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Fandango at the Wall – An Eye-Opening Journey

 

I came across a film a few months ago called Fandango at the Wall.  It caught my eye because I saw that it featured Latin jazz artist Arturo O’Farrill, who I’ve seen in concert.

The film, which can be seen on-demand on HBO, is an exploration and a tribute to a music genre known as jarocho  -- a 300-year old style of folk music from the Veracruz region of Mexico.  It’s a beautiful form of storytelling that includes improvisation – a key aspect of my favorite music, jazz.

Director Varda Bar-Kar follows O’Farrill as he tours Veracruz with Jorge Francisco Castillo, the organizer of the annual Fandango Fronterizo Festival, which unites people on both sides of the Tijuana-San Diego border through music.  We get to know some of the jarocho masters, humble and warm musicians who blend storytelling and poetry with music that derives from indigenous, Spanish, and African traditions.

I was captivated by the music – which is simultaneously simple and complex.      

The film finishes with footage from the annual Fandango at the Wall, with musicians and audience literally on both sides of the border, separated by fencing that could not block out the music and its soul.  It was especially appropriate, I think, when it was filmed during the hate-filled anti-immigrant rhetoric of the previous U.S. administration.  But although the former president is gone from office,  much of the hate and prejudice unfortunately still exists.  This film helps form a hopeful bridge.

                  Photo at right:  Arturo O'Farrill at The Wall

I connected with the director via email several weeks ago.  I asked her why she made this film.

“When the former president started vilifying Mexicans and treating refugees like criminals, separating families and locking children in cages, I recognized his rhetoric as a false narrative fostering hatred and division--a narrative that could only lead to pain and suffering. I had to do something about it,” she wrote.  “I decided I would make a film with    musical elements.  It was right at this time that a friend of mine, a fellow filmmaker, sent out the word that she had a friend who was looking for someone to film a music festival at the United States-Mexican border.  I responded immediately and was soon on the phone with Producer Kabir Sehgal who has partnered with Producer Doug Davis.  As he described his and Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra Founder Arturo O'Farrill's vision of recording an album at Fandango Fronterizo, we started to riff about what a film about this project could be.  Our visions were fully aligned and within three weeks, I was in Tijuana meeting Jorge Francisco Castillo, founder of Fandango Fronterizo and starting to film.” 

I also asked her what thoughts she hopes to leave with viewers?   

“Appreciation for Mexico's deep and beautiful son jarocho culture and people. A desire to learn more about Mexico and go there one day.  An understanding that by getting to know people who are different from us, who come from different cultures, we can enrich our lives and transcend divisions. The insight that building walls does not serve the greater good and that by breaking down walls and building bridges we come to recognize our common humanity.  The belief that it is possible to achieve harmony between nations and a more prosperous, harmonious and peaceful world.”

I encourage you to watch this film.  I think it helps accomplish the goals Varda Bar-Kar set out to achieve.  Thanks, Varda, for taking us on this wonderful musical and cultural journey.

 

Here's a link to the trailer...30 seconds

Jimmy Heath... A Jazz Giant

The jazz world sounds a little bluer today, after learning of the passing of tenor sax player Jimmy Heath at 93.  

He was one of the Heath Brothers, who played together for many years.  Brother Percy, bassist, died several years ago.  Brother Albert “Tootie” is still playing drums.

Jimmy played with a who’s who of jazz, including Miles and Dizzy, and he also did lots of arranging.

Here's a sample of Jimmy Heath's sound.

 

 

The voice from Ipanema

 

We lost a musical giant a few days ago when singer and guitarist Joao Gilberto passed away at the age of 88.

He was considered “the father of bossa nova,” singing softly in Portuguese while playing his quiet guitar.  Gilberto helped popularize countryman Antonio Carlos Jobim’s songs in the early 1960s.

