passings
Fontella Bass, singer, July 3, 1940-December 26, 2012
“Rescue Me,” TV Show (Shindig), 1965
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“Theme De Yoyo,” with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, 1970
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“God Has Smiled On Me,” with mother Martha Bass, brother David Peaston, Amina Claudine Myers (piano), Malachi Favors (bass), Phillip Wilson (drums), 1980
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“All That You Give,” with The Cinematic Orchestra, 2002
passings
Inez Andrews, gospel singer, April 14, 1929-December 19, 2012
Today, remembering her, we revisit some favorite clips.
*****
6/6/10
Fierce, insistent, soaring—this voice, which I first heard over 30 years ago, still gives me chills.
Inez Andrews
With the Andrewettes, “Let the Church Roll On,” live (TV broadcast), 1964
*****
With Rev. James Cleveland & the Metro Mass Choir, “We Are Soldiers in the Army,” live, 1981
*****
“A Stranger in the City,” “He Lives In Me,” “Lord, Don’t Move The Mountain,” “Mary Don’t You Weep,” live, Chicago (Apostolic Church of God), 1988
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lagniappe
The Caravans’ star then was Inez, whom they called the High Priestess. She looks the part. A coffee-colored woman with high Indian cheekbones and an intense, almost drugged stare, she can sing higher natural notes than anyone on the road. Tina [Albertina Walker] said, ‘The rest of us sang awhile, but the folks really wanted to hear Inez whistle.’
—Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (6th ed. 2002)
*****
Determination is important. You’ve got to be determined to live what you sing as well as sing what you sing. God understands the . . . difficulty that we go through for the truth. The Bible says your determination will be rewarded because God sees it when no one else does.
*****
7/15/12
five takes
“Mary Don’t You Weep” (AKA “O [or Oh] Mary Don’t You Weep”)
The Caravans (feat. Inez Andrews), 1958
***
The Swan Silvertones (feat. Claude Jeter), 1959
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Claude Jeter & Shirley Caesar, 1969
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The Caravans (feat. Inez Andrews), c. 2006
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Bruce Springsteen, 2005
*****
New York Times obituary (12/21/12)
Inez Andrews, whose soaring, wide-ranging voice — from contralto croon to soul-wrenching wail — made her a pillar of gospel music, died on Wednesday at her home in Chicago. She was 83.
The cause was cancer, said her son Richard Gibbs.
“She was the last great female vocalist of gospel’s golden age,” said Anthony Heilbut, author of “The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times” (1971), a history of that era, from the mid-1940s to the early ’60s. Ms. Andrews was known as the “High Priestess,” Mr. Heilbut said, ranking among the likes of Mahalia Jackson, Marion Williams, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Clara Ward.
Ms. Andrews came to national attention in 1958 with the Caravans, the Chicago gospel group led by Albertina Walker that also nurtured such stars as Shirley Caesar, the Rev. James Cleveland and Bessie Griffin. That year she was the lead singer for what became two of the Caravans’ biggest hits.
One was “I’m Not Tired Yet,” an up-tempo shout song in which she belted out, “I’ve been running for Jesus a long time/No, I’m not tired yet.”
The other was “Mary Don’t You Weep” — a rearrangement, by her, of the old spiritual into a rip-roaring sermonette. It was the Caravans’ first big hit and helped make them one of the nation’s most popular gospel groups. Ms. Andrews was the lead singer on other hits like “Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand,” “He Won’t Deny Me” and her own composition, “I’m Willing to Wait.”
***
Ms. Andrews began her career with two groups in Birmingham, Ala., her hometown: Carter’s Choral Ensemble and the Original Gospel Harmonettes. By the mid-1950s, the Harmonettes were one of the nation’s top gospel groups, with Ms. Andrews the understudy for the group’s lead singer, Dorothy Love Coates. It was Ms. Coates who recommended Ms. Andrews to the Caravans.
In 1962 Ms. Andrews left the Caravans to start her own group, Inez Andrews and the Andrewettes. They toured the country performing songs like “It’s in My Heart” and her composition “(Lord I Wonder) What Will Tomorrow Bring?” But by 1967 she was touring as a soloist, and in 1973 she recorded her biggest hit, “Lord Don’t Move the Mountain.”
