All that Jazz

Fotografia: JMPhoto

Suite para Gronho e Gaivota

Suite para Gronho e Gaivota (usurpada de Ludovico Enaudi)

Foz do Arelho
Fotografia: JMPhoto

Nikolaj Lund

Nikolaj Lund, um fotógrafo musical ou um músico fotográfico. Juntando os seus dois maiores interesses (ou a versão dinamarquesa de “eu tenho dois amores”), tem um trabalho criativo e, seguramente, original.

Based in Aarhus, Denmark, I am an internationally acclaimed photographer specializing in portraying classical music.

I have always had two big passions, classical music and photography, which first lead to a Master’s degree in cello performance in 2006. In 2008, I decided to put all my effort into photography. A decision I have never regret!

Some Like it Hot

I got a fever
An inflammation
That’s what I got
You turn the heat on me
Some like it hot
Look what you started
A conflagration
Baby, that’s what
Don’t let the flame go out
Some like it hot
Oh baby, I’m from that old school
I’ll play it real cool
But when you kissed me
I lit up
Like a four alarm fire
Call out the engine
Ring up the station
I’m on the spot
Love burns you up the most
Like it or not
But baby, I like it hot

(Marilyn Monroe)

Fotografia: JMPhoto

Uma delícia …

Apenas para iniciados …

Horácio, o filho de João da Silva

Partiu Horace Silver, figura maior do jazz, fundador do hard bop, construtor de pontes para outras músicas, explorador de caminhos para outros ritmos, pintando (ainda) mais cores na exuberante policromia do jazz.

A nós, toca-nos mais de perto porque, filho de caboverdiano, Horace foi muito influenciado pelas toadas de morna e coladera com que os familiares recordavam o som di terra. Sodade.

Dessa memória musical resultaram dois discos que, só por si e se mais nāo houvesse, colocariam Horace no panteão do jazz. Os fundamentais “Song for my father” e “The Capeverdian Blues”.

Conheci primeiro as mornas de S. Vicente e as coladeras da Praia, que frequentei incansavelmente durante os mais de dez anos em que, desde o principio da década de 80, fui regularmente a Cabo Verde.

Cheguei ao jazz mais tarde e foi, precisamente, o piano crioulo de Horace Silver a chave que me abriu muitas das suas portas.

Que descanse em paz.

Entre as muitas evocações do génio de Horace Silver, aqui fica a de Mário Lopes, no Público.

Começou por ser saxofonista no Connecticut natal, mas seria já depois de trocar o saxofone pelo piano e Connecticut por Nova Iorque que Horace Silver começou a destacar-se e a iniciar um percurso que o preservou como um dos fundadores do hard bop e um músico que, pela elegância e simplicidade melódica e pela dinâmica cativante do ritmo, se tornaria uma referência no final da década de 1950 e na seguinte.

Nascido Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silva a 2 de Setembro de 1928, Silver tocou com gigantes como Stan Getz, o primeiro a reconhecer-lhe o talento, Miles Davis ou Lester Young. Fundou os muito influentes Jazz Messengers com Art Blakey, e ajudou a revelar talentos como o saxofonista Joe Henderson, o trompetista Art Farmer ou o baterista Billy Cobham.

Filho de um cabo-verdiano imigrado nos Estados Unidos, John Tavares Silva, operário numa fábrica de borracha e multi-instrumentista (violino, mandolim) que seria influência musical marcante (o clássico Song for my father inspira-se nas tardes passadas a ouvir o pai e o tio tocarem mornas e coladeras), o pianista morreu de causas naturais esta quarta-feira na sua casa em New Rochelle, Nova Iorque, adiantou o seu único filho, Gregory, à NPR. Horace Silver tinha 85 anos.

“Pessoalmente, não acredito em política, ódio ou fúria na minha composição musical. A música deve levar felicidade e alegria às pessoas e fazê-las esquecer os seus problemas”, escreveu no texto de acompanhamento de Serenade to a Soul Sister, álbum editado em 1968. Na década seguinte, iríamos encontrá-lo a procurar dar voz a essa necessidade, quando gravou uma série de três álbuns conhecida como The United States of Mind, os primeiros em que trabalhou de forma continuada com a voz, incluindo a sua, e que reflectiam um desejo de autodescoberta espiritual através da música.

