Oh Lady Was Good: 6 Favorite Marian McPartland Piano Interviews

Marian McPartland, the first English lady of jazz piano from Windsor, died earlier this week at 95.

In the 1970s she hosted a show for NPR called Piano Jazz for which she interviewed and played along many musicians (mostly pianists, but not always' dominantly jazz, but also some notable pop instrumentalists). The format of the programme was an hour-long chat and piano playing, whether as solo or duet, and reminiscing about the musical life of each interviewee. Needless to say, thanks to a Marian's long and fruitful career in the States, many of the subjects had prior professional encounters with her. So she knew what she was talking about.

Here is my six favorite moments from those shows.

Radio Hawkins#8: Cedar Walton Sideman Years [repost]

 

برنامۀ هشتم

سيدار والتُن

برنامه‌اي از آثار والتُنِ پيانيستِ همراهي كنندۀ گروه ها و موزيسين هايي از 1959 تا 1979

شامل: ابي لينكُلن، آرت بليكي، آرت فارمر، جان كُلترين، لي مورگان، لاكي تامسُن، ري براون و بسياري از اساتيد ساكسوفن و ترومپت سال‌هاي پنجاه و شصت ميلادي

براي شنيدن اين برنامه كمي معلومات جمع كردن دربارۀ موسيقي هاردباپ ضرري ندارد و در اين‌جا فراهم است و آمادۀ خوانده 
شدن

با كيفيت متناسب با سرعت اينترنت ايران و تكه شده به دو قسمت براي تسهيل دانلود

بخش اول    بخش دوم

Jazz Mirrors Iran#7: Jazz, the Samarkand Way

If you’re a jazz aficionado, you’ll immediately assume from the cool sound of contra-bass, clarinet-bass and brushed drums that the played track [here] is a west coast jazz from the mid 1950s. The carefully established musical textures and easy-going swing of the piece with some nice urban colorizations only make you more sure.

But take a look at the album cover and you’ll see every guess, except maybe the date, is wrong. Hard to believe, but what you’re listening to is a track by Aminollah Hussein, or André Hossein, the French-Iranian composer, famous enough in France for being the father to the French movie star and director, Robert Hossein.

On Neil Young Journeys

In the last three years the number of films made with or about (and occasionally by) Neil Young has mounted up to the extent that is difficult to remember which song was in which film. Parallel to an overdose of NY album releases - marked by two recent, and rather disappointing, Crazy Horse sessions - camera seems to love this Canadian singer/songwriter, still, at 66, a restless rocker in search of a Woodstock dream. Also, the age, 66, resembles the golden number American popular music and the cross country highway of freedom in anything from Nat King Cole to Dennis Hopper.

The aforementioned filmic portrayals are: in 2009 Young was given his entry to the American Masters series in Don't Be Denied. Unlike Bob Dylan film from the same program, which had Martin Scorsese’s name in the credit, Don't Be Denied was denied soon after its initial broadcast and went into oblivion. On the same year, Jonathan Demme filmed the electric storm of a NY tour in the Trunk Show. In 2010 the electric solo album, Le Noise, with its murky, elegiac lyricism turned into a 40 minute-long YouTube video, shot in a beautiful L.A. mansion with a feeling of LSD all throughout the film. And now, Demme’s fourth film with NY (after Complex Sessions, 1994; Heart of Gold, 2006 and the Trunk Show) seems in better shape and Younger than all the recent efforts.

READ THE COMPLETE REVIEW HERE

Al Haig, a Pianist of Vigilant Sensitivity

Al Haig

One of my relatives, recently turned 66, whose life is wholly dedicated to jazz (and I'm used to calling him "uncle") asked me for a groundbreaking favor, something that utterly defines his jazz canon: he asked me to reorganize his iPod, delete the unnecessary stuff, so he can only listen to the albums recorded by three musicians and no one else - all pianists. For him, the lucky 3 who have survived the test of time were, respectively, Count Basie, Al Haig and Ahmad Jamal.

While Basie holds a rank only next to God, and Ahmad is enjoying a belated recognition (in spite of being praised by Miles Davis and selling thousands of his Pershing album more than half a century ago), though mostly in Europe, Haig still remains the pianist in the dark, the doomed figure, nevertheless the most lyrical of all.

