Village Vanguard

Subterms

    Latest story

    125 Shares139 Views

    When Connie Converse, the ‘Female Bob Dylan,’ Lived in N.Y.C.

    by

    There’s a resurgence of interest in the pioneering singer-songwriter who disappeared when she was 50.Connie Converse was a pioneer of what’s become known as the singer-songwriter era, making music in the predawn of a movement that had its roots in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s.But her songs, created a decade earlier, arrived just a moment too soon. They didn’t catch on. And by the time the sun had come up in the form of a young Bob Dylan, she was already gone. Not simply retired. She had vanished from New York City, as she eventually would from the world, along with her music and legacy.It wasn’t until 2004, when an N.Y.U. graduate student heard a 1954 bootleg recording of Ms. Converse on WNYC, that her music started to get any of the attention and respect that had evaded her some 50 years before.The student, Dan Dzula, and his friend, David Herman, were spellbound by what they heard. They dug up more archival recordings, and assembled the 2009 album, “How Sad, How Lovely,” a compilation of songs that sound as though they could have been written today. It has been streamed over 16 million times on Spotify.Young musicians like Angel Olsen and Greta Kline now cite Ms. Converse as an influence, and musical acts from Big Thief to Laurie Anderson to the opera singer Julia Bullock have covered her songs.“She was the female Bob Dylan,” Ellen Stekert, a singer, folk music scholar and song collector told me during my research for a book about Ms. Converse. “She was even better than him, as a lyricist and composer, but she didn’t have his showbiz savvy, and she wasn’t interested in writing protest songs.”Seventy-five years ago, Ms. Converse was just another young artist trying to make ends meet in the city, singing at dinner parties and private salons, and passing a hat for her performances.She knew that her songs did not jibe with the saccharine pop of the day. “This type of thing always curdles me like a dentist’s appointment,” she wrote to her brother before an audition at Frank Loesser’s music publishing company, where she predicted what executives would say of her songs: “lovely, but not commercial.”In January 1961, the same month that Dylan arrived from the Midwest, Ms. Converse left New York for Ann Arbor, Mich., where she reinvented herself as an editor, a scholar and an activist.In 1974, a week after her 50th birthday, she disappeared and was never seen again.Ms. Converse lived in New York from 1945 to 1960, and though she was intensely private, she kept a diary, scrapbooks and voluminous correspondence that were left behind after she drove away for good, offering clues about what the Manhattan chapter of her life was like. Here are some of the neighborhoods, venues and sites around the city that provided the musician with a backdrop for her short but trailblazing stint as a songwriter.The 1940s: Bohemians of the Upper West SideRiverside ParkIn 1944, after dropping out of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, Ms. Converse moved to New York. Her first job was at the American Institute of Pacific Relations, where she edited and wrote articles about international affairs. “I am struck by the breadth of the topics she covered,” said the contemporary international relations scholar Michael R. Anderson, who calls her writing and reporting “remarkable.”She lived on the Upper West Side. The image of her in Riverside Park, above, was found in an old filing cabinet that belonged to the photographer’s widow. It is one of the first known images of Ms. Converse in New York.The Lincoln ArcadeMs. Converse, left, plays for friends at the Lincoln Arcade.Lois AimeSome of Ms. Converse’s closest friends lived and hung around the bohemian enclave known as the Lincoln Arcade, a building on Broadway between West 65th and 66th Street. With a reputation as a haven for struggling artists, it had been home to the painters Robert Henri, Thomas Hart Benton and George Bellows, the last of whom had lived there with the playwright Eugene O’Neill.The group was a hard-drinking lot, given to holding court late at night. One surviving member of that crew, Edwin Bock, told me that Ms. Converse would often be clattering away at a typewriter, at a remove from the rest, though sometimes she did things he found shocking, like climbing out the front window well past midnight to stand on a ledge, several stories above the street.The 1950s: Making Music in the Village and Beyond23 Grove StreetPhotographs from Ms. Converse’s scrapbook show her studio apartment at 23 Grove Street, where she wrote almost all of her “guitar song” catalog.The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCMs. Converse lost her job when the institute landed in the cross hairs of the anti-Communist House Un-American Activities Committee. Sometime late in 1950, she moved to the West Village and began a new phase of her life as an aspiring composer and performer.She bought a Crestwood 404 reel-to-reel tape recorder and began making demos of herself singing new songs as she wrote them. It was here, while living alone in a studio apartment at 23 Grove Street that Ms. Converse wrote