Wess Reviews
Monday, July 6, 2009
MUSIC
Anderson will open new jazz series at Southern
Classical Jazz Concerts on The Bluff
WHAT: Southern University’s free outdoor summer jazz concert series.
WHEN: 7 p.m. Fridays, July 10, 17, 24 and 31.
WHERE: On the Mayberry Lawn near the J.S. Clark Administration Building overlooking the Mississippi River on the Southern University campus.
ADMISSION: Free.
INFORMATION: (225) 771-4545.
Click Image to Enlarge
JOHN OUBRE
Wess Anderson performs during a tribute to Alvin Batiste recently at Southern University.
•By ROBIN MILLER
•Arts writer
•Published: Jul 5, 2009
Let everyone else complain; Wess Anderson doesn’t mind the heat.
And he’s especially looking forward to the 90 degree-plus temperatures Friday, July 10, when he plays his saxophone on the bluff.
That’ll be the first concert in the Southern University’s new summer outdoor concert series, Classical Jazz Concerts on the Bluff.
And hey, mention of the temperature isn’t meant to be a deterrent. It’s just a fact. It’s summer in Louisiana, after all, so why not cool off with some cool jazz?
Besides, it’s cold in East Lansing, Mich. Way too cold.
“So, I’m loving the weather here,” Anderson said. “My wife called from Michigan the other day and said, ‘It’s a cool 77 here.’ I told her, ‘Well, you need to get to the 90 degree weather here.’”
Anderson’s serious. He loves Louisiana’s weather and loves the Baton Rouge community even more. Which are only two reasons why he kept his house in Baton Rouge when taking a job as an associate professor of jazz studies at Michigan State University.
His son Quad graduated high school in East Lansing, even played trombone in and around the city. And he’ll be bringing his trombone to Baton Rouge in the fall to play in the Southern University Jazz Institute.
“So, I’m making sure everything in the house is ready for him,” Anderson said. “This is going to be perfect for him. He won’t have to stay in the dorm, he’ll have his own bedroom and kitchen. All he’ll have to do is keep up his grades.”
And practice.
“Yeah, practice,” Anderson said. “He said he wanted to go into music, and I said, ‘Hey, that’s OK. Now all you’ll have to do is practice.’”
Quad, by the way, is Wessell Anderson IV. Anderson is the third in line.
“So, we call him Quad,” Anderson said. “That’s how we know who’s speaking to whom around our house.”
Space
Independent
By Geraldine Wyckoff
Some of the names of the cuts like “What Is This Thang?” and “I’ll Forget May” sound like titles that guitarist Phil DeGruy would come up with. Actually, they have a more serious purpose. As explained in the liner notes, saxophonist/composer Wess “Warmdaddy” Anderson uses the chord progressions of standards, in these cases, “What Is This Thing Called Love?” and “I’ll Remember April” to build and expand on. They become his and his band mates’ — pianist Larry Sieberth, bassist Roland Guerin and drummer Mark Gully — base of operations with new melodies and themes emerging. In the quartet setting, Anderson’s voice is dominant, especially on the freewheeling “Warm Up Warmdaddy.” He swings the relaxed groove of “I’ll Forget May,” which whispers of another standard, “On a Clear Day,” with Sieberth’s elegance matching Warmdaddy’s and the tune’s springtime mood. Things get hot and wild again when Gully opens the all-aboard-for-the-ride “Balto” before Guerin’s solid bass becomes the engine for this smoker. His wife, Briana, takes over piano duties on another twisted title, the light steppin’ “All the Thangz You Ain’t.”
Fans are sure to appreciate hearing a ton of Anderson’s horn since so much of his career has been spent with Wynton Marsalis’ bands and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. While these settings put the saxophonist in the public eye and were certainly educational, they did confine his opportunity to stand up and blow. On Space Anderson allowed himself plenty of breathing room to extend the boundaries.
Globe-trotting ‘Warmdaddy’ digs a hometown groove
Written by LAWRENCE COSENTINO
Wednesday, 08 November 2006
When a child gets to a certain age, he starts asking questions that are hard to answer over the phone.
That’s one reason why Wessell Anderson III, aka “Warmdaddy,” is MSU’s newest jazz professor. Anderson spent much of the ‘90s crisscrossing the country with one of the greatest jazz groups ever put together, the Wynton Marsalis Septet.
The group was a disciplined, passionate seven-person mob, a galvanizing synthesis of nearly every jazz style of the 20th century, from raucous Dixieland to intricate bebop to the cool school of Miles Davis to the near side of the avant-garde. It was also a hard-working band of red-eyed travelers.
“When I was with Wynton, we worked almost all the continents,” Anderson says. “The only place we didn’t work was Antarctica, Africa and Greenland.”
Anderson missed his wife and son back home in Baton Rouge, but these were heady times for a young man who grew up in the Bronx and studied music in Louisiana. Touring the globe with Marsalis, Anderson found a new love in every port — Claude Monet, for example.
“We went to the Louvre in Paris, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, looking at architecture in Madrid,” he says. “I’m with one of the world’s greatest musicians, and he’s taking me to a great museum to see other great artists. It’s too much!”
By the time the Marsalis septet began to slow down, Anderson’s eloquent, sweet-tart alto sax became a mainstay of the world’s flagship big band, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, and that meant even more touring.
But Anderson knew he was missing something important. His son, Wessell Anderson IV, was entering his teens. Every time they talked on the phone, the boy’s poignant questions tore at his father’s heart.
One would assume Wes IV was dealing with the usual challenges of growing up: meeting girls, coping with school and getting along with friends.
Maybe he was, but that’s not what he and his father talked about.
“He’d keep asking me simple things,” Anderson recalls. “Like, ‘What’s the melody of “Giant Steps?”’ or ‘How do you play the bridge of “Cherokee?”’ They were things I could tell him over the phone, but it would be better if I could be home and show him.”
There was jazz to be made at home, too.
‘I advise you to jump on’
In the jam session of human genetics, every Wes Anderson that comes along (and there are three of them loose right now) is nature’s way of taking another chorus.
MSU’s Anderson soaked up the music from his own father, a Bronx drummer who played and hung out with all the greats. Now he’s filling the same role for his own son, a budding trombonist.
As the Andersons settle in at MSU, it’s not just 16-year-old Wes IV who will reap the benefit. One of the world’s foremost alto sax players, Wes III is also a juggernaut as an enthusiast and educator, and he’ll press the full weight of his jazz love on a new cohort of students at one of the nation’s hottest jazz programs.
“People ask me what I do in my free time,” Anderson says. “Listening to jazz music!” (He says “jazz music,” never just “jazz.”) Anderson’s iPod is full of that “jazz music” —12 versions of “Caravan,” for instance — and he urges his students to immerse themselves in the music the same way. There’s a lot to cope with in jazz, from technical problems to personal challenges, and in the heat of improvisation none of these issues can be put off for a second. “You have to be independent and spontaneous,” Anderson says.
“You may be so spontaneous you’ll forget what you’re doing,” he adds with a grin, talking to a hypothetical student, “but you’ll look around and figure out that it’s still going on, whether you’re participating or not. So I advise you to jump on.”
Anderson jumped on the jazz train early, mainly because the tracks ran right through his living room. When his father wasn’t listening to jazz, he was playing it, and young Wes got an earful while wrangling his father’s drum kit at New York gigs. “He would take me to the Village Vanguard, the Village Gate, the Blue Cornet,” Anderson recalls. “He was tight with Philly Joe Jones,” he says, naming the great drummer who played in the Miles Davis-John Coltrane quintet.
