I find that good leading starts with good following, just as good teaching starts with good learning. 

Wanting to learn requires motivation. I find I’m most motivated when the subject captures my fantasy. (Conversely, another good motivation is when it’s a matter of grave consequence. In blues music that’s called the hellhound on your trail.)

A friend of mine was curious about what motivated me to learn to play jazz. I told her we are making art with the way time feels as it swirls around us. It’s a conversation of archetypes, and time is our medium. There’s a feeling of buoyancy and euphoria, of power, flight and fire, when I’m playing with musicians who have those sensibilities. You are released from the sheet music the way you are released from a script in an interesting conversation with a close friend. When we are engaged at this level, we can hear each other think, and we create a sound painting without physically talking about it. It’s difficult to get closer or more personal than that—it’s like we’re sharing a quickening spirit.

That experience is very personal, but it also connects to the essence of jazz: compassion. When we’re really into it, we feel one another.

Jazz music was born out of compassion. In the early twentieth century racism was so common it wasn’t considered racism—it was considered normal. Many people back then were compassionate toward the disenfranchised, and their collaborations are what made jazz possible. The Louis Armstrong story is about a Russian Jewish immigrant family’s compassion for the orphaned child of a prostitute. They fed him, clothed him and taught him a good work ethic. They later bought him his first horn. Because of their compassion, the Karnofskys gave the world the “father” of jazz music.

All those early jazz musicians had compassion, empathy, and even love for one another. They found this through the music, and it grew. Now, people from every walk of life and every frame of mind are in the music. Southerners, northerners, Israelis and Lebanese, old people, young people—what other thing besides breathing and eating can claim such a wide demographic?

The Dalai Lama observes that “Western civilizations these days place great importance on filling the human ‘brain’ with knowledge, but no one seems to care about filling the human ‘heart’ with compassion.” We’ve developed technology to the point that we can peel the skin off this planet. Everybody in the world can be electronically connected, yet we’re slow to recognize that this art form right in our midst carries important lessons about compassion—it continues to be dedicated to the development of social empathy among its practitioners.

We’re born as animals. Our parents are charged with civilizing us. Compassion has to be learned and then developed. To spread it, you have to teach it. To teach it, you have to learn it. So the cycle goes: each one teach one.

The New York Times calls Allan Harris “an extremely relaxed and tasteful crooner in the Nat ‘King’ Cole tradition,” and that lineage is strong for him: he performed a concert tribute, “Unforgettable: The Songs of Nat ‘King’ Cole” at the Kennedy Center, and released a live recording, Long Live the King. He has the admiration of other singers too. Not many performers can boast an introduction like this: “Frank Sinatra says his favorite singer is Tony Bennet, and Tony Bennett says his favorite singer is Allan Harris.” Winnipeg audiences are in for something special!

Growing up in Brooklyn, Harris was immersed in music from the beginning. His mother was a classical pianist, and his Aunt Theodosia was an opera singer who turned to the blues. Thanks to their success, the family found themselves entertaining many interesting musicians—including Louis Armstrong himself. Harris was encouraged to sing at a young age, and from the age of twelve, he studied guitar with Vladimir Bobry, the President of the Classical Guitar Guild. Though known primarily as a singer, he is an accomplished guitarist, composer, producer and educator as well.

Allan Harris has performed with some of the greatest artists out there today. He opened for Cassandra Wilson in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Rose Hall. He debuted Wynton Marsalis’ “Suite for Human Nature” in 2005. He shared the bill with the late Abbey Lincoln for “The Legacy Series,” a tribute to Harlem composers. His own band maintains a hectic pace, touring and recording. This past summer, they opened for Al Green and Al Jarreau at the Vienna Jazz Festival.

One of Harris’ recent projects started one day when he was listening to the radio. He heard a bluegrass version of Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You,” sung by Dolly Parton, and suddenly “I felt free to write the music I had always wanted to write, music that could be inclusive of all the American styles that had influenced me. I wanted to tell a story about the kinds of men I knew when I worked on my Grandfather’s farm back in Western Pennsylvania….” That moment was the inception of Cross That River, a song cycle about a runaway slave named Blue who flees to Texas in the 1860s to become one of the first African-American cowboys.

Directed towards school-age children, Cross That River includes a fusion of many American styles of music such as blues, folk, country, jazz, gospel, and rock. Harris has taken Cross That River to schools, museums, and performing arts centers across the United States, educating young people about the little-documented slaves who became Black Cowboys.

