billbeuttler.com

January 1, 1970

A little busier week than usual this week, owing to my having two profiles to write instead of the usual one. Both of them were of musicians originally from my native Chicago. Ramsey Lewis still lives there — these days in the chi-chi downtown Streeterville neighborhood (he was looking out his window at the Hancock building across the street when I spoke with him) — and he laughingly accepted my congratulations for the White Sox' victory in the World Series.

Anthony Braxton, like me, has transplanted himself to New England (he's a professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut). But we both gare originally from Chicago's South Side. Until I was six years old I lived at 105th and Wabash, and Braxton in those same years lived at 62nd and Michigan — meaning I was almost exactly five miles due south of him (and over two blocks), which we both got a kick out of when we realized it.

Braxton told me that his stumbling upon the Dave Brubeck album "Jazz at the College of the Pacific" at an impressionable age — and more specifically, alto saxophonist Paul Desmond's playing on that album — caused him to give up his Miles Davis-inspired plans to play trumpet and switch to alto sax. Lewis in his profile talks about forming his current piano trio several years ago and his plans for a weekly television show about jazz that will begin airing on PBS in April.

The week started out with a couple of weird mistakes, by the way. The Braxton piece was originally supposed to run on Friday, as did the Lewis piece, but my editor realized she wouldn't have room for both of them on Friday, so moved the Braxton story to Wednesday. But when she did so, she forgot to switch the references to "tomorrow" in the story to "Saturday" — which meant the need to run a correction in the paper on Thursday. I've made the fix in the version here.

The other goof involved the same editor not finding the Wynton Marsalis review I had sent her on Monday morning. I asked in passing on Tuesday whether the story had been bumped to Wednesday, since I hadn't seen it in Tuesday's paper as planned, and she told me she'd never gotten it. She didn't say why she'd never called to ask where it was, so I suspect that perhaps she'd gotten busy and forgotten it was coming. In any case, I re-sent it, and it ran on Wednesday, right next to the Braxton story. So if you're wondering why it took until Wednesday to get a Sunday-afternoon concert into the paper, there's your explanation.

Marsalis played a very impressive set, as always. But I wish he'd drop his tune "You & Me" from his repertoire soon. Unlike the other originals he's been playing, that song is so slight, it's tedious — especially on repeated hearings. But for some reason he's been making it a centerpiece of his small-group concerts, at least here in Boston.

Finally, Jimmy Heath is playing a free concert tonight at Wellesley College. The Bostonians among you might want to check it out if you haven't got other plans. Heath is one of jazz's undersung heroes.

Cheers.

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Lewis gets fresh start with return to his past

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent  |  November 4, 2005

Ramsey Lewis is one of jazz's great popularizers. Forty years ago he had a big hit with his live album "The In Crowd," and he's remained among the most accessible jazz artists ever since.

Little wonder that Lewis and his trio have been tapped to headline Steppin' Out 2005, the gala benefit for the Dimock Community Health Center taking place Saturday night at the Sheraton Boston Hotel in Back Bay. Or that Lewis will be hosting the first weekly jazz television series in 40 years when his show "Legends of Jazz" begins airing on PBS stations nationwide in April.

Lewis will be joined at tomorrow's event by vocalists Bobby Caldwell and Oleta Adams and a long list of musicians including Regina Carter, Hiromi, T.S. Monk, and Andre Ward. But it's Lewis and his piano trio who top the bill. The acoustic-piano format earned Lewis his early fame, and he returned to it several years ago with happy results.

"It's almost as if there were certain people out there kind of wishing or waiting for me to go back to an acoustic-type thing, go back to the Ramsey Lewis Trio, because we've gotten into a lot of wonderful things since then," Lewis says in a phone interview. "So it's been very rewarding. I've gotten into more writing music. It was like a shot in the arm or something when I started the acoustic journey again."

The decision to return to the trio format came when Lewis was invited to perform at a jazz festival in Cuba several years ago and decided it made no sense to lug his electronic keyboards and quintet with him to what he figured would be a mostly straight-ahead jazz setting. He put out the word that he was looking for a bassist and a drummer, and Larry Gray's name kept coming up to play bass.

In addition to being Chicago's top jazz bassist, Gray showed deep familiarity with Lewis's music the first time they rehearsed together. "We ran over the songs that we were gonna do in Cuba," says Lewis, "and he blew me totally away, because he says, 'You're not gonna do "Julia"?' And 'You're not gonna do "Close Your Eyes and Remember"?' These are my songs. I'm like, 'Damn!'"

Lewis had so much fun playing in Cuba he decided on the spot to drop his quintet and hire the trio full-time. When drummer Ernie Adams later left to tour with Al Di Meola, Gray recommended Leon Joyce to replace him.