“Lord don’t move the mountain/Give me the strength to climb,” she sang.
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From a seductive, bluesy sound — often singing behind the beat — Ms. Andrews could burst into an impassioned, raspy cry.
“Even in songs of rejoicing, her voice has a somber undertone,” Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times in 1990, “and when she takes on supplicating songs like the midtempo ‘Lord I’ve Tried’ or the glacial minor-key blues of ‘Stand by Me’ — both of which rise, verse by verse, to a near-scream — Ms. Andrews can sound desperate, on the verge of hysteria. Hers is a gospel of terror, and of the relief faith provides.”
passings
Ravi Shankar, sitarist and composer, April 7, 1920-December 11, 2012
With Ali Akbar Khan (sarod), et al., “Bangla Dhun,” New York (The Concert for Bengladesh), 1971
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lagniappe
art beat: Art Institute of Chicago
Here’s my one-word review of the newly opened gallery of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art, where, Tuesday morning (after a hearing at the nearby federal court building), sunlight was streaming through the windows: stunning.
passings
Charles Rosen, pianist, teacher, writer (1972 National Book Award for Nonfiction: The Classical Style), May 5, 1927-December 9, 2012
Frederic Chopin, Nocturne in B major (Op. 62, No. 1)
Live, Atlanta, 1985
***
Johann Sebastian Bach, The Art of the Fugue, excerpts
Recording, 1967
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
A German pre-Romantic philosopher, Johann Georg Hamann, held that the sense of music was given to man to make it possible to measure time. The composer Elliott Carter’s fame comes partly from a reconception of time in music that fits the world of today (although there are many other aspects of his music to enjoy). We do not measure time regularly, like clocks do, but with many differing rates of speed. In the complexity of today’s experience, it often seems as if simultaneous events were unfolding with different measures. These different measures coexist and often blend but are not always rationalized in experience under one central system. We might call this a system of irreconcilable regularities.
In Carter’s music, things happen for different instruments at different tempos—none of them dominates the others, and an idiosyncratic character is often given to the different instruments that preserves their individuality. Carter is never dogmatic, and the different measures of time may occasionally combine briefly for a moment of synthesis. The individuality of tempo and rhythm can make his music difficult to perform as each player unconsciously responds physically to the different rhythms he or she hears and yet tries to preserve his or her own system intact. Carter is, for this reason, best interpreted by those musicians who have often played his scores. Just as, in a polyphonic work of Bach or any other competent and genial contrapuntist, one takes pleasure in the independent line and interest of the separate voices and rejoices in the way they illuminate each other, so in Carter we can often delight in a quick foreground movement heard against a mysteriously shifting background that gives the foreground a new sense.
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[T]he sense of his music is dependent as much upon tone color and dynamics as it is on pitch; the more salient aspects of the individual instrumental lines have always to be brought out.
—Charles Rosen, “Elliott Carter’s Music of Time,” New York Review of Books, 2/9/12
*****
Everyone needs a hobby. Some pianists collect Oriental vases. I write books.
—Charles Rosen, 1981 interview
passings
Dave Brubeck, pianist, composer, bandleader
December 6, 1920-December 5, 2012
Dave Brubeck Quartet (DB, piano; Paul Desmond, alto saxophone; Gene Wright, bass; Joe Morello, drums), TV show (Jazz Casual with Ralph J. Gleason*), 1961 (followed by other clips)
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lagniappe
found words
japanese punk band with sousaphone
—Web search that brought someone here
*****
*Gleason, who died in 1975, had a hand in a lot of different things, including the Monterey Jazz Festival (cofounder, 1958) and Rolling Stone (cofounder, 1967).
only rock ’n’ roll
Metz, “Wasted”
Recording (Metz, Sub Pop), 10/12
***
Live, Canada (Sackville), 8/3/12
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Rock ’n’ roll.
R&B.
Jazz.
Whatever their differences, they’ve got something in common.
