The Zodiac Suite
Memphis moves its first jazz festival indoors and keeps it free, and Thelonious Monk's birthday puts "Brilliant Corners" on tonight's turntable. On The Bridge, Mary Lou Williams takes her Zodiac Suite to Town Hall on New Year's Eve, 1945.
LioraMemphis moves its first jazz festival's Saturday indoors to keep it going. Today's record is Thelonious Monk, born on this date. Later, Town Hall on New Year's Eve, 1945, and the one jazz number. It's Saturday. Let's go.
LioraIt's Saturday, October 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: Memphis opens its first jazz festival and moves the whole Saturday indoors to the New
LioraMemphis has a jazz festival for the first time, and the weather has already rearranged it.
The Downtown Memphis Commission says the inaugural Memphis Jazz Festival is taking place October ninth to eleventh, at Peabody Place. Then its own page prints a schedule change. The Commission has altered the schedule, in its words, to ensure a fun and safe experience for all, in response to potential severe weather.
So here is today. The Memphis Jazz Workshop, nine in the morning to half past twelve, is canceled. Every Saturday performance moves to the New Daisy Theatre on Beale Street, and the Commission says those performances are free and open to the public with limited capacity.
LioraThe running order, as the Commission prints it. DJ Digital Tech spins between sets from one o'clock. The Alex Upton Trio at half past one. Joe Restivo Four at twenty to three. Henry Conerway the Third at ten to four. Dear Silas at five. Then Theo Croker, ten past six to seven.
At nine there is a jazz jam at The Dame in the Hotel Pontotoc, which the page says proceeds as planned, hosted by Henry Conerway.
Two. Listen to This: Thelonious Monk was born on this date in 1917
LioraThelonious Sphere Monk was born one hundred nine years ago today, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The Library of Congress keeps the date in a database field. October tenth, 1917.
So today's record is "Brilliant Corners." Craft Recordings has it on vinyl at twenty five ninety nine, and a one step pressing at ninety nine dollars, four thousand numbered copies, cut all analog from the original master tapes by Bernie Grundman. Craft gives the original release as April 1957, on Riverside, and says the album was among the first fifty recordings put in the National Recording Registry, in 2003.
LioraThe tip is in the Library's own essay on that record, by Monk's biographer Robin Kelley. Go to "Pannonica." It opens with Monk playing the melody on a celeste he spotted in the studio, set perpendicular to the piano, so he could play it with his right hand and chord the piano with his left.
One more, from Blue Note yesterday. Joshua Redman shared "God Bless the Child," with Gabrielle Cavassa on the main melody, from his Sonny Rollins tribute album, out November twentieth.
Now go back eighty one years. Tonight on The Bridge: Town Hall, New Year's Eve, 1945. Mary Lou Williams takes her Zodiac Suite onto that stage, and by her own account everything goes all right until the one jazz number. Silas has the story.
Three. The Bridge: New Year's Eve, 1945. Mary Lou Williams takes her Zodiac Suite to Town Hall
LioraOne true story from this music's history, every day. Silas tells it, I ask the questions. Silas, where are we?
SilasNew York. December 31st, 1945. New Year's Eve, at Town Hall. On stage, a chamber-sized orchestra, with Ben Webster on tenor sax. At the piano, the woman who wrote the music: Mary Lou Williams. Her Zodiac Suite. Twelve movements, one for each sign.
Go back a few years. In early 1943 she had moved into an apartment at 63 Hamilton Terrace, on Sugar Hill in Harlem. It quickly became a gathering place for the young players building bebop. Her papers are at Rutgers, and the archive there names Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Tadd Dameron as frequent visitors.
LioraWhat went on up there?
SilasIn her own words, "Monk and the kids would come to my apartment every morning around four." They'd play and trade ideas until noon or later. Monk would bring the same tune back for weeks. She remembered asking him, "Why do you keep playing the same thing over and over?" His answer, as she told it: "I'm trying to see if it's a hit. It'll stay with you if it's a hit."
Her own suite had started, by one account, around 1942, after she borrowed an astrology book from someone in her band. In 1945 she introduced the movements one at a time on her own radio show, on WNEW. By June a good part was written, and she recorded a trio version at Moe Asch's studio.
LioraHow does a trio piece get to Town Hall?
SilasTwo men. Milton Orent, an arranger at NBC, gave her a crash course in modern classical composition and orchestration, and together they rescored the suite for a chamber orchestra. The other, Barney Josephson, owned Cafe Society, the club where she was a regular. He paid for a concert. In her words, "Barney Josephson agreed to give the concert for me at Town Hall, and I decided to use oboe, flute, horn, tenor sax, ten or twelve strings, piano, bass and drums."
Rehearsal time is short. Most of it goes to fixing mistakes in the written parts, and the classical players are uneasy with the jazz rhythms.
LioraSo how does the concert go?
SilasMary Lou Williams told it herself, in 1954. "Everything went all right until we got to the special arrangement of Roll 'Em." She called it "our only jazz number." "The long, drawn-out strings threw some of the other musicians," she said. "I think the conductor lost the place, and for a moment I thought we'd had it."
LioraThe jazz number. Of all things.
SilasAfterward, she said, she was sick for about a week and couldn't work. She said Josephson had paid to have the concert recorded, and when she went back for the records, "for the first time in the history of the hall, the records had been stolen." Another source says "the recording remained unavailable until its mid-1980s release on Vintage Jazz Classics." The sources don't say if those are the same discs.
Rutgers says this concert and a bigger one at Carnegie Hall six months later "were perceived as being unsuccessful at the time." Her own account is milder: one bad moment. By one account, after those two concerts, the orchestra version was never played again in her lifetime. The pianist Aaron Diehl has since recorded the complete orchestral suite.
LioraMonk's test for a hit was whether it stays with you. By that test, I'd say she wrote one.
That's The Bridge. Back to today, right after this.
Four. On the Road: Marcus Gilmore's New Orchestra holds the Village Vanguard
LioraTonight, coast to coast.
Tonight's ticket is in New York.
The Village Vanguard has Marcus Gilmore's New Orchestra, eight and ten, forty five dollars. Joel Ross on vibraphone, David Virelles on piano, Ekep Nkwelle on voice. The club's own box office shows no advance tickets left for either set, with the door hold untouched. One drink minimum.
Now the sweep.
In New Orleans, Preservation Hall has six sets tonight, two bands, from half past two to a quarter to nine. Every one of them reads sold out.
In Seattle, Jazz Alley has Ottmar Liebert and Luna Negra, half past seven and half past nine. Forty nine dollars, with a twelve fifty handling fee inside it.
In Oakland, Yoshi's has Musiq Soulchild. The early set is sold out. Half past nine is still on sale, eighty four.
LioraIn Nashville, Rudy's Jazz Room has three bills. A Dolly tribute at half past five, the Don Aliquo Quartet at eight, and the Jason Johnson Quartet at eleven for ten dollars.
Five. One More Note: One day's log at Decca, October 10, 1951, where Les Brown cut four songs in a row whose
LioraOctober tenth, 1951. One day's log at Decca.
The UC Santa Barbara archive has the date index. Horace Henderson's orchestra cut "Lido Walk" and "Hot Rock." Floyd Smith cut "Gloomy Evening" and "Floydynasty."
Then Les Brown and his Band of Renown, four masters in a row. "You're Blase." "You're Driving Me Crazy." "You're the Cream in My Coffee." "You're an Old Smoochie."
Four songs in one afternoon, and every title starts with the same word.
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 Saturday. I'm Liora. See you tomorrow.