You could say my last post on Jazz at the Aquarium went splat! – or maybe sprat! – and ruffled a few scales, as it were. This is because it was spread so far and wide on Facebook, which was neither my doing or my idea, but I’m okay with it. I thought I’d wait for things to settle down and for everyone – including me – to unknot their knickers before writing a follow-up on the responses to …

WARNING – READER DISCRETION ADVISED – MAY CONTAIN RANT, COARSE LANGUAGE and ILL-CONSIDERED HUMOUR 

So, the other day a friend sent me a link to the latest Toronto brainwave in generic jazz promotion, or Jazz-McMarketing, which could be summed up as, “Let’s bring so-called jazz to people who never listen to it, while making sure to present it at unimaginably stupid venues”. In this case, believe it or not, “Jazz at the Ripley’s Aquarium” on the second Friday …

This week brought the momentous news that Gunther Schuller died of leukemia at age 89. He was most certainly one of the giants of twentieth-century American music and just as surely one of the most versatile and wide-ranging of musicians. His work from the late 1940s on as a composer of contemporary classical music alone guarantees his eminence, he’s in all the history texts on the subject and won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1994 orchestral work “Of Reminiscences …

Sometimes bad news comes in waves, as was the case recently when the Toronto jazz scene lost two of its stalwarts – bassist Lenny Boyd, who died on June 6, and drummer Archie Alleyne, who passed on June 8. Both had long careers and there will undoubtedly be forthcoming obituaries detailing their lives and many achievements. I have no intention of doing that here, even if I could, but I would like to share some memories, as each man …

I don’t usually do this sort of thing, but I wanted to revisit Ornette Coleman and yesterday’s article about him, for several reasons.

Firstly, the response from people was very quick, positive and voluminous, so thanks to everybody for their comments and support, this was both gratifying and a little surprising. I say surprising because I wrote the piece pretty quickly, wanting to get it out in one day in the interests of timeliness in this case, and for …

This morning brought the news that jazz legend Ornette Coleman died at age 85, from cardiac arrest. Somewhat surprisingly even to me, I’m having real trouble processing this information, my reaction is mostly one of profound shock and disbelief.

This flies in the face of logic and reason, which is often the case with our feelings. I mean, I know we all have to go eventually, even Ted Williams, and at 85, Ornette was well within the age range …

In 1971, Jimmy Rushing turned seventy and became terminally ill with leukemia. He’d been singing jazz professionally for almost fifty years, first leaving his native Oklahoma as an itinerant blues singer in the early twenties, eventually joining Jelly Roll Morton for a short spell in Los Angeles. He worked his way as far back east as Kansas City, getting in on the ground floor of the seminal, blues-based music teeming from that wide-open town. He sang with Walter Page’s …

It was once said of ex-President Gerald Ford – perhaps unfairly – that he was “too dumb to chew gum and fart at the same time.”

And as Yogi Berra, that undisputed king of syntax-mangling one-liners once said, “Think!? How the hell are you gonna think and hit at the same time?”

Well….Odd as it may sound – or maybe not – I’m finding I can’t think and write at the same time, it’s a case of think …

At the end of February my wife Anna went to visit her sister Fran, who lives in the little town of Courtenay, nestled in the Comox Valley on the east coast of Vancouver Island. It was part holiday, part nursing mission – Fran had to have some surgery done in Victoria and Anna is an excellent care-giver. I went out on March 24th to join them and give Anna a break, staying about sixteen days, which explains why I …

Like many musicians, I’ve had some odd moments in my career, perhaps none odder than hearing the great Irish tenor John McCormack for the first time in a Moscow hotel room about two in the morning. I was with guitarist Oliver Gannon and drummer John Sumner, the three of us well on the way to being in our cups. The occasion was a concert tour of the Soviet Union in September of 1986 with Vancouver saxophonist Fraser McPherson, or …

When it comes to being put in the mood for listening to certain music, I’m ridiculously suggestible. A kettle whistling in the kitchen will make me think of “Five O’Clock Whistle” and the next thing I know, I’m happily listening to Ivie Anderson with the 1940 Duke Ellington band while the kettle boils over, splashing hot water all over the stove. Believe me, it could be worse….. much, much worse. Sometimes the trigger can be more abstract and subliminal, …

The term contrafact has gradually made its way into the jazz lexicon, establishing an increasingly firm toe-hold for itself in recent years. For those lucky enough not to be familiar with it, a “contrafact” is defined in jazz terms as “a composition created by overlaying a new melody line on the harmonic structure of a pre-existing song” – or put more simply, the borrowing of another song’s chord changes to create a new one.

