Sixteen Minutes of Honeysuckle Rose
The obituaries fill in Cassandra Wilson's record, from a birth name to two Grammys to a Blue Note year the sources still argue about. Then Carnegie Hall, January 1938, where a publicity idea turns into sixteen minutes of one Fats Waller tune.
LioraThe obituaries fill in Cassandra Wilson, from a birth name to two Grammys. Two represses land tomorrow, and two more records follow the week after. And Carnegie Hall, 1938, sixteen minutes of one Fats Waller tune. It's Thursday. Let's go.
LioraIt's Thursday, September 10th. This is The Daily Quintet. I'm Liora. Five stories from the world of jazz, in about ten minutes. Here we go.
One. The Lead: The obituaries fill in the life behind Cassandra Wilson's death: Cassandra Marie Fowlkes
LioraToday, the life behind a death we reported last week.
Cassandra Wilson died September 2nd at her home in Jackson, Mississippi, at 70. Some obituary listings still give September 1st, so we carry both.
Here is what the obituaries add. Her birth name was Cassandra Marie Fowlkes, born December 4th, 1955, in the same Jackson she died in. She was a founding member of the M-Base Collective, with the saxophonist Steve Coleman. Then Blue Note, and the sources split on the year: WBGO says 1992, DownBeat says 1993. Out of that signing came the landmark album, Blue Light 'Til Dawn.
LioraShe sang the lead in Wynton Marsalis's Blood on the Fields, the first jazz work to win the Pulitzer Prize. Two Grammys, for New Moon Daughter and for 2008's Loverly. Time magazine named her America's Best Singer in 2001. In 2022 the National Endowment for the Arts made her a Jazz Master, a twenty five thousand dollar award, for work that wove blues, country and folk into jazz. More than twenty albums of her own, and records with Angelique Kidjo, Charlie Haden and Luther Vandross.
Two dates before we go. The Denton Arts and Jazz Festival opens tomorrow at the North Texas Fairgrounds: Tom Braxton and Lin Rountree Friday, the Grant Sabin Trio Saturday, Brave Combo Sunday. And Pittsburgh's International Jazz Festival takes the 19th and 20th at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center. No performers named yet.
Two. Listen to This: Blue Light 'Til Dawn, played front to back and then from the top again
LioraToday's record comes out of the Lead. Blue Light 'Til Dawn, Cassandra Wilson, on Blue Note. WBGO calls it the landmark album.
The tip. Play it in the order the record gives you, front to back, nothing shuffled. Then play the first track once more. Same track, heard from the other end.
Now the release desk. International Anthem has four titles moving. Two represses reach stores tomorrow, the 11th: Anna Butterss's Mighty Vertebrate, and Daniel Villarreal's Lados B. A week later, on the 18th, Jeremiah Chiu's In Electric Time, and The Closest Thing to Silence, from Ariel Kalma, Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer.
LioraCarnegie Hall, January sixteenth, 1938. Benny Goodman is twenty-eight, already billed as the King of Swing, and the whole night starts as a publicity idea. Out of it came sixteen minutes of one Fats Waller tune. The scholar who wrote the book calls that stretch perhaps among the least successful music of the night, and the most important thing that happened. Sekou has the story.
Three. The Bridge: Carnegie Hall, January 16th, 1938, and sixteen minutes of one Fats Waller tune that the
LioraOne true story from this music's history, every day. Sekou tells it, I ask the questions. Sekou, where are we?
SekouNew York City. Carnegie Hall. The evening of January sixteenth, 1938. Benny Goodman is twenty-eight, already billed as the King of Swing. And the whole night starts as a publicity idea.
LioraWhose idea?
SekouDepends who you ask. The Library of Congress credits Goodman's publicist, Wynn Nathanson, who brought in the impresario Sol Hurok. Catherine Tackley, the scholar who wrote the book on this concert, says it was publicity for the Camel Caravan radio show. The critic Whitney Balliett wrote that Goodman's first answer was, "You must be out of your mind."