Anderson’s father, Wessell II, is still in prime playing condition. “He’s really getting into karate now,” Anderson says admiringly. “He’s 70 and he keeps himself in tip-top shape. He’s starting to sing now too. A musician doesn’t stop.”
On visits to the Bronx, all three Wessell Andersons jam together. “He’s happy he’s finally got a family band. If I tell him I’m busy, he says, ‘I don’t need you, just me and my grandson.’”
Scrapple from the apple
Like his son, Wessell III was all but dandled by dozens of icons of jazz. The cats he hung out with as a boy may not ring a bell to Joe Six-Pack, but they jingle like gold among jazzmen: Junior Cook, Bill Hardman, Frank Foster, Cecil Payne — all mainstays of the competitive yet fiercely supportive New York jazz scene.
“To me they were just uncles, extended family,” Anderson says. “I didn’t realize at the time they were great musicians. They were just people I always knew. They came by the house, they rehearsed in the basement.”
Anderson didn’t realize the soundtrack of his life was not like most people’s.
“I thought everybody’s house played jazz music!” he says.
“My aunt and my dad used to dance to ‘Scrapple From the Apple.’” (For those unfamiliar with jazz, it’s a tune most people would require three hips to dance to.) When Anderson came home from school, his dad would have record covers spread over the couch, reading the notes on the back.
“They’d talk about going to Birdland, and I wondered what a Birdland would be like,” Anderson recalls. “I didn’t realize how much information I was getting until I left to go to college.”
Lots of ink has been spilled over the definition of jazz, but Anderson got his just by walking up the stairs to his bedroom and looking down at the turntable below.
“I knew it was jazz because I’d see that blue and white label spinning around,” he says, referring to the classic Blue Note label. This year, Anderson is taking a spin of his own on that same label, exchanging sublime licks with Wynton Marsalis on the critically acclaimed “Live in the House of Tribes” album.
Despite his upbringing, Anderson didn’t seriously consider making a living in jazz until 1981, when Cliff Lee, a friend of his father (and film director Spike Lee’s uncle), took him to an outdoor concert featuring Art Blakey, one of the greatest drummers and bandleaders the music has ever known.
The aging Blakey was also a legendary talent spotter, and that afternoon Anderson heard the drummer’s last great band, featuring a young trumpet-and-saxophone tandem of brothers: Wynton and Branford Marsalis.
“It was a shock to see someone close to my age playing with a professional like Art Blakey,” Anderson says. “I thought I’d have to be 34 before I could be considered a professional.”
On the advice of Branford Marsalis, Anderson dropped plans to go to Boston’s Berklee College of Music and instead went to study with clarinetist Alvin Baptiste in Baton Rouge. Like another Louisiana jazz pedagogue, Marsalis patriarch Ellis Marsalis, Baptiste exerted a huge influence on the new generation of broad-based, swing-oriented jazzmen. “The greatest thing about studying with him was figuring out that all of jazz music is modern,” Anderson says. “In the northeast, people tend to sway you in the direction of what they think is hip — one particular period, like bebop.”
Baptiste exposed Anderson to traditional New Orleans music and to the large ensemble music of Count Basie and Duke Ellington.
Perhaps more importantly, Anderson got to jam with visiting jazz artists like Jimmy Heath, Max Roach, Nat Adderley, Dizzy Gillespie and Frank Foster.
The visiting legends were struck by Anderson’s talent, technique and soul. “Jimmy Heath wanted to take me then and there, to join his band,” Anderson says.
Dealin’ at Art Van
Inevitably, Anderson was sucked into the orbit of Wynton Marsalis, standard-bearer of the ‘80s jazz revival. The crack septet Marsalis put together, with a frontline of Anderson and former MSU Professor of Jazz Wycliffe Gordon, was the premier small group of the decade. With Marsalis or without, Anderson’s nimble, soulful style proved equally at home in a buttery ballad or the wild fractals of bebop.
Anderson’s generous, open personality earned him the nickname “Warmdaddy,” bestowed by a bandmate when Anderson climbed into the audience after a concert to help a young boy find his way backstage to meet Marsalis.
Although the Lincoln Center cohort is sometimes knocked for conservatism, musicians like Anderson make a powerful case for appreciating and nurturing the myriad styles and approaches that kept jazz evolving almost too fast to follow through the mid-’60s.
True, they’ve left the way-out experimentation largely to others, but in the ‘90s, the Marsalis septet and the larger Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra put the nation through a badly needed, whirlwind rewind of its own cultural riches. They’ve also embraced their role as teachers, helping supply living breath to a spontaneous art that could have ended up entombed on vinyl and silver oxide.
For musicians of Anderson’s generation, the main arena for these tasks has shifted from the open road to the ivy halls.
After a year of guest-artist status at MSU, Anderson succumbed to the blandishments of Jazz Studies chief and Rodney Whitaker, along with music department chairman James Forger, and joined the faculty full time this fall.
Like Whitaker, Anderson quit the Lincoln Center gig to concentrate on his new duties.
“Wynton said he understood,” Anderson says. “His son is getting into college. All of us had children around the same time, so we understand each other.”
After the jazz-soaked youth with his father in Brooklyn, the busy Baton Rouge years and touring on Olympus with Marsalis, Anderson knows East Lansing will be a big change. For one thing, he’s having a lot of food sent up from Louisiana.
Nevertheless, he says he’s ready for a period of study and stability. “You come in contact with things you really need to in a university,” he says. “The environment alone makes you want to focus.”
Besides, there are advantages to living in a town that has yet to develop a keen jazz consciousness. Last month, Anderson spotted a poster of Billie Holiday while shopping for furniture for his East Lansing condo.
He was more than willing to pay the $169 price, but correctly guessed the stunning black-and-white print wouldn’t be as appreciated at a Lansing Art Van outlet as it would in a New Orleans or New York gallery.
“Nobody knows what this is,” he recalls himself thinking. “It’s a gem. I’ll wait.”
Three weeks later, he snagged it for $59, and it now hangs above his office desk. Warmdaddy is in town, and from now on it’s going to be a lot harder to sell jazz short around here.
Warming to Warmdaddy on CD
Wessell “Warmdaddy” Anderson is well represented on CD shelves under his own name and as a sideman. Here are a few highlights:
• Anderson’s “Live at the Village Vanguard,” (1998, on Leaning House Records) finds the alto saxman getting away from band mate Wynton Marsalis and stretching out on an indie label, playing original tunes and standards with an first-rate quintet.
• The monster Anderson recording, and a landmark document of turn-of-the-millennium jazz, is another set recorded in the same venue. “Wynton Marsalis Septet Live at the Village Vanguard” (1999, Columbia) captures the energy, swing and surprising originality of the era’s premier small combo. Anderson gets plenty of blowing space in a variety of contexts, from deep blues to cool balladry to bop acrobatics. (Dig his impossible ride on the ultra-high sopranino sax when the group tackles Thelonious Monk’s fiendishly difficult “Four in One.”) This 7-CD set was released at a super-budget price, which is a blessing, because it’s indispensable.
• The Marsalis septet is no longer a regular working group, but the core members got back together for last year’s stunning “Live at the House of Tribes” on Blue Note, a classic late-night cooker with no frills or pretensions.
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•Finally, there’s Anderson’s new self-released recording, “Space,” a very appealing showcase for his tone and melodic agility. Anderson loves to spin new tunes from old standards, a la alto sax legend Charlie Parker, and the titles offer fun clues to the melodic genealogy: “What is dat thang” reworks “What is This Thing Called Love,” “I’ll Forget May” tweaks “I’ll Remember April,” and so on.
