Well, we're happy to know you're OK, Derek.

Jehovah?

Add Paul Rutherford to the obits, too. :(

Really? Thats bad news

OH SHIT NO!

Goddam that's bad.

Very sad news, indeed. A giant. RIP, Mr. Rutherford, and thanks for the music.

Does anyone - Graham? - know if he'd been battling any illness of late?

I saw him out here in Berkeley at Greg Goodman's about three years ago and he wasn't in the best shape (I'm not talking about his playing, which was fine). He said he had recently been in an altercation which left him with a damaged jaw. But he seemed to be in good, fighting spirits.

Paul Rutherford? Goddamn, that's a drag... I'd hoped to get him down to New Orleans to play at least once, but things never lined up as he didn't visit the USA very often. What an amazing player - that duo w/Lovens on PoTorch, Waterloo '85 CD w/Evan and Lytton, so MUCH other great stuff.

What a coupla weeks - you can also add to that list Lee Hazlewood and NOLA r'n'b fave Oliver "Who Shot the La-La" Morgan...

Gentlemen: Paul was found dead in his own apartment. The exact details are not yet clear, but it was known that he had not been at all well for many months. More later, when facts are clearer.

Sad news on Rutherford & Hazlewood. Two more disparate musicians might be harder to find, but both were amazing talents.

Not familiar w/ Oliver Morgan. Any recs, Rob?

Oliver Morgan was part of that illustrious tradition I refer to as "R'n'B singers with song titles for middle names" in which the singer's most well-known hit (or sole hit in some cases) was such a calling card that it morphed into part of the man's name. Examples: Al "Carnival Time" Johnson, Ernie "Mother-in-Law" K-Doe, Jessie "Ooh Poo Pah Doo" Hill, and there's several others... I don't hava a particular disc to recommend, though it's likely that he appears on many of the numerous compilations of Crescent City r'n'b from the golden period.

Morgan's big hit was "Who Shot the La-La," an imaginative re-telling of the death of singer Lawrence "Prince La La" Nelson (who
was not shot, but died of an apparent drug overdose). The full official obit on him is here = http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/metro/index.ssf?/base/news-23/118594883216750.xml&coll=1

And we can also add to this unfortunate list saxophonist Earl Turbinton, another unique character (and at times when he was well, a great musician) of my town = http://blog.nola.com/times-picayune/2007/08/new_orleans_jazz_pioneer_turbi.html

Cracked open "Waterloo 1985" to listen to some Rutherford last night and discovered that Bags post-er Jean Michel V.S. organized that concert and did the liner notes. Good job, old bean. Glad that great music survives...

I played both Iskra 1903 3CD sets, Chapters One and Two, today without a break, in Rutherford's memory. We're not likely to hear much music of this level of invention again. With Derek Bailey and Paul Rutherford now gone, that leaves only Barry Guy to carry the torch.

Received this afternoon (Brussels Time)

"As you may already know, Paul Rutherford was found dead in his flat in S.E. London on August 5. The cause of death was sclerosis of the liver and a ruptured aorta.

Paul was one of the pioneers of free improvisation, and many consider him to have been the finest trombonist and one of the finest improvisers in the area. He was certainly a very distinctive musician – many players had been influenced by him to some degree (not only trombonists), but no one sounded anything like him. Among his most important performances were his unaccompanied solos, and those in his trio Iskra 1903 that contained Barry Guy and either Derek Bailey or Philipp Wachsmann. He was a gentle, kind man with an outrageous sense of humour, and will be sorely missed. However, he also suffered from bouts of depression, and was frustrated that he was not recognised more widely.

For those who are able to attend, the funeral will be on Thursday August 16 at 10:30 am at Lewisham Crematorium in Hither Green Cemetery on Verdant Lane, London SE6 1JX. [The nearest station is Grove Park (trains from Charing Cross, Waterloo East & London Bridge). From there, it is about a 20 minute walk, or buses 124 or 284 can be boarded from the bus stop in Downham Way.]"

