TRANE-ING MISSION: Two events celebrate John Coltrane

By SHAUN BRADY
For the Daily News

JAZZ LEGEND John Coltrane was once quoted as saying, "I know that there are evil forces in the world, but I want to be a force for good.

"A force for real good."

Four decades after Coltrane's death, that sentiment is being celebrated by two events in the city that he called home for much of his life. Over Labor Day weekend, the Tranestop Resource Institute will host the second annual John Coltrane Jazz Festival at Awbury Arboretum in Germantown; later in the month, altoist and bandleader Bobby Zankel will premiere his four-part suite, "A Force For Good" at North Philly's Church of the Advocate.

Though timed to coincide with his Sept. 23 birthday, both commemorate the 40th anniversary of his passing (the anniversary of which occurred on July 17 with shamefully less fanfare than Elvis Presley's decade-younger anniversary a month later).

The Tranestop Resource Institute, founded in 1979 by Arnold Boyd, who died suddenly last November, is a "nonprofit organization with a mission to advocate, support and preserve African-American music; in particular, African-American classical music, which is jazz and all its derivatives," according to TRI executive director Rosalind Plummer-Wood.

Besides the festival, the institute hosts a series of community concerts throughout the summer.
"The reason it was named Tranestop," Plummer-Wood continued, "was because Philadelphia was a stop on Trane's spiritual and musical development, and the organization was actually established in honor of the spirituality and the discipline of John Coltrane. Our concerts have an educational thrust, to get the word out to audiences that we might not ordinarily have and turn them on to the spiritual and intellectual benefits of being exposed to jazz."

By holding the higher-profile festival each year, explained Raymond Wood - Plummer-Wood's husband and chairman of the executive board at TRI - Tranestop aims to raise the profile of the organization and of Coltrane's Philadelphia presence.

"We hope that the festival makes known that John Coltrane has more than a mural - he has an existence in Philadelphia at a festival level that is nationally recognized," Wood said.

The location of the festival is especially appropriate, the couple stressed, not just because of the natural setting of the Arboretum but because it sits directly opposite the SEPTA R7 train stop.
This year, the festival is divided into a soul/blues day, headlined by R&B master Jerry "The Ice Man" Butler, and a jazz day headlined by Philly saxophonist Odean Pope and his 12-member Saxophone Choir.

The festival will feature appearances by the Philly Blues Messengers, the Barbara Walker Story, vibraphonist Khan Jamal and the Groovin' High Quintet, saluting Dizzy Gillespie.
Pope knew Coltrane as a young man when both lived in North Philly, and he credits the older saxophonist with landing him his first major gig.

Coltrane was playing a two-week stint with organist Jimmy Smith at the now-defunct Spider Kelly's club on Columbia (now Cecil B. Moore) Avenue when he was invited to join Miles Davis' group. Coltrane recommended the 16-year-old Pope to finish the engagement in his place.
"I guess he thought I was good enough to make the gig in his place," Pope recalled, "but I was really scared to death. But from that point I started getting a little better recognition, and it opened up some doors for me."

Pope declared that despite Coltrane's musical innovations, his influence has been primarily in the discipline which Pope witnessed firsthand.

"He was very consistent, and he always stressed to me how important it was to practice every day," Pope said. "Now, if I don't play every day I feel very let down, and I'll be very grumpy and kind of hard to get along with."

Pope's latest Saxophone Choir CD, "Locked and Loaded" (HalfNote), features his arrangements of two Coltrane tunes, "Central Park West" and "Coltrane Time." For this show, Pope promises a few Coltrane pieces as well as a surprise alongside his own originals.

"That was his forte," Pope said about paying tribute to Coltrane by playing new music. "He was about trying to keep the music new and always trying to bring something new to the table."
Bobby Zankel agrees. While his new piece, "A Force For Good," incorporates several Trane-inspired techniques, the composer said that he uses them in a highly individual way.

"My idea of an homage is to take somebody's way of thinking and to expand on it," Zankel explained. "A great teacher is not one who creates imitators, it's one who creates people who are able to advance their approach. I'm trying to do it humbly, but that's what I'm trying to do: take the spirit of the music and the musical train of thought, to make a play on words, and apply it in a personal way."

Zankel will premiere the work with his big band, the Warriors of the Wonderful Sound, plus guest appearances by Pope, percussionist Mogauwane Mahloele and vocalist Ruth Naomi Floyd, who will recite the poem from the final section of Coltrane's "A Love Supreme."

The event, co-presented by West Philly's Ars Nova Workshop, will take place on Coltrane's birthday at the Church of the Advocate, a center for political activity during the civil rights era, where Coltrane himself played one of his final performances in Philly.

But besides those ties, Zankel said, its mere location in the neighborhood has iconic resonance.
"There's so little music played in North Philadelphia now," Zankel said, "when that was one of the most fertile areas, probably in the whole country, for producing great American musicians. It's unbelievable how many people in the so-called hall of fame, or who have contributed hugely to the history of American culture, came within walking distance of that church."