The Jazz of Wess Anderson
By Joan Baum, Ph.D
Nicknames are telling. In the case of the well known saxophonist Wess[el] Anderson, “Warmdaddy” was bestowed after a drummer in the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra commented on Wess’s willingness to extend his hand to give autographs, especially to young people. With a laughing modesty, Mr. Alto Sax notes that people like to have autographs and he’s only too happy to comply because he’s appreciative of their interest. It’s still an uphill battle to interest youngsters and young adults in this unique American music, but it’s a mission he and his friend and colleague Wynton Marsalis, whom he met when they were playing with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, pursue with joyous devotion. When PBS came out with the History of Jazz last year, Wess saw the series as a “national anthem.” It saddens though it does not surprise him that young people today shy away from what they’ve never been exposed to—“jazz is hard music”—just the opposite of his own life.
Repeatedly, he speaks glowingly of his father, his great mentor, who was always home by 3:00 p.m. from his late-shift job as a subway conductor on the Carnarsie Line. The family lived then in Crown Heights. And though his mother was always there to ensure that he did his homework, his father by mid-afternoon would be setting up jam sessions. His school friends, Wess recalls, would not know what he was talking about when he’d tell them that when he’d come home, he would see a Blue Note label spinning on the turntable. For Wess the record was as much a part of the household as his father’s drums and the personnel who showed up to rehearse—they were “like family.” He was a kid but he was already soaking up the environment. Most youngsters today don’t have that advantage, that prompt, that appreciation—which may be the main reason Wess Anderson cares so much about education.
Under Wynton Marsalis’s direction (Wess is the lead alto sax), musicians from the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra go out to public schools (K-12) all over the country. Jazz is a night move, so it’s important to talk to youngsters and perform for them on their time, during the day. When he was an adolescent he used to think that all jazz musicians were at least 30 – 40 years old. His own experience, because of his father’s example and encouragement, was unusual. But there is no reason why youngsters should not be exposed to a jazz early on, including its history, and there is every reason to hope that they will know it’s important to study, to be educated about the history of jazz, which is in many ways, the history of The United States. Sure, jazz involves improvisation, but improvisation turns on long experience and informed knowledge. He thinks that the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra’s focus on education is incredibly important. “To teach well,” he says, is to “relate to young people” who have no awareness, most of them, of performing or practice. To that end, he begins most education sessions playing “Happy Birthday”—a tune everyone knows. He does it straight and then . . . just . . .bops! He tells them, think basketball: you want to get the ball in the net, but you want to do it with style. In other words, improvisation is not random. And teaching well is never condescension.
Like most serious musicians, Wess Anderson plays many instruments. He started out on piano, studied clarinet under Alvin Batiste at Southern University in Baton Rouge, LA , then moved big time to the sax—“they say, you don’t pick the instrument, it picks you,” but who knows, he says with a chuckle, children never select what their parents play. His 14 year-old son loves the trombone. But why the Alto Sax? Well, he loves the tenor sax but the alto, it’s got a special “singing quality,” a beautiful soprano, a sound that just blew him away. It’s not just love, it’s study. Though he has a new CD coming out later this year, fans and those who should be, can hear Wess Anderson at The Village Vanguard on Tuesday, March 1st. And his father will be there
Big Daddy
Saxophonist Wess Anderson on playing with legends and hangin' with Darla Montgomery
By Scott Jordan | 3/21/2007
Wess Anderson’s saxophone playing is a reflection of his personality — expressive, engaging, aggressive and pointed at the right moments. The man who earned the nickname “Warmdaddy” for his generous spirit also brings Louisiana’s diverse cultural influences into his playing; Anderson went to college in Baton Rouge, worked the New Orleans nightclub circuit, went on to play alongside Wynton Marsalis for 18 years, and has spent extensive time in Acadiana. From his 1994 major-label debut Warmdaddy in the Garden of Swing to his new CD Space, Anderson’s always tackled bop, ballads, blues and burners with equal dexterity.
Anderson recently stepped down from his longtime gig with Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra so he could spend more time at home with his teenage son, but that hasn’t slowed down his creative output. He’s currently an associate professor of jazz studies at Michigan State University School of Music and is selectively touring with his own ensemble. Next week, Anderson makes a special appearance for two Lafayette shows alongside acclaimed New Orleans vocalist Stephanie Jordan. It’s a homecoming of sorts for Anderson, who knows the local terrain well, from Johnston Street to Opelousas.
The Independent Weekly caught up with Anderson by phone, just before he was headed to the airport for a weekend’s worth of gigs in Italy.
You’re a Brooklyn native — how’d you wind up in Baton Rouge?
When I was in high school, this was 1981, I met Branford Marsalis, who was playing with [drummer] Art Blakey at the time. I asked him what would be a good place to go to school, even though I already had a scholarship to go to Berklee School of Music [in Boston}.
Berklee seems like it would have been the obvious choice for you.
Yeah, they had such a big jazz department and such a pull on young musicians. That was the only place that everybody knew of, but there were many all over. Branford said he’d just finished at Berklee, and he thought it’d be better to go study with Alvin Batiste. The classes would be smaller, and it’d be a much more eye-opening experience and closer to the music. He felt like he got rushed through the system at Berklee. They have kind of a joke there now: if you graduate, that means you can’t play, because most stay for a semester or two, then they join somebody’s band and become a celebrity.
Looking back, as far as your development as a player, what difference do you think it made, if any, that you left the North and came South?
That was the greatest thing I could have done, leaving New York City. Some other musicians thought, “Oh, it’s slow down there; they don’t know what’s going on.” But I realized I could get away from the city and get down to some serious studying, because in any school environment, you don’t want to get distracted. Being in New York, there’s the distractions of performances and going to see people and hanging out, and you can’t get any work done, because it becomes a social activity.
I could really get into the theory and history of music at Southern [University]. And it was good that I was 60 miles away from New Orleans in Baton Rouge, which was great, so I could go and test things out over the weekend, and it was good to get back into academia during the week.
Baton Rouge isn’t exactly known as a jazz hotbed, but Southern University’s always had a great jazz program and faculty.
When I first got there, it was August, and I don’t think Mr. Batiste had made it back for the summer yet. I came for orientation about a week or two earlier. I was away from home for the first time, and everybody knew I was coming down there, sayin’, “We got this musician coming down from New York,” so everybody assumed I knew everything (laughs). I was in the same boat they were. When Mr. Batiste came back, I asked him if he got my audition tape. I did a Thelonious Monk tune called “Played Twice;” I made sure I had a really difficult obscure tune. He heard it and said, “Man, you can play. You ain’t gotta try and prove nothin’. I’m gonna teach you stuff you don’t know.” I realized I was with a very real person then, and somebody who was real about the music. He wasn’t just going to be giving me a class and a grade. He was somebody experienced in playing music for years and knew the history about it and how it fit.
What would you say are the biggest things you learned professionally and personally from Alvin that have stayed with you?
Even now, when I’m teaching, one thing I learned from him, is to always be as true to the music as possible. When you’re playing jazz music, you have to learn the whole history of it. So first I had to go back and figure out what made the early New Orleans jazz music sound good. The first thing he thrust me into, he said, “Instead of me trying to teach it to you, I want you to go down to New Orleans.” And I went and marched in a parade in Mardi Gras for six hours. Right then I figured it out: this music is social. It was about musicians interacting with people. A lot of musicians don’t understand that; we sit in a practice room for hours and hours and isolate ourselves. But then we can’t come out of that isolation room and perform on a bandstand.
So now when I’m teaching the students, I’m up the whole time. I have the music on and tell them that they have to play music and listen to music; you can’t just write it down. That’s just a guide. But jazz music is improvisational, so it has to be spontaneous. So I give them spontaneous situations. In my improvisation class, I’ll give them four tunes a week they’ve never heard, from four different periods. And they may have to learn about it. And I tell them, if you don’t know it, you have to get other recordings of someone else playing it, so you can understand how to approach it.
