The Magnificent Terry Waldo: This is Ragtime

November annually brings home to Columbus, Ohio the greatest living interpreter of ragtime and early jazz piano, Terry Waldo. Waldo grew up here and graduated from Ohio State. Waldo's many friends celebrate his birthday on Thanksgiving eve at Becky Ogden's Bungalow Jazz concert series. It's a tradition held as dear as the feast day itself, especially since the guests get the gifts at the honoree's expense of effort. The consummate entertainer, Waldo plays, sings, tells bawdy jokes, and even takes requests (within limits: Not Take the A Train: "It would be wasted on my talents," he suggests.) A one-man guardian of the vaudeville flame, Waldo declares himself willing to let the superficial reign, to make people happy, to have fun. 

Terry Waldo at his birthday concert, November
2013, Bungalow Jazz, Columbus, Ohio.
Photo by James Loeffler.

A Waldo performance is the delight that a sunburn must be to a Laplander in December. But tap your toes and laugh your head off, if you're paying attention to the music, you'll be astounded to find that he plays ragtime with a power one rarely ascribes to what we think of a merely a cheerful music. Waldo interprets and improvises from a depth of understanding few access. Protege of Eubie Blake for the last fifteen years of the great composer's life, Waldo began even in his teens to pursue this music and to sit in with the generation that invented it. He's become the world's premier performer and scholar of the music on the basis of experience-based understanding.

Here's Waldo's opening from November's birthday concert, "The Pearl," by Jelly Roll Morton:                  

Acute timing, articulation, and improvisation all leap out from this and all Waldo's performances, the latter being central to his understanding of the music. Over the years, he reports, he's been dragged into "pissing contests" with musicians for whom playing ragtime is a matter of copying old records. "It's not jazz," says Waldo. "You're always doomed to failure. If you're copying records note-for-note, musicians on the stand aren't listening to each other: It's not alive. I get into a lot of shit about that," he confesses. "My recordings are originals. Jelly Roll Morton wouldn't have done a tune the same way twice." How many ways has Waldo played Eubie Blake's "Troublesome Ivories?"

Waldo's education in ragtime and traditional jazz is the result of curiosity and the opportunities of a great scene in Columbus and Dayton. When he was in high school and college in the early '60s, he benefited from the legacy of the '40s traditional revival. He knew the great Johnny Ulrich, who played piano with one hand and trumpet with the other, who had played with Bobby Hackett and did Jackie Gleason's arrangements. He heard and learned from Gene Mayle and the Dixieland Rhythm Kings, the Gin Bottle Seven, and trombonist Pee Wee Hunt, who taught him banjo. He founded his own band, the Fungus Five, in 1963, as a high school student, and a star was born. Or, at least, an indomitable artist was.

Selection of Waldo's releases, including 26-hour Public
Radio series, "This is Ragtime." Photo by James Loeffler.

During his student summers, Waldo played in a banjo band at the Red Garter in the French Quarter of New Orleans and got to know musicians still living from the original days of ragtime and New Orleans jazz. He worked in San Francisco during the '70s Dixieland revival, this time as a tuba player at Turk Murphy's club as a member of Earthquake McGoon's band.

In short, Waldo learned his art from the ground up as a young man, playing with and learning from the first generation men (and women—Alberta Hunter) who made his music. 

Although Waldo was both a band member and leader (his bands included the Ralph Emerson Waldo Jazz Band, Waldo's Ragtime Orchestra, and his Gutbucket Syncopators, which recorded several great CDs), he reminds us that ragtime is principally piano music. It was offered as sheet music; it's longer form than jazz; and compared to jazz band music of the Dixieland era, it's very complex harmonically. 

Illustration from This is Ragtime by Terry Waldo, Jazz at Lincoln
Center Library Editions, 2009. Wlado's High Society Stompers
with Sandra Day O'Connor on washboard.

Many casual listeners enjoy ragtime thinking it essentially uniform and predictable. But hearing Waldo play James P. Johnson's "Carolina Shout," you can hear how the music veers among keys in both hands, changing colors crazily, rushing tempos, and making the listener stagger to keep up. We can tap our feet to it, but ultimately we have to just surrender to the exciting succession of tremblers that mark its irregular course. This goes back to interpretation and improvisation. While lots of sheet music exists for Ragtime tunes, as Wynton Marsalis points out in the introduction to Waldo's book, This is Ragtime, "Many times what you write is so much less than you can play."

During our evening with Waldo, it was interesting to hear him distinguish between band and piano music when a request was made for him to play the Lil Hardin delight, "Struttin' with Some Barbecue," a Dixieland band favorite. The music is from his period, but he's a ragtime pianist, something quite different: Hear Waldo's reaction to this request. His brief performance could convince someone unacquainted with the tune that it had been a piano rag all along. 

Waldo greets fans at Bungalow Jazz. Photo by James Loeffler.

Waldo's first real encounter with Eubie Blake  was at the 1970 St. Louis Ragtime Festival. he played Blake's formidable "Charleston Rag." Afterwards, when Blake took the stage, he declared to the crowd, "This man Terry Waldo played my 'Charleston Rag;' if he'd have been a woman, I'd have married him." 

