Bill Dixon, 84, Voice of Avant-Garde Jazz, Dies

From NYT:

"In the early 1960s, when rock was swallowing popular culture and jazz clubs were taking few chances on the “new thing” — as the developing avant-garde was then known — Mr. Dixon, who was known for the deep and almost liquid texture of his sound, fought to raise the profile of free improvisation and put more control into musicians’ hands. In 1964 he organized “The October Revolution in Jazz,” four days of music and discussions at the Cellar Cafe on West 91st Street in Manhattan, with a cast including the pianist-composers Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor, among others. It was the first free-jazz festival and the model for present-day musician-run events including the Vision Festival."

This is about the time I lose interest in jazz, though I have been trying to interest myself in contemporary artists. Still, I like this kind of principled avant-gardism even if I hate the music it produces. The best quote: “When I play,” he told the journalist Graham Lock in 2001, “whether you like it or not, I mean it.” For that alone, he'll make it into my series on jazz musicians.

Gene Lees, 82, Jazz Writer, Biographer, Critic, Lyricist

From ArtsJournal via LA Times:

"He was 'a jazz historian and critic known for his pugnacious, highly personal essays and biographies of such jazz greats as Oscar Peterson, Woody Herman and Johnny Mercer.' He was also a lyricist and composer and 'had the distinction of collaborating with a pope: He translated poems written by Pope John Paul II when the latter was a Polish priest named Karol Wojtyla.'

Fascinating! I have never heard of this guy and he co-wrote "Waltz for Debby" with Bill Evans. He translated poems by the Pope that became a song cycle sung by none other than Sarah Vaughan. He edited Down Beat. I'll have to check out his pieces.

Art must die

From Alex Ross:

"I was surprised and delighted to see my name pop up in John Colapinto's New Yorker profile of the young jazz bassist and composer Esperanza Spalding. She'd been reading The Rest Is Noise—on a Kindle, no less—and pondering a quotation that appears in the first chapter: lines from a letter that Richard Wagner wrote to Franz Liszt in 1850, condemning the emergent 'classical' tendency in the musical world. It's one of Wagner's most remarkable utterances, and I thought I'd reprint a longer sample here, as a footnote to Colaptino's piece. The translation is by Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington, in their Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, p. 210:

I have felt the pulse of modern art and know that it will die! This knowledge, however, fills me not with despondency but with joy, for I know at the same time that it is not art in general which will perish but only our own particular type of art—which stands remote from modern life—, whereas true—imperishable—constantly renewed art is still to be born. The monumental character of our art will disappear, we shall abandon our habit of clinging firmly to the past, our egotistical concern for permanence and immortality at any price: we shall let the past remain the past, the future—the future, and we shall live only in the present, in the here and now, and create works for the present age alone. Remember how fortunate I once considered you were in the practice of your own particular art, precisely because you were a performing artist, a real, actual artist whose every performance was clearly an act of giving: the fact that you could do so only upon a musical instrument was not your fault but the involuntary constraint of our age which compels the individual to depend entirely upon his own resources and renders impossible that sense of fellowship through which the individual artist, with the greatest possible deployment of his powers, might become part of a communal—immediate and actual—work of art. It was certainly not any wish to flatter you which made me say those things, rather was I—half-consciously—expressing my belief that only the performer is the real, true artist. All that we create as poets and composers expresses a wish but not an ability: only the performance itself reveals that ability or art. Believe me, I should be ten times happier if I were a dramatic performer instead of a dramatic poet and composer. — Now that I have come to hold this conviction, it can no longer be of interest to me to create works which I know in advance must be denied all life in the present in return for the flattering prospect of future immortality: what cannot be true today will remain untrue in the future as well. No longer do I abandon myself to the delusive idea of creating works for a future beyond the present: but if I am to create works for the present age, that age must offer me a less repellent aspect than is now the case. I renounce all fame, and more especially the insane specter of posthumous fame, because I love humankind far too dearly to condemn them, out of self-love, to the kind of poverty of ideas which alone sustains the fame of dead composers.

That last sentence is something for opera-company managers and symphony-orchestra programmers to contemplate. If you really wanted to be true to the spirit of Wagner, you would stop playing him and focus on new work instead."

Great quote from Wagner (one imagines his letters are as prolix as this sample) and a great remark by Ross. I have to look up this profile of Esperanza Spalding.

Music Review - Nancy Wilson Is at Home at the Blue Note

From NYTimes:

"Ms. Wilson, one of the greatest jazz singers alive, presents herself as a kind of double agent. She’s gone back and forth between pop and the jazz-to-blues tradition of Etta Jones and Jimmy Scott. The lyrics in her best-known songs put her forth as a model of finishing-school tact and husband-adoring constancy who also happens to be calculating effort-versus-return in her head.

And in “Day In, Day Out,” she did something simple and remarkable. She had a cast on her foot, but at the beginning of Mr. Matthews’s piano solo, she walked offstage, parted the throng and made her way to the bar for a drink. Then she returned and resumed, without comment."

Nancy Wilson is the motherfucking truth--and, unsurprisingly, a badass. Where isn't she at home?

The Rest Is Noise: Varèse does jazz

In an account of the Varèse festival at Tully Hall, Alex Ross at The New Yorker tells us of Varèse's encounter with Charlie Parker. This is about the saddest thing I have ever heard.

"With jazz, the ones who could have been good become very conventional. I heard the man who was playing—what was his name? He died. He was a god of music in that field. He played a kind of saxophone—Charlie Parker. At that time he lived in New York. He followed me on the street, and he said he wanted to be with us. The day I left I said, 'We'll get together. I'll take you for my pupil.' Then I had to catch my boat. It's when I went to Europe for Déserts. And Charlie Parker died in '55, in March. Oh, he was so nice, and so modest, and he had such a tone. You could not know if it was an angelic double bass, a saxophone, or a bass clarinet. Then one day I was in that big hall there on 14th Street, the Cooper Union. Somebody said, 'I want to meet you.' She was the widow of Charlie Parker. She said, 'He was always talking about you, so I know all about you.' And that man was a great star. He wanted to study music and thought I had something for him."