Listenin' to Jazz and Conversation

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Lonson, Sep 1, 2016.

  1. Sorcerer

    Sorcerer Senior Member

    Location:
    Netherlands
    Could be. Hadn't yet crossed my mind.
     
  2. eeglug

    eeglug Senior Member

    Location:
    Chicago, IL, USA
    I'm not sure if any of you are Criterion Channel subscribers...they now have the movie Imagine the Sound up for streaming. I'm pretty sure I saw this on tv in Toronto in the early 80s; my first exposure to free and free-ish jazz. My first time hearing and seeing Cecil Taylor. This was long before I was into jazz of any kind. I guess it functioned as a signpost for what lay ahead for me.

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  3. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

    This is totally weird. Last night, I was looking at my box sets at about 1AM and pulled one out to play. Today, I see that artist had just died.

    Leon Fleisher, 92, Dies; Spellbinding Pianist Using One Hand or Two
    Unable to use his right hand, he performed pieces written for left hand only, conducted and taught. Years later, he made a triumphant two-handed comeback.

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    Leon Fleisher, a leading American pianist in the 1950s and early ’60s who was forced by an injury to his right hand to channel his career into conducting, teaching and mastering the left-hand repertoire, died on Sunday in Baltimore. He was 92.

    His death, in a hospice, was confirmed by his son Julian, who said that Mr. Fleisher had been teaching and conducting master classes online as recently as last week.

    Mr. Fleisher came to believe that his career-altering malady, focal dystonia, was caused by overpracticing — “seven or eight hours a day of pumping ivory,” as he told The New York Times in 1996 — and for 30 years he tried virtually any cure that looked promising: shots of lidocaine, rehabilitation therapy, psychotherapy, shock treatments, Rolfing, EST. At times, he said, he was so despondent that he considered suicide.

    But he realized that the musicality and incisiveness that had been so widely admired in his early years could be mined in other ways. Joining the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory, in Baltimore, in 1959, he devoted himself more fully to teaching, both there and at the Tanglewood Music Center, where he was artistic director from 1986 to 1997.

    He made his way through the estimable left-hand catalog of works composed by Ravel, Prokofiev and many others for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein (the brother of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein), who had lost his right arm during World War I, and commissioned new left-hand works from American composers. He helped start the Theater Chamber Players in Washington. And he began conducting.

    Eventually, a combination of Rolfing — a deep massage technique — and Botox injections provided sufficient relief that he was able to resume his career as a two-handed pianist in 1995. He continued to play recitals and concertos and to make recordings until last year.

    Mr. Fleisher pointed out after his comeback that he was not fully cured and never would be. But he acknowledged late in life that the incapacitation of his right hand in 1964 had given him a far more varied musical life than he might have had if he had been able to pursue a conventional career as a virtuoso pianist.

    That realization is implicit in the title of his autobiography, “My Nine Lives: A Memoir of Many Careers in Music” (2010), which he wrote with the music critic Anne Midgette.

    Early in his career as a pianist Mr. Fleisher produced a warm, sharply etched and thoughtfully contoured sound that was ideally suited to 19th-century Viennese classics — Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert, most notably — but that also yielded illuminating readings of Rachmaninoff, Debussy and Liszt and of contemporary American composers like Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland.

    His recordings of the Brahms and Beethoven piano concertos with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, made from 1958 to 1963, are considered among the most vivid and moving accounts of those works.

    In the 1990s, he recorded spellbinding performances of the peaks of the left-hand repertoire, including concertos by Ravel, Prokofiev and Britten, chamber music by Korngold and Schmidt, and solo works by Saint-Saëns, Godowsky and Bach (Brahms’s left-hand arrangement of the Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 for solo violin).

    Even after he returned to recording two-hand works, on the albums “Two Hands” (2004) and “The Journey” (2006), he continued to revisit the left-hand works that had kept him going for three decades.