Zankel also stressed the spiritual influence of Coltrane's music, especially during his own youth. "1967, when I got out of high school," he said, "was an unbelievably turbulent, painful time. People talk about the summer of love, but most people were just going insane from the confusion created by the war. That was really the reality of the time. So the thing that really, in a sense, saved my life was the music that was happening at that time.

"The music from the last period of Trane's life just made me feel that there's a spiritual aspect to life that made me want to create beauty amidst turbulence."

That influence persists in the way that Zankel's Buddhist faith pervades much of his own music.
"He was making these records talking about a love supreme and all these spiritual ideas, and it really felt like he was a priest in a sense - in Buddhism we call it a bodhisattva, someone who's trying to elevate people's lives. When you read the small amount of writing we have in Trane's own words, that was very specifically what he was trying to do.

"He wasn't simply trying to entertain people, he wasn't simply trying to amass a fortune, he wasn't simply trying to be groovy and create ambience for bars," said Zankel. "He was trying to lift people's awareness of the spiritual nature of life and the goodness and potential of humanity. I was a long way from that when I started as a person, but it was really something to aspire to and it always made me feel like that was what music was about." *

Send e-mailto http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/mailto:bradys@phillynews.com.
Second annual John Coltrane Jazz Festival, Awbury Arboretum, 800 block of E. Washington Lane, 1-8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, free, 215-438-3178,

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/mailto:thetranestop@comcast.net. Bobby Zankel and the Warriors of the Wonderful Sound, Church of the Advocate, 18th and Diamond streets, 4 p.m. Sept. 23, $25, http://www.arsnovaworkshop.com/.

Original source:

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20070827_TRANE-ING_MISSION.html

Max Roach, Rest in Peace

January 10, 1924 to August 16, 2007

See Slate's article: Why Max Roach was the greatest jazz drummer.

http://www.slate.com/id/2172543/fr/flyout

Ironic Conclusion to the T.S. Eliot Quest

"The City of St. Louis has affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done, I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London."
---T.S. Eliot

Found on St. Louis promotional material.

The feeling, sadly, is not mutual.

Best Names in the History of Jazz, Part Two: Saint Louis

All St. Louis edition:

Mound City Blue Blowers
Trimp's Ambassador Bellhops
The Original Saint Louis Crackerjacks (performers of "The Duck's Yass Yass Yass" a song allegedly so ribald the professor wouldn't play a sample")
Albino Red Chapman
Falstaff Foster (Blues player, not jazz)

Final Address to the Institute

[I thought I might open with a few improvisational remarks before moving on to the memorized portion of my speech. It shouldn’t add more than eight or nine minutes. Kidding! Kidding!]

I didn’t buy my first jazz recording until I was eighteen years old, which is rather late considering Louis Armstrong was playing the cornet before his thirteenth birthday and Mary Lou Williams gave her first piano performance at age six. Then again, Red Holloway is just hitting his peak at 80, so maybe there’s still time. I was a freshman in college when I first got a copy of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. I kept it, alphabetically ordered, between a copy of The Clash’s London Calling and the Dead Milkmen’s Beelzebubba (“One Saturday I took a walk to Zipperhead/ I met a girl there and she almost knocked me dead”). Miles was, needless to say, like nothing I had ever heard before. In any case, I remember playing it for the first time in my dorm room and hearing a piano then bass then finally a blast of horn. Then it went on. And on. For more than nine minutes. It had a beat, a rhythm I could almost feel, but otherwise it was completely foreign. I kept waiting for words that would never come. In short, it both blew my mind and confused the hell out of me. Well, in the past four weeks, with the benefit of engaging and insightful speakers and carefully chosen reading selections, I’ve replaced much of my confusion with practical knowledge, while still occasionally having my mind blown.


One of the most important outcomes of this seminar is that it not only helped me appreciate jazz in particular or music in general in a much richer way—though it has—but that it has genuinely changed the way I look at the complexities of American society. Yes, it is true that I didn’t know what a “blue note” was before or what an “A-A-B-A” song structure was, nor did I know the colorful history of Stalebread Lacoume and his Razzy Tazzy Spasm band or who played drums in Ellington’s rhythm section (for the record, that would be Sonny Greer). And while knowing these things has no doubt enriched my enjoyment of music—and no doubt improved my dinner conversations—they have not, in and of themselves, made me a better teacher. What has done that, and what I will take a way from St. Louis, is an understanding of how jazz music, this wonderful sound born out of New Orleans, incubated in Chicago, dispersed through Kansas City’s territorial bands, matured in New York City, and given to the rest of the world, offers a unique lens in which we can study the cultural transformations of the 20th century and the American character. Music, literature, visual art, dance, economics, politics, sociology, history, these are not separate disciplines in everyday life and should not be taught as such. This is a fact that seemed self-evident to me before, but there is a difference between an intellectual tenet and deeply felt truth. This is the stuff, like a Charlie Parker solo, that when finally understood, blows minds.


