I knew and more. Playing up to those guys was a challenge and I am very pleased with the result. Similarly for Lua e Sol. Cyro Baptista is probably the most innovative percussionist in Brazilian music. His own music (Beat the Donkey and other ensembles) reflects the avant garde scene both in Brazil and New York. Using him on the record, with no drummer, freed Romero Lubambo and Nilson Matta to experiment with form and texture. Again, my playing in response to them pushed beyond the standard idea of bossa-nova flute playing and enabled me to freely explore melodically and harmonically. But then came Jazz Brasil.

You can hear three complete tracks from the record on my myspace page:

www.myspace.com/markweinstein

In particular check out my version of 'Brazil,' the most classic of all of the Brazilian tunes, Ary Barroso's anthem. My statement of the melody is as pure as it can be. And the solo is right on the pocket, nothing fancy just those great changes and the sweet spots to make clear and musical statements. My approach to playing the melodies of great tunes is based on hours of listening to Frank Sinatra on AM-radio. I was working as a consultant in the New York City public schools, running something called the Reasoning Skills Project in the mid-80's and I had half-ownership of of 76 Dodge Dart with my ex-wife (it had been her father's car) She had it weekends and I had it to drive around from school to school throughout Bronx, Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn. I was in the car a lot and it only had an AM radio. And there was a program that played Frank Sinatra, and only Frank Sinatra, all day long. Like everyone else on the planet I had heard Frank Sinatra, but is was only in the Dodge Dart that I really learned to listen to him. And what struck me was the care and precision with which he just sang the notes 'as written.' That become my model for playing great melodies and 'Brazil' is certainly as great a melody as anyone could hope for.

How far my performance on Jazz Brasil is from my earlier attempts a playing Brazilian music is best looked at in comparison to the other extreme. In 1998 I recorded an album of trios, playing Afr0-Cuban, Brazilian and post-bebop with three different groups of guys. The trio that did Brazilian music was Romero Lubambo and Cyro Baptista, and what we did there makes Lua e Sol look timid by comparison. Each group played two extended improvizations. When I played the first trio for Romero (Jean-Paul Bourelly on guitar and Milton Cardono on percussion) Romero suggested we record a classic baião, basically a 16-bar blues, probably by the master of the baião, Luis Gonzaga. We play the tune for close to 16 minutes. It is a serious composition, improvised completely (the only prearranged part is the figure it ends with). It moves through 3 distinct sections and includes some of the best playing by Romero on any of my records. Check it out, track 2 on the album):

http://www.myspace.com/markweinstein/music/albums/jazz-world-trios-16142410

Here is where I have to take it on faith that you listened to it. And this goes back to my earlier discussion of my proposed new blog. I want to talk to musicians about that piece of music. I want to engage in a technical discussion of its form, its use of structure, its use of harmonic motifs, it's use of contrasting acoustical environments and especially how it is possible to create such long forms through improvisation. That is, I want to start taking my music seriously and engaging with jazz theoretician and teachers using my music and their music as the basis for the discussion. Such a discussion includes how artists, change and develop. To give you an idea of where it came from and some other places I went check out two other early Brazilian recordings. The first is from my first album, Seasoning, recorded two years before Jazz World Trios in 1996. It is flute and two acoustic guitarists, Vic Juris and his student Robert Reich. It is a recording of my favorite tune from my favorite movie, 'Felicidades' from the movie 'Black Orpheus,' track #8:

http://www.myspace.com/markweinstein/music/albums/seasoning-16142428

After I recorded Jazz World Trios (and returned from California where I recorded Cuban Roots Revisited for Cubop records) I recorded an album of duos, Three Deuces, with three different guitarists, Vic Juris, Ed Cherry and Paul Meyers. Paul contributed an original tunes called 'Andando.' Here it is (track #2):

http://www.myspace.com/markweinstein/music/albums/three-deuces-16142441

But is was a collaboration with guitarist, singer and composer Richard Boukas that consolidated my interest in Brazilian music and introduced me to Nilson Matta who would co-produce all of my Brazilian recordings on Jazzheads, eventually reconnected me with Romero Lubambo and Cyro Baptista. The album with Boukas was his concept throughout. First, suggesting that we record all Hermeto Pascoal, compositions, then settling on tunes from Hermeto's Calendario do Som, writing all of the arrangements, playing a myriad of guitar-like instruments, singing, booking the musicians, running the sessions and mixing. The album is called Tudo de Bom and is well worth checking out.

http://www.myspace.com/markweinstein/music/albums/tudo-de-bom-16142498

If you would like more, there are two sets of videos of duo's with Paul Meyers, one in concert in 1999, right after I recorded Jazz World Trios and another group that I recorded for the NFA competition a few years ago. They are to be found at:

http://www.youtube.com/jazzflute41

They include my least favorite bossa-nova, 'Wave' ( a requirement of the competition) which I learned as a trombone player playing club dates the last year I played professionally before taken a few years break from music to earn my PhD. And which I played endlessly when I was broke, playing flute on the street for spare change in the late 70's (I was fired from my full-time teaching gig at CUNY when I got my PhD, since they had to promote me, but all promotions where cannibalized due to the budget crisis of 1976).

Such is life! Let us all wish for peace, health and happiness in 2011 (and a little prosperity wouldn't hurt).

this and that

2010-10-12T13:52:00.000-07:00

I've been losing readers by not updating the blog, so I guess I have to get back into if I want the blog to stay alive. I generally post when I have a new album coming out, and I do. It is called "Jazz Brasil" and features 2010 NEA Jazz Master Kenny Barron, along with Nilson Matta, who co-produced it, on bass and Marcello Pellitteri on drums and percussion. The picture is of the guys at the session. That's Nilson to my right, Marcello up front and the jazz master, in fact as well as in name, Kenny Baron on other side of me. The timing couldn't be better. The album was actually recording in 2009 before I recorded "Timbasa." After listening to both recordings, Randy Klein the president of Jazzheads, decided to put "Timbasa" out first since my last album for the company "Lua e Sol" was Brazilian jazz. I agreed with him since I was sure that "Timbasa" would be well-received and reconnect me with the Latin jazz radio stations that had pushed "Con Alma" up to number one on the radio play charts. Waiting to release "Jazz Brasil" ended up being perfect timing. Hopefully the album coming out soon soon after Kenny got the Jazz Master award will give it that extra boost.

Not that it needs is. I think the music stands on its own two feet. I felt a lot of pressure playing with Kenny, but you would never know it from the finished product. The album is relaxed, swinging and musical throughout. Playing with Kenny Barron enabled me to return to my bebop roots and he loves playing Brazilian jazz, a motivating factor in his doing the date with me. Kenny is a complete professional as was everyone else and the session went like clockwork. Once again, no rehearsals, head arrangements in the studio and a natural blending of very compatible players. We played a mixture of jazz standards by Thelonious Monk, Wayne Shorter and Joe Henderson, some originals and tunes by the best of the Brazilian composers, Ary Barroso and Jobim. We also did a cover of one of Herbie Mann's biggest hits, "Memphis Underground." I spent few years playing with Herbie when I was a trombone player and Nilson played with and loved Herbie Mann. It was his idea to play a Herbie cover, something I would have never thought of doing. It's worth remarking that the Brazilian musicians who played with Herbie really love him . Romero Lubambo calls him 'my American father.' Both he and Nilson say that I remind them of Herbie when I play. I can't see the similarity; my concept, playing world music with the best musicians I can get is straight out of Herbie's playbook. I see him as the source of how I see the flute in jazz, but honestly, I don't see myself as sounding like him at all. Part of it is that I can't swing as hard as he did. Very few people can. Herbie could swing and bring an audience to its feet. The album I recorded with him called "Standing Ovation at Newport" is a case in point.

One of big crowd pleasers we played was called 'Mushi, Mushi,' which is how you say 'hello' on the phone in Japan (Herbie was very big in Japan). It featured Patato on conga and the two bones. It was the last tune on our set at Newport. But instead of stopping the tune when it was finished, Herbie kept on playing by himself. The band had ended big, but before the people could applaud, there is Herbie standing in front of microphone, doing his patented hip-movements, and playing air. That's right AIR. He is just blowing into the flute, making no sound other than the percussive effects of his tongue and the air into the microphone. Actually Jimmy Guiffre, the clarinetist, did that on a few recording, using air, tonguing and key clicks in a very subdued and almost hypnotic way. Herbie, on the other hand, was kickin'. Patato went to the apron of the large Newport stage and started clapping on 2 and 4. The audience picked it up, a perfect rhythm section of thousands of people, and not with a rock drummer slamming back-beats, but with Herbie Mann swingin' the shit out of air. They wouldn't let us off of the stage, which was slightly embarrassing as the next act was an all-star band led by Earl 'Fatha' Hines, and featuring greats from the 30's and 40's. Herbie certainly could swing.

I on the other hand am obsessed with what I call 'saxophone' standards, to play changes and make a harmonic as well as melodic contribution. I recorded "Memphis Underground" on bass flute to keep comparisons with Herbie to a minimum. Another tune we recorded also has a strange history. Nilson played with Joe Henderson and he suggested we play "Isotope," a favorite of his when he played with Joe. I also played with Joe when he had a big band in New York in the 60's It was right after Thad Jones/Mel Lewis became a big Monday night draw at the Village Vanguard and another west village club, the Half Note, started to use big bands one night a week as well. I played with a number of big bands there, Clark Terry, Duke Pearson and Kenny Durham but playing with Joe Henderson's big band was something else. For one thing we only had about a half dozen arrangments so to play a whole night, Joe had to figure something out. For one thing he played duets with Lee Koenitz, when of the all-time most transcendental experiences of live music I have ever experienced sitting on the bandstand (another was Chick Corea accompanying Johnny Hartman when Herbie's band played the Apollo Theatre). Joe's charts were all tenor sax features and Joe would open them up the last set, letting other members of the band be the featured soloist. My feature was on "Isotope." What goes around comes around.

The album with Kenny Barron will be available shortly (its release date is November 9th) although we won't be doing promotion until after the first of the year. I'll talk more about the date when I have the recording and put up some tracks on myspace.

The other reason that I have for writing another blog is that a live video of me surfaced. I played a concert at Montclair State University with Jeff Kunkel who is head of the jazz department there. Bill Mooring is on bass and Rogerio Boccatto is on drums. I'm playing the melody on bass flute and solo on alto. The tune is an original by Jeff.

There may be something weird with the video on your screen. I noticed that although the entire video shows on the preview page, the right side (with me) is cut off on the webpage itself. If you double-click on it it goes to myspace and you get to see me as well as the other guys.

I have something else to report, although it is not related to my music. I finished a first draft of a book based on my recent work in logic and reflecting a number of earlier publications. The reason I'm mentioning it is that it is a significant accomplishment and one that I have been putting off for years. Pressure from my job gave me the basic incentive and my son Jack, the philosopher, showed me how to do it. He said, 'guys who publish aren't smarter, they just do the work.' And so I did the work. The funny thing is that I get totally into writing when I do it. Basically, when I'm home I'm at my desk practicing. I keep the computer on, occupying myself during endless long-tones and scales by reading the news and etc. I keep track of emails that way so that they don't build up, using small tasks like answering mail to break up the practicing into reasonable units without taxing my chops. But what has been happening since I got back from giving logic papers at conferences this summer is that I sit down at the computer in the late morning with my flute on a stand next to me and if I open a file for a book chapter I get completely engrossed. When things were coming to a head with a chapter I would find myself in the evening without having touched my flute. I have completely lost track of time for over 8 hours in the past several weeks while I became totally absorbed in writing. I find myself not even having started to practice at 10pm or later, having spent a whole day in 'logic land.' It is a strange place to be in. Totally absorbing. And strangely, no matter how difficult it is, and I have been dealing with technical stuff far above my pay grade (catching up with the latest developments in logic with skills from the 1970's), it is far less of a struggle than articulating in the lowest half octave on the flute. Philosophy comes very naturally to me, and music has always been hard work. Yet, my whole self-concept, my aspirations and my desire to make a lasting contribution are all involved with being a jazz musician. Strange to say, although philosophy has been very good to me and I think that my work is reasonable important, music is still at center of how I see myself and ultimately it is what I see as the accomplishment of my life. Go figure!

what I did last summer

2010-09-02T10:59:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted a new blog in quite some time, but "I'm back," as they say. I didn't post for a number of reasons. For one thing I wanted the post on "Timbasa" to stay up since the album was doing quite well on the Jazzweek radio charts and I wanted the discussion of the session to be available. Interest in "Timbasa" is still strong as evidenced by a recent interview. But the main reason was that I didn't do much during the summer. I worked a few gigs but didn't move on any major projects. For the other thing I was very busy doing a lot of different and time-consuming things. I contradict myself, I'm allowed; my PhD is in logic (actually formal philosophy of science).

I never talk about my other life, except tangentially when I discuss the topic of this blog, my dream to make a contribution to jazz as a flutist. But my other life, my PhD and my full-time job as a professor in a department of educational foundations is an integral part of the whole story. For one thing it pays me a middle class salary and being tenured, the money just keeps on coming in (unless something happens that forces me to retire-- my greatest fear at this point in my life). Plus being divorced and with grown children I can spend my salary anyway I want to, and I want to make records. That is not to say that my recordings aren't a business venture, they are. They are just about the lousiest business venture imaginable. Luckily there is no law in the tax code that says you have to be a smart business man, or even a reasonable one. Only a damn fool expects to make money selling jazz records. But there are lots of us out there trying, musicians putting every available dollar into recordings and jazz record labels willing to accept a marginal return on their investment of time and money for love of the music. My records sell, and I record for a wonderful label, Jazzheads, which has even received the recognition due to a company that earns a Grammy nomination (for Bobby Sanabria's album "Kenya Revisited Live!"). All that said, it is my full professor's salary that fuels my music habit and so a significant part of my life is dedicated to teaching and the requirement that any self-respecting academic must publish.

This summer, like every summer I taught a full schedule to earn extra money, but I also had a number of conference papers to give in the areas that I publish in, logic and argumentation theory (practical logic as evidenced in people reasoning together). That meant that I had to write papers and do some traveling. Nicely the conferences were is great places, Corsica and Amsterdam. The Amsterdam conference on argumentation meets every four years and I have been to every one since the late '80's. I love Amsterdam and I got to celebrate my 70th birthday in Vondelpark, nicely toasted playing my flute. But I also had to do the work and the paper (elaborating the history of the Periodic Table of Elements as an example of argumentation that leads to truth), required quite a bit of work since I needed to support my position with historical facts as well as logical analysis. The paper in Corsica was pure logic, the application of a theory of truth that I have been actively presenting for a number of years to the problem of counter-examples to scientific generalizations (evidence that goes against a seemingly correct theory). Piece of cake!

Corsica was the sort of adventure I loved when I was younger. The trip included a flight, a ferryboat ride across the Mediterranean, a ride along the coast in a narrow gauge railroad and a bus that went pretty much straight up the mountains, going from a hot sea-side climate to a high mountain town surrounded by bare mountain peaks and moving through pine forest and Alpine meadows all in the space of hour. But at 70 and traveling by myself I was full of trepidation. Worse, there was almost two weeks between the conferences and that meant not playing for almost 3 weeks, unless I could go somewhere where I could get together with musicians. I looked at a map and Israel seemed next door to Nice from where I was taking the ferry for Corsica (actually it turned out to be a long flight since all of flights in expedia.com within Europe and heading to to Tel Aviv seem go through Riga, Latvia a hub in Eastern Europe).

I had never been to Israel despite my deep involvement with Judaism. One reason was that like all Jews I have mythologized Israel and I was afraid of the emotional impact of my trip and the consequences it might have if I really felt drawn to the land. The contradictory emotion was that, as a long-time left leaning kind of guy, I was appalled by the political situation especially in the last decade as Israel skidded hard right in response to the second Intifada. I just let a tune of mine from an old album of Jewish jazz called "Shifra Tanzt" be used for a compilation CD called "Klezmer Musicians Against the Wall," although I required that the following be included on the album back cover.

That's a scan from the prayer book I use after eating. The cool parchment effect is actually grease stains from my hands over the years.

Anyway, Israel proved just the ticket since a dear old friend who lives in Jerusalem was friends with Steve Peskoff. Steve, a guitarist and native New Yorker, has lived in Israel since the 80's, is extremely active performing and a faculty in a number of jazz programs in Israel. Steve knew of my recordings and we both were looking forward to doing some playing. The trip to Israel was wonderful and playing with Steve as a high point both musically and personally. I made a video playing alone in a park overlooking the old city and one of the reasons I delayed in writing a blog was that I was waiting for the video so I could post it with my description of the trip to Israel. That is still in process so I'll save Israel stories for my next blog.

When I returned from my trip I was back to an intensive summer of teaching. I teach methods of empirical research to graduate students and although the teaching part is easy, reading and assessing student papers is very involving and time-consuming. The six week summer course meant putting all music projects on hold, although as indicated earlier I did get into local clubs and out door venues a few times. But nicely as things work out, my break between the summer and fall semesters was just the time that Aruán Ortiz was free and so we scheduled the recording sessions to finish "El Cumbanchero," my charanga project, for the last week in August.

The picture at the top of the post is the string section with Aruán and me in the center. The string players are (left to right) Everhard Paredes and Francisco Salazar, violins, Sam Marchand, viola and Brian Sanders, cello. Here is a picture of the rhythm section.

Again, left to right, Mauricio Herrera, timbales, conga and quiro, me, Aruán Ortiz, Yusnier Bustamante, conga and Yunior Terry, bass.

The session was rather difficult. Aruán's arrangements were complex rhythmically and harmonically and the musicians were not available for rehearsals, so we did a lot of preparatory work during the session. Teaching the rhythm section the charts took hours and the basic rhythm tracks took 11 hours to record. But the result was impressive. Aruán brought in three charts. The title tune, "El Cumbanchero," was a fast conga with a long flute solo. Another Cuban classic, "La Mulata Rumbera" was an innovative take on a classic tune which moved between a danzonet and a rumba. And an original tune, "Aruán's Co" which moved between rumba and conga and featured the latest addition to the rhythm section, Yusnier, who played quinto over Mauricio's conga (which was done after Mauricio laid down the basic drum track on timbales along with a bass drum played with the peddle ). Mauricio added an additional two tracks playing bomba (low drum) patterns on tom toms. Aruán played a wonderful piano solo which complemented the alto flute flute solo. Although the tracks were swinging and the drummers magnificent I didn't get the full effect until a few days later when Aruán brought in the string players to add the string parts on top of what we had done.

The string recording went a bit faster since the string quartet had rehearsed before hand. But, as always, the strings had problems playing with the tracks and struggling to play the complex harmonies and counterpoint that characterizes Aruan's writing for the date. And, as always, intonation problems required many takes before the string sound was as good as it needs to be. Aruán did not write standard charanga string parts. Using the string quartet gave Aruán the possibility to do some serious writing and his arrangements move the charanga concept to another level. The session took another 9 hours, but the result is amazing. Along with the two numbers, "El Cumbanchero" and "La Mulata Rumbera" (Aruán's original was without strings) Aruán brought in an arrangement for string quartet and bass flute of a Cuban classic, "Perla Marina," a deeply moving bolero melody by Sindo Garay played without drums, another break with tradition.

The session recorded last year included Aruán's rearrangements of two classic compositions from the repertoire of Arcaño y Sus Maravillas, "Doña Olga" and "Armoniosas de Amalia," plus two original compositions, one a danzón whose name is not finalized and a Latin jazz tune, Av Pintor Tapiro, which Aruán wrote when he was a student in the Conservatorio Municipal de Música de Vila-Seca, in Spain, as well as a lovely bolero, "Contigo en la Distancia" that I play on alto flute. These five and the four tunes recorded last week complete the album.

I began the process of mixing in the spring and faced a serious musical problem that I have yet to resolve to my satisfaction. Charanga bands generally have very simple string parts (Arcaño's arrangements written by Cachao are notable exceptions) generally written in unison or with simple harmonies and the strings support the flute rather than predominate. Aruán's arrangements, on the contrary, are complex string quartet writing, often reminiscent of Bartok. And so my tendency is to spread them out across the stereo spectrum and make them the focus of the music. But then where do I put the piano and drums? Latin music, whatever else it does, has to swing. And the rhythm tracks swing like crazy. But the string quartet changes the entire complexion of the music. Finding the right balance between the two will take time, and time costs money. So those full professor payroll checks are going to get a working over before this project is ready for public consumption.

here comes another

2010-01-18T13:33:00.000-08:00

"Timbasa" is coming out! The release date is February 9th and Chris DiGirolamo who does promotion for Jazzheads is beginning to send out press releases and CD's, so I might as well do my bit. Timbasa is my 6th record for Jazzheads, the record label of my dreams. Total artistic freedom, emotional and musical support and a deep conviction that my music is worth putting out-- record after record in any genre that suits my moods and my abilities. Although I have recorded a wider range of music than my records on Jazzheads indicate, Randy Klein, Jazzhead's president, has never asked me to moderate or alter my recordings in typical jazz record company fashion-- make the same record over and over again. Instead I have been given the rare freedom that reflects that afforded to some of the very best musicians in the 60's, freedom to follow my muse and develop my music using as a wide a palette as the availability of musicians permits.

My first record for Jazzheads "Algo Más" was a radical departure from standard forms, mixing Afro-Cuban folkloric music with the contemporary electric guitar of master guitarist Jean Paul Bourelly and a choir of flutes. My next album, "O Nosso Amor" switched concept and venue, moving to Brazil for a quintet album of Brazilian standards and originals. It was a jazz album, but rooted in authentic Brazilian forms played by the best Brazilian musicians in New York, Romero Lubambo, Nilson Matta, Paulo Braga and Guilerhmo Franke. It was followed by an album of mainstream Latin jazz, "Con Alma," with Latin Jazz veteran pianist Mark Levine, a straight-ahead album "Straight No Chaser with guitarist Dave Stryker and most recently, an edgy Brazilian album with percussionist Cyro Baptista opening up a range of new possibilities for Brazilian jazz.

But there are continuities. Both "Algo Más" and "Con Alma" drew upon the brilliance of Pedrito Martinez, a master of Cuban drumming in all of its forms and the winner of the Thelonious Monk Award for hand-drumming the only time such an award has been given."Timbasa" is a album that Pedrito made possible. He picked the musicians from among his closest associates and led them through 16 hours of non-stop recording of some of the most amazing Afro-Cuban Jazz that anyone has ever heard. First the guys:

That's Mauricio Herrera who played drums, timbales and guiro, Ogduardo Diaz who played bongos and batá, me, concert, alto and bass flutes, pianist Axel Tosca Laugart, Pedrito who played congas, batá, timbales, bell and chekere and Panagiotis Andreou who played electric bass with vocals.

The recording came about because of mutual attraction. Pedrito suggested I do another project with him and I jumped at the chance. We had run into each other a few times, at a memorial service and Marty Cohen's (the founder of LP Percussion) birthday. I was over my head in recording. I had just recorded Jazz Brasil with Kenny Barron, Lua e Sol had still not been released and I was already thinking of recording tangos (a project that has morphed into two albums, as I will indicate shortly). But I could not resist Pedrito's interest in following up "Algo Más" and "Con Alma" with something 'completely different' as the Monte Python folks like to say. My response to Pedrito was that if he could find a piano player and bass player who played as good as he does, I'd be open to another project. He assured me that he had exactly the right people. I told him to bring two other drummers. Within a few days Pedrito was back to me, we could get the guys he wanted for two days, March 30-31, 2008. Two days before the session, Pedrito called me and told me he could only get the musicians for the 30th. I asked him whether he was sure we could record in one day ("Con Alma was also recorded in one long session) and he assured me we could. The musicians he picked were not only the best musicians around, but they were his musicians, the guys who he played with regularly. And furthermore, he had some material already worked out with the drummers that would be the spine of the project.

I decided that I would leave the details to be provided by the musical context. That is, we would just go into the studio and play. I told Pedrito that the musicians could bring in original material and I picked a handful of my all-time favorite Latin Jazz standards. The result is a strange and yet familiar album. The standards we ended up playing are as familiar to Latin Jazz enthusiasts as any songs could be, 'Milestones,' 'Footprints,' 'Watermelon Man' and 'Caravan.' Axel contributed a Chucho Valdez composition, 'A Ernesto,' Pedrito, two originals, 'Encuentro' and the title track 'Timbasa,' plus my tune from the original Cuban Roots, 'Just Another Guajira' and an Afro-Cuban rendering of classic Turkish folk melody suggested by Panigiotis that we call, 'Kavlakari Cubano.'

The musicians are on fire. The drum routines are complex and precise, the soloing spectacular and the swing is just killing. Beyond superlatives, I can't hope to describe the music, and fortunately I don't have to. The record is there for everyone to hear for themselves. I'll be putting up a few tracks on myspace on the release date. Until then you can click on the link and enjoy the tracks I have up from my album with Omar Sosa, "Tales From the Earth" and revisit tracks from "Lua e Sol" and "Straight No Chaser."

Bobby Sanabria was kind enough to write the liner notes, which he ends by saying, "Mark's musical encounters continue. As you listen to this CD he is already working on the next one, and the next..." How right he is! The project that I have been calling "Todo Corazón," the album of danzones and tangos written for me by Aruán Ortiz and Pablo Aslan, has morphed into two albums. The danzones sound so good that I can't resist doing an entire album with strings, and the only thing to do with half an album of tangos is do the other half. So the tango's will be "Todo Corazon" and I'm waiting for Aruán to write more arrangements for an album that will be called "El Cumbanchero." For those who recognize the name of the tune the direction for the rest of the album is indicated, burning, up-tempo charanga!

confronting demons

2009-10-08T12:14:00.001-07:00

Sometime ago I mentioned that I had entered two competitions for jazz flute sponsored by the National Flute Association (NFA) to perform at the annual convention in New York City, August 2009. The NFA has an enormous membership, in the thousands. Every serious flute player and a host of amateurs are among its members. And overwhelmingly they are all classical flutists. I had a lot of confidence that I would prevail in a competition limited to jazz flutists, but I had enormous anxieties about playing in front of classical flutists. I have a unique sound, in a world where flute sound is of paramount importance in evaluating flutists and an idiosyncratic technique. I never really studied the flute, in the sense of preparing classical music under the tutelage of a teacher and so never mastered many of the flute tropes that come from the literature. Rather, I play like a cross between a sax and a trumpet.

Happily I can report that I won in both competitions. The video below is part of the recording session I submitted for the competition. I am quite pleased with it. It is Body and Soul played in Gb, which is what the original key of Db turns into when you play alto flute. Paul Meyers is the guitarist.

The conventions had ups and downs. I performed with a Jazz Flute Big Band, with 30 other flutists. I played alto flute, was selected to play a solo and had a wonderful time interacting with some of the best jazz flute players in the country. Ali Ryerson led the band and it was a true pleasure to spend 4 afternoons rehearsing and a gala concert that ended the convention on many, many high notes, especially from a 12 year old monster flutist who played piccolo. The other competition category was to perform at a master class with Lew Tabakin (that is me, him and the other two winners in the photo). Lew and I go way back. He introduced me as the 'world's loudest trombonist.' Lew had sat in front of me in a number of big bands in the 60's and has often remarked, including at the master class, that sitting in front of Mark Weinstein playing trombone is an 'experience no one forgets.' He is a great saxophonist and a formidable jazz flutist. When I found out that Lew was doing the master class, rather that Holly Hoffman who ran the competition, I was made rather anxious. Lew was always aggressive in his attitudes towards musicians and had the high standards that comes from playing saxophone in the 1960's when the prevailing high standard was set. He met the standard then and now and has had a brilliant career. I only hoped that 40+ years of success had mellowed him out somewhat. Not a chance!

The deal was for the winners to play a song of our choice with a pianist. Holly asked me to play first. Because of chronic sciatica I set up a stool by the piano and sat on the stage before Lew came up. When he did, he went into a long spiel about how much he wanted to play with the pianist and played a long a complex version of standard. I just sat there getting more and more nervous. He played everything imaginable, starting out rubato, going into time, double timing etc. He played through dozens of technical set pieces from the classical repertoire and swung his ass off. It was quite a performance.

