The Beast received gracious permission to repost a recent Facebook conversation between jazz/improvisational music artists/promoters about the scene in L.A. -- or lack thereof:
Gregg Bendian Conducts Some L.A. Friends at his 50th Birthday Bash at the Baked Potato (7/18/13 -- read Greg Burk's review of the show here)
[photo by Sander Roscoe Wolff]
GREG HOTCHKISS: Is it just me? or is the greater Los Angeles improvisational music scene practically non existent? Mr. T's Bowl, Cafe Metropol, Royal T's, Rocco's various venues,il Corral, DONE! Steuart Liebig, Kris Tiner, Jeff Kaiser, Dan Clucas, Wayne Peet, Anthony Shuduck, Jeff Gauthier, Alan Cook, John Fumo, Nels Cline, Nathan Hubbard, Jeremy Drake, G.E. Stinson, Noah Phillips, Joe Berradi, Tony Atherton, Vince Meghrouni, Bill Barrett...Those were just the names of the musicians I knew off the top of my head. There's dozens more who could be found playing through the city any given time of the month. I know Nels Cline, Ben Wendel and the other Kneebody members and Rocco Somazzi moving out of the area had a little to do with this, but I'm I missing something? Is it just me? Is there a website I'm missing?
As a person who was so deeply impacted by the music I've seen in L.A. over the last 13 years I feel bad that younger kids falling in love with Jazz will miss out on it. As a person who was so deeply impacted by the music I've seen in L.A. over the last 13 years I feel bad that younger kids falling in love with Jazz will miss out on it.
G.E. Stinson (L) with Nels Cline
[photo by Peak]
G.E. STINSON: I've been in L.A. since 1982. Never seen a worse time in terms of venues. It's easier for me to get gigs in Oakland, Berkeley, Sacramento and other places up north than L.A. Eagle Rock Center for the Arts, The Blue Whale and a few other places are happening -- but scattered and few. Rocco is in Oakland running Duende. There are some other underground venues like The Handbag Factory and The Wulf -- slightly different music but still interesting. Also, Grand Star Jazz in Chinatown. Are you on the Angel City Jazz mailing list?
BEN WENDEL: Hey Greg - the L.A. creative music scene is always going up and down. The main issue is so few venues to play in - there are actually a lot of musicians from NYC coming through and/or moving to L.A. so I know there's potential. I'm working on building up a small, humble series at a new theater in Santa Monica called The Broad Stage -- they have thankfully allowed me to increase jazz programming there. Next season in there 120 seat black box theater, there will be folks like Gerald Clayton, Dan Tepfer, WildUp!, Julia Holter, etc. The honest answer is it takes individual like Rocco, etc. giving their time for the love of the music and creating a scene - you could be one of those people if you wanted but it's really just a labor of love.
Dan Tepfer (L) with Ben Wendel
GH: Thanks Ben. I was entertaining the idea of opening a venue/record store/creative empowerment center. Experience has shown me that Orange County isn't the place to do it and I don't have the desire to try it in L.A.
ADAM BENJAMIN: Orange County could really use a place like that. If you can find a relatively central location with low low overhead and institutional support, I believe it could succeed.
JOE BERARDI: Hey Greg, you're not wrong overall, but there are still a few things going on. Eagle Rock Center is still active every month. I am doing a trio with Steuart Liebig and Kira Vollman on Aug 4. Steuart and I just played at Battery Books + Music in South Pasadena (Rich West's store) and I just did a solo show at the Folly Bowl in Altadena on Saturday. These are just my recent experiences. Everybody else can fill you in on theirs. Point being, it's not quite done, but definitely less than it was. Things can still pick up, there are still players out there and new ones coming in all the time. Cheers!