Nobody’s more important than the drummer.
If the drums aren’t happening, nothing is.
*****
reading table: passings
“The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.*****
“By Small and Small: Midnight to Four A.M.”
For eleven years I have regretted it,
regretted that I did not do what
I wanted to do as I sat there those
four hours watching her die. I wanted
to crawl in among the machinery
and hold her in my arms, knowing
the elementary, leftover bit of her
mind would dimly recognize it was me
carrying her to where she was going.—Jack Gilbert, February 18, 1925-November 11, 2012
passings
Ted Curson, trumpeter, composer, June 3, 1935-November 4, 2012
“L.S.D. Takes a Holiday” (T. Curson), live, Paris, 1973
******
With Charles Mingus, “Better Git Hit In Your Soul,” Mingus at Antibes (recorded live 1960)*
*****
“Tears for Dolphy” (T. Curson), 1964
*****
*CM (bass, piano), Ted Curson (trumpet), Eric Dolphy (alto saxophone), Booker Ervin (tenor saxophone), Dannie Richmond (drums).
passings
David S. Ware, saxophonist, composer, bandleader
November 7, 1949-October 18, 2012
“Mikuro’s Blues,” live, Europe, 200?*
*****
Live, Lithuania (Vilnius), 2007*
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lagniappe
reading table
“Variations On A Text By Vallejo”
By Donald Justice (1925-2004)
Me moriré en Paris con aguacero …
I will die in Miami in the sun,
On a day when the sun is very bright,
A day like the days I remember, a day like other days,
A day that nobody knows or remembers yet,
And the sun will be bright then on the dark glasses of strangers
And in the eyes of a few friends from my childhood
And of the surviving cousins by the graveside,
While the diggers, standing apart, in the still shade of the palms,
Rest on their shovels, and smoke,
Speaking in Spanish softly, out of respect.
I think it will be on a Sunday like today,
Except that the sun will be out, the rain will have stopped,
And the wind that today made all the little shrubs kneel down;
And I think it will be a Sunday because today,
When I took out this paper and began to write,
Never before had anything looked so blank,
My life, these words, the paper, the gray Sunday;
And my dog, quivering under a table because of the storm,
Looked up at me, not understanding,
And my son read on without speaking, and my wife slept.
Donald Justice is dead. One Sunday the sun came out,
It shone on the bay, it shone on the white buildings,
The cars moved down the street slowly as always, so many,
Some with their headlights on in spite of the sun,
And after awhile the diggers with their shovels
Walked back to the graveside through the sunlight,
And one of them put his blade into the earth
To lift a few clods of dirt, the black marl of Miami,
And scattered the dirt, and spat,
Turning away abruptly, out of respect.
*****
*With Matthew Shipp (piano), William Parker (bass), Guillermo Brown (drums).
more Von Freeman
Live, New Apartment Lounge, 504 E. 75th St., Chicago
With Mike Allemana, guitar, Matt Ferguson, bass; Michael Raynor, drums
“Mr. P.C.” (J. Coltrane, excerpt), 11/30/04
***
“Blame It on My Youth” (O. Levant & E. Heyman), 6/8/10
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lagniappe
Von Freeman, who was considered one of the finest tenor saxophonists in jazz but attained wide fame only late in life, died on Aug. 11 in Chicago. He was 88.
The cause was heart failure, his son Mark said.
Though his work won him ardent admirers, Mr. Freeman, familiarly known as Vonski, was for decades largely unknown outside Chicago, where he was born and reared and spent most of his life.
As The Chicago Tribune wrote in 1998, his playing “represents a standard by which other tenor saxophonists must be judged.”
Last year, Mr. Freeman was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, the nation’s highest honor in the field.
Not until the 1980s did he begin performing more often on famous out-of-town stages, including Alice Tully Hall and the Village Vanguard in New York. Earlier in his career Mr. Freeman had made much of his living, as he told The Tribune, playing for “strip joints, taxi dances, vaudeville shows, comedians, jugglers, weddings, bar mitzvahs, jazz clubs, dives, Polish dances, Jewish dances, every nationality.”