    His album “All the Things You Are” (2014) included not only left-hand arrangements of Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” and the Jerome Kern song that gave the collection its title, but also pieces composed for Mr. Fleisher by George Perle and Leon Kirchner, and a spacious reconsideration of the Bach-Brahms Chaconne.

    At 4, Playing the Piano by Ear
    Leon Fleisher was born in San Francisco on July 23, 1928, to Isidore and Bertha Fleisher. His parents, Jewish immigrants — his father was from Odessa, then in Russia, now in Ukraine; his mother was from Poland — each managed one of the family’s two hat shops.

    Leon was drawn to the piano from an early age. Though he showed little interest when an older brother, Raymond, was given piano lessons, Leon would go to the piano when Raymond went out to play after his lessons and repeat, by ear, everything he had heard. He was 4 years old.

    His mother soon decided that Leon, rather than Raymond, should study piano. She made her intentions for her younger son clear: He would be either the first Jewish president of the United States or a concert pianist.

    So devoted was his mother to Leon’s musical training that after two weeks of kindergarten, during which he objected strenuously to nap time, she withdrew him from public school and hired tutors so that he could devote his time to practicing the piano. She also found ways of bringing him to the attention of two San Francisco conductors, Pierre Monteux and Alfred Hertz, who in turn persuaded the pianist Artur Schnabel to take Leon on as a student in 1938, when he was 9, despite Schnabel’s policy of not teaching children.

    By then Leon had already played a few concerts, but Schnabel’s single condition for teaching him was that there be no more concerts. Schnabel relaxed the rule in 1944 and allowed his teenage pupil to play the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor with Monteux and the San Francisco Symphony and then with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, also with Monteux conducting.

    Noel Strauss, reviewing the Carnegie Hall performance for The Times, wrote that Mr. Fleisher, making his New York debut, had “established himself as one of the most remarkably gifted of the younger generation of American keyboard artists.”

    In 1945, at the Ravinia summer festival in Illinois, Mr. Fleisher played the Brahms again — it became one of his signature pieces — as well as the Liszt Concerto No. 2 in A, with Leonard Bernstein conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The next summer at Ravinia, he performed four concertos under the direction of William Steinberg and Szell, who soon engaged Mr. Fleisher to perform with the Cleveland Orchestra, which Szell took over later that year.

    By 1949, however, though he had played with many of the major American orchestras and had given recitals across the country, engagements began to dry up for Mr. Fleisher. The next year he moved to Paris and remained in Europe until 1958, relocating first to the Netherlands and then to Italy.

    As an expatriate, Mr. Fleisher became the first American to win the gold medal at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, in 1952. The victory led to a long list of engagements in Europe and revived interest in him among American orchestras, managers and concert promoters.

    When Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra were signed to a new recording contract with the Epic label in 1954, he invited Mr. Fleisher to be his main soloist for recordings of the great piano concertos.

    ‘Always More to Attain’
    It was shortly after his return to the United States, in the late 1950s, that Mr. Fleisher accepted an offer to teach at the Peabody Conservatory, though he continued to pursue a heavy performing and recording schedule.

    “I was driven, if anything, even harder by all of my successes,” he wrote in his memoir. “There was always more to attain, and more to achieve, and more musical depths to plumb, and lurking behind it all, the terrifying risk of failure.”

    Failure was not far away. During the winter of 1963, he noticed what he described as laziness in his right index finger, as well as “a creeping numbness” in his right hand. By the summer, the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand had begun to curl toward his palm.

    The timing was disastrous. He had planned to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his New York debut with a busy season that included 20 performances in New York alone and a spring 1964 tour of the Soviet Union, in which he was to be the soloist in Mozart’s Concerto No. 25 in C (K. 503) with Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra.

    Shortly before the tour, Mr. Fleisher performed the Mozart in Cleveland. Szell noted the strain Mr. Fleisher was under and told him that he did not feel he could undertake the tour. The pianist Grant Johannesen traveled with the orchestra instead.