NATHAN HUBBARD: Thanks for the shout Greg. I live in San Diego, was in AZ for about two years (2011-2012). I've played most of the venues you mentioned plus Line Space Line, Cryptonights at Club Tropical, Dangerous Curves, Chris Garcia's series at Harbor College and a few others. I've tried get up to L.A. to play as much as I can, both with groups from S.D. as well as playing with as many of the amazing people in L.A. as I can. That being said, it usually works out to once (or maybe twice) a year for the last 13 or so years. There has also been a lot of work (by myself and members of the Trummerflora Collective) to bring L.A. people down to perform in S.D.
Nathan Hubbard
NH: I agree w G.E. and Joe, things are slow with venues, but there are plenty of great things happening. Just look at G.E's soundcloud or Steuart's bandcamp, plenty of new music and all sorts of exciting collaborations. San Diego is going thru a similar situation on the venue front. It will swing back. As for other spots I don't think got mentioned yet, check Gatsby Books in LB (Scott Heustis is doing great things) and Rich West's Battery Books.
SCOTT HEUSTIS: Yes. The Book Shop circuit. Gatsby Books and Rich West's Battery Books. The Story of Open is unfortunately out of business. Even the Eagle Rock Center For The Arts used to be a library. I'm working on more venues. It's a DIY world buddy. All adventurous improvisors should cultivate at least one venue each. It's not hard to do. Instead of crying about the weakness of the LA scene, I'm creating one myself. And sharing it with everyone.
Gatsby Books
ROCCO SOMAZZI: Good conversation. For me the hard part is trying to develop an audience that will support a venue presenting this kind of music. It's easy to find a space to present music but if nobody comes to listen to it, it's very hard to make it last. I've been trying for 15 years to set-up a sustainable music presenting venue and the closest I ever got to it is my current venue in Oakland. LA has an amazing music scene but the audiences are notoriously fickle. Maybe there is too much other stuff going on all the time or maybe the venues are so spread apart it's hard to get to them.
This week, two Los Angeles jazz world mainstays -- saxophonist Arthur Blythe and the performance space The World Stage -- need a little help and support:
On June the 3rd, 2013, Arthur went into the USC Keck Center to have a large benign tumor removed from his right Kidney. The operation was serious, as Arthur spent one week after the procedure in an induced coma in their ICU unit. His health has been a challenge for him for several years now. The Parkinson's (Arthur has been living with Parkinson's for 8 years) has developed more rapidly and at this time he is in a rehabilitation center in Lancaster, CA. His goal is to be back home (?) within the next 30 days. The recent operation he underwent diminished his ability to walk and swallow foods. He is fighting hard each day to gain his strength back.
Please understand for Arthur to ask for help from his friends and fans, of his person and his music, was a difficult question he pondered over for some time. Arthur is a man of great pride and humility. His respect for people and their daily struggles has kept him from announcing his own dilemma for several years. Now he is facing an immediate need to procure a new neurologist to evaluate him after his recent surgery.
Arthur needs to remain in a secure place economically in order to fight Parkinson's disease. Your donationswill be a main source of his recovery. All the monies raised will be used to help him in his quest to regain his health and to stay current with his basic bills. Thank you in advance, with all sincerity and profound humility... from Arthur himself. Updates on his condition and the progress of this fund drive will be posted regularly. All of your good wishes and words will be read to Arthur.
8:30pm -12:30am
8:30pm The Charles Owens Ensemble
9:30pm Dwight Trible w/ John Beasley, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson,
Trevor Ware & Paul Lagaspi 11:00pm The Munyungo Jackson Group
SATURDAY
July 20th 8:30pm-12:30am 8:30pm Phil Ranelin All-Stars w/ Richard Grant, Jacques Lesure & James Leary 9:30pm Michael Session Ensemble w/ Steve Smith, Rembert James & Makela Session 11:00pm JMD and The Underground Railroad
ALSO APPEARING
The Great Poets w/ Peter J. Harris, Kamau Daa'ood, Michael Datcher and more!
$15.00 Donation
The World Stage Performance & Art Gallery
4344 Degnan Blvd., Leimert Park, LA (323) 293-2451
We really need your support! PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD! Share With all your friends!
