T. J. Kirk: “Get on the Right Foot/ Rockhard in a Funky Place” (1996)
From 1992-2001, I was vice provost and then vice president for student affairs at CSU Stanislaus. (We weren’t allowed to call it Stan State. It didn’t sound tony enough for an emerging campus with identity issues.)
It was a great place to work. And I loved my job.
A side advantage of working there was the yearly CD sale, sponsored by the campus radio station. It took place a month or two before the school year closed. All the CDs the station had received during the year and didn’t plan to keep were put on sale at two dollars a pop. To give you an idea of what a good deal that was, I bought CDs in a store or on line and paid $9-10, sometimes more.
I usually had advance notice of when the sale would take place. My staff had orders not to book me for anything that morning until after eleven because the record sale opened at nine and I was there. My allowance was twenty dollars a month then. The month before the sale, I didn’t spend a penny of it so when I went to the sale, I had $40 to blow , or better put, enough to come away from the sale with twenty CDs.
It was a great sale for three reasons:
- the records were dirt cheap;
- few buyers other than me were looking for jazz or blues; and
- there were serendipitous discoveries to be made, records you wouldn’t think of spending $10 on but were willing to take a shot on for $2.
At two dollars a pop, I could take a risk. The worst that could happen would be that I’d get a CD I didn’t like after I listened to it. If that happened, I’d simply put it aside to take to the used record exchange in Modesto, where I’d use any credit I accrued to buy something else I did like.
I picked up scads of records by artists and groups I knew, and lots by artists I’d heard of before, but who sounded interesting, to whit:
- I bought three David Murray albums there (I own ten now);
- I bought tenor saxman Joshua Redman’s Freedom in the Groove (1996), the only record by him I currently own but a good one;
- ditto altoist Kenny Garrett’s lovely tribute to Coltrane;
- I picked up a low-keyed duet album with pianist McCoy Tyner (whom I’d heard live in New York) and vibist Bobby Hutchinson (ditto in San Francisco), Manhattan Moods;
- and a so-so recording by Muhal Richard Abrams, Colors in Thirty-Third (1987);
- and my only Maria Schneider album at the time, Coming About (1995), which was important to me because she was the sole inheritor of Gil Evans’s innovative arranging style;
- I picked up a couple of Randy Weston albums, including Volcano Blues, whose first cut is Texas blues singer Johnny Copeland singing and playing guitar solo on “Blue Mood” (I heard Weston live in Ohio back in 1963-4);
- I bought an achingly beautiful album by the 29th Street Saxophone Quartet, Bobby Watson on alto; I’ve never come across another album by the group;
- I picked up a set of duets between pianist-vibes player Karl Berger and five musicians –two cuts each, one with Berger on vibes, the other on piano– playing with guitarist James ‘Blood’ Ullmer, altoist Carlos Ward, trombonist Ray Anderson, bassist Dave Holland, and Berger’s singer-wife Ingrid Sesto;
- I bought the boppish Central Avenue Reunion (1989), with trumpeter-flugelhornist Art Farmer, one of my favorites, and altoist Frank Morgan, who had lost twenty years of his performing life to jail for drugs; I found two Morgan albums soon afterwards and picked up a third at the resale shop;
- I got my favorite Art Pepper (alto) album, Tokyo Encore (1991);
- I bought an album by tuba player Bob Stewart, with blues singer Taj Mahal on board for two songs, Then & Now;
- That’s where I got my first Don Pullen albums, with his multi-national quintet, the Brazilian-African Connection: Ode to Joy and Live…Again, both recorded in 1993;
- I picked up three Dave McKenna albums (I had heard him in New York) and one, two, three, no! four! with pianist Dick Hyman;
- album of solos, duets and trios with stride pianists Ralph Sutton, Derek Smith, Dick Wellstood and Mike Lipskin;
- Dizzy Gillespie’s great band work for RCA in the late 40s, all of it!
- even a Django Reinhardt album;
- an early album, lovely stuff, by Dollar Brand (heard him live in NYC also);
- Ron Carter (heard him too) and Richard Galliano;
- Sonny Clark;
- Milt Jackson and Jimmy Heath (I heard Jackson live in Cleveland with the MJQ and with Bobby Hutchinson in San Francisco);
- the Monk retro quartet Sphere;
- Steve Coleman’s Curves of Life, with a rapper on one cut and a smoking tenor sax solo by David Murray on another;
- my favorite piano album by Michel Petrucciani, Promenade with Duke;
- producer Hal Willner’s weird homage to Mingus, Weird Nightmare, with groupings as weird as the title –rockers Keith Richards and Charlie Watt on ” Ecclesiastics,” Elvis Costello singing “Weird Nightmare,” Robbie Robertson (formerly of The Band), beat poet Henry Rollins, poet-singer Leonard Cohen, guitarist Bill Frissell, reedist Don Byron, Harry Partch-designed musical instruments on some cuts.
I first heard Gianluigi Trovesi because of that sale. I picked up an album –on ECM records, which meant it probably was good– In circa de cibo, Trovesi on clarinet and on accordion, Giani Coscia. I now own eight albums by Trovesi, including three in duet with Coscia. His music is a blend of jazz, classical and north Italian folk music. He’s recorded with the old music ensemble, Christina Pluhar’s l’Arpeggiata, and the Italian Instabile Orchestra, a Dadaist ensemble of shifting membership and impeccable modern jazz credentials. (Pluhar, by the way, plays theorbo and all of l’Arpeggiata’s many albums are wonderful.)
I would never have paid ten dollars for an album (If Four Was One, 1996) by T. J. Kirk, a three-guitar, one drummer quartet that played ONLY compositions by Thelonious Monk (that’s the ‘T’), James Brown (‘JB’) and Rahsaan Roland Kirk (‘Kirk’). For two bucks, I risked it and this spring, my son and I heard the lead guitarist, Charlie Hunter, play at Nighttown, in Cleveland where I now live.
That’s not all the jazz I acquired in those nine years. On my own or through trading with son Jeremy, I acquired the four The Art of the Trio recordings cut by pianist Brad Mehldau between 1997 and 1999, plus a couple solo albums by Mehldau.
Art Blakey: “For All We Know”, from Bluesiana Triangle (1990)
I picked up Bluesiana Triangle (1990) but not on sale. It was the last recording by Art Blakey, my favorite drummer. He even sings –badly– on one cut (“For All We Know”). You can tell he’s dying. It’s a relaxed trio which cuts across boundaries between jazz and Bayou funk –Blakey on drums (plus his one vocal), alto sax player David “Fathead” Newman, formerly of the Ray Charles band, and New Orleans’s Dr. John on piano and vocals.
You get the idea….
There’s more to follow in the next blog.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Elvis Costello: “Weird Nightmare”
MUSIC & ME 