Covid Blues

 

I was hoping my next entry would be about the joys and details of the 2024 Jazz Cruise.  Until….

 

Up until this point, Ann and I had avoided coming down with Covid.  Mostly everyone we know has had the virus in spite of, like us, having the full arsenal of seven shots.  Feeling invincible, we boldly resumed our normal social lives, wearing no masks, although we were about to go on the one cruise we treasure above all, The Jazz Cruise. We went to the theater several times before departure and Ann participated in not one but two Mah Jongg tournaments.  It was inevitable I suppose but the timing couldn’t have been worse, Ann coming down with Covid exactly one week before our departure. 

 

We had a devil of a time getting Paxlovid which was unavailable at the nearest two drug stores and then getting a voucher (for Medicare recipients) from Pfizer to cover the new $1,300 price tag on the prescription.  So within two days she was on medication but still it was a bad bout, the worst being three days of an extremely painful sore throat.  Yet, naively we still waited to pull the trigger on canceling the cruise, hoping, hoping, but two days before departure we had to throw in the towel.  Another experience lost to this pandemic, although luckily, never feeling her life was in danger.

 

Our first Jazz Cruise was right before Covid hit in 2020.  One wasn’t even planned for 2021 as we were all in the nadir of the pandemic. We booked the 2022 cruise as it looked feasible with certain precautions, but then the CDC suddenly advised against cruises because of a new Covid surge at the time. We patiently, no anxiously, awaited 2023 and by then it was considered safe and we had the time of our lives.

So we were looking forward to this year’s festivities until Covid came to visit.  Not living in NYC any longer, and now being only an infrequent visitor, the Jazz Cruise is our only opportunity to see some of our favorite jazz performers live.  My other entries in the links above mention the names of some of the jazz artists we closely follow.  Most are on the present cruise, with the exception of Bill Charlap (he will be on the 2025 Cruise which we have already booked).

 

Still another experience missed, three years out of five, not a very good grade, 40%.  At our age, how many more opportunities?  Besides not seeing family, Covid also canceled our 50^th wedding anniversary, one we expected to celebrate, possibly, in the presence of the great man himself, Stephen Sondheim.

 

Being marooned at home again, gave me more time for my own piano.  Bill Mays, a great jazz pianist who I met a few months ago when I was playing for a Christmas party (talk about being outside one’s comfort zone, playing with one of the greats listening), was nice enough to send me some lead sheets of his music and one by Johnny Mandel who he worked with and we mutually admire although he recently passed.  I thought I had most of Mandel’s music but I did not have the one he sent, “The Shining Sea,” such a plaintive, Mandel signature song.  I love it and will eventually try to record it.

 

Mays’ own “Gemma’s Eyes” is challenging for me, both rhythmically and harmonically and I’ve been practicing it.  I like challenges such as that as it helps one keep moving forward.

 

He also sent me Quincy Jones’ “Pawnbroker,” again a song I had never heard before, the theme from the film of the same title, which more easily fits into in my playing style and is a haunting melody.  From our brief encounter, Mays certainly put his finger on what I would respond to and I’m grateful to him, especially this week as I feel cut loose in a space we had reserved for non-stop jazz. 

 

This leads me another musical observation, a very unlikely one for me.  I just “discovered” Taylor Swift.  I’m not sure what led me to her other than having this void of a week of great music lost.   Whenever I’ve seen her it’s been in the context of her world tour concert, with music blasting, back up bands, strobe lights pulsating, hoards of screaming fans, and, well, essentially the way popular music is presented now, everything geared to overwhelm the senses (“deadening” might be a better word).  Maybe that’s what we need in this chaotic world but I’ve always avoided that scene.  But I’ve also seen her briefly televised at Kansas City football games, cheering on her man, the outstanding tight end, Travis Kelce.  Except for her exclusive seats in the owner’s suite, she seems like just another football fan.

