New from musician, author, journalist Ben Sidran, Talking Jazz includes an eighty page booklet with essays from writers, critics and musicians, classic photos from Lee Tanner, and 24 compact discs featuring conversations with 60 jazz greats, recorded during a five year period for Sidran’s award winning NPR program "Sidran On Record".

Ben Sidran is also the author of several books, including the critically acclaimed 2003 memoir A Life in the Music.

To hear audio samples, for more information, or to purchase, go to:
www.cdbaby.com/cd/talkingjazz

From the Talking Jazz essay by Prof. Craig Werner
 Chair, Dept. of Afro American Studies, University of Wisconsin

In the middle of his conversation with Ben Sidran, Art Blakey launches into a meditation on the challenge of melding individual personalities into a group. "There's gotta be cohesion, gotta be love, and then the sound and the band begins to come together." A moment later he adds, "When we look at each other, they know just what to do." On paper, it's a good piece of jazz philosophy. Hearing Blakey say it-the way he stretches the word love into something rich and lingering; the no-nonsense staccato of "what to do" takes it, as they say, to a whole different level. It's a true jazz moment, one that reminds you that if you had to choose a single word to sum up what jazz is about, it would probably be voice.

That's why this collection is something special. The 24 CDs orchestrated by Sidran document the speaking voice of jazz musicians in a way that's never really been approached. Individually, the conversations provide fascinating glimpses of creative minds at work, testing phrasings, hesitating at chasms, nailing down hard-won truths. Hearing the voices brings the musicians' creative personalities into sharp focus. Consider, for instance, Max Roach offering a graduate seminar on the theory of indeterminate pitch. "The best drummers," he says with absolute clarity and precision, "know how to beat the instrument into the key the music is being played." When Sonny Rollins reflects on the tonal qualities of pedestrian walkways, his voice resonates with the untranslatable knowledge he found while playing on the Williamsburg Bridge. There's an irresistible amusement in Herbie Hancock's matter of fact voice when he describes his response to Mongo Santamaria's version of "Watermelon Man." To offer one last example, it's more or less impossible to imagine anyone arguing with Betty Carter when she challenges her peers to stop complaining and start training the younger generation.

What's best about the box set, however, is the way the individual voices come together in a kind of jazz symphony, a conversational equivalent of Three or Four Shades of Blue, or Black, Brown and Beige. Themes sound, fade away, reemerge. You hear arguments about discipline and tradition, commerce and craft. You can feel the difference between regions, generations, and musical schools. You can put together mini-courses on the theory and practice of particular instruments. Begin with Dizzy Gillespie, shift to Miles (and that amazing rasp), move on to Don Cherry and Freddie Hubbard and wind up with Wynton. Follow the piano motif from Horace Silver, McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock to Keith Jarrett, Joe Sample and Doctor John. My favorite sequence centers on the drummers, Roach, Blakey (who Sidran accurately refers to as a "one man university"), Paul Motian, and Tony Williams. It may be because they play a set of instruments rather than a single piano or horn, but the percussionists seem particularly attuned to and articulate about what it takes to turn a set of powerful individuals into a group that can go places no one could have made it to on their own.

The creative tension between the individual and the group emerges as one of the dominant themes linking these conversations. The great novelist Ralph Ellison, who was trained as a jazz trumpeter, pinpointed the central issues when he described "true jazz" as "an art of individual assertion within and against the group." Differentiating "true jazz moments" from "uninspired commercial performance," Ellison defines the jazz impulse as a "contest in which each artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition." Under Sidran's expert guidance-he plays the role of Miles Davis as group leader, not so much directing the results as setting things in motion and blocking the entrances to blind alleys—, these conversations probe the complications of jazz identity. You won't find any definitive answers, but you won't go long without encountering a luminous suggestion, such as Dizzy Gillespie's reflections on Charlie Parker. "Everybody knows that I am a contributor to this music. And even to say a major contributor to this music. But there are other things in the music that take preference even over my contribution, such as style. Charlie Parker, he's the one that created that style of playing. And playing it. That's what got it, you know?"

