Prez's Centennial

Will Friedwald's tribute to tenor saxophonist Lester Young occasioned by the musician's centennial - Young was born August 27, 1909 - is recommended reading. Friedwald looks at Young's 1943 solo on Sometimes I'm Happy. Friedwald writes that Young's solo "is a prime example of the President (usually shortened to 'Prez') - as Billie Holiday called Young - touched on every emotion known to man in a single, short solo. He's obviously inspired by Irving Caesar's title and lyric as much as he is by Vincent Youmans' melody. Most popular songs present the states of 'happy' and 'sad' as monolithic poles of feeling, but Young seems to be jazzed by the way that Caesar and Youmans mix both together. His interpretation of the tune is both at the same time, a constant state of melancholic euphoria."

George Russell 1923 - 2009

Largely unknown and unheralded except to the most inveterate jazz listeners, George Russell, who died of complications from Alzheimer's disease, was a composer, arranger, bandleader, and theorist whose ideas had a huge impact on the evolution of post-World War II jazz.

Johnny Griffin 1928-2008

Tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, 80, famously known as the "Little Giant" for the incongruity of his short physical stature and prodigious technical facility and musicianship, has died.

Ornette Coleman at Town Hall

There is a wonderful piece by jazz critic Gary Giddins in New Yorker magazine on saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman's much anticipated return to New York City's Town Hall a few weeks after his seventy-eighth birthday. Giddins notes that the years have not diminished Coleman's distinctive voice:

Although Coleman performs to packed stadiums at European festivals, he remains unknown to most Americans. Perhaps the chief impediment to greater popularity is the very quality that centers his achievement: the raw, rugged, vocalized, weirdly pitched sound of his alto saxophone. Considered uniquely, radiantly beautiful by fans, it is like no other sound in or out of jazz. Within the space of a few notes—a crying glissando, say, or a chortling squeak—Coleman’s sound is as unmistakable as the voice of a loved one. Even now, in a far noisier and more dissonant world than 1959, listening to Coleman can be a bracing experience for the uninitiated. Coleman’s attitude toward intonation is unconventional. The classical composer Hale Smith once spoke to me of Coleman’s “quarter-tone pitch,” by which he meant that Coleman plays between the semitones of an ordinary chromatic scale. The core of Coleman’s genius, Smith felt, is that, however sharp or flat he is from accepted pitch, he is consistent from note to note. Coleman hears so acutely that even when he is out of tune with the rest of the musical world he is always in tune with himself.