 

As I never really heard her sing, I tried to find her in a more intimate setting without all the over the top fireworks of her concerts and I came across Taylor Swift’s NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert.  It is 28 minutes of her performing four of her well-known (well, not to me) songs "The Man", "Lover", "Death by a Thousand Cuts" and "All Too Well" at the Tiny Desk, indeed an intimate setting where it’s just her and the guitar or piano and a handful, maybe a hundred, standing, adoring fans.  It was so enjoyable to hear her singing solo. 

 

 

It's as if Paul Simon was reincarnated more than 50 plus years after I first heard him.  There are eerie comparisons.   I can see the attraction of today's youth to what she has to say.  (I first heard Paul Simon -- who lived in my neighborhood --in 1957 when he performed “Hey Schoolgirl” with his partner Art Garfunkel. They were then known as “Tom and Jerry,” that recording making it to the national charts at the time.)

 

Swift is a cross over country and folk, a little rock and a lot of pop.  Yet every generation has its troubadour (or in this case a “trobairitz” -- in my generation there were Carole King and Joan Baez).  My generation also had Bob Dylan as our troubadour, singing his songs of despair and political activism.  But most of all, Paul Simon is more relevant to Swift’s music, with his songs of lost love, sadness, nostalgia and of course, loss in general (“hello darkness my old friend”  “and we walked off to look for America”).  When I was going through my divorce in the 1960s, his songs spoke directly to me the way Taylor Swift’s speak to her generation now magnified by social media.

 

Just listen to her sing “All Too Well.” I was touched by her ability to evoke a certain kind of emotion like Paul Simon did with a guitar (or in this NPR concert, her playing the chords on the piano as she sang).  It’s a song about autumn and lost love, a sense of the same emotion in Simon’s “Leaves That Are Green” (albeit, different rhythm, styles, one contemporary and the other vintage 1960’s).

  

In “All Too Well” she writes about a boy who was her love.  She sings:

 

Autumn leaves falling down like pieces into place

And I can picture it after all these days

And I know it's long gone and that magic's not here no more

And I might be okay but I'm not fine at all

 

Some of the lyrics from Simon’s “Leaves That Are Green” could be that boy answering:

 

Once my heart was filled with the love of a girl

I held her close, but she faded in the night

Like a poem I meant to write

And the leaves that are green turn to brown

And they wither with the wind

And they crumble in your hand

 

She's the real deal and this intimate NPR setting helped me to fully understand her popularity.   Maybe in these Covid infested times I’ll become a Swifty!  I certainly respect her values, encouraging her generation to vote.  So many of those in their 20s and even 30s haven’t the slightest interest in voting, not caring (or even being conscious of) that my generation is handing off a world where the existential threats are far greater than when I was of that generation.  Shame on my generation, but shame on them to eschew the only possible route to change.  Maybe she will continue to be a force to set that right.

 

So we beat on.

 

Bill Mays’ Stories of the Road: This Book Swings!

 

A guy walks into a bar and says “set ‘em up, Joe, I got a story you oughta know” – but it’s not about “a brief episode,” but the tapestry of what constitutes an exceptional musical life.  Bill Mays’ Stories of the Road, the Studios, Sidemen & Singers: 55 Years in the music biz is a unique collection of eclectic stories which flow in such a way that you can hear the author’s voice, and his passion.

 

To me, it is more than the book’s blurb boasts: “a delightful, humorous, and entertaining collection of anecdotes from a musician who has truly done it all.”  There are 25 chapters in this 173-page book which in the aggregate is a tutorial about what it is to play music at Mays’ level, earn a good living playing nothing but music, all while revealing secrets us mere “amateurs” can only speculate about.

 

What separates a “professional” from an “amateur” pianist such as me?  “How to Tell If You’re an Amateur Musician” by Justin Colletti is a revealing article on the subject, very accurate in its assessment, other than really making clear how much an abyss there is between the two. Mays’ book underscores those differences but Colletti’s article makes me feel a little better about them.

