What You'll Find Here: Music, Movies and Me

Since May 1976, I have written in journals. When I have nothing particularly resonant to say about my own inner turmoil, philosophic ramblings, sexual peccadillos or whining on about the state of the world around me...I have always fallen back on reporting the cultural time consumption that takes up in inordinate portion of my daily goings on.

In the 40+ years since my first concerts seeing Children's Symphony presentations on Sundays at the Pasadena Civic or The Hot Jazz Society's monthly Dixieland romps in an old meeting hall on the edge of the L.A. "River" across from Griffith Park, I have been sold heavily on the magic of live music. As Neil Young so aptly put it, "Live music is better bumper stickers should be issued."

Growing up a few orange groves and canyons length away from Hollywood also contributed greatly to my family's addiction to movie going. From the time I was a small there were weekly trips to the drive-in theaters that dotted the landscape, or the local Temple theater for the Saturday matinees. Once in a while we'd drive the 12 miles into Hollywood and see something in one of the magnificent old movie palaces like Grauman's Chinese, the Egyptian, The Pantages or later the Cinerama Dome. My dad loved Westerns and War movies, as if he didn't get enough shoot-'em-up as an L.A. County Sheriff in his day gig, my mom adored musicals and comedies. My brother and I loved them all.

At SDSU, I played in my first gigging band and began booking concerts on campus as part of the well-funded Cultural Arts Board, kindling for my future life in and around music.

So it's not surprising that my first jobs out of college were working in local video rental places (which were all the rage) or managing a couple of Sam Goody record stores in Mall's on the East Coast where we marveled at the new CD format and sold the first home computers and video games (yes Commodore and Pong and Atari).

So these are really just extensions of all of those journal entries talking about the great new movies I was seeing and LPs/CDs I was listening to.

Though iPODS/iPADs, apps, smart phones and downloads now make music and movies accessible in your own pocket, there is still nothing like sitting in front of a stack of speakers with a room full of people swaying to music created before your eyes. Nor is there anything that works quite so well for me to escape the real world and all of it's pressures just outside than two hours in a dark theater, absorbing the stories flickering across that wide screen as they pull you into their world.

But a really good taco runs a close third...

Sunday, December 18, 2011

JAZZ LOVERS ARE NOT BORN THEY ARE MADE

An age-old adage in jazz is that if only people had more exposure to it they would learn to love it. Like my Mom used to say about broccoli, "How do you know you don't like it if you won't try it?"

I was lucky. My Dad, then a cop, now a painter/sculptor, used to play "Dixieland drums" on the weekends along with his Louis Armstrong, Kenny Ball and Red Nichols records. My folks would take us down to a Quonset hut next to the L.A. river to hear live trad jazz. It was an Elks Lodge or some such meeting house just downstream and across the "river" from the present day Autry Western Heritage Museum in Griffith Park where my father has some sculpture in their permanent collection. My brother and I would climb through a hole in the chain link fence, scurry down the slanted cement walls of the "riverbed" and forage for tadpole and anything scavenge-able for 7-10 year olds while our parents and their friends would slide the the first pitcher of beer and sack of pretzels listening to the bands.

Once we'd get bored or wet and filthy, we'd head back to the lodge, belly up to the bar for a Coca-Cola in a bottle and sit down in front of the stage. There would generally be 5-8 musicians up there mostly older than my folks by 10-20 years with the occasional young acolyte, playing standard New Orleans fare. "Bourbon Street Blues", "Bill Bailey", Rampart Street Parade", "Tiger Rag" (I loved that one as a kid), "My Mother's Eyes" and on and on. They were transplanted Southern men, for the most part. Many had come West for gigs working in the TV and movie studios. Occasionally they'd bring in a ringer. Someone in town for a big paying gig who would drop by and jam a few numbers with the locals. "The Southern California Hot Jazz Society" was what, I believe, this group of fans and players called themselves. I don't know if they are still in existence.

My mom also loved music. She'd play records by vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald, Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gorme, John Gary as well as the occasional Swing record and show tunes. She also adored taking us to Children's Symphony concerts at the Pasadena Civic where we were exposed to orchestral music. 