If he never got his big break as a young player, Mr. Freeman said, then that was because he never especially sought one.
“I’m not trying to brag or nothing, but I always knew I could play, 50, 60 years ago,” he told The Tribune in 2002. “I really don’t play any different than the way I played then. And I never let it worry me that I didn’t get anywhere famewise, or I didn’t make hit records.”
What he preferred to chasing fame, he said, was playing jazz as he felt it demanded to be played. The result, critics agreed, was music — often dazzling, occasionally bewildering — that sounded like no one else’s.
Mr. Freeman’s playing was characterized by emotional fire (he was so intense he once bit his mouthpiece clean off); a huge sound (this, he said, took root in strip clubs where the band played from behind a curtain); and singular musical ideas.
His work had a daring elasticity, with deliberately off-kilter phrasing that made it sound like speech. He cherished roughness and imperfection, although, as critics observed, he could play a ballad with the best of them.
Where some listeners faulted him for playing out of tune, others praised him for exploiting a chromatic range far greater than the paltry 12 notes the Western musical scale offers.
“Don’t tune up too much, baby,” Mr. Freeman once told a colleague. “You’ll lose your soul.”
His masterly tonal control let him summon unlovely sounds whenever he chose to, and he chose to often. His timbre has been called wheezing, honking, rasping and, in the words of Robert Palmer of The New York Times in 1982, a “billy goat tone” — a description that, as context makes clear, was not uncomplimentary.
Earl LaVon Freeman was born in Chicago on Oct. 3, 1923. (His given name was occasionally spelled Earle.)
His father was a city policeman — a highly unusual job for a black man then — whose beat included the Grand Terrace Ballroom, a storied nightclub. There, Von soaked up the music of Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Earl Hines and other titans of the age.
Young Von pined for a horn, and as luck would have it there was one in the house. The fact that it was attached to his father’s Victrola did not deter him, and one day when he was about 7, he pried it off, drilled holes in it and began to blow.
Deplorable sounds ensued, and his father overheard. “He picked me up, just kind of shook me, then hardly spoke to me for about a year,” Mr. Freeman later told Down Beat magazine. But if only as a deterrent, his father bought him a saxophone.
By 12, Von was playing professionally in Chicago nightclubs, reporting for work armed with a note from his mother. It read, “Don’t let him drink, don’t let him smoke, don’t let him consort with those women, and make him stay in that dressing room.”
He graduated from DuSable High School, a public school famous for its jazz program (other alumni include Nat King Cole and Dinah Washington), and entered the Navy, playing in its jazz band.
After his discharge, Mr. Freeman resumed his career, sitting in with some of the finest musicians to appear in Chicago, including Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.
He was often invited to join them on the road, but he turned most offers down. He was disinclined to leave home: besides his wife and four children, he had his mother to look after. She had been widowed since Von was a young man, when his father was shot and killed in the line of duty.
In later years, Mr. Freeman played at jazz festivals throughout the United States and Europe. But despite his newfound fame, till nearly the end of his life held court each Tuesday night at the New Apartment Lounge, a small Chicago club where he had performed since the early 1980s. “Vonski’s Night School,” musicians called his sessions there, and young players came from around the world for the chance to sit in with him.
Mr. Freeman’s marriage to Ruby Hayes ended in divorce. Besides his son Mark, he is survived by another son, Chico, a prominent tenor saxophonist, and a brother, George, a jazz guitarist. Two daughters, Denise Jarrett and Brenda Jackson, died before him, as did another brother, Eldridge (known as Bruz), a drummer.
His recordings include “Doin’ It Right Now,” (1972), “Young and Foolish” (1977), “The Great Divide” (2004), “Vonski Speaks” (2009) and, with Chico, “Freeman & Freeman” (1981).
Though Mr. Freeman had not looked for it, renown, when it came, was a vindication.
“A lot of people who didn’t pay a lot of attention to me or to my music started coming around when I was heading to my 80th birthday,” he told The Tribune in 2002. “Now they were saying, ‘Well, Vonski, you’re all right after all.’ ”