Here I must digress.  Bill Mays and I are about the same age and have similar middle-class backgrounds, his on the West Coast (CA) and mine on the East Coast (NY).  We were raised on the music of the 50s and in high school we were ‘rebels,” more interested in cruisin’ than schoolin’.  It took a catalyst, a mentor, to bring us into the life for which we were best suited.  For Mays, that was a church choir director who was a professional trumpet player who recognized talent in the young man and took him to see the great Earl Hines and that experience changed his life: he knew immediately he wanted to play jazz piano.  It didn’t hurt that Mays’ father, although a preacher was a versatile musician, and his mother had a “sweet voice” and therefore he was from a musical family, and he was given gospel and classical piano lessons since he was five years old.

I on the other hand had little of those influences but it took a high school teacher, Roger Brickner, to set me on my indirect path to becoming a publisher.  Nonetheless, I did have some music lessons when younger, too few in retrospect, and if it were not for some wishful fantasy when I was around fifteen years old or so about becoming the next Elvis, I would not have briefly picked up the guitar.  That was serendipitous as the guitar revealed chord structure to me and even long after I abandoned piano lessons I would fiddle around with the piano, playing it not as I was taught, but with chords.  I long ago lost the ability to sight read other than the melody line and the chords and improvise the rest.

I know that it sounds “almost professional” but the chasm of ability between one such as Bill Mays and an amateur such as myself, at best a busker, is deeper than is apparent.  Simply put, I know enough to know what I don’t know and to this day I am in awe of the jazz pianist, especially one such as a Bill Mays.

This separation between the professional and the amateur can be best understood as the difference between a native speaking his/her language and a foreigner with a year or so training in that language.  Sure, the latter person can sort of understand some of the language, but to really speak it is to think in that language, not to try to translate it.

The great jazz musicians have that ability, playing alone, or playing with other musicians.  To me it’s always a wonder that they can instinctively play with each other, even transposing keys on the fly, and to play standard songs so abstractly that the original song is almost not apparent.

Not that all jazz is totally abstract.  What I love about Bill Mays’ renderings is that he rarely strays too far from the melody.  He can of course get into that other universe, but that is not his style.  Neither is it of one of my other favorite pianists, Bill Charlap who approached Bill Mays for a couple of lessons when he came to NYC.  Per Mays I advised more openness, fewer notes, and more space in his playing.  No wonder the two sound similar in a way, and I can hear some of the color of the playing of the late, great Bill Evans (Bills are wild!) in their work.

I’ve never seen Evans or Charlap play live, but I listen to their music all the time.  I’ve been fortunate enough to catch Mays a few times at the Colony Hotel in West Palm Beach.  Early next year we will see Charlap in person on a Jazz Cruise.

A few years ago a friend of mine, a bass player, David Einhorn, knowing how I feel about Stephen Sondheim and Bill Mays, gifted me a CD, Our Time, the second CD recorded by Tommy Cecil and Bill Mays of Sondheim’s music.  I immediately bought their first recording, Side by Side.  These are precious, priceless, so little of Sondheim’s music recorded in this style.

Amusingly, Mays recollects about their attempt to get a response from Sondheim regarding the recordings.  Although “Steve” acknowledged their receipt, he never did comment.  Gods are busy people!

The only similar recordings I know are the ones recorded decades ago by the Terry Trotter Trio, all of which I have, covering Passion, Sweeny Todd, and Company.  Interestingly, according to Mays, early in his career he sought Trotter for advice about professional career directions having admired Trotter, that advice freely given as so often is the case in the jazz world, a small world indeed when it comes to the leading performers.

To me, a particularly fascinating observation in Mays’ book is the following: Generally speaking, it seems we jazz musicians know a lot more about the world of classical musicians then they do of ours.  Indeed, we are often much more adept at playing in that style than the other way around – witness the lame attempts by some “name” classical players and singers to try to breach the divide. 

 

I’ve often thought that in my amateur world.  Sometimes we’ll meet a new acquaintance, one who has a beautiful grand piano in their home, so the natural question is “who plays in the family?” Frequently, the “player” is one with years and years of classical lessons (I’d give my right arm, no, make it my left leg for that advantage) but then comes the confession that he/she either can no longer play or rarely plays.  That would never happen to a jazz pianist (or even to me, who can be away from a piano for a month, but sit down and play as if I never missed a beat, if I have the melody line and the chords).