A friendship was formed that resulted first in Waldo's arranging a tour for Blake of colleges in central Ohio (Ohio State declined the pleasure). Eventually, Waldo transcribed most of Blake's music and resided with Eubie and Marion for several years as student and assistant. Waldo takes amused—but very sincere—pleasure in Blake's having referred to him as his "ofay son."

In this video of Eubie Blake himself playing "Charleston Rag," one is reminded of two aspects of ragtime that are always shine from Waldo's performances. First is that, for all the fun, it is cerebral music. The rhythmic and harmonic intricacies—What work it must be to transcribe a performance!—are great. Glad as it makes us feel, there is nothing simple about it, certainly in conception. The other thing is that despite its musical demands, ragtime is always presented lightly, as an amusement for the performer and audience alike. Eubie Blake puts himself through his paces, but not without intermittent jokes about his ability to recollect the tune.

Waldo's material is accessible and engaging: "I see it as show biz." He sees himself as actively in the vaudeville tradition because even Dixieland jazz bands played vaudeville. When they did, they played no more than fifteen-minute sets with maybe five tunes per set, including drumstick showmanship and visual gags. It would be part of a larger entertainment with "singers, jugglers, comedians, an unnatural sex act—whatever made it work." 

Terry Waldo's history of ragtime and early jazz piano.

So while he is the consummate interpreter and teacher about ragtime and early jazz piano, Waldo also does television and, radio, produces musicals and is, of course, a composer in the ragtime and vaudeville veins. No show is without his own songs, always bawdy or satirical with a stinging political or social edge. After performing on request Tom Lehrer's "Vatican Rag" last month, he followed up with his own, "Let's Pray Against Someone." It's fun, but fun is also essential to the tradition.

"I do know vaudeville, and I act in my shows. Eubie was a great actor and performer," Waldo told me. "As a Black actor, he was like a boxer: You go out and give 'em everything you've got—Bam bam, no apologies, you don't be messing around! You have to have a sense of humor: Give them comedy; give them novelty songs: 'I like bananas because the have no bones.'"

For these reasons, Waldo the entertainer, the vaudevillian, takes exception to many existing presentations of ragtime, especially to people who record hour-long "archival" CDs with no breaks, simply one tune after another without suffusing any essential levity to keep it various and interesting.

Terry Waldo's knowledge about ragtime is the result of unbridled, lifelong curiosity, pursued since his 'teens. He's plunged into any opportunity he could find or create for his whole life. His book about ragtime is only one form in which he has transmitted his knowledge about early jazz. His National Public Radio series is available through his website. He has also recorded lectures for Jazz at Lincoln Center, which are available on YouTube. In these videos we can appreciate the entertainer, but we primarily see the excellent pedagogue who knows his material so deeply that he needs no recourse to academic or obfuscatory language to impart either facts or enthusiasm to his audience. He assumes we are interested and listening: He makes it fun: Terry Waldo Discusses Ragtime.  Here you can hear his own performance of the "Charleston Rag" as well as Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag." 

Terry Waldo's an artist I admire because the depth of his knowledge is based on his experience of his art—he understands it from the ground up, through his ears and muscle memory, through observation and conversation, trial and error. I also respect Waldo's lover-like commitment to what he knows and does. "I'm a dinosaur," he once told me. The revival of the '70s is long gone and the people who are interested in playing traditional jazz come through academic historical interest to a music of guts and laughter. I'll show up to his party, though, as long as it lasts, just to "come and hear." 

"Blues for Smoke" at the Wexner Center for the Arts

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Roy DeCarava, Dancers, New York, 1956. 
Gelatin silver print, 14 x 11." Courtesy of the DeCarava
Archives.

Jaki Byard, Blues for Smoke, 1960,
album jacket.

I have written about travel before, but never in the guise of an art review. Blues for Smoke, out of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, seems more like a city than an exhibition. The only elements it lacks are architecture and food. It has painting, photography, sculpture and installation. It has full-length movies, videos, documentaries, concert films, and sixty hours of The Shield. You can lean against the wall to hear whole albums of music by jazz and blues musicians (no seating, unfortunately, provided for 35 minutes of the namesake album, pianist Jaki Byard's 1960 Blues for Smoke). 

Blues for Smoke fills every inch of the Wexner Center. Headsets for music dangle ready for use in spaces better left as the passages they normally are; only the restrooms remain artlessly functional.

The outsized show reflects the excellent impulse of curator Bennett Simpson, assisted by artist Glenn Ligon, to provide as many lenses as possible on the cultural notion of the blues. And what would that notion—"the blues"—be? Refreshingly, no statement is made, no definition suggested. Only works of art are offered to us. What do we think? In or out? Do we think, "Spot on!" or "What's that doing here?" 

Beauford Delaney,Portrait of Charlie Parker, 1968.
 Oil on canvas, 28 3/4 x 23 1/2 in. 
Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York 

Still, Simpson clearly starts from the premise that the blues are a form of musical expression shaped by the impulse to make something out of the nothing of hardship. The blues has inspired nearly every art form and continues to color and shape American—and possibly foreign—culture(s).

But fundamentally, it's music, with which the show is loaded. There is less Leadbelly than Jaki Byard; less Big Mama Thornton than John Coltrane. In general, Simpson isn't as interested in the roots as in the shoots—in all the ways the blues inspire.