Os discos, editados entre 1970 e 1972, não foram consensuais, quer junto da crítica, quer junto daqueles que acompanhavam há muito a sua música. Reflectiam o seu desejo de mudança num mundo que, também ele, mudava rapidamente. Porém, Horace Silver é celebrado como um dos grandes nomes do jazz pelo que fizera antes. Outras mudanças: é um dos nomes fundadores do hard-bop, ramificação do revolucionário bebop que, apropriando-se do rhythm’n’blues ou do gospel, colocava a ênfase no ritmo e numa maior simplicidade harmónica. Foi neste período que criou alguns dos seus temas mais famosos, como Filthy McNasty, The Preacher, Sister Sadie, a latina Señor blues ou a supracitada Song for my father.

Começava a fazer o seu nome enquanto pianista no circuito local quando, aos 22 anos, Stan Getz ouve o seu trio no clube Sundown, em Hartford. Trabalharia com o saxofonista durante cerca de um ano, antes de se mudar para Nova Iorque, onde não tardaria a tornar-se músico requisitado pela fervilhante comunidade jazz da cidade, trabalhando com Coleman Hawkins ou Lester Young. Em 1953, fundava com o baterista Art Blakey os Jazz Messengers que, com a sua formação de trompete, saxofone tenor, piano, contrabaixo e bateria, viriam a ser o standard para a instrumentação hard-bop, escrevia ontem Peter Keepnews no obituário publicado pelo New York Times. Keepnews destaca o estilo peculiar de Silver: “Improvisando com destreza motivos engenhosos com a sua mão direita enquanto atacava sonoras linhas de baixo com a esquerda, conseguia evocar simultaneamente pianistas de boogie-woogie como Meade Lux e beboppers como Bud Powell. Porém, ao contrário de muitos pianistas bebop, Silver enfatizava a simplicidade melódica sobre a complexidade harmónica”.

Horace Silver manter-se-ia com os Jazz Messengers durante dois anos e meio, antes de formar o seu quinteto, inicialmente composto pela mesma formação dos Messengers, com excepção de Art Blakey, substituído pelo então muito jovem Louis Hayes. Seria enquanto líder que gravaria álbuns como 6 Pieces of Silver (1956), Blowin’ the blues away (1959), Song for my father (1965) ou The Cape Verdean Blues (1965), todos eles editados pela Blue Note, a mítica casa discográfica à qual esteve ligado entre 1955 e 1980.

Um dos nomes mais célebres do jazz em palco e em disco durante a década de 1960, com o groove do seu hard-bop a servir como banda-sonora perfeita para o período (influência transversal: os Steely Dan criaram o seu maior sucesso, Rikki, dont’t lose that number, sobre a linha de baixo de Song for my father), Horace Silver manter-se-ia bastante activo em palco e em estúdio nas décadas que se seguiram. No início dos anos 1980, fundou a Silveto, editora de vida curta, antes de prosseguir carreira com álbuns para a Impulse!, Verve ou Columbia.

Chuva de Prata

Fotografia: João Martins Pereira

Há associações de ideias inesperadas e, por alguma razão, selectivas.

Uma destas tardes de sábados de frio lá fora, com a lareira a puxar à sonolência, a chuva a bater na janela chegou-me em forma de música. E podia ter-me feito lembrar originais e versões com chuva, em diversos ritmos, melodias, géneros, cores e quantidades –

• Chuva – Rain (The Beatles)
• Muita Chuva – Rain, Rain (Cher)
• Chuva às Cores – Purple Rain (Prince), Red Rain (Peter Gabriel)
• Chuva Musical – Singing in the Rain (Gene Kelly), The Rain Song (Led Zeppelin)
• Chuva Torrencial – A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall ou Buckets of Rain (Bob Dylan)
• Chuva de Fogo – Fire and Rain (James Taylor)
•  Chuva Interior – Raining in my Heart (Buddy Holly)
• Chuva Rara – Have You Ever Seen Rain (Credence Clearwater Revival)
• Chuva Fria – Cold Rain and Snow (Grateful Dead)
• Chuva Em Espécie – It’s Raining Men(Gloria Gaynor)

Mas lembrei-me foi de uma chuva preciosa, em português trans-oceânico, em forma de Chuva de Prata, um original de Ed Wilson e Ronaldo Bastos.