"'The way he plays, I think he's your kind of drummer,'" Lewis remembers Gray telling him. "'I mean, he can go to church, he can go R&B, he can play straight-ahead jazz, he can do the classical stuff you like to do.' I said, 'Really? Let's try him out.' So I had him come to rehearsal, and Leon really bowled me over."

The trio also serves as the house band for Lewis's forthcoming TV series, the latest addition to a busy schedule that includes his hosting a daily smooth-jazz radio show in Chicago and a more straight-ahead weekly radio show that's syndicated nationally, also called "Legends of Jazz." The TV series will typically pair older and younger musicians for half-hour programs of music and conversation. An already-taped show dedicated to the trumpet, for example, brought Clark Terry together with Chris Botti and Roy Hargrove, and a tenor-sax segment had Benny Golson joined by Chris Potter and Marcus Strickland.

The idea, says Lewis, is to attract both hard-core jazz fans and curious neophytes. "We're looking for the jazz police as well as those people who have heard or felt something about jazz and never really got into it, and they're flipping through [channels and say], 'Well, let's see what this is about,'" he explains. "And hopefully, we hook these people."

Lewis contends that Ken Burns's 2001 documentary "Jazz" and the spike in sales of classic jazz recordings that followed it are proof that there's an audience for televised jazz, and that putting jazz on TV can help repopularize it.

"We didn't go into this blindly," says Lewis. "We did our homework and we found out that at the end of the day, at the end of any given year, there are more records bought by people 40 [years old] and over than there are [by people] under. It's just that they're bought over a period of time. They're not bought only in the first quarter or the second quarter or only in the third quarter."

Jazz recordings, Lewis adds, "don't sell millions, but they sell hundreds of thousands. So we said, 'That's the market we want.'"

The Ramsey Lewis Trio will perform Saturday at Steppin’ Out 2005, a benefit for the Dimock Community Health Center, at 8 p.m. at the Sheraton Boston Hotel in Back Bay. Tickets $200 ($175 for WGBH members, $100 for seniors). Call 617-442-8800 or visit www.dimock.org.
 
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Calendar Jazz Picks

Sat 11-5

Jimmy Heath
Jewett Auditorium, Wellesley College, 106 Central St., Wellesley. 781-283-2500. 8 p.m. Free.

Jimmy Heath (right) has rubbed shoulders with bebop royalty. He led a late-1940s band that included fellow Philadelphian John Coltrane (and that Charlie Parker and Max Roach once sat in with), then replaced Coltrane in Miles Davis's group a decade later. In between, Heath put in two years with Dizzy Gillespie's bebop big band. His older brother was Percy Heath, bassist for the Modern Jazz Quartet, who died last spring at 81. Jimmy Heath, who turned 79 last week, was never as well-known to the public as some of the musicians he played with, but he's widely adored by fellow jazz artists as a consummate craftsman, both as an instrumentalist - primarily tenor saxophone - and composer. "Ginger Bread Boy," written many years ago for Heath's young son, is perhaps the best known of several Heath-penned jazz standards. Heath is also one of jazz's most highly regarded arrangers and educators (he retired from full-time teaching at Queens College in 1998), and a 2003 NEA Jazz Master. For three decades, until brother Percy's death, Heath toured semi-regularly with the Heath Brothers, which also included their younger brother, Albert "Tootie" Heath, on drums. Tootie, along with Heath Brothers pianist Jeb Patton, will back Heath this weekend at Wellesley, along with bassist Paul West.

Sat 11-5 Anthony Braxton Sextet The Boston Creative Music Alliance concludes its fall season with two sets from composing and reed genius Anthony Braxton, his first Boston performances in more than a decade. Institute of Contemporary Art, 955 Boylston St., Boston. Tickets available at the door, or in advance from Twisted Village, 12 Eliot St., Cambridge, 617-354-6898. Call 617-628-4342 for show information. 7:30 & 10 p.m. $15.

BILL BEUTTLER

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Rare Boston concert thrills Braxton

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent | November 2, 2005

It's major news to the avant-garde cognoscenti that Anthony Braxton will be performing his first sets in this city in more than a decade at the Institute for Contemporary Art Saturday night, as the Boston Creative Music Alliance hosts its fall season finale.

Braxton, 60, has released dozens of intriguing experimental albums since leaving the famous Association for the Advancement of Creative Music in his native Chicago in the late '60s, passing through the short-lived cooperative quartet Circle (with Chick Corea, Dave Holland, and Barry Altschul) in the early '70s, and moving on to his own projects. He is widely regarded among the great composers and improvisers of the late 20th century, a MacArthur Foundation ''genius grant" recipient, and a longtime tenured professor at Wesleyan University.

Though Braxton is an important figure in the rarefied realms of serious artistic music, he hardly ever performs in this country. And the lack of work stateside isn't by choice.