Soon after Chet Baker's "Let's Get Lost" faded on the loudspeaker, the soft, high whisper of the late
Don Cherry filled the Central Library's Mark Taper Auditorium. "I grew up in the ghetto in L.A.," the jazz composer/multi-instrumentalist remembered over a short-film prologue to the ALOUD series event Complete Communion: A Musical Tribute to Don Cherry. "In the ghetto, you don't really feel nature. There was so much pollution, you couldn't see the mountains. But I lived on 113th Street, right next to the Watts Towers, which was being built by this Italian man [Simon Rodia] from scraps he found around the neighborhood. He didn't know why he was building it, he just had to do it."
Cherry might have well been speaking of his own musical path, which in part involved seeking out the organic worlds that were denied him as a child. Although most associated with free-jazz titan Ornette Coleman, Cherry's contributions to multicultural cross-pollination in music, art and poetry were, in their own quiet way, years ahead of their time. He was a pioneer of what we now know as "World Music" and spent years traversing the globe and sitting humbly at the feet of itinerant musicians to learn their techniques. Cherry's omnivorous vision wasn't just influential in jazz; it dripped down though the years to the DNA of groups like the Freestyle Fellowship, the Breakestra, and Fishbone. And his is a lineage that keeps on giving, covering the realms of jazz (David Ornette Cherry), R&B (Neneh Cherry), and pop (Eagle-Eye Cherry).
DJ Mark Maxwell (L) interviews David Ornette Cherry
Cherry was also a proponent of carrying jazz's liberating possibilities into the spheres of education at a time where school jazz bands weren't as common—or as endangered—as they are now; ALOUD curator Louise Steinman noted as much in her introduction to Monday night's show: "I can only imagine how thrilled he would be to have a tribute concert for him in a public library." Many of the attendees in the audience could attest to Cherry's pedagogical influence, including trombonist Phil Ranelin (who actually taught a course at the Leimert Park's World Stage called "Who Was Don Cherry?"), radio host Leroy Downs, TV host/Dominguez Hills professor Chet Hanley, poet Kamau Daa'ood and writer/community organizer Jeffrey Winston. Cherry himself skipped class from Fremont High School just so he could play in Jefferson High's swing band and study with its influential music teacher Samuel R. Browne alongside other future L.A. free-thinkers like Horace Tapscott, Hampton Hawes, and Eric Dolphy. He later met drummer Billy Higgins when they were in reform school. Both would become a part of the groundbreaking Ornette Coleman quintet that would shake up patrons at Culver City's Hillcrest Club in 1958 and go on to a legendary residency at New York's Five Spot a year later.
Cherry's weapon of choice was the pocket trumpet—sort of like a miniature cornet—and its toreador-spiced tone blasted forth from Tapscott almunus Steve Smith on the opening song "Complete Communion." Veteran saxophonist Justo Almario, primarily known for his Latin Jazz credentials, demonstrated a firm grasp of the avant-garde; his "out" playing on "Golden Hearts" and "March of the Hobbits" was wonderfully aggressive and jarring while still encompassing the skittering Bebop lyricism that was always in the mix in Cherry's music. Roberto Miguel Miranda demonstrated a similar dexterity, switching from congas on the mathematically busy funk of "Brown Rice" and the chant-heavy "Rhumba Multikulti" to acoustic bass on "Cherryco" and "Manhattan Cry," where his pizzicato solos didn't thump or pluck but floated out of the air like amoebic globules.
