BIRTH OF THE COOL REVISITED ... LEGENDS OF JAZZ WITH RAMSEY LEWIS ... DON CHEADLE AS MILES DAVIS ... CHARLIE PARKER SPECIAL ON BBC ... MONK AND COLTRANE AT CARNEGIE HALL 1957: REDISCOVERED ON TAPE ...

Birth of the Cool Revisited. If you like the kind of music that still sees its roots in the formative age of modern jazz, 1940-1970, things seem to be looking up in the spring of 2006. This past Tuesday, March 14, e.g., trumpet player Marcus Printup led members of the CNY Jazz Orchestra "through an evening devoted to recreating the landmark Miles Davis Birth of the Cool album," at the Oncenter Carrier Theater in New York.

Joining the group for the occasion, to "help fill out the unique instrumentation called for," was Howard Johnson — "the world's greatest jazz tubaist" and former Saturday Night Live bandleader on TV. The tuba parts at the original recording sessions — all in New York in January 1949, April 1949, and March 1950 — were played by John Barber. According to Gerry Mulligan, in a liner note he wrote when the recordings were "finally being released on one set" in 1971, Barber "used to transcribe Lester Young tenor choruses and play them on tuba. What a great player." It's great too to hear about the CNY Jazz Orchestra revisiting all this in March 2006 — only five days shy of exactly 56 years after the last of the original recording dates.

Legends of Jazz with Ramsey Lewis. An even better piece of spring 2006 good news is that starting in April: "Jazz, once a staple of early black-and-white TV programing, is returning to the tube with what is described as the first weekly national network jazz series in 40 years." Legends of Jazz on PBS "will feature conversations with and studio performances by a range of jazz stars." The show will be hosted by Ramsey Lewis — the pianist "best known for his 1965 jazz-pop instrumental hits ‘The 'In' Crowd' and ‘Hang on Sloopy.'" It derives from Lewis's two-hour weekly radio program, also called Legends of Jazz, and syndicated to nearly 70 US stations, with a weekly audience of some five million people.

An initial 13 installments of the TV show have been shot. Just a few of the jazz legends dealt with are Tony Bennett, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Castro-Neves, Chick Corea, Benny Golson, Roy Hargrove, Al Jarreau, Pat Metheny, Marcus Miller, Lee Ritenour, Clark Terry, and Phil Woods. An "additional 13 episodes are greenlighted for next year."

According to Ramsey Lewis, not all the listeners he already has for his radio show "are diehard jazz fans ... Some people are just curious about quality music. We researched broadening the radio idea to television, and we think interest will explode." Whatever may blossom in bigger markets, it is a cause for vast celebration that there will once again be a weekly jazz series more or less on mainstream TV, in the democracy in America that gave birth to the blues.

(Except underline "more or less on mainstream TV" in the last sentence. Modern jazz remains a minority taste, whatever your race, creed, or color. Check your local PBS listings for just when Legends of Jazz with Ramsey Lewis will be appearing in your area. The time slots are not always so mainstream. In some places the local PBS station will not be broadcasting the show at all. And note that in birdhop's own "Buffalo.Toronto" region, e.g., the show will be appearing on WNED HD — at 6 PM in the evening starting April 1, and 3 AM in the morning, with each weekly episode conveniently repeated each evening and morning of the week — but not on the still more mainstream WNED TV. In any case, it's a start — and a vast improvement over the way things have been for the past 40 years.)

Don Cheadle as Miles Davis. The spring 2006 good news just carries on. It has also just been reported that Sony Pictures "is hoping to release a biopic of Miles Davis ... with Oscar-nominated actor Don Cheadle being tapped to play the jazz legend ... Members of Davis's family broke the news to reporters after the musician was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame." According to Davis's nephew, Vince Wilburn, "Antoine Fuqua, best known for directing 2001's Training Day," is "in discussions to direct." But first, as Mr. Wilburn put it, "we have to get a script."

