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Richard Davis, Bass Extraordinaire Gone at 93

Here is an excellent write-up about Richard Davis;

Richard Davis, the versatile bass player with over 3,000 recording credits, has died at the age of 93. Davis’ daughter Persia Davis confirmed her father’s death Thursday on a memorial page.

“We appreciate all the love and support the community has shown him over the years,” Persia shared in a statement.

Perhaps no artist besides Davis could claim to have worked with musical giants as different as Igor Stravinsky, Eric Dolphy, Frank Sinatra, and Bruce Springsteen. A prolific and supremely versatile bass polymath, Davis spent his seven-decade career refusing to abide by musical barriers, playing everything from jazz (both the bebop and avant-garde varieties) to blues, pop, rock, folk, and classical music. He cited one artist in particular for this inspiration: Duke Ellington. Ellington “didn’t classify any genres,” Davis told Bob Jacobson in 2014. “To him, there were only two kinds of music: It’s either good or bad. I’m with Duke Ellington on that.”

Though popular audiences might not know Davis by name, they certainly know many of the records on which he played, particularly platinum-selling pop-rock masterpieces by Bruce Springsteen (Born To Run), Paul Simon (There Goes Rhymin’ Simon), Van Morrison (Astral Weeks) and Janis Ian (Between The Lines). But though Davis’ pop and rock excursions certainly helped him financially and took his name into the wider public domain, his heart belonged to jazz, and he played with some of the genre’s biggest names, from trumpet pioneers Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie to jazz singer Sarah Vaughan and avant-garde magus Eric Dolphy.

Famed for his deep, rich tone and musical dexterity (he could pluck, strum, and bow the bass equally well), Davis was a master technician who could alternate between acoustic and electric bass and was in high demand as a sideman. He also found time to record over 20 albums under his own name and enjoyed notable LP collaborations with ex-Coltrane drummer Elvin Jones, vibraphonist Walt Dickerson, and saxophonist Archie Shepp. The classical music world, too, benefited from Davis’ expertise; he worked with the Russian-American composer Igor Stravinsky (who once purportedly described Davis’ virtuosity as “god-like”) and also played under the baton of several eminent conductors, including Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, and Leopold Stokowski.

But Davis would probably contend that his greatest contribution to music was his role as a teacher, which began in 1977 when he took up the post of a music professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he stayed for 39 years. He firmly believed in passing on his knowledge and wisdom. “I love teaching,” he said in 1979. “I believe you should share what you have.”

Davis was a Chicagoan by birth, born on April 15, 1930. Music hooked him early thanks to his mother’s collection of 78-rpm jazz records, which he played incessantly. His first taste of active music-making was singing in a family vocal trio, coached by a cousin. But it wasn’t until he was 15 that Davis felt the urge to take up an instrument. Bashful as a child, Davis wasn’t drawn to a front-line instrument like the saxophone or trumpet but while attending DuSable High School, where his classmates included future saxophone star Clifford Jordan and blues man Bo Diddley (then known as Ellas McDaniel). He was fascinated by the upright bass. “The bass was always in the background, and I was a shy kid,” he told Steve Krakow in 2022. “So I thought maybe I’d like to be in the background.”

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Mayte Martin Interview

 

Though I have known of Mayte Martin for decades I only started listening to her recently. What a treat! Here is an interview with her from deflamenco.com:

One thing Mayte, your last names…what’s the origin?
Well, I’m a mixed bag.  My parents were from Catalonia and Málaga, my grandparents were from Murcia and Asturias…my father’s side is Andalusian, but on my mother’s there was a little of everything.  “Cadiemo” is a last name I haven’t seen anywhere outside of my family.

The reason I ask, is because of your background…to see who’s to blame.
I think my love of flamenco comes from my love of music in general.  The thing is, it was the first music that caught my attention.  The first thing that got me hooked was flamenco.  It made me feel emotions and cry, it made me want to sing.