The sense of individual voice as part of a call and response with community and tradition extends deep into the soil of African American history. From Middle Passage to the prison system of the 21st century, black people have found themselves confronting a society that ignores, denies or attacks their very humanity. A slave was a possession, not a person, a "nigger" a nightmare of non-being. With great regularity, white supremacy generated strategies designed to reduce blacks to silence: the suppression of African languages (linguistic and musical); the legal proscriptions against teaching slaves to read; "separate but equal" Jim Crow schools; the indefensible catastrophe of today's urban schools. Abused, scorned and called out of their names, Africans in exile were never silenced. Making a way out of no way, they confronted the most fundamental of existential and political questions: how to affirm and assert their humanity-inseparable from the humanity of their ancestors and children-in a world that denies it?

The most profound answers to that question-the ones that echo through the discs in this set-have been offered not by philosophers, politicians or academics, but by creative artists, especially those grounded in jazz. Rooted in the sacred and secular traditions of African American music-gospel and the spirituals, dance music and the blues-jazz provides a way of putting together the fragmented pieces of experience into something new, something that gives us a chance of making sense of our suffering and envisioning a better world. It's a vision deeply grounded in the specifics of black life, but it's open to anyone willing to accept, as James Baldwin wrote, "the immense suggestion" that we speak for ourselves.

The musicians whose voices you hear here most definitely speak for themselves. It's possible and enlightening to listen to them for what they tell us about their lives and times. But, in the final analysis, they offer more. In tones as various as the traditions they shaped— in laughter and anger and moments of cool reflection-these conversations call on each of us to become what jazz poet Yusef Komunyakaa calls "an active listener-someone who doesn't have to be told the whole story. A transmutation of mind and sound: a third something is created. He was a deep listener. . . . Clusters of chords. A woman's walk. A man's bluesy cry in the night. Expansion rather than constriction. The listener helps to decide the music's shape-keeping it organic and alive. Always becoming."

BEN SIDRAN BIO

Ben is a jazz pianist, lyricist, journalist, radio and television producer, scholar, author and teacher.

He was raised in the industrial lakeshore city of Racine, Wisconsin. On weekends, while still in high school, he went to Madison, the home of the University of Wisconsin, to play with his own jazz trio. He soon joined the Ardells, a Southern comfort party band led by frat boy singer Steve Miller and his Texas friend, Boz Scaggs. He eventually penned the lyrics for Miller's hit song "Space Cowboy," earning a place in rock history and royalties enough to cover his graduate education.

In 1967, Sidran moved to England and to attend Sussex University. While still in graduate school, Sidran did session work at Olympic Studios, including dates with Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones and the band Spooky Tooth. Upon receiving his doctorate in American Studies in 1970, he moved to Los Angeles and entered the record business.

That same year, Holt, Rinehart & Winston published Black Talk: How the Music of Black America Created a Radical Alternative to the Values of Western Literary Tradition, a book based on Sidran's Phd disseration. The next year, Sidran's first solo album, Feel Your Groove, a jazz/rock hybrid, featuring Blue Mitchell on trumpet (the first of five such engagements), Willie Ruff on bass and Jim Keltner on drums, was released on Capitol Records.

In the years that followed, Sidran has recorded more than thirty solo recordings — including Live at Montreux (1979), featuring Mike Mainieri and the Brecker Brothers; The Cat and the Hat, (1980) featuring Joe Henderson, Tom Harrell and Steve Gadd; Bop City (1983), featuring Phil Woods, Eddie Gomez and Peter Erskine; Life's a Lesson (1992), an album of Jewish liturgical music featuring Carole King, Joshua Redmond, Bob Berg, Lee Konitz, Eddie Daniels; and The Concert for Garcia Lorca (1998) which was nominated for a Grammy.

In addition, he has gathered an impressive array of radio, television and film credits, starting back in 1976, when he produced jazz programming for the PBS series Soundstage — bringing to air the groundbreaking programs "Sing Me A Jazz Song" with Eddie Jefferson, Jon Hendricks, and Annie Ross, and "Dizzy Gillespie's Bebop Reunion" with Milt Jackson, Kenny Clarke and Sarah Vaughan—and continuing through the '80s, when he was host and artistic director for the Peabody Award-winning NPR program "Jazz Alive," contributor to NPR's "All Things Considered," and producer, for five years, of "Sidran on Record" for NPR. These 60 conversations, as well as Sidran's book Talking Jazz, draw upon this series, which ran from 1985 through 1989. In 1989, Sidran left radio but remained a point man for jazz as host of VH-1 "New Visions," a television interview / performance series that was recognized with the ACE Award for "Best Cable Music Series."