It’s the academic version of the Down Beat blindfold test.
Exactly. There are a lot of students now who are very talented, probably more talented than when I came up. But my father was a musician, so I had been around and playing it before actually studying it. So that’s the advantage I had. I tell them, they have to go out and perform it more. This is music where you need to test it out on people. If you’re a great saxophonist but you’ve never played in a club on Johnston Street in Lafayette and you try to get people to like the music, you’ve got to figure out how to pace yourself for four hours. It’s the difference between getting paid and not getting paid and building an audience.
Musicians, we’re kind of like scientists in a laboratory. You keep mixing those tubes and hope it doesn’t explode in your face, and you will come up with a cure for something — you come up with a cure for the blues, you know?
How’d you wind up teaching in Michigan?
I worked 18 years with Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, and my bassist friend Rodney Whitaker, we worked together for 20 years. I met him when I was playing with Betty Carter before I joined Wynton’s band. Rodney had been trying to get me over here, and my son’s now a teenager, so I’d been leaning toward being able to come home more. My wife had been hinting, “He’s getting older and needs you to be home,” because I’d been on the road 18 years, and all his life. So it was a perfect time for me to help at home more and help get him ready for college, because he’s a junior in high school now.
Is your wife from Michigan?
No, she’s from Baton Rouge. I met her when I was at Southern doing a gig at this club, Rick’s. We used to play in there, and we were playing and she came in with her friends, and we were playin’ and they were talkin’. So I was this adamant musician: “Why are you talking? We’re playing for you.” She said, “Well, we like that, but we like to talk.” I said, “You have to focus in on it.” She said, “We’re the only six in here, you should be glad we’re listening. And if you want to get somebody’s phone number, you best know how to socialize.”
So that same thing came up where you can’t be so withdrawn in doing what you’re doing that you can’t interact with the audience. You have to let them know what you’re playing. I learned a lot. My wife’s taught me a lot. As someone who likes music but doesn’t play and has been to a lot of performances, she’s very critical. She’ll say, “That’ll sound better if you play it faster, or if you tell people more about the song.” Don’t assume the audience will be able to understand what you’re doing. My wife’s a teacher, and she’s helping me be a better teacher, too. Same thing with life. I still have to relate as if it’s a live performance.
What was it like working with Betty Carter? Her 1961 duets album with Ray Charles is still one of my all-time favorites.
My first gig with her, I had just finished at Southern in 1988.
Lemme go back here. In 1985, Wynton came down for Jazz Fest, and I was a sophomore or junior. He said, “I want you to join the band.” I played with him for a week on the road in Cleveland, Ohio, and he said, “You’re not ready yet. You need to go back and finish school.” We always talk about that now as we get older: musicians who come out and we send them back home. They’re cocky and they think they’re ready, but they’re not. And I was one of those who got sent home along with other dudes. It’s very humbling, because for a great musician to say to you, “Look, I like what you’re doing and I hear your development, but you need some more work and then you can come back,” that tears you up and builds you up at the same time. It makes you put things in perspective. When Wynton sent me home, I accepted it and said, “Next time he hears me, I am not going to be sent home.”
So next time I saw him, he said he wanted me to join the band, but they had already bought tickets for a tour in Australia. So it was too late for that, and my friend Troy Davis from Baton Rouge, a great drummer, was working with Betty Carter. He was working with Terence Blanchard, too. He said Betty’s looking for somebody who can play saxophone, and she’s doing some of the music that she did with Ray Charles, and some of the stuff she did on the record with Phil Woods. So it was the perfect gig for me. I worked with her for a short moment, and just by chance, the gig we had was at the Bottom Line, and opening the bill was Terence Blanchard and Donald Harrison, and Rodney Whitaker was working in that band. That’s how we met.
I played with Betty for a month or two, but I just learned so much about how to run a band. During that time, they had schools of learning. So if you played a horn, everybody wanted to be in Art Blakey’s band — that was one school of learning. When you left him, you were ready to work with anyone else. In Betty Carter’s band, it was more for the rhythm section people: bass, drums, piano. I was lucky enough that she started using one or two horns every now and then, so I was one of the first horn players she used.
Just that experience of working with her for two months — she was a professional and she didn’t take no crap. So the musicians in that band, you had to be spontaneous. She didn’t speak much, and when she did, it was very much to the point, and you knew exactly what she wanted. She let you know that she was in charge and she’d been doing this for 20, 30 years. So if you do what she says, you’d be fine.
How would you contrast her leadership style with Art Blakey’s?
Since she was a woman and she always had men in the band, she was probably riding people’s tail more. She didn’t mind cussing you, you know.
I’ll give you an example. First rehearsal, I got to her house early, because my father said, “Don’t get to rehearsal late. Get there early so you can get relaxed and prepared and look over the music.” So I got there early and put some headphones on and was listening to what we were about to rehearse.
She lifted up one headphone and whispered in my ear, “What the f--k are you doin’?” and let the headphone pop back on my ear.
I was so shocked. This woman I respected was cussing at me, but at the same time I couldn’t figure out why. I said, “What did I do wrong? I’m just trying to make sure I have the music right.” She said, “We’re a band. We rehearse together. If you want to practice, practice at home.”
It made me realize right then, OK, it’s about being a unit. If you’re a unit from the beginning to the end of the performance, it’s going to sound like a unit. That helped carry me in my playing and teaching. There are a lot of great musicians, but I tell them also, they have to make sure that they get together away from school, because the music develops every time you play it.
Did you ever get a chance to play with Blakey?
I went and tried out. I was in college, and everybody wanted to be in that band, so they had unofficial auditions in New York. Each set of musicians would leave, and they’d kind of tell you where the last gig on the tour was, like Sweet Basil’s in Manhattan. All of us would go sit in, guys like Kenny Garrett, Vincent Herring, all the alto players. So I sat in once or twice when Donald Harrison and Terence Blanchard were in the band. I got up there with Blakey, and I was scared to death because he was playing so strong and playing so hard it was almost like a lion on your neck. I realized, “I’m not ready for this.”
But by the time the next year, I sat in with Wynton for a week, and started getting used to being around another level of professional musicians.
For your shows here in town, you’re playing with vocalist Stephanie Jordan. How did you two become collaborators?
My quartet is drummer Jaz Sawyer; bassist Kengo Nakamura, who worked for many years with Cyrus Chestnut and also worked with Wynton; and we have our hometown favorite on piano, Mike Esnault. He’s also Stephanie’s musical director. Mike and I have worked together for years.
Stephanie and I have known each other for years. We’ve played and sat in with each other at Gino’s in Baton Rouge and Snug Harbor in New Orleans, and I know the family very well. They’re related to Alvin, too. Some friends of ours at Lincoln Center had a regular series called “Singers over Manhattan,” and they paired us together.
Do you enjoy working in that smaller quartet format after spending so much time with the huge Lincoln Center band?
It’s actually a little harder, because now I have to make more decisions. Before I’d just play, take a solo, sit down, bow. You always want to be the bandleader, but once you become the bandleader, it’s like, Oh God, now you have all this pressure: what song should be next, what do I say, will people like this, don’t mispronounce somebody’s name … It seems simple, but when you’re in front of people, it can be hard trying to be funny and communicate all the time.
Stephanie’s version of “Here’s to Life” at the Higher Ground Hurricane Katrina benefit concert at Lincoln Center was pretty amazing. What was your Katrina experience like?