So I was lucky, the exposure to music and especially improvised music really set me up for those first jazz records I'd buy on my own at the used LP stores in San Diego while attending college. The first one I really recall twisting my head around was Miles Davis' "Round Midnight" LP featuring John Coltrane. Once in college, with a little expendable cash, I haunted the used record stores and sucked up lots of jazz. I was a huge fan of anything Miles, Monk or Mingus did and LOVED the Brazilian sounds o Flora Purim, Airto, Milton Nascimento, Hermeto Pascoal. I was involved in booking concerts on campus and helped bring a lot of great jazz acts to the school including Sonny Rollins, Weather Report, Art Blakey, The L.A. Four,  Hubert Laws, Freddie Hubbard, Mose Allison, Pat Martino, McCoy Tyner (with John Blake), Leonard Feather, Jean-Luc Ponty, Cobham-Duke Band (with John Scofield & Alphonso Johnson, Elvin Jones, Chuck Mangione, Ron Carter, Tom Waits, Gary Burton, Jan Hammer Group, Noel Pointer, Yusef Lateef, John Klemmer, Oregon, Flora & Airto, Manhattan Transfer, Old & New Dreams (Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell, Don Cherry & Dewey Redman, and Hiroshima, Stanley Clarke, The Crusaders, among them.

These were just the jazz bands we had on campus. I was hooked, I took Jazz Appreciation classes with Dr. Eddie Meadows, and also hit tons of shows around town by any jazz artists I could find. Places like The Catamaran Hotel in Mission Beach and for a short while Elario's penthouse restaurant in La Jolla were hot spots for national jazz acts. You could go to the Civic Theater downtown and see people like the Milestones Jazz Stars (Rollins/Tyner/Carter/Al Foster) or VSOP (Hancock/Shorter/Carter/Tony Williams/Hubbard) but the number of dedicated jazz venues were fw and far between other than on the college campuses. These days with the establishment of the beautiful downtown cultural area, the town's jazz offerings are more frequent.

My tehn soon-to-be father-in-law also needed someone to attend swing concerts with since his wife and daughters were less likely to go with him while he fed his obsession. Through his tutelage I was lucky to see and in some cases meet many of the great band leaders, singers and players from the golden years of the Big Bands such as Count Basie, Harry James, Lionel Hampton, Benny Goodman, Les Brown, Maynard Ferguson, Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Joe Williams, Marshall Royal, Snooky Young, as well as "ghost" bands like Glenn Miller Orchestra, and the bands of Woody Herman and Artie Shaw. I was just old enough to still catch many of the jazz greats who are no longer with us like Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, Alice Coltrane, Hank Jones, Colin Walcott, Ray Brown, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, Willie Bobo, Jaki Byard, Dannie Richmond, Don Pullen, Joe Farrell, Jaco Pastorius, Joe Zawinul, Tony Williams, Bud Shank, Shelley Manne, Laurindo Almeida, Milt Jackson, Connie Kay, Gerry Niewood, Esther Phillips, T. Lavitz, Tito Puente, Kenny Kirkland, and on it goes.

Once out of school, I couldn't stay out of the music business. I built a log house, worked in the burgeoning video business but never seemed far from a conversation about music and especially jazz. When I made the switch and moved from California to the East Coast in the early 1980s I could only take 100 of my 1200 LPs with me. 30 of them were Miles Davis records. I was in deep, a die hard collector since my first Beatles 45 in 1964. Within a decade, I was pushing 10,000 LPs and the CD thang was just beginning.