Harris opens the 2010-11 season of the Izzy Asper Jazz Performances series with a Nat “King” Cole tribute concert. He’ll offer a masterclass the day before to interested musicians. Given the depth and range of his accomplishments, and the grace and warmth of his singing, he’s a must-see!

It’s fair to say that Winnipeg has developed a fondness for Andy Farber, and we’re preparing to welcome him back again this fall for the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra’s season opener, “Music from the Stage and Screen.”

Farber is one of the premier big band leaders and arrangers in New York, and he’s in high demand as a saxophonist as well. He’s played with all the big orchestras—think Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Artie Shaw—and has done multi-year stints with Jon Hendricks and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. For the past dozen years or so, he has been freelancing as a conductor, arranger and instrumentalist with a seemingly endless list of major players: Wynton Marsalis, Shirley Horn, Allan Harris, Stevie Wonder, B.B. King, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Joe Lovano, Joe Piscopo, Joe Cocker, Derek Trucks, Kevin Spacey, Wynona Judd, Vanessa Williams, and many others.

Andy Farber a high-level musician, but he’s also a character. “He’s like a throwback to the 1940s,” says Anna-Lisa Kirby. “He’s the guy with the fedora and the old-fashioned lingo—but it doesn’t seem fake with him. He loves that era, he feels at home there.”

Anna-Lisa was a fellow student at the Manhattan School of Music, and when he formed his 9-piece orchestra, Andy Farber & his Swing Mavens, she was his singer of choice. Their first recording, Bluesectomy, shows off Farber’s stylish arrangements, and his knack for making the lushness of the big band feel contemporary.

When he’s not arranging for one of his bands or on stage performing or leading, Farber composes and produces music for television and film. When he returns to Winnipeg this October, expect to hear some of the great film and stage standards packaged up and delivered with real panache. With Farber at the helm, capturing that old-fashioned ideal of classic beauty is all in a day’s work.

Here in Winnipeg, when someone says Papa Mambo, people know the music right away—it’s fun, it’s lively, it’s danceable, and it’s our very own. The big sounds of Latin jazz, salsa, and cha cha cha always get people moving, no matter where they are.

Chilean-born Rodrigo “Papa Mambo” Muñoz put his salsa band together in 1989 to play at parties. Over the past twenty years, Papa Mambo has showcased the talents of many of Winnipeg’s finest, including Walle Larrson, Will Bonness, Mira Black, Larry Roy, Gilles Fournier, Ken Gold, and Marilyn Lerner. The band is much in demand around Winnipeg, playing regularly at the Forks, the Art Gallery, Folklorama, the Jazz Festival—in just about every venue big enough to hold an 11-piece band. (And a few that can’t!) Papa Mambo has backed international names like Tito Puente and Jane Bunnett, and in 2005, the band collected fans across the country on the Canadian jazz festivals circuit.

Rodrigo is a great band leader. He knows exactly what he wants, and how to draw it out of people. One of the first things he told me when I started sitting in with Papa Mambo was that groove is the most important thing in music. The band is a machine, each person with his part, and together we produce this irresistible rhythm that makes people need to dance. No matter what, you have to be grooving, or you can just forget the rest. It took me a while to learn to play the clave (the basic rhythm behind all Latin music) while singing and dancing, and Rodrigo was very patient with me. Now I’m a full-fledged member of Papa Mambo, and love every minute of it. We get to play for dancers, which is what jazz musicians used to do—there’s no feeling like it!

Most people know Rodrigo as a percussionist since he plays timbales or congas with Papa Mambo. But he is also an accomplished classical guitarist, touring with the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra and performing with the Winnipeg Classical Guitar Society. Even when strumming away with a pared-down trio version of Papa Mambo or with Marco Castillo or Trio Bembe, his infectious groove is still there!

So what’s coming up for Papa Mambo? The band will be performing as part of Dance on Broadway and at the Jazz Under the Rooftop series in September, and with the Symphony Orchestra in January. A new salsa album is in the works too. Thats’s the thing about Papa Mambo—the groove is unstoppable!

Julian Bradford is one of the busiest bass players in the city, and he plays comfortably in many styles. He tells me he grew up listening to lots of classical, and starting messing with his parents’ stereo and a couple of tape decks when he was in his teens. He’s never been one to settle, musically or otherwise. I caught up with him between gigs this summer.

You’ve had a busy summer!