Over the years, Sidran has produced numerous artists, including Mose Allison—their Mose Chronicles was nominated for a Grammy in 2000—Van Morrison, Diana Ross. Georgie Fame, Richie Cole, Rickie Lee Jones, Tony Williams and Jon Hendricks. He is the composer and producer of the music for the acclaimed film Hoop Dream, and for PBS programs Vietnam: Long Time Coming and With All Deliberate Speed.

They say a man has done his job when he's had a son, written a book and planted a tree. Ben's son Leo is a successful musician and producer in his own right, and his autobiography, A Life In The Music was published in 2003 by Taylor Trade Press; of it, Jeff Greenfield wrote, "If Emerson was right when he said 'a man must share the actions and passions of his time, on peril of being judged not to have lived,' Ben Sidran has lived deeply — and set it down with perfect pitch." Ben continues to live in Madison, Wisconsin, producing, writing, teaching and planting trees.

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TWO REVIEWS

By BEN RATLIFF

BEN SIDRAN / "Talking Jazz: An Oral History";

Ben Sidran's interviews with jazz musicians, many of whom are now dead, broadcast on National Public Radio in the 1980s, were consistent, intelligent, not glib or jivey, and revelatory to the extent that these musicians would reveal themselves. For a time they were the closest thing in jazz to the Paris Review's interviews with writers.

But these conversations, 60 boxed in a 24-CD set, have a qualitative difference. Writers talk more uniformly, because they are all in a solitary war with consciousness and with words; when they finish a novel or poem or story, they start again, still alone. Many jazz musicians want to write a good composition, but it often happens almost by accident. They are more obsessed with social matters: musical communication within a group, audience reception, how jazz operates at home and abroad, record-business ignorance and prejudice. They can talk heartily about all of these things and sometimes not be bothered to explain how they play a note.

Mr. Sidran—who is also a musician, still composing and playing keyboards but no longer interviewing people on the radio—was a gentle questioner, but a level one. He didn't push too hard, but knew how jazz musicians could go off course or deliver a prepared spiel. He gave them small, musically literate prompts, so they knew they weren't wasting their time. He headed off generalities with quiet expertise or a casual mention that he saw them perform in 1961 and knew their previous bass player; he turned them toward particulars.

The radio programs were salted with songs, but these discs aren't, which is good: it makes the package more special, more concentrated. Instead in some interviews—the drummers Art Blakey and Tony Williams, and the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard for instance—the musicians stop to demonstrate something fascinating on their instruments: aspects of phrasing or of playing behind a soloist.

Mr. Sidran can't stop steamrollers, though, and sometimes you want a little more confrontation. The singer Betty Carter, for instance, won't talk about technique. She needs to brandish her hard agenda of self-glorification, and Mr. Sidran lets her do it. And Rudy Van Gelder, the studio engineer (one of two nonmusician interviews) seems terrified; he won't talk about how he got the sound on the old Blue Note records, which is presumably why he's there.

From time to time, especially with the most august male interviewees—Mr. Blakey, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie—you feel that you're listening to a worshiper before an oracle, and a bit of piety comes into play. But you don't cringe because Mr. Sidran is talking to them as musicians. And he wasn't only interested in front-liners; there are great rhythm-section interviews here too. (Those with drummers are particularly rich.) Expensive but addictive, "Talking Jazz" can consume hours at a stretch; a commuter in your life may be grateful for it. ($249 for a limited time, $299 thereafter, at talkingjazz.com.)

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Tuesday, April 10, 2007

By MIKE HOBART

BEN SIDRAN "Talking Jazz: An Oral History"

Music and the meaning of life

It's easy to think that when you hear a musician play he is exposing his inner self, but perhaps there are revelations to be found too in the more mundane dealings of life. An intriguing collection of recorded interviews with jazz players by the American musician and writer Ben Sidran marries both artistic and quotidian insight—so while drummer Art Blakey tells Sidran that when you perform, "you are in the nude… people can see clean through you," Sidran elsewhere notes the fascination of watching musicians "trying to get paid… how they deal with the club-owner disappearing" and of "look[ing] at them in their daily round".

Sidran's conversations with major jazz figures—he throws in the odd club-owner and recording engineer for good measure—do precisely that. In the 1980s he did a mammoth series of interviews for US public service broadcasting, of which he has now edited 60 for release on 24 CDs.

Sidran's punctilious research tempers the infectious enthusiasm of his insider status (he is also a respected pianist, arranger and producer), and these conversations explore creative processes, social backgrounds and musical biographies, revealing a singular mix of the prosaic and the profound.