Who was singing?
Marchena, Valderrama, la Niña de la Puebla.  Flamenco in the earlier lyrical line.  

They’re the ones who led to the great stylistic debate.
I don’t mean to say there aren’t two kinds of flamenco.  There are, and there always have been.  And they’re perfectly differentiated.  What’s absurd is to establish a differentiation of quality.  That’s crazy.  The style or form of things has nothing to do with that.  Marchena was flamenco and so was Caracol.  Each one had his own story.  The same thing with Manuel Torre and Chacón.

But look, when I started out I can tell you I discovered flamenco thanks to Valderrama, but it felt like something was missing, and after a time I understood.  I loved that cante, but needed…how can I say it?…something more funky, more visceral…so I went searching.  My brother Paco helped me, in those days he was accompanying me on guitar.  Together we investigated and came upon Agujetas, Chocolate, Caracol…in other words, everything that was missing.  That was the other side of the coin, but don’t think they were country bumpkins, what they were doing was plenty sophisticated in its own way.

But then, later on, I discovered la Niña de los Peines, and that’s where I saw there was someone who brought everything together, from my point of ear, she did everything and made it one.  That was Pastora Pavón.

“The end result mustn’t be a concern.  It’s the journey that matters, and how you feel about yourself.  The fruits of your labor will come later on, first plant the tree and care for it, and that tree is your truth.  If it isn’t your truth, what difference does it make if it bears fruit or not, or how big and lush it becomes?”

How old were you when that happened?
I was 19.  Had I discovered her earlier, I would have taken that step much sooner.  It was a kind of love affair, like when you meet the person you identify with.  That “mirror” as so many people call it.  In her I found what I considered flamenco to be.

Flamenco is elegant phrasing with a gutsy quality, and risking everything at each moment.

That certainly comes through in what you do.
That’s important.  Hard work and experience help you improve and express yourself better, but make no mistake, the main thing is to be free.  If I couldn’t be free on stage, I assure you I wouldn’t be in this line of work.  I can’t conceive of it. 

Well, many performing artists are pressured by the record companies…deadlines, collaborations, promotion…sometimes they miss being completely free, or so it seems at least.
That’s a consequence of the world we live in, but it cannot be a priority.  I’d like to be rich and famous, but that can’t be my priority.  It’s immoral for an artist to think like that…anyone who does is unworthy of being called an artist.  Art exists in order to be free, to release things that can’t be felt or done in day-to-day life.  It’s the sublimation of emotion, know what I mean?

I think only two things take you to that point: love and art.  That is what liberates you and shows you who you are, it gets things out of you that you didn’t know were inside.

If anything limits you, that can’t be.  You can’t be pressured because something you do isn’t commercial, or worrying about pleasing people because you’re insecure…none of that matters, you can’t go on stage like that.  The end result mustn’t be a concern.  It’s the journey that matters, and how you feel about yourself.  The fruits of your labor will come later on, first plant the tree and care for it, and that tree is your truth.  If it isn’t your truth, what difference does it make if it bears fruit or not, or how big and lush it becomes?

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The Discovery of Gil Melle

 

From Jazz Times, a good summary of Gil Melle's development, the first white musician to get signed at Blue Note in the 50's and the guy who replaced the piano with an electric guitar in the small jazz ensemble:

10-inchers and the 12-inch LP Patterns in Jazz for Blue Note, all reissued on CD as The Complete Blue Note ’50s Sessions; three records for Prestige, Primitive Modern, Gil’s Guests and Quadrama-must sound thoroughly grounded in the cool school. Mellé played baritone with a graceful lightness and a vibratoless tone, and his music, even in driving moments, has a cool distance to it, not announcing itself in broad gestures but insinuating with peculiar details.

Mellé’s oddities begin with some of the very first songs he recorded. On “Four Moons”-one of a host of Mellé originals with astrology/astronomy titles that turn up on the Blue Note sides-Monica Dell adds a spacey, low-moan scat so bizarre that it seems to anticipate the intergalactic chants of Sun Ra. Mellé’s interest in classical composition-Bartók in particular-surfaced in 1955 with the complexly structured suite “Five Impressions of Color” (from the last Blue Note 10-inch) and the almost narrative “Ghengis” from Gil’s Guests (1956).

