They say smell is the sense tied tightest to memory but, for me, nothing brings the winter holidays to life like music. As a kid, I feverishly dug out the Christmas albums like they were a gift all their own, as much a part of the holiday as evergreens and wrapping paper.
American Christmas is like everything else here: a mélange of cultural influences. Middle Eastern roots, Northern European customs, Roman festivals, New England environs, Christian beliefs and pagan rituals have all been tossed into the Yuletide blender to get what we now think of as a traditional Christmas.
My favorite holiday music is that same slurry of international flavor, rooted in a genre that is now contemporary America’s version of classical music: jazz. It’s inescapable this time of year. Whether it’s John Coltrane running through “My Favorite Things” or Mel Torme’s “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” jazz’s combination of elegance and playfulness is ideal for a time rooted in both sincerity and childish wonder.
So, we’ll skip the usual literary musings and pass out special seasonal treats. Here’s a little something for every holiday mood…
We’ve got the purposefully vintage:
From the Squirrel Nut Zippers…
The sardonic:
From Miles Davis, with vocals from Bob Dorough (of Schoolhouse Rock fame)…
Mention the words “jazz” and “guitar” and inevitably the name Django Reinhardt arises. This virtuoso turned Europe on its ear when he exploded onto the Paris scene in the 1930s with violinist Stephane Grappelli. Reinhardt married elements of his Romani musical heritage with the hot swing of artists like Duke Ellington to birth the genre of “gypsy jazz” and music was never the same again.
Local acoustic artists Roman Street will team with violinist Tom Morley in paying homage to Reinhardt tonight at MOJO’s monthly Jazz Jambalaya. WKRG’s John Nodar will narrate.
The event starts at 6:30 p.m. at Gulf City Lodge (601 State St.), six blocks north of the downtown Wintzell’s at the intersection of State and Warren across from Dunbar Performing Arts School. On street and lot parking available with security provided. First come, first serve.
Entrance is $12, $8 for MOJO members with student and military rates available. The fee includes a light jambalaya dinner.
The event is BYOB with set-ups, beverages and mixers available at the bar.
MOJO is also collecting donations of non-perishable food items for the Bay Area Food Bank.
For more info, call 251-459-2298 or email mobilejazz@bellsouth.net.
19-year-old Nahshon Mac (McCarroll) of Chickasaw, AL shocked the Gulf Coast Ethnic & Heritage Jazz Festival Jam Session when he came out of nowhere and jumped on stage with his violin. The rest is music history.
THE GCEH JAZZ FEST HAS BEEN MOVED TO ITS RAIN LOCATION
351 WATER STREET
Kent Jordan
This year flutist Kent Jordan not only performs in GCEH Jazz Fest “Jazz in Bienville” on August 6 but he also brings his educational skills as this year’s clinician. Kent hosts the “Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp” in New Orleans and will be hosting the GCEH Youth Jazz Workshop for 2011.
Hailing from New Orleans, Jordan has dazzled audiences from Rio to Tokyo and firmly established himself as the foremost master of the jazz flute.
More and more audiences had been introduced to Jordan and his seemingly magic flute (and piccolo, too) through his stints on tour and in the studio with the Improvisational Arts Quintet, Wynton and Ellis Marsalis and “Tonight Show” guitarist Kevin Eubanks. But perhaps no collaboration has had stronger impact than his experience with the great jazz drummer Elvin Jones. Jordan toured the world and recorded with Jones for two years. “My experience with Elvin,” Jordan says, “was the pinnacle for me as a jazz artist … I found myself playing with a legend who helped forge the last great jazz music with the John Coltrane Quartet.”
Chris Saunders & Friends
The New Orleans pianist and vocalist makes a return to the Gulf Coast. A 20 year veteran of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage, French Quarter and Montreal International Jazz Festivals, he has worked with Tommy Dorsey, Harry Connick, Gregory Hines,Pete Fountain, Little Milton, Al Hirt, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Liza Minnelli and has many session, TV, radio and movie credits to his name.
Jimmy Roebuck is a native of the Gulf Coast. Jimmy is one of the premier drummers in this area and is in high demand for both live performances and as a session drummer. His long career as both a live performing artist and a recording session drummer has given him the experience to play any style of music. He especiallly enjoys live jazz performance.
Bassist Jo Morris, origination from the Gulf Coast has a musical career that spans many genres, primarily jazz, rock, pop and R&B. Jo has played with such artists as Dakota Staton, The JBs and has toured Japan . His playing style focuses on the overall sound of the band and sees his role in the group as supporting all members and “making the band sound good.”)
Larry Carter toured the US, Europe, Japan, etc, with New Orleans’ Walter ‘Wolfman’ Washington – 1989-2001 and toured Japan with Fred Wesley and James Brown rhythm section.”
