billbeuttler.com

January 1, 1970

The newsletter is coming at you a day earlier than usual this week, as I'm headed to Newport in a couple of hours to cover the jazz festival.

The newsletter is a little bigger than usual, too. The Color and Talea piece that was held a couple of weeks ago finally ran today, and so did a profile of Carla Bley, who'll be performing at Newport tomorrow morning. And yesterday's Calendar section had my preview of Newport along with my weekly Jazz Pick.

The interview mentioned in the Newport preview as the source of the George Wein quotes was when I "hosted" him on New England Cable News a couple of weeks ago. Cannibalizing our "Globe at Home" chat for Calendar worked nicely, and likely not many working people saw it anyway, as it ran at 12:45 p.m. Folks with Windows Media players can watch still it on their computers, though. Go to this link — http://www.boston.com/news/necn/Entertainment/ — and scroll down to where you find my name misspelled "Biteler."

Look for my review of Newport in Monday's Globe or next week's newsletter. Ciao for now.



* * * * *

Composer brings an element of surprise to her work

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent  |  August 12, 2005

Carla Bley has a pair of interesting memories from her previous appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival — which happened 40 years ago this summer.

The first is that the person who was supposed to introduce the group she was performing with, the Jazz Composers Orchestra, refused to do so. The orchestra was too avant-garde for the guy's taste, and he claimed he wouldn't be able to call what they were doing "jazz" with a straight face.

The other is that her only child, Karen Mantler, was conceived that weekend.

"I saw [festival promoter George Wein] like a year after Newport," Bley says on the phone from her home near Woodstock, N.Y., "and I had a three-month-old child, and so he just worked back in his mind. He said, 'Aha, that happened at my festival, didn't it?'

"I hope it doesn't happen this time," she adds, laughing. "I'll have to tell Steve to be very careful."

Steve is Steve Swallow, Bley's longtime soul mate and bandmate and a perennial poll-winner as jazz's best electric bassist. The couple will open the Pavilion stage at the JVC Jazz Festival-Newport tomorrow morning with Bley's quartet the Lost Chords, joined by saxophonist Andy Sheppard and drummer Billy Drummond.

The quartet will be playing three pieces by Bley: something from their excellent 2004 CD, "The Lost Chords"; a quartet adaptation of Bley's reworking of "The National Anthem ," from her 2003 big-band disc "Looking for America"; and an older tune of hers called "The Girl Who Cried Champagne."

Bley, 67, will be playing piano, but she's best known for her work as a composer and arranger.

"I'm very self-conscious," she says. "I mean, I just like to think about what I'm doing, and as a writer I can spend two days on a phrase. When it comes up on the stage, it's just over before I've had a chance to do my best work. ... I like the tried-and-true, slow snail work of writing music."

It has been that way, Bley says, since she started out composing music for her first husband.

"Paul Bley needed songs," she recalls. "He would say, 'I've got a record date tomorrow. Give me six shorties.' So I'd go to the piano and work all night."

Small-group pieces for Paul Bley, Jimmy Giuffre, Art Farmer, and others led to larger works after she met her second husband, Michael Mantler, and began writing for the Jazz Composers Orchestra. Her best-known work in that vein is for Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra. Their third album, "Not in Our Name," will be released on Verve later this month.

Bley is the only musician besides Haden to have been with the LMO throughout its 37-year history. Besides playing piano on the new disc, she wrote all the arrangements (among them a four-part "America the Beautiful" medley whose final section is Ornette Coleman's "Skies of America"), contributed a new piece of her own ("Blue Anthem"), and conducted the orchestra. She also let Haden talk her into arranging Bill Frisell's "Throughout."

All of Bley's recent work retains the characteristics she built her reputation on, chief among them her sense of humor, taste for minor keys, and ability to surprise. Absent have been the avant-garde indulgences that offended that would-be announcer in 1965 and the electronic keyboards Bley once made use of.

"I'm not interested in that stuff anymore," she says, "but I was at the time, so I did it." These days her interests are more classically oriented — "just melodic lines and playing in 4/ 4 and wearing suits," she says, laughing.

Next month, Bley will perform at the Monterey Jazz Festival for the first time, which thrills her, since she grew up in Oakland and later lived briefly in Monterey. She'll play a concert with the Lost Chords and the next day will premiere a festival-commissioned big band composition.

"It's sort of a looking-back kind of piece," says Bley. "I've based the whole piece on my very first and only gig as a solo pianist, which happened at a nightclub in Monterey called the Black Orchid. And so the piece is called 'The Black Orchid,' and it's really funny. It's got cocktail-piano vignettes in it."