Blues for Smoke is heavy on jazz. Beauford Delaney portrayed Parker ("Bird") in 1968, thirteen years after the saxophonist's death at age thirty-five. Parker is not presented realistically, but through symbols. His skin is so black that it is like a rainbow; his costume is like an African prince's golden raiment. He doesn't hold an alto saxophone, but a hand-mirror decorated with musical notes: His reflection must be music itself—or the Bird that sits near his shoulder? Is the sparrow from a Kansas City sidewalk transformed into but a regal West African crow, gliding above Sahara sands?

Art Ensemble of Chicago, Record jacket for Art Ensemble of
Chicago with Fontella Bass, 1970, America Records.
(Image not in Blues for Smoke)

Beauford Delaney was active during the Harlem Renaissance but moved during the '50s to live in France. A gallery note tells that he did not in fact consider himself an expatriate, reasoning that one can only expatriate from a country that claims you in the first place. "One must belong before one may not belong. I belong here in Paris, I am able to realize myself here. I am no expatriate."

Without exploring anew the details of music imported with West African slaves and its shaping of the blues, Simpson gives significant attention to the free and improvised jazz of the 1960s and later made by musicians like the racially and historically conscious Art Ensemble of Chicago. The record jacket from a 1970 release (not included in the show) only hints at their connection to Africa, made in their performances not only through instrumentation—talking drums, floor drums, rattles, whistles and other percussion equipment; use of  Western instruments to produce non-Western sounds—but through exotic costume and staging. The group's motto was, "Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future."

The hour-long film, Art Ensemble of Chicago in Concert,1981 (Rhapsody Films, 2005) is one of the first events you'll encounter at Blues for Smoke. Placed as it is, this electrifying film makes it hard even to proceed any farther. AEC's sweating musicians play from electrifying, almost ecstatic inspiration. Lester Bowie, the trumpeter, dresses in a white lab coat, emphasizing the experimental nature of his work, but the others—I reveal what no note does: Malachi Favors, Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, and Famoudou Don Moye—wear masks or face paint and garments in several African styles, adorned with cowrie shells and other jewelry. The color and richness of the pageantry provide an unforgettable display of racial dignity and pride. In their avant garde music it's difficult not to hear the links they make between improvisational jazz ("American classical music") and sources in African rhythms and sounds.

A fascinating documentary about powerhouse, avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor demonstrates his daily aesthetic and cultural ties to Africa (Cecil Taylor: All the Notes, 2006. 72 minutes, Dir. Fred Barney Taylor; Maestro Media, 2009). Because the background of his life is so impregnated with Africana, one can't help but wonder about associations he may make between his racial and cultural background and his extraordinarily grounded approach to music-making. He works in a way that almost entirely eschews Western, academic notions of how music is put together, down even to the basics of scales, preferring to be led only by the ear and confidence in instinct. 

Arkestra, Barcelona, September 21, 2013. Photo, Suso Navarrete
(Image not in Blues for Smoke)

And another great avant garde musician from the '60s and '70s is Sun Ra, whose connection to an Egyptian-based mystical morality binds the music of his Arkestra to social betterment for Black youth. Blues for Smoke includes Ra's 1972 film, Space is the Place, (GRP AAIMPD249, 1993) with the plot of a conventional grade B urban action movie. White law enforcement officers try to keep Ra and the Arkestra (all in defining, exotic costume) from performing, and slick Black pimps exploit innocent Black girls. Thanks to powers that make Ra basically superhuman—harmonic progressions converted to energy—he saves all situations.

The blues? Are we still talking about the blues with all these costumed improvisers making appeals to different regions or fantasies of Africa? I was interested that Simpson insists on making them prominent, for it's not something that jumps out like the connection between the John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk and the blues. The confident commitment of free improvisation, and the musicians' deeply felt relationship with a distant world—both are drenched in fundamental tensions. They yearn for a place and time long lost, yet they work to create a comparable world of dignity and beauty by framing their own rules; by replacing old assumptions with new. Among these avant garde Black musicians, the blues aren't only about the fatigue of suffering: From the downtrodden arises a Phoenix-like impulse to brilliance.  

David Hammons, Chasing the Blue Train, 1989. Mixed media, dimensions variable.
Collection S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium. Photo by Dirk Pauwels. 

 
A few works of visual art respond directly to music itself, not to musical figures. Roy DeCarava's black and white photos of dancers at a rent dance in a small kitchen (not shown) and, above, in a dance hall, beautifully reflect the deep mysterious movement of music on soul and body. In the kitchen-dancers' everyday dress, the sadness of eking out dream-space under the overhead light and next to the sink are tenderly acknowledged. In Dancers, the darkness that accompanies all freedom is surely the flip side of the blues.

David Hammons' installation, Chasing the Blue Train, is both funny, visually engaging, and beautiful in its arrangement of a select few, spare elements. Blue Train is the title of John Coltrane's ("Trane's") first album as a leader, recorded in 1957, so the title is a pun, as is the work itself, with a blue-painted HO-guage train chugging along beneath a tunnel of coal ("coal-train") on each loop. Among the landscape of piano lids the train traverses are boom boxes playing music of pianist Thelonius Monk, Coltrane's inspirational colleague, and of a trumpeter—probably Lee Morgan, who was on the Blue Train album (no gallery note reveals the personnel or music). 