"Maybe this is the beginning of something different," Braxton says by phone from Connecticut, "but I don't work in America. I haven't played in Chicago in 15 years, if not longer. Without the support of the Europeans, I would have had no music so-called career, since I have never worked as much as it might appear. And as such, I can only say that I'm looking forward to having the chance to come to wonderful Boston."

It might surprise Braxton's fans to learn that his journey to the avant-garde began with a pair of musicians who never lacked for work. Jazz icon Paul Desmond, Braxton says, was the man who inspired him to take up alto saxophone. And Braxton admires the music of Desmond's longtime associate, Dave Brubeck.

"I have been listening to those guys since I was, oh, 10 or 11, or younger," he says. "I was in grammar school when I accidentally ran into 'Jazz at the College of the Pacific.' And before that my plan had been to play trumpet, because I was so influenced and impressed by the music of Miles Davis. But hearing the Dave Brubeck Quartet and Paul Desmond would really change that direction of my life."

He later spent three years in the AACM assimilating their influences, among others, into an approach of his own. "That's what the end of the '60s meant for me," he says. "To digest the music of Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, the great music of Lennie Tristano — especially Warne Marsh was a really profound influence on me — and the great music of John Coltrane and Albert Ayler. Not to mention the great music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Arnold Schönberg, [Iannis] Xenakis, and John Cage. These are the people whose work shaped the direction of my life. And I am grateful that I was fortunate to find role models of the caliber of people I've just named."

In recent years, Braxton's approach to composition and improvising has evolved into what he has labeled "Ghost Trance Music," the intricate theory behind which he politely and patiently explains. It's a mix Braxton describes as "one-third improvised, one-third notated, and one-third situational in a surprise way." It's also idiosyncratic enough to require musicians willing to master Braxton's system in order to play it.

No surprise then that three of the five musicians who will accompany Braxton to Boston are his current or former students. They include Taylor Ho Bynum on cornet and other brass ("one of the most brilliant of the new third millennial masters of his generation," Braxton says), Aaron Siegel on drums and percussion, and Carl Testa on upright bass. Rounding out the sextet are Jessica Pavone on violin and viola and Jay Rozen on tuba. Braxton will be supplementing his alto sax with a couple of other reed instruments, possibly including his contrabass sax.

"I chose the instrumentation based on what I felt would be a timbre space that would serve my needs in this time cycle," Braxton explains. "A timbre space that in this context has a very nice lightness to it, as well as a good bottom, with the tuba and bass."

The Anthony Braxton Sextet performs Saturday night at 7:30 and 10 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 955 Boylston St. Tickets $15. Call 617-628-4342 or visit www.icaboston.org.

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Marsalis, quintet shine
By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent | November 2, 2005

Wynton Marsalis skipped back to his 2004 CD, "The Magic Hour," for most of the material his quintet played at Sanders Theatre on Sunday, passing over the covers that fuel the more recent "Live at the House of Tribes" in favor of the trumpeter's whimsical originals.

The late-afternoon set opened with the older disc's title tune, with Marsalis's dazzling nod to "Flight of the Bumblebee" at its front end, and tenor saxophonist Walter Blanding Jr. coming in behind the leader with a solo reminiscent of Lester Young. The group (which also includes pianist Dan Nimmer, bassist Carlos Henriquez, and drummer Ali Jackson) served up the slight "You & Me," "Skipping," featuring Blanding on curved soprano sax, and the waltz "Sophie Rose-Rosalee."

Marsalis, as usual, played with unbeatable technique, and if the music seemed curiously clinical at times, he humanized it with his between-tune tales concerning the merits of barbecue and the blues and how Ray Brown and Milt Jackson put him in his place many years ago when they let him sit in with them as a teenager.

Marsalis has become well-known for introducing young jazz talent, and he was especially generous in that regard on Sunday. Nimmer, still in his early 20s, is the latest in a line of Marsalis piano discoveries. He showed exquisite touch and taste throughout Sunday's performance, but nowhere more so than in his rollicking solo on the Ben Webster-Harry "Sweets" Edison blues "Better Go."

Marsalis also introduced an impressive vocalist, 20-year-old Jennifer Sanon, who bravely and gracefully tackled four standards: "I'm Just a Lucky So and So," "Azalea," "Them There Eyes," and the encore, "Comes Love."

Marsalis had a young alto saxophonist just out of high school, Aaron Holbrook, sit in with him on a slow blues toward the end of the set. The trumpeter was at his show-offy best here, setting the stage for the kid by using a white bowler hat as a mute for a blues- and effects-laden solo. Holbrook followed with a commendable solo, not as virtuosic as Marsalis's but solidly constructed. Then Marsalis stepped back up with another humdinger on open trumpet.

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company