almost all of her “guitar song” catalog (including everything on “How Sad, How Lovely”).The Village at that time “was the Left Bank of Manhattan,” the writer Gay Talese told me, and it had “whiffs of the future in it” in terms of its permissiveness about lifestyle choices. Nicholas Pileggi, a writer and producer, suggested that given her address, Ms. Converse, a loner, would have had no problem hanging out by herself at Chumley’s, a former speakeasy.The upstart book publisher Grove Press was also just down the block, and she was close to The Nut Club at Sheridan Square, where jazz musicians often played, as well as the more respectable Village Vanguard.Grand CentralPhotographs from Ms. Converse’s scrapbook show her first and only appearance on live television: The Morning Show, with Walter Cronkite. There is no recording of the live performance. The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCHer first and only television appearance was in 1954, on the “The Morning Show” on CBS (hosted that year by Walter Cronkite), though how Ms. Converse secured the appearance and what she played and talked about may never be known (shows at this time were broadcast live; no archival footage exists). Because the program was staged in a studio above the main concourse at Grand Central and shown live on a big screen in the hall, everyone bustling through the station that morning could have looked up and caught the young musician’s one and only brush with success.Ms. Converse was extremely close to her younger brother, Phil. When he visited her in the city for the first time, Ms. Converse described the reunion in her irregularly kept diary, noting that the two “met like strangers at Grand Central, and fell to reminiscing over oysters.”Hamilton HeightsMs. Converse took a photograph of the street below her W. 138th St. apartment in 1958.The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCIn 1955, Ms. Converse took up residence at 605 West 138th Street, in Harlem, a block away from Strivers’ Row. There, she shared a three-bedroom flat with her older brother, Paul, his wife, Hyla, and their infant child, P. Bruce, a situation she called “a cost-saving measure.” The new apartment had an upright piano, which Ms. Converse used to compose an opera (now since lost), a series of settings for poems by writers like Dylan Thomas, E.E. Cummings and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a song cycle based on the myth of Cassandra who, according to Greek mythology, was given the gift of prophesy and then cursed to be never understood.Circle in the SquareThe 1956 production of “The Iceman Cometh,” which Ms. Converse attended. Sam Falk/The New York TimesAn avid theatergoer, Ms. Converse attended Jose Quintero’s 1956 revival of “The Iceman Cometh,” which made Jason Robards a star and effectively launched the Off-Broadway movement. “Did I mention that I saw an in-the-round production of ‘The Iceman Cometh’ last month?” she wrote to Phil and his wife, Jean, that October. “Some four and a half hours of uncut O’Neill, but only the last 15 minutes found me squirming in my seat.”The Blue AngelAt this erstwhile nightclub on East 55th Street, unique at the time for being desegregated, Ms. Converse met the cabaret singer Annette Warren, who expressed interest in covering Ms. Converse’s songs, and who would make at least two of them, “The Playboy of The Western World” and “The Witch and the Wizard,” staples of her show for decades to come.1960: The Lost Tape; Goodbye, New YorkNational Recording StudiosNational Recording Studios, at 730 Fifth Avenue between West 56th and 57th Streets, had been open for only a year when Ms. Converse showed up in February 1960 to record an album. It was a solo session that, because she did just one or two takes of each tune, only took a few hours. The recording was a rumor until 2014, when Phil Converse unearthed a reel of it in his basement. An adman who was a fan of Ms. Converse’s music had procured the recording session for her for free. That album, the only one she made, remains unreleased.Upper West SideMs. Converse in her apartment on West 88th Street, her last known residence in New York. The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCMs. Converse closed the circle of her peripatetic Manhattan existence by moving back to where she’d started: the Upper West Side. This time, she lived in a brownstone on West 88th Street, a half block from Central Park. This was her last known New York address; by 1961, she was gone.Her music, mostly made in isolation or at small gatherings, was nearly lost but for the efforts of her brother Phil, who archived what he could; David Garland, who played her music on WNYC in 2004 and 2009; and Dan Dzula and David Herman, the students who, decades later, introduced her work to a new generation.“The first time I played a Connie Converse song for a friend, she sat silently and cried,” Mr. Dzula said. “From that moment I knew Connie’s magic would reach at least a few more people in a deeply personal and special way.”He added: “Could I have envisioned her blowing up like this when we first put out the record? Absolutely not. But also, yeah, kind of!”Howard Fishman is the author of the new book “To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse.” More

