Intermission Riff: Musings on Jazz and Life

Jazz has been an international music for almost as long as it’s been in existence, thanks in part to American GIs who took their 78 rpm records overseas and shared them with the locals. One particularly strong jazz scene that isn’t well enough known to American fans developed in Poland. From the 1940s to the present day, a large number of Polish musicians have embraced jazz as their art of choice. And few have shone as brightly as tenor saxophonist Jan “Ptaszyn” Wroblewski. Early in his career, the gifted Wroblewski was dubbed “Ptak” (Bird) and later “Ptaszyn” (Little Bird) as a spiritual link to Charlie Parker. However, the Polish marvel soon developed a signature style on saxophone, becoming one of the most identifiable and prolific musicians in European jazz. While he does lean in the direction of Sonny Rollins at times, tonewise and in his flow of ideas, Ptaszyn is his own bird. His journey in the public eye began with an appearance at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival as part ...

If you know bebop, you know the name Minton's. The long-gone club was ground zero for the development of bebop as a viable jazz form in the 1940s. Steve Cerra has an excellent, in-depth post about Minton's at his excellent blog, Jazz Profiles. Check it out! http://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2018/07/mintons-then-and-now.html

Author Mike Faloon and I have two odd things in common: free jazz and John Ross Bowie. First, we both love the adventurous side of improvised music, enough so that we have both written books on it and attended concerts that might make our family members run away screaming. Second, my family and I once worked ( all damn day) on an episode of Bowie's hit ABC comedy, "Speechless", while Faloon and Bowie played together in the too-fun, too-short-lived 90s pop-punk band Egghead. This post will concentrate on point #1 (although Bowie is a hell of a cool guy and one of the funniest people I've ever encountered.) The Other Night at Quinn's  (Razorcake Press, 2018) is Faloon's unusual, yet deeply engaging reflection on a most unlikely venue: a run-down little diner in Beacon, New York (pop. 14,271) that hosts some of the most forward-thinking, uncompromising musicians on earth. From the outside, Quinn's seems like the last place on earth that would host con...

In my high school jazz ensemble days, while the trumpeters obsessed over Maynard and Mangione, and the trombonists worshiped at the shiny bell of Bill Watrous, George Edison and I were playing the hell out of Gato Barbieri’s Caliente! The Herb Alpert-produced blast furnace of saxophonic passion was a perfect slice of its time (made in 1976): a “sellout” to many fans who preferred the man’s timeless Impulse! albums, but to us SoCal suburb rats in the early 80s it was manna from heaven and a blessed antidote to Styx.  That tone! That range! That breath control! I’m sure George and I drove our parents nuts as we strove for some approximation of that incomparable sound. I know I never found it. (As it turns out, part of Barbieri's secret was the shoddy quality of his pieced-together tenor: a narrow Selmer neck on a Conn horn, and a paper-thin #1 reed that most players probably couldn't coax a decent sound out of. The rest was all Gato.) Then I picked up the 1968 album...

Hello! Welcome to Intermission Riff, my blog about jazz and life. I hope you find the content here enjoyable. I am always open to suggestions and critiques, so dive in and share your thoughts. This blog exists for one main reason: Google will no longer let me access Mingus Lives , the jazz blog that I operated until 2012 when life began to intrude on my ability to write regularly. I have tried many times to reboot my old account with no success, and no assistance from the good folks at Google. So Mingus Lives will fade away and Intermission Riff will (hopefully) live on for some time. If you don't recognize the name of the blog, "Intermission Riff" is a tune written by trumpeter Ray Wetzel in 1948 for the Stan Kenton Orchestra (heard in the video below). It's one of my favorite pieces in the jazz canon, and a bittersweet reminder of what a talent Ray Wetzel was. He was killed in a car accident at the age of 27, much too young and with too little of a recorded l...