Martin Davidson

Andy,

I wanted to speak to you about Bruce Hornsby, Jack Dejohnette and Christian McBride's new jazz album Camp Meeting. It came out yestreday and I would like to send you a copy for your review. You can email your address to me at legacymarketingintern@sonybmg.com or call 212.833.5023. Let me know either way. We really dig your site and would like to develope a relationship with you.

Sincerely,

Lauren Ritchie
Sony BMG
Legacy Recordings
Marketing Intern

Jeez, Sony-BMG's got some really clueless interns, haven't they.

Hey, don't forget Phil Wachsmann, Graham! :)

Proficiat Bagatellen ! Hey en ter info : volgende zondagnamiddag 12 augustus in Antwerpen, van 15 tot ca. 22 uur, vertel het voort,
RADIO CENTRAAL BEVRIJDT DE MUZIEK free jazz improv electronics festival, cf. http://www.radiocentraal.be/Home/modules/news/article.php?storyid=191 !

Proficiat Bagatellen ! Hey en ter info : volgende zondagnamiddag 12 augustus in Antwerpen, van 15 tot ca. 22 uur, vertel het voort,
RADIO CENTRAAL BEVRIJDT DE MUZIEK free jazz improv electronics festival, cf. http://www.radiocentraal.be/Home/modules/news/article.php?storyid=191 !

Yeah, Geez - Lauren Ritchie, please go away! This is a thread where we are lamenting the losses and honoring the works and memories of valued musicians. It is ENORMOUSLY disrespectful of you to hijack it for marketing purposes ferchrissakes... Absurdly inappropriate.

Ever heard the Bill Hicks bit about people in marketing and advertising and his advice to them?

In the light of the tragic death of master improviser, joyous musician and committed communist, Paul Rutherford, (no doubt of a broken spirit, a broken heart and a broken wallet), may the likes of Lauren Ritchie and their grubby sony-businesses rot in hell.

As Rob Cambre has read my name in the Waterloo 1985 Parker Rutherford Schneider Lytton Emanem album, I inform that , having invited Evan Parker in this festival, I asked him specially to bring Paul Rutherford with the trio. Also Coxhill and Van Hove were in the festival too so who else could play better with these three different personnalities ? Few. I asked Paul when he was performing with Lovens and Parker in the Incus Fest 85 (The Ericle of Dolphi second lp on Po Torch). When Martin Davidson launched Emanem digital, I wrote to him and to EP urging them to issue this Waterloo quartet recording. One other great cd is Premonitions with Eddie Prévost, cellist Tony Moore and saxist Harrison Smith of the LIO.
What could be said about Rutherford is sincerity, imagination, true poetry, absolute unpretentiousness, natural melodic invention, being a communist Party member was his way to be an egalitarian . So he learned us how to fit sounds together meaning something. That 's great ! Thanks for all Paul .

As Rob Cambre has read my name in the Waterloo 1985 Parker Rutherford Schneider Lytton Emanem album, I inform that , having invited Evan Parker in this festival, I asked him specially to bring Paul Rutherford with the trio. Also Coxhill and Van Hove were in the festival too so who else could play better with these three different personnalities ? Few. I asked Paul when he was performing with Lovens and Parker in the Incus Fest 85 (The Ericle of Dolphi second lp on Po Torch). When Martin Davidson launched Emanem digital, I wrote to him and to EP urging them to issue this Waterloo quartet recording. One other great cd is Premonitions with Eddie Prévost, cellist Tony Moore and saxist Harrison Smith of the LIO.
What could be said about Rutherford is sincerity, imagination, true poetry, absolute unpretentiousness, natural melodic invention, being a communist Party member was his way to be an egalitarian . So he learned us how to fit sounds together meaning something. That 's great ! Thanks for all Paul .

Very well said, JMVS.