Foi gravado por Gal Costa em 1984, no álbum “Profana”, já lá vão 30 anos …

Talvez as profecias de João Gilberto, Caetano Veloso ou Torquato Neto, entre outros, não se tenham cumprido integralmente, ou talvez não sejam facilmente aceites por todos.

João, logo no primeiro encontro, em Salvador, com uma, ainda então, Maria da Graça, sem carreira firmada na juventude dos seus 18 anos, não teve duvidas: “Gracinha, você é a maior cantora do Brasil”

Caetano, tambem nos idos de 60, tambem em Salvador e tambem ao primeiro encontro com Maria da Graça Penha e Costa, a Gracinha depois Gal, já havia sentenciado que “com essa voz, essa menina será a  melhor cantora do Brasil”

Torquato Neto, nos anos 70, ajudou à festa de coroação de Gal ao ouvir o album Fa-Tal.

As escolhas de repertório de Gal talvez não tenham sido sempre as mais felizes ou as mais consistentes. Mas, para mim, e que me perdoe a memória de Elis, Gal é mesmo a maior cantora do Brasil.

Janis’ sound

It’s  Summertime, Maybe I’ll drive my new Mercedes-Benz , just Me and Bobby McGee.

But don’t you Cry Baby,  you need To Love Somebody and I am just a Little Girl Blue. (se repararem bem, o senhor que apresenta o clip chama-se Tom Jones…)

I know I Need a Man to Love and when I find one, I’ll give him a Piece of My Heart.

RIP

Janis

Janis Joplin teria completado, no passado dia 19 deste mês, 70 anos de idade.

Mas os ímpetos de uma personalidade complexa e os excessos associados à cultura rock dos anos 60 fizeram-na partir muito antes, muito cedo, cedo demais.

Janis foi mais uma estrela do rock a sucumbir à estranha maldição dos 27. Tal como outras almas atormentadas, Jimmi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Brian Jones ou Amy Winehouse, partiu aos 27 anos de idade.

Aqui fica um excelente memorial da “Pearl” da autoria de Holly George-Warren, publicado na Time LightBox.

As fotografias seguintes são de Elliott Landy, da Agência Magnum, que acompanhou e fotografou a geração de Woodstock.

“I want to be the biggest blues singer in the world!”

That’s what Janis Joplin told her producer Paul Rothchild when he asked her where she wanted to be at age 65. Five years past that landmark, January 19, 2013, would have been Janis’ 70th birthday. She didn’t make it to “retirement age,” but she had already achieved her espoused goal in her way-too-short lifetime. When she died while completing her masterpiece, Pearl, on October 4, 1970, she was only 27 years old. Her swan song would top the charts for nine weeks upon its release in January 1971. During her brief life, as she worked hard to fulfill her aspirations, she not only changed the way pop culture views women, but inspired many of us who grew up in little pockets of conservatism (like her hometown of Port Arthur, Texas) to spread our wings and fly.

I was a 14-year-old growing up in North Carolina when Janis’ posthumous Number One single, “Me and Bobby McGee,” became a staple on AM radio. But between seeing a colorfully garbed and articulate Janis on The Dick Cavett Show in June 1970, and hearing that bittersweet road song, in January 1971, my eyes – and ears – were opened by this singular woman with a magnificent voice. A decade later, I was living in New York City, playing in bands and writing about music.