There was nothing for me to do but try to play up to him. I had selected Stella by Starlight, a harmonically rich and beautiful melody made famous by Miles Davis whose performance of the song in a live concert in Europe has always been the bell-weather for my playing. I started out unaccompanied, playing rubato (as had Lew) expecting the pianist to come in. He didn't so I was stuck playing a whole chorus by myself. I started softly with total concentration, as I realized that without the piano player I really had to nail the changes and yet play free enough to warrant playing without an accompanist. After a full chorus of solo flute the piano player came in and I played about 4 or 5 more choruses. I was playing totally on auto-pilot, deep into the music and paying no attention to my sound. I had to show my mastery of the form, the hell with the flute. That was a mistake. The first thing Lew said after I played was that the most important thing about the flute is its sound. And then went on to play the tune for a few choruses (between you and me and a number of people who spoke to me afterwards his performance focused more on playing bebop than on flute sound) but still he was the teacher. I played another few choruses playing more simply and concentrating on sound and then he made me play fours with him. We ended up playing simultaneously, improvising and trying to be musically coherent despite the fact that it had turned into a 'cutting contest.' He didn't give me a break. I did everything I could to play up to him. The session lasted the better part of a half hour.

After the other two winners played, without much interruption from Lew and certainly without the battle that he had forced me into, the four of us played a blues and it was over. Holly came over to me and shared her feelings about the master class. The result was that we sat in the hallway later that day and she gave me some of the best tips on sound production that anyone ever gave me. Her support and her willingness to be helpful was a stark contrast with Lew's approach to running a master class. But what he did was quite typical of many musicians' attitude towards teaching and I take it as a compliment that he put me through the wringer.

Given this is October and the conference is in the past, the question is why do I bring it up now. The reason is because I just confronted a real demon, compared to which playing at the NFA was small beer. Last year I did a number of recordings including a half an album of tangos. The story behind that is as follows. I was at a jazz convention two years ago sponsored by JazzImprov magazine. I had a number of albums ready to go and I was networking like crazy. I ran into Jochan Becker the President of Zoho records. He had passed on my album Algo Más a number of years ago, after first showing some interest (he was not crazy about the vocals, which were an integral part of the concept). He always felt badly that he had not put the album out since it led to my long-standing relationship recording for Jazzheads. Jochan suggested that if I wanted a good chance at a Grammy nomination I should record a tango album (by far the category with the fewest entries) and that he had just the right guy to do it with me, Pablo Aslan, a bassist who recorded for Zoho and who was interested in innovative tango projects. I contacted Pablo and we decided to do a half album. He selected the material and wrote arrangements for flute, piano, bandoleon, bass and guitar, classic tangos in the heart of the tradition. My job was to do something new with them.

Pablo is a meticulous musician. He hired the best guys around (bringing in a pianist from Buenos Aires) and wrote classic settings. We rehearsed and recorded the material in my usual fashion, one long day. I handled the material, read the charts and played solos. The date was finished. I made a copy of the recorded material and took it home to listen. My initial response was: Why? The music was good enough but there was no reason for me to be playing it. I knew very little about tango music so I played my usual Latin inflected bebop and it was totally meaningless. There was nothing in what I did that added anything beyond the novelty of the flute. I sat on that music for more than a year, terrified to even think about dealing with it. I would listen to the session from time to time, enough so that I eventually had those melodies in my head, but I didn't have a clue as to how to handle the improvisation. I had no idea as to how to make a musical contribution to the form. In the meantime I had connected with Aruan Ortiz and recorded the second half of the album, Cuban danzones as I discussed a few blogs back. Playing the danzones moved me closer to the spirit of the tango, but still I had no sense of how to play the music. The beauty of the tango, as I listened closely to the recordings, is the tension between the strict 2-beat rhythm (carried mainly by a bowed bass) and a free almost rubato approach to the lines. You had to always end up on strong beats, but in between you sped up and slowed down, playing freer in time that either Cuban or Brazilian music permits, which is much freer than bebop. The lines swooped rather than swung. Pablo had notated some runs for me as 11-tuples, that is, 11 notes across a half note. Now that is hard to do and not even accurate since the way you get the odd meters in time is by playing the line with an accelerando and then slowing down to compensate. It is a style of playing that takes a life-time to master and I had dealt myself the task of doing it right the first time. Or at least the 2nd time. I gave myself another shot.

Last week I went into the studio and played the five short solos over and over for a few hours. Each one took lots of takes and lots of listening until I was finally able to find a way to add my music to a form that was completely alien to me. I tried everything from bebop to Cuban to completely free jazz, letting my fingers and ears lead me. By the end of the session I had the music recorded. It is different from anything that I have done and shows a whole new side of my playing, yet it sounds like me. It will be a while before anyone else hears it. I have Timbasa coming out in February and I still have the album with Kenny Barron that I recorded around the same time finished and in the pipeline. But I can wait. I confronted the demon and I got through it. The tangos are finished!

a great story

2009-09-11T12:25:00.000-07:00

I told the story below August of 2008 as the second blog entry. It is a great story. And with Ota records starting the promotion for Tales From the Earth starting I thought many of the blog readers might have missed it.

The photo is of the musicians on the date (minus the balafone player Aly Keita). The musicians are, front row, left to right Omar Sosa, Jean Paul Bourelly (my co-producers), Ahu Luc Nicaise (lead singer and percussionist), back row, percussionist Mathais Agbonou, me, bassist Stan Michalak and drummer Marque Gilmore

The session was put together by guitarist Jean-Paul Bourelly, a master musician and one of my all-time friends. We met in the 70's when I was playing in Washington Square Park, learning how to play bebop from a guitarist, just out of jail, whose name was Slim. Anyway, Jean-Paul recorded an album with me in 2003 called Algo Mas, my first recording on Jazzheads and my first recording with master percussionist Pedrito Martinez who was one of the drummers on Con Alma (2006) and who co-produced Timbasa the album that will be coming out on Jazzheads early in 2010. Jean Paul (in 2004) was producing a concert in Berlin called the Black Atlantic, a week long festival of African based music from Europe, the US and other places. He asked me if I would play on it, but then took back the offer since somehow a white Jew from Brooklyn was not the image the concert was promoting. While we were discussing the possibilities I asked him who would be there, and he mentioned that Omar Sosa would be there and a number of African musicians including balafone virtuoso Ali Keita. Omar had recorded an album with me in 2001, Cuban Roots Revisited, and I knew Omar was originally a classically trained mallet player (vibes, marimba, tympani, the works) and so I had a brain-storm. Go to Berlin and make an album with vibes, marimba, balafone (an African marimba and the reason they play marimbas in Central and South America) African percussion and myself.

So here is the background. Picture this! A brick complex in Berlin, a number of buildings around a small park, behind the main street and isolated from the traffic. Me (a New York Jew) a Polish bass-player, tall and thin, with glasses and a beret, dressed in black (a classic image of a Polish intellectual). Three African musicians, two dressed in vividly colored African style clothes, Omar Sosa, a black Cuban, who is dedicated to Santeria and so who was wearing all white clothes and with beads and as always when he plays, incense on the piano (we played music that was based on the African religion that is the basis for Santeria), An African-American drummer, Marque Gilmore with dread-locks past his waist and Jean-Paul, 6 feet 4, of Haitian-American descent. We went into the studio with absolutely nothing, nothing planned, no music, not even a concept and recorded two days of free-jazz based on African themes. It was amazing! Now, at last, the story:

Towards the end of the first day as evening was approaching I went outside to look at the beautiful little park and to smoke a Dutch cigarillo, very addictive, don't even try them. Outside was one of the engineers. I asked him, 'This is a very interesting complex, is it pre-war?' He looked at me and said, 'The complex was Goebbels' information ministry.' It was pure acid! Here I was playing free-jazz to African music, a Jew, a Pole, 3 Africans and 3 new-world people of African descent in the heart of the Nazi culture machine, its idea factory.

The next day we piled into two cabs outside the hotel we were all staying in and headed back to the studio. The entrance to the complex was a very narrow street and the lead cab driver missed it. So we stopped in the avenue and walked the few hundred feet to the complex. And there in the middle of the narrow street leading to the complex was a dead rat, big as a cat, squashed by a car. And I had an epiphany-- clear as a bell. The rat was Goebbels, the music drove him crazy and he ran out to be smushed by a car.

If you want the more details about how the music was recorded, scroll down 2 blog entries.

Today is September 11th, cold and rainy, a dreary early Fall day and a perfect contrast to the bright warm September in 2001 when the Twin Towers were hit. I lived on the lower East Side when the Towers were being built and was very much into biking in the city. I was the cause of amusement to some construction workers one day when I biked down to the construction site and so taken by the structure fell sideways off my bike as I side-swiped the curb. My ex-wife was stuck on the NJ Turnpike on her way to work and saw the towers fall. I was getting a pepper and egg hero at the local Italian bakery when I heard that a plane had hit the towers. I rushed home just in time to see the second tower hit. I didn't believe my eyes. I live in Glen Ridge, an upper middle class community 12 miles west of Manhattan and many of my neighbors suffered losses of family and friends as did a number of my students. The resulting horror of loss of life, pain and finally foreign misadventures that caused even more loss and pain remind me of the sacrifice of the many ordinary people who have suffered as a result of war. Playing in the studio in Berlin gave me hope that even the worst human tragedies can be over-come by the human spirit. Today, remembering 9-11-2001 I can only hope and pray that the current nightmare of Iraq and Afghanistan might some day be no more than a memory and that peace might reign again someday between the various children of Abraham-- Muslim, Christian and Jew.

romance in summer

2009-07-19T15:07:00.000-07:00

That is Mauricio Herrera with a guiro at a percussion overdub for my latest project, Todo Corazon, an album of tangos and danzones. "Why a picture with a guiro?" you may ask. Well oddly enough the guiro is the soul of the swing in charanga music, the flute and violin based music that began with danzones in Cuba in the 1950's and morphed into a truncated NY version that was extremely popular with dancers in the 60's and 70's. This is a project that I have wanted to do for 30 years. In the late 70's, after I recorded the Orisha Suites I contacted both Eddie and Charlie Palmieri in hopes that they would be impressed with the music and help me back into the business. Eddie met with me and we had a drink. I gave him a tape of the music and never heard from him again. Charlie, on the other hand, invited me to his house and listened to the tape (his son had recorded the first session of drums and voices). He was very complimentary and I proposed a project, that we record a modern charanga based on the classic compositions that Cachao wrote for Arcaño y Sus Maravillas, an amazing charanga of the 50's in Cuba. He said to send him a tape of the material. It had recently been rereleased on an LP but he hadn't heard it. I got it to him and never heard anything further. The project went into the deep freeze.

Last year I went through an amazing period of recording, two and a half albums. Timbasa, out after the first of the year, Jazz Brasil with Kenny Barron, hopefully out next spring or Fall 2010 and half a tango album. The tango album was prompted by a remark to me by Jochan Becker of Zoho records, that the way to get a Latin Grammy was to make a tango album. He suggested that I contact Pablo Aslan, a jazz bass player from Argentina, who records for Zoho to do a joint project. I called Pablo who was quite interested and we met in his house. Amazingly he lived only a few blocks from where I lived my teenage years at 640 East 2nd Street in Brooklyn. A 'fetid tomb' as I described it in one of my early and rare attempts at poetry, where my earliest angst over sex and women set the stage for my later life. I remember practicing the trombone near an open window in my mother's bedroom looking out at the house next door, where my neighbor Carol once stood naked to the waist near the window while I was practicing (only once). I played by the window for weeks hoping for a repeat (no luck). And where I waited my turn to neck with Irene next door. She went further with her favorites (not me), but she was an equal opportunity kisser at age 14. Such fond memories of the 50's! No wonder I got married as soon as I could. But nostalgia aside, going back to 64o and eating in a Russian restaurant on Ditmas Avenue was a blast. As was working with Pablo who wrote some beautiful settings and got top tango musicians including importing a pianist from Buenos Aires.

As lovely as the tangos were, I felt the format, flute, piano, bandeleon (button accordion), guitar and bass was too restrictive for a whole album. I thought to contrast the tangos with half an album of baiaõ, music from the Northeast of Brasil that uses a button accordion as well. But between my unhappiness with the Brazilian musicians who were completely unforthcoming as far as any kind of payback for the many recordings we did together, and the fact that I had three completed records coming out (Tales From the Earth, Timbasa and Jazz Brasil) over the next couple of years, the half album of tangos remained unfinished.

About four months ago I received (along with a number of other musicians) an email from Aruan Ortiz introducing himself as a composer and arranger available for projects. Aruan included his resume, conservatory trained in Cuba and Spain as well as Berklee, where he studied and later taught. He had been a violist but moved to piano. He currently plays with Wallace Roney and when I asked him, during our recent recording session, whether Wallace was playing Latin jazz he looked me with a twinkle in his eye and said "Don't stereotype me." He is one hell of a jazz piano player.

After I recorded Tales From the Earth with Omar Sosa, I proposed to him and his manager that Omar write me a modern charanga album. I held on to the idea of using the Arcaño recordings as a basis, but I knew that Omar's harmonic sense and approach to music would permit a transformation of the classic compositions while retaining their musical integrity. They were both excited enough about the project that we even came up with a budget. But Omar's busy performance schedule made it impossible for him to do a serious writing project and it never came to pass. Aruan's resume opened the door. Tangos are deeply romantic music and so are danzones. They both exemplify a total lack of musical embarrassment, an unabashed romanticism. Danzones would be the perfect compliment to the tangos, the richness of the strings setting off the sparse instrumentation of the tangos, and with Cuban percussion to spice things up against the suave swing of the tango, driven by bowed acoustic bass and piano. I contacted Aruan by return email and we arranged for me to send him the material (now on CD). We set the parameters for the project in terms of money and personnel and after some weeks (he had been in Europe with Wallace) he called me to play some sketches of material. I grew up in Fort Green Projects in Brooklyn and when I map quested his address I was amazed to discover that getting to his house would take me through the projects (on Navy Street) and up past Fort Green Park and the stores that I remembered from my boyhood. On the corner of North Oxford and Myrtle Avenue was Sarjay's where I had my first ice cream sundae, a pineapple temptation with chocolate ice cream, courtesy of my big sister June. It was still a candy store. The line of stores built when the project was built looked just the same, as did the people on the street. Driving home, I passed Cumberland Hospital where I got my flu shot at 7 or 8, standing in line in an over-heated corridor with kids screaming and my mother terrified that I might get the flu right then and there. And I ended up in Junior's where I had corn beef and pastrami on twin onion rolls and a piece of cheese cake. Ah the musicians life!

When I got to Aruan's place he played some of the music on the piano. It sounded just right, modern harmonies, but with beauty and transparency. We confirmed the project and he was off, back to Europe. About another month past and he contacted me, we set two dates. The first day to record piano, bass, percussion and flute. A second day to record a string quartet. The idea was that I would play through the tunes including solos with the rhythm section and then after the strings were recorded reconsider what I should redo in light of the rich string environment. Aruan called Yunior Terry on bass and Mauricio to play timbales during the date and then add guiro and conga afterwards. The date went perfectly. The music was difficult. I had told Aruan that I didn't want to solo on simple repetitive montuno changes. I didn't know what I was asking for. He wrote amazing chords, and amazing harmonies in general. It was a real treat and a challenge to read his music and the solos were very strong all around, including Mauricio who played his usual mind blowing solos, and without any other drummers to hold the time. The four of us were very happy with the results. There was no time for Mauricio to put in guiro and conga and the strings were scheduled for the following Friday. I was off to Miami in search of an old love that beckoned. A disaster as it turned out. Never commit to spend a romantic weekend with someone you haven't seen in 30 years. The trip worked out musically though, since I really wanted to stay our of Aruan's hair and let him record the strings without my interference. I was sure the parts were difficult and although Aruan hand-picked the string players I figured it would be rough enough without me looking over their shoulders. As it turned out it took 3 hours to do the first tune and over 9 hours for the five tunes. Two reworking of Arcaño recordings, two originals by Aruan and a gorgeous bolero which sums up my love life completely, Contigo En La Distancia (with you far away). I heard the strings for the first time a week after I got back from Miami, when Mauricio did his overdubs. I was totally knocked out!

The picture is Aruan with the strings checking out a chart. Aruan is another of the Cuban musicians that reflect what might be among the greatest successes of Castro's Cuba. Whatever else the revolution did it turned Cuba into a music powerhouse. The young Cuban musicians I have been given the privilege of recording with are certainly among the best musicians I have ever encountered. Omar Sosa, Axel Laugart, Aruan Ortiz, Pedrito Martinez, Yunior Terry and Maurico Herrera are consummate musicians (check out Mauricio in the picture, when did you ever see a guiro player reading a chart?). They are classically trained, deeply rooted in Cuban folkloric forms and consummate jazz musicians. Music education is supported by the government but resources are limited and the competition is fierce. The result is that the best musicians are fantastic, and luckily for me they often come to live in New York. So I have at my disposal a level of musicianship that transcends anything I experienced in the 60's and, in my opinion, moves Latin jazz to a level beyond which American born or raised Latin jazz musicians of whatever ethnic background have to offer. But only time will tell. When the records are released I'll get some sense of the realities, and hopefully get some reprieve from the anxieties that my constant quest for recognition loads me down with. Meanwhile playing with the Cubans is a completely different experience from my recent experience recording with the Brazilians. I feel totally accepted, am completely relaxed in the studio and feel that there is a mutuality of musical aspiration that gives me the support I need for my vision of where to take the music. I'm already thinking of my next project based on the availability of a great tresero (one who plays the six string Cuban guitar that is tuned in double strings and with a characteristic tuning) in New York. Mauricio who is from Oriente, grew up playing bongos on Son and Changui, and so another folkloric avenue has been opened up to me. Maybe I'll do half an album of Cuban music and for the other half return to Brazilian forms and record Baioã as I originally intended. I'm a sucker for punishment, but I do love Brazilian music.

five years later

2009-06-15T09:45:00.000-07:00

Five years ago, in the Spring of 2004, after recording O Nosso Amor, I went to Berlin to record an album with African musicians. The date was organized for me by my dear old friend Jean Paul Bourelly (I tell a great story about the date in my second blog, August of 2008). The recording was prompted by a number of things, but the key element was the presence of Omar Sosa, the great Cuban pianist, in Berlin at that time. Omar had recorded "Cuban Roots Revisited" with me in 1999 and I knew that his first instrument was 'mallets,' that is tympani, marimba, xylophone and any other orchestral instrument that you play with a mallet (a thin supple stick with a ball of various hardness at the end). I knew Omar would jump at the chance to record an album on marimba and vibes since he recorded on piano almost exclusively. When he left Cuba he first went to Ecuador where there is a long tradition of marimba playing influenced by the heritage of the African slaves who brought the tradition of the balafon from Benin. And among the African musicians available in Berlin at the time was Aly Keita, a balafon virtuoso. Jean Paul hooked up two drummers from Benin, a bass player and Marque Gilmore on traps. This is the result.

It took 5 years to get the record out because the music was so deep and so deeply buried in what we recorded that I was terrified of dealing with it. I had taken musical risks before but never of such magnitude. The date cost a small fortune. I had to fly to Berlin, pay the musicians, pay hotel expenses for everyone, as well as the rental fee (exorbitant) for a set of vibes, and a concert marimba, plus transportation for Marque and Mathais Aobokuo from London and Paris respectively. But money aside, the project was based on blind faith. I had no music written, the musicians did not know each other. They came from very different musical traditions, the bass player, Stanislou Michalak, was a classical trained jazz bass player from Poland. But what we all had in common was the Africanization of jazz and popular music that prompted the presence of the musicians in Berlin that Spring. Jean Paul, a Haitian-American, was living in Berlin and working mainly in Europe. He had been given the opportunity to organize a week-long festival to reflect the world-wide impact of African music: Black Atlantic/Congo Square. We went into the studio cold!

I had three flutes with me, concert, alto and bass. When we got to the studio I laid them out on the stand for a keyboard in front of me in the booth that I was assigned. Next to me in an adjoining booth was Stan the bass player. In front of me in a large booth was Omar with a set of vibes in front and marimba behind, tuned boxes set up on a table. Aly Keita shared the booth with his balafon.

The drummers where in the center room, with Marque on a pedestal at the back and the Aho Luc Nicaise and Mathais surrounded by a drums and microphones. Microphones at three levels, since they would be singing and playing a variety of drums and nobody know what they were going to do when. This created an enormous problem later on.

Jean Paul was in the middle of the room right in front of me, with his guitar around his neck. He looked exhausted. He had organized the festival, ran it and on the final day played with every band that participated in a final day celebration. We had scheduled the date 2 days after the festival so that he would have a chance to wind-down. That was probably a mistake, since the crash after the adrenaline rush of the last day seemed to have wiped him out. Had we recorded right after the festival he might have been able to continue as his usual level of energy; as it was he played very little on the date. Nevertheless his presence was essential. All of the musicians know him and trusted him. Jean Paul is a world class musician and everyone who plays with him has profound respect for his musicianship and his integrity. Without Jean Paul the date would never have happened and with him I was afforded all of the respect that his participation signaled to the musicians and especially to the engineers. The studio, UFO in Berlin, went all out. They brought in their best engineers, a team that set up the room not knowing what to expect but determined to capture whatever happened with complete audio fidelity.

On the way to the studio Luc and Mathais starting singing the prayer for Elegba, the Orisha you petition for permission to engage in any serious endeavor. Omar joined in. 300 years of seperation, and three sons of Africa, one Cuban, still held to the same religion, and could join together in prayer. The prayer for Elegba is track 2 on the disc, Invocation. It starts with the drummers and Omar singing the prayer, Omar plays a chord on the vibes, I play a subdued rhythmic figure on the bass flute, bowed bass, Jean Paul enters with a vamp, the balafone comes in, vibes and drums bring in the swing and I switch to concert flute and play my first solo, then Omar plays a brief solo, we engage in conversations among the instruments, than more singers and on and on. About an hour later we stopped playing. It was insane. No one was leading anything, Jean Paul was grooving, just playing minimal vamps and occasionally shifting patterns. The rest of us were just listening and reacting. Aly Keita was the rhythmic foundation, the drums and percussion adding colors, accents and tremendous swing. We would wind down a section, but never stop. Someone would always continue, usually the percussionists who would shift instruments or tempo and the rest of us would just follow (the result: tracks 2, 7).

I was both worried and elated. The playing felt very natural. I wasn't over-playing, really responding to the musical environment and rather than playing jazz solos, all of the players were playing short contrasting sections. It was a real musical conversation. Everyone was listening very hard, the interactions are as good as anyone could hope for. We were being carried by the music as it was created in the room, no thought, no planning, no constraints, just free expression as the context of our mutual creation led us to new places. But it was hard to tell what was happening, since things would alternatively come together and fall apart. As I said, we played for about an hour without stopping. When we finally came to a halt, Jean Paul said to me, "Let them do their thing." I freaked, he was telling me not to play. The musicians, without me and Jean Paul, played for another half hour or so. They sounded fine (tracks 6 and 14) but I was getting very agitated. I felt that Jean Paul had disrespected me in front of the musicians. What was particularly disturbing was that I had played with a great deal of forbearance, and so I was paranoid that the musicians hadn't really heard me play. After they finished, I said to Jean Paul, 'I'm going to play with the bass player.' The drummers asked if they could play as well and I went into the booth and played 7 minutes of free improvisation, technical and harmonically complex (track 13). With my musicianship clearly established we continued recording (tracks 3, 8 and 9). Jean Paul didn't play for the rest of the day. We ended up with about 3 hours of music including some lovely duets between Omar and Aly Keita (tracks 1 and 4). We had been in the studio for about 6 hours and all of the musicians were wiped from the intensity of the music not to mention the tense interactions between Jean Paul and myself. We all went home for dinner and some sleep. I went to Bavarian restaurant within walking distance of the hotel and ate too much and drank too much. I didn't eat with the guys. I was too ambivalent about what had happened and too drained by the emotional experience of the music.

The next day was more relaxed. It turned out that Aly Keita could only record that first day.Without the balafon, which can only play a C major scale, we could play with a bit more harmonic freedom. Playing with a diatonic instrument in one key was a challenge, although Omar had an uncanny ability to add extensions that reflected whatever poly-tonal moves I would make during my solos. As the saying goes, 'we played all 12 notes.' Omar was amazing, playing harmonic extensions to C major that permitted any note I chose to play to sound good. But still, with C major as the background there were restrictions and playing just with vibes and marimba permitted a wider palate of harmonic structures and more jazz soloing (tracks 5 and 11). In addition we recorded a tune by Omar (track 12) and a tune by Jean Paul (track 10). The date finished I took a hard-drive with everything on it and got on a plane for Newark and home.

When I got home I called Phil my engineer and he downloaded the files onto his hard-drive. When he looked at the files they were very difficult to make sense of, about 30 microphones, plus some rhythm section overdubs and over-dubbed piano on two tracks. Plus the tracks were enormous in length, there was over 4 hours of music with some tracks of uninterrupted playing ranging from 20 minutes to over an hour. Phil set rough levels and burned me four cassettes. I drive a 2000 VW and only have a cassette player in my car. I started listening to what I had. I listened for about a year in fits and starts. I had Phil make me cassettes with the flute taken off so I could hear the recordings as rhythm section tapes, giving me the possibility of rethinking the whole project. But the more I listened the more I liked what I had played. I couldn't figure out what Jean Paul's problem was but with all of my insecurities I shelved the project.

I had recorded Algo Más for Jazzheads and Randy Klein liked the album. It had received good reviews and modest sales. I played the tracks that would become O Nossa Amor for Randy and he picked up the album. This led to Con Alma (my 'hit' album) and consolidated my relationship with the label. I mentioned the 'Berlin date' to Randy but I had a problem. When I asked Scott Price, Omar's manager about using Omar on the record date we agreed that his company Otá Records would get first refusal on the project. But my relationship with Randy was paramount to me and we were putting out a lot of records. So the Berlin date stayed in a hard-drive for a few more years. I stopped listening to it, but I never gave up on the project. Finally in Fall of 2006, before I began the hectic recording schedule of 2007 that resulted in Straight No Chaser and Lua e Sol I asked Phil to take a look at the Berlin tracks with me. This resulted in one of the most productive collaborations of my musical life.

The first problem for Phil was to make sense of the tracks. As you can see from the photo, there are three levels of microphones on the drummers. Phil had to find the best track to use for every instrument and every segment, since the drummers sometimes played standing as well as sitting. Everything was bleeding into all of the tracks, so to find the best track required careful listening, especially for the background vocals. Luc had a vocal microphone, Mathais singing was picked up by whichever drum microphone he was next to. Plus there were tracks of over-dubbed percussion, including the clapping on track 4 that had little relation to the other tracks in terms of ambient volume. To make things worse, the drum set was not well-isolated and so setting EQ became a real problem. And the same for vibes, marimba and balafon. Although each instrument had its own microphones, there was significant leakage since all three instruments were in the same booth. But the technical aspect of mixing was only part of the problem. The real problem was finding the boundaries within the music that would enable us to extract a hour of music, divided into pieces of reasonable length from the extended improvisations.

As you can see from my indications of the tracks a few paragraphs back, individual songs were edited out from the lengthy takes that we recorded. So the first day with three extended improvisations (one without me and two with me) resulted in 7 different tracks. The second day was better organized, the improvisations shorter and more focused. But still a great deal of editing was required. A lot of great playing ended up being left behind. For example, my 7 minute improvisation with Stan was cut down to 4 minutes. The short duets between Omar and Aly Keita were fractions of what they recorded. The short 'rap' by Luc against some changes of Jean Paul's was a one minute segment of an entire composition. Finding the best music, with the most coherent structure from the wealth of material recorded required great ears. First of all, just keeping track of what was heard so that choices could be made was hard enough, and then using musical judgment to select the places where the music made a definitive statement required a exquisite sensitivity to the music. Phil Ludwig, my engineer, a guitarist and bass player, with decades of experience as a working musician and long years as a recording engineer, has the best ears in the business. As I said in the liner notes: 'We became one head with two sets of ears.'