The importance of Chasing the Blue Train for us is not so much in knowing details of the Coltrane-Monk association, as it is in Hammon's 1989 response to the legendary album. Hammons'  installation is minimal, cool, and amusing. Its light-heartedness is appealing. It's based on word-play; the music is a prop for the visual and the implied verbal. I think it's more a commentary on the culture built around jazz than about the music itself. Hammon reflects on the wish to be "on the train" of "With It," recognizing the scenery, knowing the station names, where to get on and off the cool-train.

Bob Thompson, Garden of Music, 1960. Oil on canvas, 79 1/2 x 143 in. Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut
The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. 

Bob Thompson's enormous painting, Garden of Music, celebrates great jazz innovators of his moment. Among the musicians in his Garden of Eden are free jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman and musicians associated with him: trumpeter Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell literally on the drums, and Charlie Haden carrying the bass (line). To the extent that pattern, color, and visual rhythm can "make music," Thompson aims to do so. And what  truly excites me is that so immense  a canvas celebrates avant garde artists at the moment of their ascendence, when the future can still take their legacy to greatness or obscurity. It's not the same as making a portrait of Bird fifteen years after his death. Thompson is deeply in the middle of this scene. He was friends with Coleman and this musical circle in New York, though the painter and his wife expatriated to Spain. 

Melvin Edwards, Write When You Can, 1991.
 Welded steel, 13 x 10 1/2 x 8 in. Courtesy of 
the artist and Alexander Gray Associates 

Expats and Afro-centrists; people living where they never wanted to be, born into a world that didn't want them, or looking for a better place. So much of Blues for Smoke relates to location the will to move on and up—to the promise that a man who can choose his environment can change his lot. 

In general, I think that the two-dimensional works in this show are less interesting than the music, videos, and installations, and for this reason: The blues are a matter of movement, atmosphere, and ambiguous or unsettled states of being. These are best captured in transitory and dynamic art forms. Thompson's painting, and Delany's (above) pay tribute to blues figures, but there's a difference between demonstration or homage and being caught up an experience. Two-dimensional works throughout the show are secondary sources—representations—a step away from engagement. The blues are experience itself, involving time and space. 

Even a stationary, three-dimensional sculpture like this small relief work by Melvin Edwards fills space and time, psychologically and in terms time's expanse of possibilities. It implies past and future; its mood is as complex as the horror and strength of its form and materials. Write When You Can is a title packed with nuance, future, and possibilities. It signals departure, presumably from a dark place where this conglomerate of chain, gimlets, screws and fused steel will be left behind at "home." 

Does sorrow overwhelm us that this is where one has been, and that this will always be part some immigrant's life? What kind of congratulations do we give the person who leaves this? What will she say when she writes? How will she explain her new-found world to people fixed in the darkness of this one? Within the psychic space of Edwards' sculpture there is room for all these questions to exist and begin to play out in our imaginations.


Blues for Smoke includes 78 minutes of Richard Pryor Live in Concert, 1979 (directed by Jeff Margolis, HBO, 2006). If there were more than two headsets attached to the monitor, I suspect that Wexner could outright cancel the rest of the show. Blood runs through every laugh Pryor evokes. It's impossible to watch him without knowing that every joke you're doubling over about is a horrible truth. "Be happy," he says, "for any Nigger doing anything," and he probably cuts as close to the bone of the blues impulse as anyone can.

Glenn Ligon, No Room (Gold) #42, 2007. Oil and acrylic on canvas,
32 x 32 inches. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
© Glenn Ligon. Photo by Joshua White. 

Three canvases of Glenn Ligon's hang next to the monitor playing the Pryor video. Two have the text shown to the left: "I was a nigger for twenty-three years. I gave that shit up. No room for / No room for advancement." The other substitutes the word, "Negro" for "nigger." I was with a friend deeply-versed in Pryor, who assured me that this text is derived from Pryor', who is a great inspiration for Ligon too. 

These three paintings are from a much larger series with the same texts printed in greater or lesser degrees of clarity, surrounded by more or less smeared excess ink. It's a series painted of stuttering words that evenly divide a golden ground. Each canvas has, despite the sputtering and smears, an essential formal dignity. Yet despite the golden ground and the formal setting for the vernacular language, the canvas-to-canvas repetition never manages to get off the ground: There's no advancement. Nigger/Negro? How does one give that shit up? What's the relationship between statement and action? Between saying it on the stage, as comedy, and repeating it, in all seriousness, as text? Does anyone advance?

Such questions seem inevitably to lead either to constant expression of frustration and rage (Pryor, Ligon) or to movement (migration of the soul to real or imagined Africa, to Europe, to a hopefully less racist part of America). But movement away still leaves part behind. Zoe Leonard's  continuous installation/sculpture, 1961, is a poignant testimony to this idea of departure and personal history. Every suitcase added must represent more packed up from added experience—the difficulty of leaving the past behind, however painful it may have been. You can't shake the blues. You don't pack up in a pink suitcase and leave segregated America of 1961 behind as you click the latches.

Zoe Leonard, 1961, 2002- ongoing. Blue suitcases, dimensions variable.
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, Germany. Photo by Bill Jacobson. 

