Last week a recording of his complete works for solo piano (so far), Oppens Plays Carter (on Chicago-based Cedille Records), was nominated for a Grammy.
This week he celebrated his 101st birthday.
Next week?
Elliott Carter, Quintet for Piano (1997), Ursula Oppens, The Arditti Quartet, live
Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis: so many of the greatest figures in jazz weren’t just great musicians, or composers, or arrangers. They were great bandleaders. As important to their artistic success as anything else was their ability to find, and showcase, players who could make the music come alive—people like Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster and Jimmy Blanton and Lester Young and Freddie Green and Jo Jones and John Coltrane and Bill Evans and Tony Williams.
That small circle of elite bandleaders includes this man. He hired musicians who played their instruments like no one else (Eric Dolphy, Jaki Byard, et al.). He gave them a musical setting in which structure and freedom were exquisitely balanced. And together they made music that sounds (even on something familiar) like nothing else.
Charles Mingus Sextet (with Johnny Coles, trumpet; Jaki Byard, piano; Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone and bass clarinet; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Dannie Richmond, drums), “Take the A Train,” live, Norway (Oslo), 1964
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lagniappe
I nominate Charles Mingus one of America’s greatest composers—Ran Blake(in the liner notes to his recent album Driftwoods)
Wobbly and splayed, this performance of the Jobim classic sounds more like a soundtrack for my life than the silky Getz/Gilberto original ever could.
Ran Blake, “The Girl From Ipanema”
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Stan Getz/Astrud Gilberto (with a very young Gary Burton on vibes), “The Girl From Ipanema” (1964 [charted at #5 on the Billboard Hot 100]; this is from the 1964 movie “Get Yourself A College Girl”)
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lagniappe
mail
The immediacy of the e-world never ceases to amaze. After posting yesterday’s clip, I sent Sam Newsome an email—I’d happened upon his e-address at his website—to let him know that his music was being featured here. A few hours later, this was in my e-mailbox: “Thanks, Richard. It looks like I’m in good company. Peace, S”
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reading table
On this Thanksgiving Day, here’s a favorite quote.
Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.—Henry James
For Ursula Oppens, present and past aren’t far apart. In a concert I heard several years ago (at Northwestern’s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall), she opened with Beethoven (1712-1773) and closed with John Adams (1947-).
Elliott Carter (1908-), “Retrouvailles” (2000)/Ursula Oppens, piano, live, New York, 2008
David Schiff, author of ‘The Music of Elliott Carter,’ said in the program that the ‘Piano Sonata of 1946’ ‘invoked jazz.’ And during a panel discussion he smiled and said he thought he heard some influence of jazz pianist Thelonious Monk in the piano part of Carter’s ‘Cello Sonata of 2000.’
‘I’ve never heard Carter say anything about it,’ Mr. Schiff later added in an e-mail, ‘but when I play through the part (in private!) I like to give the many staccato notes that mark the pulse a kind of Monk edge to them.’—Roderick Nordell, “99 years of Elliott Carter in 5 Days,” Christian Science Monitor, 1/26/09
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An (often-fascinating) conversation between Elliott Carter and Phil Lesh (Grateful Dead) can be heard here.
While living in New York for a few months in the early 1970s (after my first year of college), I often heard Bill Evans at a place in Greenwich Village, the Top of the Gate, where, for the price of a beer, you could linger all night. Hunched over the piano, he looked at times as if he was about to fall inside and disappear.
Bill Evans, “My Foolish Heart,” live (TV broadcast), Sweden, 1964
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Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Fred Hersch, Brad Mehldau: the list of piano players who wouldn’t sound the way they do but for Bill Evans, whose approach to harmony made him the most influential piano player in jazz since Bud Powell, goes on and on and on.
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lagniappe
The ‘open’ voicings that [Bill] Evans used [i.e., leaving out a chord’s root note] were not new . . . . They had been there in ‘classical’ music since the early part of the century, since Bartok and Stravinsky. But they were new to jazz, and they opened up melody and flow in new ways.—Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition(2d ed. 1983)
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Bill [Evans] had this quiet fire that I loved on piano. The way he approached it, the sound he got was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall.
—Miles Davis (in Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography [1989])
Like all his [Monk’s] nieces and nephews, Teeny [Benetta Smith] treated her uncle as an uncle—not as some eccentric genius or celebrity. During one of her many visits in 1959 or ’60, when she was about twelve years old, Teeny noticed a book of compositions by Chopin perched on her uncle’s rented Steinway baby grand piano. Monk’s piano was notorious for its clutter. It occupied a significant portion of the kitchen and extended into the front room. The lid remained closed, since it doubled as a temporary storage space for music, miscellaneous papers, magazines, folded laundry, dishes, and any number of stray kitchen items.
Teeny thumbed through the pages of the Chopin book, then turned to her uncle and asked, ‘What are you doing with that on the piano? I thought you couldn’t read music? You can read that?’ The challenge was on. In response, Monk sat down at the piano, turned to a very difficult piece, and started playing it at breakneck speed.
‘His hands were a blur,’ she recalled decades later.—Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009)
To almost everyone’s surprise but his own, he [Morton Feldman] turned out to be one of the major composers of the twentieth century, a sovereign artist who opened up vast, quiet, agonizingly beautiful worlds of sound . . . . In the noisiest century in history, Feldman chose to be glacially slow and snowily soft.—Alex Ross
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Earlier in my life there seemed to be unlimited possibilities, but my mind was closed. Now, years later and with an open mind, possibilities no longer interest me. I seem content to be continually rearranging the same furniture in the same room.—Morton Feldman
For much of his life he wrestled with inner demons. Hospitalized repeatedly, he was treated with ECT (electroshock). But when he was seated at the piano, his fingers moved across the keyboard with the grace and elegance of a ballet dancer.
He was so expressive, such emotion flowed out of him! There are different kinds of emotion: there is the easy, superficial kind, and there is another kind, that doesn’t make you laugh or cry, that doesn’t make you feel anything but a sense of sheer perfection. It’s a feeling we sometimes get with Beethoven. . . . It’s not that it’s beautiful in the sense of pretty or brilliant, it’s something else, something much deeper. . . . If I had to choose one single musician for his artistic integrity, for the grandeur of his work, it would be Bud Powell. He was in a class by himself.—Bill Evans (in Francis Paudras, Dance of the Infidels: A Portrait of Bud Powell[1986])
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Sonny Rollins on Bud Powell
(The way Sonny, trying to describe Bud’s playing, shakes his head—first at around 1:35, then again at around 3:30—says more than any words could.)