"Tales From The Earth" has an official release date on October 2009. Otá records has given me permission to put up some track on myspace. Check it out. It is magic music!

half empty, half full

2009-04-26T13:22:00.000-07:00

I wonder how much this blog should be a true reflection of my feelings, or like so much of what I have written, self-aggrandizing recollections and pleas for acceptance. For what lies behind this blog, especially at this time, is the question that drives me. Am I a good musician? I hide that behind, do I play good music? Which stands behind, when will I get the recognition I need to answer the other two questions? Which hides behind, how much is the recognition I have received really worth? Which hides behind my whining complaint, when will I get the recognition I crave? So I guess even if I expressed all of my doubts and fears about my worth as a musician that would not be any truer than anything else. But, to be perfectly honest, it feels like shit. I need to know whether I play good music and I don't have a clue.

In part that is because I am unwilling to compare myself to anything other than the internalized standards I derived from listening to the great musicians of my era (the 50's and 6o's). And I mean the greats! Miles, Trane, Sonny Rollins and Bird. Not to mention, Mingus, Monk, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, Louis Armstrong, Jellie Roll Morton, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith and Albert King. Believe it or not, that is a fairly comprehensive list of the musicians whose records I revered and listened to over and over again. I never listened to normal great musicians, just the super giants. That way I never have to confront whether I play as good as the thousands of guys who are competing with me to be noticed. I know they are out there every time I hear the young guys at jam sessions, or when someone makes me listen to a record of some normal decent jazz musician. I was having dinner with an old musician friend, Victoria, and she played a record with a fine tenor player, Eric Alexander, on it. He sounded great. If I knew how to compete I would be competing with him for gigs. But as intimated in earlier blogs, I'm not very effective in competing for the gigs that Eric gets, the New York jazz clubs that might be the first step in getting me to my goal. The holy grail that might convince me that I am playing music worth listening: success at jazz festivals.

My not paying attention to the level of contemporary successful musicians is connected to my only listening to Trane et. al. If my standard is the super-giants of jazz, I immediately fail, no matter how hard I try, since genius like that is beyond the reach of mere mortals like myself. And so I can try to focus on what I alone can contribute. Holding the standard of genius inside of myself and doing everything I can to create the very best music I am capable of producing. But am I a good enough musician? Is the dedication to my own creation, very narrowly construed, as how I improvise on the albums I create as vehicles for my flute playing, totally wrong-headed because I am not even in the running to be a contributor to the developing language of jazz. That's why I can't compare myself to other ordinary marvelous musicians, for if I don't measure up to the sax players around me, there is no point in my even attempting to make a contribution. And I am unwilling to stop trying, no matter what.

I want to make a contribution to jazz. And because I play flute I get enough of a pass to make a contribution possible. I want to be to the flute what the greatest jazz musicians were to their instruments, someone who showed others unexplored possibilities for excellence in jazz improvisation, that is, defined a concept for their instrument that included a sound, a style, a harmonic vocabulary and an approach to time and improvisational structures. That's why I wouldn't play sax if you paid me. To make a contribution on sax is to rise to an impossible standard. And that means that contributions to the sax are going to be a long time coming. But flute! There is a shot for flute as the least developed wind instrument capable of playing jazz (God bless the few bassoonists, and french horn players and forget about the oboe and tuba). Even the flute barely makes that cut as a jazz instrument given its lack of power in the bottom register. But flute does have something to offer to jazz, even with all of its limitations compared to the saxophone. It has degrees of freedom, technical and expressive that marks a niche of its own in jazz. I believe Herbie Mann pointed the way, but he had such essential weaknesses as a jazz musician and flutist, that despite the influence of his music on flutists (or perhaps because of it) flute remains relatively unexplored if your model is the harmonic and expressive range of the saxophone.

This creates the deep insecurity that drives my crazy. Am I a good enough musician to grasp the opportunity of the last undeveloped jazz instrument, and thus make an end run to the holy of hollies of jazz: to make a contribution. Naturally, all of this is due to the aftermath of my latest album, Lua e Sol. That's the team from the recording in the picture. Phil, my engineer, Cyro Baptista, me, Romero Lubambo and Nilson Matta, who co-produced the album with me. My relationship with Nilson goes back to 2003 when I recorded Tudo de Bum. Nilson knew about Jazz World Trios with Cyro and Romero and we were both so disappointed with the controlled vibe of the album's producer, Richard Boukas, that when he suggested that we co-produce a blowing Brazilian jazz record I jumped at the opportunity. Cyro was unavailable, but Romero was willing to do the date, along with Paulo Braga . The result was O Nosso Amor. Nilson and I became close during the project and whenever we worked together I would proudly introduce him as my co-producer. Co-producer was both a favor to me and a paycheck to him. So it was no surprise that we recorded two more albums, Lua e Sol that hit the street October 2008 and an album with Kenny Barron that will probably not be released for another few years. I am over-recorded. This coming October the Berlin album, called Tales From the Earth, with Omar Sosa (my second blog entry) is coming out on Ota records. But even though it is coming out on another label, Jazzheads is holding back my next album with Pedrito Martinez (discussed a few blogs back) until after the first of the year. The album with Nilson and Kenny is next (hopefully before 2011) and then finally an album of tangos and Cuban danzones that I am currently working on. This complicates my relationship with Nilson who, as always, is looking for recording opportunities. And I don't have any for him in the near future.

Jazzheads started radio promotion on Lua e Sol after the New Year and it has been on the Jazzweek world chart ever since. It peaked at #5, but is hanging around (14 weeks so far). It was voted best Brazilian Jazz Album of 2008 on the Latin Jazz Corner. So I should have no complaints. Except I have a complaint and that is what this blog is all about. Lua e Sol is what I wanted to record ever since I first played Brazilian jazz in Jazz World Trios. It reunites Romero and Cyro, who along with Nilson Matta bring the creative energy of Jazz World Trios to a broad and representative range of Brazilian forms. Nilson and I picked great material. I rerecorded two of my favorite originals, Estralinha and Lua e Sol (first recorded as duets on Three Deuces) and it captures much of what I want to say in recording jazz with Brazilian music. The tunes range from the light-hearted sambas, Isuara, and Upa Negrinho, to a free form version of Lua e Sol; a Flamenco-like take on Estrallinha and a time shifting composition by Nilson, Floresta. It includes two Pixinginha choros as well and some really interesting and deep compositions reflecting the spiritual side of Afro-Brazilian music, Canto de Ossanha and Emorio, as well as a heart-breaking ballad by Ary Barroso.

More important, the guys play incredibly. As always the session was without any rehearsals. Nilson and I picked the tunes and we went to the studio to see what would happen. Giving those three guys complete freedom in the studio resulted in magic. The arrangements were spontaneous and the material compelling. Cyro brought room full of drums of every sort. Here is a picture of Cyro and his drums that can give you some sense of what that is all about. The sounds he makes are amazing. But most important without a trap drummer the concept of how rhythm is played becomes totally free. There are textures and surprises, happy swing and deep drama, and that is just the percussion. Romero plays magnificently, wonderful solos, perfect time and rich harmonic structures. Nilson is at his most lyrical as a soloist and an ever-changing voice, both anchoring and inspiring the soloists and statements of themes. The interactions of the three rhythm players reflect the decades that these three musicians have played together, their perfect grasp of Brazilian forms and the total confidence that each had in the abilities of the others. This album is as good as anything I have ever recorded and deserves all of the excellent reviews it received and more!

When I had a final mix I sent pre-release copies to the three guys telling them how happy I was about the record and telling them that I would be thrilled to play with any of them on any occasion. Nilson got back to me, congratulating me on the result and told me that Romero loved the album. When the album was released I sent them all copies and yet another note reminding them how great it would be to perform this music live. I have been in contact with Nilson a few times, since he is always looking for additional projects. But with so much unreleased product I have nothing to offer him. Meanwhile the three of them work all of time and use other instrumentalists on their recordings and gigs. But not me! Me and the Maytag repairman. Those guys could really help me if they wanted to. They have the reputations and connections to hook me up with club-owners and booking agents. But they don't. What are they trying to tell me? I love the music I record and so do the musicians who record with me, or so it seems. Yet nobody is willing to give me a hand up, nobody is willing to let me use them as a stepping stone towards my dreams. And so the deep anxiety. Maybe I am really not that good a musician after all.

the old days

2009-03-29T17:50:00.001-07:00

I've been involved in a discussion on a Latin jazz email list about my old friend and mentor Barry Rogers. Barry, one of the all time great musicians of his era, was the trombonist and music director of Eddie Palmieri's original band, La Perfecta, and remained associated with Eddie (on and off) until his untimely death in 1991. Barry is directly opposite me on the other side of the car (I'm holding the trombone). The discussion created so much interest that I am motivated to look back at my early experiences as a trombone player and share them with the readers of my blog.

I was 18 years old, playing bass with Larry Harlow in a Latin trio at Ben Maksik's Town and Country Club at the South end of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. The back of the club over-looked an undeveloped marsh (near the old Floyd Bennet airfield) and I used the area to practice the trombone before the gig started. I was doing my lip-drills when a slightly built man came up to me. "Are you the trombone player in the show band?" he asked. "No," I answered, "I play in the lounge band." "Too bad," he responded, 'is there a trombone player in the band?" He went on the explain that he was the star of the new show, the Jewel Box Review, a female impersonator show, that with all of the innocence of the 1950's was a favorite of middle aged female audiences, seemingly oblivious to the connection between female impersonation and homosexuality. They came to see the beautiful clothes and wonder at how gorgeous the 'girls' looked in their elaborate costumes. It turned out that a trombone player was needed. The star, Lynne Carter, did a Pearl Bailey imitation and the high (or low) point of the act was when the trombone would play a loud and inappropriate note while Lynne was singing 'I'm Tired.' He (she) called the trombonist (soon to be me) on to the hexagonal stage, jutting out into the table area, who then had to chase after Lynne, who was holding the trombone part, hitting her (him) in the butt with the trombone slide. I was a perfect foil, young, tall, with long hair for the time, and totally embarrassed by the prospect. After a bit of negotiation, I was switched from the lounge band to the show band and my career as a trombonist was started. I played on and off in the show band all through college and got my trombone chops up to speed. The lead trumpet player, Bob Bonsang, much distressed by a young inexperienced musician holding down such a well-paying job, would look at me as a struggled with difficult passages and muttered what was to become my motto as a musician and even as an academic, "Earn while you learn."

It was my stint playing bass with Harlow that moved me into my major focus as a trombonist, Latin dance bands. Eddie Palmieri had recorded his first album and was working with his band La Perfecta, a unique sound, with a trombone and flute front line (modeled on the flute and violin popular charanga style, but with a trombone instead of violins). The trombonist was Barry Rogers. Barry had a chance to make some good money playing a wedding and needed a sub. He heard about a trombone player, me, who could read well and play Latin bass (by that time I had played bass with Randy Carlos and Harvito as well as Harlow) and figured that I could hold my own in a Latin rhythm section, so he called me to do a gig for him with Eddie's band. Eddie liked the way I played so much that he hired me on the spot to play second trombone. Bass was gone forever; I was a trombone player. More people in the Latin community still think of me as the trombone player with La Perfecta despite everything else I have ever done. That is because La Perfecta had a unique role to play in the development of cultural consciousness among the young Latinos of that era.

The base for Eddie's popularity was a loft club in the South Bronx, the Triton Club, down the street from the Hunts Point Palace, a lavish dance hall catering to older Latino audiences and featuring name bands like Machito. The Triton Club, on the other hand, was a bare-loft, painted black with a few tables and chairs and a large area for dancing. It was here that the young Latino's came to be hip, to dance to the hot new bands, Eddie, Johhny Pacheco and Orlando Marin, and to come to consciousness as Latinos through music that they saw as their own, helped along by the cheer-leading of the self-appointed host Izzy Sanabria, later to publish Latin New York.

Playing with Eddie was a peak experience, playing the Palladium, Birdland and the Village Gate in the early 1960's. But it had a major down-side. The band had good arrangements, but what made the band unique was the 'mambo' section. Latin dance band arrangements had a standard form, intro, melody, montuno (where the singer improvised against a chorus, the 'coro'), mambo, montuno and coda. The mambo section was generally massed horns, trumpets played in the high register to generate maximum excitement. But Eddie only had two trombones. Eddies' best mambos were not pre-arranged but were created on the bandstand. Barry sang coro, and during the singer's (Ismeal Quintana) improvisation Barry would often come up with a lick that he liked. He would motion to me over to the mic where he was singing coro, and he would softly sing the lick to me (moving the trombone slide to show me how it was to be done). I had to catch it right away and on Barry's cue begin the lick. After a few times of playing it on my own, Barry would join me in unison, then add harmony. George Castro, the flute player, would start playing on top of the trombones and the drummers would start playing harder. Then Barry would do his thing. My job was to play the basic line, over and over. Barry would start improvising against the line, almost Dixie-land style, playing wonderfully crafted, driving, counter-melodies, evolving with more and more complexity and with tremendous swing. The place would go crazy. Nobody, not even Tito Puente with trumpets and saxes, could match the sheer energy, the electric abandon, with which Barry could push the band. It was exhilarating, and very depressing. I wanted to be Barry so badly. I wanted to play the improvised part, to be at the center of the swing. But instead I had to selflessly destroy my chops playing at full volume, the same figure over and over, endlessly, for 10 minutes or more. I quit Eddie's band and went to Europe to try to succeed as a jazz trombonist.

Europe didn't work out. I landed in Rotterdam on Christmas 1963, one of the coldest winters on record and headed south, Paris, than Italy. There was little jazz being played and Paris had just made a rule limiting horns in small clubs, so there was not even a jam session scene. I put my tail between my legs and came back home to find out that in my absence there was a trombone renaissance in the Latin scene. I was in demand. Ray Barretto asked me to join his band, but Charlie Palmieri had a 6-night steady gig at a club called the Havana-Madrid. An interesting band with Chombo Silva on sax, myself and Rod Sewart playing flute. It was a free-blowing band, modeled after the first recorded Alegre All Stars and I got to play solos almost every tune. That lead to my recording with the Alegre All Stars on their second album and to gigs with just about every other Latin band that used a trombone. Barry was always busy with Eddie as was Jose Rodriquez who became Eddie's long-standing second trombone player. So I was first call trombone player for Latin gigs. I made a good living, playing, recorded and arranging. I continued playing and recording with Eddie as well as such great bands as the La Playa Sextet, Bobby Valentin, Tito Puente, Ricardo Rey and many others. I had so many gigs I ended up giving my extra gigs to some great jazz trombone players, especially Julian Preister and Garnet Brown. They, in turn, would turn me on to big bands so I got to play with bands led by Clark Terry, Joe Henderson, Kenny Durham and Duke Pearson which led to gigs with Maynard Ferguson, Lionel Hampton and Mel Lewis/Thad Jones.

The band that I made the biggest impact on, however, was my old friend of bass playing days Larry Harlow. Larry had a summer gig at Schenk's Paramount Hotel playing with Latin quintet at the after-hours club, a hang out for musicians. He used me as the only horn player; trombone and rhythm section, something rarely seen. I got to solo to my heart's content, and since we hosted a jam session, I became well known among the jazz musicians playing in the Catskill mountains. One night Larry and I were laying around, toasted as usual, and Larry told me about his dream. A band with trombones like Eddies, but with a trumpet section to add fire and weight to the ensemble instead of the flute. He asked me to help him write the arrangements. His first album, Heavy Smoking did well on the newly formed record label, Fania, that was to dominate Latin recording for the next decades. I got the opportunity to write the next album, almost completely, Bajandote, which includes some writing and soloing that I am still quite proud of. I played with Larry for several years, playing solos and learning from the great trumpet player Chocolate, who played with the band. The trombone solo after the mass brass mambo, was Harlow's signature response to Eddie Palmieri and my tribute to what I had learned playing with Barry. You can compare Barry's and my playing on Eddie's album with Cal Tjader, Bamboleate. Barry and I both solo (on different tunes).

A long-lasting stint with Herbie Mann grew out of this experience. Herbie wanted a Latin jazz band with trombones, and Barry wouldn't leave Eddie, so I was it. Herbie's band introduced me to Chick Corea and gave me some exposure on records, at clubs and at festivals. I started to meet some great musicians and recorded Cuban Roots. This led to me getting a taste of rock and roll with, among others, Mike Bloomfield and the Electric Flag. This, in turn, led to me getting called to put together a horn section for Janis Joplin, ironically, the immediate cause of my quitting the business. I had recorded Cuban Roots with Arnie Lawrence on alto saxophone. I was convinced it was a great album, but it only received one review (in a French jazz magazine) and almost no airplay. Worse, neither Barry nor Eddie was willing to tell me that it was a good album, and I worshiped those guys. I was really badly hurt by that.

I had gotten a call from Albert Grossman, Janis' manager, about putting a horn band together for her. I was laying in bed with my wife Joyce watching the Tonight Show, and there was Arnie Lawrence playing in the band. Before the commercial the band had a feature, Arnie had played a few notes of a solo, when the band was cut off. I looked at Joyce and said, 'If I make it to the top and get to play on the Tonight Show, that is what I can look forward to. I'm not going to take the gig with Janis." In my head that was the turning point. I was out of the business! But there is a back-story. When I was negotiating to go with the Electric Flag (after a few gigs with the band in NYC) my wife had made all of these demands, that she had to go on the road, get her hotel room paid for etc. We had just had a baby, my daughter Rebecca, and Joyce did not want to risk her family while I led the rock and roll life. The Electric Flag didn't come through, the band was dropped by Columbia after one album, but Janis was going to pick up the concept, a hard driving blues band with horns. I was to write the horn arrangements and be music director, but Albert Grossman warned me not to make demands about my wife. I had to move to San Francisco and live at the band house while the band was being formed and rehearsed. I'd be on salary, but my wife and child would have to stay in New York. Joyce was freaked. I loved my daughter, and I was very, very unhappy with my marriage. To go to San Francisco would have meant the end of my family for sure. Joyce had a right to be freaked. The Tonight Show was the last straw, to leave my daughter to play rock and roll (when all I ever wanted was to play jazz), to have my solos cut off at the commercial break, to have my best efforts disregarded by the musicians I revered. It was all too much. I decided to go graduate school and get a PhD in Philosophy.

blasphemy

2008-12-19T11:12:00.000-08:00

I was reading over my last post during the first snow of the season in my beautiful house in Glen Ridge, sitting in the warmth of the colors of the rugs and furniture that my ex-wife left me with, surrounded by the paintings of my first wife that have lived with me for almost 50 years, in the room where I spend my life, practicing with the computer on in front of me. Combining the various facets of my soul through the efficiency of the computer and the allure of many forbidden things. It was a few hours before Shabbas, when I shut down for 25 hours of no practicing or computer (although I do take gigs) and I saw what I had written, that my career sucked. That is blasphemy and an affront to the gifts that I have received and the opportunity to live my dream. I am truly blessed. One of the reasons I am writing this blog is to exhibit the blessing that has been given me. The ability to play the best music I can, with the best musicians I could ever hope for, with the financial and emotional freedom to piss away every penny I have available to me so that my music will exist in this realm for a while and Baruch Hashem, that it should enter into the realm beyond, where all things of human value exist eternally.

Well the Sabbath is over and I'm ready to settle down and confront over 50 research proposals from my methods of research course and 10 papers from my doctoral students. I want to get my grading done before I leave to visit my daughter Rebecca in Portland ME. Rebecca loves Christmas and spending it with her is one of my all time treats. After a rocky childhood and adolescence, Rebecca has turned out to be my best friend. My son Jack and her turn out to be the best thing I ever did. Proud parenthood aside, my music is the core of my essence. For better or for worse it is what I have to offer the world that speaks directly from my innerness. I'm a decent teacher, a reasonably successful academic, and despite lack of longevity due to always picking beautiful women much younger than myself, I've had a decent romantic life. But it is music that I pin my hopes on. If I make good music my life is a success. Trying to make good music has given my life meaning. But the frustration of it all!

Con Alma's success gave me a few more gigs. There are a number of local jazz clubs that I play in with some regularity, Trumpet's in Montclair and Cecil's in West Orange. The picture at the top is from a photo shoot at Cecil's that I did for the album I recorded after Con Alma, Straight No Chaser. Cecil's has a regular jam session run by alto saxophonist Bruce Williams who, although close to 40 years younger than I am, has been a real influence on my playing. Bruce is one of the young saxophone giants who has mastered bebop and yet plays with complete freedom and abandon. He bridges between carefully constructed harmonic elaborations and totally free constructions, moves effortlessly from blues to complex harmonic extensions and has total mastery of the instrument. I heard him play years ago and he struck me immediately as model of where I wanted to take the flute. But it has not been easy. The jam session at Cecil's is an organ jam and the volume is horrific and the sound system is marginal (at least during the jam session). Plus because Bruce is so well respected every young sax player in the area goes there to show what they have learned. And with William Patterson, Rutgers as well as the NY jazz programs training countless young musicians they have learned plenty. I get respect from the young sax players since many of them are struggling to double on flute and so can appreciate what I have accomplished, but the raw acoustical challenge of playing without really hearing myself makes jam sessions a 'pressure,' rather than a 'pleasure.' Still, playing at Cecil's (and the more supportive environment at the Trumpet's monthly jam session) is something I force myself to do, since my ideal of a jazz musician is not limited to playing Latin jazz flute. The standard against which I measure myself is the jazz saxophone and the music that I aspire to play is based on straight-ahead jazz, rather than charanga or choro or other Latin forms.

Con Alma was a success, but the question was where to go from there. I walked into Cecil's late one night and atypically, the stage was being dominated by a guitar player rather than one of the many young saxophonists sitting at the bar. And the guitar player was playing his ass off. I asked a young drummer I knew who the guitarist was and he said, 'Dave Stryker.' I had run into Dave a few times at Trumpets years before but we had not really connected. I had been playing with Vic Juris and Ed Cherry and recording with Romero Lubambo and Jean Paul Bourelly, so another guitarist was not on my radar screen, but Dave was something really special. He had a lovely sound, great swing and a relaxed mastery that shown through everything he did. After the set was over I did my thing. I went up to him, gave him a copy of Con Alma and exchanged contact information. He vaguely remembered me, but was non-committal. A few days later he contacted me by email. He loved the record and was definitely interested in doing a project. I made him my now standard offer of c0-producing and asked him to pick musicians and work with me on repertoire. I was going to make a statement about my playing. After a Latin jazz hit record and winning Best Latin Jazz Flautist of 2007 on the Latin Jazz Corner I was going to make a straight-ahead album.

Dave picked the perfect rhythm section for the date, Victor Lewis on drums and Ed Howard on bass. Both of these guys are modern main-stream players with great swing and taste. Since it was a straight jazz album I decided it would feature original compositions, a long standing tradition among jazz soloists. I wrote three new tunes for the date. A blistering up-tempo 'Loverin'' based on the changes for the 'Lover' but with an altered bridge using 'Giant Steps' substitutions, a medium tempo tune 'Sleeping Beauty' with a waltz section in the style of 'My Favorite Things' and a minor blues I called 'Blues for Janice,' dedicated to a wonderful singer whose album I had produced the year before. I was inviting comparison with jazz saxophonists, 'Blues for Janice' was as close to a Coltrane blues in the style of his 'Blues for Bessie' as I could make it, although I did manage to find a fundamental blues phrase that Coltrane had overlooked. In case anybody missed what I was doing I added Sonny Rollins' signature tune 'Airegin' and Wayne Shorter's classic ballad 'Miyako.' I wanted to be judged by saxophone standards and I was signaling to anyone who could see the semiotics of the tunes that I wanted to be compared with the very best. Dave contributed two wonderful original compositions that he played on acoustic guitar, bringing me back to the modal playing of my days playing with guitar players in Central Park. We added two standards 'Invitation,' and 'Violets for Your Furs,' both associated with Coltrane and rounded everything out with Monk's classic blues line 'Straight, No Chaser,' which I played on bass flute. That was the album. Bass flute is not my favorite instrument and I only played 4 solo choruses, Dave took 6, ending with two choruses of pure funk. Not to be undone on my own album, I over-dubbed his last 2 choruses with a New Orleans ensemble of bass and alto flutes. It was a blast!

I had my straight-ahead album. Jazzheads was so pleased with the result that they released it next. I had also recorded Lua e Sol during the same period, which is the subject of a later blog, but Jazzheads realized that I had a statement to make that another Latin jazz album could not express. I was a jazz flutist and after achieving considerable support as a Latin jazz flutist I had to set the record straight. I love Cuban and Brazilian music, and the music is a natural vehicle for the flute. But I am a jazzer first and foremost and Straight No Chaser makes that perfectly clear.

Naturally there was a penalty to pay. Much of the momentum that I had achieved with Con Alma was lost, at least temporarily. Straight No Chaser was not suited for the world music radio stations that had made Con Alma a hit. And although Con Alma had crossed over to the jazz charts, without the foundation in Latin jazz radio Straight No Chaser moved me back to where I was with O Nosso Amor, a few weeks on the charts, but no real impact. Except for the reviews. Many of the jazz writers got the message and the reviews for Straight No Chaser started to present me as a jazz musician that needs to be taken seriously. Now if I can only get some festival gigs!

a hit record

2008-12-14T12:04:00.001-08:00

If you click on the picture on top to make it full-size you will see my record, Con Alma, #1, on the charts for 22 weeks. I stayed on the charts for another month, crossing over to the jazz chart where it hit #2. I had a little help from National Public Radio. After my asking him for years, Felix Contreras, gave me a shot on the Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. You can hear the interview online click here. NPR is syndicated nationwide so that week I got an enormous number of plays and went right to the top of the ranking.

My 'hit,' Con Alma, was recorded about year after O Nosso Amor, so the blog is back in chronological order (the Berlin date with Omar Sosa that I discussed in my second blog entry was recorded in between O Nosso Amor and Algo Más and should be released in 2009). O Nosso Amor got much better radio play than Algo Más, which was my old formula of Cuban folkloric music and innovative jazz. The innovations, Jean Paul Bourelly's guitar and that multi-tracked flutes really impressed some musicians and a number of reviewers, but few DJ's played it with any regularity. It got about as much airplay as Cuban Roots Revisited. The 'heavy' DJ's played it, but it never got the continuing play that is needed to make the charts. A Nosso Amor made it to the charts and hung on for number of weeks in the 30's (Jazzweeks charts the 50 jazz and world albums that get the most airplay for any given week). As important WBGO, the major New York area jazz station, picked it up and played it about 50 times, a major coup in terms of local exposure. Jazzheads was very happy with both records, Randy Klein, the president of the company has been amazingly supportive, based on his appreciation of the music. He had real confidence in me. I needed to do something to capitalize on having a record company behind me. I had to think of something that would build my growing presence on the scene. I had tried Afro-Cuban music, Jewish music, Brazilian music and straight-ahead. What I had never recorded was what had become the most frequent approach to Latin jazz, what I often referred to, snob that I am, as 'bebop with a cha cha beat.' Mongo and Cal Tjader, had started it off (although Bird and Machito got there first) and Tito Puente, Andy and Jerry Gonzalez and Paquito de Rivera had turned it into the new standard for the genre.

Mark Levine, the legendary pianist and jazz educator who is the piano player on Con Alma, goes all the way back in my history. He came to New York in the mid-60's playing valve trombone. Since I was a trombone player on the scene and about the same age we got together a few times. Most memorable was that he gave me the correct changes to Stella by Starlight, a tune that was just coming to the attention of young jazz musicians and that had a few key harmonic moments that characterized the harmonic direction towards which the boundary of jazz was pushing. I remember sitting at the piano in amazement. The chords sounded so good, but they made no sense in terms of my understanding of 2-5 progressions. Instead of Cmin7, F7 to prepare Bbmaj, the tune uses Eb7, Ab7. It made no sense to me, although it now makes common sense to any jazz musicians (since the chords are an extension up the higher partial of the underlying diminished chord). He also had the hots for my wife at the time, something else I couldn't get me head around.