    More stories

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Ron Miles, Understated Master of Jazz Cornet, Is Dead at 58

      by

      He enjoyed the admiration of his fellow musicians for decades, but he had just been starting to find his place in the spotlight.Ron Miles, whose gleaming, generously understated cornet playing made him one of the most rewarding bandleaders in contemporary jazz, if also one of its most easily overlooked, died on Tuesday at his home in Denver. He was 58.His label, Blue Note Records, said in an announcement that the cause was complications of a rare blood disorder. Mr. Miles had only recently gained the wider attention that he had long deserved, and his death proved as wrenching as it was unexpected for a jazz world already reeling from a cavalcade of untimely deaths during the coronavirus pandemic.The pianist Jason Moran paid tribute to Mr. Miles in a Facebook post, praising the spirit that he poured into both his compositions and his contributions to other people’s bands. “He’d make a chart with so much soul and simplicity,” Mr. Moran wrote. “And he would imbue any other song with that soulfulness as well. Every turn was original.”For decades, Mr. Miles enjoyed the admiration of insiders and fellow musicians and was known as a munificent educator and standard-bearer on the Denver scene. But his retiring personality and his relative absence from New York conspired with the resolute unflashiness of his playing to keep him out of the brightest spotlight. In his bands, the accompanists were often more famous than the leader.Only with the 2017 release of “I Am a Man,” a collection of seven inspired originals played by an all-star quintet, did the scope of his creativity gain wider recognition. Three years later, Blue Note released the quintet’s second album, “Rainbow Sign,” a set of languorous, poignant tunes that he had written while caring for his ailing father, who died in 2018.The title had a few levels of meaning for Mr. Miles, all of them intertwined. Referring to a passage in the Book of Revelation, when Christ perceives that his skin is multihued, Mr. Miles said the rainbow was a symbol of humanity’s oneness. “The idea of a rainbow is that it’s this thing that takes us outside of our expectations and our limitations of what we can see,” he told the Denver-based publication Westword.While grieving, Mr. Miles had also been drawn to mythology that sees rainbows as a gateway connecting the living to their ancestors. “Those who have left us can come back when we see a rainbow and visit us,” he said, “and we can interact with them through this rainbow.”Ronald Glen Miles was born in Indianapolis on May 9, 1963, to Jane and Fay Dooney Miles. When he was 11, his parents moved the family to Denver, hoping that the mile-high climate would help Ron cope with his asthma, and took jobs as civil servants there.He started playing trumpet in middle school, at a summer music program, and grew devoted to the instrument as a student at East High School. Mr. Miles played in the jazz band alongside the future actor Don Cheadle, who played saxophone, and soon began an apprenticeship with the respected Denver saxophonist Fred Hess.Mr. Miles and Mr. Hess would become collaborators, making a number of recordings together and both serving on the faculty of Metropolitan State University of Denver, where Mr. Miles eventually became director of jazz studies.After graduating from high school, he enrolled as an engineering student at the University of Denver, but soon transferred to the University of Colorado Boulder to study music. He went on to graduate school at the Manhattan School of Music; this was the only period he spent living outside Denver, where he would spend the rest of his career mentoring a generation of musicians — both on the live scene and in classrooms at Metropolitan