Leonard is a white woman in a show of mostly  Black artists. Simpson's piece suggests, however, just how far the influence of the blues penetrates through races, sexes, and nationalities. A splendid 14-minute, 2012 video by Wu Tsang, Mishima in Mexico, presents two young, English-speaking men of ambiguous sexuality who rent a hotel room in a Mexican city in order to finish a screen play of a book by Japanese novelist, Yuko Mishima. Moody, ambiguous, sliding between fiction and reality; character and role; and gender assignments, we watch it with questions from the surrounding blues environment. Japanese, Mexican, white, and transgendered: All these are categories that don't pop to mind with the term "the blues." Simpson invites us to see how far contemporary art can stretch the blues.

Stan Douglas, Hors-champs, 1992. Two-channel video installation with stereo 
sound 13:20 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York.
Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York, © Stan Douglas .

Blues for Smoke is a show of such grand scope, settled around so basic an issue—the  influence of the blues on contemporary artists and art forms—that it's impossible to come away unsatisfied. For any visitor there are beauties, surprises, brand-new satisfactions, and even old favorites to be found.

I was nevertheless very sorry to see that while Simpson gave much pride of place to music in a multi-media show, he did nothing to acknowledge musicians; he thought entirely like a visual arts curator, acknowledging only whom he assumed to be the Real Artists. 

One of the glories of Blues for Smoke is a 13-minute film, projected onto back-to-back screens. It records a performance of Spirits Rejoice by its composer, free-jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler and his ensemble. As the caption to the stills above reveal, all the credit goes to the film-maker, Stan Douglas. It requires very determined Internet searching on this work to eke out the name of any personnel on the performance beyond Ayler. Even though the trombonist is the great George Lewis (a MacArthur winner, even, in recent years), his name is never mentioned in the show or any materials connected to it. 

This is true of all the music films and videos. No names are given for the members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, as eminent in music as any of the visual artists in this show. Ditto for the members of Sun Ra's colleagues, and the anonymous greats of music playing on the CD soundtrack for Hammon's Blue Train. Throughout the show, music is honored, but musicians—the most famous and groundbreaking—are anonymous. Or, in the case of the Stan Douglas film, what's celebrated is his film with his title, over the content of astounding music performed by genius musicians.

The confinement to visual (Art) standards in a multi-media show is curatorial oversight of a high order, suggesting that however prominently the music is showcased, it's all really just the blues. It's not embodied; it exists just in the air, an attitude, perhaps coming naturally to anonymous Black brethern, like all blues do. 

Can we advance a little here?

DeWitt, DiCenzo, and Scott: This is Improvisation

Derek DiCenzo, Dave DeWitt, Aaron Scott

Dave DeWitt, piano. Derek DiCenzo, bass. Aaron Scott, drums. This jazz trio has been improvising around Columbus since the late '80s. Jazz; improvisation. Inseparable, right?

Yes and no. There's improvisation...and then there's improvisation.When a jazz ensemble begins a tune, they establish the melody first. Usually it's a widely recognized standard song from a great composer of the early-to-mid twentieth century, like George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, or Jule Styne; songs you know, like "There Will Never Be Another You," "[Take the] A-Train," or "Skylark." Or, it may be a jazz tune derived directly from one of those great, standard songs. 

After the tune's first chorus is set down, the musicians trade improvised solos based on the progression of chords used in the melody. By "improvised," we mean, generally, that they wing it. Their muscle memory and their ear knowledge allow them spontaneously to invent variations on the tune while adhering to the structures that tie those variations, however bold or soaring, to the melody.

The ideas of improvisation, spontaneity, and uniqueness in jazz intertwine. But if a group has two or three gigs a week, how can those improvised solos continue to be genuinely spontaneous night after night? Isn't it inevitable that the musicians will develop "licks" or patterns they like, feel comfortable with, or wish to continue exploring? Does spontaneity have to imply uniqueness, the result of continual reinvention? Is non-repetition even a possibility for musical creativity? Wouldn't that be to invoke a god-like standard of conceptual fertility?

We who follow DeWitt, DiCenzo, and Scott—variously appearing as the ADD Trio, TRio, Aaron Scott Trio, Derek DiCenzo, or Dave DeWitt Trio—can make it our week's work to attend the two or three gigs that hard-working Scott books for them. We can hear them play "Moon River" many times over. So one might assume that sooner or later, we'd start to pay more attention to our drinks than to repertory we'd presumably heard before.

Dave DeWitt. Author photo.

This emphatically doesn't happen. Every performance by this trio starts in a galaxy far, far away, from which we witness the emergence of a new star. We in the audience arrive as musical newborns. We struggle even to grasp the tune, for even the musicians aren't sure, as they set out, where they are headed, let alone in what key. These are jazz improvisers in the radical sense. 

The trio is the house band for Becky Ogden's Jazz Bungalow. On November 4th they opened the first set for a Jazz Brunch with the following set up by Dave DeWitt on the piano. Put yourself in the shoes of the bassist and drummer, preparing yourself for the tune emerging HERE. What is it? I still don't know. Clearly, the first premises of the music are trust and anticipation.

