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“My particular idols, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, were both in that picture,” Rollins said. “Those guys are much beyond me, but I guess I’ll be remembered with them when people look at this picture: ‘Oh, there’s Sonny Rollins, and wow, look, there’s Coleman Hawkins!’” Source: Music – nytimes.com More
A concert at Town Hall this week that will be led by Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra celebrates the legacies of Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo and Chico O’Farrill.In the fall of 1947, Dizzy Gillespie called on his friend, the trumpeter-arranger Mario Bauzá, in search of a conga player for an upcoming Carnegie Hall concert where he planned to debut songs exploring the connection between Afro-Cuban music and jazz. Bauzá suggested Chano Pozo, a swaggering master of Yoruba rhythms, who had just arrived from Cuba.It was a wildly fortuitous introduction: Dizzy and Chano’s team-up would mark a watershed moment in jazz history, what many refer to the birth of Latin jazz. Although neither musician could communicate in the other’s language, they shared a cultural connection, and suddenly bebop, Gillespie’s rebellious jazz experiment, became Cubop.Arturo O’Farrill, leader of the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, which he formed in 2001 for Jazz at Lincoln Center, has long contemplated that meeting. It was a collaboration that united African diasporas, north and south, reconstructing ties broken by the slave trade. “There’s a saying, I’m sure you’ve heard it,” he said in a recent video interview, “where Dizzy says, ‘I don’t speak Spanish and Chano doesn’t speak English, but we both speak African.’”This Saturday at Town Hall, O’Farrill will commemorate that moment, just over 75 years ago, when Dizzy and Chano bonded over their ancestral past and took the music into the future, as well as the role his father, Chico, played in that evolution. The concert, which pays tribute to “The Original Influencers,” celebrates a Town Hall show similar to the Carnegie performance that took place in December 1947, and will feature O’Farrill’s 18-piece orchestra, as well as special guests Pedrito Martínez on percussion, Jon Faddis on trumpet, Donald Harrison on saxophone, the singers Daymé Arocena and Melvis Santa, and O’Farrill’s two sons, Adam and Zack, on trumpet and drums.The Cuban-born Chico O’Farrill was the son of Irish and German immigrants to the island and was so taken with the fusions previously explored by Bauzá as musical director of Machito and His Afro-Cubans, that he convinced the impresario Norman Granz to commission and record his “Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite,” featuring Charlie Parker, Buddy Rich and Flip Phillips, in 1950.“My father was fully European, living in an African country — because, you know, Cuba’s basically an African country — and also falling in love with jazz,” O’Farrill said. “He was the perfect person to be in all three worlds.”The elder O’Farrill joined up with Gillespie in the following years and became one of Latin jazz’s chief arrangers and orchestra leaders. Gillespie became Faddis’s mentor soon after he arrived in New York as an 18-year-old aspiring trumpeter. On Saturday, he will perform the “Manteca Suite,” Chico’s elaborate rearrangement of the Gillespie-Pozo classic written with Gil Fuller, “Manteca.” Faddis’s close association with Gillespie made him privy to Chico’s relationship with Pozo, who was tragically murdered in Harlem in 1948.“Mario Bauzá would take Dizzy up to Spanish Harlem to hear bands like Alberto Socarrás’s, and sit in,” Faddis said in an interview. “The collaboration with Chano was really important — I know there are many things that Chano taught him and the musicians in his band.”Pozo clued in Gillespie’s band to the dense polyrhythmic patterns that permeate the Afro-Cuban music that he learned as a street drummer in the Black Cayo Hueso neighborhood of Havana. In his autobiography “To Be, or Not … to Bop,” Gillespie expressed a desire to recapture lost elements of African tradition, writing that he “always had that Latin feeling” but that his musical ancestors remained “monorhythmic,” because drums were not tolerated by U.S. slave masters, while the Afro-Cubans “remained polyrhythmic.”Gillespie and Pozo shared other cultural bonds, too. “I think when you hear Dizzy and Chano play the Afro Cuban Suite, you hear the pattern of call and response,” Faddis added. “One of the main connectors between that Afro-Cuban lineage and American jazz is what you hear in the work songs, the prison songs and even the spirituals — the call and response in the church.”Gillespie and Pozo’s reunion of different diasporic African traditions through jazz had many antecedents, particularly in New Orleans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when King Oliver and Lorenzo Tio visited Havana with a military