State.On his first album, “Distance for Safety,” released in 1987, he led a hard-driving trumpet-bass-drums trio infused with equal doses of rock and free jazz. He went on to release a string of consistently unorthodox albums on various small labels, conforming to no favored format or style, including “Witness,” a 1989 quintet date, and “Heaven,” a 2002 duo record with the guitarist Bill Frisell.As Mr. Miles’s career went on, an expansive Rocky Mountain sound seeped ever more indelibly into his compositions and his playing, which was rough around the edges but balanced and controlled at its core. In the 2000s he switched fully from the trumpet to the cornet, a slightly less glamorous instrument that seemed to suit him.Unlike a typical East Coast trumpeter, he rarely flitted or zipped around on the instrument. He approached notes as if to disarm them, sometimes allowing tones to fill themselves out gradually, becoming wide and full and bright. The melodies he traced felt designed to be followed, even when they went fiendishly askew.By his mid-50s, Mr. Miles had become the leading brass player in what can now be considered a legitimate subgenre in jazz: the blending of American folk, blues and country with cool jazz and spiritual influences. One of its originators was Mr. Frisell, a Denver native 12 years older than Mr. Miles. In the 1990s and 2000s, the drummer Brian Blade and his Fellowship Band were its biggest exponents. Mr. Miles worked closely with both musicians.Mr. Miles performing at the Stone in New York in 2006.Erin Baiano for The New York TimesHe began collaborating with Mr. Frisell in the 1990s, playing first in the guitarist’s unusual quartet (joined by trombone and violin); they went on to appear in a variety of each other’s ensembles. Mr. Blade joined them in a trio under Mr. Miles’s direction that recorded a pair of arresting albums, “Quiver” (2012) and “Circuit Rider” (2014), before expanding into a quintet.With Mr. Moran added on piano and Thomas Morgan on bass, Mr. Miles composed for the band with each individual musician in mind. And he gave his side musicians full scores, rather than just individual parts, so they would see how all their voices would move together.The band became a darling of the jazz world, and “I Am a Man,” released on Enja/Yellowbird Records, garnered widespread acclaim. Mr. Miles made his first appearance as a leader at the Village Vanguard last year, playing the storied club’s reopening week after it had been shut down for a year and a half because of the coronavirus.Mr. Miles is survived by his wife, Kari Miles; his daughter, Justice Miles; his son, Honor Miles; his mother; his brother, Johnathan Miles; his sisters, Shari Miles-Cohen and Kelly West; and his half sister, Vicki M. Brown.Mr. Miles was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame in 2017; that same year, he joined the saxophonist Joshua Redman in recording “Still Dreaming,” a tribute to the band Old and New Dreams, with Mr. Miles filling the trumpeter Don Cherry’s chair. The album earned him his lone Grammy nomination.Mr. Miles had also been a member of the pianist Myra Melford’s Snowy Egret, an acclaimed avant-garde quintet; the violinist Jenny Scheinman’s groups; and the blues musician Otis Taylor’s backing band.A decade before Mr. Miles put together his quintet, the New York Times critic Nate Chinen, reviewing a performance with a sextet, made note of how selflessly he led his band. “Mr. Miles, who wrote most of the material for the group, appeared flatly uninterested in solo heroics; he was more intent on submerging himself in a sound,” Mr. Chinen wrote. “The songs felt like internal monologues in open spaces: careful and contemplative but free.” More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Ron Miles Headlines the Village Vanguard, at Last, as the Club Reopens