Don Cheadle seems a good bet for taking on the vast challenges of portraying Miles Dewey Davis III on the big screen. Readers of such literary works as Miles's own autobiography with Quincy Troupe or John Szwed's more recent Miles biography can appreciate just how vast the challenges will be. Don Cheadle is neither quite as handsome nor quite as black as Miles Davis was. But something about him does seem to plug into something right. And Cheadle's recent performances in Crash, Hotel Rwanda, and Traffic suggest that he has the ambition to dig into the literary works and other surviving memories for the many nuances in the Davis persona.

The acting assignment here would also seem not quite as challenging as the one Forest Whitaker faced in Clint Eastwood's Bird movie of 1988. Miles Davis was in some ways a successful version of the great modern jazz innovator Charlie Parker. Miles himself rightly scorned this concept in his autobiography, but it still makes some sense. Starting as Bird's most favored apprentice, the much more high-middle-class Miles Dewey Davis III (with his dentist father, who owned a country estate with horses) went on to live almost twice as long, make much more money, and become much more famous among many more people — while still retaining some of the complex inner torment that helped drive Bird's career to its unequaled artistic heights.

It probably means something as well that the new Miles Davis movie project was made known "to reporters after the musician was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame." Miles is the only jazz great to be so honored — a sign of the cachet his name still has for hip young people today, born after the formative age of modern jazz had largely come to an end. Without really knowing anything about the business, you might guess that it ought to be a bit easier to make a broadly popular Hollywood movie about Miles Davis than it was in Charlie Parker's always difficult and struggling case. Finding a good script is no doubt the crucial next step. Meanwhile, Don Cheadle as Miles Davis, up on the big screen, is another great thing to look forward to down the road.

Charlie Parker special on BBC. Some further good news from a while back, about how the "BBC is filming a special on Charlie Parker" himself, is still hanging in the spring 2006 air. In the summer of 2005 a BBC crew was filming in New York on the project. Then it showed up in Bird's Kansas City hometown for what would have been his 85th birthday on August 29. (The crew had also "filmed at the Brecon Jazz Fest in the UK which featured a tribute to Bird" last year.)

We've been trying to find out about the fate of this project, and have finally tracked down a definitive report by Llew Walker in the UK. Apparently the resulting documentary, The Charlie Parker Story was broadcast on BBC FOUR at 9 PM on Friday, January 20, 2006, followed by Clint Eastwood's Bird.

As reviewed by Walker on his excellent Bird Lives website: "The documentary follows a chronological layout with music samples, acted parts, snatches of interviews from the several Charlie Parker radio interviews, interspersed with interviews with many eminent Parker scholars. Gary Giddens appears and, as usual is wonderfully enthusiastic ... Chuck Haddix, another Parker academic is also present and his discussions are full of details about Charlie's life that underlie the vigorous research Haddix carries out in the libraries and archives of Kansas City."

Unfortunately for those of us who live elsewhere, Walker also reports that: "Apparently there are no plans to release this documentary outside the UK and neither are there plans for a DVD version. If this changes, I will post the information here." Intriguingly enough, Walker concludes with: "As an aside, to celebrate the first showing of this, BBC4 ran Clint Eastwood's movie, Bird, after the screening of the documentary, and sadly, it looks extremely dated these days." (Which may give Don Cheadle as Miles Davis some extra room to grow?)

November 1957: Monk and Coltrane at Carnegie Hall ... rediscovered on tape. In the spring of 2006 we at birdhop have also finally caught up with a modern jazz revival that began in February 2005. Larry Applebaum at the Library of Congress was "thumbing through some VOA [Voice of America] tapes awaiting digitization," when he "noticed several reels labeled ‘Carnegie Hall Jazz 1957.'" One of the tape boxes "had a handwritten note on the back that said ‘T. Monk'."

This proved to be a recording of a brilliant November 29, 1957 performance by Thelonious Monk (piano), John Coltrane (tenor saxophone), Ahmed Abdul-Malik (bass), and Shadow Wilson (drums). It took place at the end of Monk and Coltrane's now legendary five-month stint at the Five Spot Café in deep downtown Manhattan, which had started in the summer of 1957 — an odyssey in the history of modern jazz for which the previous recorded documentation had been slight and imperfect at best.