Making music that coalesces into standard tunes, the trio depends on pianist DeWitt to let his hands and imagination wend their ways through rhythmic thickets and chordal tides for as long as it takes DiCenzo and Scott—and DeWitt himself—to figure out what they are playing. When everything falls together (it can take the audience even longer to figure out what the tune is), the band surges, often beyond the information of the moment. The ambiguous, novel puzzle of DeWitt's question—the antithesis of the normal "statement"—makes each performance of the same tune a unique event for musicians and listeners alike. Given this device the trio has chosen for setting up each tune, there simply is no possibility of repetition. As you watch as well as listen, you can see these guys literally sweating to pull it off; you can see and hear the hits and misses, the facial telegraphing of the hits and misses, the pleasure, panic, and pains of improvisation. And it is good.

I love this antic, all-out, seven-and-a-half-minute performance of a tune I didn't identify until several minutes along, the name of which you'll find with the following YouTube of its simple version. This tune gives ADD at its best: The statement-as-question, the headlong playing, the unity on-the-fly. I've decided not to excerpt this or the following tunes. I simply don't know how to interrupt such driving music, and my will to try is weak. So HERE it is. You can compare it to a simple rendition, the perfect material for a "tune with variations," copied from YouTube HERE.

Derek DiCenzo. Author photo.

The music this ensemble makes is molten, always hot and taking shape, but never solidified into a state of rest, even up to the last second. Only in retrospect can the listener, like the musicians, begin to analyze what happened; only when there's time to exhale and laugh off the tension can anyone begin sorting through all the musical quotations, key changes, and collective exhibition of forms, styles, and rhythms of Western music.

The gigs that this trio play are divided into sets. Unlike others', though, the sets are not exactly divided into tunes separated by time during which the crowd applauds and the musicians reset. Usually, there is barely a break between one number and the next. DeWitt is loath to let the energy lapse and keeps his hands on the keyboard, roiling the notes until the next tune unravels itself. In some groups, this would be the means of making a medley of tunes, but that's never what DeWitt is setting up. For these guys, the performance unit is the set, not the tune, so their energy is wave-like, increasing in pressure throughout the hour. The lack of space between the tunes gives the listener the heady sense of riding a wave that is gaining height and force until it exhausts itself in a crash—as these musicians literally come close  to doing by set's end.

To illustrate the persistence and push of a performance, on this 8-1/2 minute sample is the closing of "On Green Dolphin Street" and the full performance of the Latin classic, "Fungi Mama." Listen HERE.

How do DeWitt, DiCenzo, and Scott generate music of such size, energy, and originality? For one thing, by being nonpareil musicians. For another, by being playmates. One has a sense of them as being in an eternal clubhouse: At one minute they're the chess nerds, and the next they are covered in grease, taking apart car engines.

Aaron Scott. Author photo.

Scott is unstoppable both as drummer and impresario: He will get work for his phenomenal group, and he does, even in  tight times. He's been booking since his twenties, when he returned to town from North Texas State where he went on scholarship. Even then he began booking for himself and for the city's top jazz musicians with whom he was playing, including his father, pianist Bob Allen. Booking, and playing, Scott was also teaching at Columbus Percussion Center and enrolled at Capital University to complete his degree. He's a man whose excellence on his instrument is paralleled by his knowledge of talent and determination that it will not go empty-handed. He will also not let talent go without attracting it to his own.

DeWitt and DiCenzo are madmen; naturals, whose music wells up from inner springs. Both are self-taught musical polymaths. 

I first knew the mercurial DeWitt as a premier bassist when I came to Columbus ten years ago, and was surprised when I first heard him on the keyboards, making astonishing music. Yet, as it seems, many know him primarily as a drummer. DeWitt explains that he began playing piano at age 3, even before his musician father knew that he could; his parents thought he had been simply pecking at the instrument in the garage. He confesses to a lifelong "love/hate relationship" with piano, the hate side of which led him to give it up in his teens and to take up drums, again on his own.

DeWitt returned to piano for a decade but in his mid-thirties (during the '80s), he turned to the string bass. "I was seldom happy with the bassists I played with, so I decided I'd do it myself," he grins. "I really liked it. I like being in the middle of the rhythm section."

Dave DeWitt. Author photo.

Indeed, the relationship between piano and bass in this trio is arresting, for the two instruments occupy virtually equal positions—DeWitt cites the relationship between pianist Bill Evans and bassist Scott LaFaro as an admirable example. Although the piano "leads" in the sense of insuring that each tune becomes the strand picked from the knot, this is not at all a "piano trio." Actually, it's not a trio led by any voice: It's a three-part conversation. Even the pianist plays all three instruments.

As does the bassist. Derek DiCenzo, too, like his colleagues, has supported himself by his music in Columbus since the '80s. He, too, is largely self-taught. He reads music, as DeWitt does not, but he makes it clear that he is in another world from the great "technicians" of conservatory and college with whom he often plays in the Columbus Jazz Orchestra and on tours. 

I originally identified DiCenzo with guitar and electric bass. Then I heard him on upright bass, as in this group. But these are just the start: He also gigs on piano, Hammond B3 organ, drums, steel drums, and accordion. On special occasions, he can be convinced to bring and play his theremin.

Derek DiCenzo. Author photo.

On the occasion of this recording, the second of two sets ended with the musicians literally close to physical collapse, yet in a nervous state of exhausted euphoria. Scott threw down his sticks, laughing to DiCenzo, of the last tune, "All the Things You Are," "Man! We were swinging by the seat of our pants!" DiCenzo responded incredulously, "Where are the beats? What am I doing up here? This is crazy stuff!" Laughing, "You'd think we'd rehearse or something!"