The Organic Roots Ensemble (L to R): Justo Almario, Ollie Elder Jr., Steve Smith, Don Littleton, Roberto Miguel Miranda (obscured), Jan Cherry, John L. Price
The three extended medleys of Cherry's compositions were layered with sit-down interviews conducted by wild-haired KPFK radio host Mark Maxwell with Cherry's daughter, violinist/vocalist Jan Cherry, and son David Ornette Cherry, who related how his father's music comforted him as a child during the Watts Rebellion of 1965. Jan Cherry admitted that her father's musical approach was a shock to her classically trained sensibilities: "Don exposed me to music that didn't have a chordal structure, and that blew me away. I remember thinking, 'They're not using notes! They're just improvising!' The way he conducted and the way he taught us -- 'This is how they do it; this is how I do it' -- the musical themes could switch up at any moment." Later, during testimonials from the band members, electric bassist Ollie Elder Jr. echoed this sentiment when he reminisced about playing with Cherry for the first time: "I asked him, 'Uh, what am I supposed to play? 'Anything!' "OK, in what key?" 'Any key!'"
After describing his father's endlessly curious pilgrimages, David Ornette Cherry sat down with a large dousn' gounni, a Malinese instrument resembling a large sitar with a dodgeball-sized wooden shell, while Smith blew bubbling, strangulated notes on a trumpet mouthpiece. "Calisthenics" was exactly what its title implies: A soaring and vigorous ensemble workout seasoned nicely by John L. Price's vibraphone. "My Butterfly Friend" showed Cherry's love of reggae, with Almario dancing across the stage while soloing to Jan Cherry's scat-croon vocals. "Art Deco" was straight-ahead jazz highlighted by the warm interplay of Almario and Smith. "Coming and Going" built off a Native-American toe-heel drumbeat anchored by the triple-percussion attack of Miranda, Price and Don Littleton. For the closer, Don Cherry's granddaughter—one of at least ten Cherrys present in the audience—jumped up onstage for the proto-slam poetry rap "I Walked." (Apparently, walking and rollerskating were two of her granddad's favorite nonmusical pastimes.) And then, one by one, the musicians strutted off the stage to the beat, still playing. The maestro would have approved.
Last week, Los Angeles jazz lost one of its most ardent and influential patrons, journalist/historianMimi Clar Melnick. What follows is a profile The Beast wrote on this amazing woman for a 2007 issue of Los Angeles magazine.
[photo courtesy of Teresa Jenkins]
On a crisp, sun-dappled Sunday afternoon in the Encino hills, a long line of automobiles crowds the curb in front of a grey California contemporary home. People stream up the steep incline: women with kelplike dreads, African-print dresses and tinkling jewelry; men with snow-white beards in dashikis carrying large conga drums; academic types with soul patches and leather jackets; young mothers ushering distracted children. All make their way towards the open front doors, through which one can hear the low sounds of an acoustic bass being tuned, rimshots, sax and bass clarinet runs, laughing, the slap of backs.
The house is built atop a sconce of desert cacti and gazania. The front doorknobs are swirling nautilus shells of molded metal; the welcome mat is in the shape of a city manhole cover. There are more manhole covers inside, framed black-and-white photographs shot with a wide-angle lens hanging around the white-brick interior. In the family room, about 30 metal folding chairs are set up in tight rows, with more along the wall and in the breakfast nook beyond.
It is already standing room only: many sandaled feet shuffle about on the white carpet. The instruments sit in a corner of the room dominated by a pristine brown 1922 Steinway grand piano, holding court before top-to-bottom sliding glass patio doors that unveil the West Valley as a gorgeous Technicolor fresco. But it’s the opposite wall that draws the eye: autographed jazz visages of Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Bud Powell, Dave Brubeck, Ornette Coleman, Buddy Collette, Ahmad Jamal, Percy Heath, Milt Jackson, Hank Jones, Teddy Edwards and Shelly Manne. Many of the inscriptions are dedicated to the tiny lady with the bell-shaped silver bouffant who sits under the skylight by the front door greeting comers with her blue moneybox: ‘To Mimi, Thank you for your kindness and genuine concern for jazz’; ‘Dear Mimi, Great creative energy in your space!’; ‘To MM (Double Em!): You have brought so much pleasure to the music world’.