Damn, you guys are brutal. Not sure who “Andy” is, but I’m actually working up a review of that Hornsby record most likely for publication here. Busting his chops for attempting ingress as a jazz artist is as easy as spearing fish in a barrel, but I’ve been surprised by how decent the disc is. It certainly helps having Jack DeJohnette and Christian McBride as your sidemen and the songbook shows some taste with covers of Ornette, Miles, Jarrett, Coltrane, Monk and Powell. Is he the next Sascha Perry? Hell no, but neither is he trying to be.

Back to more topic-appropriate commentellan: thanks Jean Michel for all your recent postings here.

About Bruce Hornsby, it could be said that he was in the Grateful Dead and notwhitstanding what a creative music fan could think, the members of this group showed an enthusiasm for "our music" . Miles Davis and many jazz greats , like David Murray, spoke with admiration about Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh's musical abilities. The members of GD speak with much respect about the Afro American music continumm and the so called ethnic musics. Mickey Hart was a pupil of tabla master Alla Rakha ( Shankar & Ali Akbar Khan) the model of Elvin Jones at the request of John Coltrane. Mingus and Gillespie himself congratulated them publickly after concerts about their musicianship. Not many performers could play with such togetherness (two drummers simultaneously !!). GD were unlike many rock groups very concerned by social, cultural and environmental causes and their Rex Foundation donated million of dollars saved from their stadium concert incomes. Even Richad Barrett was granted by Rex F at the suggestion of Phil Lesh, himself a former pupil of Berio.
If Hornsby is a contracted artist with Sony , it seems that Ellington Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck were too !
If I suppose Bruce H has his own kind of creativity (sorry boy, never heard BH properly), it will perhaps open the mind of some people. I remember that when I was involved in free improv end seventies - mid eighties , a lot of blokes were in AC DC or Led Zep or in industrial rock or whatever before discovering that I was myself not an idiot supporting obsure improvisors. Strict conservative bop fans became John Zorn followers before to turn improv fanatics........ so let's people make their own experience . The world is more complicated than it shows.......

Ah, a nicely done plea for sanity and tolerance from Mister Jean-Michel...well done. Perhaps I was being a bit harsh.

Hate to add another death to this list, but I just read in Time Magazine that bassist Art Davis passed away. The TIME obit even cited Coltrane's Ole and Ascension among his significant dates.

Art Davis was mentioned in the original roll call of fallen above. Marc’s new ROW pays pithy homage. Davis had a bunch of fine sideman appearances, but a pair I dug out yesterday were pleasant reminders: Joe Newman’s At Count Basie’s and Max Roach’s Deeds, Not Words.

I was never much of a Deadhead and particularly never understood the idolatry surrounding Garcia. I put him pretty much in the same camp as Clapton as a guy who played mostly pale facsimiles of older folk forms. Hornsby’s work w/ that group left me cold too, but his new one is solid.

Jean-Michel, I think we may need to set up regular column space for you here. Thanks again for the contributions & happy to serve as a forum for your thoughts.

Ah, that's what I get for only reading the most recent comments. Sorry for my rendundancy there.

I'd love to see a column for Jean Michel. Sounds like he was THERE for a lot of particularly vital activity and has some excellent observations and anecdotes to share.

I neither like nor dislike Garcia - always found the Dead to be one of those phenomena that I never understood why anyone would find them exciting or interesting enough to follow around and tape every note. Not a slam on 'em, just my own taste. They did seem to generally be a force for good in terms of exposing their audience to other significant music. Some folks whose opinions I respect (H.Kaiser, L.Ranaldo, R.Poole) were/are fans of the Dead, so I figure there must be something there of value.

Clapton on the other hand I severely dislike - the most over-rated guitar player ever, in my opinion. Not only does he pale (no pun intended) in comparison to the blues greats he, ahem, "borrowed" from, but his guitar work is severely uninteresting when compared to his peer Neil Young (one of the greatest + most distinctive rock guitarists of all) and certainly to elder Link Wray, who combined white and black influences into a gloriously wild and original synthesis. And that's just naming two guitarists who deserve far more acclaim than EC. Strictly Dullsville Daddy-O, and he's one of the more egregious examples of 60's rock royalty/self-involved baby boomerdom. Don't get me started.