I hadn't been in touch with Mark for years, but I had been playing with him without his knowing it. Mark is a frequent pianist on Jamey Aebersold play along records, and he plays on many of my favorite ones to practice with. I had made a connect with Mark when I was in San Francisco at an American Philosophical Association meeting. My son (who is also a philosopher) and I had a pleasant dinner with him, talking about old times and etc. Mark has had a wonderful career, playing with all of the giants of Latin jazz including Cal Tjader, Poncho Sanchez, Moacir Santos and Mongo Santamaria. He was a brilliant harmonist, writing influential books on jazz harmony and, probably because he started piano as a second instrument, plays with great delicacy and taste. Plus, he had won a Grammy nomination for his own recording, Isla, with his quartet the Latin Tinge. I listened to his record, and sure enough, it was classic bebop with a cha cha beat. Mark Levine was just the person to call if I wanted to move into the mainstream of Latin jazz. I put in a call to Mark in Oakland where he was living and asked him to come to New York and co-produce a record with me.

But the very centrality of Mark's conception created a problem, for I was known as an 'edgy' player. Algo Más was as radical in its innovation as had been Cuban Roots Revisited and Cuban Roots before it. I had always relied on drummers to give my records their characteristic edge, and so I turned to Pedrito Martinez to give this new project an innovative spin. He was the key to the mix of musicians that made Con Alma a hit. Pedrito had lead the drummers on Algo Más and did the singing and his reputation as a conga drummer is as good as it gets (he had, after all, won the Thelonious Monk award on hand drums). He was playing a gig at the Blue Note with trombonist Conrad Herwig. I went down and caught a set. I had met Conrad who knew of my trombone playing and he graciously announced my presence as one of the most important sources of his own conception. It was especially gratifying since another old friend, Ronnie Cuber, who I hadn't seen in decades was playing baritone sax in the band. Pedrito sounded amazing. I had never heard a conga drummer playing with a trap drummer that swung more or took more risks with the time and he had amazing technique. During the break I asked Pedrito to do a record with me and to get a trap drummer of his choice. Mark Levine meanwhile, was taking the co-producing role very seriously, sending me great recordings with tunes that he thought would be perfect for a flute quintet. But I needed a bridge between the extreme drumming I knew I would get from Pedrito and Mark's centrist concept. Santi Debriano had played magnificently on Algo Más and had recorded two extended tunes out of the 6 that constituted Jazz World Trios along with drummer Cindy Blackman, and Santi could swing. So there it was-- a centrist jazz piano player, a jazz bass player of exceptional breadth and ability and drummers at the cutting edge of Cuban music. It was a recipe for disaster unless it jelled perfectly. But there was reason for it to jell. All of the musicians had enormous respect for the music and the highest integrity as individual musicians. And they all played their asses off.

It was a complicated date to organize. Mark was in Oakland, Santi had a full-time college teaching gig in Massachusetts and Pedrito was working all of the time. I had no idea who Pedrito would bring to play drums, but, as always, I relied on the musicians I respected to make the decision that would enable them to play their best. I had worked through Mark's suggestions for material and had made some of my own. Santi asked if he could include an original. I decided that each of us, Mark, Santi and myself would contribute one original and then I would pick jazz classics as well as some less familiar tunes. Mark had suggested a great funk tune by Mulgrew Miller, 'Sol-Leo' and a Bobby Hutcherson tune, 'Gotcha,' that was perfect for bass flute. He also suggested a tune, 'Monte Adentro,' by the great Cuban flutist Maraca, that I played on alto flute giving it a very different treatment than Maraca had. Santi's tune had basic harmonies but an interesting overlay of two ways of playing 6/8 (the vamp with a 1,2,3; 4,5,6 and the melody in 3/4 time over the 6/8, 1,2; 3,4; 5,6) a concept often found in Peruvian music. The tune, 'Afrokaleidescope,' lived up to its name, time-shifting as the listener could move from one perspective on the 6/8 to another. As a contrast, I included my original 'Broadway Local,' which I had recorded years before on Three Deuces with Vic Juris. It was as harmonically complex as Santi's tune was rhythmically. It is based on the chords to Coltrane's signature composition 'Giant Steps,' but rather than return back to B major at the top of the chorus, I transpose the changes into G major and then Eb major, replicating the internal structure in a 3 chorus sequence. Despite the apparent complexity, it is quite natural to play and the guys played it down without a hitch. Years ago, Jerry Gonzalez had recorded Monk's 'Evidence' as a Latin jazz tune. I decided to do it against a fast double-time drum rhythm and then double-time my solo as Coltrane did in the recently rediscovered Town Hall recording with Thelonous Monk. I added three classic jazz composition, Dizzy's 'Con Alma,' Coltrane's 'Crescent' and Wayne Shorter's funky Fee 'Fi Fo Dum.' I had the material, now to organize the date.

Mark could come in for 3 days, one to rehearse and two to record. I set it up with Pedrito and Santi and booked the studio for Friday and Saturday since I was teaching Monday and Wednesday. The Tuesday before the date Pedrito called my all flustered and told me he had a problem with the date. He could record Friday but not Saturday, but he was available on Sunday. Mark was flying back to Oakland Sunday morning. Then Santi called. He had a teaching conflict on Thursday and could not get down until late Thursday night. I had no options, there was no point in calling a late rehearsal and then recording the next day; it would be better to do the date cold. Mark, Santi and myself would look through the material on Thursday, we would record the quintet on Friday, record without Pedrito and Saturday and Pedrito would overdub the congas on Sunday. This was not a promising scenario for a record date. When Santi showed up he was exhausted. The three of us went out to dinner and forgot about looking at the material and crashed in my house. We had to be in the studio at noon.

When Mark, Santi and myself arrived at the studio Friday Pedrito was already there and introduced me to the drummer, a boyhood friend of his in Cuba, who had recently come to the states, Mauricio Herrerra. Pedrito and Mauricio played together all of the time, but this was their first commercial recording together. They were very excited. While the mikes were being set up we talked about the music. Santi played the vamp for his tune, with the melody laid contrary to the pattern. Pedrito immediately laid down the drums in a further contrast playing the 6/8 double time under the two patterns. It was amazing! And it swung! The tune went like clock-work, solos by all. The date continued with the same pattern. Mark or Santi would establish a pattern; the drummers would come up with some amazing contrasting rhythm. After Santi had sight-read 'Broadway Local' perfectly, Mark came over to me and said, "That is the best bass player I ever played with.' After we played 'Evidence' and the drummers came up with some amazing shit, Santi came over to me and said, 'Man, those are great drummers.' It was jelling all right. It was killing!

We had booked the studio for 8 hours. We were into the 6th hour of the session and had recorded 5 tunes, each one unique and played superbly. I was getting tired and the nagging migraine that had accompanied my last recording was back (it turned out to be serious glaucoma). I was in my booth and Pedro came to my door. He was on fire! 'Please' he asked me, 'can't we finish the date tonight? We can never get the same swing with me overdubbing the drums on Sunday.' I asked Phil, my engineer, if he would stay with us. He agreed. I took two Advils. We ordered dinner. We continue to work while we waited for the food to be delivered. We had been in the studio for almost twelve hours and had completed 10 tunes. No one wanted to leave, but we were out of material. Mark said 'let's play Stella,' the tune whose changes he had taught me 4o years before. Mark showed Santi some interesting chromatic additions to the end of the chorus and some figures that gave the performance a tightly arranged feel. We played it top to bottom, solos all around, with the drummers sounding as fresh as they did on the first tune. The recording was done. Mark and I took Sunday off and visited with Lois Gilbert, the web-mistress of Jazz Corner and a old friend of both of ours and had a great Indian dinner.

Con Alma exceeded all of my expectations. Randy Klein of Jazzheads loved it, it got great reviews and took off on on radio, staying on the charts and hitting the top. I got my NPR interview and I had achieved a milestone in my career. Instead of playing radical alternative Afro-Cuban jazz I had a record of Latin jazz that was right in the pocket. People could relate to it and understand what I was doing. Instead of playing music on the margins, I was addressing the center of Latin jazz and doing it with respect for the genre, referencing the great contributors to the music, while adding a mix of elements that was characteristically my own. If this was the 60's I would be on my way. But it was 2008 and no one was making room at the top for Mark Weinstein. The record was a hit, but very little changed in my ability to get work, particularly at festivals, where my reputation would have to be made. I was succeeding musically but my career still sucked.

vote for me

2008-12-05T09:20:00.000-08:00

My latest album on Jazzheads, Lua e Sol has been nominated for the Best Brazilian Jazz album of 2008. I have been nominated as Best Latin Jazz Flutist . I would appreciate your vote. Check out the music at myspace and vote here.

You can also vote for my record lable, Jazzheads and the guitarist on the record, Romero Lubambo.

Thanks for your support,

Mark

the flute and I

2008-11-21T11:54:00.000-08:00

It was the summer of 1961, I had been married for a year and was on full-scholarship playing bass trombone at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, CA when I fell in love with the sound of the flute. My reputation as a young trombonist was good enough so that Davis Shuman-- the classical trombone virtuoso and inventor of the slide at an angle, so that the right arm movement was more natural (one of those brilliant ideas that have everything going for it except success)-- asked me to audition for the resident summer orchestra. When he heard me play he offered my a free-ride for the summer on the condition I learn to play bass trombone. I accepted and my wife Joyce and I were off by bus for all parts West. Taking a bus cross-country is quite an experience, sweaty, dirty, very smelly and we had a fight every day for the four days it took at precisely 3PM, as the boredom and fatigue stressed our, even then, rocky marriage.

Santa Barbara was lovely, we rented a one-room studio off campus (since there were no 'couples accommodations' at the music academy. And I began a summer of practicing, playing and lusting after every good looking female musician in the orchestra. One of major objects of my lust was a bassoon player, who as the saying went, 'would never drown.' I had a thing for bassoon players. My sister June, who I adored, was one. And I sat right behind a gorgeous bassoon player in the All City High School Orchestra. Bassoon players keep their bassoons upright by sitting on a long strap that goes from a clip on the bottom of the bassoon. I spent my time in the All City High School Orchestra envying the strap.

Anyway the bassoon player was married to a flute player, Stanley Weinstein, who was a hairier version of me, big and beefy. The first time I heard Stanley play up close I fell in love. Stanley had a classic Julius Baker flute sound, the sound that came to dominate orchestral flute playing, as Julius Baker, principle flutist with the New York Philharmonic for decades, and his students defined the hard-centered, glistening flute sound that is still the standard for orchestral flutists world-wide. When I heard Stanley I understood why people played flute. Oh, to be able to make such a beautiful sound, not to mention double the violins on the greatest melodies ever written by the world's greatest composers.

The trouble was that when I began to play the flute about 12 years later I had made a promise. I promised myself that instead of being critical I would search for the beauty in my flute playing. At that point I interpreted that as being accepting of whatever sound came out of the flute. Recall, I was self-taught, didn't even know the right fingerings, and was only interested in improvising. My ritual was to take the flute out. Make a sound, and no matter what came out, follow a musical thread, playing completely freely and spinning streams of sound, melodies that grow organically under my hands. No long tones, no scales, no exercises, just musical freedom. Ask any flute teacher, it was a recipe for tone-disaster. Plus the only embouchure that I knew was a trombone embouchure, so I played with loose lips and a slight frown. Ask any flute teacher, it was a recipe for tone-disaster. But I wasn't worried about tone, I was worried about spinning out melodies, about exploiting my natural fluency and the flute's endless technical potential. Ask any flute teacher, a recipe for tone disaster.

I was teaching at Mannes College of Music (western civilization) at 8AM. A student of mine told me that if I turned the head all of the way out, I could play faster. I could always play fast. After pushing a trombone slide around, fast was where I was going. I saw the great jazz reed player, Eddie Daniels, walking down the subway stairs. Eddie and I had come up together in Brooklyn and we hadn't seen each other in years. After 'hello's' etc. told him that I was playing flute and asked him to give me a lesson. I had an old Armstrong student model, all black from playing it outdoors. As soon as I put the flute together, Eddie reached out and took it from me and centered the head joint. He said, 'that's were most people put it.' He played a chord on the piano and I played as fast as I could. He stopped. I said, 'don't I have a lot of technique?' He said, 'that's not technique, that's nervousness. He suggested I study with Harvey Estrin, a taskmaster, and a master of all of the woodwinds. The 'go to' guy for sax players who wanted to develop flute chops. Harvey gave me the basics, a warm-up, long tone octaves and three octave scales. I studied with him for about a year until the fateful day when he questioned the 'aesthetics' of my first recorded efforts (the story is in 'back to the beginning').

I didn't study again for years, just tried to play Harvey's routine every day and, by that time, playing hours of Jamey Aebersold records every day, playing free in the park and working trio gigs with young jazz musicians. I was playing an open-hole b-foot Armstrong by this time and another old friend Bobby Porcelli told me about a Miyazawa flute for about $1,500. I ended up taking lessons with the guy who sold it to me and I used to tell folks that 'he sold me a lousy flute and ruined my chops.' And so of course he remains nameless. He was used to flute players with tight smiles and told his students to relax their embouchures. Since I was his student he told me the same. It was a disaster. I couldn't play low notes for years. I was just blowing with no control from my upper-lip and a flabby platform from my lower lip. But the high register worked and I still could play fast. My tone was going nowhere. David Valentin, the great salsa flutist heard my first record and said 'I can help you out.' He showed me that I had muscles in my mouth and how to use them. The sound got better, but without even a glimmer of the characteristic classical sound that David, like Hubert Laws, had made 'the gold standard' of jazz flute playing.

When I received tenure my wife and I moved out to Glen Ridge, 4 miles from the University. Peggy Schecter was the flute teacher. I asked her for lessons. I played a single note for months. She called it 'brain exercises.' I was learning to feel how a sound is produced and concentrate and making it better. She showed me how to use my upper lip to control the air. I never did get the sound she was looking for. She claimed I was the only student she ever had who couldn't get the Julius Baker shine in their sound. You know, the sound that I talked about at the beginning of blog, the sound that made me want to play flute! She had me get rid of my Miyazawa and buy the first decent flute I over owned a Sankyo Silversonic for about $3,000. I was no Stanley Weinstein, but my sound was centered and fat, and it had expressive qualities, or so reviewers began to notice.

Around the time Peggy and I gave up on each other, I was at the New York Flute Club annual flute fair and I was looking at a pile of flute books. I saw De La Sonoritie (the picture at the top of the blog). I looked inside at the price; it was a fortune. And there was nothing in it. I had seen books like that, generally printed in three languages, with repetitious exercises, laboriously reprinted in 12 keys, something that a jazz musician would explain to another musician in 25 words or less. But I knew these were magic books, books that although seemingly sparse in quantity, were miraculous in quality. I bought it. I spend hours every day playing about 8 pages of that book. Long tones, low crescendos and increasing intervals. Every flute player plays the Moyse, it is the secret to getting a flute sound; that's what the title means, 'About Sound.' A routine like that, once discovered, is a priceless gift, sort of like the lotus-position. It is a doing that supports all other doings.

I had gone to Robert Dick, the master of extended flute techniques, in hopes that he could help me understand my idiosyncratic sound. He gave me some tips, but the person who helped my sound the most was Laura George. She told me to play the Moyse with a tuner in front of me. Laura lives in Montclair and she had been calling me to volunteer at the New York Flute Club fair. I was stationed outside the door of the exhibit room. I always liked the alto flute and had gone through an old Armstrong with problems and was playing another, an Altus, that was a better flute, but still hard to play in tune. And there I was with my credit cards in a room full of flutes. The first year I bought a Sankyo alto flute, which I love and the third year I bought a great Yamaha bass flute. But it was the second year that I bought my sweetheart, a Powell, Arumite (a tube of gold, wrapped around a tube of silver) one hell of a jazz flute. $25,000 worth flutes in 3 years. My poor second wife Lesley would be having kittens. And I was on my way to being able to play the flute at last

A charanga flute player hipped me to harmonics, and a young girl once gave me a tonguing exercise in the first octave. That was always the hardest thing for me to do and every beginning flute player starts by learning how to do it. But since I was never a beginning flute player, I have to practice tonguing in the first octave every day, since I didn't grow my muscles. Flute players often start at 8 years old, so the muscles grow in response to practicing. Not when you start at 34 they don't. And, of course, as a jazz musician I always play scales, one and two octaves with various articulations, as well as arpeggios, in all keys. For a finale, Harvey Estrin's three octave scales in all keys (you can play any scale beginning on one of two notes, so I play from top to bottom). That's my life, three hours a day, every day. I guess I'll never get married again.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I am taking my life into my hands and submitting CD's to the National Flute Association competitions for this year. They do the jazz just like classical compositions. They ask for a specific repertoire, in the case of jazz, rhythm changes a ballad and a bossa nova. I'm going to confront the flute establishment.

If you only know me through recordings, you might be surprised by how rarely I get to perform. As saxophonist, Dave Leibman (also an old friend) just said to me in a recent email when I complained about how hard it is to perform, 'it is harder than ever.' And without performances there are no performance videos, and without performance videos there is no presence on youtube, increasingly a must for musicians. The only performance videos I had were a poorly recorded 3 minute of a local gig in New Jersey and a video of a concert I played with guitarist Paul Meyers in 1999. I put them up on youtube but they don't represent my playing. Making the competition CD gave me a unique opportunity. I didn't want to spend a fortune on the CD for the competition, or submit a poorly recorded one. So I split the difference and recorded just a duo in my engineer Phil's recording studio. Paul has been working gigs with me (Trio Jazz Brasil is the name we use) and he is a very responsive accompanist. I found a student through the universities media department and had him video the recording session. So far he has finished video editing two of them (he used 2 cameras). They are now up on youtube. Click on the names of the tunes and check out the videos. Body and Soul and No More Blues (Chega de Saudade) . Let's see if the flute players will accept me and then the real test. If I succeed in the CD round of the competition, I get to perform live in front of classical flutists at the annual convention of the National Flute Association in New York in 2009. Wish me luck!

free stuff

2008-11-17T20:44:00.000-08:00

There is a website, Tribe of Noise that lets musicians upload material they control as free downloads. The requirements are that the musician own both the rights to the songs and the rights to the recording, and they will only take songs less then 10mb. I have uploaded four songs, two from my first album Seasoning (1997) and my third album Three Deuces (2001). I discuss both albums in earlier blogs, 'now or never' and 'losing control.' Included in the down loads are two different original blues compositions, 'Last Minute Blues' with guitarist Ed Cherry and 'Walk On Out' with Vic Juris on guitar, Chris White on bass and Cecil Brooks III playing drums and two original tunes, 'Fall Guy,' with Bryan Carrot on marimba, Dwayne Dolphin on bass and Cecil on drums and 'Dawn's Early Light' my anti-war song (don't ask me why I think it is an anti-war song, it just is) with Ed Cherry on guitar. 'Fall Guy' is a 48 bar extended version of the 32 bar tune 'Autumn Leaves.' I take the harmonic principle of each of the sections of the tune and develop them one harmonic extension further. I recorded 'Fall Guy' again as a duet with Vic Juris on Three Dueces and rerecorded 'Dawns Early Light' on the album I recorded for Jazzheads Spring of 2008 with Kenny Barron. That album will probably not be released for another year, since Jazzheads will probably first put out the Cuban album that I recorded during the same period and discuss in the last blog.

I think my old stuff holds up pretty well, and I am pleased with my playing the blues. I wish I could upload another of my blues compositions 'LKC Blues' on Jazz World Trio, but is it 13 minutes long and is 16mb so they won't let me upload it. The first 81/2 minutes were used on a soundtrack for a memorial to my friend Arnie Lawrence, the alto player on the original Cuban Roots. You can get the 4 tune download from tribe of noise can get to the video from youtube here. I also recorded an original minor blues on Straight No Chaser, called 'Blues for Janice,' but I don't own the right to the Jazzheads CD's so I can't give it away as a free download.

Playing the blues is more than a basic requirement for a jazz musician, it is the ultimate test. As I listen to my various recordings of blues across ten years I am struck with the consistency of my approach to the material. I play very freely on blues and yet play with an unashamed classicism, playing deep blues phrases and searching for the primordial. Or as my kids used to say, 'whatever.' Anyway feel free to download the free stuff, and if you would like to hear 'Blues for Janice,' it and all of the other tunes from my albums for Jazzheads are all over the web for about 99 cents. All of my early albums, including Jazz World Trios (with the exception of the original Cuban Roots and Cuban Roots Revisited, which I do not own) are on cdbaby.com (search for 'mark weinstein') with short samples and downloads and albums to buy. I have uploads you can listen to from my Jazzheads albums on jazzplayer.com (search 'mark weinstein') and of course on myspace.

Listen to the music, download it for free if you can and pass it around if you want to. Also, don't be afraid to make comments about the music or about anything in the blog that strikes your fancy

Enjoy!

breaking the pattern

2008-11-08T19:01:00.000-08:00

With the exception of the second blog, which jumped ahead to 2004 with the date in Berlin, which by the way is coming out this winter, I have been going chronologically and am up to my 'hit' album Con Alma, 26 weeks on the charts and thanks to an NPR interview with Scott Simon number one on the Jazzweek world chart and number two on the jazz chart for a few weeks after the interview aired on NPR stations nationwide. But I've been listening to one of two and a half albums I recorded last Spring and it is so phenomenal that I have to break the pattern and talk about it.

The picture is of Pedrito Martinez, winner of the Thelonious Monk prize on hand drums, the singer and leader of the drums on Algo Más and the congero on Con Alma, for which he won best Latin Jazz Percussionist on 2007 on the Latin Jazz Corner poll (I won best Latin Jazz Flutist in the same poll). Pedrito is on the ascendent, he plays with everybody and the depth of his knowledge of the tradition is as profound as any drummers, he is lightening fast and has the must advanced rhythmic conception of any drummer I have ever heard. Pedrito surrounds himself with the very best musicians playing on the edge of Latin jazz and his choice of his compadre Mauricio Hererra as the drummer for Con Alma gave me a demonstration of what the young Cuban cats were up to. But that is the Con Alma story, which has another hook that I will get to in another blog.

Marty Cohen is the founder of Latin Percussion (LP), and the greatest friend to the community of hand drummers in NY. He respects them, is respected by them and has given them countless opportunities to perform and document their music. Of course, he made a nice living doing it, and an LP conga drum is in the musical instrument exhibit of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, along with the most beautiful and rare instruments in all of human history. No small accomplishment for a Jewish engineer in New Jersey who made a cow bell on a small lathe in his garage for Johnny Pacheco in 1961. Cowbells were as scarce as hen's teeth in NY in the 50's and Pacheco, who had gone to Automotive Trades High School in the Bronx (with Barry Rogers), the magic combination that along with Eddie and Charlie Palmieri invented the musical scene that turned into the Salsa revolution, asked Marty Cohen it he could make a cowbell for him. That became the famed Pacheco bell of the early 60's, the gold standard for timbale players from then on. Fiber glass congos followed and LP is to Latin drums what Coca Cola is to soft drinks.

Anyway, Marty Cohen had a birthday party at his house. I knew Marty since 1961 (two Jewish guys in the middle of the South Bronx as Puerto Ricans took ownership of their musical heritage and transformed it into into one of the major musics of the world (Salsa). When I started to play again, we got back in touch and so he invited me to his party. Marty has a gorgeous house in Northern New Jersey and he laid on more great Cuban food than I have ever seen in one place. The house was so jammed with musicians and friends that you could barely find a place to sit and as Barry Rogers used to say 'grease,' that is eat with total abandon. I managed, stuffing myself like crazy. Their was a big room set up for musicians to play, three sets of congas, piano, drums, amps, timbales. I knew the sax player, Ivan Rentas, and I had my flute with me. But there was nothing happening, everybody was eating, talking and looking at the great recording and photography equipment that Marty had in his studio. Pedrito saw me and came over, and thanked me for using him on Con Alma, which he seemed to think was a big deal. I was soon in the middle of a bunch of musicians I didn't know, lots of people giving me lots of good energy about the recording. I was stuffed beyond belief and really needed to sit down. As I walked away from the musicians, Pedrito said, 'when are we going to do another record?'. I smiled and headed for a empty seat on couch. The musicians started to play in the next room. There were at least 5 drummers playing, with a loud electric piano and electric bass. Ivan had the microphone stuck all the way into the bell of his tenor sax and I could barely hear him. There was no was I could play the flute with the band that loud. I had seriously over-eaten, it was late, the noise level was murderous. I saw Marty, thanked him and left.

The next week I got an email from Juan Wust, the engineer who had recorded Algo Más. His 17 year old son had died in a tragic accident a few years ago, and he was producing a concert to raise money for a scholarship fund for students in his son's high school. Pacquito Rivera was head-lining the band and I knew Juan's son. Of course I would buy a ticket. When I got to St Peters College in Jersey City for the event, the auditorium, was surprisingly empty, instruments on the band stand, but the guys hanging around with friends in the audience. I said hello to Pacquito who was sitting talking to some people a few rows in front of me and I laid my two latest albums on him (one can always hope). Pedrito came over and sat down next to me. He said it again, 'when are we going to do another album?' I said, 'If you can find me a piano player and a bass player who play as good as you do, get two more drummers and we can record.' Pacquito got up to go on the bandstand as did Pedrito. I didn't think anything of his remark, and so was very surprised when a few days later, in mid-March, I got a phone call from Pedrito saying he could get the guys for March 30 and 31st. I was in a bind. I had committed myself to record a Brazilian record with Nilson Matta and Kenny Barron, a very expensive project. And I had given a $1,000 deposit to Argentinian bass player Pablo Aslan so he could bring up an Argentinian piano player from Buenos Aires to record a tango album the first week in April. But to turn Pedrito down was to risk being seen as 'jive.' After all, I had set him a challenge. So I said to myself, 'what the hell.' my house in Glen Ridge was an ATM (the housing market hadn't totally tanked yet) and if I did another album I would just be pulling money out of my home equity line as I had planed to do for the other albums. I said, hire the guys, I'll make sure we can get the studio that I like to record in (I have been working with the same engineer, Phil Ludwig, since Tudo de Bom, and he was an equal partner in editing down the hours of music I recorded in Berlin. With Phil and his partner Larry Gates in my corner, I could relax about the technical aspects of recording). The next day Pedrito called me, the piano player could only record one day since he was leaving for a European tour. 'Can we do the record in one day?' I asked. Pedrito said 'sure.' We were set for March 30th.

I told Pedrito that if the guys brought in originals they would get co-publishing and I pulled out a few of the most standard tunes I could think off just in case. Milestones, Footprints, Caravan and as a sort of joke, Watermelon Man, plus my 60's tune recorded on Cuban Roots and Cuban Roots revisited, Just Another Guajira, for luck.

When I arrived at the studio, the guys where already there (check out the photos on myspace). I was setting up my flutes when the piano player came into my booth. Axel Tosca Laugart, 23 years old, a wildman in appearance and bursting with energy. I told him to be careful not to knock over my flutes, he responded, 'I'm young, but I'm a professional.' Little did I know. Axel went into his booth to try out the piano. I almost fell over, he was playing serious Chopin to warm up. I knew I was in for something special. We started with a piano feature, a Chucho Valdez composition called Ernesto. I was totally knocked out. The piano playing was richer than anything I had ever played with and I have played with great pianists (Chick Corea, Omar Sosa and Mark Levine). He had the rhythmic control of Sosa, moving from gaujeo to gaujeo (the piano vamp that Latin piano players play) in an endless stream of creative improvisation. He had the harmonic complexity and structural stability of Chick Corea, and the easy swing and warmth of Mark Levine, and he had all of the incredible technique that is the hallmark of the great Cuban pianists. Axel has it all! Playing solos with him was literally holding the tiger by the tail, he responded to every move I made, extended the rhythmic concept at every opportunity and he forced me to listen and respond in a manner that stretched me like no other recording I have ever done. And then, no matter how good I played, his solos stole the show. No matter how far I moved, he 'saw me and raised.' It wasn't what we used to call a 'cutting contest,' he wasn't trying to show me up. It was just his natural exuberance and phenomenal musical ability. What ever I did, he integrated it into his playing and transformed it. And the rhythm section was in heaven. At the end of the date Pedrito said to me, 'Thank you for letting me play my music.' I had little choice since his music was what I have been dreaming of ever since I started playing jazz to Cuban music.

