Choo choo! Woo woo!

For all of you swing voters.... Thanks to my friend (and fellow MacPhail student) Bevyn Marvy for passing this on.

MJF/51: Festival Wrap-Up

The whole glorious Monterey Jazz Festival weekend--as much of it as I could squeeze in--is described in my just-posted wrap-up on Jazz Police, with you-are-there photos by John Whiting.

If the flow seems a little hinky, simply resize your browser window. (Click and pull on the right-hand corner if you're on a Mac--I'm guessing it works that way on PCs, too?)

XOXOXO to Lena-Andrea Kobett for wrangling the beast.

Charlie Haden Family & Friends

While researching Charlie Haden for MinnPost, I learned he was about to release a country music CD, and that he had sung (and yodeled) bluegrass music as a child on his family's radio program on KMA in Shenandoah, Iowa. Rambling Boy came out on Tuesday (Sept. 23). "Great CD," he said during our interview. "Couldn't be better. My daughters, my son, my wife, Vince Gill, Elvis Costello, Roseanne Cash, Ricky Skaggs, Jerry Douglas--all these great musicians. Pictures of my family."

The CD has its own Web site, with a video about the making of the album. Check it out.

Liane Hansen interviewed Haden and his family (including son-in-law Jack Black) for NPR's Weekend Edition on Sunday, Sept. 21. It's a really nice piece and worth a listen.

The NPR site led me to an earlier interview from the Tavis Smiley Show (Nov. 11, 2004) during which Haden talked with Roy Hurst about the creation of free jazz--and why he plays with his eyes closed: "The obvious answer to that is 'to concentrate.' But I tell this funny little story: The first night we opened at the Five Spot, I was unpacking my base, and Ornette was getting his horn out, we're getting ready to play, and I looked across at where the bar was, and standing at the bar were Wilbur Ware, Charlie Mingus, Ray Brown, Percy Heath, Paul Chambers--every great bass player in New York City was looking right in my face, and I said, from that time on, I close my eyes."

Photo by Jim McGuire.

Charlie Haden: More from the interview

The great bassist Charlie Haden brings his Liberation Music Orchestra to Minneapolis tomorrow (Saturday, Sept. 27) for the first concert in the 2008-09 Northrop Jazz Season. I had the opportunity to speak with him earlier this month for MinnPost.

Not everything from the interview made it into the article. Here's more.

Haden described the latest LMO album, Not in Our Name, as "a desperate attempt to reach people with beautiful music and try...to make them realize how important it is to have reverence for life. To see the preciousness of life and to recognize the injustices of the world." (This quote does appear in the article.)

I asked him if something specific had happened in his life to make him care so much. He related the story, which has been reported elsewhere, of being rocked to sleep by his mother when he was about 2 years old. She was humming folk songs to him, and he started humming the harmony.

"I think that was my first sensitivity to music," he told me. "From then on, it was a very sensitive journey for me--everything was very delicate, sensitive, vulnerable.... When I was 4, I was screaming in my room, really loud, and my mother ran in saying 'Charlie, what is wrong?' I said, 'I don't want to die!' She said, 'Charlie, you're 4 years old, you're not going to die!' I was confronted [at that early age] with how lucky life is, that the history of the universe is inside of all of us from the beginning of time, and we have to do everything we can to make [life] as beautiful as we can for everybody....

"I saw a lot of things when I was a kid in a racist place.... I don't know why my mother chose to take me once a month to an African-American church and sit and listen to the choir. She took me out of my three brothers and two sisters. All I had to do was look around me--at the lunch counters, the one movie theater where blacks could sit in the third balcony, the one school for African-American students. There were not many places they could go.... My family were not racist. Dad liked Roosevelt and was unhappy with Truman. I was raised in a family that was very liberal. Some things attracted me right away to right injustices in the world, to be more aware."

In 1971, while on tour in Portugal with Ornette Coleman and other jazz giants (Ellington, Miles, Dexter Gordon, Dizzy, Monk), Haden was arrested for dedicating "Song for Che" (a track from the first self-titled Liberation Music Orchestra album) to liberation movements in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau, which were then Portuguese colonies. He was apprehended at the airport, imprisoned overnight, and interrogated by the political police. The next day, Nixon's cultural attache to Portugal came for him and he was released.

I asked him, "Do you think if you were arrested in Portugal today that a cultural attache would come for you?" He said, and I heard sadness in his voice, "Probably not."