No problem, Rob. J-M, how about it? It would necessitate another spelunking trip into the cavernous innards of the Bag’s site architecture in order set things up, but I’m willing to give it a go, caged canary in tow.

I was gonna bring the “white guy” polemic into the Clapton appraisal, but opted not. Thanks for having the guts, Rob. There are plenty who disprove it, but Clapton ain’t one of them. I like some Cream, but beyond that his popularity is totally lost on me.

I love the segment in the film Jimi Hendrix (1973) where the filmmakers interview contemporaneous guitarists about Jimi’s greatness. Clapton drops the anecdote about being alerted to his presence on the London scene (iirc, by Jeff Beck) and coming to the sobering conclusion that there was a new contender to the throne. I can’t think of more blatant disconnect between status and talent: Clapton never should have had his ass on “the throne” to begin with.

Garcia’s a noodler of the worst order and there’s something about his favored guitar tone that gives me aural hives. As for the social good the Dead’s done, word. But they also spawned Phish and a legion of other “jam bands” so that might even the record out or even put things in the minus column.

And now Max Roach too.

August 16, 2007
Max Roach, a Founder of Modern Jazz, Dies at 83

By PETER KEEPNEWS
Max Roach, a founder of modern jazz who rewrote the rules of drumming in the 1940’s and spent the rest of his career breaking musical barriers and defying listeners’ expectations, died early today at his home in New York. He was 83.

His death was announced today by a spokesman for Blue Note records, on which he frequently appeared. No cause was given. Mr. Roach had been known to be ill for several years.

As a young man, Mr. Roach, a percussion virtuoso capable of playing at the most brutal tempos with subtlety as well as power, was among a small circle of adventurous musicians who brought about wholesale changes in jazz. He remained adventurous to the end.

Over the years he challenged both his audiences and himself by working not just with standard jazz instrumentation, and not just in traditional jazz venues, but in a wide variety of contexts, some of them well beyond the confines of jazz as that word is generally understood.

He led a “double quartet” consisting of his working group of trumpet, saxophone, bass and drums plus a string quartet. He led an ensemble consisting entirely of percussionists. He dueted with uncompromising avant-gardists like the pianist Cecil Taylor and the saxophonist Anthony Braxton. He performed unaccompanied. He wrote music for plays by Sam Shepard and dance pieces by Alvin Ailey. He collaborated with video artists, gospel choirs and hip-hop performers.

Mr. Roach explained his philosophy to The New York Times in 1990: “You can’t write the same book twice. Though I’ve been in historic musical situations, I can’t go back and do that again. And though I run into artistic crises, they keep my life interesting.”

He found himself in historic situations from the beginning of his career. He was still in his teens when he played drums with the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, a pioneer of modern jazz, at a Harlem after-hours club in 1942. Within a few years, Mr. Roach was himself recognized as a pioneer in the development of the sophisticated new form of jazz that came to be known as bebop.

He was not the first drummer to play bebop — Kenny Clarke, 10 years his senior, is generally credited with that distinction — but he quickly established himself as both the most imaginative percussionist in modern jazz and the most influential.

In Mr. Roach’s hands, the drum kit became much more than a means of keeping time. He saw himself as a full-fledged member of the front line, not simply as a supporting player.

Layering rhythms on top of rhythms, he paid as much attention to a song’s melody as to its beat. He developed, as the jazz critic Burt Korall put it, “a highly responsive, contrapuntal style,” engaging his fellow musicians in an open-ended conversation while maintaining a rock-solid pulse. His approach “initially mystified and thoroughly challenged other drummers,” Mr. Korall wrote, but quickly earned the respect of his peers and established a new standard for the instrument.