Janis always had a larger-than-life image that inspired girls like me, but as Elliott Landy’s photographs testify, she was multifaceted. She enjoyed a good book, even backstage at Detroit’s psychedelic Grande Ballroom, and scintillating conversation with the likes of director Paul Morrissey, sphinx-like Andy Warhol and singer-songwriter Tim Buckley at the legendary Manhattan watering hole, Max’s Kansas City. She loved her manager Albert Grossman, a wheeler-dealer who’d handled Bob Dylan, and she adored her audiences, whom she addressed onstage – from the Fillmore East to Newport to Woodstock – like they were old friends. In concert, she transformed into a shamanic force of nature; in the studio, working with longtime Doors producer Paul Rothchild, she helped steer the ship.

“What a gorgeous lady to photograph,” marveled Landy, whose images of Joplin also can be found in his book, Woodstock Vision. “She was very exciting to look at. When she sang and performed, visual harmony happened.” On his travels with Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1968, he attempted to make himself “as invisible as possible and try to make her forget I was there, so I could capture her soul.”

Janis often referred to herself as the “chick singer,” first finding fame with Big Brother, in 1966-7; then going solo and forming the Kozmic Blues Band to back her in 1968-9; and finally leading the Full-Tilt Boogie Band, with whom she recorded the timeless Pearl. Listening to the studio chatter documented on the two-CD set, The Pearl Sessions, you hear her brainstorming ideas for song arrangements and tempos, guitar parts, and vocal styles – proving she was so much more than just a chick singer.

With surplus vocal talent, intellect, and artistry, Janis fearlessly lived by the philosophy “Get It While You Can,” also the title of the gut-wrenching final track on Pearl. Just four days before her death, she told New York radio DJ Howard Smith, “You are only as much as you settle for.”

Janis never settled; she kept striving for the next musical step. Nicknamed “Pearl” by her Full-Tilt band mates, Janis spent her final days doing what she loved, and as Rothchild later told her sister, Laura Joplin, “She was a singer, full of song, totally immersed in the magic of that moment of creativity – she was at one.”

Her decision to shoot heroin during a break from the recording sessions, tragically, took her away from us. But what she left behind – her music and her legacy – have enriched generations.

Dave Brubeck (1920 – 2012)

Morreu ontem, na véspera de completar 92 anos, uma das figuras a quem o jazz mais deve, mesmo que por vezes não o tenha reconhecido.

Chamava-se Dave Brubeck, um esteta do jazz.

Pianista de formação clássica (como John Lewis, Oscar Peterson, André Previn ou Keith Jarrett, por exemplo), Brubeck foi, durante as décadas de 50 e 60, desprezado pelos sectores ultra-ordoxos do jazz dito “puro”, que não lhe perdoavam a aproximação a um publico jovem, estudantil, de uma classe media branca, a matriz clássica das composições (contemporânea de, e por oposição a, improvisadores arrojados como Coltrane), a elegância e contenção do estilo e, talvez acima de tudo, o sucesso comercial, considerado um pecado mortal de um género musical que se entendia miserabilista.

Brubeck a tudo sobreviveu, e a musica do seu famoso Quarteto abriu as portas do jazz a públicos muito mais vastos.

Pessoalmente, tive a felicidade de ver Brubeck ao vivo em três ocasiões, no North Sea Jazz Festival, no Ronnie Scott, em Londres, e, a ultima e memorável, num concerto de piano solo no CCB, em Lisboa.

Brubeck deixa uma discografia vasta de que destaco 2 registos. Um, porventura menos divulgado, “Dave Digs Disney“, onde o Quarteto recria versões dos temas dos filmes de animação da Disney (ouçam a belíssima versão de Someday My Princesa Will Come, o tema principal do filme  Branca de Neve, cuja interpretação mais conhecida será a de Miles Davis) e o incontornável “Time Out“, com aquele que será o tema mais divulgado do jazz, certamente o de maior sucesso comercial e o responsável por milhares terem sido, e continuarem a ser, mordidos pelo “bicho do jazz”.

Chama-se Take Five, mas o destino tem destas ironias. Não foi composto por Brubeck, mas sim pelo seu fiel escudeiro, o grande Paul Desmond, um dos profetas maiores do sax alto.