Yet he keeps on keeping on, and his music is not, as you might expect, bitter or angry or full of despair. The title track to "Not in Our Name" is one of the sunniest, most optimistic tunes I have ever heard. It makes you want to dance and run through a field of flowers and smile at strangers.

Northrop sent out an email yesterday to ticket holders with a message from Haden: "We hope to see a new society of enlightenment and wisdom where creative thought becomes the most dominant force in all people's lives."

Two lengthy interviews with Charlie Haden are available online, one by Ethan Iverson for DownBeat (2008), the other by Amy Goodman for Democracy Now (2006). I learned a lot from both of them. Photo of Charlie Haden and Carla Bley by Thomas Dorn.

Miguel Zenon

HH and I were reading the Strib over breakfast yesterday when we noticed a brief piece on this year's MacArthur Foundation "genius grants." Among the 25 recipients are a violin virtuoso, an architectural historian who studies ancient bridges, and...a saxophonist?

We went to www.macfound.org (not www.macfund.org, as the Strib misprinted) and learned that the saxophonist is Miguel Zenon, whom we just saw twice at Monterey, with Maraca "Cuban Lullabies" and again with Antonio Sanchez's Migration. Before then, at the Dakota in 2005 and IAJE in 2004.



The MacArthur is the best of all possible awards. A description from the Web site: "Recipients learn in a single phone call from the Foundation that they will each receive $500,000 in 'no strings attached' support over the next five years."

Congratulations to this fine young musician.

Read more about Zenon here.
Visit his Web site.
Visit his music channel on YouTube, with podcasts.
Hear him on his MySpace page.

Photos by John Whiting from the 51st Annual Monterey Jazz Festival. Top: Miguel Zenon. Bottom: Miguel Zenon and David Sanchez.

Jazz is bad, women are dumb

Nice work, Mickey D's.

As HH says, "Stupid is the new smart."

Gridlock

To paraphrase Robert Burns: The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

Our plane is scheduled to leave San Francisco at 3:55 p.m. Our rental car is due back at the airport at 2 p.m. We leave the hotel at 11 a.m. and turn onto Highway 1 heading north. It's about a 2-hour drive and we have 3 hours, after which we'll have 2 hours at the airport for lunch and leg-stretching before assuming the fetal position in the cramped 757.

At around 10:30 a.m., a tractor trailer heading north on Highway 1 miles ahead of us blows a tire, hits a guardrail, and bursts into flames.

See the man at the side of the road. That's the driver, running.

Kaboom!

Trees and vegetation catch fire. Area residents are notified that they might have to evacuate. Traffic is s-l-o-w-l-y rerouted off the scenic highway to the surface streets of Aptos.

We spend the next 2 hours like this.

We arrive at the airport after 3, quickly return the car, and take the tram to the main terminal. By now it's 3:30. I'm certain we won't make our 3:55 flight. HH remains calm.

We make our flight. By some strange miracle, we seem to be the only people in the airport. No one in line at the Northwest counter, no one in line at the security checkpoint. We leave our luggage at the counter and get through security without being wanded or patted down. At the door of the plane, there's a brief verbal tussle about what to do with our small rollaboards. Of course there's no room in the overhead bins. There is never room in the overhead bins for the last people on the plane! One flight attend insists they must be checked. Another, a voice of reason, says "Oh, just stick them under the seats in front of you. Now go!" The door slams behind us. Later, when the beverage cart rolls our way, we buy the last remaining snack pack: three tiny triangles of bread, three cubes of cheese, six apple slices, eight grapes, seven dollars.

We're on our way home. Our luggage will take a later flight.

To quote William Shakespeare, "All's well that ends well."

Photos: Dan Coyro/Santa Cruz Sentinel.

MJF/51: Sunday

The final day of this fine festival always comes too soon. We saw what we could: Jamie Cullum, a conversation with Cullum and Clint Eastwood, a bit of Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band, Kurt Elling, Herbie Hancock. As we left the arena (during Herbie Hancock's encore), Kurt and Laurence Hobgood were leaving the autographing table. I wanted to run after them but exercised self-restraint.

In the days to come, I'll post longer pieces on Cassandra Wilson, Jamie Cullum, Kurt Elling, and Antonio Sanchez. A festival review/wrap-up will appear on Jazz Police.

(Update: The wrap-up has been posted.)

Photo by John Whiting.