“I was into translating Bartók’s architectonic thinking into jazz,” Mellé says. “There are movements and sections that Bartók wrote that have a pulse like you wouldn’t believe. They really move. And I thought, ‘My God, if I can just rethink this and make it work within a jazz composition.”

The music Mellé made for Prestige is not only more rich, confidant and fully realized than his Blue Note work, it’s also more densely populated with unexpected twists and turns. The creative firecrackers threaded into the recordings give the music an almost casual air of the avant-garde. Consider, for example, “Ironworks” from Primitive Modern (1956): Ed Thigpen uses an unorthodox drum kit that is expanded to accommodate large pieces of piping, which gives him a machine-shop sound, and there’s a unexpected break in the tune where the whole band drops out save Cinderella, who emits a beam of abstract sound-a totally static moment and an early echo of Mellé’s future in electronic music.

“I wasn’t playing bebop,” Mellé says. “And for that matter, neither was Monk, neither was George Russell, neither was Teddy Charles, neither was Lennie Tristano. There were some of us who had a little more respect for Bird and Diz and Miles than to just imitate them-steal their lines-which is what everyone was doing. We just picked our own direction.”

By this time Mellé’s own directions were several. Alfred Lion liked Mellé’s artwork enough that he encouraged the saxophonist to design his own album covers from the start. “Alfred was like a second father to me. He took me to museums, the MOMA, the Guggenheim and all these places I had never been. We went to see a lot of foreign films. He gave me a peek over the pigsty, which is what Jersey was. That changed my life.”

 

Moutin-Omicil-Moutin at Pausa

Sometimes you can find some excellent improvised music on the Internet. This trio has a lot of imagination. Wish the microphone on each instrument could have been better to capture the nuances of the interplay. But grateful it was recorded.

New Coltrane

 

From New Yorker's Richard Brodey on Coltrane's new release from the early 60's:

Rightly understood, the new release (available on CD, vinyl, and digital formats) is as valuable for tyros as for aficionados. I don’t believe in cultural starter sets; with great artists, there’s no point to beginning at a simpler, more conventional stage, or with a sampler. In my experience, what matters is to come in where the passion runs high, and in the Village Gate album, the entire band plays with an astonishing, even overwhelming intensity. The spectrum of achievements that the recording documents for Coltrane and Dolphy is narrow, but it reaches further into the musical future—the musicians’ and that of jazz at large—than any other recordings of theirs from the early sixties that I’ve heard. Here, Coltrane, in particular, offers audacious premonitions of a jazz avant-garde, running years ahead to prefigure the way he’d be playing from 1965 through the end of his life, in 1967.

Coltrane was a late bloomer. Born in 1926, he came to prominence as a sideman, playing tenor saxophone in Miles Davis’s groups, in 1955, and stayed with him, on and off, through 1960. Though Coltrane made many recordings under his own name throughout that time, only in 1960 did he form his own working band, the core of which, heard here, is the pianist McCoy Tyner and the drummer Elvin Jones. (On “Evenings at the Village Gate,” two bassists, Reggie Workman and Art Davis, perform together.) Dolphy, too, had a long musical gestation. Born in 1928 in Los Angeles, he came to New York in 1959, and began to record as a leader in 1960, but worked mainly as a sideman (notably, in Charles Mingus’s group). In the album’s liner notes, Ashley Kahn quotes an interview with Coltrane from soon after this gig: Coltrane said that he and Dolphy had been “talking music for quite a few years, since about 1954.” He added, “A few months ago Eric was in New York, where the group was working, and he felt like playing, wanted to come down and sit in. So I told him to come on down and play, and he did—and turned us all around.”