    “The initial problem was a very stupid kind of overwork,” Mr. Fleisher said in 1996, cautioning young pianists against following his path. “I see kids still falling into this, and there are many reasons for it. The perfection that they’re bombarded with from recordings. The kind of sound a [Vladimir] Horowitz produced, which is wonderful, but people don’t realize that he had his technician work very hard on the piano, so the piano itself helped. So when kids go to an acoustically dead hall, and get a dead piano, and try to make these Horowitz kinds of sounds, they end up brutalizing themselves.”

    Mr. Fleisher resisted taking up the left-hand repertoire, partly because he felt that to do so would be an admission that he would never regain the use of his right hand. But after two years without playing concerts, he reconsidered, agreeing to play both Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand and Benjamin Britten’s left-hand work “Diversions” with Seiji Ozawa and the Toronto Symphony in 1967.

    The next year, with the pianist and composer Dina Koston, he started the Theater Chamber Players, a flexible chamber group meant to present both contemporary music and classics.

    The ensemble — initially based at the Washington Theater Club, later at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and ultimately at the Kennedy Center in Washington — provided an opportunity for Mr. Fleisher both to play and to conduct. And an invitation to be music director of the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra in Maryland, a semiprofessional community group, gave him a chance to work on the symphonic repertoire.

    Soon he was guest-conducting around the country — his debut at the head of a professional orchestra took place at Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival in 1970 — and in 1973 he became associate conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

    Mr. Fleisher held that post for only five years, but he maintained a close relationship with the orchestra thereafter. When the ensemble was preparing to inaugurate the new Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in 1982, its music director, Sergiu Comissiona, invited him to be the opening-night soloist.

    A Two-Hand Return
    Having recently had an operation to relieve carpal tunnel syndrome, Mr. Fleisher began to regain the use of his right hand, if only partly and inconsistently. But he felt he could make the jump back to two-handed playing, using the televised opening of Meyerhoff Hall as the occasion for his comeback.

    In a bold moment, he told the orchestra that he would play Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. But as the occasion drew near, he decided to play Franck’s Symphonic Variations instead, a shorter and less pianistically exposed work.

    Most listeners thought the performance went well. But Mr. Fleisher was not satisfied. In his view, the amount of effort he had expended working to control his right hand precluded the kind of interpretive depth he had hoped for, and he dropped plans for a broader return to two-handed playing.

    Shortly after the Baltimore performance, Mr. Fleisher married Katherine Jacobson, a pianist who had been a student of his at Peabody. His two previous marriages — to Dorothy Druzinsky and Rikki Rosenthal — ended in divorce.

    Ms. Jacobson survives him, as do his children from his first marriage, Deborah, Richard and Leah Fleisher; his children from his second marriage, Julian and Paula Fleisher; and two grandchildren.

    In 1991, Mr. Fleisher found a doctor who was experimenting with Botox injections for injuries like his. At first he found that the injections loosened up his still-cramped fourth and fifth fingers, to the point where he could play. But the injections wore off, and he was still looking for a permanent cure.

    Having tried Rolfing in the 1970s, he decided to try again in 1994. This time he found that a regimen of Rolfing and Botox injections was enough to keep him in playing trim.

    “Nothing felt sweeter than the feeling of those notes falling into place,” he wrote in his memoir, “the right hand singing, the left hand balancing it on the lower part of the keyboard, and the piece growing into something whole and complete, a dream become reality.”

    Mr. Fleisher cautiously reclaimed the repertoire he had been unable to play for more than 30 years, building his recital programs with both two-hand and left-hand works and playing programs of piano four-hand works with his wife.

    Mr. Fleisher was made a commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 2006 and received a Kennedy Center Honor the next year. A film about his struggle with focal dystonia, “Two Hands,” directed by Nathaniel Kahn, was nominated for an Academy Award for best short documentary in 2006.

    Toward the end of his life, Mr. Fleisher spoke about the level of despair he had felt when he was unable to use his right hand. But having regained that ability he was philosophical about the challenges life presents.