And that rhythm section. Almost every tune has drum solos. With Ogduarte Diaz playing bongos and bell, Pedrito and Mauricio Hererra had a totally reliable time keeper. Mauricio played dramatically, using the kit to add colors and suspense and Pedrito pushed the envelope of time like no other conga drummer I have ever played with. The drum solos that Mauricio and Pedrito contributed to Con Alma were exceptional. Their playing on this recording is transcendent. Complex unison drum figures characterizes the tunes that Pedrito contributed, amazingly complex, and so tight you have to listen hard to hear that it is more than one drummer. And everything with great swing. And then we did the standards. We played Milestones way up-tempo, Footprints in 7/4 rather than the usual 6/8, Watermelon Man as a down home blues (and one of the all time greatest conga drum solos in homage to Mongo Santamaria), Just Another Guajira in yet another rendition, Axel after Omar Sosa, after Chick Corea, another piano setting and one that lives up to the versions of the other two piano masters.

And then there is the bass player. Panagiotis Andreou. I have never recorded with an electric bass player before and Panagiotis is no ordinary electric bass player, a classical guitarist originally, he plays with the tips of his fingers. No matter how fast he plays you can barely see his right hand moving, it is all delicacy, all control, with total freedom in the time and a melodic gift. Barry Rogers was the only 'gringo' that was totally respected by the Latin musicians. When Barry said something it mattered. The same goes for Panagiotis, these masters of Cuban drumming accepted his opinions without question. Axel and him were like musical twins, they moved together in some of the most subtle playing behind the drum solos, playing flexible, but superbly tight figures that held the time against the drummers pushing the boundaries. And then came kicker. When I called Caravan as the next tune I thought we would start with a bass solo for contrast. Panagiotis asked for a vocal mike. He played one of the greatest bass solos I have ever heard as an introduction and sang along with every note. I was floored. At the end of the date he asked if we could record a Turkish folk song with bata drums. By this time I was up for anything. He wrote it out for us and I played bass flute in unison with that haunting melody.

That finished the recording. We had been in the studio for 16 hours and we had one hell of a record. If this one doesn't put me over the top, nothing will.

So, you might ask, why do I wrote about this album now? Two reasons, musicians don't go for spit, no matter how good a record is, to get a phone call with a compliment from the 'first call' players that I record with is virtually impossible. I have heard on the grapevine the Romero and Cyro really love our latest album, Lua e Sol, but neither of them would ever call me up to say so. I guess it is not cool to let the leader know how much you enjoyed the record you made for him. Or maybe the top pros that I record with don't give that much energy to their recordings after they come out. After I finished the mix of the date, I sent a copy to Pedrito. Two days later I got an excited phone call, 'the flute sounds great,' Pedrito started off, 'I'm playing the record for the guys now and everyone loves it,' he continued (and then made a few suggestions for refining the drum mix). I was over the moon! If one of the heavy players that record with me, took the time to tell me how great the record sounds, it must be special. Then I sent it to Randy Klein, the owner of Jazzheads, the record label I record for. He sent me an email, 'this is a major album, it should get you a Grammy nomination, let's talk about how we can push it.' And so I'm putting myself out there for those of you who are interested in my music. This album is a ground-breaking contribution to Latin jazz, it breaks the pattern while staying within the genre, simply by being more innovative and more challenging than anything out there, with virtuoso playing by all and tremendous swing. That's right, to all of the Latin jazz fans out there, I'm putting it on the line. This album is killing! Randy hopes to put it out for Summer of 2009. Meanwhile check out myspace for the tracks from my latest Brazilian record, Lua e Sol.

pluses and minuses

2008-10-24T13:53:00.000-07:00

My career as a trombonist was unexceptional. I started playing in high school in Brooklyn playing with local musicians, started to meet other musicians and branched out into the city. I caught some lucky breaks (a class-A show gig at 18, a funny story I will tell one day) a sub with Eddie Palmieri's band that led to lots of gigs on the exploding Latin dance band scene, got to play some decent jazz gigs, record dates, and quite a bit of arranging to augment my income. I was able to make a living and support my wife and kids, the essential musicians' definition of success. I lived off of the telephone, no self-promotion, just the steady climb through the ranks of musicians relying on word of mouth and personal contacts. My career as a jazz flute player couldn't be more different.

First of all I was playing flute. With all due respect to the few flute players who manage to survive playing jazz, flute is no way to make a living as a jazz musician. In fact after I quit the music business to become an academic I choose flute because I knew I wouldn't be tempted into being a professional musician again. Flute isn't a jazz instrument, it is a jazz double, a side-car attached to a saxophone. If you need a flute player, there are dozens of great sax players you can call. Hubert Laws played tenor with Mongo, Herbie Mann started on tenor, Joe Farrell who made all of those great flute records with Chick Corea was basically a tenor player and on and on. So playing flute didn't give me the community of working musicians that I could draw upon for advancement. Second flute is a classical instrument and is gendered female. Most flute players are female, start playing in middle school and study with classical flutists who teach them the flute repertoire. Even jazz sax players who double on flute study with classical flutists. And I never played classical music, never developed the strengths and weaknesses of classical flutists who move into jazz. Instead I was a self-taught free improviser who played in parks and on beaches, on roof tops and under bridges. I had tremendous dexterity, a lousy sound and a totally personal approach to the instrument. Not a very good prognosis for a career as a professional musician.

Third, by the time I was ready to play jazz seriously, in the mid 1990's, the music business was sliding downhill faster and faster. My Uncle Irving predicted it in 1955. I was 15 and working a few gigs. Irving, a klezmer trumpet player from Poland and a Marxist said to me, 'So you want to be a musician, do you know the music was the first profession to be destroyed by technology?' I said, "What do you mean, records? He said, 'You're stupid.' I said, 'What do you mean, radio?' He said, 'You're stupid?' I said, 'OK, so teach me.' He said, 'When I came America (in 1919) if you could read and fake (play by ear) you could walk down any main street in any city or town and find a movie theatre that needed musicians to play in the pit along with the movie. Talking movies ruined the music business.' He was right, every technological advance from sound tracks to synthesizers has put ordinary musicians out of work. From radio to recordings, to DJ's at weddings every technological advance resulted in the replacement of average musician with canned perfection. Why hire a wedding band to play crappy covers of your favorite songs when a DJ will give you the real thing. In fact why listen to live music at all when you can construct your musical world to order and carry it around in an i-pod. The only musician who has a hope in Hell is a great musician and there are countless numbers of them, and more and more being trained by the only growth industry in jazz today, jazz education. Great jazz musicians are being turned out at an incredible rate as more and more jazz musicians become educators, helping aspiring musicians to master America's classical music.

Fourth I was financially secure, a tenured full professor with a comfortable and reliable middle-class income. And so I wasn't hungry! I was desperate to succeed, but I wasn't driven by the most reliable motivator that musicians have, the need to eat. So, among other things, I didn't force myself to play charanga flute. Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against charanga flute. I love the classic recordings of Arcaño and Sus Maravillas (if you don't know them check them out). It is the essence of Cuban glamor and up-scale romance and the flute melodies, played in the highest octave of the flute register are touching. But to me playing charanga on flute is like playing dixieland on trombone. It is harmonically uninteresting, has very stringent stylistic requirements and it is murder on your chops. I played dixieland on trombone when I had to, I even played the Red Onion, a chain of beer joints that used trombone, tuba and banjo trios cranking out old favorites for hours on end, when I had no other work. But with a check coming in twice a month I wasn't going to hustle the few charanga gigs there are for flute players. And that pretty much meant I couldn't work as a flute player in latin bands, and since I couldn't play with classical ensembles, I couldn't work very much at all.

If I was 20 and playing flute and had to make a living. I'd get my classical chops up enough to be within striking distance of Broadway shows and record dates. I'd force myself to play latin gigs and most important I'd find a way to work. There is no doubt in my mind that with the harsh task master of necessity I would have figured out a way to make a living playing flute, hustling weddings, playing in restaurants, playing on the subway, giving lessons, anything to make a buck. And I'm sure that would have put me in touch with young musicians who would add a flute to their bands every now and then. I'm willing to bet there are young flute players out there making it somehow (or do they all end up playing saxophone?). But I had those checks coming in, I was in my mid-fifties and I had the money to subsidize records with some really great musicians. Every one of my flute records is with fine musicians, and hiring them to play small-time jazz gigs always ends up costing me a few hundred dollars. The alternative, playing little gigs with young cats so I wouldn't have to spend a fortune to work the gig was attractive to me from time to time, I did my fair share, but I didn't have the motivation to keep it going. And so I never really built a presence on the NY jazz scene as a live performer.

I have played the small Village jazz clubs for the 'door.' It is what jazz musicians are forced to do in NY. But even that is highly competitive in a way that I can't really compete. There are a half dozen jazz programs in the area. Every one of those young music students can play in a club and bring down a couple of dozen classmates hoping to sit in and willing to hang out. And besides for local clubs in my area where I can guilt-trip my friends and colleagues to come out and hear me (usually no more than a few times at most) I can't really guarantee a club owner nearly as many bodies in the room as any tenor player enrolled in the New School, or NYU or Manhattan or Juilliard. And since I don't teach music I can't get my students to come to my gigs without it bordering on harassment. Club owners know the deal and so are hesitant to hire me. I work now and then but basically my life as a flute player exists in the recording studio. And that creates problems.

I can afford to record with the best musicians. The rhythm sections on my records are world class and the guys on my records are working all of the time. They are top professionals and in the real sense of the word I am an amateur, I play for the love of music. I practice all the time, I play maybe a dozen gigs a year and twice a year I have to go into a studio and play as if I have no limits, play as if I just got off the plane from playing some major jazz festival and am one my way to do another. I have to play at the highest standard of those few master musicians who have managed to succeed as jazz musicians in the hardest competitive market imaginable. That is to say, I have to play my ass off, each and every time.

Nilson Matta (that's me and him mugging for the camera) is a great bass player, nobody plays in 2/4 like he does and he is one of the most melodic bass soloists I have ever heard. Nilson needs to generate income as a musician and he knows how to hustle. I hadn't seen him since we recorded Tudo de Bom and he was playing with the Trio de Paz in town. I went down to hear the band and say hello. He said something to the effect that it was a shame we didn't get to stretch out when we recorded the album with Boukas and suggested that we make another record, a Brazilian jazz record which would really let me express myself as a soloist. I agreed on the condition that he could get guitarist Romero Lubambo to do the date. He set it up, calling Paulo Braga to play drums and Guilherme Franco to play percussion. Nilson and I got together in his house and picked tunes for the date include the Ary Barroso classic Bahia. We went over the tunes and Romero came by for about an hour and looked at the material including some originals by Nilson and myself. So much for rehearsals. The date was on! I was under a lot of pressure and suffering from tension headaches that I later found out were the result of serious glaucoma. I was determined that the date would go well, but I had agreed to play two choros, a style I barely knew, and I wasn't familiar with most of the material we had selected.

We first tune of the date was Bahia. We recorded a first take. It went well, but the rhythm section was not really tight enough. We did another take and it sounded great. I played the melody and a decent enough solo, but I really wasn't comfortable with the tune. The harmonic rhythm of the tune builds from a beginning with very few chords until a climax with chords changing every beat. I got through the changes fine, but I hadn't really built a solo that was worthy of the harmonic structure, with growing intensity as the harmonies got denser. I needed another take, and Romero knew it. But the rest of the guys had played superbly and to do it again was to risk the very freedom that Nilson and I were trying to accomplish. I didn't know what to do. Romero walked up to my booth and opened the door, "Don't make me play that fucking song again," he said and walked back to his booth. I called the next tune. The die was cast. I had no choice, if I was to play up to the rhythm section I would have to overdub my solo. That had a strange effect on me. Pluses and minuses! I had done my share of overdubbing on earlier records, but always felt guilty about it. My model for a jazz musician came out of the 60's. You played at least 4 nights a week and a record date was just a high-stakes gig. You brought all of your experience from the bandstand into the studio and you played the date as it went down. Whenever I had overdubbed I felt like a failure, but I had to face facts. Since I hardly ever played except in the studio, if I was to play my best I had to bite the bullet and use the artistic freedom the modern technology provides. I had to be realistic about how to get the best performance, rather than live up to the standard of live recording that made sense in another era, but that made less and less sense as musicians performed less and less, with me at the furthest extreme of hardly ever performing.

I played the rest of the date as well as I could, but I made up my mind. If I had to play Bahia again as an overdub I would utilize the technology to make up for my lack of a professional lifestyle. I would swallow my pride and overdub where needed and get the best performance possible, rather than rely on the magic of the moment. Instead of being a victim of technology I would use it to my advantage. Commercial records had been doing that for years, pop records are recorded in layers with dozens if not hundreds of takes and retakes until each part is as perfect as possible. I would give myself the same option. I would do what ever it took to make the best music possible. I took home a CD of the record date and played along with the tracks until I knew the tunes inside and out. I went into the studio and in a few takes had the performances that I needed. The rhythm section had been responding to the solos I played live, I would then go back and do them one better, responding to every one of there responses to my original solo with a perfect musical fit. The result, O Nosso Amor, was a much better record than anything I had produced so far. The music was free and full of life and I was playing at my very best. But I was full of guilt, a nagging sense that I had sold my musical integrity in the name of making the very best music I could. Once I crossed that Rubicon I was in another place. I would work to record the very best rhythm tracks I could, never worrying about doing anything in the studio except driving the band with my solos, and then I would do what I had to do so that the results would be as perfect an example of what I was trying to accomplish as I was capable of. No regrets, each performance would be as good as it could be. With that change in perspective I decided to perfect my solos to my heart's content. It is a compromise, but it is a compromise that goes back to the choice I made when I first started to play flute and committed myself to finding the beauty in my music. I have to love what I play. I have to find the most beauty that my music can provide. And so I have to make records that are as perfect an expression of my playing as they can be, performances that honestly present my strivings to make beautiful music, no matter what it takes. I have to do what is necessary for the music and my ego be damned.

my afro-cuban soul

2008-09-23T13:00:00.000-07:00

I love Shifra Tanzt. I got to play the music live a few times and it is wonderful to present, but there were few takers. The Jewish music business is focused on tradition or novelty, shul gigs, weddings or world music festivals. Jazz is no longer a novelty and the the tradition the record fits into is the tradition I'm inventing as a jazz musician. Where do I get such chutzpah from? I was blessed! We had just moved into Fort Green projects I was not quite six and I walked down the six flights of concrete and steel steps to go outside for the first time with my sister June. I remember it as a cold day. June started talking to some of the girls her age (she's six years older than me) and a beautiful African-American girl put her hand on my head and said, 'you are blessed!' She did it for me. I believe it with all my heart and soul.

Jean Paul Bourelly had heard Cuban Roots Revisited. He called to congratulate me on the music and asked whether I could get him in the studio with drummers like that. My records were out but my career was in the doldrums. So I figured I'd do it again, rerecord Cuban Roots and Jean Paul had given me the ticket to ride. I called up Bobby Sanabria and asked him to recommend a drummer who knew the tradition but had an open-mind. Bobby is a great musician and an historian of Latin music. He knew just what I meant and gave me Pedrito Martinez's phone number. He told me that Pedrito played a rumbón (a gathering of drummers, singers and dancers playing traditional rumba) in Union City on Sundays. For those of us who would love to go to Cuba, La Esquina Habanera in Union City on Sundays offered a rare glimpse of the real deal. A doctoral student, Pablo, from Ecuador who was staying with me wanted to go so I had some moral support. The club was crowded when we arrived, about a half hour before the scheduled start. Even at the door, the heat from the club could be felt carried by the sound of the the great Cuban records they were playing. The women at the door sized me up and spoke Spanish anyway. Working with recent Cuban emigre musicians from Cuban in the 60's have given me a small but effective Spanish working vocabulary. Her attitude seemed to me that along with the $5 door charge, Spanish was required. I asked, in Nuyorican Spanish whether Pedrito would be playing that night. I must have done OK since she led us to a small table bordering the stage (gringo of merit, perhaps). We ordered some Cuban style fried chicken and a few beers. Pablo was psyched. The room just kept on getting more and more crowded, we had a great table and the food was on the money. I was getting really nervous. I had found out about Pedrito. He had come to the states with the Canadian flutist Jane Bunnett and had made a rapid move through the ranks of drummers once he settled in the New York area. He had won the most prestigious award in jazz the Thelonious Monk prize playing bata and conga a few years back and was generally considered among the very best drummers around. He didn't know me from Adam. My history was well known to New York Latin musicians but it was highly unlikely that Pedrito had ever heard of me. After about an hour wait five drummers starting setting up Conga drums on the stage. Microphones were set up for the singers and dancers dressed in traditional Cuban fashion came out onto the small dance floor and begun to make themselves noticed by joking with customers they knew. I was trying to figure out which drummer was Pedrito. Nobody seemed to stand out. The performance began. It was incredible. Hearing rumba live is to hearing it on record as sex is to pornography. There is no comparison. The show had a really authentic flavor, great drummers and singers, and dancers dominating the small dance floor area, trying to outdo each other for audience approval including pulling people out of their chairs and onto the dance floor, getting an extra round of applause when a member of the audience was made to look good. One of the male dancers had been teasing Pablo, who looks all the world like a young Latino intellectual and tried to pull him onto the floor. Pablo panicked. I had other worries. There was no chance I would be asked to dance, white, middle-aged and overweight, but I was of two minds, anxiety over how to approach Pedrito and a bit bummed out. I was pretty sure by the vibe on the stage the Pedrito was not there.

After the show was well on its way there was a buzz by the door, someone special had come in. An exceptionally good looking young man in a well-tailored white suit came through the crowd that had formed between the door and the dance floor. He stepped up the two feet onto the stage in the middle of the singers and started singing lead, improvising with poetry and music on the theme that the other singers were singing (the call and response pattern found in all African based music from gospel to salsa). There was no doubt in my mind that was Pedrito. He just sang, the star of the show, and never touched a drum.

At the first break I walked up to Pedrito who was sitting at a table in the back of the room with a group of friends and musicians. I introduced myself, saying that Bobby Sanabria had suggested that I talk to him about a recording project. The music was loud and we walked outside. I told him what I had in mind, an experimental recording of rumba and toques de santo and asked him if he would get me three other drummers to do the date. It's hard to know why he said yes, he had a young daughter and it is tough making a living as a musician no matter how good you are and a record date pays money (and it is in town). But I wasn't just asking him to play conga, I was asking him to organize the drums for the most important music that he plays (his religion and the basis for all conga drumming, la rumba). Maybe it was my willingness to talk really rotten Spanish, rather than make him speak English, maybe it is my sweet Jewish face, or alternatively, my almost scary intense Jewish face (at least my students think it is scary). Or maybe my sincerity shown through in those few minutes of preliminary conversation. Or maybe he just liked the idea of getting drummers together and making an experimental folkloric record. I called him the next day and worked out the arrangements for the date with his wife who speaks perfect English. I would pay him for all of the drummers (a big selling point since it would give him the discretion to decide on who gets what). He told me I should record in a studio on Jersey City where the engineer know how to record drums (the world famous Cuban drum ensemble Los Muñoquitos recorded there when they recorded in the states). I got dates when Jean Paul would be in town, called Santi Debriano (who understands the drums) and set up two days. First day bata and second day congas. I decided I wouldn't do any planing for the date.

The studio was a rabbit's warren of small booths with no sight lines in the basement of a three story brownstone. The three bata drummers and Pedrito went into the largest booth to the left with a window looking into the control booth with the recording equipment. Directly across from the control booth were two small booths each just large enough for one musician, both had windows that faced the engineer and the booth with the drummers, but you couldn't see from one of the booths to the other. Santi went into the one closest to the drummers, Jean Paul went into the other. There was no place for me to play except in a front room with no sight lines except for a small TV monitor. The first day was to be for toques de Santo and Pedrito was going to sing. The singer leads the drummers through the progression of rhythms based on what is sung. Cuban religious music is highly stylized and the drummers have fixed interactive patterns that they move through as the song requires and as the spirit moves them. The patterns are like chord changes in bebop, except you can vary them, it is a lot like improvising in ragas in North Indian music, selection from pre-determined set of elements that are selected from with a open-ended set of sequencing choices. This is not music to fool around with. I decided I wouldn't play, and hoped that Jean Paul and Pedrito would come to a meeting of the minds. I had confidence the Santi could respond to whatever the two of the came up with. Everything hung on Pedrito and Jean Paul and they couldn't even see each other.

Pedrito walked into Jean Paul's booth and sang a version of the toque for Ellegua that I had never heard before, beautiful with just a hint of rhythm and blues. Jean Paul called Santi in and went through the simple sequence of chords. Pedro was singing in E major. I told Jean Paul to 'put something up front' to set the mood of the date. He played some totally macho Jimi Hendrix sounding stuff, powerful and full of technical display. I could see Pedrito looking down at the floor slowly shaking his head, 'No!' Jean Paul had no idea how Pedrito was responding, he was just doing his thing. Jean Paul played for a while waiting for something to happen, when nothing did, he stopped. I walked into his booth. We were old friends but this was very tricky. I looked at him and said, "Why are you show-boating?" That is, why are you playing unmusically and showing off. He looked at me. Jean Paul was quite famous by then, the Jimi Hendrix foundation had featured him in a memorial concert to Jimi in Town Hall in New York, he was well known throughout Europe, and had succeeded beyond my wildest dreams for the few years he was playing jazz in New York, playing the Elvin Jones and recording with McCoy Tyner. Jean Paul had three choices, he could punch me out for the level of my disrespect, he could pack up his guitar and leave or he could take it. He took it!.

I left the booth and he improvised that beautiful limpid minute and and half of unaccompanied guitar that Algo Más begins with. He played in a Spanish mode Emajor against F major, the one note he didn't play was C#, that's the first note Pedrito sings. When the voice comes in it is in harmonic contrast gently nudging the key into the mode of the song. They played toque Ellegua top to bottom without a hitch. When things got going. I stood up in the control booth in full sight of the drummers and did a shuffling dance while they played. I danced through every number that day, as is required. Drum, dance and voice is how one reaches the Orishas. Pedrito still was not convinced by Jean Paul's playing, but he is a professional, he sang the toques and got fine performances out of the drummers. I had told Pedrito to leave spaces for me to solo and Jean Paul and Santi had played some decent solos, but the music was very much unfinished when the day ended. Tomorrow was rumba. I decided that would be all instrumental to give me, Jean Paul and Santi a chance to stretch out. Pedrito and the drummers still had not heard me play a note. As we packed up Pedrito came up to me and said that we needed a 'better guitar player.'

That night I taught Jean Paul a few classic rumba melodies that I loved including one that I had never recorded, Consuelete Como Yo, one of the best loved of all of the rumbas. Pedrito had had problems with the first day's music. Although the toques got recorded, Jean Paul's approach didn't sit easily with Pedrito's expectations. Jean Paul used a wide vocabulary in supporting the toques, he played in styles that range from rock and soul to afro-pop. The one thing he never did was play anything remotely Cuban. I had complete trust in Jean Paul's musical instincts. Pedrito did what was required. The stylized drum parts were flawless and he sang the appropriate melodies and left room for me to play responses. Part of the deal with Pedrito was that he would come back and record additional voices and percussion. Jean Paul was isolated so it would have been no problem to replace him. But that didn't help me with the next day when we were going to record rumba without voices. Both Jean Paul and Pedrito were still not really in sync and rumba is highly interactive, drummers freely improvise and pass figures back and forth in a free-wheeling and swinging conversations. Unless the drums and Jean Paul found a meeting of the minds the session would be a failure. I decided to begin with Consuelete Como Yo a medium rumba with a beautiful melody. But music was not the only problem. I had to deal with the studio There was no place for me to play except the control booth or the front room. I choose the front room since I needed to concentrate. I stood in the living room and looked at the small video screen. I could see the drummers and no one else. Somehow I had to communicate with music alone. My reality was the shared head phone mix. I had to do it all with sound. I closed my eyes and said, 'empiece el ritmo.' The drums began and I entered with a vocalistic phrase in the style of rumba singers when they begin a poetical solo introduction, an extended section that prepares for the statement of the melody. I laid a spare diatonic phrase in half time across the rhythm of the drums. Jean Paul played an equally understated chord, just slightly dissonant against the diatonic phrase. It was the perfect response. Lot's of space for the drums, completely relaxed and in perfect command of the time. 8 minutes later I stopped playing, Jean Paul hadn't played a solo but he and I had had one of the best conversations I have ever had with another musician. Mis Consuelos, as it is called on the album, is my favorite track of Algo Más and one of my all time favorite recordings from among the albums I have recorded, before or since. The rest of the date went off without a hitch. Pedrito taught me a beautiful and engaging tune, that, as Mamita Baila became one of the more popular tunes on the album, getting a lion's share of the radio play. Jean Paul and Santi got to play some amazing solos and Jean Paul played a free 4 minute guitar improvisation on top of killing drums that is worth the price of the album by itself. But I still had to deal with the toques and redeem the music and the faith that Pedrito had in me.

I walked around listening to the tracks of the toques and tried to figure out what to do. The only model I had was what I had done with Edy Martinez on the toques for the Orisha Suites (that was the name I gave to my truncated recording of 1977 discussed in an earlier blog). There I had used layered keyboards. I decided to build a flute ensemble with layered flutes. I went back to the studio and put in responses on alto flute to the toque for Ellegua. The harmonic context that Jean Paul had laid down felt good, and his spare rhythmic style left plenty of rooms for the drums to be heard, rather then competing for the same rhythmic space that a Cuban approach would have done. After my solos were finished I played the track and experimented with background figures. After an endless series of false tries and increasing frustration I hit on a pattern that worked for part of the tune. Juan Wust, the engineer, was an angel from heaven. I kept me calm and never tired of replaying the same section as I floundered around looking for something that worked. Once I found a line, I improvised a second line until I had a mini Eddie Palmieri trombone section, one voice laying down a pattern and the other harmonizing and extending it with counter-melodies. I did this for days, always improvising, looking for a key musical idea and then building on it. I constructed flute ensembles of as many as 6 flutes in places, playing the roles I had learned so well playing straight-man to Barry Rogers' amazing extensions of the basic trombone line that was the high point of the live performances of Eddie's first band, La Perfecta. I also drew on my years of experience as an arranger with Larry Harlow and the many bands I recorded with and heard in the years I played trombone. Chris Washburne gets it just right in the liner notes, 'He is an orchestra of flutes.'

After I finished recording the flutes I called Pedrito and set up a time for him to do additional voices and percussion. He came into the studio and I played what I had done with Ellegua. He sat quietly listening to the complex texture of the overdubbed flutes against the spare lines that Jean Paul had played. He looked at me and said, 'I'm sorry I said that bullshit about the guitar player.' The gate was open. He went on to record all of the additional voices and crucial drum parts to strengthen the basic rhythm and even added another layer of drum solos in a few crucial places. Algo Más was finished. Now I had to figure out how to sell it to a record company. I had basically self-produced all of my previous records and that was pointless. I needed a record company behind me.