Studied at Berklee in Boston.
THE GCEH JAZZ FEST HAS BEEN MOVED TO ITS RAIN LOCATION
351 WATER STREET
Mobile, Alabama’s Gulf Coast Ethnic & Heritage Jazz Festival has announced it’s headlining act for the 2011 GCEH Jazz Fest to be held next Saturday, August 6, 2011, 4:30-9pm 351 Water Street:
“Big Chief” Donald Harrison Jr.
of New Orleans who will be accompanied by his band and fellow Mardi Gras Indians
It will be a rare opportunity for Mobile to see the Congo Nation in action.
Mr. Harrison was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal – recapped below – as well as cameos and music in the HBO series Treme.
Old School, Cutting Edge
By LARRY BLUMENFELD
New Orleans
‘I’ve always been down with tradition,” said alto saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr. amid the din of a noisy nightclub. “Yeah, I noticed,” trumpeter Delmond Lambreaux shot back. “But you’re old school and cutting edge at the same time.”
That exchange was scripted within the fiction of David Simon’s HBO series “Treme.” The show is based largely on the true experiences of New Orleans musicians since the 2005 flood. Lambreaux, played by actor Rob Brown, was invented by Mr. Simon’s writing team and drawn in part from strands of Mr. Harrison’s actual story.
Mr. Harrison, who portrayed himself, is quite real. He grew up in New Orleans, and made a name for himself in New York in the 1980s and ’90s; by 1999, he’d moved back home. He never considered leaving New Orleans again, in Katrina’s wake. “I love it here, and when you love something you do whatever it takes to nurture that love,” he said over a cup of coffee recently, not far from the Upper Ninth Ward, where his mother has rebuilt his childhood home. “But it’s something more. New Orleans is the missing link for a lot of modern music, the last—the only—place where jazz is actually a culture. I need that to thrive.”
“Quantum Leap” is also the title track of Mr. Harrison’s latest CD (on his own FOMP label).
Five of the seven musicians Mr. Harrison, who is 50, enlisted for his new CD and all the members of his working quartet are in their early 20s; each of these younger players has studied with him on Monday nights through a music-education program associated with Tipitina’s, a storied New Orleans music club.
If Mr. Harrison’s manner of transmitting knowledge and purpose draws on (Art) Blakey’s storied mentorship, it owes as well to the Mardi Gras Indian tradition in which he was raised—a world of elaborate feathered-and-beaded suits, chants and hand-drummed beats, and homage to both West African and Native American traditions. Jazz credentials notwithstanding, Mr. Harrison is best known to some in his hometown as Big Chief of the Congo Nation, named after Congo Square, where enslaved Africans once drummed and danced on Sundays, and as the son of Donald Harrison Sr., who was during his life Big Chief of four different Mardi Gras Indian tribes.
“The Mardi Gras Indian rhythms and chants were really the first music that entered my consciousness,” he said. “But I didn’t get the connection between the jazz I was playing and that culture until I started coming out with the Indians again 20 years ago. When I heard that again—the chanting, and the rhythm behind that chant—in the back of my head, I started hearing Blakey’s drums. I thought ‘Wow, this is all starting to make sense.’ I stopped thinking of music in boxes.”
Such thinking was not always encouraged. “When I was just starting out, the record companies told me it would be the kiss of death to play too many different styles of music,” he said. “But what Blakey told me and what I learned from reading about Charlie Parker is that you can play anything you like, as long as it comes from the life you’ve lived. And provided you can do it well.”
Mr. Harrison can do a wide range of things well. He’s played Sidney Bechet’s music with spot-on technique at a Xavier University seminar. He’s swung hard withing the Afro-Latin grooves of pianist Eddie Palmieri’s band. He’s moved from smooth R&B to challenging modern jazz to African-tinged funk and, finally, Mardi Gras Indian traditional songs within a single set. Shortly before Donald Sr. died, in 1998, Donald Jr. recorded “Indian Blues,” blending New York-based jazz with the chants of Mardi Gras Indians (among them, his father).
“I’m the Big Chief of Congo Square” invests “Indian Blues” with new wrinkles, such as substituting Detroit Brooks’s rhythm guitar for tambourine. “The Sand Castle Head Hunter” features percussionist Bill Summers, the longtime friend who enlisted Mr. Harrison in a re-formed edition of Headhunters, the worldly funk band, and toys inventively with that band’s signature style. Even the hip-hop groove and Mr. Harrison’s rapping on “The Greatest” is no affectation. Back when he lived in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Mr. Harrison befriended his neighbor, Chris Wallace (the rapper who would become better known as The Notorious B.I.G.), encouraging him to learn to scat-sing Cannonball Adderley and Charlie Parker solos. “We worked on tonguing, on enunciation,” Mr. Harrison said, “and on projecting authority.”