I’ll put it in a nutshell: I had 30 people in my three-bedroom house, and one of my toilets broke. I told everybody, please make sure you clean up after yourselves, be courteous and be neighborly. Now everybody doesn’t have much, so now you realize what it is to be an American — and a human being. You look out for somebody. You say you’re Christian or whatever your nationality is or religious background is, it’s time to put up or shut up. These are people who’ve been your neighbors for years, you may have talked to them or maybe not, but now they don’t have anything. Will you share?
That’s what happens when I get on the bandstand. I have to play and I have to share myself with the other musicians whether I’ve known them for years or it’s the first time I’m playing with them. That’s the type of humility you have to have as a musician and a human being when a catastrophe like this happens. I was in New York playing at Lincoln Center, so I was away from my family. So my wife was by herself with our son and all my in-laws from New Orleans. By the time I got back to Baton Rouge, I had to adjust to 30 people in my house. So I had to let go and be humble and realize, these people have nothing. It’s a very humbling experience.
And I come from a small family, so I’m not used to being around a lot of people for long periods of time. I travel with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, but we’re staying at five-star hotels. Somebody gets on your nerves, you can retreat to your hotel room. But there was no place to retreat to in my house, except maybe the backyard and the barbecue grill. There was a line to get to the refrigerator to get a beer.
And there’s the unspoken rule: you don’t drink the last beer.
And if you do, you better go get some more or there’s gonna be some s--t (laughs).
Have you adjusted to going back and forth to Michigan?
I’m still getting used to this cold. It was 68 yesterday, and it’s 25 today. I can’t wait to get back [to Louisiana].
A good friend of mine is a TV newscaster there in Lafayette — Darla Montgomery. I told Darla I need to get some publicity, or there’s gonna be three people out there on Jefferson Street (laughs).
Darla’s brother is a great trumpet player, and I met him at the jazz department [at Southern]. So on weekends, her brother would take me back there. They’re from Opelousas. I was like, “Where? Ope-who? What’s that?” And he’d say, “Come on with me and you’ll see what the country’s like.” He took me there and then took me to the zydeco festival, and boy, I fell in love with that.
I became part of [Darla’s] family. They made figs in a jar and canned figs. They had a fig tree. Coming from Brooklyn, I’d never seen no tree that had any type of fruit on it. One thing about people from New York, they think everything revolves around New York. When they leave, then you realize how much you learn being outside of a major city.
Wess Anderson Quartet with Stephanie Jordan
7:30 and 9:30 p.m. Friday, March 30, Keith’s Ballroom, 417 Jefferson St. Tickets $15-$27 plus a $10 minimum food and drink charge. For more info, call 237-2787 or visit www.pasa-online.org.
Wessell Anderson
Published: March 8, 2004
By Bob Margolis
The Village Vanguard April 15-20, 1997 New York City
”Wess Anderson's playing contains the essence of soul, that's why we call him “WarmDaddy.” This comment, spoken by Anderson's part-time employer and musical foil Wynton Marsalis, was backed up by WarmDaddy's performances in and around NYC this past month.
Fronting a group featuring the fabulous Stephan Harris on vibes, altoist Anderson played out of a mostly original book, largely drawn from his superb new disc, The Ways of Warmdaddy, with a nice sprinkling of standards thrown in. Whether playing a WarmDaddy-penned number or a work by Monk, Anderson was able to maintain his highly unique, bluesey, soul influenced style of playing and writing. A number of the tunes featured the young Harris displayed not only impressive techical ability but more importantly a tasteful, restrained approach that belies his youth. The use of vibes in this group was a very smart choice made by the leader.
As a result of growing up in Brooklyn and being involved in the legendary “Jazzmobile” workshops up in Harlem in addition to a brief stint with one of the ultimate jazz teachers, Betty Carter, the alto player is particularly proud of his burgeoning role as an academy for younger players. “I work them hard... their eyes are poppin' out by the end of a practice session, but by the end of the week, the tunes really come together,” says Anderson. Giving these young players a bandstand to play from is what Anderson himself was given by legends such as Sonny Stitt, Alvin Batiste, and of course, Wynton Marsalis. Says Anderson, “No matter how together you are in terms of reading and knowing what to play, you gotta get out there and do it.”
Speaking of just getting out there and playing, this lesson is in effect for even the most celebrated of musicians. Roughly halfway through Anderson's late set on a Wednesday night at Birdland, Wynton Marsalis strolls in and begins to play with the group - from his table! - this led to a fine bit of playing featuring Wynton, Warmdaddy and the fine baritone player, Gideon Feldstein, another Wynton Alumni. A fine capper to a great, relaxed set of WarmDaddy and crew
Wessell "Warmdaddy" Anderson Live at the Village Vanguard
Wessell Anderson | Leaning House
Big Alto Saxophonists. A copy of Sherman Irby's new disc, Big Mama's Biscuits (also reviewed this month) recently crossed my desk and got me to thinking about alto saxophone players who were also physically large men, such as the corpulent Irby. While this specialized population would include Bird when he was healthy, I was thinking more along the lines of Julian “Cannonball” Adderley and those that followed him. I went on to listen to a lot of Cannon's music, from the Miles Davis Sextet of Milestones and Kind of Blue to his Be Bop quintet and Soul Jazz groups (who cannot like “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” even if it is simple and might not be jazz at all to some listeners?). While listening to Adderley, I was trying to remember the name of another young alto giant (giant alto?) who was currently part of the young lions movement.
That giant revealed himself while listening to Wynton Marsalis? The Majesty of the Blues. Yes, the altoist I was thinking about was Wessell ?Warmdaddy? Anderson. I knew that he had released some solo work in the past several years. I went looking for some stumbled across the newly released Wessel ?Warmdaddy? Anderson Live at the Village Vanguard. I asked myself, ?How can a jazz listener possibly go wrong buying a Village Vanguard live album by an alto player with the great moniker, ?Warmdaddy??? This recording represents Anderson?s debut on Leaning House Records after having recorded two other solo outings for Atlantic Jazz.
Hommage a Saxophone. Anderson winks at several of the giants upon whose shoulders he stands. This recording contains six standards and three originals, and each deserve comment:
?African Cowboy?. A bi-directional nod to Sonny Rollins? ?I?m an Old Cowhand? and Oliver Nelson?s ?Hoedown? with some super home-on-the-range piano by Xavier Davis. Contains some Irvin Mayfield trumpet squeaks that make this a perfect live recording.
?Now?s The Time?. Bird?s blues played straight through the filter of Post Bop Modernism.
?Dis Here?. Cannon?s hit penned by Hard Bop deity Bobby Timmons. Anderson?s alto is harsh and aggressive, like late Art Pepper, who never recorded Soul Jazz this hard.
“Soul Eyes”. Stan Getz vehicle, among others. “Warmdaddy” might ought to be called “Hotdaddy”. His ballad playing on this tune is more of a statement of fact as opposed to a wistful declaration. Jaz Sawyer caresses the tune with his brushes, taking the edge off of Anderson's aggression.
“Snake Charmer”. An Anderson original, with Anderson playing the sopranino saxophone. Opens with a cool Middle Eastern feel, transforming into a Latin carnival. Again, Sawyer's drumming is outstanding.
“I'll Remember April”. Warmdaddy again smiles at Bird. A straight ahead reading, tapped off at a quick tempo and containing some of Anderson's most inspired playing.
“Star-crossed Lovers”. Warmdaddy is truly warm on this ballad. His tone is sweet and affectionate, without the edges of “Soul Eyes”. However, he and the band do swing.
“Quick Skeem”. Another Anderson original with Irvin Mayfield on trumpet. Spirited solos all the way around.
“Red Top”. Anderson closes with a midtempo blues that highlights the swing of his working group.