Bobby Sanabria was playing a gig with Chris Washburne's band. I went down and thanked him for putting me in touch with Pedrito I told Bobby the project was finished and he, in turn, introduced me to a record company owner who was in the club. I had a brief conversation with the owner and he agreed to listen to the CD. He called me back and said he would put it out. Two days later he called me again and asked me if I could remove the vocals since he didn't think the people who bought his records would appreciate the folkloric singing. Of course I refused. Even had it been technically possible, to remove the voices from the toques would have been a sacrilege, both metaphorically and literally. I knew the Chris Washburne recorded for Jazzheads and asked him about the label. 'You get what you see,' was his response, high phrase from a jazz musician about a recording label. I called Randy Klein the owner of Jazzheads and he agreed to listen to the record. He loved it and we signed a contract, beginning the most productive relationship with a record company any artist could hope for. It had worked again, recording Cuban Roots, now for the fourth time (including the Orisha Suites), was the way forward.

my yiddish heart

2008-09-22T22:22:00.000-07:00

I had made some decent records, gotten good reviews and some airplay, but my career was still going nowhere (for all I know it may still be going nowhere). But a lot of musicians knew me and I felt respected, which was always of enormous importance to me. I got called by a singer to do a recording and the bassist was Mike Richmond, head of the bass department at NYU. Mike had played with Stan Getz, Miles and countless others and was doing the date with the singer as a favor, since she wanted a bass player who bowed well and Mike is among the best. While we were waiting for the rehearsal to begin we started some old Jewish man talk, comparing ailments etc. It turned out that Mike had a problem with cholesterol medicine and was forced to exercise on a treadmill at the gym (I pop pills with impunity). I asked him how he deals with the music they play and he said that he listens to klezmer music through earphones while he on the treadmill and pretends to be dancing at a wedding. I had never played Jewish music except as a trombone player at weddings and in the Catskill Mountains. But I had picked up a number of hard to get books of Jewish tunes, including some rare Dave Tarras originals over the years. I asked Mike how he would like to record a Jewish album. He liked the idea very much. I brought my books over to Mike's house. We set up a stand and stood next to each other reading through tune after tune. We picked some great klezmer tunes including an obscure tune by Dave Tarras, Shifra Tanzt, that would be the title tune of the album (Mike's favorite aunt was called Shifra). I showed him some sephardic tunes that I had learned from a good friend and fine singer, Robert Esformes, and I taught him two of my favorite nigunim (prayer melodies). We were good to go.

Mike had been playing with a great Moroccan musician Simon Shaheen, and he recommended that I use two New York musicians who were in the band with him, guitarist Brad Shepik and percussionist Jamey Hadad. He told me to contact Brad and go over the material, then we would go into the studio with minimal rehearsal, the way my most successful records have been made. I called Brad and set up a meeting in his house in Brooklyn. I had no idea what I wanted the music to sound like. I wanted neither a traditional klezmer album, common in the recent klezmer revival movement (e.g. Andy Statman) nor the kind of fusion record that combines the klezmer neshuma (soul) with contemporary adulterations (think, Klezmatics). I sat down across from Brad in his basement studio and we started to play a klezmer tune, he played in a very simple traditional style and I stopped and said I want something freer. He climbed up on his high horse and said he wasn't used to being told how to play. I packed up my flute, and Brad saw the money for the record date about to walk out the door. I spotted it in his face and I said 'let's just play free.' I took out my flute and we played for about 15 minutes, it was a natural. On the way out he said, 'why don't you write out some changes for the tunes you want to do.' I had been there before with Romero, who said the same thing after we ran through the baioã for Jazz World Trios. Jazz musicians are a funny breed. Guitar players, like piano players, live through chord changes, so if I was to win his confidence I had to be good at what he was good at, finding interesting harmonies. Go figure!

I had been in heavy writing mode when I recorded Three Deuces and I had just played Hermeto Pascoal's delightful and innovative harmonic explorations on Tudo do Bom. I sat down with the material and asked myself the following question, 'if there had been no Holocaust, and if klezmer musicians had been free to develop their music for the last 50 years, hearing and being influenced by jazz, what might it sound like? I was inspired and wrote interesting chords, finding clues as to the direction in the traditional music, linking different songs together with interesting harmonic interludes that would be the basis for improvisation. We did the recording. Brad had flown in that morning from a concert in Israel and he had picked up an airplane respiratory problem, and had a hacking cough, but he played magnificently. Mike bowed some melodies that are among the most beautiful examples of bowed bass I have ever heard on a jazz record. Jamey was perfect, simultaneously playing traps and frame drums, without ever missing a beat. I played my heart out and dedicated the album to the memory of my mother Mollie Weinstein. The picture is Momma and her four children, June, me, Cy and Marcia.

My son Jack the philosophy professor complained that my blog doesn't explain the philosophy behind my music. I rarely mix philosophy and music, but it's about time. The experience recording Shifra Tanzt concretized what I started doing in the original Cuban Roots and would become the self-conscious basis for what I have recorded since. I am a white musician who has made his mark playing Afro-Cuban music. I was raised as a white kid in public housing and had internalized the prerogatives of Black musicians to play jazz with a sense of entitlement. When I play Cuban or Brazilian music I don't mimic the traditional flute style. Both Brazilian and Cuban music use flute extensively and have distinctive flute styles. In Cuban music it is charanga in Brazil choro. I don't like to play charanga flute since it is very harmonically limited and relies on the top octave of the flute in order to be heard clearly. Although I record choros on my Brazilian albums I am not a choro player, they have classical technique and don't improvise very much. Instead I play like I own the music and so am free to be as innovative as I want to be. But I always play with great respect for the tradition. I don't play jazz to Cuban tunes, I play jazz with Cuban tunes, transforming the original through a jazz consciousness, but never losing the essence of the music I am transforming. This is something I learned from how Charlie Mingus would transform traditional jazz and blues into his magic music. Mingus more than anyone fits his music to the underlying composition. He doesn't just play bebop on changes, he rethinks what the music has at its heart and invents a new way of expressing the musical core. And so his music is never stereotypical, always changing and with perfect integrity. When I found harmonies for the traditional tunes in Shifra Tanzt I was not a musicologist trying to recreate what had been done. I was a modern musician in conversation with a musical tradition, a modern musician with a jazz sensibility. My music is rooted in the New York jazz scene. And I accept its standards: you have to be able to really play your instrument, you have to have a complete mastery of bebop harmony and beyond, you have to swing, and most important, you have to have something to say. The roots of my music is the music of the world that I love. I always look for musicians who play traditional music with profound knowledge and respect. But they know that when they play it with me it will be something different.

losing control

2008-09-22T10:45:00.000-07:00

I had been feeling sick in LA. I put it off to tension. And I kept on getting sick, fevers and pains on my left side. I felt Cuban Roots Revisited didn't reflect my playing and I wanted to play jazz. I got my three favorite guitar players, Ed Cherry, Vic Juris and Paul Meyers to each record four tunes in a duet format. Ed played electric, Vic steel string and Paul classical guitar. I wrote a number of originals, some of which I like so much that I have recorded them again. My next album out on Jazzheads is Lua e Sol, with Romero, Cyro and Nilson. Lua e Sol, the title tune was originally recorded with Paul Meyers on my duet album, Three Deuces. I recently rerecorded another tune from the album, Dawn's Early Light with Kenny Barron. It was easy to record Three Deuces, we just sat down and played, very relaxed and very conversational. Each guitar player approached the problem of being the entire rhythm section differently. And they all did it superbly. The album has 13 tunes. On the run through of my tune Last Minute Blues, Ed Cherry and I got so into exploring the substitutions I wrote that we recorded for over 13 minutes. Jazz World Trios got very little radio play, Seasoning got a fair amount of play, given it was my first album as a flutist. Jazz World Trios got far less. The tracks were too long. I wasn't going to do that again so I recorded a 4 minute version of the tune that did get airplay. But I liked the free exploration with Ed so much I added it as a 13th track. Bad luck! Within a few months I was in the hospital having a foot and a half of colon removed, diverticulitis, at least it wasn't cancer.

My father Jack came to this country when he was 5, in 1903 from the Kiev region in Ukraine. He was the youngest of 10 children. The entire family came, landed in Philadelphia and opened a grocery store. My mother, Mollie, on the other hand, left her village, Hrubshief in Poland, alone with some 'landsleit' (that's what diaspora Jews call people from the same area) traveled overland and left on a boat from Rotterdam in 1913. She was 13 years old. Her father had come to New York a few years earlier, earned enough to bring his oldest daughter to 'keep house' for him. And of course to earn money to bring over the family. My Grandma Rose and the other 5 kids couldn't get out because of WW I. My grandfather and mother had plenty of time to save the money to bring them over. My mother made straw hats. I am named after my mother's grandfather, Meyir in Hebrew , he was a house painter and ultimately either saved or destroyed my father by helping him to become one as well.

I always wondered how my father's family pulled it off. A dozen steamship tickets and enough money left over to set up a house and buy a store. They were working people (in America most of my father's brothers became contractors) and workers in Russia didn't get rich. I didn't know my father's side of the family since my father had a 'bruygis' with his older brothers, that is, one of those dark Russian angers that keeps one brother from talking to another for 20 years. Funerals are where you reconcile a bruygis, if at all. But my oldest sister Marcia, who lived on Long Island had been a member of the cousins club. So one day I asked her how Daddy's family could afford the trip to America. Marcia said, 'Daddy's father was a horse trader and he sold a whole bunch of horses twice.' So there it is. Jews like to brag that they come from a long line of Rabbis. But I get to say that I am the proud descendant of horse thieves.

My father's family left Ukraine to escape from the anti-Jewish riots (pogroms) of the 1890's . So Ukraine was up there with Germany as places I could do without. But my university had a relationship with a pedagogical academy in Ukraine and a number of Ukrainian professors were at the college involved in a program to connect models of critical thinking with their need to develop a basis for democratic education. I was the associate director of an institute for critical thinking and I was expected to participate. Somehow I managed to avoid the whole thing until the end of the academic year, close to the time the visiting professors were due to return. I got roped into giving a talk. Afterwards, Alex, one of the professors told me that he had heard I played jazz and that he was the DJ for the only jazz radio program in Ukraine. I became much more open to things Ukrainian. Plus he was a great guy, as was the other Ukrainian professor, but they were on their way back home. I gave Alex copies of all of my albums.

About six months later I got an email. Alexey Kharchenko a Ukrainian composer and friend of Alex's had heard Jazz World Trios and he had been inspired to write a series of compositions for flute, guitar and piano. He sent me an mp3 of the music, with the flute part played on the keyboard. It was lovely, but strange, a sort of smooth jazz song, a tango, and a modernistic circus-like composition. Everything had a very dark edge (horror movies about children's dolls gone bad) but the melodies were beautiful. It was all composed, not a note of improvisation. He wanted me to help him become known in America.

There was going to be a big conference on democracy in education in Kiev the following Spring (2003) and if I participated I would get a plane ticket on the college. I emailed Alex, the DJ professor, and asked him how much it would be to record in Kiev. He said $20 an hour and I told him the dates and to have Alexey set up the other musician and the studio to record his music. I told the folks at my college they could count on me to present at the conference. Staying in Kiev to record after the conference posed a problem. I can't speak or read Russian and they use another alphabet so you can't even guess whether it's the Gents or the Ladies bathroom, During the conference the folks from the college were going to be put up in a conference hotel where everyone spoke English. I made a deal with the people from my college. I would give an extra day of workshops on implementing critical thinking in the classroom if they would arrange for me to stay in the conference hotel for an extra week.

I told Alex to tell Kharchenko to write out lead sheets (melody and chords) for some of his tunes and that we would improvise on them, just like Jazz World Trios and that I would not play the complex written flute parts that he had played on the mp3 (wouldn't because I thought I couldn't, to be perfectly honest). I was told by Alex that Kharchenko understood completely. We were going to play jazz with his compositions, rather then play the compositions per se.

The conference went well. I loved the food (my mother learned to cook from my father's mother, so Ukrainian food is my 'hamische tahm,' the taste of my mother's home). I gave my workshop. The day before the end of the conference, Alex and Alexey came to my hotel room. Alexey Kharchenko spoke no English. He gave me a stack of music paper in plastic covers. I glanced at them quickly. They were written in pencil on small sheets of manuscript paper, full piano scores with the flute part written into the treble clef over the piano part and with chord symbols that I barely understood (it was a German notation that I finally figured out how to read). The flute parts looked really difficult (they were what he had played on the mp3). I put the music away and gave my final workshop.

The next morning everyone was packing to leave the conference hotel, except for me. I was starting to panic about the recording. After breakfast, as the college folks were walking to the buses that would take them to the airport the woman that I had arranged everything with came over to me and told me she was very sorry, but I couldn't stay in the conference hotel since I was no longer participating in a conference. I freaked! She told me that Alex would make arrangements for me in one of the two hotels in Kiev open to foreigners. I laid down on a bench with a cigar and put my hat over my face (the picture above). Kharchenko showed up about a half hour later and said, 'the sun is shining bright,' that was the English he remembered from school. That was all the English he remembered from school. I got my stuff, we got in a cab and went to a hotel. They let me register, Alex was there with the necessary papers. I could barely understand the desk clerk who supposedly spoke English. I was on my own in Ukraine and had the stack of unintelligible music to deal with. We were to start recording the next day.

We went to the studio by subway. It became an elevated train as it crossed the Dneiper River. There was a beach and an amusement park. The train was full of families with blankets and lunch baskets. It was like my childhood on the BMT Culver line going to Coney Island. I felt at home. I was wearing a skull cap, and more than once someone walking by would whisper 'Shalom.' It turns out Ukrainians are part-Jewish like white southerners are part-black, it's a family secret that is almost bragged about, sort of like being descended from horse thieves.

The recording was very difficult, I had lost control of the process. After the first tune I realized it would take every day I had available to record and mix. I had 10 hundred dollar bills (the preferred currency in Ukraine) and I knew it would all be gone before I left, even at $20 an hour. We negotiated how I could play solos by extending sections of the compositions, but I had to play the written flute parts. Somehow I managed to and the music has a sweet charm that has resulted in a number of visual artists using the album as the sound track for electronic portfolios with Eastern European themes. Milling Time, the name of one of Kharchenko's tunes is my third album on flute. It was a great experience, returning to my father's birthplace and I had gained a great deal of confidence as a flutist. I had dealt with complex written music, something I dreaded. I am probably the only flute player on the planet that doesn't practice from etude books. I always hated to play classical pieces, because I could never tolerate how lousy the music sounded while I was learning to play the piece. I practice the basics like a classical flutist, hours of long tones and hours of scales and arpeggios, but I never play the classical repertoire and have never really learned to be comfortable playing complex music as written.

My next project would be another one that got out of hand. Milling Time was a sweet record and I'm glad I did it (I dedicated it to the memory of my father). But is was useless as a career move. It was too idiosyncratic and not really a jazz record. I decided to take another look at Brazilian music. Romero was much too busy to rely on and I wanted a guitarist that I could build an ongoing relationship with. I found out about Richard Boukas, an excellent guitarist and fine musician, a student of Brazilian music. Richard organized the Brazilian section at the New School University jazz program. I sent him Jazz World Trios and asked him if he would put an album together for me. The great and innovative Brazilian composer Hermeto Pascoal had, upon reaching 60 years of age, set himself the task of writing a song every day for 365 days. The result was published in manuscript form as the Calendário do Som. Richard suggested that we do an entire album of compositions from the Calendário and set himself the task of translating Hermeto's obscure chord notations into arrangements for the quartet. Hermeto combines standard chord symbols in layers that don't have names, but once you understand how to read them it shows the voicing (arrangement of notes) he wants and they always sound wonderful. Richard hired Nilson Matta to play bass and Paulo Braga to play drums. He picked the very best musicians! Nilson and I have recorded three more albums and Paulo recorded another album with me before he moved back to Brazil.

Boukas had very clear ideas about how he wanted to bass and drums to play. Everything was carefully arranged and notated. Nilson and Paulo were annoyed by the constraints and there were moments in the 2 days of recording where I thought things would blow up in my face. We finished the recording and I was reasonably happy with the results. Richard is a great guitar player and although it was no Jazz World Trios in terms of spontaneity and musical interaction, it sounded fine. I would have to fix parts here and there, the music was very difficult, but the tracks were clear and I had played through the material as I felt it should be played. After the session was completed Richard asked me if he could double some of melodies on guitar (something typical of Brazilian music that frequently has a number of different guitars in a single ensemble). He also wanted to add his voice as another instrument. Richard has amazing ears and he can sing anything written with perfect intonation. Plus there is a tradition in Brazilian jazz to have guitar players sing while they play and especially sing along with their solos, without using words, but choosing syllables that give it that special Brazilian drive. I booked the studio for another day.

When Boukas tried add the guitar to double the melody I had played, he decided he didn't like the way I phrased it. I had my flute so after he recorded the melody I tried to match his phrasing exactly. It took the better part of an hour. When Boukas says exactly, he means exactly, and I'm a free player who likes to take liberties with phrasing. We took a break and the engineer called me over. He said, 'you have a really nice record, if you get involved with Boukas it will take forever and cost you a fortune.' I had to make a choice. I got involved with Boukas. We rerecorded just about everything I had played to meet Boukas' ever more specific ideas of how the music should be played. Boukas was on a roll. He added layer after layer of guitars, big guitars, little guitars, an electric guitar (he had played on a classical guitar for the basic session) a steel-string guitar, banjo and an electronic effect that made the guitar sound like a Brazilian button accordian (a semphona). This took days and days. I had to leave for a week-long argumentation conference in Amsterdam. Boukas asked me if he could record voice over-dubs and percussion while I was gone. In for a penny, in for a pound! I said yes. When I got back he had recorded voice melodies over my flute melodies (frequently already doubled by guitar), he had recorded multiple voices as a chorus, he had song along with his guitar solos and had hired a percussionist to put in percussion colors and effects. The flute ended up being buried. He had spent about as much time (and therefore money) recording while I was away as everything we had done since the basic session. And all of those layers were recorded separately so mixing would be a nightmare, and would take forever and so would cost an additional arm and a leg.

By the time we finished mixing, including micro-tuning instruments where the intonation didn't live up to a standard of accuracy that Boukas alone may hear, I was broke and Boukas was wiped out emotionally. He had a very rough patch for a pretty long time beginning the last day of mixing. He told me that I shouldn't feel responsible, I didn't. He had spent my money like it was going out of style and the result was an album in which, although any single track sounded great, the total album was not what it should have been, given the wonderful music and the great musicians. Boukas' layered arrangements were structurally repetitious and ultimately not very interesting as one tune followed another along the very same sequence of musical ideas. Although there were lots of instrumental colors, most beautifully selected, almost every tune started small with a flute melody (sometimes doubled by guitar) and then got more and more acoustically complex, layers of guitars, percussion and voice and then, the big finish, with Boukas' multi-tracked singing. The album, Tudo de Bom, cost me more to make than any album I ever made before or since. And I learned my lesson. After Dan Weinstein, Alexey Kharchenco and Richard Boukas I would never lose control of a recording again. My wife Lesley had left before the Boukas recording. When we would discuss finances she would always say to me, 'you just don't understand money.' As unhappy as I was when she left, I was relieved that I didn't have to confront her with what Boukas' project cost me.

family matters

2008-09-21T13:51:00.000-07:00

My nephew Dan Weinstein is a great musician working out of LA and more important he is a successful musician, using the musician's tried and true standard for success, he supports his family playing music. Dan plays trombone and violin and any other instrument he can put his hands on. My older brother Cy, a trombone player himself, tried desperately to keep Dan from playing the trombone. He had seen what happened to me after he gave me my first lesson, taking the trombone out of the case, putting it together, taking it apart and putting it back in the case (it was his trombone after all). When he let me take his trombone out for the second lesson I played the damn thing and didn't stop for the next 15 or so years. He wasn't going to let that happen to his first-born son, hence a violin as soon as Dan could hold one up. But Danny got a baritone horn as soon as he was old enough to play in a school band that had brass instruments, changed to trombone as fast as he could and saw himself as a trombone player ever since. Although he is one hell of a fiddle player and a great arranger.

That's Cy, 2nd from the left in the picture next to his youngest son David, a math professor. I'm to Cy's right and Dan is holding Julie his daughter, who now, at 9 years old, is already a great flute player. Cy's eldest, my niece Nancy, plays flute as well, as did my sister June.

After Jazz World Trios I thought success was inevitable. Plus a track from Cuban Roots had been included in a prestigious compilation record of the most important Latin jazz recordings of the 60's. Dan was recording with a number Latin bands for a company called Cubop out of San Francisco. Cubop wanted to rerelease Cuban Roots but couldn't get anywhere with the company that had the master. So through Dan, Cubop asked me if I could recreate the album. I told them it was impossible since I no longer played trombone, but I would record the same material for them with another ensemble. I sent the company Jazz World Trios and they gave me a $10,000 budget to come to LA and record. Dan was to co-produce it with me, get the guys and write half of the arrangements. I had made some arrangement sketches a few years back for a singer who wanted a band with 3 trombones and flute. That was the ticket. The trombones would give it a connection to the original Cuban Roots, and give a lush background for the flute. LA is a center for Cuban folkloric drumming, so the pieces could easily fall into place. I let Danny know what I had come up with and he liked the idea. The plan was that I would write 5 charts and Dan write 5 ; it would by Weinstein x 2, a joint venture and a glorification of family and music.

I wrote my five charts. I extended the role of the trombones in a novel way, as compared to the standard use of trombones in salsa bands. I used the bass trombone extensively and wrote rich harmonies forming a chorus against which the flute played melodies, for call and response in the tradition of Cuban folk music, as well as the more standard riffs behind the flute solos. I left room for Dan to play solos and sent the 5 charts out to Danny sometime in November. He was a professional copyist (it was a bit early to expect people to use music writing programs) so he had quite a but of work to do: write 5 arrangements, copy out the parts from my 5 scores, find musicians, book a recording studio and get me a motel room. But remember, Dan is a successful musician and that takes some doing, so Dan doesn't have a lot of time to spare. If he is not performing, he is rehearsing, or writing arrangements or copying out parts, or spending a minute or two with his kids or helping his father get around.

It was after New Years in 1999 and I had a few weeks off after winter holidays and before the Spring semester began. So I booked a flight to LA. We had 8 days to do the session. I couldn't ask Danny for more time, he had a living to make. I got to the motel he booked for me, conveniently next to the musician's union, Local 47, which is surprisingly alive and well as compared to the once legendary Local 802 in NYC, which gained noteriety for striking right after WWII putting the record companies and Broadway shows out of business until they won a better deal for working musicians (those were the days). Local 47 had free rehearsal facilities that were heavily used by big bands to rehearse, but we could find smaller rooms to rehearse the trombones in and I would have a place to practice if the motel complained about my playing in the room.

I landed in LA in the morning on Saturday and went to the motel. Dan showed up with an armful of music paper and his two daughters (Julie is his younger daughter. Her older sister Gabriela play trumpet). We took the girls to lunch and I asked him how things were going. He said things were on track, but I had to meet Francisco Aguabella who was going to organize the drummers. Francisco is a legend among Cuban drummers, famous for his carnival performances in pre-Castro Cuba. Francisco had also played with Eddie Palmieri when I was back with the band right after I had recorded Cuban Roots. Eddie's solo trombone player Barry Rogers had left the band during one of his many attempts to disconnect. So I got to play all of the solos and Francisco was added as a second conga drummer, so the band was moving in the direction of 'heavy drumming,' the calling card of Cuban Roots. I thought Francisco would remember me. Dan, however, was supposed to have booked the musicians before I got there; but we had 8 days, no sweat. He had talked up the date among the guys and had the right musicians on tap. I spent some time with my brother and the family and went back to the hotel and crashed.

The next morning Dan showed up with his music paper and he told me he was busy all day and he would meet me later. He wanted to take me around to meet the guys, a musician imperative when a visiting musician comes to town, especially one who had some special status. And after I left the business, I was given all of the respect owed to the dead for conceiving of and recording Cuban Roots. Dan was very anxious to show off Uncle Mark. So that night we hung out. It was Sunday, the studio was booked for Wednesday and Thursday. Since I would be pre-occupied during the recording, I would play my parts during the basic recording session, but I scheduled Friday morning to fix my parts and especially my solos. That gave most of Friday to mix and all day Saturday. I have to catch a plane on Sunday to be back to teach on Monday. I met Francisco at a doughnut shop on Sunday morning. He remembered me and we talked about some summer concerts we played in Harlem the greatest moments of my trombone playing days with Eddie's band. And with Francisco in place, Dan knew who else to call. We would record secular music on the first day, rumba and comparsa, where the drummers would play conga drums and the second day for toques do Santo on which they would play bata.

Michael McFadin, the owner of Cubop, asked if we would use Cuban pianist Omar Sosa on the date as well as percussionist John Santos. They were the leading Latin musicians in San Francisco and were both going to be in LA for a jazz convention. I couldn't be happier with the additions. And their presence eventually was the key the the records musical success. Omar contributed the finest music played at the session and John who is perfect gentleman, was willing to play the basic rhythm on the claves, palitos (sticks that keep time for rumba) and cow bell, instead of vying for the limelight. Most important, he could calm tempers whenever the egos of the drummers clashed, something that is all too common when you have 5 drummers in a room playing together

Sunday night Danny had a gig that he wanted me to sit in on, so the rest of Sunday was spent with my brother, Dan's family and doing the gig. On the way to the gig I discovered that Dan hadn't done any of his arrangements or any of copying. That was all of the music paper he had been carrying around. He had planned to write every spare minute, but there were very few minutes to spare and so little or nothing was done. Dan assured me that this was no problem since he wrote without a piano and so could write or copy parts anywhere.

It also turned out the trombone players couldn't rehearse until Tuesday and the parts I wrote were both atypical and difficult, requiring nuance and blend, which is not a strong suit of Latin trombone playing. There was no question about rehearsing drummers, that just couldn't happen and Omar and John wouldn't be there until Tuesday night anyway. I started to get very nervous.

I spent Monday practicing and having a repair man look at my alto flute, more to kill time then for anything. Tuesday Dan showed up only to tell me he had a big band rehearsal at the union rehearsal hall during the afternoon and that some old friends were in the band that wanted to see me. We would rehearse the bones that evening. He had copied out the trombone parts for my 5 charts, but still had only sketched out one part of one of the 5 arrangements he was supposed to write. It was my trombone solo on a tune I wrote for Cuban Roots called Just Another Guajira harmonized for the three trombones, sort of an homage to his uncle. I was touched, it was a labor of love, but I was getting pissed. We had 5 half copied charts, a chorus of another and we had to record the next day. After hanging out with some old friends that had relocated to LA, Dan and I went into a small rehearsal room with the two other trombone players. They were great players and Dan is a clear copyist, they played through the parts, fixed notes, discussed phrasing, but basically didn't get anywhere near the familiarity that would let them play music in the high pressure situation of recording. Plus I was the only one who had a sense of how complex 5 Cuban drummers get when they are playing rumba and trying to impress each other with the depth of their bag, (that is, able to play things that are surprising and difficult to execute, yet correct in the highly stylized context of Cuban folkloric drumming). Drummers with deep bags make horn players lose the beat. And we had five drummers in the studio, playing their kind of music. I was really worried! Plus after the rehearsal Dan asked me about the chords I had used on one of the two tunes he was to have arranged. I was worried and I was pissed, he hadn't started the other 4 arrangements that I was counting on.

We got to the studio Wednesday at noon, Danny had been copying all night and had finished most of my arrangements and his arrangement for Just Another Guajira. The three charts of mine were for the first day, as was Just Another Guajira, so we were ready to record. I had met John Santos and Omar the night before and we made a solid connection. John had tremendous respect for Cuban Roots and Omar trusted John. Danny felt he could only finish two more arrangements and the remaining copying Wednesday night. So even it he got everything done we were a tune short of the 10 tunes we had promised Cubop. So we decided that the drummers would do an additional solo piece, setting the proper tone for the project by playing in the rhythm for Ellegua, which is the official way to open a serious musical offering. Ellegua opens the door and many of the people in the room, including me, took that very seriously. Dan had asked to write the chart for Ellegua, but he hadn't even started it. So letting the drummers play was a perfect solution, we could eventually use the drum version of Elegua at the end of the recording (to close the door and mark the recording over), use Dan's orchestrated version to start the record once it was written, and still begin the recording session with the proper respect for the religious music that was the heart of the project. The drummers sounded great, Omar was inspired and we dealt with the first arrangement, a classic rumba called Malanga. After the usual discussion about how to address the clave, we recorded. The drummers sounded great, the bass player Carlitos Del Puerto, son of the Cuban bassist with Irakere, Carlos Del Puerto, connected the drummers to the horn section and Omar played magnificently. He invented a way to play piano with the rich arrangements and sophisticated drumming that was a mixture of Count Basie, Chick Corea and the best of the Cuban piano tradition. He found beautiful harmonic extensions in support of what I had written, played with exquisite taste and tremendous swing, playing a delicate passage behind the horns and then levitating the drummers with a killer vamp (or 'guajeo,' the term for the repetitious figures that Cuban dance band pianists player). Omar played sequences of guajeos matching the shifting drum patterns and addressing the melodies and modern harmonies of my arrangements for the trombones.