A propósito de Brubeck, transcrevo, com a devida vénia, o obituário publicado no “The Guardian” por John Fordham. Aqui fica.

“When the end of the 20th century came, some aspects of jazz began to be given the status of a classical form. In the reassessments that followed, the work of the American pianist and composer Dave Brubeck, who has died aged 91, was a major beneficiary. He was a figure simultaneously feted and mugged by ecstatic fans and infuriated purists during the years between 1954 and 1966 – the time when his catchiest and most deftly composed records were pop hits.

Like the Modern Jazz Quartet, which enjoyed similar commercial success in that period, Brubeck’s music flattered and engaged the young white middle-class, and particularly the student population, much as the classical-sounding clarinettist Benny Goodman’s work had done in the mid-1930s. Brubeck intertwined jazz swing with time-signatures that looked like algebra, and mingled standard song-forms with rondos and fugues. All kinds of music fans who would have hated to be seen with a jazz album owned Brubeck records in the 60s, just as they own Diana Krall, Jan Garbarek or Keith Jarrett discs today.

But if Brubeck’s success, and the repertoire that achieved it, could be fighting talk among music-lovers 40 years ago, now time, and the eclecticism and fluid collaborations of a shrinking world, have healed his estrangement from the jazz audience. Brubeck’s pieces are now recognised for the harmonically subtle, melodically devious and original works they are, and his most classically oriented works (such as the soft-winds Bach tribute Chorale) as triumphs in a treacherous territory in which short-changing jazz or dumbing-down symphonic composition is very hard to avoid. The Brubeck debate eventually vanished into the archives, and his real gifts – as a composer, and a charter of new rhythmic waters as inventive as the brilliant bebop drummer-composer Max Roach – came to be appreciated for what they always were.

Unlike Goodman and his college audience triumphs of the 1930s, Brubeck discovered his jazz in the postwar world – in a very different climate, which initiated the unusual chemistry of his music by a very different route. Jazz, pop and dancing were synonymous in the 30s. But Brubeck emerged a decade later, after the more cerebral and exploratory modernist idiom of bebop had profoundly influenced the music.

To make jazz popular again, to haul it out of the bare-bulb, hipster-subculture cellar it had holed up in during the late 1940s, would require a different approach. Brubeck, who grew up on a California ranch and initially trained as a vet, certainly made no such opportunistic calculations in the beginning, and wanted only to pursue his abiding passion for music any way he could. However, the populist approach found him in the end, whether he was looking for it or not. Born in Concord, California, he was originally trained in classical music, at first by a piano-playing mother. His environment cut him out to be a cowboy more than a musician – and with two older brothers on their way to music college, he was initially happy to embrace the alternative of working on the land himself. Though he resisted leaving the family ranch, his parents persuaded him to enrol as veterinarian major at the College of the Pacific.

Brubeck’s musical enthusiasms then overtook him, and he switched courses after a year – to the mingled delight and anxiety of the music faculty, which welcomed someone clearly cut out to be one of its most naturally gifted students, but whose notation-reading was so poor they made him promise never to teach music before they had let him graduate. During this period Brubeck led and played in jazz bands most nights of the week, and also met Iola Whitlock, who ran the weekly campus radio show. Brubeck proposed to her after a two-week relationship, and she survives him, along with four sons and a daughter.

Brubeck was a conscientious objector during the second world war, but was eventually given an army band to run on a tour of Europe in 1944. His superior officer, a jazz fan, repeatedly intervened to prevent the musician being sent to the front. After demobilisation, he studied at Mills College with the classical composer Darius Milhaud, who revealed the intricacies of polyrhythm and polytonality to him, and influenced his music for life, telling him that if he wanted to express America, he would always use the jazz idiom.