The disc liner notes were provided by the ubiquitous Stanley Crouch, whose notes read like, well, a set of Stanley Crouch liner notes. They are informed and insightful, dissolved in his broad critical experience. This disc is a lot of fun. It is what you would expect from a live date at the mythic Vanguard in the late 20th Century. Recommended.
Track listing: African Cowboy, Now's the Time, Dis Here, Soul Eyes, Snake Charmer, I'll Remember April, Star-crossed Lovers, Quick Skeem, Red Top.
Personnel: Wessell Anderson: Alto and Sopranino Saxophones, Irvin Mayfield: Trumpet, Xavier Davis: Piano, Steve Kirby: Bass, Jaz Sawyer: Drums.
Style: Mainstream | Published: November 01, 1998
5 15 07
Bringing It Home
Alvin Batiste carved his place in the jazz continuum by teaching others how to take their place there -- and by showing that those who teach can also play.
By Jason Berry
For most of his 74 years, Alvin Batiste was rooted by two passions: his wife, Edith, and his clarinet. Edith wrote poetry as they raised three children. His poetic voice was on the dark reed, full of soaring lines that summon comparisons to John Coltrane, the saxophone modernist famous for a style known as "sheets of sound."
The sounds of Batiste ended prosaically on the last Saturday night of Jazz Fest. His heart stopped beating as he dozed in front of a TV set. He had a major venue the following afternoon at the Fair Grounds for the new CD, Alvin Batiste on the Marsalis Music label's Honors Series, produced by Branford Marsalis. Along past midnight, Edith could not get him into bed. She called her brother, Maynard Chatters, a trumpeter and former band director at Dillard.
A younger trumpeter, Marlon Jordan, was driving home from a gig when his cell phone rang. His mother, Edvidge -- sister of Edith and Maynard -- reported the bad news. Marlon drove straight to uncle Alvin's just as his sister, Stephanie Jordan, the singer, was making her way to the Uptown house on Delachaise Street in response to a similar call.
Photo by Scott Saltzman
Batiste blows his clarinet in the Jazz Tent as the 2006 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival
By 3 a.m., 20 relatives had converged to sit with Edith and wait for Alvin's final departure.
Having vacated a FEMA trailer several months earlier, Alvin and Edith were back in the house, their second home, in the old hometown. They had spent more time here since his retirement in 2002 after three decades of teaching at the Jazz Institute (now named for him) at Southern University in Baton Rouge. Where other musicians might have savored the free time, Batiste plunged into post-retirement by teaching high school students at NOCCA.
Music was the center of gravity in the sprawling clan.
Edith and Edvidge Chatters married experimental jazzmen who became music professors -- Alvin and saxophonist Edward "Kidd" Jordan, the longtime director of the jazz program at SUNO.
When Hurricane Katrina hit, Kidd and Edvidge, Stephanie and her son, other Jordan and Batiste kin and Los Hombres Calientes percussionist Bill Summers went to the Batiste home in Baton Rouge. Marlon Jordan ended up on the roof of his house in eastern New Orleans for four days before being rescued by helicopter and evacuated to a military hospital in Birmingham, Ala., where he was treated for dehydration and broken ankles.
"I'm going to remember him showing me how to be a man and loving me as a nephew," Marlon reflected. "I was one of his students and got to see a different side by spending the night and eating with him and at family functions. I will miss him as more than a musician. He was like a second father. He would teach me every time he saw me. He'd say, 'Go get your horn' after Sunday dinner, and we'd practice duets."
Photo by Jackson Hill
Marlon, Stephanie, sibling Rachel Jordan (a violinist with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra) and their parents lived in eastern New Orleans. All had homes wrecked in the flood, but all are rebuilding and plan to move back.
Alvin Batiste played on several tracks on his niece's 2005 breakout CD, Marlon Jordan Introducing Stephanie Jordan: You Don't Know What Love Is.
Stephanie was barely a teenager when she saw a computer for the first time on a visit to the Batiste home in Baton Rouge. "Uncle Alvin had a keyboard attached to his TV and he was dealing with computer technology pre-DOS," she told Gambit Weekly. "He was always innovative. I think that's the one thing I learned from him -- always be aware of what's going on with the next thing -- expand the creative process. As a singer I will always take chances because of being around him. We've all learned to take chances, utilize technology, never be afraid of the next step. That's my approach to music. I'm not afraid of anything I want to sing."
If that sense of experimentation cut against a professorial stereotype, the reality is that Alvin Batiste, a large man with restless energy, limited his output as a recording artist precisely because of his teaching. Many artists strive to release a CD every year or two. (Wynton Marsalis has been known to do several in as many months.) Batiste had less than a dozen over more than 50 years of performing.
Still, the quality of his recording work seems destined for a boxed set to capture the arc of his journey through jazz impressionism.
"One of the fascinating things about Alvin is that he was a pioneer of modern jazz but stuck it out in the land of traditional jazz," says Xavier jazz professor and traditional clarinetist Michael White. "His accomplishment is even greater, when you consider that the clarinet is not well liked or accepted in modern jazz. For the longest time, he was one of the few African-American clarinetists in modern jazz. Yet he played with Cannonball Adderly and Ornette Coleman. Alvin believed in constant experimentation; he was an advocate of what he called 'the continuum' -- that jazz should change and you should always look for new directions."
Photo by Sydney Byrd
Throughout his career, Batiste played with some of the top names in jazz. Here he plays a concert with pianist Earl "Fatha" Hines, whose jazz recordings with Louis Armstrong are considered among the most important of the 1920s. Hines died in 1983 at the age of 80.
In his long career, Batiste earned fellowships from NEH and the Louisiana Division of the Arts, The National Association of Jazz Educators Humanitarian Award, the International Association of Jazz Educators' Lifetime Achievement Award, Southern University's Distinguished Service Award and the Louisiana Governor's 2005 award for Outstanding Contribution to Arts Education.
And yet, for all of those establishment credentials, Batiste had a deeply experimental side as an artist.
"For bebop musicians, the clarinet was marginalized," says Tulane Hogan Jazz Archive curator Bruce Boyd Raeburn. "Charlie Parker Bird was so dominant that the saxophones became the influential reed instruments. ... Alvin found a great voice on his instrument. To me, he's like the John Coltrane of the clarinet. He opened up the possibilities of that instrument in the free jazz context. But everyone knows him as an educator."
Ironically, from his teaching position in Baton Rouge, Batiste became a catalytic force in developing a generation of musicians -- some local, others not -- whose works constitute a post-bebop New Orleans impressionism.
"Mr. Bat was the teacher who loved to teach," recalls saxophonist Wess "Warmdaddy" Anderson, a former student who performed with Wynton Marsalis and is now a recording artist in his own right. Anderson teaches music at Michigan State, with a permanent home in Baton Rouge.
Raised in Brooklyn, Anderson turned down a scholarship in Boston at the prestigious Berklee College of Music for the chance to study at Southern. "The joke at Berklee was, you graduate and you can't find a place to play -- you've got to go on the road to prove your chops," explains Anderson. "I wanted to go somewhere and learn the craft of playing. [Batiste's] classrooms were hands-on. He'd show you something and then take you to the Hilton in Baton Rouge to play for a convention, or drive down to Snug Harbor in New Orleans. You played on-the-job training."
Photo by Brian Hammell
Batiste (second from left) with NOCCA students Max Moran, Conun Pappas and Joe Dyson Jr.
SNAPSHOT, 1982: Seeking an interview for a book-in-progress, I spent several days on the phone with Batiste, trying to nail down a time. He wanted to help, but a foreign concert tour was looming. He was busy. Come on this day, he said, no that day -- wait, come this other day at exactly such-and-such a time. I drove to his house in Baton Rouge; Edith directed me to a studio on the outskirts of town. A bearish guy with a radiant grin, Batiste greeted me like a lost relative and said he wouldn't be long. "Leaving for France tomorrow, gotta wrap up some things. Watch."
