billbeuttler.com

January 1, 1970

It's a busier newsletter than usual this week, owing to last Friday's Jazz Notes column holding until Monday and a pair of concert reviews. The week's two columns were profiles of saxophonist Tobias Delius and guitarist Pat Martino, the latter one of the more usual stories in music — a brain aneurysm caused such severe amnesia that he had to completely relearn to play guitar.

The Calendar pick this week was Dee Dee Bridgewater, whose first set Friday night I reviewed for what will probably turn out to be Monday's paper. This past week's two reviews were of the Ellis Marsalis Quartet and the supergroup Trio!, made up of Stanley Clarke, Jean-Luc Ponty, and Bela Fleck.

That latter review was apparently the most anticipated review I've written to date, and the most controversial. While I was still in the middle of writing it, the show's publicist phoned to ask when it would run, adding that "everyone" had requested copies of it. A friend also e-mailed wondering why it hadn't appeared in that morning's paper, and calling the concert "one of the most musical" he'd seen in years.

I liked the show pretty well myself, but thought the three principals played better as individuals than they had as a group. (I had no such quibbles with the opening act, the duo of 21-year-old pianist Taylor Eigsti and 16-year-old guitarist Julian Lage.) The headline of the review, which I didn't write, exaggerated that opinion by saying that Trio! had "no teamwork." I merely called the teamwork lacking, and the exclamation in the group's name therefore unearned.

My counterpart at the Boston Herald, Bob Young, disagreed, and used the same exclamation-mark conceit to say so — his review said Trio!'s name deserves a second exclamation mark. Others who saw the show agreed more with me. A Globe colleague e-mailed to say so, calling it a case of "great, great musicians, not melding well at all." When I bumped into a prominent agent a couple of nights later and asked what he'd thought of the show, he replied, "I hated it! I hated it!" Ponty's violin had been mixed so loud, he said, that he'd left after Trio!'s third tune. He did like the kids who opened the show, however. Fred Taylor, who produced the show, was diplomatic about my response to it. But he added that he was especially proud of the kids who'd opened it.

My first correspondent also weighed in again to say my complaint about the lack of interplay among the principals was "premature." That strikes me as excessively generous. Trio! was something like four months into a five-month tour, after which they've planned all along to disband. They're running out of time to figure out how to play together, assuming that matters to them. Besides which, Eigsti and Lage haven't been together any longer than Trio! has. My reviews gives the two kids gold stars for playing well with others. If the young guys can do it, musicians of Trio!'s caliber out to be able to, too.

In any case, the whole review is below, along with all the other Globe jazz stuff mentioned above.

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Saxophonist inspires collective improvisation

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent  |  October 14, 2005

Saxophonist Tobias Delius is a leading light on the Dutch jazz scene, where freedom and irony have long fueled the work of artists Willem Breuker, Misha Mengelberg, and Han Bennink. So it's fitting somehow that the group he'll be bringing to the Institute of Contemporary Art next week -- the Tobias Delius 4tet -- is partly inspired by Delius's youthful stay in . . . Mexico City.

Delius, 41, who last year was awarded the Boy Edgar Prize as Holland's foremost practitioner of improvised music, got his start as an indifferent grade-school clarinet student in his native England. He picked up the tenor saxophone and an intense interest in jazz as a teenager in Germany, where his family had relocated when he was 10, teaching himself the instrument primarily from the albums he was collecting. In 1983, he moved to Mexico for a year, and brought his saxophone with him.

"As far as going to Mexico," Delius says by phone from Amsterdam, "I don't actually remember why. I just went there without any plan. And what struck me there was that live music was everywhere. I had this kind of precious idea of [music]. I basically had never done a gig . . . and suddenly I came to this place where every corner there's a band playing."

Delius soon caught on with one such group himself, when pianist Francisco Tellez hired him for a regular gig with Tellez's Cuarteto Mexicano de Jazz. The experience, says Delius, proved crucial.

"It opened my eyes up that live music, as well as being something very precious, is also something very normal for day-to-day life," he explains. "I found that very healthy, and it helped me in my decision to persevere and become a musician."

Delius moved to Amsterdam in 1984 to study at the Sweelinck Conservatorium, but he soon dropped out, having come under the sway of Bennink, Mengelberg, and others. "Just being around those people was a huge influence," he recalls. "In those days it was a very open time. I was made to feel welcome, and before I knew it, I was playing with a lot of these people."