That turnaround was a revolution, one that’s all the more remarkable for being a revolution within a revolution, because Coltrane was at the center of mighty and epochal change. Coltrane was already at the forefront of jazz modernity. With his sophisticated ideas about harmony and its mighty complexities, he made recordings in the nineteen-fifties that were definitively characterized by the critic Ira Gitler as “sheets of sound,” colossal skeins of notes that ran at high speed, in long-breathing phrases, through ferociously intricate sets of chromatic variations.

Early in 1960, Coltrane was ready to start his own band, but Davis, who had booked a European concert tour, persuaded him to come along. During that tour, Coltrane’s impatience was evident, and he gave it furious musical expression, soloing—usually at much greater length than Davis—with a vehemence that ripped the sheets to shreds. (These concert recordings are among my favorites of Coltrane’s.) In the course of that tour, Davis bought Coltrane a present—a soprano saxophone—and, according to Davis’s drummer at the time, Jimmy Cobb, Coltrane spent most of his time on the tour bus “looking out the window and playing Oriental-sounding scales on soprano.” Later that year, back in New York, Coltrane formed his group. His recording of “My Favorite Things,” which he made on soprano sax, was released in March, 1961, and became, of all things, a jukebox hit. Coltrane built that long-limbed, loping studio performance on the expanded sense of musical space that he had developed with Davis. (That track runs nearly fourteen minutes.)

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Ciao Joao

From the NYT obituaries, Jon Pareles writes about Donato's life:

João Donato, a Brazilian composer, musician and producer who was a pioneer of bossa nova and who went on to cross-pollinate music across the Americas, died on Monday in Rio de Janeiro. He was 88.

His death, in a hospital, was announced on his Instagram page. Brazilian news media reported that the cause was pneumonia.

Mr. Donato was in the coterie of Rio de Janeiro musicians — among them Antonio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto and the guitarist Luiz Bonfá — who developed the subtle swing and harmonic sophistication of bossa nova in the mid-1950s.

But Mr. Donato didn’t confine himself to any genre. In a recording career that extended from the 1950s into the current decade, he released some three dozen albums as a leader and collaborated with a wide range of artists on many more. Although he was best known as a keyboardist, he was also a singer, accordionist and trombonist.

As a pianist, Mr. Donato was known for his blend of a frisky, restlessly syncopated, harmonically intricate left hand with relaxed, sure-footed right-hand melodies. As a composer, producer and arranger, he constantly — and playfully — fused and stretched idioms and production styles. He once said he had a “sweet tooth for funky ideas.”

Mr. Donato played MPB (as Brazilian popular music is widely known; the letters stand for “música popular brasileira”), jazz, funk, salsa, American pop and pan-American hybrids that were entirely his own. He worked with generations of Brazilian musicians, including the singer and movie star Carmen Miranda; the singers Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento and Marisa Monte; and the rapper Marcelo D2.

He also recorded with Eddie Palmieri, Michael Franks, Mongo Santamaría and Ali Shaheed Muhammad from A Tribe Called Quest. Throughout his life, he sought new grooves.

The president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said on Twitter: “João Donato saw music in everything. He innovated, he passed through samba, bossa nova, jazz, forró, and in the mixture of rhythm built something unique. He kept creating and innovating until the end.”

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Worldwide FM · Gilles Peterson: Joao Donato Mix

From The Recent Plena Libre Concert at Creative Alliance

Last Friday we attended the Plena Libre concert at Creative Alliance. Needless to say we had a great time dancing to their positive music. Here are some images from our evening.

Vallejo Nocturno 2023 Copyright

My Latest Playlist

Theory Therapy 15: Suso Saiz

Excellent music series, Low End Theorist, here is a mix by Suso Saiz:

Theory Therapy · Theory Therapy 15: Suso Sáiz

Karl Berger Gone at 88

 

From WRTI and Michael West, news of Karl Berger's passing away and a good review of his accomplishments. A free musician with great musical sensibilities regardless of the genre. A mentor to many:

Karl Berger, a vibraphonist, pianist, composer, and educator who served as a mentor and father figure for generations of improvising avant-garde musicians, died on April 9 at Albany Medical Center in Albany, NY. He was 10 days past his 88th birthday.