Watch -- said in a tone of authority, suggesting that you'll get more than you thought.
The session was behind schedule. I watched. He was like a hunter tracking wild boar -- crossing and criss-crossing the studio, resetting vocal arrangements, studying the playback, demanding more precision on the horns, dispensing orders in a firm-yet-patriarchal manner to young musicians who held him in awe. We'll do the interview over dinner. When I left at midnight, he was still at work. Nobody had ordered out.
Born Nov. 7, 1932, in New Orleans, Alvin Batiste was the son of a railroad worker and avocational clarinetist who gave the boy his first instrument. A product of the city's public schools, he graduated from Booker T. Washington High in 1950 and went on to Southern University in Baton Rouge. As an undergraduate, he won a competition to perform as a soloist on a Mozart composition with the New Orleans Philharmonic Symphony -- the first African-American student to do so. In 1954, he graduated from Southern. That summer, he toured with the Ray Charles Orchestra and in September began teaching music at McDonogh 35 Senior High. Later he became one of the first African Americans to study at LSU, where he earned his master's in music.
His reputation as a bebop stylist spread to New York, where he began making trips to perform, and he recorded with Cannonball Adderly. Back home, he became a central figure in the coterie of modernists in New Orleans who recorded on Harold Battiste's AFO (All For One) label: Ellis Marsalis, Ed Blackwell, James Brown, Nat Perilliat and Melvin Lastie among others. In 1966, A.B. Spellman published Black Music: Four Lives and made passing reference to Batiste -- "now in New York, where he is regarded as an underground giant of the clarinet" -- at the very time he was in Baton Rouge working with the university's marching band. In 1969, he founded SU's Jazz Institute, which, over the years, drew a line of young talents because of "Mr. Bat."
Herlin Riley, a drummer who grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward, says he "knew about Alvin Batiste from my uncles." They included trumpeter Mel Lastie, saxophonist David Lastie and drummer Walter "Popee" Lastie, all now deceased.
By © Sydney Byrd 2007
Batiste in a study at his home in Baton Rouge.
Riley, who drummed on the final Alvin Batiste CD, continues: "When I was in high school, I got to meet him and hang around him a little bit. He was doing Jazz Artists in Residence -- this was in 1973, before NOCCA -- and he would drive down from Baton Rouge. I was going to Carver High School [studying music] under Miss Yvonne Busch. Alvin would come down three times a week. Herman Jackson, the drummer, was going to school up there; Julius Farmer was the bass player who has since passed away. Also Henry Butler was there. I got to meet them. That was part of the dedication I experienced from him early on. ... And Mr. Bat would practice all the time. Even during 1974, Miss Edith would talk about Alvin 'shedding' for an hour and a half" -- meaning out in the woodshed, practicing.
The Alvin Batiste CD includes lyrics by Edith on "My Life As a Tree" and his son Maynard, an attorney and musician, on the songs, "Everloving Star." Another cut, the instrumental "Bumps," is the nickname of Alvin's grandson.
"When we finished that track ["Bumps"] Alvin was crying," recalls Riley of the final production. "He was really choked up, pulled out his handkerchief. I said, 'What's the matter, Mr. Bat?' 'Oh the music's so good,' he said. 'So, so good.' I didn't see him act that way before. When I saw Maynard at the last set [at Jazz Fest, honoring Batiste the day after his death], I told him that story about the studio and we both kinda broke down over it. Alvin Batiste was such a dedicated man."
Riley was one in a succession of players who went to Southern to study with Batiste. The jazz professor steered his better students to Wynton Marsalis at the Lincoln Center jazz program in New York, where Riley would become a regular performer. Recording the final disc with Branford Marsalis, his former student, on the Marsalis Music Label, was the closing of a circle for the clarinetist.
"I used to call him daddy," recalls Wess Anderson. "Branford told me to go study with him in '82. I stayed till '88. I became very close with him and his wife. It wasn't just professor-student -- it was like family. From the first time I met him, he took me through the whole step of registering for school. A professor doesn't have to do that. ... When I finished school, Mr. Bat made sure I got to meet Wynton."
Photo by Scott Saltzman
Branford Marsalis plays in front of a large photo of Alvin Batiste during a tribute set in Batiste's honor at Jazz Fest.
The career paths that moved from Baton Rouge to New Orleans to New York revolved around Batiste, Ellis Marsalis at UNO, and Kidd Jordan at SUNO. As mentors, each man had his own style, his own approach to the jazz tradition and his own set of contacts for students who worked the hardest.
"Jazz pedagogy is really not scientific," Batiste told me in 1989. "It's theoretical. Each one of the personalities involved with a program gives it something different. ... As long as you can get the content of knowledge in the jazz legacy, and have a chance to experience the time-tested procedures without psychologically arresting the creative process, then you have something that's nurturing."
His recordings in the 1980s included Musique D'Afrique, which marked a phase in which he matched the ranging clarinet lines with African percussive rhythms, and Bayou Magic, which included a cut with Edith reading her poetry. The sinuous melodies that Batiste spun off in his solos, from one recording to the next, seem as natural as beads of sunshine rippling on a brook.
And yet for all his paternal warmth, the message he drove home to his students was blunt. "He was all about the work ethic," says Donald Harrison Jr., the alto saxophonist who studied at Southern in 1978 and '79 after going to NOCCA and Nicholls High School, with Kidd Jordan as a private instructor.
"Jordan's universe was to let each person find the most natural thing for them to do," continues Harrison. "Alvin developed The Root Progression System [a textbook], that was similar in approach but got you to develop your hearing in all directions.
"You learned to get up in the morning with the music ritual -- play the long tones, practicing scales, parts of the classical pieces," explains Harrison. "I was having trouble learning circular breathing. He took me outside and showed me a hosepipe. He said to think of my air like the water and how it flowed. He would make up things to help you understand what he was talking about in terms of music and how to achieve it."
By the end of the week after his death, with plans underway for a wake and funeral at Gallier Hall, Alvin Batiste's final presence would follow the few musicians so remembered at the city's chief ceremonial temple -- Danny Barker and Ernie K-Doe.
Of the many friends and family making plans for those events, two would not attend. Stephanie Jordan was due to perform in Washington, D.C., at the Kennedy Center for a Ladies in Jazz concert series, with a band led by Marlon.
"I got the blessing of my family to do the concert in Washington," Stephanie said early last week. "My heart will be at the funeral but I know Uncle Alvin would understand. He encouraged me from the day I decided to be a singer. I was floored when he said, 'I want you to come sing with me at Snug Harbor.' In my mind, Snug is the jazz club in New Orleans. For him to say, 'I want you on my bandstand,' meant more than I can say. He invited me to sing with him at Jazz Fest, too. Even though he's my uncle, he was a real musician. One of the greatest compliments he gave me was, 'You are a world-class singer. Keep going. Don't have any doubts.' I love that man and will miss him every day here on."
Jason Berry is author of the novel Last of the Red Hot Poppas.
Tight spot
Written by LAWRENCE COSENTINO
Wednesday, 12 March 2008
If pressure cookers are rated by force per square inch, Saturday night’s jam session at East Lansing’s tiny Gumbo & Jazz could have parboiled a walrus.
Just past 8 p.m. Saturday night, proprietor Desi Anderson stuffed a dozen chairs into her 5-month-old restaurant, next to Bell’s Greek Pizza on Grand River Avenue in East Lansing.
Hassan Malouf on keyboards, Josh Davis on drums, Noah Jackson on bass and Wessell “Warmdaddy” Anderson on alto sax Saturday night at Gumbo and Jazz (Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse).