Yeah, this summer has been a lot of fun. I performed at the Jazz Festival with Moses Mayes, Iskwe Emme, Flo, and a few others at Old Market Cube. Opened for one of my all time favorite groups, The Roots, with Magnum K.I. Great club shows with Jeff Presslaff and Walle Larson, Heitha Forsyth, Adam Young. I did a gig with guitarist Keith Price at the Montreal Jazz Festival too. I also just recently got the opportunity to track some bass for Kenny G’s latest record Heart and Soul—pick that up! And just did a gig with Chantal Kreviazuk. So it’s been an exciting month so far.

You play both stand-up and electric. Apart from the physical stuff, how are those two different?

I often find it hard to put down the upright because the sound is so full and warm and organic, but you can’t play the funk on it like you can with the electric! Stylistically, some music feels better on one or the other. Pop music generally calls for the long sustain and clear tone that the electric provides, whereas the feel of jazz or bluegrass can benefit from the faster decay and round attack of the notes on the upright.

What bassists really inspire you?

Mingus for being bad-ass. I love Ray Brown. For pop stuff, I love crazy bass players like Ethan Farmer and Adam Blackstone and Pino Paladino of course. I just watched an Alison Krauss DVD today with Abe Laboriel playing bass. He played so tastefully and sparingly you barely knew he was there. This guy could tear it up if he wanted! I really love bass players that have good taste and feel—bassists who nail that are inspiring to me.

What’s right ahead for you?

Cello!! My father started me on the cello when I was really young (thank you), but I gave it up. I’ve recently rediscovered it and haven’t been able to put it down. I’m very excited to be playing bass and cello with a very talented up-and-coming artist, Bean—watch out for her! Also, the cello will be coming out on a few dates with singer/songwriter/fiddler extraordinaire Sierra Noble very soon!

The Jazz on Wheels band has had a great summer. We’ve played in school yards and city parks—and even on a barge—to crowds that range from toddlers to elders. The kids have danced and added spice (from lion roars to tambourines), and even those whose dancing days are behind them have grooved along in their wheelchairs.

The band is a good mix of newcomers and veterans this year. Sheena Rattai has been tearing it up on vocals—she’s a superstar-in-training, with personality and musical intelligence to burn. I’m also thrilled that we have two new drummers. As most people know, I’m very picky about drummers, and I think there’s a huge future for both Lucas Sader and Allan Suban. Newcomer Niall Bakkestad-Legare is a truly gifted young sax player. I’m always excited by his creativity and taste.

They’re backed up by a whole load of experience. The fact that we actually have veterans is worth celebrating, and this crew is excellent. Will Bonness on keyboard, Simon Christie on trumpet, Shannon Kristjanson on sax/flute, Jared Castle-Sitas on trombone, Amber Epp and Anna-Lisa (when she can shake free of Solomon) on vocals—these musicians have loads of musicality and great ease on stage. I always look forward to a chance to play with them.

We have two more gigs to round out the season. On September 1, we play at Rossbrook House, a place that’s become a personal favorite of mine over the years. Every year, I get to hook up again with some kids who’ve been coming to hear us play since we started in 2006. They start out a bit reserved and watchful, but by the end of the performance, there’s usually a bunch of them up participating. It’s great to see them relaxing and having a good time.

The Sherbrook Street Festival is our last outing. On September 11, Sherbrook becomes a pedestrian zone, and people can wander through the neighborhood shops and cafes as well as enjoy the stage shows and street vendors. We were there last September—it was one of the highlights of our year.

Communities are made when people gather and get to know one another. The Jazz on Wheels band is more than happy to provide the party soundtrack!

“Precocious” is the first word that comes to mind when I think of Aaron Parks. At 15, he was attending the University of Washington, doing a triple major in computer science, math, and music. He did not plan to pursue music professionally, but soon after university, he was performing and recording with many of the top jazz artists in the world, including Terence Blanchard, Gretchen Parlato, and Kurt Rosenwinkel. Now 25, Parks recently released his debut album, Invisible Cinema, on Blue Note Records, probably the most prestigious jazz label in the world.

Youthful accomplishments aside, Parks is a mature artist with a subtle touch, a fluid technique and a strong sense of melody and drama. His playing sounds natural; listening to him, I am swept away by beautiful melodies and masterful storytelling, and I am rarely aware of his technique, though he has plenty of it. This is in contrast to many young artists who give the impression that they are giving a lecture on harmony, form, and history. In Parks’ playing and compositions I hear strains of Bach, Radiohead, Björk, and Brad Mehldau, seamlessly blended into a personal and compelling musical vision that I am happy to return to again and again.