Yet when I talked with DiCenzo a few minutes later, he assured me that of all the work he does, playing almost daily, this is "what makes me feel like a great musician." As he explains this, I know exactly what he means, because I've heard everything. He says that, "It's not just filling up the space with notes. It's crazily fresh," because the three of them have "a perfect hook-up" that allows "great accidents to happen." And, best of all, it is the most basic form of improvisation, the complete opposite of playing from scored music. "You don't practice at home to go play the same notes that you practiced. The music happens. I love it. It's unlike anything else." He nails his words with the hammer of his voice.

DiCenzo, Scott, and DeWitt play with love and abandon. They joke about calling themselves the ADD Trio (for Aaron, Derek and Dave) with the implications ("attention deficit disorder") of frantic, turn-on-a-dime energy. Maybe, given that each member is absolutely crucial to the existence of the music they make, they should try something like The Codependents, or Dave DeWitt and the Enablers. 

The intensity of their abandoned playing—the all out, sweaty, no-breaks and no-brakes leap—does indeed make me marvel at the energy they generate for work that leaves them at the end both exhausted and possessed. Coming down from a session like this would seem to be as difficult as playing it; the consequences of returning to earth after such a euphoria of ideas, adrenaline, and fiery creativity could require as much attention, balance, and management as making the music itself.

Those of us on the audience side of jazz enjoy the privilege of sitting at the table, knowing how richly we enjoy the feast. But we are as gourmets to cooks, savoring the dishes without having had to slit any throats. It seems so little to applaud musicians like these, who can take us to heights of joy as we simply listen, while they get there by sweating blood.

Listen HERE to DeWitt, DiCenzo and Scott play "My Funny Valentine."

Old Friends in Low Places: On the Front Line with Jazz Sextet: The Champaign Connection

Poster by Kerry Helms

Back in August, I discovered one day that a notice had been ripening for several days on my neglected Facebook page. Jazz Sextet: The Champaign Connection was playing from six o'clock until nine Central time that very evening at a wine bar in Urbana, Illinois. It was one o'clock in the afternoon that I read this. Columbus is in Eastern time. With the hour's lag between time zones, five hours would be just enough time to make the three-hundred mile drive. I was on the road in under a half hour.

It still makes me happy to remember the sense of victory I felt  upon arriving with ten minutes to spare then even finding a tall stool empty at the bar, a spot a little isolated, placing me above the inevitably noisy crowd. People pack the house to hear these guys; the two bars where they play (the beer bar—Iron Post—and the wine bar—Buvons) are as tightly packed as a liquor distributor's order book. And they play as a group only in Urbana-Champaign, where all of them teach, taught, studied, or are enrolled in the University of Illinois School of Music.

The front line is the permanent core of Jazz Sextet. On alto and soprano saxophones is Clevelander, Howie Smith. Everything about his full-throttle, athletic playing—his all-out enthusiasm for everything he involves himself in—belies the sober sophistication of his website photographs. Trombonist and fellow composer Morgan Powell, the one group member who has remained in Champaign since the '60s, reminded the crowd that Smith and he have been playing together for forty-five years, since they were graduate students together. Not only have they been partners in jazz, but Smith has been a performer whom composer Powell relies on for interpretation of his work.

Jazz Sextet in June, 2011 at the Iron Post. Left to right: Chip Stephens, Howie Smith, Ray Sasaki, Kelly Sill, Morgan Powell, Joel Spencer

Powell and Ray Sasaki met at Illinois as faculty members when Powell had left the ranks of graduate students to join the composition faculty, and Sasaki came was hired to teach in both his areas of expertise, classical and jazz trumpet. Powell has often written for Sasaki, notably on his 1995 CD, foRay froMorgan: The Beastly Beatitudes. When violinist Dorothy Martirano needed coaching with the extraordinary challenges of learning a piece Powell had written for her, she turned to Sasaki for tutelage in the composer's idiom.

Chip Stephens, of the University of Illinois School of Music's Jazz Studies Division, is the current pianist of choice for the Sextet. I've heard Stephens on several occasions, including as pianist with midwest tour of the Woody Herman ghost band. Again, I've never heard (or seen) anyone like him. On the bench, he would appear to be in a trance, focusing his unmoving face into the short distance while his entire upper body rocks in the gusty wind his maelstrom of music generates. He's like Gaudi architecture, all riffs and adornments straight from nature—from music that you know—and the more amazing for being that way since he links every phrase into a whole that the most artful patissiere would envy: a finely spun wonder of the imagination from the same ingredients that usually bring us Pop Tarts.

Larry Gray and Jay Sawyer at Buvons

The August ensemble was completed by fast-track drummer Jay Sawyer, a native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, graduate of Western Michigan University, and currently a graduate student in Jazz Studies at Illinois; and the redoubtable Chicago bassist, Larry Gray, who is a Jazz Studies faculty member as well. When Gray, Sawyer, and Stephens get cooking, the rest of the room can disappear, there is such esprit, joking, and vivacity in their music; such grins and jibes among them. On Jazz Sextet gigs in the past I've heard drummers John Von Ohlen and Joel Spencer, bassists Kelly Sill and Arlene Rosenberg. It's one hell of a bar band.