The newly discovered tapes were released as a CD by Blue Note at the end of September 2005. After listening to this CD off and on over several weeks in the late winter and early spring of 2006, you start to think that maybe it should replace one of the current selections on the birdhop Top 10 Modern Jazz Albums list. (And who knows, maybe some day it will — edging out Monk's Brilliant Corners, e.g.) In the early 1960s the great trombonist J.J. Johnson apparently told jazz journalist Ira Gitler: "Since Charlie Parker, the most electrifying sound I've heard in contemporary jazz was Coltrane playing with Monk at the Five Spot." When you hear the new Blue Note CD thelonious monk quartet with john coltrane at carnegie hall, you can start to see what J.J. Johnson meant.

The nicely put together booklet accompanying the CD explains that when the Monk quartet with Coltrane started out at the Five Spot in the middle of July 1957, it was "very clumsy, very obscure, very maladroit, and then each night it got a little more relaxed." By the time it played Carnegie Hall for one night at the end of November, the "band was remarkably tight." Both Monk and Coltrane knew exactly what they were doing, and the accompaniment from Ahmed Abdul-Malik and Shadow Wilson was altogether apt and adroit. The tunes included such classic Monk compositions as "Monk's Mood," "Crepuscule With Nellie," "Epistrophy," and "Blue Monk." Monk was always interesting, and Coltrane inspired authentic shock and awe.

The months at the Five Spot were an upbeat turning point for the careers of both Monk and Coltrane. But for the most part they went their separate ways. Monk's most stable tenor saxophone partner in his subsequent 1960s quartets was probably Charlie Rouse, who did have some unique talent for playing Monk's music effectively. Coltrane rejoined Miles Davis, and then went on from there in his own right.

After the initial awkwardness, however, John Coltrane in the New York summer and fall of 1957 (also the year that the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers announced they'd be moving to the West coast) gave Thelonious Monk's remarkable tunes a stunning interpretation that could never quite be equaled again by anyone. Up to now this was only completely clear to the comparative handfuls of people who had hung out at the Five Spot at the time — an "elemental place" much frequented by "painters who were soon to become famous in the area of Abstract Expressionism," where "you might see a Bowery bum mugging if you looked out through the plate-glass window" [Ira Gitler]. But thanks to the 2005 discovery of the Carnegie Hall tapes by Larry Applebaum at the Library of Congress (egged on by Coltrane biographer Lewis Porter), in the spring of 2006 we can all start to see the point.

Coda. "Spring is Here" by Rodgers and Hart is not, in our book at least, one of the great standards of all time. But you can hear John Coltrane play what some see as "another of Coltrane's favorite standards ... a hugely thoughtful and technically adroit reading, ranging without strain across two and a half octaves" [Do Whan Kim from Seoul, South Korea] on the current Standard Coltrane album available at Amazon.com. Coltrane recorded the tune in 1958, not long after his stint with Monk. And there are some interesting further details in the reviews on the Amazon site. Check out the cduniverse and list.fm sites too.

On a final note, the PBS program History Detectives is running a spring 2006 episode on one of Bird's notorious pawn-shop adventures. Here is the promotional blurb: "A woman in Oakland, California, owns a beautiful old alto saxophone that belonged to her father and according to family legend was once owned by the legendary jazz musician Charlie ‘Bird' Parker. Her late father, a white musician, told her that when they lived in Portland, Oregon, Charlie Parker came to a practice session without his horn. The story goes that when her father chided Parker for selling his instrument, Bird said, ‘If you want the horn so much, here's the pawn ticket.' But is the story true? Did these two musicians ever meet? Would Charlie Parker abandon his horn?" Modern jazz fans will already know that the answer to the last question is yes of course he would, and often did. But the show may be worth looking at anyway. In birdhop's own region, e.g., it will appear on WNED HD, Friday, April 7, 2006 at 1:00 PM. Check local listings elsewhere.