    “There are forces out there,” he told The International Herald Tribune in 2007, “and if you keep yourself open to them, if you go along with them, there are wondrous surprises.”

    [​IMG]
     
  4. Six String

    Six String Senior Member

    In my mind not all string arrangements are equal. There are some I like a lot, some I’m indifferent to and some I actively dislike. As the old saying goes, it’s a case by case basis. Nashville can take their countrypolitan sound and shove it. :)
     
  5. Six String

    Six String Senior Member

    Agree. That was a silly statement. A lot of the CTI strings sound like window dressing to me. Totally unnecessary.
     
    frightwigwam and Mark E. Moon. like this.
  6. Craig's Story

    Craig's Story Forum Resident

    Location:
    Canada
    Yes I too got the shipping soon and then the cancellation
     
    frightwigwam likes this.
  7. Six String

    Six String Senior Member

    NP Bobo Stenson - Indicum (ECM)
     
  8. Rimshottbob

    Rimshottbob Forum Resident

    Location:
    Eastbourne
    Well, I'm in the UK and mine was cancelled. No refund forthcoming yet... I guess they've got quite a few to get through?
     
    Sorcerer likes this.
  9. Fischman

    Fischman RockMonster, ClassicalMaster, and JazzMeister

    Location:
    New Mexico
    Dave Brubeck - Jazz; Red Hot and Cool
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    This is a fine album full of laid back, easy swinging cool music. Still, it doesn't grab me the way Brubeck's monster from the previous year, "Jazz Goes to College" does. The highlight of the album has to be the melodically inventive "Indiana," would would have been a strong add on any Brubeck album.



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  10. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

    Nashville shoved that sound several decades ago, and replaced it with oversized cowboy hats and exotic low cut dresses, along with rock drummers.

    I seriously love vintage country, meaning honky tonk from 1945-1955 and earlier.

    [​IMG]
     
  11. Robitjazz

    Robitjazz Forum Resident

    Location:
    Liguria, Italy
  12. Yes, I'd put drum machines right in there with CTI strings. Can't stand 'em.
     
  13. Xelfo

    Xelfo Forum Resident

    Location:
    Cesis, Latvia
    Welcome to the club. I graduated from music school and my main instrument was violin, too.
     
    alarickc likes this.
  14. Xelfo

    Xelfo Forum Resident

    Location:
    Cesis, Latvia
    Starwanderer, bluemooze and Erik B. like this.
  15. Lonson

    Lonson I'm in the kitchen with the Tombstone Blues Thread Starter

    Houston Person "The Lion and his Pride" Muse cd.
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    Followed by
    Ed Motta "Perpetual Gateways" Sony cd
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    I just love Ed Motta. He should record a lot more!
     
  16. Tim 2

    Tim 2 MORE MUSIC PLEASE

    Location:
    Alberta Canada
    Lee, at his best.
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  17. Six String

    Six String Senior Member

    NP Wes Montgomery Trio (Riverside) OJC CD
     
  18. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

    If some of you are getting tired of looking at the same old websites, and are curious about many topics, take a look at this:

    APHELIS - An iconographic and text archive related to communication, technology and art.

    APHELIS
    An iconographic and text archive related to communication, technology and art.


    Aphelis is an archive of items related to communication, technology and art. It also acts as a research blog about the loose ends of the ideals of community (see below). In doing so, it provides adequate source attribution for each and every one of its entries. Aphelis is maintained by Philippe Theophanidis.

    Over the years, the site has been referenced or linked to by a number of significant publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Variety, Publishers Weekly, The Daily Kos, Notebook, Flavorwire, Indiewire, and The Dish. Some of its content has been quoted in peer-reviewed journals and in books.

    • • •

    “Ideals of community” refer to the various beliefs either that human beings once have lived together harmoniously (nostalgia for a lost community) or that it is their upcoming destiny (hope in the coming community). Those ideals tend to see community as being positive both in the sense that it is believed to be substantial (it is thought to be something) and in the sense that it is believed to be good (it is thought to be a desirable value).