Invisible Cinema is a stellar debut album. As the title suggests, its primary concern is to tell a story. Parks says, “I was thinking about actual cinema, and this album has a story line that I wouldn’t spell out to anybody, because I want to leave it open to interpretation. But for me there’s a narration in the sequence and song titles and everything.”

The opening track, “Travellers,” sounds to me like a lonely nomad traveling to exotic lands, and “Peaceful Warrior” sounds like a medieval knight who inspires his fellow warriors with his inner strength and peaceful actions. I also sense a theme of solitude and contemplation throughout the album. These, however, are simply my subjective experiences of the album. The joy for the listener lies in creating a unique, personal interpretation.

Parks describes the experience when “you’re playing and you completely lose yourself, and the music plays you… I think everyone who plays improvisational music tries to reach that state.” Listening to Parks, not only do I hear him having this experience, but I share in it myself. It would be great to experience this live here in Winnipeg.

A perceptive jazz fan once commented that when Ella Fitzgerald sang about her man leaving, you thought he’d gone to the corner store to pick up a loaf of bread and a carton of milk. When Billie Holiday sang that her man had left, you knew he’d packed a suitcase, caught an airplane, and was never coming back. Therein lies the power of Billie Holiday. She is the most emotionally tragic singer in the history of jazz.

Holiday was born in 1915 in Baltimore. Her real name was Eleanora Fagan Gough. She came up with the name Billie Holiday from the first name of the silent-movie actress Billy Dove and the last name of her father, Clarence Holiday. Her life was one of tragedy. Rape, prostitution, beatings, addiction, incarceration, racism, and divorce were just some of the calamities she experienced. She was the voice of tears and dark memories.

The recordings Holiday made for Commodore Records are some of the most important of her career. All sixteen songs are collected on The Commodore Master Takes (Verve/GRP #3145432722) and represent four recording sessions, one from 1939 and three from 1944.

Commodore began as a small Manhattan electronics store that gradually started selling records. While still running his store, Milt Gabler (comedian Billy Crystal’s uncle) moved into the music business by releasing records by Pee Wee Russell, Eddie Condon, and Louis Jordan.

In 1939, Holiday was hired to perform at Café Society, in Greenwich Village, New York’s first integrated nightclub outside Harlem. It was there she premiered “Strange Fruit,” which was written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish high school teacher, that became her signature song. Its lyrics describe a lynched black man hanged from a poplar tree in the American south. The first jazz song to decry racism in the States, its effect on listeners was (and still is) absolutely chilling.

At the time, Holiday was signed to Columbia Records, but both the label’s executives and her producer, John Hammond, refused to record the song, perhaps because they didn’t want to upset their southern distributors. Holiday contacted her friend Milt Gabler and asked if he would do it. In a daring move, Gabler agreed, and on April 20, 1939, Holiday recorded “Strange Fruit.” When you listen to it, you can easily understand why Time magazine hailed “Strange Fruit” as the most important song of the twentieth century and why Q, a British music magazine, named it one of the ten songs to have actually changed the world.

Holiday went on to record “Strange Fruit” several more times in her career but this is the first and definitive version. She and the band sparkle because they had been playing the song almost every night at Café Society. Pianist Sonny White’s playing is dark and rich; Holiday’s voice, at twenty-four, is sombre and pure.

The other selections included on The Commodore Master Takes are also impressive. Holiday’s slightly autobiographical composition “Fine and Mellow,” about a man who drinks, gambles, and womanizes, is powerful and unnerving. Her renditions of “Embraceable You,” “I’ll Get By,” “He’s Funny That Way,” and “I’ll Be Seeing You” are all highly expressive. Much like Louis Armstrong, Holiday makes every song, even familiar classics, hers. There is such power and melancholy in her delivery, you believe each song was written specifically for her. The harsh tone and roughness that affected her voice later in her career is nowhere to be heard. This CD features a vibrant and emotional young singer; it is the essential Billie Holiday disc to own.

Abbey Lincoln is one of those singers who makes an impression on you. It’s not just her throaty voice or her elegant musicianship, but a certain quality—like every song is an intensely personal revelation, an invitation to meet her where she lives. Like Nina Simone and Billie Holiday before her, you hear that disarming combination of guts and vulnerability in Lincoln. It gives you the sense that she’s put herself out there, and uses her music to report back to the rest of us.