I describe those not …

Surely, Toronto has had no better jazz fan and supporter than Terry Sheard, pictured above at the Prince Edward County Jazz Festival last August. As he will turn 90 this February 25th, he’s also been one of the most enduring. I think Terry might agree that his enjoyment of music has helped keep him young despite his advancing years; something certainly has, because he has more jump than many people a third of his age. He’s very well-known …

The vast repertoire of jazz is mostly made up of two main streams: The Great American Songbook, which came from musical theatre or Tin Pan Alley, and songs or compositions that have come from within the ranks of jazz itself. While rumbling around among all these, it’s common to come across the same prolific contributors over and over again. The show-tune “big boys”, including Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Richard Rodgers and many others …

As I revealed in a much earlier post entitled “Aural Hygiene”, I often combine dental-hygiene appointments with CD-shopping because my favourite record store Atelier Grigorian is right around the corner from my tooth-scraper. I repeated this “jazz S&M double-play” this week with some serendipitous results, which in turn led me to remember some stories. As they preserve so much precious music which would otherwise be lost, jazz records provide an indispensable current linking memory, songs, emotion, important musical developments …

Along with more gender-appropriate gifts, I bought my wife Anna a copy of the 2013 documentary Muscle Shoals for Christmas. I felt slightly guilty about this because I knew I wanted to see it too. On the other hand, Anna’s a big fan of the soul/R&B music which this movie would definitely touch on, and then some. She also really enjoyed the similar music docs Standing In the Shadows of Motown and Twenty Feet From Stardom – how’s that …

Last Friday around midnight, my wife Anna picked me up from the subway after a gig. As I opened the car door to load in my bass, I was hit by a blast furnace of music, not loud, but intense, like a freight-train. A fat, romping beat and a thundering, edgy voice that could only be one guy. As always when I unexpectedly hear great music coming from a radio, I was stunned and just stood there for a …

I’ve been playing the bass for about forty years now and I thank my lucky stars that all of the knowledge I’ve acquired through experience and study has not blunted my ability to partake of music on a purely emotional level. Whether playing or listening, it’s the way music feels – and makes you feel – that counts, and this goes beyond any knowledge, important though that is. No matter what kind, music at its best should move you, …

Hello all – some of you may be wondering why there have been no posts from me for such a long while – has Wallace lost it, gotten lazy, is he suffering from writer’s block?

It was actually none of these. Just before the World Series finished I came down with a nasty cough and chest infection which I walked around functioning with like an idiot before it got really bad and turned into what my newly-appointed respirologist called …

It probably doesn’t speak well for my mental health, but often for no reason I can fathom, I wake up with a particular record deeply embedded in my mind and ears. Almost as though it had been played constantly by jazz elves while I slept, as some kind of weird music-hypnosis therapy. This happened quite early on Saturday morning, when I couldn’t get a Gerry Mulligan record called JERU out of my head even while half asleep. There was …

Last night, I had a craving for the flavour of a simple tomato sauce over pasta, something I haven’t had in a while. It’s not really a summery dish, but then again it hasn’t been all that summery a summer. I set out to make a straightforward Bolognese sauce, made a blunder and ended up with a cross between a Bolognese and a Puttanesca sauce. Much to my surprise and delight, it turned out to be one of the …

Recently, I began an email correspondence with the multi-faceted, New York-based jazz figure Bill Kirchner [1], on whom more later. Bill stumbled across my blog and left some nice comments, then contacted me by email. We’ve been back and forth quite a bit, exchanging thoughts, information and stories. We’re about the same age and while he’s a lot more accomplished than I could ever hope to be, we have a lot in common, including knowing some of the …

One thing leads to another and my recent post about trombonist Eddie Bert touched on the drumming of Osie Johnson, which got me to thinking about him and listening again to some of the many records he played on. I’ve been thinking of writing something on him for a while as he’s long been a great favourite, so here goes.