band and absorbed Cuban influences. The ragtime pianist Jellyroll Morton famously referenced “tinges of Spanish” in his playing, and in New York, Bauzá had been steadily absorbing jazz techniques and sharing Cuban rhythmic tradition as musical director of the Chick Webb orchestra in the 1930s.Both Gillespie and Bauzá had yearned to escape the predictability of danceable Latin ballroom and big band music, and in 1947, just as Gillespie was perfecting his notion of bebop, Pozo’s intervention helped jazz became an international genre. It would put Gillespie on a path that defined the rest of his musical career. By 1988, Dizzy founded the United Nations Orchestra, which over the years featured Latin jazz stars like Paquito D’Rivera, Giovanni Hidalgo, Arturo Sandoval, David Sánchez and Miguel Zenón among many others.Pedrito Martínez, who will be performing two songs from his 2013 self-titled debut at the Town Hall concert, is evidence of Cubop’s internationalist legacy. He was inspired by Pozo, and even grew up in the same neighborhood in Havana. “I learned to play rumba in the street, like Chano did,” Martínez said in an interview. “He was someone from the marginal world who didn’t speak English, but he opened up doors for all of us.”Martínez had collaborated with Faddis in Steve Turre’s “Sanctified Shells” band, and had Faddis guest on his most recent album, “Acertijos.” He sees the connection between Afro-Cuban and jazz music as a kind of mystical fusion of spirit worlds. “I’ve seen a lot of Thelonious Monk videos, and he looked like a rumbero,” Martínez said, referring to the way Monk would sometimes perform a spinning dance that suggested Yoruban dance and spirit possession. “He stood up to dance and played the piano with one hand and then the other. Jazz has a very spiritual connection to Afro-Cuban music, because it’s a way of feeling, of giving reverence to the ancestors.”The rediscovery of common spiritual roots between African Americans and the Afro-Latin American diaspora is what keeps the Afro-Cuban jazz concept grounded and coherent. While there have been many debates about whether American jazz’s melodic and harmonic traditions and Afro-Caribbean rhythmic techniques dominate, it’s always been a back-and-forth conversation, an inter-hemispheric musical negotiation. It’s no surprise that Pérez Prado and Tito Puente’s mambo rose quickly in the wake of Gillespie and Pozo’s Cubop, and that it’s possible to hear Prado mambo elements in the early work of the Afro-futurist pioneer Sun Ra.What’s clear is that there’s no going back. “There are a lot of purists who want to keep jazz, jazz as jazz, they don’t want to mess with it,” O’Farrill said. “But I’ve been fighting this battle for 30 years, and I’m like, no, no, no. Jazz and Latin are the same trunk of the same tree. But it looks like we can never resolve this discussion. It can only go on and be explored to the end of time.”“Dizzy, Chano and Chico: The Original Influencers, 75 Years Later at Town Hall,” featuring Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, runs at Town Hall on Saturday at 8 p.m.; thetownhall.org. More
Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell: They altered the course of American music and raised the bar for improvisation. Listen to 10 experts’ favorites.What five minutes of music would you play for a friend to make them love Alice Coltrane or Duke Ellington? After a few years of listening to a wide range of classical music, The New York Times has been asking musicians, writers, editors, critics and scholars to share their jazz favorites with readers.This month, our focus isn’t an artist, but a style: bebop. Think of a horn player zipping through a dizzying line, over a swinging beat that sizzles so fast you can almost see smoke drifting from the cymbals. That’s bebop.Forged in the fires of Black urban life during the postwar era, bebop was, as Amiri Baraka writes in “Blues People,” the style that “led jazz into the arena of art.” It was also laced with irreverence. “To a certain extent, this music resulted from conscious attempts to remove it from the danger of mainstream dilution or even understanding,” Baraka says.By way of its corrugated harmonies, its dashing tempos and the particular spotlight it placed on the interplay between horns and drums, bebop altered the course of American music, and raised the bar for improvisation and composition worldwide. And it’s never really gone out of fashion: Bebop is the music Jean-Michel Basquiat painted to, and it’s the foundation of jazz theory that music students around the world are taught when they learn to improvise.Enjoy listening to these tracks selected by a range of the genre’s practitioners, commentators and devotees. You can find a playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own bebop favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Jon Faddis, trumpeterFor me, any discussion of bebop must include Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. This