By 1990, he'd won the Dutch Podiumprijs, an award then given out to the young local musician most deserving wider recognition. In April of that year, he formed an early version of the 4tet, with Bennink on drums, Tristan Honsinger on cello, and Larry Fishkind on tuba. Bassist Joe Williamson replaced Fishkind nine years ago, and aside from occasional substitutions, the lineup has remained intact ever since. (Williamson will miss the ICA performance, due to the recent birth of his second daughter. His replacement, the young Icelandic bassist Valdi Kolli, was field-tested last week at a pair of 4tet gigs in Amsterdam.)

The combination of cello and upright bass flavors the 4tet's distinctive sound, but not nearly as much as the group's colloquially evolved approach to improvisation. Delius and Bennink bring strong jazz backgrounds to the proceedings; Honsinger, a New England native, has a classical orientation crossed with jazz and other disciplines, including theater. Delius and Honsinger contribute most of the repertoire, but compositions are treated mainly as loose starting points.

"The idea is once we more or less know them, they're at our disposition as we dive into the set," Delius explains. "Somebody can start a tune, and then it's up to the others either to join in or not. It's possible that I might call a tune and then the others decide they'd rather look into something else. In that way, the pieces are not like safe harbors where we end up when we've lost our way." He laughs. "It's more like they're there to maybe add even more confusion to the whole thing."

Collective improvisation dominates the proceedings.

"We never even think really in terms of solos," Delius says. "Most of the time all four of us play, and it's kind of a constant counterpoint."

With all that freedom, however, comes responsibility.

"It requires a different kind of concentration," Delius says. "A lot of times you will end up in areas of quicksand, which you have to do your best, as a group and also individually, to swim out of again. It's a certain kind of tension and quality of which I find exciting. Hopefully, also to the listener."

The Tobias Delius 4tet performs at 8 p.m. Tuesday at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 955 Boylston St. Tickets $10 ($8 students). Call 617-628-4342 or visit www.icaboston.org.

Michelin guide: Pianist Nando Michelin is playing impresario at the Acton Jazz Cafe Sunday evenings through mid-December, presenting 12 weeks of world jazz concerts by locally based artists (himself included). Michelin got things rolling two weeks ago by celebrating his 40th birthday with his band SUR, featuring vocalist Leala Cyr and guitarist Ricardo Vogt. The next two Sundays feature groups led by bassist-composers: the Alejandro Cimadoro Quintet this week, with Bruno Raberg and his band Ascencio following on Oct. 23. Michelin will lead bands twice more: with drummer Richie Barshay and bassist Esperanza Spalding on Nov. 27, and with his quartet featuring saxophonist Jerry Bergonzi in the series-ending concert on Dec. 18. Admission is $7 per concert, or $50 for the entire series. 

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Trio! has individual talent but no teamwork

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent  |  October 13, 2005

Five jazz virtuosos took turns onstage at Symphony Hall Tuesday in one of the most highly anticipated concerts of the season, with the young duo of pianist Taylor Eigsti and guitarist Julian Lage opening for Trio!, the barnstorming all-star team of Stanley Clarke, Jean-Luc Ponty, and Bela Fleck. The results were often electrifying but ultimately mixed.

Eigsti and Lage, who are 21 and 16, respectively, fared better than their elders did, particularly when it came to playing as a unit. Their set included three originals and three standards, and they played them with a clarity (the title of one of those originals, written by Lage) and rapport reminiscent of Lage's sometime employer Gary Burton's collaborations with Chick Corea.

Their take on "Caravan" was especially illuminating. Eigsti and Lage had fun splintering the familiar melody by Duke Ellington and Juan Tizol, then alternately took their best solos of the set, earning them something unusual for an opening act: an encore. These kids deserved gold stars — both for their chops and for playing well with others.

That last quality was less evident with the headliners. Their banter between tunes showed that they like one another, but their work together had too much in common with an all-star game: lots of impressive individual moments, but lacking in the teamwork department. Clarke, Ponty, and Fleck have been touring together for four months, but they haven't coalesced as a trio. That meant their set too often amounted to three phenomenal musicians making mediocre music, their interplay surprisingly sluggish.

Not that there weren't plenty of good moments. Fleck's piece "Storm Warning," written to be as difficult as he could make it, fared better than most as a group effort, its complexity perhaps focusing everyone's attention. Clarke's "Song to John" (a Coltrane tribute) and Fleck's "Plucky Davenport" were both solid. The group's encore, Ponty's "Translove Express," had the bass and violin parts dancing together admirably as it transported Clarke and Ponty back to their 1970s heyday.

