[Dixielandjazz] Who Says You Can't Go Home Again?

[Steve barbone]

THIS IS A MUST READ FOLKS - DON'T STOP BEFORE YOU READ THE LAST LINE OF THE
FIRST PARAGRAPH. I REMEMBER AND PLAYED WITH RUDD WHEN HE WAS STILL PLAYING
DIXIELAND AT THE CINDERELLA CLUB IN NYC, ALONG WITH JACK FINE. CIRCA 1950s.

HERE IS THE LAST LINE OF THIS REVIEW ABOUT RUDD CELEBRATING DIXIELAND!!!!

"He was as galvanizing a presence as ever; at his best, he made the music
sound as if it were still being discovered."

ROSWELL RUDD IS A MAJOR JAZZ PLAYER. PERHAPS SOME FESTIVAL PRODUCER MIGHT
"TAKE A CHANCE" ON HIM?????????  NAH. PROBABLY NOT.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


Jazz Review | Roswell Rudd

A Little Nostalgia and a Lot of Unruly Trombone

By NATE CHINEN - NY TIMES - November 22, 2005

The big, braying sound of Roswell Rudd's trombone has been a prominent
feature of jazz's avant-garde landscape for more than 40 years. It still has
a way of turning up in strange places: Mr. Rudd's latest album, "Blue
Mongol" (Sunnyside), puts him in touch with Buryat throat singers from
Mongolia. On Sunday afternoon at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, he
went for something more familiar - although, in a way, almost as uncommon.
For a celebration of his 70th birthday, he reunited with Eli's Chosen Six,
the Dixieland band from his student days at Yale.

A boisterous bunch of white revivalists, Eli's Chosen Six had its hot minute
in the mid-1950's, when "college jazz" suggested a catchphrase rather than a
curriculum. With the help of the producer and Yale alumnus George Avakian,
the band recorded an album for Columbia Records in 1955, and it appeared a
few years later in the film "Jazz on a Summer's Day." (Mr. Rudd missed the
shoot, which would have involved zipping around Newport, R.I., in a
convertible jalopy.) In the years since, the group has performed
sporadically - and almost always without Mr. Rudd, by far the most prominent
musician to have emerged from its ranks.

The reunion, and the occasion, put Mr. Rudd in a nostalgic frame of mind. He
spent much of his two hours of stage time in free-associative reminiscence,
praising his bandmates and working toward an oral history of the group. This
included tributes to founding members who could not be there, like the
accomplished bassist Buell Neidlinger, whose successor, Bob Morgan,
acquitted himself with a Fender electric. Reaching back at one point to his
childhood in Connecticut, Mr. Rudd invoked the memory of his father, an
amateur drummer. "By the time I was 8 years old, Duke Ellington and Spike
Jones were my main guys," he said. "Music was like a big cartoon."

The same could almost be said of Eli's Chosen Six. The cornetist Lee Lorenz
and clarinetist Leroy Sam Parkins joined Mr. Rudd in scrappy frontline
counterpoint - a hallmark of both Dixieland and the 1960's avant-garde. One
of the liveliest pieces, "Sheik of Araby," opened with Mr. Rudd's
plunger-muted blare over the thumping toms of the drummer, Steve Little.
Another tune, "Tishomingo Blues," elicited rambunctious and well-rounded
improvisations from all the horns, plus a few keyboard choruses by Dick
Voigt. Buoyancy and brightness were common undercurrents, bubbling to the
surface during the better solo choruses, like most by the cool-headed Mr.
Lorenz and nearly all by the extroverted Mr. Rudd.

Of course, Mr. Rudd was the star. Filling the function of a tailgate
trombonist, he leaned on what he has memorably termed his "mammalian
vocabulary" - a trove of anthropomorphic smears, wobbles, buzzes and slurs -
but never loosened his grip on harmony or rhythm. He was as galvanizing a
presence as ever; at his best, he made the music sound as if it were still
being discovered.