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Both on records and in person, drummer Osie Johnson was all over the hyperactive New York jazz …

Lester Young and Bill Evans are two examples of the rare breed who achieved an imperishable standing in jazz by creating unique, highly influential styles. Rarer still are those who were beyond category as visionary composers who virtually invented their own musical universe, such as Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk.

These are one-of-a-kind geniuses though, originals who come along once in a generation, maybe even once in a lifetime. But there are mere mortals among us who achieve a …

Fairly late the other night I was trawling around the channels, glass of French red in hand, looking for something to watch. There was a ballgame from Seattle on, but it was already 4-0 Orioles in the fifth inning and it had that look of a yawner. I flipped over to TCM just as host Ben Mankiewicz was introducing Young Man With A Horn from 1950, starring Kirk Douglas (!), Doris Day (!!), Lauren Bacall (!!!) and Hoagy Carmichael …

It’s as well the trombonist Bill Harris actually existed, because not even the most imaginative novelist or jazz fan could have made him up. He was most certainly unique, but that word doesn’t quite do him justice; he was “unique” the way 9/11 was “devastating”, as the JFK assassination was “shocking”, like Rob Ford is “dissolute.” And words such as original, individual, colourful and distinctive, while equally applicable, don’t really do it in his case either. In spite of …

As listeners, we all know what the different musical instruments sound like….or at least we like to think so. Every once in a while though, a player will escape the tonal boundaries of his horn, making it sound like another one, or even like something we’ve never heard before. For example, Lester Young’s tenor saxophone, which seemed to come at the listener as a vapour through an invisible airshaft, sounding more like a French horn than a tenor. Fittingly, …

“There has long been a disturbing tendency among jazz aficionados to regard each innovation in the music as “progress”, a practice that sends the musicians who have been supplanted into the outer darkness” – Whitney Balliett.

I wanted to revisit the above quotation which began Part 1 of this piece, because the process of marginalization Balliett describes applies to few more than James P. Johnson. Johnson was a key pioneer of jazz piano, the founder and widely acknowledged king …

“There has long been a disturbing tendency among jazz aficionados to regard each innovation in the music as “progress”, a practice that sends the musicians who have been supplanted into the outer darkness” –  Whitney Balliett.

The process so neatly described above by Mr. Balliett has bothered me for some time, though I’ve also been guilty of it myself at times, certainly when I was younger. What troubles me the most is the last part about older musicians …

Like many of us, I’m growing a little tired of hearing or thinking about Toronto’s disgraced mayor. But his recent crash off the wagon and skedaddle to a rehab shack somewhere in or near Illinois got me to thinking of something more pleasant, namely the classic Count Basie-Jimmy Rushing blues, “Goin’ to Chicago”.

Basie recorded this a number of times in the ’40s with Jimmy Rushing singing. I love Rushing to death, but my favourite version of this is …

Ben Webster fell under the spell of Coleman Hawkins’ ground-breaking tenor saxophone style early in his career, but eventually discovered himself and largely formed his own style by about 1938. Shortly after this he found a setting as perfect for him as the Count Basie band was for Lester Young – the Duke Ellington Orchestra, from 1940-43. His time with Ellington and especially the exposure to Johnny Hodges further shaped him. Hawkins may have been Webster’s original model, but …

The Name Game.

As if jazz fans don’t feel confused and isolated enough already, there are some snarly name-duplications around just to make matters worse. Take the name Tommy Flanagan, for example. Most jazz fans would think of the pianist, but the general public might think of the Scottish actor. Google is neutral and offers up about an equal number of hits for each, though the actor’s come first. Or Tommy Williams – is it the jazz bassist …

It’s sort of funny, but because I played bass for ten years in Rob McConnell’s big band The Boss Brass (and later, about another decade in his Tentette), some people may think of me as this ace big band bass guy. I suppose it makes sense in a way, they were both very good bands and playing in them became part of my skill set and profile. For sure, I learned a lot about playing in big bands from …

Yesterday brought the sad news that guitarist Gary Benson, a fixture on Toronto’s jazz scene for many years, died at the age of 75. It was not entirely unexpected as Gary had been very ill for some time, but the news will hit those who knew him in the jazz community hard nonetheless. He was a fine player and an even better person, we’ll all miss his even-keeled, modest personality and sense of humour, his jokes and wonderful impersonations. …