Those are keys to Mr. Harrison’s achievements too. In the final episode of the first season of “Treme,” actor Clarke Peters, dressed as a Mardi Gras Indian Big Chief, looked and sounded believable—no easy feat. Then the camera turned to Mr. Harrison, wearing a magnificent suit of ostrich and turkey feathers dyed to shine like gold, and flashing a devastating glare. Here was the real deal, no mistaking it, steeped in secret knowledge and experience that can never simply be assumed. The same is true of Mr. Harrison’s music, whatever style he chooses.
Too often, death equates regret. Life lost becomes time lost, opportunity pondered but squandered.
A pair of deaths bracketed the past week but my attendant regrets differed on each end, much like the lives gone. The sadness bore opposing hues.
First, Lil Greenwood died in the early morning of July 19. The ringing voice of Mobile’s jazz matriarch was silenced after 87 years.
When I first heard the news, it was no shock. Her illness was common knowledge and we knew her struggle was winding down.
But there was no feeling she wasted anything. Her life’s promise had been fulfilled. She seized what she wanted, forging her way against the paradigm of the times. In her day, a good girl stayed home, listened to her man and raised kids.
Not Lil. She forged ahead, heading out and up. It paid off with a slot in Duke Ellington’s band. She was “in high cotton,” as they said back home.
The jazz world then was racy territory for a preacher’s daughter but she was a friend to all and judge of none. She was able to mingle and mix without falling prey to the self-destruction around her. She attributed her lengthy lifespan filled with global travel and unique experience to her self-discipline. Greenwood spread a lot of love and much of it came full circle.
Lil’s funeral was in a room filled with no remorse for her full life. Any sadness was for the presence lost from us. The mood lightened easily as stories of her journey rolled from the guests who stood and spoke.
Local saxophonist Joe Lewis told of Lil’s penchant for wearing pants, of catching her in a dress once and glimpsing nice legs. He asked why she didn’t show them off.
“Because when I wear dresses, all they do is look at my legs,” Lil said, “they don’t listen to me sing.” There was laughter.
Excelsior Band honcho Hosea London spoke of Lil’s sweet talk.
“Baby, oh, you play that trumpet so good,” she would say, with coercion soon to follow. There were smiles.
Friend and lawyer Creola Ruffin told about Greenwood singing at a funeral, launching into a powerful rendition of “My Way” that so moved attendees, it did itself in. Through his tears, the preacher finally interrupted and begged Greenwood to stop singing. It was too much for him to take. There were nods.
The most poignant moment was the end. Through her career, Greenwood’s theme song was one penned for her by Duke Ellington, “Walking and Singing the Blues.” She closed shows with it, using the ending refrain – “I’m walking, I’m walking” over and over – to strut from the stage, often down the aisle.
As the funeral recessional began, Lil’s casket was rolled down the chapel aisle while London led a small band through “Walking and Singing the Blues.” The bandleader sang “I’m walking, I’m walking” as the coffin rolled by, the last time Lil would ever exit a room.
Regrets? Mine were that I didn’t spend more time with her, that I never repaid a favor. My failure was a specter.
Then the day after Lil’s funeral, I sat in a diner and heard about the death of another voice, someone I never knew personally. Amy Winehouse’s corpse was found an ocean away. The voice of an artistic ingénue was silenced after only 27 years.
When I first heard the news, it was no shock. Her illness was common knowledge and we knew her struggle was winding down.
There was a feeling she had wasted everything. Her life’s promise was unfulfilled.
Winehouse had the opportunities needed, a supportive family, life in a time and place where the success of such talent should have been a foregone conclusion. Possibilities abounded.
The daughter of a London cabbie found the music world dangerous territory. She couldn’t resist the self-destruction it offered.
Admittedly, I was a fan but what bothered me most about Winehouse’s demise wasn’t her Grammy-winning work. There was something far better in her.
What captured me was what prompted Tony Bennett to call her “an artist of immense proportions…an extraordinary musician with a rare intuition as a vocalist….exceptional talent.” Before the tattoos and beehive and long slide down, there was this.
And this.
And this.
Displaying talent in this fashion is deceptive. The songs are old, bare bones, no studio tricks.
Listen to the nuance, the tiny things she does with her voice, inflections, phrasing, timing. The reason it sounds so effortless is due to the breadth of her gifts. Anyone who’s tried it can tell you nothing about it is easy.
This isn’t a typical pop diva going through grandiose gymnastics that don’t serve the song as much as show off. This is control, something she lacked everywhere else in her life.