Brubeck then founded an experimental collective, the Jazz Workshop Ensemble. It was dedicated to exploring forms of jazz less hidebound by orthodox “swing” and Tin Pan Alley-derived harmonic structures. In 1951 he formed his first quartet, including a feathery-sounding alto saxophonist called Paul Desmond, a confirmed disciple of the undemonstrative, dynamically restrained white “cool school” variations on bebop whom he had briefly worked with in San Francisco in 1947. The pianist set up his own record label, Fantasy Records, and released Jazz at Oberlin (1953), the quartet’s first album. This exploration of live recording, rare for the time, secured a deal with Columbia Records – and the ensuing Jazz Goes to College (1954) sold over 100,000 copies. The success made Brubeck the first jazz musician to be featured on the cover of Time magazine, which said he was ushering in the birth of a new kind of jazz age in the US.

In the late 1950s the first quartet lineup, with bassist Norman Bates and drummer Joe Dodge, was transformed by the remarkable drummer Joe Morello and the bassist Gene Wright, and the most popular and influential Brubeck quartet was born. The familiar four-on-four metre of straight-ahead jazz time was augmented by complex tempos like 9/8 (as in the engaging Mozartian Blue Rondo a la Turk) and 11/4, though the improvising sections of Brubeck’s pieces frequently loosened into regular swing, which ingeniously balanced their appeal.

The album Time Out (1959) turned out to be the group’s biggest landmark, unleashing the first million-selling post-bebop jazz records with singles of Blue Rondo and the Desmond composition – triggered by a 5/4 Morello drum exercise – Take Five. Between 1959 and 1965, the Quartet won Down Beat magazine’s readers’ poll five times and was Playboy readers’ favourite jazz group for 12 years running, from 1957 to 1968. By the early 1960s, the New Yorker announced that the quartet was “the world’s best-paid, most widely travelled, most highly publicised, and most popular small group now playing improvised syncopated music”.

But this success had not come without reservations in the jazz world. Brubeck was on the wrong side of the purists almost as soon as his discs started to become hits – for what were seen by some as three betrayals. First, and maybe worst, he made money, which was a form of notoriety usually regarded as a sell-out by hardline hipsters. Second, his conspicuously complex tempos paraded cleverness and a fondness for European classical devices at a time when black American jazz was dumping much of its formal baggage, and fiery, impassioned and unpredictable improvisers such as Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane were on the rise. Third, he was portrayed by the cognoscenti as wasting the talents of a truly great improviser in Desmond, his lyrical and delicate alto saxophonist.

Such generally perspicacious writers as the British critic Benny Green were merciless with Brubeck. But the band was a huge success all around the world, and toured constantly. The jazz-loving American comedian Mort Sahl once remarked of American cold-war foreign diplomacy that “After John Foster Dulles visits a country, the State Department sends the Brubeck Quartet in to repair the damage.”

The quartet finally disbanded in 1967, rejoining only once, in 1976, for a 25th anniversary tour. Brubeck branched out, concentrating increasingly on large-scale composition, writing ballets – Points on Jazz (1960) entered the repertory of the American Ballet Theatre – a mass, various cantatas, and combinations of jazz musicians and symphony bands. He also began performing with his highly musical sons: Darius, a keyboard player; Chris, a trombonist/bassist; Danny, a drummer; and latterly the youngest, cello-improviser Matthew. He also worked effectively with the saxophonist Jerry Bergonzi in the 80s, and the uncannily Desmond-like Bobby Militello in the 90s.

Brubeck’s landmarks, awards and citations became too numerous to count – he played for presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan and Clinton, appeared at the Reagan-Gorbachev Moscow summit in 1988, and composed a score for Pope John Paul II’s visit to San Francisco in 1987.

All his life, Brubeck continued to regard himself as “a composer who plays the piano”. Though much was made of his piano-playing by his early fans, Brubeck’s solos relied heavily on riff-like block chords and rather relentless dynamics. They became more varied and unpredictable in the later stages of his career and remained so into his 80s. But Brubeck’s real achievement was to blend European compositional ideas, very demanding rhythmic structures, jazz song-forms and improvisation in expressive and accessible ways. His son Chris was to tell the Guardian, “when I hear Chorale, it reminds me of the very best Aaron Copland, something like Appalachian Spring. There’s a sort of American honesty to it.”
The Guardian / John Fordham