My Music History Monday post back on June 15, 2020, marked the death on June 15, 1996, of the the “First Lady of Song,” the “Queen of Jazz,” “Lady Ella”: of Ella Jane Fitzgerald, at the age of 79. Music History Monday for April 29, 2024 (just last week!), marked the birth of “The Duke”: Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, on April 29, 1899. Ella and Duke. They knew each other, loved each other, and performed and recorded music together for half a century. They were, the cliché, be damned, a musical marriage made in heaven. And thus, in my self-proclaimed “Year of Popular American Song,” this album of songs associated with Duke Ellington – which, BTW, is one of the greatest recordings ever made (no hyperbole that; just fact) – just screams to be examined and prescribed. And so we shall. Ella and Duke Up Close and Personal I would introduce you all to Leonard Geoffrey Feather (1914-1994). He was a London-born jazz pianist, composer, and producer, who nevertheless is best known today for his books and essays about jazz and his jazz criticism (he was the chief jazz critic for the Los Angeles Times from the 1960s until his […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Jazz Appreciation
It’s been a while since I blogged about my favorite jazz pianists. A new crush calls me back to the (computer) keyboard. That pianistic crush is the magnificent, in-every-way spectacular Roger Kellaway. Roger who? Roger KELLAWAY (born in Waban, Massachusetts on November 1, 1939), thank you very much. In fact, whether we’re aware of it or not, most of us have heard Kellaway play, as his performance of his song “Remembering You” concluded the classic Norman Lear-produced TV show “All in the Family” (which ran from January of 1971 to April of 1979). I first became aware of Roger Kellaway in the very early 1970’s when I acquired his album “Roger Kellaway Cello Quartet”. The album featured Kellaway on piano, Joe Pass on guitar, Chuck Domanico on bass, and – yes – a cellist named Edgar Lustgarten. I liked the album okay, but I sold it – along with most of my records – when I moved to California in 1978. Maestro Kellaway promptly fell off my radar and – boohoo for me – remained thus until about 6 months ago, when a friend came to dinner. The friend is a super guy named Lenny Paul, who at 86 years […]
Continue ReadingBack in early autumn, I ran a series of blogs on my favorite jazz pianists. With your indulgence, I would resume with a wonderful – if somewhat under under-appreciated – pianist, whose name I will broach in due time (not that you haven’t just checked the bottom of the post). But first, a necessary screed. The holiday season is finally behind us, and for a humbug like me, I’d hazard that IT’S ABOUT TIME. Consider this: Hanukkah started at sundown on November 27, the day before Thanksgiving. Figuring that the “holiday season” runs through New Year’s Day, that’s a holiday season of 36 days, a full 9.86% of the entire year. There’s just so much good cheer and rapacious consumerism a person can indulge. So it’s time to put the tree out by the curb, toss away what remains of that toxic, rum-infused fruitcake, brace ourselves for our credit card bills, and settle in for the winter, with the knowledge that Spring Training (and with it the rebirth of life as we know it) is but six weeks away. For me, one of the biggest problems of the extended holiday season was the non-stop music. Now don’t get me wrong; […]
Continue ReadingIt was as a result of my lessons with Lee Konitz that I was first exposed to the music of Lennie Tristano (as well as Tristano’s teaching method, which Konitz employed pretty much verbatim). Along with my discovery of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”, Tristano’s compositions and style of playing was the great musical revelation of my late teens. To repeat an assertion made in my previous post, along with J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Béla Bartók, Lennie Tristano is my single greatest influence as a pianist and composer. Leonard Joseph Tristano was born in Chicago on March 19, 1919 and died on November 18, 1978. Mention his name to most jazz fans (to say nothing for most concert musicians) and you will draw a blank. Part of that is Tristano’s fault; though he complained endlessly about his lack of recognition, he hardly ever played in public and did next-to-nothing to create a rapport with a fan base. Blind since childhood and rather thorny of temperament, he instead devoted himself to his teaching, to practicing, and, later in his life, making recordings in his home studio. We are told that “unfortunately, Tristano’s esoteric style of playing and improving […]
Continue ReadingI studied jazz improvisation with the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz for the better part of a year between 1973 and ’74. As best as I recall, his apartment in New York City was on the East 30’s. He shared it with his wife and a two cats. Of the three, Konitz clearly had the better relationship with the cats. (One day I went in for a lesson and the place felt different; a bit dustier and more cluttered. His wife, who had always been around during my lessons, was nowhere to be seen. I asked after her. Konitz said, “My old lady’s GONE.” I said I was sorry to hear it. He said, “I’m not”, and that was the end of that conversation.) Konitz was part of a small and elite group of musicians who had studied and/or worked with the pianist Lennie Tristano in the 1940’s, ‘50’s, and 60’s. This “Club Tristano” included the tenor sax player Warne Marsh, the pianist Sal Mosca, the guitarist Billy Bauer, and the bassist Peter Ind. What all these musicians had in common were mad technical skills and a penchant for improvising long, harmonically complex lines marked by a rhythmic asymmetry and phrase […]