The real highlights came in the solos, especially when each took a turn onstage alone and broke out some flashy stunts. Fleck applied his nose to his banjo fret board while playing a snippet of "Mona Lisa." Ponty set his bow on his music stand and played a piece holding and plucking his violin like a guitar. Clarke dropped jaws by coaxing what sounded like flamenco guitar from his upright bass, then segued, rapidly slapping his open hand up and down the strings. (That he'd done the same things earlier in the set didn't diminish the audience's enthusiasm for them; he was given a standing ovation.)

The group's name, however, is Trio! Tuesday night, the exclamation mark usually felt unearned. 

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Calendar Jazz Picks

Fri 10-14

Dee Dee Bridgewater
Scullers, Doubletree Guest Suites Boston, 400 Soldiers Field Road, Boston. 617-562-4111. 8 and 10 p.m. $24, $64 with dinner. Repeats Sat. Friday's 8 p.m. set is a fundraiser for the Lupus Foundation of New England. Tickets for that show, which includes a "meet and greet" reception afterward, are $50 and can be purchased through the foundation by calling 877-665-8787 or visiting www.lupusne.org.

Dee Dee Bridgewater (right) gets around professionally. She won a Tony Award 30 years ago for her role as Glinda the Good Witch in the Broadway musical "The Wiz." She hosts recorded concerts Thursdays on National Public Radio’s "JazzSet," having taken over that role a few years ago from Branford Marsalis. Bridgewater’s roots are in jazz. Her mother immersed her in the music of Ella Fitzgerald, and her trumpeter father taught jazz to such standout Memphis musicians as Booker Little, Charles Lloyd, and George Coleman. In 1970, fresh from the University of Illinois Big Band, Bridgewater followed her then-husband, trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, to New York and into the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra. That in turn led to work with such giants as Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, and Dexter Gordon. More recently, Bridgewater’s tribute to Fitzgerald, “Dear Ella,” won two Grammy awards in 1997. But she still isn’t letting her jazz bona fides lock her in place. Her new disc, “J'ai Deux Amours,” is her tribute to France, where Bridgewater now lives part-time. Expect to hear French love songs at Scullers this weekend, sung en français.

Thurs 10-13 Pat Martino Guitar great Martino brings his quartet to Cambridge to pay homage to a guitar hero of his own: Wes Montgomery. Regattabar, Charles Hotel, One Bennett St., Cambridge. 617-395-7757. 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. $25. Repeats Friday.

BILL BEUTTLER

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Marsalis and friends take a trip through jazz history

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent  |  October 10, 2005

Ellis Marsalis is widely known as a great jazz educator. On Friday at Scullers, he showed himself to be a great student of the genre, too, while also demonstrating his underrecognized prowess as a jazz artist.

Sharing the stage with the 71-year-old pianist was a pair of fellow New Orleans "refugees" and former students, saxophonist Derek Douget and drummer Adonis Rose, with Duke University jazz studies director John Brown on bass. Marsalis opened with a brief piano intro that led into "Bye Bye Blackbird," the first of several standards making up the set. Douget blew an impressive solo on tenor sax, with Marsalis and Brown following with smart solo turns in that order, Marsalis quoting the telltale phrase of Dizzy Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts" during his accompaniment of Brown.

The next tune, Herbie Hancock's "Dolphin Dance," revealed Marsalis's fondness for more modern classics (ditto Wayne Shorter's "Infant Eyes," which appears on the quartet CD Marsalis later autographed in the lobby between sets). Douget ended his tenor solo this time with some painterly, fluttering notes reminiscent of Shorter or Charles Lloyd, and Marsalis weighed in after him with a solo rich in harmonic sophistication.

The next two pieces were highlights, with Douget switching to soprano sax for both. First came "Mozartin'," by Marsalis's New Orleans contemporary Alvin Batiste, a sprightly, up-tempo crowd-pleaser. Douget's solo was full of playful echoes of Sidney Bechet and old New Orleans, and Marsalis supplemented a similarly blues-laden solo with a few modern frills. Brown and Rose each got turns, too — Rose rapping out triplets on his high-hat through Brown's hard-driving effort, then being goaded through his own by alternating phrases from Douget and Marsalis.

A brilliant rendition of "My Favorite Things" followed, taken at a considerably slower tempo than the familiar John Coltrane version. Douget's phrasing on soprano paid obvious homage to Trane — even seeming to reference "A Love Supreme" at one point — and Marsalis worked some modal magic a la McCoy Tyner. Brown and Rose, supporting them, did fair imitations of Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, too.