His death was confirmed by Chuck ver Straeten, a former student and longtime family friend who was at Berger’s bedside when he passed. Ver Straeten tells WRTI that the cause of death was complications following gastrointestinal surgery.

Born and raised in Germany, Berger was part of the first wave of European musicians to pursue free jazz in the 1960s. His breakthrough came in ‘65, when as a vibraphonist he joined trumpeter Don Cherry’s band in Paris; the following year he traveled to the United States to perform on Cherry’s album Symphony for Improvisers. He recorded his own self-titled debut a few months later, and made his home in the States for the next six decades.

Along with Cherry, his résumé included work with bassist Dave Holland, drummers Jack DeJohnette and Ed Blackwell, and saxophonists Lee Konitz, Ivo Perelman and Ornette Coleman. Coleman was Berger’s primary inspiration (and later his mentor), an influence apparent in his vibraphone style: hard-swinging, informed by the blues, eschewing chords to tell a story in single-note lines that he sometimes doubled with his voice.

Berger was also an accomplished pianist, playing the keys with a more chordal and pensive style — but no less exploratory or melodic. “His musicianship was off the charts,” bassist Michael Bisio, another frequent collaborator, tells WRTI. “He was absolutely one of the most underrated musicians, maybe of all time.”

Berger’s most far-reaching achievement, however, was as an educator. Together with his wife, vocalist Ingrid Sertso, and Coleman, he co-founded the Creative Music Studio, producing workshops and concerts throughout the Woodstock area before purchasing a resort property in the Catskill foothills. CMS, which Berger served as longtime director, focuses on teaching improvising musicians to develop their own aesthetics, and to draw and mesh ideas from across genres, traditions, and international borders. From 1972 to 1984, it offered instructional workshops, master classes, multi-week intensives, and hundreds of live performances. In its prime it was considered a premiere school of contemporary creative music.

The organization’s facility in Woodstock, New York closed in 1984, but CMS survived in the forms of “World Jazz Encounters” workshops held throughout the world; Sertso Recording Studio in Woodstock (which Berger and Sertso founded in 2004); and more than 500 CMS concert recordings that are now archived at Columbia University Library.

Berger also taught at the New School, the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts, and University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for many years before reviving CMS in 2013, with Sertso as his co-artistic director. “What Karl and Ingrid created was such a unique place,” says ver Straeten. “It really brought together people from all over the world, created such a brotherhood and sisterhood. Karl was incredibly encouraging to everyone to just go exploring.”

“It’s a world,” Berger explained of his concept of music in a 2014 interview with Monk Rowe. “And once you go there, you’re in the world of spontaneity, and you’re no longer in the thinking world…. But everybody can go there. Everybody, whether you play or not.”

Karl Hans Berger was born on March 30, 1935, in Heidelberg, Germany. He began playing classical piano when he was 10, though encountering a live jam session by American musicians at age 14 redirected his interests.

In his twenties he landed a gig as house pianist at Heidelberg’s Club 54, where he got lessons in modern jazz from American soldiers. “The surrounding Army and Air Force stations had all bands,” he told Rowe. “In those bands played a few jazz musicians who later became pretty well known, such as Cedar Walton, or Lex Humphries, and Don Ellis. And they would all come to that club … and we would be playing every night ‘til five in the morning.”

After earning a PhD in musicology from the University of Berlin in 1963, Berger played with the likes of multi-reedist Eric Dolphy and saxophonist Steve Lacy before moving to Paris in 1965. After settling in New York with Sertso in 1966, he became a key figure in the avant-garde music scene, working behind Cherry, Roswell Rudd, Carla Bley, and John McLaughlin. He also built his own career as a leader in earnest, putting together multiple ensembles in both the US and Europe.