is not to negate the contributions of Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Pettiford, Kenny Clarke, Fats Navarro, Max Roach and many others. Parker spearheaded bebop; Gillespie, a consummate teacher, conveyed this complex musical style to others. On an autumn evening over 75 years ago, at one of my favorite venues, Carnegie Hall, a groundbreaking concert made many fall in love with bebop. It still inspires and resonates. Although there are many classic bebop recordings, such as “Complete Jazz at Massey Hall,” “Parker’s Mood,” “Koko,” “Groovin’ High,” and another favorite of mine, Bird’s solo on “Lady Be Good,” this version of “Dizzy Atmosphere” epitomizes the genius abilities of Bird and Diz to create at such a high level. Charlie Parker is on fire, and Dizzy Gillespie is right there with him. As Dizzy used to say, “Two hearts as one.”“Dizzy Atmosphere”Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (Blue Note Records)◆ ◆ ◆Camille Thurman, saxophonist and vocalistCharlie Parker was the epitome of bebop. His improvisations were innovative, limitless, freeing, bold, boundary-pushing and unapologetically groundbreaking in the way he transcended all preconceived understanding of western harmony. This version of “Just Friends” is what bebop is all about in a nutshell. You have this beautiful orchestration of strings, with a whimsical yet eerie backdrop, and like a bolt of lightning, Bird comes in with a highly imaginative, vivid, rapid flow of endless ideas that for four measures is exhilarating, taking you on a virtuosic sonic roller coaster ride. He ever so gracefully lands into the melody of “Just Friends” and perfectly introduces the song at the end of his improvisation. To love bebop is to recognize how musicians like Bird had the gift of hearing beyond the scope of what we might take for granted when listening to a standard. Bird could take something ordinary and recreate it into something that was iconic, sophisticated, unique and timeless while freely and honestly expressing himself. He set the standard for what makes bebop, bebop.“Just Friends”Charlie Parker (Verve Reissues)◆ ◆ ◆Gary Giddins, former Village Voice jazz criticOnly in bebop could you take a pop song, strip it of its melody and lyrics, and create a defining standard from the remains: the chord changes. The British musician Ray Noble’s 1938 “Indian Suite” harkened to the romantic Americana of Victor Herbert and Coleridge-Taylor, yet the first movement, “Cherokee,” was a swing-era hit, despite a slow-moving melody and a fast-moving harmonic episode considered so challenging (B major, A major, G major) that Count Basie relieved Lester Young from having to solo on it. Charlie Parker obsessed over those chords, and in 1945 launched bop with his transformational “Koko.” Several classic versions ensued, none more dazzling than Bud Powell’s masterpiece. He begins with a caricature of Indian music à la Hollywood, witty but also rhythmically intense so that you smile but don’t laugh, which leads to Noble’s often-ignored theme, powered by a contrapuntal plateau of chords, as if he’s laying out the territory before he explores it, which he does in two choruses of electrifying linear invention, against a barrage of bass clef chords. The solo is staged within two octaves, dipping only once as low as the area of middle C, spelled by infrequent breath-like rests, a minimal reliance on triplets, and a few heady riff episodes. After dozens of hearings over six decades, it hasn’t lost one iota of its joy, ingenuity and wonder.“Cherokee”Bud Powell (Verve)◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz criticAn unforgettable tune, hung loosely upon chord changes that originated in a George Gershwin composition but are adapted here and restructured, turned sideways and adorned with a rockslide of rhythmic melody. A French announcer atop the sound, running through titles and names. A young Miles Davis, not yet 23, blasting forth with enough squiggly canned heat on the trumpet to leave the announcer’s words sounding lifeless, irrelevant. In each of these facets, this recording of “Good Bait” — penned by the quietly revolutionary pianist Tadd Dameron — epitomizes the brilliant moment of bebop: a reckoning for Western modernism, the greeting of its own limitations, the Molotov cocktail concealed under the lapels of a three-piece suit.“Good Bait”The Miles Davis/Tadd Dameron Quintet (Legacy Recordings)◆ ◆ ◆Natalie Weiner, writerScat singing wasn’t a bebop innovation, but it was a core part of the subgenre’s development — right down to its name, derived from common scat syllables. Betty Carter shows why on this 1958 record, cramming a nearly unfathomable number of notes into a whirlwind minute and 48 seconds of slick big band sound. Her tics and riffs sound so familiar because they’ve become standard, but here Carter was forging new ground, extending the scat innovations of Dizzy Gillespie with wild virtuosity and never conceding to the mellow, background music stylings often expected of “girl singers.”