Mr. Roach was an innovator in other ways. In the late 1950s, he led a group that was among the first in jazz to regularly perform pieces in waltz time and other unusual meters in addition to the conventional 4/4. In the early 1960s, he was among the first to use jazz to address racial and political issues, with works like the album-length “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.”

In 1972, he became one of the first jazz musicians to teach full time at the college level when he was hired as a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And in 1988, he became the first jazz musician to receive a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

Maxwell Roach was born on Jan. 10, 1924, in the small town of New Land, N.C., and grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. He began studying piano at a neighborhood Baptist church when he was 8 and took up the drums a few years later.

Even before he graduated from Boys High School in 1942, savvy New York jazz musicians knew his name. As a teenager he worked briefly with Duke Ellington’s orchestra at the Paramount Theater and with Charlie Parker at Monroe’s Uptown House in Harlem, where he took part in jam sessions that helped lay the groundwork for bebop.

By the middle 1940’s, he had become a ubiquitous presence on the New York jazz scene, working in the 52nd Street nightclubs with Parker, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and other leading modernists. Within a few years he had become equally ubiquitous on record, participating in such seminal recordings as Miles Davis’s “Birth of the Cool” sessions in 1949 and 1950.

He also found time to study composition at the Manhattan School of Music. He had planned to major in percussion, he later recalled in an interview, but changed his mind after a teacher told him his technique was incorrect. “The way he wanted me to play would have been fine if I’d been after a career in a symphony orchestra,” he said, “but it wouldn’t have worked on 52nd Street.”

Mr. Roach made the transition from sideman to leader in 1954, when he and the young trumpet virtuoso Clifford Brown formed a quintet. That group, which specialized in a muscular and stripped-down version of bebop that came to be called hard bop, took the jazz world by storm. But it was short-lived.

In June 1956, at the height of the Brown-Roach quintet’s success, Brown was killed in an automobile accident, along with Richie Powell, the group’s pianist, and Powell’s wife. The sudden loss of his friend and co-leader, Mr. Roach later recalled, plunged him into depression and heavy drinking from which it took him years to emerge.

Nonetheless, he kept working. He honored his existing nightclub bookings with the two surviving members of his group, the saxophonist Sonny Rollins and the bassist George Morrow, before briefly taking time off and putting together a new quartet. By the end of the 50’s, seemingly recovered from his depression, he was recording prolifically, mostly as a leader but occasionally as a sideman with Mr. Rollins and others.

The personnel of Mr. Roach’s working group changed frequently over the next decade, but the level of artistry and innovation remained high. His sidemen included such important musicians as the saxophonists Eric Dolphy, Stanley Turrentine and George Coleman and the trumpet players Donald Byrd, Kenny Dorham and Booker Little. Few of his groups had a pianist, making for a distinctively open ensemble sound in which Mr. Roach’s drums were prominent.

Always among the most politically active of jazz musicians, Mr. Roach had helped the bassist Charles Mingus establish one of the first musician-run record companies, Debut, in 1952. Eight years later, the two organized a so-called rebel festival in Newport, R.I., to protest the Newport Jazz Festival’s treatment of performers. That same year, Mr. Roach collaborated with the lyricist Oscar Brown Jr. on “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite,” which played variations on the theme of black people’s struggle for equality in the United States and Africa.

The album, which featured vocals by Abbey Lincoln (Mr. Roach’s frequent collaborator and, from 1962 to 1970, his wife), received mixed reviews: many critics praised its ambition, but some attacked it as overly polemical. Mr. Roach was undeterred.

“I will never again play anything that does not have social significance,” he told Down Beat magazine after the album’s release. “We American jazz musicians of African descent have proved beyond all doubt that we’re master musicians of our instruments. Now what we have to do is employ our skill to tell the dramatic story of our people and what we’ve been through.”