Bley will handle the cocktail-piano parts herself, self-consciousness be damned.

"I'm trying to memorize some of these weird things so it doesn't look like I'm reading music," she says. "Because of course cocktail pianists never read music."

Carla Bley and the Lost Chords will perform at 11:45 a.m. tomorrow at the Pavilion Stage, JVC Jazz Festival-Newport, Fort Adams State Park, Newport, R.I. The festival runs from 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. tomorrow and Sunday. Tickets $65 in advance, $70 on festival weekend, $5 for children under 12, children under 2 free. Call 866-468-7619 or visit www.ticketweb.com.

Donor search: Saxophone great Michael Brecker will miss his two scheduled appearances at the JVC Jazz Festival-Newport this weekend due to a recently diagnosed life-threatening illness, myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), which will require him to undergo a marrow stem cell transplant. Potential donors for Brecker — as well as for others suffering from the disease — will be able to visit a special tent at the festival, organized by the Rhode Island Blood Center, where they can join the National Marrow Donor Program. The tent will be located next to the Museum of Yachting at Fort Adams State Park, Newport, tomorrow and Sunday. Potential donors who won't be at Newport can contact the National Marrow Donor program by calling 800-MARROW2 or online at www.marrow.org. Brecker had been scheduled to perform with both Saxophone Summit and Steps Ahead 2005. He will be replaced in the latter group by saxophonist Bill Evans. 

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

* * * * *

Band's experimental sound is built on a jazz foundation

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent  |  August 12, 2005

There's only one place Anthony Buonpane has been spending more time this summer than onstage at Zeitgeist Gallery. That's his top-floor apartment in Allston.

"This is where I do everything," says Buonpane, 23, the saxophonist and de facto manager of the experimental jazz trio Color and Talea, as he glances around his room one recent afternoon. "Book gigs, book tours, all sorts of Internet things, compose, make records — all of it."

He's been booking some pretty impressive gigs for the band lately, most prominently a weekly two-month residency at Zeitgeist running Saturday nights through the end of the month. There's also a lengthy tour of the United States and Canada coming up this fall and an October date opening for the Bad Plus at the Somerville Theatre.

The truth is, Color and Talea and the Bad Plus aren't that much alike artistically, Buonpane says. But the Bad Plus is a strong influence in other ways.

"They're an inspiration in terms of marketing," he says. "In terms of being able to make money with this thing, I'm like, 'Wow, that's probably the most successful a band like us could ever be.' "

To judge by its most recent CD, "Project Mayhem," Color and Talea had begun evolving a sound all its own — one mixing jazz improvisation with electronic effects and breakbeats — even before original bassist Ben Das left the group this spring and was replaced by Adam Minkoff, 22.

Buonpane, Das, and 22-year-old drummer Adam Sturtevant — who lives downstairs from Buonpane — first began playing music together in high school in Warren, N.J. When it came time for college, Das and Sturtevant headed to Berklee.

Buonpane went to New York University, where he majored in music business and managed to secure the group its first residency, at the Knitting Factory, Manhattan's renowned bastion of experimental music, while still in school.

Color and Talea put out a quickie, self-produced debut CD, "Gallery of the Muse," in 2001, and Buonpane joined the others in Boston after graduating from NYU. The decision to bring in Minkoff, a current Berklee student first spotted by Buonpane performing at the Zeitgeist with the band Sesroh, came after Das decided to become a full-time middle-school teacher in Chinatown.

The group brings a rock-like energy to its music, much as the Bad Plus does. Though it is often billed with jam bands when performing out of town, it views itself as something else entirely.

"Even though Color and Talea is very much a rocking band, we all grew up with jazz," Sturtevant explains. "We wanted to take what we had learned from jazz and what we loved about rock and kind of fuse them together to make a louder, more rocking genre of music but that's still fresh and exciting and uses a lot of improvisational vocabulary that we got from jazz."

The Zeitgeist residency has allowed Buonpane and Sturtevant to concentrate heavily on composing this summer. Hence all the hours Buonpane has logged hunkered down in his room with his alto sax, laptop, and various effects pedals.

"Recently we did an experimental thing with beats and loops," Buonpane says. "What we do is we synch up through the software a tempo click and work around pre-synthesized creative loops. That's the breakbeat part of what we're doing. Call them laptop jams or what have you. We're just trying to create a unified sound through electronic production and live instruments."

Color and Talea perform at 7 p.m. tomorrow at Zeitgeist Gallery. Donation $10. Call 617-876-6060 or visit www.zeitgeistgallery.org.
 