If time permits, I would like to address one specific area that appeals directly to my English classroom. Professor Herman Beavers from the University of Pennsylvania, challenged us in a few particular areas. First, he stressed a point made in Guthrie Ramsay’s Race Matters: Music cannot be separated from the conditions that created it. I often find myself asked to teach literature to my seniors in a method called New Criticism, which advocates close reading of texts independent of any background information; in a sense, we are to isolate the words on the page from external influences such as race, class, and gender. This seminar has seriously called into question much of this thinking. In addition, I could cite some of the techniques he suggested for a discussion of time, setting, characterization, space, and identity, but I think it would be more fitting to end with another of Dr. Beaver’s challenges: “Sustain this moment.” Let us not be tourists here, but, as he urged, occupants. And let us take that challenge with us back to home, [improvisational riff ] back to our students.


So, to steal Columbia University professor Dr. Bob O’Meally’s paraphrase of Mark Twain: I apologize. If I had more time, it would have been shorter.

Eating St. Louis IX: Barbeque

St. Louis consumes more barbeque sauce than anywhere else in the world--more than in Kansas City or Memphis, Dallas or Houston, and probably more than all those bodunk towns in North Carolina. So what took me so long to finally get some BBQ?

I finally found Mama's Coal Pot BBQ in walking distance from Wash U.



If I were truly more adventurous I would have ordered the "Snoot Dinner." Instead, I go the Pork Steak, a true St. Louis original.


Washed it down with an Orange Whistle. The Vess Company has been making soda in STL since 1919. One of their salesmen went on to create a version of his own favorite. You may know it as 7-Up.




Another good local soft drink is from Fitz's. Their specialty is rootbeer, but I also like the Cream Soda.

Annotated Listening: Duke Ellington

Ellington, Duke. “Such Sweet Thunder.” Such Sweet Thunder. Sony Records CD, 1999.

After performing two concerts at the Shakespearean Festival in Stratford, Ontario in July of 1956, Duke Ellington, no doubt impressed by the brilliant performance of a young Canadian actor named William Shatner, was inspired to write a jazz suite inspired by the works of the Bard. Composed with long time collaborator Billy Strayhorn, Ellington sought to create a series of musical portraits for some of Shakespeare’s most famous characters. For students and teachers of both literature and music, Ellington’s daring work offers an exciting tool for the discussing the individual personalities of Shakespearean characterization, Ellington’s sophistication and ambition, jazz’ musical vocabulary, and larger questions about music’s ability to create mood, tone, and perhaps even tell a story.
Ellington’s initial work offered eleven songs, each linked to a Shakespearean character: “Sweet Sweet Thunder” is based on Othello; "Sonnet for Caesar" on Julius Caesar; "Sonnet to Hank Cinq" on Henry V; "Lady Mac" on Lady Macbeth; "Sonnet in Search of a Moor" on Othello; "The Telecasters" is for both the Three Witches from Macbeth and Iago from Othello; "Up and Down, Up and Down, I Will Lead Them (Up and Down)" on Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream; "Sonnet for Sister Kate" on Katherine from The Taming of the Shrew; "The Star-Crossed Lovers" on Romeo and Juliet; "Madness in Great Ones" on Hamlet; and "Half the Fun" on Cleopatra. While some tracks work better than others as reflections of Shakespeare’s characters, each is ambitious and interesting in its own right and may be recommended for classroom use.
One of the interesting things about the title track “Such Sweet Thunder” is that while it purports to describe the character of Othello, it is actually a line lifted from another play—it is taken from Hippolyta’s description of Hercules in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Some critics have argued that the title is actually a clever reminder of how jazz was initially dismissed by white listeners; the full quote is “I never heard/so musical a discord, such sweet thunder.” The song itself is a 12-bar blues based on strong drum beats and low horns, but how does Ellington make this piece fit Othello? This may be one of the issues worth exploring in class discussion as there seems to be no clear consensus. Stephen M. Buhler, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, suggests that the “music is applied to Othello's accounts of his own experiences (see Othello 1.3. 128-45). Ellington and Strayhorn factor in how these adventures and the man who endured them might have sounded to Desdemona.” Jack Chambers, in his essay Birdland: Shakespeare in Ellington’s World,” is not so convinced, saying, “Unlike the other scenes, however, it is only tangentially Shakespearean. It has no connection to its source play. Originally titled "Cleo," it might have been intended as an evocation of Cleopatra’s sexuality, which certainly works, but instead Ellington always introduced it as (at Juan les Pins in 1966) ‘the sweet swinging line of talk that Othello gave to Desdemona which swayed her into his direction.’ That does not work. It is far from pillow talk, by any criterion. Though it works perfectly as overture, it is one of the pieces that only loosely fits the thematic conception.” An ongoing debate concerning music and the story telling tradition, and one I won’t attempt to answer here, is whether or not music is properly equipped with the necessary devices to narrate. While there is little question that music, especially in the skilled hands of a composer like Ellington, can evoke a mood, create a scene, inspire feeling, and even invite listeners to visualize action, students may enjoy debating the question of whether or not the tracks on Such Sweet Thunder reveals anything about character and plot.