I’m sure that Mays and most other jazz pianists can play classical, perhaps not at the concert hall level, but their understanding of the genre is substantial.  I know that was the case with Oscar Peterson, who I saw perform in NYC when I was in college, but who also came back to live performance after his stroke, with a weakened left hand but his right hand making up for what his left hand lost.  Also, our favorite young jazz musician, Emmet Cohen, who we’ve seen live several times, is a skilled classical musician (love it when he drops in some Bach in his jazz phrasing) and is probably the most versatile of all jazz musicians today, playing any style of jazz.  He is remarkable.

Another amazing pianist who we’ve seen, also mentioned by Mays in his book, is the late great French jazz pianist Claude Bolling who is probably best known for his “crossover” work, walking the fine line between classical and jazz, particularly his Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano.

There are so many interesting stories here, not to mention laugh a minute moments, but most of all this book is about a guy who is totally in love with what he does best.  These range from live gigs at clubs, solo, or with “his” trio, or as a sideman, with an extensive discography and having worked in the world of film (as a performer and arranger), and as an accompanist to almost 200 singers, some of whom we’ve seen perform live and many of whom we’ve heard.

Whenever I’m asked the question what I would ideally have liked to have been if I were not a publisher, professional jazz pianist is right up there or writer (and when much younger, pitcher for the New York Yankees!).  Indeed: amateur, someone who does something out of love, and in my advancing age, I still have the piano and word-processor at my side every day.  Bill Mays’ book describes that alternative life, but I never had the supreme talent, nor learned skills, only the passion.  It is wonderful to have all three and few jazz musicians have “recorded” their experiences such as Mays has in this wonderful book.  It has that personal voicing as does his music.  Thanks, Bill!  

My room where it happens

 

 

Sondheim Side by Side with Cecil and Mays

My favorite bass player, David Einhorn, knowing my love of Sondheim, gifted me Our Time, Tommy Cecil and Bill Mays’ incredible jazz interpretation of Sondheim’s work.  As it is indicated as “Volume 2” I was able to find their first CD of Sondheim’s music, appropriately called Side by Side.  I don’t think I’ve ever written a “plug” for anything in this space, but I make an exception for these two CDs. (Amazon carries both.)

Tommy Cecil and Bill Mays

They take the beautiful and frequently complex music of Sondheim to another level (although some of the pieces Sondheim was only the lyricist), probably the most unique jazz pieces I’ve ever heard.  It is an equal partnership between a gifted bassist and pianist.  We’ve seen Bill Mays at the Colony on Palm Beach, intended to go back this year, but learned that the Colony had cancelled his brunch gigs on Sunday, probably due to financial considerations.  He is perhaps one of the best jazz pianists at work today.

No drummer is necessary for this pair. In fact a drummer would interfere with their accomplishment, a unique collaboration of two gifted musicians, their voicing and rhythm just perfect.

Before these two CDs I had collected a series of Sondheim jazz albums by the Terry Trotter Trio, the only such authorized renditions by the great man himself, Stephen Sondheim.  I listen to them frequently but now I’m fixated on the innovative work of Cecil and Mays. Here are the tracks from the two CDs:

Side By Side (Sondheim Duos)

1 Something's Coming 7:09

2 Not While I'm Around 6:25

3 Broadway Baby 8:00

4 Every Day a Little Death 6:10

5 Ballad of Sweeney Todd 4:50

6 Small World 6:52

7 Side By Side By Side 5:27

8 Anyone Can Whistle 6:28

9 Comedy Tonight 7:06

Our Time (Sondheim Duos 2)