"In many respects,"Max Harrison declared, "Al Haig was  the most sympathetic pianist to record with Parker." The same writer quotes Stan Getz who calls Haig "the best in the business."

Williams' Jazz Review article (Volume 3, Number 5, June 1960) sheds more light on the career of the obscured giant:

Jazz Mirrors Iran#6: Paraded Beauty

Women in Iran: a hot topic, no matter how you look at it, from European feminists studying the country to Iranian men sipping cups of “smuggled” Starbucks coffee while cruising up Tehran’s Jam Avenue. Whatever helps to glamorize these young ladies on the streets comes to their service: heavy make-up, flamboyant haircuts which under the veil turns the head into a piece of early Cubist art, bold colors that remind one of Gauguin in Martinique, tight dresses that generously exhibit the female figure, high heels and leather boots that make the infamous Betty Page look like a modest housewife - cigarette smokers, driving behind the wheel of expensive sport cars in northern Tehran, listening to loud music - patrons of Tehran’s reputation as the nose job capital of the world, as if all Persian girls rival themselves with Nicole Kidman in how properly whittled noses should look.

photo by Reza Hakimi

Art and culture aside, what impresses Western visitors in Iran are these apparent dichotomies of beauty and street fashion, all the more exotic to foreign eyes as defiance within the stringent rules of the Islamic Republic regime. “Women are so chic there,” Mark Cousins, an Irish filmmaker told me one time while making a documentary in Iran, “it’s like a European country, but a strange kind of Europe.”

Pari Ruu, Lloyd Miller and the Heliocentrics

Image(s) of the Day: Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra

In Memory of Paul Smith (1922-2013) + Intensive Care LP

Paul Smith

The jazz pianist Paul Smith, also a versatile composer and arranger and a prolific sideman, died at 91. To be honest, I didn't know he was still alive.

The Los Angeles Times reported his passing and added that the man had worked with "such greats as Bing Crosby, Nat 'King' Cole and Dizzy Gillespie...Smith began studying classical piano when he was 8 and joined a professional band in his teens. Over a long career, he recorded more than five dozen albums with his own groups and accompanied many performers, including Sammy Davis Jr., Ella Fitzgerald, Doris Day and the Andrews Sisters. Smith also arranged and performed TV and movie scores as a studio musician. He spent more than 25 years as pianist and music director for The Steve Allen Comedy Hour."

Nearly 60 years ago, Paul Smith who contrasted his size (six-foot-four, over two hundred pounds) with an "extremely deft and delicate touch at the piano," was introduced in the liner notes of one of his early recordings as "a brilliant young pianist who plays classics, 'pop' tunes, and modern jazz with equal facility, and as a result is one most sought after studio musicians in Hollywood. In past years he's been both performer and arranger with leading dance bands and musical groups throughout the country."

Jazz Mirrors Iran#5: Strictly for the Persians

For my fifth installment in Jazz Mirrors Iran, I'll look at a tune from a third country in which the secretive consociation between the American art form and Persian culture took place: France.


If you were in Paris during the cold winter of 1941, walking by the Seine and watching the German barracks, you could whistle a beautiful tune by Alix Combelle Orchestra, a song ironically called Strictement pour les Persans, or in English, Strictly for the Persians. 

Strictement Pour Les Persans (Strictly for Persians) - Alix Combelle Orchestra

Paris’ underground resistance did not stay paralyzed for too long. To write the French off as cowards or conceding would be dismissive and inaccurate. A Parisian writer at the time was “incapable of surviving for long hiding, he would sell his soul to see his name in print,” silenced essayist Jean Guehenno observed. “He believes that he is French literature and thought and that they will die without him.” Satre himself had stated that artists and writers had a duty to tell the rest of France “not to be ruled by Germans.”

We all know that jazz played a significant role in uniting African-Americans under the oppressive Jim Crow laws. In Paris of 1941, even as a borrowed art form, it still manifested the self-empowerment to create a nationalistic identity at a point where the country was already fractured into rubble. Before the Nazi invasion of France, when news of an eventual war reached Paris, many African-American expatriate musicians left to return to the United States. Their sudden departure left the active French jazz scene on its own, and club owners found themselves without any entertainers or live music to supply the demand of tasteful customers.

Return of the Sacred

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