Three or four times a year, Mimi Clar Melnick opens her impeccable home for the Double M Jazz Salon, an invite-only concert series she has been running by herself and at her own expense. The first salon was on February 4, 1996 and posed a problem not of logistics but because the talent present looked so hard to top: pianist Horace Tapscott with bassist Roberto Miguel Miranda and drummer Fritz Wise. The concert was advertised on a single pink sheet of Xeroxed paper, like an errant flyer for a school talent show. “We played and that place just exploded,” says Miranda. “That whole day was nothing but L-O-V-E. It’s as though we had our close friends listening to us and supporting us to be as adventurous as we possibly could be. And man, it was just the beginning.”
Motoko Honda & Wadada Leo Smith at the Double M Jazz Salon (May 2011)
Now, as Miranda affirms, Melnick’s home has become an integral part of the Los Angeles jazz scene. The crème of the art form has since passed though to schmooze and give intimate and rollicking musical afternoons: Arthur Blythe, Bobby Bradford, Oscar Brashear, Alex and Nels Cline, Kenny Burrell, Billy Childs, Gerald Clayton, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Dr. Art Davis, Tamir Hendelman, John Heard, John Hicks, Billy Higgins, Pete Jolly, Don and Jeff Littleton, Roberto Miguel Miranda, Onaje Murray, Charles Owens, Austin Peralta, Don Preston, Wadada Leo Smith, Horace Tapscott, Nedra Wheeler, Gerald Wiggins. It has even evolved into a rehearsal space where musicians woodshed for upcoming performances in clubs or festivals, calling ahead before they drive up the hill with their gear.
Then there’s the audience, which has grown exponentially from an original mailing list of 50 to currently around 500, requiring Melnick to reluctantly forgo what she calls “the personal touch” of individual flyers to bulk e-mail. Yet the personal touch of experiencing music in such a sublime and informal setting—no microphone hum or cellphone gab, no clattering plates or hovering wait staff—is not lost on the crowd. “Some of the best live music I have ever heard in LA has been in Mimi’s family room,” notes local jazz historian Steven Isoardi, who attended the very first Double M Salon. “There is no other experience I’ve had that comes close to being in that little room with all these great artists who are loving being there and sharing their music with you. It sort of spoiled me in a way. I can’t go to a big venue like Disney Hall now, it feels so alienating. Mimi’s made it harder.”
During the performances, Melnick rarely sits. She floats around on the edge of the crowd or stays in her small kitchen cutting up gourmet cheeses or peeling cellophane off a Costco cookie platter. She is a soft-spoken woman who exudes elegance even when wearing cowboy boots. When asked about her stress level at having nearly 70 people in and out of her house for two hour-long sets (broken up by an hour break), Melnick whispers, “It’s out of my hands!” as applause erupts in the next room for a 10-minute slap-and-pluck bass solo. “I’m so honored,” she adds with kittenish excitement. “I feel like I’m in their living room!”
Jesse Sharps, Roberto Miranda & Miguel Atwood-Ferguson (March 2012)
Of course, the salons do not come without their pressure points. Melnick labors to ensure maximum capacity so the musicians can get adequate pay for their efforts, musical and otherwise, even as many of the musicians she features play a vanguard style of jazz that many ears might find too abrasive or aggressive (or, in the lingo, “That cat plays way out!”). “It’s the same concern that the club owners have, so I can definitely identify with them on that,” Mimi laughs. But a gig is a gig, as they say, and Melnick tries to keep the price at $20, mainly to encourage young music students to attend. “It was the most amazing thing I’d ever heard,” says bassist Nick Rosen, who first went to a Double M salon when he was 15. “I was so close to the musicians that I could read their music—you don’t get that anywhere. I got hooked and I haven’t missed one since.” Now, at 21, Rosen is a rising talent who plays with Horace Tapscott’s Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. Last September, Rosen and sixteen members of “the Ark” wedged Tetris-style into Melnick’s 20’ x 25’ family room. “That was the first time we made any money playing with the Ark and it was a great show,” says Rosen. “Musicians need to know that there are others out there who appreciate their music. No matter how much we say it’s ‘creative’ and that we ‘need to do it,’ we also need validation in what we do.”