In 1963 he recorded with Stan Getz, and a song from the album became a giant hit that launched bossa nova here in the U.S.  – “The Girl from Ipanema,” with his wife Astrud Gilberto singing in English and Joao singing in Portuguese.  I used to enjoy playing it and other songs by him on my jazz show on my college radio station in the late 1960s.

Listen here to bring back good memories.   

Remembering Grady Tate

 

I just saw something online that Grady Tate, one of the top drummers in modern jazz, died last week at age 85.

In addition to being one of the most in-demand studio drummers for countless jazz albums in the 1960s and 70s and a longtime member of the Billy Taylor Trio, he was also respected as a jazz vocalist.  I was lucky to be in the studio in 1969 when he recorded his first vocal album, "Windmills of My Mind."

It's a long story, but one I love to retell...

In the late 1960s while in college, I did a weekly jazz show on the college FM radio station.  One of my favorites back then (and now) was pianist and educator Billy Taylor, whose daily program on a local radio station in New York first got me hooked on jazz.  So I knew very well who the other members of the Billy Taylor Trio were -- Grady Tate on drums and Ben Tucker on bass.

When I'd come home on schools breaks, I would make a point of getting into the city to visit the promotion guys at the various record labels to get copies of the latest releases to bring up to school and play on my show.  On one of those visits, someone told me about a new jazz label, so I went up to the label's offices to see what I might be able to get.  Skye Records was in a penthouse of an apartment building on E. 55th Street, just off of Sixth Avenue.

I rang the bell and a well-dressed black guy answered the door.  After I introduced myself, he did the same telling me his name -- Ben Tucker.  I asked him, are you a bass player? When he said yes, I said, are you the Ben Trucker who plays with Billy Taylor?  I think he was so surprised that some skinny white kid knew who he was that he invited me in and we talked for about an hour.  I told him about my radio show, and he told me about the new label, of which he was an A&R and promotion guy.  He played me bits and pieces from the label's debut albums -- stuff by vibes player Gary McFarland (one of the owners of the label), guitarist Gabor Szabo, Latin percussionist Armando Peraza.  He told me they were planning a new album with Grady Tate, which would be his first as a vocalist. 

On my next visit home, I stopped up to see Ben and he told me they were in the middle of recording the new Grady Tate album, "Windmills of my Mind."  He invited me to come to the studio and watch, which of course I did the next night.  There I was sitting in the control room next to Ben Tucker, watching Gary McFarland at the control console and looking through the glass at a who's who of the top jazz musicians of the day -- Snookie Young and Marvin Stamm on trumpet, Urbie Green and Jimmy Cleveland on trombone, Herbie Hancock on organ, Bernard "Pretty Purdie" Purdie on drums, Jerome Richardson on sax, Chuck Rainey on Fender bass, and Grady Tate at the mic... I was in heaven.

I briefly met Grady that night, and I got to spend some time with him, Ben and Billy Taylor a few months later when they sat in live on my radio show, after finishing a concert at another college ten miles down the road. What a thrill, letting the guys pick out songs from the library, play them and talk about the tunes and the musicians playing them.

I stayed in touch with Ben Tucker for a while until he left the label and moved down to Savannah, where he bought a radio station and became a local celebrity, playing at a club every week until he died in an accident a few years ago. I saw Grady Tate at a concert many years ago and I went up afterwards to say hello and remind him how we had met.  He said he remembered.  Maybe he was just being polite, but it was a great thrill for me. 

Sorry to hear that he is gone, but his music lives on.

Here's a link to "Sack Full of Dreams," one of the songs he recorded when I was in the studio in 1969...

 

 

Vinyl

Saturday marked the 10th anniversary of Record Store Day.

If you're a boomer or Gen Xer, you'll know what a record is. 

Records were the source of music for most of us, beyond the radio. They were packaged in cardboard albums with great photos and illustrations, and liner notes with info on the songs and the musicians.  Some of those albums have themselves become collectors' items, worth far more than the original $5.99 to $15.99 cost of albums back in the day.