The live music scene in Philadelphia was especially strong and had great opportunities for jazz. At clubs like the original Zanzibar Blue and The Ripley Music Hall (both now gone) where you could catch national talent as well as accomplished local heavyweights. Larger crossover and fusion guys played the Chestnut Cabaret (defunct) or the T.L.A. and occasionally a BIG act like Pat Metheny would play the legendary Tower Theater in Upper Darby. Later on the Keswick Theater in Glenside became the go-to spot for fusion, contemporary and groups too popular for the smaller clubs like from straight-ahead legends like Marian McPartland to the chameleon-esque Chick Corea performed there. Philly may get short shrift in the press since many of the great, homegrown talents have made a tradition of leaving for the more fertile jazz climes in NYC just up I-95 but this proximity also allows for artists of note stopping in town more frequently than to cities a greater distance from the jazz center of the universe. Locally you could catch the Sun Ra Arkestra a couple times a year or the masterful saxist Odean Pope regularly at places like the Painted Bride Arts Center. The great Pat Martino still gives lessons from his family home in South Philly when not on the road as one of the predominant guitarists of his generation. For a few years the Afro-American Museum or the Clef Club was a hot spot for shows by the likes of Benny Carter, David Murray, Max Roach, The Art Ensemble of Chicago and many others, the latter still promtes jazz through concerts, education and community outreach.  The Philadelphia Art Museum still has a long-running weekly series Art After 5 on Friday nights. !st Fridays feature international music and all other Fridays feature jazz, drink & food and of course, their world-class art exhibits. Art After 5 has featured everyone from Greg Osby, Jason Moran, Brad Mehldau, Trudy Pitts, Bill Charlap, Trio 3, and hundreds of others. The Academy of Music hosted big names and the KOOL Jazz Festival played multiple venues in town including dates at the large outdoor Mann Music Center where you might see Miles, Dizzy, Blakey, Ella, Herbie, Oscar Peterson, The Heath Brothers etc. over the course of a two-day festival. Nowadays Philly boasts the Kimmel Center, one of the nation's finest performing arts venues for it's most prestigious jazz shows and right around the corner.  Ars Nova Workshop continues to put on dozens of concerts a year featuring the hippest avant-garde musicians and ensembles from around the country and the world, many shows free of charge in unique and varied setting from college classrooms, off the beaten track city parks to venerable old historic buildings. By far one of the premier left-of-center jazz series presented continually in the country. Philly's vibrant jazz history continues to evolve and there is always some new venue or neighborhood embracing the music.

I was also very blessed to have always lived in towns where there was a strong and dedicated jazz radio station or two. In L.A. it was KLON back in the day, now KJaZZ has taken up the standard. KSDS in San Diego was an incredibly vibrant station back in the late 70s and long a major contributor to the popularity of the music in the region. In Philly, WRTI, even when going from 24/7 jazz to jazz all-night and classical all-day, still holds onto some of the hippest programming around with the old school knowledge and good taste of DJs like Philly's own Bob Perkins and the ever challenging, hip and wide-open playlists of J. Michael Harrison's late-night show, "The Bridge" on Fridays which stretches the boundaries of improvised music with great interviews, a dash of poetry and genre-bridging choices.
 
So through the 10 years of owning a jazz-centric record store, booking shows by national jazz acts and later as a publicist for over a decade and a half for some of the greatest jazz legends and legends-to-be, collecting nearly 30,000 pieces of recorded music and memorabilia and enjoying a legion of mind-blowing performances, I have been and always will be indebted to those first Sundays when my folks would take us to the river and anoint us with the jazz spirit.  

As a long-time publicist for the lamentably dissolved IAJE's annual jazz conference, I witnessed first hand each January, 1000s of jazz fans, musicians, educators, students and industry professionals coming together to share their enthusiasm and love for the music. Every year formal panels and informal discussions proliferated asking the same question, "How do we get more people to love jazz?" And often, through all of the hypothetical business models, prospective educational  solutions and harsh economic realities, the answer always seems to hinge delicately on the idea that one must "play it and they will come."

Nearly every time you go into a Starbucks or half of the fine restaurants in the world. You will hear jazz playing in the background at some point during your stay. In a huge portion of the movies in theaters, jazz or jazz influenced music is part of the soundtrack. Commercials constantly pick hip vintage jazz tunes to help them sell their products.

Maybe we just need to get more music out of the pricey concert halls, dwindling clubs and back out on the streets, into the public's ears where it is unavoidable. More free concerts in town squares, more festivals and yes, more jazz for cows.


 The most entranced jazz crowd ever.