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
 
* * * * *

WEIN'S WORLD

Newport Jazz Festival preview

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent  |  August 11, 2005

George Wein says his decision to eschew crossover acts and stick to jazz for last year's 50th-anniversary JVC Jazz Festival-Newport went over so well that he's repeating the formula this weekend.

"Years ago I brought a beautiful girl to the ball, and it was jazz music," Wein said in a recent interview. "Last year, I said, 'I'm gonna go with the gal I took the first year.' So I put together, literally, a pure jazz festival representing every style [of jazz]. It was a great success, so for the 51st we're doing the same thing."

Among the highlights slated for this weekend is Sunday's festival-concluding celebration of Boston native Roy Haynes's 80th birthday, which will see the master bebop drummer surrounded by Chick Corea, Gary Burton, Joshua Redman, Christian McBride, Wynton Marsalis, and Haynes's own quartet, the Fountain of Youth Band. Wein and Haynes have known each other since their days playing jam sessions in Boston with Frankie Newton, Red Allen, and J. C. Higginbotham during the early 1940s, a few years before Haynes began playing with Charlie Parker.

"He just happens to be, in my mind, the greatest living drummer today, and maybe as great as any drummer that ever lived," Wein said. "So Roy is my man. It's his 80th year. It's my 80th year — I'll be 80 in October. And so we decided to have this tribute to him."

Another octogenarian who'll be on hand again this year is Dave Brubeck, who at 84 has played more Newport Jazz Festivals than any other musician (this will be No. 33), beginning with the second of Wein's shindigs in 1955. And Brubeck isn't even the oldest great who'll perform at Newport this year. That would be Hank Jones, who turned 87 on July 31, and who'll be joined onstage Sunday by Joe Lovano, George Mraz, and Lewis Nash.

Wein makes no apologies for booking older masters of such high caliber.

"I've always been accused of playing a lot of the old artists, the same old thing," he explained. "People don't understand what a privilege it is to still do it. They don't understand that if Dizzy Gillespie were still alive — he was born in 1917 — I'd still be happy to play him. I still wish I could play Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington. I can't; they're gone. But believe me, if they were still around, I'd play them."

Which is not to say Newport will be overloaded with elders. Among the very young and youngish talents booked for the festival's three stages this year are Julian Lage, Taylor Eigsti, Redman and his Elastic Band, Medeski Martin & Wood, Patricia Barber, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Matt Wilson, Jason Moran (as one-third of Don Byron's Ivey-Divey Trio), and Brad Mehldau.

Among the several whippersnappers making their first Newport appearances, Wein is particularly fond of Mehldau, whom he calls "one of the finest young piano players around. I think he's bordering on being a genius."

A few more established geniuses and the bands that they will lead at Newport include the McCoy Tyner Trio, the Dave Holland Big Band, the Charles Lloyd Quartet, the Wynton Marsalis Septet, and Don Byron's Ivey-Divey Trio (see opposite). And that's to name just a few of the dozens of all-stars gathered together this weekend.

"Anyone who was there last year," Wein said, "will know it's a cornucopia of jazz." 

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
 
* * * * *

Calendar Jazz Picks

Tues 8-16

Don Byron's Ivey-Divey Trio
Scullers, Doubletree Guest Suites Boston, 400 Soldiers Field Road, Boston. 617-562-4111. 8 and 10 p.m. $20, $60 with dinner.

It's okey-dokey if you can't make it to Newport to catch Don Byron's Ivey-Divey Trio on Sunday at the JVC Jazz Festival-Newport. Byron and mates Jason Moran and Billy Hart will head to Boston right after for a pair of Tuesday night sets at Scullers. The trio is named for Byron's CD "Ivey-Divey," a tribute to tenor sax great Lester Young and his 1946 trio recording with Nat King Cole and Buddy Rich. Byron's disc was widely ranked among the top jazz CDs of 2004, and Bryon's core group on it, like Young's, had no bassist. Instead, Byron built his sound around his own clarinet and tenor saxophone, Moran's piano, and the drumming of Jack DeJohnette. Moran's busy left hand helps make up for the missing bass, but Byron in any case relishes the way the otherwise missing bottom keeps everyone on their toes. As for Hart filling in for DeJohnette, not to worry: Byron considers them interchangeable, noting that Hart played several nights with the trio at the Village Vanguard before the CD was recorded. "It's a toss up," says Byron. "If you can't get Jack, you get Billy. You're not really losing anything there. They're both great drummers."

Fri 8-12 Allan Harris He's led clinics at Berklee before, but tomorrow night will mark vocalist Harris's long-overdue first performance in Boston. Regattabar, Charles Hotel, One Bennett St., Cambridge. 617-395-7757. 7:30 p.m. $15.

BILL BEUTTLER