Tape cassettes and then CDs seemed to spell the end of music on vinyl records.  Record stores that used to be filled with row after row of vinyl record albums began to replace vinyls with CDs, relegating record albums to small areas that carried only the top sellers.  That meant if you were looking for jazz, classical or anything beyond the Top 40 hits, you were probably out of luck.

And then came downloading and streaming, and record stores themselves began to disappear.

Through all the changes, however, there's always been small group of music lovers who clung to vinyl. They preferred the fuller sound that vinyl provided, as opposed to the crisp yet somewhat clipped digital sound of CDs.  Some alternative and punk bands put their recordings out on vinyl, perhaps as a way to thumb their noses at the music establishment. 

And then along came the millennials, always looking for something new but, in doing so, often "discovering" for themselves the things of their elders.  And that included music and the format for listening to it.  Vinyl record stores began cropping up in neighborhoods populated by the young generation.

Vinyl records last year hit a 25-year high mark, with more than 13 million units sold -- a 53% jump from sales of 2015.  It was the first year that vinyl record sales outpaced digital downloads, in terms of dollars spent.  And industry experts project vinyl sales to hit 40 million units this year, worth $1 billion.

Even as vinyl sales have been growing for the past ten years, it's still a drop in the bucket from the heyday when, in 1981, a billion vinyl albums were sold with dollar volume exceeding $5 billion.

Today vinyl represents about 6% of the $15 billion recorded music market.

Record Store Day celebrates and promotes the vinyl music format, just as it celebrates record stores themselves. Several hundred record stores have opened throughout the U.S. in the past five years, proving that vinyl is not dead.

For musicians, fans and retailers, that's music to the ears.

 

 

 

from Englewood Cliffs

 

Jazz aficionados know the town Englewood Cliffs.

To non jazz-lovers and most New Yorkers, it's just a town in New Jersey, on the Palisades overlooking the Hudson a bit north of the George Washington Bridge. 

To jazz folks in the know, especially those who bought jazz albums in the 1960s and 70s, many of those albums included this tag in the liner notes --  Recorded at Rudy Van Gelder Studios, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.

Rudy Van Gelder, who died this week at 91, made the sleepy suburban town as important a place in jazz history as legendary venues like The Blue Note, Birdland, The Village Vanguard and The Village Gate in New York and The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach south of L.A.  He engineered albums in his home-made studio, which doubled as his home, for top jazz labels including Blue Note, Prestige, Verve, Impulse and CTI.  His name and sound imprint is on classic jazz discs like John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," Miles' "Walkin," Horace Silver's "Song for My Father" and Herbie Hancock's "Maiden Voyage."  He engineered most of the albums on CTI including the Wes Montgomery classics of the mid - late 60s. 

He developed his interest in sound technology as a teenager, when he was active in ham radio.

Van Gelder was immortalized in a jazz tune by Duke Pearson from his 1965 album "Sweet Honey Bee."  The tune, "Ready Rudy?" was written as a tribute to legendary sound engineer.

Rudy Van Gelder is now gone, but his soul lives on in countless jazz recordings.  And Englewood Cliffs remains an important part of the jazz legacy.

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

              One of hundreds of jazz LPs recorded by Rudy Van Gelder

A 60's icon fades away

 

I remember as a teen hurrying home from school to check the mail, hoping it would contain a large parcel from the Columbia Record Club.  Inside would be ten or eleven records that had cost me only a penny (plus shipping and handling). What a deal!

And then, every so often, I'd get another package with more records I had bought at discount prices (plus shipping & handling).

It was a fun and exciting way build a music collection. The ads in magazines and Sunday newspaper supplements had dozens of album cover photos (or tape cassettes, as in the ad at the right), and all you had to do was check the ones you wanted.  A whole world of music was right there on the page.  And after you got your free records, you only had to buy a few more at full price (plus shipping & handling) in order to qualify for a free record of your choice.