The trombones sounded pretty awful, having a hard time playing in tempo with the complex drumming. We kept the bones low in the drummers' headphone mix so as not to throw them off time. All I could focus on was how the horns players were messing up my beautiful arrangements. And we couldn't really do more than one or two takes since we would lose the spontaneity of the drummers who were playing each take as if their lives depended on it. 'Don't worry we will fix the bones in over-dubs,' was the refrain. I played adequately showed Omar and the drummers the kinds of things I was going to play in my solos and was very grateful that I had built time in the recording schedule for me to fix my parts. I knew that I might have to do almost everything I played over again, but I had a whole morning set aside to do it.

The drummers needed a bit of a break from the intensity of the first two tunes and I wanted the trombone players to get their confidence back. Dan had taken a decent trombone solo on Malanga, but when he brought the trombones in with vamp (called a muña) to push the flute solo, he misunderstood the drum pattern and brought it in across the clave (the ultimate sin for a horn section in a Latin band). I wasn't sure how we could fix that since it was loud and probably picked up by the mikes on the drum tracks. The trombones where in a booth facing the drummers who were spread out across the studio floor. Omar and I were in seperate booths at the other end the studio and Carlitos was between Omar and the drummers with his electric base going directly into the board. The drums had about ten mikes and a few of them were pretty close to the trombones, and booths are not sound-proof. This wouldn't be a problem if we had to fix wrong notes in the trombones by overdubbing after the session was over. When you fix wrong notes the new note goes in the same place as the wrong one so the echo of the wrong one is covered up. But if you replace something in another place the slight sound of the original recording is likely to be heard, but life goes on. The time in Malanga gets spacey when the trombones come in, 'crossed' against the clave, behind my flute solo, but the tune sounds great anyway. But for now the trombone players were feeling pretty uncomfortable.

Dan had finished the chart for Just Another Guajira the night before, basically rewriting the original melodies and back-up figure. But he did have the ensemble harmonization of my trombone solo that the trombone players had rehearsed, and that is just the sort of playing that these great trombone players could do with panache. They could read and had great technique, and the complex and coordinated playing required to recreate a solo by a brass section is what horn players take the greatest pride in. This was the way to get the trombones back on track and enable them to regain the confidence of the other musicians. They did a great job and Dan's writing and their playing is quite impressive. Just Another Gaujira had another advantage as the next tune of the date. The drum part was fun and easy, a guajira is the simplest kind of cha cha beat and it swings. And the piano and bass parts were equally familiar and even routine, except for some interesting harmonies that make the tune something special to play. This was a tune to make everyone relaxed. But there was a problem.

Chick Corea had played the original recorded version of the tune on Cuban Roots and Danny wanted Omar to play what Chick had played behind the horn parts. Dan hadn't written out the piano part, just sketched the chords and Omar had just constructed an amazing role for the piano to play on Malanga. Plus, he was a little pissed at the trombones since he had had to listen to them to hear where he could add figures and contrasting harmonies, and he knew that they had screwed up. So he was in no mood to listen when Danny came into his recording booth, sat next to him on the piano and starting banging out his version of Chick's part. Omar started to get annoyed and told Danny to back off. Dan got on his high horse and said he was the arranger and that he wanted Omar to play what Chick Corea had played. Omar said, 'So call Chick Corea,' and for a minute I thought the record date was over. Fortunately lunch came, Pollo Loco for all, and everyone went to eat. Dan went to copy arrangements and Omar sat in his booth with his ear phones on. I was across the studio in my booth with my ear phones on (I had been listening in horror to their conversation which was picked up by the open mikes). I had my flute in my hands and Omar started to play. He played a phrase and I played something in response. We played like that without looking at each other for about 10 minutes. We stopped and came out of our booths. I said to him in Spanish, 'that's how you play on my record, whatever you feel.' We went to eat chicken.

The rest of the recording went pretty much the same. The high point of the second day was Danny playing a lovely violin solo on the toque for Ochun, Danny's patron saint. Danny had wanted to write the arrangement but only had enough time to writes out a simple harmonization of the melody based on the Cuban Roots original (He did write a brilliant arrangement for Ellegua that starts the album with beauty and love). He compensated for the lack of written horn parts by making it a piano and violin feature. Dan is a great violin player and him and Omar rose to the occasion, put bad blood behind them and played their asses off. But mainly, Danny was copying parts (he had piano and bass parts for two more of my charts to do and his entire arrangement for Ellegua). He wasn't taking breaks and generally raising the tension level, writing at the table, while the guys were having lunch. Inevitably there were copying errors and Danny was rewriting parts while as we were recording. The trombones were getting through the charts but with some real problems. The drummers were having a ball, Omar was having a good time and I was just waiting until I could get into the studio on Friday and play without tension and with full concentration. Carlitos, the bass player, had a very high paying record date the second day and sent in a sub, Eddie Resto, who did a wonderful job playing the toques do Santo. The $10,ooo was just enough to pay studio costs and minimal money for the musician; Carlitos just couldn't afford to turn down the date. Danny did all of his arranging and copying for free, making the same money as the guys and I paid for all of my living expenses and flight. All in all, Cubop got their money's worth. A reasonable budget for the date would have been at least $15,000 and we should have had at least another day of mixing time. 'Whatever,' as they say.

The music was all recorded that Thursday and Friday was to be my day to relax and concentrate on my playing. But there were trombone parts to fix. Danny decided that rather than bring back the trombone players he would over-dub all of the parts himself. He also decided to play bass trumpet on a tune that was supposed to be his trombone feature, a comparsa called El Barracón, for which he had memorized a trumpet solo by the legendary Cuban trunpet player, La Florecita, recorded on probably the best folkloric record to ever come out of pre-Castro Cuba, Festival in Havana. Barry Rogers had made my buy that record when I first joined Eddie Palmieri's band so that I would know the 'real deal.' That record has been my touchstone ever since. Danny nailed the trumpet solo on bass trumpet, but spent quite a bit of time playing his own solo, trying to bring it up to the sublime level of the classic solo he had played as an introduction before the band brings in the melody.

By the time Danny had recorded what needed to be done to fix the trombone parts, including at least a half hour on his bass trumpet solo, I was fuming. It was in the afternoon, he had been working for hours and I had to rerecord flute parts and do the basic mix. I went off! I have had three physical encounters in my life. In the second grade someone knocked my pencils off my desk and we got into a little kid fight in which the kid stabbed me on the wrist with a pencil (a blue dot which I will proudly show to anyone, my only mark of valor). The other two were involved with my first wife when I was in my twenties. Some guys had made an unflattering remark about my soon to be wife and I, enraged, pushed one of them in the gutter. The real fight was when I jumped off the bandstand and attacking a guy who had made her laugh during a period when I was breaking her heart (I had confessed to an affair and told her I wanted to leave, we had a kid instead. Ah youth!). As Danny was packing up something he said made me lose it. I started to scream at Danny that he had fucked up my recording, that he was irresponsible, that he was an unreliable low-life mother fucker and push came to shove. The engineer broke us up before a blow was struck (we are musicians after all and who would risk a broken finger or a busted lip just to prove a point) and Danny left. I was sweating like a pig, white as a sheet and with my blood sugar down to nothing. I was trembling and dizzy and I had to record the flute parts and solos on more than a few tunes. I tried to play but couldn't get any breath support for the sound. Someone in the studio gave me a banana and some orange juice and I played through my parts an redid some solos in an hour or so. It is not my best playing, but as they say, it has moments. We started mixing and called it quits about 10 at night and left the rest for the next day. The engineer was marvelous. It was before pro-tools, but he had a computer automated board and so he could save his EQ's and section balances from tune to tune. This saved a lot of time, but it meant that once he had a balance for the three trombones that balance was used for all of the tunes and the same for the two drum ensembles, congas the first day, bata drums the second. Unfortunately that robbed the trombone parts of a lot of nuance, but miraculously the drums sounded great. The album, Cuban Roots Revisited, is among the best recording of folkloric drums to come out of the US. The horns are another story.

Saturday night, when I got back to my motel I listened to the tape dub of the finished record and I cried. It was very close, but no cigar. On the plane I listened to it over and over and knew exactly what I needed to do to fix the mix. The studio had sent a tape dub up to Cubop and after a few days I called Michael McFadin and told him we didn't have enough time to do the mix justice and I would pay to fly out and remix. He said he liked the mix. Cuban Roots Revisited was done. I swore I would never do a record without enough time to mix and remix if necessary, that I would never record on too small a budget, that I would never rely on another musician and that I would never mix family and music, that is record with Danny. Lot's of luck! I'd would even love to do another project with Dan if he had the time and inclination.

now or never

2008-09-18T11:30:00.000-07:00

The 1980's was no time to live in Washington Heights if you had proclivities towards self-destruction. I was going through hard times. Faith, my toothsome sweetie was gone, living out her fantasy, going to India and ending up married in Bali. Sioux, my teenage dream girl, had gone off to the Rainbow Family after an all too brief year of great fun and romance. And the most beautiful one of all, a Punjabi women who must remain nameless, one of the great loves of my life, had finished her year and a half dalliance with sex and the seamier side of life and moved on to her proper station in life. I had gone bankrupt in 1980, pulled a job out of a hat thanks to Philosophy for Children, and was running around the city, first by subway and bus, then with my ex-father in law's trusty 1976 Dodge Dart, putting together a living as an educational consultant. The only 'club date' philosopher I knew, waiting until August to see if I had enough contracts to survive another school year. In the mid 80's my best friend Jerry had succumbed to the white beast in California and I let him live with me, when his choice was leave Santa Cruz or go to jail. Suffice it to say between Jerry and Washington Heights I was sunk. I met Lesley, my second wife, at the World Congress of Philosophy in Brighton, England in 1988 and grabbed onto her like the proverbial drowning man and the life-saver (she was to melt away after 11 years, but saved my life in the meantime).

My trouble behind me, ensconced in a beautiful house, built in 1902, in Glen Ridge NJ with a tenured position and two incomes, mine and Lesley's, I decided it was now or never. It was 1995, I was 55 years old, had been playing non-stop for 20 years, and Montclair NJ (next door to Glen Ridge) is a place to be if you want to be a jazz musician. The Dean I worked under was an ex-drummer and when he found out about my playing jazz he told me that Chris White was teaching jazz at the College. Chris had been the bass player at the first jam session I ever went to in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn when I was still in high school. And musicians never forget musicians. I called up Chris and he gave me a lesson. Chris is an all-time great teacher, who finds just what a student needs. I had plenty of chops and could play changes fine. He knew I played with Jamey Aebersold records. His advice to me was that when I practice with the records, I should play cliches. His example of a cliche was 'Happy Birthday.' He also told me to listen to women singers. It was perfect advise. I had to play melodies and I had to project a sound worth listening to.

Chris and I rehearsed a few time with a quartet with the great guitarist Jimmy Ponder and a drummer friend of his and I got a sense of how it felt to play with the 'big boys.' The college offered a performance opportunity. I got to play in the art gallery for openings, usually with bass and drums. Montclair was a cornucopia of musicians. One of my gallery gigs used Cecil Brooks III and Reggie Workman. Cecil was a great drummer and producer and he put together a rhythm section for me to record the four tune demo that became my first album, Seasoning. The quartet had Bryan Carrot on vibes and marimba and bassist Dwayne Dolphin. After the recording, Cecil pointed out that the days of 4 tune demos were gone forever. I liked the quartet tunes, but I felt I needed to do something out of the ordinary. There was a great little club in Montclair (now gone) that had guitar night on Wednesdays. New Jersey has always had a guitar players' scene and the two guitarists who alternated Wednesdays were among the best in New Jersey, Vic Cenicola and Vic Juris. Both of them played duos with another guitar player. Cenicola let horn players sit in. I became a regular at the session, but it was Juris who I was after. Vic Juris didn't let people sit in except for a few musicians he knew and I hadn't met him. He played with a fine young guitarist, a student of his Rob Reich. One Wednesday I called the club to see if Juris was playing and heard a flute player sitting on. I grabbed my flute and went down. Bob Ackerman, a local well-regarded sax player was playing flute with the duo. He had finished a solo and sat down at the bar, while the guitarists were still playing. I took out my flute and did the compare flutes thing that flute players do instead sniffing crotches (trombone players do mouthpieces). When the tune was over I walked up to the guitarists holding my flute, Vic glared at me, and I said 'let's play Stella.' We played Stella by Starlight, a tune that easily shows bebop skills, and Vic said, 'you know Cenicola is the jam session, not me.' I told him I was making a record and just wanted him to hear me play. Rob and Vic became the second rhythm section concept of Seasoning, flute and two guitars. And Vic Juris, Chris White and Cecil became the third concept. I had a finished album.

Vic was playing at the Blue Note and I was sitting at the bar talking to a nice old guy (whose name is lost to me). When I mentioned I had just recorded an album with Vic he told me that he had been associated with Concord Jazz and I laid a copy of Seasoning on him. After he heard it he offered to send it out to radio stations for me and gave me the bad news. Jazz CD's are expensive business cards. The main thing you do with them is give them away. He also told me about a Brazilian guitarist Romero Lubambo. I wish I could find out his name. He did me two really big favors and I'd love to thank him. He set my expectations low enough to survive the realities of being a jazz musician, as musicians used to say, 'he pulled my coat' and Romero was to become one of my favorite musicians to record with.

With Seasoning as a business card I was able to start working some gigs. The picture is Vic Juris, Chris White, Steve Berrios and me playing at Trumpets Jazz Club in Montclair in 1997. The three heads in front are my second wife Lesley and her parents, including my all time favorite father in law, Edmund who, 5 years older than me, Lesley was 18 years my junior, referred to me as 'the boy' during my first awkward visit to her family in England.

Jean Paul Bourelly had moved to Berlin and he had come to the states to pick up his van from his families home in Chicago and bring it to their new home in DC. He had a recording to do in New York and he asked me if he could leave his van in my driveway. I said 'sure' and asked him if he had time to record with me while he was in town. We had played some gigs and recorded two demo records in the past, but nothing had ever worked. Jean Paul knew about my interest in Cuban music and was very interested in African based music. When he got my place I played some folkloric records of Santeria music which he related to immediately. He recognized some of the melodies as songs he remembered his grandmother singing to him when he was a child (Santeria and Voudon share much of the same West-African heritage). I called Steve Berrios to play percussion. It was very short notice, Jean Paul only had a few days in town, and Steve was busy, so I called the master percussionist Milton Cardona who knew my history (I had done some arrangements for Milton of toques de Santo, the music played for the deities in Santeria). The three of us went into the studio and played two extended improvisations on the toques de Santo for Elegua and Babalu Aye. We recorded in a typical New Jersey basement studio run by a guitarist, Tony Vizcardo. Jean Paul only had an electric guitar with him, but I knew Tony had a number of acoustic guitars in the studio. Jean Paul decided to do the date on 12-string, which ended up being perfect for the music.

I got Romero Lubambo's phone number and asked him if he would consider recording a trio with me and a percussionist. I told him it would be part of an album that I had already begun with Jean Paul and Milton. That was good enough for him and we got together, picked tunes and discussed the concept. He called Cyro Baptista, a world class percussionist, who showed up with a van-full of amazing sounding percussion instruments that were the perfect complement to Romero's exquisite sounding hand-made classical guitar. I played the Jean Paul recording while we were setting up to show the guys what I wanted. We played two tunes, the first a 17 minute improvisation on a well-loved baioã, a classic example of music from the northeast of Brazil and a beautiful, but obscure bossa nova. I had 2/3rds of one of the most amazing recordings I have ever made, Jazz World Trios. I asked Jean Paul to recommend a bass player. He told me about Santi Debriano, who was to play with me on a number of other records. I played the music I had already recorded for Santi and he got Cindy Blackman to play drums. We played a 13 minute blues and an original composition of mine. Jazz World Trios was finished. I had touched the three kinds of music that I would focus on from then on, Brazilian, Cuban and post-bebop.

Jazz World Trios is a record I will always be proud of. It is wonderful music, but it was the experience of recording it that changed my life. I shouldn't have been able to pull it off. Jean Paul had never played with Cuban drummers. Milton seemed under the weather (he only had one conga drum, but fortunately the studio had a djembe). It turned out that he was suffering from a heart condition that would put him in the hospital soon after the recording. But Milton and Jean Paul hit if off musically and the music speaks for itself. Playing Brazilian music was even more of a stretch. I had never played authentic Brazilian music in my life. When I told Romero I wanted a folkloric tune he picked a baioã so fundamental to the genre that guys argue about what it is called and who wrote it. I had no idea of what a baoiã was! Romero and Cyro are masters of the genre and I had to play up to standard. I am quite content with the music we played.

But what stands out in my memory of the session, the experience that showed me what was up, was the first take of the recording session with Santi and Cindy. I was presenting a paper at a conference on argumentation theory at Alta, Utah and had a dream that I was a musician in the 30's and had written a hit song. I wrote down the melody of the song when I woke up, drawing the ledger lines on the manila envelope my paper was in. I wrote down the primeval blues melody that I named LKC Blues, my wife's initials and the name of our record company. I decided to record that with Santi as well as an art sung that I had written in Puerto Rico, on the road with a salsa band, when I was flirting with going to Juilliard to study composition. Playing a fundamental sounding blues is a tall order for anyone. Modern jazz musicians rarely mess with basic blues; that is Coltrane territory. I was dealing with musicians who had never played with me and playing the blues was coming on very strong. That was more pressure than the two earlier recording dates. Jean Paul and I went way back and we had the melodies we recorded in common. Romero had come by my house before the recording date with him and Cyro and we had played through the material. I had written some suggestions for harmonic development, so he knew the direction I wanted to go in. But I had never played note one with Santi or even met Cindy before. It was all or nothing! I told Santi to begin a medium blues with a classic bass line, 'like Sonny's Blue 7,' I said. I told Cindy to come in after the first chorus with press roll (the signature jazz technique first used by the New Orleans drummer Baby Dodds in the 1920's). She looked at me oddly. I said, 'let's run through it.' I played the deep blues melody from my dream, and as they say, 'took the music out.' They followed me like we had been playing every day for years and we never looked back. 13 minutes later the three of us walked into the booth to hear the take. Cindy looked at me and said 'we could never do that again.' I got religion! There was no way that I could have done that without some real help from G-d.

I am very much an ethnic Jew, but I was raised with no connection to the religion. My father was the kind of Russian-Jewish immigrant you rarely hear about, in and out of the army, a small time hood during prohibition and a manual laborer. That's why I was raised in the projects. My mother kept kosher until my brother came back from the Navy after WWII and wanted bacon and eggs for breakfast. We had Passover dinner and ate matzoh, but didn't even go to the synagogue on High Holidays. I had no Jewish education and since my father died when I was 12 1/2 never even had the sort of pseudo Bar Mitzvah that even secular Jews make their sons go through. But out of nowhere, when my son Jack hit 12 in 1981 I wanted him to have a Bar Mitzvah. I called up an old student, Emile Pincus, who had recently become a Bal Teshuvah (one who was returned to serious observance). Emile and his wife Helen were among the stalwarts who would support me by coming to my gigs and Emile had asked in return that I come to the West Side Minyan the first time he chanted Torah at the Sabbath service. I called Emile and asked him how Jack could become a Bar Mitzvah and he told me to come with him to services at the Minyan. We did for almost a year and the community was kind enough to let Jack (and me) be called up for an Aliya (Torah honors, the essential thing to become a Bar Mitzvah) and so both of us became a Bar Mitvah the same day. Jack, in typical 13 year old fashion stopped coming to shul (synagogue). I felt too obligated to stop, plus there was something about the shul that I needed. I was going through a rough period after breaking up with my Punjabi sweetheart. There were lots of cultural reasons why the relationship couldn't work, but at the heart of it was that I was a failure, a recent bankrupt, and a musician. She just couldn't present me to her family. And that really hurt! I could sit in the shul and cry, an old Jewish tradition. It wasn't only the crying that led me to sit in the back by myself. I was an illiterate in a community of knowledgeable Jews and very ambivalent about religion in a community of committed Jews. But I came most Saturdays, sat alone and didn't relate to the people. They accepted me anyhow. The West Side Minyan was an amazing place, egalitarian and participatory, full of brilliant women who were permitted to read Torah (many of whom went on to become women Rabbis, when that was finally possible) and equally wonderful men. When I left New York with my life back in shape I committed myself to strive to connect to Judaism. I joined a synagogue in Montclair, learned Hebrew and began to pray regularly. But it was recording Jazz World Trios that gave me my first real sense of religious connection. There is just no reason for me to have been able to record that album. The other musicians are so great, the improvisations are exceptionally long and rely on the musical performance for structure (the tunes don't have the complex changes that carry a soloist) and with very little experience other than with Jamey Aebersold play-alongs, I played up to the level of those guys and we made music from start to finish. I put a line from the Psalms on the cover of Jazz World Trios, as I do on all my recordings. And on the desk top of my computer is the statement of my deepest commitment to spirituality: there are no atheists in recording studios.

once more, from the top

2008-09-14T10:57:00.000-07:00

I had about 25 minutes of music completed when Bob Blank pulled the plug on the free studio time. He figured that with the two prayers and three instrumental tunes I had more than enough to get a recording contract. Bob's plan all along was that I submit it to the record company that wanted the disco single. He was convinced the disco would be a hit and the company would jump at the chance of putting out such a richly innovative recording. Little did we know. The disco flopped and the company had no interest in innovation. I tried unsuccessfully to get other record companies interested in giving me a record date with no luck at all. But I did get airplay on Roger Dawson's Sunday Salsa Show on NPR (something very rare in broadcasting) and eventually did a live show on WBAI with Lenny Lopate. Roger was very supportive, even making a pitch to record companies for me during the broadcast. He eventually used a minute of one of the tunes as his opening theme. But it was no use, nobody was interested in the record. Except musicians. Everyone that I played the music for thought it was worth pursuing, but that didn't give me the money to record the rest of the material, another prayer and another tunes worth of drumming, enough for the 45 minutes required to record an LP. And I had a problem with Bob Blank and money.

I had promised Bob I would pay the cost for the raw tape; 2-inch tape that was used for multi-track recording was quite expensive and he had made me a number of good sounding 1/4 inch tape copies to play on reel-to reel recorders as well as a number of cassette copies. The whole thing was probably no more than a few hundred dollar. But I was totally broke. I had gotten as much money from friends as I could and was heading for bankruptcy. I had aced my comprehensive exams in the CUNY PhD program and had been given a full time teaching job at Hunter College that payed just enough for me to meet my obligations to my family and that gave me enough financial stability so that with the help of friends I could invest in the recording. But I lost the job when NY went bankrupt in 1976 right after I successful defended my dissertation and received the PhD. I had started the recording project the year before and had every expectation of pulling enough money from my paycheck to complete the recording and even, eventually, to pay back my friends if the album didn't sell. But I had been put up for promotion to Assistant Professor by the Philosophy Department contingent upon my receiving the degree. So when I received my PhD, and since promotions were frozen city-wide, I was fired instead of promoted and had to go back to teaching part-time as an adjunct at about 1/3 the salary. So I just couldn't spare the few hundred dollars that I owed Bob and humiliated at my failure to keep my end of the bargain left the 2-inch master with the additional recorded material at Bob's studio. I never saw the 2-inch master again. Given how much a reel of 2-inch cost, I was pretty sure Bob had cut his losses and reused the tape and so a priceless recording of Olympia Alfara (who has since passed away) was lost forever. But I still had the 25 minutes of music I had recorded on a few decent tape copies and I started playing the music for any musicians that would listen.

Trumpeter Randy Brecker, who by now was quite famous , was running a jazz club called Seventh Avenue South. I had met Randy the summer before he came to New York when I was playing trombone with Herbie Mann at the Newport Jazz Festival. I had helped him connect with a number of bands that I was playing with and he was always grateful to me. He heard the music and offered me a weekend at the club. I put together a band with a great electric bass player, Eddie Guagua, three Cuban drummers, led by Tommy Lopez Sr. who had been the drummer that first refused to play the religious music, but then played on Cuban Roots once Julito said it was permitted to play jazz to the prayers. And Warren Smith playing vibes, marimba and assorted percussion. Warren ended up putting the horn section together for Janis Joplin, after I turned down her offer and quit the business, so he knew me and my music. He and I wheeled set a of vibes with a marimba upside down on it and a big canvas trolley on wheels filled with gongs and bells down 7th Avenue from his studio in the West 20's to Seventh Avenue South, below Bleeker St (it is nights like that that a musician's dreams are made of). It was a unique concept, folkloric drumming, Warren playing percussive melodies and accenting with all of his percussion effects, a groove bass player and me playing free on top of it all.

The club was packed with musicians who were curious as to what I was up to and after the second set on Friday a musician I didn't know, Mike Morganstern, came up to me and made me an offer. He was running a prestigious jam session under the aegis if the Jazzmania Society every Tuesday and he asked me if I would be willing to come down and play as a featured soloist. I jumped at the opportunity. I might not have been able to get a recording contract, but I was getting support from my fellow musicians. That had always been how I succeeded as a trombone player and it seemed to be happening again. The next Tuesday I went down to the session. The room was packed and there were about a half dozen sax players waiting to sit in. Mike gave me a big build up, describing the gig he had heard and talked about what a great innovative player I was. The band started to play a tune I didn't recognize and I, as the featured soloist, had to play the first solo. I had never played bebop on flute in my life, I only played free or with guitar players playing folk or rock patterns. And I started to flounder, trying to find the chords under my fingers. After my first chorus the sax player next in line to play nudged me away from the microphone and that was the end of my debut as the next great jazz flutist. I was devastated! But one thing was clear, playing free was not going to cut it; I had to learn to play bebop.

Although I played in the park as much as I could, I had stayed away from Washington Square Park where there always were two or three jazz bands jamming on the weekend. Their were always great sax and trumpet players, amplified guitar and bass and a drummer. It was street music and it was a loud as it could be, each band trying get the attention of the audience and each musician trying to outdo every other musician. Flute players (who played free or folk music, as I did) were not welcome, barely tolerated and almost totally inaudible. I started hanging around sitting on a bench playing along with the band far enough from the noise so that I could hear myself. I started to feel comfortable playing on bebop tunes, and pretty soon a few people would stand around and listen to my version of what the band was playing. I started meeting musicians and got enough respect so that they would let me play with the bands, but the volume was so loud that I never could really play comfortably, since I could barely hear what I was playing except when I would bang out high notes.

All of the jazz guitarists who played with the bands had electric guitars except for one older guy who, like me, sat on the periphery and played along with the band on an acoustic guitar. I started sitting next to him when I played and soon he and I were sitting by ourselves away from the band playing acoustically on our own. It was a classic encounter, a cliche in musician movies. His name was Slim, African-American, no front teeth and in his 50's. He was recently out of jail after a long stretch and had learned how to play bebop guitar in jail. He had been a blues guitar player and a sax player in jail had taught him to play the chords to bebop tunes. Slim played bebop like a folk musician, simple clear patterns with strong time. Plus he didn't like to play solos. It was perfect for me. Pressed for cash and habituated to pot, I would hook up my friends with musicians who had the best weed, so I always had a taste for Slim and me. I generally had enough money to spring for beers when the guys who sold beer out of shopping bags came around so Slim was always happy to see me. We would play for hours. And I was getting my bebop chops together. One day a young, tall kid sat down in front of us watching Slim intensely. He listened for almost an hour, got up and left without saying a word. One of the other musicians came up to us and said, "Do you who that guy is? He is playing on 6th Avenue and he is a monster." Later I checked him out and he was one of the best guitar players I had ever heard. It was Jean Paul Bourelly who at 19 had just arrived in New York. He was later to play with Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner and with many other great musicians. We became life-long friends and he has recorded 2 albums with me and was responsible for getting together the Berlin date that I discussed in my second blog. Jean Paul started playing a few gigs with me, and playing with him was a revelation. He was such a great player that I came to realize that I had a very long way to go if I wanted to be taken seriously as a jazz musician.