“You’re Driving Me Crazy”Betty Carter (Master Tape Records)◆ ◆ ◆Sean Jones, trumpeterThis group’s performance with Thelonious Monk on “Evidence” is one of the greatest displays of bebop musicians communicating at a highly sophisticated level at extremely brisk tempos. This form of communication, improvisation, is one of the world’s best examples of spontaneous composition. The improvised section is based on Jesse Greer’s iconic “Just You, Just Me,” showing bebop’s ability to recontextualize the pop song form. Referencing that title, Monk thought, “Just Us/Justice” — which requires “Evidence.” This track also reflects the most profound aspects of rhythm and its relationship to harmony through the African American experience, creating new sonic phrasing that would become the foundation of hip-hop and other American styles of music.“Evidence”Thelonious Monk Quartet With Johnny Griffin (Riverside Records)◆ ◆ ◆Charles McPherson, saxophonistBird comes from the middle of the country, Kansas City, in the middle of the 1930s, when that area was in a good musical period. But besides absorbing all the Kansas City blues and the Kansas City swing, Bird was pretty eclectic. He very much knew about people like Stravinsky: He quoted passages from “Firebird Suite” or “Petrushka.” Bird listened to cowboy country-western; he listened to everything. So he was like a sponge, musically. He also probably listened to Middle Eastern music — certainly Dizzy did that. So they’re pushing all kinds of envelopes. These guys were particularly smart and wide open, with the technique to merge it all. Billy Higgins, the drummer, said that bebop was the beginning of “sanctified intelligence.” That says it all.The way that Bird and Dizzy play “Shaw ’Nuff,” they’re so accurate it almost sounds like one person playing. It’s a lot of moving parts, it’s very notey — but they’re played very cleanly. And these guys are right with each other. When I talk to California musicians who are of that age, they say: “We just heard Bird and Dizzy on record, they had never come out here to Los Angeles, so we thought it was one person playing. So when they came out there in the 1940s it was the first time we saw them playing, and it amazed us. Because a lot of the compositions that we thought were one person playing — no, it was two people playing.” That floored them.“Shaw ’Nuff”Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (Savoy)◆ ◆ ◆Marcus J. Moore, jazz writerI’ve always admired the brazenness of the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard: No matter how powerfully the music swirled around him, and whether he was the bandleader or a sideman, his wail scorched through the arrangement every time. On this 1969 version of “Space Track,” from the live album “Without a Song,” Hubbard dots the composition with brisk upper-register notes that float atop the band’s turbulent mix of piano, drums and bass, bolstering the song’s urgency while guiding its shape-shifting journey. “Space Track” dips into occasional silence meant to reinforce its balance of power and tranquillity. With each of the band’s upswings, Hubbard also ascends, at one point following Louis Hayes’s spirited drum solo with an equally blistering tone. To me, the track typifies Hubbard’s command of his instrument alongside the message he wanted to convey. His mastery of tension was unparalleled.“Space Track”Freddie Hubbard (Blue Note Records)◆ ◆ ◆Kenny Barron, pianistThis is a very melodic piece. I know some people may be intimidated by bebop — the lines can be very fast and complicated — but this is a very melodic piece, with a very accessible line. It’s not a simple melody but it’s not super-complicated, either: You can actually sing along with it. And it’s taken at a tempo that’s not too fast, so it’s really very clear. Where the rhythmic emphasis falls, that’s one of the things that makes it work. One of the things that makes bebop work is that the way the one is felt — the first beat of the bar — is actually the “and” of four. So that gives it a certain kind of propulsion and forward motion, at any tempo. So when the tempo’s not that fast, you really hear that forward motion. Bud Powell’s important because he improvised like a horn player. There were some things that he did that were kind of demonic, they were so incredible. Speed-wise, and also some of the things he wrote. He was an amazing pianist.“Celia”Bud Powell (Verve)◆ ◆ ◆Melissa Aldana, saxophonistTo me, this album — “Charlie Parker With Strings” — captures the deepness of Parker’s innovative nature as an artist in a way that is beautiful, lyrical and emotional. Bird’s sound is raw and personal, but this track shows what it means to simply have a beautiful sound. It made a particular impact on me years ago, and continues to affect me now.“April in Paris”Charlie Parker (Verve Reissues)◆ ◆ ◆ More