After a battering in the 1970s, the 1980s were a turning point for jazz. The decade witnessed the jazz renaissance, the birth of smooth jazz and the consolidation of jazz academia. It was also the last decade when many leading figures of be-bop and even the swing era were still working flat out. Sidran talks to them all, from veterans such as Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie to young Turks such as the Marsalis brothers; from commercially minded producer/composers such as Bob James to radical academics like Archie Shepp.

Many express unease at the future of jazz, at the way that younger musicians seem almost interchangeable. Some blame the loss of a hard-knock apprenticeship in the clubs—playing 40 minutes on, 20 minutes off until three in the morning, recalls bassist Richard Davis—that with cut-throat jam sessions after hours encouraged innovation and individuality. Other musicians blame jazz schools for pouring out technically proficient musicians lacking a personal voice.

For recording engineer and one-time optometrist Rudy Van Gelder, earphones have a lot to answer for. They were part and parcel of the process of multi-track recording—"a machine of mass destruction", he chuckles—that helped separate musicians and did away with risk. But technology answers problems as well as creating them, and new direct-to-disc technology has brought risk back into the equation, with state-of-the-art sound. And anyway, as bass player Marcus Miller says, you still "have to play with some kind of feeling".

The conversations also illuminate the huge and early influence of family and friends—the record collections of musical parents, childhood music lessons, a shared album—but all of Sidran's interviewees reveal a near-obsessive focus on jazz as the centre of daily life. There's something heart-warming about super-hip Miller enthusing about an album sleeve-note, or hard-bitten club-owner Max Gordon reminiscing about hanging around record shops.

But jazz goes way beyond music, lifestyle and economics. Vocalist Ken Nordine—who does a passable impression of T.S. Eliot reading poetry—insists rather grandly that "musicians are closer to God than anybody". Though few of Sidran's interviewees go this far, most believe that jazz has much to teach the world, and manage to explain both insights and technicalities without sounding pedantic. Gravel-voiced Miles Davis muses on creativity, blackness and Ravel; Dizzy Gillespie chuckles about art and world peace; Art Blakey lays it down straight: "This is an artform and you are going to have to work for it."

Much of the work that Blakey refers to took place in the grubby world of nightclubs and cabarets, with racism to the fore and drug addiction lurking in the background. But this is dealt with in a matter-of-fact way. Drug addictions conquered are in the past, but racism, though ameliorated, is not forgotten. Saxophonist Johnny Griffin recalls problems in the army; blues singer Charles Brown gave up a career as a chemist, finding "problems he didn't like"; Blakey went along with the idea that any publicity was good publicity, even when a reviewer referred to him as "the little black pygmy sitting back there". Richard Davis, reminding us of the colour bar in symphonic music, recalls that "black musicians were out of the question, but I still went to auditions." He eventually landed a gig with Igor Stravinsky.

At the time of clubowner Max Gordon's interview with Sidran, in December 1986, he had owned New York's longest-running jazz club, the Village Vanguard, for more than 50 years. This minute venue—holding an uncomfortably packed 125—is probably the most often-used location for live jazz recording in the world. The famous "Live at the Village Vanguard" tag attaches to seminal works ranging from John Coltrane to Bill Evans.

Gordon reflects that, essentially, little has changed over the years: his advice is to "find the band and find the money to pay 'em". He booked Evans because "I could afford him". The club's name came when a bill for plumbing work was deferred on the understanding that the plumber could name the club.

Economics is, as ever, a constant spur to innovation. Charles Brown's sophisticated blues came from playing in supper clubs to an aspiring black working class audience, while the Kansas City bandleader Jay MacShann—Charlie Parker's first major employer—learnt blues style to hold down a well-paid gig.

Business sense is probably a prerequisite for survival, but in the early years at least, a supportive family certainly helps. Van Gelder took this to extremes, building his first studio in his parents' Hackensack living room—"it had a nice sound"—from where he recorded classic albums for Blue Note and Prestige.

Sidran is a sympathetic, if sometimes strict interviewer. He ruthlessly corrects Gil Evans on the personnel of the hugely influential Birth of the Cool recordings—the ensuing longueur speaks volumes. Rightly picky and properly focused (he even has himself interviewed, so we know where he's coming from), Sidran still lets the interviewees roam round their personal quirks and philosophies. The result is that listening to this collection is rather like eavesdropping on a particularly eloquent and focused chat.