1 Everybody Says Don't  5:33

2 Johanna 3:44

3 Our Time5:59  

4 Moments in the Woods 6:09

5 Finishing the Hat 4:48

6 The Miller's Son 5:55  

7 Losing My Mind 4:19

8 The Best Thing That Has Ever Happened 5:44

9 Agony 6:05

10 Being Alive 5:44

11 Rich and Happy 6:08

The Great American Songbook Inhabits the Palm Beaches

Some recent events bear witness to the title of this entry.  A focal point, though, is Palm Beach’s The Colony Hotel which has its very own version of Manhattan’s Cafe Carlyle, or any of the well known NYC cabarets, only more intimate.  The Colony’s Royal Room attracts some topnotch American Songbook talent. Also, the Colony’s Polo Lounge Sunday brunch this season featured one of the best jazz pianists, Bill Mays. Sometime ago we heard Mays accompany diva Ann Hampton Callaway (a composer and a great jazz-cabaret singer) at the Eissey Campus Theatre of Palm Beach State College and made it a point to seek him out at the Colony’s Polo Lounge a couple of weeks ago. 

I asked him to play Bill Evans’ Turn Out the Stars, not very frequently performed, a work of beautiful voicing and emotion.  After a break, Mays played it solo, without the bass, effortlessly as if he plays it daily.  To me, it was heartrending. Then we were treated to an impromptu performance by the then featured performer at the Royal Room -- Karen Oberlin.  Amazing how an unrehearsed number by three professionals can be so natural.  Bill Mays’ CD Front Row Seat is exactly as titled – it’s as if he is playing in your living room.

Last month at the Royal Room we also caught Jane Monheit who we saw years ago and who has matured into such a great stylist, with phenomenal range, her latest album, The Songbook Sessions, a tribute to the great Ella Fitzgerald. She gladly posed with Ann for a photo. 

She performed pieces from her album and other numbers with her trio, husband Rick Montalbano on drums, Neal Miner on bass and Michael Kanin on piano, just the perfect combo for classic jazz.  Unfortunately her album (and this is very personal, not a professional observation) included a trumpet player, at times a distraction. I just wonder why the addition of a brass instrument was necessary. The bass, piano, and percussion combo is (to me) ideal for intimate, classic jazz.

Nonetheless, just to tie this together is a YouTube performance by Jane Monheit of Bill Evans’ Turn out the Stars, which was recorded at the Rainbow Room some six years ago.  What a sultry performer, one of our leading jazz first ladies, along with Stacey Kent, two completely different styles but both at the top of their games.

Last Saturday our close friend and neighbor, Nina (the artist who painted “Jessica” which hangs over my piano), who is also a cellist and a singer (do her talents have no bounds?), performed in the Choral Society of the Palm Beaches (S. Mark Aliapoulios, Artistic Director) – at Jupiter’s Florida Atlantic University auditorium. 

This was one of the most diverse programs we’ve seen in a long time, culminating in a partially acted out version of Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, a Broadway show which was recently performed at the New York City Opera.

The program’s featured performers made it especially enjoyable, vocalists Lisa Vroman, a soprano with extensive Broadway experience (who played Rosabella in that New York City Opera presentation) and Mark Sanders, a baritone who frequently performs with the Gulf Coast Symphony.  They had the perfect chemistry for performing one of the most beautiful Broadway duets ever written, Loesser’s "My Heart Is So Full of You."

But for me the highlight was the appearance and performance of Paul Posnak, who arranged Four Songs By George Gershwin for two pianos, which he played with the Choral Society’s pianist Dr. Anita Castiglione.  The songs reminded me so much of Earl Wild’s arrangement, Fantasy on Porgy and Bess and after the concert I told him so. He was delighted by the comparison, and it was apt.

Not enough praise can be directed to Dr. Catiglione for her nearly non-stop performance during the 2-1/2 hour program, easily transitioning to soloing, to accompanying, from Gershwin, to Irving Berlin, to Rogers and Hammerstein, to then to Frank Loesser and finally to classical, accompanying songs beautifully sung by the 2016 Young Artist Vocal Competition Winners, Mr. Julian Frias and Ms. Celene Perez, both high school seniors with great artistic careers ahead of them.  Our friend, Nina, was instrumental in organizing this competition.

Judging by these events, the American Songbook thrives and its future seems assured in the Palm Beaches!