Part of the fun was the anticipation.  It usually took 7 - 10 days between placing the order by mail and actually receiving the records. I suppose I paid with a check -- I can't recall.  This was before the days of Pay-Pal or online credit card payments.

Members would get a catalogue every few weeks with pictures of all the hot albums of the day.  If you didn't respond by a certain date, you'd automatically get the monthly album pick, along with a bill.  This was called a negative billing option, which ran into some controversy in the 1990s.

Those memories came back to me today as I read that Columbia House (the current name of the old Columbia Record Club) filed for bankruptcy yesterday.  It was formed by CBS Records in 1955 and in its glory days, they probably had a membership in the millions. Today, according to the story in The Wall Street Journal, they are down to about 100,000 members, and they only sell DVDs.  No LPs, cassettes or CDs -- no music downloads.

Today's teens have no idea what the Columbia Record Club was. Many probably don't know what a record was.  And imagine kids today -- or anyone for that matter -- waiting a week for music.  We're used to getting it immediately, for 99 cents or less.

It was a different world back then.

 

 

 

 

 

Bragging

 

Proud to say my filmmaker son Michael is mentioned in Rolling Stone for a video he just shot for rocker Ryan Adams.  The piece features mistress-of-the-dark Elvira, who Michael said is really sweet.

Here's a link to the article...

 

and here's the video ...   (Give it a moment.  It might take a few seconds or more to load.)

Enjoy.

 

  

"America's Conscience"

 

He was far more than a folksinger.  Pete Seeger has been called America's conscience, speaking out on issues that may not have been popular at the time but are now considered "the right thing."

In an interview several years ago with Charlie Rose, Seeger said it's often easier to say tough things in a song than in simple direct speech.  He often used music to say tough things that needed to be said.

I grew up with his music, but never thought of him as more than a folksinger until I saw a PBS American Masters show about him.  That's when I came to appreciate what he did for us -- not only penning so many memorable songs, but standing up and fighting for so many things we now hold dear.

Pete Seeger died last night at age 94.

 

 

 

 

What we too often take for granted

 

"... the home of the brave and the land of the free."

That final line from our nation's national anthem is something we live with every day, but it's too easy to take the "land of the free" concept for granted.  I was reminded of that earlier today when I saw a piece on "CBS This Morning" profiling jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, who receives the Medal of Freedom from President Obama at the White House today.

I've loved Sandoval's music for years.  I've seen him in concert and I have several of his albums.  But there's a great story behind the music.

Sandoval grew up in Cuba and began playing trumpet as a young boy.  He attended Cuba's top music conservatory, but he knew nothing about jazz.  A visiting journalist first exposed Sandoval to jazz, and the trumpeter never looked back.  But jazz, considered an American art form, was banned from the Cuban airwaves and from music clubs on the island.  Sandoval listened to Voice of America and whatever jazz records he could manage to find.  As a young man, he played jazz at clubs in Havana, but received threats from the Castro regime that if he continued playing jazz, he and his family would be at risk.

He met jazz master Dizzy Gillespie when Dizzy played in Havana in 1977.  He managed to get himself a gig as Dizzy's driver in Cuba, and Dizzy heard Sandoval play.  Neither spoke the other's language, but they connected through the music and Sandoval was invited to the stage to play with Dizzy and his band.  Eventually, Gillespie got him a spot to tour with him as part of the United Nations Orchestra.

Dizzy helped Sandoval defect to the U.S. in 1990.  Sandoval became a U.S. citizen in 1999.

In the CBS interview this morning, Sandoval talked about how much he loves this country for its freedom -- which includes the freedom to express himself through jazz.  When you've lived without freedom, one can appreciate it that much more.

There's a fantastic movie about Sandoval's life, produced by and starring fellow Cubano Andy Garcia --  "For Love or Country," released in 2000.  Sandoval plays in the soundtrack.  It's worth checking out.

And gracias, Arturo, for reminding us of the meaning of freedom.