Duke Ellington's "Just Squeeze Me" came next, a charmingly light-hearted number that was as close as the quartet came to playing a ballad. Then Marsalis brought out Esperanza Spalding to sit in on a couple of numbers on bass. Spalding, a rising star in Boston who'll be leading her own combo at Scullers on Oct. 20, played the lead line on Ellington's "Prelude to a Kiss," with Marsalis and Rose in support, then took the anchor role when Marsalis's turn came to solo. She also essayed a dazzling solo on the up-tempo blues that closed the set, Professor Brown smiling in admiration from offstage.

Marsalis took a quick solo piano turn as an encore that had a snippet of stride in it, proving his familiarity with jazz history reaches all the way back. 

Ellis Marsalis
At: Scullers, first set, Friday

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Getting lost in his guitar helps Martino find himself

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent  |  October 10, 2005

Twenty-five years ago, jazz guitarist Pat Martino emerged from surgery to repair a brain aneurysm with near total memory loss. His severe amnesia meant he no longer knew that he'd ever played guitar, let alone how. His father tried jogging his memory by bringing LPs with Martino's name and photo on them to the hospital as proof of his son's ability on the instrument, but that didn't go over as well as expected.

"By him doing that," recalls Martino, 61, by phone from Philadelphia, "it triggered something within me that pushed the guitar away from me. It pushed music away from me, in fact."

The problem, Martino says, was that in the early days of his recovery he was totally absorbed in the present, with zero interest in the past or the future. Depressed, Martino tried various therapies to lift his mood. Nothing worked. Then he began fooling around on his guitar, not with an eye toward resuming his career but as a way of taking his mind off his worries.

"My favorite toy became the guitar again," says Martino, who performs at the Regattabar Thursday and Friday. "It was the only thing that I could play with and lose myself in. And that's how I learned the instrument. The same way that I did when I was a little boy. I lost myself in it. The only difference, of course, was that there was no one to say to me as an adult, 'Stop playing and do your homework.'"

As he played with the guitar, enjoying "simple, basic motions on the instrument" and "the sound of its tone," Martino found his technique rebuilding itself.

By the late '80s, Martino had resumed playing professionally. (Now he's on what might be considered his third act, having surmounted life-threatening lung problems in the late '90s through a combination of diet and yoga exercises.) His recorded work since then includes a Grammy-nominated live organ-trio disc with fellow Philadelphian Joey DeFrancesco and drummer Billy Hart, and an all-star studio session with Joe Lovano, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Christian McBride, and Lewis Nash. The latter, titled "Think Tank," helped Martino win the guitar category in the 2004 Down Beat Readers Poll.

Martino's current project, a CD tribute to late guitar great Wes Montgomery, is due out on Blue Note early next year. Martino claims credit for introducing Montgomery and his work to another guitar icon, Les Paul, who used to drop by regularly to watch Martino perform in New York. One night, Montgomery was playing a couple of blocks down Seventh Avenue, and Martino brought Paul in to meet him.

"One of the strangest things happened," Martino recalls. "Wes came offstage as we were waiting to see him. He walked on over, and I introduced him to Les, and Wes told Les Paul, 'I'm one of your biggest fans.' And Les was so taken by his playing that I just left them there."

Martino met Montgomery and Paul outside Count Basie's nightclub afterward, where George Benson and Grant Green wandered up and joined them, and the impromptu assemblage of guitar greats headed off to breakfast together.

At the Regattabar, Martino and his working quartet of Rick Germanson on piano, Steve Varner on bass, and Scott Robinson on drums will be playing such Montgomery favorites as "Four on Six," "Unit 7," "Groove Yard," and "Full House," the same basic repertoire as on the CD in progress. Decades-old LPs from Martino's boyhood collection contributed heavily to the song selections — and this time Martino was delighted to have old records reconnect him with his past.

"I found records that brought me way, way back," he said, "and I found little ballpoint pen markings on the backs of the albums. Certain songs that were circled told me what really had moved me, and it triggered bursts of images that brought me back to sitting in front of a record player that belonged to my father and putting the arm of the needle on the album, again and again, copying the solo, at the age of 13 or 14 years old. I took those circles off of those albums and chose that as the repertoire for this particular project."

Guitar clinics: Aspiring guitarists who'd like to tap into Martino's mastery of the instrument are in luck. He'll bookend his Regattabar shows with clinics at Berklee College of Music and at Bosse School of Music in Weymouth. The Berklee event is Wednesday at 1 p.m. at the Berklee Performance Center. Martino will also give two clinics on Saturday at Bosse, at noon and 2 p.m. For reservations for the Bosse clinics, call 781-337-8500.
 
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company