Yesterdays

Joe Lovano and Will Calhoun, Stephanie Stein Crease, the Choir Invisible, and Miles Davis

Village Vanguard, 1976. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Two Sundays ago, I was at Joe Lovano’s gig at the Vanguard with Julian Lage on guitar, Santi Debriano on bass, and Will Calhoun on drums. The lineup was certainly intriguing, and I was curious to hear Calhoun, maybe still best known as the drummer from Living Colour, in a mostly-acoustic small-group jazz setting.

The gig was great— Lovano was, as always, engaging and communicative, and his sound was so present that I wanted to reach out and grab it. The audience was rapt, boisterous and celebratory, a classic ‘last set at the Vanguard’ crowd. There was an infectious anything-goes sort of feeling in the room.

For instance, in about the middle of the set, the band was bouncing between Ornette’s “Happy House” and Monk’s “Bemsha Swing”, briefly playing one tune, then cuing the other, soloing on one, jumping to the other. It was fun, seemed purely spontaneous, Lage, Debriano, and Calhoun simply following Joe’s lead.

Listeners can always feel when a band is on the edge in a good way, and I was reminded of some edge-of-my-seat moments with Joe Lovano, Bill Frisell, and Paul Motian. I’d sort of forgotten just how risky that group was. You always felt that they might teeter into nothingness. Of course, they never did.

Will Calhoun was the group’s wild card, impossible to predict. Within one note, any thoughts of Living Colour were banished, and I felt a little foolish for bringing those expectations with me, like I’d put him in a box by thinking about the past. Bravo Will Calhoun!

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Stephanie Stein Crease’s important Chick Webb biography Rhythm Man is still on my mind. A few nights after the Lovano concert, I went to hear her speak at The National Jazz Museum in Harlem, only blocks from the site of the Savoy Ballroom, Webb’s commercial home base.

Crease walked us through Webb’s life in just under an hour, with photos and a soundtrack, before taking questions. Loren Schoenberg joined her, and it was only then that I truly understood the magnitude of her achievement in Rhythm Man. For some reason, I hadn’t realized just how little archival material on Webb has survived.

Stephanie said, plain and simple, that there are no Chick Webb archives, and almost no documents of his life besides some photos and records. For her research, Crease dove into the paper trail of Webb’s more famous associates (she mentioned Duke Ellington and Webb’s protege Ella Fitzgerald) and picked up hints and traces of him until she had a complete biography. Astonishing.

Schoenberg then chimed in, and explained that the eyewitness accounts of Chick Webb— how his solos set audiences on fire, how he drove a band relentlessly, how he could get an audience dancing like no other— were simply not preserved on records.

He contrasted this with Art Tatum and Benny Carter: though we can’t reproduce the magic of hearing them in the room, if we listen to the recordings (a lot of them and over a period of years), they’re there. But as Schoenberg said, with Webb, “he’s not there”. He and Crease were in agreement— there are whole swaths of his artistry lost to the ages.

If you haven’t read Rhythm Man yet, get a copy immediately. Stephanie Stein Crease, building on the work of a few others, has brought Webb out of the world of rumor and legend, and put his story into print and in our hands.

For most of human history, most musical culture was like that— gone and never to be heard or felt again. I was reminded to pay much closer attention. You never know when you’re going to hear, play, or feel something transformative.

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I think the lessons from Lovano and Calhoun and the example of Stephanie Stein Crease were coming through at the Jazz Gallery last week for our album release gig with the Choir Invisible, my co-op band with alto saxophonist and vocalist Charlotte Greve and virtuoso bassist Chris Tordini.

Our new album is out on Intakt Records, and we’re so proud of it; you can visit this Bandcamp page from Intakt to hear a few tracks. Due to a large contingent of visiting high school students from Massachusetts, we managed to sell out the first set at the Gallery. Let’s hear it for school trips!

On both sets, we were joined by vocalist Fay Victor for David Lynch’s “In Heaven” from Eraserhead, and I’d like to think that we were able to, briefly, maybe not erase anything in the high schooler’s heads, but add to it. This is a special band, Charlotte and Chris have a unique chemistry, and Fay Victor just took it to that extra-special place.

Thank you Rio and everyone at the Jazz Gallery for a great night. Next month, we head to Europe for the first time, and are playing around NYC later this year. We hope to see you at one of the shows.

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Somehow all these moments coalesced on Sunday into a need to hear a few tracks from Miles Davis’ Plugged Nickel recordings, made in December 1965 with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. These records will forever be an active space, their meaning always evolving.

Looking back to Webb, we can assume that this band’s greatest moments were not recorded. Still, they left us plenty of diamonds and pearls. Thinking about Lovano and our gig at the Gallery, I notice that the musicians and the audience create the moments together.