Winehouse never hid the fact she was raised on jazz. I always hoped if she lived long enough, jazz was where she would end up. And if she sounded like this in her early 20s, more life experience would have brought astounding depth to future performances.
But it all goes to show that “potential” is merely the world’s longest four-letter word.
Coincidentally, even her struggles and habits were tailor-made for jazz. Louis Armstrong was a lifelong, unabashed pot smoker. Charlie Parker was one of the most famous addicts that ever lived, passively luring many down the same path. Billie Holiday, Anita O’ Day, the list of greats with addictions is fabled. But few of them cashed it in so soon.
Winehouse’s funeral was heart-rending, flooded in the regrets of family and friends. Not just remorse at the career that never materialized, but the life still furled, at chances flushed away.
Undoubtedly, misgivings filled the hearts there, questions about what they could have done to change the past. It always does with life snuffed young.
When they rolled Winehouse down the aisle, the accompanying music was Carole King’s “So Far Away,” not just her favorite song, but plaintive testament to the distance between the young woman and those who watched a multi-year suicide.
Duke Ellington always called Greenwood “little girl,” an artifact of his charm. But at least Lil had a chance to “grow up” and we reaped the results.
A little girl in England never finished that arc and everybody lost.
Lil Greenwood discusses her roots with David Calametti and Mod Mobilian, April 2010:
Lil’s was born in 1923 in Prichard. Her father was a minister at a Baptist Church. Lil attended Alabama State College.
In 1948, at 24-years-old, she quit her job as elementary school teacher in Prichard and boarded a train for San Francisco for a reunion with her husband, due back from service with the US Army.
The reunion never happened, but Lil did land a job singing at San Francisco’s Purple Onion, and she refused demands by her husband that she quit and join him back in Prichard to raise a family. One of his last requests when he died recently was for Lil to sing at his funeral.
Lil learned quickly that there wasn’t a big demand on the San Francisco jazz scene for the hymns and spirituals which she was known for back in Prichard and the three or four secular songs she knew were woefully insufficient for an aspiring jazz club diva. She not only learned more music fast but she started composing her own, some of it included in Back to My Roots.
She recorded R&B singles with the Modern label in 1950 and King and Federal Records in 1952/3. Her singles from this era are available on the 2004 Ace Records CD “Walking and Singing the Blues”.
In 1956, Duke Ellington saw Lil perform at the Purple Onion one night. Lil was excited but had nearly forgotten about it until Duke himself phoned her a week later from New York. Could she be in Manhattan by Sunday afternoon to meet with him and Billy Strayhorn?
“I got to Stray’s apartment about five in the afternoon. He and Duke had already taken the song I had written to open and close my shows, ‘Walkin’ and Singin’ the Blues’, and added more lyrics and verses.”
After a late dinner, Duke and Strayhorn surprised her with an invitation to sit in at a midnight recording session. “Suddenly Duke pointed at me and said, ‘Okay, that’s where you come in. ’We did just one take and Duke said it was a wrap. That night Duke nicknamed me, ‘One Take Lil’.”
By midweek, Lil was with the Ellington Orchestra in Boston and a week after that they were on stage at the Newport Jazz Festival. More weeks went by and ‘Walkin’ and Singin’ the Blues’ was released on the flip side of a 45. She worked with Duke and his son Mercer Ellington until the early 1960s.
After her stint in Ellington’s band ended, Greenwood recorded sporadically for other labels like NRC, Reprise, and Tangerine, and made some appearance on TV series, including The Tonight Show, Good Times, and The Jeffersons.
Years later when she performed and partied with the likes of Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn and others not known for conservative lifestyles and restrained social conduct, Lil still never smoked, drank or drugged. “I always imagined that my Daddy was looking over my shoulder and I never wanted to let him down or disappoint him. I never preached to my friends about their habits or anything like that, but I did usually leave the parties before they did,” she laughs.
In 2002 a retrospective CD of her early 1950s recordings “Walking and Singing the Blues” was released on Ace Records. Lil returned to Mobile and in 2007 she recorded the CD “Back to My Roots” with David Amram. She suffered a stroke in 2010 and afterwards was unable to perform again. She passed away July 19, 2011.
Lil with Hosea London at Serda’s, March 2010:
Interview & Performance “Back To My Roots” with The E.B. Coleman Orchestra at the Saenger Theater on September 1, 2007:
Featuring Tampa-based trumpeter Dan McMillion and his band.
Tonight Monday, March 28, 6:30pm at Gulf City Lodge, 601 State St.
Admission is $8 for MOJO members, $12 for nonmembers and $6 for students and active military with ID. The price includes a light jambalaya dinner, and a cash bar is available. Info: mobilejazz@bellsouth.net.
