(from a Brick’s Picks in the LA Weekly, c. 2008)

Saxophonist Benn Clatworthy started in London but moved to Los Angeles. His playing is muscular and gutsy, and he’s always thinking…like classic Sonny Rollins you swear that every note he plays makes perfect sense, no matter the original melody. It’s not pretty, but it can be beautiful, and his languid overblowing and long mournful stretches of high notes shush a crowd, as if they’re hearing something very intimate. He can honk with the best of them, too, a Booker Ervin getting down. But when he really gets going and his ideas take him out, look out…. But it’s never exactly free. Never just squawk for squawk’s sake. The sound is often Trane, but the thinking Sonny. His albums are all on the tiniest labels (Verve never did call). They’re all excellent, like the tough Tercet, or both Live At Charlie O’s cds (the latest collaboration with pianist Theo Saunders, bassist Chris Colangelo and drummer Jimmy Branly.) You can buy one off him at Charlie O’s this Sat., April 7. Or buy one at Jax on Tues., April 10. He’s still plays the smaller clubs. It’s a tough living, but the jazz is intense and bracing, gorgeous and angry. Like fellow saxophonists Charles Owens, Herman Riley, and Pete Christlieb, Benn Clatworthy is a jazz master tucked away on the wrong coast.

(I wrote more words about Benn Clatworthy than any other musician, thousands if words, and it did nothing for the guy. In any other town he’d be a star. He remains my favorite living tenor saxophonist…and is right up there with a bunch of the non-living tenor players, too.)

(The LA Weekly music editor wanted a best of 2007 list. I always hated Best of lists.)

Compiling a best of the year list for jazz Seems to us that “Bests of” are not really easy in jazz. Or fair. Anyone who hits the clubs regularly will see so many moments of perfection and brilliance and unadulterated inspiration that as the year progresses all the examples from January and February and March tend to blend into one another and pale, while the moments from December burn fiercely in the mind’s eye and ear. But here are some moments:

Walking up to the stage last summer at the Central Avenue Jazz Festival during trombonist Phil Ranelin’s set was highlight of the year. You knew this was real. That jazz was a living creative force.  Ranelin and saxmen Charles Owens and trumpeter Richard Grant were up there and their solos had a molten intensity.  The audience ate it up. The next day Skipper Franklin was afire, too.  Michael Session was up there, and Azar Lawrence going nuts, as Azar does. Blowing blowing blowing.  The crowd was with it all the way.

And there was that night sitting a yard away from the stage at Jax as saxmen Jason Goldman andWalter Smith III fronted the Bill Wysaske Trio at Jax. The crowd was us and a few others, maybe ten in all, but the band played as if their lives depended on it; Smith’s soloing especially was brilliant. 

The Filipino-American Jazz Festival, all of it.  Julius Tolentino, Victor  Noriega getting deep, the brilliance of Tateng Katindig, vocalists Mon David and headliner Charmaine Clamor (who never fails to impress)

Roy Haynes’ return to Catalinas was a triumph, as always. The man is ageless, his drumming fresh, pushing his young band to play with everything they got. And then our own local Chuck Manning at several places….the 322 stands out, and intimacy of the Café Metropol brought out aspects of his playing, his sound that  don’t always carry in louder places. And seeing alto Zane Musa explore the outer edge on the soprano.

The quartet of Benn Clatworthy, pianist Theo Saunders, bassist Chris Colangelo and drummer Jimmy Branly at Charlie O’s. And a night with Clatworthy and the John Heard Trio that went some heavy places. And seeing the same trio back Charles Owens one amazing night. And Owens was on fire with Dwight Trible’s band at LACMA. You could hear Trible from the parking lot across Fairfax. And his extraordinary vocals almost overwhelmed the audience in the intimate confines of the Vic in an amazing show.

And nights at the World Stage come to mind. Azar Lawrence. Charles Owens. Richard Grant. The stage brings out the best in players, and when the players are among the best, the results are profound, spine tingling.

The preview of the remarkable documentary Anita O’Day—The Life of a Jazz Singer at a little theater in Beverly Hills with Anita O’Day herself only two rows behind us. She was in a wheelchair and silenced by her stroke, but the audience, surprised she was even there, gave her an immense ovation.