This was evident last January at a Double M salon featuring the Arthur Blythe Quintet. Blythe, a tender-wise Buddha of a man with deep and inscrutable eyes, soloed sweet notes that cried and wailed—one man in the front row held a digital camera up to his alto saxophone, filming the sounds as they were born. As the group ended their second set to warm and genuine applause, the 66-year-old Arkestra alumnus whispered “Thank you"; a voice from the audience responded, “Thank you.” A lady with a frumpy orange sweater and wild-curly grey hair materialized in the foyer, practically hyperventilating. She stopped bassist Essiet Okun Essiet in the hallway: “I so enjoyed watching you play!” Then she asked him to hold out his hands, and ran hers over his outstretched palms.
The Audience at Mimi's (Note Mike Watt in yellow raincoat)
In the 1920s, Reva Howitt was a striking brunette whose effervescent charisma and dancer’s legs had earned her the nickname “Lollipop” and a centerpiece position on the San Francisco Beauties, California’s first all-female tap troupe. After her husband Charles Clar, a colonial fireplace merchant, died in 1977, Howitt sat down in her Los Feliz home to write her memoirs, in which she recalled her ambivalence about her daughter’s precocious talent for the piano. “When Mimi began at an extremely early age to show musical ability, I ignored it. When she was about four years old and neighbors who had pianos told me that she rang their doorbells to ask to play on their instruments, I was amused. By the time she was seven, I had to acknowledge her needs. From the start I made it clear that she was to play for her own pleasure and not for public performances.”
From the beginning, Melnick says she never really loved the classical music that was de rigueur for serious piano students. The sounds of jazz were loose and liberating for a self-described “conventional girl on the outside, not on the inside.” But her mother's lesson is so ingrained that even today, when asked, Melnick shows a reluctance to play her own Steinway. "My mother had said to me from the time I was a child, 'Do not be a performer, because you are always at the mercy of someone else.' And she knew this from experience." Yet, when prodded, she eases over to her piano and runs through some fluid, dirty boogie-woogie before finishing with a delicate little upper-register note, like a devilish wink. "I don't know what kind of pianist I'd have been if I'd gone ahead and really pursued jazz as a career. I do have some regrets about that," she says. "But it came out in my writing."
In the early 1960s, when she was a Music Major at UCLA, Melnick had the convictions of the youthfully obsessed, even facing down the Los Angeles Times’ formidable music critic Albert Goldberg—not the world’s biggest jazz fan—over an essay she wrote for his class. “He handed it back to me and said, ‘Now let’s see what you can do with something serious.’ So I looked at him and said, ‘Jazz is serious.’” Goldberg must have been impressed: he hired her as a Times music writer, as position she held for seven years. It was during this period that she met and married Robert Melnick, an electronics engineer with a passion for photography.
Melnick is a preservationist as well as an enthusiast—besides her jazz salons, she co-written two pioneering and endearingly quirky books on Art Deco-era city manhole covers with her late husband. Many of the iron sentinels they documented were ornate and beautifully embossed antiques by obsolete foundries and utility companies, pieces that the Melnicks saw as irreplaceable examples of industrial art—literally, historical records buried in the street. “We called ourselves, ‘urban archaeologists,’” she smiles. “When we did it in the early 1970s it was a very strange thing to be involved in. A lot of people thought we were nuts, they thought it was so humorous. But everybody responded to it one way or another. We really felt like explorers.”