That is when I discovered Jamey Aebersold. Every musician knows what I'm talking about. In the 1970's, Jamey Aebersold, a jazz saxophonist and educator had the brilliant idea of recording serious play-along records for aspiring jazz musicians. Before than there were only 'music minus one' records that let you play the melody and perhaps one chorus with dance-band rhythm sections. Jamey's idea was to record great rhythm sections (piano, bass and drums) playing the jazz repertoire with lots of room for solos, chorus after chorus, so the soloist could really stretch out and learn the changes to the tunes. Jamey Aebersold's recordings have revolutionized jazz playing. They are mandated for students in jazz programs in high schools and colleges (jazz programs are becoming the new economic foundation of the jazz industry. Teaching in a jazz program is how more and more jazz musicians manage to survive and young jazz musicians still buy jazz records). In my opinion Aebersold is directly responsible for the uniform level of competence young university trained jazz musicians invariably display. Playing with those great rhythm sections, learning the repertoire and, most important, soloing as much as you want without worrying about grand-standing for the audience or other musicians lets a developing jazz musician experiment and remediate, try anything or work for perfection. I own dozens of Jamey Aebersold recordings and played with them for hours and hours every day for 20 years.

I was broke but playing better and better. There where few gigs available and I needed to play with other musicians and for people. I was still wandering the parks looking for opportunities to play. I had bought a travel amplifier and a microphone to play with some conga drummers I had met in the park and started carrying it around with me. One day in Central Park I saw an odd combination of musicians, mandolin, guitar, bass and drums. I caught the eye of the guitar player, hooked up my mike to the amp and started to play with them. The guitarist, Steve Groves and I hit it off. We became a regular street band and I started playing on the street regularly, earning small amounts of badly needed cash and applying what I was learning playing with Jamey Aebersold recordings on the 'bandstand.' The Almardewisegroove Quintet (right to left in the photo, Steve Groves, Bob Demaio, Alex Gressel, Martin Aubert and me) became a fixture during the golden age of street music in New York in the late the late 70's before it was all shut down in the early 80's. By that time I was working as a school consultant so I couldn't do it regularly anyway, but it did lead to some interesting moments. I had just applied for a part-time teaching job at the Ethical Culture (on 64th St.and Central Park West) and was out on the street playing. It was the horn players job to walk around with the drum case when the other players where soloing and get people to give the band some money. I was doing the thing and there in front of me was the Chair of the Ethics Department who had interviewed me a few days before. He put a few coins in the case. I did get the job eventually and ended up writing a curriculum that was published as the Fieldston Ethics Reader, something that I am very proud of.

The few dollars from playing on the street and, once again, teaching as an adjunct was not enough to meet my family obligations. I went through all of the available credit that I had, based on teaching full-time at Hunter College, and went bankrupt. I had to do something with my life. Through a lucky encounter with a former doctoral student from the CUNY program I learned about a program called Philosophy for Children that gave PhD's in philosophy the chance to work with schools helping students to develop thinking skills. Broke and with no job prospects that could support me and my family I went for a two week training session and was given the opportunity to work, at a minimal salary, in schools in New Jersey. That went well and within in a few years I had moved the program into New York and had expanded it to a grant-funded program through CUNY and the New York Board of Education called the Reasoning Skills Project. It was a full time job, traveling throughout the city running programs in 12 out of the 36 school districts in New York. I started to become known as a thinking skills expert and after a number of years got a position as Associate Director of the Institute for Critical Thinking at Montclair State University. That required a refocusing of my energies and flute playing became a hobby rather than a career option. My end-run around the music business had crashed and burned. All I had to show for it was 25 minutes of great music and an unfilled desire to do something with my growing competence as a jazz flutist.

My life had turned around. I had a job, was publishing and was making presentation at critical thinking conferences all over the world. I had met my second wife, Lesley, at the World Congress of Philosophy in 1988. And I had defeated a 1980's substance-abuse issue with her help and my own determination, fueled by growing terror at what the headlines would look like if my stupid risk-taking behavior had led to exposure. My focus was on succeeding as an academic and I had to leave childish things behind me. I was still playing with Jamey Aebersold records every day, working gigs once and a while and I even made a few demo recordings with Jean-Paul. But I never felt satisfied enough with the results to do anything with them. I settled down into the routine of being a married academic, bought a house in New Jersey and built a successful career: tenure, full professor and head of the department. And of course, I was going nuts. I needed to play.

pick yourself up

2008-09-13T18:40:00.001-07:00

I didn't stop playing and more important I didn't stop dreaming. I was living on West 171 St. almost all the way to the Hudson River in a 6-story prewar apartment house, rumored to have been designed by Stanford White (who designed the original Madison Square Garden). I was on the roof practicing, looking over the sea of roofs of Washington Heights. when I had the idea.

I loved playing on the roof. I would play free for hours, space out and think of stoned-out ideas like getting all the Dominican ex-farmers in the neighborhood to grow fresh vegetables on their roofs (actually solar panels on those roofs still seems like great idea). I loved playing and looking over the city. It seemed to me I was playing for everyone, throwing my sound across the buildings, bouncing high notes off of the gigantic tower blocks on Haven Avenue. But it was all an illusion. My first recorded effort had fallen flat and in reality I was playing for nobody. Playing in the park, on beaches, on roofs, pretending that my music was being heard was not enough. I decided to make a real record. It all fell into place in my head.

I had sent the flute tape to my oldest friend in the business Larry Harlow and asked him about making a connect for me to present it to Fania records (I had written Larry's first records for Fania and I had been on a number of Fania recordings on trombone). He said absolutely not to, and suggested instead that I send them a copy of my trombone album, Cuban Roots. I guess anyone who is reading this blog knows about my infamous 1967 recording Cuban Roots , and the idea that hit me playing on the roof that day was to redo Cuban Roots as a flute album. That would take some rethinking, since Cuban Roots was 3 horns (trombone and alto and baritone sax) and a 6 person rhythm section including Chick Corea playing piano and some of the greatest Cuban drummers from the 60's. I could never do that again. But maybe I could build on it. One of the great drummers of that or any era, Steve Berrios, had not been on Cuban Roots, something that I knew he would have loved to have done, so I figured I might be able to get him interested in a related project. But get him interested in what? I needed to do something that would be spectacularly different, something that would let me make an end-run around the business and get me back to where I had been in one shot. It was clear, however, that no matter how good I felt about my flute playing, others found it lacking so I had to find a way of presenting the flute that would enable people to get past whatever was keeping them from seeing what I saw in my music.

I had been playing with some good guitar players. The best experience I had so far was with a classical guitarist Steve Palitz. I had met Steve on a ferry to Fire Island. He was carrying a guitar in a very impressive case and was pale as a ghost, obviously from sitting indoors and practicing. I struck up a conversation and we played that day and every day for that weekend. The music felt easy and natural. Steve played his own compositions as the basis for my improvisation. They had form and swing and interesting harmonies. It was as free as playing by myself, except there was clear structure and the beautiful sound of a fine classical guitar; we were making music that people could relate to. At one point while we were playing, I became overwhelmed with gratitude and tears started running down my cheeks. We played for my friends and his friends, everyone said we sounded great.

It was the sunny weekend on Fire Album, against the darkness of my mood that gave me the concept that day on the roof: light and dark, sunlight and the dark of night. I would play bright and beautiful songs against Cuban drums with Steve Palitz and get singers to sing the darkly beautiful music of the Santeria religion. Steve Berrios might be willing to hook me up with drummers and singers. But that might prove to be a problem. Cuban Roots was the first record to ever play jazz with authentic Cuban folk music and a number of the songs on the album were the prayer melodies sung to Orishas, the deities in the religion. That took some doing when I first tried it. The original drummers I picked to do Cuban Roots thought I was being sacrilegious and stopped playing during the first rehearsal as soon as they realized what melodies the horns were playing. But thanks to Julito Collazo, a master of Santeria drumming, who gave the OK, I was able to get some of those same drummers to record Cuban Roots with its instrumental versions of the sacred music. But could I go the next step, actually record the prayers as sung in religious settings and play jazz to them? I would call Steve Berrios, who I knew was close to Julito.

I called Steve Berrios and he told me about a wonderful singer, Olympia Alfara, who had never recorded and who was looking for professional opportunities (after she recorded with me she went on to record with Mongo Santamaria). He said he would call Julito and try to get him to set it up for me. Julito was more than willing to help. I raised money to pay for the musicians and studio from two dear friends Jerry Kriss and David Komar (there was to be a big tax right-off, which never materialized-- sorry guys). Before I knew it I was in a studio with three drummers with bata drums (two headed drums that are played in Cuban religious music) and chekeres (large gourds of various sizes with beads around them, that are hit on the bottom and shaken) and 4 singers, two men and two women. The idea was that they would record a number of prayers. And then, in addition, the drummers would lay down about 20 minutes of rhythm for me and Steve Palitz to play over sometime later. The drummers and singers were playing music that was second nature to them. It was their religion and I didn't want to get in there way. So I just let them do their thing. The recording went quickly and easily. I dimmed the lights in the studio and held a note on the studio B3 organ to make sure the singers would be in standard tuning (so that there would be no problems over-dubbing) and they started recording. A few hours later I had about 40 minutes of magic on tape. And even more amazing, I had their trust. They knew that I was going to record over what they had performed and had the confidence that I would do the music justice. It was their religion after all. Somehow my sincerity and the fact of Cuban Roots had opened the door for me.

I played the tracks for Steve Palitz and he picked some material and we recorded over chekeres, light bright and pretty. There was another very fast piece with bata drums that Steve didn't fell comfortable with, so we did a long flute and guitar duet instead. I took the result to an old friend, Andy Kaufman, who had always appreciated my music. He liked the concept, but it was clear that I needed to do more. I was out of money. Andy suggested that I get in touch with a recording engineer Bob Blank who might be willing to help me. I played what I had recorded so far for Bob and he made me a deal. He was doing a lot of recording for a new Latin label and they wanted to put out a Latin disco single. If I would write the charts and produce the disco record he would let me use his studio for a cut of both projects. I was in business.

Now that I had free studio time I could think bigger. I listened to what Steve Palitz and I had done and heard cellos playing lush backgrounds.. So I wrote for 3 cellos and had a young classical cellist add them to what we had recorded. I did a similar thing with the flute and guitar duet, getting a fine young French horn player to add 4 horn parts playing rich and emotional chords. I was getting the studio time for free, but musicians cost money and I was just scraping by. I redid the flute solos to fit the new settings. I still had the fast piece with bata drums. I listened closely and heard the individual parts of each drum. That gave me an idea. I rented a concert marimba and played along on the marimba with each of three bata drums (low, high and medium). Bata drums have two heads so I played with two sticks following along with the drum patterns. I had written out a sequence of chord changes and moved each marimba part through the sequence. I then recorded three tracks of flute on top of that rich texture of drums and marimba. And added some marimba to the other guitar/cello piece as a bass line.

The instrumentals were finished. But what about the prayers. So far there were voices and drums. Short of money as always, I thought of using various keyboard instruments (all available in the studio) to give harmonic and rhythmic structure. All I would need is to find the right keyboard player. The great Columbian pianist Edy Martinez had played on a demo of the material for Cuban Roots that got me the record date and was understandably disappointed when the record was made with Chick Corea instead. So when I told him of my new project and who had recorded the drums and voices he was happy to work with me. Edy and I went into the studio and Edy recorded multiple tracks of keyboards over the prayers (piano, organ, Fender Rhodes and synthesizer). Although he was doing the playing we worked out the keyboard concept together. One of the prayers was for Ochun, it has a difficult shift in rhythm in the middle and Edy and I took turns playing bass lines on a synthesizer until we found one that worked and than Edy recorded it. I added flute parts for one of the prayers, a three flute ensemble supporting and accentuating the voices and keyboards. I was in heaven. I was a musician again!

I played the result, the 'Orisha Suite,' for a few record companies and sent it around to musicians. I was sure I was on my way.

back to the beginning

2008-09-01T09:53:00.000-07:00

So let's see, where were we. I had had a brief encounter with the flute the Summer of 1972 and resumed trying to get my academic life together. Things were going well with the doctorate and I was making enough money to take a real vacation. I was involved with a 'melt in your mouth' young lady who was to be one of my all time favorite lovers. She was quite a bit younger than me (a pattern that has resulted in my being alone in my 60's as one young women after another moved on with their lives). Faith was like chocolate to me, I feel in love with her the first time I saw her, just back from Greece, nut-brown with a bead on a thong around her neck. I snatched her right up and that Spring we decided to go to the Greek islands. I was just turning 33, skinny, with a pony-tail and flower-patches on my washed-out corduroys. We spent the night on a roof in Athens and headed to the port to get a boat to the Islands. On Crete we met a young guy from Prince Edward's Island, just returned from India with a dulcimer over his shoulder. He was 'mellow' personified and the three of us ended up traveling together. I was crazy with jealousy, musical, not sexual. He would play the dulcimer and I would itch to play with him. I tried whistling but that was too hooky. And then in some town there was a guy selling wooden flutes. I bought a six hole bamboo flute with some painted trim, that had no cracks, a sweet little sound and an interesting scale. John and I started playing together. The trip went from great to fabulous; I was playing again.

We had been staying away from tourist islands, but the desire to score some hash led us to Mykonos where the best drugs were. We arrived the day before the new moon and went to Super Paradise, the hippie beach. New moon on Mykonos brings out the acid and soon I found myself, by myself, tripped out sitting on a rock over-looking the Aegean Sea and playing my one drachma bamboo flute. And then it happened (I was tripping after all). It hit me that I could be the musician I always wanted to be. Something, that whatever my success as a trombone player, I never really believed could happen. And I had a touchstone for what that was that came in a blaze of light into my consciousness.

I was raised in public housing in Brooklyn (the picture is me, probably in the 4th grade). My father was in the army during WWII (my older brother Cy was in the navy), so in 1944 my family moved from Red Hook projects to Fort Green, a new project with preference for service men and their families. After the war the project started going downhill fast and as a little boy with an over-protective Jewish mother and an atypical absent Jewish father I had to deal with an increasingly frightening environment. By the time I was in third grade my school PS 67, had fallen to the point where the brighter kids were sent off to another school that had an IQ-based program, IGC, intelligently gifted children. That was great in some ways. My teacher's husband was the music director of the Brooklyn Museum so there were lots of trips to the museum and interesting music related projects (I remember measuring wood to make the bars of a marimba). But it also meant that I had to walk through Fort Green Park by myself to get to Myrtle Avenue where I would turn left and have walking races with unknowing adults as I power-walked the remaining 6 blocks to the school. It is interesting, by that time my mother was increasingly worried about my safety and she was always warning me about going to Fort Green Park, but it never dawned on her that walking through the park to get to school was an equal threat to playing in the park with the big guys who might beat me up. Since I was going to school (safe) not playing (dangerous) I was on my own.

But I was scared shitless, everyday, both ways, to school and back home. So I came up with a protective ritual. I had painstakingly learned to whistle when I was about 5. I remember it clearly. I believe it was my sister June who gave me the basics (she taught me to read in self-defense, when I was about 4 because I was always pestering her to read to me). I practiced constantly until I could get a sound and became a really great little kid whistler. Whistling got me through Fort Green Park. It was the first sign of the obsessive/compulsive response that ended up being the key to my experience as a musician (as well as my response to religion. I pray three times a day). I set myself a task. I had to whistle a 'real' song and then a made-up song (and repeat) for the entire time it took me to walk through the park. And as long as I was whistling, I was safe. That's what came flooding back to me on the rock on Mykonos, playing a bamboo flute, tripped out on some really clean LSD.

I could be the kid that I had been. I could play music with that purity and intentionality. Music would keep me safe in the scary adventure of coming to grips with being a divorced father with two babies who I loved more than life and an ex-wife who I had to come to terms with since we had joint custody (I lived ten blocks from my kids and never reneged on my promise to them that whatever the issues between me and their mother, the three of us were a team). When I came back from Greece I asked Joyce, my ex-wife, if I could borrow her flute. She said that she had given it to my daughter Rebecca, who sweet kid that she was, gave it to me. It was a student model Armstrong in a maroon plastic case. I took the flute back to my apartment, smoked a joint and made a promise to myself. I was always unhappy with my trombone playing, always critical, always comparing myself to, especially, Barry Rogers, the great trombone player who I played with on Eddie Palmieri's band. So I made a promise to myself. I would love every sound that came out of the flute! No matter what came out when I played it for the first time I would listen and find the beauty in what I had played. I opened the case put the flute together, blew into it, got some airy sounding note and held it until I heard it for the beautiful thing it could be. I fell in love right then and right there and no matter how much I have reverted to the self-critical stance necessary to progress as a musician I started the process that I have struggled to continue ever since, finding the beauty in what I am able to play.

The flute was no summer romance. It was a marriage for life. I played for hours everyday. I made up the fingerings as I found them. For the first few years I played all three octaves by over-blowing using the first octave fingerings. I didn't want to know the fingerings, I didn't want to know the notes I was playing. I had a universe of sound, of air, of fingers to explore. I played the first thing when I woke up. I played all winter, everyday, every single day without exception. When the weather warmed I played in the park while I was with my kids. I would move far enough away from the other people to discourage interference, but I loved the sense of audience. People were hearing me play! I loved playing outdoors. I played in the grape arbor behind the Band Shell in Central Park after I finished teaching at Hunter College. I played on beaches, I played on my roof. I played under the George Washington Bridge at night, when it was too late to play in my apartment. But mainly I played in Fort Tryon Park overlooking the Hudson, close enough to the playground so my kids could get me if they needed me, but far enough from the playground so that I could smoke a joint and play for hours on end, everyday, no matter what, indoors or outside. Within two years there were three other flute players playing in Fort Tryon Park. It was my first musical community. I met a few decent guitarists in the park and made my first recording in my house with one of them. I still have the 4 track reels in a box. Someday I ought to dig them out and see what they sounded like. That recording gave me a taste of what was to come and it wasn't all positive.

I moved up from my student model Armstrong to a open-whole Armstrong and starting taking lessons with a great flute doubler Harvey Estrin. He taught me the right fingerings, gave me a basic practicing routine and my playing really started to improve. I decided to record my flute playing. It was winter of 1975 when I hired a guy with a four track machine to come to my house and record me. I recorded quite a bit of solo flute, some played into my 100 year old upright piano with the pedal depressed to get sympathetic vibrations and I played free against an acoustic guitar player playing 70's rock and folk patterns. There was about three hours of music, so I went to a studio to edit it down. I brought along an ex-student, Menachum, who was to become a life-long friend. He was a great lover of music and he sat in the studio through the hours that it took to edit the tape down. As we left with me carrying the tapes and a box of cassette dubs of the music, he said to me, 'You know the music gets really boring.' I didn't say anything, just freaked. It literally took all of my will-power not to throw the tapes into the nearest garbage can. That night I had one of the few real thoughts of suicide I ever have had in my entire life. I fantasized putting on my army surplus coat with the fur hood and walking that cold winter night to the GW Bridge and taking a header. The next morning I took out the flute and played just as I did everyday since I started.

I took my life into my hands and brought a tape dub to my next lesson. Harvey listened to it and said, 'I'm not sure what word to use, but it is lacking in something, perhaps aesthetics.' I said, 'maybe I should stop playing flute.' He said, 'that might be a good idea.' I went home and took out my flute and played, that day and every day, just as I did ever since I started that summer of 1973

That tape ended up moving me to the next level as a musician. That story is for another time.

back after 6 weeks

2008-08-31T13:11:00.000-07:00

I have no idea whether this will go anywhere. The first and last entry was almost 6 weeks ago, so the prognosis is not good. What has happened meanwhile is a hectic summer of teaching, reading graduate course research proposals and confronting the consequences of my recent increase in recording (editing and mixing). I had intended to do this log in a logical sequence, telling the story of how I became a flute player, But with so much on my mind, I think I'm going to use the blog to help me come to terms with what is going on in my head.

As those of you who look at my webpage and myspace can see I've had a very hectic year and an especially challenging summer. My last album, recorded in March, 2007, Straight No Chaser come out in June and the other album I recorded last Spring, Lua e Sol, just landed on my doorstep. It is due out in October so have 1,000 promo copies and a few hundred to sell in boxes that I hold on to until it is time to start radio and press promotion. This Spring I recorded two and a half albums, and I have been mixing them all summer. I generally go through a lot of ups and downs when I finish an intensive period of recording and start confronting what I have done and these albums have put me in a emotional tailspin, trying to figure out whether I did the right thing in recording them (as usual each album is completely unique). But there is another issue underlying it all. My unwillingness to face something that every statistician knows (I teach research methods and so, although I am no statistician, I shouldn't be surprised). It is called 'regression to the mean.' Here is how it works. If a team or player is doing better than usual, it is a statistical certainty that as they continue their performance will move towards their average. So unless something fundamental has happened that signals an average movement upward (e.g. new players or strategies for the team or a change in training for the individual) one should reasonably expect the exceptional high to be followed by a drop. My last record, Algo Mas, was 26 weeks on the charts and hit #1 in Jazzweek, and so I shouldn't have been surprised that Straight No Chaser hit the charts, but stayed pretty low, just as my previous album, O Nosso Amor did. Needless to say, it depressed me no end, since I was hoping that having a 'hit' album as far as radio play was concerned would shift me upward in the consciousness of DJ's and increase my radio play in general.

That much said, my mood is more attuned to problems then it is to achievement and I am feeling pretty stressed. So I am going back to the blog to give myself a boost, because as I look at things objectively, I have a great deal to be grateful for. An album that I recorded in Berlin with some amazing African musicians and Cuban pianist Omar Sosa should be coming out, as soon as I finalize the deal, and the albums I recorded this Spring are with some incredible musicians. If you go to myspace there are photos of all of those sessions with the musicians listed. The photo at the top of this blog entry is Omar Sosa at the console during the Berlin recording with percussionist/singers Aho Luc Nicaise and Mathais Ogbogoa (very faint kneeling in the middle of the frame) and me standing in the background. Recording the African album in Berlin was an incredible experience, and is a story worth telling. So I will!

The session was put together by guitarist Jean-Paul Bourelly, a master musician and one of my all-time friends. We met in the 70's when I was playing in Washington Square Park, learning how to play bebop from a guitarist, just out of jail, whose name was Slim. Now that is a story worth telling, but that is for another time. Anyway, Jean-Paul had recorded an album with me in 2003 called Algo Mas, my first recording on Jazzheads and my first recording with master percussionist Pedrito Martinez who was one of the drummers on the record with which I began, Con Alma, and who co-produced one of the albums I have been mixing this summer. Got that all straight? Jean Paul (in 2004) was producing a concert in Berlin called the Black Atlantic, a week long festival of African based music from Europe, the US and other places. He asked me if I would play on it, but then took back the offer since somehow a white Jew from Brooklyn was not the image the concert was promoting. While we were discussing the possibilities I asked him who would be there, and he mentioned that Omar Sosa would be there and a number of African musicians including balafone virtuoso Ali Keita. Omar had recorded an album with me in 2001, Cuban Roots Revisited, and I knew Omar was originally a classically trained mallet player (vibes, marimba, tympani, the works) and so I had a brain-storm. Go to Berlin and make an album with vibes, marimba, balafone (an African marimba and the reason they play marimbas in Central and South America) African percussion and myself.

So here is the background. Picture this! A brick complex in Berlin, a number of buildings around a small park, behind the main street and isolated from the traffic. Me (a New York Jew) a Polish bass-player, tall and thin, with glasses and a beret, dressed in black (a classic image of a Polish intellectual). Three African musicians, two dressed in vividly colored African style clothes, Omar Sosa, a black Cuban, who is dedicated to Santeria and so who was wearing all white clothes and with beads and as always when he plays, incense on the piano (we played music that was based on the African religion that is the basis for Santeria), An African-American drummer, Marque Gilmore with dread-locks past his waist and Jean-Paul, 6 feet 4, of Haitian-American descent (there is picture on my space of all of guys, with their names, except for Ali Keita who missed the picture). We went into the studio with absolutely nothing, nothing planned, no music, not even a concept and recorded two days of free-jazz based on African themes. It was amazing! Now, at last, the story:

Towards the end of the first day as evening was approaching I went outside to look at the beautiful little park and to smoke a Dutch cigarillo, very addictive, don't even try them (if you need to smoke, smoke reefer). Outside was one of the engineers. I asked him, 'This is a very interesting complex, is it pre-war?' He looked at me and said, 'The complex was Goebbels' information ministry.' It was pure acid! Here I was playing free-jazz to African music, a Jew, a Pole, 3 Africans and 3 new-world people of African descent in the heart of the Nazi culture machine, its idea factory.

So with experiences like that, how dare I be bummed out about the lack of anything.

More to come.

How it started

2008-07-17T18:31:00.000-07:00

I was recently divorced, early Spring, 1972 and was sitting in my ex-wife's apartment in Washington Heights while my kids (the photo) almost 3 and just turned 5 , were napping. My ex-wife was in CCNY finishing up her BA so she could get on with her life as an independent divorced women. I was doing my part by staying with the kids. The apartment was magnificent, a Woody Allen classic, 9 rooms off of a long hallway with ceiling to floor French windows. And I was going crazy. I hated being in that space. After 11 brutal years of a marriage entered into much too young, and a complete change of life-- I was no longer a working trombone player, I was a grad student in Philosophy teaching as an adjunct to support my wife, kids and a tenement apartment on E 14 Street and Avenue D-- sitting in her (once our) chair was torture.

I had stopped playing trombone, and my only musical outlet was to whistle bebop as I walked around the lower East side, a free spirit hoping to entice females into giving me a compliment, a phone number, or even a date. I was pretty good at whistling, reasonably good at getting some congratulatory glances, but few dates. Playing had always been my escape. Escape from adolescent inadequacy, escape into a fantasy of what I might become, escape from having to succeed in a real profession. So why not make sitting there bearable by playing music.

When we were first married my wife wanted to take flute lessons so we bought her a student model Armstrong flute that had laid unused for 11 years. And since we were living in a one room studio in Borough Park in Brooklyn I had sat through her few lessons. Not knowing what else to do, I found the flute, put it together and got a sound right off. I played the melody of Summertime in D minor and started improvising. I didn't know the fingerings, but I understood the principle of laying one finger down after another, and before I knew it, I had played more on flute than I could ever hope to pushing a trombone slide around. It was magic, but I didn't touch the flute again for months.

That August I took my kids to a camp in the 1000 Lakes district of NY. It was a retreat facility for people interested in Transactional Analysis, rustic, on a lake, no electricity or running water and about 4 families with kids. Perfect, except the people were all nuts. Whatever you did or said became part of nightly group therapy session or worse required an encounter on the spot. There were a number of big heavy wooden canoes and I found out that a 9 year old girl at the camp had a flute. I became a dedicated flute player, a perfect excuse to get away from the people. My kids were with the other kids (and some adult) and so it was cool, except that I didn't know how to swim (and no life-jackets). But sanity took precedence over safety, so I borrowed the flute (rolled a few joints) and paddled onto the lake and played and played. I figured as long as I was playing no one could question my behavior, since rather than being anti-social I was engaged in self-actualization. I improved enormously over the two weeks.

When I got home I didn't pick up the flute again. It had been a summer romance and now I had to get back to reality, taking doctoral courses in a field for which I was unprepared ( 18 undergrad credits in Philosophy at Brooklyn College where I majored in music). And I had to succeed in my PhD program to get enough adjunct work to make my life work.