At the Plugged Nickel, Miles and Co. play, of all things, “Yesterdays”. It wasn’t a regular tune for the band, and Miles hadn’t played it in years. Why did Miles play it that night, and why does it sound so good?

“Yesterdays”, composed by Jerome Kern, is one of the most recorded standards we have. A glance at the Lord Discography shows over 1300 versions of the tune. Imported into jazz from Broadway, Billie Holiday made it hers in 1938, before Coleman Hawkins, Art Tatum, and Bud Powell laid claim to it.

By 1945 at the latest, “Yesterdays” was a song everyone knew. Miles Davis, then in his late teens, no doubt heard his heroes in NYC play the tune any number of times. One can only imagine the impression “Yesterdays” made on him: at those tender ages, every bit of music leaves a mark.

Though he played on a version of the tune with Lee Konitz in 1951, Miles only recorded “Yesterdays” as a leader once prior to the Plugged Nickel gig, in 1952, for Blue Note. Pianist Gil Coggins, one of the truly undersung keepers of the flame, provides the intro, sets the mood, and is essential to the performance. Miles was very serious about Gil, as my friend Sam Kulok has pointed out:

Jackie introduced me to a lot of good players, like Gil Coggins. He was a hell of a piano player. When Jackie first introduced me to him I didn’t dig him. Then he played behind me on “Yesterdays” and just knocked me out.  All them Sugar Hill musicians could really play back in those days. They were super hip.

From Miles: The Autobiography.

According to plosin.com, for most of 1965, Davis was preoccupied with health problems, including two hip surgeries and a broken leg. From February to November, there are no Miles Davis gigs or recordings, no public musical activity whatsoever.

And then out of nowhere, only a month after coming back to music, on the fourth set at a gig in Chicago, Miles pulls out “Yesterdays”.

Three loud, sharp notes from Williams— floor tom, snare drum, floor tom (and then what sounds like Tony dropping his sticks on the floor tom) become three notes from Miles, unaccompanied— “yes-ter-days”. The club goes silent, Miles commands the space, and changes the temperature in the room. The drama and pathos with which Miles states and paraphrases the melody is undeniable. Herbie and Ron play enough to let Davis know they’re there, allowing the tempo and feel to emerge naturally.

Eventually, the rhythm section swings out for Miles, who takes chorus after chorus. They go back undercover for the beginning of Shorter’s solo, Tony going back to brushes, Hancock playing hide-and-seek with Wayne. But they can’t stay in the shadows for long. When Williams picks up the sticks for Shorter’s “joyous free and happy life forsooth was mine”, I want to cheer, it’s so real and spontaneous.

Herbie starts his solo rubato and unaccompanied, before Tony’s pianissimo bass drum and tomtom comments introduce some avant-garde surreality, and eventually Carter joins. Miles’ re-entry, at “Glad am I”, piercing the abstraction of the rhythm section, is the sound of pure vulnerability.

But jazz honors both tears and laughter. So, without really concluding “Yesterdays”, the group launches into a playful, lighthearted version of “The Theme”. There’s brilliant co-soloing from Shorter and Miles, who sound like friends reminiscing— Wayne quotes “Lester Leaps In”, and Miles almost plays the Art Tatum variations to “I Got Rhythm”. The clouds have parted, the sun is out, the music is alive— they could go all night. Fittingly, they stop after five minutes.

There’s so much mystery here. Did Miles tell the band he was going to play “Yesterdays”, or did he launch into it spontaneously, certain they would follow him? Judging by the emotion he brings to the tune, “Yesterdays” certainly seems to mean something to Miles, but precisely what it means, we’ll never know.

And how about Tony’s three loud hits right before Miles declaims the melody— what a way to start a ballad, fate knocking on the door indeed. Is Williams perhaps trying to get the audience to quiet down and pay attention?

All that aside, Miles and Co.’s version of “Yesterdays” is what I love about live jazz. At the start of the set, it's just a great group doing a gig— not bad, not good, just ordinary. And then, out of nowhere, the night changes course— what had been good becomes great, what had been routine becomes spontaneous. Happens all the time.

The gig ends on a high and celebratory note with “The Theme”, but could we have gotten there without the pain, sadness, and confusion of “Yesterdays”? I think about the folks in the room, the course of the night, how strong the feeling must have been between audience and musicians to be captured on a recording and still palpable nearly 60 years later. We are so lucky to have these documents.

Salty and sweet, drama and comedy. Would I have noticed the miracle of “Yesterdays” if I’d been in the audience at the Plugged Nickel in 1965? Maybe, maybe not. I’ve seen enough of the miracles to know that you have to watch for them. You never know when one is going to come, and if you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss something magical.