    The need to research the “loose ends” of those ideals stems from the experience of actual conditions of coexistence. The “loose ends” are the pieces of everyday life that don’t quite fit the picture: conflicts, catastrophes, dissensions. More importantly, the need for this inquiry rise from the paradoxical fact that such deadly confrontations often are carried in the name of safeguarding the communal life.

    In order to be able to think through this deadlock, ideals of community must be turned upside down. This research blog intend to document the process by which “community” or human coexistence can be thought of along different paths. In doing so, it will explicitly explore the trails opened by Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito and others. Community here won’t be approached as something substantial but on the contrary as a gap. It won’t be given a positive value but instead will be treated as an existential condition.


     
    bluemooze and JazzcornerND like this.
  19. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

    Many live drummers play with a synthetic sound too. Mixed right up front.

    Way, way back - in about 1971 - I had a long conversation with Herbie Hancock where he mocked and ridiculed rock drummers. He kept on it for a long time.
     
  20. frightwigwam

    frightwigwam Talented Amateur

    Location:
    Oregon
    There are some CTI albums where the strings are tastefully done, and even unobtrusive, and some where it's a layer of unnecessary glop. Depends. Fortunately, there are also quite a few CTI albums that don't involve Don Sebesky's string arrangements at all.
     
  21. Slippers-on

    Slippers-on Forum Resident

    Location:
    St.Louis Mo.
    He's one that's really nice...smooth and can set the mood for you listening session!
    Sassy! Its got Herbie Mann laying down some nice licks.
    The younger Jazz fans probably didn't know, like Bob James,
    Herbie Mann busted his chops with the heavy weights back
    in the day. And lots of Jazz fans had no idea that Sarah Vaughan
    was also trained on piano and was great at it! If she wasn't a first class singer
    she could have easily been a great Jazz pianist!

    Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown.
    [​IMG]

    Sarah Vaughan......vocals
    Clifford Brown.......Trumpet
    Paul Quinichette.....Sax
    Herbie Mann...........Flute
    Jimmy Jones...........Piano
    Joe Benjamine.........Bass
    Roy Haynes..............Drums

    Recorded Dec, 1954, EmArcy Records, Release, 1955
    Reissue....Jazz Tracks Records, 2008
     
  22. Slippers-on

    Slippers-on Forum Resident

    Location:
    St.Louis Mo.
    Surprised Herbie would mock them, seeing he played that portable key board synthesizer thingie.
     
    dennis the menace likes this.
  23. Tribute

    Tribute Senior Member

    In 1974, I decided to stop buying music, put my collection in storage and live the life of a monk, just devoted to studies. I even slept on the floor.

    But other people in my building were playing rock music all night long.

    I got sick of it, so I pulled my stereo from storage (200 miles away) and bought this record. I thought having one record would be a life of almost purity.

    But it hooked me and before I knew it, I started buying music like crazy all over again.

    I also found a mattress from the 1920's in the attic of the building and stopped sleeping on the floor.
     
  24. Slippers-on

    Slippers-on Forum Resident

    Location:
    St.Louis Mo.
    I think you're right....some times the strings dont bother me with CTI. But others used strings as well...like right know i'm listening to a record I pulled out of my collection, and the strings are realley sounding great!....A 1960
    release by Mercury records....Sarah Vaughan "Close To You" and she is backed by the "Fred Normans's Orchestra" so strings all through it.

    [​IMG]
     
  25. Fischman

    Fischman RockMonster, ClassicalMaster, and JazzMeister

    Location:
    New Mexico
    Marian McPartland - from At Storyville/At the Hickory House
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    Marian McPartland - Reprise
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    Marian McPartland was a name I'd heard plenty but never yet pursued. Well, that was my loss. Mary and her trio make some very fine music. I thoroughly enjoyed both of these albums, recorded almost five decades apart! (1951 and 1999)
     

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