What matters here? Is it all the pedigrees and careers? The fact that you can look up their websites and find their further affiliations with the jazz greats that even people who never listen to music have heard of? 

For me, it's the certainty that I'll hear extraordinary music, amber while it's still alive and flowing, before it sets into preciousness. What I see and hear in this group—that could just as well be playing the Village Vanguard in New York or Chicago's Jazz Showcase—is that they play only twice a year, reunited virtually as playmates, inspired by their own familiar ground of happy associations. They perform with the spirit of boys at play, happy men blowing with abandon and no thought but of music, themselves the music itself. This is as compelling a form as art can take.

It's never that these old friends are reclaiming anything lost; there's no nostalgia. Their reunions are like the resurfacing of a vital, relentless spring of music that continues to flow underground, a wide-branching system that converges as a spectacular geyser a couple of times a year, at its original site. This music is never not a part of Sasaki, Powell, and Smith, wherever they go individually. Twice a year it erupts, and fans gather again to experience Old Faithful's explosion, Champaign-style.

Champaign Connection at the Iron Post in Urbana, full house in June 2011.

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While the Jazz Sextet's front line's constituted of an important composer and two definitive interpreters of his work (hear, for instance, the incomparable Destiny and Desire by Powell, a duet played by Smith and Sasaki), their voices and modes of playing are breathtakingly distinct. In jazz rather than contemporary chamber music, the surprise might be in finding these three in the same lineup. Not only am I amazed by the art and musical personality of each, but also by the integrative power of jazz itself.

Ray Sasaki with Chip Stephens

Ray Sasaki practices in two sessions every day, one devoted to classical, one devoted to jazz. This discipline comes home—one hears and feels it—in the considered perfection of his solos: in his articulation; his round, open tone; the converging of emotion and his control over it. "Stardust" is a signature tune, and, with self-mocking humor, he opens the Sextet's performance of  STARDUST here.

When Sasaki plays, his eyes are open and he looks like he is inspecting the music as a material that he's sculpting as it emerges from the bell, as if it were molten gold to which his breath imparts elegant form.

Howie Smith draws on power sources unfathomable to me. The man is kinetic, seeming by the end of a two-set, three-hour session just to have warmed up. His presence is declarative and frontal; when he solos, he takes the stage like a thespian delivering the soliloquy that reveals the heart of the matter. Notes cascade from his horn as words do from a master of revenge drama; he explores changes as the betrayed hero rehearses his fury. Here's a sample from THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER YOU.

Howie Smith

Still, I particularly admire Smith's way with ballads; he makes full use of the sweet possibilities of the alto and soprano voices. He's told me that the ballad is, in fact, his favorite mode. While I find myself gripping my barstool, not to be blown off by his athletic runs and chases, I lean forward and shiver to the emotional radiation from his rendering of WHAT'S NEW.

When Powell is up front, he plays softly, almost diffidently it would seem, and listeners have to bow in, sharpen their ears and even, perhaps, suspend their chatter to hear what's going on. Subtlety is his mode. Where others play the melody or play along the melody's harmonic changes—in a more traditional way—Powell calls our attention into the middle of the band itself, away from our outside perspective in the crowd. Every musician's ears have to be tuned to the ensemble; as improvisers, their music is at least as much the product of group decision as of personal ones. But Powell demonstrates this more radically, often by using his trombone not as an instrument of melody, but to join the rhythm section or to respond to or interact instantaneously with his fellows. In this sample from STELLA BY STARLIGHT we hear Powell playing with Stephens at the piano, using his trombone percussively, allowing the rhythm section sometimes to assume the melody. No role is fixed; it's all trust and play. Powell's friend and colleague, Dorothy Martirano, has more than once said that Powell is a musician who elevates the playing of everyone around him: This passage is one example of what she means, as he shares "his solo" with Stephens, bassist Gray, and drummer Sawyer. 

Morgan Powell

It's folly, of course, to write only of the styles of soloists, anyway, for the magic of an ensemble is precisely what Powell illustrates: the interplay of sounds, ideas, decision and impulses among the group members, listening to each other on the fly. Even solos are always shared. What we hear is only partially the result the each musician's skill in blowing, striking, or plucking: Their skills in listening and responding have no less weight. As listeners, we are the ones with options. We can float on the current; or we can saddle up, take the reins, and listen back.

It's a big disadvantage with any music not to be there when it's made, not to see as well as hear, for we hear with all our senses when we have the chance for our eyes, our deep muscles, and even our skin to react to the physical sensation of sound; to the visual information that improves or enhances our understanding of music's structure and surfaces.

But the chances are very small that most of us will make it to a bar in Urbana-Champaign on one of the weekends when Jazz Sextet plays, so with the kind endorsement of the band, I post several whole samples of this rarely heard music. "Basin Street Blues" and "It's You or No One" are tunes they nearly always play, freshly inspired by them every time, especially with changing rhythm sections.

This excerpt from a first set medley includes Powell's "Body and Soul," then a throw-down of comedy and heart-break staged by Stephens and Gray in back-to-back "Stompin' at the Savoy," and "Sophisticated Lady."

Close your eyes, spend some time, and be there.

Poster for June, 2011 by Kerry Helms

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With particular thanks to Howie Smith for his recordings, and to Tom Johnson for coaching me through audio edits. Blame for inconsistency in the quality of these samples is to be attributed to me alone.