One thing to set down first. This is not the first jazz concert at Carnegie Hall. The Hall's own history puts jazz in that building in 1912, with James Reese Europe and the Clef Club, and calls W. C. Handy's 1928 debut there the first true jazz concert. What holds up is narrower. This is the first time people sit in that hall to listen to swing instead of dance to it.
LioraSo what's the story of the night?
SekouThe middle of the program. A section called "Twenty Years of Jazz," and then a jam session, the longest item of the evening. One tune, Fats Waller's "Honeysuckle Rose." About sixteen minutes of it.
Then look who walks out. Count Basie at the piano, three choruses. Lester Young on tenor. Buck Clayton on trumpet. Walter Page, Freddie Green. From Ellington's band, Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney. Gene Krupa in Jo Jones's drum chair. Four white, seven Black.
LioraIn 1938.
SekouIn 1938, in that hall, in front of a paying audience. And Tackley makes two points about it that sit oddly together. Musically, she calls the jam session perhaps one of the least successful aspects of the night. Historically, she calls it the most significant, for jazz and for integration.
She notes how little contemporary comment there was about the mixed bandstand. She suggests that silence may itself measure the strategy's success. Her argument, not a fact.
And the band itself was not integrated. Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton played in the Trio and the Quartet, a special turn beside an all-white orchestra. Fletcher Henderson, in July 1939, was the first Black musician permanently employed in the main band.
LioraAnd the reviews?
SekouMixed. The Library of Congress says that plainly.
A producer named Albert Marx, married to Helen Ward, Goodman's former singer, paid to have the concert taken down, a gift for his wife, with a second set of discs for Goodman.
Goodman's set sat in a closet in his apartment for twelve years. Then someone in his family found it. Two Library of Congress essays name two different people, a sister-in-law and a daughter, and neither gives her name.
Columbia released it in 1950, produced by George Avakian. It is described as one of the first long-playing records to sell a million, and as the first live album to do so, on the authority of Columbia's own producer. Tackley says that album sustained Goodman's career at a moment when bebop had gone past him.
Then in 1998, better masters turned up. The next year Phil Schaap put out an edition that restored previously omitted portions of expanded solos by Harry Carney, Freddie Green, and Buck Clayton.
LioraSixteen minutes the scholar calls perhaps among the least successful music of the night. And the part history kept. That's The Bridge. Back to today, right after this.
Four. On the Road: The ticket is the Roy Hargrove Big Band's monthly residency at The Jazz Gallery in New
LioraTonight, coast to coast.
Tonight's ticket first.
If I had one ticket tonight, it's New York. The Jazz Gallery has the Roy Hargrove Big Band, the monthly residency, sets at seven and nine. General seating thirty eight fifty, cabaret forty nine, livestream twenty two fifty. Come at five and the same room opens Steven Sussman's exhibition, "Jazz, Seen," free.
LioraNow the sweep. In Seattle, Jazz Alley opens a four night run with the Joshua Redman Quartet, one set at seven thirty. In New Orleans, Preservation Hall runs the Preservation All-Stars featuring Wendell Brunious four times, first set at five, last at eight forty five. In Oakland, Yoshi's has Dominique Fils-Aimé at seven thirty, billed as one of today's leading voices in vocal jazz. In Nashville, Rudy's Jazz Room runs its Hot Club Happy Hour, Gypsy Jazz Thursdays, at six, then the Melvin Macias Afro-Cuban Jazz Quintet at nine. And in Cambridge, the Regattabar has Duochrome at seven, thirty five general.
One room quiet tonight. Jazz St. Louis lists nothing. Its September calendar is empty, and its list view returned no results through March 10th.
Five. One More Note: Roy Ayers was born in Los Angeles on this date in 1940, eighty-six years ago today
LioraSeptember 10th belongs to a vibraphone player.
Roy Ayers was born on this date in 1940, in Los Angeles. Eighty-six years ago today. Jazz funk, acid jazz, neo soul: he helped shape all three.
Put on something with vibes in it.
Outro
LioraThat's the Quintet. If today's show earned it, follow The Daily Quintet wherever you listen.
The Daily Quintet is an AI-crafted production, researched and checked by humans. Every listing you heard came from the venue or the festival's own organizer.
That's your Thursday. I'm Liora. See you tomorrow.