Continue ReadingSpring semester of my freshman year at college – this would have been 1973 – I took a jazz history class taught by a youngish (28 year-old) jazz scholar and graduate student named Jim Patrick. (In preparation for writing this blog, I Googled Jim to see what he was up to, expecting – foolishly – to see pictures of the bearded, somewhat rotund, dryly funny guy I knew in the early ‘70’s. Instead, I found his obituary from just a few days ago – July 25, 2013 –which mentions that he died at 68, was predeceased by his wife, was a loving grandfather and yadda yadda. Holy crap. Sometimes I hate the internet; we can no longer pretend “not to know”. Meanwhile, the question, no matter how cliché, must be asked: where does the time go?) I became friends with Jim, because he was the one-and-only jazz guy on the Princeton music faculty. (An interesting factoid: as a graduate student in jazz, he wasn’t being advised and overseen by a music department faculty member but rather, by a sociology professor named Morroe Berger. In those days at ivy-strangled Princeton, jazz was not considered a genuine musical genre but rather, a […]
Continue ReadingI was sixteen years old when I bought two record albums that changed my life. One was called “Oscar Peterson at the JATP” and the other “Oscar Peterson on Prestige”. “Oscar Peterson at the JATP” [‘Jazz at the Philharmonic’], the producer Norman Granz’ touring jazz mega-show] is available on a just-released, four-CD set called “Oscar Peterson, Live Recordings 1952-1958”, issued by the UK-based “Coda” label. Sadly, the set is not available in the United States for reasons inexplicable. However, it can be found on iTunes, and I would single out in particular a cut called “Come to the Mardi Gras” that cooks like a roomful of industrial ranges set on “broil”. With Ray Brown on bass and Herb Ellis on guitar it is – in my opinion – a must have despite the fact that it can only be acquired from the evil audio empire, the Starbucks of recorded sound (iTunes). In the name of great music we do what we must. The other album named above – “Oscar Peterson on Prestige” – is indeed available, albeit under a different title. The circumstances behind its creation are fascinating, and it’s a story I’ll tell in a moment. But first, a […]
Continue ReadingIt was sometime in the spring of 1980. I was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, living in a studio apartment in a dilapidated old brown shingle house south of campus, across from a package store. I made my dollars as a teaching assistant in the music department and by giving private lessons. When folks called the music department looking for a theory or composition teacher, I was the person to whom they were referred. As a result, I received a lot of calls from prospective students, a few of whom actually took a lesson or two. So I didn’t pay all that much attention when I received just such a call of inquiry from a guy who identified himself as “Anthony”. Anthony told me that he wanted not just theory, analysis, and composition lessons, but that he wanted the equivalent of an undergraduate music education, from start to finish. I told him that that would take years. He told me that he was prepared to do whatever it took, including taking lessons twice a week, no small thing considering that he lived about an hour away, in the chi-chi village of San Anselmo in Marin County. […]
Continue ReadingThe jazz-inspired revelation that changed my life at the age of fourteen was foisted on me by none-other-than the Elf himself: Erroll Garner. My dad had a number of Garner LP’s among the various stacks in the record cabinet, most notably the albums “Concert by the Sea” and “Soliloquy”. These records literally drove me wild, and if you had lined ‘em up side-by-side with a scantily clad Gina Lollobrigida and asked my testosterone-ravaged 14 year-old self to choose between the records and the sex kitten, I would have (eventually) chosen La Lollobrigida, but grudgingly and only after a few minutes thought. That’s how crazy these records made me. “Concert by the Sea” was recorded on an open reel tape deck by a serviceman named Will Thornbury when Garner and his trio performed in a church outside of Carmel, California in September, 1955. Garner’s manager Martha Glaser took the tape and played it for George Avakian at Columbia Records. Boom: the LP was made and just like that it climbed to the top of the charts, becoming gone of the most successful jazz records of all time. All these years later, this record still has the power to drive me absolutely […]
Continue ReadingIt’s a standard question in a literary interview to ask an author “what books are on your bedside table.” We humans are, by our nature, voyeurs, and we can’t resist knowing what authors are themselves reading. (What we’ d REALLY like to know is what’s in their medicine cabinets and sock drawers, but that’s a question that – sadly – rarely comes up in interviews). The equivalent question for a musician would be “what music is in your car CD player/MP3player/iPod/iPhone/iPad/8-track cartridge/turntable (vinyl phreaks unite!)/gramophone (78 r.p.m. crazies unite!), or Edison cylinder Dictaphone (crazies!)”? Let’s make this personal. “Bob, dude, what’s is in your car CD player?” The answer: over the last year, way more often than not, it is the music of Chick Corea. Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts on June 12, 1941, making him – today – a sprightly 72 years-old. As is so often the case with jazz musicians, Corea – unlike a concert pianist – did not hone his skills under the watchful eyes and ears of a particular set of mentors/teachers. Jazz is an oral tradition, and the only way to “learn it” is to live it: by listening to jazz […]
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