Abbey Lincoln was born Anna Marie Wooldridge in Chicago in 1930—her stage name was an inspired melding of Westminster Abbey and Abraham Lincoln. She made several recordings in the 1950s, starting with Abbey Lincoln’s Affair: A Story of a Girl in Love. She appears on Max Roach’s 1960 recording, We Insist! Freedom Now Suite—Roach was both a musical collaborator and her husband from 1962 to 1970, a period which shows her deep commitment to the civil rights movement. The 1960s also saw her on screen in several films, including For the Love of Ivy with Sidney Poitier (1966), a role that gained her a Golden Globe nomination. She began writing her own material in the early 1970s, and has enjoyed a long and steady career. Among her best recordings: Abbey Sings Billie (1987), You Gotta Pay the Band (1991), A Turtle’s Dream (1994), Over the Years (2000), and Abbey Sings Abbey (2007).

Steve Kirby toured with Abbey Lincoln’s band in 1998, and counts that experience as one of the most musically enriching of his career. “She’s a mystic,” he says, “a sorceress. When she ended a song with a cadenza, she channeled Miles as clear as the midday sun.”

Both intense and temperamental, she was not easy to work with, but she was always an object lesson in being fully engaged. Steve remembers one day in Lisbon when the band had left a rehearsal. “Abbey was particularly perturbed,” Steve says, “so the band was disciplined. She paced along regally, and we fell in behind her. Then she stopped sharply, and we all had to stop. An African woman stepped out of a doorway and crossed to another building. This woman was stunning—mocha-colored skin, flowing azure robes, jewelry, perfect carriage. Abbey turned to us and said, ‘Now that was beautiful!’ Then we walked on.”

“She was always mixing some kind of brew in her head,” Steve says. “She would take a moment to appreciate what was around her, then go back into it. On that occasion, she was instructing us about the true nature of beauty.”

Lincoln died August 14, 2010, at the age of 80. Her later work shows an artist continuing to explore the mystery of life and love with a deepening wisdom. As she said to an interviewer on NPR, “when everything is finished in a world, the people go to look for what the artists leave. It’s the only thing we have really in this world—an ability to express ourselves and say I was here.”

No doubt about it, Abbey Lincoln was here.

This summer, I watched the wonderfully quirky documentary, Babies. The premise is simple. Director Thomas Balmès tracks the first year or so in the lives of four babies in four parts of the world. Two of them live in cities—San Francisco and Tokyo. One lives in the steppes of Mongolia, one in a mud hut in Namibia.

What is so compelling about the film is seeing such a familiar range of human emotions—from contentment to rage, from curiosity to boredom—animate these little people. It dawns on the Japanese girl that she can put a wooden dowel into the hole in her blocks. When she can’t quite muster the coordination to pull it off, she throws herself back and kicks her legs in frustration. The Mongolian boy sits in a clutter of toys, cringing as his brother hits him repeatedly with his mother’s silk scarf. Does it hurt? Not exactly, but it’s not pleasant—and it won’t stop.

Watching these babies adventuring through the first year of life, I was struck again at how much of us is actually present from our first moments. By all indications, we are built to feel things. Eating, bathing, moving, even just feeling the breeze on your face: they all carry a big emotional charge.

Like many poets, e.e.cummings celebrated the special—and ephemeral—knowledge of childhood: “children guessed,” as he puts it, “but only a few / and down they forgot as up they grew.” It seems to me it’s the artists who work against that amnesia. They remind us, over and over, about what it means to be connected to others and to the world through these powerful channels of feeling.

Over the past few months, I’ve made my way through a couple of hundred new books in preparation for THIN AIR. On the far side of a binge like that, I know for certain that there are very few new stories, yet I am always excited by a writer who is able to share their particular feeling of what they know. It’s not novelty but authenticity that gets me every time. It’s true of the other art forms as well. I had the uncanny feeling that I was hearing words during one of Jimmy Greene’s ethereal saxophone solos on the art gallery rooftop this August, then I realized it wasn’t language I was locking into, but the emotional contours that sit right inside it.

A few critics carped that Babies was a feel-good film, but shallow. I think they missed the point Balmès offers so delicately: no matter what social realities will be stamped upon us through the accident of our birth, each of us is precious, rich with potential, and absolutely alive with the fire of feeling.

As adults, we might be healthier if we thought about refining rather than damping down the emotional intensity we’re born with. It’s within our reach to become like a child: the artists offer us their example.