With the help of a vinyl bench and some stools in the entrance hallway, 20 people crammed inside to put their faces within point-blank range of alto saxophonist Wessell “Warmdaddy” Anderson, Desi’s husband and alto saxman par excellence.
An older couple looked up from their dessert at the flurry of activity. “Does this mean we’re going to lose the table?” the lady said.
“Sooner than you think,” Desi said.
Until last week, the restaurant held occasional private musical nights featuring Anderson, other MSU Professors of Jazz and students, but now they’re beginning to go public. The nights get workhorse Wes out of the barn for a run, of course, but they do more than that. Thanks to MSU’s jazz school, the area is top-heavy with jazz talent but painfully venue-deprived.
“If I wasn’t here, I’d be home practicing — on a Saturday night,” jazz student Herbert Scott said. Instead, Scott, a phenomenal player, ended up locking horns with Anderson in a classic head-to-head alto battle.
Anderson hasn’t returned to the classroom since he suffered a stroke last July, but Saturday night he delivered a three-hour lesson on canning jam in a pressure-cooker. The all-student rhythm section worked out of a food prep area barely two strides wide. Keyboardist Hassan Malouf looked like he had been naughty and was in a time-out corner, Noah Jackson’s bass cleared the ceiling by a few inches and drummer Josh Davis could have done some moonlighting by reaching back and slipping some food through the take-out window.
But when the trio eased into “Green Dolphin Street,” their cubicle became Birdland — especially when the outsized star made his entrance from a side door, already in mid-blow.
Despite the small crowd, Anderson played with the inventiveness and variety he showed on “Live at the House of Tribes,” his 2006 CD with Wynton Marsalis, and a zillion live dates all over the world. Uncrowded by Marsalis or anyone else, Anderson pulled out hundreds of melodic ideas, like the bolts and screws in hardware store drawers, turning them over, fitting them together, never repeating himself.
Before joining the MSU jazz faculty in 2006, Anderson toured the world in Marsalis’ septet, one of the greatest mid-size combos in jazz history. He spent several years with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, then took a leap of faith and moved from Baton Rouge to East Lansing at the invitation of MSU Jazz Studies chief Rodney Whitaker. Desi opened the restaurant in October, after the couple spent months in Lansing longing for Louisiana cuisine.
Just outside the door leading to Bell’s, a gray-haired woman in a purple scarf sat at a table, listening intently. A folded walker stood nearby. More than 50 years ago, Jenny McAskill lolled on top of a piano and sang jazz tunes in the Mermaid’s Cove lounge, in the basement of the Drake Hotel in Detroit. She sang with Eddie Bartell and his Dukes of Rhythm and was known as “Zarka.”
McAskill, now living in East Lansing, only came to Bell’s for a pizza, but ended up sitting outside the door for two hours. “I feel so alive,” she said.
More students, including trumpet-and-keyboard whiz Ross Margitza and 17-year-old trombonist Wessell Anderson IV (“Quad” to his family), tested the laws of physics by adding to the combo. After a blistering “Cherokee,” Quad made a move to go. His girlfriend waited on a stool in the hall.
“Don’t go nowhere,” Anderson said. He called to the band for a slow blues — one that would give his son maximum exposure.
Anderson the elder laid down some searing blues testimony that stopped all chatter. No pressure there. Quad slid in on a perfectly bent blue note.
“Play it, son.”
Finally, Anderson’s colleague, jazz Professor Derrick Gardner, breezed in and put his cherry of a trumpet on top of the whole grand jam.
So when’s the next jazz night? When word spread that the Andersons would put out a spread every other Saturday, an exhausted Desi put up her hand. “Have people call and find out first,” she said.
Remembering a night of Marsalis therapy
Written by Lawrence Cosentino
Wednesday, 26 December 2007
Outside the window, eyes goggled and jaws dropped.
Inside, two old friends picked up their horns and blew them straight at mortality until mortality backed down.
It didn’t matter that these friends were two of the greatest jazzmen in the world — but it didn’t hurt the music any.
Sunday, Aug. 12, 2007, was the sleeper date of the local music year, the night trumpeter Wynton Marsalis jammed with the MSU Professors of Jazz at East Lansing’s Green River Café.
The musicians were in casual clothes. Only 30 people or so were in the room, most drawn by quick-spreading word of mouth.
But this impromptu free gig was dead serious. Marsalis was in East Lansing to support his old friend and bandmate, alto saxman Wessell “Warmdaddy” Anderson, now a professor of jazz at MSU, who had suffered a stroke the month before. Rodney Whitaker, the head of Jazz Studies at MSU and an old friend of both men, set up the gig.
Famed jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis plays an unannounced show with the MSU Professors of Jazz last August. (From left) Wessell "Warmdaddy" Anderson, Rodney Whitaker, Marsalis and Derrick Gardner. (Courtesy photo)
The Green River Cafe has recently become a local haven for jazz, hosting regular Thursday night jams featuring the Professors and their students. Six weeks ago, the café hosted 75-year-old alto legend Frank Morgan, who died last week.
For Anderson, the visit from Marsalis alone was priceless therapy.
“I’m so happy he came to my house to come see me, even if I couldn’t have played anymore,” he said. “It’s a great memory I’ll give to my son and everybody else.”
But Anderson did play.
Two decades ago, he and Marsalis were young Turks touring the world; later, they compared notes as educators and fathers.
But a stroke? It was too soon for that. Marsalis needed to know if Anderson would recover. “My hands were still kind of nervous,” Anderson said. “It had only been two or three weeks.”
First tune: “Sweet Georgia Brown,” the A-B-C of jazz changes, comfortably familiar but prone to treacherous acceleration.
Following Marsalis, the band galloped off. “Wynton took the first solo, rubbing it in, and I knew he was thinking, ‘You can’t play this,’” Anderson recalled. “We were always competitive.
“Then I started my solo, and he said, ‘Oh shit, he’s still playing.’”
In the ‘90s, the Wynton Marsalis Septet took a place among the tightest combos in jazz history. Later, Anderson was a stalwart of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. There was always something special about their meat-and-gravy trumpet-alto combination; for proof, check out the blazing video of “Green Chimneys” on YouTube, from last year’s Blue Note CD “Live at the House of Tribes.”
Diego Rivera, East Lansing’s homegrown tenor saxophonist-turned-jazz-professor, also played at Green River that night. “Wynton was a little unsure at first,” Rivera said, “but once Wes started playing, you could see it in Wynton’s face. He was like, ‘He’s gonna be OK, everything’s gonna be cool.’”
“There ain’t nothing wrong with you,” Marsalis told his friend.
He wasn’t the only one who was relieved.
“I’ll always remember the look on everybody’s face when they first heard Wes,” Rivera said. “They were pretty enamored.”
Next the combo dug deeper into a hornet’s nest of bebop: “Dig,” “Stablemates” and finally, “Donna Lee,” a scorching tangle of notes made famous by uber-altoist Charlie Parker.
“He was doing exceptionally well,” Rivera said of Anderson.
Confident the old spark was there, Marsalis waved off the band and called a duet with Anderson, the tender ballad “Embraceable You.”
“That’s when it really became evident that Wes was back,” Rivera said. “They traded phrases back and forth, and Wynton was pretty tickled with Wes’ playing.”
“He just started playing, and I knew he wanted me to take half of the tune.” Anderson said. “We’ve been working together so long that he looks at me and I know what he’s thinking.”
“Seeing Wes and Wynton share that moment — it was really something special,” Rivera said.
“That was a good night,” Anderson said.
Anderson is already performing regularly and hopes to return to teaching in the fall.