      by

      The cornetist led a quintet featuring Jason Moran, Bill Frisell, Thomas Morgan and Brian Blade as the 86-year-old establishment came back to life after its pandemic shutdown.Ron Miles has a dusty and unvarnished sound on cornet that hints at his Rocky Mountain roots, and unlike your typical high-brass improviser, he hardly ever resorts to flash or big pronouncements. Onstage he’s unhurried, low-key and playing for the audience, yes, but not directly to it.All of which helped make his quintet’s early set at the Village Vanguard on Saturday night feel comfortable, even familiar, despite it being Miles’s first week leading a band at the storied club — and his shows being the Vanguard’s first after 18 months of lockdown.There was an air of celebration as the 86-year-old establishment came back to life, but the way to engage with it was seemingly to pick up right where things left off, letting the music do its work.Patrons returning to the club found it largely unchanged after the long pause.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesThe tiny white bistro tables and wooden chairs were just as before, knocked closely together between the venue’s obtusely angled walls, all lined with leather benches. The simple laminated drink menus were unchanged, except for a sticker on each one with a handwritten “Modelo” replacing the Stella Artois.But a big part of the night’s easy, familial feeling came from the fact that the members of Miles’s all-star quintet were all Vanguard regulars. Everyone but the band’s leader had previously headlined at the club in his own right: the pianist Jason Moran, the guitarist Bill Frisell, the bassist Thomas Morgan and the drummer Brian Blade.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesMiles, 58, has spent most of his life in Denver and has only recently begun to garner the heavy national attention he was due, and it’s come thanks to this band. He had booked this engagement with the club’s management far in advance, after the quintet had released its debut album but before last year’s equally spellbinding release, “Rainbow Sign.” When the Vanguard decided to align its reopening with Broadway’s, in mid-September, Miles’s became the first date on the schedule that stood.The cornetist first convened the quintet in 2016 as an extension of a trio that he had long maintained with Blade and Frisell. Everyone in the group spent at least his adolescent years west of the Mississippi River — Louisiana, Texas, Colorado, California — and Miles’s slyly swinging compositions are built perfectly to find the natural simpatico between these musicians. Steeped in American roots music, 1950s cool jazz and the musical openness of Don Cherry, it never feels settled but almost always seems centered on a search for shared comfort.Appearing onstage with the band just after 8 p.m., Miles allowed a pregnant silence to build before beaming out one evenly held note; Moran responded with a low and cloudy chord, striking it just half a moment behind Miles. Frisell’s guitar, run through reversed effects and sudden loops, added an electric charge to their earth tones.It was Morgan who started, finally, to set a firm pulse, though he built it in response to Blade’s scattered strokes on the snare and bass drums, which implied a flow. The tune became slowly recognizable as “Like Those Who Dream,” the opener from “Rainbow Sign.” The musicians bent in and out of blues form as they moved into a steady three-beat pattern, and solos folded neatly into composed sections.The drummer Brian Blade and the guitarist Bill Frisell on the Vanguard stage.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesThe set started with long, expansive renditions of original compositions, and ended with a diptych of short, pithy pieces: a quick-hit take on Lee Konitz’s cool-jazz classic “Subconscious-Lee” and a short version of “The Rumor,” a pool of harmony and tone that serves as the centerpiece of the new album.Miles knows about fitting his voice into another musician’s band; most of his higher-profile work had been as a side musician, and he makes himself indispensable by paying attention to a group’s entire sound, in the way that a bassist or a pianist might.He encouraged the same approach from his bandmates here by not only writing to their natural strengths but by presenting each member with a score that shows the entire band’s parts, rather than just their own.Miles’s skills as an accompanist were in evidence too on Saturday. On “Queen of the South,” another original from the new album with a memorable, folklike melody, after the solo section ended and the band reclined back into the melody, Miles capered happily around it, adding bright coloration and cross-swipes of rhythm.He followed with “Let’s,” an up-tempo tune by Thad Jones, the trumpeter and Vanguard icon, hoisting up the energy and the tempo but not the volume. Moran stayed out as Frisell improvised, starting with spare gestures and getting more creative, treating his solo like an engine being rebuilt one part at a time. Miles took his own solo quickly off the harmonic map, tugging against whatever structure had set in with the swing feel.After “Let’s,” Miles took the microphone off its stand for the first and only time that set, and spoke as if this was just a normal night of music in a highly special place. “We are blessed to be here and blessed to be in this hallowed space,” he said. “We’re going to play some more music for you.”There was an air of celebration as the club came back to life.An Rong Xu for The New York Times More