“We Insist!” was not a commercial success, but it emboldened Mr. Roach to broaden his scope as a composer. Soon he was collaborating with choreographers, filmmakers and Off Broadway playwrights on projects, including a stage version of “We Insist!”

As his range of activities expanded, his career as a bandleader became less of a priority. At the same time, the market for his uncompromising brand of small-group jazz began to diminish. By the time he joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts in 1972, teaching had come to seem an increasingly attractive alternative to the demands of the musician’s life.

Joining the academy did not mean turning his back entirely on performing. In the early ‘70s, Mr. Roach joined with seven fellow drummers to form M’Boom, an ensemble that achieved tonal and coloristic variety through the use of xylophones, chimes, steel drums and other percussion instruments. Later in the decade he formed a new quartet, two of whose members — the saxophonist Odean Pope and the trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater — would perform and record with him off and on for more than two decades.

He also participated in a number of unusual experiments. He appeared in concert in 1983 with a rapper, two disc jockeys and a team of break dancers. A year later, he composed music for an Off Broadway production of three Sam Shepard plays, for which he won an Obie Award. In 1985, he took part in a multimedia collaboration with the video artist Kit Fitzgerald and the stage director George Ferencz.

Perhaps his most ambitious experiment in those years was the Max Roach Double Quartet, a combination of his quartet and the Uptown String Quartet. Jazz musicians had performed with string accompaniment before, but rarely if ever in a setting like this, where the string players were an equal part of the ensemble and were given the opportunity to improvise. Reviewing a Double Quartet album in The Times in 1985, Robert Palmer wrote, “For the first time in the history of jazz recording, strings swing as persuasively as any saxophonist or drummer.”

This endeavor had personal as well as musical significance for Mr. Roach: the Uptown String Quartet’s founder and viola player was his daughter Maxine. She survives him, as do two other daughters, Ayo and Dara, and two sons, Raoul and Darryl.

By the early ‘90s, Mr. Roach had reduced his teaching load and was again based in New York year-round, traveling to Amherst only for two residencies and a summer program each year. He was still touring with his quartet as recently as 2000, and he also remained active as a composer. In 2002 he wrote and performed the music for “How to Draw a Bunny,” a documentary about the artist Ray Johnson.

Whoops, I've been away for a while. Just noticed your comment of 10th August, Derek. No brutalities intended.

Paul Rutherford was a genuine communist - forget what you remember of the former Soviet bloc. He did not accept the notion of "ownership", and thus the means of exchange of ownership, i.e. "money".

Imagine an America today without either ownership or money. What kind of country would you then be living in? That's where Paul Rutherford's head was.

No worries, Graham. Thanks for the info on Rutherford's politics. Honestly, I can't even conceive of a U.S. w/o ownership or money. I didn't use "America" as our ownership of that signifier is suspect like so much else.

RIP Joe Zawinul

a great loss

atch ma Devleh
Cor

I had heard he was sick, but didn't realize he'd passed. Damn.

And down NOLA way we just got word of the death of Willie-T, the man responsible for some of the tastiest grooves every waxed (including the killer "Wasted" by The Gators, worth seeking out).

Wilson "Willie Tee" Turbinton
"Keyboardist, songwriter and producer Wilson "Willie Tee" Turbinton, an early architect of New Orleans funk and soul, died today of colon cancer. He was 63.

Mr. Turbinton secured his place in New Orleans music legend by producing and co-writing the Wild Magnolias' self-titled 1973 debut. That landmark recording and the subsequent "They Call Us Wild," also produced by Mr. Turbinton, largely introduced the Mardi Gras Indians' distinctive street beats and chants to the world.

"In a city of treasures, he was rich in taste and tradition," said record producer and longtime friend Leo Sacks. "The depth, breadth, scope and command of his piano playing were profound. He helped shape the sound of New Orleans for more than four decades."

Mr. Turbinton's passing follows that of his older brother, modern jazz saxophonist Earl Turbinton, on Aug. 3." - Keith Spera (Times Picayune)