In a way, this love for the handcrafted quotidian was how the Melnicks expressed their unconventionality in the confines of Nixon-era suburbia. After publishing Manhole Covers of Los Angeles in 1974, the Melnicks embarked on a cross-country drainspotting journey, photographing nearly 300 disks over the next ten years. At the end of the project, Robert Melnick—a lifelong nonsmoker—was diagnosed with lung cancer. After he died in 1984, she she unearthed his proof sheets; Manhole Covers—her words, his photos—was published by MIT Press in 1994. A year after that, Melnick successfully petitioned the city council to preserve sixteen manhole covers as historical artifacts, making Los Angeles the first U.S. city to do so.
After her mother died in 1997, Mimi discovered the memoirs she had written 20 years earlier; it was published in 2002. Lollipop: Vaudeville Turns with a Fanchon and Marco Dancer documents the life of Reva Howitt and the underreported history of the California vaudeville circuit of the 1920s. [Watch a 2003 interview with Melnick about the book here.] But after finishing these projects, she finally turned to something she could truly call her own—sort of. Melnick says that her idea for a series of house concerts had actually been seeded in the 1970s when she attended an afternoon of Indian music in the Los Feliz home of a woman named Jan Steward. “It was such an intimate and casual atmosphere that I thought, ‘I have to do this for jazz,’” she recalls. “After Bob died, I got to know many of the musicians on the avant-garde scene in Los Angeles, and at that time there were not that many venues for them to really stretch out and play.” Theirs was a local lineage graced by the towering presences of Taspcott, Ornette Coleman, Bobby Bradford and John Carter.
Arguably, things have gotten worse in recent years—when a rubric like "Smooth Jazz" not only outsells every other kind but has its own television show. But Melnick points out that Azar Lawrence—he of the epic fractal sax solos with minimal pauses for breath—has recently been playing shows at "straight-ahead" jazz venues, like Charlie O's in Van Nuys and Vibrato in Bel-Air. "The relationship between the avant-garde and the local jazz clubs has actually gotten better over the years," she maintains. "Because if Azar can play those places—Huh? Hello? Azar? That's not dinner music! —something must be opening up."
What connects manhole covers and jazz musicians, of dancer mothers and creative partners, it is that none of them can be replaced once they are gone. Take the bootleg videotape of a March 1997 Double M salon still making its rounds through the underground tributaries of the Southern California jazz community [see above]. It features an elite ensemble: Horace Tapscott and Roberto Miranda with saxophonist Michael Session, percussionist/trumpeter Juno Lewis and drummer Billy Higgins. Lewis, a Leimert Park renaissance man who built his own instruments and collaborated with John Coltrane, kicks things off with a hand-drum solo. As the applause dies down, Miranda’s bass seems to bleed out of the walls like bog sweat as he saws an intensely personal, Jimi Hendrix-flavored solo turn on “Amazing Grace.” Tapscott falls over sideways on his piano bench, laughing in amazement. Then a feisty Higgins drum showcase leads into John Coltrane’s “Impressions,” and Tapscott unleashes a protean five minute and forty-four second piano solo. Session steps up with his soprano sax and blows lacerating and furious runs until perspiration rolls down his cheeks. Then poet Kamau Daa’ood reads his verse over the music, an incantation dedicated to Charles “Yardbird” Parker but somehow apropos to this fleeting moment:
messages from a higher realm descend
here at the center of the universe…
men entwined with their instruments like lovers
and in the air
passion and feathers
On such afternoons—and on the ones since Tapscott, Higgins and Lewis all passed away—Double M feels like some sort of return to jazz’s pre-historical tidepools, to a time when it flourished in private homes and public spaces, places out of the hands of the critics and moneymen and organized by the musicians and the fans. It produces the endorphin rush that comes from the realization: In this city, where so much is determined for us, here we manage to get away with something. Here we share something secret and precious.
The sentiments on the musicians’ side of the equation are best echoed by the formidable Arkestra saxophonist/flautist Kafi Roberts: "Man, anybody in the world says anything bad about Mimi, they'd better duck." When she is told this later, Melnick blushes.