Walking up Cahuenga from a tame day at the tamest of all the Playboy Jazz Festivals into a maelstrom of samba at the Ford Amphitheater, where the Grupo Fundo de Quintal kept the audience on their feet and at the top of their lungs for two hours. Or Caetano Veloso with a tough little three piece in a remarkable night of his classic tunes rearranged, stripped down, intensified.

(That was it. I tried, anyway. I squeezed in another paragraph full of picks for the week, stuff that was actually yet to happen and not just reminiscences. But it’s nice to think back about those moments now.)

(This was some Brick’s Picks first draft copy that I dumped but was saved because I was tracking changes (one of those Microsoft Word things).Alas I rarely tracked the changes. I used to write up entire columns and trash them without saving a word. Just hit delete and start all over. I haven’t a clue about context here, what I was trying to get at, it’s just an oddity. Makes me wonder how many of the 300 columns I have drafts of contain  miniature essays like this hidden away. I think this is from 2008.)   

It doesn’t help things any that jazz is such an in-the-know kinda thing. I mean…some cat you never heard of is some place you’ve never been to and how the hell were you even supposed to know it was happening, whatever it was…but damn man, your best jazz buddy and a whole table full of way cool players you really dig are telling you that man, it was the shit…but hell, how was you supposed to know about it? But that doesn’t mean you didn’t miss it. You did. All those amazing sounds…all that crazy inspired heavy stuff…and yu were home doing who knows what. But you did miss it. That’s jazz, baby. You either know what’s happening or before it happens, or more likely you just happen to stumble into some joint when things are absolutely elevated. But unless you are deep in the know, a lot of the names here—maybe most even—you’ll know nothing about. It’s not like John Coltrane will be appearing in corporeal form, or that Bird really does live. No way…most of the big names are gone or faded. So a list of Angeleno jazz is like a menu in a Chinese restaurant and all you can do is pick something and hope that it’s good.

(from a Brick’s Picks in the LA Weekly, 2007)

If you’re looking for soul there’s saxophonist Red Holloway’s 80th Birthday Bash at the Jazz Bakery Friday through Sunday. The Bakery might be a little smart and arty itself, but you’ll forget all about that once Red begins to blow the blues. They don’t teach this stuff, you know. They can teach all the chords and fingerings and changes and whatever….but none of that will ever tell you how to get the sound that Red gets.  He feels this stuff, he’s lived it, he is it and he plays it. That’s eighty years worth of that you’re hearing. A lifetime compressed into gorgeous sound. Maybe that explains why a great, profound solo can shake you to your core. Who knows how or who knows why…but just go to a gig sometime and sit there and just listen. When that certain solo gets rolling you’ll feel it, down in your bones you’ll feel it. And Red is one of those players who’ll do it to you.

(early draft of a Brick’s Picks, not sure how much made it into the LA Weekly, c.2008)

Sometimes you see jazz at the Bowl, or in big echoey halls, or even on football fields. And sometimes you see it in your living room. Well, the Foundry on Melrose, of all places, felt like a living room, with couches and pillows and musicians an arm’s length away. It was wild stuff, too: Josh Nelson had that upright sounding beautiful and bassist Matt Cory and drummer Zach Harmon were laying down amazing rhythms.  Harmon’s drumming in particular is Max Roach and beyond; sitting just feet away you can get lost in the math of his polyrhythms, wicked dense pattering patterns and jarring tom tom explosions. Damn man—this stuff is intense, even the ballads have a romantic intensity and Nelson at times seems lost in them, oblivious to all but their logic and flow. Cory picks up his bow and announces some classical suite, something, he says, that isn’t quite the usual cocktail lounge fare. It isn’t, his arco is beautiful, the band cooks, the crowd eats it up. Back of the bar owner/chef Eric Greenspan is glowing in all this energy…he likes the young cats, their intensity, their art. Never tells them to tone it down like so many other posh places. Indeed you can hear this acoustic jazz a block away. People are drawn in, jazz fans and neophytes. Most come for the food which is damn good and $25 plus for entrees, while the great eats from the bar run under $10. And more and more come for the incredibly inspired music. Melrose ain’t exactly 52^nd Street, but on Thursdays and Fridays and Saturdays in this little room you would never know it. These cats, like so many of the young jazzers in this town, are deadly serious jazzmen.